Category / Writing

by Michael

A Peopled Memoir

The other week I finished Stanley Hauerwas’s memoir, Hannah’s Child.  Hauerwas spoke a bit in the beginning of his book about the reasons he wrote a memoir.  He mentioned the obvious in that theologians are not known for completing such works.  He said by their nature and by the nature of their work theologians don’t spend many energies in the apparent effort of telling their own stories as much as they tell another story, the story of God and God’s things.  Of course, that’s a very rough summary of his introductory remarks, in my own words.

Coming away from his book, thinking it through slowly while I read it, I am convinced and glad at how peopled his remembrances are.  He even said that he nearly subtitled his memoir so as to make it a clear tribute to his friends.  Over and again he commented on how necessary and significant others were for the work he had done and the work he was doing.  Friends–and he named them and told their stories as well–were the ones who framed how this thinker about God told of his life.

I’m not writing a memoir and I won’t most likely, but I think Hauerwas, theologian that he is, has left us with more than his own story in Hannah’s Child.  I think he’s given us a method of doing theology.  I think he’s given a way of going about the work of God and God things and in God’s world.  I think his example of pointing to people, getting into trouble and fun with them, and of making a life for and full of others is more than commendable for us, whether or not we consider ourselves theologians.

Of course, we all talk and make sense of God; in that way, aren’t we all theologians?  But we can benefit from the way this teacher and servant has chronicled his life.  If you’re interested, please read the memoir.  The content in the first pages is worth the purchase.  Then there’s the added benefit in getting through the pages.

by Michael

Meg Wolitzer “On The Rules…”

Have you seen this essay, The Second Shelf, by Meg Wolitzer, over at the NYT?  You can read the entire essay by clicking here.

If “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention? Or would this novel (which I loved) have been relegated to “Women’s Fiction,” that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated? Certainly “The Marriage Plot,” Eugenides’s first novel since his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex,” was poised to receive tremendous literary interest regardless of subject matter, but the presence of a female protagonist, the gracefulness, the sometimes nostalgic tone and the relationship-heavy nature of the book only highlight the fact that many first-rate books by women and about women’s lives never find a way to escape “Women’s Fiction” and make the leap onto the upper shelf where certain books, most of them written by men (and, yes, some women — more about them later), are prominently displayed and admired.

This is a tricky subject. Bringing up the women’s question — I mean the women’s fiction question — is not unlike mentioning the national debt at a dinner party. Some people will get annoyed and insist it’s been talked about too much and inaccurately, and some will think it really matters. When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women. But some people, especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.

Recently at a social gathering, when a guest found out I was a writer, he asked, “Would I have heard of you?” I dutifully told him my name — no recognition, fine, I’m not that famous — and then, at his request, I described my novels. “You know, contemporary, I guess,” I said. “Sometimes they’re about marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children.” After a few uncomfortable moments he called his wife over, announcing that she, who “reads that kind of book,” was the one I ought to talk to. When I look back on that encounter, I see a lost opportunity. When someone asks, “Would I have heard of you?” many female novelists would be tempted to answer, “In a more just world.”

The truth is, women who write literary fiction frequently find themselves in an unjust world, even as young single women are outearning men in major American cities and higher education in the United States is skewing female. As VIDA, a women’s literary organization, showed in February in its second annual statistical roundup, women get shockingly short shrift as reviewers and reviewees in most prestigious publications. Of all the authors reviewed in the publications it tracked, nearly three-fourths were men. No wonder that when we talk about today’s leading novelists — the ones who generate heat and conversation and are read by both men and women — we are talking mostly about men.

Exploring Amazon, I came across a category called “Women’s Fiction” where I am listed, along with Jane Austen, Sophie Kinsella, Kathryn Stockett, Toni Morrison, Danielle Steel and Louisa May Alcott. (Needless to say, Amazon fits us into other categories as well.) If there is a stylistic or thematic link to be found among us, it’s hard to see. It should be noted that Amazon puts the occasional man in this category. Tom Perrotta is there, and so is Jonathan Franzen (albeit the Oprah’s Book Club edition of “Freedom”), which should provide yet more fodder for those who complain of his ubiquity. Both men write about relationships and also about suburbia; is that why they’re included?

Amazon is clearly trying to help readers find titles they want. But any lumping together of disparate writers by gender or perceived female subject matter separates the women from the men. And it subtly keeps female writers from finding a coed audience, not to mention from entering the larger, more influential playing field. It’s done all the time, and not just by strangers at parties or by various booksellers that have no trouble calling interesting, complex novels by women “Women’s Fiction,” as if men should have nothing to do with them. A writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down. Look at some of the jackets of novels by women. Laundry hanging on a line. A little girl in a field of wildflowers. A pair of shoes on a beach. An empty swing on the porch of an old yellow house.

Compare these with the typeface-only jacket of Chad Harbach’s novel, “The Art of Fielding,” or the jumbo lettering on “The Corrections.” Such covers, according to a book publicist I spoke to, tell the readers, “This book is an event.” Eugenides’s gold ring may appear to be an exception, though it has a geometric abstraction about it: the Möbius strip ring suggesting that an Escher-like, unsolvable puzzle lies within. The illustration might have been more conventional and included the slender fingers and wrist of a woman, had it not been designated a major literary undertaking.

I took semiotics back at Brown University in the same heyday of deconstruction in which Eugenides’s novel takes place (he and I were in a writing workshop together), but I don’t need to remember anything about signifiers to understand that just like the jumbo, block-lettered masculine typeface, feminine cover illustrations are code. Certain images, whether they summon a kind of Walker Evans poverty nostalgia or offer a glimpse into quilted domesticity, are geared toward women as strongly as an ad for “calcium plus D.” These covers might as well have a hex sign slapped on them, along with the words: “Stay away, men! Go read Cormac ­McCarthy instead!”

I sometimes wonder if book length, intentionally or inadvertently, signals to readers a novel’s supposed importance. Certain novelists who have achieved high literary profiles, like David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami and William T. Vollmann, have all published extremely long books — in the case of Wallace and Vollmann, over 1,000 pages. With some notable exceptions, women have not published many well-known doorstops since Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook.” As it happens, we live not only in the era of the abbreviated attention span, but also in the era of the book group, whose members often set a strict page limit. Yet does the marketplace subtly and paradoxically seem to whisper in some men’s ears, “Sure, buddy, run on as long as you like, just sit down and type out all your ideas about America” — what might in some extreme cases be titled “The Big Baggy Book of Me”? Do women reflexively edit themselves (or let themselves be edited) more severely, creating tight and shapely novels that readers and book groups will find approachable? Or do they simply not fetishize book length one way or the other? (And for that matter, would most long-form men say they were just letting content seek form?)

All this isn’t to say megabooks are necessarily better; in their prolixity perhaps it’s easier for them to in fact be worse. But they are certainly louder.

Over centuries, the broad literary brush strokes and the big-canvas page have belonged mostly to men, whereas “craft” had belonged to women, uncontested. It’s no wonder that the painted-egg precision of short stories allows reviewers to comfortably celebrate female accomplishment, even to celebrate it prominently in the case of Alice Munro. But generally speaking, a story collection is considered a quieter animal than a novel, and is tacitly judged in some quarters as the work of someone who lacks the sprawling confidence of a novelist.

My sense is that like most men, most women are writing at the length they want to write — but they’re not always getting the same reward. Men like Ian ­Mc­Ewan and Julian Barnes have written very short, highly regarded and widely read books in recent years. Yet if a woman writes something short these days, particularly if it’s about a woman, it risks being considered minor. (“Spare” is the oft-used word of faint praise.) Yet if, on the other hand, a woman writes a doorstop filled with free associations about life and love and childbirth and war, and jokes and recipes and maybe even a novel-within-a-novel, and anything else that will fit inside an endlessly elastic membrane, she risks being labeled undisciplined and self-indulgent.

Sure, Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is pretty massive, but I suspect that a historical work — one that teaches the reader about a subject (in this case a male one) — is considered more acceptable from a woman than, say, the kind of long “sensibility” novel written more frequently by men. Julia Glass, who won a National Book Award in 2002 for her novel “Three Junes,” said: “Many readers ask why I write so often from a male point of view. I have theories, but I don’t really know. I don’t game my books toward a male audience, and yet the point of view may help their reception. I think men are more accepting of my books than they would be if the points of view were always female.”

Characters matter to a great extent, and novels that involve parents and young children seem at first glance to be considered the potentially sentimental province of women. Except, of course, when those parents and children are male, as is the case in “The Road” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” both of which feature father-son duos and have been praised enthusiastically by men and women.

But some of the most acclaimed female novelists have written unapologetically and authoritatively about women. And the environment needs to be receptive to that authority, recognizing and celebrating it in order for it to catch. It seems no coincidence that some of the most esteemed women writing today — Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Marilynne Robinson — came to prominence at an unusual moment in time when the women’s movement could be felt everywhere. Stories, long and short, and often about women’s lives, suddenly mattered to the cultural conversation. This period, the 1970s and to an extent the early ’80s, initially appeared to create an entirely different and permanent reality for female fiction writers. Men were actively interested in reading about the inner lives of women (or maybe some just pretended they were) and received moral kudos for doing so. Whereas before that a lone woman might be allowed on the so-called men’s team, literary women began achieving critical mass and becoming more than anomalies. But though this wave of prominent authors helped the women who followed, as time passed it seemed harder for literary women to go the distance. As Katha Pollitt, the poet and literary critic, says: “I think there’s always space for a Toni Morrison or a Mary McCarthy, but only one of them at a time. For every one woman, there’s room for three men.”

Finish reading this essay by clicking here.

by Michael

How Amina Gautier Became A Writer

I follow Kelcey Parker’s blog, phdincreativewriting, and Kelcey recently posted this interview with Amina Gautier.  I hope you find it interesting and inspiring.  You can visit Kelcey’s blog to see her other interviews by clicking here.

How Amina Gautier Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Amina for saying yes!

1.     Why did you want to become a writer?

I came of age during the anti-apartheid movement in the US; I was an adolescent when Stevie Wonder recorded his anti-apartheid song, when the play Sarafina!toured New York, when the Cosby spin-off A Different World was weaving anti-apartheid material into its episodes, and when Nelson Mandela was not yet free. At home, my mother had a copy of Kaffir Boy and when I entered ninth grade, Nadine Gordimer’sJuly’s People was selected as the book in common, the one text all incoming students would have to read and discuss communally. I was surrounded by adult and peer discussions of apartheid, which also led to conversations wherein which it was easy to draw parallels between the restrictions placed upon native (black) South Africans during apartheid and on African Americans during slavery and after the Reconstruction, one of the most obvious being restrictions upon literacy and education. This atmosphere impressed upon me the importance, power and danger of literature. When factions attempt to create oppressed societies, one of the foremost ways they go about doing so is by banning thought-provoking literature. It is no accident that slaves were forbidden to read and write, or that women were long kept out of universities. Knowing this so early on made me believe that being a writer was the best thing one could be and that writing literature was the most revolutionary, dangerous, powerful, empowering and important thing a human being could do.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

Short Answer: I have always been a writer.

Long Answer: I played with dolls and listened to music. When I was a child, I imbibed many elements of craft without any conscious effort on my part, learning quite a bit about writing stories from playing with my toys and listening to music. Any child who has played with toys—be it Barbie or Transformers—has the makings of a fiction writer. As any kid knows, there’s no game without a premise or story. Playing with dolls went a long way to helping me learn the intricacies of plot. No matter what I had in mind for Barbie and Ken, Midge or Skipper could always interfere. Enter subplot. Enter characterization. Enter forward moving action motivated by a character’s wants or desires.

The first stories I ever recognized as stories were actually songs. There was no way to live in my childhood home and not be exposed to music. When I was younger, I was part of an extended family and I had only to walk from one room to another to hear a different song i.e. a different story. My grandmother played gospel, my cousin favored hip hop, and my uncle preferred rock, but it was in my mother’s room, where she played soul music that I first absorbed stories. The songs I heard: Ashford and Simpson’s “Hi-Rise” The Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” and “Since I Lost My Baby,” Luther Vandross’s “Superstar/Until You Come Back to Me,” The Stylistics’ “People Make the World Go Round” and “Children of the Night,” Aretha Franklin’s “Jump to It” and “Jimmy Lee,” Natalie Cole’s “Just Can’t Stay Away,” Blue Magic’s “Sideshow” and Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s duet “You Are My Heaven” were complete and linear narratives set to music. They had beginnings, middles, and ends. If you took away the musical accompaniment, you would have short stories.

In the more formal sense, I began with writing poetry, in the way that most elementary school kids in Brooklyn begin with writing poetry. My language arts teacher exposed us to poetry around the fourth grade and made us kids in the gifted class enter a variety of poetry contests. My poems won a bunch of these school-wide, district-wide, borough-wide, city-wide contests. One particular win allowed me to meet the mayor (Koch, at the time) and shake his hand. All of the contest wins came with trophies and savings bonds. All in all, it was a good deal and it wasn’t anything I thought very much about. When I got to Stanford, I majored in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis (the precursor to the minor which the university now offers). The creative writing courses were all taught by Jones Lecturers (former Stegner Fellows who stayed on to teach) and entry into the courses was by lottery only.

As lottery would have it, my number came up for the fiction workshop first, though I continued to write poetry. My fiction instructor shared an office with one of the poetry instructors and one afternoon I brought some of my poetry to Chris Wiman for some feedback. After showing him my poems, he promptly shot me down. And—here’s the thing—I let him. I realized that I had no desire to be a poet if I had to train to do it. This was partly because the rewards of it had come too easily to me as an adolescent and partly because I just wasn’t interested enough. That’s how I knew I was a fiction writer. I’d only been in the workshop for one quarter, but I already knew that if I’d shown my fiction teacher my stories and he told me I would never make it and advised me to quit, I would not have been meek and walked away with my tail between my legs. I would have ignored him, marched to my dorm, written ten brand new stories, and made him choke on his words. After only weeks, I was fully invested. There was no one in the world that could discourage me. In order to be a fiction writer, I was willing to be in it for the long haul, to work as hard as it took, to write as many hours as it required, to dump as many boyfriends as it necessitated and to lose as much sleep as I could afford.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

Odd as this may seem, my Latin teachers helped me to become a good writer. I started studying Latin in fifth grade and continued with it all the way through high school to AP Latin my junior year, after which there was nothing left to study until college. The rules of grammar, which I found confusing or irregular in English, made sense to me when I viewed them through the lens of this non-native language. Exposure to Latin will, of course, improve anyone’s vocabulary, but the focus on word formation, etymology, derivatives and nuanced language will serve the fiction writer a good turn. Since no one expects secondary school Latin students to prepare for lives as theologians or priests, much of the material students learn to translate is secular rather than ecclesiastical. Thus, Latin exposed me to rhetoric and poetry. Although I learned first through another language, I was already well-versed in scansion, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, irony, litotes, caesuras and all of the other rhetorical devices long before I ever got to AP English. My study of Latin made me hyper-aware of language, syntax, diction, and rhetoric earlier than I might have been expected to care about the formal qualities of language. Thank you—ago tibi gratias— Mr. Doddington, Mr. Schroeder, Mr. Mulgrew, Miss Bennett, Barb Watson and David Demaine.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

I’m not particularly interested in any fiction writer’s biography. Perhaps I would be if I were reading poetry or autobiography, but when it comes to fiction all I need to know about the writers that I read is that they write damn good stories and don’t cut corners. Just as Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan never met a shot they didn’t like, I’ve never met a story I didn’t like. For just a small investment of my time—somewhere between five and thirty minutes depending on the story’s length—I can read a story that will make my heart and mind grow by leaps and bounds. That’s a great return on investment if ever I’ve heard of one. Unfortunately, I’m not as open-minded when it comes to novels. Given the tendency of many contemporary novels to disintegrate three fourths of the way through, I’m hardly willing to invest hours or days of my time into one unless multiple trusted sources can vouch for it. If, by some chance, I am roped in to reading a novel that dies midway through, I make it a point to never read anything else by that author ever again. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

I am, however, inspired by lines and passages in stories. If I’m in a funk, reading the last line of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” or the opening paragraph of Stanley Elkin’s “A Poetics for Bullies” or the “Be a Martin” scene in Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” will always bring me back to a better frame of mind.

I have always been inspired by the section of John Gardner’s Art of Fiction, in which he says:

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. That is not to say, of course, that the writer who has no personal experience of pain and terror should try to write about pain and terror, or that one should never write lightly, humorously; it is only to say that every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded toward life or death. It does not mean, either that writers should write moralistically, like preachers. And above all it does not mean that writers should lie. It means only that they should think, always, of what harm they might inadvertently do and not do it. If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad, to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.”

Gardner’s suggestion that literature can soothe the desperate and that good literature is a matter of life and death rings true with me. Literature has certainly saved my sanity. Therefore, whenever I write, I am always mindful of Gardner’s inspiring advice. It reminds me that my reader has many faces. He or she is not just a person with leisure reclining on a sofa. He or she is also a nursing home patient, the quiet teen who turns to books when shut out of reindeer games and socializing and reads late at night in corners of the house/apartment when parents are asleep, an infirm person who rarely has visitors, the adolescent who closes the bedroom door and buries himself or herself in a book to drown out the noise of adults fighting, the retiree who has been waiting decades to read literature at leisure. Knowing this prevents me from cutting corners and taking shortcuts as a writer, it deters me from writing gimmicky material, veers me away from sentimentality, forces me to write however many drafts the story requires.

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Dear Writer,

1.     Get Out of Your Own Way:

In his rap “Bad” LL Cool J rhymes “You want a hit? Give me an hour plus a pen and a pad!” Bravado aside, his lyrics boil the writing process down to its bare essentials. In terms of accoutrements, all a writer needs in order to write is pen and paper. All of other the niceties are a bonus, like sprinkles on ice cream, nice but not necessary. Real writers can write anywhere, anytime, anyplace. You don’t need a certain time of day, peace and quiet, the right circumstances, the correct placement of the constellations in the sky, green apples or any type of rituals. You don’t even need a muse. These esoteric needs are actually self-imposed obstacles and roadblocks aspiring writers place in their paths. If you spend your time awaiting optimal conditions to begin writing, you are setting yourself up to fail. Writers are not picky. When we need to write, we will write on whatever is handy. I have written on computers, typewriters, and word processors. I have written by hand. I have filled spiral notebooks, Trapper Keepers, legal pads. I have written on index cards, construction paper, receipts and cereal boxes. I have even written on myself. I am a writer. I write.

2.     Don’t try to write something ‘new.’ Just try to write something good.

Although fiction is not as old as poetry in terms of genre, it is at least four hundred years old (if not older), if we date it back to 1605 with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which many cite as the “first novel.” Plenty of stories have been written since then and most, if not all, stories have already been told. Writing a short story as a series of emails is neither new nor innovative, since it is based on the premise of writing a short story as a series of letters, a technique which is at least as old as Samuel Richardson’s novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Same thing goes for writing the story in the form of a photo album, homework assignment, map, radio broadcast, telegram, or PowerPoint presentation. Ditto for writing the story in second person, first person plural, or the point of view of an animal/inanimate object/ghost. This is not to say that the writer should eschew experimenting with these forms or any others; it is merely to say that the writer who does so in the belief that adopting any of these forms makes the story “new” is a writer who is not well-read enough to discern. There has been a tendency among aspiring writers and workshop students (at least in my own classes) to offer the following commentary as praise when discussing a fellow student’s story: “This is good. I’ve never seen it before. It’s very original” which erroneously conflates quality, originality and lack of exposure, when all it really means is that the person making the comment needs to read more and read better.

3.     Remember what Yoda told Luke: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

by Michael

The Country Where I Live

I think that if I didn’t have this outlet–which allows me to focus and have an ongoing passion–I would go crazy too. Whatever book I’m writing often becomes the organizing principle for my days–it’s what I think about from morning to night.  The book becomes the country where I live. Without it, I might go insane. That’s why vacation time is often really hard for me.

Samuel Park answering a question on Caroline Leavitt’s blog.

by Michael

First Drafts

A first draft is a funny thing.  A stack of questions waiting to be answered.  Seven thousand, one hundred twenty lines to be reviewed with patience you don’t have.  Words to be heard aloud, doubted like a thief walking through your favorite room, turned over in the mind, changed for something tighter, or left alone like that one lavender flower growing in a field of green.

All the judgment sits in that pile of paper.  You see it differently when it’s paper.  As a file it’s just like anything else on that tap tap tap laptop.  It’s something in a screen.  It’s real but still less real.  When it’s printed, it zips across your all-in-one and each scrimp of the printer is a question and a hope and a prayer about you taking every letter to the next level.  The articles, verbs, and characters join together into a choir, one you love and hate.  They sing to you as the printer forms their melody in the faint, terrible background.  You’re enchanted and afraid of their music.

Lift the language.  Tighten the plot.  Excise the unnecessary.  Describe.  Take your time.  Strengthen the dialogue.  Add this scene.  Delete that.  Say it better.  They sing things like that, and their collective voice takes the tone of a friend.  Their instructions and encouragements collapse the way jazz does, unexpected and delightful.  Go.  See.  Soar.

You wait because you gave yourself a waiting period.  A break.  It’s helpful even if it claims the three ounces of sanity you think you still have.  You hate waiting, at least, for the work of revision.  You remember that conference workshop where the presenter said revision was seeing again, looking again, searching again.  And her broad smile finds you while you wait. She was a white woman, her face plumped like the rest of her body.  She wore red and, though red was a color for fire and heat and summer, you imagined her cool as stood at the podium to speak.  She was joyous as she spoke.  Joy was calming, cool.  Joy was the collection of possessing your words and your characters and your vision for the story.  You thought of her as you waited because her coolness was what you needed while you watched that stack, the pile with 96,504 expectations.  Each word commanding to be the best.

You got tired thinking of those words.  You cherished them.  But they made you a little sick.  You wanted time to pass before you saw them.  Even when you clicked the manuscript open, you couldn’t read.  You saw the blur of that first page and closed it quickly.  The X from Microsoft Word pressed into your mind.  There would be enough time to do what needed to be done.  It just wouldn’t be now.

by Michael

Granta Interview with Catherine Chung

Granta interviewed Catherine Chung, author of the novel, Forgotten Country.

Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

Catherine Chung was one of Granta’s New Voices in 2010. Her first book, the novel Forgotten Country, is published this month by Riverhead.Granta’s Patrick Ryan talks with the author about the inception of her novel, and how stories from the past, a fascination with sisterhood and math came into play.

PR: What is the ‘forgotten country’ in the book? Is there more than one possible meaning in the title?

CC: I came up with this title around the time when I was doing a lot of research into the Korean War, which is also sometimes called the Forgotten War. The idea of that blew my mind – just how something as large as a war can be forgotten, and how in forgetting it you’re also forgetting the country that fought it and was divided by it – the title came from that and then seemed to resonate with the history of the particular family in Forgotten Country.

They’ve lost their homeland – not just the Korea they leave behind, but also the Korea that existed and was lost before it: before the split from the Korean War and before Japanese Occupation, when it was still a whole country. That initial loss echoes in all the others. In a similar way, I liked how the histories of the family – the national and the personal ones – are encompassed by this title, which is also – I think – about the lost unity of the family itself.

Sibling rivalry plays a large part in the novel. One of the major arcs involves the narrator and her sister and their struggle to come to terms with both their past and present. How important was it to you that this rivalry be resolved? And do you have a sister?

I don’t have a sister – I have an older brother, but I have always been really interested in sisterhood, which is filled with such complexity of emotion. There’s the possibility of so much intimacy, but also competitiveness and dependency and blame. It’s so fraught.

It was important to me that the rivalry or the issues between Janie and Hannah be engaged, that they would both be forced to face up to One day my aunt disappeared, and my family thought she’d been kidnapped by North Koreans who were raiding dorms and taking girls.their longing for closeness as well as the ways in which they’ve both made it so difficult for their family to be together – but I don’t know if I ever expected an actual resolution to come out of that, not in the sense that everything is good now between them. I don’t believe that real relationships between anyone actually work like that. I wanted there to be hope for that though, for the possibility of it to be real and clear between them.

To finish reading the interview, click here.

by Michael

Bookman’s Alley Closing

I saw this on Chicago Tonight–another sad development in the literary life of the Chicago area.  Go here to see the segment on the show.

At Bookman’s Alley, the Evanston mainstay, the decorations—the top hats, the model ships, the presidential busts—are almost as important as the books. Toy airplanes are perched atop bookshelves, across the hall from a 19th century printing press.

When owner Roger Carlson opened the store more than 30 years ago, he wanted to finally open a used bookstore that didn’t have the same atmosphere as a soup kitchen.

“I was dressing the set, if you think of my shop as a presentation,” he said. “There are many fine used bookshops, but they tend to be pretty much devoted to displaying the books.”

Carlson likes to keep the decorations thematic. In the Western literature and history section, for example, “there’s a western saddle, and eight or nine hats and spurs,” Carlson said. “Everything but a cowboy sitting there, shooting at beer bottles.”

The creative decorating is part of why so many frequent the shop and why, as the store prepares to close in the news month or so, so many are interested in taking home a piece for themselves. Carlson says he’s holding on to most of it until the very end, but price tags have started popping up on gold bird figurines ($90) and black top hats ($85).

Carlson says declining sales at brick-and-mortar bookstores and recent health problems forced him to close. He’s been promising to close the store “soon” since December, but it’s taken him longer than he expected to liquidate his inventory.

To finish reading, click here.

by Michael

An Exercise in Thinking Constellationally

Teju Cole wrote this essay after tweeting several statements in response to KONY 2012.  His analysis is critical, illuminating, and skillful.  His writing is pointed and worth reading and learning from as it is an exercise in thinking constellationally.

These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who’d reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as “resentment.”

This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof’s approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.

Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone’s feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.

But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

It’s only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. “Of course,” he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:

There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.

Here are some of the “middle-class educated Africans” Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord’s Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world’s leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a “humanitarian disaster,” and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.

I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

To finish this essay, click here.

by Michael

Five Female Writers in Chicago Literary History

Thanks to David Swanson for pointing me to this fine article at chicagoist.com in celebration of a few female writers who have contributed to Chicago and world literary history:

March is Women’s History Month; for 31 days we celebrate the women who have made our employment, the oration of our opinions, and our lifestyles possible.

When it comes to contemporary authors, there’s plenty of strong female voices in Chicago. This wasn’t always the case. Women have had to fight for their spot in society at the very least, and still are still presented with threats against their equal rights in today’s political mess. The Christine Sneeds and Audrey Niffeneggers of Chicago can thank plenty of individuals for their publications, but here are a list of five Chicago ladies who paved the way for their success.

Harriet Monroe (1860-1936)

Poets of Chicago and the world in general can thank Miss Harriet Monroe for the work championing the genre. Monroe was the founder and editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. After gaining some popularity as poet and freelancer for The Tribune, she became increasingly agitated over the lack of recognition—and funding—for poets. And so, in 1912, Monroe reached out to 100 head honchos in Chicago to pay for a subscription to her new poetry magazine. With this money, Poetry was launched. Its success wascolossal in the genre: poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, and Carl Sandburg were all edited at one time or another by Monroe, and it was her support that ensured the longevity of their reputations.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)

Ida Wells is Chicago’s First Lady of Civil Rights, and a pivotal player in the the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Wells’ influence was cast through the power of journalism. She dove straight into investigation and exploitation of lynching in the U.S. with her pamphlets: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record. In 1893 she and Frederick Douglass, among several others, organized a boycott against the World’s Columbian Exposition, arguing that the Exposition did not work with the black community to fairly display African American life. They distributed their pamphlet, Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not Like the Columbian Exposition, in protest. The list of Wells’ articles and documentation is endless, but the influence remains: she asserted herself within Chicago’s windy politics, and made it an easier place for the rest of us women to do so.

To finish reading, click here.

by Michael

Penguin, Mullet, Bread

Last night at the closing of the AWP, I listened to Nikky Finney read several of her poems, a few from her National Book Award winning collection, Head Off & Split.  It was my first time hearing her in person and while I listened to her, I wanted to keep leaning in and listening.

When Professor Finney signed my copy of her collection, she asked if I was a writer, if I lived in Chicago.  I told her yes to both, and saying yes, in the company of a woman, writer, communicator, and advocate so powerful was its own affirmation.  If you don’t know her work, it can offer you life and renewal and fullness.  Really, I wouldn’t suggest that you linger over her careful words unless they’d be worth it.

by Michael

10 Steps To Better Emails

This list is from Literary Agent, Rachelle Gardner.  I have used several of these regularly in the past, but I can probably add a few into my practice.  What about you?

10 Steps to Writing Better Emails

1. Keep it brief.

Many people recommend the three-sentence rule: If you can say what you need to in 3 sentences or less, do it! If not, keep it as close to 3 sentences as possible. If you have something in-depth that will take several paragraphs, consider talking to the person instead. You know, talking. Like they used to do in the old days.

2. Pause before hitting Send.

Is it completely necessary? Does it have to go NOW? If it can possibly wait, then use the DRAFT function of your email program to save it. Once a week, pull up all your drafts and only send the ones that are still necessary. This is especially handy if you tend to send several emails a week to one person. Can they be consolidated?

3. Get to the point.

Make it easy for the recipient to get the gist of your message right away. Don’t ramble.

4. Make questions and action points stand out.

DON’T bury your questions throughout the email in the middle of paragraphs! If there is action needed, or a question that needs an answer, make it VERY obvious. For example, you might want to number them and put them at the end of your email.

5. Use NNTR

I’ve started putting “NNTR” at the end of the subject line. It means No Need To Reply. This can save people lots of time and eliminate needless back-and-forth.

6. Use EOM

Another one of my favorites – I put “EOM” at the end of the subject line to indicate “End of Message.” That is, the entire message is in the subject line. So in responding to an email requesting a phone call, my subject line might say, “I’ll call you Tues 3/6 at 4pm eastern — EOM.” And the recipient doesn’t even need to open the email, they’ve got all the info they need.

7. Use a relevant subject line

Try NOT to use a generic subject line, such as “Thought you might want to know…” The subject line is for… wait for it… the actual subject of your email.

8. Change the subject line when necessary

If you’re emailing back and forth with someone, and the topic changes mid-conversation, change the subject line! This goes extra for those of you who never actually start a new email stream, but whenever you want to email someone, you simply grab the last email from them and hit “Reply.” Change the subject line, please.

9. DON’T use “Quick Question”  

Avoid that oldie-but-goodie in the subject line unless you want your recipient to shoot themselves. First, a quick question is never quick. Second, it’s generic and tells nothing. It’s much better for your subject line to say, “Question about why my agent never returns my emails.” At least that’s specific. And memorable.

10. Remember that every time you send an email, somewhere a fairy dies.

Well, maybe not. But it should at least make us think twice about it!

→ Bonus: What about saying “thank you”?

To read Rachelle’s entire post, click here.