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.

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.

I love you, Edith Pearlman

So, after inaugurating this blog with posts on apocalypse and pain, I thought that this time I would write something warm and gushy instead: an unabashed love letter to the newest addition to my writerly pantheon, Edith Pearlman. I’ll try not to get too purple, but it’s going to be difficult.

I must admit I came late to the party. Thanks to Lookout Books, a new imprint out of UNC Wilmington (so new, this is their first book), some of Pearlman’s gems have been gathered together to form the collection Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (2011). In the introduction, Ann Patchett claims that “this should be the book with which Pearlman shakes off her secret-handshake status” (p. xi). A review in the New York Times brought the book to wide attention; then came Pearlman’s PEN/Malamud Award and the book’s nomination for a National Book Award. I think Patchett can consider her prediction fulfilled.

I saw the NYT review and added the book to my reading list, but didn’t get around to it. Then, I got a group email from Rosellen Brown to everybody writerly she could think of, encouraging us to attend Pearlman’s reading at Women and Children First. I meant to go – who am I to ignore a recommendation by Rosellen Brown? – but didn’t. Finally, I read the book. And re-read it, and re-read it. It has been on my nightstand for months, a book I dip back into again and again for delight and solace and a reminder of what is possible in this art and of how far I have yet to go in it.

In her introduction, Patchett talks about having to fill in for an actor who was supposed to read one of Pearlman’s stories at a book launch party for BASS 2006. She says, “My only challenge was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, ‘Did you hear that? Do you understand how good this is?’” (p. xii). I say that to myself so often as I read these stories, not because they preen with cleverness or showy prose, but because they are works of art so deftly crafted, so surely made. No seams or thumbprints show. And I say it to myself because these stories are so richly, deeply human, addressing all the glories and foibles of this sorry species, in death and love and war and clumsy tenderness.  They lay bare with piercing honesty and sympathy, and without any smarty-pants superiority (despite their wit and intelligence). I also say it to remind myself to “read like a writer,” and pay attention to what I can learn about my art and craft here. These stories are so good it can be hard to resist the power that makes them sing through you, and respond to them any other way than as a grateful, entranced, fully engaged reader.

I wrote a couple posts ago about David Foster Wallace’s call for fiction that keeps alive the glow of what is possible despite the time’s darkness. I wonder if he was in on the Pearlman handshake. For his sake, I hope so, despite the great difference in their styles and approaches. I know that I am glad to be. I can’t claim some sort of insider status, now that handshake is not so secret anymore, but I have the gift of having read these stories and been changed by them, and that is what really counts.

I’ll leave you with a sample of the Pearlman prose that now lives in my head, thankfully. This is from “The Coat,” a story about a relief worker who comes home to the U.S. after years serving in European DP camps. She cuts her gray hair in the Mary Martin crop fashionable in New York at the time, and takes to the streets of the city in the fur-collared wool overcoat left behind by a previous occupant of the Manhattan apartment she is subletting:

She did not think of the coat as lawfully hers, oh no. But in its illicit protection she became a personage. Immigrant men hoping to adapt to the New World were buying fedoras and secondhand broad-shouldered suits. Unwittingly they looked like gangsters. In print dresses their wives resembled charladies. Sonya, American by birth, graduate of a teacher’s college and an accounting course, never out of the country until she was past fifty…Sonya was preserving the Old World of Ringstraßen, universities, coffeehouses, salons, museums, bunds and diets and parliaments and banks. She walked and walked. Truck drivers shouted coarse phrases to one another. Shopgirls out for lunch wore glistening lipstick. Sometimes she paused at a department store window and bowed at her reflection. (pp. 154-155)

Do you hear that? Do you understand how good that is? Of course you do.

New Year, End Times

The new year seemed as good a time as any to start this blog, and the sermon I gave during Kol Nidre services at Congregation Or Chadash seemed as good a first post as any, since it addresses an issue that has been nagging at me lately. I realize this is lengthy for a blog post, but don't worry -- I won't usually go on for this long! As a sermon, this was written for a specific audience, in this case a community of fabulous, caring, intellectually-inclined, mostly LGBTQ Jews, so please bear that in mind when you run into any use of the 1st person plural.
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One evening, Rabbi Israel Salanter passed a tailor still stitching despite the darkened sky, by the light of one candle. When the rabbi asked the man why, the tailor replied, “So long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend.” Rabbi Salanter did not sleep himself that night, but paced the floor in a fever of excitement, muttering to himself, “So long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend!”

I was reminded of this story when, after novelist David Foster Wallace lost his long battle with depression, a New Yorker article reprinted a point Wallace had made about 10 years earlier:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. (http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html)

This quote provided me with my own Salanteresque response, in which I walked around repeating to myself, “these may be dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” The New Yorker article claimed that this problem drove Wallace as he worked on The Pale King, the novel left unfinished by his suicide, but it matters for anyone trying to “apply CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical, that still live and glow despite the time’s darkness.” How does one see this dark and stupid world in all honesty and clarity but still identify, even act upon, the possibilities for being alive and human in it? 

Gary Shteyngart could have had Wallace’s definition in mind when he wrote Super Sad True Love Story, a satire which imagines the collapse our dark and stupid ways will bring upon us, although its dystopic vision might be too total to illuminate what still glimmers in the darkness. In the novel’s disconcertingly not-too-distant future, conversation has been largely drowned out by the constant stream of data coming over the “äpparäts” people wear around their necks. When people do “verbal” each other, they fend off the embarrassment of “emoting” with glibness and reflexive irony, peppering sentences with acronyms like “JBF” or flat “hahas.” Written communication fares no better: at every National Guard checkpoint, you will find misspelled signs advising you that merely reading the sign means that you have consented to deny that it exists. Our unfashionably bookish hero, Larry Abramov, uses a ruler to help him keep his place as he pores over the pages of obsolete “printed objects,” his lips moving to form each word. Larry manages to find moments where he can connect with others, if imperfectly, in this crass, violent, and soul-deadening world, but there is no stopping or escaping from its bloated sickness.

I can appreciate the fact that Shteyngart wouldn’t pull any punches: he pummeled his target the way he thought it deserved. Even as I found myself deeply affected by the novel, however, I wondered if, in giving his cynicism such free reign, he wasn’t actually engaging in the same sort of hip distancing his novel decries. In the 19^th century, for example, William Morris claimed that he lived his entire life in opposition to modernity; his novel Erehwon was part of that effort, imagining a utopia that corrected all of the wrongs he found in his society and culture. I doubt a utopic novel like Morris’s would get the same critical appreciation today that Shteyngart’s dystopic one did: such an effort would likely be dismissed as sentimental, unserious, or naïve.

Our current moment is beset by dystopic visions: from every point on the ideological spectrum, people seem to be convinced that we have or are coming to the end of something, and whatever comes next won’t be good. Even Christians who embrace rapture theology indulge in lurid fantasies about what will happen to those “left behind” (as the series with that title puts it) more than they seem to look forward to “ten thousand years” of “bright shining like the sun” with the composer of “Amazing Grace.” But eschatology, the belief that history leads toward some end, doesn’t have to breed morbidity and pessimism. Indeed, the Book of Isaiah contains utopic images that have resonated down the centuries:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare. (Isaiah 2:4)

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

These days, we can imagine the end but not the new beginning; we are fascinated by the tropes of end times because they provide a way to talk about how lost and stuck and hopeless we feel.

So where do we go from here? What do we do, beyond rail against the dark and stupid times in which we live? How do we approach a new year if we are indeed living during some sort of end, or at least a time when it is very hard to have faith in beginnings?

One clue might be found in Dara Horn’s novel, All Other Nights. After two novels which built bridges between the violent erasures of the Holocaust and the quiet uncertainty of the present day, Horn turned to the Civil War, that nexus of American mythology so beloved by reenacters and romantics, and Judaized it, focusing on real and fictional American Jews who were pivotal in the conflict, and also weaving together Jewish and American symbols and themes in her presentation of the period. The war disintegrates the lives and selves of the novel’s main characters. Even Richmond consumes itself in a great conflagration. For the old Jewish men fleeing the city, however, the disaster is just another chapter in a longer story. As the novel puts it, “They had seen the world end so many times before.” The lesson for the younger characters and civilization is that we are rarely masters of our fate and circumstances, and in such a world sometimes the only recourse is to gather one’s remnant and live on as best as one can.

The last few centuries have shown us that secular eschatology, with its dreams of inevitable progress and human perfectibility, has its limits. When these dreams were made manifest in the world, they wrought changes which, alongside their benefits, have had a human cost, as well as an environmental one: from the Gilded Age to our own, industrialized and now globalized progress has consumed human and material resources as well as produced them. These dreams also ignored the intractability of greed, bloodlust, and other elements of human behavior we like to pretend have no place in civilized society, but which we cannot seem to eradicate with rational analysis or notions of social contracts.

In dark and stupid times such as these, perhaps we can only pick up and carry on, knowing the world will end again and again, but that it will also continue after each ending, so long as we are here to persist. In other words, we should combine an understanding that the worst can happen with a faith that things might be made better, or at least bearable, recalling Hillel’s advice that when everyone around you ceases to be human, you should struggle to remain a human being. To desist from the work does not make us or the world any better off. Because if we now know that human nature is not perfectible, that the human appetite for destruction and power will never go away, we know too, or should recognize, that the human desire to create and to nurture will also never go away. If the light will never completely banish the darkness, so too will the darkness never completely extinguish the light. These may be dark times, and stupid ones, but so long as the candle still burns, it is still possible to do and to mend. What other, better choice do we have? Surrender ensures that culture and society will sink under the weight of the ugliness of which human beings are capable.

A story in the Talmud teaches that The Messiah is already present, and we are the ones who must come to understand how to recognize and heed him. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi once encountered the prophet Elijah, and asked him, “When will the Messiah come?”

“Go and ask him,” Elijah replied. “You will find him at the entrance to the city, sitting among the poor lepers: the rest of them untie their bandages all at once, and rebandage them together, but he unties and then rebandages each of his sores separately, thinking, should I be wanted, I must not be delayed.”

So Rabbi Joshua went to the Messiah and greeted him, and asked, “When will you come, Master?”

“Today,” the Messiah answered.

Rabbi Joshua later returned to Elijah and said, “The Messiah spoke falsely to me: he said that he would come today, but he has not.” Elijah answered, “This is what he said to you: Today, if you will hear his voice.” (adapted from Talmud Sanhedrin 98a)

Though he may tarry, I cannot help but believe, albeit with an imperfect faith, in the promise implicit in the coming of the Messiah. If not now, then someday – I hope, I pray, someday – and until then, without knowing when, I can only continue the work while the candle still burns.