There Are Dry Tiny Horses Running in My Veins: Mourning Barry Hannah
Below are a few eulogies, remembrances, encomia, etc. for the late Barry Hannah. No introduction needed. Thank you, Barry.
Jeremiah Chamberlin (editor at Fiction Writers Review):
I experienced both sides of Barry’s honesty when I was a student of his in 2003 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The day of my workshop, we moved around the table in usual fashion–what’s working, what isn’t. Janet Peery was co-teaching the session, and among the group were writers such as Ben Percy, Lisa Lerner, Dave Schuman, Dave Koch, Forrest Anderson, and John Struloeff. I was giddy to be in the room with one of my literary heroes. And while the others were offering feedback on my writing, I stole the occasional glance to see how Barry was reacting. Most of the time he spent flipping fairly idly through my pages. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been a surprise when, upon his turn to speak, he began gutting the opening paragraph of the prologue to the novel I’d been working on. Sentence by sentence, word by word, he worked like a butcher, cutting back the fat. Let’s just say that there wasn’t much meat left when he got down to the bone. Or, rather, he showed me that there hadn’t been much muscle to begin with. Would it be too much to say I felt eviscerated along with my work?
Yet it wasn’t cruel. It was honest. And when the furnace of my face cooled I saw that he was mostly right.
Barry.
First lines of Barry Hannah’s I ever read:
When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can some out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for it often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.
I’m glad it’s not my name.
Barry Hannah being interviewed by Don Swaim.
I like Barry Hannah a lot. Heard a thing. Sad if true.
UPDATE:
Barry Hicks, Bill Hannah
P.S. If this actually ever happens, I’m getting out a gun, Hannah-style.
P.P.S. Here’s Barry editing himself.
Reading Ray Backwards (guest-post by Alec Niedenthal)
If Gary Lutz does it–and he says he does–I don’t know how he does. In an interview with Michael Kimball, Lutz says, “Maybe part of the explanation of why I write the way I write has to do with the way I sometimes read. I sometimes read a book from back to front, sentence by sentence-a practice that, as one might imagine, can give a completely different disposition to a book.” I’ve been trying to read Barry Hannah’s slim marvel, “Ray,” back to front. Sentence by sentence. It won’t work. A book like “Ray” has a certain velocity, speed, force. You’d think that because most sentences here are jewels, are the sharpest of diamonds, that one could isolate them and pick them apart from the bone outward. But it’s become clear to me that Hannah’s sentences sing precisely because they are deeply embedded in a system of voice which, however fragmented the narrative structure of “Ray,” is a system, and therefore, to my mind, necessary.
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December 17th, 2009 / 1:48 pm
December 17th, 2009 / 1:48 pm
Creative Writing 101
(for previous installments in this series, click here)
WORK DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: “Two Boys” by Lorrie Moore & “Water Liars by Barry Hannah
Tuesday, 9/29 – “Two Boys.” I’m not a huge Lorrie Moore fan. I don’t dislike her, but I’ve had Birds of America taught to me several times and it just never…grabs me. I think the best experience I’ve had reading Moore was in David Gates’s lit seminar at New School when I was an MFA student. And even at that, what I mostly remember is David’s enthusiasm for “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.” That, and a single line from the story that’s always struck me as incredibly beautiful and haunting. A blood clot discovered in a baby’s diaper is described as looking like “a tiny mouse heart packed in snow.” Beyond that, I’m content to know she’s out there in the world, making some people very happy. Good for her; good for them.
But a couple summers ago I was teaching a non-credit writing class at the Gotham Writers Workshop, and I was trying to find a way to spice things up.
Hannah in Harper’s
Here’a a big FYI: the excerpt from Hannah’s novel-in-progress, Sick Soldier at Your Door, which was published in the Winter ’09 issue of Gulf Coast, has been picked up by the “Readings” section of Harper’s. It’s reprinted in the current issue, the one with the Vonnegut short story and the large roundtable with contributions from–among many others–Ben Marcus and Zadie Smith. I guess those are all pretty good reasons to pick the issue up. Actually, Harper’s is one of those magazines you’re better off subscribing to than buying on stands. It’s under 20 bucks for a year subscription, compared to something like 7 bucks per issue if you buy them one at a time. Basically, if you feel like you might want to buy a Harper’s twice in a given year, you’re better off just subscribing, and letting it come right to you.
Dispatches from Captain Maximus (guest posted by Michael Bible)
Michael Bible, a former student of Barry Hannah (and wearing one of the best names around), shares some of his Hannah light:
Zita, an odd and earnest woman in her 60’s, sat in on Barry Hannah’s workshop. She often reeked of gin. She hounded Barry so much about “rules” to writing (something he preached hard against) that he finally caved and wrote out a few things for her about her writing. She photocopied the handwritten “rules” and passed them out to everyone in the class the next week. So when reading this remember they are addressed to her.
1. [Your writing is] in the rut of adjectives and “Life Studies.” In the rut of people who aren’t there.
Barry Hannah’s Long Shadow – by Wells Tower
Big giant kudos to Kevin Sampsell for this one. I think I saw it once a while back, but it must have been before I knew who Wells Tower is, and also perhaps before my Hannah-love had reached its present feverpitch. In any case, I’d forgotten about this profile of Hannah that Tower wrote for Garden & Gun magazine, until Kevin posted it on facebook the other day. Good, good man. Also, when you click through, the article isn’t as long as it looks. (Would that it were longer!) The last few screens are Hannah’s short story, “Water Liars.”
Paragraphs I Would Probably Stab My Dick To Have Written (1): Barry Hannah
Geronimo Rex, pg. 142, first full graph:
Other nights Fleece explained to me how he had declared himself–he was going to be a doctor and study how “one suffers in the meat.” “I was always a meatball,” he said. “I’m going to be the best doctor Mississippi ever produced. They’ll bring in some whore whose boyfriend has shot her in the cunt pointblank with a shotgun and alongside her her boyfriend also, who thought he commited suicide putting the last shot into his navel, and I’ll put on my mask, wave my hands with some instruments, and bring them back Romeo and Juliet.”