Steve Almond signs a copy of Candy Freak / photo by Jonathunder, via Wikipedia Commons

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think:

If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah.

I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want the book to be an artifact that commemorates a particular human gathering, not a commodity.

Read the full essay–including why Almond thinks self-publishing isn’t for everyone, why print publishing probably isn’t doomed, and where writers should look for publishing inspiration–here

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head.

Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is by one of my (and FWR’s) favorite authors, Aryn Kyle, I suddenly appreciate the enforced pacing, slowing down to wallow in each line of prose. This is like someone doling out chocolate mousse to you one very rich spoonful at a time, so you can relish every bit of it. Part One of “Take Care” is up now, but for the rest, you’ll have to check tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Savor, and enjoy.

Also on FWR…

• Read more about Five Chapters and other serial fiction and why slow might be good for you
• Check out Elizabeth Ames Staudt’s review of Kyle’s debut novel The God of Animals

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind.

The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is the most prominent organization in the country dedicated to exceptional literature by writers of Asian descent.

Fiction Writers Review is proud to be a media partner for the 2010 contest.

This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed Coffin. Ten finalists will receive a one-year subscription to Hyphen and a one-year membership to AAWW, and one grand prize winner will also receive $1,000 and publication in Hyphen.

The contest is open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada, and there is no required theme. For full contest instructions, visit http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/shortstory. The deadline for submission is March 31st, 2010 (postmark deadline), and winners will be announced by June 16.

Further Reading:

Preeta Samarasan

• Read the 2008 winning story: “Playing the Sheik,” by Shivani Manghnani
• Read the 2007 winning story: “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers,” by (FWR contributor!) Preeta Samarasan

In one of the four letters contained in About Writing (Wesleyan UP), Samuel Delany describes contrasting narrative styles or streams, “writing that is more efficiently ornamented than the norm,” like that of Joyce, Proust, or Woolf, and “writing that is more efficiently stripped down than the norm,” like that of “Stein, Hemingway, Beckett, or Carver.” He marks yet another stream as the “experimental work” of “a Ron Silliman, a Lyn Hejinian, a Christian Bok, or a John Keene.” Farewell Navigator (Open City), Leni Zumas’s 2008 collection of enigmatic short stories, flows somewhere between the experimental and stripped down streams. The strongest stories, namely “Heart Sockets,” “Farewell Navigator,” “Waste No Time If This Method Fails,” and “Leopard Arms” use slight yet meaningful temporal time shifts, idiosyncratic syntax and grammar, and eccentric narration. And, in stories like “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” the author also veers into more speculative and fabulist narrative approaches.

Most of these stories are compact studies of paralysis, in the tradition of Beckett and Ionesco. These ciphers don’t so much act or react, but are usually quietly or loudly inert. Insignificance, ennui, insensitivity, and impotence all figure largely here. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears…

of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand. Significant fears to face, I would say: but these two do a bang-up job of not. Their evasion strategy is deftly honed.

Such characters are unmoored in an unforgiving world, bereft of hope for renewal or redemption.

Naming and defining are powerful motifs throughout the stories. Zumas’s characters sometimes come to us by their nicknames–Black, Blue, the fish-stick girl, Blotilla, Squinch, and Johnnycake–but more often they are simply pronouns, or even fragments or sketches. There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding. In a world without much explicit exposition, any tiny elaboration of a thought, image, or perspective becomes magnified: the reader is drawn in to fill in the blanks.

Leni Zumas / photo by Anne Hall (from www.lenizumas.com/)

In “Farewell Navigator,” a teen’s physical blindness seems an insurmountable barrier both to maintaining trust and intimacy with his family and to establishing his independence and own sense of identity. And yet it is a psychological, spiritual darkness that proves to be the family’s greatest obstacle. This is a story of creating a life out of darkness–physically yes, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. His mother has other blind spots: the story explodes when he discovers her brazenly seducing one of his friends.

Language is celebrated and played with throughout the stories. Characters invent words, usually through pun-filled mash-ups, but in “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” Zumas develops unusual syntactical strategies to fit these otherwordy, otherworldly tales. A theme that runs across most of the stories is the discovery of new words. For instance, in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” while a mother wallows within television’s wasteland, her daughter revels in language. She tests her mother’s comprehension and patience by reading out loud from the dictionary.

In “Farewell Navigator,” the son learns the word “grubble” from a poem in English class. It means groping or feeling around in the dark. And this is just what we find him doing: trying to make sense of his mother’s senselessness and insensitivity, processing his father’s obliviousness, his own impotence, and reaching toward his own future’s light. This new word, grubble, is used in the story’s most radiant passage where, after the son destroys his father’s jars of plum jelly, his father responds by putting his

fingers to my cheeks, grubbling for tears. His eyes are closed but I see on the red-streaked lids, as if they were maps, how much he doesn’t care if my bloody snot glops down on his shirt. I see how he will hold my shoulders hard and fast for as long as it takes me to stop crying and how I can, if I want, stay bandaged in the soft heat of him for hours, leaking brine, tethered by giant arms to the beat under his ribs till night comes and we’re afloat on dark water, shivering together, hearing the cold get brighter and the waves slower, so slow they turn from liquid to ice—hushed meadows of frozen lather—and we are surrounded.

In this story about blindness, color becomes a powerful element. The son names his parents Black and Blue after what he perceives to be their eye colors. His father, oblivious to his wife’s reasons for being interested in her son’s friend’s green eyes, says, “green is the color of the hair on the ground.” And when the son catches his mother in the act, he runs and hits “the light. Yellow pours onto Blue, who is naked except for her underpants.” The way colors enter into this story is very powerful as is the symbolic message encoded in the parents’ names.

James Agee

In About Writing, Delany also writes about how language delights, startles, inspires. First, he describes a friend turning to a sentence in Joyce’s Ulysses. “Listen to this,” his friend says:

“On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” Now I love this sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, “Sunlight fell on him through the leaves?” Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?

Delany, in his inimitable style, answers his own question by offering several possible reasons, including this one:

The vividness comes from a kind of surprise, the surprise of meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic—striding under a tree on a June day—but words that, at a certain point, astonish us with their economy, accuracy, and playful vitality. Again, some of it will work on one reader, whereas others will only find it affected.

Reading Farewell Navigator, we find many instances of this “economy, accuracy, and playful vitality.” In “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” the daughter looks at her mother, “Folds of skin accordion at her neck,” and despairs that “James Agee could have described her better—would have done justice to my mother, her loggishness, her ghouliness, her secret gentleness…” But what a wonderful image she herself has created to describe her mother’s sagging, withered flesh. And then, bemoaning her own “not-bad shade of blue eyes,” she thinks that Agee would “have piled adjectives upon this blue, lavished it with taut slippery words until it was unrecognizable as a color and had become—a feeling.” This reminds me again of Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: writing about a difficult thing, he despairs that his descriptions are not enough, that his technique is faulty. He writes, that what he wrote “is crudely stated. It needs the poet there.” But we have one in Zumas–one by way of Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel, with detours through industrial blight, tours of strip malls and stripper bars, layovers in drug-addled adolescence, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-something unplanned obsolescence.

While the daughter in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” plays games with strange words like “moxa,” “umbelliferous,” “flocculence,” and also making up the occasional word, other characters play with imagined etymologies, homonyms, textural associations, and mash-ups. More wordplay can be found in “Waste No Time If This Method Fails.” There’s a funny moment when an overanxious medical student questions one of the hospital inmates about

how he likes it here.
He says, Where—in this cage? and the medical student says, So the hospital feels like a cage to you?
He says. It isn’t a simile. Points at the window: barred. The other window: barred.
He senses the medical student’s disappointment, so he throws him a little bone of crazy. Hearts of oak, he cries, did you go down alive into the homes of death?

When Zumas hints at where these stories might be set, what rings through my head is Neil Young singing, “Everybody seems to wonder what it’s like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.”

In “Thieves and Mapmakers,” Zumas writes about the “Town”:

Although it looked clean on the surface, it was like a river that’s quit running, whose water languishes on the rocks, collecting germs. Because nothing in the Town ever changed shape, hidden viruses were allowed to grow. The rooms of my house stank of sameness…It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, it was a way station of gray streets and brown storefronts and paralyzed faces.

She describes a similar place in “The Everything Hater”: “a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly.”

As we bid farewell to the navigator, let us greet this new, compelling voice. I look forward to reading more of Zumas’s incisive prose, especially the more speculative elements of her work. In particular, I’d be interested to see the alternate/parallel/post-apocalyptic worlds of “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms” developed further, perhaps even into novel-length narratives.

Further Reading

Leni Zumas (photo from Open City's website)

- Shopping for a copy of Farewell Navigator? Order from your local indie bookseller.

- Read Zumas’s story “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” on Open City’s website; you can also read “The Everything Hater” at Five Chapters; “Leopard Arms” at Harp & Altar; “Heart Sockets” at Quarterly West; and “Handfasting” in The Journal.

- On the author’s website, read more fiction by Zumas: “To Greenland,” “An Account of My Death in the Mountains,” and “Diligent Blows.”

- To whet your appetite, here’s a sampling of striking images from Farewell Navigator:
From the title story:

“He hurts himself, sure—blood in ribbons on the cutting board, ropy splashes on the ramekins…”
“I want to answer but my mouth refuses. It makes a little fist on my face.”

From “The Everything Hater”:

“Mom’s face was a punched-out cake.”

“We walk in the glittery cold to the center of town, where ribbons festoon the street lamps and plowed snow hardens on the curbs.”

From “Heart Sockets”:

“His face blown perfect like blue glass animals that cost a thousand dollars to make…”

“I have a talented mind for matching one feeling to another. A caught scarf on the bus seatback, for instance, is the hand on your neck of someone who knows you but when you turn around, nobody’s there.”

“I am leaking heavy onto my shirt, two sopping moons, the mild night a cold sleeve between wet skin and milk-drenched cotton.”

From “Thieves and Mapmakers”:

“Yet he possessed a quality more attractive—to me—than handsomeness: it was his sheer haggardness, the battered-ship’s hull look he wore, as if a lifetime of senseless routines had etched gulleys in his cheeks.”

“All four boys, I noticed, were twitching constantly, glancing around with fretful eyes. Their agitation made me feel closer to them. Their translucent skin, the dried sputum at the corners of their mouths, and the way their shrunken muscles hung as if ready to come off the bone meant they were nothing like the normal people I’d grown up with.”

“Her hair, a dimpled egg, was studded with tiny black bristles.”

“When the sun was up and burning and the guests had cleared away, we settled down on the carpets of the parlor. I dreamed of the Town, of its odors: the first cold day in fall, when all the lingering frowses of heat have left the air and the newly emptied chill is flecked with wood smoke, soft and bitter, the smell of anticipation; and springtime—bright, forgiving air with the hint of unannounced visitors, impending journeys. Of course no visitors ever showed and no journeys were ever taken and the smell would soon retreat, replaced by a dingy warmth. This was why the Town disappointed me so badly: it could never deliver on the promise of its scents.”

From “Waste No Time if This Method Fails”:

“He likes to watch salt dry in bronchial patterns.”

“…but she blinked in a way that reminded him of ocean arachnids who live so many fathoms down their eyes have not reason to grow.”

1909 postcard of Boston Public Library

The Boston Public Library is now accepting applications for its Children’s Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, a little-known but wonderful opportunity for children’s and YA writers. The fellowship, offered to one writer per year, is intended to “provide an emerging children’s writer with the financial and administrative support needed to complete one literary work” and offers a workspace in the library and a $20,000 stipend.

Recipients’ projects may be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, illustration combined with any of the former, or a script; last year’s recipient, Kelly Hourihan, is working on a YA novel.

There is no application fee, and to apply, you must be a U.S. citizen with no more than three previously published works of children’s literature. The Boston Public Library’s webpage has more information about the fellowship and past recipients, as well as full application guidelines in PDF form. The next residency runs from September 1, 2010, to June 1, 2011, and the deadline for application is April 1, 2010.

The Shady Side Review is having a postcard contest. They’re seeking the best poetry or prose of 100 words or less. Winners will have their work published on–what else?–postcards. The submission deadline is March 17, and each entry is $1. From the Editors:

What can you get for a dollar these days?

• A newspaper (but they don’t usually publish fiction unless you’re famous. Are you famous? Maybe your work is already in a newspaper then.)
• A bagel (but unless you carve your poem into the dough, your work does not appear here).
• Eternal fame and glory (this can be achieved by submitting your work that is one hundred words or less to shady side review’s annual (probably) postcard contest).

If you win the grand prize, you’ll receive a cash prize and ten glossy postcards featuring your work…Two runners-up, you can call them second and third place if you prefer, will receive 10 copies of their postcards, but no cash. Sorry. On top of that, yes, it does keep getting better and better, we will be handing out the winners’ postcards at AWP in Denver this year. Think of all that amazing publicity. So what are you waiting for? Submit!

For more information on how and where to submit your work, please see the Shady Side Review’s contest guidelines.

Photograph from My Wings Books - http://www.mywingsbooks.com/coll-terms/edg02_.shtml

Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves.

This act of cutting open pages to read a book has been lost (one imagines the paper knife arrangement wouldn’t go over well with the TSA), and right now, all over the world, people are reading their books on screens and the idea of even opening a cover and turning pages may one day seem odd as well.

This idea of the book as an anachronism may explain the persistence of the deckle edge, which is now created not by the reader with a knife but by leaving one edge of the page untrimmed during the printing and binding process.

I’ll admit I’m not crazy about the deckle edge myself: it makes the pages harder to turn. And when I’m caught up in a great book, even a second or two of fumbling with the page is too long to wait. But I couldn’t agree with C. Max Magee more when he points out that books are objects of beauty, not just information. Those who appreciate that beauty–in the cover, in the deckle edge, in the smell of the paper–may be the ones to save paper books.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that book tours don’t really sell books. Or at least they don’t sell a lot of books in comparison to the amount of time and expense involved. So then why do authors continue to go on them? Well, book tours have ancillary benefits, otherwise publishers wouldn’t still send authors on them. Meeting booksellers makes them more likely to recommend your work, or to look forward to your next book. It gives local media an excuse to talk about you. It gives you a chance to travel the country, catch up with old friends, and show your exes what they missed when they dumped you.

But what if your publisher is an independent press with little to no budget for touring? What if your big name publisher doesn’t think it’s worth sending you out? Plan your own tour.

When my collection of short stories THINGS THAT PASS FOR LOVE was published by OV/Dzanc Books in 2008, they offered me $1000 toward book promotion. I took it on the road (and ended up spending a bit more than that, but I did visit over 17 cities). Here are some helpful tips as you plan your own DIY book tour:

To see Amend’s suggestions–which range from practical to philosophical to humorous–you can read the rest of her essay here.

In addition to Amend’s work, this issue features essays by Stephanie Soileau and Josh Henkin, as well as announcements about the most recent Glimmer Train Prize Winners and upcoming contests. The Bulletin is a free monthly subscription. No adds, no solicitations–just writers on writing. Sign up here.

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah had died. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible.

Maybe it’s also because Barry’s prose felt like it was carved out of stone. Not weighty, but permanent. With a hint of the divine. That crazy Old Testament kind of divinity that’s equal parts kindness and cruelty, lust and humor. Especially humor. Who else could open a collection of stories as Barry did his 1978 masterpiece, Airships, with a passage like this:

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 come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is 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.

For many young writers, this was our first encounter with Barry’s work. His voice hooked you deep. I was in college when this book was pressed upon me and my now brother-in-law, Dean Bakopoulos, by Elwood Reid. This was the late 1990s. Dean and I were undergrads at the University of Michigan, both eager to be writers but still sorting out exactly how to go about the task. Elwood, who was finishing his MFA at the time, took us under his wing to show us the way. For Elwood, who’d once been a college football player, that meant work. Lots of work. And by “work” I mean reading. Barry Hannah. Larry Brown. Rick Bass. Amy Hempl. Mary Gaitskill. The collections piled up.

But there was something about Barry’s work that stood out. An urgency in the prose that punctured your heart. “Water Liars” is a great story, but when I hit the second one in the collection, “Love Too Long,” I was gone.

My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.

For a college kid, Barry bored down through the mantle to the molten core of what it meant to feel. He still does. Typing his words you can feel the anguish and energy. Further down this page, the narrator, nearly beside himself, writes, “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.” It’s an image that makes you wince, but it’s also oddly tender. What it is is honest.

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 Koch, Forrest Anderson, Karen McKinnon, 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 surprised 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.

But I didn’t want my teacher and literary icon to have this impression of my work (I swear, the rest was better). So, later that night, during the evening cocktail hour, I slipped him one of my stories, one which I’d been carrying around for the better part of an hour rolled up in my fist, wrinkled and creased. And when I finally got the nerve to give it to him, I tried hard to assure him that this wasn’t extra work. Nothing I was looking for feedback on. Nothing he even had to read during the conference. Just, well, something I wanted him to have. And I’m sure I must have said something inane like, “I hope you enjoy it.” As if it were some sort of gift. Walking away, I was certain that I had made things worse.

And the next morning, when Barry found me at breakfast, I was more than sure of my mistake. “Here, kid,” he said, handing the story back to me across the table. Without another word, he walked off. Cut to blistered cheeks again. In front of an entire table of your peers, Barry Hannah has just returned the story you gave him the evening before, the story meant to redeem you. “Thanks, but no thanks,” is what you read in this gesture. And in that moment you imagine escaping back to Michigan several days from now–it’s a nice, long trip from Tennessee, one that will give you plenty of highway to replay this moment over and over and over.

Yet when I unrolled my story, he’d scrawled this across the top in loopy script: “I enjoyed greatly. I’m nominating it for Best New American Voices.” Simple. Generous. An unasked for kindness. And I realized that it wasn’t about you in that classroom; for Barry it was about the work.

At the end of his fantastic interview with Barry in Tin House last year, Tom Franklin asked the author how his teaching has changed over the years. Here is Barry’s response:

It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.

It’s impossible for me to behave as if I were thirty-five when I was writing Airships–it’s impossible. And I must say you don’t necessarily gain a lot by age; you sometimes are in danger of becoming the old hack plagiarizing his own former work. That’s probably why the old often bore people, they just say the same damn things over and over, and they just deal in truisms. That’s the mass of America, one truism after another. For instance, the word motherfucker is a truism now. It’s just empty. It used to be an exciting word because it’s the worst thing you can imagine, you know? But now it’s just a weak flat noun.

It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.

Thank you, Barry.

From the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on March 2, 2010:

We are saddened to hear that Barry Hannah, a great friend of the conference, passed away on Monday, March 1. Barry was a member of the fiction faculty at Sewanee in 1999, 2000-2003, and 2006. He visited the conference to read in 2004, 2005, 2007, and he was scheduled to read at this summer’s conference.

One of the finest writers in American letters, Barry Hannah published eight novels—Geronimo Rex (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972—winner of the William Faulkner Prize), Nightwatchmen (Viking, 1974), Ray, The Tennis Handsome (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, 1983, respectively), Boomerang, Never Die (University Press of Mississippi, 1986 and 1990), Hey Jack! (Dutton, 1992), and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove/Atlantic, 2001). His story collections are Airships, Captain Maximus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978 and 1985), Bats out of Hell, and High Lonesome (Grove/Atlantic, 1993 and 1996).

Barry’s readings at Sewanee were always the highlight of the conference, and his openness with all participants spoke to his generosity. We will miss him greatly.

• You can read the New York Times obituary here.
• The Mississippi Review has an interview with Hannah from 1996.
• At Wired for Books, you can hear Hannah read from his stories “Water Liars” and “That’s True”.
• The Oxford Conference for the Book, which begins March 4th, is dedicated to Barry Hannah. Writers such as Tom Franklin and Amy Hempel will discuss his life and work.

Postscript:

Like many writers who’ve been inspired and influenced by Barry’s work, I’ve spent much of the past few days pulling his books off the shelf to reread favorite stories and passages. I’ve been carrying my copy of Airships around with me since Tuesday, like some sort of totem. It’s inscribed with a simple message from Barry: “Yours to hell and back.” Part promise, part confession. It’s a simple line, but it matters. And it reminded me how much Barry cared about the line. Particularly those clean, simple, honest lines: “I’m going to die from love.” Who else could end a story like that and truly mean it?

I think it was the honesty of Barry’s work that drew so many of us to him. And I also think the many memorials and tributes that have poured out since news of his death are a testament to not only his great talent, but also his generosity and his kindness. He had damn high standards, but as long as you were willing to be true to the art you were good in his book.

And so to celebrate Barry’s influence, and also with the hopes of bringing new readers to his fiction, we decided to republish this essay as a feature. We also wanted to take this opportunity to recognize some of the sites that have been paying homage to Hannah this week, as well as those publications that have supported his work for years. Thank you.

• Matthew Simmons from HTML Giant was one of the first to bring news of Barry Hannah’s passing, and he has a wonderful tribute to the author that unfolded as we learned of his death.
• Alec Niedenthal subsequently put together a collection of remembrances for the same site entitled “There are Dry Tiny Horses Running in My Veins: Mourning Barry Hannah,” which includes not only his recollections and those of Michael Bible and Lincoln Michel, but also a selection from this post of mine. Many thanks for that.
• Lincoln Michel has a great round-up of links to work by and about Hananh on The Faster Times.
• One of those pieces that stands out is a wonderful compilation in Vanity Fair by Claire Howorth, which includes remembrances of Hannah by such writers as Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, Amy Hempl, Matt Wieland, and Wells Tower.
• There’s also a great essay on The Rumpus by A.N. Devers about Hannah, grieving, and the memory of our teachers.
• And a wonderful anecdote about idolizing Hannah from Kevin Wilson on his blog.
• Just a few weeks ago Elwood Reid wrote a brief review for Three Guys One Book about how the collection Airships affected him when he read it for the first time. He writes, “Airships didn’t change my life, it rewired my idea of the sentence and what a short story could and should do.”
• To hear Hannah talk about his work and the writing life, you can read Tom Franklin’s 2009 Tin House interview, or Mark Smirnoff’s 2001 interview from The Oxford American.
• Wells Tower also has a beautiful portrait of Hannah and the trip he took with the author to visit Larry Brown’s grave in 2008 for Garden & Gun.
• For more on Hannah’s writing style itself, read “Among Mutinous Helium Bursts Around Saturn: Barry Hannah’s dangerous syntax,” an essay by Jamie Quatro, which appeared in the September 2009 Southern Lit issue of The Oxford American.

• And last, but certainly not least, here is “Water Liars,” the opening story from Barry Hannah’s 1978 collection, Airships (reprinted with permission from Grove Press on the Garden & Gun website).

Of Special Note: Hannah’s influence on American Letters will be celebrated in Oxford at the 17th Annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which begins March 4. The conference had been dedicated to the author’s work and life, and will take place as planned. Scheduled to speak are such writers as Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, John Grisham, Hendrik Hertzberg, Mark Jarman, JoAnne Prichard Morris, Mark Richard, Cynthia Shearer, Wells Tower, and Steve Yates. Here is Richard Howorth’s tribute, which had originally been written to be delivered at the conference. Howorth is the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and a long-time friend of Hannah.

Maybe it’s also because Barry’s prose felt like it was carved out of stone. Not weighty, but permanent. With a hint of the divine. That crazy Old Testament kind of divinity that’s equal parts kindness and cruelty, lust and humor. Especially humor. Who else could open a collection of stories as Barry did his 1978 masterpiece, Airships, with a passage like this:

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 come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is 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.

For many young writers, this was our first encounter with Barry’s work. His voice hooked you deep. I was in college when this book was pressed upon me and my now brother-in-law, Dean Bakopoulos, by Elwood Reid. This was the late 1990s. Dean and I were undergrads at the University of Michigan, both eager to be writers but still sorting out exactly how to go about the task. Elwood, who was finishing his MFA at the time, took us under his wing to show us the way. For Elwood, who’d once been a college football player, that meant work. Lots of work. And by “work” I mean reading. Barry Hannah. Larry Brown. Rick Bass. Alice Munro. The collections piled up.

But there was something about Barry’s work that stood out. An urgency in the prose that punctured your heart. “Water Liars” is a great story, but when I hit the second one in the collection, “Love Too Long,” I was gone.

My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.

For a college kid, Barry bored down through the mantle to the molten core of what it meant to feel. He still does. Typing his words you can feel the anguish and energy. Further down this page, the narrator, nearly beside himself, writes, “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.” It’s an image that makes you wince, but it’s also oddly tender. What it is is honest.

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 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 surprised 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.

But I didn’t want my teacher and literary icon to have this impression of my work (I swear, the rest was better). So, later that night, during the evening cocktail hour, I slipped him one of my stories, one which I’d been carrying around for the better part of an hour rolled up in my fist, wrinkled and creased. And when I finally got the nerve to give it to him, I tried hard to assure him that this wasn’t extra work. Nothing I was looking for feedback on. Nothing he even had to read during the conference. Just, well, something I wanted him to have. And I’m sure I must have said something inane like, “I hope you enjoy it.” As if it were some sort of gift. Walking away, I was certain that I had made things worse.

And the next morning, when Barry found me at breakfast, I was more than sure of my mistake. “Here, kid,” he said, handing the story back to me across the table. Without another word, he walked off. Cut to blistered cheeks again. In front of an entire table of your peers, Barry Hannah has just returned the story you gave him the evening before, the story meant to redeem you. “Thanks, but no thanks,” is what you read in this gesture. And in that moment you imagine escaping back to Michigan several days from now–it’s a nice, long trip from Tennessee, one that will give you plenty of highway to replay this moment over and over and over.

Yet when I unrolled my story, he’d scrawled this across the top in loopy script: “I enjoyed greatly. I’m nominating it for Best New American Voices.” Simple. Generous. An unasked for kindness. And I realized that it wasn’t about you in that classroom; for Barry it was about the work.

At the end of his fantastic interview with Barry in Tin House last year, Tom Franklin asked the author how his teaching has changed over the years. Here is Barry’s response:

It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.

It’s impossible for me to behave as if I were thirty-five when I was writing Airships–it’s impossible. And I must say you don’t necessarily gain a lot by age; you sometimes are in danger of becoming the old hack plagiarizing his own former work. That’s probably why the old often bore people, they just say the same damn things over and over, and they just deal in truisms. That’s the mass of America, one truism after another. For instance, the word motherfucker is a truism now. It’s just empty. It used to be an exciting word because it’s the worst thing you can imagine, you know? But now it’s just a weak flat noun.

It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.

Thank you, Barry.

From the Sewanee Writers’ Conference:

We are saddened to hear that Barry Hannah, a great friend of the conference, passed away on Monday, March 1.  Barry was a member of the fiction faculty at Sewanee in 1999, 2000-2003, and 2006.  He visited the conference to read in 2004, 2005, 2007, and he was scheduled to read at this summer’s conference.

One of the finest writers in American letters, Barry Hannah published eight novels—Geronimo Rex (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972—winner of the William Faulkner Prize), Nightwatchmen (Viking, 1974), Ray, The Tennis Handsome (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, 1983, respectively), Boomerang, Never Die (University Press of Mississippi, 1986 and 1990), Hey Jack! (Dutton, 1992), and Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove/Atlantic, 2001). His story collections are Airships, Captain Maximus (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978 and 1985), Bats out of Hell, and High Lonesome (Grove/Atlantic, 1993 and 1996).

Barry’s readings at Sewanee were always the highlight of the conference, and his openness with all participants spoke to his generosity.  We will miss him greatly.