Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Again with the MFA programs
A book review from Louis Menand turns into a pretty evenhanded look at the age old question: Can writing be taught?
I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
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June 5th, 2009 / 2:35 pm
June 5th, 2009 / 2:35 pm
Stephen Elliott reacts to BEA
Stephen Elliott just got back from BEA (BookExpo America, the “largest publishing event in North America”), and he wrote an essay about it.
I couldn’t agree with this more:
But here’s the thing, I don’t care about those books. I don’t care about the publishing industry that’s concerned with cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. And I don’t believe the people that say they’re publishing celebrity memoirs so they can publish great literature…
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Influences: Me
Years later here I am, still writing because of her influence.
I wrote this story for her and put it on my blog.
(That whole thing is a link.)
06.07.2009 THE SUSAN G. KOMEN RACE FOR THE CURE.
(That’s another one.)
Uncategorized / 6 Comments
June 1st, 2009 / 12:28 pm
June 1st, 2009 / 12:28 pm
Tom Waits gets into a fight with a kitty.
kiplin: @tomwaits u so crazy. y u so crayzay?
tomwaits: @kiplin get off my fucking lawn.
kiplin: @tomwaits Y DO U H8 MERICA??!?!?! Y U H8 TWITTER?!?! Y U H8 CATS?!?!
tomwaits: @kiplin You’d better watch your back, stupid cat. ☠
kiplin: @tomwaits YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR UGLY FACE. YOUR MUSIC SUCKS.
tomwaits: @kiplin Why the hell am I wasting my time with you, cat. I’m gonna write a song about you and make you get hit by a flaming arrow.
UPDATE:
Sorry. These comments come from the Twitter feeds of Tom Waits and a cat named Kiplin. Links are a little hard to see sometimes.
Laird Hunt’s influences
Laird Hunt, author of the incredible Indiana, Indiana, has been posting short synopses of the five books that influenced his upcoming novel Ray of the Star.
Book three has me curious about both Hunt’s book and this influence.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Some of the book is available here.
Anyone read this? Recommendations?
Vimeo teaches me something about writing
Block Tests 01 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.
This person has taken Street Fighter and broken it down to its simplest shapes.
So, this and fiction. I’m not just thinking about minimalism v. maximalism here. I’m curious about breaking a story down to a simple shape. I’m thinking about Stephen Dixon’s amazing story “Said,” in which the dialogue tags remain, but all the dialogue has been removed. A pair of lines from the story (which, sadly, I don’t have in front of me) can be as simple as:
He said.
She said.
The actions, free of dialogue, remain.
I’ve been writing a story in nothing but dialogue for the past couple of weeks, and trying to figure out what, when you strip away the other constituent parts of a story, needs to remain.
This is what I think needs to remain. I came up with this watching that video.
The story must, no matter what you take away, move. In the video, Blanka and Ken continue to contend, lacking arms, lacking faces. They continue to move. In Dixon’s story, he says, she says. We don’t have anything other than context to interpret what would happen before or after the dialogue tags.
So. Move. Maybe? Just a guess, I suppose.
TARGET: Shorts!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN35-NWUzWM
Spotted in attic where Gene goes to escape from “the kids” and “the wife,” probably: Target shorts. Pepsi Max in bottles?
What if we give it away?
Shya Scanlon has decided to give away his second novel, Forecast. Go here to read it online or to download it.
It’s been a few years since I originally read Forecast, but I remember enjoying it quite a bit, and have a line about “the easier eases” of something stuck in my head. There are lots of lyrical moments like that in the book: places where a single root word is explored in a couple of ways.
Just searched the document. Here it is.
Like so many people around them who, from Jen and Marshal’s perspective, had let things go so far astray, had simply let things go, they accused themselves of a fundamental acquiescence of spirit, a surrender in the face of life’s Great Challenges, one of which, they’d say, was the challenge to spread about evenly the precious resources that let them live, that allowed for the easier eases of everyday life.
Forecast could be called science fiction. The world has developed a way of turning emotions into power. The television talks to you. There’s a weatherman. A woman named Helen. Someone made a movie out of it, too. Or a movie out of part of it. The trailer used to be online, and the guy who was in Seattle’s late night sketch comedy show Almost Live was in it. (That guy, Pat Cashman, is in Taco Time ads now. Kevin Seal, one of the first MTV VJs was in a Taco Time ad a while back, too.)
Huh. Sorry about that. Apparently, this HTMLGiant update on Shya Scanlon’s book is being brought to you by Taco Time.
“Taco Time—time to eat fresh.”
Ryan Call’s book trade thing: it really works!
“No matter how good of a tan you get, there’s always someone around with a better one. One year, me and Tutti went to Greece. I thought, I’m gonna get the best fuckin’ tan ever. And it happened. I came back home and nobody had a better tan. I went and visited everybody I knew and I thought, There, you fuckers, top that.”
—For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers by Ken Sparling.
Thanks, Ken. This is really rad so far.
Everyone else should also become a part of the HTMLGiant Book Exchange.
Influences 6: Barry Graham
Here is the sixth response to my influences post. The respondent is Barry Graham. He chose Christopher Kennedy’s Trouble with the Machine.
Prompts:
1) Pick one of the pieces you chose and describe the thing about it that seems particularly innovative about it.
2) Tell me what changed about your writing because of that innovation.
Answers after the jump: READ MORE >