This morning Lambda Literary named me one of “Five New Queer Voices to Watch Out For.” I’m so, so thrilled.
The other writers on the list are Justin Torres, recent classmate of mine at the Writers’ Workshop; Melissa Febos, memoirist and teacher at SUNY Purchase; Jaime Shearn Coan, poet and writer of young adult fiction; and Nicole J. Georges, a graphic novelist. Please, check it out.
Thanks so much to Courtney Gillette for the generous article, and to Sara Marcus for her kindness and support.
I took a day trip to Montreal with one of my new friends here at Yaddo yesterday. The result: one of the most decadant meals of my life at Restaurant Au Pied de Cochon.
All of the entrees we ate had foie gras in them, including the Duck in a Can. The duck, foie gras (and cabbage?) medley is literally cooked in a can and then presented at the table. Below is the video of how it’s served on top of a parsnip puree.
What books do you pack when you travel? Is it a nightmare trying to fit all of them into your carry-on? Or are you the lucky, simpler type? The type who can grab whatever is on your nightstand, stuff it in your backpack, and jet?
Me: I used to have a disorder. If it was shelved on my bookcase, it was going with me. I’m not joking. Once, when my brother and I traveled to Wisconsin to visit my grandma and aunt for three weeks, I packed three or four dozen books. The whole Judy Blume oeuvre. All the mysteries the Boxcar Children could solve. I didn’t have enough clothes, but I had literature for months. (I was also a slow reader.)
How many did I actually read?
Not a single fucking one.
I just liked the reassurance that came with having them all on me. I knew that, should the urge strike, I could read anything. What if I wanted Superfudge, and it wasn’t there? Honestly, that was the greatest apocalypse my little eight-year-old mind could imagine.
Over the years, I’ve gotten better, if only mildly so. My carry-on typically fits my laptop, a long book, a short book, a journal, and poetry if I’m feeling optimistic. Then, right before I board the plane, I buy a copy of Food & Wine, because who the hell can read on the plane? Gunter Grass doesn’t do shit to calm me through turbulence, but recipes and features on the natural wine industry? Calming as Xanax.
All this is meant as prelude to my recent dilemma: How does a writer pack books for a four-week residency?
The question appears similar to “What books would you bring to a desert island?” Though the lists do overlap, the reasoning behind them is quite different. On a desert island, I’d want my faves. The ones that entertain endlessly, that hold up to repetition and bring back all the joys of the civilization I just left behind.
For residencies, though, I prefer my “desk books,” the ones that I keep at arm’s length. The ones I can flip through and find inspiration on any page. The best of this category is one with a voice that doesn’t infect my own. What books do I love but have to leave at home? Anything by George Saunders. Love CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, but I always find myself writing like him whenever I read it for extended periods. Also, a new favorite, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Try it. Two pages in, and you’ll write like Lucy Marsden too.
I’ll be featuring some of the books here that I did decide to bring along: my current roster of desk books. I’d hoped to post this before I left, but the timing didn’t work out. Hopefully, in doing this, I don’t discover I’ve made some huge mistake in bringing an overly influential book with me. If that’s the case, back in the suitcase it’ll go until it’s time to leave.
Have Books, Will Travel. Part One
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece is one of the overlapping books. I’d bring it to residencies, islands, conferences, the moon, the sea floor, and heaven. It goes everywhere with me. Why? Not only is it a joy to read and reread–the story is so sprawling it feels new every single time–it’s an endless source of inspiration. Garcia Marquez does everything, and he does it beautifully. Write about an oversized dong? He’s done it. Train of corpses? Done it. Paparazzi of butterflies? Done it.
I also love to keep any book around that’s set in a small town. Macondo, for me, is the prototype for my Helix. I hope to make something much different, but there’s no better model than this one.
My rule–and my students will attest to this–is that you are not allowed to claim any other writer is a hack if you have not finished your book. Say what you will about Stephanie Myers, but she finished her book. Have you finished yours? If not, shut up and get to work. It’s really that harsh and it’s really that simple.
I learned so many things when I worked with Tayari at GWU, but my favorite lessons were about the best mindset for a writer, advice that was always rooted in a loving urgency to remind aspiring authors that, after all is said and done, it’s got to be about the work.
Last night I dreamt that a close friend of mine here at the Workshop won the Pulitzer. He won the Pulitzer, and I was not happy about it. At. All.
My immediate reactions were jealousy and bewilderment. He won for a novel none of us knew he’d written. Come to find out, that was because it hadn’t been released yet.
My friend’s book was the first in history to win the Pulitzer Prize before it had even been published.
This was a staggering achievement, as you can imagine. We were shocked. How? Why? Could it be so amazing that the uncorrected proofs warranted the most prestigious prize in American letters? And what was the damned thing called?
So–rather than asking my friend any more about it–I looked up his book on the Internet. I discovered that not only was it a straight-to-paperback, it was a straight-to-mass-market-paperback. This brand-new, unpublished, Pultizer prize-winning novel’s cover was brown with age and wear, and in the style of an antique Del-Rey sci-fi book. It looked like it had been designed in the 1960s and then quietly fermented at a printer somewhere, waiting for someone at Random House to give the go-ahead.
And then I saw it. The title.
My friend’s book, the new classic of our time, was called The Big Swallow: A Story of Organisms.
Sadly, that’s when I woke up.
Everyone needs to check out Eduardo Corral’s blog Lorcaloca. A graduate of the Writers’ Workshop, Eduardo does an exceptional job of assembling resources for poets. Mixed in with reviews, contest info, interviews, and work by poets such as Jean Valentine, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, James Galvin, and Sabrina Orah Mark, is an ongoing journal, of sorts. They’re called “bits,” and they’re entertaining, candid, and deliciously acerbic. An example: “Don’t be a starfucker” (from bread loaf 2010 bits).
Perhaps my favorite reason to read his blog, though, is the Hottie of the Week series. Eduardo has an eclectic taste in men, and I always look forward to seeing who’s going to get the nod next.
Go forth. Read, learn, laugh, and enjoy.
On any given day, you’re going to encounter, on average, and not including this post, 13,879 references to Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
In the last five seconds, I found an article on The Rumpus (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Progress”) and a piece by Eileen Pollack in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Theme”). Oh, and there’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Vince Carter” on NBA Fanhouse, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Chickens” on The New Yorker blog Close Read, and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Movies” on New York Press. Etc., etc.
Okay, yes. I understand that this, the original, is a great title. It’s fantastic. It’s as long-winded as the story itself is succinct. And though the characters start out by talking about love, when it’s over they’ve gone through–either explicitly or subliminally–violence, drinking, friendship, sanity, empathy, sex, hatred, death, depression, and regret. The title is about subtext: The story itself is less about love and more about the other things, the whole constellation of subjects that come up when we try to talk about it.
My problem is this: I feel like “What We Talk About When We Talk About _____” has become a placeholder for writers who haven’t come up with a better title. Those first eight words function more or less as a prolonged fanfare leading up to the last word, the article’s subject. Instead of “Brands,” we get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands.” Why? I think it’s both because long titles are in vogue right now, and because it’s just so easy to stick any word(s) at the end, and presto! You’ve got a title. It works for anything. The filibuster. Revolution. Climate. Democracy. Mad-Cow Disease. A quick Google search will show you just how much this title has been used. Recently.
So the question becomes: How do you properly borrow someone else’s title? Should it always be in the spirit of the prototype? Should authors be obliged to mimic the original relationship between title and text? Or is its function flexible, changing each time a new author appropriates it? And at what point does it expire? After 50 years? After 50,000 uses? Ever?
Or maybe I’m just too persnickity. Maybe it’s the length of Carver’s, er, title that makes it so tough for me to handle its imitators. I guess I just wish people would leave Ray alone and find someone else to poach.
(NB: I wrote this with a small amount of authority. Only two days ago I stole Speak, Memory from Vladimir Nabokov for a blog post. I spent precisely six lazy seconds thinking about it, and I’ve never even read the damn thing.)
(NB Pt. 2: My intention with this post was not to denigrate the writing quality of the above articles. I only wanted to consider the impulse behind choosing a particular title and what our responsibilities are to the artwork it came from. You’ll notice that I’m just skimming the surface of these subjects. All this being said, read that Rumpus article. It’s a fascinating piece about, among other things, how we experience art. Written, like Carver’s story, in the form of a conversation.)
Photo: A poster the poets used to taunt the fiction writers at the Workshop softball game. Love it.
This is poet Dan Bellm and me after sharing the stage (or, more specifically, a music stand in a living room) at Yaddo in 2007. He’s a sweet, talented man, and I’ll always think of him as the writer who made my first reading so special. Seriously, guys, he’s great.
Now, he’s got a website! Go forth and check out that beautiful thing and read his work. Read it.
That is all.
I was going through my books to pick out which one(s) to read next, and I came across this wonderful passage on memory from William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow:
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory–meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion–is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
Perfection. If this quotation doesn’t make it into the book as an epigraph, it will at least help me write the damn thing.
The semester is officially over. I’ve said my goodbyes to the graduates, and it’s time now to hunker down and get a draft of this novel written. That means: getting to bed before midnight, writing every morning, reading every afternoon, and exercising. It also means saying “no” to social invitations here and there. The month of May has been dominated by potlucks and the Foxhead, and to be honest, I’m partied out. It’s time for the real work to begin.
Last week, I had some fairly successful days of writing. On Monday, my first day back with the novel, I wrote over 1,500 words. As the week progressed, though, my daily word totals gradually shrank. Was I disappointed? Yes. Will I let it distract me from the work ahead? No.
My residency at Yaddo starts next week, and to prepare for it, I’ve been testing out the schedule I plan to use there.
- 7:30 a.m. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Shower.
- 8:30 a.m. Start writing.
- 11:30 a.m. Break for lunch.
- 12:30 p.m. Run and/or swim.
- 1 p.m. Start writing.
- 3 p.m. End writing. Spend the rest of the afternoon reading, answering emails, etc.
I’ll probably work on WIWRWYW in the morning and story revisions in the afternoon. Other projects I hope to work on: writing my course syllabus for the fall, transcribing my interview with Allan Gurganus, writing a review of Dan Gutstein’s non/fiction, and writing an adaptive translation of Le Petit Prince. This last project is something I might do for Russell Valentino’s translation class at the Overseas Writers’ Workshop, but I haven’t decided yet. As much as I’d love to go to Greece–the workshop this year is held on the island of Corfu–I think it might be smarter to stay home and finish my novel. My number-one goal is to end the summer with a finished draft so I can work on it with Sam Chang in the fall.
