Suzan-Lori Parks - Interview

The Days Grow Short

So, it's September. Sorry for the silence all of August. August took some unexpected turns and vanished.

I'm re-reading "Disgrace" by Coetzee for school. It's not fun, but it's forcing me to read it with a more analytical eye, which is great.

Have been writing lots. Reading lots of Lorrie Moore short stories. Am going to go see her read at this year's International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront.

Gearing up for some self-reflection leading up to Yom Kippur, so I might not post again till after September 27th.

See you soon...

Come upstairs/I'll force-feed you/book covers

Book Covers
Can I ever get enough gorgeous, startling book cover design? No. Delicious book covers with credits and notes are at this blog, Covers. It is updated by a design firm called Fwis, who design, you guessed it, book covers. Yum! And here's another book cover blog, because you've been good, Book Covers Anonymous. Some of the posts highlight different covers used for US/UK editions. I could look at these all day.

Want to design your own now? You can buy these naked Penguins and go wild. I bought The Waves and I intend to harass an artist friend until he designs the cover.

And from the Covers blog, this shelf, this shelf,
I WANT IT. I want many many like it, all custom-carved to fit my books. Giant puzzles on my walls. Imagine?

*
Force-feeding

I have been trying to use the word gavage in my story. It means force-feed. It can be used regarding the feeding of infants who cannot suck, or people who need super-alimentation. It can also refer to force-feeding as torture, and the way geese are fed to create foie gras.

I can't use it in my story. It's the right image, but the wrong word. I've checked all my dictionaries (I have a collection) and thesauruses, and most do not have the word. My French and my medical dictionaries have it though, as it is a French word and medical term.

Sometimes english feels so limiting.

*
Come Upstairs

Now I am trying to decide if my character would say:

Come upstairs, I have to show you the shoes I bought.
or
Come upstairs, you need to see the shoes I bought.

She's a small-n narcissist, a sophisticated drama queen, generous and selfish at once. I can't decide if she'd stick with the pronoun "I" - "I" have to show you, or whether she'd prefer to tell her friend what to do - "you need to see". The "come upstairs" is already imperative. Maybe I should follow Gordon Lish's idea of letting the beginning of a sentence dictate where it should end.

Come upstairs and see the shoes I bought.
Come upstairs. Come see the shoes I bought.

I'll work on it.

Writing for Mentor

I went over my first draft of the newest story today. We'll call it Garbage Strike.

It was definitely in need of tailoring. Some parts need taking in and some need letting out. My focus was intensified however, by knowing that this story will soon go out to (the) Mentor who will be looking closely at every word. It affected the demand I put on myself. It is a lot like working out with a trainer rather than working out by yourself. You can be just about ready to drop, but with a take-no-whining trainer, you will put in that extra set of reps.

Previously, I wanted to write well enough to sell, and now I am trying to write the best I possibly can. Hopefully that will still sell.

I want to make writing to the best of my abilities a habit, make it stick - 'cause when this MFA is over, who will I be writing for?

That Old Time Anxiety

I'm actually caught up on my reading. Had to read A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor and Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson.

I'm caught in that spot between "inspired" and "give up". I have to keep reminding myself that the simplest stories can be breathtakingly beautiful, and the most painful and profound stories can be simply written.

I've written a new story. I'm afraid to look at it. I have to keep polishing an older one too, since I have to send them both in to my mentor (let's just call him Mentor, ok?) in ten days. I have already censored one story by clothing a half-naked character. Why do I do this?!

The anxiety I'm feeling is somewhat wonderful in that I haven't felt this sense of direction and ambition in a long long time. However, the odd manifestation of night-time (almost-)panic attacks is not cool. I've been a bit weird since I got home though what with 3-hour sleep intervals and jaw-clenching and a strange relationship to food. By strange, I mean I entirely forget certain food groups until I feel faint and then need to eat MEAT!!! or KALE!!! urgently. Interesting. Stay tuned for scurvy-watch 2009.

When it's all too much, I just resort to ZooBorns.com, because baby animals make everything better as long as you don't focus on their captivity, endangered status, and dwindling natural habitat!

Beginnings!

Things I managed to do today (by "today" I mean since 12am):

Finished reading Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. It was terrific and I should have read it years ago.

Started re-reading The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

Had lunch with a friend-of-a-friend who is more-or-less where I was at for the last six months, and I was able to confidently say to her, "don't worry, you'll figure it out".

Remembered to put sunscreen on my shins and the tops of my feet, but did not remember to sunscreen my thighs. Wore a short-ish skirt. Have the dumbest looking tan EVER. Half my thighs are pasty white, half are tanned and my knees are slightly burned. Picture it - you could use a good laugh.

Got spaghetti sauce on my shirt. Naturally. (I can make spaghetti here because it's an "apartment-style" hotel with a kitchenette.)

Went to the two-hour orientation seminar for the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program I have just started. It was terrific. Tomorrow the actual seminars and lectures and introductions to software (for the online portion) begin. I'm really excited. I have a ton of reading to do. I will also have a ton of writing to do, but that part is more intimidating than exciting, so I'm going to ignore it till the next ten days are over.

I dreamt of David Bowie again. I do occasionally dream of David Bowie and Madonna. In the last dream, David showed me his art collection* and then David and my cousin and I played a practical joke on my other cousin. It involved David wearing a fake rubber nose. It was hilarious. In the dream.

I wrote this blog entry. I thought of you and you and you and you.

* I have no idea what kind of art David Bowie actually collects.

Read Poetry for Toronto's Birthday

Toronto and I shared a birthday last week and it was great fun. I didn't know it was going to be Toronto's birthday, so I made my own plans.

I did at least get with the program regarding the Keep Toronto Reading event, and at the Graphic Bandita's urging, put a copy of Glen Downie's Loyalty Management on hold. If you haven't read poetry in a while, I recommend you pick it up. It will remind you how great poetry can be.

Check out the Shortlist for Keep Toronto Reading too. Elyse Friedman's book, Long Story Short, which I blogged about a while ago, was shortlisted. Her stories really merge a new Canadian incarnation of tragic hipness.

Now I am back to reading the Portable MFA in Creative Writing book I mentioned before. I was reading about classic story structure and there was a section on the (non-classic) plotless story. When I got to:

"Keeping a reader engaged with an idea is tricky... However, Milan Kundera's hugely succesful novels are idea laden, perhaps even idea driven."

I realized that I have never read a Kundera novel because of the type of people I've only ever seen reading Kundera novels: skeezy pretentious guys in their twenties! Ha! There's my confession of reading bias for today. What's yours?

When Your Character Bosses You Around

I wrote a story today. 2677 words.

There was a moment when I KNEW my protagonist was supposed to suffer. Life is cruel and it was going to be cruel to him. It was supposed to be. That's what you're supposed to do to your "hero", or even your "anti-hero" - you're supposed to put him through hell, or up a tree, or up a creek or whatever.

Then I chickened out.

I couldn't do it. He'd already had a plain day and a rough couple of years, so I gave him a hope-y ending.

I don't know if that constitutes a story or just a character sketch, but I'll see how it reads tomorrow in the light of day.

I always chicken out. Apparently it's common for a writer to weep when killing off a favourite character, but I can't even give my character a broken heart.

I need to get tougher. How do you do it?

Three Reasons Why Work is Rejected

A good post at the Guide to Literary Agents blog on the top three reasons work is rejected for representation by an agent. So to read:

But why do GOOD writers get rejected? Simple... They submit before the work is ready.

It strikes fear into my writerly heart.

Sometimes people say, are you still working on your book? When will you submit it?

Although I would like to submit my manuscript soon, I do not want to submit it before it's ready. The truth is that most first novels end up locked away in drawers to be laughed at later when the author has successfully published her third novel. My Novel #1 still needs revisions, but I am always plagued by the thought that the revisions won't be enough. It might just be my "drawer" novel, and it's too soon to tell.

The Portable MFA

I got The Portable MFA from the library. I am on page 28. So far it is excellent. I've worked through my mini-drought and I've written 793 words this evening. Hurrah.

The book is meant to be a portable summary of the lessons you'd learn in the New York Writer's Workshop and so far, the fiction portion is quite good. (It also address magazine, screenplay, and non-fiction writing.)

I especially recommend the Introduction by Tim Tomlinson where he discusses the uses of an MFA (and abuses, too, in programs that are poorly taught by lazy teachers). His list of top ten flaws of Creative Writing MFA programs should be required reading for anyone applying to/pursuing an MFA program and for those teaching one.

While there is nothing radical in the fiction section, I much prefer Tomlinson's approach to teaching plot and structure to McKee's. A lot of the story set-ups he examines are familiar, but I've never looked at them with a writerly perspective as story forms.

So far so good. I'll let you know what else I discover.

Graphic Novels

I don't profess to know anything about graphic novels.

I read the entire set of Akira in my teens, 'cause hey, my friend was cool and he read them. (I'm original like that.) Then I read Maus some time later.

In the past few months I've read both American Widow by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi and Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.

American Widow is Alisa Torres' story of her life after 9/11. Her husband was on his second day of his new job at Cantor Fitzgerald and she was pregnant with their first child. Cancer Vixen also recounts joy interrupted when three weeks before her wedding, cartoonist Marisa Acocella found a lump in her breast. Both women have expressed these experiences via incredibly powerful tellings of very personal and painful stories. Torres and Choi's story uses more silence and less humour. Marchetto's tone is just as raw, but more conversational, and often funny too. Both of them transported me fully into their lives and left me better for it.

I feel like sometimes talking about "women's stories" actually does them (us?) a disservice, by segregating them rather than allowing them to be stories in the marketplace, but these two graphic novels are really women's stories, told by women from their own experiences in their own voices. The emotional intensity, honesty, and fantastic art, however, will appeal to everyone.

Now to put Marjane Satrapi's books on hold at the library.

New York Times book review on American Widow here.

Who Am I and What Do I Write, Part IV

"Novels are concealed autobiography": Insofar as writing goes, the writer's fundamental attempt is to understand the meaning of his own experiences. If he can't break through to those issues that concern him deeply, he's not going to be very good.

- Robert Penn Warren

from Good Advice on Writing: Great Quotations from Writer's Past and Present on How to Write Well

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fodder

No fodder, really. I'm just busy with life, applications to school programs, etc. right now. I'll have more to blog in a week or so. If you have any info on good "writing progress graphs" I can use to embed on this blorg, let me know.

Have a gorgeous Valenschmine's Day and don't buy any marked-up flowers! If you must, consider Organic Bouquet. I could tell you to be frugal and buy a bouquet of beets and carrots, but I've always liked the hyacinths philosophy.

Query Letters

Taking another stab at writing a query letter for agent submission feels about as fun as taking a stab at my own gut with a rusty knife.

Naturally, I can't just go ahead and start writing it. I must read everything anyone ever wrote on the inturwebz about query letters first.

You can join me!

Agent Query
So You Wanna (Write a Query Letter)
Nelson Literary Agency advice
The author of "The Art of Kissing" dishes query letter advice*
Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent, on how she likes her query letters
Poewar, a blog, on the QL
eHow makes it look easy.

Plus all the links to agents, etc., I have on the side over there.

So, if you would just read all those, summarize and send me a 1-page synopsis by tomorrow, that would be great, thanks.

Yeah, yeah, back to work, I know. But you can't expect me to write a query letter without breakfast. I'm sure I'll write a spectacular letter that will entrance agents and garner me huge advances... just as soon as I've had some brioche french toast and another cup of coffee.

*I don't make this stuff up, I just google it.

Don't Get Me Wrong, Some of My Best Fiction is Science!

David Barnett present a good article (with a great title) about one of my personal bete-noirs: science fiction that refuses to be labeled so.

This annoyed me when Philip K. Dick moved from the Science Fiction section to the Fiction section at the store, 'cause he had "moved into the literary cannon", as my teacher at the time said. I call foul. His work is, was, and will always be science fiction - so why does he get "elevated" to the Fiction aisle, while Harlan Ellison stays in the Science Fiction section? (Did it have more to do with the movie "Minority Report" coming out at the time?)

What puts Oryx and Crake in Fiction? Is Margaret Atwood better than Octavia Butler? Puh-leeze.

Science Fiction, or SF, gets a bad rap because of it's hokey genre associations. Mystery novels, however, don't attract the same disrespect. You can write genre mystery or literary mystery, and your work will be in the mystery aisle with no one pooh-poohing it either way. But if you happen to have a science fiction slant to your novel, then your publisher will take great pains to keep it quarantined from the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. It's just snobbery and makes me grumpy. (As I mentioned a few posts ago, Jonathan Lethem's book was SF marketed as "literary" and still crap.)

I'd be quite happy to do away with most of the categories in the bookstore starting with "Books for Her" tables and "African-American" shelves. I don't like ghettos for people or for the written word.

Spider Robinson wrote an article once delineating between what he writes, "science fiction", and that other, silly genre stuff, "sci-fi". To me, it was a meaningless distinction. (Sorry, I can't find it to post.) IMO, the cream will rise to the top no matter what you call it, and people will gravitate to whatever stories they want in the moment. You could put Anna Karenina in the Romance section and no one's gonna mistake it for The Greek Tycoon's Virgin Wife!

There is a lot of good science fiction out there - Heinlein, Willis, Butler, Robinson, Varley, Hopkinson, and Ellison are just a few. So for "mainstream" authors to write science fiction and then shirk the label does a disservice to all the great SF out there. Why are we still at the not that there's anything wrong with that stage? If, as an author, writing SF is an aberration for you, it would be much classier to say, "There's a lot of excellent science fiction out there, and I'm proud of the company my book is in".

What do you think? Does it matter to you if it's called science fiction, sci-fi, or speculative fiction? If you had to get your Murakami fix from the SF section, would you be caught dead there? What about vampire fiction - is it going to demand its own section in the basement?

Police Procedural Research

I'm writing a mystery novel and have just started a short story that includes the police too. The problem is everything I know about police procedure comes from television or from pulp novels circa 1952.

Luckily, Lee Lofland has written Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers. He also has a blog called The Graveyard Shift about police matters and writing, including interviews with published authors, agents, and editors.

Cops 'n' Writers is a consultation service that might also be worthwhile, if I had an advance from a publishing house (and if the cops in my writing were American).

At least the research books and the consultation could be claimed as expenses at tax time.

Writers Write also has an article stuffed with links on internet law enforcement resources. I haven't checked any of the links yet, but even the titles make good starting points.

Fabulous links and a way better layout can be found here at In Reference to Murder. This amazing site is put together by a mystery writer/librarian - check out his/her homepage and blog, too!

Lastly, keep in mind the various yahoo groups and forums you can join to glean info from people. I was part of a gun group on Yahoo for a while that was an offshoot (pun!) of a firearm training school (hello, CSIS!). Although I eventually left 'cause I just didn't need that much information, if I ever did need more info on guns for my writing, I'd go back. The people there have access to a lot of professional, technical, and firsthand info and experience that would take me much longer to amass on my own.

I only know one police officer, and I don't want to wear out my welcome by pestering her with too many questions, so it's good to have places to read up on the basics first. If you have any of your favourite research links to share (especially for genre writing), please let me know in the comments!

The Magic Pudding links

The Magic Pudding is listed on my profile as one of my favourite books, and I've blogged about it before.

Today I clicked it on my profile and saw a list of other bloggers who also claim it as one of their faves.

One of those people is named Tot Vogel and has a blog called Naked Photographs. It does not contain naked photographs, or rather, photographs of anything naked. It appears to be a memoir.

His first post, The Spoon is quite well-written and compelling - especially with the accompanying print. I googled to see if he was a published writer and found his fascinating Flickr photostream instead - all black and white and many from the '80s.

The fun of the internet lies in creeping around other people's artifacts.

Who am I and what do I write - Part III

Wandering Jews? is part of this year's Limmud, a festival of Jewish learning and culture.

"Wandering Jews?" looks like it grapples with some of the questions I raised in my previous posts, in terms of identity in the writing of Jewish writers. The seminar, however, will focus more on "place" and what is "home" and how or whether Judaism informs the idea of home in a Jewish writer's work.

The panelists are Adam Sol, Sidura Ludwig, and Rebecca Rosenblum.

Limmud (which means "learning" in Hebrew, I think) takes place on Sunday, February 15, 209. This particular seminar goes from 4:35PM–5:45PM. Maybe I'll see you there.

Contests, Conference, Confidence

Some contests and a conference:

1) Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It is open to residents of Canada - yay!

2) The 2009 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize
This has one awesome requirement: Your story must have a title
AND
One potentially difficult requirement: Submit a single short story that contains a surprise

Initially, I thought, well, EVERY short story contains a surprise, but no, they don't. What do they mean by "surprise" anyhow? Can it be about a surprise, or must there be some kind of twist ending? I say, harrumph. This contest has a $10 entry fee and is hosted by one more thing to love about NY - this website.

3) The New York Round Table Writer's Conference is open for registration. They max out at 200 writers, so register early if you are thinking of going. The conference is put together by The New York Center for Independent Publishing, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and the Writer magazine. It's not cheap ($350 for two days), but it's cheaper than some, and hey, if it's awful, at least you're in NYC!

Today I got nagged very nicely by someone who told me to submit my work to an agent, already! I do not fully agree that my work is ready - it could stand much improvement, but if I only allow myself to be the judge, how will I ever really know?

Who am I and what do I write - Part II

In my last post I discussed whether I should "write what I know" in reference to my Judaism, and I posed the question, "What are my stories?".

Here is another look at an answer.
The problem with "my stories" is that I am reticent to claim ownership. Are they really mine?

They are my parents', my aunts' and uncles', my grandparents' stories. Do I ask for them and begin tape-recording, listening diligently? And then what? Would I have what it takes to shape them with the respect and finesse they deserve? Why do it? Can I give my relatives back their own memories? Would I be a writer or a ventriloquist?

Would I be honouring my genealogical history or exploiting my family for material?

I would guess that to a storyteller in the oral tradition, like Dan Yashinsky, stories can belong to one person (or group), but can be told by anyone as long as they are told faithfully. He is quoted as saying,

"Stories show you that other people have traveled before you," he says. "They show you that no matter what is happening in your life, someone else has gone there before you. Someone else has been there, come back, and at least has a good story to show for it."

Some of these stories (like those of my family) have already been told by writers like Andree Aciman in Out of Egypt, Hisham Matar in In the Country of Men, and Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. Aciman's memoir beautifully and painfully renders Alexandria and the expulsion of Egypt's Jews, and Matar (whom I have not yet read), tells of the fear of his (non-Jewish) family during Khadafi's rise to power. Lagnado relates the contrast of her father's dashing life in Cairo society till Nasser's rise, and the cost on the family of delaying their departure from Egypt.

Some of my own childhood feels "told" in the first story (about Russian Jews in 1980s Toronto) in Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmosgis. What my parents may have felt upon their arrival to Canada was projected so intensely on top of my own memories that I found it hard to breathe.

If I am to record the stories I have heard all my life, I must do it soon. These inherited stories are not mine directly, but I am free to try and preserve them or keep them in trust for future generations.

My friend, an Egyptian Christian (Copt), who introduced me to "Out of Egypt" says that even though it is not exactly his story, nothing comforts him and takes him back to his youth like the description of old Alexandria in the novel.

Maybe I won't know who the stories belong to until they are read.