Frank Bill

There is a lot of talk about the MFA, pro and con, and a corresponding vilification or romanticization of the autodidact who goes it alone and succeeds. As a writer, I’m glad I’m better because I got one. As a reader, I say: Who cares whether the writer did or didn’t get one? All that matters is whether or not what’s on the page knocks me out.

My buddy Frank Bill went it alone, and he’s doing pretty well these days. Soon FSG will publish his short story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana and his novel Donnybrook. They’re gritty stories that might put you in mind of Larry Brown or Donald Ray Pollock or Bonnie Jo Campbell. Today he posted a brief synopsis of the hard road from there to here. It is full of long hours reading and writing and stuff like this:

I gave up my studies in Chinese martial arts to write. I lost two grandparents. My dog died. My wife lost both of her grandparents within six months. My mother was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. She went through a second divorce. I went from 14 years on night shift to day work. The economy went to shit.

Reading it, I thought: Here is a guy who works harder than any seven human beings. That’s no guarantee that you’ll ever find readers, but that plus some talent plus having something to say plus the ability to be like a small child who will never take no for an answer plus some good luck might do the trick. Now the good luck is the reader’s. I can’t wait for his books to come into print, so I can buy copies for everyone I know. Here’s a link to his blog post.

First, some anecdotia:

1. Last semester, I assigned the essay “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White to my students. Most of them were not into it. I suggested that the author’s inner conflicts about change and aging might be more real to them when they are older; they were even less into that. I don’t blame them for being offended; it’s no good to be told we are too young to understand something. I’m not much older than them, so in my mind I was implicating myself in that, but even so.

2. When I was twenty, a much older friend told me that, at my age, I had to listen to Horses by Patti Smith. I did, a lot, and rarely do anymore. Around the same time, I read something in the New Yorker about how the author loved Sylvia Plath in her (or his? can’t remember) late teens/early twenties. I felt somehow offended. I never read much Plath, but I was reading a lot of Sexton at the time. I don’t read much Sexton anymore.

3. When I was 13, I tried reading Austen. I didn’t get very far. When I was 16, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I liked it, but I don’t remember thinking it was very funny. That year, I also read Lolita up to the point of the motel sex scene, then quit. I don’t remember thinking the writing was particularly special. These days, I count Emma, Huckleberry Finn, and Lolita as top-favorite most-important-t0-me novels. The ones that delight me the most.

4. Last year, I went to a Leonard Cohen concert. I’ve always really liked his songs, especially the early ones. Birds on wires, Janis Joplin giving head and all that. The concert was by all definitions amazing. Technically perfect and highly charged. He kept falling to his knees or something. But I wasn’t moved as much as I would have liked. I kept thinking, he is old. He has accomplished so much, and here is the fruit of all that. A packed house. What more could he want. I believe that my failure to be moved had to do with not being able to comprehend what he still wanted, feared, needed, regretted after so many years and so much success without seeming to compromise. Sure, he must fear death and regret something, but I didn’t hear that in his singing.

This kind of thing is still happening to me. Does it happen to you? Are you offended yet, as I was and still probably would be if someone told me I’m just not ready for Cormac McCarthy yet, or that in time I will grow out of Frank O’Hara?

Research shows that our brain is still developing into our late twenties. What effect if any does that have on our taste in books? On how much delight we feel, or how much we “get it,” or when we are moved or not? Something in me resists it.

On the other hand, it’s comforting to think that there is something additive about aging. That we keep understanding more things. That an increased knowledge of and commerce with language and the world will further unblock us from art. READ MORE >