Down with Schlub Stories

I'm still reeling from seeing an exhibition of the work of James Turrell this past weekend. It made things different, in my head, not just in how I think about art and perception (you know, little things) but in how I think about memory and impermanence and other existential stuff. It was not an ordinary experience.

So I want to write about something else entirely. Last summer I read two books of short stories that I'll be recommending for years to come: Mary Gaitskill's Don't Cry and Jincy Willett's Jenny and the Jaws of Life. Neither is perfect, but neither is ordinary. Gaitskill is a strange, prickly writer, embodying strength and control and keeping the reader at a definite distance. She is not interested in making you happy, but sometimes, before you're finished with her story, the earth will move. Willett is even more original, and harder to parse, but her work is slightly more personable. It still leaves you turned totally upside down, baffled at what you just read but urgently turning the page.

During my UCLA Extension fiction class last semester, we read a lot of short stories that all felt exactly the same (to one another, not to my description of Gaitskill and Willett in the preceding paragraph). Let's call these "schlub stories." They were about blue-collar guys, many of them drinkers, most of them pathetically flawed, going on some kind of escapade that ends either badly or without a resolution. I understood that the instructor wanted to teach what he knew best, what he felt best qualified to interpret, and what he liked. But the sameyness of these stories seriously got on my nerves.

Gaitskill and Willett rocked me, fascinated me, and I have no idea how they accomplished what they did. The schlub stories didn't, on the whole, work any magic on me, and I could hardly distinguish the voices from one another, even if they were written by completely different authors years apart. It was reasonably easy to tell how these stories were built, how they manipulated the reader along the journey.

Couldn't I learn more from reading stories on the edges of the map and breaking them down than I could from stories that are extremely technically proficient, but right in the literary middle?

There's also the problem of who was represented in this selection of fiction. Even if the stories hadn't all seemed exactly the same, their writers definitely did. In ten weeks, the only fiction we read by a woman was Dorothy Parker's "Here We Are" (which was presented as a novelty of form rather than of interest as content), and every single writer was white. Those of you white men out there reading this may not know it, but the white male perspective is actually not the only perspective that exists on human life.

"But Kat," you say, "stories like 'Rock Springs' and 'Bullet in the Brain' are supposed to be universal." Uh huh. Get this: the white male perspective is not universal. Okay? It's one perspective, and it's not mine. I want to hear from other people. Even people whose cultural perspectives I hardly understand at all. I didn't like Life and Times of Michael K, but I appreciated having a different experience. I did like Things Fall Apart and The God of Small Things, and again, I appreciated having a different experience.

I guess that breaking down a Willett story would be too complicated for a basic-level fiction class for which anyone on the street can sign up, but that doesn't excuse the lack of diversity. I guess that teaching nearly all white male writers was easier for the instructor, but that doesn't excuse the lack of variety in the stories. It was so disappointing to read the same story over and over and feel left out week after week. I suspect we - and that "we" includes the instructor - would have learned a great deal from reading challenging, enigmatic stories at least once or twice. I've learned an awful lot in the last couple of years reading books I didn't understand.

So that's part of why I doubt I'll be going back to UCLA Extension for more classes. I'm getting better and more diverse education at CSUN.

Upcoming and Downgoing

I woke up on the wrong side of the week, but I have some administrative stuff to address and a few other things to say, so here's a post anyway.

1) I referred to a secret project a few posts back. Tomorrow, that project debuts: I helped to copy-edit a series of comics for the creator of Ctrl+Alt+Del, one of my two most favorite webcomics. While labor-intensive, this project was so much fun that I am having a hard time adjusting back to my normal copy-editing job. If you somehow got here from there, welcome!

2) I mentioned it on Facebook and in a group e-mail, but not here: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #45, with my story "Kingdom Automata", aka the crazy robot story, which I have written about at great length in this blog, is available here. For free in electronic forms, and for a nominal fee in paperback.

3) Opera season started on Saturday. Get ready for opera posts for the next several months! Woooo!!!!1!

4) I was the only one to volunteer a story during the first week of workshop in my UCLA class, so one of my stories is going to be drawn and quartered workshopped by 17 other students tomorrow night. I agonized over the choice, and spent most of the last four days regretting the story I picked, but there's nothing for it now and I must have had a reason to select that one in the first place.

The instructor got the class to give me a round of applause for being brave enough to volunteer during the first week, before we know anything about each other. I waved it away: "I'm just a show-off." Because I am.

5) One of our assignments for this class is to find a paragraph or two of fiction that we love and bring it in at some point to read aloud. I am stumped. I looked at all my best-loved books and realized I love them in macro ways; because the story connects to itself, and the characters shift over time, not because one paragraph stands out. (This is not so for movies - I know plenty of movies where just one shot will send me to heaven.) I'd do Chandler or Leonard, because they're masters at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, but our instructor has mentioned that he's going to bring in some Chandler, so.

The one I'm considering right now is Rebecca, some of the first chapter: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Rebecca emerged from my youth as my Fahrenheit 451 book - the one I'd choose to memorize, to become, in the event that books went extinct. Rereading it last year, I realized it's really not a perfect book, but I still stand by it as one of the most evocative books I've read, and one of those books calculated to make you fall in love with itself. So, reading from that first spell-setting chapter seems to fit in with the point of the exercise, even if the book isn't one I can defend on the whole. Maybe I'll figure out something else before it's my turn.

Wish me luck with the rest of the week.

Unadorned, But Updated

Over the weekend, I worked on a secret project and I fixed my website. The former was a total geek-out for me, and I can't in good conscience discuss what it was. The best I can do: it involved copy editing and an artist I admire a lot, and is probably not remotely as supercool to anyone else as it is to me. My website, of course, took much less time than I thought it would, and once it was fixed, it was fixed. So, voila. Check it out. I'll have to change it again pretty soon here, because the issue of Theaker's QF with my crazy robot story in it is evidently going to come out within a couple of weeks. But that change will be quick and easy and I will accomplish it fearlessly. 

Back in 2008, my website had all kinds of other shit on it. It had loads of writing samples; it had a detailed table that set forth my submissions and rejections, which I updated so that my [nonexistent] readers could track my progress; it had pages of writer's backstory about the projects I was working on or had completed. None of this seems like a good idea anymore. The samples - okay, but the links on the site to my published fiction show stuff that's finished and editor-approved, which is even better than stuff no one has said yes to. If I had books for sale, samples would be a good idea, but I don't. The progress table - something tells me that magazine editors won't think too highly of me publishing that information. The backstory - well, I'm permanently interested in writer's backstory, particularly my own (preen), but I doubt that anyone else is, particularly since I am the opposite of prominent. 

So I don't really know what to put on the site other than what I have: two little pages, the index and the one that sets out all the published work of mine that you can find on the internet. I am not a fan of rambling bios; when asked by publications, I stick with "Katharine Coldiron's work has appeared in x, y, and z. She lives in California and blogs at <a>The Fictator</a>." Clean and neat. Although I always want to know more about the writers I like, long bios virtually never give me the information I want and are almost always dull or self-aggrandizing or both. 

Anyone have any thoughts about how to juice up the site? Anything you'd like to see there? The only ideas I have involve lists, like lists of movies or books I enjoy, lists of places I've lived, lists of people I've dated, etc. Even with more biographical detail than just a blank list, that stuff is not interesting and I know it. 

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My UCLA class starts Wednesday. I am excited and extremely anxious that I'll fuck it up somehow. We've been assigned stories to read, which is a pleasant surprise, as prior workshopping classes I've taken would have benefited from outside work. I finished my instructor's book, Middle Men, over the weekend, and really enjoyed it. I'd read two of the stories before in litmags but liked them just as much a second time. Los Angeles is one of the stars of the book, so I rolled around in that like a horse in the grass. 

My classes at CSUN are simultaneously more effort than I expected and exactly how I thought they'd be. In my lit class, we've moved on from short stories to poetry, and thence, for me, into the black void of know-nothing. In my syntax class, I'm passionately engaged on a conceptual level and fumbling around like an idiot on the level of concrete answers to homework problems. 

My life has gotten a little overstuffed in recent weeks, and I'm trying to keep up. I expect to write an essay this week about this picture 

and I really want to get started on a complex short story I've mentioned in half the posts I've put up recently. I doubt I'd accomplish any more if I was juggling three balls instead of four (with school), but when I'm looking at the clock and looking at my to-do list, it doesn't feel that way. 

And tomorrow begins my 384th month on this planet. After spending all damn weekend at my computer, I feel every minute of that in my neck muscles. 

Embarrafleeing and Writing Poorly

What a title. It's a rich, fascinating life I lead, and well worth your time. 

On the last Sunday in August, I went to UCLA to attend the Writers Faire. Despite the information on the website and the flyer I got in the mail, I didn't know what to expect there. I'm really glad I went, but I had a bit of a social anxiety moment right at the end there, found myself doing the activity a friend coined "embarrafleeing" - walking overly fast in an attempt to outrun having just made an idiot of yourself. I think that's why I haven't written here in a week. The responsible thing to do would be to make good art out of this, break it down and tell you in excruciating detail how much of a twit I felt, trying to explain my educational motives to the head of an MFA program while we both sweated in the sun, praying as I hurried to my car that he would never, ever remember me in any way or for any reason. Great practice for sketching a scene. But every time I opened a Compose window, I balked. And I'd rather write than not write, so, that's all I'll say about it for now. 

In the interests of posterity, or those who get here by Googling, amazingly smart and engaging people spoke and manned booths at the UCLA Extension Writers Faire, and it was a fine event to attend even though I had no real idea what I, or it, was about. I'm really looking forward to my class there, which starts in October. I had a short talk with my instructor-to-be about the Writers Program, and he was friendly and thoughtful and humble and helpful. It was great. (For the record, this guy started at UCLA Extension, and went on to a Stegner Fellowship and placing work in the New Yorker and other honors.) If you have an opportunity to go to the Faire and an interest in the Extension Writers' Program (or, really, getting a writing degree in the greater L.A. area), go. It'll help. 

Last week I started school at CSUN, and while it's been exhilarating and fun and bizarre in equal measures to sit in a classroom full of undergraduates, there isn't much there to write about, either. Both of my professors are enthusiastic and interesting and smart. I'm intimidated by the concepts and workload of the one class and itching to get at the material in the other. The library's really nice, and buying a Razor scooter to get around on campus was a far better idea than I could have guessed. 

I'm over the halfway point in Ulysses, and I'm thinking seriously of skipping most of the rest of it, listening to Molly Bloom's soliloquy, and walking away. I'm just not enjoying it at all. "Tiresome" is the adjective that best describes my opinion as I listen and listen and listen and listen to it. On the other hand, I think, I could just listen to the whole thing now and be done, earn the achievement of completing it, never have to get into it again. A book like this doesn't have the same rules as the rest of what I read, of giving up when I feel like it because life is too short. It's too Important to the Canon. Blech. 

On break from Ulysses, I read Jenny and the Jaws of Life, a book of short stories published in the 1980s by Jincy Willett, and I've never read a book like it. Go read it for yourself, and maybe you can tell me what went on in half the stories. When I wasn't slightly baffled, I was enraptured; never was I bored. Really a treasure. 

Writing news: I tried to write a particular story a couple of weeks ago, and this is what happened: 

I was in the wrong mode, trying to apply genre style to a literary idea, and I couldn't get my brain to switch back over. The tone was freaky and hyper and the dialogue was atrocious. So I'm going to give it another try in a couple of weeks, after Ulysses is over one way or the other, after I've settled into school. 

Additionally, I have one scene to rewrite in that dissection story, and then I think it'll be good to go. The subject matter of this story draws largely from my experience at Esalen, and there is nothing about it that really makes it pop, if you will. Most of my other lit stories are extreme in some way, involving death or sex or something, but this is just one woman's quiet crisis. 

Part of me wonders what on earth the point is of writing a story like this, where the stakes are so low that getting the reader to care is a dicey thing. But the other part of me says that, really, the balance of writers working today routinely ignore this question and get their work in excellent, prestigious markets. Because of style, because of quality, because of character. Those are things I think this story has. Not that I don't work hard to make those things exist in the more flashy stories, but that I always assume I need both to make a story good enough for professional consideration (and because it's just my tendency at present to write about sex and death). So it's been a worthwhile experience to set aside the special effects and concentrate on wordcraft to make a story pop off the page. We'll see if it worked. I have two markets in mind already. 

Grad School, Here I Come

So I start classes in just over a week. I'm attending Cal State Northridge, which is about 10 minutes away, and I'm taking prerequisite classes to qualify for grad school there.

Back in May, I decided that I wanted to get a graduate degree. This was the culmination of a long process, and in fact over the summer I drafted and re-drafted a lengthy post explaining this decision and what it's about for me and all the things I considered. The more I edited the post, the more I hated it, so I decided to chuck it and just explain in two sentences, as above. I didn't study English much at all at the college level, aside from Shakespeare, and it's grounding that I'd like to have (and which I increasingly think I need) while moving forward as a writer. Since I don't have an English BA, I have to take enough high-level English classes to equate an English major before I can apply for the MA program.

I don't know if I'm going to continue on this path, whether I'll take a semester or two of these prereqs and change my mind, ending with life-choice-egg on my face the way I have numerous times before; whether I'm going to sign up for a program at UCLA instead (more on that shortly); whether I'll spend the next four years slogging through and wind up choking on the failure of my thesis, the way I did in undergrad. But I'm starting, anyway, on August 26, and we'll just have to see what happens.

Cal State Northridge is very near me, with no traffic to speak of. UCLA is half an hour away as the crow flies, but that distance is hard ground in terms of freeway traffic. There's a big program there called UCLA Extension, which I think resembles a community college. UCLA Extension has a writers' program, which is pretty detailed and sort of self-contained. You can get a certificate there, which looks to me like it's a mini-graduate degree, but Extension is open enrollment, so I assume it's only somewhat like the real thing.

The people who teach in this program are people I recognize: the editors of litmags to which I've submitted, the authors of short stories (or books) that I've enjoyed. (Francesca Lia Block, a sort-of hero of mine, teaches a course on YA fiction.) Because of my student status at Cal State Northridge, there's no way I'm getting into any of the writing classes there, so I went on and signed up for a basic-level fiction workshop at UCLA Extension instead. Its instructor is Jim Gavin, who was a Stegner fellow and whose story in Zoetrope was one of those rare litmag stories I enjoyed enormously, enough to look him up. I'm pretty excited about this class.

Sidebar: Oddly, UCLA doesn't have a master's program for writers unless they are screenwriters. Neither does USC, although the latter does have a Ph.D.

After this semester's over, I hope to have an idea of where to go next. Northridge promises training in literature that I don't have, that I think I can use, while UCLA promises prime networking and actual writing training from working writers rather than professors. I don't know what to expect from the quality of each. I don't know which one I need more. But I'm really looking forward to finding out.

There's a whole lot more to this decision: the years of talking myself out of a graduate degree, why an MFA isn't right for me, the school research I did, what various famous writers have said when weighing in on the necessity of an MFA and why I think they're jerks. That was all in the post I decided not to put up. If that stuff interests you, let me know, and I'll do it as a supplement.