http://www.catherinelacey.com/
Catherine Lacey is a 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow. She has published work in The Believer, The Atlantic.com, a Harper Perennial's 40 Stories, Diagram and others. She writes for Brooklyn Magazine rather often and is a founding partner of 3B, a cooperatively operated bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn.
Author websites generally fall into two broad categories: A) The Slick and Professional Page; these are useful when the author just wants a functional thing that will make other people take them seriously and some contact information just in case anyone has a bag of money to send them. Generally, it’s journalists who go this route. Take Richard Morgan’s website for example. (Bonus points for the Anagram.)
Then there are the author websites that are meant to do something else entirely, to be a thing in and of themselves. Maybe they have a good blog or art or something attached. Maybe they have some kind of page-maze to click through. Here are some of my favorites:
Ander Monson’s website (OtherElectricities.com) Monson has some great essays posted. The whole website reads more like an e-book than a website and the design is great.
Aimee Bender (Flammableskirt.com) I like the writing exercises section and all the illustrations are good.
Ben Marcus’s site (Benmarcus.com) is really awesome, but I think it’s broken or something right now. Ben had a section called “Disguises” that was a bunch of pictures of people who looked like him (Big bald headed white guys with glasses, Caucasian Jimmy Chens.) Don’t know what’s wrong with the…
Chelsea Martin (Jerkethics.com) Duh. I felt like I had to include this on the list even though you’ve probably all seen it. Chelsea’s drawings are rad. ( and the drawings are very good::: )
David Shields (Davidshields.com) Shields’s site is really well designed and the front page is a picture of his bald head.
More to come…
Found an awesome thing on the internet the other day: an interview between a woman and a dog as written by an entity that is neither dog nor woman: Specifically, it was written by David Stromberg, a writer and artist who has a graphic book coming out from Melville House this fall. Woman & Dog interview below…
1.Did you always know you were my dog?
Yes, no, yes.
2. How do you feel, having no ultimate control over
your life, having your own decisions be meaningless?
I have control, I could pee now, or later, or I could
poop.
3. But if you poop at the wrong time, if you poop at
home, for example, then you get your face in your
poop, I know you don’t like that.
If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t do it where you could
see it.
*I can’t quite figure out the circumstances under which this interview/fiction/thing was published. It seems to be a personal website, but not Stromberg’s website, I think? If anyone can explain this to me leave a comment.
Ernesto Neto
Please leave your desk for just a moment and go see Ernesto Neto’s installation, anthropodino, at The Park Avenue Armory in New York City. All the information you need is here.
Thou Shalt Underline Me
One of the greatest surprises found in a used book is entertaining marginalia, though, often, the last reader’s scribblings are either illegible, inane or distracting. In a library copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I found someone’s psychotic, paranoid underlinings that were inane and distracting, but somehow also entertaining. There’s even an narrative arc to their madness. READ MORE >
The Vicarious MFA!
Informal survey: Are writers with MFA’s the only writers who give a damn what people in other MFA programs are reading? If so, thanks to all you non/anti-MFA HTML giant readers who put up with the all this MFA chatter. Here is your last dose of Vicarious MFA hoo-hah.
+ Surprise guest class with Richard Ford!
Before the class, everyone who signed up for it read Indian Uprising by Donald Barthelme, Louis Menand’s New Yorker article about Barthelme , and an interview with Umberto Eco. Richard Ford talked about Barthelme for a little while and we asked him a lot of questions about his writing process, philosophy and ideas about the collage element that is innate in all forms/types of writing. He brought his “notebook” to class, which, in fact, was not a notebook at all. It was a huge, purple, three-ring binder in which he collects quotes, thoughts, facts, research, etc for whatever novel he’s working on at the time. He told us about how he’s dyslexic and how that effects his writing. At one point Ford said, “Rick Moody, who I deeply disrespect, once said something about how there are only two kinds of writers: writers like Hemingway and writers like Beckett. I disagree with that… It’s too narrow a perspective on what a writer can be…Writing is supposed to broaden your world, open things up… Rick is probably a nice boy, he just says silly things.” I got to chat with Ford for a moment afterwards, just to say thanks and hello. I was excited about this because we are both from Mississippi and we’ve both lived in New Orleans, which is the nearest refuge for people born in Mississippi. We talked about New Orleans for a minute, how easy it is to get nostalgic about New Orleans and how we both want to buy houses there.
More Highlights:
+Amy Benson made strawberry-rhubarb pound cake for our last meeting of Non/Fiction. I turned in a monster crazy-weird essay that I will be excited to get her feedback on.
+Last workshop is kicked off with a few bottles of champagne, which went straight to everyones’ heads, loosening a hysteria of honesty. It was a good group, but I will be happy not to have to read anyone else’s first drafts for a while.
The Vicarious MFA!
The semester is almost over; just six class meetings left and about 47 parties. I omitted last week because I was trying to give you the “full experience” of getting an MFA. There will always be something that you weren’t around for (I missed George Saunders’s and Gary Lutz’s guest lectures last year) or some class that you were too sleep-deprived to actually understand. (Ok, actually, I was busy.)
Today in Non/Fiction we’re talking about W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Class discussion should go something like this: I liked it. It was weird. I didn’t like it. Man, he was doing a whole lot of stuff in there! Whew!
Awesome quote from The Rings of Saturn about what happens when you spend a lot of time writing:
“For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.
A summary of the phantom week is after the jump.
Clusterfuck!
A few weeks ago I got an email from John Madera asking me to come up with a list of novellas that I like and some explanations about why I like them. John said he had asked “a bunch of writers” what their favorite novellas are and had gotten a “good” response back. I was thinking it would be something like ten people, fifteen max. Actually, this novella compendium includes entries and lists from every writer with a modicum of web presence.
A few: Nick Antosca, Ken Baumann, Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, Shane Jones, Sean Kilpatrick, Carole Maso, Christine Schutt, Matthew Simmons, Justin Taylor, William Walsh, John Dermot Woods, Steve Almond, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Michael Joyce, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, AND! David Shields AND! many, many others.
Can we handle it?
Last year I took a class from the illustrious Leslie Sharpe titled “Can The Truth Be Told?” Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about truth in creative writing. What is truth if it’s not fact? When does fact get in the way or truth and truth in the way of fact? Can creativity get along with factuality? What is emotional truth (other than a bomb shelter for the fake memoirists) and does it have a use in the “real” memoir. Can we even consider our memories as forms of truth?
As the panels editor for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art I get a chance to wrangle together some people who are a lot smarter than me and ask them to think about these things and then have a public discussion about it. (Our very own Justin Taylor moderated the one we organized in the fall on Literary Dichotomies which featured Heidi Julavits, Nathaniel Rich, Shelley Jackson and Mark Grief.)
The spring panel is titled True Stories and it will take place on Friday April 17 at Housing Works Bookstore. It starts at 7 pm. Brenda Wineapple will be moderating and the panel will feature David Shields, Rachel Zucker and David Ebershoff. Bios after the jump… READ MORE >
Books read since last post: Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and Life on the Outside by Jennifer Gonnerman.
Michael Ondaatje
In Non/Fiction we discussed Running in the Family, a beautiful memoir of Michael Ondaatje’s unbelievably lush, gin-swilling family who lived on Ceylon, an island off the coast of India. Some people in class were disappointed/confused that Ondaatje didn’t really approach the whole colonialism aspect of a British family living in India and having servants. Most people didn’t care that much because they were distracted by the beauty of the book. Each chapter reads like a prose poem and there’s no overt narrative arc. It’s more like a book of poetry masquerading as a memoir.
For The First Book seminar we read Jennifer Gonnerman’s Life on the Outside, a ridiculously impressive book about Elaine Bartlett, a woman
Elaine Bartlett (Photo by Heather Conley)
who was sentenced to 25 years of jail time under the Rockefeller Drug Laws after being set up by a drug dealer working for the cops. The book focuses on the Bartlett family’s struggle to make ends meet before, during and after Elaine’s prison time. She served 16 years before being granted clemency in 2000. I can’t even begin to explain how well this book was written. The amount of information Gonnerman gets the reader to understand and remember about Elaine’s set up, her huge family, the Rockefeller drug laws, and the myriad complications before and after the jail sentence is nothing short of phenomenal. The Rockefeller drug laws were repealed by Gov. David Patterson last week and Elaine Bartlett’s story had an impact in that decision.
Read for Next Week:
Non/Fiction: Oh, wait, I forgot. Will update this later today.
The First Book: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides
And of course, workshop submissions.
The Vicarious MFA
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. -Henry James (see to do # 3 for more on this)
If you’re following along with the V-MFA this is the part of the semester where all your assignments and deadlines converge and you get dangerously close to caffeine-induced combustion.
TO DO:
1. Though Lethem’s 4-week master class is over, the essay has been due for a week and, so get to work.
2. Workshop Submission # 3 is due on Tuesday: Aiming for revising about 40-50 pages of new stuff.
3. The essay for the First Book seminar is due in 2 weeks but an outline was due yesterday. It needs to be about 2000 words on which character from one of the books so far has been the most interesting.
“Each of those books is organized around a figure who is the book’s central intelligence, some compound of narrator, protagonist, and author. In the seminar, I’ve set out my view that the literary power of the book – as a first book — very often depends on the author’s ability to create and introduce this figure in such a way as to organize and illuminate his or her material and to catch, hold, and reward the reader’s interest. Which figure, then, is most interesting, and why? Binx Bolling? Richard Rodriguez? The Antiguan surrogate who develops from girl to woman in Jamaica Kincaid’s first book? Bruce Chatwin? Kathleen Norris? Nick Hornby?…