In the Scheme of Things

In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but my cactus is dying. 

I could have written this the opposite way: "My cactus is dying. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter." But I felt the need to write it the first way, so as to make it clear that I know it doesn't broadly matter before I tell you this thing that matters, to me, in a way I can't defend. 

I think I've written before here about how I kill plants, how I have a brown thumb. It's been a joke in my life for a long time, but there are times when it's not funny. I can do lots of other things, so I try to focus on that instead of dwelling on this thing I can't do: keep plants alive. I've kept this cactus alive for two years. I bought it as one of three matching ones, the other colors were pink and red, this one is yellow, and the other two died but this one lived. I repotted it recently and gave it new soil and some liquid food, but one of those elements has made it very sick, sagging and thin and leaking fluid out its top, and I am fixated on it, my poor cactus, to the point where I had an argument with Matt this week because we misunderstood each other about the roses I needed to prune back, and I couldn't bring myself to prune them back because I didn't want to kill them like I'm killing my cactus, and Matt didn't understand where this was coming from at all and why I didn't just prune the roses like I said I would, and he tried to do it himself and that made me even more upset and I couldn't explain why. 

Keeping a plant alive for two years is nothing in the scheme of things. It is a record-breaker for me. I can't touch my cactus, because it is full of tiny prickles; I can't do anything but look at it lovingly, not like a pet you can bring into your lap. But it is the only nonhuman living thing I am not paid to give love to. It is the only thing in my life I have nurtured that belongs to me (the roses are the landlord's). And it's really sick. And it's my fault. And I cannot stop feeling anguish about this. 

It's stupid. It's just a cactus. I can buy another one for $3.99 at Lowe's. It has not grown significantly in the time I've had it. But it has not died in that time, and it is dying now, and that matters to me. 

--

This week I wrote a roundup of books by Black authors that I enjoy and recommend. Not all of them are directly applicable to the current situation, which was on purpose. Reading underrepresented voices is an end in itself, and it can be a diversion even as it's innately looped in to what's happening. I also edited a review of a book by a poet and felon, Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts, and put it up at Barrelhouse. These things I can do, even if I can't do much else. 

--

Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer event is going on right now and I'm using it as an opportunity to start the next project. I got a little sidetracked yesterday by a frightening episode of heat exhaustion, but I've well and truly begun the work, and I feel good about how it's shaping up. For community and for accountability, I'm posting about it on Twitter once a day - and I forwent posting about it on Tuesday, for the ill-fated "blackout" - but then today I read a well-reasoned thread from people of color about it being insensitive to post about it at all. That made me feel guilty, but also a little annoyed. They suggested we move those updates to a private community/writing group, and I don't have one; my writing group is Twitter, for better or worse. 

In the same hour I read a comment on Facebook in a private group by a white woman feeling as if she's done enough activism (she gave examples), and doesn't deserve criticism for not speaking out in every single platform she has, even apolitical ones. 

I really do not know how to hold both of these views in the same hand. I'm trying to make my feeds mostly about other voices and issues and lives, and a little bit about me, but maybe that is wrong, too? Do my feeds reflect my life? Does my life always or mostly need to be about me? Does the balance I've attempted to strike look as ugly as that white woman's defensiveness, or are we all looking at each other cockeyed anyway, and no one can possibly do it right all the time? Do I reckon with myself, my past/future self, or with what others are doing/not doing? What is my example, my standard? Should it be at-least-I'm-not, or should it be I-could-never-be-but-I'll-try? 

This blog post is about me because this is my blog, not a shared space like a social media feed or a book club or a coffee shop. Or...is the entire internet a shared space? No, that's too far. This is my blog. 

I'm trying to explore and question, not defend. White defensiveness has no utility at all. 

I don't know. 

--

There's something else happening in my life right now that has to be secret for now but is causing me heavy stress. It may come to nothing. We'll see. 

--

At the barn, there's a horse named Mia whom I didn't like at all when I first started working there. She was wary and impenetrable, hard to catch in her stall and evidently uninterested in whether I lived or died. It's exasperating to work with horses like this, because you feel bad asking them to obey you when they clearly do not enjoy even being near you. 

Over time, she started to be nicer to be around. I finally realized she wasn't a jerk, she was just slow to trust, and she had no reason to trust me when she met me. If she were a human she'd be "hard to know." So I hung back until she was ready to know me, and treated her like a co-worker instead of pressing her for affection and obedience. When I hand-walked her I let her walk to the left instead of the right, because she clearly preferred that, even though it isn't how you're supposed to walk horses. Now she's recovered from an injury and is being ridden, which means I tack her up and down instead of just walking her. I've found out that she loves having her face brushed. She stretches out her neck and closes her eyes, and if I stand in front of her she nuzzles my chest and rests her chin on the edge of my sports bra while I brush and brush. 

Since we figured this out, she trusts me more than ever; she now whinnies and trots over to me when I come to her stall, as if I'm her friend instead of her keeper. She gives me all kinds of affection I don't get from the other, more skittish horses. She obeys me readily, which means it doesn't feel so bad giving her commands. We're developing a deeper and more loving relationship because I was patient and listened to her. I judged too quickly, but when I figured out she was just slow to trust, I gave her every reason to trust me instead of insisting that she do so right off. 

Yesterday I had to put a yucky-smelling salve on her nose. Three months ago she would have wriggled and jerked and made it impossible to do this, but I talked to her and petted her and she stood still and let me. I took the time, and was rewarded with trust and more love than I know what to do with. She's a wonderful horse. I never would have known that if I'd stuck with my first judgment. 

I hope I can write about Mia someday as a metaphor, but I don't quite know what my experience with her means yet. For now I just wanted to share it as a story. Working with her is some of the nicest time I spend at the barn, when she used to be a horse I dreaded a little. 

--

I just moved my cactus into the sun. Light will help it, right? Maybe it's leaking because it's purging something bad that came in through its roots. I hope, if that's the case, it gets better. I do not want it to die. 

One's Gotta Go

September, uh:

Just updated my website and discovered I set a record last month: in September, fourteen (14) reviews, covering sixteen (16) books, were published on the internet with my name on them. pic.twitter.com/yEbAVEmmYm

— Katharine Coldiron 🌟 (@ferrifrigida) October 1, 2019

Fourteen reviews is a lot for one month. I didn't file all of them at the same time or even within a few weeks of each other, so it's a little disingenuous about the nature of my productivity. A little. But not a lot.

Now that September is over, I'm looking forward to doing fewer things. October has, oh, six or eight books to read, and November has even fewer than that, largely because I've been saying no to things and keeping well away from Nectar Literary's delectable newsletter.

Idly, I've been wondering what to do next. I'm trying to slow down the reviews because they're not leading to steady income (yet), and that's starting to become a priority. Freelancing is exhausting, and while I'm better suited to it than to a regular job, I'm so worried and keyed up all the time that I'd like to have something else in place by mid-2020.

I'm applying for various opportunities and putting my intentions out there. Irons in the fire include a podcast a friend is launching with me as a rotating guest, a one-time editing job that's going to be helpful on my resume, and of course the book I'm 9/10 of the way done with. The film series I co-run at CSUN has suddenly taken off in popularity, based on our newsletter numbers and an invitation we got for a Halloween event. I'm trying to teach off- and online. But underlying all this is a question mark about making the Venn diagram work for me.

I don't know whether to lean into stuff that I'm good at and makes money (legal work, detail management), or to keep limping along at what I like. I've lived both ways now, and I like this way better, but I sleep better the other way.

In April and then from August until yesterday, I watched the five seasons of The Wire, which I knew was some kind of phenomenon, but which I didn't comprehend as the monumental work of art it is until I was a few episodes in. I started tweeting it, and couldn't stop, and now I have this huge thread of tweets across several months that covers my emotional & critical reactions to the show. People who have seen the show have really enjoyed the thread, they tell me. I've decided to collect the tweets into a little paper zine, because making an internet-based text into a physical text always tickles me. Don't know when, but hopefully sometime in the next couple of months.

Now that I have one essay left, I'm balking at writing it. Even though I get great satisfaction from finishing things generally (TV shows, boxes of tea, leftover dinners), I don't like finishing creative stuff. I went over this in therapy last week and I think it's tied up with fear of success, and/or disappointment that the best part of the endeavor (the making part) is over, and the part I like least (the fixing part) has to begin. Luckily, I found a contest that it'll suit, and its deadline is October 15. So that's a good prod to make me do the work.

Along with that, I'm planning to reread Highbinder this week. An agent event happened on Twitter recently, so I pitched three folks, and got a full request from one yesterday. I haven't read it all the way through in...gosh, over a year? More than two years? Don't remember. It's time to give it another read. I was thinking about it the other week because I know I named a character Malcolm, and I have to change that because the only male character in Ceremonials is named Malcolm. They both look like Malcolms in my head, just of different kinds. But one's gotta go.

Weekly To-Do, 2/10/19 - 2/16/19

I successfully got up early every day this week, which means I got a lot done. Lots of good stuff went on, too - I spoke at a writer's group with decent success, I got good early feedback on a review I was scared to turn in, and I got an acceptance at a super duper outlet. Plus, on Friday, I got news so good I haven't really been able to believe it yet, and which I've got to keep private for a little while longer.

Disclaimer: I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Mother Winter review
Handbook review
Sissy review
Denslow review

Reading:
Not Everyone Is Special
The Gutter Prayer
The Bird King
Getting Off

Pitching/Queries:
Southwest (rejected)
Jarrold
Woolfer (rejected)
Room (rejected)
LRB
YWEH to two NM pubs
NPR (accepted!!!!!)
Paris Review
Caroline (agent)
Walrus

Followups:
Prairie Schooner
Bitch (answered/assignment)
S&S publicist
Books I Hate folks (4)

Correspondence:
Barrelhouse business
Locus business
Galley request - Inanna (replied)
WRB assignment (yay!)

Other:

[secret thing]
[GIANT INCREDIBLE NEWS]
Submit "4 to 6"
Critical Notes submission
Promote Surge review
Promote Mother Winter review
Pleiades contract
Finish Ramadan interview
Promote Öræfi review
Attend reading
Speak at writers' group

Ten Books That Mattered: Part Five (Humblings)

1. C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
2. Sue Townsend - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 1/3
3. Stephen King - Carrie
4. Blake Nelson - Girl
5. Anaïs Nin - Incest
6. Dorothy Herrmann - Helen Keller: A Life
7. David Foster Wallace - Oblivion
8. Edna O'Brien - The Light of Evening
9. John D'Agata & Jim Fingal - The Lifespan of a Fact
10. Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

A few years ago, my mentor, giving one of her lovely, lazy-Susan-like lectures, explained that when she first read Moby-Dick at a young age, she decided she would never write another word. She despaired of ever writing anything as good as Moby-Dick and thought it would be better not to write at all. Of course, she went back on this decision, and - having read her work - I can tell you that we're all richer for her change of heart.

Some time later, in another class, she re-told this story, and I told her that I'd read Moby-Dick since the last time I heard it, almost entirely because of this story: I didn't want to miss a book so extraordinary that it made her feel incapable of writing well.

"And what'd you think?" she said. "Pretty good, right?"

"Yeah, pretty good," I answered. We chuckled over the understatement.

One Writer's Experience at AWP

In March I attended the 2016 AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference in Los Angeles. It was interesting. I'm going to write about it as if you, the reader, are a writer who is considering going to AWP in a future year and you need help deciding whether or not to go.

Well, I'd go, unless you don't like crowds, in which case definitely don't go. It wasn't packed like a concert (no sardine syndrome), but it was packed like an amusement park (astonishing in the sheer number of people around you). I read that 12,000 people were at this particular AWP, and I fully believe it.

But yeah, I'd go. For these reasons:

TL;DR Reading in Public Is Fun But Weird

Prior to March of this year, I had read my work (aloud) in public zero times. As of Saturday, I have done so twice. Here is video of me reading from my essay, "This is Not a Safe World", at The Last Bookstore on Friday, April 24th.

I am not as short as I appear to be.

You can find the entire essay in the 2015 issue of the Southern California Review, which I know you can purchase in person at The Last Bookstore and which I'm assuming you'll soon be able to purchase at this website, although the new issue's information doesn't appear there just yet. Like I said in the last post about it, the essay's very personal, trigger warning, yadda yadda. I'm not ashamed, I just don't want to make you uncomfortable.

I can't tell you what a weird, heady, impossible experience it was to do this reading. In the car on the way home, I yelped "I'm confused!" more than once in trying to explain to Matt how I felt and thought about it.

The prior reading took place at CSUN on March 20th and was in honor of the spring Northridge Review's release. Even though I'm happy that the story appearing in that issue finally found a home (it's the oft-rejected story that guest-stars in this post), I failed to blog about that reading or promote it here. Now I wish I had, because the two experiences were quite different.

Let's Justify Solipsistic Literature

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article on Flavorwire by Jonathon Sturgeon, "2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction," and it's been bothering me ever since. I was put off immediately by its first two sentences, which assert that postmodernism is over and no writers are interested in creating in the genre. It goes on to discuss a new, or at least newly named, genre called autofiction, in which writers turn to themselves as subjects, writing novels that aren't exactly novels about the topography of their lives. Not memoir, not exactly roman à clef, these books, like My Struggle, see the world as the writer sees them and they call it fiction.

At least that's what I gather from reading Sturgeon's article. Autofiction is news to me. What it sounds like, honestly, is just narcissism, the aggrandized importance of the self. It is not a trend I welcome.

I like it when I see me

It's pretty cute for me to criticize what I see as a narcissistic turn in contemporary literature here on my blog, subject: me. But I've been bothered for a while by novelists who put on airs (or have airs put on for them) about their genre-bending fictional tendencies when writing about their own barely disguised lives. I am definitely interested in the triangular tension between reality, truth, and fiction (in fact, it's one of my primary concerns as a writer), but from what I've read, these novels aren't standing at the same intersection I am. Really what they seem to be doing is an exercise in very accomplished navel-gazing. Is that so revolutionary? Is that so worthy of all this study and praise?

Sturgeon says that it's not just a conversation between fiction and reality, and that these novels "redistribut[e] the relation between the self and fiction." Mmkay. The central idea is that the self is made up of fictions, stories, that we tell ourselves about ourselves and others from birth to death. Well...yes. That's the nature of the brain, that it is not an indifferent camera. And it's also the twisted magic of the human experience, all the in-betweening and mitigation of reality. It's not magic that needs a mirror of self-importance to be witnessed.

It's possible I'm just stung by this assertion of the death of postmodernism. I think postmodernism is still worthy, and still has new directions in which to develop. Wallace's work is not finished; his endeavor - which I'd argue was welding a humanist approach to the random, teetering sculptures of Pynchonian postmodernism, trying to show that it is possible to live with heart and authenticity in a culture that is fractured and demanding and wholly simulacrafied - not fully laid to rest. So...fuck it? We just throw all that out and read thousands of pages about some Norwegian guy's completely ordinary life instead of trying to say something of worth about the internet?

No, no. I, lover of Proust, should not be so rude to My Struggle when I haven't read it. But I did not need a Flavorwire article to tell me that this culture is veering away from mutual connection and toward the mirror. I guess I just hoped that literature would not take the same path. I had hoped that post-postmodernism, or whatever you call DFW's work, could bleed sincerity through absurdity, could communicate a human core to our merry, tragic, impossibly splintered experience of postmillenial life. Yet, apparently, literature's solution is just to turn a camera on the author, and thence will come all wisdom.

Ugh.

Somewhat related is this review from The New Yorker, which doesn't quite argue but does present the idea that the possibilities of fiction are exhausted. Or at least that getting tired of putting together fictional plots and characters is something that happens to writers. I'm thirty-three, not fifty-three, and I've been writing seriously for only about seven years, not twenty. But I feel, as a knee-jerk reaction, that if you find it too tiresome to put something into fiction which you can sum up in a single conceptual word, something may be wrong with you, not with fiction itself.

Maybe I'm too bourgeois, or haven't spent enough time wearing black berets and smoking, but fiction seems limitless to me. The blandest realism can spawn worthy intellectual pursuit; look at Bovary. As you add elements beyond realism - fantasy, like García Márquez, or odd narrative strategies, like Faulkner, or odd textual strategies, like Joyce, or or or or - you get more moving parts, more to work with. How can all those various add-ons not be enough, in a career so infinitesimal as a human lifespan grants? If an intelligent, thoughtful novelist can find no way to create interesting work other than looking in the mirror, then I think our culture is in a lot more trouble than anyone suspects.

I'm Not a Screenwriter, and I'm Okay with That

Last Thursday I went to a poetry reading on the CSUN campus. It was very interesting. The poet founded a small press in the 1990s that has since become quite successful (I'd heard of it long before now), and she seems to be pretty active in the Los Angeles writing community.

What there is of one. Something I keep hearing from various sources as I go to more events like this is that L.A. is not at all a literary city. That there just isn't much here for writers who are not screenwriters, and the city values books and literature much less than it does the biggest motor of this town: films.

We can't stop here. This is L.A. 

I am not a professional writer yet, and I don't go to more than a few literary events per year, but I feel a kind of mild disagreement with this attitude and assessment. No, L.A. is decidedly not New York, but the entire publishing industry is headquartered in New York. It's a bit like saying there isn't much of a film community in Washington, DC. No, there isn't, but that's not what DC is for.

I'm reminded a little of a woman I met in an online workshop who resided either in Texas or somewhere in the Midwest, I don't remember. She lived in a small and boring community, so she said, and she felt that she couldn't write interesting work unless she up and moved to New York. Things happen there, she said, and nothing happens in small towns.

I really, truly thought she was crazy. Some of the greatest books come out of pastoral settings; some of the most memorable literary situations come out of small-town living rooms. To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary. All of Jane Austen. In Cold Blood. Alice Munro! You can live a really boring life in New York and write meaningless fiction, or you can live a very colorful life in Nowhere, Nebraska and write remarkable fiction. (Is The Hudsucker Proxy better than Fargo?) Thinking that you need an infusion of New York to make your fiction worth reading seems to me like thinking you need a different mixing bowl to make a better cake. Making good cake is so not about the vessel you mix it in.

Of course, certain stories can't but be told in New York (or Miami, or Bangkok), and that may have been what this writer was trying to say: that she wanted to tell New York stories but didn't have any experience with life in that city. Which would be fine; if she just plain didn't want to write Munro-type stories, then she probably did need to move to New York. But that wasn't really what she said.

Anyway, from my admittedly limited perspective, the L.A. writing community doesn't feel very small or neglected. Some truly great and unique writers have made this city their subject - Didion, Pynchon, Chandler. Writerly defensiveness about not fitting in to L.A., with its focus on film, seems a bit misplaced to me. For instance, I know that finding a workshop group or a space for your work or readings to go to is not hard. There aren't dozens of indie bookstores around, but those that exist have events all the time. A significant handful of MFA programs are spread across the city, and there are terrific foundations and rent-a-carrel places where you can connect with other writers. Saying that this town squeezes out fiction writers and poets seems to me a defeatist way to look at living here, when in fact opportunities are everywhere. And you get the chance to be a Didion instead of being one of a zillion just like you.

Mostly, I feel that if you want to be a New York writer, with all the benefits available from living in the city where most American books are born, maybe don't live in L.A. If you want to live in L.A., this is the lit community you have available to you. Why complain about it? It's your family, and your family kind of is what it is.

In Which I Dabble in Great Novels

Over the past month, I read Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, and Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. The former is considered an important novel of the 20th century, the latter an important novel of the Western canon. Both were compulsively readable, and I felt a mix of relief and satisfaction when I finished each, and I find it really weird that I happened to read them back-to-back like that. They have almost nothing in common aside from prominence, and even in that fashion they are known for different reasons and qualities. But they are both Great Novels.

Genre Urgency (?)

Last time on The Fictator:

11. One of our exercises was to write down the question at the core of our work. I had a very hard time with this at first, although eventually I came up with an answer. But more on that in the next post.

This was in the context of the workshop I attended at Esalen. Along with the question at the core of our work, we had to set down the universal question in the work (the first question is what does the work mean to you; the second question is what does the work mean to the rest of the world), other experiences that collide with the story, something in culture/history/mythology that resonates with the story, how many layers there are in the story, and, finally, "who are you really?". Right. Simple stuff.

I haven't felt the same kind of urgency to write the novels I've written as Cheryl spoke about over and over. The name of the workshop was "Writing from the Urgent Place/The Story You Have to Tell" and part of the reason I was eager to sign up for it was the nagging feeling that I don't write from a particularly urgent place. Going through them one by one, I remember my motivations for everything I've written, back at least to my terrible superdramatic stories in high school about the cool best friend I never had, but I would scarcely call most of those motivations urgent.

I could point to stories I've written and tell you that this or that one felt urgent. The boy-on-garbage-scow story is the most recent example. That story felt necessary, felt like a part of me that had to be excised and put on the page. But the boy-and-mom-in-crisis story, and a fun noir story about zombies (the two that I've finished most recently - one literary, one genre), they didn't feel urgent. They felt good, like I was practicing my craft and pressing up the hill toward my goal, but they didn't feel like I was tearing something out of me with my fingernails and grinding it into the page. I do feel compelled to get the ideas out into the world that I put in my books and stories. But as I listened to my co-workshoppers' passion, cranked up to 11, about the work they want to complete, my feelings about the novels I've written seemed tepid.

Am I doing it wrong? Should I keep seeking that urgent place? If I didn't write, I would shrivel up on the inside and my sanity would be threatened. But I wouldn't die if I didn't complete a particular project - I'd just move on to another one - and that was the kind of urgency everyone else was talking about.

I would like very much to hear from other genre writers about this issue. Writing Highbinder felt necessary because I wanted so much to bring Berra to life, wanted everyone who read the book to love her as much as I love her. But I didn't feel like my life depended on being able to set her down. Pam said in the very first session that those were the stories she loved most: when it felt to her, while reading, as if the writer's life depended on writing it. No project I've tackled has felt so urgent as that. Am I not meant to be doing this? Or am I just doing a different thing than finding a story under my own skin?

As I looked back, I didn't see a single thread connecting all my work that could be called a core question that mattered to me, the person, rather than me the storyteller. I see themes that are similar: disappointing, manipulative, or absent parents is the most consistent one, but betrayal and sexual deviancy seem to be interesting to me too, and women or girls in severe peril appear over and over. (I have explanations for some of these themes but not others.) I thought long and hard about this core question thing, and finally I wrote down the issue at the heart of the wikibook, which also sits at the center of the other big literary project I've conceived, one I know I'm not ready to write yet.

Truth. The nature of it, the fallacy of it, the value of it, whether or not it matters in a life story.

Unsurprisingly, this is an issue at the heart of my life in the world, too, but I don't see it as having appeared in my other novels so much. The novels I've written have been about their stories and their characters, not about a literary question. Yet I just can't see this as being the wrong way to have written them. I wanted to write about Berra, about Elaine, about Rose and Eliza and Jackson, about poor prickly Fiona, even about Jessamyn. When putting their stories together, I didn't want to write about truth, or about what it meant to be alone, or about how to go on when it seems impossible to go on (a sampling of other core questions). I just wanted to write about what happened to them.

Am I doing it wrong?

Grumble

One of the books I checked out of the library on my most recent trip was Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, which, after about a third of it, I'm pretty sure I've read before. I don't remember how much of Carver's total oeuvre I've read, but I remember these stories, so if I just picked the same only book of his I've read, well, that was pretty stupid.

I checked it out to remind me of the experience of reading Carver's stories. I'd read them before and only sort of understood, kind of the way I feel when I read Hemingway. I can tell there's expertise and genius here, but it doesn't feel comfortable against my brain. I want more detail. I want more words. I don't want biting economy of language; I want the full ostrich-feather caress that I get when the writer wants to say it all.

Some would argue that Carver does say it all, but that you have to read under the words and between the lines. That he's a jazz musician: read the words he's not writing. There was a Simpsons episode where Lisa said this to a co-audience member about a jazz concert, "listen to the notes she's not playing", and the other guy scoffed and said he could do that at home. I find myself in that guy's shoes. I like jazz and I like subtext, but Carver's an iceberg: there's so much below the surface that it feels dangerous to navigate.

The thing is, I'd argue that nearly all of modern literary short story writing, all the journal stories, are Carver's offspring. Most of the stories I read on journals' pages are cold and subtextual and filled with hard emotions. They are based around seemingly ordinary incidents injected with subtle meaning, and they generally insert an event or conversation 2/3 of the way through that machetes quickly to the heart of...something, when previously it all felt benign. Or lifeless.

If it's not plain, I don't like this kind of writing. I admire Hemingway and Carver for being able to pack so much into so little, but it's the same kind of admiration I have for people who write exquisite historical nonfiction. The achievement fails to connect with me.

If Carver has a polar opposite in my reading life, it's Henry James, whom I adore. (Ironically, he was something of a radical for his time, and his straightforwardness could be compared to Carver's in context.) No one could accuse him of being brief, but his situations, turns of phrase, long and complex sentences, characterizations punch my gut far more powerfully, even though in theory I have a lot less in common with his 19th-century characters than I have with Carver's 20th-century folk. And even exhaustive detail doesn't rob James of ambiguity, you know. It just means there's more heft to him, more to see when you set sail.

No one writes like Henry James anymore. No short story writers, anyway. He uses adverbs, for God's sake. He explains. He doesn't hesitate to use fifteen words instead of five. He rolls around in language like a horse in a field.

I don't understand why there's only room for Carver stories in the literary market these days (unless you're a virtuoso writer), and I am frustrated by it. Yesterday I developed a story idea and thought I might, just for an experiment, try to structure and write it as if it were a Carver instead of the way I'd like to. But it's discouraging to feel the subsequent lift of "maybe that'll get an acceptance", just due to mimicking a style I don't like.

I can't even bring myself to finish his book of short stories. I just don't enjoy them. It's bad; I mean, this is my market. The very essence of it. But it's going back to the library unfinished.

The Power of Three

Saturday morning I saw The Master at a matinee. I have watched P.T. Anderson's career with great interest since the turn of the century, and I hoped for more from him than was delivered to me with this one. Tempted as I am to turn this blog into a film rant outlet for me from time to time, it's not really why I write here, so I won't go into the movie in much detail. (Although I went into it at probably too much length after my friend kamper issued a perfectly innocent and general "What did you think?" on his blog. Spoilers there.)

One of the things that's still nagging at me about this movie occurred in the very last few moments. I'm definitely going to misquote this, so I'm sorry. The titular master says to his disciple, "If, in your travels, you discover a way to answer to no master, no master of any kind, will you please let us know of it? Because you will be the first man in the history of the species to do so."*

This got me thinking about the masters to which we all answer. This is more literal for some people than for others: most of us are employed by someone, some of us are tethered to manipulative or tyrannical people, some of us are devoted to a higher power. But it also reminded me of two other messages that have given me profound food for thought in the recent past.

The first chronologically is DFW's. His "This Is Water" has hardly once left my mind since I read it this spring. This link takes you to the abridged version at the WSJ, and this link takes you to the published book version, which I wish I was rich enough to buy for everyone I know. Here are part one and part two of the actual speech given by the actual DFW. It's not as polished as the final version, but it is, after all, the man himself.

I wrote about this speech a little bit previously, tying it to purpose both in life and in writing. But the echoes of his ideas - that there is no genuine atheism, that everyone chooses something to worship, and that choosing unwisely "will eat you alive" - have only gotten louder since that time, and have touched untold segments of my life. They are ideas I've mentally breathed, their essence reaching into the lowest and highest little lobes and crannies of my brain. I have decided to think hard and choose wisely, and, just as he says, it's a daily process. Minute-by-minute, even.

The second is Stephen Colbert. He gave a commencement speech to Northwestern last year, and it's pretty damn good. (I've seen better in terms of organization, but his credentials are improv, not stand-up.) He gave the speech as himself, not his character; it's still funny, but it's not high on satire. The heart of the speech is at the end, when he [mostly] sets aside jokes. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, go to 15:25 and watch the rest; that's only five minutes.

The you-can't-win-at-life thing is so, so cool. I wish someone had properly explained to me when I was young that adults, who seem to have it all put together, are totally just making shit up from day to day and year to year. I would have been a lot less intimidated about growing up.

The point, though, is that Stephen has this to say:

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love. Because service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself. 

I watched this last week and it got me to wondering what I serve. Then, I saw The Master, where nearly the same question was set out. That was the third time this message and question have been presented to me this year. Humans like the number three, is the way Matt put it to me once when I was being highfalutin' about how I style my written sentences, and it did not escape me even as I was sitting there watching the movie that I was hearing this, that this was impacting my personal atmosphere and shaking up the dust, for the third time.

I thought about it for a while and the only proper answers I could come up with to the question of what I serve were "truth", "compassion", and "art". Those are the things I value most deeply, when I really strip away everything else.

"Art" was also the answer I gave to the question of who my master is. This answer has spun off a whole new way of thinking about why I write and what I want to achieve when writing, a way I have barely even approached before. It soothes and calms the impatience and jealousy that have dogged me when I think about what I want to accomplish. Because giving a name to what I worship/my master/what I serve seems far more permanent and less empty than the wish to tot up money and awards, the desire to check those things off the list and to breathe easy about at least I've got that settled. I can't even number the novelists who've said in interviews that publishing a book isn't nearly as satisfying as s/he expected, and that it rid her/him of virtually none of her/his uncertainty. If that's true, is there ever any certainty to be found, even when blessed with financial security and critical praise? (Martha Graham says emphatically no. And I think she'd know.)

If I'm not being too premature, I think this is how you stop writing with the monkey on your back - how you stop worrying about rejection and the whims of the market. You just serve what you love. You step back to the wider, this-is-water view and you think only about the master - in my case, the art. And when you send something out, you hope for the best; you hope that the market serves the work (the art, the master), and also, if possible, the other way around.

Wow. Let's hear it for the power of three, eh?

*(Might as well make a definite misquote artful, right?) 

The Dim Star

Before I get going - yesterday I blazed through Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? in about four hours. I know there are people who read this blog who have challenging mothers, and if you're one of them, get yourself to the library and put your paws on this book. I admit bias, because her Fun Home is in my top ten favorite books ever. But really. Read it. Epiphanies await you inside. (And don't listen to this sexist asshat.)

All right, so, today's subject. Remember how I said I went to the beach in part to see if I could make some biggish writing decisions? The one that was troubling me the most was which book to buckle down on: the [non-]horror novel or the KUFC book. For one or the other, I need to set a deadline and commit to it and get to work.

I could reproduce for you the dithering I was doing over these two projects, but I do not think it would make good reading. In short: the most significant attraction for the [non-]horror novel was an agent telling me it's an extremely saleable idea and she wants to see a rewrite if I do one, and the most significant attraction for the KUFC book was a heady and totally new blend of confidence and organization. The most sig. negative for the [non-]horror novel was having to write from scratch a book I'd already written and am a bit sick of, and the most sig. neg. for the KUFC book was fear (creeping terror, in truth) that I'd get to the end and be similarly fucked.

Trust me that there were many more things to consider and I've rifled them all.

Mid-last week I was so tired of worrying about it and wanted so much just to write that I opened up KUFC and started writing. I'd only gotten to about 9,000 words on it, which is really very little, before setting it aside. Last week I added 4,000. After my third day of work on it, I guessed that my decision was made.

Dear Sugar: The Other Night I Went to a Reading

Margaret Atwood once said - and I don't remember if it was in this wonderful book or in an interview or what - that once of the very best things you can do as a writer is to give readings. I was close to dumbfounded at this advice. This might sound arrogant, but if you're a writer you probably recognize it as true: you hear the same goddamn advice over and over and OVER again. It comes in different forms, and sometimes it appears as the opposite of itself, but there are certain things that stay true and bear repeating and you can still get good and tired of hearing them from every possible source. But this was new. This was the first time I'd heard this advice.

It astonished me to hear something new in the sea of yeah-yeah-yeah, so I instantly doubted it. How are readings really going to help your bottom line? You reach a small roomful of people in most cases, a couple hundred in an auditorium at best (and most unlikely). But she's Margaret Living-Canadian-Treasure Atwood, so I figured she knows best, even if I didn't really understand.

As of Monday night, I understood. I went to my first-ever reading (...I think? There must have been another one before now, surely, I'm not that introverted) at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, and the reader/writer was Cheryl Strayed. This UTTERLY FANTASTIC and not-large bookstore was quite packed with Sugar and Wild fans waiting to hear her. I stood up for about two hours, all told. From the personal perspective, the one where I'm me living in my skin and this is the woman who's inspired me to be a better and truer human in 84 different ways, it was incredible. When she signed my book, I said idiotic stuff, including "thank you" about 6 times in a row, which was really what I wanted to say most even if it didn't come out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to hug her and bow to her and ask her about my mom and cry into her nice black dress. But there were too many people also waiting to say thank you and watch her hand write into their books.

From the writer's perspective, so much was accomplished: big sloppy fans of hers, like me, got to hear her voice and see her in living life, which I'm sure was gratifying for her. People walking by looked in, saw the crowd, came in for a listen, and discovered her for the first time. She sold a ton of books that she wouldn't have otherwise sold (the bookstore sold out of Wild), all of which have the potential to be lent around to friends and lead to more sales. The bookstore itself profited quite a lot (yeah, I bought some more books, some of which I'd intended to buy and others not so intentional). People in line for the signing got to trading stories and learned about even more books that needed reading. And now I'm telling all of you that if you have the chance to hear Cheryl Strayed do a reading, don't miss it, and that will lead to STILL MORE sales and word-of-mouth. It's just a big round robin of book-reading and book-buying. Even though it's only a little, person-to-person thing, doing a reading - not like appearing on Oprah, for instance - it makes a non-insignificant, stone-in-a-pond kind of impact. Lesson learnt: Margaret Atwood is right about everything.

So go see Cheryl Strayed if she comes to your town. Here's her schedule for the rest of 2012. If you have no idea who this Cheryl Strayed is that I'm talking about, buy this book. Don't ask questions, don't protest, don't read about it and think about it before buying. Just buy it. I can pretty much guarantee you won't be sorry. If you insist that you can't afford it, here's the archive of her Sugar columns at The Rumpus, but it's less fun by an order of magnitude than reading it in book form, and harder to fold down pages and write YES!! in the margins.

In other news, I think there's an essay on its way out of me this evening. I'm feeling a little less confident about my KUFC book, for reasons I want to write about in the essay. It has to do with Salieri. That's all I'll say.

Painting Within a Tended Field

It frustrates me how easily I give myself over to Yes This Is The Answer. When I find a solution for something, even if there's no chance it's sustainable, I tend to be all I AM THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE I FOUND THE ANSWER HUZZAH!!, and then I feel very foolish when whatever it is falls apart upon use in the long term.

Lemme splain.

Remember how I talked about hating to outline? All that still holds true. But there's a lot to keep track of in the KUFC book, a sort of A plot/B plot construction (global plot, personal plot) and some other people's plots that have their own arcs even while our heroine is blissfully ignorant of them. Plus the unfamiliar universe, plus a number of odd characters, plus a backstory, plus being certain that I'm self-styling instead of just plunking the prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis. (Sidebar: the Greenland novel was even more complicated than this, and I think if I'd had an outline, it wouldn't have turned out such a damn mess. For revision, if I ever fucking revise that book, I plan to create an outline and edit it, and then edit the book.) So but for this book I thought I'd do what I usually do and make copious notes in a pretty journal to the side of my desk. That wasn't enough, it turned out, because after I'd written my prologue, after writing pages of notes about the universe, and even after a few hundred words of Chapter One, I still didn't know what happened next.

So I wrote Chapter One on a new page of my notebook and scribbled what I already knew about it: I was going to open with action, with my heroine freerunning, doing what she calls her night work. I thought that was all I knew about it, but then I wrote down what I needed to establish about her, and what I thought was likely to happen to her in order to establish this stuff. Suddenly, more ideas were flowing: little details about the universe, character names and traits, something essential and very interesting about her background that reshapes things a bit. None of this amounted to what anyone would call an outline, because it was just notes and the majority of it stretched way beyond the first chapter, but it gave me a grounding for what I was going to write, which meant that I had a more structured and yet somehow more innovative first chapter when I got down to business on it.

Very stupidly, I presumed that this little bit of outlining had created momentum that would sustain me into Chapter Two. Which it did not. I wrote about a third of Two before I had to stop and go back to the notebook, and scribble through what was going to happen next and why. Then I came up with even more ideas: ways that her personal life was tied in to some of the intrigue of the book, characters who were going to appear sooner rather than later, other characters who weren't going to show up until later and the devices that were going to drag them back into her life. Before even writing it, I fixed what would have been a major mistake: drawing the A plot into the heroine's story too soon.

Everything feels much more orderly. I don't feel restrained, as if I'm doing the prose version of this:

Wait! I know! It's a giraffe! 

But more like I'm running around in a field that has been carefully bordered and mown. Tended, sure, but not unnaturally limited. Plus, I can always jump the fence. While writing Chapter One, I shifted gears to create a character who hadn't been part of my plan, and she's going to be useful.

The work I've ended up with is so superior to what I could have written, with so many more little cables wiring itself to the rest of the book, that I feel...just...grateful, and wholly stupid for not doing this with other projects before now.

I know I'm going against the advice of absolutely every writer I've ever heard of (and surely thousands I haven't), but writing every day doesn't seem to work out for me unless I'm a) short-storying or b) barreling headlong toward the end of a project. Everyday writing on a novel makes me feel resentful of and bored by the work instead of fascinated by it. I feel like I've got all the stuff of my life in the evening (dinner, Matt, movies, relaxing) on one side of a seesaw and writing on the other, and it seems unfair that writing is always heavier. Thus far on this book I've been writing every other day (sometimes with an extra off day in between), and the work has seemed much fresher for it. Sometimes I'll sit down with my notebook on the off day, and sometimes I'll do the notebook thing before writing that evening.

(This all sounds a lot more orderly than it is; a routine has still not been established. Yesterday I spent all morning at errands and didn't get to my job until 2:30, which meant that there really was no evening, just a shower and some Skyrim-watching and bed. Today I'm dawdling in the morning and I don't know if I'll get to anything but dinner at night, although I do hope it's a writing night.)

THE POINT IS, to make this into a Solution, the idea that outlineish note-taking in my notebook is the way that I'll write from now unto death, is wildly premature. And yet I'm thinking Yeeees, This Is The Answer. This is how I outline. See? Problem solved. Now I can be a writer.

It's so exasperating to do this, because I'll trumpet and crow about whatever solution I've just come up with, be very self-satisfied, and then find that this method doesn't work at all for the next project or the next stage of life. Back in my early 20s, I thought the way I wrote was to write completely nonstop for a few weeks, eating, sleeping, breathing the work, and then at the end of it I'd have a novella. That notion was born partially of being in my early 20s and having fewer other responsibilities, and partially of the creative machine being a very different thing then than it is now. A few years ago, it was trudge and slog and write through the pain, and I thought that was effective. (That might have been delusion rather than changing circumstances.) Now it's this notebook/every other day thing. And I'm sure in a few years it'll change again.

It's just like my job-hopping. It gets embarrassing telling your family members at Thanksgiving that you have a different job than you had last Christmas. Again. And telling them that no, you still haven't had any more stories published. Yes, you've changed your method of writing for the 18th time, but you're sure this time you're really on the trolley and nothing will ever change again, so when you're asked about it next year, you'll be able to say yep, that's still the way I do it, I'm confident and secure and totally not a wishy-washy idiot.

Um. Got a little sidetracked there. But I stand by it: I do feel like a wishy-washy idiot sharing these methods and then being like no, I had to tear down that building and build another one four inches away from the first one. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in the currency of personal pride, but it'll definitely be worth it. After all, I've written seven thousand whole words now! Totally worth it.

In unrelated news, I thought we had black-chinned hummingbirds, and then I thought they were Anna's hummingbirds, and now I seriously don't know. Half the hummingbirds native to this area seem to have greenish backs and red throats and dark heads, as these do. Whatever; they're full of pep, and I love watching them. When I'm actually on the patio, in my reading chair, I can hear them going ttttthhhhhhhhrrrrrrrRRRR as they zip by.

An Afforded Opportunity

SO. Writers' conference.

I have a wary relationship with anything geared directly toward unproven writers - conferences, MFA programs, Writer's Digest contests, enthusiastic agents, nondenominational groups that meet at Barnes & Noble twice a month. I fear that, more often than not, these things are designed to take your money and leave your head swimming with feedback that may or may not be of use. Beyond this, a common perk is the dreaded networking opportunity, which, for a writer like me who pines for the garret and the publisher reached by post, is not so much a positive aspect of such situations.

Once upon a time, a blogger whose posts I used to read went to a writer's conference, and I read about his experience. I had a middling opinion of his work; I had never read any of the writing he was trying to flog at the conference and thence had a likely unfair opinion of what he wrote, but I thought his blog posts were fairly pedestrian and undeveloped. He talked about the agent pitch meeting he went to and the people he met and the events he attended and whatnot, and I was burning with such terrible envy that I knew then my days reading his blog were numbered. He could afford the conference, you see. He had the money for it, and I didn't, and hence I would never get the opportunities he was getting.

There's a lot wrong with my reaction to this blogger - way too much to parse in this space - but the point I'm trying to make is that I never thought I could afford a writers' conference, and hence never really wanted to go to one. It was a toy I was too jealous of to try and acquire. I also found the concept of conferences essentially unfair, because if writing is really a matter of being afforded opportunities once you can...afford them, this is extremely wrong.

Now I'm in the position of being afforded this opportunity whether I can really afford it or not, and I find myself still kind of tangled about it. I feel resigned, as if okay, I guess it's time to do this, I've been avoiding it (whether because I genuinely couldn't afford it or just didn't want to afford it) for a long long time and now I really can't say no to this friend of mine who wants me to go and I actually have a decent book to flog and it's TIME TO FACE THE MUSIC.

There's a lot else that contributed to my decision to go on and do this - the location, a part of the country I've always wanted to see; the friend, whom I've wanted to meet in person for going on four years; the fact that Matt will be away in California and I will feel ever more empty and achy without him by late April and will want distraction very badly; and the fact that I actually sort of can afford it (which for various reasons has knocked me flat, emotionally, that I can sort of afford it). Mostly I keep seeing this:

Yeah. When? Huh, genius? Now's the time.

I travel so rarely, and enjoy it so little, that my net reaction is to view the conference with trepidation. There's happy excitement, and there's dread, but mostly just "what is going to happen? what is it going to be like? is anything going to change or will I be the same person, with the same confidence and the same relationship with Dame Fortune, on the plane ride home?"

Most times that I go on and go out with friends, rather than begging off because I'm too shy or home is too appealing for me to agree to go out, I have a good time and don't regret it. All the times I've gone running in the past couple of weeks, I have not once wanted to, but have never regretted it. I'm not sure I'm really getting across why I am reluctant to go to this conference, nor why I decided to go anyway, but I'm more than sure that this will be another one of those times, when I didn't want to, did it anyway, and everything was hunky-dory.

"I knew I wanted to be a novelist"

Got a rejection from The Sun over the weekend. Not terribly surprising; it's a very difficult market. I really believed in this essay, but hey, I'll just try again somewhere else. Que sera, sera.

I'm hard at work on the first edit of my book, and it's slow going. Every word is accompanied by uncertainty. And often there are cascading changes that have to happen - if I change one thing, fourteen other things have to change on down the line. But I have a vision of everything hanging together, of it all making sense, and oh, it's beautiful.

In my day-to-day life, it's rough. I still haven't started paid work for the company that hired me nearly four weeks ago, and if things don't change in the next 48 hours I'm going to have to give up the dream and do something else. Having been at home for a month, I am so loath to go back to the outside world - it's so nice in here, with all my stuff, all the safety and happiness of home and sweatpants. But I am feeling 200 pounds of guilt on my shoulders, moving around with it every moment, that I'm not contributing my part of the income to make our household run. We can't live without me making an income, and I can't live with the guilt of that for longer than a few days more, even if circumstances keep appearing that they're going to change any day now.

I admit to being sort of captivated by the vision of this, writing, being my job. Plenty will scoff and say that what I've been up to isn't hard work, and I'll grant you that I haven't had my nose to a grindstone, exactly (or I would have opened up my working draft and gotten to it by now this morning) but what I figured out here still holds, that when I do put in a workday on the fiction, it's hard. Not to be sniffed at.

A few weeks ago I read an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, whose epic book Middlesex I was alone in not enjoying, but whose earlier book The Virgin Suicides I liked a great deal. The interviewer asked him if he had a lack of direction during the years after college, and he said he had direction "because I knew I wanted to be a novelist". He went on, but I got stuck on this phrase, I knew I wanted to be a novelist. As if  "novelist" was a professional career you could just decide to do, get enough training and experience and have that be your job. Like being a lawyer, or an electrician.

There seemed to be such naivete wrapped in this phrase of his. Like he wouldn't be hampered by people who didn't like his work enough, or have to pay any bills while he was writing the first novel that sold. Like the capacity to be a novelist doesn't depend on anything except your decision to do it. I see the field of writing fiction as one from which only fools and angels attempt to make a living; if you can't get into the gate, if no publisher likes what you've done, you don't have a living. You have nothing. Nothing but work that's not good enough, a dream that won't come true, and bills.

But the thing is: he became a novelist. He found success. I don't know the story of it; maybe he worked really hard and was good enough, maybe he had a friend who had a friend who had an agent, maybe he made a deal with the devil. The point is, he wasn't naive. He was correct. Novelist is his career.

I've been using the word "writer" when thinking of the career I want to build. I already am a writer; I've had things published in print media and been paid for my work with the written word. It's not what I do on a full-time basis, but I think that calling myself that isn't trespassing. But to me the word "novelist" implies vocation, professionalism. And striving for that, calling my desired career "novelist" - without all the equivocations involved in "writer", since textbook authors and short story authors and people who create content for spam blogs can all fairly be termed "writer" - seems like a firmer choice, one that feels more accurate to what I want to do. I don't think I'm a particularly good writer of short stories, but I think the longer stuff I've written is better, so it's a more comfortable fit anyway.

But I'm not a novelist yet. I may be a writer, by hook or by crook, but novelist isn't something you can be until you've been paid for work that's bound and sold at a store. At least, that's the way I see it. I don't know what Eugenides would say.