I am a writer. I can’t help it. Don’t judge.

Writer Wednesday: Joan Didion

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For me, books can be like hard candy. You get a bag of Jolly Ranchers,  you rip it open and maybe you immediately eat one of your favorite flavors first, as a sort of opening-the-bag celebration.  But, then if you’re like me, you start eating all your least favorite flavors, so that what’s left in the bag – eventually – is a big pile of watermelon and sour apple. Heaven.

There are probably more moody black and white portraits of Joan Didion than of any other writer. If you print them all out and staple them together in a flip book, you can actually watch her age.

That’s how I’ve been treating the work of Joan Didion. I’ve loved Didion since a newspaper editor gave me The White Album as part of a newsroom Secret Santa gift exchange. I was 23, loved my job, and Didion’s essays sang to me. I’d never read prose like that before. I spent months on that book. I pored over each essay, reading each word twice, but I was stingy with myself, squirreling the essays away like sour apple Jolly Ranchers, and savoring that wonderful first-read feeling.

I have not read Slouching Toward Bethlehem yet. I know I will love it, so I am saving it for later.

Joan D.  is a two-edged sword, however. On the one hand, her work is heartbreakingly beautiful. On the other hand, it’s also just heartbreaking. I read Play it As it Lays this past spring and emerged from the novel feeling like I’d gotten drunk and then had a three-hour phone conversation with a friend who makes bad choices.

Below the page break is the craft essay I wrote about point of view in that novel.

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My First Page, or how I learned to stop sulking and love the bomb.

About a month ago, my MFA colleague Elizabeth Hilts blogged about her submission to writer and teacher Peter Selgin’s Your First Page, a blog on which he critiques – for free and with considerable knowledge – the first pages of in-progress fiction and memoir, emailed to him by hopeful writers.

I was impressed with Selgin’s comments on Hilts’ first page, so I sent in my own. I’ve been more or less a shut-in this fall, working furiously on this novel. Except for one brief reading in October, no one outside my house had seen or heard the thing. So I sent the first page of my novel off to Selgin and waited. On Friday evening, he posted his critique.

This is what I hoped he would say: “Good lord! You’re a literary genius! How come you’re not already required reading for high school English classes?”

What he actually said is here.

I’ll be honest with you. I sulked like a little girl for about an hour after I read it. Then my adult self re-emerged and took another look at Selgin’s comments. And I realized that he has a very good point: By starting my story in the way I do, I shortchange both my main character and my readers. So I’m playing around with ways to change the the opening page, and I think the novel will be stronger for it.

I’m not changing anything just yet, though. I will be interested to see what my fellow MFA master class workshoppers say about the piece when we discuss it after the holidays. I plan to print out Selgin’s critique and bring it to my residency so that I can use his comments as well as theirs.

At any rate, I encourage all writers who want an objective (and blunt) pair of eyes on their work to check out Selgin’s blog. Submit your own first pages – Your First Page is actually going to become a regular feature in The Writer Magazine, starting in January, so if you send in a first page, you never know who might pick up the magazine and read your work.

 

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Writer Wednesday: Richard Russo

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Richard Russo thinks of himself as a comic writer.

I had the advantage of being able to interview Richard Russo for my newspaper’s entertainment section just as I was writing a craft essay about him for my MFA program.

Russo was coming to town this past June to discuss That Old Cape Magic. I had just finished reading Empire Falls, and I was very excited to speak with him.

During the interview, Russo surprised me by referring to himself as a comic writer. In fact, he compared himself to Mark Twain, with whom he appeared in Granta magazine this summer. That ran counter to my observations as a reader. Sure, there were moments of humor – pure slapstick humor, actually – within the 483 pages of Empire Falls. But the book was more of an American epic, not the work of a humorist.

I didn’t get it until Russo told me that he considers people to be funny.  Just watching people being people, he said, can be enormously funny. That made sense, because Empire Falls is a lot like sitting in your hometown, having coffee at the diner and watching everyone you know as they walk by, living their lives.

And he’s right – people are funny. We’re funny in the same way that our cousins in the monkey house at the zoo are funny. We have basically the same motivations, and our attempts to get what we’re after can be just as clumsy and brash. And that can be hilarious, or it can be horrible.

“I do gravitate toward folly,” said Russo. “Sometimes there are tragic consequences to human folly.”

For the full story, click this link. For the craft essay I wrote about Russo’s graceful management of multiple viewpoint characters, read on.

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On crossing the finish line.

I always identified with the hare, the grasshopper and other Aesopian goof-offs.

It happens every single time. Despite years of having to meet deadlines, despite months of work on a project, and despite many hours of effort, I always try to sabotage myself right before I complete a task.

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A world-class event.

This won’t be a long post, nor will it be filled with my usual embarrassing personal revelations.  All I have to say here is that not only did the student reading last night go well, but I am in awe of my colleagues from the Fairfield University MFA program.

From the new student, who got up to read his work even though he’s never set foot on Enders, to the poet who riffed on Gertrude Stein like he was performing a guitar solo, to the memoirists who put their most private moments out there for us to see – you all rock. Hard.

Also rockstars? The students who didn’t read but showed up to support us, even though they have jobs, families and lives. And the student rep who organized the whole event, and who chose not to read, even though we would have welcomed a reading from her.

It’s really cool to be a part of this group of people.

Now, before this post gets cloying, I’m going to put an end to it. Just as  my colleague Steve Otfinoski put an end to some adorable sacrificial bunnies in his reading last night.

Update: This post is titled “A world class event” because that’s how we were described by the store manager during his in-store announcement. I thought I’d written that into this post but I must have edited it out. Whoops.

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The fretter

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As a sixteen-year-old, this was terrifying to me.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’m concerned about the Fairfield University student reading that’s happening this evening.

It’ll most definitely go well, but I’m gonna worry a little anyhow, ’cause that’s how I roll. I’m a world-class fretter. I worry about ridiculous things.

Here’s an example. When I was a teenager, I thought the Immaculate Conception was the most terrifying thing in the world. Read more

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Deep breaths.

This Wednesday brings the fall semester student reading for my MFA program. I’m one of the readers, which is very cool, because I’m going to be trotting out my new novel. Still it’s terrifying, because I never know how I’m going to react when I get to that podium.

As I was explaining to a fellow student over the weekend, it all depends on the space.

I once did a reading with such a loud rushing in my ears that I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I was so relieved to get away from the podium that I left a pile of important papers on it, and only remembered them hours later. But then again, I did a reading this summer and I was fine. Granted, I had a drink in me before I got up to read, but I don’t actually think I needed the drink. That reading was in a smallish crowded room. The first, terrifying reading? That was done from the pulpit of a church.

Wednesday’s reading is being held in a Borders. And while I’ve spent many hours happily shopping in that space, I don’t know how I’ll feel reading there. I guess we will see.

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Writer Wednesday: James Baldwin

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I quoted him for years, but I never knew who Baldwin was until last fall.

It came as a complete surprise to me that James Baldwin wrote fiction. I had it in my mind that he was an educator, an essayist and an activist. It just hadn’t occurred to me that did all that and wrote fiction.

I first became aware of Baldwin when I was working as an education reporter for the Stamford Times. As part of my duties I had to cover several graduations every spring, three of them in Stamford. The superintendent there was fond of quoting Baldwin’s paradox of education from the writer’s 1963 A Talk to Teachers. The super included the exact same quote from Baldwin at each of the graduations every single year. I must have heard it 15 times.

I got hip to the super’s graduation speech tricks by the second year. Rather than look up the paradox of education again and again and again, and rather than try to take down the whole, lengthy quote during the graduation speech, I simply printed out the quote and kept it in my desk at work:

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.  But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.  What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.  If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

I grew pretty familiar with the paradox of education as I tried to gracefully work it into three separate graduation stories every June. So last year, when a professor, Kim McLarin, mentioned Baldwin during the first workshop for my MFA program, I snapped to attention. James Baldwin? A-talk-to-teachers Baldwin? Paradox-of-education Baldwin?  We couldn’t be talking about the same Baldwin, could we?

Now, after having read Another Country and read more about Baldwin, I’m impressed by all the things Baldwin did. He was an activist for civil rights, he wrote fervently about racial and sexual issues and he was a prolific and eloquent author.

Below the break is the craft essay I wrote for Kim about plot in Another Country.

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Writer Wednesday: Denise Mina

I’m a candidate for an MFA in creative fiction at Fairfield University. The program places a clear emphasis on literary fiction (think James Baldwin, not James Rollins.) So I was shocked when my mentor (short story writer Al Davis), recommended that I read a genre mystery – Scottish writer Denise Mina’s Field of Blood – as part of my literary training. “She uses a lot of literary elements,” he told me.

Mina blurs the line between genre and fiction. And she's Scottish.

Al was right. Field of Blood is a thriller and a mystery, but it was beautifully written. It was recommended to me, I think, because it’s about a reporter, and at the time, I was working on a piece about a journalist. But I recommend it to anyone, not only because of all the lovely Scottishness in the book, but because it’s a very well-told story.  Below the page break is the craft essay I wrote for Al about one of Mina’s literary elements: description.

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Something wicked (awesome) this way comes.

This week, PBS is showing Macbeth, starring Sir Patrick Stewart, and I am so excited.

Avoid this one. Avoid it like the plague.

I’m researching a novel, and I’ve spent a lot of time with the Scottish usurper lately.

In the last week, I’ve seen three film versions of  Macbeth. One, shot in the ’80s, was really terrible, of the variety shown to high school English classes by substitute teachers. I couldn’t get all the way through it, although in my own defense, I tried twice to watch it. It was horrible.  Both members of the Macbeth family panted their way through the first act. By the time they murdered the king I was ready to take a dagger to my own temple.

McKellen was actually kind of a hottie. Who knew?

I later saw a very good version of the play, one which got both Ian McKellen and Judi Dench knighted. The film suffered a little, because it was a minimalist production, shot in 1979 and it could not help being dated. That’s a minor issue however – the actors were amazing, particularly McKellen and Dench. All the other Macbeths and Lady Macbeths pale by comparison. (Other high points: look for both Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars films and the Sheriff of Rottingham of Mel Brooks’ Men in Tights among the cast.)

Then I saw an older version of Macbeth – Roman Polanski’s  1971 film, which is not dated at all, but beautifully shot with period costumes, horses, sets, and hundreds of naked women (it was produced by Hugh Hefner.)  That Macbeth was a case of style over substance. The film was over-directed; it had far too much cinematography, Shakespeare’s lines were rewritten and re-arranged, and the violence recalls the violence done to Polanski’s own family by the Manson family.

Annis as Lady M.

I actually liked Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth (you nerds know her as Dune‘s Jessica), but I thought her role was crippled by her own good looks. She had to do the sleepwalking scene nude, for example. And instead of nagging her husband she would occasionally burst into tears to keep him in check. Ah well. That’s what happens when Hefner is executive producer of a Shakespearean production.

I’ve been most excited about the  Stewart Macbeth, which features Kate Fleetwood as the Lady Macbeth. The preview – set in what appears to be the  WWII era, looks amazing, and Stewart’s stage production got great reviews. Stewart might be the only actor who can match McKellen’s Macbeth. I can’t wait to find out. Below is the preview.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuFFTTymqc8&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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