Roxane Gay—
When you’re asked to withdraw something or to resign from a position, there’s often some kind of pressure involved and that pressure is generally wielded to make someone else save face. Last week, the National Book Foundation announced this year’s nominees for the National Book Award. They made a mistake (?!) and today, the writer whose work was “mistakenly” included, withdrew her work from consideration, at the Foundation’s “request.” The word clusterfuck comes to mind. Real talk: I’d cry if this happened to me.
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Inside an MFA: Call & Response #1.5
Last week, I put up student responses to 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?
Here is a long response, penned by Jeff Pickell. Enjoy. & read it all. It’s worth it!
- Shitty syntax begets shitty phrases. Shitty phrases beget shitty sentences. Shitty sentences beget shitty paragraphs. Shitty paragraphs beget shitty sections. Shittiness begets shittiness begets shittiness.
- The MFA enrolls in a creative writing program. He does not enroll in a written creations program. Asked what he studies, the MFA replies “creative writing” or simply “writing.” He doesn’t reply “creative.” This is because the MFA doesn’t have a creative deficiency. He has a writing deficiency. He should know this, too. A lot of MFA’s—the shitty MFA’s—don’t. The shitty MFA is a strange creature. More on him later.
- Many contend writing can’t be taught. This is absolutely false, as any MFA with a journalism background knows.
- The shittier the story is, the harder it is to revise. READ MORE >
&NOW Tomorrowland Forever & The Mad Science of Narrative
This past weekend (Thursday – Saturday) was the &NOW Festival of New Writing 2011 (Tomorrowland Forever) at UC San Diego. I planned on writing a more cohesive write-up of the conference, but the condensed intensity of the conference (in the most positive way possible) has exhausted by brain and I may need a bit of a recovery period to really process all the stimulating conversation and events. So much thanks and to Anna Joy Springer and Amina Cain for putting on such an awesome event.
On one of the panels I was a part of, “The Mad Science of Narrative: Temporal Horizons and Neurological Transcendence,” we 4 panelists (loosely operating as the collective Strophe) continued to explore some themes we’ve been talking about for some time now, surrounding issues of narrative & narrativization. Some really amazing & productive conversation ensued, and we hope to keep this conversation going, so in hopes of that, am posting up our mini-papers here (which we presented first and then opened up for general discussion). My own paper is largely recycled from some other things I’ve also been working on, as these ideas have largely been shaping my critical & creative practice as of late. Anyways, looking forward to hearing more thoughts.
Sunday Service: Leanna Petronella Poem
Promises, Promises
Let’s only bless each other
Said the mad priest to his cross
The cross chuckled
And jumped to the ground
The priest watched it hop away
The priest sighed
And drearily married his left foot
To his right
And we must never be honest with each other
Vowed a man to his wife
She took away her veil
And planted flowers in her moles as he stared
It is for the best, she agreed
Applying warts to his teeth
What can we do
I asked my body
We can twist your skull
Into star metal
But besides that
I want to sing all the songs
The man said to his coffin
The coffin opened and closed
And offered a steady beat
Leanna Petronella is a Michener Fellow in the University of Texas’s MFA program. Her poetry has appeared in Cutbank, La Petite Zine, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
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Patsy Cline on Writing
I got me a hit record and I ain’t never made a cent from it.
His hug is his beer in a frosted mug.
I don’t apologize that I don’t sing through my nose.
Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy.
I thought I loved him but he’s dull.
I’ll die before I go all the way pop.
That applause don’t help you any when you’re laying in that bed at night being totally ignored.
I’ll screw the boots off of you.
I’ve become a captive of my own ambitions.
They said I would be the Hemingway of music. I would have my own style.
I got to change my firecracker!
Most lyrics don’t have any balls.
It’s like things are creeping on me and I just want to lay low.
I go to church on Sundays, the vows I make. I break them on Monday.
I don’t give a goddamn!
I’m gonna walk a little bit of dog.
Five Albums For Saturday
It’s Saturday. I’m working on a paper I’ll be presenting in two weeks at the A.S.A.P. conference in Pittsburgh, entitled: “Gen-Web: The Emergent Literary Coterie.” My goal will be, in part, to bring the current online literary scene to the dinner table of academia. If you should find yourself in PA between October 27-30, you should come by the Wyndham Hotel and catch a panel or two. It’s gonna be a kick-ass conference, because it’s geared toward bleeding-edge research and innovative approaches to literature. The president of the association is a mentor of mine, Brian McHale, who has written extensively about innovative literature, including the seminal volume Postmodernist Fiction. The advisory committee for the organization includes Charles Bernstein, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Michael Berube and many other internationally recognized and groundbreaking scholars and distinguished practitioners in the contemporary arts. So the atmosphere should be pretty cool. If you’re around Friday night, for instance, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) will be giving a plenary session at the Warhol Museum. Not to mention, Friday afternoon htmlgiant friends Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney will team up with Josh Corey and Monica Mody to present a panel on “The Pastoral and the Necropastoral.”
This post isn’t going to be about that, though. Instead it’s going to be about some music I’ve been listening to lately…
Something Film Understands but that Literature Doesn’t
I was talking with Jeremy M. Davies recently (actually, we were on our way to see Drive), and the topic of genre as art came up. Now, Jeremy and I are both huge into genre, in all media. We’re nuts over spy thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, for instance—not to mention Batman comics. (Only the good ones, though, natch.)
And of course lots of people in various lit scenes (all over) don’t think that genre fiction can be art. They’re really wedded to that “high art / low art” divide. (Or the “literary fiction / all else” divide, as it’s so commonly called.)
Me and J, we were saying how we don’t get it. How can someone read, for instance, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad and not recognize it as total artistic brilliance? Or Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, which is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, hands down? And of course I’d argue that Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is one of the finest things published in the 1980s, “despite its being” a comic book. (I didn’t spend all that time analyzing it at Big Other because I thought it was merely cute.)
Anyway, I came to a certain conclusion…
Q&A #8
If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at htmlgiant dot com and we will find you some answers.
Question:
i have a website and published stories. i sell booklets of my stories on the streets. sometimes i feel like no one reads anything i’ve written. how do i put myself out in the public more? how do i get a broader readership?