Paley: "This Woman, Faith, Who Works for Me"

Found yet another treasure trove of audio files.  UPenn's Kelly Writer's House has a searchable database of recorded events, both lectures/classes and readings.  I greatly enjoyed this reading by Grace Paley, which is available in both RealAudio and MP3, in which she shares a short story, several poems, and a short autobiographical essay.  What a mind, and what courage.  I love how she talks about her perennial protag: "This Woman, Faith, Who Works for Me."  Grace, Faith, both fantastic qualities this writer left for us to learn from. 

Here's the reading with audio only. Finally figured out the widget thing (again).


The archive is enormous and searchable. Poets and prose writers. Enjoy.

Hoagland: "The Naming is Not a Divorce from the Thing"

I've discovered a new audio resource, a ton of interviews, lectures, and readings of poets and writers both living and dead. It's called Wired for Books, from Ohio University radio, and I'm just scratching the surface.

Love him or hate him, this one is worth a listen, Tony Hoagland lecturing on poetics, the "new" and "old" poetry, and litany poems as a good place to see what "new" is.  He talks about the "American plain style," as given to us by William Carlos Williams, and its legacy in the last 40 years, in which language is pushing its way back up to the front.  On the gap between the word and the thing: "The naming is not a divorce from the thing; the naming is a kind of wedding with the thing."

Among the poems he reads and unpacks is "Or," by Thomas Sayers Ellis, which embodies the American plain style and also a sense of the "game" of language. 

here's the MP3:
http://www.wiredforbooks.org/mp3/litfest/TonyHoaglandLecture.mp3

Maron and Almond on Self Doubt

If you're a fan of Marc Maron, you'll recognize his ability to zero in on the troubled soul of his subject, in this case writer and mentor and inspiration Steve Almond.  Almond almost sounds like he is disappointed with himself.  I guess even rock stars are human.  Steve, you didn't disappoint us.  We are here.  We are reading.  We are grateful for your stories.

Listen here.

Virtual Summer Conference: Sellers on the Nonexistent Top Ten Tips

Given recent events, it's hard to just resume activities.  But I am doing it.

Back to the Virtual Summer Conference.  Here's a podcast I have listened to often, Heather Sellers giving a talk called, "10 Tips for Finishing Your Book." She confesses early on, "there are no top ten tips," and, "when you're at a conference, it's really easy to turn into a child," with respect to the plethora of advice one receives at these events. "Remember, you already know every single thing you need to know--you just need to do it," Sellers says. So the bulk of her talk is about how to find the kind of solitary play that fosters the right mindset for finishing a long project.  She's from the Lynda Barry / Robert Olen Butler school of teaching writing, which I always find gets things moving for me.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE HEATHER SELLERS TALK VIA ITUNES.
(It's iTunes U. You can stream or download. Track #4.)

Bloomsday Helper

We interrupt this Virtual Summer Conference to bring you a Bloomsday interlude. My hubby introduced me to this podcast by Frank Delaney, who dissects Ulysses line by line. I've embedded the intro episode below, or you can go to the site and click to the rest of them. Every Wednesday for the next 22 years or so? Enjoy the "vulgarity of a single day" in Dublin!

Junot Diaz and the "Culture of Respectability"

AWP has started podcasting weekly!  Here's what they have on offer.  You can subscribe via iTunes too.

I found myself laughing outloud at episode 15, Junot Diaz reading at the 2011 conference.  When asked about the use of profanity and rough language in his work, he talked about the "culture of respectability" as a way to silence others.  Censorship becomes "a wonderful way to obscure the vast, violent privilege of the people who have it."  It's the keeping-it-real argument all over again, but I never tire of hearing it, because it's true.  And as for his focus on Dominican-American identity (as well as New Jersey identity), it really is an offshoot of the reading he did as a kid, where he felt he was not represented. 

Lit TV: Robert Olen Butler and the Terrorism of Our Own Longings and Horrors

It's like going to school for free! It's like being in Georgia without getting on a plane! Check out Robert Olen Butler talking not only about his novel HELL, but also about the creative process. He argues that the artist creating the object is akin to an athlete "in the zone"--too much analysis destroys the ability to create the object being analyzed. Do we analyze literary fiction too much? Are conscious craft and technique "the antithesis of the creative process?" To him, the artist is the one who "faces down the unconscious," and is "profoundly uncomfortable" with abstraction.

If you like this, I highly recommend his book for writers, FROM WHERE YOU DREAM. I wrote it up a few years ago.

Also, check out Forum Network in general. I'm just getting started. Amazing resource.

Lit TV: "You Have to Forget Yourself"

This craft talk by Peter Straub, offered by The Center for Fiction, starts off jokey but ends up quite serious indeed. He opens with rules and tricks, like starting a sentence with "and" or "but" is like "a rimshot" (and not in a good way), but by part three, admits to slogging with the process like anyone else. There aren't really any tricks. With regard to revision: "What really works for me is always related to something I'd written earlier, and the best advice I give myself in such times is to really go back and look at what I did on page four, look at what I did in chapter three--because there's a reason those things happen. They seem random, and at the time when you write them they may be random, but as you go on, they're determinative. They color everything that happens afterward, and they must be remembered."

He reminds that it's not about you, it's about the thing you are making. With respect to killing his favorite parts: "You have to forget yourself." I think I need to hang that sentence over my monitor.

FREEDOM's Just Another Word for Me Missing My Train Stop

This blogger thinks Jonathan Franzen's FREEDOM lives up to the hype, and earned its sprawling proportions. (Love a spread-out book about, among other things, the harmful nature of spreading out.) Family conflict runs deep, and it takes a lot of pages. Just ask those Russian novelists the character Patty keeps reading. Meticulous plotting, with many, many ends he manages to tie up. Characters you love but might not want to live with--the best kind!

If you enjoyed it as much as me, you might get a kick out of this podcast from Slate's DoubleX Gabfest, in which they hash out all the major characters and themes (including spoilers, so read it first for sure). Is it a masterpiece? Do we care? What will we do until the next Franzen opus?

Also, if you're a fan, prepare to be a little freaked by this 1996 Charlie Rose roundtable in which Franzen has a mild debate with (RIP) David Foster Wallace. They are discussing the death of the novel. Turns out we humans are far more mortal than the stories we tell.

And on a lighter note, Franzen is among the advice-giving writers in this old Guardian article, "The Ten Rules for Writing Fiction." His #10, which reminds me of his characters: "You have to love before you can be relentless."

Lit TV: Abani on Horror, Humanity, and Superhero Comix.

"You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you."



This one grabs me in the gut every time I watch it. Thought I'd share.

(Yes, I'm alive!) Ann Beattie on craft.

Sorry for my long blogosphere absence. I decided today I miss it.

So I'll go right to my go-to: podcasts. I am still addicted.

Check out this Michael Silverblatt interview with Ann Beattie. They talk about the process of getting into the New Yorker (she went through the slushpile), the temptation to "hide behind technique," how "bringing the strands together" feels concocted in a short story, and how she aims to undercut lyricism. The key is the "surprise after the surprise." Beattie did not take any fiction workshops, but did learn a ton from sitting beside editor Roger Angell.

Without the Mosquitos

This year Bread Loaf posted some of its readings very quickly on podcast. Free and no mosquito bites! Jim Shepard's fiction reading is worth a listen. Click here to go to iTunes U, then click on Summer 2010: Lectures & Readings to get to the content.

Life Before Language--and After, and During

What emotions does a human being feel on the discovery that things have names? How did Shakespeare come up with new words and expressions (madcap? eyesore? dead as a doornail?) that feel like they always existed? Is language required to think about thinking? How do humans develop language in a vacuum of language? Why do I always cry when I listen to Radiolab?

Tune in and join the sobfest...

A Memoir is Not a Shoutout

Catching up on my podcasts. I don't write much memoir, but I enjoy a peek under the hood, since fiction is not all that different. I like what Stephen Elliott (no relation, but I like how he spells his name) has to say, and the plain way he says it, on the Pen on Fire podcast. Free writing lesson! He talks about not-knowing, which we writers love to talk about, and editing characters out for the sake of narrative, since a memoir is "not a shoutout." Enjoy and be inspired.

When Road is Paved with Gold / When Road is Just a Road

This conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Patti Smith is a real treat. Watch as they discuss paving the way for the next generation; the "adolescent quarantine" of coolness and learning to broaden the scope; building a writer's discipline while raising a family; collecting powerful objects and taking care of them during one's lifetime; walking with Walt Whitman. Plus a song by Patti, a tribute to William Blake and his years of working in obscurity. Gives me the gumption to get my ass to work. The interview is a great complement to the writings of each, particularly Smith's recent memoir, JUST KIDS.

What We Think About When We Think About Carver

Are Raymond Carver's stories really by Raymond Carver? Have we accepted the death of the author in this postmodern era? Or, is it a disappointment to note the differences between the urtext version of Carver's stories and the lean, enigmatic, Gordon Lish-edited ones? On Slate's audio book club podcast, Meghan O'Rourke, Troy Patterson, and Katie Roiphe have a very stimulating discussion of the mythology of Carver, fiction as collaboration, and which version they like better. Which matters more, the story or its authorship? Feel free to discuss in comments, I'd like your views...

Audio Joys

You may already know I'm a podcast junkie. Here are a few of my recent faves:

Tobias Wolff reads the Denis Johnson classic short story "Emergency" on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Time to buy milk for the preemie rabbits and save some lives. Some of my favorite dialogue ever written, the kind that makes me laugh aloud on the subway. (And news to me--I learned that Johnson himself played the patient with the knife in his eye in the movie version of Jesus' Son!)

Zadie Smith talks about language, social class, and inclusion/exclusion in her NYPL lecture "Speaking in Tongues." From Pygmalion to Obama (both president and memoirist). What exactly is "keeping it real," and does education make that impossible? And if so, is that a tragedy, as it has been painted in the past, the so-called "tragedy of the mulatto?" Or, are people like Obama (and Zadie Smith too) teaching us a new way to think about "real?"

Luis Alberto Urrea lectures at Bread Loaf 2008: "The Road Out of Tijuana is Paved with Ink." Talk about keeping it real. Dude has wild stories to tell about his aunt, La Flaca, and her terrifying fireside tales, along with other early experiences that formed who he is as a writer. Instructive and entertaining. Sorry I could not figure out how to deep link to this episode. Click on the "lectures" tab in iTunes. Also recommended from Bread Loaf: Robert Boswell's lecture on omniscient narration, a pared-down version of his essay from The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction, my new favorite craft book ever.

Alan Davis Drake's podcast of Anton Chekhov's unabridged short stories is fun and well-produced. It's a good way to get up to speed on the classics. There are two things I love about Chekhov (so far)... One: he makes characters' motives transparent--often selfish ones--without completely sacrificing their likeability. Is this the essence of comedy? Or at least the kind of comedy I love, which laughs at the self and the other at the same time? And two: he doesn't appear to be following strict rules of beginning-middle-end. You know how I feel about that crap. Character motive pulls you right on through. That, and the feeling you're sitting around a campfire or card table hearing the story. The structural surprises are welcome and satisfying.

If You Can't Afford Bread Loaf

If you can't afford Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (or like me, you simply can't get in), here's the good news--they are now podcasting. It's free. Who will you listen to first? I'm thinking James Longenbach, who taught me in a half hour lecture at last year's AWP how to love John Ashbery's line breaks. I'm off to begin downloading.

Self-Consciousness vs. Art--It's Rigged

Very inspiring interview with Andre Dubus III on Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's radio show, Writers on Writing.

Do your writer self a favor and listen in. He talks about self-consciousness and the damage it does to art--a message this insecure, inexperienced writer needs to hear over and over and over. Also covers how it feels to be one of two Andre Dubuses in the literary world, and how he arrives at honesty in his fiction. He talks about his method of research (interview people about their jobs, etc., but not about how they feel--thats the writer's job), and how he gets unstuck (patience, waiting). And of course, my favorite topic: trusting intuition. In his words: "The horse knows the way."

As usual, Barbara coaxes the good stuff out of her guest. Brava!

PEN's Achebe Tribute Now Online

I went to this event at Town Hall last February and found it really inspiring. Chris Abani was so funny and charming, talking about how to use literature to lure women; Suheir Hammad was fierce as she read one of her own poems; Chimamanda Adichie did a great job of repping the newest generation of Nigerian voices, with stories of her childhood in Chinua Achebe's former house (!); Ha Jin enlightened me on the loaded choice of writing in English; Colum McCann made me want to grovel and be his student: "What gives off the deepest sparks is the democracy of story-telling."

And of course, softspoken Chinua Achebe brought down the house at the end, talking about the publication (almost thwarted by a typist) of THINGS FALL APART, and expressing gratitude to his readers .

The place was packed. The line outside was long. It was one of those moments where I loved New York, claustrophobia and all. Now the computerized world can listen in, with added elbow room and a pause button. I look forward to listening again.