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.

Trying a Different Audio Host

I decided to test a different audio host with streaming. Below is a poem/music collaboration I did with my sweetheart, James Barr, a couple years ago. Let's see how this widget works out! If it holds up OK (the last one didn't), I'll start adding tracks.

(Opinions welcome on both the widget and the audio piece.)

Go To FileFactory.com

How Not to How To

Kudos to Richard Bausch for holding the line. In the new world of reading, where aspiring writers are primarily a sales demographic, it's tempting to participate in the game in order to make a paycheck. Check out his article in The Atlantic, How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons, in which he reminds us that the last thing fiction writers need to read is formulaic prescription books.

Sounds like he received a lesson himself, on the length some publishers will go to protect their cash cow, the "how to write" genre. How long until the "how to write" section in the bookstore gets bigger than the literature section?

No More Hibernation

I’ve been in blog hibernation too long. Blame Facebook, blame my day job, blame TV, blame my novel, blame my need to walk around and do nothing, blame it all. I've decided to try updating the blog again for awhile, primarily links to other things I find interesting.

Salon.com smart lady Laura Miller takes on the topic of the day, self-publishing. She nails it:

What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile? …You've either experienced slush or you haven't, and the difference is not trivial.

I have read slush. I have been slush. Slush has its purpose.

We emerging fiction writers are not know for our self-restraint. The hardest thing for us to learn is how to tell if a project is finished, since the nature of writing is that revision is an infinite possibility. How do thoughtful and serious writers deal with the infinite? With arbitrary cutoff dates, with addiction to workshopping, with rulebooks of various sorts, with editor rejections. We feed on feedback. We’re insatiable. Workshop is a verb.

We feel special for having finished a novel, then we learn that everyone in the world has finished a novel, then we learn that we never did finish one ourselves, or that this pack of pages is more mess than novel, and we use it for kindling, and we quit for awhile and watch HBO. Then we get the itch and go back to the desk and write another novel. Somewhere in the process someone says yes, someone with the power to publish. But I rely on the chorus of nos to keep my feet on the ground and teach me patience. The older I get, the more grateful I am for the rejections. I would hate for them all to disappear.

Thanks, Mary Akers, for the link.

I'm Reading This Thursday at KGB

If you're in NYC and free, come on by, it's free!

Drunken! Careening! Writers!
Thursday, May 20, 2010, 7pm
KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St.
FREE
Andrea Alton & Allen Warnock
Jacob Appel
Anne Elliott
"Amazing Points of View"
with your hostess, Kathleen Warnock

Allen Warnock & Andrea Alton as Carl & Shelly
Andrea Alton is a New York based, actor/writer/comedian. She recently finished a commercial run of Carl & Shelly, Best Friends Forever (co-writer/actor with Allen Warnock) which originally premiered at the 2008 NY Fringe Festival. Other favorite theatre credits include The Chiselers and Labor Day Weekend (Emerging Artists Theatre), The Strangest Kind of Romance (Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival), Big Girl, Little World (NY Fringe Festival) and Reckless, She Stoops to Conquer (Kaleidoscope Theatre Company). Andrea performs characters and sketch through out the city and most recently took part in the Miss Fag Pageant at Comix as Miss Park Slope which was a benefit for the Harvey Milk School. www.andreaalton.com.

Allen Warnock: Theatre credits include: The Skin of Our Teeth, A Servant of Two Masters, and WASP (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Off-White Christmas (Manhattan Theatre Source) and Zen and the Art of Doing Nothing (Center Stage, Midtown Int. Theatre Fest '08). Allen co-wrote and appeared in Carl & Shelly, Best Friends Forever which premiered at the '08 NY Fringe Fest and later received a commercial run at Theatre 3 this past February. Film credits: Morning Glory(with Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, upcoming) and The Wedding Bros. (with Dan Fogler). www.myspace.com/allenwarren.

Anne Elliott Anne Elliott's stories have appeared in Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Opium, FRiGG, 3:AM, and other indie litmags, including the late, great WV. She hails from the Pacific Northwest, and resides now in Brooklyn, where her hobbies include gardening and feral cat management. She has an MFA in visual / performance art from UC San Diego. http://assbackwords.blogspot.com/

Jacob M. Appel Jacob M. Appel's short fiction has appeared in more than 120 leading literary journals. His prose has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review's Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and many others. Jacob's stage plays have been performed in New York City, regionally and abroad. Jacob has taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia, an M.D. from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also publishes in the field of bioethics He currently practices medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. www.jacobmappel.com

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...

Listen to Cliff Garstang Talk About Linked Collections

Cliff Garstang gives the best summary of linked short fiction collections that I've heard. Is it a "story cycle" or "novel in stories?" Lots of reading & writing ideas in here, plus an excerpt from his new book at the end. Enjoy!

Write Camp Notes Part Two

As promised, I'll continue with my report from the New York State Summer Writers' Institute at Skidmore College. I had two workshop instructors, Amy Hempel and Mary Gaitskill. I'm a fan of the writings of both of them, for different reasons.

Hempel's fiction has a warm feeling that I appreciate; I haven't pinpointed exactly how she accomplishes it, but I have a couple theories. One possibility is that she doesn't rely on conflict in the traditional sense. Because much of her work is very very short, she doesn't need to use conflict to make one commit to reading, and her notion of "plot" is more reliant on character obsession and language. Her humor is based in surpise, the disarming turns her narrators take inside paragraphs, or indeed sentences. And she doesn't waste language. This feels to me very respectful of the reader and is another source of warmth.

One of the things I like about Gaitskill's work (Veronica in particular) is her facility with physical description to bring out character emotion. Her empathy is not just for characters but for everything in their world. When I read her work, I am reminded that emotions are not something contained inside a human being. We all radiate emotion all around us, in the way we observe the world and interact with it. The interpenetration is palpable and mysterious. Gaitskill captures this in a very rare way.

I bring up these observations about their work because each had an approach to teaching writing that was consitent with these observations.

Amy Hempel immediately set a warm tone. At the beginning of each critique we went around the room and each named something that we thought was working well in the story. This was a welcome reminder to me that something positive can be said about every unfinished work, and I mean every one, and it does not hurt to give specifics. Further, pointing out what works is not the same as saying you love the story, it's finished, etc. We had no trouble with this exercise.

After going around the circle, she asked us leading questions, like "how did people feel about ____?" Sometimes she even took a vote. What I liked was how she followed up after our response: she addressed the writer each time and instead of "here's what you should do," she said, "so there's some information you can use." (Or something like that.) It's an important distinction, and very respectful of the writer. One of the reasons we go to workshop is to learn how strangers react. The reactions are a data point, not necessarily a prescription for how to move forward.

Hempel also found moments in each critique to address us all with general ideas about how to make fiction better. Questions to ask ourselves: what do I have that's already enough? What happens in this story--not what is it "about," but what happens? (She allowed that what happens is often language, not incident.) Regarding setting: what is the thing that only happens here? Is the story an account of an event or an event itself? And some tidbits I jotted in my notebook: Pay attention to what you give yourself to work with later. The story needs to be logical on its own terms. In stories of illness, illness is the situation, not the story. (I think of her much anthologized "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.")

Her comments in my manuscipt were gems. I had submitted a reminiscence piece and she encouraged me to do something to bring it into the present, to give a reason for discussing 1977 right now. It's a logic question. I've played with this suggestion and I'm happier with the story. And her line edits were what you would expect from Hempel. Like she said, what do I have that's already enough? It's hard for me, sometimes, to trust that I've adequately presented a theme. Her cuts were quite encouraging. Like yes, I did say it already. She helped me to trust my readers more.

On to Mary Gaitskill. She opened the class with a discussion of the state of literature. Her argument was that we attend writing programs to learn how to write better, and since this costs money, social class is involved. (The elephant in the room at a nice college like Skidmore, and she said it on the first day. I applauded inwardly.) Further, writers teach at writing programs to make a living, because publishing isn't enough. And to top it off, the only people who read literary fiction are aspiring writers, writers, academics, etc. It's become an insular world. We are ghettoizing ourselves. She seemed really distraught over this development, over the inability of writers to actually interact with people in other walks of life.

Her approach to teaching writing reminded me of the (offstage) teacher in her story "Description." Partly because of themes in the student stories we were critiquing, and partly because this is her strong suit, she focused on creating emotional empathy through physical description. The discussion was tremendously helpful to me. We went through stories of John Cheever and Flannery O'Connor, among others, to look at the use of crude characterization mixed with not-crude description. It's an angle I hadn't thought of before. The crude, maybe even grotesque nature of the characters in the textbook stories had a similarity to Gaitskill's earlier work, and she pointed out where the description in the stories "opened up" and became more subtle. Listening to Gaitskill's close reading was worth the price of admission.

Early in the class, Gaiskill discussed the mysterious nature of what makes writing great. "It's like a person's unconscious or guts--invisible but essential--that inner quality that makes the work alive." And she argued that style is a big part of it. "We think of style as something superficial," she said, "but it's not. " The examples she gave later in the class supported this argument, where the nature of the description turned softer, making character identities--even crude ones--fall apart.

Which is in line with something Hempel said, and I'll close with it: "The more consistent a character is, the less credible." I'll chew on this for awhile, while I go off to finish my household chores.

Hope this has been fun for you to read. If you ever get the chance to work with either of these teachers, I recommend them.

Write Camp Notes Part One

It's been a couple weeks since I got back from the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College. Now that I've finally unpacked, I'll share.

First the basics and logistics. It was a four week workshop with the option to attend for only two. I was there for the second half. Many of the students were there on scholarship from grad or undergrad creative writing programs at other schools. Others were teachers using continuing ed grants. Others were serious "hobbyists" like me, who need to play full-time writer for a couple weeks every year, on vacation from otherwise unrelated dayjobs. And there was a handful of retirees, some just starting to write. The mix of age and experience was large (with all the positive and negative aspects one would expect). Most of us stayed in the dorms, in a block of single rooms set aside for writers.

The schedule was less strenous than other conferences. Mornings were unprogrammed. Workshop met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Class size ranged from 5 to 16. There were 7 concurrent workshops, so it was possible to learn every single student's name. Some students paid extra for a consultation on a book-length manuscript with an author of note. (Many of them told me it was a shining highlight of the conference.) Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were generic Q&A sessions with visiting writers. (These sessions relied on the students to provide the topics of discussion, which I felt was a weakness relative to other conferences--I would have preferred to hear the authors talk on specific craft-related subjects. Wouldn't you love to hear Russell Banks talk about voice for an hour? Or Charles Simic talk about what one learns from doing translations? But I digress.) Each evening had a reading by two of the faculty or visitors, followed by a reception. There was a good amount of drinking but alcohol was not the main event. Sunday evening had a student reading and barbecue at an old Victorian mansion attached to the school.

But enough with the nuts and bolts, and on to the unique and/or noteworthy aspects. My overall impression was that we were encouraged to delve deeply into the work of others. The nightly faculty readings were long (each author for as much as 45 minutes) and gave more than a taste of a writer's work. Bob Boyers, the director, gave a thorough, thoughtful introduction to each writer, and while the good-natured jokes did fly about the length of his speeches, they were an art form unto themselves, carefully composed (and even, from previous years, compiled in a volume called A BOOK OF COMMON PRAISE), and designed to help us hear new things in the work of authors we thought we already knew.

A word on the faculty and guests. It's an astonishing list of literary heavies, and my reason for going. (My favorite readings were from Charles Simic, Danzy Senna, Nick Delbanco, Rick Moody, and my teachers Amy Hempel and Mary Gaitskill.) Hero worship was definitely in the air. But the faculty, too, seemed committed to passing the baton. It felt (to me) like it was more than a dayjob to them.

This theme of delving deeply extended into the classroom, where we were reading and annotating 30 pages each of student prose. (Most other workshops I have done ask for half that amount.) With a class of 16, plus assigned published works to read, the load added up. I learned what a slow reader I am. I had flash memories of the oppressive weekends of grading papers, back when I used to teach comp. So the "free" mornings in Saratoga Springs turned out to be me with my folder and pencil, changing venue but not activity: to the cafe in town, to the cafeteria, to the library, to my dorm, to the outdoor chair. To work and work some more, this annotating freak went.

The sheer volume of required reading created in me a new impatience for extra verbiage, for explanation of character motive and/or backstory, for wit for wit's sake. I apologize (if you're reading this) to my classmates for the mass of delete marks I put in your pages. It's not you, it's me, and I think I overreached. I encourage you to ignore the unhelpful comments. I'm not one of those people who thinks workshop is about thickening your skin. But it is about sharpening one's taste and editing skills, and I grew a lot in that department. Emphasis on taste, as in that's why there's horseracing.

I kept thinking about what my husband says about a good day up at bat. The pitch might be coming at 80MPH but if you're in the groove, if you've practiced your fundamentals and put on your lucky underwear and said rabbit rabbit rabbit when you got out of bed in the morning, if you are in the best possible shape before you stand at the plate, the ball looks like it's hanging in the air. All you have to do is whack it.

I felt a little of this shift happening in my brain. The long hours spent picking apart other peoples' unfinished work has made it much easier to pick apart my own. The mistakes and missed opportunities jump out faster. I don't have to beg readers to show them all to me.

The other byproduct of the deep-looking emphasis of the conference was a total lack of instruction on how to get published. I found this refreshing. It wasn't a matter of the discussion being premature for the students (it was for some, but not all), but rather, it would almost be in bad taste. This was a conference about writing and reading, but not about sales. Yahoo.

I want to get into more specifics about what I learned in the classroom, but I'll save that for a future post. Just one more thing before I sign off--that sparkly water they have all over Saratoga bubbling from those cute Victorian spigots--delicious! But it contained microbes my body did not know yet. Be warned. Also: racehorses are exciting and gorgeous when they're working out in the morning. They're not wearing all that wacky colorful clothing they wear on race day, and they are not in a big pack, so you can see more of what they're doing. Worth getting up early. Damn, they're fast.

More later! Off to make dinner.

My New Favorite Projaholic Resource

I'm late to the party discovering the Threadbanger DIY podcasts. I'm at school for two weeks without a TV, so I've been watching these instead! You can learn really cool stuff like how to make a $10 wedding dress out of tee shirts, or dog cookies out of organic stuff, or a stuffed monster out of a pair of pants. Right up my alley. Check out the folks who knit cozies for parking meters! Now that's my kind of graffiti!

Wearing Big Sweater but Forgot His Pants

Paging Doctor Evil! A shaved cat is a sight to behold. Check out Angus with his bare ass. His stripes are just starting to come in, and he's re-learning how to walk up stairs, attack his sister, and chase bugs! Doctor Not-Evil-at-All prescribed plenty of exercise.

One sobering thing: the shaving revealed some pretty bad burn scars. This is a bird's eye view--sorry the photo isn't clearer. Our little guy has had a rough life: burns, abscesses, a crushed hip, and a crusty eyeball! Sorry, Bud, wish we could have found you sooner.

Chow down! You're home now, crosseyed cat.

It's Hard Out There for a Gimp

Poor baby! Angus, the feral cat we brought inside way back when, doesn't act like he's in pain, but his right hip is completely messed up inside. We had no idea how bad it was until we got this Xray taken. Who knows what happened to him out there--or when. It's a good thing my dear hubby noticed his slightly lopsided gait and tendency to bunny-hop up the stairs. He'll be getting orthopedic surgery on Thursday, at the vet clinic where said hubby works. We're all pulling for you, Angus! Pretty soon you'll REALLY be able to attack your sister.

Will Wilbur Get a Sister?

News flash, we may be adopting this dog:

And while we're doing mug shots, a side view:

What do you think? I like her black nailpolish. She's about 2 years old and can jump really high. Will Willie like her as much as we humans do? What about the cats? And what the heck breed is she? A Corgiweiler? I'll keep you posted.

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.

Two Gigs in Same Week? What Are the Odds?

After a long period of silence, I have two gigs in the same week! I'm feeling lucky.

Both in NYC, one poetry, one prose. Both are lineups I'm stoked to be in.

POETRY:

NYQuarterly series
Monday, May 18 2009, 6PM
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street, NYC 10014
Cover $7 (includes one house drink)

Host: Ted Jonathan
Featuring: R.D. Coleman, Anne Elliott, Jason Tandon

Friends of and contributors to NYQuarterly celebrate one of America's finest poetry journals by reading from its pages.



PROSE:

Drunken! Careening! Writers!
Thursday May 21, 7PM
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St. NYC
Free

Hostess: Kathleen Warnock
Featuring: Anne Elliott, Jessie Male, Felicia Sullivan


READER BIOS:

In 2005, Jessie Male's advanced knowledge of the frozen foods section earned her the title of assistant editor at the number two grocery trade magazine in the country. She has since been published in numerous food and dance publications and is currently working on two nonfiction collections. Jessie recently emigrated from Brooklyn to Manhattan to serve as a program coordinator at Columbia University. Her family is a constant source of support and material.

Felicia C. Sullivan is the author of The Sky Isn't Visible from Here, which has been featured in Vanity Fair, Elle, USA Today, Redbook, Newsday, and The Washington Post. In 2008, her memoir was optioned for film by Gigi Productions. Sullivan lives in New York where she is presently writing the screenplay adaptation of her memoir and working on her novel, Women and Children First. Visit her online at: http://www.feliciasullivan.com/.

Jason Tandon is the author of two collections of poetry, Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award for a first book (Black Lawrence Press, 2008), and Wee Hour Martyrdom (Sunnyoutside Press, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in many journals including Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Fugue, Laurel Review, Madison Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, Red Cedar Review, Poet Lore, and Quarterly West. He is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Boston University.

(I'll add info as it becomes available.)

How to Watch TV

Check out my pals Bill and Janice and their new show, Bilge. It's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 only funny. So far they opine on American Idol, Lost, and Mad Men, and have a brand new catch phrase.

(Audio may not be safe for work)





(and here is their youtube channel)

Three More for the To-Read List

I'm proud and happy to see my talented netfriends getting their work out there in print. This month, we celebrate three new titles hitting the public:

PRECIOUS, by Sandra Novack, via Random House. Publisher's Weekly says, "The graceful prose and bleak atmosphere underscore the loneliness of each character. Novack takes the massive distance between friends, husbands and wives, and makes it her home." Me, I love bleak, and I love family drama, so I'm definitely gonna read this. You can read an excerpt here at Powell's to decide for yourself.


WOMEN UP ON BLOCKS, a short story collection by Mary Akers, coauthor of RADICAL GRATITUDE. This fiction collection, published by Press 53, "explores the price women pay when they allow the roles of wife, mother, daughter, or lover to define them." Also right up my alley. Akers has a clean, no-nonsense voice that is a joy to read.



NOTHING LIKE AN OCEAN, another short story collection by Jim Tomlinson, author of THINGS KEPT, THINGS LEFT BEHIND, which I gushed over here back when I still had time to write full reviews. The stories in the new collection "reflect Tomlinson’s awareness of place, revisiting the fictional town of Spivey, a community in rural Appalachia where the characters confront difficult circumstances and, with quiet dignity, try to do what is right." This collection comes via University Press of Kentucky's Kentucky Voices series.

Time to get off the net and start reading! So here I go.

2008 Reading Roundup

Last year I had fun writing mini book reviews from memory, so I'll make it an annual tradition. Here's what stuck with me in my 2008 reading:

Every centimeter of Lynda Barry's WHAT IT IS is covered with full color collage, drawing, and writing, including the endpapers. Monkeys, birds, cats, monsters, found postcards with old person handwriting, yellow legal paper, and pattern. I took it all in. I read it in bed and it fed my dreams. This book instructs on Barry's creative method, passing the art baton to us all.

Believe the hype about David Wroblewski's THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE. The prose has a courageously slow pace, yet the action is riveting. The dogs are real characters, echoing Shakespeare, but never stop being dogs, a rarity in fiction. The conflict is biblical. And Wroblewski used to be a computer programmer who wrote by night, so he's automatically cool to me. Did he quit his day job? I don't know, but the Oprah sticker indicates he probably should.

Ed Park's PERSONAL DAYS is the workplace novel I wish I'd written. Told in titled fragments, sometimes in first person plural, it has the rhythm of a real office on the verge of shutting down. Characters make their own language and amusement even as they panic about their imminent firings. Corporatespeak starts off funny, then becomes eerily poignant. The book is compact; its ideas are huge. And it made me laugh aloud on the subway more than once.




You may already know I'm fascinated with stories of the formerly-religious. I heard Shalom Auslander in an interview suggest bookstores should create a table: "Literature of the Fallen." Ha! We have a genre! I immediately grabbed FORESKIN'S LAMENT, his hilarious memoir. I was surprised to learn that he didn't stop believing in God, but rather, stopped liking him. His God is the vengeful Old Testament version, who hurts his loved ones out of spite. Like if Auslander carries money on the Sabbath, the New York Rangers lose. He's known for his humor, but it's rooted in real trauma, and I surprised myself by crying as I read the heartbreaking end.

And speaking of the Literature of the Fallen, James Wood's THE BOOK AGAINST GOD stayed with me too. This is a PK (preacher's kid) novel rooted in the Anglican tradition of questioning faith. The protag is not likeable--a bad husband, he doesn't finish things, and he speaks embarrasingly in public. Yet this one moved me to tears also, when I realized in a rush that everyone around the protag was playing a role in his noneffectiveness, shushing him and pooh-pooing his atheism. Woods speaks in his critical work of the "unreliably unreliable" narrator, and this book has a prime example, when the untrustworthy protag acknowledges the truth (and conflict) that everyone else refuses to face. It disarmed me completely.

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.

Turning into a Crazy Old Lady? Here's Proof.

I made apple-blackberry (right) and apple-cranberry (left) sauce today. I never tried canning before, but it was fun! Can you believe this projaholic never went there? I followed directions as best I could from a Sunset book I had laying around from the 1970s.

Now, to do the dishes....