Virtual Summer Conference: Bender on Boredom, Weirdness, and Humor

Aimee Bender always livens up a conference. Here she is speaking to Google employees and enjoying the free M&M's. She reads the short story "Fruit and Words," then answers questions about the writing process. She's pro-Nanowrimo, for its power to make writing less precious and more fun. She talks about her 2-hour daily writing regimen, which eliminates the I-should-be-writing guilt and makes her just bored enough to push herself into areas of weirdness and humor.

Virtual Summer Conference: The Obligatory Publishing Panel

What's a summer conference without a publishing panel? My summer conference will have a little point/counterpoint. We'll start with agent / publicist Erin Cox's talk, "Agents: How to Find One, Keep One, and Be Inspired," which focuses on the basics of getting started in traditional publishing: find the right agents for your material, treat the agent like a human (ie don't send them all the same letter), know your audience, and find your reading public before you approach agents.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE AGENT TALK VIA ITUNES.
(It's iTunes U. You can stream or download. Track #2.)

Or, are you becoming totally jaded about platforms, proposals, and all the trappings of today's gasping publishing industry? Check out this international panel of "revolutionaries" (surprise! They think big houses have their role in the culture, as much as little houses!) who have defected from big places for the creative freedom of small places: Ben Greenman, Mykola Riabchuk, Dale Peck, Carmen Boullosa, Amy Scholder, and moderator (dressed as "the man") Lisa Dierbeck of Mischief and Mayhem. Defection goes both ways. Authors start at small houses and defect to big ones, or start at big houses and escape to little ones. Is editorial guidance "censorship?" (My opinion? Maybe so, with the author's partial responsibility. Censorship brought on by desperation.) The lighting is a little dim, which makes them seem like those brave people who risk grave danger to talk to reporters on television.

Virtual Summer Conference: The Almond Show

I can attest that Steve Almond gives a good workshop. Here he is answering the questions of a group of fiction students, and reading from his self-published collection. It's like his workshop, only without the manuscript part...

Lit TV: Boswell and Shepard. Virtual Summer Conference!

I'm not going to any summer conferences this year, so how about we make our own? Virtual conference, anyone?

We'll start with an evening reading, two short fiction heroes. Here, Robert Boswell reads from "Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards."


Reading by Robert Boswell from ASU English on Vimeo.

And here, Jim Shepard reads in entirety his astonishing short, "Boy's Town."

Author Jim Shepard reading "Boys Town" from ASU English on Vimeo.

We can pretend to go out for drinks after the reading and talk about their viruosity with voice, or the fact that both stories feature looming incarceration, or what crushes we have on them as writers.

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.

Lit TV: Getting to Know Litmags

Youtube, Vimeo, and the like are loaded with live reading videos, which can be a fun way to get to know literary magazines. This video, sponsored by CLMP and NY Public Library, features members of the editorial staff of several magazines. They make macro comments about each magazine, talk about publication schedule, philosophy, and history, before reading excerpts.

Taking Care of the Writer

With so many folks around me learning to cope with serious illness, grief, and transitions, it's absurd for me to obsess on my recent batch of routine literary disappointments. The skinny SASE's and almost-theres are nothing new to me, and I have plenty of practice handling them.

One disappointment has nothing to do with literary merit. The class I was planning on taking this summer has been canceled. I heard from Captain Fiction himself that he has chosen to take care of his own health instead. Six-hour lectures are no joke for anyone at any age. He clearly made the right choice, one that I hope might lead him back to the writing desk. (It's selfish of me, but I would not mind reading another single-paragraph Lishkowitz novel.) Maybe I can learn, if not from his yelling voice in class, from his example of self-care. (Dumb, therapyish choice of words, for which he would probably yell at me, but yeah. I said it.) He is "refusing the gas pipe," to use his own words. Refusing suicide-by-teaching.

I find myself running all those choice sentences through my head, the ones I have been composing carefully and hoping to test out on him, the man with the magic ear. Then it dawns on me: this is just the usual schoolgirl crap. Hoping to please teacher. Hoping to please editor. Please, notice me! Notice me! When will I just stop already?

The teacher I need to please is me. The editor I need to please is me. The ear I need to tune up is mine. Self-care is how adults cope with routine difficulty and disappointment.

And with that in mind, I went back to another teacher, one I have never met. Natalie Goldberg's books helped me access some rich subject matter back when I was first exploring fiction-writing. I discovered they are available on audio download, for a reasonable price, read by the author, with remarks thrown in, the 50-year-old Natalie commenting on the 36-year-old Natalie. She has evolved, but also cares for the person she used to be. It's a self study that is full of the right kind of humility. In her Long Island accent, she "nags" (her word) me gently to "get to work."

Teachers come in all forms--some gentle, some not--some in person, some far removed by geography or time. So, for the moment, I'm back on track. Writing. Back in the practice, as she says.

I feel impotent in the face of the frailties of body and spirit I have been hearing about in the past few weeks. I think we all do. For all of you I know who are heartbroken or grieving or in pain or facing giant challenges right now, I think about you every day, and wish you peace of mind, energy, and courage.

Lit TV. Gaitskill Talks About Reading

If you haven't discovered the Center for Fiction channel at Youtube yet, discover it. They have full videos of their fantastic events, in parts. In this one, for example, Mary Gaitskill talks about the writer's arm. It's very physical, to her, writing, and reading is a sharing of the physical between writer and reader. I love this point of view.

Dogs With Hands--ALWAYS FUNNY.

Right up there with hairy men in tutus.

Some Old Drawings.

This embedded slideshow thing is new for me. Fun!

The drawings are 52 illustrations for a long poem I did in 1994, entitled Stories Inside a Crawling Skin. I published it at home in an edition of 52 (or was it 50)? signed copies. I'm proud of both the drawings and the poems, even though my work has evolved a bit since then. What I miss is the artmaking energy I had. I still have the research and inquiry and obsession thing pretty strongly, but I don't stay up all night drawing any more. I sleep instead! Gave up drawing for dreaming.

Running Around in Circles

In a good way! Check out Baby Gracie, all grown up. She has her own friends, even.

Medieval Guild System? Maybe.

I just love Anis Shivani's essay in the Fall 2010 issue of Boulevard, "The MFA/Creative Writing System is a Closed, Undemocratic, Medieval Guild System that Represses Good Writing." I don't entirely agree with it, but I do love the argument. What are your thoughts? "Well-told myths of internal solidarity and well-timed rituals to enhance fellow-feeling"--well, that sounds about right. Programs each have their "house style." He goes after all the big institutions: the schools, the artist colonies, the fellowships, the summer conferences, the magazines, even the annual "bacchanal" of the AWP gathering, with an almost gleeful hammer. Masters, journeymen, and the rest of us schlubs trying to get in.

The only thing missing from his argument is joy. Yes! The kind of joy that doesn't come from a dark outlook. Maybe this fellow-feeling isn't all that false. Just one girl's opinion.

As for the assertion of written output getting more "conservative," this is something many of us agree on, including the MFA-ers themselves. Part of the challenge of entering the guild is knowing which kool-aid to drink, not losing sight of the world outside the guild.

Anyway, I highly recommend this entertaining essay. Inflammatory in all the right places.

Hempel's Dog Notices Stuff Too

What's not to love about Amy Hempel and her yellow lab? And that wonderful story, "The Harvest?"



"How you solve being alive...what do you have that you can draw on?"

Live at r.kv.r.y

Check out the April 2011 issue of r.kv.r.y, and not just because I'm in it! I love the theme of this journal: recovery in all its forms. Emotional, physical, even environmental. Also, the editor, Mary Akers, interviewed me here, on the r.kv.r.y blog. Topics include knitting, transitioning from visual art to written art, and the use of sensory detail in fiction.

(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.

Writing Class Time Machine

Ever wish you could take a workshop with Faulkner? Check out this free resource. Listen in on a writing class from 1957.