The Savage Specifics of Such a Finale: A Conversation With Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr’s Damascus (Two Dollar Radio) is a tightly packed novel about the lost, losing, and broken people who frequent Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco. The story is moving, bitterly charming, sometimes depressing, but always engaging. I talked to Joshua about his book, character driven writing, writing as a form of protest and much more.
I read Damascus as very character driven. It’s really the people and what you show us about their lives that create the narrative. Would you consider Damascus character driven?
Absolutely. Books don’t work if the people on the pages aren’t alive. It’s why writing a novel takes so long. You have to dig around in other psyches, other hearts and souls. The book isn’t going to be any good until your characters are the ones telling the story, and you’re just the poorly paid secretary scribbling it all down.
I teach in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and when I talk characterization with my students, I emphasize the idea that actually the characters have to characterize themselves: the reader just sits back and watches the players stalk their sordid habitats. This kind of active characterization involves your reader in the story, too, making them put the pieces together for what each new scene means, how it contributes and complicates the action they’ve already observed. They become a kind of detective trying to compile an interpretation.
The Orange Suitcase
The Orange Suitcase
by Joseph Riippi
Ampersand Books, 2011
92 pages / $14.95 Buy from Ampersand Books
Rating: 7.0
Memories prop us up like skeletons. Each one exists autonomously, with its own root and biology, but put them together and you’ve got an emotional skeleton, something that helps shape who we are and the way we interact with the world around us. Over the course of the 34 short stories that fill The Orange Suitcase, author Joseph Riippi shines an x-ray on himself and examines a series of bone-like memories that are brief reflections on the formative experiences that make up his own skeleton.
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October 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
October 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
I’m going to liveblog whatever baseball game is happening now between the tigers and the rangers until my computer runs out of batteries, right now it is at 33%
A job I’d like to have and think I’d be good at is writing the script for the announcers for baseball video games. One thing I’d innovate the shit out of is to write bits/segments/whatever that have nothing to do with the game that’s going on. In this way it’d be like watching a real baseball game. I’d have the announcers talk about things that happened to them on the way to the stadium and like their kids and shit. I haven’t played a video game in years and I don’t know if I’ve ever played a baseball video game.
Baseball is incredible to me. It’s all mediated. There’s a bat and a glove. The only person who really touches the ball is the pitcher and then he’s a pitcher throwing a tiny ball into a tiny space. The whole thing seems impossible to me. Other sports seem more feasible except for golf.
Wow there are 3 mascot versions of real people racing around the stadium. They are Davy Crockett, Lincoln, and someone else. Their heads are fucking huge and they are scowling it doesn’t look like fun at all.
Imagine if David Foster Wallace wrote that book about baseball instead of tennis. Just imagine, don’t comment. I hope no one comments on this. I think more and more that is an ideal I work towards in social media/blogging. It’s easy to get everyone pissed or write something that everyone will pat my back and congratulate, but it’s kind of fun to write something that goes completely unnoticed. Or like something that is good and I can acknowledge it as good but it doesn’t demand my concrete interaction in any way. That is perfection to me. That’s like how books are.
Oh here comes the manager. Someone might have just scored while I wasn’t paying attention. It would be funny if there was a man on first and the runner and the first base coach switched places so the coach was running and the player was just standing there doing whatever.
The announcer just said “now they’re playing the Munster’s theme song” and the other guys was like “bro that’s Addams family…” — that’s the kind of shit that needs to be in video games. Sometimes I feel like I could make everything better if I were just in charge of everything.
Have you ever seen those photos of broken bats flying into the stands? I’m going to see if I can find one, they’re really funny sometimes.
I mean you hope no one gets hurt but it’s also like “damn is that Michael J. Fox?” and “what the fuck is in that guy’s mouth, could that be his tongue?”
The score is 3 to 2. Detroit is winning. Good for them. Did GW Bush really own the Rangers? How’d he do that? Does he even like baseball?
I got Sam Pink’s novel in the mail today, just like 30 mins. ago. It’s called “The No Hellos Diet”. I think it would be funny if he called his next novel “Just a Few Hellos Diet” or like “The Three Hellos Diet” although I have a feeling I won’t think that’s funny in two hours.
Damn the tigers just got out of some sort of situation. The pitcher was totally psyched and they showed him being totally psyched in slow motion as they went to commercial. The Fox Sports theme song makes me think of oreos! I wonder how much longer TVs are going to be as we know them.
Today is Columbus day? are we really still celebrating that? You’d think they’d just drop it already. I found my copy of “A People’s History of the United States” from sophomore year of high school and it was full of retarded annotations like “good” and “yes”. I think that’s why I don’t write in books anymore, I just embarrass myself later on.
This/That
The Dzanc Sessions, coordinated by Anna Leigh Clark, look pretty interesting. Session One classes begin the week of October 16. Each class spans eight or ten weeks. The content of the class is the same regardless of the time span; it is merely accelerated in the eight-week version. Eight-week Session One classes run through the week of December 4. Ten-week classes run through the week of December 18. Session Two will begin the first week of January 2012 with another eclectic line-up of workshop opportunities. The price for workshops is $325 Cost includes a three-month membership to the Dzanc Books eBook Club. (Or, if you do not have an e-reader, you can select a free copy of any print title from Dzanc Books.) The bulk of your registration fee supports the non-profit work of Dzanc Books. A portion of it supports the work of your instructor and the administration of the Dzanc Sessions.
Anna also has a great roundup of literary things here.
Don’t forget that the new Literary Magazine Club discussion begins on November 1. You can find details on ordering the magazine we’ll be reading, Beecher’s here.
Emily Books. What do you guys think of the concept? I’ve talked about how we’re inundated by books these days and it’s hard to know what to read. I’ve also talked about Vouched Books, where Chris Newgent personally vouches for the books he sells and is both able and willing to talk about any title he caries (from a limited, curated selection). That intimacy makes it easy to get on board with taking a chance on writers we’re not familiar with and I’ve enjoyed learning about books I wouldn’t ordinarily come across at his table. Emily Books seems to do something similar. They feature one title a month, selling only e-books. There’s also a book club… if you live in NYC. A bookstore that only sells one book at any given time is intriguing. This has kind of been done before but I’m interested in future selections and seeing if other people adopt similar approaches to bookselling.
Does Timothy McSweeney have a white savior complex? I found this essay really thought provoking and it introduces interesting questions about cultural representation and the consequences of getting “it” wrong or right (via Jackson Nieuwland).
The Occupy Wall Street library has a blog worth checking out (via Bookslut).
Writer’s Relief is having a contest to support literary magazines.
The new TV season is kind of disappointing, right? I haven’t seen anything yet that I must watch.
The last two books I enjoyed: Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell (not perfect but very immersive and more complex than I initially realized) and Reality Bites Back by Jennifer Pozner (very incisive). Don’t read that latter book unless you want your enjoyment of reality television to be ruined forever (I kid, mostly).
There is an encyclopedia of science fiction. I wonder what an encyclopedia of literary fiction would look like. Divorce: In literary parlance, the dissolution of a marriage as a narrative catalyst to explain character motivations such as drinking, promiscuity, bitterness, and tear-stained arguments. See also: the children.
Ken Baumann—
The rad novel Fires, by Nick Antosca, has just been rereleased by Civil Coping Mechanisms. It’s also packed with a few short stories, including a short story that is actually uncomfortably sexy: The Girlfriend Game.
Inside an MFA program: Call & response #1
We’ve had a bunch of pedagogy posts recently from inside the creative writing classroom, from the professor’s point of view. I thought it would be pretty cool to let some students chime in. And as luck would have it, I happen to have access to a bunch of MFA peoples (at New Mexico State), because I’m professional like that. So, last Thursday night, during my 500-level Form & Techniques in Fiction class (themed Constrained Prose), I put out my laptop and posed the following questions:
Can you teach creative writing? How? How would you teach creative writing that is different from your MFA? How would you “innovate” or “renovate”? What have you “learned” from your MFA? What has been the biggest surprise? Disappointment?
Below, you’ll find the responses. If you have other questions you’d like discussed/answered, this will be an on-going segment for me, so shoot me an email or something.
A Night With Steve Katz
This Wednesday, October 12, 7–9pm, at the KGB Bar, NYC. Hosted by Louffa Press in celebration of Steve’s new fiction broadside:
The native New Yorker has threatened to bless us with his world of experimental fiction, flying all the way from Denver to woo his audience with tales of personal mishaps with traditional jazz legend Louis Armstrong, plants that grow human body-parts, cautionary tales of the electric fence, the unswerving wisdom of Italian prostitutes and old school New York City.
The broadside (Slave Husbandry) is a limited numbered edition of 50, handprinted on swarthy yet sophisticated recycled artisan paper, inked and pressed on the Vandercook Universal One letterpress. The large format broadsides (19″x12″) will be available at the event for your enjoyment and (italics) for your pleasure.
Also reading will be David Moscovich, Eileen Myles, Ted Pelton, and Mike Topp. It’s free and I wish I could be there. More info about Steve and the other readers after the jump…
Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes
Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes
by Jennifer Tamayo
Switchback Books, 2011
88 pages / $18 Buy from Switchback Books
If “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented” as de Kooning claimed, then the natural antithesis of oils are collages, and it seems no coincidence this method is increasingly popular in art and literature as the materialization of an ideal smooth whole flesh feels rejectable in this era of multi-medium hybridity. Where a lens is fragmented so fragments the subject even beyond lenses; and tidy categories of language, race and gender follow, as in Jennifer Tamayo’s collection of poems/images in Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes.
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October 10th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
October 10th, 2011 / 12:00 pm