Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne, 2011)
“I’ve read Ms. Yuknavitch’s book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary..”
–CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Fight Club and Pygmy“The Chronology of Water’s central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction.”
–DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger: A ManifestoMore praise here
Watch the book trailer here
Available for preorder now until April 1 from Powells or Amazon
I Know Not of War: The Responsibility of the Writer
Over at the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog, Alan Stewart Carl wrote a really interesting essay in response to my posts about race, class, Best American Short Stories, and publishing at large. In his essay, he grapples with his responsibility as a writer who self-identifies as a white, middle class man.
He writes:
Yes, there is plenty all writers can do to change things on the editorial front and on the promotional front and on the educational and societal front, too. But what about the writing itself? Should white, middle-class male writers feel any pressure to write about people and experiences outside of those they intimately know? Would doing so even help matters?
Ultimately, he concludes that as a writer he has a responsibility not only to himself and the stories he wants to tell but also to the outside world because, “writing towards the outside world seems like a good way to proceed forward.”
Your Books Broke My Neck
YOUR BOOKS BROKE MY NECK: A Physiosociative Review of Spork’s Chapbook Series # A – 4 (Jake Levine, Dan Beachy-Quick, Gordon Massman, Drew Krewer, Zachary Schomburg)
by Joe Hall and A Poem In A Remaindered Library Book
Dear mother…just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I shall be crossing it shortly. I don’t know if I shall find hills and valleys made of flesh on the other side, or simply constant night, villages of sleep. The seam of the open book on the bridge of my nose, two dense board covers pressing down the pages over my eyes on a bed in a basement dug into a planet. The spine of the book a roof peak for my face-house. Or a lid. It fits pretty good. I feel safe, take a nap. No, no, dummy, you are not designed to hurt me; I am designed to hurt you…Prominent stencils I remember in DC: some gorilla head, the Borf face (his dead friend?), like targets on specific lamp posts in Georgetown—as if the graffiti artists want you to remember there used to be punk shows there. And on Jake Levine’s (Chap A) cover—the black ink pressed into the brown paper board. Some kind of guy in a flannel suit with a smiling skull mask holding one foot up at head level? As if I’ve seen it through a metro window on some concrete barrier in Northeast?
9 Comments
January 18th, 2011 / 1:01 pm
January 18th, 2011 / 1:01 pm
“We Are Not Experiencing a Short Story Renaissance”
So says Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter, and fiction writing teacher at Ball State University (and formerly in the M.F.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh.) The reason the story has become a dominant form is that the university workshop encourages the writing of stories, not the writing of novels. Her quite reasonable questions: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”
Bhanu Kapil
I am getting better at laying the meshes down on the riverbank, without feeling that I have to explain to my students how rivers begin, which is all lies anyway. Young river, old river, my ass. We studied that in Geography but the girls who went on to do it for A Level said that when they got there, they were told, straight off, that rivers, in and of themselves, don’t age. That the young river thing makes the force of time comprehensible in the absence of a true geology curriculum. Reading Winnicott on deep play, and still dazzled from seeing Lynda Barry lecture on creativity last week, I understand that I have to avoid the tendency to tell my students what is what before they begin. I have to let them begin. I have to make enough room for a person to go a little wild, in the first stages of a process, something that universities generally curtail.
A Few Items of Interest
There’s a writing contest with a $149 fee, no guarantee of publication, and whose administrators claim all rights to your writing if you enter the contest. That sounds pretty fantastic. John Scalzi breaks down all the ways in which this contest is vile.
Seth Fischer has a new project where you can write over the Internet. He is looking for submissions.
Anis Shivani has come up with some new rules for writers and continues to show his contempt for the academy and other things. I definitely understand the position Shivani is advocating but what he’s saying is not really new. I am a bit old school in this thinking, perhaps, but rather than worrying about rules as a writer, I largely prefer writing. Shivani baffles me.
Andrew Shaffer has a response for Shivani’s “rules.” I love what he has to say.
The Collagist is having a chapbook contest with the winner to be published this fall by Dzanc.
Rose Metal Press has announced the winner (Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman) of their annual chapbook contest. The book will be released in July 2011.
Bullett Magazine seems pretty sexy.
Laura Ellen Scott’s Curio is being published one story at a time over at Uncanny Valley. It’s worth a look.
Parable of a Lazy Reader
A latent review of Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James Books) by Chad Sweeney.
I have a confession to make. I’ve been a rotten reader. In six months, I’ve read two novels, a few sporadic articles, and maybe one or two books of poetry—cover to cover. Maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I’m an impostor in the ranks. But, whatever.
That said, I have my reasons for shelving my skillz for more potent, if untenable, desires.
Lately, as I’m climbing back into my reading chair and remembering how comfortable it can be, I feel this way:
LOGGIA DOCUMENT
I’ve looked for it under tables
among junkyard cats
fussing dead things.
Its letters turn
with barrow birds
in sleeves of warehouse glass.
It rattles
the pampas grass,
one dry word seven summers long.
I’ve knelt in the twilight of idols.
I’ve chipped my teeth
on the bright water.
This is the final poem of Chad Sweeney’s book, Parable of Hide and Seek. “Its letters turn / with barrow birds / in sleeves of warehouse glass.” Read that aloud. Do you hear the rhythm? Do you see the fragility of language in the shards of warehouse glass?
Sweeney’s book is swimming in these charged moments. Its one of those twenty-five or so books I’ve had stacked on my desk to review for months, one of those books I’ve picked up sporadically and read a poem at a time. What I’ve discovered through my stunted reading practice is this: Duh, a good book of poems wants reading—and, sure, poets (and their friends and editors) spend a lot of time sequencing poems in a collection, thinking about narrative structure and flow—but Parable of Hide and Seek has convinced me that a good book of poems wants each of its individual poems savored, wants its vertices studied, wants you to read a poem to your dog each night before bed—more than it wants you to read it cover to cover with a fabricated purpose.
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January 17th, 2011 / 3:36 pm
January 17th, 2011 / 3:36 pm
Benefit for Dean this week in NYC
via Coldfront
Matthea Harvey, Edward Hirsch, Mary Karr, Matthew Rohrer, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier and others will read at a benefit for the eminent poet and teacher Dean Young in Manhattan this Thursday night. Young is facing a heart transplant, and all donations will be used to help with his expenses. Admission to the event is free. To read about Dean and make an online donation, please visit http://www.transplants.org/
Address: Grand Gallery, National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY
Literature as “What Survives”
In this 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum, Jane Smiley said:
I am taking a medievalist’s view. That’s what I studied in graduate school. And when you are a medievalist you don’t study what’s good, you study what’s left. And you try to find good things in it. So you come to appreciate every fragment of every bit that’s left. And try to glean something from that fragment, whatever it is.
How does it survive? There are a lot of copies of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown around. Not so many of Cynthia Ozick and Barry Hannah, relatively speaking. And way fewer of, say, Christine Schutt and Ben Marcus. Are they in physical danger?
There is also the priestly tradition — what gets revived, by whom, and how does it impact future readership or future revivals? (Justin Taylor did Donald Barthelme a huge favor on these grounds, READ MORE >