My Writing Process (Blog Tour Entry)

This blog has been silent for quite a while, but when Claire Guyton asks me to do something, how can I refuse? So, here is my contribution to the ever-widening #MyWritingProcess blog tour.

1)  What am I working on?

Right now, mostly flash fiction and nonfiction, because I only have short bouts of time and energy to write, and because this seems to be how my mind is working lately: in lyric bursts.

2)  How does my work differ from others of its genre? 

I’m going to punt this question by quoting George Saunders: “Originality in art means settling into who you actually are.” To the extent that a writer looks closely and honestly at the world around her through the lenses her knowledge, experience, and imagination have crafted for her, and presents that world in her own life-won vernacular (that blend of words and cadences from her grandmother’s kitchen, the office where she works every day, the books that she dreamed over as a child, and so on), then her work will differentiate itself from that of other writers.

3)  Why do I write what I do?

I write when some character, situation, image, or idea niggles at me. Sometimes, in the writing, I figure out why it was niggling at me, although usually I discover some other thing which is as good or better.

I write because life is a mess and a muddle, a beautiful, terrible thing we will never be able to parse out or capture entire, so the best we can do is keep banging away at it, hammering out our bits of understanding.

I write because, as Bernard Malamud said, writing is not a bad way to live out this human confusion. [I can’t find the exact quote to link to it, but I believe it is somewhere in Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco’s Talking Horse.]

4)   How does your writing process work?

Because my writing time is catch as catch can, I have to make the most of mental percolation and unconscious readiness: I try to keep the back burners bubbling with ideas, images, and language, to remain open and attentive whenever I can. This is harder than you might think, but necessary – even for writers with longer swaths of time to call their own, I suspect. Writing, like any art, demands a certain way of being in the world alongside the knowledge and the discipline necessary to create. In order for something to come out in your writing, it has to be somewhere in you, something that you were receptive or perceptive enough to register even in inchoate form. I read an essay a couple of years ago by Kamila Shamsie in which she challenges American writers to be as globally involved in our work as our government is in its interventions, and I realized that, if I were to take up her challenge, I would have to be a different person: not just more knowledgeable about world affairs, but someone who inhabited the world differently, both in my thoughts and in my actions. Shamsie was unconsciously ready to be struck by that image of a woman with her kimono’s patterns burnt into her back, but I’m guessing some conscious effort went into making her ready: the research necessary to write the story that came out of that image was necessary work, but so was the less direct preparation that came before that image even struck her, that made her the sort of person who would be struck by that image and then be able to imagine further beyond that image into a character and situation that would be rich and alive with complexity. How can I be so open to the world beyond me, ready to accurately and responsibly respond to it? The kind of writer I want to be and the kind of person I want to be go hand in hand here, and reaching toward them both is a crucial part of the process and practice of writing.

For other aspects of the writing process, visit other points on the #MyWritingProcess blog tour, where you can poach from the thoughts of smart, talented folks like Diane Lefer, Suzanne Farrell Smith, James Pounds, and, last but not least, the wonderful Claire Guyton, who was the person who invited me to participate in this venture. I am now passing the torch to the witty Eileen Favorite, the incandescent Goldie Goldbloom, and the wise Marci Rich (see bios below).

Eileen Favorite's first novel The Heroines (Scribner, 2008) was named a Best Debut Novel by The Rocky Mountain News, and has been translated into Finnish, Italian, Russian, Korean, and will soon appear in Czech. The audio version was nominated for best recording by the American Library Association. A writer of both poetry and prose, she's twice received Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships (prose, 2001; poetry 2005). Her work has appeared in many publications, including Triquarterly, Folio, Chicago Reader, Poetry East, and Diagram. She's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction and nonfiction. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in Writing and at the Graham School of Continuing Studies at the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters. She is represented by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh of William Morris Endeavor.

Goldie Goldbloom’s novel, The Paperbark Shoe (Picador, 2011), won the AWP Novel Award and the Novel of the Year from ForeWord Magazine. Her short fiction was published in a collection, You Lose These  (Fremantle Press, 2011) and has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly and Narrative Magazine, as well as in many anthologies. She was the winner of Hunger Mountain’s 2014 Non-Fiction Award and the Jerusalem Post’s International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom’s essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Le Monde, on NPR and G-dcast, and in the groundbreaking anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires (North Atlantic, 2010). In 2014, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and earlier, was the Simon Blattner Fellow at Northwestern University, where she still teaches creative writing at the graduate level. Goldbloom is an internationally recognized speaker and was recently honored by being invited to speak at the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France. She lives in Chicago, Illinois, with her eight children. She is originally from Western Australia.

Marci Rich, creator of the blog “The Midlife Second Wife” and a contributing blogger at the Huffington Post, is at work on a memoir. Among the print and online publications in which her blog posts, essays, poems, and articles have appeared are the Richmond Times-Dispatch; the Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio); the ​alumni magazines for Oberlin College and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (she edited the latter for 10 years); Silver Kris (Singapore); Katie.com, the website for the Katie Couric show; BlogHer; and the literary journals FIELD, Timbuktu, Synaesthetic and the Abiko Quarterly (Japan), among others. In 2012, the Huffington Post honored The Midlife Second Wife as one of the top seven blogs for readers over the age of 50. Rich is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in creative writing, and where she won the Academy of American Poets student award. She is president of KeyWord Communications, LLC, which offers writing, media relations, and consulting services, and lives with her husband in Rocky River, Ohio.

​http://www.themidlifesecondwife.com

http://www.marcirich.com​

No More Genre Wars

I would like to use what little bully pulpit this blog affords me to ask my fellow writers to please, please stop engaging in the literary equivalent of the Mommy Wars, in which people who choose to write fiction and people who choose to write nonfiction defend that choice by attacking those who have made a different choice. Every writer does not have to choose one genre and one genre only to read and write (any more than every mother only works outside the home or is a stay-at-home mother, and never moves between those statuses). More importantly, though, the Genre Wars perpetuate the same facile assumptions about each genre that they are meant to dispel.

When someone says something stupid to you like, “I don’t have time for fiction; I only bother with things that are true,” or “Nonfiction must be easy to write, because you just put down what happened,” the correct response is not to bash the genre which it sounds like the person prefers, but to point out patiently (and quickly, because these folks often have short attention spans and aren’t really interested in reading anyway) that in fact all writers deal in imagination and the truth. Sometimes – and it pains me to say this, but it happens – your own fellow writers will make such claims, although I have found it is usually in an attempt to defend their own little corner of the literary realm. Don’t tell me about how great fiction is, one CNF devotee sniffed in a Facebook comment, why should I care about your imaginary friends? The response here should be the same, although given with greater urgency: whatever the genre, we all rely upon imagination and seek truths that we render through the medium of language.

Fiction writers, please bring me your imaginary friends, rendered as carefully and powerfully as you can manage. Elizabeth Bennett, Faith in a Tree, The Monster, Gregor Samsa – I have loved them all, and always welcome the chance to make more imaginary friends over whom I can laugh and cry and wonder and complain, and in the end feel changed, or at least less alone in my human messiness. Nonfiction writers, you too, please bring me your mother, your great-grandfather, the guy on the shrimp trawler, yourself on the Appalachian Trail, yourself in recovery, yourself learning how to roller skate at age 52 – because when you render these on the page for me, your reader, they become my imaginary friends too, as real and necessary and challenging for me as any fictional character, and, no, that is not an insult. It is the way of things for all of us, no matter what genre we choose to write: imagination and the truth are the twin stars to guide us, and bring writer and reader alike to whatever destination the words carry us.

Q & A, or, Might as Well Write

So what’s the point?

she wants to know –

always some no-nonsense

middle-aged lady with no time

for waste, for self-aggrandizement

with no other price tag.

All those words

nobody will read ­– she can see

not only does the emperor

have no clothes but the tailors

honestly believe they are sewing something.

Maybe you pile up those words

for your protection,

like a levee you crouch

against, flood waters

lapping and spitting

over the top, spraying us all.

Maybe you will be the one to say it:

slot the necessary words in the order

that springs the lock, releasing us

from our own stupidity, from an existence

empty and hungry as a mouth

gaping and bleeding like a wound.

Maybe you try to say it

so the stupid doesn’t chain you

so you can go on believing

that at least you somehow

remain unchanged.

Dark Epiphanies

Has it really been over two months since I posted last? Shame on me for neglecting you, blog. It's been a lack of time, really, not a lack of ideas. I keep thinking, "I should write a post about that," but then time runs away from me, and it's another week gone without posting.

Claire Guyton's wonderful blog up on Hunger Mountain's website has pushed me to post, however. In a recent pair of linked posts, Claire mused on what she calls "limbo" in short stories: "people rarely change," she notes in a review of Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body," so why do so many writers and critics insist that a short story build up toward a moment of deep change in a character's life? Claire has her own reasons for "loving limbo," and she does such a wonderful job of explaining them, that I recommend you read the posts for yourself. What struck me most, however, was this paragraph:

I am partial to short stories that end in the middle of a crucial moment, made ambiguous by its refusal to resolve. I like reading endings like that and I like writing them. A moment of becoming (or not becoming), when a character is neither that thing anymore but not yet this thing, either—it’s so honest. 

Honest indeed, like the Edward P. Jones story which concludes with the main character flipping a coin to choose which corner to turn, then flipping the coin and turning a corner again and again. This is how we live: not in light, but peering through a glass darkly, and that peering is in itself fascinating, ripe with its own sort of drama.

So far as I can tell, if and when we do experience an epiphany, it is not a moment of perfect clarity, but one of perfect cognitive dissonance. It is not a sudden insight into what is, but a slow release into the recognition that one's categories of analysis, terms of debate, and ways of understanding the world (or some aspect of it) cannot hold, have been wrong all along, yet what should replace them are unclear. It is not a moment of "not this, but that," but of "not this – now what?".

My stories usually resolve this way, to the puzzlement of some readers, but, as Claire says, anything else feels dishonest to me. I wrote a story when I was in my MFA program about an academic refugee from Nazi-occupied Holland who comes to the U.S. and struggles to acclimate herself to her new situation, a struggle made all the more difficult by how placid her surroundings are. The bucolic environment in which she finds herself after the trauma of displacement only numbs her further. The faculty member I was working with told me that I was starting the story after the main action: that the story should have been about her escape from Holland, not her life afterward. I can't say that the story was totally successful, but I disagree with the claim that one of the problems with it was the situation it explored. If I were writing a Hollywood screenplay, then, yes, I might want something with more chase scenes and close escapes. I was writing a short story, however, a genre in which character can provide narrative momentum, rather than incident. For me, the question of how one puts one's life and self back together in a place where no one can begin to understand your brokenness was well worth exploring, and the insight that healing would be slow, piecemeal, and probably never total was more than epiphany enough to resolve it, if one can even claim that such a question can be resolved.

Perhaps our cultural moment has made us wary of endings that seem too neat, or characters who could have a moment of pure clarity at all, never mind one that transforms forevermore. Maybe we have become jaded by television shows that wrap up a complicated situation in 20 or 50 minutes, and by a 24-hour news cycle which confirms for us over and over again the awful and absurd ways people can behave. Maybe we are in a transitional moment in our culture, like the postmodernists claim, where the old modes seem worn out, but we haven't been able to come up with any new ones. As David Jauss has pointed out in his wonderful essay on endings in Chekhov (available in the archives of the Writer's Chronicle, if you are able to log in at awpwriter.org), however, that 19th-century master was wary of the resolved conclusion long before our time, so I would like to think those of us who share that suspicion are in good company. Chekhov believed story endings should "return the characters to life again," and, let's face it, life is a mess that we pick our way through as best we can.

I know that some writers and readers out there decry the overinfluence, as they see it, of Chekhov in the contemporary short story, precisely because it has lead to an overreliance on domestic dramas in which "nothing happens." What it means to have "something happen" in fiction is a separate topic I would like to tackle some other time, but suffice it to say that a brief moment in time when characters who can't change come together can generate narrative tension and forward momentum, and raise questions necessary to ponder but impossible to resolve. In one of my favorite Eudora Welty stories, "A Still Moment," three men come together at the same spot on the Natchez Trace: an itinerant preacher bound for a camp revival, a serial killer who happens upon the preacher and decides to make him his next victim, and John James Audubon, who is collecting specimens and making sketches of the birds he finds. The prose roils with each man's individual obsession, until a white heron lights down in the marsh, transfixing each man. I won't spoil the story for you if you haven't read it (and if you haven't, please do), but suffice it to say each man then goes his separate way, pointedly unchanged in his obsession and his outlook, in the case of the preacher willfully so. I love this story for the elegance of its construction and the brilliance of its conceit, as well as the fine use of character and voice you'll always find in Welty. Could every story be "A Still Moment"? No. It would lose it's special character if that were so. But to claim that such a story should not have been written, that it presents its reader with a "zero sum"? I could never agree to that.

Quotidian

Oh how I wanted genius,
that gorgeousness surging:
no sense mattered so much as that sound.

Prone behind my bed, book in hand.
Shelley formed a bright
bubble around me on the brown shag.
My mother came in, went out
believing I was elsewhere.

I thought it would be some kind of escape,
but the words don't really carry you away.
You can't live in that realm of language.

I fall upon the thorns of life.
That's all I have to write about:
that pricking over and over
without even a skylark's flight
to fall from.