A portion of Dana Levin’s July 2020 lecture on poetry, divination, and dreams—thoughts on Shane McCrae’s The Hell Poem, a tremendous poem in the Visio genre—has been published at The Rumpus.
Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with. She may have gotten this from someone else—it was her first year teaching and it’s a pretty common assignment—but I still take to heart the impulse behind it. (In fact, I saw now, when I was looking again at her three books, that Mrs. Rafferty, who’s a pain in the ass in a story in the first book, has her own story in the second. How could I not have remembered that? I who do that all the time.)
Read more at this link: https://www.sarahstoneauthor.com/the-marvelous-paragraph/2021/3/6/joan-silber-on-grace-paley
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has awarded Laura van den Berg the Mildred & Harold Strauss Livings Literature Prize. $200,000 is given as income over two years in recognition of literary excellence and to provide freedom to devote time exclusively to writing.
The literature prizes, totaling $600,000, honor both established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. The Academy’s 300 members propose candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects winners. This year’s award committee members were Amy Hempel (chair), Edwidge Danticat, Louise Glück, John Guare, Edward Hirsch, and Joy Williams.
Read more about this year’s prizes at this link: https://artsandletters.org/pressrelease/2021-literature-award-winners/
An excerpt from the essay “In Bed With a Book”
The first time I taught at Warren Wilson, I found myself traveling down a North Carolina highway with a group of writers I greatly admired. It was dinner time, and, after a day of classes, we were headed out for a meal. Because I had said, “Boys in the front, girls in the back,” as I folded myself into the car’s backseat, I had an urge to say something that might make me seem, however vaguely, like an adult. You don’t get to be an accomplished writer without being a passionate reader, so I asked my companions what made them readers, and they all had the same answer: “My mother.”
Rick, the driver, said that when he was young, his father abandoned the family, so his mother had to work all day. His grandmother served dinner at five o’clock, the hour when his grandfather returned from work. “She would not,” Rick said, clearly still amazed, “wait on dinner. She would not wait on dinner.” When Rick’s mother came home, she had to cook her own dinner, clean up, wash the family’s clothes (by hand), and tend to her son. The last thing she did each day was climb into bed and read for an hour. “It gave me the idea,” Rick said, “that reading was something to look forward to. A pleasure.”
My mother tells me that when my twin sister, Laura, and I were little, we would go to the library and each pick out ten books. Back home, flanking her on the living room couch, we’d make her read through all twenty at a sitting.
I trust my mother’s memory. I’ve seen photographs of just this scene, but I don’t remember experiencing reading as a pleasure until I was older. As soon as reading was something I could do (as opposed to something that was done for me), reading became a matter of ambition. In first grade, I felt humiliated by my place in the intermediate-level reading group. In third grade, when we were given a reading wheel to fill out—you colored in a square for each book you read—I gave myself headaches trying to read one hundred books in a week. I hunkered down with Shakespeare’s As You Like It in fourth grade (not that I understood a word) and took—what can I say, it’s true—Crime and Punishment to camp.
All this embarrasses me now. In the car in North Carolina, when I started to rant about my own impure motives for reading, another passenger politely quieted me: “But look where it got you.” And he was right, right mostly to shut me up, since it wasn’t really ambition that made me a lover of books but my mother and, as with Rick, an image of my mother reading in bed.
FIRST COME THE FIRES, the neglected grid breaking down and sparking the dry fields. Next a week of clouds, so dark, so heavy, like nothing we’ve ever seen. Methuselah’s death has put all the humans in a panic. They miscounted the days; they thought the rains would start later, much later, or perhaps would never come. The future is here; this is that very moment. I run down the streets, looking for my sister, my twin, Azy, who’s broken out of our pen again. Restless Azy, perfect in a way I have never wanted to be. I am always afraid for her.
The humans laugh and point: A goat, a goat! She’s running away! Catch her!
I’m faster than all of them.
In the deep shadows of the ark—that pitchy, longstanding joke, Noah’s great gopher-wood folly—stands a woman dressed as fire, her crown blazing, her skirts full of lights, posed in front of a giant pumpkin stuffed with bones, her two little firefighters beside her in full uniform. It’s our last Halloween, and the neighborhood is full of wild children on sugar highs screaming in the dark playgrounds and men in masks, their hyper-realistic chainsaws revved. Everyone photographs everyone else, for the time when it’s all gone.
Though I find Azy, as I always do, there’s no safety out here: Noah’s children grab us and pull us into their mad project. These are not our humans, not the children we played with, not Sarita who fed us, photographed Azy, put us to bed at night. We will not see Sarita or her children again.
Read the rest of the story on the IMAGE JOURNAL’s website.
“Don’t Stand So Close: Part I” by faculty member Peter Turchi, published by Fiction Writers Review. This essay is based on a lecture Peter Turchi gave during the July 2018 Residency.
About two-thirds of the way through Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the two outlaws, having fled the American West to Bolivia, decide to clean up their act, to go straight. They attempt to get work as payroll guards. As part of their job interview, as it were, their would-be employer asks if they can shoot. He tosses a tobacco plug, as a target, to test them; Sundance, the notorious gunslinger, misses badly. Butch looks stunned. Sundance, sullen, asks, “Can I move?” Even as the mine owner asks, “What do you mean, move?” Sundance drops to one side, drawing and firing, and blows the tobacco plug to bits.
As the dust settles, Sundance says, “I’m better when I move.”
I’m not suggesting that the narrator of a story or novel is equivalent to a mythic gunfighter seeking work as a payroll guard in Bolivia. But I often think of that scene when I read a story, or a draft of a story, and the narrator seems locked in place—particularly a third person story when the narrator seems to have yielded all independence and authority, and essentially records the point of view character’s thoughts and actions.
I had not thought much about shifting narrative distance until a particular graduate workshop forced the issue. As we discussed a student’s draft, one of the participants noted that we had no idea what the main character did for a living; someone else added, “Or what he looks like.” That started the sort of avalanche we sometimes see in workshops: someone else noted that we didn’t know who the character’s close friends were; someone pointed out that we knew virtually nothing about his past; someone else noted that the other characters were never physically described. Exasperated, the author said, “I know, I know—but how am I supposed to get him to think about all of that?”
The writer had somehow picked up a strange notion about the limited third person: he believed that once a story indicated it would be close to a particular character, it was somehow required to stay close to that character, within the confines of that character’s thoughts. Even more surprising—to me—was that other students agreed; some went so far as to say it was a “violation of the rules” of the limited third person to include information that might come from a narrator, even when that information was as objective as the color of a character’s hair, or the fact that she drove a Camry in disrepair—never mind the fact that her co-workers thought she was irresponsible, or that her mother thought she had a worrisome number of cats.
I was tempted to quote another line from Butch Cassidy: “Rules? What rules?”
[…continue reading “Don’t Stand So Close: Part I” as well as “Don’t Stand So Close: Part II” at Fiction Writers Review.]
“A Walk Round the Park” by faculty member Sandra Lim, published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets.
We did not say much to each other but
we grinned,
because this love was so good you sucked the
rib bones
and I licked my fingers like a cat.
[…continue reading “A Walk Round the Park” at poets.org.]
“The Dog” by faculty member Dean Bakopoulos, published by The South Carolina Review.
In the second week of her vacation, the general boredom Anna was experiencing had transformed itself into a kind of reckless impulsivity, and so the idea of a new face in the hotel bar was enough to compel her to sit there, on the patio that overlooked the pool and the bay, watching the new face eat. He was about her age, thirty-nine, and his dog, a well-trained German shorthair pointer, was sitting next to him, staring at his feet. The man was eating a plate of fish tacos and drinking sparkling water; she was drinking beer and, although she had already settled up her tab, she called the waiter over and started a new one.
“Another Peroni?” the waiter said.
He’d put a faint emphasis on the word another, but she didn’t flinch.
“Yes,” she said.
She still had two weeks left of her “retreat,” and already she was dreading the inevitable comment that she would hear when she returned home: Oh my god, people would say, it was so great of Ben to let you do that!
Nobody would lead with You look so tan! Or, perhaps, How did the writing go? Or, even, the judgmental but well-intentioned, You must have missed the kids so much, nor the slightly worse, The kids must have missed you so much. No, everyone, and she meant everyone, would lead with praise for her husband, Ben. Oh my god, she could already hear her friend Flora saying, Ben is a saint!
[…continue reading “The Dog” at The South Carolina Review.]
Maurice Manning writes poems about turnips, and copperheads, and tire swings, and a woman who gets her apron strings caught in an old wringer washer. His work is dug from the ground of the Kentucky farmland where he lives. But it’s also elevated, universal, as high and expansive as the stars.
Manning was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for an earlier book of poems called “The Common Man.” His new book Railsplitter is a series of poems written in Abraham Lincoln’s voice from beyond the grave. It’s a tribute to another plainspoken man with visions of something bigger.
Listen to the interview on SouthBound.
An excerpt from an essay by faculty member Peter Turchi, published by Fiction Writers Review.
A couple of semesters ago I noticed something strange about the fiction I was getting from undergraduates in an advanced class. I had seen it before, but hadn’t thought much about it. This time, I just asked them.
These undergraduates were good students. When I had them write exercises, the results looked like plausible parts of stories. When they had free rein, though—when they got to submit a complete draft of a story of their own devising, with no constraints—not one of the drafts included an entire page without dialogue. Not even close. There were no extended expository passages, no descriptive passages, there was no extended narration. These stories were nothing but scene—in fact, in many cases, they were almost entirely dialogue. Several of them could have passed as radio plays.
“What’s the deal?” I finally asked them. “Every published story we’ve read has narration, often entire paragraphs of narration, and exposition. In your stories, it’s all talk-talk-talk; no one stops to take a breath.”
“That’s just it,” they said. “We don’t want to be boring.”
“Boring?” I said. “We can’t tell if this conversation on page five is taking place in a motel room or a submarine. Would it hurt to slow down long enough to establish the setting?”
They shook their heads, sadly. They had a very disconcerting habit of acting as one.
And that’s when I named the evil they feared: an information dump.
[…continue reading at Fiction Writers Review.]
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