Long Pine Limited

Party! Burrow Press Rolls Out "15 Views..." in Hard Copy

2012-01-28T04:40:00.000-08:00

Look! It's the girl with blue hair!

Luckily, we can't see the tattoo. This is the cover of Burrow Press's new book, "15 Views of Orlando," constructed from the serial flash fiction online story project local writers whipped up to celebrate the city.

Last summer the crew at Urban ReThink/Burrow Press, continued their near obsessive mission to stay deeply connected to the Orlando literary community and really the city-at-large by cooking up an online project, "15 Views of Orlando," an interconnected flash fiction string by 15 very good and not very alike local fiction writers. Among the stipulations to the contributors was a thematic rule to set the individual stories in familiar or exotic or random unknown places across the town. Of course, writers were also to connect somehow with previous writers' story lines and pull at least one of them through. The result was not a story cycle but kind of a story braid.

The drill was that the stories appeared every few weeks on the Burrow Press site. If you were eighth in line, you didn't really begin your contribution until after number seven was posted, because you were to build on what had come before. You wouldn't necessarily build on number seven, the one immediately before. No, no. Tires ain't pretty, and writers ain't linear. You might pull through a plot-line from number three, but use a character from number four, a location from number two, and cook a new plot strand from something you noticed shaping up in number seven. Or whatever. It was best to take everything that had come before into account as you began to cook up your own contribution. You had a week.

I was number twelve, and in my long life I've never written anything in a week! Trying to do so, in August, just before I left for Shanghai, got me in a giant sweat-down and I was spinning out drafts like a ceiling fan. How Ryan Rivas (Burrow Press Publisher) and Nathan Holic ("15 Views ..." editor) managed to ride herd on 15 random loose-cannon wholesale neurotic lone wolves and get this thing to actually work could probably be another book. But let's not get ahead of myself.

Release Party

So Burrow Press made a book of it, the proceeds from which serve their central nonprofit mission of helping Orlando kids. This coming Tuesday, Jan. 31, 6:00 PM at the local literary community's home base, Urban ReThink, 625 E. Central Blvd. in Thornton Park, EVERYBODY will gather for some conviviality, book buying, writerly and readerly getting together, did I mention book-buying, and the opportunity starting at 7:00 PM to hear John King, Jared Silvia, J Bradley, Hunter Choate, and Ashley Inguanta read from their contributions to the torrid "15 Views . . ." flash fiction braid. Your interest, presence, and book purchase also helps support Burrow Press itself, Orlando's new pivot spot for the next local literary generation. Most important, of course, is buying the book, perhaps two or three. Find out all you need to know at: http://burrowpress.com/burrowing-into-the-new-year/

Congratulations to all the writers, Burrow Press, and Urban ReThink for a successful collaboration. Astounding.

Silent Retreats is now available on Kindle thru Amazon

2012-01-21T14:39:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased to announce that, thanks to my publisher the U. of Georgia Press, Silent Retreats is now available on Kindle. The book contains 11 short stories including "Arcola Girls" which appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards after it was accepted by the New England Review and "Silent Retreats," which was first accepted by Kevin McIlvoy at Puerto del Sol. My anti hero Skidmore first appeared in these stories, in serial cameos that frequently acted to take it up a notch, like adding Jack Daniels to your milk. The stories also contain nostalgia, even more than originally I just noticed, as well as an early take on one of my time-honored themes, What happened to men after what happened to women.

Click Here for More Info...

Who's Got Obama's Back?

2011-10-31T23:33:00.000-07:00

Unike the Tea Party, which was born when the alien/socialist enemy held all three of Washington’s elected redoubts, Occupy Wall Street inhabits a different political world, one whose most prominent figure, the President, has fallen short of not only many Occupiers’ hopes but also his own—in large part because of the Republicans’ conscienceless exploitation of the perverse veto points of the congressional machine.
--Hendrick Herzberg, Nov. 7 New Yorker

Unlike Herzberg, whose commentary I do follow and highly value, I don’t think it’s as important when the Tea Party was born as why it was born. It was born because a black man became President of the United States. When it was born, the Tea Party was full of low information white people who never even noticed what George Bush and the Republicans did to the economy and didn’t know what a debt ceiling was. And they darn sure never dreamed Barack Obama would win the presidency, especially up against such a powerhouse ticket as John McCain and Sarah Palin. But when he did win, they hit the roof. They wanted to go to presidential rallies carrying a loaded automatic weapon because sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of tyrants and to them Obama was apparently a tyrant though he hadn’t been in office two months. There were cartoons of a monkey shot by cops. They spit on black congressmen as they entered the capitol building. That was the Tea Party, and more sophisticated right wingers harnessed their racist anger and gave them a code to talk in. Republicans invented that code.

Why would the Tea Party declare war on the social safety net that we've assembled for the sick, disabled, aging and poor in this country.

Why would all these Tea Partiers stand for the ruin of the middle class by banks, Wall Street, and the richest 1% (and what proportion of that 1% do you suppose is white?)? Why would they want to cut off all revenue to the government, a completely nutty idea? Why would they oppose health care reform so somebody besides Big Pharma gets well? The reason is the Tea Party is a bunch of low-information disgruntled people who hate people who are different from them, and there is a rope through their nose ring, the other end of which is attached to Karl Rove, George Bush's brain as he was once referred to, and a group of Republican elected officials who never liked democracy anyway. Those elected officials have no plan to say yes to anything. Famously they vote with uniform consistency against bills they know have bipartisan support and that they themselves wrote and proposed.

They were never this obvious before. A black guy in the White House was the last straw. Senseless primitive racial hate has been harnessed in favor of the Republican agenda. This is the last cornered snake in the big barn. It's been in hiding since Martin Luther King's death and we've made progress. You can't say we haven't made progress. Barack Obama didn't win the Presidency by just a little and that event was unthinkable only a very few years before it happened. His election has flushed out some really bad stuff we collectively still have in us. Nobody in our big world of punditry and opinion expressing says that racism is at the core of our problem today. The very fact it isn't being said let's you know how dark this place is inside us. Barack Obama cannot say he's a victim of racism, and there’s nobody watching his back who will say it for him. Black activists in the US know better than to call a snake a snake. If they do, it's "game on" and they're gonna need more than a pitchfork.

That is what we're up against. For the country's mental health, it has to be named, it must be said aloud. It will be painful.

Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews was faulting Obama for not reaching out to democratic congressmen and senators. “Why doesn’t he have them over and play cards and have a drink with them and get them to help him?” Chris said, “He needs to be more like Kennedy, skillful at the politics of politics. Why does he try to do all of it by himself?” Chris was selling his book on John Kennedy. Matthews virtually said, “Why doesn’t Barack have a brother right there with him, like Kennedy had Robert kicking ass for him?” Uh-huh. Think about it.

They both got shot.

Why does Barack have to have a drink with congressmen and senators in his own party to get them to fight the Republicans as they, the Republicans, dismantle the system and the middle class on a singular, pre-announced mission to bring down the President using parliamentary stunts to stop everything, everything, every single thing? You know, that's actually a threat to the security of the US -- when the depression really hits, that will be obvious. Do you know this has never happened before? The country is being strangled, and the economy is being intentionally crashed by a bunch of flag waving know-nothings and their quite evil leaders. Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of a giant reaction, a revolution. A massive number of people are losing their jobs and houses, states are going broke, taxes are the lowest ever and are off the table for negotiation because NO is the answer, period. We can no longer afford to have America be America, and the black guy is why. Social security, medicare, people’s retirement accounts, it’s all gonna go. And if the Tea Party and the richest one percent don’t stop it with this crap they're pulling, it is for sure gonna get loud. I'd prefer for us to win the next election and get the snakes outta there that way.

It is shocking how little empathy is being shown to anybody, and I think that is one of OWS's main issues. Republicans are cold. People this cold are very dangerous. It's okay with them if people remain unemployed another couple of years or decades. People in democratic districts all across the country, let alone in Republican districts, are not being represented, their pain isn't pain, it's just discomfort. Wounded veterans home from Bush’s dumb wars will be jobless and desperate and, pretty darn soon, pissed off. Why does Barack Obama have to play cards with senators on his own team so they get behind the jobs act and fixing infrastructure and not killing public schools? Why aren’t the democratic senators and congressmen raising holy hell? Cat got their tongue? Why don’t the democratic senators and congressmen have the President’s back, I mean in a Giant Ted Kennedy way? In fact, if they can’t get by the filibuster, why don’t they just walk out (as happened in the legislature in Wisconsin) -- pull on their jeans and get some earmuffs and flock down to Wall Street themselves? Their usefulness in their elected office seems over. Getting whipped like that by Republicans would make me awful mad, if I were in there. I'd go down and join the protest. But if the democratic elected officials are stumped and can't do anything, including can't raise hell, that pretty much explains why they've left their president swinging in the wind by himself.

Or, can it be that congressmen and senators in both parties, in significant numbers, are part of the 1%, and/or are inextricably in bed with the rich? Is the system that fucked?

Occupy Wall Street is positive it is.

They, therefore, don't want to be co-opted by, associated with, or pigeon-holed by any party. They certainly don’t want to get swallowed by business-as-usual do-nothing politics in Washington and find themselves up against the expressionless dim gaze of Speaker Boehner. They want action and now they will force it. It's getting cold out. They blame Wall Street for the crimes that gave us a brush with a world depression, a close call that is still a close call, but trust me, for a lot of these people it IS a depression, and yes they blame Wall Street but also they blame the Republicans -- they’re basically the same machine, just two different interconnected parts of it. And they do have each others' backs.

I hope somebody in the Occupy movement realizes that Barack Obama is a very well-placed ally for what they want to accomplish, the best and best-placed ally they could ever have. But divided we cannot stand, and we have been successfully divided. If OWS wants Mitt Romney to be president, and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to have a victory parade in 2012 which the Occupy movement can watch from a tent city somewhere in a warm climate, they should hurry off and find a third party candidate who in their daydreams can do so much better against congress than Obama has done alone, and we’ll all lose and the country will make Karl Rovian "progress" backwards to the glory days of Calvin Coolidge when human beings and dinosaurs dwelled the earth together..

Instead, OWS should meet with Obama this week, play cards with him and have a beer, and they should plan to crush those democracy-hating bastards in 2012 and get us going again -- 99% is a lot of people. Hopefully the Republicans won't be able to stop a significant number of them from expressing their will at the polls, one of their more telling anti-minority, anti-democracy, anti-constitution conspiracies that for some reason nobody can do anything about. Jesus.

Anyway. We have a fully functioning progressive articulate and ready to move on the issues that brought OWS into the streets. In fact, in his famous September speech to Congress, he invited this uprising, he said get up, get out and express yourselves. It was his only choice, to by-pass congress and call on the people for action. Now, for weeks he's been sending signals to OWS that he wants what they want (he's been working around congress by signing executive orders because nothing can get done at all unless he does). OWS needs to go see him. There is still time. They don't need to distance themselves from him like everyone else has. By no stretch of the imagination is he the problem. OWS should walk a mile in Barack's shoes. Occupy the White House, see what it's like being America's first black president.

Birthday Poem

2011-08-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

-Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers" from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz.

Paris and Books

2011-08-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

There was one day in Paris when Susan and I took the longest walk, starting where we were staying, on Rue Cler, crossing the Seine on Pont l'Alma, angling up Rue Montaigne and intersecting Champs Elysees, strolling the Tuileries all the way to the Louvre, crossing back on Pont Royal basically threading the needle between the far reaches of the Louvre on the Right Bank and the Musee d'Orsay on the left, proceeding up Rue du Bac (a favorite street during our stay), then bending into the Jardin du Luxembourg, across to the Pantheon, down to Shakespeare and Co. on the river across from Notre Dame. We crossed onto Ile St Louis, and dipped into Le Marais for ice cream which we ate on the bridge, Pont Louis Philippe. From there we contemplated finding Hemingway and Hadley's place on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, which we could see from the bridge receding into the Latin Quarter. A Moveable Feast traced the route. In that book Hemingway, conscious of the fact that he was remembering first hand from the 1950's his days in Paris during the Lost Generation years, that famous literary heyday from back when writers earnestly engaged themselves in writing what we called then "books" (see wikipedia for a definition and an illustration) -- conscious as he was of how one day we would romanticize the literary Paris of the '20's because the romance of writing and books would nosedive, he took special care to write not only the ethereal spirit of Paris but the physical place itself, the beauty and vitality of the streets, of the people, of the language. I have to say, the beauty and vitality have survived.

Ann Beattie and the Late History of the American Short Story

2011-07-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

This discussion will draw 100% from Ann Beattie's new book, see above. This book reprints in chronological order all 48 stories Beattie has published in the New Yorker since April of 1974. In this single volume we can observe the evolution of one of our master story writers, one who was a prime mover in the late lamented renaissance of the short story. As I read it, and really as I read her work over time, I thought I observed Beattie’s evolution from chronicler of the boomer generation to authentic master adapting to and riding out the storm of time – and it has been a storm. I think this is the kind of evolution and adaptation such committed artists do and how their art changes shape and continues on, growing better and deeper and smarter.

I arrived in Charlottesville in August of 1974 to begin a Charles Stewart Mott doctoral fellowship at UVa, and there was a rumor that Ann Beattie was in town. She’d already been in the New Yorker once by then, her first appearance, April ’74. Starting in August of that year I was in Charlottesville for a year and eleven months, and by the time I left, she’d been in the New Yorker seven times. People do forget that in those days the New Yorker frequently contained two short stories per issue. But still!

Here is Ann Beattie’s first New Yorker story opening:

When Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty. She would tuck her hair neatly behind her ears, instead of letting it fall free, schoolgirlishly. She had met some of the teachers when she went for her interview, and they all seemed to look like what she was trying to get away from—suburbanites at a shopping center. Casual and airy, the fashion magazines would call it. At least, that’s what they would have called it back when she still read them, when she lived in Chevy Chase and wore her hair long, falling free, the way it had fallen in her high school graduation picture. ‘Your lovely face,’ her mother used to say, “and all covered by hair.” Her graduation picture was still on display in her parents’ house, next to a picture of her on her first birthday.

It didn’t matter how Ellen looked now; the students laughed at her behind her back. They laughed behind all the teachers’ backs. . . .”

“A Platonic Relationship”

April 8, 1974

I remember enjoying this story. By ’74 I was six years married, I’d taught high school for a year, then been drafted (Germany for some reason, not Vietnam), then paid my compulsory dues to unemployment for a year (because they didn’t hire the vets upon their return), then had gone back to school. I can’t resurrect from memory when it was, but sometime early in the 23 months I was in Charlottesville, I learned from a dependable source exactly where Ann Beattie lived. It was in a nice neighborhood with fairly big houses, the kind that sometimes are turned into law offices. I would walk my big malamute Shadrak in that area sometimes (and with increased frequency once I knew she lived there). A few times in the late evening as I passed by I’d actually rather theatrically genuflect in her front yard. I never saw her there, but I did keep my eyes peeled as I strolled by looking in the windows (kidding), though just being in her neighborhood was really enough. When I first actually met her, in the fall of 2000, I told her all about this, including the bit about genuflecting, and she advised me she didn’t live in that area, that those houses weren’t really residences but had all been converted to law offices. Grrrk.

In 1974, the whole baby boom was living in college towns getting graduate degrees. Many of us were back from the army, and Watergate was in the news. We all drove Chevy Vegas, Ford Pintos, AMC Gremlins, and VW bugs. We all owned Smith-Coronas and Olympia typewriters, and lusted after IBM Selectrics with a correct key. We still had our guitars from college. We were writing poems, novels and songs, or at least that's what we told each other over beer. People were still getting killed in Southeast Asia, but it was nearly over (it would be years before "The Things They Carried" and writing that had perspective on the war). We were streaming into the U. of Iowa writers workshop. In writing, and a lot of other fields but not teaching, men were still courting the illusion they were in charge.

In “The Platonic Relationship,” Beattie’s protagonist, Ellen, leaves her husband because at the age of 32 she thought there had to be more to life than being a lawyer’s wife; so she took a teaching job and sank into it the way one really has to to be a good teacher, and she move out on her husband. Probably not knowing what hit him, he helped her move into her own place, and before long she had a roommate, a guy named Sam who was strange but thought she was pretty, and before long Sam had also befriended Ellen’s husband saying he wanted to go to law school, and after a few months of friendship, Sam abruptly left on a new motorcycle bound for California and Ellen’s husband wasn’t able to find his mother’s jewelry box. Ellen was happy to be on her own teaching, and still liked Sam because he thought she was pretty, and the story concludes with neither Ellen nor her husband knowing what hit them. In those days, the youth culture was teeming, everyone in first marriages, with no children quite yet, and the bonds and boundaries of marriage were being stretched every which way. Nixon was in office and people still didn’t trust anyone over thirty even if THEY were over thirty. The women’s movement was on the move, and thus chess pieces on the board were moving differently than they ever had. The generation of the Summer of Love, the War on Poverty, pot, free love, the Civil Rights Movement, and the loud and tumultuous anti-war demonstrations on the moral argument, was careening into adulthood on the skids; there was a moral compass, in theory, but as the pragmatic realities came to bear in their lives and the generation began the entropic journey to becoming their parents only worse, there was also cultural confusion. Twenty five years later, we got two boomers for president, Clinton and Bush, both, like me, a year older than Ann Beattie and representing, at the turn of the century, a baffling exact 50-50 split in the philosophy and political orientation, right and left. 50-50! Beattie’s story fixes a point in time when that split becoming manifest but wasn’t quite showing. Her flat style would not comment on the big picture because our focus was definitely on the trees and not the forest.

Here’s the first paragraph from Beattie’s second appearance in the New Yorker:

Silas is afraid of the vacuum cleaner. He stands, looking out the bedroom door, growling at it. He also growls when small children are around. The dog is afraid of them, and they are afraid of him because he growls. His growling always get him in trouble; nobody thinks he is entitled to growl. The dog is also afraid of a log of music. “One Little Story That the Crow Told Me” by the New Lost City Ramblers raises his hackles. Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” brings bared teeth and a drooping tail . . . If the dog had his way, he would get Dylan by the leg in a dark alley. Maybe they could take a trip—Michael and the dog—to a recording studio or a concert hall, wherever Dylan was playing, and wait for him to come out. Then Silas could get him. Thoughts like these (“fancy flights,” his foreman called them) were responsible for Michael’s no longer having a job.”
“Fancy Flights”

October 21, 1974

In this selection, Beattie’s signature first person/present tense makes its initial appearance in a story of hers in the New Yorker. Ann Beattie, as I said, appeared in the New Yorker 7 times in two years after she first broke in. The New Yorker had been through a giant John Updike phase in the sixties, Updike being six years older than Ray Carver and fifteen years older than Beattie. Beattie was a genuine boomer, and, think about it, the New Yorker had to transition. A giant generation was coming and college kids didn’t normally subscribe to that magazine; their parents did. I think the giant push with Ann Beattie was brilliant but, if not at all intentional, then certainly fortuitous. In ’74 I already had a Harper’s and Atlantic subscription (thanks to Duke Rank, my first college advisor), but in '74 I was buying the New Yorker off the shelf or we were getting it from my wife’s parents, long time subscribers (and my wife thus a long-time John Updike afficianado). In those days it seemed like Beattie was always in the New Yorker, and her stories about long haired girls and tall skinny boys, rock’n’roll and weed and young people’s angst and malaise, supplied parental units with a study guide and handout on us, their kids. The term minimalism had already been applied to Beattie and Carver and others, though it was never a term Beattie accepted as accurate about her. But the style must have driven the older generation crazy--it would explain nothing, just lay it out there as if to say, "Here it is, folks, what you've created!"

In 1975 the Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses) was first published. You can be assured this is because the baby boom was writing and submitting and there wasn’t room for everybody in the New Yorker. Writers like Joyce Carol Oates, already well established, became great advocates for the small presses and the rising optimism that one could get published if one was persistent and good. Writers, make no mistake, were modeling on the stories in the New Yorker. As it says in the fly leaf to her new book, there was actually a term "Beattie-esque." I do remember that.

My favorite story of Beattie’s has long been “Waiting,” which I’m sure I read in the New Yorker when it came out. Ann Beattie told me in 2000 that her favorite story of her own was “The Burning House.” At the time of our first conversation, her big new and selected collection was out, Park City (1998), but the title of her previous collection of stories (1995) was The Burning House, after the story which was first published June 11, 1979 followed immediately by “Waiting” the next week!

In the story “The Burning House,” Amy is occupied by doing dishes and snatching a moment with her lover, Johnny, on the phone when he calls just to hear her voice, a very loose thing to do that predicts the lid coming off before too long. In the other room, her husband is holding court with his men friends, and in the shreds of conversation that she hears, she knows he too has a shadow life that is pulling at him. In bed, alone together, in the final scene of “The Burning House,” Amy asks for clarity on their situation:

“I want to know if you’re staying or going.”
“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve’ surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker; if they’re gay ... like Reddy Fox, even if they’re six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars."
He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

“The Burning House”

June 11, 1979

Beattie has often been called the chronicler of the post-counterculture boomer crowd, and in “The Burning House” we can feel the sacrament and legal arrangment called marriage sorting out all crazy as men and women struggled to find a new balance. The pill was a new reality and with it freedom. The human potential movement was driving us all crazy. All things were both possible and not, and the International Year of the Woman had been established in ’75 -- in ’82 the Equal Rights Amendment would fall only three states short of ratification. That was some of the Big Picture change that was causing an earthquake in middle class American boomer marriages.

In the more ghostly story “Waiting,” the young wife who is the first person protagonist is selling a piece of furniture. People are calling in on the house phone to come over and look at it. One lady has come to buy it. As we track through their negotiations, we understand that the young wife is blue on this day; her husband left a few months ago for no reason that is actually stated, except to play in a band. He was going to take the dog with him, but she stopped that saying the dog wouldn’t survive the trip, so off her husband went alone. Again, we don’t know why. In first person present tense we move forward as if with blinders on, what happens next, what happens next. In this point of view there is no looking around, planning, or even contemplating what’s going on or why. The next thing just happens. The young wife looks down and her dog is not reacting to her. She tries to get him to move, but he won’t. She’s sold this important piece of her life, and now is making lunch and the dog has apparently died in his sleep right there on the linoleum. She goes out on the front porch. Male friends have been looking in on her since her husband left. One of her favorites, Ray, has come over and she’s on the porch and he kindly says he’ll make them both some lunch, and she’s happy about that. As he’s going in, she tells him, “...

If there’s anything wrong, just fix it.” In other words, if you happen to spot my deceased dog, please handle it. And here’s the New Yorker ending.

I look back at the house. Ray, balancing a tray, opens the door with one hand, and Hugo is beside him—not rushing out, the way he usually does to get through the door, but padding slowly, shaking himself out of sleep. He comes over and lies down next to me, blinking because his eyes are not yet accustomed to sunlight.
Ray sits down with his plate of crackers and cheese and a beer. He looks at the tear streaming down my cheeks and shoves over close to me. He takes a big drink and puts the beer on the grass. He pushes the tray next to the beer can.
“Hey,” Ray says. “Everything’s cool, OK? No right and no wrong. People do what they do. A neutral observer, and friend to all. Same easy advice from Ray all around. Our discretion assured.” He pushes my hair gently off my wet cheeks. “It’s OK,” he says softly, turning and cupping his hands over my forehead. “Just tell me what you’ve done.”

“Waiting” June 21, 1979

I never have been able to understand what this ending establishes. I think there is no definitive answer. Some may find it maddening. Ray, too, is puzzled—what’s going on with this woman and her husband? We can imagine a number of possibilities, and to effectively keep the ending open effectively opens the story to various takes and several biases and orientations. This is realism. There are not always answers to what’s going on, and at the moment of the ending of the story, the young wife isn’t likely to want to or be able to say. But we recognize the family of dilemmas being referenced. And wouldn’t it be the shits if right in the middle of it Hugo croaked? So her crying could be joy. Joy! How often do we see that in an Ann Beattie New Yorker story of the seventies.

It was these stories of the ‘70s that helped cause a resurgence in the short story, a literal renaissance of the short story, that was much talked about in’80s. The New Yorker helped cause a renaissance and I’m sure caused a renaissance in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and at the New Yorker itself, not to mention the explosion of AWP and the MFA program movement, not to mention the establishment of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the blizzard of competitions we see now which replace subscriptions as a way for magazines to raise the cash to continue. In 1986 Ray Carver was the guest editor of Best American Short Stories, and in 1987 it was Ann Beattie. If they ever were minimalists (I think they were), by then they weren’t anymore. By then Raymond Carver was dry and had a hold of his own career and craft—witness his lush story “Errand,” his last one, paying homage to Chekhov and at the same time staring his own death straight in the eye.

And Ann Beattie was no longer the chronicler of the boomer generation. As one reviewer put it, the generation no longer needed a chronicler to explain them to themselves. Instead, Beattie continued to evolve, continued to write from the perspective of her generation as it moved through its time. In “Find and Replace,” one of the last stories of the 48 in the New Yorker stories volume, the first person protagonist, named “Ann,” travels to Fort Myers to see her mother. It’s the first time she’s seen her mother since her father passed away. During this visit, her mother breaks it to her that she’s moving in with a man who lives next door, a man who was a good friend of Ann’s parents while both were living and who spoke at her father’s funeral. It is clear that her mother continues to desire connection with the world, and full-grown adult Ann feels that as a waft of a double loss and a betrayal. The author of this story is not the long haired hippie girl literary lion of 1974. It is the grown woman who’s kept on with the times, as we see in this paragraph from the first page of “Find and Replace”:

On a globally warmed July day, I flew into Fort Myers and picked up a rental and set off for my mother’s to observe (her terminology) the occasion of my father’s death, six months after the event. It was actually seven months later, but because I was in Toronto checking out sites for an HBO movie, and there was no way I could make it on June 25, my mother thought the most respectful thing to do would be to wait until the same day, on month later. I don’t ask my mother a lot of questions; when I can, I simply try to keep the peace by doing what she asks. As mothers go, she’s not demanding. Most requests are simple and have to do with her notions of propriety, which often center on the writing of notes . . .
My mother has a million friends. She keeps the greeting card industry in business. She would probably send greetings on Groundhog Day, if the cards existed. Also, no one ever seems to disappear from her life (with the notable exception of my father). She still exchanges notes with a maid who cleaned her room at the Swift House Inn fifteen years ago—and my parents were only there for a weekend . . .
Anyway, all the preliminaries to my story are nothing but that: the almost inevitable five minutes of hard rain midway through the trip; the beautiful bridge; the damned trucks expelling herculean farts. I drove to Venice, singing along with Mick Jagger about beasts of burden. When I got to my mother’s street, which is, it seems, the only quarter mile long stretch of America watched by God, through the eyes of a Florida policeman in a radar equipped car, I set the cruise control for twenty and coasted to her driveway.

“Find and Replace”

The contemporary details, the hectic pulse of travel and urban life, the shelters we seek in good sound systems in the cars, and the realistic depiction of the relationship to our parents once life has gone on—this is not the voice of a chronicler of the generation, rather one of someone who’s in for the ride, who’s writing to digest and understand. (You can hear Ann Beattie read this story aloud at: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2010/find-and-replace.)

The reviewers don’t rave much. And the New Yorker has stopped publishing her stories. The New York Times Book Review of the New Yorker stories volume said that the short story is a marginalized form and thus Ann Beattie is a marginalized author. Barely a month later the New York Times listed Beattie’s book one of the five best fiction books in their list of Ten Best Books of 2010.

Here are the last lines of a review by Nathan Heller of Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories in Slate (posted Dec. 10, 2010): . . .

This is formally self-conscious work—as readers, we're forced to study how the story's elements and motifs hang together—but it is also an effort to break past the conventions of literary storytelling, to mimic the disorderly, superstitious process of searching for meaning and direction in the brambles of personal experience. What these recent stories manage to convey is the aesthetics of consciousness: the feeling of being a mind in motion in the world.
Today, those quieter, more subjective portraits have replaced generation-channeling as Beattie's virtuosic skill—in part because the boomer generation has, at this point, been channeled as broadly as the BBC. What's startling in The New Yorker Stories isn't how her work has fallen behind the times. It's how persistently she's kept ahead—first using fiction to bring legibility and emotional direction to a society that needed both, and then, when that goal lost its urgency, turning her attention to interior life and formal innovation on the page. More than perhaps any writer of her generation, Beattie has remained tuned to the literary needs and intimations of middle-class life. Her latest lesson on the boomer zeitgeist is the most poignant one so far: acknowledgement that, even at the moment when we reach our highest point, the world moves on.

Nathan Heller

Slate

Dec. 10, 2010

Upcoming Workshop

2011-03-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

Hop in. I'm figuring out right now how we might include you from your home if you don't live in the area and want to work along with us in a six hour workshop to write a story by afternoon you didn't know you'd write in the morning.

Drop me a note at dan81446@gmail.com if you have questions or want to sign up through me instead of the regular system.

30 dollars.

It's a benefit for Dzanc Books.

Spread the word.

Philip

Japan and the Daydream of Good

2011-03-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

I was watching Japan dying today on MSNBC, and in other news, was so very happy to hear the Right Wing champing at the bit to invade Libya. They were mad at the President for inaction. They never saw a war they couldn't afford, these people who are so worried about "entitlements," health care to the less fortunate, and balancing the budget. When it comes to helping people, including Americans but most obviously people in foreign countries, suddenly the old anal retentiveness sets in and they get that addled look my dog gets when I want him to crap and it's raining. We can't quite think what to do when it comes to helping. We send in 74 guys from the elite Task Force 1 from the Fairfax, VA fire department, with rescue and recovery dogs. We send in some ships with some aid, and some helicopters, but ultimately this “help” says more about our inability to conceive of the size of the disaster. Why don't we invade Japan with help, swarm over the debacle, with tents, water, blankets, food, boatloads of medical personnel, soldiers to clear the debris and rebuild. Send the Army Corps of Engineers. Draft people into service to go help. Draft Glen Beck, I’m sure he’d be willing to serve, and I’d serve right beside him. Are there only 50 brave men and women on the planet to pour water on those melting rods, but an unlimited number to play shoot 'em up in selected small dictatorships and kingdoms we've tolerated for years but that now have us in a bad mood? Isn't intervening in this disaster a more important endeavor than kicking the snot out of another tiny country with overwhelming military force? Isn't there a strong argument that saving Japan from a most horrific ruination is more important? Remember "Right to Life"? Remember "Family Values"? Remember "Christianity"? Remember true heroism? Remember international trade and the stock market? Doesn't Japan right now present us with a 21st century opportunity for a new model of global leadership, one that doesn’t include killing people? If we can even contemplate another war, why can't we motivate ourselves to save lives and help an ally with fervor equal to or greater than bombing and shooting? This is our chance to unHiroshima our Karma and square ourselves with modern history. Here's a chance to do something we can all agree on with that untouchable defense budget; here's a chance to do combat with global disaster. We need to start getting good at it, because the disasters are getting bigger and I’m almost certain our national lucky days are numbered. Why can't just once we be an overwhelming force for humanity and the Greater Good like we think we are in our dreams?

Ann Beattie's New Yorker short stories, collected in a single volume

2011-02-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

In her celebrated new collection Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories, I went searching for a couple of stories in particular. In my classes and my own mythology about the past, I thought I remembered that Beattie had begun scoring The New Yorker in the early seventies. Turns out her first one was in the April 8, 1974 issue. I once asked her, this was ten years ago or so, what her favorite story (of her own) was. John Updike had fairly recently edited Best American Short Stories of the Century, and had included in that celebrated volume her story “Janus,” which was in the 1986 Best American Short Stories. And while that selection worked well in Updike’s overall editorial scheme, I had an opinion what her very best story was (don’t we all?) and was curious to see what the master herself would deem her best. As I say, this is old information and has probably changed by now, but she said “The Burning House” was her favorite, and I’ve said on this blog that my traditional favorite is a little beauty titled “Waiting.” The pieces in Beattie’s collection of New Yorker stories are arranged in chronological order, from the April 8, ’74 story "A Platonic Relationship" forward to “The Confidence Decoy” in November of ’06 (she's continued to place stories there since then, but that's the span of this new collection). Surveying the table of contents, what pleasure I got from finding “The Burning House” and “Waiting” back to back, both having appeared in The New Yorker (a week apart) in June of ’79. It was back in the days when Beattie led a school of writing called Minimalism, and two more muscular samples of minimalism would be hard to find. Her famous first person present tense is right there in the first sentence of “The Burning House”: “Freddy Fox is in the kitchen with me.” Using present tense like that, the reader can never see anything coming. There is no anticipating from accumulated evidence. One thing after another happens. Our point of view character is stoned by the bottom of the second page and so is dicey even reporting what we need to know as it happens. A family friend, J.D., is late for the dinner gathering. Our narrator is washing dishes at the sink when J.D. pops up in the kitchen window right over the sink – he’s wearing a goat-head mask and scares crap out of her. It’s two paragraphs later before we learn that she cut her hand when she reacted. It is a characteristic of the social events at this house that her husband’s friends, all male, make the scene, never any other women, and a lot of the interaction in the story is stuff she hears from the kitchen while the men are shooting the shit in the living room. Freddy Fox, her husband’s gay half brother, stays in the kitchen with her. They all seem to be early thirty somethings. They’ve known each other, all these friends, and of course the half brother, many years and history plays through the conversations. Our narrator is lonely; her husband controls most of what goes on. Because of present tense, even though there’s access to the interiority of our narrator, we only feel the relationship of the husband and wife in the story is shaky, we don’t know it. But in bed that night they have a conversation and the reality of the dismal, deteriorating marriage they have rolls over them and us all at once in the last lines.

In creative writing, teaching dialogue, we try to show students how when people talk the communication is barely communication at all. In “The Burning House,” all of the conversation is loaded with allusions to things we the readers know little about except what we can glean from their literal statements. And two conversations at once are going on, Freddy and our narrator in the kitchen, Frank Wayne, her husband, and his several pals in the living room. The story is finely tuned to spring its trap in the last four lines and suddenly fly open.

A week later she published “Waiting” in The New Yorker, an entirely different story but using the same superstructure and vector. You have only to read the first line to know you’re in for it again: “’It’s beautiful,’ the woman says. ‘How did you come by this?’ She wiggles her finger in the mousehole.” So deliciously oblique a beginning, so tantalizing the middle. There is an emotional load riding in the sentences, a momentum that's like being hurled forward while blindfolded. In present tense we can’t see the end coming. Suddenly it’s there with that satisfying minimalist one line culmination, pop.

Carol Frost reads from her new book Honeycomb this coming Tuesday, 6 PM, Galloway Room on the Rollins Campus

2010-11-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

Listen, Carol Frost's new book Honeycomb is out, and on Tuesday, this coming one, 11/16, in the Galloway Room on the Rollins campus, at 6 PM, Carol will read. Come out and let's celebrate this fabulous poet who has come to Central Florida to direct Winter with the Writers, do her good work and teach us all. I first met Carol at Bread Loaf in 1991. That was many Carol Frost books ago, and she's only getting better.

See you soon, I hope.

Philip

More Dylan: Speaking of Blasts from the Past

2010-10-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

Herb Budden, my great old friend since seventh grade, rings in on Dylan:

I have been trying to remember the details of my first Dylan concert, in 1965. There were others I'd been to, but this is the one & only in my estimation. Thank goodness for Google...I found the playlist and the exact date for the concert friend Craig and I saw at the Arie Crown in Chicago that year. Here it is:

Bob Dylan
McCormick Place
Arie Crown Theater - Chicago, Illinois
November 26, 1965

She Belongs to Me

To Ramona

Gates of Eden

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Desolation Row

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Mr. Tambourine Man

Tombstone Blues

I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

Baby Let Me Follow You Down

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

Ballad of a Thin Man

Positively 4th Street

Like a Rolling Stone

Forty-five years this Thanksgiving. We went up from Champaign on the train. I have no recollection of staying anywhere, or even how we got to McCormick Place. On a side note, I was there at the Arie Crown this past spring--the first time I'd been there since . . . . It's been refurbished, obviously, but the bones are the same.

At the concert we sat main floor, ramrod straight in what were possibly reserved seats, like at a symphony, and applauded politely after each song. In those days, before real pandemonium overtook rock concerts (just four years later in May 1969 we saw Hendrix at the Fairgrounds--Led Zeppelin was the warmup--everything was way, way different). I believe in '65 there was still a controversy going on about Dylan's "going electric," and we wondered if there would be boos. There weren't.

I wish I could remember more about the evening except to recall thinking how cool he behaved & looked & how he never said a word between songs. I don't know if the set list was played through or if there was a break.

All I know is that a couple of years ago . . . I made my way to the Morgan Library in NY and felt the hair on the back of my head stand up when, while looking at Dylan's rather prosaic Mead notebooks under glass, I saw in his handwriting the words "How does it feel, to be on your own..." among other scribblings & crossouts.

Listening to him today on XM and reading Chronicles, I know I'd have the letdown-- if I could meet him in person-- that I have had on meeting the few celebs I have in the past.

He's just a man, and on virtually most counts, an ordinary primate like the rest of us. BUT. The work overtakes the man.

Listen again to any song on the above set list to have it confirmed, esp. Baby Blue and Tom Thumb's Blues.

Bob Dylan for the first time

2010-10-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

On 10/10/10 evening Susan and I trundled out to the University of Central Florida arena to see Bob Dylan. I thought I should see him since a scene from a 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue concert is central to a story of mine, "Lowell and the Rolling Thunder." I was a follower of Dylan and Baez long, long, long ago, and saw with commentary the scene I describe in the story in the Scorsese film "No Direction Home." Susan had seen Dylan three times over the years, in different stages of his life.

I'm ashamed to admit that after 45 years of playing the guitar (capitalizing on 1963 lessons at the Green Street Y in Champaign), the one song I can play clear through is "Don't Think Twice," a favorite song of all time for me even now. I'm more ashamed to admit that the concert had just kicked off on Sunday, and we were well into the second song, and I leaned down from my binoculars to ask Susan what song was playing. I couldn't catch the melody, I couldn't come close to catching the words. THAT was the song Dylan was singing! That made me laugh, and then I settled in to listening and did catch a phrase or two. I'm damned in fact if he didn't actually end it on a verse that isn't the published end of the song, but that's sort of how it went, not like anything you'd imagine but wondrous nevertheless if you happen to live in the past as intensely as I do.

Dylan wore a flat brimmed brilliant white hat, a white shirt with a string tie, as I recall, and a blue blazer with larger than you'd expect gold buttons, matching blue pants with a wide sparkly gold stripe down the side, quite prominent at first because he stood sideways to the audience playing the keyboard for his first song. For "Don't Think Twice" he stood face-on with his guitar. At the keyboard, stage lights, reddish, shined from below and his skin was red brown. Facing the audience at the microphone, brilliant white light forced his eyes to slits. His expression was intense and serious while he was deep in a song but he smiled between songs and during bridges, smiled with his mouth though in his almost closed eyes the expression was plain and flat and giving nothing. The famous harmonica bracket never appeared. Instead, on those songs he let the band handle the guitar and he held in his hand a special mic and his harmonica, and I think I loved those songs the most because there was great familiarity in Dylan's distinctive harmonica riffs. Clearly he'd been standing there all his life, and, apart from my aging ears, one reason I didn't quite pick up "Don't Think Twice" initially was that vocally he wrestles with his best known melodies and reinvents the songs spontaneously. The band was great staying right with him as he went on his way.

Dylan doesn't say much from the stage. We could say he lets the music speak for itself -- nah, that's not it either. Instead of performing, he's up there evoking himself through all the years, like an abstract painting that refuses to speak in plain language because there's not much else to say but maybe it will remind us of something. That tall shadow on the wall behind, see it? It put me in mind of the icon of Don Quixote in the Sixties when "Man of La Mancha" was playing everywhere and Quixote was an image of naive idealism and a heroic fantasy.

You've probably seen Bob Dylan in concert. For me it was long awaited. The past, all of those years, was present in the giant arena. Dylan's connection to youth isn't gone, or maybe it was the youth who treasure music including musical history who were there, but it was a great blend of people. As you can see by the picture above, taken with my lame little phone camera, I needed the binoculars. I wanted everyone to have them, because the view was beautiful and the sound was huge and together they hit me with great force in my chest. I wanted my friends from back then to be with me, and I wanted that me to come again and hang out a while. The past is present at a Dylan concert. We can't go back except maybe just a little, and when the music takes off, something very big I can only call (with reverence) the past comes up the tunnel to meet us half-way.

Argentina and the Southern Cross

2010-07-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Argentina June 21, a few hours after it turned winter there. While Bali is about 10 degrees south of the equator, Buenos Aires is 35 degrees south. One evening in San Antonio de Areco, where the gaucho picture above was taken (there were festivities going on and I was putting the dodge on dancing), several us went out far out away from the out buildings on the ranch and, standing next to the fence for a giant pasture, we looked up and scanned the sky to see if we could spot the Southern Cross. I didn’t know what proportion to look for. Would I have to sort of glue it together in my mind like I do the Big Dipper, or would it jump at me at a glance, like Orion’s belt. Well, it jumped at me. The Southern Cross hangs in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere like a crucifix on the wall at home when you were growing up. I know, not everybody's Catholic, but 92 percent of Argentina is. It is a beautiful, stately four star configuration (technically five star but the key cross figure is the four points you’d expect to form a t shape). It was not small but it was rather compact, so the entire effect of it hits the eye at once and with startling force. That was the evening of our first night in the country, after eleven days in the city, Buenos Aires.

Most of the people in our group knew cities, and Buenos Aires is beautiful and European in flavor, but it's a typical city in more ways than not. While Argentina is big in square miles, almost half of its 36 million people live in the city and province of Buenos Aires. Suffice it to say, it was good to get out of town.

Like Bali, probably like the US, too, if I think about it, in some sense Argentina has become an attraction, a tourist stop-off, and when you go there, there are, as they say, places to go, things to see, and like a good tourist, you check them off one by one. The result is seeing the Argentina someone has fashioned for you to see, like a photograph of it instead of the thing itself. In fact, progress has taken the country beyond gauchos and the tango, and, as in the US, the new generations are making their own new Argentina, but part of that new Argentina is that many people are employed to show these artifacts of Argentina's past to those who come visit and to represent them as Argentina. The Buenos Aires tourist literature tells you where to go for tango lessons and to see "real" gauchos. In Bali, you can read in similar literature where to go to see quaint villages, and when you get to them, there they are being professionally quaint and performing the Bali version of quaintness. It's okay. There is a real Bali, with amazingly beautiful people, but they know new money when they see it and are lithe enough to go for it. Somewhere there is a statistic about the money being made in Bali, and at the top of the list of activities that make it, you won't find rice farming. If that's how human beings worked, there would still be a lot of Americans interested in 4-H and running a hardware store in Kansas. No, there's a lot of money to be made on the story of America. There's a whole town in South Dakota that exists on the historical concept of Wild Bill Hickock, promoting the myth and selling U. S. Marshal's badges with a Colt .45 sized hole in them, nevermind Bill was shot in the back. Nevermind Argentina is past gauchos, the Balinese don’t love poverty more than they love tourists, and we in the new Americana are past cowboys and Indians. As Bali is willing to risk rapid deterioration of its beauty in order to sell its beauty to a withering stream of tourists, the US is willing to forgive the ruination of the gorgeous waters of the Gulf to keep the oil flowing in its veins. I digress again....

But do I? If I really went out into that pasture to see the Southern Cross for the first time, what was even more awesome than that constellation was the night sky itself. We’d been in Buenos Aires quite a while and the sky, as above all modern big cities, was dulled out and muted by ambient light in polluted air. Out in the country, away from lights, the sky was sparkling and pristine. I’d been terribly worked up by the Gulf oil spill, and I didn’t realize how much so. I think I began to believe nothing was clean and bright anymore. When was the last time you looked at the Milky Way, our galaxy? The pasture gave us a big flat gentle winter breeze, the great smell of the land, earth, like we remember it, a sky so vivid you could almost imagine we hadn’t yet ruined everything for ourselves. The irony. If word were to get out about the beauty of the sky at the edge of this beautiful pasture somewhere in Argentina, the inevitable would happen again – we’d go there in droves, stomp it, pave it, buy postcards of it.

I'd go back to Argentina. I'd try to find a writing place there, far enough from the city that ambient light wouldn't snuff my hope, close enough so I could get into town and see the art. The only way to get through the skrim of self-conscious promotion of an image of real Argentina (or anyplace) is to live there a while. I am curious and want to see Argentina's really real life, its day to day people and work and art and stories. You and I know there are great stories there -- in fact, though the lens will be different, we probably even know what those stories are. Half the fun is knowing they're half universal, half so specific to this beautiful country they could take place nowhere else.

I’ve been writing stories set in these places I’m visiting. As with the Bali story, I'm finding myself writing an ex-patriot fiction (I can’t get myself to presume to write from the point of view of a store-keeper in Ubud or a young person from the pampas now living in a suburb of Buenos Aires, so the ex-pat gambit is on again), and even so there's research to be done so that the story is organic to Argentina. Research. The core lesson of writing (for me) always elbows its way forward as I'm industriously making notecards and loving "information." It is: write the story while researching. The story can't be mulled and figured out in advance, and thus what well-targeted research is needed can't be predicted -- in novels this is, or could be, different. In stories, the story itself will arise from the writing of it. I'm sure there's a metaphor for this in the tango. In the metaphor, one of the dancing partners is the writer, the other is the writing on the page. And, you know, it switches back and forth. :-)

Bali

2010-06-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a story set in Ubud, a sort of artists' community in the southern center of the island. Many expatriots have flocked to Bali, and Ubud is the place of choice for most who do. The challenge of my story is to fully realize the little I know and the lot I feel about Bali. We say in writing that often "place" is a character, influencing the goings on of a story in its unique way, such that the blend of place and people and "what happens next" makes a unique potion that would be fundamentally different in all ways if you simply changed the place. In theory this is obvious, of course. Place changes everything. But once in a while, as on this trip, the idea hits with force. My challenge is to make Bali organic to the story.

The religion of the island is key to all things there. It is lived and breathed. The island is not diverse. The Balinese are 92 percent the same as each other. Among their many challenges, one is not having to deal with competing interests from immigrants. They do have to deal with progress and development, as tourists storm the island, but the Balinese have to a large extent changed themselves to grow their incomes and their island economy -- have changed themselves from poor rice farmers to entrepreneurs finding ways to cash in on world interest in their island. Of course big development is there, in the south central part of the island, Denpasar and environs. The environment in the tourist places is being spoiled by litter and high demands for water and land.

Inland however the burgeoning population is focused on work, family, prayer, and community. People have motorbikes for transportation, and they have their cell phones and their ipods and their blackberries and the flat screen TVs. Their villages are very old, many of them, and some are new and fairly modern. As progress arrives, it is religion and family that enables the culture of Bali to hold steady. The women are strong; the men are resourceful.

Cooperation and togetherness, a respect for others, is real and apparent. If someone on the crowded streets (motorbikes by the thousands, not many cars) happens to pass a car and on-coming traffic is close, the driver being passed slows down and the passing vehicle is allowed to duck into the left lane. If that vehicle couldn't get in in time, the oncoming vehicle simply moves over so all three cars can pass each other three abreast, no problem, happens all the time. The slow down and stop for pedestrians as well as dogs and chickens and motorbikes parked with their rear ends on the right of way. No one gets annoyed. They simply watch out for each other and yield to one another appropriate to the situation.

In my very few days in Bali I witnessed the famous Balinese generosity, smartness, and goodness. That's the big news I got from being there. I might have begun to think those qualities were disappearing from the earth, and they aren't. I know exactly how this will work in my Bali story.

My Workshop in Melbourne is June 7 - 9

2010-05-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

See the poster above. FIT's energetic new workshop is drawing in a lot of the region's writers, and by region I mean Central Florida. The ocean's close by. Come on over and let's write a story.

Let's Crank for Dzanc

2010-03-16T04:07:00.000-07:00

To benefit Dzanc Books, the celebrated new independent publisher that brought us Laura van den Berg's debut volume of short stories, I'm offering an electronic version of the workshop described in the poster above. Simply sign up following the process described there, then drop me a note at

dan81446@gmail.com

to let me know you're in. Sign up right away, and over the next two weeks (two weeks from sign-up) I'll get you going writing a new story, then in early April, after the story exists in draft, will provide you ideas on how to improve and finish it. Your registration fee goes as a contribution to this publisher of exciting emerging writers, and four weeks later there's a story where there wasn't one before. I'll write one, too. It's Spring -- let's crank out a new story for Dzanc Books.

Any questions about the idea, please drop me a note at the email address above.

The Long Short Story Revisited

2009-12-21T06:07:00.000-08:00

Last year at just this time, the Solstice, I wrote a short piece on the Long Short Story, and this is a Part II to that. This is the same post as you'll see on the new philipfdeaver.com, so you could read it in either place. Posts at the two sites won't always be redundant, but this is long overdue. This piece began as a lecture at Spalding.

I believe I can say that I was one of the first literary writers you sort of know to use a personal computer. It was an Osborne I, and the word processor (what an outrageous term that was at the time) was WordStar, a true miracle of its day. (William F. Buckley once called WordStar his “brother.”) Wow. Our retyping ourselves hell was over. I hope whoever figured WordStar out is living well today or has risen to sit at the right hand of God if that seat isn’t taken. Anyway, an inheritance from my grandmother, $2000, fixed me up with one of the first portable computers. It was 1982 and I was thirty six.

Because I’d been a writer a long time by then, who spent many long years typing and retyping (not a bad way to learn the craft), the computer was an astonishing leap forward. From Model T to Cessna 210, turboprop with a retractable gear and pressurized cabin – that’s the degree of change. I remember in Murray, KY standing over the shoulder of someone who was demo-ing an Apple desktop (Apple I?), the late 1970’s. I watched that cursor, sort of yellow, dance across the black screen. I watched text get moved around on the page, words inserted. In that one Kubrick movie, the opening sequence shows cavemen, who were way more monkey than human, suddenly discover using tools. In Murray that day, watching that guy, forgive me, “word process” (geeeez it’s still pretty ugly that term), I felt like I was watching the second opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Soon after that, we hurled into, as the man said in “Pulp Fiction,” a time of transition. The first story I wrote on the Osborne, I mean to say actually composed on the computer, was an autobiographical dump using baseball as the ostensible subject. The story was “Infield.” I never imagined it would be in any book, much less my own. It was a long story from the start, roughly 8,500 words. (With the computer, the average length of my stories leaped by a whopping 5,000 words.) This limited the market, because the literary magazines were geared for, actually dictated, a rather standard length of a short story, 3 to 5 thousand words. You could get by with 6,000, though they might ask you to cut. You would endure a short chat with the editor, who had you so very over the barrel, about how the story was fat in the beginning and a little confusing there in the middle and not tight enough in the end, and – basically — take out two pages, he’d tell you, and it’d be all fixed, would perfectly, no MIRACULOUSLY, coincide with the space he had in the magazine! The sneakily fine Florida Review was the first to take a really long story of mine, “Dakota Feed and Grain,” named after at restaurant in Murray. Roughly 1990. That story was 10,000 words. The editor, your friend and mine, the estimable Russell Kesler. The Florida Review never even commented on the length.

When I won the Flannery O’Connor Award, that collection contained stories that were first crafted pre-computer but were refined and grown using WordStar and also stories composed by hand and then worked to final form with WordStar and, finally, some stories, “Infield” being the first, written and evolved entirely on the computer. I hadn’t planned for it to be so long. It bloomed at my fingertips. It was like mainlining a story. Most of the real work was in revision, sculpting the first draft to final, but hell, on the computer you COULD revise, thoroughly – and still make it to work by 8 o’clock.

I’m calling this blog, which almost certainly is about the fiction form best termed the “novella” – I’m calling it “The Long Short” (as in the Long Short Story), but it turns out one person’s short is another’s long: I found this review by Janet Maslin in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago, an article called “Bite Size Legal Trouble and Suspense,” about Grisham’s new book Ford County, which travelers in airports are already waving around because that’s how it goes with John Grisham. Maslin says, “John Grisham had some story ideas that he didn’t think could sustain full length narrative [full length narrative! – like “Brokeback Mountain” wasn’t a full length narrative but a broken little chip off some fully legit full length narrative block]. So [I’m still quoting Maslin] he did what he customarily does: whatever he wants to. Was anyone at Doubleday going to argue with that? Mr. Grisham took seven of his unused plot ideas and turned them into a sharp, lean tale free of subplots and padding [emphasis mine – implication: novels contain padding]. At an average length of over 40 pages[she goes on to say], these narratives are shorter than novellas but longer than conventional short stories….” [Janet Maslin has some version of the precise measure short and long well in mind, very impressive, mysterious to the rest of us – These next lines, get ready for them, they are hurtful to a starving short story writes – Maslin writes:], “For a fledgling author, this format would be a tough sell. For Mr. Grisham, it’s a vacation from whatever grueling work goes into the construction of fully rigged best sellers. The change invigorates him in ways that show up on the page.”

Maslin apparently doesn’t see (this from me, a story writer) what the “change” is that invigorates Grisham. It’s the change to the long short form, baby. The long story is a real form, like a sonnet, like a portrait (in painting), like a still life – the short story, long or short, isn’t detritus conveniently made into something or other from the notebook between bestsellers. It’s the short long for John Grisham, and the long short for me, and for many of you, and for Andre Dubus and Richard Yates and Alice Munro and Andrea Barrett and F. Scott Fitgerald and Stephen Crane and Robert Stone and Ann Beattie. It’s all the same thing, man, art in words. Yeah, formerly — Doubleday exists for John Grisham, because Doubleday is novels, and novels are John Grisham, and that’s fine but we’re talking about the NBA here, lottery winners, 50 or 60 literary lottery winners in the American literary world, but in 2010 there are millions of writers and only thousands of readers [I exaggerate but not much to make my point], and the day is coming to an end when Doubleday tells us what size of picture to paint because of what size of wall they like to hang things on.

You recall it was magazines that sustained the short story, back when we had magazines. But you could also, most assuredly without stretching it, say it the other way, that the short story sustained the magazines. It was a time when readers outnumbered writers. The sea change was afoot before the computer but our beautiful little laptops sealed the deal, make no mistake about it.

One of the stories in my Flannery collection, the newest at the time I won, was “Forty Martyrs,” a giant at upwards of 40 pages, and the Flannery O’Connor series editor, Charles East (rest in peace: he’s just died Oct. 1, a great, kind, good man) suggested I take it out because it made the book too long. I did, and this is not a criticism of Charles – it was the right thing, the book galleys were 275 pages without “Forty Martyrs.”

That was in the ‘80’s. In the ‘90’s, “Forty Martyrs” became the anchor tenant of my novel-in-stories, all of the stories in it 8,000 words or more. When I wrote my novel, Past Tense, about how the past haunts us, I gave it 75 page chapters. I call it a novel-in-novellas. To give it some kind of form, I tried very hard to make each chapter exactly 75 manuscript pages, not by fattening the short ones and trimming the long ones, but just by targetting that as I wrote — how different is that from giving a poem fourteen lines iambic and a rhyme scheme? Form is good. Grace and form have been in fiction all along.

Yes, I make the leap that the long short story, which I’ll arbitrarily define as a work of fiction longer than 7,000 words and shorter than a novella (aah hahaha – good one, I kill me), or maybe I could vaguely define it as a story so long most magazines couldn’t print it – anyway, I’ll make the leap that the short story became a real form with the appearance of the magazines, or at least that their existences were symbiotic, and that the long short story, although it existed before, became a real contemporary story form after writers began to compose on their computers. At first editors saw the long story as full of fluff and fat that needed cutting. Later when they too worked almost exclusively on the computer, you didn’t hear that so much. It coincided with, within ten years, a wave of magazines going under, and newspapers soon to follow, so editors had bigger fish to fry than to complain if an established writer came knocking with something longer than the editor had in mind. This is probably an established fact, that the use of the computer by writers helped the longer story to be an option though it put pressure on an already to the breaking point magazine publishing industry, so it all comes down to Philip Deaver’s grandmother and the Osborne I, just kidding; but sometimes it’s fun to contemplate one’s personal involvement, even if minute, in the establishment of an established fact.

In the ‘80’s, suddenly if something was short and otherwise trimmed down (I’m speaking in generalizations to make a larger point), it was called “minimalism,” and even the minimalists revered the work of Alice Munro which was invariably long (though she reportedly has never felt much compulsion to write a novel – I think she has one). But by 1990, not so much minimalism anymore, and half the writing world was on Macs and the other half on PCs. Ray Carver’s last story “Errand,” gracefully long and lush, clearly was rendered unminimally after he was out from under the mothy wing of Gordon Lish. (The recent biography of Carver reveals he'd been free of the Lish influence for a number of years by the time he died.)

The lengthening of the literary short story isn’t all because of the publishing industry’s going slack or the rise of the computer. The final short story of Joyce’s Dubliners is a masterwork of all time, “The Dead,” not usually thought of as a novella not because of its length but because it focuses on a group of characters moving through a single evening, which will get it classified for sure as a long short, not a short long. The final short story of Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories was “Brokeback Mountain,” a story that must be over 10,000 words (someone out there will know or can find out). Laura van den Berg’s title story for her new collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is also over 10,000 words. Nancy Zafris, the new Series Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award, observed to me recently that a current winner of the prize has a story 68 pages long, surely pushing the Flannery O’Connor Award high-end limit. This summer Alice Munro placed a story in Harper’s that was called a novella on the cover of the magazine, and Munro regularly places long stories in the New Yorker. Her collections are full of long stories, she’s known for her winding road plots and for stories that depend partly on the passage of considerable time for some of their impact and resonance. Does the fact that so many well-known contemporary story writers cite Alice Munro as their exemplar and ideal mean that long stories are experiencing increased acceptance, that if you are a writer of stature your long story might be allowed to take up all those expensive hard copy pages within a magazine? Does the slow rise of digital publication mean the gradual reconsideration of traditional length limitations, all else being equal even though, elephant in the room alert, all else isn’t equal? Could it be that, in this time of there being (here comes the elephant) millions of writers and only thousands of readers, and all the millions of writers are bamming out their work on high powered laptops – could it be that the tendency of the computer-era writer is to write longer not just to write longer but because it’s a natural form and they’ve got just the technology to achieve it still make it to work by 8 o’clock (because they will have to have a day job)?

In the past it was axiomatic that the reason you didn’t write a long story or a novella was because “there’s no place to publish it.” It seems apparent to me that the hard copy magazine markets that publish short fiction are getting more friendly to the longer story (they are less frequently accusing writers of “losing control” and/or writing fat), and perhaps if we can agree that online markets for stories are growing in number, markets that don’t even think in terms of numbers of pages, perhaps the world in general is getting there, and perhaps John Grisham knows it. Is that optimistic enough for ya?

Many of you know that I follow the work of Richard Ford. I’ve read his every published word – okay, except for that first novel — and it’s my opinion that his stories are much better than his novels which are pretty danged good. I first heard from him the quote I always use in these lectures and once thought was his, but he advised me came from Randall Jarrell, definition of a novel:

A novel is a long work of fiction that there’s something wrong with.

Ford over the years has been a spokesman for the short story, and has edited two volumes for Granta plus, I believe, one of the Best American Short Story anthologies. If you have never seen it, please read Ford’s hilarious and spot-on introduction to his reverent acknowledgement of the long short in his Granta Book of the American Long Story, now eleven years old, containing great ones from Peter Taylor, Jane Smiley, Philip Roth, William Styron, Stanley Elkin, Andrea Barrett, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates of course, Barry Hannah, and Edwidge Danticat. I hope Granta does it again one of these days and that Ford, who better?, edits it.

I believe that Updike’s stories are better than his novels, and Robert Stone’s are awful good too, and Ray Carver of course and Andre Dubus and Alice Munro, they’re devoted to the form, and I do believe we must cease to view the short story as a form fledgling writers use to become real writers so they can write novels and that bestselling writers use to dump the growing detritus in their notebooks-of-gold between their gleaming bestsellers. If you have some doubt of this, read “The Dead” again (not a bag of fluff rendered fat with a word-gushing laptop but a masterwork in the long short story form by an author capable of writing both short short and long long) an exquisite beauty in and of itself, a master work that renders

at worst silly,

at best moot,

a discussion of the long and/or short of it.

Reads from the Title Story

2009-10-24T12:49:00.000-07:00

Thursday night in the exquisitely fine Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Laura van den Berg made a triumphant return to her old college to read from her new book, the short story collection What The World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. And what to say about the poise and smarts of this rising star. Her family circled around her and embraced her from the moment she arrived, and the celebration was large, thorough and complete. So was the fun.

Her stories have a dark surreal edge to them, and like Andrea Barrett she will make inquiry into science and quirky facts along the way. The stories emerge from the interactions of the characters, and she knows to let landscape act as a character, too. In a class of mine the following day, she explained that a story might click for her, in the writing, because of the oddest small thing. In the title story of her collection, she said, when she learned that in Madagascar the earth was red, the whole narrative came together and she was on her way. "Somehow," she said, "that small fact did it."

Patricia Smith!

2009-10-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of the launch of Volume II of Rollins College's specs journal, a celebratory reading will take place this coming Thursday, Oct. 8, 7:30 in Bush Auditorium on the Rollins campus. I'm happy to pass along the news that the great Patricia Smith will read. Smith, who has two poems in this issue of specs, is something else entirely, let me tell you. Join us and see. You won't soon forget it.

Patricia is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a collection of poems (finalist for the 2008 National Book Award) chronicling the events of Hurricane Katrina.

A four-time Individual Winner of the National Poetry Slam (more than any other in the competition’s history), Smith has also appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman shows.

She was the winner of the first Hurston/Wright Award in Poetry for her book, Teahouse of the Almighty, which was also a National Poetry Series selection.

She currently teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, and is a Professor of Creative Writing at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island.

Insider advice: Park in the SunBank parking garage, located directly across Fairbanks from Bush Auditorium. Maybe get there around 7. Join us to celebrate specs and show yet another national literary luminary who we are! :-)

Jeanie Comes to Town (Urban Think!, Fri., 9/18, 7 PM)

2009-09-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased that Jeanie Thompson is coming to read from her new book The Seasons Bear Us. I had the opportunity to read this manuscript on its way to publication and found it moving, smart, and beautiful all at once. The manuscript became a beautiful and moving book. Jeanie is a poet of national importance, and one of the pleasures of having her here is to introduce her to our formidable community of writers. What better place than the fine literary scene at Urban Think! I hope you get a chance to join us at 7 PM this Friday. Bring friends.

And After

I caught you looking at my hand,
you held it up above us, light
in your larger hand, you held it
like a specimen –
splayed the fingers –
naked, ringless, white.

What were you thinking when I
caught you looking at my hand?
I wouldn’t call it beautiful, though you can.

After love, the body doesn’t care –
it slackens in a drowse, goes unaware,
just naked, ringed with pleasure everywhere.
The organ of the skin has ruled the blood,
the heart, the lumpish brain –

Were you thinking
that this hand,
that’d touched you deftly
back to life, to breath,
will lie so still in death?

Where had I been
when I caught you
looking at my hand?
Far away in the skin’s flush, pale now,
contracting, wondering,
where did this begin?

What were you thinking
when I caught you looking at my hand?
Were you thinking, “How small within
my larger hand, I don’t know this hand at all,
or even grasp her naked pleasure, when she alone
seems ringed with light.”

What were you thinking – (I didn’t ask) –
when I caught you – (you didn’t know) –
looking at my hand – (that afterglow,
held in morning light.)

by Jeanie Thompson
from The Seasons Bear Us

July 17, 1969 -- Welcome to the United States Army

2009-07-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

You might take a look at this wonderful NY Times chronology of 1969. You'll note below that my memory has drifted from the actual calendar dates but the spirit of the Times piece is the same idea as below, that 1969 was packed with stuff we'd never forget, and Walter Cronkite and the Times are who told us about it. Check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20090717-1969-feature/?hp
___________________________________________

I try not to take history personally. But Walter Cronkite, who as a news anchor, along with Eric Sevareid, embarked in the Sixties on giving us the nightly body counts from the Vietnam war as a way to put pressure on the administration to think a little bit about the terrific horror that was going on in Southeast Asia for no reason anybody could name, died yesterday, 40 years to the day after I was spirited out of Tuscola in the dead of night to serve my country. I was drafted by my lower jaw, like how you pull a Northern Pike from the water after he bites. A whiner by temperament, I had opposed the war with letters to the town newspaper but I was unable to make my opinion stick with moral action when it came right down to it.

Our group of draftees, many players from my Little League team, who had gone on to graduate from college but got nabbed right after they took off their graduation robes, and younger kids, the 19 year olds who were raised with Midwestern values and lacked the wiles to dodge the draft, were driven triumphantly out of town at midnight on a bus for Chicago where we all had our induction physical in a warehouse somewhere featuring the all-important finger up the ass, metaphor not lost on any of us. Yes, it was 15 months after the ’68 Tet offensive, after which even Robert McNamara knew it was all for naught, but nevertheless there we went, up into the sky from O’Hare to Columbus, Georgia to begin basic training.

The army then was fat, corrupt, and stupid. My drill sergeant attempted to sell me amphetamines on the firing line while we were practicing shooting our M-16s. At home everyone was going through the motions of peace, with a fairly nice economy, while we, the select few, were bound for Southeast Asia, some to die. We forget why. It was war inertia. Nobody could figure out how to get out without admitting that it had been a stupid murderous nutty vile Kafkaesque devil’s spiral of lunacy from the start. Please for fun try to think of one good thing that came from it except an inspiring war memorial with 58,000 or so dead boys chiseled on it. Untold thousands more slept under bridges and in the woods after their return; some are still out there.

Walter Cronkite, who was constitutionally unlikely to express his opinion in his role as a journalist, visited Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, roughly February of '68, and upon his return finally broke out on Feb. 27, '68 with an editorial in favor of negotiation and opposed to the continuation of the dying. Robert McNamara was out of a job by March 1, and Johnson declared he would not stand for re-election. Cronkite proceeded to begin closing his very important CBS Evening News program with US and Vietnamese body counts. That’s what they called them. Body counts. It was hard even then to see how the body counts could be accurate, but on a given evening you might see this on your TV screen:

Body Count:
US – 109
Vietnamese – 1254

Nightly!!

For those without an iota of conscience, including very reverent Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Quakers, Mormons, Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses and Nazarenes, that count might have looked like impending victory. How many Vietnamese could be left? Surely we were almost done with them!

When the Tet offensive hit, which was a suicidal mess for the North Vietnamese but had huge impact on the US because we didn’t know they still had the heart, let alone the numbers, to raise a ruckus like that that late in the war – when Tet hit, everybody knew the war was a failed futile mess. That’s why peace candidate Eugene McCarthy was gonna win the presidency, we thought, unless Bobby Kennedy, seeing that Eugene would win, wanted to hop in himself, and then he damn sure was gonna win, unless he got killed while campaigning. Most Americans still didn't know where Vietnam was, but it was pretty clear they weren't gonna topple America since they didn't have one single plane or boat. People in this country wanted the war to be over. Nixon whipped Humphrey because Humphrey was VP during the Vietnam debacle. Nixon could get us out of Vietnam, he told us.

That was a little less than a year before I was drafted. Well, it turned out we were only about half done from a US body count point of view. Nixon pushed for Peace with Honor, how ironic, which meant more war, a lot more, including the bombing of Hanoi on Christmas, tons of fun stuff, and, oddly, no "honor" at all. Just embarrassment. We were wrong. We lost. We were stupid. We kept slaughtering and being slaughtered long after everything was obvious except the reason why. Presidents with daughters kept sending other people’s sons off to die. It was amazing. I'm serious, it was like a collective mental disease episode, not one single logical thing about it. We couldn't get out because we couldn't get out because we wouldn't get out. This is where that special use of the term "quagmire" came from, if you ever wondered.

And, as Cronkite would say, that's the way it was -- that’s what kind of happy horseshit was going on when I was drafted July 17, 1969. I was at Ft. Benning for roughly 60 days. What happened during that small window of time, all dutifully reported by Walter Cronkite each evening? The day after, while I was getting my head shaved, I watched Ted Kennedy, wet from a long swim at Chappaquiddick, remorsefully talking to the press. Because of this he would never be president. Three days after that, we landed on the moon. We troops sat in folding chairs on sand outside our barracks watching it on a small black and white TV. A few weeks later, a beautiful famous actress, Sharon Tate, and others were killed in a really nasty cult murder, Charles Manson and the gang. Aug. 14, wearing fatigues of green, I turned 23. Aug. 19 Bill Clinton turned 23, and in Wrigley Field's outfield in the middle of a ballgame, two hooligans were about burn the American flag. Dodger centerfielder Rick Monday, otherwise forgotten since, rescued it unharmed to a standing ovation. Elsewhere, Woodstock was happening. We watched it at the USO while we played pool. Hordes of kids our age swarming along a country road in New York State, love, peace and rock’n’roll.

Not us though. We were cannon fodder. It wasn’t even the luck of the draw, because there wasn’t yet a draft lottery when we were drafted. (The first one was a few months later.) I’m not still mad about it! It’s a few wars later, and I’ve seen it happen over and over. It is terribly primitive, bloodlust, conquering other nations, slaughter. I always loved the bumper sticker “War is menstruation envy.” I don’t think that’s too far off. Something unconscious is taking place, something Freudian I'm almost certain. We go into war so easily. Republicans, particularly, love it. They hate abortion and would deny it to a woman under almost any circumstances, and are particularly grossed out by partial birth abortion because they value life so much, but the random bombing of a major city, including the killing of women some of whom might be pregnant, does not give them one moment's pause. For this one thing, you can even raise their taxes!

And we can never figure a way to get out of a war short of blasting the enemy to smithereens like Hiroshima. Short of that, a war just drags on, peters out. Since the end of the Cold War, there’s not been much external to ourselves that has threatened the existence of the United States. We did get surprised when a Hole in the Wall gang pulled off a suicide mission that exceeded even their fondest dreams. They got us pretty good, and we never got them back to our own satisfaction because, why, well, because, well, a cat bit us and we decided, rather mysteriously, to avenge it by kicking the dog. It didn't really matter if we actually got the people who got us. What mattered was that we rush to get into a war that was fairly big, kill a society or a country, get the blood splattered and fire off some weapons and make the very heavens themselves regret hurting us, by raising hell, literally, because we are good, good people, not like people in other countries, most of whom are ignorant, can't speak English, are not favored by destiny to use all the world's oil, and aren't white like God.

But listen. Allowing myself to be drafted was my first but not my last serious moral lapse. And then what happened? -- I never went to Vietnam. They sent me to Germany, where I was a clerk and a shortstop on the company softball team. This is my kind of luck. I kept bitching about the war until one of my friends told me to stop. “Shut up,” he told me. “Our generation is dying in Southeast Asia and you’ve got a cushy gig. Shut up.” I saw his point. I can't see it now, but I did then. My wife came there to be with me. We toured Europe when we could take some leave and then later more extensively, after I was excused from active duty, that would be 38 years ago to the day, July 17, 1971. That day we drove our new sky blue super beetle out of Frankfurt, drove a long way to St. Moritz and slept in a tent on the high shoulder of a mountain. In the morning, 38 years ago today, July 18, my wife and I walked higher into the mountains until the meadows were full of snow, then back down, making plans for the future, talking, trying to purge the shame and olive drab out of our blood. I turned 24 in Paris (hence the Paris picture down below, not taken back then but later). I turned 25 in Athens. I saw Barcelona, Rome, Vienna, Venice, Split, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, so much more. In our travels in Europe, I saw the battlefields of WWI and WWII, astonishing expanses of headstones in rank and file. I saw ruined castles along the Rhine. The Frankfurt opera house was still a bombed out hulk from 1944, along with houses up and down that street.

You begin to realize the big picture. Things look quite rational day to day in our neighborhoods, perhaps. But big picture, we’re grasshoppers, not very bright collectively, doing what comes natural which is, mostly, eating the earth and killing each other for the rights to have more earth to eat. Under a thin veneer of civilization fathers still want their sons to put on the uniform and bravely die so they can cry and bury them and have their chests burst with pride. We know now this can't go on forever. We're rattling our own cage now. It's just a matter of time. When it all ends, we’ll be why. And I proved long ago, July 17, 1969 to be exact, that I'm completely in the flow, not one bit above any of it, I know.

But anyway, happy July 18. This is, sad to say, the deadliest month so far in Afghanistan. We need to hire an architect and get the next memorial wall going.

A nod and a toast to my fellow draftees who went on this day 40 years ago. Rest in peace, Walter Cronkite – you will be missed. I’m writing, and I’m trying to figure how I can get to Paris for a year when my sabbatical comes. I'm fairly green, I'm praying when I think of it, exercising and eating right. I can do better at things. I'll try. I have great kids. It's been a long 40 years and a short 40 years. I shouldn't have let myself be drafted. I honor those who were drafted and served, whatever honor means, whatever "serving" means, and those who didn't by whatever wiles they used, their rich daddy with privileged entre into the National Guard, twisted knee, CO status, color blind, gay, Canada, running and hiding, female, or jail. It's a rough goddamned world. If we need forgiveness for the past, we've got to do the forgiving ourselves. If we want peace, we'll have to make it. Hell yes things could be worse, and will be -- that's for sure --, but meantime I'm quietly planning ahead for sabbatical, trolling for a small place in Vezelay or sweet small apartment in Paris with a view over the river toward Sacre Coeur.

Erotica and Her Sisters

2009-06-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

I’m pasting below a letter I received today from the only genuine writer of erotica I know, who graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program the same semester as her pal, the estimable Susan Lilley. I asked her in my note to help us find the path to real literary erotica and away from Ms. McNaughty. I hit paydirt, as you will see. Here’s the reply of Ann Rosenquist Fee:

OH PHIL, what timing!! I’m at the Minneapolis airport with a few hours to spare, waiting for a fellow Stonecoast grad to arrive from New York so we can teach, tomorrow at the Loft Literary Center, a one-day workshop called Sex on the Page. The class is a product of our final Stonecoast presentation, in which I presented Ann’s Theory of Erotic Truth (an original blend of theories from French philosopher Georges Bataille and erotica writer/editor Susie Bright), and then my co-presenter, Ellen Neuborne, and I used that as a lens to help students judge what works and what doesn’t in their own and others’ erotic scenes, and then showed how to use that lens to create the most powerful, efficient and relevant erotic scenes possible in service to story. In short, our theory mandates that in order for erotic art to succeed, it needs two things: 1) an element of transgression, either in content or form (and we mean REAL transgression, smart transgression, not purportedly naughty sex, which doesn't surprise us at all, really -- transgression as in a conventional narrative that suddenly becomes a panting list of phrases and fragments when a kiss is described, because such a break in form embodies and shows-versus-tells how the character experiences this moment differently than, say, walking down the street) and 2) a fecundity, a transcendence, a fertility to the scene that both slams the reader into his/her own body and also sends them to an entirely other place, which, in sum, should be more/different than what porn achieves, and always in service to the larger story.

Here ere are some suggestions straight from the outline I’m prepping right now.

Texts that get at the theory…
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression
Susie Bright, The Sexual State of the Union
Jean Paulhan’s foreword to Story of O
Diana Widmaier Picasso, Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic

Examples of powerful and artful erotic writing…
Best American Erotica collections edited by Susie Bright (especially 2006 with “Talk About Sex: An Orientation” by Jamie Cat Callan)
Any Cleis Press erotica collection edited by Alison Tyler
Judy Blume, Forever
Cris Mazza, “Is It Sexual Harassment Yet” from Normal: Fiction Collective Two (1998)
Anais Nin, House of Incest
Pauline Reage, Story of O
Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

And here's the link to the Loft class description...

http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.loft.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=2166

…in case you decide Rollins or some other entity needs Sex on the Page. Ellen and I are pitching it to conferences around the country – we were thrilled to have the Loft as our first taker.

Hello to superstar Susan, please, and to Paul next time you’re in touch. Writerly vibes to you all…

Ann

On Finishing

2009-06-18T05:04:00.001-07:00

I was talking with some people last night at the great Bloomsday celebration at yours and my favorite indy bookstore, Urban Think, in Thornton Park, and someone was saying that he knew a writer who writes first drafts on a typewriter, then puts them on the computer as a second draft. Why haven't I ever thought of that? I'm so much more friendly to the keyboard than my own legendarily bad handwriting. One reason I have never thought of that is that first drafts usually go in my notebook which one would think is a place for handwriting, but sometimes I do a first draft on the computer, print it out, edit it by hand, and tape the edited copy into my notebook. So already it, the notebook, isn't a place solely for handwriting. I paste, tape, and post many different things in there. Typed drafts would be fine.

I should go on ebay or craigslist and see if I can find an Olympia portable in great condition. It would be a real adjustment, reintroducing into the household the steady click clack ding zing bang. When I was growing up in the big house (shown here), I had a desk in my room that instead of setting on the floor like an ordinary desk was bolted to the vertical oak studs behind the plaster wall, the easier to clean beneath it. From sixth grade, I was up there in my room typing, and I had my grandfather's serious Royal upright, battleship gray and weighing in at four hundred and twenty two pounds. When I would throw the carriage (sorry to the young pups -- you had to be there), the whole house would shake. You've heard of teenagers playing music too loud in their rooms. My parents would have given anything if I'd preferred Gracie Slick and the Beatles on the hi-fi instead.

I read Updike one time saying that when he first started writing, he just liked to see all those words of his on a page, and a lot of what he was doing in his stories had to do with filling the page up, and he said he was always supremely satisfied to roll a page out of the typewriter that was completely filled with his words. In fact, it was always a little disconcerting to him to take a page out that was not "finished." To him, “finished” meant filling the available space. When he was young, that is -- later, finished to Updike had the meaning it has to the rest of us -- finding the end of our story, completing the writing of it so that the draft has a beginning, middle, and an end.

I might look around for a typewriter, or oil up the old family Hermes, that we used to use for addressing envelopes before we learned how to do that on the printer. The Olympia was a great typewriter, not talking about the electric. I remember buying my first Olympia in Champaign, '66. I had a second one, '71.

In my mind, there is some connection I haven’t understood yet between typing on the typewriter and finishing. Somehow the levels of effort for typing accurately to avoid excessive retyping and for squaring away the content in a story were one thing. On the computer keyboard, the writing is supremely easy, revision so easy it is sometimes too easy, and the arc and heart of a story become the main concentration which, separated from the process of writing, seems to come along slower. Who’d have thunk it?

My experience with this may not be the common experience. To comment on this precise thing, you’d have to have done plenty of time doing creative writing on a typewriter, and with that understanding I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing. Over the past five years, I’ve seemed to have developed a habit of robust starts that come to not very much. A story idea that comes along goes into a partial first draft satisfactorily, but I don’t give it the time, or lose the enthusiasm, and the next thing you know it’s on the back burner or abandoned entirely. This habit came along without my spotting it as a pattern until recently.

I know enough about me and writing to know how to address this. In writing, word by word, line by line, story by story, there is always a balance between the application of discipline and logic and the “go with the flow” surge of instinct and impulse. Both angles on the text are needed, discipline and instinct. The author is in charge. Therefore, as the author, if I notice I’m not finishing a lot of stuff and it concerns me, the fix is to break the habit by finishing no matter what. Well, I’ll tell myself, it may not be worth finishing. Well, MAKE it worth finishing, I’ll reply. I’m trying to make this a practical, workable observation on finishing, so I’ll take the ideal out of it. Everything can’t be finished or made worth finishing. To which I think to myself, yeah, but let’s improve the average.

I know that can be done, because I do keep a lot of my unfinished drafts, and years later I’ll take a look and miserably observe that the draft had a lot going for it and I should have finished it. Sometimes it is hard to get one’s self back in some bygone mode to finish an old start. It should be tried when one arrives on the idea that he has to begin finishing more. But the lesson in looking back on the junk pile of starts that were worthy but given up on is mainly to reaffirm something the typewriter years taught us, that writing is work, that the good stuff is hard to do which is why the few rewards for the good, finished work are so sweet.

No magic. I’ve got a 6,000 word story troubled by unresolved autobiography and some other torments, and word back from my trusty first readers isn’t good. As usual, they’ve seen into the piece perfectly, spelling out its issues (which far outweigh it). Finishing is far off. It will involve pushing. It will involve reading the piece over and over until I understand my own motives and edit out the crap and spot strands that aren’t being pulled through. And press on—I’m in a covered wagon, westward ho the long trek. My horses and ox are being hoisted up Scott’s Bluff, in Nebraska, which looks like a big obstacle. The ferryman has my wagons on the river. I’m hoping to get to the ocean. I don’t know it, but between me and finishing, there’s the Grand Tetons.

On another burner I’ve got a big story, culminating piece of an otherwise pretty successful book manuscript. I know the problems. First readers have helped, but I knew the problems all along. The piece, at the conceptual level, was risky, but that’s what I wanted and every time I reread it it’s still what I want. Onward. It’s summer.

There’s probably a science to finishing a story. Maybe a seven step process. Or a twelve step process to address the habit of not finishing. Nevermind. We know what to do. Lean into it. Read it again for all its possibilities. Don’t be afraid. Get a little joy. Work in the morning earlier, well before the sun is up. Leave the radio off. Take the coffee black. Work to finish. Retype the goddamn thing! Let it be messy—not every piece we write will be a masterwork, but the process of finishing grows us in the art, make no mistake—takes us to the next level where the good work is.

The Writer Paul Freidinger on James Wood and How Fiction Works

2009-04-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

The writer Paul Freidinger is my guest on this site for the first time -- first, I hope, of many. We both grew up in Central Illinois and probably played basketball and baseball against each other in the early sixties. Astoundingly, Paul had a poem in the same Florida Review as my "Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea," in the mid-eighties, and still we didn't actually meet and shake hands until four or five years ago. In addition to being a serious and remarkable poet, Paul is a gargantuan reader and reviewer of contemporary fiction. You would not, I think you'll agree, if you read the piece below a thousand times, peg him as a Cub fan. Enjoy.

For the last few years I’ve followed the reviews of contemporary fiction by James Wood whenever I’ve had the chance. I have to say I usually feel younger than he is although I am older by more than fifteen years. I feel younger because reading him leaves me with the sense of being vastly inexperienced in comparison to his depth of understanding the pantheon of Western literature. My lack doesn’t diminish the sense of pleasure and insight I receive when I read his reviews. In light of this, it took the gift of his recent book How Fiction Works to be motivated to read it. I’m left with the impression it should be required reading for any writer or anyone who has a serious interest in literary fiction.

I am not intending for this to be a full-length discussion of the book. I would hope to discuss other parts of it in the future. For now I would like to focus on a small section which I think a reader could apply to any book he or she may be reading. I should preface this by saying I hate the term “literary fiction,” and that distinction only serves to marginalize writers and readers alike. When I was young, I always wondered what made a book a classic. As I grew older, I decided a classic was simply a great story told in a superior way. I can also confess that I often disagree with Wood, as many qualified critics do. I think the value of his book is that it offers practical models to approach a wide variety of modern fiction.

I should point out that Wood is impressively grounded in the classics and the evolution of the novel and has a thorough grasp of Western philosophy. In his book he focuses on Shakespeare, Flaubert, Proust, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Austen, Henry James, Joyce, among others, attempting as he goes to trace the evolution to the modern novel and the use by authors of free indirect style. He speaks highly of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee, and V.S. Naipaul. Contemporary writers he likes include people as diverse as Ian McEwan, Norman Rush, Marilynne Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Josè Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, and Alexsander Hemon. He argues in favor of a realist fiction which respects the lineage of the tradition of those named authors, but he isn’t above embracing certain postmodern writers, as long as they don’t diverge into “hysterical realism,” narrative in its lightness that is neither unbearable nor grounded in the realm of a character’s possible life.

Of the current novelists, I want to draw attention to this one quote as a simple way to assess a book. Wood explains at length:

The novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we would call language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary writer now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) “the palpable present-intimate.”

As it turns out, I read Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence at the same time I was reading How Fiction Works. About Rushdie’s Fury Wood wrote that “playful self-indulgence is a sign of an author in terminal decline.” The Enchantress of Florence is no less an example of this. I feel certain Wood would say it has a hard time staying grounded, that the author falls in love with his own cleverness, that Rushdie can’t be serious long enough to write the novel he is capable of. As a reader-reviewer, I can easily agree that Rushdie the author overpowers his characters. I wouldn’t say this is one of his best books. On the other hand, I would say that Rushdie remains a unique practitioner of fiction, suited as no other current writer is to articulate how Hinduism and Islam are bound and simultaneously antithetical and the tragic way Western Civilization continues to misunderstand Asia and create problems on a world stage born of our own ignorance. He is a brilliant story teller to boot, and for all of its faults, I loved The Enchantress of Florence.

Wood takes issue with two other books of which I am fond: Delillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I took the effort to track down Wood’s reviews of both books, and he pronounced both of them failures. He charged Underworld with having no center and being populated with dead characters. The Corrections, he went on to say, was a distillation of DeLillo’s book, concentrated on a single family’s dynamic, but suffering from the same lack of authenticity, the same absence of “living, breathable” characters. I love both of these books, and they have become part of my own ontology, part of the way I experience the world. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t evaluate some experience by the means I learned in reading DeLillo and Franzen. For me they are examples of how fiction can teach us to live, to judge experience, to gain a heightened sense of receptivity. I empathize with the characters easily, and I was sad to see both come to an end. Again, I would like to say that, in retrospect, James Wood helped guide me through them, after the fact, and reading his reviews helped me appreciate them more; perhaps, more because of their flaws. I have read two novels by Norman Rush and disliked them intensely. I read them because of Wood’s recommendations. An odd thing happened for me with Rush. Wood aptly demonstrates how Rush creates a style of language by cobbling it together in an unusual way. It turns out that he articulated something I attempt with my own writing: the process of forming a language with different registers that contain within them a kind of tension, perhaps unlike any ordinary spoken language, but one that forces a reader to pay attention and see the world from a new perspective. I guess my argument here is that one needn’t subscribe wholly to the church of James Wood to learn from him, and that poets have as much to gain from him as fiction writers.

I’ll continue with one last comment on the dangers, as Wood sees them, of a writer adopting the “language of the world.” Here, Wood cites David Foster Wallace as the poster child for good intentions gone awry. About Wallace’s use of this style, Wood fires, “the language of his unidentified narration is hideously ugly, and rather painful for more than a page or two.” He goes on to say,

the risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to invoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps, thoroughly debase your own language... In other words, the novelist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring. David Foster Wallace is good at becoming the whole of boredom.

Whether or not you the reader buy his assessment, I think any writer today grapples with the challenge of how to use language effectively. I think Wood reveals himself in this prejudice, and I can list any number of reputable writers who would ignore his advice. Ignoring his advice would not minimize the writer’s task.

I will say, in ending, that this is one small component of Wood’s rubric. I’m advocating the value to a reader of intentionally assessing a writer’s language and whether the characters’ voices are true to themselves or simply an author’s desire to convey his own conceits at the expense of a character’s personality. I’m suggesting a reader examine whether a writer can resurrect our daily language and give a character an authentic voice, or whether he becomes a victim of the superficial, to the degree of being unable to make us care enough about that character to complete his story. The rest of Wood’s book takes one deeper into the formation of a novel and what is essential to its success. He offers equally sound advice as he takes the reader through the essential elements of the novel. Give it a chance, read the book. It might make you a better reader. It might even cause you to reconsider your own writing.

*All quotes are from James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Reflections on Matthews

2009-03-04T18:06:00.000-08:00

I am so pleased that Jeanie Thompson, the poet who serves as Executive Director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, allowed me to let fly with an amplification of my November lecture at Spalding University (I teach poetry and fiction in the brief residency MFA program there). The amplified piece appears in First Draft, the great magazine of the Forum edited by the estimable Danny Gamble (a toast to both Jeanie and Danny). Last summer, I wrote a friendly overview of the work of David Huddle for the Southern Review, Huddle being a friend and mentor since 1991 when I met him at Bread Loaf after years of admiring his work from afar. The piece in First Draft, entitled “Deep Image, Humor, and the Poetry of William Matthews," observes my modest little friendship and connection with Matthews, who died a day or so after his 55th birthday in November of 1997.

You can read First Draft, including my article, at

http://www.writersforum.org/pdfs/FirstDraft/spring2009.pdf

and how can you resist!

Both the Spalding lecture and this retrospective of mine in First Draft are the results of a long mood of remembrance many of us have been in since the 10th anniversary of Bill’s death, which was in November of 2007. Back in February of 1997, working at that time in a consulting firm in Longwood, I coordinated with UCF to bring him to Orlando to read. He read at UCF on February 13th, 1997, and stayed at the Holiday Inn across the street from the main entrance. I joined him for breakfast the day after the reading and to give him a ride to the airport – he was in a rush to get back to Celia on Valentine’s Day. His book Time and Money had won a big award, the Ruth Lilly Award, as well as the New York Critics Circle Award, and he appeared to be getting the recognition we all thought he’d deserved for a number of years. He was tired, but he was happy, and at the reading he was funny and generous. As we sat there at breakfast eating fruit and cereal and talking, he had almost exactly nine months to live. We can never know these things.

“I think there might be a Pulitzer in Time and Money,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “Helen (Vendler, the influential poetry critic through whom one must go to the Pulitzer, or at least such was the case at the time) doesn’t like people like me.”

Isn’t that a wild statement?

After that, in August of ‘97, we traded notes. He was just back from Israel and, I think, Prague, and that was entirely too much travel for a man in his condition. He and Celia were scoping out a house to buy. The September before, 1996, he’d had surgery for serious vascular problems, probably shouldn't have come to Orlando the following February. So in that next August I wrote and asked him how he was doing. He wrote back, very quickly, “I suppose you mean by that have I quit smoking.” It was a funny, faux cranky remark, seriously funny. I say how can we ever know what's ahead, but I've always thought if anyone knew it was Bill himself. The evidence was piling up in his interior life, I imagine, after that big surgery, though he wouldn't have been likely to mention it. (to be continued)

The Death of John Updike

2009-01-27T16:51:00.001-08:00

The death of John Updike caused a flurry of retrospect and comment in the New York Times, and as usual looking at all of it gives a fuller picture than looking at any bit of it. Michiko Kakutani wrote a great appraisal, and Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote the actual obituary. The slide show link below is somehow richer than all the words surviving writers lavish on Updike, the master of words.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/27/obituaries/0127-UPDIKE_index.html

Somewhere in these materials Philip Roth eulogizes that Updike was 20th century America's version of 19th century America's Nathaniel Hawthorn. I don't think that's far off at all. I like the comparison to Henry James, because of the full array Updike brought to the label "Man of Letters." Michiko Kakutani, in her piece, finally said he published too much, and observed that in one of his nonfiction collections of articles he reprinted the captions he'd written for Marilyn Monroe's pictorial in Playboy way back when.

Updike was not only a man of letters but a man of books. The Times coverage included Updike's famous thoughts about the origins of his writing, that before he loved writing sentences, he loved books, the making of books, printing presses, binding, typewriters, pens, paper, filling pages with handwriting or typing or print. For him, finally getting his written words between the covers of a published book, that alone was supremely important and satisfying to him, and thus he kept the mighty pace of three pages of writing a day, an average of one book a year (and way more writing than just one book in a year -- 800 contributions to the New Yorker magazine, counting the fact that he, like our friend Jamaica Kincaid, was an anonymous writer of the New Yorker's Talk of the Town feature).

A friend who is a friend of a relative of Updike's has written me that his death of lung cancer began in September when he was hospitalized for what they thought was pneumonia. It was reported that he checked into a hospice facility near his home in New England on Monday and died Tuesday. I believe I read he has two books coming out this coming year.

Because of his prose, which could be especially when he was young a bit of an acquired taste, I'm seeing persistent critical comment about his style even in his obituaries and the appraisals. He was a big deal and it will take years to get him into perspective. Michiko Kakutani quoted James Wood from long ago saying, in effect, that Updike was way more style than substance. I've said on this page that even I, who worship at his feet and memory, believe Updike's novels were not the best display of his writing. I've said you can find his best writing in his short fiction precisely because his expansive painting of detail is controlled better in the short form -- he really lets the horse go in the long work. I am fond of a couple of his short novels that are rarely mentioned, one being A Month of Sundays.

My ex-wife was a fanatic about Updike from the time I met her in 1964. She introduced me to his work and we followed his career all the way. I believe in my files I have that Time magazine from '68, pictured above. I have a hardback copy of Couples from back then, and many copies of the Rabbit and Bech series. In 1995 I was on a road trip for my job and was driving back to the hotel on the beltway between Eden Prairie and Minneapolis airport. The NPR station announced that Updike was in town, speaking McAlister College in St. Paul. I went to the hotel, changed into jeans, and drove up there for the reading. I got there way early (two hours). I found the venue, an old gym at the college, with a student center (I seem to recall) one floor below it. I got two slices of pizza and a large cup of orange juice, went into the gym where chairs were being set out for the event, placed myself on the center aisle in the first row, and waited. I was 49 years old, and I felt like I was thirteen and about to meet Stan Musial. After the reading, I was second in line behind another fanatic for the book signing. The other fanatic had brought all his old Updike books and, while 300 people lined up to meet the author, had Updike sign them all. Then I stepped up and Updike flashed a smiling generous look at the departing fanatic, a look that very clearly and bemusedly said, "You see it all in this business."

The only book I had with me that day that he might sign was my softback copy of the 1995 Best American Short Stories. I had a story ("Forty Martyrs") in the back list that year, the section of the book "100 Other Distinguished Stories from 1994," and he was in the same list. He was always in the book or in the backlist, year after year. For me it was unique and happy, this development, so I carried it with me everywhere I went. I told him it was the second time he and I had been in a book together (we were both in the 1988 O. Henry volume -- he was frequently in there, but once ["Arcola Girls"] was quite a thrill for me). He said, "Let me see," and I gladly flipped from U's to the D's. He said, "It's great to meet you," and shook my hand. He was super cordial, and in a great mood, as his appearance at McAlister was co-sponsored by The Hungry Mind bookstore on the occasion of the publication of his Rabbit compendium, all four of the Rabbit novels in one book. Combined into that volume, the Rabbit series was a ranking contender for the elusive label The Great American Novel. My encounter with him was about a minute and a half and I'm surely treasuring both the signature and the memory this week.

Richard Bausch's "Design"

2009-01-08T18:40:00.000-08:00

Reading this Richard Bausch story again, a favorite of mine for fifteen years (another of the stories my good friend the writer Mary Burns pointed me toward) (and having met Bausch himself since the last time I read it), I’m as pleased as I was the first time. This story appeared in the 1990 Best American Short Stories anthology, and, in fact, Bausch had two stories in that volume. I think he and Alice Munro are the only authors ever to pull that off (someone give me a shout about this if you know). It is so perfect that this story, which then was entitled “A Kind of Simple, Happy Grace,” is one of Bausch’s honored two that make up that achievement. James Wood, in his fine book How Fiction Works, sometimes seems not to have a clue about how fiction actually works, and I think it is because he’s so taken by the craft aspect, which can be talked about at length. Only God knows how the art aspect works, and that part is so mysterious and magical even God hasn’t bothered to write a book about it. Perhaps Wood's intention (I’ll confess here I’m not through the book though I am through the section on characters in fiction) is to explore the question How Fiction Works rather than answer it. I haven’t read as much fiction as Wood has (very few people have – he’s amazing), but I’ve written more of it, and I can tell you the word “works” in his title is tricky. Anybody who ever ran a workshop knows it. It’s avoided. Works for who? What constitutes working? The word, when you think of it, is intentionally vague. “Well, I dunno, it just works, works for me anyway.” That kinda thing.

In the chapters where Wood is pondering character, he turns to the traditional terminology of round characters and flat ones (well, not so traditional – the terms, Wood advises us, come from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel), and he (Wood) concludes all characters, even the best ones in the best fiction, are somewhat flat, because they can’t be round, because round characters are “real.” Real people are round characters, and fiction can’t go that far in creating characters, so in fiction they’re all a bit flat. And for damn sure, you aren’t going to have any round characters in short fiction because it’s too short to make them even a little bit round! Take a look (How Fiction Works, p 128), I think he really says this.

We have to find our way to stories. We tease them up from the subconscious by following a trail we hope we’re seeing but maybe not and maybe that’s okay, just keep going. The trail is mostly made up of characters who emerge as we write. In the back of the Best American Short Stories anthology in which the story we’re talking about appeared, Bausch reported that one summer it came to pass that he had to drive to work on “a route that led [him] past several churches, ranged within sight of each other in the lovely hills beyond McClean, Virginia.” He said that from that landscape he began to imagine a story about two men from different denominations and that the story would somehow involve them finally coming into “a sort of helpless embrace.” Bausch had no idea what the embrace would be about, who they men were, or how the story would get there. He couldn’t know that because he didn’t know the men yet. I love this, the story and understanding the background of it. What story was whispering to Richard Bausch from this landscape? After many blind alleys, he finally found it. He says it took him seven years to write. “So simple,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest idea why.”

“Design” begins with the Catholic priest Father Russell watching from his window the aging Baptist minister Reverend Tarmigian raking his leaves across the way even though the leaves weren’t finished falling and the old man was in no condition to be doing it. Tarmigian, ailing, pale and just a little dottering, didn’t seem at all well even from a distance, and Father Russell was going through a bad time, worried about everything, including but not limited to the old minister on the opposite side of the deep gully separating their churches. To get from one to the other one had to walk down to the sidewalk by the road, and walk over there, crossing the gully on a sidewalk bridge. Finally, having watched the old man struggle in his work, Russell had to go over there, even though through the years he’d actually avoided contact with the Reverend, idle conversation, waste of time, a whole flock on the right side of the gully to worry about, plate full, can’t take on the scene that’s going on over on the other side. So guilt came to roost. Time to go talk.

I think Tarmigian is one of the most interesting and fine characters I’ve seen in contemporary short fiction. I love this man, bright eyed though dying, still raking the leaves of the massive churchyard, still carrying the mulch up the hill to the cemetery where his wife, dead twenty years, was buried. Pausing there to pray a while, and back down the hill to work. Teasing Father Russell for being so worried about him. What are characters in fiction? James Wood asks rhetorically as he opens his discussion on character development in his book. But it isn’t even a question worth asking, is it? It’s like asking, What are people for? One might as well ask what are atoms in a compound? What are rivers through a field?

While parrying Father Russell’s concern about his well being, Tarmigian lapses into preacher shop-talk, telling him that recently he’s been counseling a couple who have been married 52 years and want a divorce. Tarmigian is on the one hand wryly amused, on the other hand enthralled by the question. He tells Russell, it’s like the woman suddenly slaps herself on the forehead and says, what were we thinking? Fifty two years! The couple can’t agree on what television show to watch. Damn sure they don’t want to sleep in the same room! Those are just a couple of the points of contention, but fifty two years is the main thing – when marriage was invented, nobody ever dreamed two people would have to co-habitate until they were blue in the face. One farts a lot, the other is stone deaf, years ago they went beyond knowing each other well into the region of knowing each other too well, then past that into the zone of once again not knowing each other at all. This is what hard labor and crusades and disease were for, to kill off one of them, most likely the male, mercifully of course, we hope, in some regular civilized death way, but one of them has to go. Read the fine print! Until death do us part!

Father Russell, in the story, makes three trips over to Tarmigian’s place, worried about him. In the second trip, Russell has traipsed over to the very frail Tarmigian’s side of the gully to get him to stop working and go to a doctor. Russell is having a crisis, ostensibly so worried about Tarmigian that he can’t sleep, though we, the reader, can see this is a case of classic projection and Russell is easily as worried about himself. Celibacy! He’s forty three, alone, coming unstuck from reality. He has is own neurotic past to deal with and he can’t deal with it by himself in his creaky old rectory, nobody can!, his flock’s going walkabout all over town, the past haunts even those of us who aren’t neurotic, his faith-tormented present isn't feeling so great either, and his prospects looking ahead are pretty grim if you ask me (and for sure he'd agree, in this mid-life mood of his). Imagine the storms inside this man. And don’t forget, for a priest, this kind of worry about self is masturbation pure and simple – self indulgence – so he’s (convinced himself he's very) worried not about himself but about the guy next door. And also. Russell is a good guy and really IS worried about the guy next door.

Tarmigian meantime is on Russell’s last nerve, seeming to push his worry to the limit. In this second trip over, Russell comes into the church and finds Tarmigian, normally dottering even on terra firma, teetering at the very tip top of a rickety ladder painting the upper regions of the interior of his church. You have to know Richard Bausch to know how he loved writing this, so funny I’m laughing in my chair right now. When Tarmigian coughs, the ladder tips this way and that, and he coughs a lot. One hand’s fully bandaged from a mishap with the sharp lid of a paint can, and that’s the hand Tarmigian holds on with – the paint brush is in the other one. Father Russell fairly seizes up watching all this.

In the third visit of Father Russell over to Tarmigian’s place, when the priest arrives, Tarmigian is nowhere to be found, and Russell places himself in a pew in Tarmigian’s church and waits. Russell is a wreck, on the edge of a breakdown, worried about Tarmigian's health and, of course, himself. He's shaking and upset, holding back tears. He really wants to go to confession to this old minister, his father in a way and his brother in another way and in yet another way his priest, but Baptists aren’t into the sacrament of penance, dang. Finally Russell hears Tarmigian’s voice, out on the front walk with someone, talking loudly as he strolls into the church. He's walking into the church with an old woman, and the old woman is deaf. Tarmigian sees the priest sitting there and welcomes him, introduces him to the woman, who turns out to be guess who, the woman of the 52 year marriage on the rocks, and asks her to settle a moment in a back pew while he talks with the priest who seems to be wigging out. As they talk, the woman shouts she can't hear what they're saying and that she's deaf as a post. Meantime Tarmigian is calming the priest. The woman yells a couple more times, "Hey, what's going on over there. I can't hear a thing. I am stone cold deaf!" Tarmigian is aware she's trying to figure out what they're talking about, these two men of different cloths – what an odd thing. “What’s going on?” she shouts. It’s puzzling. She can see one of them is upset. "Hey!" she shouts, kindly, but just letting them know she's lost as to what's happening. Tarmigian, ever more frail, talks Russell down best he can, telling him to relax, all's well, it gets like this sometimes, don't worry – "I'm fine,” he assures the priest, “don't worry about me," etc. Russell is in tears. They are a few feet away from the deaf woman in the pew who's watching them but can't hear them. Finally Tarmigian says to Father Russell, turned away so his lips can’t be read, something like, so, are you gonna be okay? and then he says, "C'mon, let's shake hands so she sees us -- no, wait," he says, "let's embrace. Let's give her an ecumenical thrill." And they do. Of course, in the story, the hug is way more important than just performance for a deaf onlooker. We’re in Russell’s third person limited point of view and he feels the skeletal remains of his wise and kindly old Baptist neighbor, experiences the embrace as confession, and nearly collapses in the old man's arms. Tarmigian, we assume, experiences it as fellow reverend and father figure to the young priest, as spiritual healer and marriage counselor to the old woman.

Under that different title, you can find the story in the 1990 Best American Short Stories. I recently read it in my copy of The Stories of Richard Bausch. I wish James Wood would read “Design.” What is character in fiction? It’s art. It’s a bunch of words the artist makes live and breathe so it’s a round character we’re better for having met, this old minister Tarmigian. The author found this man among the churches in the landscape he was driving through at the time. He imagined an embrace and found his way to it. Inspired, he knew just the brushstrokes to give us and exactly when to stop. He got two stories into the 1990 Best American. This one took him seven years. That’s how fiction “works.” So simple.

Updike’s “A Constellation of Events”

2009-01-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

I’m reading the formidable writer and critic James Wood’s new book How Fiction Works, and the first twenty five percent of it (that’s how far I’ve gotten) is devoted to one of my favorite things, third person limited point of view, which he, from a different school of thinking and a different angle of comment, calls “free indirect style.” Wood is a writer my pal, the poet, essayist and Central Illinoisian Paul Freidinger, has really latched onto, in the New Yorker and really all over the place (including an interview with him conducted by the Kenyon Review that came out on their website about the time mine did – get on kenyonreview.org and find it in their archive). Wood’s astonishing contribution is the breadth of his reading and his continuing command over all of it.

Anyway, James Wood traces free indirect style (I like this expansion of the concept of point of view to the level of “style,” and when you think of it, of course, per the quote I’m about to show you, point of view IS style – something I’ve never thought before) to Flaubert. In the quote below, Wood’s simply helping us understand what he’s pinpointing with the term “free independent style”:

The tension between the author’s style and his or her characters’ styles becomes
acute when three elements coincide: when a notable stylist is at work, like
Bellow or Joyce; when that stylist also has a commitment to following the
perceptions and thoughts of his or her characters (a commitment usually
organized by free indirect style or its off-spring, stream of consciousness);
and when the stylist has a special interest in the rendering of detail.
Stylishness, free indirect style, and detail: I have described
Flaubert, whose work opens up and tries to solve this tension, and who is really
its founder.

Of course, John Updike, contemporary realist master, is a prose stylist, more articulate than most of us by double, and so there’s a problem. When he’s writing in free indirect style, he’s under an awful lot of pressure for his point of view character, mainly, to have the Updikean eye for detail and flare for language. This would be a rare Yankee suburban WASP bored cop, housewife or businessman, indeed. Yet Updike has to sell us on the reality of this character so that we aren’t distracted when the character pleases us with his spectacular observation or precision articulation of detail (he doesn’t want the reader to stop and think, “wait a minute, who’s talking here – the character or the author?”).

Free indirect style allows the “style” of the story to free float hopefully quite unobtrustively between the voice of the author and the voice of the character so that the reader isn’t distracted or bothered but buys in – just as the good reader dutifully performs that grandest of mental gymnastics, the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

John Updike’s little beauty of a story “A Constellation of Events” can be found in this collection (Trust Me) along with “Poker Night,” “Leaf Season,” “Getting Into the Set,” and “Deaths of Distant Friends” – all of these latter stories frequently anthologized but never “A Constellation of Events.” If you have attempted to read Updike’s novels and haven’t been drawn to them, there is quite likely a good reason for that, relevant to this discussion if only we had time. You could come to your own conclusions, and they’d be right, if you’d give Updike’s mid-career stories a try instead of one of the novels, next time you’re so moved. The stories in Trust Me, as usual with him, first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and the Atlantic, mostly in the late seventies through the late eighties – that’s “mid-career” for Updike, a time when critics finally admitted he’d grown into his much touted vocabulary and his somewhat muscle-bound talent for metaphor and simile.

“A Constellation of Events” is told from the point of view of the wife of an insurance executive, living in suburban Hartford, CT. She, Betty, is recalling four days in a certain February that made a sort of constellation if you looked how they dotted a calendar. On that first day, some certain day in the winter when the fields were full of new snow, she and her husband (Rob) pulled together a few friends (and their young families – toddlers, adolescents, etc.) to go cross-country skiing. There were three couples plus kids in the entourage. Updike writes: “They all met at the Pattersons’ field in their different-colored cars and soon made a line of dark silhouettes across the white pasture.”

Like the three stars in the belt of Orion, snow skiing has a way of bringing the illusion of order (in the form of a single file line) to a random group of individuals. But among them there were two people who were having an affair, and while the other adults mostly knew it, they pretended that everything was regular and relatively fine. Betty, our third person limited point of view character, took on the role of helping those who were bringing up the rear, including the slightly slumping, vaguely depressed, cuckolded husband (Rafe) as well as Betty and Rob’s own daughter who was (a) too young for skiing and (b) didn’t have the right equipment. Rafe had the right equipment but the skis were set wrong, and he kept popping out of his bindings.

Out in the country, broken off from the rest of the group, Rafe and Betty, struggling with stragglers and equipment, manage to get each other’s attention. They find commonality in a book Rafe’s reading which he loans her. There is an afternoon together to discuss the book, and before long this unlikely duo is finding even more commonality on the naugahide of the couch in Rafe’s law office downtown.

The story is short, probably 3500 words or about 12 pages in the printed collection. It begins with Betty bored but in a good mood about her marriage. All signs are her husband is bored as well, no signs he’s straying as Rafe’s wife is with some other guy. Rob and Betty aren’t at the end of their marriage but they are in the desert-like middle of it. There is no sign that this private lapse of Betty and Rafe’s will cause an end to either of their marriages, but it will cause hurt, infinite confusion, and long-lasting disorder, and Rafe and Betty know it and say it to each other, and they ask each other if they really want that, and they both seem to say “yes.” In the frame of the story, Betty, staring at the calendar later on, looking at the distribution of those four sunny winter days among the squares that formed the month of February when all this happened, thinks of the days as a miracle, no matter how it all turned out.

Why have I been drawn to this story over the years? It is Updike’s style and insight, not the story line. It is his assumptions, cagily attributed to Betty in a free indirect style that allows him to launder his views through a fictional character. It is the inexorable progress of the situation through these few days we see and Betty, too, comes to understand, what she wants to do. It amazes her, in retrospect, that she was capable of this sudden switch in direction. Updike writes at the end:

And though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would
never cease, Betty remembered these days – the open fields, the dripping eaves,
the paintings, the law books – as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not
scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.

To appreciate this story we must understand that Betty, a good person, precisely the sort you know and are friends with, could actually believably do this U-turn, and maybe even that you know what she might feel like later if she did.

In mid-career, Updike had grown into his language, his metaphors, his stories. The novel is a whole different issue, for all authors. It is a gigantic project, enormously demanding. It takes time from our limited lives, a couple of years to write if you write steadily, maybe three, and after all that it might suck anyway. It’s in the stories, perfectable in their scale and scope, that you can see the masters handle the rough air of our lives through their characters whom they first have to sell us (with the skillful use of free indirect style) can talk and observe like the masters but also can live and love and be like you and me.

"Passion," by Alice Munro

2008-12-26T05:11:00.000-08:00

A little turn on the old adage: "When the teacher is ready, the student will appear." The wonderful, the spectacular Gretchen Tremoulet, my ex-student and friend, brought me to Alice Munro. I had circled over Munro's work all through the '80's and '90's, watched her appear year after year in the O. Henry and Best American Short Story (BASS) anthologies, and I'd heard our best writers place her high in the list of writers' writers -- somehow I couldn't get there. In the abstract I honored Munro because she stayed with the short story form, much in the way Andre Dubus did, not letting the publishing industry push her out of the approach to fiction that is her art and wheelhouse. But in the case of Munro, as with Updike, we have longevity going for us -- and thus a long career of writing in which we can watch the artist come to full blossom. I've often said the short story, like a poem, is actually perfectable (we have to think that, even if it might not be absolutely true), in a way, sorry, the novel is not, and Alice Munro regularly approaches the rarified air with her stories.

"Passion" appeared in Munro's Runaway collection, one of a number of momentous achievements in that single volume. In this story, our third person limited point of view character Grace returns many years later to a town and a neighborhood where life-changing events occurred back when she was in her early twenties. Driving through this town and finding the old places, almost lost in their changed new world, Grace recalls the events. She had come to this town to work when she was 20 and had become friends with an interesting family -- in fact, it developed that she came very near to marrying one of the sons, falling into a relationship with him because it was so easy to, a matter of convenience. They were both ready to marry, they supposed, and there they were together, and so Destiny seemed to have spoken. However, Grace was not entirely finished with her education, and she was also a little more hot blooded than her prospective husband, who was stable to a fault and a bit boring it must be said, and Grace mourned the loss of excitement and passion that was bound to accompany her tying the knot with this man.

It happened that the family was gathering for a holiday. Grace did look forward to this, because she had a fascination and a soul connection to her prospective husband's parents, who were the original attraction. Holiday at that homestead, and the convergence of their whole family, was something Grace found herself wanting to be a part of. It happened that on the first evening as family was coming together, Grace cut her foot, rather minorly actually but more than could be handled by a bandade, and while everyone sympathized on the front step of the house as she surveyed the damage, her prospective husband's half brother Neil (a doctor, speaking of Destiny) came up the driveway to save the day. Neil, smelling of alcohol and dashing in his confidence, cupped Grace's arch in his healing hand and opined that the injury would take a stitch. And so he drove her to the ER at the local hospital where he was a staff MD and swiftly closed the wound. While they were in the emergency room, Grace's husband-to-be, Neil's brother, arrived in the waiting room and sent in the message he was there to take her home. With Grace sitting there, Neil told the nurse to tell his brother that they had left already. The nurse said, "He'll know you're here because your car's outside." Neil said, "I'm parked in the doctor's lot in the back." "Veeeery clever," the nurse said, and Grace was listening to all this and was into it. Neil looked at her and said, "You don't really want to go home yet, do you?" This brassy presumption on Neil's part was the sort of adventure and passion Grace had feared she would never see again as she slipped into a staid marriage without much thought simply because Destiny seemed to have spoken. "You don't really want to go home yet, do you?" Neil said to her in the emergency room. And Munro writes something like: "No," Grace said as if the word was written on the wall and she was simply reading it. The two slide out of the hospital by a back door and have an adventurous afternoon that turns out to have been the end of Grace's relationship with that family and the beginning of her real life, the one Destiny really did have in store for her.

Because this is a long short story, and very quiet and civilized, it is much like reading a novel. It has two more "turns" of story line than most stories, almost as many as Gatsby which might be four times as long. You do not put down a Munro short story and go, "Huh?" Follow her thread, and you will be rewarded. This is just one of the stories of Munro we could talk about. I raise high a toast, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, to Lady Gretchen for friendship and showing me the way to Alice Munro.

Richard Ford's "Reunion"

2008-12-25T07:09:00.000-08:00

It sounds tricky, of course, but one of the themes in my own work is "what happened to men after what happened to women." I attempted to talk about this in my interview with Nancy Zafris, archived on the Kenyon Review site -- didn't do a very good job of it. The idea is that prior to the women's liberation movement men and women were raised, literally, to relate to one another in certain ways. When the change came, in the 1970's so goes my version of the story, there was an earthquake in the culture as old v. new smashed and ground against one another and as women in the full flush of new possibilities and a scramble for opportunity flexed themselves against their generation of men who were startled and puzzled by how all this was to affect them. Not talking about the men who resisted these changes for women, trying to protect their realm or simply trying to keep things the same so they knew who they were. Talking about those many men who were very happy at these new changes, still are, but did not anticipate the full array of implications. The baby boomer generation that gave us the "summer of love" in '60's was suddenly the generation of divorce. There was a huge scramble. A lot of full grown adults, more than usual by far, were single, or were behaving that way. There was a shakeout going on. It was fairly big and not subtle.

Richard Ford's story "Reunion," from his great collection A Multitutde of Sins, captures a moment, a chance meeting, of two men as they crossed the big main floor of Grand Central Station. One of the men, recently divorced, was waiting for his daughter to arrive on the train. The other was a man who'd had an affair with the divorced man's wife before the divorce. There had been a bad scene in the past, in which the husband caught the two in a hotel and open-hand slapped the guy silly. So that was the history of the two, not having seen each other since, when a couple of years later they chance to cross paths down on the main floor of the giant train station. They exchange polite hellos, neither of them ready to fight some more, but the maneuvers, body language, alpha behaviors, fully deploy. The (ex) husband has a psychological leg up on the other, because the last they met he'd slapped him around. The other guy (Johnny, our bad boy point of view character) has an interest in scoring a couple of points to at least get back to even, even if it's subliminally just by dominating this ostensibly nonconfrontational moment and scene. The (ex) husband finally says for him to leave. He says, "I'm due to meet my daughter right now and for obvious reasons I don't want her to meet you." So Johnny starts to recede, and the (ex) husband says something to him as he departs. He says, "Just so you know, nothing happened here today. Nothing happened." This was his way of saying, "If you were here to even the score, you didn't get it done."

The story is over moments after that. Johnny does a small swirl of narration to try to moderate the appearances of his intent. That is the climax. I suppose there is nothing new about menfighting over a woman. But when you read the story you understand that one reason she and her two men were now alone in this world has to do with forces bigger than marriage and adultery and family and even ego and narcissism and character and good and bad. It's geothermal, somehow, continental plates shifting. The story shows a specific instance of how certain underpinnings, or what used to be underpinnings, are iffy now, culture cracked and consensus gone, at least in our urban society if not in Pinkneyville, Illinois yet, causing a misery of uncertainty and a lot of rough games between people who aren't "bad" but who end up being villains in someone else's story.

Hell, I don't know. There is so much more to this story than what I'm saying -- I'm just trying to make an ordinary point. I'll continue to try to express this in paraphrase, but the wonder of the short story as an art form, and the wonder of Richard Ford's story collection A Multitude of Sins and, for me, this one story, "Reunion," is the SHOWING instead of paraphrasing. As a writer, I think when i've read this one, how can I write something that makes a reader feel what this story made me feel? And whatever that is, how could I ever tell it, let alone show it.

A Few Favorite Stories

2008-12-20T20:16:00.000-08:00

My students know my favorite stories, mostly. Each semester I encounter new ones. But I thought I would say a thing or two about the time-honored faves.

"Helping," by Robert Stone. This story was called to my attention years ago by my writer friend Mary Burns. Stone doesn't write many short stories, but his short story collection The Bear and His Daughter came out in the mid-nineties, and "Helping" was in there. When it was selected for Best American Short Stories in the late '80's, they found it in the New Yorker, I believe. A very smart, tough writer, tough like Hemingway could only dream of being, and far more complex and smart. This story tracks a MSW-type counselor, a Vietnam vet, on the day he comes yet again off the wagon. The story follows him, Elliott, through a series of triggers that result in this lapse, and then we follow him home for the inevitable clash with his lapse-weary wife, Grace. Nothing expected happens, and the sad ending of the story stalwartly occupies the gossamer line between hope and hopelessness that is implied in AA's realistic axiom and admonition, "One day at a time." I always think, this ending is earned. How can I do that in a story?

"Waiting," by Ann Beattie. I'm sure in the old days this was one of the stories that annoyed Beattie's critics, with its minimalist blankness and the numb inevitability of its mysterious ending, so perfectly the feel in the air in the '70's (and it will come again). But after another generation of different sorts of writers has weighed in and processed through, and after all the tone and voice and explicit conflict (a lot of this in reaction to the old minimalism), the worldly realism so fully specified (as in the stories after Carver -- I'm being way too general but trying to describe an evolution), Beattie's first person present tense is new and interesting again and, of course, contrary to her critics, she's not at all limited to it (see "Find and Replace," in her Follies collection). Her character, we're back to "Waiting" now, doesn't know much more than we do, and the story's slow revelation of its situations drags her and us through a day when whole life change is in the air for her. Her husband is gone. She will be moving soon. She will be alone. She will have to sell a lot of stuff. She will be alone. The story literally hangs in the air, like that moment when we reach the apex but haven't quite started down yet. The protagonist is making herself some lunch, and as if things aren't bad enough, she notes in the corner of her eye that her dog is sleeping through food smells in the air. It suddenly hits her the dog may be dead, which would be just her luck at this time. She can't quite look to be sure. She goes onto the front porch, very upset. Someone finally comes by to help her. She's crying. The friend goes inside to get something, water maybe, and she says to him as he goes, "If you see anything wrong, please just take care of it." As with Stone's story, the end leaves much hanging, but the dog finally comes wagging to the screen door and is fine -- letting us know that this at least was a worry that would turn out okay; and so, trapped inside this woman's point of view, we wonder what else in her story is mere sadness and panic over things that aren't quite that bad and what is rational and much to be worried about. A very little story, masterfully representing an important stage we went through in short fiction that, make no mistake, informs the new wave and will come again. There is so much for the story writer to learn from this wise master.

"Customs of the Country," by Madison Smartt Bell. Like "Helping," this story was in Best American Short Stories in the late eighties. This story, too, was pointed out to me by Mary Burns. Bell writes it from the third person point of view of a struggling addict, a waitress, who alternates between violence toward her child (which results in hospitalization followed by foster care) and miserable lonely efforts to rehab herself in the eyes of the court and get her child back. She lives in an apartment in a miserable little apartment building that I picture as being like a two storey motel. The walls are very thin, and next door there's a couple. The male of the down and out duo next door is always wham bamming the woman, sending her crashing against the wall, knocking a cast iron pan off the wall of our character's kitchen onto the stove and then to the floor causing a nerve jangling clatter. This story too (Like "Helping") depicts the hopelessness of her situation and attempts to explain what her spiral is like, why she can't actually recover, why she can't actually get on top of her problems, why, instead, something very bad is likely to happen. Extremely well written, the story delivers a startling blow at the end and you're not likely to forget it.

Later I will talk a bit about "Design," by Richard Bausch; "Find and Replace," by Ann Beattie; "Passion," by Alice Munro, "Reunion," by Richard Ford; and "A Constellation of Events," by John Updike. In some sense, all of these stories are like Edward Hopper's wondrous "Nighthawks," capturing a small constellation of people in a frame -- giving us not only the tableau but the characters and the context in such close detail that we realize we could never have predicted the end and yet, in retrospect (I so love this), the ending we get is the only outcome that could ever have happened. Oh, and in these stories I like, the "ending" is never quite the end -- life will go on, the stir of issues and swirl of complexity will continue, the people flexing themselves against it all will show what they're made of on and on. When I write my own stories, these (and perhaps 50 others) play in my mind, their voices and their characters and the writing. Even though I know I can't quite get to their level, the journey is great and these master writers, in their best work, point the way.

Tell me some other short stories I should be sure to look at and why.

The Long Short Story

2008-12-19T20:15:00.000-08:00

These days I'm thinking a lot about the long short story, in the terms Richard Ford established -- a long short story being just short of a novella in length. Whereas the novella is "designed" with an arc like a novel, the long short story has an arc like short fiction. We know the boundaries between these forms are rough and fuzzy. But for discussion, the long short story would be no longer than 15,000 words. The idea is that it is a long work of fiction that is not long enough to be bound in book form by itself. Normally the long short story is too long for the litmags, but fits nicely in a collection of stories, often serving as the anchor tenant. "Brokeback Mountain," in Annie Proulx's famous story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories might be an example (although most of those stories are pretty long and I think "Brokeback..." played in the New Yorker). I'm not sure, but many Alice Munro stories have the long arc I'm thinking of, for example her "Passion" and "Silent" from the Runaway collection. I have a notion that online publishing might be perfect for the long short story, often as engaging and absorbing as a novel and at the same time with that graceful story arc that requires only an hour to read yet allows complexity and more than one turn before coming in for a landing. Can you name some other authors who write these or specific stories that fit this description?