Done and Undone

The only way this post will make sense is if I outline it: 

1. Collection soon 

2. Book finished 

3. New project 

1. My mini-collection of short stories, Wire Mothers, releases in just about a week. Confetti emoji! I am long overdue on making the announcement that I'll be appearing in Brooklyn in late June to promote it, but I haven't gotten my ass to Canva to make a graphic for that event, because April was messy (see 2). 

Art by Bri Chapman. Order here.

I've gone on record lots of times that I don't consider myself a great writer of short stories. I have gathered this from the world rather than believing it in my heart. I've tried (a lot) to write New Yorker-style minimalist short fiction, and I just can't do it. My stories, thus, got rejected constantly for the better part of a decade. And yes that is a very normal thing for a writer to report, stories getting rejected constantly for the better part of a decade, but whatever mold I was supposed to be reshaping to pour my short-form fiction into over all that time, so as to make it suitable for magazines - I never managed to find that mold's schematics. My acceptance rate didn't improve post-grad school, post-having a firmer grip on my craft. I write what I write, and magazines rarely like it, and I've accepted that (even if they won't, ha HA). 

So these five stories are the result of that process, of figuring out what kind of writer I am and accepting that I'm unacceptable. I like them a lot. I like how they turned out. I hope you will, too, but I long ago stopped believing that people who like regular American short fiction will like my stories, so it's OK if you don't. 

I'm moaning about lack of publication but the fact is, three of five of the stories in Wire Mothers were previously published. (This is not the average ratio for the stories sitting in my hard drive.) Fun fact: the editor who published "To-Do" in 2015 wanted to remove the bullet points. If/when you read that story, enjoy thinking of it without them. Editors can be idiots. 

2. For the first 12 days of April, I was at a residency, my first ever. It was at Yefe Nof, which is located at Lake Arrowhead, California, which is 5,000 feet above sea level. I did not think this would be a problem, because I've visited Denver multiple times, did a long weekend in Colorado Springs, etc., and never noticed the altitude. But I was increasingly ill the entire time I was there: digestive problems, anxiety, poor sleep, shortness of breath, et al. I pushed through and wrote a staggering number of words, successfully finishing a draft of my novel, Men from Other Countries. Then I went home early and hugged my husband. 

For the following couple of weeks of April, I stayed more or less in the zone, revising and rewriting and working through the draft, until I had something I was ready to give Matt. He read it, and gave me useful feedback, and now it's with my second reader. The door isn't completely open to more reader-friends yet, because I need one more line edit plus more feedback re: Matt's points before I can consider it really a finished draft, but it's functionally finished, and I'm so relieved. 

I started this book in 2017, but then I got sidetracked by Ceremonials and Junk Film. Gun to my head, I'd say I've been working on it for about two years, especially considering research, but the majority of the word count was written in two huge bursts in November 2023 (30k) and April 2024 (40k). I'm explaining this for transparency, and because when the book gets published, people are going to ask how long I worked on it and I want to have an answer to hand. It's not an answer that lines up with the historical record of me working on this book, but it's spiritually close to say two years, on and off, with inconsistent work and gaps in between for other priorities. 

It's a good book, and I'm proud of it, but it was rarely fun to write the way Highbinder was (and nowhere near as fun as Junk Film was). I remembered the fun I had with that book as I was reskimming it the other day, and the comparison was stark. Other Countries was serious business, and I only enjoyed myself on a handful of occasions (eg I came up with a reason for my gay character to hide in a closet). So, for my next trick... 

3. ...I'm going to write something that I hope is a lot more fun: a series of essays to form a character study of Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager and explore my stupid crush on him. 

just look at this idiot. God I love him so much

The project is also intended to reflect some more light on Voyager as a metaphor for family relationships and a much better Trek show than it's given credit for. But mostly it's about Tom. 

I'm a little concerned that it's my rebound project after working on Other Countries so intensely, and that it won't amount to anything. This concern is amplified because I'm telling people about it, instead of waiting to see if private work on it comes to something. That tends to be a jinx. But my list of undone projects includes this Tom Paris thing, a really dark hybrid essay I'm not ready to write yet, a very annoying revision of my grad school thesis that I have to read philosophy to do, and a huge undertaking about Jean Harlow's husband, which is likely some years away from being ready to write, if I even decide to do it. So I thought I'd start rewatching Voyager and taking notes and going from there instead of just waiting for my second reader to get back to me (hellish), or getting a real job (equally hellish). Very casual work for a possible fun-writing reward, no pressure. 

4. Misc: I've been wishing I had something good to write about re: movies, like the essay I wrote about The Zone of Interest here, but I haven't happened upon anything just yet. I gulped the entirety of the Hannibal TV show in less than a week, but most of what's generally useful criticism about that show has been said already, whether in words or in fan art. Pretty sure I'll be making this x-stitch pattern, though. 

found here

A Research Report

For the last six or seven weeks, I've been researching my next novel. I have not been quiet about the paths I've taken; on Twitter and Facebook I've been complaining, screenshotting paragraphs from books, and posting brief reviews of movies. I've also written about a few things I've learned. The actual book I'm writing isn't much of a secret among my writer friends, but I will be unspecific in this post. 

What I can be specific about is the time and place: Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Sweden, North Africa, London, and a bit of Lisbon and the former Czechoslovakia. This means I needed to learn a basic outline of events in World War II - more than I learned in high school, anyway - and, in much more detail, what daily life was like. What people wore, ate, read, listened to, talked about, did in those regions during those years. Were there refrigerators? Cars? Deodorant? Fashion magazines? The war impacts all this, of course, but even establishing a baseline for daily life, before any crisis began, was a challenge. 

(In this post, I am going to use not-the-obvious terms for the German government during the mid-twentieth century, for search engine reasons. I'm not denying or soft-pedaling anything; I am not a supporter of that government or its ideals!!!; I just don't want certain audiences who Google horrible shit for the wrong reasons to find this post.) 

I'm a poor researcher, I'll be the first to admit, but I did not want to commit anachronisms or be caught flat-footed, partway through a draft, without an activity for my characters to do or the right kind of food for them to eat. So I started finding books to read. 

This was the toughest one (soooooo drrryyyyyy), and possibly the most useful. It taught me the broad outlines of the war's progression and to expect huge differences between the nations in attitudes toward the war. That has served me well. For Sweden, the safety of the people was absolutely paramount, way above worry about how history would judge the leaders' actions, shows of strength, or sticking to a particular moral certainty. That priority was hard for me to get my head around. It was good I started there, though, because this book 

was even more challenging (although in its particulars, a very good read). For France, national culture was paramount, above concern about how its populace would cope, and far, far above historical judgment. America's culture is so exportable and reproducible that it took a lot of squinting to figure this out as a priority. Also notable in France was how easily the elderly leaders capitulated, how their concessions and waiting-and-seeing contradicted what younger people wanted and believed (whether they were resistance-minded or not). I think these men, many of whom served in the prior war, believed this would pass, that the German threat simply was not worth digging trenches and making shells, again. Their nearness to sunset likely had a lot to do with this perspective. Food for thought in 2022 America. 

This book was helpful for a bunch of reasons, but it was also fun to read because it was full of Jack Warner stories. For those who don't know, Jack Warner, who held absolute power at Warner Bros. for nearly half a century, is legendary for his monstrousness. He was a greedy, single-minded tyrant - but an unbiased one, treating everyone on earth equally terribly. Plus, he was almost always right, which makes him a prime-cut Hollywood monster. I also learned a handful of surprising (and sad) facts about refugees in Hollywood in the 1940s. The author kept returning to the differences in American film production between the 1940s and the 1990s (when the book was written), which I found bitter and needless. 

I was surprised at this book, which is self-published history, but was smoothly and tensely written, carefully researched, and fascinating in its own right even though it's about the author's parents. It gave me good information about Stockholm during the war. Self-published history is like Vogon poetry in reputation, but this is a strong book that I'd acquire if I were the editor of a history imprint. Which I never, ever will be. 

In my late teens and early 20s I was a Steinbeck fiend, and I'm pretty sure I read this book during that time and retained none of it. The reread was a pleasure. It's a beautiful piece of work, if a little sketchy (in the literary sense). Fun fact: even though it was written deliberately as propaganda, the Allies didn't like it for that purpose, because it "humanized" the enemy. Citizens of occupied nations, however, loved it, and took guerilla publishing measures to get it into as many hands as possible. They knew, because they lived under occupation, that a cartoon enemy is neither accurate nor helpful. 

(To be clear: what Steinbeck does in this book is one hundred percent different than what the New York Times has done with its humanizing bullshit. Steinbeck won a Nobel, and the NYT is bothsidesing itself directly into sympathy with the devil.) 

I'm nearly out of books I should read and it's almost time to write, so while I wait for a couple of interlibrary loans, I've switched to movies, in the hope that some of them will have reasonably accurate period details. 

This one is off to the side a bit in some ways, but the moral philosophy underlying it is right within my concerns. It's got some memorable scenes and situations, but it's a little tedious; Skarsgård is at full power, but Keitel is flashing a LOW BATT light. It also tugs at a thread I noticed across my reading: the punishment meted out to anyone affiliated with the former German government after 1945 was extremely inconsistent, from country to country and from person to person. Frenchmen who wrote occasional pandering articles were shot right away; Germans who did cruel, racist things to fellow human beings walked free. So it went in all nations touched by the war. It's an impossible task, of course, trying to figure out who deserves what. None of us is God. 

These two were frustrating but helpful. (Both star Jesper Christensen, a Dane of great renown, but this is sheer coincidence.) The one is about the King of Norway's actions when Germans invaded in the spring of 1940, and the other is about a famous Swedish journalist who publicly, bitchily denounced the German regime from 1933-1945. The King's Choice was shot in all handheld, which annoyed me to no end, yet the acting, the personal dilemmas, and the period details were tremendous. It was clearly influenced by Downfall, but the story didn't propel itself as urgently as Downfall's did. Not a waste of time, but not as good as it thought it was. 

The Last Sentence had Bergman intentions and Dreyer austerity, but without the brilliance or flawed human core of either. Also, the DP did not understand how to make a black and white movie vs. a color movie with a black and white filter. But the content had direct bearing on the book I'm writing, more than any other save the one below, so I'm glad I watched it. 

So far this is the only movie for research I can recommend without an asterisk (i.e. "if you're interested in Sweden during WWII" or similar). It was stunning, and for an American audience, it's a very unusual story. It did have major elision problems, but I credit the filmmaker for attacking them with sheer will rather than logical writing. Also, the last third of it took place in the very city/decade where a large portion of my book is set, so yay for that. 

Here are some other books and movies on my list: 

not great

nicer to read than expected but that only goes so far

totally awesome

sentimental, propagandistic hogwash that I enjoyed a great deal

This six or seven weeks has been quite a journey for me. I did not know I'd find World War II so fascinating, but I really, really do, in a way that will remind you of your dad or granddad if you ever set me talking about it. It seems from a distance as if it was a simple war, with binary choices and obviously divined motives, but it's not that at all; the middle ground has been far more populous than I expected. Plus I've learned so many amazing one-off facts. Like, for instance, the reason the Blitz on London was halted? Because it didn't work. The intention was to destroy the RAF, various manufacturing hotspots, and the morale of the people. It accomplished none of these things. The RAF turned out to be more skilled, with more maneuverable planes, than expected; manufacturing merely spread out to other parts of the country instead of remaining centralized and thus easily bombable; and, apparently, nothing can destroy the morale of the British people. I find that completely amazing. 

I've also learned that the "neutral" powers made a lot of collaborationist compromises; the dictator of Portugal was...kind of...unobjectionable? as a dictator?; Ingrid Bergman was a workaholic; Coco Chanel was a spy for the wrong side; and Czechoslovakia was horribly wronged, but it gave almost as good as it got in the end. And lots more. 

I hope I won't have to make another report like this, and that I can just write the damned book instead. But there's still a book on fashion, a book on interwar Britain, a book of Swedish statistics, and a giant book of James Agee reviews (570 pp) containing only one of use to me, all of which are either in my office or headed my way. So...we'll see whether I get this thing going for real by September, or not. 

May Miscellany

As usual, once I write enough organized, one-topic posts I wind up with a bunch of smaller thoughts that need a place to go.

1. In finishing out the last semester of my graduate degree, I did two public readings and two semipublic readings. They were terrific. I love giving readings and I will miss the opportunity to do it. I guess I either need to join somebody's reading series or start a series of my own.

For the final GRS (Graduate Reading Series, which I've been co-running at CSUN all year), I read what I most wanted to, which meant I read a piece of the secret project, a poem (!) about hawks, and my manifesto. It meant a lot to me to get to read these things in front of an audience, particularly an audience that's known me for a long time but might not have heard/read this stuff of mine. I got positive responses.

Beyond my own experience, it was wonderful it was to hear my dearest Jesse read his poetry for the first time in well over a year. His work is so good, SO good, and I needed it.

For the first semipublic reading, I meant to read a piece of the revised final project I did for that class, and instead I ended up speaking sort of extemporaneously and reading a piece of this blog post, which had nothing to do with the class, and I don't really know how I ended up there but it made sense at the time. For the second semipublic reading, I read the start of the second chapter of the Casablanca novel I've started writing (did I mention that here? I'm writing a novel about Casablanca), and I think it went over fine.

The final reading was for 698D, my capstone/"thesis" class, and I was nervous for the first time in about six months. I'd been at a microphone easily a dozen times in the meantime, but this one, wow. My hands trembled. The reason was the material. I decided to read some of my hardest stories: the codex for why I will never live in New England again, the time I cried over a Banquet frozen dinner. I was afraid of being so vulnerable. Which is weird, because vulnerability doesn't usually scare me, but...I don't know. I was such a different person when I went through all that. Which explains itself, kind of; I wouldn't be who I am without crying over that Banquet dinner. Yet if this material wasn't interesting, or worth hearing, maybe that meant I was not an interesting or worthwhile person? [gestures with flappy hands] Whatever. I read the hard thing and I don't think it went as well as GRS but it's over and fine.

2. There's been some literary-world kerfuffle about this article, which says you HAVE TO HAVE TO write every day if you want to be a writer. No, you don't. I didn't even click on it when I started seeing it around last week, because no, you don't, and people who say that are locked into thinking there's One Right Way to do writing. Few things exist with One Right Way attached to them. I sat and stared at the wall and thought about this just now for several minutes, and drilled on down to things that are the same for everyone, like bodily functions, and even then I can't settle on the idea that yes, there's one right way to urinate and all the other ways are wrong. Human beings always have a choice.

But that is very far off the point, which is no, you don't have to write every day. I don't. I do, however, take writing seriously, which is the practice I think is truly important if you want to be a writer, and which practice I believe looks different for everybody. Consequently, in about two weeks I'll have another publication to tell you about. Take that, dude on Salon whose books I've never read.

3. I had to cut this out of my post about Girl and Incest:

In the suburb where I lived during high school, there was briefly a bookstore in the same plaza as our local music store/safe haven, Record & Tape Traders. I don't know what the deal was with this bookstore, whether it was an indie or an overstock seller like Crown, but I found there one of the most unusual books I've ever read: Exegesis, by Astro Teller (who, the internet tells me, now runs Google[x], which surprises me not at all). I bought it because the cover was nearly black, with an imprinted :) on it, and that looked interesting. I imagine the book would seem very quaint now, because it's about AI and takes the form of emails and instant messaging, all circa 1997, but at the time its form and subjects were totally new to me. It was one of those books that drops out of nowhere and back into nowhere. It's never come up anywhere else in my life, and in the middle of a high school curriculum it was exotic indeed.

4. Augh, I forgot to tell you about this interview with Gayle Brandeis! It was the most fun one yet. Two more interviews are on their way.

5. Somehow I have become a person who asks for, and receives, ARCs (advanced reader copies). I don't know how. It's a delicious mystery and it makes me feel very fancy indeed.

6. Related to this, I've become convinced that the best way to be a writer in the world is to lift other writers up. I've had a lot of good luck in the past two years, but I've also tried hard to spread the work of others out in the world: giving small-press books away to people I think would like them, sharing poetry and essays around, telling people about writers/friends I know that I think they should know. Every victory for every writer I know is a victory for me, too. I don't know which way the karma is flowing for me, but I don't really think that's the point of karma. 

I guess this is networking, in its truest sense. But it seems to be going well. 

Bitlets

I recently made long-distance friends with a fascinating writer of poetry and prose. After I rando-emailed her, she Googled me, sensibly, and found my blog, and read my From Me to You series. She asked in her next email if she could share the series with her students, because she found it helpful and thought they would too. I tried not to use too many exclamation points in my reply, but I was flattered and pleased that I'd been of help. Others have told me they've referred students to the series, as well. This got me wondering whether I should collect the series and print it, or put it in an ebook. Still considering. What do you think?

In the meantime, I've written another installment, which I'll put up next week. It's not about submitting work, as the first five were, but it definitely circulates around the issue of publishing.

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This week, on deadline, I wrote a thing. I'm not satisfied with it, but off it goes to workshop anyway. (see "deadline".) It's definitely the beginning of something bigger rather than a story that stands on its own, and I'm looking forward to digging deeper into it later. Through this whatever-it-becomes, I will finally wreak my revenge on Casablanca for its mediocrity.

Yeah, I said it. Argue against me. Unemotionally.

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Reading at present:

Anne Enright, The Gathering. The audiobook is driving me totally crazy so I think I'm going to pick up the paper book sometime this summer instead. The woman reading it is so slow that I lose track of what the last sentence said by the time we're in the middle of the next sentence, and the library app doesn't have the ability to change speed like iBooks does. Fully four seconds elapse between every sentence, which makes me want to scream. I really like the writing, though.

Wendy C. Ortiz, Bruja. Funny and moving and interesting and beautifully detailed. If you are a person who gets bored by other people's dreams, you won't like it. But I'm not, so I do.

Kate Zambreno, Heroines. So good I wish I could take it more slowly than I am. I did not like her novel Green Girl (I believe I'm the only one) (sorry), but I deeply love this.

The Cupboard Pamphlet. I picked up a subscription to the Cupboard at AWP last year, mostly because their tote bags were terrific, and man, I'm glad I did. I read duncan b. barlow's "Of Flesh and Fur" a couple of weeks ago and raved about it for two days, and then I read John Paul Stadler's "Prehistoric", and admired it although it was not my kind of thing. The Cupboard publishes tiny, beautifully designed little booklets, and I have not yet read one that wasn't excellent. Check it out.

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This weekend I am going to separate literary events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I guess that's my life now.