“I Am Your Father, Luke”

I am thinking about the dark side, those things that prompt your best writing but you wouldn’t admit to in your darkest hour. Those things that make you cringe when they brush up against your consciousness. Those things, like drug addictions and mental illnesses, that you fight every day of your life.

Okay, things I wouldn’t admit to in my darkest hour, and, no, I’m not going to admit to them here either.

I’m home with sick kids today and caught an episode of Law and Order, the one where the Army officer’s wife smuggles drugs from Colombia and then testifies against the drug dealer. At the beginning she’s a no-account party girl and at the end she comes clean and tries to take responsibility.

I was also reading the blog of a friend and he’s having a hard time. I don’t know the inside scoop but it may be drugs or health or who knows what. I feel bad for him.

I was thinking about how those black holes are like drug addictions ~ sometimes are drug addictions ~ and how they are both in and out of your control. How some people think of them simply as bad habits and others think of them as the devil himself come to torment their lives.

I was thinking about how one’s art is focused on these things. Sometimes the references are so veiled that no one, except possibly someone with a similar problem, would ever guess them. Or would guess them wrong. But by their very nature ~ how they obsess us, the effects they have on our lives ~ they permeate our art.

No grand conclusions about this. Sometimes it’s enough just to acknowledge its existence.

What I’m Reading Today: Maurice Gee’s Going West. I was turned on ~ and I mean that literally ~ to this book by the New Zealand Book Council’s rocking book trailer (which I have on my site here toward the bottom). It’s an amazing book and Gee’s style is just out of this world. He has a way of taking a subject and turning it over and over in fascinating ways, as he says (I’m quoting and probably misquoting from memory) “like vegetables bobbing up in a stew.” He takes ordinary situations and makes them surprising but not odd, very nuanced and real. I read a scene or a description and go “Yeah! That was right on the money.” He’s like (what I’ve read of) Proust, only more approachable.

Size Matters

I’ve been thinking about length in fiction ~ mostly because I’m working on some short shorts (less than 1,000 words). Size really does matter. Short shorts have to be like narrative poetry, while with a novel you have room to spread out. To be lazy, actually.

It’s true. With a novel, each word doesn’t count for as much, so you can get away with a lot more on the word and sentence level. Sure, novels are a challenge in other ways. How to get them done. How to keep them together. How to keep it all in your head! I always imagine the huge tornado cloud that is my novel swirling above my head. It takes a lot of effort.

However, short stories have really helped me to learn craft on a word-sentence-paragraph level. Every bit of a short story is important. It’s like (what I’ve heard about) the 400 meter in track ~ longer than sprint distance, but yet you still have to sprint the whole way. In other words, the whole thing counts, and you have to put forth your best effort at the beginning, middle, and end, every step of the way.

When writing short stories, there’s also always a tension for me between an exterior fable-like story that covers long spreads of time (and is mostly telling) and a story that covers a very short span of time and is very internal with intrusions of memories (with a lot of showing). Think Annie Proulx or Gabrial Garcia Marquez vs. Tobias Wolff or Anthony Doerr. The same story can be told both ways ~ chronological fable-like skipping through time or one scene with flashbacks. This is something I need to think through more thoroughly.

So, one of my pieces of advice to anyone trying to hone their craft ~ and to myself: work on some short stories.

Oh, and I finished a short short today!

What I’m Reading Today: More of The Known World.

Submissions Calendar

Yesterday, I put together a submissions calendar for the next couple of months. A very ambitious schedule, requiring me to write a bunch of new things. I’m excited about it. Planning always gives me hope and energy, and entering contests and deciding which magazines to submit to gives me deadlines and focus. Right now I can use some of that, with the post-holiday blahs.

Taking a workshop used to give me deadlines as well, but I’m much pickier about workshops nowadays. First of all, where I am limits what I can take, but, second, the workshop has to be taught by someone I really want to work with. Also, taking a class can feel like a cop-out in some ways; I know what I want to write and how to improve ~ by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair ~ and taking a class is an elaborate and expensive avoidance mechanism. It has to come from in here, not out there. (I know, I know. This contradicts what I said in the first paragraph. We all must have our illusions.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love taking workshops. I love the people I meet and reading others’ work and working with more-accomplished writers. It’s very valuable. I wouldn’t be opposed to getting an MFA some day. (Or teaching at one.)

So here I am working up a round of submissions ~ regular submissions but contests too. In the past, I’ve done at least two massive rounds of submissions per year, but I’m trying to step up the frequency, which will keep me focused on writing new stuff.

The absurdly, wonderfully talented Jacob Appel has won an obscene amount of contests ~ deservedly so. (I don’t know when he sleeps. He must be the hardest working writer and student in the world. He has more publications and degrees ~ including in Law and Medicine ~ than you can count. I am in awe.). He wrote a great piece about entering contests, “The Case for Contests: Why Emerging Writers Should Submit.” It first appeared in Poets & Writers and then on the Gotham Writers site. He makes the case for entering contests, and I buy it. I love the image of him “cuddling up with my checkbook on a Friday afternoon and doling out my meager earnings to literary journals in ten and fifteen dollar increments.”

Hope springs eternal.

What I’m Reading Today: My friend Bonnie ZoBell’s short story “The Whack-Job Girls” at Bartleby Snopes. Such wonderful energy and zazz. I very much enjoyed it! (And could take a lesson from it on pure poetic momentum.)

PS Today is my birthday!

PPS I seem to be getting carried away with the PSs lately.

The Curse of Memoir - A Guest Post by Ken Olsen

Our Cool Person Guest Blogger today is Ken Olsen. Ken is an award-winning freelance journalist who covers the West from Portland, Oregon. Here’s an excellent article of his on the salmon controversy in Oregon. His writing has appeared newspapers and magazines including Men’s Journal, National Wildlife, High Country News, The American Legion, Boys’ Life, and many others. His widely hailed series on Vernon Baker, the only living World War II veteran to receive the Medal of Honor, was published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review and resulted in a book called Lasting Valor. His essays have been published in the Left Bank series of literary anthologies. He was born and raised in Wyoming and misses fishing with a willow-stick. When he’s not chasing his border collies, he’s hard at work on a book about love, loss, adventure, and Alaska.

If you are the spouse of a philandering politician from the South or a flaky has-been from the Far North, memoir sounds like grand revenge on the cheating bastard in your life or the campaign staffer you wish to blame for your intellectual shortcomings. Not to mention a ticket to appear on Oprah.

If you are running for president, you have to get your personal story of triumph into print to try and control the biography the press will recount if you and your campaign fund last long enough to command some coverage.

In either case, there’s generally a ghostwriter to endure the pain of turning your stream of consciousness into something coherent and readable. And ample evidence that it’s not always possible to turn a sow’s ear into anything more than a sow’s backside. (We can all think of a recent example, but lest we sneer, the “author” has a sleek touring bus and appears to be finding plenty of people willing to shell out the $28.99 for a printed copy of her incoherence.)

For the rest of us, writing memoir is a long, lonely battle with self-doubt, family expectations, disappointment and the endless evidence of our own shortcomings. It’s laboring to make sense of the nuances, the things left unsaid, the care given and the emotional acknowledgement denied. Pretty much like any creative writing project except that memoir, by definition, means dragging the family’s worst baggage out into the spotlight of cross-examination and humiliation. And nothing haunts your pages like the worry of how your mother/father/sister/grandmother will react to you detailing the family back-story in print.

Abigail Thomas offers me the best remedy. “Write like you are an orphan,” advises Thomas, author of a magnificent memoir titled A Three Dog Life as well as a craft book called Thinking About Memoir.

Amen.

Lest you’ve breathed a sigh of relief because your brother never went to jail for his mobile meth lab, remember that it’s often the small, innocuous stuff that causes the most family backlash. Not Uncle Eddy’s addiction to cough syrup or Mom’s life as a pool hustler. Rather, it’s often the stuff the writer considers inconsequential – the phrases and scenes that are “just there for color” – that are gasoline for the fires of disagreement.

Early in my journalism career, I was required to write a weekly column. Like most newly minted reporters with a limited repertoire of life experience and war stories to draw upon, I quickly turned to embarrassing my family in order to fill that gapping hole in the newspaper. My family quickly turned against me.

The most memorable rebuke came after I penned an insightful, if not slightly hyperbolic piece, about the Scandinavian-American’s zeal for celebrating Norwegian Independence Day by purposefully ruining fish and other perfectly good food, a rigid tradition of culinary transgressions reenacted to mark the fatherland’s habit of savoring cod reconstituted in lye and rancid trout fermented in a buried crock. (Truth be known, independence amounted to the Swedes cutting Norway loose before some Viking began whipping up Lutefisk on the Food Channel.) Even worse: a little research reveals that Norwegian-Americans stranded in North Dakota and Minnesota are about the only people enthusiastic about lutefisk and other “traditional” dishes. Back in Norway, this sort of crap went out with the invention of the refrigerator.

But I digress.

My sister wrote a blistering letter to the editor in response to my column, ridiculing my abject lack of patriotism and pointing out all of the ways I had blasphemed my roots. She has since packed her steamer trunk and decamped to the fatherland, so I am free to bring this matter back out into the open. Unless, of course, the Internet allows her to stumble across it from her cottage in the fjord.

Since that dispute and a dozen similar incidents, my family has nominally adjusted to my proclivity for telling stories about our clan. Or decided to ignore me. They still quietly torment me, when I fail to follow Abigail Thomas’ directive to adopt an orphan writer’s mindset. Even then, my family is not the greatest hurdle.

I am.

Memoir requires that I reveal myself on the page. It is a means of holding a mirror up to myself that illuminates, in high definition, scars and warts and moles I’ve learned to overlook. It reminds of things I’d like to forget. It makes me self-conscious, self-aware, embarrassed, self-critical and every other adjective about insecurity and self-doubt.

I also sometimes find it impossible to articulate how I felt, what I anticipated, what I was anxious or excited about without being seized with the fear that I’ll look like the most ridiculous fool to find pen and paper. And what I consider a breakthrough, a strip-me-naked soul-bearing passage, often reads like a vague dodge to my closest writing confidents. I haven’t shown myself on the page, shared emotion. Conveyed feeling. Allowed the reader to love/hate/empathize with me. It’s an exasperating, throw-in-the towel place for a writer. It’s like being a male in a reality-show version of couples counseling, where the woman says, “honey, I just want to know how you feel,” the guy says, “I just told you. I’m worried my truck is losing compression on two cylinders, hunting season opens in a month, and I don’t have the money to fix it.” And they stare at each other as if they are conversing with someone speaking in tongues.

Simultaneously, I battle the built-in filters. Top of the list: The Scandinavian proclivity for silence – brooding is the breed’s pinnacle of self-expression. Then there’s my own family’s tendency not to talk about anything personal. Add to that growing up in the West where self-sufficiency is assumed. If you’ve got to whimper about your troubles – with the notable exceptions of gun rights, wolves, and gubberment interference with just about anything – you don’t belong. Finally, I trained as a journalist, which means I’ve been trained to keep myself out of a story. And so I naturally do.

Beyond these creative hurdles, there’s the constant task of reining in the sprawling tome. How much background, how much chronological time, how much detail about the setting do I share? Can I use the most interesting decade of my life as the lens through which everything about me is revealed? Tobias Wolf wrote a great memoir centered on a single year in Vietnam called In Pharaohs Army. Ann Hood’s Comfort is about the unexpected death of her child. A Three Dog Life tells of how Abigail Thomas dealt with her husband’s traumatic brain injury. Jarhead is about Anthony Swofford’s tour in the first Gulf War. None are exhaustive in terms of the time span covered. Each of these excellent writers selected a slice of their lives and told us compelling stories without burdening us with the narrative of their lives from birth to baptism, baccalaureate degree and beyond.

Finding this container, that shape, is incredibly important because it forces us to put sideboards on the story, to discard the legions of stuff that don’t belong, to hone in on the essence of our narrative. Like everything involving writing, finding this shape means trying many times before discovering the right mix.

After four years and many jettisoned manuscripts, I’ve finally found that container. And, thanks to the politics of the moment, I’ve also found myself blessed with one great association: Sarah Palin. She’s from Alaska. (I’m taking that on faith. I haven’t seen her birth certificate.) I lived in Alaska. She skinned a moose. I skinned a few million salmon. She was governor of Alaska for several months. I worked in a fish cannery several summers. She attended college in Idaho. As did I.

The rest of the details? The dirt? You’ll have to wait for my tell-all.

I can’t wait. Thanks so much, Ken!

Reality Descends

A new year ~ and way too much to accomplish. Easy for life to get in the way of art. So here’s to keeping the nose to the grindstone. Cheers.

What I’m Reading Today: The short story “Safari” by Jennifer Egan in the New Yorker. A fabulous story, so complex yet clearly expressed. Confession: I burst into tears at the end. I’ve been a fan of Egan’s ever since I read The Keep. There also was a great interview of her in Poets & Writers a few years ago. (In it, they used the phrase “eerily prescient,” which my husband and I joke about. “How eerily prescient,” we’ll say of this or that.)

PS Soon you'll get a break from my droning on to be graced by the infinite wisdom of another Cool Person Guest Blogger. Stay tuned.

Those Adulterous Words

Your word of the day: disintermediation (from George Walkley’s blog Life as a Beta Geek), as in “Authors with their own successful platforms will start to behave like publishers, including the possibility of disintermediation.” Has the ring of “disestablishmentarianism.”

I love coming across new uses for or variations of old words. It feels Shakespearean. And the way words can mean the same thing (denotation) yet hold the opposite weight (connotation). For example, the archaeologists I used to edit would write about the layers of sediment “harboring” cultural remains. They could have said that the sediment “contains” cultural remains, which carries no negative connotation, but the resentment of having to stop everything to dig the dang things up comes through with the word “harboring.” It was more about their reaction then the physical reality.

The only audio recording of Virginia Woolf I’ve come across (“A Eulogy to Words”) celebrates this slipperiness of words ~ in VW’s wonderfully stately but subversive way: “English words are full of echoes, memories, associations. … They’ve contracted so many famous marriages in the past. …Words are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. … Words don’t live in dictionaries. They live in the mind. … How do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live. Ranging hither and thither, falling in love, mating together. Tis true they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we inquire into the past of our dear mother English, the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. Because she has gone a’roving, a’roving, fair maid.”

What I’m Reading Today: My good friend April Heaney’s story “Homebound” in the latest Prick of the Spindle. The story tracks the thoughts and emotions of a woman after she dies. I love it. A remarkable exercise in empathy and imagination and craft, April! And I also want to give a shout out to Prick of the Spindle and the wonderful work Cynthia Reeser and her staff are showcasing (whether or not that category includes the story of mine that they generously published).

And, oh, PS A story of mine "Control Erosion" (pdf) went up today at the SNReview! So exciting. Thanks, Joseph Conlin and all!

Happy New Year’s Resolution

Happy New Year!

I love the new year, and I’m someone who always makes a resolution. Unlike a lot of people, I love new year’s resolutions. I mean, if you’re a secular person and don’t regularly attend church, where else are you urged to be a better person, to think long term, to make yourself (and the world) a better place. This is a good thing, I think ~ to try to improve, to do better.

Yes, many of our resolutions are too grand, too ambitious, but what are ideals for if not benchmarks to shoot for. And I think the effort is worth it. It makes us all better people.

Let’s hear it for resolutions.

What I’m Reading Today: I’m finishing up the Anchor Anthology and I’m reading Edward P. Jones The Known World. I love how Jones gives us the life stories of all his characters and we go in and out of points of view all the time yet we’re never confused. I like how nuanced and muddy the world is yet you totally understand it. Plus, I’m totally psyched because Jones is visiting the University of Wyoming and (hopefully) I get to take his workshop!