Tag Archives: reading

Today Was a Shining Success; Today Was a Spectacular Failure

I’m contributing to the Write Like Hell blog at Hyptertext, where writers document the process of working on a novel-length project. Here’s my first post:

I write a little every day, without hope, without despair—Isak Dinesen

What’s scary isn’t the writing, it’s living with the writing. I’m afraid that if I say, Today is day one, Today we are beginning the life of Writing This Book, that I’ll fail before I even get started. I’ve failed before. I have many excuses, so many reasons to put it to the side: my kid, my job, my other job, my other other job, sleep, students, other deadlines, readings, mortgage, so tired, so many things to worry about—but fuck it. It’s time. I’m reading Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel—and P.S. where has this book been my whole life? How have I never read it? It’s the journal he kept while writing East of Eden, one of my very favorite books, my child is named after that book and now, at the age of thirty-six, I’m reading it for the very first time?

Maybe it’s because now is when I need it.

Here’s the gist: he wrote a little bit to his editor, every morning, before he worked on the book; he credits these little letters with allowing him to get into the writing, clearing his head enough so he could focus and find his words. I tried that today and it worked—it worked! It worked! 1000 new wonderful, messy, not-yet-right but still there, existing on the page, moving forward words! I’d like to keep that pace up every day, but it’s not realistic. 500 is realistic. I can make 500 happen. Steinbeck keeps talking about taking it slow. He says, “As I go on, my happiness increases,” and I need to remind myself of this, again and again. My happiness will increase. The part of me that’s felt off, crazy, furious all the goddamn time, is because I haven’t been writing this book. It’s because I’ve been working on every other possible thing, the easy stuff—no, not easy, just… the stuff that has an end in sight, essays, mostly, and short stories, things I can finish in one or two or five sittings. Done and done. But in the back of my mind is this story, this book—and it is big.

Last year, when I tried to sit down and make it happen, tried to get myself on a schedule, I kept banging my head against this idea that it had to be about one thing, like with an essay, or the pieces I write for 2nd Story. Then, I was reading Shirer’s bio of the Tolstoys and found this:

Anna Karennina remains one of the great works of the imagination, a moving tale of two very opposite love affairs… But it is much more than that. It is at the same time an ode to life, to human courage and endurance, a pleas for understanding and a tolerance of those who fail and fall, a devastating critique of a cruel and corrupt society, and a deep inquiry into the questions that troubled the author all his life: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the meaning, if any, of life—and death? (Love and Hatred, pg. 79).

It hit me, a brick to the forehead, and God, what a simple, obvious thing: A novel doesn’t have to be about one thing. It can be about twenty, forty, a hundred. I don’t have to chose. At least not before I even get started, and when I say started, I don’t mean out of the clear blue sky, facing down a blank page. I’ve been working on this thing for a while now, chunks and instances and journal entires, like puzzle pieces. I saw a video recently of Anne Rice talking to a group of high school students, and she said each of her novels took years of thinking, of journaling, and then when she finally sat down to write it would come quickly, easily, because she already saw so much of it in her head. And I’m like—okay. That. That’s how this is going to work, right? Those 1000 words I just wrote?—cake. And why wouldn’t they be? I’ve been kicking around this story for years. I can taste it almost, some two hundred some pages of What the Fuck already written.

Now it’s about putting it together, finding what I want to give to an audience, what I want to—as they say—say.

It’s about committing to the life of Writing This Book.

*

Here’s the thing: you set aside time to write and then when you get to that time, you’re exhausted. I swear, I had time today, but I spent yesterday doing an eight hour long workshop on professional documentation, working with thirty faculty members on cv’s, teaching philosophies, portfolios and cover letters, and then my brain felt heavy, like I was carrying concrete up there instead of light, airy tissue, and then—then—I got home and my little boy runs to hug me, Look at this spaceship I built, Mommy, and I have to chose.

Either way I go, there is guilt. There is always, always, always guilt.

This is where the Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel does me a diservice: he had money coming in already from scripts and other projects, so he could wake up in the morning and write, and then hang with his family and rest. I don’t have that luxury. I don’t need his journal. I need Toni Morrison, who’d work all day and then come home at the end to take care of her family and then have to summon the energy to write at night. How did she find that energy? I bow before that woman, for a thousand of reasons, not the least of which is she was a single mom, so not only was she doing it, she was doing it on her own. I am not on my own, I am lucky in a thousand ways: supportive partner; healthy, awesome kid; a job that I love, that I’m good at; and I’ll have the time tomorrow for this novel, right?

Right?

My daughter can read just fine.

When I was in 3rd grade—maybe 4th?—my teacher called my mother in to tell her I was failing reading. My memory of this moment is fits and spurts: I remember mom and I sitting in little-kid desks across from the teacher in her ginormous teacher-desk. I remember being scared I was in trouble; your mom gets called in, that means you screwed up, right? I remember the classroom was on the 2nd floor, with windows overlooking the playground, and there were seesaws shaped like sea animals. My mom has since filled in the blanks for much of what happened: apparently, there were these workbooks we were supposed to read, with stories about frogs and cats and stuff, and we had to fill out multiple choice worksheets: A. the frog is happy B. the frog is sad C. the frog is thinking, etc. My teacher showed my mother my worksheets; all the multiple choice questions were wrong, big red X’s through the A’s and B’s and C’s.

I do remember this next part: my mother looked at me and smiled. What my teacher didn’t know was that my mom has a Master’s in early childhood education and was then designing a K-5 Gifted and Talented program for Washtenaw County. You want to hear a thing or two about kids and reading? Take my mom out for a beer—but more important than that? I was her kid. You don’t need a Master’s degree to be an expert in your own eight-year-old.  I remember she held up the workbook with the frog story and asked, “Megan. Did you read this?” I shook my head no. Mom tapped the stack of workbooks on the teacher’s desk, a semester’s worth of stories about frogs, and asked, “Did you read any of these?” Again, I shook my head. “What were you reading instead?” she asked, and I went to my desk, got the dogeared copy of Little Women, and brought it back to my mother, who thumbed through its pages—somewhere around 400, depending on your edition—and asked me to tell her about it. I remember my fear of the teacher, the classroom, the workbooks—all of it fell away as I told my mom about how Jo didn’t want to get married, how the girls all helped that family at Christmas, how Beth died (to this day, that scene makes me cry). I loved that book, especially ‘cause it was about sisters, and I wanted sisters—in retrospect the March girls kind of were my sisters. I profoundly believe in the relationships we have with fictional characters; what they teach us, how they help us grow and see the world and see ourselves—anyhow. I remember my mother patting me on the shoulder. Then she turned and, very slowly, very purposefully, gave my teacher a look. I will never forget that look for as long as I live. It held fury and pride and a rapidly brewing thunderstorm of words. Heavy words. Dangerous ones. Over the years, I’ve been grateful that—no matter how much stupid shit I pulled—my mother never looked at me with that look, and it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I truly understood its magnitude.

Three decades later, as an educator myself, I think about that teacher making such a snap judgement about my reading ability. Her assessment could have changed my life completely; at worst, I could’ve been held back, and at—not best; no, a different kind of worst—I was being labeled: Can’t Read. Granted, labels can be helpful, offering much-needed support for a myrid of challenges kids are up against, but they also have a lasting impact on a kid’s psyche and should be treated with care. Can I tell you how many college students come to my classes with horror stories of What Teachers Told Them? You can’t read, you can’t write, you’re dumb, you’re bad, and then teachers tell parents and sometimes parents believe it because teachers are the experts, right? And the parents, they’re tired, overworked—believe me, I’m a parent, I know tired and overworked, but I’m also a teacher, I know tired and overstuffed classrooms, I know too many students and too much student work, I know too many hours and not enough to pay my mortgage and how do you manage it all? Do you take shortcuts? And what might those shortcuts do to the student in the long run? What I’m trying to say here is that my teacher screwed up, yes, but to say this is entirely her fault is a whole other systematic problem that needs to be addressed. It’s not as easy as “Some teachers are good and some are bad and let’s make these oversimplified judgements by testing students on reading comprehension when maybe, just maybe, kids are filling out those multiple choice questions without even reading about the fucking frog!”

Imagine where my life might have gone had my mother not been the woman she is—my advocate, my watchdog, my parent, and FYI, I’d like to include the idea of “significant adult” into this diatribe here, ‘cause I’ve known many awesome kids raised by aunts or grandparents or foster parents or friends or a million other amazing, selfless people who want to make this world a better place for their kid and everyone’s kids and to all of you, I say Thank You.

To my mom, I say Thank You. I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands—

(lots of books, many of which are on the banned books list, about which I could write a whole other blog post but this very smart woman, M. Molly Backes, says everything I want to very eloquently here).

—my mother put books in my hands, and read them with me, and asked me what I thought about them, and listened as I told her, and gave me other books to read based on what I told her, for years she did this, she still does this—so imagine, after all of that, being told by some teacher who barely knew me that I couldn’t read? I’m not a religious person, but Lord Almighty! What would you have done, sitting in that little-kid desk as someone told you something untrue about your very own child?

My mom is a dignified lady. I try very hard to follow her example, and more often than not, I fail. I tend to turn red, fly off the handle, let the words out of my mouth before thinking them through. Over the years, I’ve learned that this approach doesn’t do anyone any good, and there’ve been many times when, on the edge of exploding all over the place, I’ve summoned up the memory of my mother that day. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. She smiled. Then she said, “As you can see, my daughter can read just fine.” My teacher must have said something here. Or maybe she just took off her foot and stuck it in her mouth? I don’t remember. What I do remember is my mother calmly explaining, in a voice that offered no room for discussion, a voice not unlike the Book of Genesis, that this teacher would no longer have anything to do with my English education. I would come to class every day and do math and science and social studies with everyone else, but when the rest of the class did their reading and their workbooks, I would be doing assignments that she—my mother—would send to school. Then she—my mother—would grade those assignments and she—my mother—would share that grade with her—the teacher—and if there were any questions about all of this, perhaps they should set up an appointment with the Superintendent of Schools?

My mother is a badass.

For the rest of the year, when everyone else would read about frogs and fill out their multiple choice, I would read the books my mother gave me: Charlotte’s Web; The Great Gilly Hopkins; Bridge to Terabithia; Where the Red Fern Grows; Ramona Quimby; A Wrinkle in Time; Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinely and Me, Elizabeth; The Egypt Game; A Cricket in Times Square; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM; Jacob Two-two and the Hooded Fang; The Pushcart War; Island of the Blue Dolphins; and on and on. I had lots of spiral-bound notebooks full of questions, not multiple choice questions but questions, ones I had to think through and explain, ones that brought me to new questions that I had to think through, explain, and often talk about with my mom and dad and, look at that! Now we’re talking about the world! And suddenly reading means this whole other thing to me: I’m not just watching the characters of Karana and Rontu and Rontu-Aru running around on the island of blue dolphins, I’m imagining myself there with them. I’m seeing it all from their point of view, and for a little girl growing up in  small-town Southeast Michigan, seeing the world through the eyes of a little girl growing up in Ghalas-at on San Nicolas Island was a gift.

What a profound introduction to literature! I remember reading about Karana and wondering why things she does after her father and brother die, things like hunting and fishing , were traditionally only tasks for men. My dad took me hunting and fishing, and I was a girl! I look back and laugh at this childhood outrage, but I’m grateful for it, too. There I am, eight years old, starting to think over some pretty fucking big truths. Here’s another truth: I didn’t know what foster care was, or that some children didn’t have parents, until I read The Great Gilly Hopkins. The kind of kid I was back then lived in a sort of bubble: your own home and neighborhood and school. I remember that book changing the way I thought about gratitude and survival and perseverence and starting a dialogue about privilege that I’m still, to this day, trying to work through and learn about. I’ve had that experience with a lot of books over the past twenty years—through reading, I learn about points of view that are different than my own. It starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t before seen. It inspires me to share this same gift to others. That’s why I write. That’s why I teach writing. And all of this started back in that 3rd—or was it 4th?—grade classroom.

It all started with my mom.

Interview for Hypertext

I did this super-fun and slightly insane interview about Everyone Remain Calm for Hypertext. I talked for like an hour about artists that influence me. I talked about the fictional characters I’d like to sleep with. I talked and talked and laughed a lot, and figured out some things about myself that I didn’t really know before. The best kind! (thanks, Chris!).

Thank you for writing about a character with the Incredible Hulk under her bed. Why do you think other writers don’t come clean about those kinds of relationships? I mean, no one talks about it. It’s the last frontier. 

There’s this scene in Love in the Time of the Cholera when Florentino Ariza runs into Fermina Daza in the market. He was totally in love with her; she stomped all over his heart; now she’s standing there with her new husband and Florentino looks at him and thinks, This man has to die. I was going through a break-up myself at the time, I’d just bumped into my ex and his new girlfriend, and reading that scene was like, Yes! That’s it exactly! It’s a feeling I’d wager everyone has experienced at some point, but of course, you can’t admit it. You have to move on! You have to be the bigger person!—but in secret? Your imagination is on fire.

So there I was, a twenty-year-old girl in Chicago in 2000, connecting with some Columbian guy in the early 1800′s, all because of the very honest admission of a  secret feeling. I love this about fiction; those moments where I connect with the characters. I’ve seen myself in Florentino Ariza, in Lena Grove, in Ivan Yakovlevich and Jimmy Cross and Alice Kingsleigh and on and on. It’s fucking fascinating, and, I hope, opens me up more to finding connections in my day-to-day life. If I can see myself in these fictional characters, why not the guy next to me on the bus? The woman on TV with the fundamentally different political beliefs? People of different backgrounds and cultures and experiences—and to think someone might read my stuff and find their secrets, somehow, within it? It blows my mind.

Here’s the secret about my Hulk story: for a long time, the relationships I had in my head were more fulfilling than those I had in real life. At the time, I was reading a lot of Kafka, and he does this thing where he gives a concrete, visual image to an abstract feeling or concept. Don’t want to go to work? Okay, now you’re a cockroach. The justice system is fucked up? Okay, here’s this whacked-out machine. I thought, Let’s give this secret of mine a concrete image. Let’s give it the Incredible Hulk.

I have conversations all the time with people about the fictional characters they want to have relationships with (and/or sleep with). Can there be a comment section at the end of this interview and people can write in their list? Everyone’s got a list. Mine goes like this: 1. The Hulk 2. Indiana Jones 3. Seven of Nine 4. Jose Arcadio 5. Luke Duke.

Chicago and Michigan. Alaska. Chicago, Michigan and Alaska. What’s the connection? What’s the attraction to those places besides living there? Why plop your characters in them?  Why not Miami?  Or L.A.?  Somewhere where people eat jicama and are addicted to Botox? What does ‘place’ do for you as a writer?

For me, place is the guts of the whole damn thing. It affects everything: first in a very immediate way dictated by the space; like, I’m thinking of that scene in Kill Bill where the two blondes are kicking the shit out of each other in a trailer. Uma Thurman keeps trying to pull out her samurai sword to behead the chick with the eyepatch, but she can’t get it out of its sheath ’cause the ceiling in the trailer is too low. If that space had a higher ceiling, the scene would have been over in ten seconds. And then there’s the more abstract way of how the characters relate to and act within the place. For example, I act differently in my home than I do in public, in places I know versus places I’ve never been, in different countries, time periods, etc. I’m big into the sci-fi and other-worldy stuff, and the trick is creating the world that the characters inhabit. It’s not any different writing about Chicago, Michigan, and Alaska (all places I’ve lived, by the way). You have to create those worlds. My Chicago is different than yours. My Chicago now is different than it was ten years ago. My Chicago is different than the Chicago of some of my fictional characters.

I could spend my whole life writing about only Chicago and never begin to crack its surface. To really get the complexity of a place, I think, you need to see it through the eyes of lots of different voices/backgrounds/experiences. You also need real specifics, the place within the place within the place; like Leo’s Lunchroom in Wicker Park in Chicago in 1999. The Uptown Theatre in Uptown in Chicago in 1940.  Women and Children First in Andersonville in Chicago in 2010. I’m working on a novel right now—which, incidentally, is set in Chicago, Michigan, Alaska, and Prague—and the magnitude of research I’m swimming through to really understand these characters and their experiences is just crazy. Awesome, but crazy. What did Chicago mean to a Czech immigrant in 1968? What does it mean to a college student from Michigan in 1995? To a new mom in 2008?

Honestly, it feels less like I’m consciously choosing place, and more like the characters I come up with tell me where they’re from; I just listen and try to do them justice. L.A. will show up if one of my characters makes it happen. Or if I get an assignment to write about it, in which case I’ll make it happen. Or maybe at the end of this month, since I’m going to L.A. for a conference. Or, shit—maybe I’ll write about it tomorrow, ’cause now you’ve got me thinking.

These characters, I’m thinking, in particular, about Penny in ‘The Boot’, are desperate in some way.  They’re all seeking something (the Dad in ‘Shot To The Lungs and No Breath Left’, Shelly, Penny, everyone in ‘Times Are Tough All Over’, Eliza).  And, yet, there seems to be this incredible hopefulness in all of the stories.  Amidst all of this emotional or economic desolation there’s an escape.  Can you talk about that a little bit?

I was recently hanging out with my friend Bobby, and somebody asked him if he believed in love at first sight. He said yes and they asked why and he said, “I don’t want to live in a world where it doesn’t exist.” That’s how I feel: I don’t want to live in a world where hope doesn’t exist. I can tell you all sorts of stories about desperation or fear or anger, but for me the most important part is knowing how the characters react under such circumstances. You can either say, This is scary, let’s hide under the bed, or This is scary and here I go.

So, I get to ‘Professional Development’ and I’m along for the ride, in fact you’ve got a hook in my lip and I’m just letting the current take me, and, I’m thinking, ‘What a shift!  This is so realistic.’ (Not that ‘Incredible’ wasn’t) I’m along for the ride, though, as I said, and then things start to shift back again into that world between reality and a very realistic dream-reality (which is where most of these stories hang) and I’m completely buying it. I’m right there with the band. It doesn’t seem fantastic at all. It just seems like the reality you’ve created. Why is that odd reality something that attracts you as a writer?  Why do you feel comfortable there?

The psychology 101 answer is that I was an only child from a very small town, and what saves you is your imagination. Imagination, and the library. I remember spending a lot of time in the creek behind the house, looking for fairies. That scene in Times Are Tough all Over where the girl catches all the frogs and kisses them?—that was me.

I’m really attracted to the phrase What if. What if the marching band follows me home? What if the guy sells pee for a living? What if a tidal wave of hot lava poured down the hall? It’s such a good gateway into storytelling, whether you’re writing the very realistically real or the totally fantastic real. It also makes even the simple acts of walking down the street or grocery shopping—those deadly mundane things—so much more interesting! Seriously, what if there are ninjas in the produce section?

Not to go all crazy with the Kafka, but reading The Metamorphosis was a big lightbulb sort of moment for me. I was on the el, on the way to a job that I hated, thinking Gregor doesn’t want to go to work either, so he turns into a bug. The realization that I could make something magical, dreamlike, or cracked-out happen to someone in response to a very realistic, universal emotion was a huge revelation. And then somebody gave me Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to this day my favorite writer, and that’s when I started really thinking about magical realism and how it might fit into my life—here, now, in Chicago. I also love Murakami, Allende, Vonnegut, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Geek Love, my friends Joe Meno and Elizabeth Crane, all sorts of sci-fi and fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Carnival, The Matrix, The Shining, that crazy scene in Magnolia where it starts raining frogs, anything that explores a… let’s say tilted view of reality. I also think magical realism is a really fascinating way to tackle political commentary, which is becoming more and more important to me as I get older and became—how do I want to say this?—a more engaged citizen. I think our world can be better. I think art can help accomplish that.

I like the transition/placement of ‘One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand, Three’ after ‘Professional Development’.  How much did you think about story placement?  Or is it the way the stories came to you?

I wish I had something really profound to say, like I ordered the stories mathematically or in accordance with the tides, but the truth is: it didn’t cross my mind until a week before the final draft was due. See, like most everyone—I’m busy. I have three jobs and a three-year-old. At this point in my life, writing time is precious, guarded, the last canteen when you’re lost in the desert. I spend it on the actual physical act of writing, the Ass In Chair sort of thing, and at that time I was locked in to rewriting each individual story as opposed to examining the book as a complete movement.

My friend Leif has a farm in Michigan, this stunning, peaceful place with the pond and the land and everything opposite of my life in Chicago. I called him totally panicked, crying about deadlines, about noise—not the noise of the city but the noise of life in general and how can one be reflective, or think critically, or even daydream for that matter with all this go-go-go, at which point he was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” and I said, “I need to come to the farm,” and he said, “Oh, cool. I’ll get wine.” I am eternally grateful to him for that time, that room of one’s own. I spent a desperately needed week just… sitting, rereading the stories and trying to examine how they all fit together. I wrote the story titles on post-it notes, laid them on the floor in the solarium, and moved them back and forth. I’d switch two of them, stare at them for an hour, and then move them back. How did they fit together? Tone, point of view, subject matter, realism to magical stuff, lengthwise? My work as a curator for 2nd Story really came into play here: instead of finding the connections between multiple storytellers, I had to find them in myself.

There’s something interesting happening with time in ‘One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand, Three.’ In fact, in most of the stories. Can you talk a little bit about how you use time in the structure of your stories? 

I was rereading American Skin, and in the beginning there’s this fight scene that totally kills me: it starts with the narrator getting on the el, and ends when he gets off of it. That’s it. On and off. It seems like writers are always having the whole How do you know when the story is done conversation, and the simplicity of that structure blew my mind. I tried it with One-One Thousand, this thing I’d been working on where a girl is stuck skinny-dipping in a quarry: story starts when she gets in the water and ends when she gets out of it. That’s what determined time: how long can you tread water? How cold does the water get after the sun goes down? What does your skin look like?

It’s helpful for me, when I’m finishing a story, to think about how much time moves within it. Shot to the Lungs covers about a half hour. The Boot happens over several months, however long it takes Penny to walk off the weight. In Logic, the narrator is a waitress, so time moves by her counting coffee refills. It’s about what makes sense to the characters, the worlds they inhabit, and what’s going on in the particular moment. I have a story I perform for 2nd Story about pregnancy tests, and it moves in real time as you wait for the stick to turn blue or pink.

(I ripped that off 24).

(I really like Jack Bauer. Maybe he could live under my bed).

There’s this kind of fascination with the modern world and the hoops through which we’re expected to jump.  It’s like, as an artist, you’re saying, ‘This is all just so complex and weird…when did it get like this?’  Your characters have to negotiate through all the shit (‘I Asked The Guy Why Are You So Fly?’). Do you feel that way or is it limited to the characters on your pages?

I feel that way for sure. There are all sorts of hoops, many of them shitty and unfair and totally irrational, but when I finally get some distance and am able to look back on the moment reflectively (i.e. I’m not pissed off about it anymore), it’s easy to see the profound part of the experience as well.

I originally wrote I Asked the Guy Why Are You So Fly? for this super-awesome performance series called The Dollar Store. The host, Jonathan Messinger, gave a bunch of writers and performers and musicians an item from the dollar store, and we had to come up with something around that item. Mine was a plastic marijuana leaf on a chain. Which made me think of those giant bling necklaces guys used to wear on MTV. Which made me think of the song Funky Comedina by Tone Loc that played on the radio during the Eighties.  It was a funny gimmick, but I didn’t want a gimmick—I wanted a story. At the time, I was in the middle of dating a bunch of people, trying to find The One, that insane all-consuming search. Want to talk about jumping hoops? About complex and weird? Shit, there’s a reason there are so many stories and books and movies and plays and sitcoms and songs and operas and poems about looking for love. Out of all the ridiculous situations we find ourselves in, a date with Tone Loc seemed pretty tame.

You’re an oral storyteller, too.  I hear you very clearly on the page and have heard at least one of these stories told orally.  What’s the connection between oral storytelling and printed work?  What’s different?  How much does live performance – gesture, voice intonation, pauses, etc., – overlap with what’s happening on the page?  How is it different?

I paid for college waiting tables: in the mornings I read Tolstoy and Morrison and Christina Stead, and at night I poured drinks and listened to people of varying levels of intoxication. It really struck me that the books I was reading and the stories I was hearing had all these profound similarities in voice, craft, and intention. People tell stories to connect. To explain, escape, seduce, educate—connect.

For me, the story on the page and the story told aloud are one and the same. I write  for an audience, and I’d like the audience to read my work on the page the same way I’d read it aloud. I’m interested in the craft of that—voice, punctuation, word choice, pacing. Have you read The Tell-Tale Heart? It’s not possible to read that story without yelling at certain moments. HOW DID POE DO THAT? HE MAKES YOU YELL. It’s amazing; it’s craft; and I’m interested in how the craft of performance influences the craft of writing. A lot of this comes from my training in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, where the oral telling is a large part of the writing process, and also my work with 2nd Story, where we’ve spent the better part of a decade experimenting with this stuff. I get really excited about it, obviously, but I can also get all fancy and scholarly. Give me a sec to put my hair in a bun.

Can you explain the popularity of the Foo Fighters?

I cannot.

I got a bit misty at the end of ‘Greek or Czeck or Japanese’.  Do you think that’s fair to lay on your readers?  I mean, we’ve got a lot on our plates.  Why should a story elicit those emotions? Why put your readers through this?

I watch a lot of bad movies (if my husband were here, he’d be nodding vigorously right now). I love ones that are really, really awful, but also wonderful, preferably with lots of gratuitous explosions. I like a good fight scene, I like drama, I like watching characters react when they’re really challenged in some way. But people are challenged in small ways, too. I tried to think about finding balance between some of those giant, overwhelming things, like in the title story where the girls mom gets squashed by a tornado, and those seemingly small moments that are actually huge, like in One-One Thousand where a 14-year-old girl lets a boy see her naked. All she does is get up, out of the water, but for her, it’s the greatest challenge I could’ve thrown her way. Greek or Czech or Japanese was, for me, another one about challenges. Having a kid in this world? My God. Even getting married, putting your heart in someone else’s hands? What a profound act of bravery.

I think the emotional reactions we have to stories—or any kind of art, for that matter—is more about what’s inside us than necessarily what the artist intended. There’s this scene in the movie Things You Can Tell By Looking At Her where Holly Hunter walks down a street and cries. That’s all that happens. She walks down the street and cries, and every time I see that scene, I lose it. I am a puddle on the floor, the gaspy, gulpy kind of crying where you can’t control the sides of your mouth. Every time I watch it, I think, Okay, here it comes, hold it together—but I can’t. Something just erupts.

It’s kind of beautiful,. I think.

‘Oscar and Veronica’ has the acidity of Tennessee Williams and oaky hints of Woody Allen.  How much are you influenced by other artists? 

Careful. I can talk about this for a really long time.

Bradbury’s got a great line about stuffing yourself with all kinds of stories and art so every morning you can explode like Old Faithful. He says, “I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.” I love that. It’s a fucking way of life: I read books. I read literary journals and student work and 2nd Story stories. My husband curates an art blog and every day is like, Look at these sculptures,! Look at these photographs! Look at these paintings made from wine and wax and gravity! There’s always art coming in. My challenge is figuring out what I  can learn from it: about craft; about the world; about myself.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the magical stuff, but I also really get off on art that makes reality seem so fucking real, you have to punch the wall. I’m looking at you, Nina Simone, and you, Adele—have you heard Adele sing Someone Like You? That song makes me die. How can I write a page of text with even a fraction of that emotion? And PJ Harvey!—google PJ Harvey singing Rid of Me in Sydney. She’s seriously going to jump through your computer and cut your arm off, which I totally get; I’ve had days where I want to cut somebody, too—but here’s the thing: I won’t. I’m too nice. PJ Harvey’s probably too nice, too, but in the song she allows me to engage with these feelings I wouldn’t ever act on. It’s amazing, because it’s so totally real.

Yes, yes, I know, we’re all way too sober for the What is Real? conversation, but I learn a lot from artists who really test that water. There’s this scene in the film The Princess and the Warrior where two characters fall in love during an emergency tracheotomy performed under a mack truck with a Big Gulp straw and a Swiss army knife. The girl can’t breath. The guy is sucking blood out of her neck. It’s crazy and implausible and beautiful and real and it kills me. KILLS ME. The scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov takes an axe to that moneylender kills me, too. He’s this kid, trying to get through college. He can’t pay tuition. He’s can’t buy food. He can’t go to the doctor—doesn’t have money—so the hunger and exhaustion and fever make everything fuzzy in his brain and I’ve seen this kid a thousand times in the college students I teach today, here, in 2011. Same with Caleb Trask in East of Eden—everyone tells him he’s bad, so that’s what he thinks of himself. He can’t see the good that’s there, too, and it’s so, so, so REAL. How do you write that? How do you craft it? In the book Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, he goes on for like a gazillion pages about how obsessed Philip is with Mildred (which is totally crazy ‘cause she makes fun of his clubbed foot and calls him names and steals his money—total bitch, this girl) and finally it’s like, OKAY MAUGHAM. I GET IT. HE’S OBSESSED.WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS. But then my friend Lisa came over for dinner, and she’s dating this girl who doesn’t treat her particularly well, but she won’t break up with her, and this has been going on for months, and it’s all Lisa talks about and suddenly I was like MAUGHAM IS A GENIUS. Because it’s real. Because we do obsess over people who are bad for us. We go on and on, and this gets me thinking as to how much page time I spend on any given thing, and also what point of view do I best tell it from? You want to look at point of view, you look at Faulkner. Reading Light in August made me want to lie down on the floor and give up. I mean, for real, Faulkner. HOW DID YOU DO THAT? It’s third person, but goes off into italicized first person whenever we’re in a character’s head, but there’s this section right in the middle where we’re in those italics but the first person narrator just got knocked unconscious, so these aren’t his conscious thoughts we’re reading, but rather his subconscious mind? WTF, FAULKNER! And while I’m WTF’ing Faulkner (yeah, I just said that), it’s fascinating that he can go for nine pages without a period and it reads super, super, super sloooow, and then you’ve got someone like Hubert Selby Jr. in Last Exit to Brooklyn who’ll go for nine pages and it’s like a lightning bolt, I almost can’t keep up the pacing’s so damn fast. It has something to do with adjectives and adverbs, I think; Selby doesn’t much use them, and Faulkner’s got like twenty in every sentence!—I could go on. I love this shit. I geek out on it, like my sister Mary does with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or my Aunt Phyllis does with Nascar.

Why do life-altering events always happen at the Metro?

There’s such safety at a rock show: the anonymity, the darkness, the booze, the crowd—you can be anyone. You can try on different personalities and see if they work, and, at the same time, you’re not alone, because the music connects everyone. It’s really magical, if you think about it. A sweaty, sloppy, magical mess.

The worst feeling in the world is when the lights come up at the end of the night. Suddenly, everyone has to go back to who they really are.

In many of the stories, there’s this tight link between physical and emotional pain (the Hulk pummeling a lovelorn character under her bed or the Indestructible Lady pierced with knives and sobbing). Can you comment on that connection?

I think that connection is more a part of our day-to-day life than anything I came up with. Listen to what we say: “He hurt me.” “She ripped out my heart.” “I want to punch him in the face.” “You guys, I died. I’m serious, I died.” Our language even assigns the same verb for physical and emotional pain: I feel. It’s a part of our culture, I think, and from a literary standpoint, it’s back to that whole thing with assigning a concrete image to an abstract feeling or concept. Love in the Time of the Cholera, for example, compares lovesickness and cholera.

Also, I’ve had my heart broken once or twice. It fucking sucked, and took way longer to heal than the time I fractured my ankle.

Your characters experience tornado drills, being blockaded in their own bedroom, all kinds of natural and unnatural events.  Which is more difficult:  fiction or life?  Or fictional life.  Or life as fiction?

In fiction, you can edit out the boring parts, or at least make marching bands or tornadoes or tidal waves of lava appear to make things more interesting. I’m trying to apply that same principle to real life: edit out the boring parts. Or add a marching band.

 

That kind of time

I teach creative writing, which, for me, has a lot to do with creative reading (thanks for the term, Burroughs): how is this book structured? What’s the point-of-view? How does the writer deal with scene, time, transitions, character, movement, language, pacing—like how come Faulkner can go for nine pages without a period and it reads super slow but Selby can do the same thing and it moves like lightning? It has something to do with adjectives, I think; Selby rarely uses them, and Faulker uses three or four at a time—the rickety, water-soaked, creaking wagon wheel—AND, when he really wants you to slow down, he puts an and between each—the rickety and water-soaked and creaking wagon wheel—I’m thinking specifically of Light in August, but I’m sure there’s other shit going on in his other novels, especially if he’s in the first person … and tense! What about tense! After Tell Tale Heart, I thought I had the whole tense thing figured out, but I’ve since realized that having anything figured out in writing is the most ridiculous statement ever because somebody out there has busted open anything you thought you knew about anything. I just read this great essay by Francine Prose about how whenever she thought she knew what she was doing, she’d read something by Chekov that totally went totally the other way. Fucking Chekov. Rape Fantasies by Margaret Atwood did that to me, too: the whole story’s in past tense and then SHAZAM, on the last page we’re in present sitting in some bar??! And that Edward P. Jones story The First Day, which is in past for one sentence and then present-tense-little-girl until the end? WTF, Edward P. Jones?

Seriously, I LOVE this shit. I get super excited talking about it. I jump up and down in my chair. My students look at me like I’m on crack (until they start jumping up and down, too, which I know is when I’ve done my job right. When we all bounce) but then, then, then, THEN the question is, how can I use all this in my own writing?  Like, what tense is my stuff in? What if I switch it? What if I yank out all the adjectives? What if I try this or that or that or this, and when you know that the solutions to whateverthehell challenge you’re having in your writing is there, in front of your face, sitting on your very own bookshelf! or maybe in a play you saw last week! or a movie! or maybe a TV show if the show is good (Hi, Keifer Sutherland! Hi, Lady Who Played Starbuck on BSG!) and the thing is—I could keep going. And going and going. This is, hands down, the most important thing about my life as a writer: having an understanding of craft. A love of craft. But in my life as a reader? Sometimes I want to turn that part of my brain off. I’m trying to think of it as a sort of control panel on the side of my head, like I’m a cylon or something, and can flip the switch to whatever kind of reading I’d like to focus on, subsequently canceling out the others:

Reading to study the craft.
Reading to learn the content.
Reading to critique the message.
Reading because I love to read.
Reading because I need a good laugh.
Reading because I want to make the world a better place.
Reading to my son.
Reading to escape.
Reading to relax.

So, I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is the structure: multiple chronological short movements, each 3 years apart, in the lives of two sisters. I love that idea: to look at two characters through the lens of the most significant moments in their relationship. I love it, and I’m going to use it.

I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is voice. It’s a dual 1st person, the narration jumping back and forth between the two sisters. Through my work with 2nd Story’s personal narratives, I spend a lot of time thinking about 1st person. We write our stories to be told aloud, and the language must be 100% authentic to how that storyteller speaks. Sometimes that feels really different from a more literary 1st person narration. There are times when these sisters speak and I’m like, That’s fancypants language, it’s not really her talking! And it’s not … it’s her voice on the page. But somewhere in the back of my head I’m like, Her voice on the page IS her voice speaking, and if it’s not authentic to her speaking voice—character that’s being created for me on the page—then I don’t buy it. But I don’t know if that’s a personal preference thing, or a solid rule (and if it is a solid rule, probably Chekov broke it, right?). Anyhow, it’s something I think about a lot, and look for in every first person narration. So much has to be taken into account: what time period are we in, who is this character, where are they from, what level of education have they had, etc.? How does that come into the voice on the page, and must that be authentic to the character’s speaking voice?

I’ve been reading I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass, and what I want to talk about is this struggle I’m having with how I read. You’re reading just to read, I told myself at page one. NOT to look at craft—but obviously, that’s not working. It’s the first thing I see, and actively shutting that part of my brain takes work (it’s totally like how Sookie in Trueblood is telekinetic and has to put in constant effort not to hear other people’s thoughts ’cause listening to other people’s thoughts all the time’ll drive a girl crazy. Shit, listening to your own thoughts all the time’ll drive you crazy; imagine hearing everyone?—That’s what I’m talking about. Except without the vampires [and while I'm on True blood ...WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT A WHOLE YEAR TO GET THE NEXT SEASON IN ITUNES?] or awesome opening credits). I remember, back in grad school, and the crazy and necessary process of training myself to study craft, as opposed to metaphor or meaning. Like, instead of reading Moby Dick and arguing about whether or not the whale represented God, or The Man, or organized religion, or whateverthehell, maybe the whale could just be a whale for once and, instead, I look at how Melville dealt with vantage point and structure and model telling, ’cause those are the techniques I can use in my own work. Creative reading, indeed.

In an ideal universe, I’d read the book nine times in all sorts of ways, but who has that kind of time?

In an ideal world, I’d have that kind of time.

Blogging makes me nervous

I used to blog every day. Then I had my son, and suddenly free time was this rare, precious commodity, something first meant for sleeping and then, later, to be fought over. There’s only X amount of time, how do you chose? Write a blog, write a book, write about a book, read a book, read about writing? What about doing dishes, groceries, showering? When will I see my husband? What about my job—student work, syllabi, 2nd Story?

Also, now that I have the luxury of examining this all in retrospect, I was a bit post-partem. Not Brooke Shields, Down Came the Rain, but not that baby blues thing they talk about, either. Something in between. Something messy and complicated, and, in the middle of it all was my little boy. Who wants to blog when you can build a castle out of spice jars?

So the pressure kind of got to me, and my blog was yet another reminder of things I wasn’t getting done. Everytime I’d look at it, the date of my last entry grew further and further away, and one day, after another How come you’re not blogging anymore email showed up in my inbox, I took everything down (I was very dramatic about it, lots of yelling and banging into things. Meryl Streep will play me in the movie). Again, in retrospect, it was more about me trying to find the balance between being a parent and being … everything else. When I’d complain, people told me to cut myself some slack. “You’ve got a kid at home!” they’d say. “It’s okay if you’re not producing what you used to.” On one hand, that’s a really nice sentiment, but the fact is this: my kid is the coolest thing ever. I want to be better at everything because of him: better mother, better writer, better wife and teacher and friend and human being. Using him as an excuse for not getting work done—novel, stories, essays, blog—makes me want to stick a fork in my eye.

My point: I’m taking this blog thing a little bit at a time.

That said, I’m super excited about it. I need it, I think. I’ve been feeling sort of crazytown, which always happens when I’m not writing enough, like, what do I do with all these thoughts? (The only thing that quiets everything down is watching 24 on streaming Netflix. Seriously, I do this every night. It cancels out all the noise in my head which for the record is just a normal-person amount of noise, as opposed to Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood being all telepathic and needing to sleep with vampires for some peace and quiet. Also, I’m currently ripping off 24‘s real-time-countdown stuff for a story which is a total blast [at this point, whenever I talk about this shit, and I talk about it a lot, somebody always asks why I'm not using models of real-time-countdown in literature instead of some implausible TV show about terrorists and I’m all, Have you SEEN 24? An hour-long adrenaline rush! And the technology is awesome! And Jack Bauer ripped some guy’s ear off with his teeth! And everybody keeps coming back from the dead! I LOVE people coming back from the dead!] What was I talking about? Bauer, Sookie [rhymes with cookie], busy thoughts, feeling crazy). Running helps with the crazy, as well, which is too bad because I sort of hate running. I’m reading Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running right now in the hopes of finding some joy in it.

Related: I have these pants. Really great pants. They were expensive, and do great things for the ass. I bought them before I got pregnant, and I still can’t fit into them, and lately, when I look in the mirror, I’m all pantspantspants! and then I’m like, Really? All that women’s lib and positive self image hoohah and I’m STILL talking about my butt? ‘cause the thing is, it’s not about the pants, it’s about feeling bad about myself, self deprecation on a continual loop, and eventually you have to shut up and just tackle the shit head-on. Which means, for me, to suck it up and do the running. I got an app called Couch to the 5K and Murakami’s memoir about running and writing. Two birds, one stone.

I love Murakami. I lovelovelove his story “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” It made me fall in love with strangers. Like, I’d be walking down the street and I’d pass all these people and be all that is totally my 100% perfect person, no wait, it’s him! Or him! What about that guy! I love everybody! you and you and you! And the voice! It’s like the narrator’s sitting across the table from me, just talking, like we’re the very best of friends, plus it jumps back and forth between past and present tense which is a bitch to pull off but somehow it all works, and did I mention that part about love and strangers?

Also: His novel Wind Up Bird Chronicles is on my all-time top-five list of Best First Pages of a Novel Ever.

Also: The title is a play on one of my favorite short stories of all time: Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I was maybe fifteen when I first read that story, with a very small-town Midwestern girl idea of how love was supposed to look. Something about pop songs and yearning. Reading it was like a brick to the head: people have different ideas as to what love is! You can fall in love more than once! Sometimes love is ugly! Sometimes beautiful, but not beautiful like Pat Benetar’s We Belong Together, beautiful in a different way! Then, about a thousand years ago, in grad school, I had to write a structural parody of it, swapping out LOVE for whatever subject matter I chose, as in: What We Talk About When We Talk About Screwdrivers. What We Talk About When We Talk About Our Mothers. What We Talk About When We Talk About Paris, or Politics, or Technology, whatever, fill-in-the-blank. Best assignment ever. Aside from being an awesome study of dialogue, it’s a blast insofar as character development: what kind of people would sit around talking about screwdrivers? Or their mothers? etc. Furthermore, all the characters in the story are drinking—getting progressively drunker as the night goes on—but everyone gets drunk in different ways. Some of us are chatty, some belligerent, some quiet, so who are these people I’m writing about and how do I show that?

So here I am, getting all excited about writing. Which is the goddamn point, right?

Also: I just picked up the new Carver biography (new to me, at least). I’m a fan of biographies. Mostly because I’m interested in the writing process, and I get ideas from things other writers have tried. Here, I owe thanks to the every student who’s ever sat in my Critical Reading and Writing: Short Story class, studying different writers’ processes and reporting back to the rest of the class. Every semester, I hear about sixteen new writers, and that has had an enormous impact on my life as a writer, the most notable example being: Ann Petry would work for a year and save, then take a year off and write. Year on, year off. So, in 2003, I added two bar shifts a week to my teaching schedule, and in 2004, I moved to Prague for a year.

I might be gearing up for that again.

If I’m being honest, I also dig into biographies because I’d like to know there’s hope. That people can slay tremendous dragons and come out unscathed; or, if they are scathed, at least they’re better for it. They make art from it. They make the world a better place, somehow. I taught a class on Kafka when I was in Prague, and the most powerful thing about his journals was that every other entry talks about how he didn’t get writing done today, not the way he wanted, he’s pissed at himself, how do you find the balance, this SUCKS—but still, he keeps going.

That’s what I’d like this blog to be: an experiment in keeping going. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami says: “I didn’t write at one stretch, but rather a little at a time, whenever I could find free time in between other work. Each time I wrote more I’d ask myself, So—what’s on my mind right now?”