November 3rd, 2008: We live in the epicenter of Last Best Hope Land. Just over one mile from the Obamas’ Boulevard home, two blocks from the University of Chicago Law School, where #44 (yes, let’s go ahead and call him that now) taught; across the Midway, and just beyond the sight line of the Apostolic Church, where Candidate Barack delivered his tortured rail on black fathers after Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s funky shimmy-shake on a Motown stage.

So this morning, the day before Election Day, I drove two-thirds of our neighborhood’s stretch to drop some correspondence into our most dependable USPS box and found myself caught amidst gridlock born of what seemed a political rally at Bishop Brazier’s church, my auto idling behind folks lined up halfway down 63rd Street—painted worshipers adorned in their Sabbath best at 8:30 a.m. on the Monday after All Hallows Day, 2008.

Television cameras and microphones were perched all about Apostolic’s parking lot, gleaning and beaming insights from the waiting revelers to the universe of elsewhere. Helicopters whirred overhead: networks, secret service, military? I wasn't sure. Nor did I know whether Obama had promised the believers a pre–Election Day visit, or whether this gathering was merely the latest congregational prostration in an effort to recruit the soon-to-be #44’s Trinity Baptist farther south. The anti-shake: plenty funky, less shimmy to it.

What surely would never make it into the network video chronicle was a scene just to the west at 63rd and Woodlawn, a mere three blocks from the apostles’ wireless congregation. There I drove by twice, as I could not quite believe my eyes on first pass: at what less than forty years before had been the center of the Black South Side, where Jeff Fort and the pre-Temple Blackstone Rangers had held court, protested a group of seven alien souls—five women and two bald, bearded soldiers among them—marching in semicircle formation atop a weed-strewn lot while toting signs exclaiming the following in bold-colored fonts:

God Hates Obama! (red)

God Hates You! (blue)

God Killed Your Children! (both)

America IS Doomed! (green)

—and another that I could not quite make out as the traffic zipped on toward the west.

Those flaxen evangelicals, imbued with their holy ghost or some such helter-skelter mania, were surely not from Chicago, not of Sweet Home—bused in from Kansas, perchance? So the venerable Chicago Police Department posted officers across 63rd to protect the protesters’ blood-won constitutional rights in another lot that not so long before had hosted a currency exchange.

Before noon, my mother called to tell me that the crowd at Apostolic was not gathered on behalf of #44's coming victory. Not at all; no, that morning the church had served as site of the funeral services for members of Dreamgirls actress Jennifer Hudson’s family, slaughtered just the week prior over to the south and west of 63rd Street.

“Jesus Christ,” I said to my mother, a daughter of the very same Englewood neighborhood, “and welcome to Chi-town.”

The typical image of a writer is a person slumped over a keyboard, face unshaven, hair unkempt, a cigarette fuming into the air beside a furrowed brow, a glass of whiskey in hand and a half-empty bottle on the table - man, I really need to stop looking in the mirror when I write these things…

But truth be told, the writer as a drinker is an iconic image from Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde to Jack Kerouac and Raymond Carver. The ink, it seems, is in the pen if the spirits are in the blood. This stereotype is true enough that there’s even a Bartending Guide to Great American Writers where you can find the favored libations of some of the craft’s greatest practitioners. Faulkner liked Mint Juleps, Anne Sexton loved Martinis, and Hunter S. Thompson had parts of his body osmotically replaced with Chivas Regal.

The old adage is for writers to write what they know, and with all this imbibing going on it’s not surprising that raging benders and blinding hangovers have become plot points and sometimes the topic of entire novels. Writers have even thought up their own cocktails; for instance, Hemingway devised his own daiquiri and Ian Fleming cooked up the Vesper Martini. Naturally enough, if a writer drinks, and writers create drinks, then there will be a plethora of drinks named after writers and for their books. Who wouldn’t want a Douglas Adams Pangalactic Gargleblaster chaser for a Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner?

Fine dining touts beverage pairings and a good sommelier can tell you what wine will match your confit of beef tongue on a brioche with salsa verde and a fried egg, so why not a sommelier for books? Go ahead, put on some Beethoven, mix 8 oz whole milk, 1 1.9 oz 5-Hour Energy bottle, 1.5 oz vodka and a few ice cubes in a Collins glass and stir with a dagger for a sip of Milk-Plus while you read A Clockwork Orange. If that’s a bit too much, fly to Baltimore and pick up some Edgar Allen Poe themed Raven Lager and wonder why Conrad Aiken said “A poet without alcohol is no real poet.”

Whatever the reason, booze and books are forever entwined. The tales of alcoholism taking its toll on writers are infamous and we’ve lost a great many voices to drink. Yet as with all things, moderation is key and over indulgence in any one thing can do harm. Even without alcohol, authors do have some crazy addictions (James Joyce dug flatulence?!?), so the rest of us always have the option to teetotal and just read about it.

Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate
by Judith Kitchen
Coffee House Press

Imagine sifting through a box of old photographs you found in the attic. Some snapshots capture relatives, some complete strangers. Most reveal a world unknown to you but known intimately by deceased relations. You try to piece together what it all means. This, in essence, is the project Judith Kitchen embarks upon in her new part-memoir, part-historical fiction, part-speculation titled Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate. Over the course of ten years, Kitchen has jotted notes about photos she found in her family’s scrapbook. She has now collected her writings into a cohesive work accompanied by approximately seventy images. One image dates as far back as 1860, most date prior to 1950, and most capture relatives and family friends, some of whom Kitchen knew and some of whom she has difficulty identifying. Also included are a few historical pop-culture images, as well as some reproductions of letters and ephemera from Kitchen’s family’s life. The result is an ambitious-yet-diaphanous ontological meditation on knowing, the nature of time, and the effects of history.

In Half in Shade, Kitchen stakes her claim early as a wonderstruck doubter: she is amazed by the possibilities inherent in each image, but as someone from the future, she’s well aware of how things turn out (i.e., usually for the worse). Contemplating a 1939 image of her father doing physics research at the University of Michigan, she notes how young her father is, how guileless and scientific-looking in the predigital age. He is enthusiastic; he is practicing his art. Of his future, Kitchen says: “Careful. The arrow points to zero. Everything is about to begin”—and we get a sense of the sweep of life before him, his to shape and mold. Such poetic weaving of fact, hope, and future is Kitchen at her strongest.

Later, when her father reappears, we are treated to a view of where that hope-laden “everything” finally rested: in a man who would putter in the garden for hours to escape his chore-burdened, neurotic wife. Kitchen speculates that her father planted corn and asparagus because they were “the vegetables that took the least work” and therefore afforded him the most free time outside, away from his family, where he could ruminate endlessly. In characteristic fashion, her description is lyric and pastoral:

Corn is simply a lesson in waiting. A lesson in sunlight and rainfall and fear of an early frost. It measures out the months, and when it is finally there—tassels bending in the breeze, yellow ear hidden inside its green jacket—summer is over.

Prose poems such as these are embedded within the text, a large measure of which catalogs Judith Kitchen’s bafflement that her father and mother became who they were. For example, Kitchen cannot account for her father’s story to her about “two young schoolteachers, too old to be still unmarried. [Her father] liked them both. On thinking, though, he had finally decided on the one with the greater sense of play,” who turned out to be Kitchen’s mother. Kitchen comments, “The story disturbed me because I did not recognize my mother in his final choice.”

Kitchen’s questing after the-mother-she-could-not-recognize is perhaps the book’s weakest thread. A large portion of the middle section is devoted to Kitchen’s scrutiny of the letters, photographs, and ephemera of her mother’s 1930 trip to the Continent. Much is criticized: her mother’s naiveté, her mother’s choice of shoes, her mother’s impersonal journal, her mother’s supposed behavior with a possible lover named “Trueheart,” her mother’s emotional emptiness. Actually the reader may appreciate Kitchen’s mother’s unvarnished enthusiasm and be impressed by her leaving a Michigan farm to become a teacher and saving enough money to travel abroad. However, Kitchen, despite her attempts to overcome a difficult history with her mother, is ultimately unable to see her mother’s younger years through this lens.

She instead treats the reader to dredged-up resentment and irritation: in considering her mother’s relation to Trueheart, she says, “I’ve given my mother the inner life she didn’t give herself” (87); her young mother “bores my sixty-some-year-old self, the one who looks back on my own youth and cannot recognize myself in her” (89). She muses, “I don’t recall ever, not even once, thinking that [a dance was the most important thing in my life]. . . . No, I may not be completely sympathetic, but I envy [my mother] like mad” (97).

While this tension and pettiness can be frustrating, it is also instructive: memories and history can be difficult. That Kitchen makes such an effort (even if failed) at understanding her mother, and that she lays her emotions bare in the attempt, is admirable.

The bulk of the book is an elegiac mélange of reminisce, practicality, and historical instruction, such as Kitchen’s rumination on high school, prompted by her finding a 45-rpm adaptor for a standard player. “You only get about half a decade’s worth of involuntary memory,” she decides. “Five to seven years where just one note heard over half a century later will strike the chord of recollection. Mine spans ‘Mr. Sandman’ to ‘Mack the Knife.’”

She goes on to reflect that:

Those were the pre-pill, pre-abortion days, so you lived with the sense that you, too, could have to spend a year “living with your aunt in East Aurora,” or, worse yet, might “have to get married,” which happened all the time. You’d see your ex-school-mate walking down the sidewalk pushing a stroller, sixteen years old and already out of commission. Your life and hers had diverged—just like that. You were locked forever on one side of the divide. Luck, you called it.

Kitchen’s knack for apt description and the poetic turn is notable. She proves to be up to the very demanding challenge of surveying large swaths of history and connecting them to her life and our current era. This makes Half in Shade well worth the read. Together with the photographs, it offers an entertaining, quirky, and sometimes profound trip down memory lane—even if the lane is not your own.

On April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles Police Officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King, sparking what became the Los Angeles Riots. By the end, over a billion dollars in damage had been done, 53 people lost their lives, and many, like Reginald Denny, were forever changed. Twenty years later, on February 26, 2012 George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin and the aftermath of that event is still unfolding around us as acts of anger and retaliation slowly ripple across the nation. If we expand our view, we find that these types of acts are repeated all over the world, every where from Afghanistan to Canada time and time again.

Our problem is thinking we’ve got the story, that we know what happened and who the other person is. We make decisions based not on fact, but on what we believe, on what we’ve heard, and what we’ve seen. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie calls this the danger of a single story. She says that, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” That Zimmerman shot Martin is true, there is no question of that. What remains to be seen is whether his reasons for doing so - the story he tells, in effect - will be considered justifiable by a court of law. Our understanding of the facts is blurred by context and by who is telling us the story.

“Stories,” Adichie says, “who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. Show a people as one thing — as only one thing — over and over again, and that is what they become.” Whether it’s the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny or the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the problem remains the same, people carry with them the preconceived notions of society that color their perception.

What’s the solution? More stories from all voices and all points of view. Alex Kotlowitz writes that “Stories inform the present and help sculpt the future, and so we need to take care not to craft a single narrative, not to pigeonhole people, not to think we know when in fact we know very little. We need to listen to the stories—the unpredictable stories—of those whose voices have been lost amidst the cacophonous noise of ideologues and rhetorical ruffians.”

In the end it comes down to empathy and understanding, recent studies have shown that reading fiction actually increases a person capacity for empathy, the same is most likely true for narrative non-fiction. As I wrote in my previous blog, reading rewires your brain by forcing you to live through the experiences of a stories protagonist. Would Zimmerman have shot Martin if he’d read To Kill a Mockingbird? Who can say? I do believe though, that if we try to empathize and put our preconceived notions aside, this world would be a better place.

Water Puppets
by Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press

There is a journalistic objectivity to Quan Barry’s new collection of poems, Water Puppets. The poems linger on scenes of profound violence and inhumanity, reporting heavy truths of war, massacre, and disaster. These scenes evoke a multitude of televised and printed images that remain in many readers’ memories from recent decades. Fortunately, the inherent madness and violence of such images are balanced by the pensiveness of Barry’s poems as well as her utter care with her art. The vocabulary she employs throughout the book is stark and stunning, a victory against these brutal themes. There can be no denial: the winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry is a demanding, worthwhile read.

Barry’s poems are a passport to the theater of savagery. This book is global in scale, examining human fragility in each of the hemispheres. However, Barry, who was born in Vietnam but raised in America, provides what is definitely a Western point of view. From her perspective, violence is a shocking misfortune that remains foreign, beyond her personal borders. The voice of the poems is often removed from the action, physically unharmed but emotionally damaged and ethically rocked. Images from theater—specifically the titular Vietnamese water puppets—subtly frame the book. Barry describes the lacquered and painted wooden water puppets as an example of an art form developed from disaster: a millennium ago, farmers invented the puppets when their land flooded. That farmland served as setting and stage as well as an excuse to perform rather than work. Of course the puppets and puppeteers were threatened by the violence of the Vietnam War. Barry wants us to remember “that the United States considered using nuclear weapons against these people” (“poem,” 59). The idea of the water puppets floats in the background of the book, pointing to the struggle between beauty and uncontrollable destruction.

The long poem “meditations,” perhaps the most poignant in the collection, is an eloquent consideration of guilt and our complicity in the destruction of beauty. This poem wheels all around the world, but one of its most devastating moments is when the narrator speaks of Afghan wedding parties that were accidentally bombed by US-led coalition forces. “I am always relieved / when I hear the bride and groom are among the dead,” she says (35), but the fact that there will be no widow or widower is sparse comfort. Or perhaps she’s trying to find some lingering fragment of beauty—perhaps the sentiment that love somehow outlasts death.

Thankfully, there are also softer poems in the book. For example, in a six-part poem about the Vietnamese language, the narrator ponders:

Imagine water traveling back up

into the sky, the sound of it

climbing like a question. Má?

Who would I be if I had stayed?

(“learning the tones,” 4)

Reflective moments such as this one are crucial to the book; they absorb the gut punches of harsher truths. They help alleviate the tension and anguish that Barry often creates. For example, the first poem of the book, “lion,” effectively dehumanizes readers by anthropomorphizing a captive lion. The lion is brutalized as prisoners of war are humiliated and abused. Barry forces us to relate to the lion’s experience when she states, “I am the lion and the lion is me” (2). Thus this poem conditions the readers for the further atrocities that course through the book. We never really lose this feeling of being a captive animal, vulnerable and lacking any control.

Even a nature scene suggests murder:

Where? The eye. Overhead steel clouds thunder. A terrace

brims with poppies, the red stalks wind-whipped like slashed throats.

(“ode,” 70)

Here, the sky is turbulent and the wind viciously cuts through the poppies. This depiction of the poppy fields of Afghanistan evokes John McCrae’s famous World War I poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915), a valediction for dead comrades that opens with a line about the gentle wind blowing through a poppy field.

Another natural setting, this time a newly thawed lake in New Hampshire, opens “Sunday Essay,” a poem about encounters with violence to the body during childhood. At first the beauty of the scene is marred by a minor boating accident that causes a puncture in the narrator’s palm. Then, as the narrator waits in the ER to receive stitches, she learns that the screaming she hears comes from a young teammate on her soccer team “who on the way home / in the disfiguring rain, a friend’s father behind the wheel, went rocketing / through the windshield” (29). The boat had been piloted by the narrator’s father, the car was driven by a friend’s father. Here adults can do nothing to prevent injuries that harm their children. They have failed to protect the children—episodes of violence prove unavoidable.

For the majority of the book the speaker seems to be Barry, but in “arsenal” the narrator is one member of a cadre of sea kayakers traversing the Antarctic Peninsula. Or perhaps it is still Barry herself: “On the page, all men are adventurers. I gather them to me / until we were three.” Reading or hearing about these adventurers, she relives their exploits. However, it seems more likely that this is the leader of the kayakers speaking about gathering his team and their innate appetite for adventure. This poem stands out from most of the others in the book because it is the natural world—more than the human world—that the kayakers experience as the source of destruction. Instead of creating violence or being victims of it, they seek it. “Our pact: fail and die,” the narrator explains (17). But instead of recoiling in horror, they reach reconciliation with their mortality: “this blue world squeezed of air / says: a society without death is decadent” (18). The Antarctic they find is primeval, pure, and nearly unconquerable. The kayakers learn, as the readers do, a truth of their own humanity:

There is no inconsistency. Of transcendence, of deliverance

from ruin in the human sense, here on the shattered kneecap

at the bottom of the world, my cohorts still beating

and strewn on the floes, I am my own salvation.

(“arsenal,” 18)

The discovery toward which Barry points her readers is that tragedy is a defining part of human experience. It is in the Antarctic, the farthest place from civilization, that we finally find a sense of triumph and can celebrate survival.

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

Though I thoroughly enjoy reading them, I’ve come to realize that short stories—that form beloved by fiction writers—just aren’t for me. Years ago, before I knew much about structuring short fiction, I wrote vignettes/flash-fiction/list stories (i.e., stories under 2,000 words) without knowing that was what those forms were called. I liked the associations and abstractions I could play around with in those forms. Now, after years of trying to make my short fiction fit into a traditional story format, and suffering through workshops in which others tried to make my scenic/descriptive/abstract stories conform to that traditional format, I’ve decided to shed the idea that these alternate forms are somehow not “real” fiction and I’m once again experimenting again with list stories and vignettes. And, I have to say, it’s so much GD-fun.

I’ve got the beginnings of a few vignette-y pieces on my desktop and while they marinate, I started looking around at the current crop of short-short fiction journals. Poets and Writers lists journals that accept flash fiction, but I’ve also been checking out journals and website devoted to flash fiction entirely.

Among my favorite discoveries so far are Flashquake, a quarterly with the mission: “Words are meant to enlighten and to inspire.” and Six Sentences, which is exactly what it sounds like. There is also 3a.m., Vestal (“the longest running flash fiction magazine in the world”), and Freight Stories. I haven’t yet had a chance to delve fully into Double Room Journal, but am compelled by the fact that it’s both prose poetry and flash fiction, (the form that comes most naturally to me).

But my favorite by far was been Wigleaf, recommended to me by friend/novelist/writing teacher Susannah Felts, who has impeccable taste in pretty much everything. Read this one by Ellen Birkett Morris or this one by Delaney Nolan and you’ll be hooked too, regardless of your feelings on the short story versus flash fiction format.

This is the last in a series of four essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “On Reinvigorating the Creative Writing Workshop: Four Bold New Approaches,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 3rd, 2012.

I’ll start with some informal remarks about how theme lends cohesion to my workshops, particularly when the students come with varied layers of skill/talent and experience. I’ll give a couple of examples of theme-based workshops and then end with some questions.

Like many writing instructors, I teach workshops in wildly different contexts. I teach undergraduate writing classes at Stanford, MFA workshops in the U of Alaska Low Residency program, seven- to ten-day workshops at Bread Loaf, Aspen, Port Townsend, et cetera. I’ve also taught creative writing workshops during Fulbrights to India, Tunisia, and Indonesia as well as in shorter visits to Chile, Turkey, Australia, and other places. And for fifteen years I taught workshops in residential MFA programs at Arizona State and the University of Minnesota.

Of course it’s important that we not assume we all have the same students or contexts. Yet in each of these settings—undergraduate or graduate, short-term or long-term, American or international—I have found that theme-based workshops function well.

Perhaps one of my advantages as a teacher is that I never took a creative writing class. After my BA in literature and master’s in journalism from Berkeley, I immediately left the United States for seven years, working as a journalist in Europe, Canada, and Africa. During those early years I joined two writing collectives, both of which produced coauthored books. So I learned to write fiction by reading and reporting as well as by critiquing my work with professional peers with shared tasks heading in a common thematic direction. This has shaped my teaching of creative writing over the decades.

When I was hired at ASU long ago, I worried about my lack of formal CW training. I’ve never understood the workshop model where one “just” reads manuscripts. For me, learning to write was integrally connected to reading published work as well as colleagues’ manuscripts. It involved focusing on particular elements of craft in a rigorous way. Yet many of my friends seemed to teach free-form workshops where the only content was student work.

The reasons for my discomfort became clear one September afternoon at the Minnesota State Fair pig-judging contest. One by one the little porkers wiggled their way forward to be evaluated—height, weight, curl of tail, glint in eye. One by one they were judged against that great pig in the sky. At the end of this loud, fragrant, and amazingly brief competition, the judge duly awarded blue, red, and white ribbons. Ah, I thought, as I walked off in the direction of the goats, that’s what I don’t like about the traditional workshop model. Too often we assume all the writers are homogeneous, pigs or goats or hens. Too often we evaluate against the ideal manuscript in the sky or the great manuscript in the professor’s drawer.

I was more interested in working with a “menagerie” toward common but individual goals. For me this is best accomplished by centering workshop on a theme. While the notion of theme might seem restrictive, I find that it frees the imagination in the same way that choosing a form—villanelle, sonnet, sestina—does in poetry. The framework stimulates new work and offers a shared context for closely exploring elements of craft.

Two theme-based workshops I enjoy are “Spirit of Place” and “Finding the Shapes of Our Stories.” For brevity’s sake I’ll focus on the former, but let me outline the other class first.

In “Finding the Shapes of Our Stories,” students read novels, novellas, short stories, and microfictions that explore narrative forms in provocatively diverse ways. They write short exercises as well as longer manuscripts. The exercises expose them to models such as fairytale, fable, multicultural scriptures, visual art, reportage, and musical composition. The revised writing builds on these experiments. Exploring forms from other arts and literary genres introduces new ways to read and write narrative.

In “Spirit of Place,” I assign texts and writing assignments related to place: Home; Ancestral Place; Foreign Places (distinguishing between visitor, traveler, and refugee experiences). We also look closely at our habits. Do we usually focus description and action inside or outside? If we’re “insiders,” how can we become more observant from the outside? Our tools include memory, imagination, and metaphor as well as research.

We consider the role of narrative time—flashback, flashforward, slow-motion, et cetera—in evoking authentic locale. We investigate the haunting nature of absence. We think about historical place, remember that whether we set our stories in 1812 or 2012, our characters all live in history, affecting and reflecting different times and settings.

By taking a common direction and following individual paths, students not only tackle basic questions about setting but also address language, characterization, point of view, and more. There’s something about the common territory and the specific prompts that offers students a fresh source for story generation and enhances the way they learn from one another.

Place is a verb (“to place”) as well as a noun. Place is what’s happening as well as where it’s happening. In this class we “take place” by studying dialect, music, angles of sunlight, moisture in the air, cultural traditions, whispers of the spirits. Setting is action and being and states of being. Artistic prose is just as musical as poetry, and we attend to the rhythm of one word breathing against another. We listen as we write.

I’m startled anew every time a student forgets setting. An almost pathological focus on the isolated individual’s quest, combined with the “action-packed” nature of film culture, encourages storytellers to deemphasize locale. In reaching for the universal, many young writers flounder in general description. The very particularity of place engages readers. Also, setting is different depending on who is experiencing it (character) and how (plot). The best writers allow themselves to be surprised by complications of place, derailments, astral projections.

How many of us have read these stories? (1) Four pages of dialogue in which the speakers don’t seem to move any body part, except possibly their lips. (Are they laughing in the kitchen? Whispering in the bedroom? Shouting in the backyard?) (2) The long, grim narrative that reveals no geography, no history, no hint about the age or ethnic mix of the people. (3) Lyrical passages in which every flower in a generic garden is sniffed by a disembodied nose.

Some students fret that their places will be too common or too exotic. A graduate student asked me whether she should abandon her collection of New York stories because New York had been done before. “What can I add to Paley, Doctorow, Mailer?” None of these authors, to my knowledge had written from the perspective of a young WASP midwestern woman camping out in Manhattan for a couple of years. Her New York would be a completely different location, perhaps in some ways an infinitely more fascinating city because of her foreignness, just as nonnative speakers of English (Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad) often compose our most musical prose, graced with original idioms.

Yes, speech is a primary element of setting. Dialect and vocabulary hint at where our characters have been, where they might be heading. So do the rhythms of conversations, from fast-paced, ever-interrupting exchanges in Greenwich Village to slower, more collaborative conversations in the Big Horn Mountains. Randall Kenan’s exemplary story “Tell Me, Tell Me” opens with a middle-of-the-night telephone conversation between two women. From their vocabulary, we realize they are old white southerners (“grandboy,” “pickaninny”). We gather something about their social status when one of them suggests that the other has had a bad dream: “Probably those oysters you ate at the club. You had oysters that other night, too. Remember? Oysters must just don’t agree with you. They didn’t agree with my mamma either.” Although the story subsequently unfolds in a more traditional mix of dialogue, description, and action, these first four pages of conversation are the key to our understanding of Bella and Ida’s places in Tims Creek, North Carolina, and in American social history.

Finally, our workshops discuss how “writing the familiar” is the trickiest task because we assume too much, don’t look closely enough, and thus the first-draft setting is often overly implicit and vague. Then we do basic archaeology into our neighborhoods—finding maps, photos, news articles, oral histories. Suddenly setting is neither a supernatural gift nor impossible drudgery, but an aesthetic opportunity that opens our stories (and ourselves) to deeper sensual pleasure and emotional power.

Specific assignments and strategies might include inviting a painter to the class to show her work and discuss her engagement of place or sending a group of new MFA students to the farmers’ market to see their new city through the eyes of Hmong and Somali farmers.

I’d like to end with a few questions we address in class:

What are the consequences of losing place through homogenization?

How important is ancestral home to our characters?

How do refugees and immigrants experience travel?

What are the differences between settling in a new place and trespassing on someone else’s territory?

Much like a caterer for a zombie luncheon, I’ve had brains on the brain this last week, and right now I am messing with your mind. As your mind assembles these letters into words, combine words into phrases, and then subsequently process those phrases and sentences in conjunction with each other your brain begins to form a model that is similar to the one I’ve created in my mind. My suggestions have an effect on you; the internal voice you are reading this in will suddenly change when I tell you to read it in my sultry deep Barry White bass… can’t get enough? Research has shown that reading actually rewires your brain, using several different areas originally designed for other tasks to translate a series of symbols into language. While this process may come with a trade-off, i.e. if you read more you might not be able to recognize faces, other research has shown that, because reading uses so many different areas, it actually strengthens the connections in your brain.

So, what should you read for a strong and healthy brain? Why fiction of course! A recent article by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times called “Your Brain on Ficiton”, delves into research that shows that fiction, because it mimics real-life situations, can actually help us understand the “complexities of social life.” A good short story or novel functions along the lines of a flight simulator, running us through interactions and events that our brains conjure and process thereby training us on what to do and what not to do in a particular situation. Fiction in this respect functions as a form of meditation or dream, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in his opening to Bagombo Snuff Box likened the reading of short stories to “a bunch of Buddhist cat naps.”

Which is exactly why my blog is completely unhealthy for you but completely addicting… can’t get enough? You see, where reading off the page or the act of reading fiction involves the concentrated effort of mental processes, reading off the internet, especially hyperlinked text, actually shatters focus. Items read off the internet are comprehended only at a superficial level, the information we glean off the internet is primarily transferred to the short term memory and very little of it passes into long term memory, in other words, in one ear and out the other. Nicholar Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, asserts that the internet “is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.” This also may explain why no one was able to select a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year.

On the bright side, though our brains may be devolving into their primate origins because of the internet, it was announced last week that baboons can read, or at least recognize real words amongst fake words. My hope is that future experiments with baboons will involve typewriters, or at the very least Microsoft Word, in order to test the infinite monkey theorem. The idea, if you’re not familiar with it, is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” in which ream after ream of pages typed by monkeys will ultimately produce the great works of literature through sheer probability of letter combinations. Some “real world” experiments have already been conducted in the last few years, but the results show that those primates writing books are not quite there yet when it comes to producing “a classic”.

This is the third in a series of four essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “On Reinvigorating the Creative Writing Workshop: Four Bold New Approaches,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 3rd, 2012.

Recently I taught a 400-level creative nonfiction workshop, and instead of having students turn in traditional hard-copy essays for workshop, I required them to create blogs and post everything there. I also required that the blogs be completely open to the public and without restrictions. Here are a few of the logistics.

1. For consistency and ease, all students were required to use blogger.com. I did not want to use my university's Blackboard system, because I wanted their writing to be truly public and not under any university restrictions.

2. Each student had to post something on his or her blog every week. Weekly posts could be short (100–300 words), with no topic restrictions.

3. Each student had to post two longer “workshop essays” on his or her blog over the semester. These were critiqued in workshop discussion.

4. Each student was required to read other students’ blog posts and comment on half of them every week, then alternate to the other half the following week. Students did not write critique letters for other students beyond commenting on their blogs.

5. Because I’d never used such a format before, I used a contract grading system in which students would automatically receive a B if they followed the basic contract of the course, but they would quickly fall below a B if they broke the contract.

My rationale, as stated in my syllabus, was as follows:

Public blogs provide students with opportunities to get response and feedback not just from other students but also from a wider audience. The social aspect of blogs creates a greater sense of community for students, since blogs act as a “middle place” between the classroom and the rest of the world.

My experiences using this blog format in the creative writing workshop were admittedly mixed. Several things surprised me, and I want to share what I learned from these surprises, as well as offer some ideas for how to use blogs effectively in your own workshops.

Surprise #1

Students were primarily worried about their privacy. I have to admit that in an era of Facebook-Twitter-Tumblr-O-Mania, I hadn’t seen this one coming. Privacy? This from students who had extremely loud “private” cell phone conversations right outside my office door? From students who weren’t shy about yanking up their shirts right in class in order to show off their most recent tattoos? When pressed to explain further, one student said: “Well, what if someone links my blog post on their Facebook and then their fourteen-year-old cousin reads it?” After heated discussion, someone suggested the use of pseudonyms in order to ensure their privacy. I was leery of this, partly because it was a nonfiction workshop. But I acquiesced. “Okay, fine,” I said. (And may I mention here some of the pseudonyms chosen: Tiffany in the Lost and Found, Cecil Brooks, M.S. McKibbin, J Scatter.)

Students, it seemed, not only liked, valued, and were familiar with the “safe,” insulated workshop environment but had come to see it as a sanctuary from all the Internet babble out there. “Plus,” one student said, “this is a class. And we’re doing this for a grade. So we don’t just want some perv looking at our stuff online and commenting on it.”

Still, I pushed on, challenging them to examine their notions of audience. Why “perv”? And why did students in general not want outside audiences for their work? Was it because they wanted to be writers but not have to face the hard issues of having “real” readers with sometimes unsavory opinions about their work?

Also, I realized my students had unrealistic ideas about what it meant to throw their proverbial blogging hats into the ring. One student said to me, “When trying to think of my first blog post, I was stuck for a while, maybe because I was worried about it being read by millions of people, but once I got going I realized it’s kind of cool to have my own site.” Millions of people? Really? How would that happen? Perhaps they’d seen too many movies like Julie and Julia. Perhaps they were just young and idealistic.

But this quickly led to the second surprise.

Surprise #2

Students were also concerned about censorship. One said, “What if I want to write about drugs and orgies and stuff? Or what if I want to swear?” There was laughter but also real concern.

“Well,” I said, “would you write about those things in an essay and turn in hard copies of it to the class?”

Sure, they said, but that was just for the class. This was different. “Why?” I asked.

“Because,” someone said, “no one in here would judge you. But if you throw something out there on the Internet, who knows who might read it, and then what if someone writes a really nasty response to my blog post?”

Ah—I was beginning to understand. They were not just concerned about who might be reading or sharing their blog posts but with how someone out there might comment negatively and make them look bad. Valid concerns, certainly, but not deal breakers.

Surprise #3

Students were concerned about the length of blog posts. Normally when students ask me how long their short stories should be, they’re asking because they tend to err on the short side, but with blogs the concern was reversed. Since studies have shown that the average Internet user changes activity at least every three minutes, how long could student bloggers expect to hold their reader’s attention? “Let’s say two to five pages,” I said, but then realized that seemed too skimpy for an advanced workshop requirement and yet too long for a blog post. Also, blog posts aren’t measured in pages but in—what? Inches? Paragraphs? Screen length? Word count? What to do?

We decided that everyone should use their own best judgment, but that since it was for a class, to err on the long side. And speaking of class, this led to the fourth surprise.

Surprise #4

After a few weeks of workshop, some students declared that blogs didn’t feel “academic” enough. One student said that blogs “make me write more but write worse”; another agreed that blogs “make me write less carefully.” Though there were a few who credited the blogs with making them write “freer and more candidly and genuinely,” the majority of the class expressed concern with how “casual” and “loose” blogs made their writing. As one student put it: “Too much liberty for me is death.”

What I gleaned from thinking over these comments was twofold (and contradictory, I might add):

1. Even though in regular, nonblog workshops I rarely gave specific writing topics to students, I'd never once received a complaint or a comment that they were too loose or casual or free.

2. Students do not take very seriously writing that they (or others) do online.

Conclusions

Despite how conflicted these responses might sound, as time went on I discovered great pedagogical value in using blogs in the workshop.

1. Using blogs engendered more journalistic, sociocultural writing than I’d ever seen in a creative nonfiction workshop. If you teach CNF workshops, you know what I mean: if not instructed otherwise, students will most often write about their childhoods, their parents, a bad accident or breakup, or (fill in the blank). But there was something about the blog’s wider audience reach that pushed many students toward topics beyond the personal. One student wrote a post titled “Music and the Fate of Modern Girls” in which she deconstructed Taylor Swift’s song lyrics as unempowering to young girls. In the process she also wrote memoiristically about her own female music idols while growing up. Another student wrote a post titled “I Think I’m in Love with Clint Eastwood,” in which he compared the animated children’s film Rango to old spaghetti westerns. He situated himself as a narrator who'd been in love with movies from a young age. I can say with 98 percent certainty that these essays would not have been written for a regular nonblog workshop by these students.

2. Students who did write in a more autobiographical way used the blog to take more emotional risks. One student, who had spent all semester playing nervously with a deck of cards in class, outed himself as autistic in a blog post but did it in an oblique way by utilizing second-person narration and a series of poker hand combinations presented visually. In his case, the blog format allowed him to tell it "slant." Another student wrote about his obsession with playing paintball by using short clips of paintball footage, collaged with literary quotes about war, footnoted with his own asides about how embarrassing and juvenile paintball wars are. The blogs, in his case, allowed him an multimedia outlet to express emotions he would not have been comfortable doing with straight text.

Some Blog Dos

1. DO mention early on that students can and should use images, weblinks, audio, video, and anything else blogs allow that they couldn’t do on paper.

2. DO allow them to use pseudonyms.

3. DO require hard-copy story critiques if you want your students to give each other astute and useful feedback.

4. DO set a word-count limit for blog posts. Include students in that discussion.

5. DO establish firm standards (be specific and descriptive) for what type of feedback is expected when students comment on other students’ blog posts.

6. DO use a textbook or anthology in a blog course. It keeps students grounded.

7. DO provide writing prompts and possible topics for blog posts. Students feel oddly lost when writing blogs.

8. DO plan to spend roughly 20 percent more time at your computer than you would in a regular workshop.

And Some Blog Don’ts

1. DON’T expect every blog post to be great. It’s the nature of the beast.

2. DON’T require students to provide feedback to everybody’s blog post. Two to four each is adequate.

3. DON’T let students who already have blogs use those. Require them to make a new one just for the class.

4. DON’T get too bent out of shape about occasional typos, misspellings, and the like. Again, it’s the nature of the beast.

5. DON’T allow students to revise their blog posts until after the class has discussed them. Otherwise you will all be reading different versions.

I plan to use the blog format again, with gusto, now that I know what I need to tweak and adjust. I hope you’ll plan to try it as well.

This is the second in a series of four essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “On Reinvigorating the Creative Writing Workshop: Four Bold New Approaches,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 3rd, 2012.

After a quarter of a century of teaching creative writing, I think I’m a good workshop leader. I’m attentive, respectful, and honest, and I try to create a workshop that doesn’t enervate the writer but energizes her or him and makes her want to tackle another draft rather than give up writing forever. Still, in my experience there are too many problems with the workshop as it’s generally configured.

1. The workshop is often dominated by a few voices. The loud students talk and the shy ones stay silent, but this doesn’t mean the shy ones are without opinions. You can devise ways around this, for example by going around the room and asking everyone’s opinion in turn, but this often turns out to be a rather grim exercise, or repetitive: “I agree with what Tim said.” “Yes, me too.”
2. Someone starts brainstorming wildly, going further and further away from the story at hand. “I think it would be good if Rosalie developed cancer and if a baseball came flying through the window at the moment she was telling her children she loved them, and she died from a concussion instead.”
3. The students haven’t all read the story or essay at hand. “I didn’t have time to read the story, but from what everyone else is saying, I think that the character of Rosalie needs to be more developed.”
4. The students form a kind of club, the aim of which is to flatter one another. “I had Tim in my last workshop, and this is, for lack of a better word, Tim-esque. It displays his own very unique style.”
5. Sometimes a tone can be set in a workshop, either by the instructor or by a student, and it can be difficult to shift away from it, whether it’s a positive or negative tone.

Those are a few of the problems that I’ve had to deal with over the years, and while they’re all repairable, I’d rather not have to deal with them at all. So several years ago, I decided to enter the twenty-first century in terms of workshop techniques, and I developed a system for critiquing that for me solved all these problems and more.

At the University of Iowa, each course is given a virtual space on a program called ICON. If you’re not familiar with this program, you might know about Blackboard, but I much prefer ICON. The system I devised, at any rate, fully utilizes this virtual classroom. Each week we do a kind of pre-workshop on ICON. Let’s say the course meets once a week on Tuesdays. The stories or essays that are to be critiqued during the next class session are passed out, and I give students approximately five days to read and critique one another’s work. I tell them they need to post their comments on the essay or story at hand by the following Sunday, but with this added caveat: they should not look at anyone else’s comments until after they have posted their own comments. It’s quite important that they follow this rule, and it’s something I stress in class. I follow the rule as well—I don’t look at any of their remarks until after I’ve posted, as a kind of reward.

In one fell swoop, this eliminates almost all the problems I’ve encountered in typical workshops. First, students can’t pretend they have read the story—if they haven’t read the story or essay, it’s obvious. This method also puts everyone on the same footing. If you don’t know what everyone else is saying about the work at hand, it sobers you a bit and makes you more mindful of your opinions and their impact. Likewise, everyone gets their say. The shy students have as much of a voice as the loud students, and no one is able to dominate this initial discussion. And the author, too, gets to see where everyone stands before workshop. You have two days to consider these initial opinions, and this eliminates the surprise factor of walking into a workshop terrified, not knowing how people feel about your work. This way, you know beforehand and can consider the various opinions on your own before workshop.

Two or three days after the pieces are posted, the face-to-face workshop tends to be much more productive and efficient than the traditional workshop, where there’s often a lot of throat clearing. Everyone knows where everyone else stands. Everyone has read the work and has written a considered and thoughtful opinion, and so the conversation tends to be more focused. I generally ask students first to identify some of the trends in the discussion on ICON, and I write these down on the chalkboard or whiteboard. I’m not trying to form a consensus here, because I don’t think a story should be written by committee—another potential problem in the traditional workshop . We’re simply pointing out areas of discussion and trying to consider what these convergences or divergences of opinion can tell us and the writer of the story.

One possible criticism of such a method is that it is likely to solidify opinion and discourage give-and-take, but the opposite is actually true, in my experience. After reading the comments of students, I often change my mind about my reading of a particular piece, and my students likewise have a chance to revise their opinions of a piece with the reflection afforded by the two-day lag time between posting their opinions and the actual class. A blatant misreading of an essay also becomes evident when it’s posted on ICON—it’s certainly not my goal to embarrass anyone, either writer or critic, but simply that we approach one another’s work with humility and the understanding that even critics are fallible.

I myself had a moment of embarrassment several years ago when I confused the authors of two essays I was reading. I thought I was reading a piece by a particular male student. In the essay, the narrator ducks into a bathroom to apply lipstick and eye shadow, and I was rather mystified. I thought, “I didn’t know David was a cross-dresser!" I realized my mistake before I posted my comments, but in my post to him I mentioned my misreading and how funny I found it to imagine him applying makeup. Two weeks later, he posted a wonderful essay about cross-dressing, my mistake having turned out to be the truth. The essay, called “The Dressing Room,” was later published in Fourth Genre, and it remains one of my favorites of his. Though such gaffes are rare, it’s good for the instructor to be humbled as well from time to time.

Just the other day, I learned that one of my students from a past workshop regularly goes back to the comments on her work on ICON, even two years later.

This semester I’m using this method for the first time with a group of undergraduates, and the verdict is still out on its effectiveness, but so far I think it’s gone well. These are highly motivated students in our creative writing track, and so they haven’t so far balked at the extra work. The only blip thus far was a student’s post explaining that he had written the attached story while “drowning in malt liquor.” Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest admission, as some of the other students remarked in a slightly chiding tone that the story suffered somewhat as a result.

Recently, when I had to find a substitute to teach my class, he remarked afterward on how talkative the group was and how well-informed they seemed about the stories being discussed, so I have high hopes for this method’s effectiveness for undergrads.

I should add that this form of critique eliminates for the most part the kinds of meaningless qualitative remarks that begin a lot of workshops: the “I really love this story” and “This isn’t my cup of tea” remarks. My method forces a pretty deep engagement with the work, and of course I give the students guidelines, asking them to specifically indicate what in the story works for them and why, as well as what feels incomplete. Rewrites get posted online as well, and this allows all of us to compare the versions and serves as a chance for the writer to remark on what advice he or she found most helpful.

I’m sure I’ll continue to refine these workshops further. One modification I’m considering is to ask students to write down at the beginning of the class how their opinions of the story or essay were modified in response to their classmates’ comments, if at all, as well as what questions they still have for the writer. The point of this method, after all, is to not to pin down one’s opinion but to keep modifying it as new information is received.

This is the first in a series of four essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “On Reinvigorating the Creative Writing Workshop: Four Bold New Approaches,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 3rd, 2012.

Here is my brief on the traditional workshop.

1. It is a form that is a creature of the GI Bill, mostly developed by veterans of the recent war (World War II), young men who had, under fire, become expert in fixing things, in improvisational problem solving, but whose larger goals (winning the battle, surviving the battle) were fixed and narrowly defined. The thinking in combat was mainly tactical and not strategic. A hill to be captured. A story to be written. There are obstacles for each enterprise, and there are workarounds to be employed, various feints and movements. But the goal is clear. A hill is a hill. A story is a story. And the traditional workshop is designed for attack with a clear objective to produce not just writing but “great” writing.

2. This tactical approach creates a classroom that places the work under fire—again I apologize for the militaristic conceit, but part of my point is that the drama of combat was written into the DNA of the form. It sorts. There are winners and losers. The writer creates a scenario (a story) that in the workshop is then “gamed.” The classroom becomes a simulation of the imagined hostile environment of the larger world. The work succeeds or fails on its own merits, and the writer remains silent once the attack has been launched. The work for the writer takes place before the workshop. The traditional workshop regards the written work as one product always already complete and finished. The environment is hostile by definition, and the gag rule that seeks to defuse tension actually forces the writer to anticipate and confront all possible criticism before he or she even gets to the workshop. Ironically, workshop, though the term connotes working on a work in progress, actually produces for its consideration a finished product.

3. The tactical workshop finds itself housed in an ancient critical scientific fiduciary institution, the university classroom. The university treats knowledge as a trust. Its classrooms are set up to transfer knowledge you don’t know but need to know. Knowledge that is good for you. Take the heart, for instance. I was not born with any idea as to how the heart works—its chemical electric wiring, its biomechanics, its diseases and remedies. I must go to a place where knowledge of these matters is held in trust and there transferred to me, an empty vessel, who receives said knowledge. I then can be tested upon the success of the transfer and elevated by degree into the position of fiduciary. I contend the knowledge to write about the human heart, to express emotion, to make art about the heart is not the same kind of knowledge. But in the context of the university classroom the bias remains. What the student knows is not what the student needs to know.

4. Time. Given that the university’s point of view is fiduciary, that it is involved in the transfer of knowledge from a bank to an empty vessel, it imagines that there are optimum time intervals for that to take place. Classes are three hours. Semester’s sixteen weeks. The typical class of twelve writers is broken up into four groups of three writers whose work is discussed for forty-five minutes each. The yield if you are a writer is that you have three stories considered by semester’s end. The rest of the time you are asked to operate as a critic. I contend that what the traditional workshop trains most successfully is the critical mind, and it does so at the expense of the creative one. It asks its participants to be present as critics the vast majority of the time in attempts to identify what is good and bad with a story and suggest how one makes it better. The consequence is that the writer trained as a critic is trained then to anticipate criticism when he or she is writing, instead of simply writing. The current time management also assumes that the creation of art and the creation of the writer who creates the art are incremental, progressive, schedulable, and predictable. Under these conditions, what the traditional workshop most efficiently identifies and produces is a failed story, and it defines a writer who cannot write by definition. It efficiently weeds out.

My response has been the hypoxic workshop. Hypoxic means to go breathless and is borrowed from athletic training, swimming, running: to train with intervals of breathless exertion, endurance by resetting the point of exhaustion.

The hypoxic workshop looks at all twelve stories each session, and each story is discussed in eight- to ten-minute intervals (I use a Michael Graves–designed egg timer to keep time; the bell dings, we move on), with the writer of the story under discussion participating in the discussion. At the end of the semester the writer has produced fourteen or fifteen prose pieces instead of the more typical two or three. The critique under these conditions is curious, responsive, descriptive, and collaborative, and it does not focus on what is good or bad or what euphemistically “works” or “doesn’t work.” The writer speaks as a writer, not a critic of writing, and often identifies the writer’s own intent, the problems and challenges posed for the writer him- or herself, and some attempted solutions. The critique is led by the writer under discussion and uses the other writers in the room collaboratively to better understand where the writer and the story want to go. The critique is not interested in norming, fixing, or making something better or even good. As the teacher, I do not know what is good for you. That is to say, I do not know what is good for you to do, nor do I know what you yourself think is “good.” I am not in the business here of policing, protecting standards, or enforcing rigor. I hope to create an environment in which the students will do things they want to do. Control means “roll against.” My idea is to roll with. Students who come into this workshop do so saying they want to write, so they write. I don’t even see it as my business to get them to write or create art in the way I think they should. I roll with. It is their time to waste. It is their choice to make. I try to help them do what is already important and interesting to them and not necessarily to me. I try not to care in a careful way.

The hypoxic workshop is strategic instead of tactical. It is interested in process more than product. And it seeks to develop and inculcate the habits of writing that are sustainable over the lifetime of the writer. Writing should be as natural as breathing. And this does not become unconsciously natural when it is practiced in an environment that privileges judgment, improvement, and success in narrowly defined metrics or binary distinctions of good and bad. Quantity has a quality all its own. The hypoxic workshop seeks to explore the quality of quantitative production of writing, derailing the hierarchical, critical, and narrow desire for quality alone, and does so in conditions that encourage production and full participation by muting the distinction between writer and critic, writer and reader. It seeks to train the writer for a long-term sustained lifetime participation in the act of creating art.

Lately, I’ve been waking from dreams in which Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sweetly whispers in my ear: “Hey baby, avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous to equate the denial of taxpayer subsidy with measures ‘aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.’ That’s right, épater les bourgeois, I know French baby. ”

Okay, so I haven’t really been dreaming that… Well, maybe a little.

With the Supreme Court in session I’ve found myself listening to excerpts and reading transcripts of the cases on health care reform and life without parole for juvenile convicts. The sheer eloquence of the Justices and the counselors trying the cases is captivating. There is an auditory eros in hearing the English language, in an age where it’s butchered by every means imaginable, used so perfectly in rhetorical debates where there is no vehemence or mudslinging, only philosophical thought put into play. It’s almost like being front row to the dialogues of Plato, listening to Socrates as he sounds out his party’s beliefs.

I’ve been getting an additional fix online at the Oyez Project of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, a multimedia archive of the Supreme Court since October 1955. It is fascinating to listen to the arguments posed over the last half-century and find how many have some import to freedom of speech and obscenity. There have been countless novels that have been deemed obscene, many of which are now considered canonical. While Banned Books Week isn’t until the last week of September, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded how perilously close we’ve come to being deprived of important works of literature.

On a related note, back in February Barney Rosset passed away. His Grove Press introduced the American readers to authors ranging from Samuel Becket and Octavio Paz to Tom Stoppard and Henry Miller, and published unexpurgated copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch. Rosset and Grove Press battled in the Supreme Court for the right to publish works deemed obscene in cases like Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, (decided in Miller v California) and Grove Press v Maryland State Board of Censors. His literary magazine the Evergreen Review published works by the likes of Nabokov, Bukowski, Sontag and Malcolm X, and, to bring things full circle, it even carried a controversial piece by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Who knows? Maybe tonight I’ll dream of Justice Douglas propping up his feet to read one of Grove Press’ editions of the Marquis de Sade, and hollering at me, “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

The Chicagoan is a new media company/publication (which—full disclosure—I’m an editor for) generating buzz for an innovative approach to funding and long-form storytelling.

I’ve been thrilled to contribute to this publication (with many talented others; check the masthead here), because the mission is so very rad. In the 1920s, The Chicagoan was launched to compete with the New Yorker et al, in the arts/culture coverage of a city then commonly called “Porkopolis.” But, the insular society stories the mag published weren’t compelling to either the general public or Chicago socialites and it didn’t last long. (The issues were collected in a book, “The Chicagoan: A Lost History of the Jazz Age” by cultural historian Neil Harris in 2008.)

After meeting with Harris, JC Gabel, the publisher and editor behind the now-defunct arts and culture mag Stop Smiling, decided to resurrect the original Chicagoan with a new mission “to document the arts, culture, innovators and history of Chicago and the greater Midwest through long-form storytelling.”

In that, Issue 1 succeeds. Don’t take my (biased) word for it: Janet Potter at The Millions calls the stories about a beat cop and the documentary film The Interrupters “complicated, antireductive pieces.” John Dugan at the Economist says the magazine “feels elegant and built-to-last.” And, as Robert Feder put it in a Time Out Chicago article, it’s a “sumptuous 194-page magazine that carries a dazzling array of articles, artwork and photographs, zero advertising and a cover price of $19.95. A line beneath the nameplate describes its mission as nothing less than ‘documenting the arts, culture, innovators and history of Chicago and the Greater Midwest.’”

Issue # 1, released at the end of February, resembles a book more than a magazine in length and quality, and has been admired for being “heavy on design” - it's a limited-edition and sold only in independent bookstores, online, and in pop-up stores. The 194 pages include profiles about Indiana outsider artist Peter Anton, Blackbird chef-turned-social-justice-food-advocate Tara Lane, short fiction from Joe Meno, and much more. Perhaps most notably, there’s a 25,000-word retrospective of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, “The Original Frenemies,” excerpted at Slate.com.

Gabel noted the singularity of the length of these stories. “I’m pretty proud of all the stories, because I don’t think they could have appeared anywhere else in the city in any other periodicals at that length….Some of these things have been covered before, but they get a mention or a blurb — not a six-page feature.”

But the word counts, coupled with the fact that ads aren’t funding the project, means that even though 500 copies were sold in an hour, funding is the big issue. Gabel noted: “The next issue is still being lined up—but will likely come from deep-pocketed donors with an interest in promoting Chicago as a cultural centre.”

What’s that? Twenty bucks for a publication is a lot of money? You’ve gotten used to reading articles for free? I know. I know. Me too. But the thing is, it wasn’t always this way. People used to understand that in order to read great stories, you had to pay for them. Can I tell you what a pleasure it’s been for me as an editor to sink into a long, poignant story about burning a farm in Kansas? Or Ling Ma’s odd, intimate profile of Pitchfork founder Mike Reed, instead of charticles and listicles? This is work that reminds me why I am called to storytelling.

In the last few years, we’ve gotten away from that idea; that you’re supposed to pay for writers to do solid storytelling and I don’t know about you, but my experience as a reader has suffered; (the aforementioned charticles, copious typos, boredom). We’re even further away from the idea that the Midwest deserves a publication focusing on long-form essays and stories (think The Atlantic, Harpers), enjoyed by the east coast. I hope that we, as a culture, are starting to realize that good storytelling - the kind that transports you and changes your thinking - requires talented writers who are paid a fair wage for their work. But if we don’t, we’re going to end up with only content like this. And this. Or this. And no one wants that. (Right?)

So, if you also support the idea of telling stories of Chicago and the Midwest well and fully, vote with your dollar and buy a copy of the mag. And/or, help fund the project and tell your wealthy, culturally-savvy friends to do the same. But if you’re trying to nab Issue #1 - and help ensure there’s an Issue #2 - you might want to hustle: Bookstores are having trouble keeping it in stock and, as The Millions notes, “getting your hands on the issue became the coup du jour for hipsters and literati alike.”

This is the last in a series of three nonfiction craft essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “The Persona in Personal Narrative: Crafting the Made-Up Self,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 2nd, 2012.

In his recent book The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, Carl Klaus maintains that “‘the person’ in a personal essay is a written construct, a fabricated thing, a character of sorts.” I agree in spirit with Klaus’s view. Where we differ (though only slightly so) is that I see narrative personae not as made-up selves but rather as several different selves.

*

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes,

The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. . . . The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves. . . . Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned. . . . This narrator becomes a persona [I prefer thinking that the narrator adopts a persona]. [Gornick continues:] Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentence, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject.

That last phrase, “to serve the subject,” underscores the difference between a straightforward retelling of an experience and crafting a narrator (or narrators) that best fits the story being told. As examples of what I mean, I’ll cite some decisions I struggled with while working on my memoir, Still Pitching.

First though, some background. The memoir’s time frame extends from 1947 to 1957, a period that baseball historians and hard core fans still refer to as “the golden age of New York baseball”— the city’s three professional baseball teams, the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, and New York Giants, played in and sometimes won the World Series ten times in those eleven years. If you were an adolescent male growing up back then, you couldn’t avoid baseball whether you wanted to or not. Playing the game was, in effect, a male rite of passage, like schoolyard fights and boasting about fabricated sexual conquests.

The narrative centers on how this young boy, someone his high school classmates thought of as a nebbish, manages—through a mix of determination, tenacity, force of will, and desperation—to make himself into a successful, well-recognized baseball pitcher.

An initial impetus for writing Still Pitching was a nagging later-life itch to explore, with the hope of better understanding the early influences that helped shape that baseball-obsessed kid into a midlife writer. But a more insistent need was the desire to craft that state of affairs into an aesthetically satisfying memoir. The first challenge was finding the most appropriate narrator for this story. Or, as it turned out, the most appropriate narrators.

During the early stages of composing, I discovered that Still Pitching, by necessity, needed not one but three narrative personae; the author, whom Bill Roorbach refers to as “the writer at the desk”; the adult narrator, a spinoff, surrogate, stand-in—call him what you will—who’s looking back at a younger incarnation of himself; and the adolescent “I.” As the memoir’s de facto narrator, the adolescent boy has the purpose of, as Gornick suggests, “serving the subject.” To that end, his thoughts and feelings are filtered through the adult narrator’s sensibilities.

As a memoirist, I believe that you can’t truly understand a character, especially one who’s a surrogate self, unless you can fully imagine who he is. Here, in order for the adult persona to allow himself (and the reader) access to the boy’s inner life, he had to shape that younger self into a three-dimensional character. Which meant that in addition to painting an accurate portrait of that particular time and place—New York City in the 1950s—the adult persona had to imagine (not invent, not make up) who that kid was and what compelled him to pursue his most important hopes and dreams.

*

Just as in everyday life we laugh and cry, show anger and sadness, so, too, for personal essayists and memoirists, one voice is rarely enough. Memoirists, for example need different voices in order to reveal the complexity of a life. You may need to twine a child voice with an adult voice; a lyric voice with a comic voice; a sober voice with an out-of-control voice. In other words, there are several “me(s)” that make up the whole story. —Sue William Silverman

Curiously enough, it was only after Still Pitching came out that I began thinking more seriously about multiple personae. A few months after the book’s publication, I received an e-mail from Ted Mahan, baseball coach at Michigan State University, a man I knew of but had never met. In his e-mail the coach said, “I finished reading your book Still Pitching and loved it. Thanks for writing about your youth; that took some courage. If you are around this spring we would love to have you attend a game and throw out a first pitch. I want to see if you can still throw.”

This raised an interesting dilemma. Being a former athlete, my knee-jerk response was to take the coach up on his last-line challenge. And in time, I was able to do just that. But my memoirist-self wanted to tell him straight on that it didn’t take any courage at all to write about my youth. In fact, whenever I managed to write a graceful sentence or render a telling sensory detail, I’d experience an exhilarating, yet fleeting, sense of accomplishment, somewhat similar, I might add, to the momentary satisfaction I used to feel when I’d come up with a pitching strategy to befuddle a good hitter.

Moreover, I wanted to explain that I chose particular scenes and situations largely because they served the narrative. And I was even thinking of telling him that the kid pitcher in the memoir wasn’t really me. He was a version of me, to be sure, but a character nevertheless—a character, in fact, I’d constructed in part though memory and imagination.

*

"I like to think of persona this way: nested-doll image, author inside, covered with narrator, who is covered by the persona. I also like to use nouns to characterize a persona; as E. B. White says, 'The essayist arises in the morning and . . . can . . . be any sort of person . . . philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.'" —Kim Kupperman

A few weeks later I received a similar e-mail, this one from Tom Watson, a former writing student, now himself a writer. In it, he said, “I admired the guts it took to bare your soul as you did.” Tom’s and the coach’s comments reminded me once again of just how difficult it is to teach my students the distinction between crafting their narrators as appropriate personae and contending, as they often do, that the narrator was “really me” and the events being described “really did happened that way.”

Here, then, is a paraphrase of what I said in my e-mail to Tom:

Actually, it didn't feel like I was baring my soul. As the adult persona looking back on a younger version of himself, I was trying to get inside that adolescent boy’s head and describe, even evoke, what he was thinking and feeling. And to accomplish that, the adult “I” had to imagine, among other things, how the boy’s mind and imagination worked. What were his deepest yearnings, passions, and fears? What major changes did he experience from ages twelve to seventeen? How did he cope with disappointment and failure? Where did his resilience and determination come from? And, more specifically, how and why did he put up with the deliberately cruel and humiliating treatment he received from his early coaches?

I went on to say that for the entire time I was writing the memoir, I thought of myself first as “the writer at the desk” and then as the adult narrator inhabiting an earlier version of himself. Moreover, as the “writer at the desk” (even that’s a persona of sorts), I wasn’t aiming for a literal rendering of my childhood and adolescence. By utilizing multiple narrative selves, I was trying to imagine and reflect on what it felt like to be that character, that wannabe-kid-pitcher growing up in New York in the 1950s.

*

Imagination doesn’t simply mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside, emotions, events and experiences that you haven’t actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you’ve got them onto the page. —David Malouf

One reason I write literary memoir is to find out things I don’t understand about myself, especially in relation to the confusing world I live in. At the same time, the memoirist in me is consciously using his childhood/adolescent experiences as raw materials for crafting a compelling, cohesive narrative.

Consequently, I understand what writer Pam Houston means when she says, “I’m not going to tell the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.” In my own case, I remember it in the context of urgently having to write about that young boy while simultaneously attempting to make some larger sense out of his struggles.

And that’s a much different undertaking from relating the story to old friends over a drink—or writing it simply because it happened.

Ghassan ZaqtanPalestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, whose collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me Yale University Press is releasing this month, has still not received a visa to travel to the United States for a two-week-long book tour, which was supposed to begin yesterday. The poetry of Fady Joudah, Zaqtan’s translator who was to help Zaqtan kick off his tour, appears in the latest issue of TQO.

Come out to the Teaching Artist Showcase and Multi-University Student Open Mic at Experimental Station this Wednesday, April 11, from 7-8:30 PM. Sandi Wisenberg will be reading from her novel manuscript and will be joined by Northwestern graduate student Matt Carmichael, fiction writer Bayo Ojikutu and Bayo’s students. The event is free of charge.

This is the second in a series of three nonfiction craft essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “The Persona in Personal Narrative: Crafting the Made-Up Self,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 2nd, 2012.

I was away on a writing retreat this January, the first time since my husband Stu died last August that I was able to push away the loss and sense of chaos and feel more like a self I remembered. I vowed not to do e-mail, but like Adam biting the apple, I did it anyway. “Did you pay your quarterly taxes on time?” my accountant wrote. What quarterly taxes? Stu paid taxes in April, I thought. And again, the world I’d been hobbling together was splitting apart. I hit ’Reply’ and hesitated. Who was I at this moment? The helpless widow barely holding on? Which I felt. The furious dowager ready to fire someone? Which I felt. The woman you can’t reach? Very tempting. I started writing:

Dear Howard,

. . . I am very disappointed to hear about the taxes, especially since I wrote you several times last fall about what I need to be doing. I’m away until Sunday, but am hoping we can set up an appointment next week to put a better system in place. Given your long history with Stu, I know he would assume that you would make that happen.

Best,

Mimi

The “I” sounded so calm, so in command. No one I had planned on, and yet here “she” was—and I liked her. So did Howard, who wrote back, promising a help session on Monday morning, free of charge. Even better, I went back to writing for six more days, thinking, “To hell with taxes.” It was a nonchalance I had not managed in five months.

In Jungian terms, a persona is a public mask that doesn’t represent the inner personality of an individual. The implication is that a false external self, carefully constructed, hides the real self, the one at home in pajamas. Maybe in a society with a wider gulf between desire and social expectation, but not growing up in my America. I think of my mother, deep in glumness, over her morning coffee—until the phone rang and a friend was on the line. Suddenly her face was all smiles, her voice lilting with positive energy that might fade as soon as she hung up, but not usually. The phone call seemed to rouse another self waiting below the glumness, who took over from the sulker. Everyone in the family teased her about her “phone-y smile.” Yes, a bad pun and bad strategy, plus we got it wrong. That smile had power, I realize now, calling forth a cheerful persona to challenge the glum one and get through the day despite dark mornings. It wasn’t a case of phony versus real; both personae had a fair share in the emotional turf. And like my unruffled e-mail persona co-opting the fragile widow and angry dowager, they influenced one another. That kind of interconnectivity, I would argue, leads to authenticity. My take-charge persona was not just a rhetorical ploy to get my accountant on my side; rather, it was a missing part of myself that I gratefully welcomed back.

As a writer of first-person nonfiction, both memoir and personal essays, I need to believe in multiple selves who are intimately connected as they rise up into different personas that compete to tell a particular story. If there is only one self, unchallenged as narrator, I’m more predictable; surprises are harder to come by. But when I imagine many Mimis responding to experience, tension gets into the writing. I don’t know who will win out and for how long (the others are always there, lurking), and that puts me on a roll, open to discovery and insight. So, for example, I realized that the unruffled e-mail persona saved my six-day retreat only when I began writing this presentation. As soon as I put the words down, I knew they were true: the e-mail persona had leaped from the page into my life—at least for six days.

Many people believe that journal writing, free from public pressure, reveals one’s true self, unguarded, unconstructed. Sometimes, perhaps, but I have only to reread my journal entries, especially those written during crises, to know how limited they are emotional and intellectually. In the 1970s I once wrote hundreds of pages as I went back and forth on the bus to therapy sessions in New York City. I was full of epic insights, brilliant, I thought, and put them away, convinced they would become the great American something. But a year later, I reread them and there was nothing there. Boring stuff. Not even I was interested in this self who was whiny, full of self-pity, and pompous in her certainty that everything she wrote was absolutely true.

I kept a journal again in the late 1980s when, out of the blue, Stu and I, at forty-seven and forty-eight, both fell mortally ill two weeks apart (his heart, my breast cancer). Again I used the journal to write how I felt—about death, fear, shock, and desperation—but this time I also wrote about what the hospital room looked like, and what the nurses said, and how the sun slanted in through the venetian blinds. It was these details, maybe 20 percent of the entries, that jumpstarted a memoir, the objects and bits of dialogue moving me beyond the fearful self and the weeping self and to the other selves, tough and funny, whom I’d forgotten. “Honey, no one ever died from laughing,” the nurse in intensive care said when I became alarmed to see the needle on Stu’s heart monitor swinging wildly. We’d been giggling about a Dr. Botch who was being paged to return immediately to the OR for surgery. Months later I reread it and remembered how we kept laughing, holding hands, and that’s when the story of illness began shifting to one of marriage. The persona who ended up with the lead role as narrator was not victim, nurse, or patient—though they were there—but a wife dealing with the ups and downs of a shared life.

It became a book, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, and the battle of me’s felt natural and intuitive as I wrote, more evolution than revolution as I moved from what Vivian Gornick calls “the situation” (what happened) to “the story” (what it meant). Not so when I tried to write an essay about an anti-Semitic incident at my college. I had not written much about being Jewish. I had never written about anti-Semitism—it took nine painful months to find the right persona to tell that story. As before, the struggle was inward, defining my relationship to my subject, but this time it was also outward, worrying about how colleagues, not just family, would receive me.

First I was an English professor deconstructing the symbolism of a pro-Palestinian poster. Then I was a crusader righting wrongs. Then I was the child of Holocaust survivors, avoiding my past until this moment. Then I was an assimilated American Jew who suddenly had to face a German past she had always avoided. Each beginning read smoothly—so it wasn’t about craft—but only the last one felt like the right persona for this particular story. It began:

For me as an American Jew—the child of German refugees—overt anti-Semitism was my parents’ old world, not mine. There’d be an occasional remark here and there, but everyone gets that in multi-ethnic New Jersey. No big deal, I thought, until 500 anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the walls and kiosks of the college where I’ve taught for twenty-two years. That was a shock. Some had swastikas leaning on Jewish stars. Some had a picture of Hitler and of an Israeli soldier, both of equal size. Its caption read: “How many millions must die?” Some had the Christ-like figure of crucifixion paintings, but instead of the expected cross, the arms were draped over a Jewish star. . .

Was that persona a construct, an invented “I” who was not truly me? Only if we define true as the first self to respond. My English professor lacked passion, and my angry crusader had not yet talked to colleagues or confronted her best friend, who defended the posters and later, after reading my draft and engaging in more discussion, signed up for a trip to Israel with a group of nuns over Christmas. “As penance,” she joked. She was glad she went and we’re still friends, thanks in part to the persona who persuaded her, a Catholic, to see my position, and persuaded me that was I being a little paranoid about some of the poster images. I doubt the angry crusader would have fared as well—and I believe she may have felt cheated and is waiting, ready to push hard for a lead role somewhere else. Still, when I reread that essay after publication, I felt “That’s how it was!” and was relieved, and others who were there said the same. That’s gold.

So far I’ve looked at persona from the inside out, as writer. But I’d like to end today as a reader, responding to I’s whom I meet only on the page. I can’t know the full battles of self that end with publication, but I want authors to show signs of them. Maybe in a stream-of-consciousness that lets me into the author’s head. Maybe in a shuttle between a voice of innocence (responding to the now) and a voice of experience (reflecting on what happened before). Maybe in a juxtaposition of essays, as Scott Russell Sanders does in his collection Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home. The first, called “Under the Influence,” is about the legacy of his father’s drinking for him and on this family, and his persona is as son, bearing the burden. The second, “Reasons for the Body,” has the same cast of characters—house, garage, driveway—­but here he and his father are athletes, and his father’s drinking is only mentioned in half a sentence.

I love how one essay follows the other, a reminder that we are made up of many selves and each one can tell a story with the others pressing in, reminding and remembering, in wait for a turn. It’s when we hitch ourselves too closely to one self who seems to know it all, unhampered by the others who question, doubt, and challenge, that we are less likely to write what we don’t yet know about the rich complexity of our lives.

This is the first in a series of three nonfiction craft essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from the panel “The Persona in Personal Narrative: Crafting the Made-Up Self,” originally presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference on March 2nd, 2012.

The idea that personal essayists and memoirists construct a persona would seem to be self-evident. In The Made-Up Self, Carl H. Klaus has given us an excellent, nuanced, and very useful elaboration of that historical process. I myself once wrote an essay with a similar argument, titled “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” and so I was delighted when I read Klaus’s book—delighted enough to blurb it, I might add. And yet, asked to speak about this self-evident phenomenon today, I find myself hesitating and entertaining objections. Why is that? Am I such a contrarian that I must argue with my own understanding and the collective wisdom of my fellow panelists? There is that, but I think it goes further. I do not remember ever having concocted this made-up self; I can’t recall the night when, like Geppetto fabricating his Pinocchio, I stayed up late and finished off the puppet that would stand in for me.

On the contrary: what impresses and appalls me is how little I seem to be able to change my everyday personality, not to mention my writing style. I have been writing with literary intent for half a century, and for the most part, my “I” persona has remained fairly constant. Even the papers I wrote in college show many traces of characteristic syntactical constructions, tones of voice, argumentation, and strategies that have followed me around and still infect my writing. When you add to that the fact that I continue to make the same interpersonal mistakes in my domestic life, in my friendships, in my handling of students, despite the immense embarrassment they have caused me and the pain they have caused others, I really have to wonder how much is in my control and how much is out of it.

The United States has often been characterized as a generator of self-invention. How could it be otherwise, when so many immigrants cut their ties with the social stratification of the Old Country and began what they hoped was a new, more fluid life, aiming to fulfill their dreams on these shores? Nineteenth-century America saw a plague of con artists who passed themselves off as counts and dukes, in the absence of a national aristocracy: they were just the gaudiest representatives of the tendency toward self-invention that enveloped large swatches of the population. So yes, we as a people are receptive to the idea of a made-up self. Contrast that with Europe, where the very idea that one has a self, made-up or otherwise, is contested. Continental cultural criticism seems more inclined to view the self as a social construct, an aggregate of mass media inputs and political indoctrinations. In this regard I instinctively side with the American viewpoint: yes, I am an individual and I damned sure have a self, which I rely on with comfort and consolation—though, come to think of it, I can’t quite recall how I came by it.

Many people like to think that they are radically different from their parents—that they took a separate path of self-invention, so to speak, sometime around adolescence. I consider this posture arrogant and ungrateful. Like it or not, I see both my parents when I look in the mirror, and their genes, their habits, even their lousy posture have taken up room in me. Certainly, I am not the same as my parents, or my siblings, but even taking into consideration the extent that I rebelled against them, they set the template for my personality. My father had wanted to write; I became a writer.

When I sit down to write, I hear a voice in my head. Who sent me that voice? Did I “fabricate” it? If I did, I can’t remember. In my case (pace Tom Larson), the voice is singular. I don’t hear voices; at this stage of life I’m too rigid and set in my ways, and so it tends to be the same damn voice jabbering on. All I know is that I keep listening for the voice to surprise me, say something out of the ordinary, provocative, mischievous, even borderline dangerous. I go along in a civilized manner, generating reasonable discourse, and then I start to get bored. Hence my love of contrariness. It’s not that I’ve “made up” a contrarian or curmudgeonly persona, but that my physiological restlessness, my low tolerance for boredom, my neurotic antipathy to sentimentality all dictate that I throw in a dash of paradox, humorous chagrin, or spite. I wait to pounce with glee on some received truth. Meanwhile I record what the voice is telling me—not everything, I do refuse some inanities, but in the main I overwrite at this initial stage because I am taking down all that dictation, and so I end up having to cut back. It’s really only at the editing stage that I can truthfully say I am constructing or fabricating an object. I am “making a hat,” as Stephen Sondheim says.

Now, the selection that occurs in the editing process has less to do with concocting a persona from scratch than with tweaking it—“it” being the familiar voice that I have been taking dictation from, lo these many years. Some factors that go into my suppressions and augmentations are the tonal and political values of the organ that commissioned the piece from me (or that I hope to solicit, if I am writing this on spec); the word count or page limitations; and the social fear upon discovering that I have written, perhaps inadvertently, something that could piss off a segment of the population. I like to take chances, but I am not an utter fool. In any event, even with the most pusillanimous corrections, I expect there will be readers who get angry at what I have written. Experience has taught me that there is no way I can shield myself in advance from giving offense to someone.

I hope these remarks will be accepted in the gentle spirit in which they are offered: as a mild demurral in the face of a new consensus. It’s true that we make up our selves from moment to moment—as is readily apparent from observing the cocktail parties and receptions at this AWP convention—but it is also true that we have far less leeway in remaking ourselves and our personae on the page than we might first imagine.

This week life finds me in the South of France, not the Côte d'Azur made popular by its film festivals, movie stars, beaches, Grimaldi Princes, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, but in Provence. The wine, food, and art of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso tend to overshadow the literary aspects of this part of France, but like its painters, the literary guns are just as mighty.

Marseille is the second largest city in France, a Mediterranean metropolis with enough history and intrigue to make it the setting of works from Charles Dicken’s Little Dorrit to Peter Child’s Marseille Taxi. Here too, you will find a strange monument memorializing Arthur Rimbaud who died here upon his return from Africa. If swashbuckling is more your thing, take a boat from Marseille’s Vieux Port to the setting of Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, the Chateau d’If.

Thirty minutes to the north of Marseille is Aix-en-Provence, the city that gave birth not only to Paul Cezanne, but to his best friend Emile Zola. Zola wrote not only the infamous “J’Accuse” article of the Dreyfus Affair, but over thirty novels, twenty of which comprised the epic story of the Rougon-Macquart family, and here you thought the A Song of Ice and Fire saga was long. Aix is also home to the Cite du Livre, the city of books, an innovative library and research center whose archives contain the papers of Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus, amongst others.

Further afield, in Arles, where Van Gogh painted some of his most famous works, another Nobel Prize winner in literature, Frédéric Mistral, used his prize money to set up a museum dedicated to the preservation of the local culture, just as his work had preserved the local language, L’Occitan, in poems like Mirèio.

The last stop on my itinerary is Avignon, the home of the Papacy from 1309 to 1376. Here Petrarch wrote his Canzoniere and the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill lived the last years of his life in a house overlooking the cemetery where his wife was buried.

It isn’t hard to see how this part of France is so inspirational to painters, poets, and writers. The landscape is inspiring, the history rife with events and characters, and the food and wine delicious. The lesson learned, as Peter Mayle says in Toujours Provence, is “Why not make a daily pleasure out a daily necessity?”

Susie Bright has been known for at least four decades for her work as a sex expert and feminist activist. Bright hosts "In Bed with Susie Bright," a weekly radio program through audible.com, where she addresses sexual politics and provides sexual advice to listeners who email their questions. Her memoir, Big Sex Little Death, focuses on Bright’s complicated and sometimes painful history, as she shares personal stories about her unhappy childhood, her abusive and unstable mother, and her years as a troubled teenage radical. TriQuarterly Online interviewed her about writing her memoir and staying politically active, using email correspondence (at Bright's request).

TriQuarterly Online: How were you able to choose the specific stories from various stages of your journey that you wanted to share?

Susie Bright: I started with my high school radical underground days, because I’d never written about that before and it felt like a big secret history that had to be unearthed. I started with the stabbing because I felt like if I could write that well, I could do anything.

TQO: Many of them were so detailed, especially the memories from your childhood. Did you record a lot of your experiences while living them, or was there more mental recollection involved in compiling this work?

SB: It’s funny you say that, because I think my memory is terrible. Certain moments just hold your imagination forever. I can tell you something in detail that took place for five minutes when I was seven, but I certainly don’t remember what happened the next hour, day, week.

When you write a memoir, you tend to immerse yourself in the music, photos, ephemera of the times you’re recalling. I found those things, even making meals I remembered from my childhood kitchen, would just bring out all kinds of lost detail.

TQO: What were some of the challenges you faced while recounting the story of your life?

SB: Coming out of my writing room and rejoining the present moment. I’d get so lost. Sometimes the chapters were so sad or stinging, it was like reliving them. There’s no way around it that writing is a little bit like being your own therapist, dog, and executioner.

TQO: In the preface of your book you inform the reader, “I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice—the cry of ‘That isn’t fair!’ gets a lot more impulsive behavior from me than I want to get off.” During the second-wave feminist movement, these two concepts are tied directly together. How are the concepts intertwined for you today?

SB: I am still motivated more by outrage than just about anything else. I really need to calm the fuck down. Quaaludes were probably made to temper someone like me.

TQO: I, too, am the product of fiercely radical parents, so I am really interested in the description of your parents’ unshockability in the book. You tell the reader: “They were brainiacs; they were language, poetry, and music fiends; they took enormous pleasure in big ideas and the power of word. They were literary sensualists.” I wonder if you felt their radicalness bestowed upon you a certain wild freedom.

SB: Oh good grief, no. My mom was liberal politically, very much so, but in her childrearing and discipline attitudes, in our daily life, she was very traditional, very strict. We wore gloves to church. We cleaned our house from top to bottom every week. I was punished for slight infractions. She wasn’t lying around in a hammock smoking pot; she was working from dawn to dusk and then came home exhausted. There was no social life.

TQO: Do radical parents pass on radical DNA to progeny, and have you ever sensed your own daughter trying to outradical you?

SB: Remember that I moved in with my father when I was fourteen. He did have a social life; he had a more comfortable professor’s life . . . no worrying about groceries; he owned his own house, he had career security. He went to parties and had friends and a love life; he introduced me to a lot of culture, movies, books, music—that was great. But he was also a workaholic and very disciplined about his scholarly work; it meant everything to him.

I think I got a lot of “the work ethic” from both my parents and their sense of fairness and integrity.

My daughter? I don’t think we compete that way. She’s into all kinds of things I know little about, but it’s not that one of us is more “radical” than the other. I don’t compete with her in that fashion. I also think she has tremendous compassion and sense of justice . . . but gosh, who doesn’t, if you haven’t been locked in some gilded cage?

TQO: It was so fascinating to read this memoir against the backdrop of the recent protests against Wall Street. As a young woman you lament: “Why had people formulated revolution so long ago, yet nothing, nothing had changed?” Later you state, “I felt like we were swimming against a tide of apathy.” How do you perceive this in light of the Occupy movements all across the country and world? Also, what are some other ways in which you see the revolution being continued today?

SB: Well, all the original activists of the Occupy movement have been screaming their lungs out for years, it’s just the times have caught up with them. The pinkos, the anarchists, the punks, the anticapitalists, the workers’ rights movement, those who’ve been the brunt of racism, sexism, etc. ,etc.—we never go away; we just go through some really depressing periods when you feel like apathy is going to do you in. I felt like that during the entire Reagan administration. “Seize the Time” is really the thing we all have to have tattooed on our asses, if we’re in for the long haul . . .

TQO: Who would Susie Bright crown as today’s George Putnam and why?

SB: Oh, Rush Limbaugh, very much so. I’m sure he aspired to be Putnam in his early work.

TQO: In this story, you really portray your mother as a perpetual wanderer whose wandering spirit was bequeathed to you. By the end of the book the reader senses that Santa Cruz is home base for you and a bit of the transience has faded. Is that an accurate perception, and how has that affected your writing?

SB: Yes, I am surprised that I settled down in one place for more than a year or two. My mom was still making one last move when she was in her seventies! I think my mother’s constant migration wasn’t because she was some dancing fey gypsy, but came out of poverty, fear, each biting each other’s tail. She came from people who’d lived all their lives in one place, Ireland, then were forced out. Then they homestead, live for decades in one place in North Dakota, and the bank forecloses on their farm. Sound familiar? The cycle of homelessness, of being on the run, is really hard to break. But everyone loves a place to come home to.

TQO: About On Our Backs magazine you state, “The premise of On Our Backs was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distinct planets. We were alive to sex and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be.” What is the equivalent now of OOB, or if none exists, what queer publication makes you the most excited?

SB: Equivalent to OOB? Nothing. Fucking nothing. I show that magazine to people today and their mouths drop open. It is still ahead of its time.

The magazine world really isn’t what it used to be. I am usually reading blogs or listening to podcasts or audiobooks or reading paper books or going to live events. I follow all the quick-witted militant queer and feminist bloggers, of course.

I should tell you something but my mind always goes blank at moments like this. You know one blog I follow religiously these days? Titsandsass.com.

TQO: One of my favorite vignettes in the book is when you are working at the feminist vibrator store and the two nuns who have been in love for twenty years walk in. You imply that it’s hard to imagine being with someone for so long. What are the sexual secrets for relational longevity?

SB: What they told me at the time: “We just love each other so much.” It really is just that. You can’t bottle it.

TQO: How and why did you choose to end Big Sex Little Death where you did? Was ending the story something you struggled with as an author, or did it come about rather organically?

SB: You’ll laugh, but one night I was wondering aloud this very question, “How will I end this giant elephant?” and my daughter interrupted: “You’re going to stop it when I am born.” I was so relieved someone told me what to do!

It is hard to know where to stop, although you know when to stop when you find yourself accidentally rewriting chapters you’ve already completed.

I find that I need a good twenty years’ hindsight to figure out how to write something with any psychological depth. Look forward to part 2 as I crawl into my coffin . . .

Neighborhood Register
by Marcus Jackson
CavanKerry Press

For his freshman collection of poems, Neighborhood Register, Marcus Jackson eloquently establishes a time and place: the American Rust Belt of his adolescence during the late twentieth century. He takes readers back to a time when “morning light / caught in your curls like barbwire,” when pagers were popular and eighth-grade English seemed pointless. Jackson ends the collection with his escape to college in New York City after graduating from high school.

Although the collection is presented as autobiographical, Jackson’s poems are not confined to his own experiences. For example, some of the poems predate Jackson’s birth and awareness, such as “Freshman Audition,” an homage to his mother when she was younger, and “Escape, 1961,” a look into his father’s affair and second family.

Jackson creates a positive identity as a young man growing up in a run-down neighborhood. He offers deep meditations on the everyday on the seamier side of the tracks, defending blunts, 40s, double negatives, and stolen cars, and giving them new insight. For instance, he ends his poem “Heartbeat by Way of a Blunt”—about getting high—with profundity and grace:

wallpaper breaks

an atom at a time from its glue;

your heart is a fist

something has tricked

to knock a century on the same door.

Jackson’s language is fresh and commanding. In “Speech Therapy” he asserts, “Ain’t nothing wrong with double negatives.” He argues:

You breathe better

when your throat’s welcome

to untunnel

the no’s and not’s that stockpile

during even a week a’ heartbeat.

The alliterations, rhythms, internal rhymes, and sound in his work demonstrate that Jackson is clearly a poet in tune with language. Language itself becomes the focus of his poetry at times; in “Eighth Grade Grammar,” Jackson lauds his English teacher, Mr. Bernard, asking,

How would we have known

to merit . . .

a man assigned to somehow

recouple the muddled

boxcars of our clauses,

to remeter our words

so the world might better hear us?

Not only does Jackson appreciate language and those who fight for it, he also attacks those who condemn poetry that he believes is worthwhile. “Poet’s Condolences to Critics” begins sarcastically with

Complete pity

your delicate skin forbids you

from the June sun strumming

every atom in this public park.

In this and other poems, his thick sarcasm, wit, and passion sing of a life he loves. This includes a love for his community; in “Ode to Kool-Aid,” Jackson discusses the drink’s various uses within his world, where Sandra from ninth grade “employed a jug of Black Cherry / to dye her straightened / bangs burgundy” and when “Granddad takes out his teeth / to make more mouth to admit [Kool-Aid].” He uses the first-person plural to tie himself to this communal consumption of Kool-Aid:

We need factory-crafted packets,

unpronounceable ingredients

a logo cute enough to hug,

a drink unnaturally sweet

This shared experience, albeit potentially hazardous to one’s health, is gladly imparted to readers.

Jackson’s collection includes many other odes as well: “Ode to the Scholarship,” “Ode to Last Call,” “Ode to the Hater.” In fact, nearly every poem in the book celebrates the reality of life at hand, his own and his community’s.

Neighborhood Register is an account of empowerment in spite of poverty, family turmoil, and decay. The book is a testament to how life can thrive, how folks can, as he puts it in a poem set in a Columbia College Students of Color bowling party after his arrival in New York, “aim between gutters.”

Our reaction when platforms like Facebook change is similar to how we handle the other ways in which the Internet changes our lives. There are striking similarities to the Five Stages of Grief, first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. We scream, we deal, we forget. Repeat.

Denial

As a writer, I enjoy reading other writers bemoan the Internet and social media’s effect on fiction, our attention spans, and our very souls. Writers are the slow-moving train wrecks of Internet contrarians. We write within it and against it and about it by using it.

Last week, a Great American Novelist famously said that Twitter is “unspeakably irritating.” Franzen’s aversion to social media is clear, but other writers often admit to both admiration and fear. Gary Shteyngart—who has led me to believe that the future of the Internet is largely based on how closely we read his novel Super Sad Love Story—wrote a haunting piece about how his mobile device merged his online and offline lives.

The best article I’ve read about technology and literature in recent times is an in-depth review by Zadie Smith, of The Social Network and the book You Are Not a Gadget. There, she writes,

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

Surely, this must have some effect on the way we understand the stories we read, as well our own life narratives. The common thread with both is news. News about our friends. News about the world. With respect to the latter, what effect has the web had on traditional journalism?

Anger

Enter John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and altogether upset with Team Internet and its ideological underpinnings and its effects on writing at large. He likes his offline life exactly where it is.

Devotees of the Internet like to say that the Web is a bottom-up phenomenon that wondrously bypasses the traditional gatekeepers in publishing and politics who allegedly snuff out true debate. But much of what I see is unedited, incoherent babble indicative of a herd mentality, not a true desire for self-government or fairness.

Partly due to MacArthur’s guidance, Harper’s is notorious for its mostly gated content, as in you have to pay for it (though I do miss Wyatt Mason’s free, excellent, and now extinct blog). MacArthur argues that this is necessary for a very simple reason: money. Online advertising can’t support a magazine, magazines can’t afford to pay their writers, writing is instead grown on dystopic-sounding content farms, the quality of Thought diminishes. Good content, he argues, does not wish to be free.

Bargaining

In a cutting reply in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes that MacArthur doesn’t understand the finances of a web-based magazine because MacArthur doesn’t publish a web-based magazine, and therefore doesn’t understand how online advertising works.

Why do advertisers buy across platforms? Because that’s how people read now. More visibility for a website means more visibility for a magazine and vice versa. People flip back and forth between Vulture and NY Mag, from Mother Jones’ infographics to Mother Jones’ great speedup package, from Jeff Goldberg’s interview on TheAtlantic.com with President Obama to Jim Fallows’ Atlantic cover story dissecting the same man. Ideas don’t exist because of print magazines. (Though they often find a beautiful, comfortable home inside them.)

He then offers to slap him with a white glove.

Why them fighting words? Putting aside Madrigal’s penchant for Tweetable sentences (times are tough), the two writers disagree on two fundamental points. The first is that the quality of writing is enhanced by compensation. The second is our reading comprehension is affected by the tool we use to read it.

As far as getting paid, Madrigal claims he’s in it for the glory, for the story, for the power of the written word—though he admits an admiration for the value MacArthur places on writers and writing. This kind of value is specific to the 20th century. The kind we typically reserve for Didion and Fitzgerald.

MacArthur’s insistence on paper as the best transport for intellectual thought is also a 20th century idea. To his credit, I do a majority of my serious reading on paper and will reach for my white glove you if you ever call a novel a #longreads. But I’m also totally game to read vitriolic articles about the death of print on my phone or tablet.

With the advent of new media storytelling, we use multiple platforms not only to consume, but also to create stories. Madrigal echoes this sentiment, asserting that stories and narrative will be told through words but also through charts, infographics, and endless data sets. This data comes from progressive governments, from private companies, and—somewhat alarmingly—from Facebook and Twitter. People will read these narratives however they can, however they choose.

Depression

Both writers touch upon the question I’m most interested in: What is our generation’s dominant narrative? Is it told by prose writers, or by the bulk of online content we spew through our social networks every day?

Paul Ford wrote about the modern-day narratives spawned by the Internet and about why we’re all so upset.

These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions.

According to Ford, the Internet needs no coherent beginning and end. We are multifaceted, we trend, we don’t change our minds so much as reserve the right to be as many different people as we’d like. And we never die. Our Facebook profiles live on as digital gravestones—our stories never end. Our grandchildren will understand our lives in a way we’ll never understand our grandparents.

So.

Do we even need writers?

Acceptance

Well, yes. Of course we need writers, and we will until we stop telling stories. Though it might be hard to believe, publishing houses and newspapers are still conduits for writers to earn a living. Yes, the same institutions are simultaneously tasked with collecting “Likes” and followers and fans and comments and chasing the latest algorithmically-derived definitions of “engagement.” But we’ll be okay. As Paul Ford wrote: “No one joined Facebook in the hope of destroying the publishing industry.”

Actually, just last week, Facebook’s 29-year-old co-founder just bought a century-old magazine in order to reinvent it.

I linked my own book of stories by accident.

I began with a girl named Leah, age eleven. It was my first story, and the goal was simply to write one. The action, a theft, took place in the basement of Leah’s building in New York. “Restitution” won a prize, got published, and gave me a cast of characters.

I had no MFA, no idea yet how to learn from reading. Instead, I had an unfinished novel manuscript, also starring Leah Levinson. Not once did it occur to me to invent a new character.

So the second story was about Leah, too. This time she was twelve and up against a mean girl named Rainey, whom she feared and worshiped.

Then I wrote about Rainey, thirteen, lying beneath her father’s best friend at dusk in Central Park.

Then Leah again, fifteen, watching her best friend’s sister lose her virginity on a roof. More prizes, more publications. By now I’d had some terrific mentors, and saw that if Leah just kept growing up, I’d have a manuscript with a coming-of-age arc about troubled girls and their mothers. Normal People Don’t Live like This took five years to write, chronologically, and when I called it a novel-in-stories, no one said otherwise.

* * *

When Anne Sanow invited me onto an AWP ’11 panel on linked stories (with Clifford Garstang and Cathy Day), I knew I’d confess that my own links were due to a failure of imagination. But then what?

When I am in dire need of a craft lesson, one book invariably opens itself up like a flower. My job is to find it. I began close-reading linked collections I had loved previously, among them Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Elissa Schappell’s Use Me, and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. It was Love Medicine that showed me how little I knew. It revealed that stories can be tatted together so intricately that they form a kind of three-dimensional lacework.

My own links, in contrast, began to feel like a neatly made paper chain.

Here are a few things Erdrich’s book revealed. Tiny red Post-its, like the kind lawyers use that say “sign here,” were useful each time a link appeared and recurred, though the book came to resemble a porcupine. I also wrote in the margins, cross-referencing page numbers, so I could track one link across several stories. Most of the book occurs on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, so I did not apply stickies for characters or place.

Put the “Umbrella Story” Up Front

Let the first story contain the underlying or dominant link of the collection, making it what Cliff Garstang on our panel calls the umbrella story. In Love Medicine, the dominant link is the death of June Kashpaw, “aged hard in every way except how she moved.” She dies on page 7 in the first story, leaving a vacuum—a legitimate family, husband Gordie Kashpaw and son King; and an illegitimate family, lover Gerry Nanapush and their son, Lipsha, who doesn’t know who his parents are; everyone else does, though.

This first story, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” also contains broad swaths of backstory, paragraphs that don’t try to hide their purpose. Here is information you need in order to read this book, these paragraphs say. This, too, creates the umbrella. If Erdrich needs a long paragraph to sketch out family ties and some tribal history, she just writes it. She’s not afraid of losing the reader; she’s afraid of not orienting him.

Her umbrella story also sets up future links. Erdrich rubs at them, like bottles from the bottom of a lake, until they shimmer with meaning and we sense that something will fly out of them much later.

For example, the secret of Lipsha’s parentage is set up as a link in story 1 when the narrator, Albertine, tries to tell him about June. Here, Lipsha rebuffs her. He sticks to the version he’s been told: that his “real” mother tried to drown him at birth. (In the final story, Lipsha’s identity is resolved.)

Imagery of water, used throughout the book, begins here. So does the more potent image of crossing water, a metaphor for both dying and coming home, which can be the same thing. In the umbrella story, June freezes to death and the imagery link is launched:

Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn’t blow her off course. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.

Tim O’Brien does this too, in The Things They Carried, introducing all the soldiers and showing us their stuff—the physical, the psychological—in the first and title story. So does Harriet Doerr in the umbrella story of Stones for Ibarra. We watch the Evertons drive through Mexico toward the town they are to inhabit, the mine they will reopen, the place where Richard Everton will die in six years.

In this way, certain pacts with the reader are made.

Compiling Normal People Don’t Live Like This, I acted intuitively, and launched with Rainey Royal being molested. It’s a compelling story. It’s won prizes, been anthologized. But there’s no umbrella. Rainey reappears once, as a bully in story 2, then vanishes. Some reviewers found this disorienting, and at readings I’m invariably asked if I plan to write more about Rainey. (I think now I owe her a novel of her own.)

Make Links Kinetic So They Grow in power, Increase Tension, and Further the Plot

Here is how Erdrich takes an object—a car—and reloads it with emotional freight every time she picks it up:

In the first story, June’s legitimate son, King Kashpaw, uses the insurance money from her death to buy a sports car. Her relatives keep their distance, as if the car might be a ghost:

Nobody leaned against the shiny blue fenders, rested elbows on the hood, or set paper plates there while they ate. Aurelia didn’t even want to hear King’s tapes. It was as if the car was wired up to something. As if it might give off a shock when touched. Later, when Gordie came, he brushed the glazed chrome and gently tapped the tires with his toes. He would not go riding in it either, even though King urged his father to experience how smooth it ran.

Erdrich, never afraid of a good fight, picks the link up eleven pages later in the same story and drives it hard. King drinks, becomes abusive, and chases his wife, Lynette. She runs outside and locks herself in the sports car. King wrenches off a side mirror and beats the car until Gordie, his father, wrestles him to the ground and holds him.

“It’s her car. You’re June’s boy, King. Don’t cry.”

For as they lay there, welded in shock, King’s face was grinding deep into the cinders and his shoulders shook with heavy sobs. He screamed up through dirt at his father.

“It’s awful to be dead. Oh my God, she’s so cold.”

In the sixteenth and final story, “Crossing the Water,” Erdrich brings that car back. She almost doesn’t have to: The car did its job in “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” bringing out all the grief and rage in King. But Erdrich’s got that battered sports car so deeply identified with June, she can’t just leave it parked.

In “Crossing the Water,” she creates a crucible: King’s windowless apartment. (Okay, there’s a window, but it’s on an airshaft and draws no light.) She traps three men here: Gerry, escaped from prison and seeking revenge on King. The terrified King, his former cellmate, who ratted him out to the police. And Lipsha, hated by King for being the ill-gotten son of June.

Lipsha’s just learned his parentage. He’s dying to declare himself to Gerry. And as tension builds, he’s handling a deck of cards, quietly nicking the edges.

The men play poker for the car—a car that King desperately wants to keep, having bought it with his mother’s insurance money. But the cards are marked. Lipsha deals himself a winning hand.

Done? Not yet. Erdrich freights the link again, bringing the police to the door. Gerry vanishes out that tiny window. Lipsha drives off in his prize car, pulling over when he hears a knocking sound. It’s his father, hiding in the trunk.

Lipsha drives Gerry all the way to Canada, crossing water to safety at the end with his newly discovered father—in the car that represents his newly claimed mother.

Make Links Kinetic So with Each Alteration, Character Is Revealed

Post-its really helped here.

For example, I followed the repeating link of the crimped cards, because there are no accidents in Love Medicine. They first turn up in story 15, “The Good Tears,” where Lulu Lamartine is nearly blind. She’s still spirited and sexual, even in the senior center where she lives and where Lipsha works. Lulu Lamartine has borne eight sons to quite a few fathers. She’s Gerry’s mother and Lipsha’s grandmother.

She sounds impressively intuitive when she tells us: “Sometimes I played cards with a magnifying glass and sometimes I just played by feel and what I could hear.”

Can she divine things through her fingertips? She’d like us to think so. But in story 16, “Crossing the Water,” we learn that what Lulu “feels” are crimps and nicks she makes in the cards with her nails. We know this from Lipsha, who picks up King’s cards and does the same thing. Lulu taught him, he says, when he worked in the senior center. “She’d learned to crimp, that is, to mark your cards with little scratches and folds as you play, when she started losing her eyesight.”

We also know what Lipsha doesn’t: Lulu taught him because he is her grandson.

Erdrich reveals character with those crimps whenever they arise. The first time, we learn that Lulu is proud of her heightened sensitivity. The second time, we learn that Lulu’s not above lying.

Now watch Erdrich make the link shimmer as Gerry starts handling those cards in King’s apartment. Gerry’s never met his son—he was in prison for the birth. But here’s Lipsha, a young man of the right age, with Gerry’s nose, and with something else, too:

[Gerry’s] fingers moved around the paper edges, found the nail nicks. His wolf smile glinted. There was a system to the crimping that he recognized. Those crimps were like a signature—his mother’s.

Erdrich’s telling us so much about Gerry with those cards. She’s saying that he trusts signs; he trusts intuition. He trusts the kinds of signatures that can’t be found on the contracts of men.

When an Event Is the Link, Change the Retelling

Consider Henry Lamartine Jr.’s suicide.

Henry comes home from Vietnam depressed and explosive, a grenade with the pin gone. In story 10, “The Red Convertible,” his brother Lyman tries hard to engage him with the red Olds convertible they’d bought together, but that plan fails. When they’re out together, Henry leaps into a rain-swollen river. It looks playful, but Henry lets the current take him, and drowns.

Lyman then pushes the car into the water. The writing gets poetic here. Lyman seems to be giving the car to his brother, as if unable to own it alone.

Five stories later, in “The Good Tears,” their mother, Lulu Lamartine, recalls a calculated, unpoetic Lyman coming home that day.

“It was an accident,” Lyman said, coming in the door. He looked half gone himself. I threw an afghan on his shoulders.

“Don’t say nothing.” I led him over to a chair. He sat in shock.

“The car went in,” he said. “Out of control.” There was a false note in his voice and I knew he had planned to say this. I also knew that no accident would have taken Henry Junior’s life.

Look at what Erdrich does with ten sentences!

She alters the account of Henry’s death—that’s what makes the link kinetic.

She deepens our understanding of all three characters. We see that Lyman is a man who manages a crisis rather than being governed by it; that Lulu can wordlessly read her sons; and that our sense of a suicide was correct—the river could not have killed Henry without his consent.

That’s a lot of information in ten sentences.

It results partly from the fact that Erdrich controls the gap between the first and second appearances of the link. She knows what information to reveal, and when, and what to withhold.

Engineer the Gap between Links; Make It Shapely

I would love to resculpt one of the gaps in Normal People Don’t Live Like This.

When my character Leah is fifteen, she dissects a frog in “Rana Fegrina.” Her father’s dying, and she’s thinking about how he smells in his hospital room and about her lab partner’s BO, and fragments of Walt Whitman poetry, and her sexual fears, and crucifixion imagery. Another prizewinner; what could be missing? Four years and several stories later later she’s nineteen, sniffing a potential lover’s shirts and remembering the elegance and scent of her late father’s shirts.

A couple of reviewers said, Wait—her father died? Really? They felt stranded in the gap. At first I didn’t get it. Were they asking for a funeral scene? After close-reading Love Medicine I realize it’s the impact of the death that was lacking, a kinetic link that would help readers imagine, for themselves, the scene that takes place in the gap, much the way I imagine Lyman framing the story of Henry’s death.

Because there is always a story that takes place in the gap. Our job is to shape the links around it.

At Stake: Writing and LawDahlia Lithwick summarizes a recent U.S. Supreme Court argument regarding the nobly named Stolen Valor Act, which criminalizes lying about receiving a military medal. The article wonderfully discusses what else the Justices worry people lie about: mostly fibs to get jobs or dates.

The argument also includes an interesting exchange about the literary value of a lie. Chief Justice Roberts asks, “What is the First Amendment value in a pure lie?” “There is the value of personal autonomy,” answers the defendant’s lawyer. "What does that mean?" asks Roberts. “Well, when we create our own persona, we're often making up things about ourselves that we want people to think about us, and that can be valuable. Samuel Clemens creating Mark Twain.”

Of course, the writing world has had its share of lies. And the liars certainly have found value in their works. James Frey’s Million Little Pieces was an Oprah darling as a memoir chronicling overcoming addiction before it was found to be “semi-fictional.” The controversy didn’t stop Frey’s following works, including the fully fictional Bright Shiny Morning, from being bestsellers.

And just this week, Lizzie Widdicombe gives plagiarist Quentin Rowan a portrait/free ad in the New Yorker. The Paris Review published not one, but two, plagiarized stories of Rowan’s -- one copied from a 1913 sea captain’s memoir, the other a mélange of three writers, Janet Hobhouse, Stephen Wright, and a splash of Graham Greene. Rowan was set to publish a spy novel cobbled together from a myriad of sources before being undone by message boarder sleuths.

But Widdicombe is unpersuasive when she suggests that the “making of a plagiarist can be hard to distinguish from the making of a writer. Joan Didion has described learning to write by typing Hemingway’s fiction; Hunter S. Thompson did the same with The Great Gatsby.” Those are nice tales and all, but they describe exercises in learning to write, not submissions. Aleksandar Hemon has tasked his students here at NU with breaking down an author’s strategies and composing a similar story. Much can be learned by analyzing, copying, even “stealing” from other authors.

But a plagiarist is not hard to distinguish from a writer, and neither is the making of one. Certainly not the kind of plagiarism Rowan engaged in. Perhaps Widdicombe felt sympathetic to Rowan, or unnerved realizing she was giving a huge boost to sales of Rowan’s upcoming memoir. Sometimes lying pays. Maybe a fib is no big deal -- maybe it’s even worthwhile for literary purposes. It certainly is valuable as career enhancement if you can get away with it for at least a little while.

As I’ve alluded to in previous posts, the literary nightlife in Chicago is a rather girthy beast. There are independent bookstores like The Book Cellar and Quimby’s in which Chicago’s readers can support independent businesses and local authors (or perhaps relive the glory days of spending hours browsing in real life, brick and mortar bookstores). There are reading series like Danny’s Tavern and Reading Under the Influence which afford attendees liquor-lubricated literary evenings.

Just keeping tabs on all there is to do and see in this city can become too much to handle, which is why I’d like to direct your attention to one specific website. Whether you’re a Chicago literary newcomer or someone who has already run the Windy City’s literary gambit, this website will be helpful: Literarychicago.com.

Literary Chicago posts reviews of readings and events (with irregular consistency), but that’s not necessarily its most valuable function. I am, instead, highlighting the comprehensive list of links organized on the website’s left hand side. This content is split into three sections—the first of which is links to other websites which cover Chicago’s literary scene. This alone makes Literary Chicago worth visiting. The second set of links is a list of ongoing reading series—not all of which were created equal. If you are interested in finding a new literary event to attend, I highly suggest clicking through this list. You can get a feeling each reading’s ethos by its website. The last section provides links to Chicago’s independent literary magazines (including TQO).

In short—if you’re interested in Chicago’s current literary culture, take a few moments and click around LiteraryChicago.com.

Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century Master
Edited by Takako Lento and Wayne Miller
Pleiades Press

Tamura Ryuichi, considered to be among the most important twentieth-century Japanese poets, is virtually unknown in the United States. Fortunately, Pleiades Press has chosen to focus on his work in the second volume of its new Unsung Master Series, Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century Master. The volume features a selection of the poet’s translated work along with critical and biographical essays to help illuminate the work.

Writing in the mid to late twentieth century, Tamura (in Japanese the surname comes first) was a central figure in Japan’s modernist poetry movement. Throughout the collection it is clear that Tamura’s interest was in challenging the conventional ways in which language is used to create meaning.

Beyond his experimental ambitions, one theme that runs consistently through his poems is the devastating effects of war and violence. After enlisting in the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1943, Tamura manned artillery emplacements to fend off possible American and Soviet invasions. Friends of his were ordered to kill themselves in kamikaze missions. The horrifying impact of living in a war-ridden world is evident through much of his work.

This can be seen in the opening of the poem “Noon:”

what exists outside the window

fire, rock, bones,

our “time” carved into teeth, nails, and hair,

amid a shower of rain, premonitions and intimations,

dangling from a bed

is her arm

(87)

Tamura is a master at shifting from the general to the specific. The poem begins with a description of a harsh, hostile world that carves itself into bodies. Then, to personalize the horror, he abruptly shifts to a single woman’s arm dangling from a bed.

The strategy of moving from descriptions of large, horrific events to their effects on individuals is common in antiwar, antiviolence poems. However, Tamura has no interest in the easy, morally superior stance many of these poems adopt. Instead he describes an uncomfortably complicit relationship with the violent world. After a series of questions on the nature of this suffering, he inserts himself into the end of the poem:

she is ill. does that mean

she loves me?

her call to me, a single call, just once,

creates shade in a vast desert, and now

the world enters noon

(87)

Tamura states that the woman is ill, but instead of offering sympathy, he asks the confounding question “does that mean she loves me?” He then looks to her call (a cry of pain?) to provide him with protection from the harsh desert at noon. Is he taking solace in the woman’s pain? Is he mimicking the inhuman voice of those responsible for the violence? Is he adopting the voice of madness? Tamura pulls his readers into much more difficult territory than that of typical antiwar poems. He identifies with the victims but seems to also participate in the madness responsible for their suffering.

Tamura’s work exposes how we look to reinforce our values in the poetry we read. Within the disorienting shifts in diction, tone, and subject matter, he pushes us to examine our need for consistency, including moral consistency.

Consider the prose poem “Etching.” This is the entire poem:

He sees, in front of him, a landscape like the one he saw in a German etching.

It seems like a bird’s-eye view of an ancient city, which is about to shift from

evening into night, or like a realistic picture representing a modern precipice that

is changing from deep night into daybreak.

He, namely the man I have begun to tell you about, killed his father when he was

young. That autumn his mother went beautifully mad. (13)

We expect the two stanzas to be in some way related. Yet they are jarringly different. The first offers a cool, detached account of a man’s impression of a landscape that reminds him of an etching. The second stanza opens with a direct address of the reader. Immediately the tone becomes warmer and more intimate. But what follows is the disturbing statement that the man killed his father. The matter-of-fact tone gives the reader no clue as to whether the speaker finds this an abhorrent act. Without that, not only are we uncertain what to make of the statement, but we don’t know whether the speaker shares in our discomfort with it.

The next sentence only increases this discomfort. The adjective “beautiful” is the only word in the poem that hints at the speaker’s attitude. But it provides no clarity. We don’t know whether “beautifully mad” is meant as harsh sarcasm or whether the speaker values the madness and shares in it.

As mentioned in one of the essays, Tamura said of “Etching” that the space separating the two stanzas is “where my ‘poem’ happens” (93). The separation draws attention to our desire to connect the disparate elements. Continually his work challenges us to examine our need to find coherence and consistency.

Admittedly this ambition is shared among many disjunctive experimental poets. However, Tamura’s work does not manifest the emotionally flat, detached attitude found in so many experimental poems. What makes his work so interesting is that it is filled with emotionally charged and uncomfortable material:

we have no venom

we have no venom to heal us

(“Standing Coffin,” 24)

In order to give birth to a poem

we must kill those we love

(“Four Thousand Days and Nights,” 14)

We need more cunning to hunger harder

more imagination to end our dreaming

(“The Man with a Green Face,” 35)

I just want to see with my own eyes

the collapse of the house of man

the deconstruction of my language

(“The House of Man,” 39)

Tamura’s work relentlessly pulls us into highly charged and disturbing themes of violence, culpability, and survival.

Despite the rough subject matter, Tamura Ryuichi is, foremost, a lyric poet. One of the pleasures in reading his work is his sophisticated use of line and repetition. Images and phrases are introduced and repeated such that meaning is altered in unexpected and profound ways. This is especially notable in the longer poems (“Standing Coffin,” “World without Words,” “Every Morning after Killing Thousands of Angels”). His lyric skills are a provocative counterbalance to the aggressively harsh and disconcerting subject matter.

One disappointment of this collection is its relative lack of poetry. Tamura Ryuichi published over twenty volumes of poetry in his lifetime. However, of the 172 pages in this book, only 41 are devoted to his poems. Admittedly, the purpose is to introduce the poet through his work and through essays by scholars and people who knew and admired him. Yet while most of the essays are informative, there are a couple of personal essays that offer little new information or insight. Given that Tamura’s poetry is virtually unknown in the English-reading world, if these essays had been replaced by more of the poetry, it would have made for a better book.

This complaint aside, the Unsung Master Series admirably achieves what it sets out to do. It introduces us to a previously unknown major voice in modern poetry. Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century Master introduces a poet whose work challenges and informs our notions of poetry in ways that are relevant and exciting in the twenty-first century as well.

At Stake: Writing and Law

I'm finishing up my MFA here at NU - indeed, both my readers have approved my thesis. People hearing this news have offered congratulations and suggested I must be relieved. The truth is, however, that I'm worried. I no longer have the deadlines of class or thesis work to motivate me. I no longer have the guaranteed rewards of passing grades or of smart readers giving me helpful feedback. Instead I have my legal work - the kind that pays the bills - and family, two potential disincentives to writing.

I've turned for inspiration to Louis Auchincloss for his ability to produce work as both a lawyer and a writer. Auchincloss wrote over sixty books, including novels, short story collections, and nonfiction books, most while being an associate then partner at respected New York law firms. The New Yorker noted his unusual method: he wrote his novels on a legal pad in his living room "while his children played cowboys and Indians around him." He reflected that he never remembered any conflict coming up between his legal work and writing: "I can’t imagine what it would be. I didn’t have a timetable on when a book was to be done. What difference would it make? If something came up for a week or so, I’d just give up writing for a week." During this period that had no deadlines for books, Auchincloss produced one per year. The trick, apparently, was being so productive that it didn't matter if he couldn't be productive for a brief span. The other lesson is that conflicts or obstacles can be in the eye of the beholder. He also had this to say about the writer's space:

"Lots of writers have to have whole days or nights to get ready to write; they like to be by a fire, with absolute quiet, with their slippers on and a pipe or something, and then they’re ready to go. They can’t believe you can use five minutes here, ten minutes there, fifteen minutes at another time. Yet it’s only a question of training to learn that trick. If they had to do it that way, they’d be able to—the real writers, that is. I can pick up in the middle of a sentence and then go on. I wrote at night; sometimes I wrote at the office and then practiced law at home. My wife and I never went away on weekends. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else try this method, but it worked for me."

While I would like slippers and a glass of wine - pipes are out these days - I'll probably have to learn some of Auchincloss's tricks. I'm sure I'm not alone in that regard.

In a sub-basement several floors beneath the New Bodleian Library at Oxford University, there lives an old yet functioning hand press. When Ian Heames first encountered it, he was a curious young poet. He quickly learned the art of typesetting and, from there, printed a small book of his own poems to explore the mystery of printing. Although that first project did not turn out perfectly, it solidified Heames’s interest in printing and book design, and ©_© Press was born.

Printed by his very own ©_© Press, Heames’s second chapbook of poetry, Out Of Villon, is now available. TriQuarterly Online sat down with Heames to talk about his new chapbook, his printing press, and all things poetry.

TriQuarterly Online: There are some specific questions I’d like to ask you regarding the chapbook, but to begin, can you tell me a bit about your background, how you became involved with poetry?

Ian Heames: I didn’t know much about English literature when I started university. I knew nothing at all about contemporary poetry. While my interest in the subject led me to study it, I probably wouldn’t have chosen English if my sense of what its study should entail had been then what it is now. I suppose my intuitions have mutated, partly from wider reading in general and partly from exposure to communities of writers and readers, initially in Cambridge and then also elsewhere, who gave me a better sense of what those activities can be. My own writing grew out of this kind of discovery, which at first, at least, took the form of an interdiction or refusal rather than an active practice of composition. I felt I had more command of what it wasn’t possible to say or wasn’t worth saying. This distrust is something I try to hold onto.

TQO: Your comment regarding the writing of poetry that “isn’t possible to say, or isn't worth saying,” deserves more exploration. Can you expand on this idea? Does Out Of Villon reflect this?

IH: I suppose this has to do with the politics of lyric: the total range of implications of what is said in or done by (or with) the poem. If the poem exists merely for the sake of affecting an ambience to which some subject matter is raised, just to make it “feel like a poem,” then in my opinion it isn’t worth saying. The poem should be a tool for intervening in, or at least for observing, whatever the concern of the work is, or for examining the idea of that kind of focus as such. But what isn’t possible is a complete appraisal or index of global conditions. Any conspicuous politics that comprehensive is bound to be reductive in the way that all laws are a simplification: the universal autotune of the schematic. That isn’t good for poetry unless the mode of address somehow targets the contradiction and makes up for it, working through the algebra of its seductions.

Simon Jarvis, in a recent poem, “Persephone,” considers how a tendency of the poem “assuages conditions I took it to show and inspect.” This is the kind of critical awareness that’s shaped my sense of poetic practice. But I don’t know how, or if, my own work reflects this. I can only read my own poems as mnemonics (more likely screen mnemonics) of the conditions that induced them.

One problem I try to think about is how registering an awareness of the complicities of lyric practice in the poem appears to introduce a sort of countervailing irony. This irony is problematic because it can appear to inoculate the poem against the implications most threatening to it merely by registering their existence, as if conflating awareness of a problem with its solution. You can see how this sort of dynamic will admit of various irreducible twists and turns. I’m interested in these sorts of corollaries and escalations.

TQO: Terrific. I’m very interested in your press. How and why did you start the press? The format and graphic sensibility are wonderful . . . is there a reason you chose an analog format for your press? How do you choose what to publish?

IH: I started ©_© Press in 2008 and the first books were published in 2009. I was living in Oxford at the time and attending a poetry-reading group at Balliol College. Some of the students there were taking a course in the history of the book at the New Bodleian Library as part of their master’s. They showed me the printing workshop where the course took place: the Bibliography Room in a sub-basement several floors beneath the library, a large white room with a green concrete floor, lime-green iron pillars and a large amount of hand-press printing equipment. Dr. Paul W. Nash, who taught the course, taught me how to typeset, and I started setting a small book of my own poems as an experiment in the mystery of printing. I’m endlessly grateful to Paul for the generosity with which he shared his time and expertise. Without his help it would never have been possible for the press to make books in this way.

After my experimental project turned out OK, it seemed like a good idea to carry on using this technology and doing different things with it. Mike Wallace-Hadrill’s book Nettle Range Bladefear, the second ©_© book, was an early highlight. The compositing of the text (setting the metal type) took place while the poem was still being written. Finished sections were locked into forms and printed before the final form of the poem was known. There was a real confidence in the trajectory of the whole project, both Mike’s serial composition and the compositing of it, which we worked on together. The book was designed by its author, who cut a resin block for the front cover (it’s a friar playing a flute). The colophon to the second edition describes how the computer on which the poem was written fried itself not long after the time of writing, marking a nice contrast with the resilience of the lead type and cast-iron Albion presses.

The most important aspect of book design for me is that the authors of a work have complete control over it, or as much input as they care to have. Their book will be a vehicle for their text, and its design is the most immediate feature of the text’s context. Some projects are printed digitally, for aesthetic economy as well as other kinds. Some are hybrids, like Tom Raworth’s Got On, which combines letterpress internal text with blind-stamped covers with a desktop inkjet label and endpapers printed by a commercial printer. The design of Got On recalls Raworth’s Four Door Guide in the use of a cover label. The label is set off-center away from the spine to suggest another interpretation of the title. The signed edition of the book also recalls Ace’s signed run in its alphabet-book-style inspiration. The endpapers were designed by the author.

What to publish is unfortunately a question of money and time (quite short on both at the moment) as well as engagement with the work. I’d like to publish a lot more of the really vital poetry that’s being written in the UK at present, but there’s already a backlog of half a dozen projects which will last a long way into the new year.

TQO: Can you expand a bit on this notion of the book being a vehicle for a given text, specifically how its design acts as the text’s most immediate context? How do you use Out Of Villon's graphic and compositional sensibilities to assist as a vehicle for the content of the poem?

IH: Even deliberate decisions about aspects of design will probably have only a fairly speculative relation to anyone’s reception of the object. But some choices do proceed from a rationale of sorts. With Out Of Villon I wanted to have two sections of the text per page to emphasize that it’s one poem and not a sequence, as one-text-per-page might have implied. The section numerals maybe suggest otherwise, but they’re a different color from the text so could offer a slightly different sense of its divisions. Section numbers are an odd conceit. They tend to suggest an idea of movement that is somehow unlikely to be matched in a text itself. I think of them as unvoiced here. Having just two leaves in the large format made it seem more ephemeral.

V for green (in French) seemed to fit with Villon. The green stripe on the cover is made by a roller that’s been over the metal printing block of a plant. All the covers are different. You can tell the direction of the stripe, up like the flowers, by the fact that the ink is thinner toward the top on the second turn of the roller. I just thought of that. You could project anything onto it really.

TQO: What, if any, connections are there between Out Of Villon and the poet François Villon? Why do he and his work interest you?

IH: My poem began with Villon, but “out of” also suggests the distance from the source text; perhaps there’s not much of it still in there.

My impression of the French poet was heavily influenced by Stephen Rodefer’s magisterial Villon (Pick Pocket, 1985). I wasn’t directly consulting these versions whilst writing, but I had a strong sense of Rodefer’s distinctive approach to translation. Rodefer channels the persona of Villon. Even though we accept that this is Rodefer’s own concoction, it still transcends that origin. It doesn’t feel presumptuous—or it does, but in the right way, as if the poet’s serious engagement necessitates creative appropriation. The spirit of Villon not only sanctions but demands the synthesis of his medieval Paris with Rodefer’s 1970s San Francisco.

My poem was a meditation on the idea of translation that I found in Rodefer rather than an attempt to inhabit that mode. I didn’t want to try to write his Villon from a different time and place.

TQO: It seems that throughout your chapbook there lies an interest in what you’re calling translation, in relation to Rodefer’s Villon. Perhaps this translation of a canonical figure cheapens or devalues one’s experience now by attempting to superimpose one poet’s work and experience upon another more modern one. Would you say this chapbook argues against this superimposition of one time and space upon another?

IH: Rodefer’s Villon is brilliant. More straightforwardly, literal translation exercises a different sort of care with respect to the original and results in a different sort of poem and a different sort of resource for imagining an original text. I certainly don’t want to discredit either approach. What it could mean to imagine Villon’s experience, or one’s own, or to think of either as being made commensurate with the other, is not really a question I would look to approach head on. My own poem is perhaps at a tangent to the idea of translation as appropriation. The automatic generation of affect that can attend the deployment of a canonical poet’s name, or the implicit claim that a new poem is connected to some famous pre-text, is a difficult expectation to meet rigorously. If my poem is skeptical of anything, it is how it carries its own presumption of that question.

TQO: Who are your literary influences? Who have you been reading lately?

IH: Presently I’m reading the novel Male, Black by Buttercup McGillicuddy. It’s online here: http://maleblack.blogspot.com. I don’t think I can really give a list of influences. It would just be arbitrary, leaving things out and giving the wrong sense of relative emphasis, which constantly changes anyway. At the moment I find I’m more influenced by things other than other writing.

TQO: What differences, if any, do you see between the European and American poetry being written right now?

IH: Tao Lin is one difference. I think it’s important to work out whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (and for what and whom). Of course, these are two huge territories, too huge to be of use in more than vague gestural terms. And by Tao Lin I mean only a category, a bit like how I meant Villon; not necessarily an actual person, or scene, or even an actual body of work. Just an imaginary vibe that suggests a kind of compressed argument, something I feel the need to take stock of. I’d like there to be more dialogue between British poetry and the poetry of the rest of Europe and America, and everywhere else too.

TQO: Where can readers find more of your work?

IH: Bad Flowers (©_© Press, 2009), http://cucpress.tumblr.com
Out Of Villon (©_© Press, 2011), http://cucpress.tumblr.com
Gloss to Carriers (Critical Documents, 2011), http://plantarchy.us/gloss.html

A couple of other short-run booklets too, and some magazine appearances—Axolotl, Cambridge Literary Review, Hi Zero, Holly White, Friends, etc.

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

Listening to Third Coast International Audio Festival the other day, I discovered Cowbird, a spectacular, innovative "pioneering online platform for storytellers of any stripe." It has the goal of building a public library of human experience on the commons. Along with a few short audio stories from Cowbird, Third Coast Festival featured an interview with Annie Correal, Cowbird's content manager in which she explains the eclectic title of the project:

"The name is meant to reflect the qualities of the platform: quick and agile like a bird, slow and grounded like a cow. A lot of the recent Web (including sites like Facebook and Twitter) seem to be all bird and no cow, while more traditional formats like operas and novels seem to be all cow and no bird. Cowbird combines these two extremes, forming a space that is both contemplative and efficient. Also, real-life cowbirds are known as "nest parasites": They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and fly away. We’re like a nest for our cowbirders: leave your stories here and we’ll take care of them for you."

Cowbird was launched on Dec 8, 2011 and takes submissions consisting of images, words and audio but it's not a curated space. Rather, it's a networked tool, a platform that weaves contributions from a wide range of amateur and professional storytellers into an easy, elegant and richly interconnected space for exploration and sharing. It handily weaves diversity with quality; exposes stories that might be hard to stumble across otherwise. My favorite thing about the site might be that you can search all stories by keyword; "rabbit," "lover," "winter," etc.

Over the past year, it has quickly grown to become a respectful and supportive international community, including nearly 6,000 stories from almost 1,000 cities across the globe. Among the forms included are:

• audio-visual diaries

• participatory journalism

• collaborative storytelling

• reflective writing about experiences

• dialogue

• prose poems

• photographs and interpretations

• interviews

Anyone interested in contributing writes a few sentences about who they are and what they'd like to do with Cowbird, and administrators welcome each new author into the Cowbird community personally. To get a good idea of what the site's about, listen to the excerpts on the Third Coast site; I particularly like the one titled "1,000 Words." (Find it under the section titled "Excerpts.")

For some, an evening of literature means the clothbound Penguin classics edition of Pride and Prejudice, a cup of hot tea, and a crocheted afghan. WRITE CLUB—while still an evening of literature—is emphatically not that. Its all caps title should be the first indication that it will, in fact, bear no similarity to Ms. Austen’s work.

The host of WRITE CLUB, Ian Belknap, describes his reading series as “bare knuckled lit” because it pits writers against one another in a throw down for the audience’s affection and applause. Each WRITE CLUB takes the same basic shape. There are three “bouts” consisting of two opposing ideas represented by different writers. The winner is chosen by applause and earns one third of the door money for his or her chosen charity.

While the performers vary from poets to fiction writers to comedians to bloggers/essayists, their objective is always the same—convince the audience that their topic trumps their opponent’s. This Christmas Naughty was pitted against Nice—Santa took on Jesus. When discussing how he chooses these binaries, Belknap says, “The opposing ideas of a good WRITE CLUB bout have requirements - they need to be broad enough to afford the writer/performer leeway to interpret it; they need to be specific enough to have teeth/constitute satisfactory oppositions; the best ones are also familiar-seeming, too; and they need to be a word or phrase around which ideas and associations can cluster.” Belkap’s keen eye for divisive pairings can instinctively rile his audience. Who is better Jesus or Santa? One has fun-sized indentured servants and a flying sleigh while the other has healing powers and millions of adoring fans.

The upcoming WRITE CLUB will take place Tuesday February 28^th. (Consider it a pre-party for AWP). All three bouts focus on class warfare and if you’re familiar with live literature in Chicago, you may recognize Second Story’s Megan Stielstra and the Paper Machete’s Ali Weiss from its list of contributors.

I will leave you with one last comment from Belknap that fully encapsulates why I love performance-based literature. He argues, “there is no substitute for sharing space with other humans in real time and getting your socks knocked off by the a deft turn of phrase and a dazzling set of ideas.” It is for this reason that this Chicago reading series is expanding and holding regular events in San Francisco, Atlanta, and (soon) Los Angeles.

Fall Line
by Joe Samuel Starnes
NewSouth Books

Most of the two dozen or so lakes in Georgia were forced into being at the behest of power, both electrical and human. As post–World War II urbanites built vacation communities on the man-made shores and spent their weekends free of the city, they water-skied and fished above the barnacled remnants of drowned towns. Somewhere below the sparkling blue waves lay junkyards of rusted cars, brick foundations of groceries and churches, and spires of ancient oaks denied the sky, now ”nothing but deadwood where catfish would gather."

With Fall Line, Joe Samuel Starnes has written a novel that accrues force the way a swollen river becomes a torrent. Fall Line lays bare the twenty-four hours before the demolition of the fictional town of Finley Shoals, a flyspeck middle-Georgia community in the crosshairs of progress. While last-minute backroom land grabs cheat high-rollers out of the best waterfront real estate and the community assembles for a fireworks show to kick off the damming of the Oogasula River, a doomed town breathes its last. The water release approaches, and the silent anger of ex-deputy Elmer Blizzard surfaces.

Told over the course of December 1, 1955, Fall Line depicts the demise of Finley Shoals through the eyes of several townspeople, a politician, and a dog, each of whom—dog included—has his or her own allegiances to the town and the acres of forest that surround it. Only Blizzard, son of a dirt farmer, disputes the inevitability of the destruction of his town, reminding his star-struck uncle that the senator behind the land deal made “good money in selling what used to be my mama’s land."

Starnes manages a neat feat by beginning the book from the point of view of Percy, a “half-chow and half-mutt” country dog. This opening isn’t a sentimental ploy, as Starnes uses Percy’s distorted perception of seismic and emotional upheaval to immerse us in the gut-level disorientation that Fall Line is ultimately about. The dog’s limited view makes way for Elmer Blizzard’s, as imperfect in its own way as the other characters’: Blizzard’s glad-handing uncle Lloyd, Senator Aubrey Terrell, and the teenaged Raynelle Watson, who will meet the town’s new day with blood on her hands.

Blizzard, he of the angry past, and of little interest in how the present is turning out, does a good deed in coercing his neighbor Mrs. McNulty to leave her shack at the edge of the river. The old woman owns the gun-shy dog Percy and her deceased husband’s acres of useless “leaf covered old cars dating back to the beginning of automobiles." Blizzard knows he can’t hold back the surge of water that will drown his community, but from one dawn to the next, he carries out a dour plan to make his opinion known to Senator Aubrey Terrell, known as “guvnah” to the more sycophantic in Finley Shoals. It’s Terrell for whom the imminent lake will be named, and it’s Terrell, power and destruction in one, who is squarely in Blizzard’s sullen sights.

Starnes, a Georgia native now living outside the South, slips into the skin of a small southern town. This, his second novel, rings with the piercing accuracy of other modern authors of the rural South, particularly Ron Rash and Tom Franklin. His first novel, Calling, earned him a comparison to the late and legendary Mississippi novelist Larry Brown.

A fertile southern story is made of the full character of southern diction and human beings whose lives are a mix of suspicion, naiveté, and eagerness. Most of Finley Shoals’ residents and outliers—black and white—are at the very least resigned to the dam. During the course of Fall Line’s day, most of the town’s upper crust eagerly make their way to the opening ceremony and fireworks show. Starnes writes against a small horizon; in Fall Line we cover no more landscape than the small stretch from the wooded Oogasula riverbank to the town, up to the inside of the giant, dormant dam, and ultimately back into the woods. Blizzard gets a tour of the monolith with his uncle and a helmeted guide from the power company. Starnes conveys the deputy’s awe and anxiety in a sentence that carries the full threat of the future to Finley Shoals: “Never had he seen so much concrete in one place, and he had been to Atlanta."

Unlike O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted” southerners, the people of doomed Finley Shoals will be haunted by a land that they’ve been convinced to relinquish for the forward march of progress, and like Elmer Blizzard and Raynelle, Starnes’s readers, especially those who dip into Fall Line on a lakeside weekend, will know how deeply loss can run.

The town’s fate is sealed on the book’s first page, and in a tightly controlled, elegant narrative, Starnes’s exacting novel brings us inside one rural community when the American South was about to burst and not one thing could hold back water or time.

Many Americans dismiss foreign languages, perhaps because much of our exposure to them comes from immigrants and exchange students who are here trying to learn English; we assume that because so many people in the world strive to speak our language, we don’t have to learn theirs. But language is about more than what is said. It’s also about how things are said. In my own studies I’ve learned that the ways we express ourselves affect our experience.

My first attempts, as a young American interested in other languages, were frustrated. Even though my mother had lived in India for five years, she could teach me only to count to ten in Hindi, no matter how many times I asked for more. I had to resort to paging through a travel-size Hindi phrase book and piecing together insults to satisfy my foreign-language craving. I realized later these must have been grammatical atrocities, but all I knew at the time was that it was fun to call my brother a “little headache” and have him not understand. My high school French progress was hindered by budget cutbacks, which caused several classes to be combined, so that my fourth year was a repetition of the third. But Russian was the language I worked hardest at, and also where I encountered the most difficulties. Of course I would decide to study it the same year my college cut the department. I was the last Knox undergraduate to declare a Russian major, which I earned entirely through independent studies and a semester abroad. And though learning Russian was no easy task—I wrote and studied hundreds of flash cards, watched several seasons of a bad Russian soap, and dutifully worked through course books without any classmates to practice or commiserate with—acquiring a new tongue allowed me to think about culture, perception, and even my craft as a writer.

I have a theory that Russians were linguistically prepared for communism. Instead of saying “I have a house” or “I have a car,” they say “Around me there is a house” or “Around me there’s a car.” Put this way, what’s ours is defined more by temporary proximity than by ownership. While there are possessive adjectives equivalent to what we use in English—my/moi, your/tvoi—they are far less frequent, because there is also a multipurpose possessive adjective, svoi, that always reflects back the subject, be it you, we, or she. This word svoi extends beyond simple possession and can also express belonging within a group, sort of like saying “one of ours.” In Russian, when making a distinction between friend and foe, svoi is the word used to convey “friend.”

Thus the idea of a community is captured in a word that we English speakers typically translate into our divided possessive adjectives. What’s more, often neither moi nor svoi is required and possession is implied. In Russian, you brush teeth and you comb hair, and don’t have to specify whose teeth or hair unless they belong to someone else. English speakers, with our frequent haves and mys, would have had a harder time adapting to a sense of the communal. Or a communal apartment, for that matter. We like our privacy, something that doesn’t quite translate. Two words are close: chastny, for “personal,” and lichny, for “privatized.”

More superficially, Russians may have been predisposed to favor all things red because it is, at its root, the most beautiful color. The famous Krasnaya Ploschad’ does indeed translate to Red Square in modern Russian, but once it meant Beautiful Square. Beautiful is now krasivaya, and the close relationship between the two can still be heard. Prefix “very” before “red” and the resulting prekrasnaya means “fine, splendid, excellent.” It must be easier to rally around an army that, at least subconsciously, is associated with excellence through the color red.

Of course, there were many factors other than language that led to the political differences between the United States and Russia. But as I’ve learned each of these linguistic gaps, I’ve observed that the way something is expressed reveals how we think about it. There are words I didn’t know I needed until I learned them. Like koe-shto, one of the many ways to say “something,” which is used if the speaker knows what the thing is and the listener doesn’t. That’s the “something” I wish I could have used when my brother asked what my tortured Hindi meant, so that I could withhold the answer while simultaneously emphasizing my superior learning.

Even with my “superior” learning, I wouldn’t claim fluency in Russian, because fluent is such an intimidating word. It seems to me to require a level of competence rivaling how we speak our first language, and I will never know another language the way I know English. But Russians don’t ask whether I’m fluent. They ask if I can speak svobodna, freely. And this I can do.

I can talk about how the stereotype of Russians being lazy workers, with no motivation to exceed quota during Soviet times because there would be no personal gain, is practically built into the days of the week. Saturday, subbota, named for the Jewish sabbath, is followed by voskresenya, or resurrection, after the Christian day of rest. Monday, although it starts the work week, is still defined by the weekend: ponedel’nik, “after holiday.” The week itself, nedel’ya, means “no work.”

We might assume that with all that resistance to work, Russians would be occupied with having fun, but that’s not exactly possible. Americans in Russia often fumble for some equivalent to “have fun,” but the closest they can come without grafting in English (there’s no Russian word that quite means fun) is veselitsya, or “to enjoy oneself,” from the same root as jolly, and prevlekat’sya, which literally means “to distract oneself.” A Russian friend once explained to me that for them, enjoyment either was found or was not, but it was never manufactured, nor was it possessed (that troublesome English have again).

Maybe it is because we Americans are working so hard at having fun that our idea of tiredness does not quite translate either. At a morning Russian lesson, an American will often answer, “How are you?” with “Ya ustal(a).” This is usually met with a correction: “You can’t be tired yet. It’s too early. To be tired, you must have done something.” In English the student might protest, “But I am tired!” However, that would require the present tense of the verb “to be,” which is omitted in Russian. This makes it rather difficult to talk about the way things are. I mean, they manage to express “is” and “are” through em dashes (“Me—Tarzan, you—Jane” would be correct Russian if only that “me” had been an “I”), but there is no natural way while speaking to emphasize the punctuation. The present tense in general feels weaker in Russian because of a dimension called aspect. Russian verbs are paired—with one version for completed actions and one for incomplete—and only the incomplete, or imperfect, aspect can be used in the present tense. Perfective verbs exist to talk about the past and the future but never about the way things are.

Another state of being that’s expressed differently is thirst. In Russian, instead of saying “I’m thirsty”—which seems to set up a need that must be met—you say, “I want to drink.” To me, the second sounds like a matter of personal desire that can wait for fulfillment. In that way, Russian has taught me patience. In fact, much of what I know about writing in English I’ve learned from Russian, a language that requires me to circumlocute every time I want to say “creative writing.” It has taught me that being tired is not an option until something has been accomplished, but at the same time life should not be centered on work. I’m still learning to resist my impulse to always write about the way things are. This becomes easier when I keep in mind that the stories I write aren’t really mine; I’m surrounded by them temporarily. While they’re around me, I’m going to use all the words I have and speak freely, even if I never feel I’ll quite be fluent. And when I can’t find the words, I can measure weeks in the things that aren’t work, months in moons and years in summers. From that perspective, enjoying myself while writing doesn’t seem like such a chore.

Sometimes, say walking down a Moscow street with ten-story-tall ads affixed to buildings, I would feel a kind of sadness I did not know how to express. But the graffiti on those very same streets taught me the feeling was just a suppressed question I had not known I wanted to ask: zachem. This word, spray-painted across the country, is one of two ways Russian has for asking “why.” The other, pochemu, is the kind of “why” we usually use in English, and it asks for causation. Why did I take up Russian? Because people told me I couldn’t learn it. Zachem, however, is a question we ask less often—“what for?”—and it can’t be answered with a simple “because” phrase. So I ask myself, “All this work learning Russian, zachem?” and honestly the answer isn’t to prove wrong those people who told me I couldn’t do it. Not really. It’s to learn how to express the questions I didn’t know I was asking.

At Stake: Writing and LawFebruary is Black History Month, and Northwestern has a variety of notable events remaining. Artists and writers might be particularly interested in a screening and discussion of the movie Freedom Writers, based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. The event is hosted by the National Pen-Hellenic Council and is on February 23rd at 7 p.m. in Harris Hall. For lawyers, on February 23 at 7 p.m. at 1914 Sheridan Road, there will be a discussion of progressive legislation that has worked at ending discrimination.

On February 14, that heartiest of days, HBO will premiere the Loving Story, a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple who faced a year in jail for the crime in Virginia of marrying interracially. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court held that such laws violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. June 12, the date of the Supreme Court’s decision, is now celebrated as Loving Day. It is hard to imagine a better name for the couple and the case. And it is hard to believe that we have not even reached the forty-fifth Loving Day.

On June 12, 2007, the fortieth anniversary of the decision, Mildred Loving issued a statement that ended like so: “I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.

Perhaps one of the most expansive literary events scheduled to take place in Chicago this year is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. If you’ve never been, you should note that there are three major aspects to AWP. The first is what you’d generally consider standard conference fare: magazine editors, writers, scholars, etc. hold panels designed to address all aspects of writing and publishing. This year AWP has added a feature to its website to help conference goers better plan which panels to attend, and I’ve already spent far too much time perfecting my schedule. I’m particularly interested in the multi-genre panel on apocalypse literature entitled “Apocalypse Now.”

The second major aspect of AWP is its utterly overwhelming book fair. Conference organizers create a complicated system of letters and numbers to arrange the mass of participating literary magazines, writing programs, and publishers. This system may be intuitive to other conference attendees—but not to me. Every year, I think that I will develop some plan of attack or some way to move effeciently through the rows, but I inevitably end up wandering around like a septuagenarian lost in a supermarket. The colossal number of participants isn’t even the most overwhelming part. If you’re like me and you get all woozy when you see one of your writerly idols, you’ll probably need to carry an industrial strength sedative because you will at some point see someone who will make you weak-kneed and loose-lipped. When I was in such a state, I may have (definitely) told Jordan Bass of McSweeney’s that I was just going to pick up a copy of Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation at one of the many floundering Borders instead of buying it from him at his booth.

The last segment of AWP does not require registration, so if you’ve been damning your crappy job or more specifically your crappy paycheck because you can’t afford the price of admission—fear not. Each night the conference boasts a series of off site events that are open to the public. These events are as close to true literary nightlife as you’re likely to find. In many ways the whole weekend functions like a national literary prom—and much like a high schooler, I’m just giddy about it.

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit MagsI was going to write a post rounding up the recent obituaries about the life and work of Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska—who died February 1 at the age of 88—but since the Poetry Foundation’s already done an apt job of that, I’ll instead focus on what it was about Szymborska’s style that appealed to me.

It’s okay if you don’t know who I’m talking about. First, let’s get her name pronunciation down: It is vees-WAH-vah. As the Telegraph noted last week: "While she was arguably the most popular poet in Poland, most of the world had not heard of the shy, soft-spoken Szymborska before she won the Nobel prize [in 1996]."

What always drew me to her poetry was its deep and quiet meditative quality, which was often injected with doses of her dry humor. From a Guardian article: “Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation,” she said, going on to wonder why anyone would want to interview her. “For the last few years my favourite phrase has been ‘I don’t know’. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”

The Nobel committee described her as the "Mozart of poetry" but with "something of the fury of Beethoven” and the Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an "irreparable loss to Poland's culture."

Ms. Szymborska “looks at things from an angle you would never think of looking at for yourself in a million years,” Dr. Cavanagh said on the day of the Nobel announcement. She pointed to “one stunning poem that’s a eulogy.” That poem, “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” as translated by Dr. Cavanagh and Mr. Baranczak, opens:

Die — You can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?

Climb the walls?

Rub up against the furniture?

Something that I learned while reading her obituaries is that Poland has a reputation for romanticizing its poets; (more than I can say of Americans, the vast majority of whom are indifferent to poetry). Per the Times: “She was popular in Poland, which tends to make romantic heroes of poets, but she was little known abroad. Her poems were clear in topic and language, but her playfulness and tendency to invent words made her work hard to translate.”

Back to that wry wit. In Szymborska’s Nobel lecture, she said this of poets’ lives, as compared to those of artists or musicians: “Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic…Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”

At Stake: Writing and Law

The Cameras in the Courtroom Act – is it a slapstick vaudeville routine? No, it’s legislation Congress is considering that would require the Supreme Court to install television cameras and allow broadcasting of oral arguments. The Court already distributes transcripts of the arguments, which, by the way, are open to the public, with limited seating space. Whether Congress can and should force the Court to permit video of its open sessions is for another forum – what’s noteworthy for us is the implicit beliefs the Justices and supporters and critics of the CitCA have regarding the difference between words and video.

Remember, transcripts from the arguments are available on the internet, often the next day. Justice Kagan, a supporter of cameras in the Supreme Court, described her impressions before becoming a justice: “Everybody was so prepared, so smart, so obviously deeply concerned about getting to the right answer . . . . if everybody could see this, it would make people feel so good about this branch of government and how it’s operating.” So Justice Kagan believes that nobody can read? That the intelligence and preparation won’t be evident from the transcript? Or that words in general lack the power of video? Some combination of these, likely, from a member of the Court that writes opinions thousands of words long and has huge battles over what words mean and even what methods to use in interpretation.

Nancy Marder, a professor at Kent Law School here in Chicago and former Supreme Court clerk, opposes cameras because they will make attorneys and Justices more guarded, more concerned about their images, and that little snippets will “go viral.” Again, the assumptions seem to be that nobody bothers to read the transcripts, or the articles that quote from them, and that words are nothing to worry about anyway.

My own view is that it’s much ado about very little. The Illinois Supreme Court already has cameras in its courtroom, and not even my mom has watched my arguments there. Appellate arguments are just not very gripping. The U.S. Supreme Court has more high-profile cases, but beyond the brief clip here and there, cameras in the courtroom won’t change much. The People’s Court will get much better ratings. And if I’m wrong, well, it’s just words, right?

Brooklyn Copeland is the author of several chapbooks, the recipient of a 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and the editor of a limited-run print journal of music, poetry, and translation called TAIGA. Her first full-length collection, Siphon, Harbor, is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2012 from Shearsman Books. She lives in Indianapolis.

TriQuarterly Online: How did you start writing poems?

Brooklyn Copeland: I started writing poetry as a freshman in high school. I would buy blank notebooks as souvenirs because I found the idea of a bunch of blank pages really appealing. My friends and I would take turns with the books, filling them with our (really terrible) touchy-feely verse and sketches.

My junior year, when I was supposed to be going to a Swedish-language high school as an exchange student in Finland, I skipped the entire second semester of classes to go sit in the back of a café with a bottomless cup of tea, a pastry, my Discman, and my little blank notebook. I was listening to a lot of Tori Amos at the time, so you can imagine that my poetry was still pretty terrible, but I wrote the heck out of it. I think the school called my host “parents” periodically to make sure I was alive since they’d go weeks without seeing me, but no one ever confronted me outright.

It was a very formative time in my young adulthood—and it wrecked me as a scholar. From that point on, I’d continue to skip school to go hole up and read or write. During a year in college, which I spent in Canterbury, England, I skipped philosophy classes and went to pubs with my laptop. I got good grades and loved to sit in lectures, but I did drop out of college after that. As silly as it sounds, I knew that my professional ambition was to be a writer, not a philosophy professor, and I knew that I couldn’t “become” a writer by wasting more money at a university. I’m only twenty-seven years old, so I won’t say I’ll never go back to school; I might someday go back to study history or to learn a new trade.

TQO: So you would buy empty notebooks because you found “a bunch of blank pages appealing.” Was it the emptiness of the pages or the filling of the pages that most appealed to you? I ask because your poems, specifically in Laked, Fielded, Blanked, seem to interact very intentionally with the white spaces on the page. Can you elaborate on this? Have you always gravitated toward sparseness?

BC: The short answer is yes, I have. My poems have never been too long or wordy, and a length of blankness, for me, holds nearly the same value as a string of words. In my notebooks (which I still use), I enjoy the challenge of nailing my image in as few words as possible and leaving as much space as is appropriate. If you write poetry that is meditative (which I think describes my work right now) and is more of an offering to the reader, the amount of blank space becomes even more important. In small poems, dead weight’s not allowed. You find out quickly that one misstep ruins the whole poem—small poems seem to require extra trust from the reader in the writer. (I mean, sometimes there’s this weird suspicion to overcome: “Why are you able to say in fifteen words what other poets say in fifteen lines?” “Is this a joke? My four-year-old could have written this,” etc.) Even other poets can be dismissive of (or perhaps intimidated by) small poetry. The poetry teachers and professors I’ve had seem to begin and end the lesson with petals on a wet black bough, almost as if to say, “Look at this kooky experiment from a hundred years ago!”

As a reader, I think words come to life when you give them room to breathe. When I see a lot of space on the page, I know that I should read the poem slowly. Even poems made up of a single word can be read slowly, you know. Once you’ve read the poem, you have enough elbow room to work out your reactions to the poem and relate the poem to your own experience. Poems that don’t give me enough space or that I feel talk at me instead of with me actually bore me at first glance—-it’s more of an effort for me to commit to reading the work. It’s not because I’m lazy or an unconditioned reader; it’s because I have the opposite weird suspicions to overcome: “Why did it take you fifteen lines to say what could have been said in fifteen words?”

There are areas of my life where I’m splashy and larger-than-life and baroque. I admire poetry that is like that, too, but it’s not the kind of poetry I’m capable of writing authentically.

TQO: And what does it mean to write authentically?

BC: I mean, writing beyond imitation or self-consciousness. I feel like “authentic writing” is what they used to call “writing like something is at stake” or “writing that takes risks.” I still get confused when editors use those terms. You don’t have to pretend your life depends on your poem in order to write a great one, dig. Authenticity might be a (slightly less) relative (urgent?) measure of whether a poem is successful. It could be the most casual little piece or some unreadable conceptual word mag. It’s a balance of “WHOOSH!” and “Aha!”

TQO: You mention image as central to your writing. What about sound?

BC: What’s interesting is that I see my world in the words themselves. If an image moves me somehow, I will literally see black words on a white page in my head as I work out descriptors. The sound is important, too, but I guess I don’t attach the same mystique to it, or it’s so deeply intuitive to how I come by the words that I don’t notice it until further in the process. I prefer natural language and the regular old flow of words. Sometimes I’ll verb-up a noun or vice versa—that’s usually in the interest of word economy more than it is me trying to come across as “poetic.”

My words do rub against each other with intention, sure. It’s mostly a matter of arranging the words on the page in a way that optimizes those sounds. I stack and space words so the eye pauses where the ear should add the “heard dimension.”

TQO: I like that phrase: heard dimension. What’s your writing/editing process like?

BC: It changes slightly with each project, but I usually keep a small notebook in my bag and jot down lines or images as they come to me. I might keep things in that book for months, even a year, before they become part of a poem. That transition from the original note to a fresh, clean Word document is never easy for me: I’m always wondering if I’ll remember how to “write a poem.” Once it’s there, though, I leave it alone for a week or two. Editing is my absolute favorite part of the process. I love going in, being objective, getting rid of the “clever” bits, moving words around, making decisions about punctuation, et cetera.

I’m never in a rush to write or edit. I’m not on any deadlines. I’m not turning in assignments or bringing projects to a workshop. I used to worry that I wasn’t publishing often enough—my poetry has turned into something that many editors see as “fragments” rather than neatly titled pieces that fit nicely in tables of contents, so I’ve abandoned a regular submission schedule and worked more toward completing chapbook-length projects—I’ve had more success with that.

TQO: Who are your influences, literarily speaking? Who are you reading right now?

BC: Literarily, my influences and “favorite finds” are all over the place. I don’t limit myself. I collect books, chapbooks, and literary journals faster than I can read them.

Anyway, there are the obvious influences that people tend to pick up on right away: Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, H. D. . . .

And many of the poets published by Shearsman Books in the UK. From that press I’ve read and reread books by Harriet Tarlo and most recently Anna Reckin and Laura Walker.

Then there’s George Oppen’s Discrete Series, Barbara Guest’s The Türler Losses, Laura Moriarty’s like roads . . .

Anne Shaw’s Undertow knocked me on my butt. So did Sarah Menefee’s chapbook In Your Fish Helmet, Anne Carson’s Sappho fragments, Jennifer Denrow’s California, Lucas Farrell’s Bird Any Damn Kind, Joshua Ware’s Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, Michael Palmer’s Notes for Echo Lake, Gustaf Sobin’s Breaths’ Burials, Robert Kelly’s Kill the Messenger, Jessica Smith’s Organic Furniture Cellar, Stacy Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships . . . Greying Ghost Press put out a tiny chapbook of neologisms (Naturalistless) by Christopher Rizzo a few years ago—still a favorite from that press along with B. J. Love’s Michigander. A few weeks ago I got a copy of the terrific little clothbound chapbook Matryoshka by Jamie Townsend and I’m still re-reading it . . .

The book of poetry I’ve carried all over the world with me, even before I knew much about its contents, is The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry—twelve years later those poems still scare the crap out of me.

TQO: What is it about that specific collection—The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry—that’s stuck with you?

BC: Honestly, I’ve developed a sentimental attachment to the poets themselves. I mean, these are intelligent, literary, well-meaning men watching their friends and cities get blown to pieces and wondering what for. These are Reality Check poems. There’s so much confusion, all kinds of nervy, rattled-existence stuff in those pages. Also, the poetry itself is mostly straightforward war verse. WWI was the subject that fascinated me the most in history classes. You feel transitional energy in this collection. It’s huge transitional energy—it’s more than some guy telling the Internet, “Oh, well, poets. Now we’re done with that trend and here’s the new trend.” With Ezra Pound and company, some of these soldiers helped make readers understand that poetry was losing currency in its romantic state. I think they went back and made a second edition, which included other poets (women, nonsoldiers), but I have the first edition and it’s one of three books I’d save from a fire.

There’s an equally gripping book along this line out recently from Birds, LLC: The Kings of the F**King Sea by Dan Boehl. It’s certainly one of the most remarkable books to come out in a long, long time. I had similar reactions reading it that I did to reading the Penguin volume: fear and guilt and a shaky excitement that poetry could be so powerful. It’s such brutal matter-of-factness and coolness and strength in story. I mean, compare this:

The sea shouldn’t be

a commodity.

Oh but it is.

Oh but it is.

The gunner pointed

to a ship on the horizon

lighting up the vessel for us.

…………………………..

It took an hour to cut the lock

from the hold

……………………………

And in the pile

a woman still alive

her hands a couple of wolves working the darkness.

Her eyes have seen the darkest version

of this world.

I was a lamb.

(from “Cobra[Sombrero])” by Dan Boehl)

to this:

This is Charing Cross;

It is midnight;

There is a great crowd

And no light.

A great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud.

Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother!

She has a dead face;

She is dressed all in black;

She wanders to the bookstall and back,

At the back of a crowd;

And back again and again back,

She sways and wanders.

(from “Antwerp” by Ford Maddox Ford)

TQO: Do you read much poetry is translation?

BC: I try to. I tend to collect from the Swedish (and other Scandinavian languages) and French because those are the languages I’m best able to “decipher” poetically. I have a pretty generic collection of the twentieth-century “standards,” otherwise. I recently discovered a press called Tavern Books and would recommend them to anyone looking for an entree or just something new. I prefer bilingual editions to those that publish only the English versions—even if you can’t read the other language, you can’t help but scan the lines and let your imagination play laterally in them. I think that’s an important part of reading in translation; you’re cheated out of that connection if you’re only reading the poem in English.

TQO: As an avid reader of poetry, what do you say to someone who just doesn’t get poetry—someone who can’t see any pragmatic purpose to it? What about the accusation that poetry can be understood and enjoyed by only a select group of people?

BC: I can empathize, but I think there’s usually a difference between those who don’t get poetry and those who don’t think there is a pragmatic purpose to it. Basically, you just have to allow that poetry serves a purpose the way that music, theater, comic books, and graffiti serve a purpose: creative types can’t help but make their commentary through their art.

And, honestly, there is a point where poetry can only be understood by select group of people. Poetry as we write it in 2011 is a wild animal for most readers who don’t also write it; it doesn’t offer the same access points that a news article or a blog post or a novel offers. And there’s an element of poetry that is like philosophy: readers know it can be skillful and rigorous and smart and taken seriously, but there simply is no “right or wrong” to it, there are lots of variables and opposing approaches. Once readers allow that a poem can be understood “correctly” more than one way (intuitively, contextually, critically, artistically, etc.), they get poetry just as well as any practicing poet. It’s up to that reader to dig deeper into the poem to get the most out of it.

TQO: What does it mean to be a contemporary poet (beyond being someone who is presently writing poems)? Or maybe a better way to put it: What do you see happening in poetry right now— where is the artform heading?

BC: I do think the term contemporary poet can only mean “someone who is presently writing poetry.” There is so much going on and most of it is very exciting. In fact, many poets I know are still (candidly) lacing back through poetry that was written in the first half of the twentieth century. I don’t think we were done digesting that poetry, or the poetry that came just after, before certain people started declaring we were past modernism or past-past modernism or whatever.

I think we’re at an interesting point: there is, honestly, a glut of “poets” in my generation, and, apart from those teaching positions everyone covets (then kvetches about), there really isn’t much competition amongst ourselves—just the opposite. I mean, we publish each other, we buy from each other, we hold parties and readings for each other, we assign our friends’ books to our creative writing classes, we enlist each other for anthologies, we review each other (mostly favorably). I think it all comes from a place of sincere intentions—none of us are thinking we’re going to get rich or famous writing poetry, so we might as well bond-up and support each other. That lack of criticism (not “critical thinking” but “criticism of each other”) can stifle you in its own way. People lose the ability or desire to be objective because it’s easier to be polite or encouraging or not say anything at all. It can also mean that a lot of people who wouldn’t have necessarily “become poets” or “become poets, yet” consider themselves “career poets” in their mid-twenties or late twenties because they’ve gotten comfy in a community where they feel valued and like they belong, even if no one actually addresses their work. Without much life experience or time away from academia, I feel that many of these “lifers” are writing poetry that is, essentially, only about poetry. That, to me, is boring.

Sometimes that’s awkward: you can genuinely enjoy someone’s company and you can be friends with them and hug them at parties and buy them drinks when they’re in town, but be totally indifferent to their work. And I sometimes can’t tell if I’m part of the problem or a whiff of the antidote, myself. But I think that goes back to what I’m talking about with “authentic” poetry. I can’t read authenticity in much of what gets published—I think so many poems could be titled “This Is a Smilingly Self-Conscious Poem in Response to That Poem My Buddy Published in That One Journal Last Year.”

That probably sounds kind of harsh. I mean, is a glut of poets who all love each other really such a terrible thing? Nope. The more the merrier, I guess. Two or three times a year you read a poem by a poet you’ve never heard of and it strikes such a deep chord that you google them and you write to them and before you know it you’ve made a new friend and you feel slightly less awkward for a little while.

TQO: Or you ask them for an interview.

BC: Yeah! As a matter of fact, I’m working up to interviewing a poet for the journal I publish whose work I typically love but whose last book really perplexed me. He was gracious enough to agree to the interview, and I’m excited because I know I’m going to learn a lot from it. I love it when poets don’t mind putting themselves out there, even if it’s on the defensive sometimes.

TQO: Have you had any writing mentors—anyone who has taken you under his or her wing, so to speak—or has your writing developed solely within the context of your peers?

BC: Honestly, I’ve received very helpful feedback from a few writers over the past few years, but I wouldn’t call anyone my mentor. I always want feedback from different types of writers—an even non-writers. Somehow it’s easier to trust someone’s take on your work if they aren’t reading it already assuming they’ll enjoy or understand it, if that makes any sense.

TQO: You said earlier that people—editors specifically—have understood your writing as “fragments rather than neatly titled pieces that fit nicely in tables of contents.” It seems that the three poems constituting Laked, Blanked, Fielded can fall under this (mis)understanding as well. What is the chapbook about?

BC: That chapbook is divided into three series-poems: “Morse,” “Notes on Vanishing,” and “Seall.” They were all written at different times over the course of a few years under the spell of different inspirations. “Morse” is about the reservoir where I grew up in the rural part of the county just north of Indianapolis. I wrote that poem right after I left my ex-husband. I came home to this place from Oxford, England, and was both so sad over the breakdown of our relationship and so comforted by the reservoir that the poem is in fact me reflecting and working toward renewal (which water is for me—reflection and renewal—and that’s why it is so present in my work right now; I’m a swimmer of cycles). The original poem was slightly longer and addressed the failure of marriage head-on—it was published in a run of twenty-five copies by Spooky Girlfriend Press a few years ago. It sold out quickly and the “dear husband” poems were removed, as I’d made my peace with the situation and those no longer seemed appropriate.

“Notes on Vanishing” was actually written as part of a much longer series about tribal Baltic-Finnic languages (some of which are truly vanishing—in some cases the number of speakers is down to single digits). The idea runs parallel to vanishing natural landscapes, particularly in a part of the world that feels like my second home.

“Seall” is a poem about my boyfriend—that’s his last name. Our relationship over the past few years has also been a constant source of reflection and renewal. Writing poems for him is the closest I’ll ever come to tattooing a guy’s name on my arm.

TQO: But if you did have to get a tattoo, what would it be or say?

BC: I worked for the public library in Carmel, Indiana, for ten years off and on. My favorite section was (of course) the 811 section (which in this library is very extensive)—more specifically, the 811.52 section. My friend and fellow poet Danielle Wheeler is the first one I know to have the 811 tattoo, and I was crazy with envy when I saw it—but I’d have to go all the way with 811.52. I haven’t ruled out getting that one but keep bumping up the literary milestone that will warrant it. At this rate, I’ll need to win the Nobel before I get it done.

TQO: If I may ask, what do you do for a living? How does this interact with your vocation as a writer?

BC: I am an auditor and I teach several yoga classes per week. Both vocations play into my writing, the way working in a library or a winery or for an airline played into my writing. I don’t live in a literary world 24/7. Auditing plays to the part of me that wants to find patterns and repetition in massive amounts of data; yoga plays to the part of me that wants to be in the moment, acting out that moment with my entire body. I’d say at this point in my life I’m balanced and appreciative and content. I’m good at weeding out or ignoring things or people who disturb me. So my poetry isn’t the poetry of someone who is angry or demanding or offended or seeking to offend or to confuse. It’s probably the poetry of a well-adjusted auditor / yoga instructor. I can’t say I’ll always feel this way or write this way, but for now it’s the only way I know how to write, and I’m glad (and grateful) that resonates with a few readers.

TQO: Where can readers find more of your work?

BC: Nothing pending for journals right this minute, but my first full-length book (which kind of scales up what Laked, Fielded, Blanked summarizes), called Siphon, Harbor, is out on Shearsman Books in March 2012. It’s the best birthday present I could receive, and I’m over the moon with anticipation. Also, a new press out of Pittsburgh, Hyacinth Girl Press, has picked up a crazy hybrid chapbook: translations of Edith Södergran and new original work. That one’s called Salt Ballads. I’m still working on translations but don’t have much else in the pipelineI’m just hanging out and enjoying what is sure to be another unpredictable Midwestern winter.

For more information on Copeland’s upcoming work, check brooklyncopeland.blogspot.com.

When I was twelve, I spent most of my time after school watching Darkwing Duck, a show about which I now remember nothing except that the opening credits featured a duck wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Time, I fully concede, spent poorly. I have been thinking about how I spent my time as a youth lately because there have been two recent incarnations of youths producing really high quality literature and literary commentary: the Louder than a Bomb Chicago youth poetry slam and the Newberry Film Festival, in which youths aged 0-18 submit their 90-second homemade videos summarizing/reenacting the plots of Newberry Medal winners.

The Newberry Film Festival is curated by Chicago-based writer James Kennedy. On his website, Kennedy promotes the project this way, “Teachers, here’s a fun project that will get your students reading Newbery winners. Students, here’s an excuse to mess around with video equipment. Librarians, here’s an activity to do with your teen advisory boards. Anyone can enter. Everyone wins!” He’s right. Everyone does seem to win. These videos are not only hysterical, they give me hope for the future of reading. The children making these videos are clearly having fun. To reiterate, they are making reading fun, a task that many with noble intentions and stout hearts attempt and fail, fail miserably, fail in a way that actually makes reading less fun. To see youths succeed and succeed with smiles is incredibly buoying.

Louder than a Bomb, a documentary about the youth poetry slam, premiered on January 5th on the Oprah Winfrey Network and follows the preparations of four students living in Chicago. LTAB is an amazing event that inspires great art. Watch the documentary. Attend this year’s event. Support the talented individuals who make LTAB happen. It will impress you.

I am jealous of these two sets of youths. I am jealous that they are more literary as children and teenagers than I was. If there were, in fact, a wrinkle in time (Newberry Medal winner) and I were a youth in Chicago today, I’d like to think that I’d have been different. I’d like to think that I’d be donning a wig and videotaping myself bridging my way to Terabithia. I’d like to think that I’d have the courage to stand on a stage and read incredibly raw poetry. But since time travel is still relegated to fiction, I will have to acknowledge that I spent my youth watching a fashion conscious duck—I think—fight crime.

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

Goldie Goldbloom, my current workshop instructor, has been urging us to really immerse ourselves in the tone and feeling of our fiction submissions. Meaning, she wants us to think deeply about place/location—even going so far as to draw a map of where our story is set. She’s also recommending that while we write, we listen to music that is relevant to our story. I’m conflicted about this advice. On the one hand, I think listening to music can help you set the tone of your work, and that tone may well come out beautifully in the writing. At the same time, I have difficulty writing alongside any music containing words, so my music go-tos are usually jazz or avant-garde classical: Edgar Varese, Thelonious Monk, Mum, Django Reinhardt, Cecilia Bartoli, Cesaria Evora (those last 2 are singers, but if I can’t understand the language, words are weirdly okay). But I admit, none of those musicians has anything remotely to do with my story. If I was going to listen to music pertinent to my manuscript, it’d likely be 70s country rock, which I find tough to write with.

Because I’ve been thinking about this lately, this article on The Millions literary magazine about book “soundtracks” really hit home. I agree with the author that the popularity of this idea has much to do with readers feeling as though it allows them to know the author more intimately and have insights into aspects of the work that might otherwise be hidden. And, I do love the idea of curating a soundtrack to my novel after it’s written.

This train of thought reminded me of an interview I did with author/teacher Elizabeth Merrick for Venus Zine a few years ago. Reading this again reminded me that although she loved to listen and write, for her, listening to music was only possible during certain phases of the writing process. So, maybe I just need to try out the 70s country rock while generating text rather than during the editing phase, as I’ve been doing. Fingers crossed.

Do you listen to music while you’re writing?

In the early phases, yes. I’ll drive and drive and drive and the stories will show up. And then at a certain point, the music will start jangling and I’ll hear the characters speaking, and I’ll have to turn the music off. What the music does is get me into my right brain-all of the intuition stuff-and then once I can access that and the story is there, I turn it off. The music for me is the way to feel unconstricted.

This spring my alma mater, Indiana University, is offering a literature class geared toward MFAs called “The Interconnected Story Collection.” The genre—also often called the short-story cycle, the short story sequence, novel in stories, and composite novel—is, at its most basic, a collection of stories that are simultaneously interrelated and autonomous. Although not the first of its kind, the introduction of this class acknowledges two truths: (1) so much good work is being done in the genre, and (2) there has been a gap between the production of interconnected story collections within MFA programs and study of them as a literary genre.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is viewed as one of the best examples of a successful short-story cycle.

I am glad to see this class offered. Indiana University gave me excellent training. However, it was not until I took my PhD qualifying exams that I realized that something strange was happening in American literature that we had not talked about in any of my classes: the ubiquity of the short-story cycle. Since the mid-nineteenth century, its rise and proliferation have constituted one of the most generative and influential developments in US literary history. Many of the texts on the class’s reading list were also on mine or made their way into my dissertation on the topic: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Susan Minot’s Monkeys, and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The tension between the stories’ independence and interconnection makes it an ideal genre for engaging the concurrent but often competing impulses that animate the literary works and critical narratives of US cultural production: expansiveness and particularity, coherence and fragmentation, tradition and novelty, recurrence and uniqueness, and individuality and community. The cycle uncannily acts out these central tensions of modern American experience and articulates the sense that the identities that arise from them, whether personal, ethnic, regional, or national, resist stasis. It’s not a genre unique to American literature—far from it—but it has become a dominant yet diverse strand of literary production from regionalism through modernism and postmodernism to whatever we call the current moment.

Short-story cycles have been especially prominent since the 1980s: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and her subsequent tetralogy, Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, Cathy Day’s Circus in Winter, Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar, and this year’s Pulitzer-winning Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—to name only a very few. The logic of cycles has also made its way into less integrated collections: for instance, the Lionel and Julia stories of Amy Bloom or the trio of stories called “Hema and Kaushik” in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. Despite these prominent cycles and practitioners, there is a gap between the production of the genre and academic and popular understanding of it. Within higher education, undergraduate curriculum design and PhD literature programs marginalize the genre, while MFA programs valorize the cycle as a genre of choice, conditioning its visible but vexed status in the academy.

The genre of the short-story cycle evinces the correlation between how often a text is read in the classroom and how much has been written about it. In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl takes Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street as a case study in the relationship between teaching, scholarship, and reception. Arguing that its modernist attention to fragmentation and the accessibility of its narrator’s voice render it ideal for the classroom, McGurl outlines the process by which this cycle went from the small press Arte Público Press to Vintage and from a text on the margins to near saturation in both criticism and the classroom. He cites Cisneros as an example of “high cultural pluralism,” a trend in post­–World War II fiction in which ethnic American writers espouse the practices of modernist fiction (32).

The history and reception of Cisneros’s volume, which is a cycle but does not get called such by McGurl, also make a compelling case study for the influence MFA programs are having on contemporary literature. Cisneros, once a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, exemplifies the influence creative-writing programs can have on contemporary fiction (338). McGurl contends that the institutionalization of creative writing at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels has contributed to an explosion of literary talent. Although there is hardly a consensus on the usefulness or success of such programs, the sheer number of programs and the caliber of writers that emerge from them testify to the influence of the workshop on the market, the study of literature, the kinds of writing being produced, and its dissemination through publication. While such programs took off with the GI Bill and the flooding of government resources into higher education, the first programs appeared in the 1930s (McGurl, 529). As of June 2009, according to Louis Menand, there were 822 programs that offered degrees in creative writing; 37 of these offered the PhD and 153 offered the MFA (“Show or Tell”).

The history of “the Program Era” and the history of the short-story cycle intersect in complex ways. While the cycle long predates the institutionalization of creative writing, there is no doubt that many cycles began in writing workshops. The workshop setting may indeed be an ideal forum for producing and honing the cycle. As Menand and McGurl note, in fiction-writing workshops the short story is the preferred form, due to the reasonable possibility of producing, workshopping, and revising a story. Further, the repetition of workshops across semesters may well induce or encourage writers to return to a character, setting, or theme as they move toward a collection, novel, or cycle. Rebecca Barry, for example, has referred to the way one of her recurring characters kept creeping into her efforts in a writing workshop in graduate school. It is impossible to quantify how frequently or purely this is the case. However, a striking number of writers who emerged from workshops published first books that were cycles proper, highly integrated collections, or loose novels: Flannery O’Connor, Banks, Cisneros, Denis Johnson, Barry, Day, Junot Díaz, and Minot, to name just a few.

One reason short-story cycles have been so marginalized is the perception that they are apprentice works, produced before an author reaches maturity. This narrative of the cycle as an apprentice work is often inaccurate. One of William Faulkner’s most nuanced works, Go Down, Moses, is a short-story cycle that appeared relatively late among his major works. Winesburg remains in the eyes of many Anderson’s highest accomplishment, and his work in the novel is largely considered less influential and sophisticated. Among contemporary writers, cycles are often their breakout and most popular volumes, as is the case for many of the writers listed above as well as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Thus, the cycle can present problems for neat and easy narratives of authorial development. The influence of the academy on the genre is one of ambivalence: literature departments unintentionally suppress the genre from view, while creative-writing programs promote it. Born in the workshop, nurtured in the small and large magazines, and reaching maturity in finished cycles, much of the best contemporary writing is happening in the short-story cycle.

Works Cited

Barry, Rebecca. “Interview with the Author” by Simon and Schuster. October 23, 2011, www.rebeccabarry.net.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009.

Menand, Louis. “Show or Tell.” New Yorker, June 8, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com.