Megan Stielstra's Blog

Thanks to everyone who came to the Hideout last week for our silly retelling of the Twelve Days of Christmas, especially those of you drank enough beer to sing along. A couple of my former students were there (former as of two weeks ago when the semester ended, which is why I now have the time to deliver the mothership of a post you’re currently reading) and we got to chatting about inspiration. “What keeps you inspired?” one of them asked, and I don’t remember what I said exactly, something about doing readings, and sitting around with guys like Jonathan and Brian and coming up with silly retellings of Christmas songs—just swapping ideas and making each other laugh.

You know how sometimes you have a conversation with someone, and a day or so later you think of what you should’ve said? Like, you come up with something way wittier, or more intelligent, or honest, and wish you could call up that person and say, “Hey, remember yesterday when you said blah blah and I said blah blah? I’ve had some time to think that over and how I should’ve responded is—” but of course you can’t do that ‘cause it’s just not appropriate and the other person probably won’t even remember what the hell you’re even talking about.

What I’m talking about is inspiration, and how I answered that question doesn’t even skim the surface. So, Dear Sam: Remember last week when you said, ‘What keeps you inspired’ and I said doing readings and coming up with silly stuff? Well, that’s part of it. So is hanging out with friends, and listening to myself tell stories, and figuring out what they liked and wanted to hear more of. Also: music and film and theater and all sorts of art that’s story-centered. Also: the news/what’s going on in this crazy world/how that touches people. Also: being in love and wanting to be a better person (that said, the SEARCH for love was pretty goddamn inspiring—the good parts AND the bad—for, at the very least, the MATERIAL it gave me). Also: my dog, who gets me outside everyday to look around and watch everyday life as it exists outside my imagination. Also: all sorts of stuff like Kung-fu movies and Marc Chagall and Anthony Terenin and The House Theater and Mary Zimmerman’s new one at the Goodman and my dad telling me hunting stories and my home—I have a home! A calm, beautiful place that’s mine—and traveling and writing in my journal and my students and loads of other stuff but most of all, Sam, what I should’ve said was this:

I read and I read and I read. Just now it’s Bluebired Used to Croon in the Choir by Meno, the Shirer biography of Gandhi and Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov. Now that the semester is finished, I’ve got time to play catch up. So far as I’m concerned, it’s awfully luxurious to sit down with a glass of wine and a new book and know you’ve got a few hours to kill. No papers, nowhere to be, just an empty journal and pages to turn. I just placed a big ol’ order from Abe Books of stuff I’ve been wanting to dig into. A partial list:

1. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (usually I don’t buy the new releases, only because I have a tendency to break the bank on books and I’d rather have two paperbacks than one hardback, but, holy fuck, I read an excerpt and needed it immediately. Needed it. Like a drug. Not ‘cause I have to know what happens—she begins the book with what happens—but because I have to know how she gets THROUGH what happens)
2. Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx (because Oh My God I loved The Shipping News and Oh My God how does she DO that shit in a SHORT STORY and Oh My God I saw the movie last Friday and it was gorgeous—besides how much I love Ang Lee’s stuff, and besides how long overdue I think this film and its story are in our culture, and besides I’ve never in my life been to a sold-out eleven a.m. MATINEE, I hurt so much for Ennis and Alma that not even once did I think about how sexy Jake Gyllenhall is, and I’m of the Jake Gyllenhall is waaay sexy camp—that’s how fuckin’ GOOD this film is!—and Oh My God Annie Proulx is just totally badass )
3. Mothers and Other Monsters, Maureen McHugh (in the Top Five at Bookslut AND GirlReaction, two sites I stalk because I trust the reviewers, high praise indeed because I am, in general, skeptical of reviewers).
AND—
4. Willfull Creatures, Aimee Bender
5. Pricksongs and Descants, Coover
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (no I HAVEN’T read it yet. I’ve been BUSY)
7. Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link (Who got to open for Magnetic FIELDS!)
8. Man Without a Country, Vonnegut
9. About Grace, Anthony Doerr (Looved The Shell Collector. Looved with multiple O’s)
10. Grapes of Wrath, Steinback (yes, yes I KNOW!)

(I cut myself at ten books to an order. So that’s ten)

ALSO, every year I give another read to my old standbys, which is always incredibly inspiring because I always notice different things, which can mean either (but hopefully both) that A. these books stand the test of time and B. I’m growing as a writer/human and can better recognize the complexities of both how they’re told and what they’re telling. There are lots of these, but for now I’ll mention Faulkner’s Light in August because I’m rereading it right now. Like, I’m halfway through (again. And again and again) and he does this thing where he puts all the internal point of view of a character in italics. The point of view is a sort of close vantage point third person, so he could just give their thoughts within the narrative, but the voice in the italics really contrasts to the voice of the overall storyteller, so I’m figuring that’s why: he doesn’t just want to give you their thoughts, he wants to give you the way they’re thinking. Also: the passages in italics never have periods at the end of them. There’s just two spaces and then the third person text picks up again, so you get the impression that the internal point of view is still going, we’re just going to step out of it and WATCH what’s happening for a while, so what you’re really getting is the thought and the action at the same fucking time. Okay, fine, I’ve noticed this and ripped it off like a thousand times, but there’s this big chunk of italics at the beginning of the chapter where Joe went out with that white waitress, Bobbie, and I just realized that he’s knocked out immediately prior to that moment, so it’s not his thoughts we’re getting there—he’s friggin’ unconscious!—it’s his subconscious REMEMBERING his thoughts of the scene where he gets knocked out! And I’m like, how the hell do you even DO that in text? WTF, Faulkner! And that, Sam, that shit is supremely inspiring to me. The same way the symphony does, or Andrew Bird or Jeunet’s films or something … how do you craft something like that while still keeping me in the story? How do YOU do it, and how do I do it? And then I just want to go write. Period. And I can give you a thousand examples like that of stuff I read. I read a lot of writer’s journals, also. I’m constantly putzing around in Kafka’s journals—because I read them and want to immediately go write in my own. Because you’re seeing history happen in that exact moment … he’s writing about Felice or Milena or his problems with his dad or problems with his writing, but all around him the war is beginning, and then happening, and then ending, and the realization that my journal can also be that, a document of some sort of history not just of me but of the greater world is a total Jedi mind-fuck as far as I’m concerned. Do I consider my life as important as Kafka’s? Hell no. Do I consider the time I’m living in to be as important as the time he was living in? Absolutely. Also: I dig the form. The present-tenseness of it all. Like how you imagine your kids asking what you doing on September 11th, or when Katrina hit. I’ve got it down. I can look it up (and what’ll really blow your mind as when you try to figure out if what I wrote is fiction. Which is a whole different conversation, one I’ve had often with purists who are all How can you fictionalize your journal? That’s a place for truth! And I say Sure, but what exactly IS truth? and then we’re getting all sorts of philosophical and while I can hold my own in those discussions I’d really prefer to have a Makers and hear some good stories). I also read Nin’s journals, not so much as a historical document ‘cause I know she made up a shit-ton of everything in there, but because it’s a good READ. BECAUSE she made up so much of it. She is my guilty pleasure, not unlike Kelly Clarkston and US magazine and this).

What I’m saying here, Sam, is that all that stuff I talked about in class is for real. It’s what I do everyday—not just to get excited about writing, but, rather, to get excited about writing WELL.