Fiction Writers Review

826 Michigan’s “How to Write Like I Do Series”—This Weekend!

Celeste Ng — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:22:58 +0000

Not a kid, but wish you could go to 826’s amazing writing programs? Now, thanks to 826 Michigan’s How To Write Like I Do workshops, you can—and you don’t have to put your hair in pigtails and pretend to know about Bakugan.

Inspired by a similar series at 826 Seattle, the How To Write Like I Do workshops for adults are held 5-6 times per year, led by writers like Daniel Alarcon and Peter Ho Davies. Novelist and UM MFA faculty member V.V. Ganeshananthan leads the next session February 4, 2012 (that’s tomorrow!) titled “The Reported Imagination: Journalism Techniques for Fiction Writers“:

Whether writing what she knows or writing what she doesn’t — and needs to find out — any fiction writer can learn from reporters. Reporters go out into the world and observe it closely: interviewing people; hunting down information; producing lots of copy on deadline; and subjecting themselves to rigorous editing for length and clarity. How can fiction writers turn this approach toward the practice of writing creatively? [...]

Workshop participants will enjoy Zingerman’s coffee and pastries as they read, write, and discuss the issues raised in this workshop. Proceeds, as ever, support 826michigan’s free creative writing programs for students 6-18 in Washtenaw County.

The cost is $25 for one person or $40 for two, and tickets are available online at Brown Paper Tickets. (Zingerman’s pastries? As if I needed yet another reason to wish I were in Ann Arbor…)

If you’ve already got plans this weekend, no need to despair. You can catch the next session, “The Richness of Place: Setting in Fiction” with Doug Trevor (winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award) on May 5, 2012, or attend 826 Michigan’s Third Annual Writer’s Conference, June 15-17, 2012. Check their website for forthcoming details.

And stay tuned—Program Coordinator Catherine Calabro writes: “We’re hoping to start a sister series called ‘How to Write Like Kids Do’— workshops that our volunteers teach but for adults to give them the chance to play/write creatively with a cool community of writers.”

“Masturbate frequently.”

Celeste Ng — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:41 +0000

We hear a lot about how writers find their inspiration. But how about other creative artists? The Guardian surveyed contemporary musicians, dancers, directors, and architects to find out where they got their creative inspiration. Much of their advice is unexpected, yet would be useful to writers as well.

Here’s a sampler:

Guy Garvey, musician: Spending time in your own head is important. When I was a boy, I had to go to church every Sunday; the priest had an incomprehensible Irish accent, so I’d tune out for the whole hour, just spending time in my own thoughts. I still do that now; I’m often scribbling down fragments that later act like trigger-points for lyrics.

Tamara Rojo, ballet dancer: To be truly inspired, you must learn to trust your instinct, and your creative empathy. Don’t over-rehearse a part, or you’ll find you get bored with it. Hard work is important, but that comes before inspiration: in your years of training, in your ballet class, in the Pilates classes. That work is there just to support your instinct and your ability to empathise.

Rupert Goold, director: I always try to reshape my ideas in other forms: dance, soap opera, Olympic competition, children’s games, pornography – anything that will keep turning them for possibilities.

Sunand Prasas, architect: Ask off-piste questions. What if this library were a garden? If this facade could speak, would it be cooing, swearing, silent, erudite?

Polly Morgan, artist: Leave the house. Or better still, go to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and rescue a staffie. I did so partly to get out more, as I was spending too much time surrounded by the same objects, within the same walls. The sense of guilt I feel when my dogs are indoors forces me out at regular intervals. One of my favourite new ideas came about when I stopped to examine a weed growing in the forest I walk in.

Kate Royal, opera singer: Remember that art is everywhere. It’s amazing what you can find inspiring on the No 464 bus from Peckham.

And then there’s playwright Anthony Neilson’s advice, which I’ll let you decide whether to follow or not:

Masturbate frequently. You’ll probably do that anyway, but you may as well make it a rule.

Read the full list here, and tell us which parts you find helpful in the comments!

Further Reading:

Writing lessons from another unexpected source: the police
Also secretly creative? Supreme court justices.
Tips on stealing like an artist

[Reviewlet] badbadbad, by Jesús Ángel García

Tyler McMahon — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Jesús Ángel García (JAG) is both author and narrator of the debut novel badbadbad (New Pulp Press). Telling his story to a younger brother facing combat overseas, JAG complains of a heartless ex-wife who prevents him from visiting his young son. By day, JAG works as Webmaster for a charismatic Reverend and his conservative Southern church. By night, he raises hell with the Reverend’s wayward son Cyrus. While JAG excels at both tasks, Cyrus ultimately proves more persuasive.

Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

The problem with stories

Celeste Ng — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:39 +0000

We love TED here at FWR–which, in case you haven’t encountered it before, you’re welcome, and I hope you didn’t have any work to do this month. This is an old TED talk, but one I hadn’t heard before and one I’ve been thinking about–particularly because it challenges the concept of storytelling.

In his TED talk, writer/economist Tyler Cowen talks about why stories make him nervous and why we should be suspicious of stories. Here’s a snippet of the transcript:

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I’d like to do is instead tell you why I’m suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they’re a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You’re always left with the same few stories. There’s the old saying, just about every story can be summed up as, “A stranger came to town.” There’s a book by Christopher Booker, he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There’s monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don’t have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you’re telling yourself the same things over and over again. [...]

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like “this” instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it’s a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we’re too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story.

Watch Tyler Cowen’s whole TED talk below:

Further Reading:

Anne gives a roundup of some of her favorite TED talks by writers
See more writers on writing: Chuck Palahniuk and Ann Patchett

The Mystery of Fiction: An Interview with Ana Menendez

Melissa Scholes Young — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:21 +0000

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, you’ll find the past haunting the pages of Ana Menendez’s latest collection of stories, Adios, Happy Homeland! In twenty-seven tales of interlinked prose we enter the mythical, magical world of Cuba. Characters take flight—literally and metaphorically—as they wrestle with issues of family, art, literature, and the need to run away from it all. It is a familiar Cuba, but Menendez’s modern take challenges how we tell our stories. Menendez blends her experiences as the child of Cuban exiles with her own migration narrative as a journalist to weave a magical, sometimes surreal take on Cuban culture.

Adios, Happy Homeland! is Menendez’s fourth book of fiction. Her first collection of stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and the title story won a Pushcart Prize. In addition to her other books—Loving Che (2004) and The Last War (2009)—she’s worked as a journalist and prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Now Menendez is establishing a creative writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She and I met in cyberworld and chatted about balancing the memories of the past with the demands of the present.

Let’s begin with process, Ana. I read your first collection, In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd, when I first started writing fiction and I remember being shocked that you could link stories that way. At what point in the process does the tie that binds them together emerge? Do you begin with character or idea or story?

With In Cuba I began with one character: Maximo. And almost every story grew out of his relationships. It was a fictional treatment of what I had seen in my own community. My mother was forever running into someone who knew someone who knew someone with whom she went to school in Cuba. It seemed to me as a child that all Cubans knew each other.

Was it a similar process with your latest collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! ?

With Adios it was different. These stories grew out of the prologue, which itself grew out of someone else’s fiction: Borges’ “An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain.” With In Cuba I wrote the stories as a spider spins its web. With Adios, the writing was much more linear: one story led to another, led to another in a pretty direct way.

There is a shared thematic link of flight in Adios, Happy Homeland, but I also saw truth as a permeating idea. The Prologue ends with the declaration “…just because it never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true” and in “Cojimar” we’re told, “truth is the strangest thing you’ll ever know.” In “Flying” the word true/truth/truly appears on almost every page. So, is wrestling with truth the writer’s ultimate goal?

For me, yes, this wrestling with truth is paramount. It’s the obsession—or I should say puzzle—that has driven all my books in one way or another. In Adios this working out of the truth becomes even more important. The prologue, after all, is written by a creolized version of a fictional author who is presented as a real writer, in a short story that reads like a non-fiction obituary/retrospective written by an Argentine author who sounds like an Anglo-Saxon scholar!

And why might fiction be a fruitful place for this?

Fiction—any art really—is the best way to explore the dynamic between what is real and what lives only in imagination. And the mystery of fiction– the open-ended, indirect poetry of it — is the best approximation of what it feels like to be alive.

The characters of In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd straddle worlds and geographies. When I interviewed Jennine Capó Crucet, who is also the daughter of Cuban exiles, we talked about the simultaneous push and pull of being from a place people are often trying to escape. It seems no matter how far you get from home, either for writers or for these characters, there exists this distant voice calling to you. In the title story, Juanito declares, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba, I was a German Shepherd.” What can we learn about identity and place in the present if we’re still living in exile?

Interesting that Jennine wrote her Hialeah book while living elsewhere. That certainly has been true for me as well. I’ve never written about Miami while I was living there. The one book I wrote while in Miami is set in Istanbul – a city I still miss as well. All my characters, in one way or another, are divided and trapped by their loyalties. In Adios, one character says, “we’re always leaving.”

Do you feel that way, too?

For me, leaving is the way we learn about identity and place. Travel far and long enough and you realize there is no such thing as a fixed “identity” – though this is often so difficult a realization that we cling to the outlines of who we thought we were.

You play with language in Adios, Happy Homeland! We get Google translations, dream parables, mythical prologues, and made up glossaries. You conclude with a fictional bibliography. Even some of the traditional stories have magical qualities. Was it liberating to write in less traditional forms?

Yes, it was really a joy to write this book. The most joy I had since I was a twenty-seven-year-old living in New York City and working on my first collection. I started Adios after abandoning two novels that were boring me to tears to write. I realized that I hadn’t read a novel I enjoyed in years—yet I was reading every short story that came my way. Who was I kidding! So I sat down to write fragments, more for my own amusement than with any idea toward a finished work.

Did it stir the creative process even more?

Absolutely! For the first time in years, I found myself sitting at the keyboard for hours, forgetting to eat, returning late at night. That’s when you know you are working honestly: when it stops seeming like a job and takes on the form of the old obsessions. As I started linking up the stories, the ideas started coming so fast that I had to open a new file just to keep track of them.

I’m wondering about structure. How did you decide to order the risks you took on the page?

I had a lot of help on the ordering. Initially, I just put them down in the order I wrote them. But a few friends who read it thought there were too many non-traditional forms near the end of the collection. With the help of my fantastic editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, I was able to re-order them in a way that seemed more cohesive. She did the same thing with my first collection, by the way, and now I can’t even remember the original order I gave them—hers was so perfect.

Do you consider this collection a tribute? To whom or what are you paying homage?

Yes, very much a tribute to Cuban writers of both prose and poetry (though in the case of Cuba, I think it’s all poetry, even when labeled prose). Those writers were on my mind with every piece, most strongly in “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors,” which I wrote as a tribute to the late, brave Reinaldo Arenas.

In your blog post “1989,” published with The Huffington Post, you wrote: “I grew up into a culture where nothing was what it seemed, where liberation meant tyranny, where hope begat doom and optimism was for the mentally deficient.” Are you acknowledging this divide between reality and truth when you deconstruct and reconstruct myths in Adios?

Reality, truth, imagination, desires, delusions—I think these themes have always played a role in my writing. Not so much the hard lines that separate them as the way they bleed into one another, the way our delusions become reality, the way we construct truths out of our desires. The self, our personal histories, are themselves a powerful work of the imagination. Throughout our lives we are sifting, re-ordering, constructing and deconstructing our ideas of who we are.

You balance journalist and fiction writer. Many writers have day jobs – we’re writers, but also teachers, editors, parents. Do you struggle to separate the writing worlds or do they relate?

“Balance” is quite a hopeful term! In truth, it’s a real struggle. I’m fortunate that I left journalism in 2008. I doubt I could have written a collection like this while still working as a journalist. Truth, or rather, accuracy, is such an overriding concern in journalism that it can’t help but influence the fiction one writes. Of course, it seems to have only fostered Garcia Marquez’s imagination. But most former journalists end up writing in a more minimalist vein. It took me many years and an extended hiatus to muster the courage to write in a different way.

At the moment, I’m working at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, setting up a new creative writing program there. The job is incredibly gratifying and I find that thinking about writing and reading feeds my own work. The biggest challenge I have right now is finding time to write fiction while caring for a nine-month-old baby!

That I completely understand! Such a juggle, isn’t it? Babies and books. And speaking of feeding your work, what writers have influenced you most?

James Joyce would be the first. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read Dubliners. “The Dead” is one of the most perfect short stories ever written. It has an ineffable quality that transcends the form. It’s impossible to summarize it in the way, for example, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is possible to summarize. To understand “The Dead” you must read every line to the devastating end. I love Kafka and Borges for the way they take on dreams and shatter “reality.”

Alice Munro is a master. I just love everything she’s written. Though she writes in a more realist vein, her stories are beautiful and moving and I never finish one without feeling I’ve just spent some time with a genius. And I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. I remember the first time I read one of his stories in The New Yorker and I thought, you can do that? You can thumb your nose at the tidy ending? It was exhilarating.

Are there other short story collections that you recommend that link by theme or character well?

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics would have to be at the top of the list—it’s a strange and beautiful ride taken in the company of a “cosmic know-it-all” as one critic described. Same with his Invisible Cities—you don’t know whether to call it a short story collection or a novel in parts or even poetry. But it’s all sublime.

Which writers do you return to again and again?

Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock is gorgeous—I learned so much reading and re-reading that collection. I would also include W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in this list, though maybe it’s more accurate to call that a novella collection or even a “novel” as I think the publisher described it. All of these fit my definition of a good collection: The whole adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. When you’re done reading them, you are haunted, sometimes for years.

Further Links and Resources

Check out this Miami Herald review of Adios, Happy Homeland!

Listen to Menendez read from Adios, Happy Homeland! from the 2010 Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Ana Menenedez talks with Celeste Fraser Delgado about history and poetry in her novel, The Last War, at the Miami Book Fair International, 2009:

How The Muppets Changed the Course of Self-Publishing

Celeste Ng — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Remember Amanda Hocking, the writer who’s now the poster child for self-publishing success? Well, she might never have been spurred to publish her work at all if it not for… The Muppets. The Guardian has the scoop:

To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work. To make matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can’t afford to make the trip. As a huge Muppets fan, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money for petrol, let alone a hotel for the night. What is she to do?

Then it comes to her. She can take one of the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all of which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and other digital ebook sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies to her family and friends? All she needs for the journey to Chicago is $300 (£195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she’s bound to make it.

“I’m going to sell books on Amazon,” she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: “Yeah. OK. I’ll believe that when it happens.”

Let’s jump to October 2010. In those six months, Hocking has raised not only the $300 she needed, but an additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has sold 1.5m books and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self. Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales force or marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the historians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets. And along the way she helps to foment a revolution in global publishing.

The rest of the profile on Hocking is great, and Hocking seems really down-to-earth—but I can’t get over that first part. The Muppets! Is there anything they can’t do?

Further Reading:

More on Amanda Hocking

Book of the Week: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey

Jeremiah Chamberlin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:51:39 +0000

This week’s feature is Margot Livesey’s new novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, which was published last week by HarperCollins. Livesey is the author of six previous novels: Homework (1990), Criminals (1996), The Missing World (2000), Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), Banishing Verona (2004), and The House on Fortune Street (2008). Her first book, Learning by Heart, was a collection of short fiction published by Penguin in 1986. Her nonfiction and essays have appeared in such places as The Boston Globe, AWP Chronicle, The Cincinnati Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Five Points, as well as anthologized in such collections as The Business of Memory, Now Write!, The Eleventh Draft, and Naming the World. She has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. Livesey is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College.

Livesey’s new novel is a modern (1960s) take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In the introduction to his recent interview with Livesey, contributing editor Steve Wingate describes the literary relationship between the books. He writes:

Though the resemblances are close, including a five-part structure, they are not ponderous or strained. One could labor over the similarities between the characters, such as Brontë’s troubled gentleman Mr. Rochester and Livesey’s troubled gentleman Hugh Sinclair, or Brontë’s ill-fated schoolgirl Helen and Livesey’s ill-fated schoolgirl Miriam. But such comparisons are unnecessary when taking in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and looking for them instead of letting Livesey’s tale live on its own merely distracts from it.

Wingate continues:

The book’s eponymous heroine Gemma, orphaned spawn of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father, is in trouble from the start. Thrust into her aunt’s protection when her beloved uncle dies, she is treated as a servant girl and worse. The first movement of the novel, which covers Gemma’s escape from her adoptive family, filled me with unease over her physical and emotional safety in ways I did not expect. She is also a spooky, elvish girl, tending toward a receptivity to the supernatural that Livesey calls “second sight.” The first impression one gets of Gemma is of someone who will be frequently on the run, a delicate but scrappy survivor with no real place in the world who will land on her feet and create one.

In this interview, Wingate speaks with Livesey about such things as keeping the imagination fresh, the role of setting in her work, and learning from Brontë. In response to a question about “borrowing” from her own history and background, Livesey replies:

I knew as I embarked on the novel that I would be making use of my difficult stepmother and the grim boarding school I attended for four years. Only as Gemma began to grow up did I discover that I would be drawing on my deep sense that books and exams were a way to escape my present life. As for the role that my romantic life played in my creation of Gemma’s, I think that’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

Margot Livesey / credit: Emma Hardy

To read the rest of this interview, please click here.

For more on Livesey’s work, including upcoming events and author appearances, please visit the author’s Website.

You can also win one of three copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Journal-of-the-Week Winners: Georgia Review

Jeremiah Chamberlin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:53:13 +0000

Last week we featured The Georgia Review as our Journal-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations:

Lee Libro (@LeeLibro)
Donna Bailey(@DBailey_GirlInk)
Jessica Dall (@JessicaDall)

To claim your free subscription, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

I CAPTCHA the Castle

Celeste Ng — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:08 +0000

You probably know what a CAPTCHA is, even if you didn’t know its name. Those warped words that you sometimes have to type out? That’s a CAPTCHA. Websites use them to prevent spambots from posting (spam) comments. Humans can read CAPTCHAs very easily. Robots, not so much.

But did you know that although CAPTCHAs seem like gibberish, they actually help preserve and create literature?

Some CAPTCHAs actually help digitize books and magazines: the reCAPTCHA system uses scanned words from old books. Every time a user like you types in the word, it helps the system decipher old books. Explains the reCAPTCHA site:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

CAPTCHAs have even inspired literature of their own. Some sites use two CAPTCHAs side-by-side, and reading them, I find myself making up a sentence or story. Apparently I’m not the only one. At imgur, one user posted a fantasy comic inspired by the random phrases, via GalleyCat:

via imgur

It’s proof, I suppose, that writers see stories in everything.

(Oh, and if you were wondering? CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Bust that factoid out at your Superbowl party!)

Further Reading:

More fiction from an unexpected online place: the spam box

A Meaning for Wife, by Mark Yakich

Erika Dreifus — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:31 +0000

“There are people who talk about themselves in the first person, people who talk about themselves in the third person, and people who don’t talk about themselves at all,” one character tells the narrator of Mark Yakich’s first novel, A Meaning for Wife (Ig Publishing, 2011). “Naturally,” she continues, “you’re in that last category.”

It is a flawed argument. As the narrator makes clear for just under 200 pages, there are also people who talk about themselves in the second person. The character shares a number of qualities with his creator: a last name that rhymes with “jock itch”; a son named Owen; residence in New Orleans. One cannot help but wonder to what extent Yakich is using the second person to talk about himself as well.

That potential juxtaposition is wrenching, since the narrator of A Meaning for Wife is a recent widower, whose wife’s unexpected death hovers over nearly every page of this book, set during the weekend of the narrator’s twentieth high-school reunion (class of ’88). Bringing his toddler back to his parents’ home for the occasion, the narrator faces plenty of demons from his past, including his father’s schizophrenia. But somehow, Yakich infuses this story with humor.

Readers can have strong reactions—not always positive—to the second-person point of view. Most of us can think of a handful of highly successful short stories that rely on this narrative technique; successful novels with second-person narrators, however, seem fewer. Since I’m continuing to experiment with second-person storytelling in my own writing, I wanted to see how Yakich managed to sustain his narrator’s voice for the length of an entire book. I discovered that at least two writerly tools helped him: dialogue, and plenty of narration that comes from but is not necessarily about the narrator.

A brief, intriguing mention in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Shelf Unbound magazine led me to this novel from Ig Publishing, which also brought us Jacob Paul’s excellent Sarah/Sara. That Yakich’s primary literary reputation is as a poet also drew me as I recently read another debut novel from a poet—Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It turned out to be one of the most impressive books I read last year. A Meaning for Wife sets a high bar for 2012, too.

Further Links and Resources

Read an interview with Mark Yakich about A Meaning for Wife, second-person narration, and more.
Learn more about Ig on the publisher’s website.
Here are some samples of Yakich’s poetry. His collections include The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, and The Making of Collateral Beauty.
With Loyola University-New Orleans colleague Christopher Schaberg, Yakich has co-founded Airplane Reading, a site that was started “to treat ‘airplane reading’ seriously.” Yakich and Schaberg have also recently published Checking In/Checking Out, a nonfiction book that reflects their individual experiences with and attitudes toward air travel.