“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”¹

For nearly a year, Flaubert—“M’sieu Gustave,” to his valet Narcisse, napping under that bell-pull in Croisset—had been hard at work on a novel that would, upon its serial publication in the autumn of 1856 in the journal La Revue de Paris, ignite a firestorm of moral indignation, eventually landing Flaubert (and editor Laurent-Pichat, along with the journal’s printer, Auguste Pillet) in a Paris courtroom, charged with endangering public morality. That novel, Madame Bovary (this essay refers to the Lydia Davis translation, Viking 2010), would become the first masterpiece of so-called “realist” fiction—a label Flaubert himself resisted—in which the author essentially disappears behind what Flaubert called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose.

Emma Bovary, the novel’s putative heroine—or anti-heroine, depending upon one’s sympathies—seduced as much by her own romantic illusions as she is by the callow, calculating Rodolphe Boulanger, strolls arm-in-arm with the reader to the very edge of the abyss, and then over that abyss. Without authorial judgment, without moralizing, in meticulously, beautifully turned prose, Flaubert vividly describes her fall.  “Novelists,” writes the critic James Wood, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” But in 1857, few were thanking Flaubert, least of all Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor who sought to have Madame Bovary banned:

“Who in this book can condemn this woman?” Pinard argued, readily answering himself: “No one.” Admirable though the book was, at least in terms of Flaubert’s considerable artistic talent, Pinard pronounced the author’s apparent lack of morality “execrable,” declaring: “Monsieur Flaubert can embellish his paintings with all the resources of art but with none of its caution; there is in this work no gauze, no veils—it shows nature in the raw.”

And how exactly did Flaubert go about his dangerous art in Madame Bovary? What does “nature in the raw” even look like, as far as fiction is concerned? Take this passage, fairly early in the novel, in which Emma and her husband Charles are invited to a ball at the opulent château of the Marquis d’Andervilliers, in La Vaubyessard:

It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another : “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high on a plump calf.

Here we have the subtlest of seductions, without gauze or veils. To Emma, through whose eyes we witness this scene, and into whom Flaubert has all but vanished, it is all so romantic, so beguiling. The lofty entrance hall, echoing like a church, and those serious, smiling, “decorated” men standing around the green-clothed billiards table, making their shots. And of course the decorated men hanging on the wall, the noble dead, burnished in their martial (and one suspects amorous) triumphs by the light from the lamps hanging over the billiards table. This is Flaubert at his soft-pedaled best, “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” as he famously put it in a letter in 1852, allowing each deliberately chosen detail to speak for itself, without comment. Where once these decorated men might have hacked at each other with swords, thus earning themselves some measure of glory (an attenuated, rather silly glory, we can almost hear Flaubert murmuring), now they can only knock little ivory balls around a billiards table. Later, as dawn approaches, with the music of the dance “still humming in her ears,” Emma stands looking up at the windows of the château, imagining the guests in their rooms. “She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows, one soon finds, are a returning motif in Madame Bovary; and no wonder, since the novel is itself a window, clear as glass, into Emma Bovary’s soul.

It was this very idea of fiction as a crystal clear window that Pinard was railing against. By what moral compass was the reader to navigate the world illuminated by this novel and its “execrable” creator? Up until the publication of Madame Bovary, authors were more than happy to be that compass. But not Flaubert, apparently. Pinard was not only arguing against this one novel but against the extraordinary vanishing act Flaubert had performed. This is the spring Flaubert in no small way ushered in. This is his gift to us.

*

But had Flaubert really disappeared? How exactly can an author be both, as Flaubert himself put it, present everywhere and visible nowhere in fiction?

In How Fiction Works, James Wood counters the occasionally heard criticism that realism, as form, is not really so realistic after all, contriving as it does to compose what is and always has been a rather messy world into a daisy-chain of scenes which invariably (one hopes) build, through conflict and rising action, to a moment of epiphany or change. “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another.  The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and green-clothed writing table and gilded Buddha, and yes, even that little porcelain frog inkwell, looking out past the tulip tree and yew hedges to the Seine. “I have sketched, botched, slogged, groped,” Flaubert had written with no small amount of frustration in 1852. “Oh, what a rascally thing style is. I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is. I’m trying to be as buttoned-up in it as I was unbuttoned in the others and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent.” Absent but nonetheless present everywhere, like God and the Devil, in the details.

And this is precisely how Flaubert could be both present and nowhere at once in that billiards room with Emma Bovary—in the very details he’s given us. Again, these details aren’t merely photographic; they’re not a simple accretion of seemingly random props present only to fill a scene: footsteps and voices in a marble-flagged entrance hall, a billiards table, the light-burnished portraits fading into shadow. I’m talking about fiction at its best now, fiction which is artistically capable of keeping any number of plates spinning in the air. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and in much of the finest literature that has followed, from Chekhov to Babel, Welty to Bellows to Munro, those details we encounter in scene are details the author has scrupulously and deliberately chosen (or instinctively, blessedly stumbled upon) that go beyond the mere surface of things. Yes, they paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under that ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.

Take this marvelous passage from John Banville’s novel, The Infinities, in which young Adam Godley is waiting for a train to deliver a somewhat unwelcomed guest:

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat. Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

Notice how quietly Banville introduces a note of unease into this sunlit idyll with that rotten-egg “smell of kitchen gas.” It’s a lovely detail, unexpected and strange, and delicately rich with menace. Immediately Adam looks around, as if knocked slightly off balance, and sees everything is as it should be, as it’s always been, “so far as he can see.” In other words, the visible surface of the morning is still intact. The old iron-edged roof, the pots of geraniums and varnished benches, that painted hand pointing to the bathrooms. But where is everyone? Unnerved, Adam paces, then sits on one of the sticky benches to wait. The dead grass “ticks in the heat”—another marvelous, sly tightening of the screw of disquiet, as is the ragged crow down on the tracks, “looking for something” it does not find. A shift has occurred, as surely as if a cloud had crossed over the sun. “The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlight surface of the day…” and abruptly gets up to pace again, “more agitatedly this time.”

With its rigorous, poetic attention to rhythm and sound, it’s a passage one could well imagine James Joyce or even Flaubert writing, and yet Banville’s book was published in 2010. Call it what you will—realism or lifeness, or simply the artist quietly, attentively at work, whispering in our ear: we are there with Adam, waiting uneasily on that hot, sun-beaten platform, with the faint smell of kitchen gas in the shimmering air and the dry grass ticking beyond the tracks.

Another example of this attentiveness to telling detail is Pat Barker’s deeply affecting 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, in which we witness the death of the British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the final months of the First World War while trying to cross a canal under machine gun fire. Here, only moments after the battle, we come upon the terrible scene:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps toward them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

It is a scene Barker renders with both pathos and restraint, with this image of the dead sprawled along the canal after the storm has passed, their “limbs not yet decently arranged.” These young men have quite literally been left behind, not only by the battle still raging in the distance but by time itself. Already, one senses, the world is moving on. The rising sun, creeping near, discovers them, just as we have discovered them. Briefly, in that rosy glow that rises on the hands and necks and faces of these young men who in death have suddenly ceased to be themselves and are now simply the scattered, anonymous dead—in this glow we see the last flickering echo of life. The shaft of sunlight lingers on them, just as our eye might for a moment linger over a black-and-white war photograph in a book, before turning to the next page. It is not only Wilfred Owen then who has been effaced here by this Flaubertian-smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose. Barker too has vanished, or at least faded, right before our eyes.

*

Within a year of Flaubert’s death in 1879, Croisset was gone. The white-walled villa where he had written Madame Bovary, which for decades had served Flaubert so well as an island of domestic tranquility and peace, was sold to a consortium of investors and promptly gutted to the rafters. In its place they erected an enormous red-brick distillery, to which barges regularly delivered loads of coal and grain, docking down by the water’s edge. Where once eel fisherman had cast their nets, now a huge factory pipe poured an endless stream of reeking white foamy runoff into the river, while tall brick stacks, lit by the ugly light of softly hissing gas lanterns, spewed smoke into the air round the clock. Gone was the garden with its flower beds and yew hedges and glorious tulip tree, where M’sieu Gustave, when he was not laboring away at his desk upstairs, was often seen by the neighborhood children lounging on sunny afternoons, contentedly smoking his pipe. Years later, one of those children, now grown to adulthood, remembered that time at Croisset:

For me, he was a being like no other, exotic and fantastic, a mysterious personality whom I regarded in a confusion of wonder and respect. I never believed he was Norman. He was Persian or Turkish, Chinese or Hindu, I couldn’t decide which, but for sure he came from some distant place and had a distinctive nature. The fabulous accoutrements made me think he might well be a prince… When my nanny wanted to treat me, she’d walk me past his front gate, where I’d gaze at him smoking his pipe, slouched in a large armchair. I’ll always remember with tender emotion his pink and white striped culottes and his house robes, the floral design of which were pure poetry.

In life and in fiction, detail is everything.

*

From his study earlier, Flaubert had watched his greyhound Julio swim out to greet the boatman paddling past. A glittering golden-silver thread sketched itself on the brown river behind the dog as the slow current carried them along, and where the boatman’s oars dashed the water’s calm surface, the sunlight seemed to shatter like little glass globes. Standing there in his flowered Bokharan robe, a gift from his good friend Turgenev, with the mess of his great, unruly manuscript behind him on the green-clothed table—Bouvard et Pécuchet, on which he had labored now for three long years and saw no end to—Flaubert had felt the bones in his right hand throbbing, a deep smoldering ache that, along with the rheumatism in his knees and the pain in his swollen feet, rarely went away these days. Along with the pills Flaubert took for epilepsy and gout and his wretched, rotting teeth, his physician Fortin had prescribed a daily walk, but it was the garden with its weedy flower beds that had finally drawn him away from his writing this afternoon. Crouching painfully now, he pulled clump after clump of spiky dandelion. If only old Narcisse were here to help. But Narcisse, half blind with age, had returned to the bosom of his family years ago. Gone too was Flaubert’s mother, buried in Rouen, and Uncle Parain, and dear Liline, along with her English governess. A bumble bee, emerging from the soft purple throat of a lily, its black legs furred with pollen, lit for a second on the long sleeve of his robe, circled the bright red embroidered flower there, then buzzed away. Asleep on the warm flagstones, Julio’s paws twitched, a little ripple flowing up and down the muscles of his slender legs. The greyhound was dreaming, but of what? That boatman perhaps, his round red face, the oars creaking on the gunnels. What a little fool you are! Go back! Swim home before you drown! The long sun-emblazoned thread unfurling behind Julio as he swam toward shore. His beating heart.

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The second story, on being grateful for what you have, concerned the December in the late 1930s when my mother and her six siblings got off the school bus to find that their farmhouse had burned to the ground. My grandmother stood there by the smoldering foundation holding the only things she managed to grab as she ran out—the family Bible and two dresses on hangers. Everything else was lost, including their savings; in those early post-Depression years, my grandfather did not believe in banks. The neighboring families took them in by twos and threes that winter and (she always presented this as a fitting conclusion) gave them gifts of new Christmas ornaments.

The third wasn’t really a story but, rather, ingredients toward one, which I combined and recombined—a collection of mementos from my mother’s high school years. Her senior yearbook, with its twenty graduates—all those smooth, expectant faces gazing out and up toward a future that even in my childhood, of course, had long since settled into circumscribed lives centered around coal mines and factories. My mother’s radiant photograph captioned in iambic tetrameter: “She leaves a string of broken hearts.” And all the little mementos and keepsakes she kept in a small cedar jewelry box, its neat brass clasp opening with a whiff of past-preserved: twin black Scottie magnets which seemed ever to repel each other, a broken gold watch whose pinching wristband seemed itself a reproach to my encroachment.

What I was drawn to in these stories were all the wrong things. The dark pressured suspense of gypsies in the woods, molten mounds of gold and silver in the snow and charred timbers. The perplexing symbols of those two dresses or Christmas ornaments decorating loss (for years I rehearsed what I’d rescue if our house caught on fire). Souvenirs as synecdoche. Behind it all, the reminder of the utter unknowability of someone I was with every day, the vastness of the absences in a family’s past. The primary lesson, I suppose, was what reticence can teach, or at least coax forth—how we construct another’s life to the extent we can from remnants and fragments, much as I used to try to piece into a whole understanding my mother’s countless letter drafts to her own mother from the scraps in her wastebasket, revised until she’d written out anything that might cause any worry, revised until they said almost nothing at all. Torn in half, torn in half again. We are all fine here, she’d write in her tidy run-ons, the weather is unusually warm. Or sometimes just her full name, written over and over down the page. If, as Eudora Welty learned in her own childhood, one secret is often offered up in place of another, in my own family—which was loving and secure but also securely contained, each of us keeping our own counsel—I was another degree removed from those secrets, trying to assemble a story from whatever images and objects were offered or found or forgotten.

∞

My husband, Matthew Fontaine Maury Gildea, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, because his parents drove there from Charlottesville for their honeymoon and decided to stay. Both my husband’s parents were Virginians, centuries back on his mother’s side. He was descended from French Huguenots, the Fontaines and the Maurys, who had come to Virginia in early 1700s. We have John Fontaine’s memoir, written between 1710 and 1719, on our shelves, there are plaques honoring his forebears on the walls of the Huguenot church in Charleston, and outside Charlottesville you can still see the marker on the site of the boarding school run by Fontaine’s grandson, the Reverend James Maury, where the promising and privileged boys he taught included Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. History weights my husband’s very name, the first Matthew Fontaine Maury—Reverend Maury’s grandson— being “the Pathfinder of the Seas,” the author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first American to systematically chart wind and ocean currents. In my own family, I knew the names of my great-grandparents—and that’s the edge of my map; anything prior to that becomes a dissolve, a blank page, terra incognita. When my mother told me the fire story, I longed to look into that rescued Bible; I felt sure it was the repository of what would otherwise be lost, and perhaps now indeed has been.

∞

I was born in Hocking County, Ohio, where both of my parents had been born and raised, my mother in New Straitsville and my father in Enterprise, but we lived during my early childhood in a larger town called Logan. My memory of southern Ohio has a noirish pall over it, all semi-darkened rooms and parlor silence; outside, a perpetual light rain scented with coal, cinders always crunching underfoot. When I was seven, the auto-parts factory where my father was working closed down, so he and his fellow workers drove all around Ohio together looking for work. My father was eventually hired at the Ford plant in Sandusky, by Lake Erie, and so we moved four hours north to our new home in Clyde, about an hour south of Toledo. The distance from family was significant for my parents; we returned to Logan often on weekend trips. I recall that for a while, when we’d drive south to visit my grandparents, I’d feel excited, alert, as, just past Columbus, we crossed the terminal moraine—the line where the glaciers had stopped and the land shifted dramatically from dead flat to rolling hills. Over time that too receded, and instead of feeling I was returning to the place I was from, I began to feel that I was from nowhere at all. And that didn’t trouble me; it kept every road open.

∞

So it was that I grew up in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown, Clyde, Ohio, which had served as the model for his seminal collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. In the front matter of the collection, there’s a map which is still quite true to the town’s layout, if skewed in scale, a kind of through-the-looking-glass glimpse. I used to turn just to that map, that visible connection with a place I walked every day—Main Street and the alley behind, Buckeye Street (eventually my family’s own address), Waterworks Pond—sensing some kind of larger resonance just by its transmutation, and often just transparent translation, into tales. Winesburg’s “Hern’s Grocery” was a thinly-disguised Hurd’s, the small grocery on Main Street where my mother sent me in the summertime to buy bread and milk. Herman Hurd had been Anderson’s boyhood friend; as Herman died in 1963, before we moved north, the shopkeeper I remember must have been his brother, Hiram. Herman’s son Thaddeus, an architect, became the town historian, the founder of the Clyde Heritage League, and a highly respected if, to me, rather forbidding figure (my memory substitutes photos of Ezra Pound).

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus. [Above image courtesy the Sherwood Anderson Foundation]

Instead, it became, as the city-limits signs still proclaim, America’s famous small town. If Clyde in itself wasn’t very distinctive—a single block of downtown with three stoplights, the fathers all working at Whirlpool or Ford or GM, the mothers at home endlessly making their ends meet—at least it could take pride in imagining itself as representative or definitive, a model, an emblem. Not that the townspeople generally were aware of Anderson’s book during the time I was growing up there, or the acute depiction of their town in it, its sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of largely inarticulate, isolated lives marked by stunted ambitions, limited resources, thwarted desires. Anderson, in later years, recalled the reception of the book as hostile: “The people of the actual Winesburg protested. They declared the book immoral….” He writes of New Englanders burning copies outside of their town library, just as I’ve heard was done in 1919 in Clyde. Walter Rideout makes a persuasive case for Anderson’s revisionist account as a defensive reaction “to the erosion of the fame Winesburg had helped to bring him”; the reviews, as well as the letters he received around the time of publication, were actually predominantly positive. But what I knew firsthand in the 60s and 70s was that “Winesburg” was largely unchanged, and that Anderson, in his hometown, was unknown.

Anderson himself wasn’t a presence for me until I was twelve or so. My father was then, and remains, a champion reader—voracious and speedy, and not so much indiscriminate in his tastes as democratic. He was a regular patron at the library, where he favored hefty historical novels (I remember him dispatching Herman Wouk or R. F. Delderfield doorstops in no time), but he also would buy paperbacks by the pound in the nearby town of Fremont—John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard—and would read through a grocery bag of them each week at the Ford plant where he worked a brass tumbler at twenty-minute intervals. I had settled on writing as my calling by the time I was eleven, and it was around that time that he bought a college literature text at a garage sale for me for a dime. Red cloth binding and about four inches thick, it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “Death in the Woods.” My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

∞

In the Clyde Public Library, an oil portrait of Sherwood Anderson, a broadstroked rendering in umber and ochre based on a 1923 Stieglitz photograph, hangs over the fireplace in its rotunda reading room. I spent quite a bit of time reading opposite that painting while I was growing up. And then in summers when I was in college, I was employed at the library as a page. W.S. Merwin has written of those “angels” which all burgeoning writers need to encounter along the way, the teachers and kindly adults who take an interest at critical moments, who tend a passion with their direction and respect. For me, that angel was Marjorie Buck, the head librarian during my school years. She spoke softly and always very precisely, and had both a librarian’s thin-lipped primness as well as a generous and listening deference. She steered me early on from the YA books toward Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and to Frost and T.S. Eliot; she allowed me to borrow books that didn’t circulate, including the full four feet of the Harvard Classics and a beautiful gilt-edged, leather-bound set of Conrad that was kept in a locked cabinet in the basement. In a town full of recreational readers checking out the same handful of mysteries and bestsellers over and over, she would quote Shirley Jackson, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh. She confided to me when I started working there that for years she had kept the subscription to Poetry magazine active solely for me—no one else had ever checked it out.

Marjorie was also unlike most women in town in that she had gone to college, and, as her husband was from Germany, had traveled widely in Europe. She told me a story once that I think Anderson would have enjoyed: at a meeting of the Clyde Garden Club everyone was asked to write down on a slip of paper the place where they would “most like to live in the entire world.” Marjorie said that was a difficult decision for her (Paris? Florence?), but she ultimately, loyally, decided on Stuttgart, where her husband had grown up. She then collected the slips of paper and read them aloud, and was startled to see that she was the only one in the room who hadn’t written down Clyde, Ohio. “Imagine,” she said to me, her smile both gently sympathetic and genuinely baffled. Imagine.

∞

Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story, published in 1924, was his first of three overtly autobiographical works; he also published Tar: A Midwest Childhood, a semi-fictional account, in 1926, and his Memoirs. Really, all of Anderson’s autobiographical writings could come under the heading of “semi-fictional”—Anderson was by nature an embellisher, a teller of tales—he revised fact or fiction by repeating it aloud, retooling the narrative toward better effect with each new listener. But the basic players in his own story were these: the hardworking, gaunt, self-sacrificing mother who dies young; the ne’er-do-well footloose yarn-spinner musician father; the meager, hardscrabble childhood; the romantic, dreamy, misfit siblings; and young industrious Sherwood—“Jobby,” the go-getter whose own silver-tongued talent leads to success in advertising and business and a profitable marriage, but mires him in an empty life which he then dramatically abandons for art. His exit from the paint company he owned near Elyria, Ohio in November, 1912 was one such moment that grew in the retelling—the dramatic departure from the business world, the refusal to be a “mere peddler of words,” as Kate Swift will later warn George Willard in Winesburg from becoming.

The event does have firm basis in fact. Anderson had already written his apprentice novels Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, and the stress of his strained marriage and family life, and immersion in work that felt dishonest to him were all increasingly taking their toll. He dictated a letter, then wrote a cryptic note to his wife saying, “There is a bridge over a river with some cross-ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right.” He walked out of the building, and turned up in Cleveland four days later. The story he made of this psychological crisis was that it marked his immediate departure for the writing life. Of course, it wasn’t that clean a break—it took about three more years for him to head to Chicago and fully embark on a writer’s life, and even then he had to return to advertising occasionally. But metaphorically, certainly, it was a division line, his own terminal moraine, a gesture that was more than telling. In recasting that gesture as a poem, I tried to imagine the missing days in that fugue state, while letting him tell his story the way he had parsed it out through his Winesburg characters. My own orienting insertion was my grandmother’s Logan farmhouse, whose roof had a great W N spelled out in slate shingles—the mark of its builder, William North, my father told me. I wondered as a child what person would ever dare leave so large a signature.

∞

What drew me from the start to Anderson’s fiction was his plain speech; his effort to honor, give name and voice to, unacknowledged lives; the poetry he recognized in the commonplace: “There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.” Anderson’s work derives from the oral storytelling tradition, but what made it distinctive, what makes it—at its best—riveting still, were its lyrical modernist undercurrents and its psychological acuities: the curtailed, halting, pulsing rhythms of speech and what those currents carry; what is revealed through what we suppress or what is generated between what we juxtapose—what simple words and their colors can convey and what rises out of language’s failure. (“It had the appearance of fumbling,” Faulkner wrote, “but actually it wasn’t. It was hunting, seeking.”) His voice was as familiar as a relative’s to me: those dovetailings of naivete and down-home turns of phrase and exaggeration’s swagger, laid over a solid foundation of humility, compassion, decency—in stories marked by the struggle between silence and expression, ineffectuality and control, desire and denial. His prose strives toward a purity—as Faulkner said, “The exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude, whatever you like”:

His was not the power and rush of Melville, who was his grandfather, nor the lusty humor for living of Twain, who was his father, he had nothing of the heavy-handed disregard for nuances of his older brother, Dreiser. His was that fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity, to milk them both dry, to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.

For all these kinships I felt, I discovered early on that what I didn’t share with Anderson was a need to invent myself through story. My impulse rather was to seek out others’ stories in my own—an inclination toward essence rather than elaboration, toward metaphor more than description, suggestion rather than narration. Which is not to say that Anderson didn’t also incline toward poetry: he did publish three books of Whitmanesque verse. But Anderson, like Faulkner, wrote his best poetry within his prose. “It is a job for a poet”; “It needs the poet there,” he wrote in “Hands.” Such was the case throughout his fiction. His unsaids and untolds were what spoke to me most strongly, how a poet’s tools operated beneath those passive (“it needs”) gropings for “truths.”

∞

I’ve given this essay the title “A Story Teller’s Story,” and I’ve referred mostly to Winesburg, but the destination of the journey is “Death in the Woods,” the first story by Anderson that I read, and the one to which I’ve returned most often. It appeared initially in a magazine in 1916—so, written around the time he was writing the Winesburg stories—then was related again in Tar in 1926, and then was included in Death in the Woods and Other Stories, in 1933. It’s set quite clearly, given the placenames, in Clyde. The story, in first person, narrates the life of a woman named Mrs. Grimes, once a servant girl but now an old woman who lives on a farm with her abusive husband and son. On her way back from town where she’s gone to buy food for the men and the livestock, she freezes to death, and a pack of wild dogs make a kind of ritual circle around her body. The narrator lets us know then that he observed this death as a boy, with his brother. Tells how the brother related the story when they get home, of his dissatisfaction with the brother’s account. The story is his effort to do the story justice:

The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.…
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

It’s fascinating to compare this version with the one that appeared five years earlier, though Anderson continued to revise it, repeatedly, after its appearance in 1933. What he appends to the 1933 version is his sense of the inadequacy of the story he’s just told: “I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.” If that sense of distance between the story I need to tell and the story I’m able to tell called to me at the earliest stage of my apprenticeship, it does so no less now. The restless effort to honor a life by piecing together its facts and remnants (like torn letter drafts, isolated keepsakes) and sketching the boundaries of its mystery, the desire to give voice to that life, the recognition that what’s unknowable and elusive might be conjured in the effort—those were ambitions I recognized and admired.

Death in the Woods

The story is about the storyteller,
about getting the telling right.

The narrator is recalling the winter
he and his brother, just boys, found a woman

frozen to death in the woods.
She’s been made old before her time

by a hard life, hard men. She’s beautiful
in death, of course. Her clothes worried

from her body by a pack of dogs
that have circled her dying, left an iced zero

around her in the clearing. It’s that circle
in the story that always gives me solace,

the drumbeat of that path, the dogs running
nose to tail. And the boy, now a man,

can’t stop telling this story. He invents a life
for the woman in an effort toward honor,

he erases it and starts again because
to be done with it is a disservice. The point

of the story is to keep her cold mystery,
keep that circle drawn around her

higher and higher, a glass wall, keep everyone
from getting any closer.

(Section 4 of “In the Pines,” Fimbul-Winter 74-75)

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine. A print of that Stieglitz photograph, the one which was the basis of the painting presiding over the reading room in the Clyde Library, was the first picture I hung when I moved into my Warren Wilson College office. Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.” And if place, as Welty says, is our source of inspiration and knowledge, if a writer’s honesty begins there, she also allows, “You can equally be true to an impression of place.” That impression, for me, has now been shaped by Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and North Carolina, as well as Ohio, and it’s been informed over the years by so many other writers. If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became, as it did for George Willard, a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.

Further Links and Resources

The brief volume’s slim spine almost disappeared between bulkier neighbors. On the cover, three brush-stroked birds skim a cresting wave; a few more lines suggest a fringe of evergreens straggling down a jagged cliff into the surf.

I opened the frail paperback. Across the flyleaf, my name and childhood address staggered in block letters. Tucked inside was a sheaf of folded wide-ruled notebook paper: my youngest daughter’s third-grade homework from a dozen years ago, when she read my heirloom copy. Now, I began again to re-read Buck’s tale of Jiya, the lone survivor of his family after another Japanese tsunami.

Warned by a “strange fiery dawn,” Jiya’s father insists his youngest child leave the rest of the family on the beach for safety on the mountainside. Jiya takes shelter with his friend Kino’s family on their farm, and the boys witness the tsunami’s terrible beauty:

The purple rim of the ocean seemed to lift and rise against clouds…With a great sucking sigh the wave swept back…dragging everything with it, trees and stones and houses…the beach was as clean of houses as if no human beings had ever lived there.

Devastated by grief, Jiya is fostered by Kino’s family. Kino cannot imagine how his friend will ever be happy again, but Kino’s father promises that “life is always stronger than death.” Time passes, “split in two parts by the big wave.” Jiya grows up farming beside his friend. He falls in love with Kino’s sister, Setsu. “Happiness began to live in him secretly, hidden inside him.” However, when Jiya sees people re-building the fishing village, he becomes restless and announces his need to return to the seaside. Kino’s father supports his intention and pays him wages for farming. Jiya buys a boat, strings nets, and builds a house on the shore for himself and his bride Setsu. The house is a copy of his childhood home, except for one innovation: windows facing the sea. “I have opened my house to the ocean,” he tells Kino on the last page. “If ever the big wave comes back, I shall be ready. I face it. I am not afraid.” Although Kino fears for his friend on the beach, his father reminds him no one is safe anywhere and says, “To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

The Big Wave drew on Buck’s recollections of a sojourn on the Japanese coast. In 1927, she and her husband – both professors at the University of Nanking – fled China to escape the violence between the Nationalists and the Communists.  They settled in relative safety on the slopes of a volcano in Unzen, Japan. While there, she witnessed a tsunami sweep away the fishing village below, learned of prior tidal disasters in the community over the centuries, and watched the villagers rebuild as before, on the same beach. Buck explains in her introduction to my 1962 Scholastic Books edition that she wrote the story shortly after World War II, because children everywhere had learned that “death comes even to the young.” She wrote it to help children learn to “live in the presence of death, as we all do, young and old.”

The book arrived on my fourth grade desk in my monthly book order. How had I chosen it from the Scholastic Book Services flier?  It was likely that my mother, a primary school teacher, knew of the book, a winner of The Child Study Association Children’s Book Award. I don’t recall her prompting me to select it, though later she stockpiled multiple copies of the same fifty-cent Scholastic reprint as a sympathy gift for students or friends suffering a loss.

As it happened, the book fell into my hands just when I needed it most: in the autumn of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That weekend in October 1962 felt ominous in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Despite the blue of the fall sky and the golden leaves of tulip poplars, I felt a shivery sense of threat. Some of my friends’ families left town, but we remained at home. I retreated to my bedroom and lost myself in my new book and the familiar comfort of reading: inhaling the aroma of cheap paper and ink, turning the rough pages.

Buck’s description of the thatched houses on the beach – “frail wooden houses the big wave could lift like toys and crush and throw away” – particularly resonated with me, as I hid from Castro up in my bedroom under the eaves. That afternoon, my own home also felt flimsy, frail, and under threat.

Our house was a contemporary modular design, a franchised kit house called a Techbuilt designed by Karl Koch, an architect inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and, like Wright, by Japanese architecture.  Floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors unified the interior with the natural space outside. No attic, no basement, no place for a fallout shelter. No place to hide. Our house was as open as the house Jiya built on the beach with big windows facing the sea. And my parents’ house, like Jiya’s, was built by survivors to prove that life is stronger than death.

West Hill Drive (1999)

Growing up in Illinois, my parents had never seen a dwelling like a Techbuilt. As newlyweds, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so my father could attend graduate school on the G.I. bill. They shared a small flat with a dour elderly woman before moving to the relative luxury of an attic apartment above the school where my mother taught. Then they visited friends renting a Techbuilt in Lincoln. They fell in love with the airy, open-plan house.

After my father finished school, they moved to junior faculty housing on the campus of Haverford College. I arrived, and my brother, Hugh, followed eighteen months later. We might have grown up as faculty kids, in a rambling Victorian on College Circle. But, when I was three, my brother died. Hugh’s death – though I cannot recall it – was the transforming event of our lives, the big wave demarcating our “Before” and “After.” I grew up in a family defined by the unspoken understanding that life is precious, and provisional.

We moved to Bethesda, Maryland where my father had accepted a job offer at the National Institute of Mental Health. Barely three months after losing Hugh, my mother was pregnant again, and she and my father were preparing to construct their own Techbuilt.

I cannot remember the hours they spent dreaming that house into existence, playing with a three-dimensional planning kit my father designed, so they might juggle modular room-blocks in various patterns and configurations. Now, I marvel at the bravery required to invest in the future with a pregnancy, a move, a new house, a new job – all so soon after losing Hugh.

My mother would say they did it because you must. Like Kino’s father, she believed that life is stronger than death.  Now, when I think of her giving The Big Wave to bereaved friends and students, I wonder if she knew and empathized with of Buck’s own maternal history: the author’s biological daughter profoundly disabled due to phenylketonuria, seven adopted children, activism on behalf of orphans considered unwanted. My second brother, Don, was born in January, 1957. All children are prized, but Hugh’s death rendered Don’s life even more precious to my parents. As Kino’s father says, “Every day of life is more valuable now than it was before the storm.”

My parents planned, broke ground, and built their house after Hugh’s death in the manner of all survivors: out of necessity, denial, and hope. Like Jiya, they put windows in their house – a sheer skin of glass the architect intended to “provide bright sunlit rooms…bringing in the whole outdoors.” We moved into the new house in April for my mother’s thirty-third birthday. She remembered being so happy she could not sleep. Even after many memories departed her in the fog of dementia later, she remembered the white blossoms of the native dogwood tree shining beyond the curtain-less expanse of glass.

Weeping Cherry / photo credit foliosus

Those sheer glass walls might have felt insubstantial to me that weekend in October 1962, but my parents loved the open house and its wooded setting. They sited the house with respect to the sloping lot in a forest of pine, tulip poplar, dogwood and beech. Even as parsimonious children of the depression, they splurged and hired a landscape architect. Lester Collins had studied in the Far East and designed according to ancient Japanese principles with reverence for topography and symmetric balance. For a child the best feature of Collins’s design was not the moss garden nor the patio’s expanse of blue-gray gravel, but his meandering circuit of irregular wood-chip paths through the trees. My parents worked hard to implement his vision: spreading wood chips and gravel, transplanting and encouraging native flora. They planted bulbs every fall in the early years to multiply, naturalize and eventually carpet the woods with snowdrops, crocus, wood anemones, scilla, and daffodils.

Earlier in that October week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father had received a mail-order treasure: a bushel of daffodil bulbs from Holland. He summoned me outside for yard work on that brilliant, ominous fall day. With typical resolve and common sense, he intentionally brought me out into the world. Like Kino’s father, mine would have said, if he were more of a talker – “To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is.”

Many years later, my father described planting those bulbs as an “exercise in suburban defiance” and claimed with his trademark wry humor that the bulbs had indeed proved good deterrents. “No missiles yet,” he said.

No missiles yet, but house and woods and flowers have vanished. When my parents moved from their beloved Techbuilt on the eve of my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday – a departure necessitated by the gathering storm of her dementia – the daffodils were in bloom. I gathered armloads. The new owners never missed the stolen flowers; the white dogwood bathed in moonlight never kept them awake. They never even slept in the house before smashing it, shattering the windows, bulldozing the acre of trees and flowers to build their own dream mini-mansion surrounded by sod and asphalt.

Although only bricks and mortar and the flowering woods were lost, I grieve for the house. No missiles, no tsunami, just the tedious work of a bulldozer; the commonplace destruction of one house so another can take its place. In comparison, how unimaginable the grief wrought by the big wave which swallowed Jiya’s family and village, or the March 2011 tsunami.

Aerial view of the Fukushima I plant area in 1975, showing sea walls and completed reactors via National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs)

The March tsunami drowned twenty thousand, cracked the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and triggered a continuing, insidious wave of devastation. Six months after the tsunami, Prime Minister Naoto Kan bowed and announced his resignation amidst the widening tide of nuclear contamination discovered in crops, fish and beef far beyond Fukushima Daichi’s immediate locale. Now, despite the invisible and uncertain threat, evacuees are returning to the region just outside the no-entry radius; perhaps needing to jump-start life despite lingering uncertainty, residual danger. Schools in Fukushima scrape the surface layer of contaminated soil away and store it in plastic-lined pits: an inadequate solution. Children play there again. No one knows the long term effects of playing on the tainted ground.

I can’t stop thinking about how the destructive impact of this most recent tsunami has not yet ended. After every tsunami the threat of recurrence remains; as Kino’s father said, “On any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame.” But after the March tsunami, an active danger persists – radiation. Radioactive cesium may persist for three hundred years, bound to earth, in the silt in water.

But the children go back to the playground. We must let them play, Pearl S. Buck and my mother might say, even when the world is ruined and dangerous. My brother Hugh’s memorial at Haverford is a sandbox beneath a gnarled Osage orange tree. Children dig in the sand and clamber on the tree where we once played.

Before returning my shabby paperback copy of The Big Wave to the shelf, I read my daughter’s homework penciled in her careful beginner cursive a dozen years ago. She was nine, about my age at first reading, and Jiya’s and Kino’s age when the big wave struck. She wrote:

Ellen at Home (1962)

When Kino’s father says “we love life because we live in danger” he means they love life because they will not always have it. Also that they will not be able to enjoy life when they are dead…I agree with Kino’s father because they will not live forever.

Planting bulbs, building houses are both acts of creative defiance; gestures we make, knowing we can’t live forever. Writing is the ultimate act of creative defiance. I think of Pearl S. Buck on the slopes of a volcano, writing a story of loss and survival. Her voice lives on in her story of resilience and re-creation and will long outlast my fragile copy of The Big Wave.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read more about architect Carl Koch and his Techbuilt homes in a 2010 article on the Dwell Website.
• Read more about Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department Website.

Saint Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Editor’s Note: We continue this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminar retrospective with work by Molly Antopol and Lee Romer Kaplan. Read Part I here, featuring writing by John Struloeff, Jane E. Martin, and Michael Hinken.

The Messiness of Translation: A Conversation with Miroslav Penkov

by Molly Antopol

Molly Antopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

During our time together on the Black Sea, in the gorgeous seaside town of Sozopol we spent a good deal of time discussing issues of translation. Because of Bulgaria’s relatively small market, and tiny percentage of their writers being published in English, it’s a topic that resonates for Bulgarian writers on a very practical level. The subject really came to a head for me when the group returned from Sozopol to Sofia. It was there, during a roundtable discussion about “The Future of Translation,” that I encountered Miroslav Penkov, whose stories I had already enjoyed in a number of American journals.

Penkov was born in 1982 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and arrived in America in 2001, where he entered the University of Arkansas, earning a BA in Psychology, followed by an MFA in fiction. His debut story collection, East of the West: A Country in Stories, has recently been published in the U.S.US by FSG, as well as in translation in ten other countries. In Bulgaria, his own translation of the stories will soon be published by Ciela, under the title “На изток от запада.”

After spending a week in Sozopol thinking and talking so much about Bulgarian literature and translation, Penkov put flesh on the bones by describing what it was like to write a book about Bulgaria in English—and then to translate it into his native language himself.

"Future of Translation" panel, Sofia. From left: Kapka Kassabova, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Rana Dasgupta, Miroslav Penkov. Not featured: John Freeman. / CR: Simona Ilieva

Back home in San Francisco and missing my new friends and Bulgaria, I read Penkov’s collection and fell in love with the book. These stories give much to admire: they’re ambitious in terms of structure and scope, beautifully written but never showy, and the global forces that shape the characters are as much a part of the narrative as their inner lives. Penkov writes directly about history and politics, but somehow maintains a lightness to his prose—indeed, these stories are both emotionally fraught and laugh-out-loud funny.

The Sozopol Fiction Seminars provided me with a much more complex way of seeing Bulgarian literature, and translation more generally. I left Bulgaria challenged by a host of new questions that I hadn’t even known how to ask before visiting. Shortly after I returned home, Penkov was kind enough to answer some of these questions. Excerpts from our exchange are below.

Interview:

Molly Antopol: One of the things I admire most about these stories is how big they feel—larger political and historical issues seem to extend so naturally from your characters’ everyday lives. Were you purposeful with this during the writing? Did it emerge naturally? Or would it simply feel impossible to write about Bulgaria without social and political concerns making their way into the stories?

Miroslav Penkov: I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to write Bulgarian stories without considering history and politics. Some of the finest examples of Bulgarian short fiction concern themselves with the everyday life of ordinary people—say, peasants in the countryside—and turn a deaf ear to the politics of the day. But I would say that for me, at this time in my life, it is impossible to write about Bulgaria without getting the past involved. At this time in my life, I cannot help but feel, much like some of the great writers of the American South – Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter – that to understand the present, we need to first make sense of the past; that the two are linked inseparably.

We all know that in writing fiction following a line of cause and effect is paramount. One thing occurs and leads to another. A character interacts with his surrounding world and out of this interaction the story’s plot is generated and the story moves along. But I believe that when it comes to history, this cause and effect connection can be reversed, that the present can not only influence our understanding of the past, but can also shape this past. I believe that out of our present we can invent and create personal versions of a past that, in reality, might never have existed. I don’t mean this in some scary Orwellian way, of course. I’m talking merely about discovering personal truths in history, achieving a personal understanding of the past that might not be applicable to someone else.

Some really great advice for writing short stories is to get in, get out, and not linger. But I wanted to linger. I wanted these stories to flow really large across land and time, to gain momentum, feed off past and present and future, and move not only forward like rivers, but rather backward and forward simultaneously like whirlpools. As you can guess, in short fiction this is often a recipe for disaster. Consider for example the title story, “East of the West.” It’s a story that takes up more than thirty years of the narrator’s life, that concerns itself with a million wars, with communism and its fall, with the narrator’s love for his cousin, with the tragic death of the narrator’s sister and her fiancé, with the death of everyone close to the main hero, and on and on and on. A good workshop might tell you that all this is more than the story can handle, that all this makes the story lose focus. But I don’t think of the short story only as a fragile thing, as something only glimpsed in passing.

How long after living in the states did you begin to write fiction in English?

Miroslav Penkov / CR: Simona Ilieva

I arrived in the U.S. in 2001 and there was this schizoid fragmentation in my mind when it came to my writing. On one hand, I wanted to be a writer. On the other, I couldn’t quite understand how I would start writing in English. On one hand I gave myself an impossible deadline – to get a story published by Christmas of my first year; on the other – I was sincerely convinced it would take me ten years before I could start writing in English. In reality, I started writing in English immediately. Within the first month of my arrival, I had translated a story I’d published in Bulgaria and sent it out to a sci-fi contest. The story was returned to me with a kind instruction that I should double-space it, print it on one side of the page only, and resubmit.

There are things about writing that transcend language and culture. Creating convincing characters is one such thing. And writing in English has been a good thing for me.  Because my “command” of English doesn’t come close to my “command” of Bulgarian, I’m less likely to make pompous moves in my English prose, less likely to try to be too cute and smart, to try to dazzle the reader with a spectacular turn of phrase. Writing in English has made me pay closer attention to individual words (something that was not so obvious when I first started), it’s taught me to choose only the right ones, to check my ego at the door and surrender myself to what is often the simplest, most elegant way of unfolding a sentence in service of character (something that was even less obvious back in the day).

While working on the collection, did you feel like you were translating these stories from the Bulgarian in your head into English?

John Freeman, Editor of Granta, Future of Translation panel, Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

No. Such translation used to happen in my head early on, when I was just beginning to learn English in high school. You babble like a baby and search for the right word in your head. You feel stupid, because you can’t express yourself, and the scary thing is that your interlocutors too often perceive you as stupid, which is, often, a mistake. It’s this feeling of stupidity and embarrassment that prevents me from ever wanting to learn another language. And, of course, laziness.

But after a few years of studying, I started thinking in English and such word-for-word translation was no longer necessary. And yet, in writing I wanted my prose to have a distinct Bulgarian feel (which, in all honestly, it will have regardless of whether I want it to or not). I like, for example, how Hemingway can make his foreigners speak an English that on the page sounds like Italian, or Spanish, distinct, foreign. And I wanted to invest my prose with such oddity, especially because seven of the eight stories in the book are first person narratives. I wanted to come up with as many distinct Bulgarian voices as I could, strong enough to cross an ocean of language and speak to the American reader convincingly of this distant and unfamiliar world.

Living in the U.S. and writing about your native country, did you have specific (real or imaginary) readers in your mind? For example, did you find that you had to explain certain parts of Bulgarian life to readers who had never been?

Audience Members at the Future of Translation Panel in Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

I think it’s dangerous to write toward satisfying a particular reader, but I also think it’s silly not to consider who you might be writing for. Over the years friends would ask me about Bulgarian literature and I would say – yes, yes in Bulgaria we have divine poetry, and some really great prose. Would I recommend an author or a book then? I sure could. But you’d have to learn Bulgarian first. Why? Because nothing has been translated, or if it has a) the translation might be poor and b) the book is most certainly out of print. So I wanted to write such a book that would show Bulgaria—its history, people—a book which, when someone asks, “Hey, how about that country of yours?” you would say (if you’re Bulgarian in the U.S.), I have a book for you. Of course I realize how pretentious I’m sounding. But the sad truth is that until you come up with good translations of Bulgarian books that stay in print, until more Bulgarian writers start writing in English, this book will be one of very few books in English about Bulgaria by a Bulgarian.

Were there particular challenges, technical or otherwise, that you struggled with when writing these stories? And are there parts of writing that come easily to you?

Challenges? How much time do you have? First of all, there was the question of self-belief. I always knew that I would be a writer, but I didn’t always believe it. When I first started writing in English, because I was so poorly read, I was aware of only two other writers who’d written in a tongue that was not their mothers’: Conrad and Nabokov. This was a big psychological weight, but luckily I was younger, very naïve, clueless, stupid, and because of this courageous; and—because of this—I didn’t pay much attention to this weight; I simply wrote. Then, there is the challenge of people telling me that no one in America would read anything about Bulgaria. Many friends and teachers have genuinely supported and encouraged me while I wrote the stories. But plenty others, and I have no idea why they wouldn’t just keep this opinion to themselves, would come to me and say, flatly—no one will read about Bulgaria here, no American will care. I still don’t know how true this is. Sometimes, like when you sent me the questions for this interview, I feel hopeful. Other times, I feel very low.

And then—and this would be the final challenge I’ll mention for lack of time—there comes the writing itself. I had a really, really difficult time getting the majority of these stories to a place that made both me and my editor happy. I don’t presume to give aspiring authors any advice, but I’ll say this—don’t expect to get a story done on a first draft, don’t feel discouraged when you don’t get it right on a first draft and try to find joy in rewriting, because writing truly is rewriting. Amen.

Your collection is coming out in eleven countries—congratulations! What was it like to translate these stories yourself for the Bulgarian edition?

Boris Deliradev + Angela Rodel, Translators and Interpreters at the Future of Translation / CR: Simona Ilieva

Absolute agony. And I’m still working, I have two more stories to translate. I’m pleased with the results. I think that certain parts sound more alive in Bulgarian, more colorful, messier in a good way. For reasons that I mentioned above, I tried to make my English prose economical and elegant. But I cannot employ such economy in Bulgarian. In Bulgarian these first person narratives are somewhat messier, somewhat more deeply rooted in dialect, and that’s the only way they could work. Had I chosen to strive for elegance and economy in Bulgarian, I would not have been able to create convincing Bulgarian voices. So, reinventing these voices has been a really agonizing experience, because I also don’t want to rewrite the stories and get away from the original. The whole endeavor has been torturously slow. I wrote them faster than I’m translating them. But then, what’s the rush (other than a deadline from a publisher, that is)?

And as far as the eleven countries… It all happened so unexpectedly, so fast. I think it caught everyone by surprise. But these wonderful publishers across Western Europe (and Israel, I should not exclude them) seem to have really liked the stories. As far as my Slavic brothers… no interest so far. So, Slavic brothers of Russia, Poland, Serbia etc. – why you no want my book?

Who are some of your favorite Bulgarian writers—and are there particular writers who haven’t yet been translated into English, but who you wish would be?

See? The inevitable question. There are two Bulgarian writers that I like who write in English. I recommend Kapka Kassabova and her memoir Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. I also recommend Nikolai Grozni’s memoir Turtle Feet, which is not about Bulgaria, but about his days as a Buddhist monk in India. He also has a novel coming out, Wunderkind, which I’m excited about. That one, it seems, will be all about Bulgaria. Years ago, in the university library in Arkansas, I found Anton Donchev’s now classic novel Time of Parting. I recommend that one, as well. I also recommend what I consider to be the greatest short story collection in the known universe: Wild Tales by one of my all-time favorite writers, Nikolai Haitov. These are stories written in such peculiar dialect that even translating them into conventional Bulgarian would kill most of their beauty. But there is a translation out there (Unesco Collection of Representative Works. European Series) and the translator, Peter Owen, has done a really good job, considering he was attempting the impossible. Kapka Kassabova, whom I mentioned earlier, has recently translated short stories by Deyan Enev, a Bulgarian writer I really like. The book, Circus Bulgaria, was published in the UK.

What I wish for is that someone would publish an anthology of Bulgarian short fiction, starting with the classics and moving forward in time. I was able to find one such anthology in the library, but the translations were pretty stiff and unconvincing. We need a duo like the terrific Pevear-Volokhonsky to do for Bulgarian literature what they’re doing for Russian.

What are you working on now?

I’m fighting with the Bulgarian translation of the stories. I’m at the end of the rope, I’ve hit a massive wall, and somehow I have to make myself go on. Thank you for lending me a compassionate ear. Then I’d like to write a novel. I really like short stories, but for me the novel is what writing is really all about.

2011 Fellows at Red House Cultural Center, Sofia. From left: Rayko Baychev (BG) Michael Hinken (US) Paullina Petrova (BG) Yana Punkina (BG) Jane Martin (CA) Molly Antopol (US) Petja Heinrich (BG). Not pictured: Ivan Landzhev (BG) John Struloeff (US) Lee Kaplan (US)

Stealing Poetry

by Lee Romer Kaplan

Lee Kaplan

I’m a fiction writer for a reason: there’s safety in imagined worlds. I’ve chosen two professions—acting and writing—in part because they make use of my own stories without exposing them. In fiction, you can speak your truth without telling your personal truth.

In Sozopol, however, I ended up sharing a hotel room and my own stories with my Bulgarian counterpart, the lovely and brave Paullina Petrova. Despite our very different histories, Paullina and I connected because we’re both rewriting ourselves, as women and as artists, after years spent trying to be anything but fiction writers. My avoidance of the writing life led me first to theater, then to law school, and more recently to education. This past year, I taught composition, creative writing, and literature to community college students in Manhattan while my behemoth of a novel sat in the proverbial drawer, awaiting revision. Paullina’s avoidance tactics seem less obvious, if equally effective: she runs a business and a household, and cares for two young children.

The first time I saw Paullina—a petite woman with a dark blond ponytail and covetable baby-blue platform sandals edged with metal studs—we were waiting to load our suitcases onto the bus from Sofia to Sozopol. That first morning, unsure how profound the language barrier might be, we didn’t speak. A few hours later, the bus stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant, and I noted the “Nationalization” of the Fellows’ seating arrangements that soon unfolded: Americans at one table, Bulgarians at another. Not unexpected on the first day, of course—and by the end of the seminar we would all be sitting together—but at that moment, there were still borders between us.

Paullina on the Bus / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Happily, literary translator Angela Rodel—an American linguist who came to Bulgaria on a Fulbright seventeen years ago and has lived and worked in the country since 2004— offered to make the introductions. The Bulgarians, who’d been having an animated discussion in their native tongue, fell silent as she and I approached. Ivan and Yana, the two most fluent in English, engaged me in conversation, but Paullina just said her name, which I didn’t quite catch, and smiled. We didn’t yet know we’d be paired as roommates, and so after a few pleasantries we said goodbye and once again boarded the bus.

In fact, I didn’t learn that Paullina would be my roommate until she was—that is, until Elizabeth Kostova noted the two of us standing next to each other in the lobby of the Hotel Diamanti, gestured first at me and then at Paullina, smiled, and asked if we’d like to room together. I think we both nodded assent, blushed, and looked at our feet. We stumbled upstairs to the room together, lugging our bags, both trying to be polite, engaging in unintentional slapstick, each of us saying, “After you,” and the other replying, “No. Please, after you.”

During my adolescence and young adulthood, I moved house constantly, shuttling between Israel and the US, and for a time, Europe. I rarely stayed in one place long enough to call it home. This constant uprooting forged an urgent need to claim new spaces as my own; in Sozopol, as soon as we entered our room, I began to unpack, careful to take exactly half the space in our shared armoire and bureau. Paullina dropped her bags by the sliding glass door to our patio with a view of the Black Sea, mumbled something I didn’t understand, and when I wasn’t looking, quietly left the room.

View of Black Sea from Balcony / CR: Lee Kaplan

I didn’t know what to make of my new roommate’s abrupt departure, and so continued putting my things away, wondering whether she felt as awkward as I did about sharing a room with a stranger. Fifteen minutes later, just as I finished unpacking, my roommate returned, holding aloft a plastic bag filled with beautiful, fresh red and yellow cherries.

“Wherever did you find such lovely cherries?” I asked. In answer, Paullina held out her hands, full of fruit. “Duvduvanim,” I said. “That’s cherries in Hebrew.” Paullina repeated the word and laughed, a mischievous, knowing laugh that’s impossible to describe, but which once heard, cannot be forgotten. She told me the word in Bulgarian, and we sat in companionable silence for a while, absorbed by the pleasure of eating perfectly ripe cherries.

Paullina then insisted I take the double bed. For herself, she chose the daybed, a single. Later, she told me that she preferred having a small bed all to herself, a luxury for a mother of two, who’d been sharing a bed with her children’s father, her first and only sweetheart, since she was a teenager. Later that night, we lay in our respective beds, listening to the sea, and eventually, despite the considerable language barrier, began to tell our stories. We discovered commonalities. Not only do we wear the same size shoe, we are the same age. The people who love us call us by similar nicknames: her “Polly” to my “Lili.” We’re both aspiring novelists who don’t (Polly) and cannot (me) write short stories. The novel excerpts we submitted for translation into each other’s languages both feature young boys who embark upon magical journeys and have complicated relationships with their fathers.

Dinner on the Terrace of the Diamanti Hotel / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

We also discovered difference: Polly studied mathematics and I can hardly balance my checkbook. She’s the mother of two gymnastics-loving little girls, whose father’s been her partner, in work and love, for twenty years. Previously engaged but never married, for now, I’m single in New York City. Paullina’s lived only in Bulgaria; I came of age in Northern Israel and Berkeley, California, and have lived in the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York.

And then there’s this: for both of us, adolescence marked the turning point in our sense of ourselves as writers, but in entirely different ways. My adolescence sparked my writing life, but for Paullina, her teen years marked the end of her life as a poet, and initiated a twenty-year moratorium on writing until she discovered prose, and, very recently, began the first of two novels-in-progress.

My seventeenth year was spent during the Lebanon War on Israel’s northern border. By that age, I’d lost friends in the war, and I’d begun to question long-held beliefs, asking whether it was indeed tov lamoot b’ad artzeinu—good to die for one’s country—as I’d been taught in school, a question that haunts my writing still. I wrote earnest, and sometimes awful political poetry and songs about the impossibility of peace in a world so bound by history and violence. Paullina, living in what, for a little longer, would still be Communist Bulgaria, was writing love poems, two of which were published in a children’s literary journal, despite her lack of “connections,” which means that the work itself must have been very good.

Not long after the first of the two poems was published, late on a weekend afternoon, Paullina received a call summoning her to the office of the editor-in-chief. Upon arrival, she was handed an anonymous letter addressed “Dear Comrade Editor,” which accused Paullina of plagiarism, an act she explained to me by using the phrase “stealing poetry.” When she got to this point in the story, I laughed, because it struck me as absurd. Accused of stealing poetry? It sounded like a Kafka story.  But Paullina assured me she’d been threatened with “consequences” if she did not confess to having copied a famous poet’s work and submitted it as her own.

She refused, courageous child, insisting the poems were hers. The editor then asked if he should call the now doddering poet’s wife, and appeared surprised when Paullina said yes. The poet’s wife responded that the poems, though good, were not in fact her husband’s. Despite this, the editor, who did not apologize, informed Paullina that her work would never again be published in the journal’s pages. “Cut down,” as she put it, Paullina resolved to stop writing, and for twenty years, she did just that—not writing a verse, except in the invitations to her children’s birthday parties.

After Paullina fell asleep, that first night in Sozopol, I thought about my favorite Yehuda Amichai poem, which speaks to those moments when “the waters are pressing mightily.” I thought about Paullina at seventeen, and how writing—giving words to our beliefs and imaginings, our secrets and truths—represents what Amichai calls “daring”: “how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain when the great dangers are arched above.”

Sunset Over the Black Sea / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

And I thought about the fact that though I consider myself a secular Jew, I come from a tribe that traces everything—light, the separation of sea and sky, the names we call ourselves, all varieties of human suffering—back to “the word,” or perhaps more accurately, the written word. I thought about how writing fiction keeps me safe, allows me access to other lives, and sometimes, how scary writing feels, especially when I think about finishing my novel, the fear that the book will not be good enough, or attract intense scrutiny of my life and my character, or anger people I love. These thoughts stayed with me for the remainder of our time at the seminar.

After Bulgaria, I returned to New York for just three days before leaving for the first of two artists’ residencies that would take up the remaining three months of the summer. When I applied for those residencies, I said that 2011 would be the summer of my novel revision. But even as I typed those words, I was afraid they might not be true. My dear friend and mentor, the only person who’d read the book and knew where I was heading, had died before being able to provide feedback on the manuscript. I had no idea where to start, how to impose structure on what felt like an unwieldy, too long and mostly non-linear manuscript. Now at Ragdale, the second residency, which will end in three short weeks, I’m writing this essay as a way to stave off returning to the novel. And so, I am thinking about Polly, and about her courage, imagining her at seventeen, and the fierce grace with which she told her story of being accused of stealing poetry, and about the way her poetry was stolen from her. I am thinking about why we write, and why sometimes we’re afraid to write, and who Paullina and I would be if we weren’t writers.

Lee and Paullina read on the last night in Sozopol / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Since our talk that first night in Sozopol, Polly and I’ve begun a longer conversation about being women who write, and how the energy for writing often gets channeled into care taking, and making a living, and loving the people in our lives. We’ve each expressed just how joyful and terrifying and magical it is to allow ourselves time and space to write. I wrote myself into adulthood, even though I stopped for many years, too. Now, I’m channeling Paullina at seventeen, taking strength from her courage, and facing my manuscript. Maybe the key is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Maybe the way in is just making my way in.

Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories, Nimrod’s Prize Stories, Croatia’s Zarez, and on New York Public Radio and NPR’s This American Life. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s finishing up a collection of stories and beginning work on a novel.

Lee Romer Kaplan spent her early years in Berkeley, California and Northern Israel. While studying at Haifa University, she taught theater and literary arts as conflict mediation tools in a program for Muslim, Jewish and Christian youth. She’s performed, written and directed shows with theater companies in the US, Israel, and Europe. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, Lee holds a law degree from University of California at Berkeley, and practiced as a civil rights and poverty lawyer for five years before returning to the arts. For now, she lives in New York City, teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College and is on the teaching artist roster at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her upcoming debut novel, The Flight of the Lesser Kestrel, takes place primarily in Jerusalem during the first Lebanon War.

The 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: May 24 – 27

Ten scholarships, valued at approximately $1,600 each, will be available to attend the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Funding will support five fiction writers working in English and five fiction writers working in Bulgarian. Scholarships will cover tuition fees, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible to apply.

• Application deadline is March 7, 2012.

• For more information, or to apply, please visit the EKF Website.

• 2012  faculty members: Elizabeth Kostova (US), Barry Lopez (US), Deyan Enev (BG), and Krassimir Damianov (BG/ES).

Along the Black Sea in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the fellows, along with now Contributing Editor Steven Wingate. That journey was chronicled in an essay entitled “Literary Life on the Black Sea,” which FWR published later that summer. The following year, we asked the English speaking fellows if they would be willing to compile a similar essay reflecting on their trip to Bulgaria to participate in 2010 seminar. Those individuals were Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. You can read about their experiences here.

In what has now become an annual tradition, FWR is happy to present the literary contribution’s from this year’s English speaking fellows, which we’ll publish in two parts this week:

Part One:
• “Meeting the Ambassador,” by John Struloeff
• “Embroidery and Home,” by Jane E. Martin
• “The Walk,” by Michael Hinken

Part Two:

• “Some Thoughts on Translation: A Conversation with Miroslav Penkov,” by Molly Antopol
• “Stealing Poetry: Why We Write and, Sometimes, Why We Don’t,” by Lee Romer Kaplan

I was also lucky enough to have been invited back to the 2011 seminar as a guest and panelist, for which I am grateful. We hope you enjoy this year’s retrospective!

Meeting the Ambassador:

by John Struloeff

John Struloeff / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

After more than twenty-four hours of travel from my home near Los Angeles, a wild taxi ride from the airport (what’s the word for ‘turbocharged’ in Bulgarian?), and only minutes after checking in to the Diter Hotel in Sofia, Simona Ilieva, the Assistant Director of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which sponsors the Sozopol Fiction Seminars each year, called my room to say it was time to meet the U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria. This was our first official event for the 2011 Seminar. I was honored by the invitation, of course, but I still hadn’t determined why an ambassador would want to meet me and a small group of emerging writers. So, red-eyed but exhilarated, I packed my satchel and met the early arrivals in the lobby.

In my delirium I only recall hazy images from that first walk through the capital city to the ambassador’s residence: cobblestone streets, intersections that angle oddly in the Old Europe style so that you’re always rounding a building’s corner, people crossing streets and brushing past my shoulder, gray stone and old trees, the whir and bell of a trolley passing behind, a large park with an enormous Soviet Army monument darkly splitting the sky between trees. It was a rejuvenating walk, the weather warm, a nice breeze, blue sky.

We eventually stopped in front of two men wearing black suits and sunglasses. The embassy security detail. Beside them, an iron gate led through a high cement wall into a courtyard. Inside was what seemed like a small park, with a manicured lawn, a scattering of shade trees, a few benches and small tables. Facing the yard was a large manor house, shades drawn from the long span of windows to show artwork hanging on the walls inside.

James Warlick, the ambassador, greeted us right away with a smile and a handshake, followed by a woman with a tray of cold water and cola. Mr. Warlick was a pleasant man in his fifties who had served as Principal Advisor to Paul Bremer in Baghdad, as well as the Counsel General in Moscow. He was well dressed in a pressed white shirt, a tie, and slacks, and he seemed very interested in what we wrote, what the life of a writer was like, what brought writers together in the U.S. He talked about how his own writing was storytelling, but in a different way, and he was curious about how we looked at story writing. I began to see how an ambassador worked – listening and connecting.

The conversations in the courtyard grew, with laughter and the greeting of old and new friends. Soon there were more than a dozen of us, and so Mr. Warlick suggested we gather in a circle to introduce ourselves. Elizabeth Kostova, fresh from a television interview and dressed smartly in a skirt and jacket, welcomed us all and said how much she was looking forward to the workshops and discussions in the week to come, and the rest of us followed: Angela Rodel from Southern California who had married a Bulgarian and has been translating Bulgarian to English for over fifteen years; Svetlozar Zhelev, the publisher of the biggest publishing house in Bulgaria; Ivan Landzhev, a screenwriter for Bulgaria’s top TV show; Jane E. Martin from Montreal who wrote tech manuals and short stories; Ivan Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Fellow from last year who just wanted to continue the discussion; Jeremiah Chamberlin, the head of the English Department Writing Program at University of Michigan; me, the director of creative writing at Pepperdine University in California.

As the introductions continued, I began to recognize the experience and breadth of professional talent that had been gathered here. I had come to Bulgaria to continue my work on a biographical novel about the spiritual transformation of Leo Tolstoy, with the hope of receiving insights from others who cared about the literature of this part of the world. I wanted to hear what my work sounded like from a person in another culture and language, to hear from people as serious about this pursuit as I was. More than anything, I think, I wanted to see if my work could engage writers and publishers in another part of the world. With the conclusion of the introductions, I was excited to begin this conversation – to be heard as an artist, but also to listen.

Ivan Landzhev Reading / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Three days later, when workshops began at the seaside town of Sozopol, where we’d spend a week immersed in sharing our work and listening to lectures and attending readings, I’d find those other readers. Not just in the English-speaking fellows who had come from the US and Canada to attend the seminar, but also during our first of two public readings, when a selection of the novel, which had been translated by Angela Rodel, would be read in Bulgarian by my roommate, Ivan Landzhev. Each of us was paired – one English-speaking fellow with one Bulgarian fellow – so that all of us had the chance to read our own work, and then to hear that same work in the other language. I had never had that experience before – not only to have a professional translator carefully translate my writing, but then to have another person read it just as carefully. My novel opens with a very intense and graphic scene about the death of one of Tolstoy’s neighbors, and it was fascinating to hear Ivan’s Bulgarian intonations and to see the rapt attention of the audience. In that moment, the writing was my own, but curiously not my own. I know very little Bulgarian, yet I could see the connection that was growing between the audience and my work as Ivan read. And the other short stories and novel excerpts were all vivid and so well written – I really didn’t expect how memorable and meaningful this part of our stay would be.

But back at the ambassador’s house, this was still to come. And when we were then invited into the ambassador’s home, where there was an array of paintings and sculptures from around Bulgaria, we started the first of many conversations that would take place over the next week. Within an hour I had gone from weary and feeling very much on the other side of the Earth, to feeling the openness and friendship growing in this circle, set by Elizabeth’s incredibly warm presence. We began to joke and tell our stories and open our lives and art to one another. Within a week, this group would become a close-knit and beautifully complex mix of artists and publishers and translators from a variety of different cultures, and I would learn from them more than I expected – about the art of translation, about the complicated forces in the international publishing world – and I would find true friends. By the end of my stay, it was clear why an ambassador would want us to visit his home, and also why Elizabeth had created her foundation: because of the power of art to connect us.

2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellows. In back, from left: Ivan Landzhev (BG), Molly Antopol (US), Lee Romer Kaplan (US), Jane E. Martin (CA), Rayko Baychev (BG). Front row, from left: Michael Hinken (US), Yana Punkina (BG), John Struloeff (US), Petja Heinrich (BG). Not pictured: Paullina Petrova (BG). Photo credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Embroidery and Home:

by Jane E. Martin

Jane E. Martin / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each day during the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, after our morning fiction workshop and before the afternoon lecture, I visited a woman selling traditional Bulgarian embroideries in Old Town. I nearly walked past her the first day. I was headed toward the docks and she was the last artisan before the pathway to the water. Her work stood out—the embroideries hung on clotheslines and blew in the breeze. As well, they were beautiful. I paused briefly, only for a beat or two, because I was determined to get to the water. But that was enough. The old woman rose from her chair and crossed the walkway. She moved easily, lightly—though, I wouldn’t have guessed that she could when she’d been sitting.

Over the next ten minutes, she watched me examine her work more closely. I touched one piece, admired the stitching and patterning of another. She had a lot to say about each, in Bulgarian, a language I don’t understand, and I had many words of praise —“So beautiful”; “I love this one”—which, though she spoke no English, she did seem to understand. She folded one of the embroideries I’d been looking at and put it in a plastic bag for me, as though I’d agreed to buy it. I laughed. She pulled out a weathered piece of cardboard on which the numbers 1 to 100 were handwritten. She pointed to a number, a price, and I pointed to a smaller number. She then referred me to the elaborate lacing on her work. I felt like an ass. I’d also felt like an ass a few days before, when I’d learned that a taxi driver had charged me twice the normal rate for a ride from the airport to downtown (“the English speaker’s tax,” a new Bulgarian friend suggested). And, in the end, decisions make me nervous, so I couldn’t buy an embroidery without thinking more about whether I should. “I’ll come back,” I said to the old woman. “I’ll come back.”

Woman selling embroideries in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Jane E. Martin

Later that day, as we gathered inside an old school that had been converted into an art gallery, where our afternoon lectures took place, my Bulgarian friends told me that the price the woman had requested was reasonable. They also told me that in the past, many such women sold embroideries on clotheslines in Old Town. Now that Sozopol was becoming increasingly developed, these women were scarce. They had been replaced by shops and cafés, by street vendors selling crafts one might find in any city of the world. I wanted to run to the old woman right then. I wanted to give her the price she’d asked for, to show her, through decisiveness and lack of protest, that her work was worth this amount, worth much much more. I hoped she would be in her spot the following day. “She will be,” my friends told me.

The lecturer that afternoon was the Bulgarian-born German author Ilya Troyanov. He told us about Sir Richard Burton, a British explorer he had always admired, who had once taken a particularly momentous journey. Troyanov had retraced his hero’s steps so that he could write about the journey in his novel The Collector of Worlds. Back in Montréal, where I’ve lived for nearly two years now, I’d been doing my own retracing. My grandmother lived in a small farming village before she and her family—along with a million other Québécois—left Canada for the United States for a better life. My six other great-grandparents had done the same, years earlier. I hadn’t known much about French-Canadian history until recently—or that marveling openly over its more polarizing or debated events, at parties, on the metro, at work, was not always a popular thing to do in Canada. As a French-Canadian whose first language was English, I hadn’t yet figured out how to integrate comfortably into any particular community in my new home.

Shopping for embroidery in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Michael Hinken

The next day, I bought an embroidery from the old woman. The piece I’d really had my eye on during my previous visit, however, was gone. I tried to ask—through histrionic gestures—whether it had been sold. “Come back,” she said to me, remembering my words from the day before. “Come back.”

I did return again, the next day, with two other American fellows. The old woman sat in the shade of a building, working on an embroidery as we approached. She looked up and in an instant was beside us. “Zdrasty,” I said to her. “Hello.” From a box that lay before the clothesline, she removed the piece that I’d been especially drawn to the first day. I bought it, and another. My friends bought embroideries, too. The woman clasped her hands together and laughed. I held a hand out to her and she pressed it between her two. “I’m going to teach you Bulgarian,” she told me. (My friends, Russian speakers, were able to translate for me.) We stood there, the old woman and I, my hand between hers, as I repeated the Bulgarian words she wanted me to know: sutrin, vecher, nosht, dovizhdane—morning, evening, night, goodbye.

I didn’t want to leave her. I loved that she understood a different time and life and that for hours each day, she sat alone and quietly reconstructed part of that world in her work. I loved that she persisted amidst unexpected shifts—even though occasionally, perhaps, she felt like an outsider. And that despite this, she was warm, and seemed happy. This old woman made me feel welcomed.

Selecting embroidery in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Michael Hinken

And so I was sad to leave her company, but comforted that I would bring an embroidery or two—some representation of her vision—back home with me to Québec.

The Walk:

by Michael Hinken

Michael Hinken / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

I had been in Sozopol for three days, in Bulgaria for four, and my sleeping habits had yet to normalize. On the morning of that fourth day, I awoke early, listening to the odd, pained cries of the seagulls outside the balcony, their calls sounding vaguely feline at times, sometimes vaguely human. Realizing I was wide awake, I decided to get up and walk into the city to mail some postcards and stick my feet in the Black Sea before embarking on a day of workshops, roundtables and seminars.

This morning, with the early sunlight on the tops of buildings and nobody about, it’s pretty quiet. A long, short-legged red dog pauses in the middle of the sidewalk to sniff something, then moves on. I think I’ve seen that dog every day since I’ve been here, definitely the day before, when one of the writing fellows, John, and I made our way down to the beach. In the plaza past the post office, women in orange reflective vests sweep the cobblestones with half brooms. The souvenir stands are setting up. In the plaza, under a façade with the city’s name and some lines—probably historical—engraved below in Cyrillic, there’s a bench built into the wall. Yesterday a dozen or so men sat in row, talking or just sitting in the afternoon sun with their canes and hats and slacks rising above their old shins. “There’s the city council,” John said. “The old guard.” I added. Now the bench is empty.

Approaching the Beach in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

I walk through the park, past the ancient church, past the fountain of many small brown smooth stones the size of golf balls, down the steps and to the sea. There’s that crystalline light that you get by the water, that tang on the breeze. And below, on the beach, rows of metal contraptions like skeletons of beach umbrellas, waiting, I suppose, for some canvas to be thrown over them and make them umbrellas. I walk between the rows down to the water, take off my shoes, and wade in. Not bad. I thought it would be colder. I walk along where the water joins the shore. I meet a jogger coming the other way, an old man with ruffled, swept-back hair. He’s stringy and tanned and wearing the smallest yet somehow the saggiest bathing suit I have ever seen. He jogs past, a gold disc on a chain bouncing in his sparse, fluffy gray chest hair. I nod at him as he passes, and think, here’s a guy who runs on the beach every day.

Farther on, I sit on a sofa pushed against the concrete wall of an empty concession stand and make some notes on the past few days, the discussion of translation from the day before, ideas from my workshop, things I want to remember. After a few minutes, I look up and there’s the old guy. He’s standing on a rock in the shallow surf doing these stretches, or maybe poses, some improvised personal version of Tai chi. This goes on for a while—this little bronzed guy doing exercises in the sea. I have one of those telescoping moments: I am sitting on a red sofa, on this beach, near the Black Sea, in Sozopol, in Bulgaria, in Europe. I am watching a guy on a rock. Then he jumps. But it’s not some ordinary, point-A-to-point-B jump. Not at all. It’s something graceful, suspended. He catches some air. The act seems both spontaneous and performed—as if it was supposed to look like something, but only he knew what. And then he’s on the ground running again.

Overlooking the Sea in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

As I walk back from the beach, past an open-air bar called Captain Jack’s where “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” blares from the speakers, I am thinking of something one of my professors said years ago. It was a simple line and it has stuck with me; it explains travel and probably the impulse to the travel narrative: We travel to see things we can’t see at home. Home for me is Peoria, Illinois, where men grow old in the air-conditioned cabs of farm machinery or behind desks at Caterpillar, Inc., and where there are no beaches to run on, just flat miles of soybeans and corn. The small odd moment of the old guy on the rock is something I had to leave home to see, which may explain why I keep thinking about it. I have no idea why the guy made that little leap, or why it made an impression on me.

Later that day, at his reading and craft talk, the writer Rana Dasgupta would speak about “writing from ignorance.” This impulse was, in part, what led him to write his second novel, Solo, which is set in Bulgaria. “Aside from Albania,” he said, “Bulgaria is the least known country in the European Union. And not only is it the least known, but you are told by inference through a general lack of its coverage in the global media, that there is nothing there worth knowing about.”

In his discussion, Dasgupta went on to draw a distinction between a culture of experts and a culture of ignorance, suggesting that writers ought to question established knowledge, the knowledge of the experts. “Established knowledge builds and supports institutions. To challenge established knowledge is to be ignorant, and this position of ignorance about the world is a much more interesting place from which to write.”

Rana Dasgupta (left) with translator Boris Deliradev / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

That a writer should write from ignorance rather than authority is a claim that may be hard to accept at first. In fact, a murmur rose from the writers and translators and editors in the room that evening when Dasgupta made his assertion, and one person, during the Q&A that followed, even pressed him further on this point. As much as the idea seems counterintuitive, something about it resonated with my thoughts about writing and on traveling.

I thought first of advice from Anne Lamott’s fun and wise book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. In it, she says that somewhere along the line we adults lose the capacity to inhabit that worldview most of us have as children, which amounts to, essentially, “Wow, look at that crazy bird” and “check out that humongous tree.” Being young, lacking experience with birds and trees and the world, we were constantly in wonder at the most ordinary things—pigeons and cranes and seagulls, ginkgos and cedars and huge spreading oaks. Lamott suggests that writers try to recapture that child’s-eye view, to push through the dulling of the senses that comes with encountering your nine hundredth pigeon and really see that iridescent rat-with-wings.

Lamott’s idea of recovering the child’s eye links up with the concept of defamiliarization put forth by twentieth century Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky in the essay “Art as Technique.” In it, he asserts: “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been’ (Tolstoy). And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

To make that stone stony, writers must set aside the abstractions of repetition and experience and see it anew, make it new. In essence, as Dasgupta suggested, writers need to be willfully ignorant of not only the established knowledge of institutions—media, governments, history—but also that established, accumulated knowledge stored in oneself.

And what better way to do this than travel? As an American in Bulgaria, largely ignorant of the culture, the language, I came into contact with defamiliarized moments constantly, moments when the familiar became strange, whether it was hearing Pink Floyd outside Captain Jack’s or watching the Tai chi guy leaping into the surf. To be abroad is to be surrounded by the strange, to be a stranger. This ignorance and strangeness comprise that which is so fundamental to art, to writing, and that is the ability to cut through the tyranny of the everyday, the blunting of our world rendered by familiarity, and to see as if for the first time.

2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Participants / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

John Struloeff grew up in the mountainous rainforests of northwestern Oregon. His debut poetry collection, The Man I Was Supposed to Be, was published by Loom Press in 2008, with individual poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, PN Review, and elsewhere. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and both the Weldon Kees and Tennessee Williams Scholarships. He has taught at Stanford University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he received both his MA and PhD in English. Currently he directs the creative writing program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Jane E. Martin earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and before that, an MA in Drama from Tufts University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Prairie Fire (Canada). She was recently a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University and currently lives and works in Montréal.

Michael Hinken has taught English in the Russian Far East, covered municipal news in central Illinois, and now teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2004. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown during 2007-08. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Tampa Review, River City, West Branch and Third Coast, and his essays have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and the Peoria Journal Star. He is working on a short story collection and a novel. He is also a contributor to Fiction Writers Review.

The 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: May 24 – 27

Ten scholarships, valued at approximately $1,600 each, will be available to attend the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Funding will support five fiction writers working in English and five fiction writers working in Bulgarian. Scholarships will cover tuition fees, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible to apply.

• Application deadline is March 7, 2012.

• For more information, or to apply, please visit the EKF Website.

• 2012 faculty members: Elizabeth Kostova (US), Barry Lopez (US), Deyan Enev (BG), and Krassimir Damianov (BG/ES).

“Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix.”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“We Call Upon the Author to Explain”

I thought about using a more purely literary quote for this essay—Elmore Leonard’s “Skip the boring parts”—but that’s an oversimplification, and I want to speak against oversimplification. (Besides, Nick Cave is a terrific writer with two novels under his belt, and his album notes look and read like chapbooks; he deserves to be quoted by writerly types more often.) Fiction writers are admonished to cut, cut, cut at least as many times as we are urged to write every day. And while it is generally sound advice, it is also terribly easy to misapply.

Thousands of pieces of fiction annually grow stronger by cutting, but those aren’t the ones I worry about. I’m concerned for those that have the life and soul torn out of them because the scissors of concision are wielded with no apparent purpose other than cutting for its own sake. A lot of this kind of cutting happens in response to critique from workshop leaders or peers who have seen other pieces improve through cutting, and who pass on the well-intentioned dictum without thinking, as if it applies to all pieces at all times.

Which is, of course, untrue. Six-line prose poems have turned into eight-page short stories. Novellas have bloomed into trilogies. Novels have gone from 280 pages to 320 pages and gotten better, not worse. Sometimes pieces get bigger not because they become bloated with needless words, but because they tell more story, and sometimes more is exactly what a work needs. In the interest of making a work “tighter” we often reach for the scissors because we’ve been instructed to cut, cut, cut. Telling more story in the same number of pages can also achieve the tightness we desire, perhaps to better effect. We tend to confuse brevity with tautness, though plenty of work—especially today, with the ubiquity of abstract, absurdist flash fiction—is guilty of having so little story that it can’t become taut no matter how stripped down it is.

In the worst-case scenario, premature cutting for its own sake doesn’t serve the tale, and it can even cause a tale to die before it has a chance to blossom. I don’t know how many works of fiction die annually from such premature cutting, but I do know that writers who teach or critique their fellow writers need to encourage the responsible use of scissors for a specific purpose. Scissors need to serve a controlling idea, and if that controlling idea is absent, then tightness is merely an attempt to write like somebody else (frequently Raymond Carver or, in the case of abstract, absurdist flash fiction, Donald Barthelme).

One way to look at the scissors question is through the figure of the narrator, which we can talk about regardless of whether a work is in first, second, or third person. I know that I’m in the minority in speaking of narrators when discussing third-person point of view, since some writers only acknowledge its existence in first person. But all tales have tellers, and these tellers vary from story to story and book to book; if they didn’t, all work by a particular writer would sound the same across the board, or be determined by the vagaries of mood and circumstance. If narrators don’t exist in third person POV, then how can we accommodate books that follow multiple characters in close third person, such as Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, or blend close third person with first person, such as Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street?

Narrators exist across the spectrum of fiction, and plenty of people use more than one narrator in a single work. These multiple narrative personae notice different things, and they represent the psyches of the characters they follow in different ways. They serve as periscopes looking into the author’s fictive world, and as the interface between the author and the reader. Narrators guide our attention, and they can change considerably as authors move from draft to draft. They are what changes first—a small loosening of diction, a hint of more or less desperation, an increased willingness to let characters suffer for their wrongs—when authors want to chart new pathways through their fictive worlds that are more elucidating, more suspenseful, more concrete than those in previous drafts.

Narrators, over time, tend to speak their truths more bravely and bring us more directly to the heart of things. As we work through the drafting process, changing lines here and there—and yes, skipping the boring parts—we’re actually arriving at more precise narrative personae that allow us to work with more confidence and render our characters more decisively. How often have you heard a fellow writer say, “I just found a new voice for this draft, and I love how vague and imprecise it is!”? The great joy of working through drafts in fiction is to see sharp focus emerge from blurriness, to hear innuendo-filled dialogue turn into direct personal challenge, to feel murmurs of understanding and desire become actions in the flesh.

This, not concision for its own sake, is what we should aspire to when we take out the scissors and cut our fiction. If we tweak our work only to make it appear more taut—though it never contains more story, and though its truths are never spoken more sharply—then we embrace concision as a mere stylistic ornament. Ultimately I agree with Nick Cave: there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix, as long as we’re wise about how we use them—to serve the work, not some knee-jerk reaction to cut, cut, cut.

Maybe that project on your desk or bookshelf doesn’t need cutting after all. Maybe it needs more of a story to tell, or a bolder narrator to tell it.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.

"TV Show Daughters" by Suzie Silver, from Tri-Stan

Introduction

Sometimes the muse assumes the unlikeliest forms. When composer Eric Moe began searching for a lyrical inspiration for a new piece, a collection of Hideous Men might have seemed an odd place for lightning to strike. But in the chopped-up, pseudo-classical, post-modern melange of David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” he found both personal connection and musical possibility. The resulting piece debuted in 2005, and enjoyed a New York revival earlier this year. Here Moe describes his long, strange journey. The interlude quotations come from Wallace’s original short story.

A whole new kind of ritual narrative, neither Old Comic nor New Tragic – the sit-trag.

This spring I had the good fortune to have a New York revival of my one-woman opera/situation-tragedy Tri-Stan, a musical setting of David Foster Wallace’s story “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko.” Also this spring, I had the spectacular good fortune to be awarded a residency fellowship as a composer at the Camargo Foundation in the south of France. The excellent writers in residence at Camargo were very much interested in how a composer collaborates with a writer and deals with setting a text to music. After all, how any composer works with writers and their words is shrouded in mystery to anyone but the composers themselves. (In fact, everything a composer of contemporary art music/concert music does is a well-kept secret in America). But the writers were interested not only in this process in general, but also regarding this particular writer and this particular text. After all, DFW’s work is not exactly simple, not to mention everyone’s fascination at the idea of collaborating with a literary icon.

[Before going any further, it’s a fair question to ask what a musical setting of a literary text offers. I mean, from the composer’s point of view, why bother? Thousands of songs, operas, and whatnot, many of them well-loved and some of them masterpieces even, have texts that can only charitably be described as mediocre. And getting permission to set a published text under copyright—even if the author is enthusiastically in favor—can be excruciatingly difficult, as contemporary publishers seem incapable of drawing a distinction between an individual concert music composer and, say, Disney. For my part, if I’m going to be spending serious time scrutinizing the structure, syntax, phonemes, and, yes, even the meaning of a text, I want to work with something that’s going to be truly rewarding.]

Our discussion at Camargo continued: What’s in it for the writer? A Shakespeare sonnet, for instance, is complex enough without adding a layer of musical structure. I suggested this extra layer would be an asset in my lapidary soliciting abstract to DFW. I explained: “…musical setting can expand, even further, the range of allusions, make the C#-minor aria audible, and in general add another dimension to the (admittedly already incredibly rich) piece.” But music can also focus, heighten, and unify and thus can offer an inviting way into a text, roll out a red carpet by giving the listener a persuasive interpretation, like a masterful actor.

Plus it can sneak a firecracker of smartass irony in with a beautiful tune.

…the dark logic of a genuine entertainment-market inspiration.

I’ve heard that writers often struggle with structure. So do composers. If you want to see some serious structure-struggle, try writing a large-scale piece of music. But composers do have one advantage writers don’t: we can use their texts as a skeleton, or at least scaffolding. I did this in two earlier big vocal pieces, Sonnets to Orpheus and Siren Songs. Both of these resemble the classical song cycle, a genre invented by Beethoven, I believe. Sonnets to Orpheus was a setting of eight of Rilke’s fifty-odd sonnets in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, a selection that preserved the narrative arc of the Orpheus story. Siren Songs took an opposite tack, setting six siren-related texts from all over the geographical and temporal map: Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century translation of Homer (eighth century BCE); my own contemporary translations of Dante (early fourteenth) and Kafka (early twentieth); an explorer’s chronicle (early seventeenth century); and two freshly written works by living American poets, Janet McAdams and Paula McLain.

For the next big piece, I wanted to try something different still. Mary Nessinger, an amazing singer living in New York who could sing anything I could dream up and a lot of things I couldn’t, commissioned me to write a dramatic concert piece for her. After my previous globe-hopping and time-traveling, I was curious to see if I could write a distinctly American piece, a national epic for my generation of ironists, who want nothing more than, as DFW puts it, to “put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need.” A Ring of the Brady Bunch, a Fanfare for the Pop Ironist. Not an easy task, since our national sagas are all computer-generated-imagery fests with recycled plots and our folk music consists of TV-sitcom theme songs and advertising jingles.

…at this point Ovid the O. got the idea to turn the entire affair into this sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property, a ‘…high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypes-type metamyth,’ a kind of hottub-swingers’ incest among Tristan & Narcissus & Echo & Isolde

I was looking for a text that might be suitable for a musical setting. I had already read many, many collections of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and one-act plays. But I’d been having a lot of trouble. Finding the right text is a tricky business. First, there are practical considerations. It has to be short; singing words generally takes a lot longer than speaking them, which in turn takes a lot longer than reading them. Plus it’s helpful if the words are short but with lots of long vowel sounds, and arranged in short sentences. (Long vowels allow a singer to hold a note easily without causing listeners to scratch their heads). Rhyme is also a plus, because it’s hard to understand sung speech. Everyone has their favorite mondegreens—imperfectly perceived lyrics. A classic example from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”: “Excuse me while I [pick one] (1) kiss this guy or (2) kiss the sky.” Professional lyricists specialize in making texts that retain their intelligibility when sung. I didn’t want to write a Broadway musical, though, and I wanted literary quality. I also wanted something profound and funny.

Then I began reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It was in the middle of a story called “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” that I slowly began to realize that this was what I had been looking for. I’m not sure exactly where or what triggered it. Was it the passage where the demiurge Erythema appears to the suffering Reggie Ecko, victim of a massive self-esteem displacement, in the mortal guise of Robert Vaughn hosting Hair Loss Update? (I reluctantly admit that I actually do remember this late-night infomercial from UHF TV). Yet there was more to it than nostalgia. For example: “… it was just one of those large-r Romantic love-at-initial-reception things, the stuff of chivalric myth, the Tristian/Lancelotian fuck-it-all plunge, the Sicilian thunderbolt, the Wagnerian Liebestod.” I was also struck by DFW’s empathy for his all-too-mortal and all-too-fallible fame-seeking or substance-abusing characters. Postmodernism with a heart.

The sense of recognition became stronger when I read some of DFW’s essays and discovered that we were about the same age, that he, too, had grown up in downstate Illinois in an academic family, and that he had played a lot of tennis on summer days hot enough to melt asphalt. We had both spent serious time at the Illinois State Fair, sampling corn dogs and viewing the world’s largest hog. Reading Infinite Jest, I discovered that we also shared an interest in addiction issues and popular culture, a fantasy of creating complexly addictive artworks, and a fascination with the troubling nature of competition and celebrity.

…myth, classic & Classical myth: rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, susceptible of neverending renewal, ever fresh

True, the story was on the long side. And the sentences were long and complex, containing long and complex words. (The first less-than-scrutable sentence begins with the phrase “The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse…” and rolls on for thirty or forty more words. “Hensonian” refers – I’m pretty sure – to Jim Henson, the muppetteer; you won’t find “epiclete” in the unabridged OED). Words like “thanataphiliacal” and “mithradititic” pose challenges for musical text setting. So much for the practical side of things. I would just have to find some extraordinary solutions.  Making art is a lot more exciting when big risks are being taken.

But I was most excited by the subject matter and its treatment, to see how the text dealt self-referentially with myth, the common stuff of high and low art, of grand opera and Hollywood. Add the timely and timeless themes of obsession and addiction, self-image and self-regard, and late ‘70s TV sit-coms – neither timely nor timeless, but definitely fascinating – and it had me.

"Nymphetitudea" by Suzie Silver, from Tri-Stan

…in a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine.

The first words of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, one of the first operas ever, are “Io la Musica son,” or “I am Music.” From the start, operas often did not make a distinction between words and music, since words exist, sonically, in the domain of music. Tuneful parts are often segregated from wordier parts, however. In Schönberg’s Moses und Aron, the seductive Aaron sings his lines, while the stammerer Moses speaks.

For Tri-Stan, I decided to use both rhythmic speech and song. Sometimes the use of song is predictable. In the big dreamsong aria, for instance, a vision sent by the goddess Codependae who appears in the dream disguised as a singing three-headed siren (the three heads belonging to the three CEOs of Tri-Stan, each named Stanley). The words needed to be visible as well as audible, both to highlight the text’s literary quality and to aid the assimilation of the baroque complexities of the language. Supertitles in opera productions are now commonplace, but I wanted Ultra-Titles®, wherein the very presentation of the text itself would be artistic. To my delight, I was able to persuade the brilliant video artist Suzie Silver to make a video incorporating the text, which now accompanies live performances of the work, synced by Suzie in real time to the music through various high-tech means.

But there was nothing high-tech about my collaborative relationship with DFW, which was an old-fashioned correspondence. The printed word, via the USPS. A certain delay and distance was built into the arrangement that felt odd in the age of instant communiqués. It didn’t involve sound, aside from the CDs he asked me to send him; my proposal/fan letter and his cheerful agreement kicked off a literary friendship. I was disappointed that I didn’t have closer contact with him—an email address at least—but I was also relieved. I needed to perform some surgery on the text to fashion it into something I could use, and I was glad to have a trusting, hands-off writer to deal with. I was clear on the need to abbreviate the story, and on the strength of a vague promise “to cut as little as possible,” he mercifully allowed me free rein.

Alas, we no longer get to say “alas” with a straight face…

We had only one point of divergence. The Guggenheim Museum was interested in presenting the work on its Works & Process series (the NYC premiere of the Sonnets took place in this series). Works & Process is all about collaboration, and so DFW’s presence was necessary. At this point I found out how phobic he was to public appearances. I’m grateful to Jonathan Franzen, a close friend of DFW’s, for eventually explaining the situation to me. I had trouble understanding it at the time. Music is a performing art and thus ultimately a collaborative venture, even if it requires a vast amount of solitary preparation. Every performer has felt the hot breath of the composer on the back of their neck. And a public audience is generally involved as well. There are plenty of shy composers (myself included), but not many reclusive ones. I wrote the piece in the mountain solitudes of Montana, but I wrote it for New York City musicians – and a New York City audience – to bring to life. Luckily, an alternate and excellent venue was soon found that didn’t require the writer’s presence: Merkin Concert Hall near Lincoln Center.

Long-jaded viewers were rapt, Vanna’s show stolen, critics indulgent, & sponsors all but manic.

So even in the writer’s absence, the piece had great success. Mary Nessinger dazzled, effortlessly switching from Valley Girl-ese to mock-Puccini to pseudo-Wagner to bizarre hip-hop; Paul Hostetter, the conductor, carved out a sizzling interpretation of the piece with great performances from the Sequitur musicians, an orchestra of new music superstars. The audiences loved it. So did the critics, who gave it close-to-rave reviews in the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece was a hit, as much as anything in the culturally marginalized world of contemporary classical art music can reasonably hope to be.

But one more test was to come.

I packed up a copy of the fresh-pressed commercial CD recording plus a DVD dub of the video and mailed it off to DFW. I wondered. Time passed. I wondered. I stopped wondering. Then one day I got a card in the mail from him with a funny and warm appreciation. I was greatly relieved and very, very pleased. He was my target audience, after all. There was talk of a special performance of the piece at Pomona College, where DFW was on the faculty and where the story is set, the fluorescent basin of [post-] medieval CA itself.

It’s right around here that Ovid the O. tone-shifts to Lament.

Like so many others, I read the news flash of his death over and over. I was bereft. I went to the gym to distract myself, and, in an eerily Tri-Stanian moment, heard the news again there on TV. A lot of friends and even people I don’t know so well contacted me to express sympathy. A few trawled for inside information or gossip. I was way too sad to say much by way of thanks for the condolences, and I was way too sad to work up much indignation about the voyeurs. I was touched when one friend, a composer, told me he was listening to Tri-Stan as his personal memorial service for Wallace.

When someone I know dies, I find myself thinking about the last communication I had with them, to see if I can draw any comfort from it. This can be painful. I once was very late in answering an extraordinarily nice letter I’d received from a composer whose music I’d programmed. I got my letter back, unopened, with a terse note from the grieving spouse: “Lou died last month.” With DFW, at least, I could skip the self-reproach. I even allow myself, from time to time, a consoling fantasy. More than a few times, I’ve had the exhilaration of hearing a performer give a truly revelatory performance of a composition of mine. And I hoped that my musical setting might have made DFW feel this same sort of exhilaration.

In the last pages of “Tri-Stan,” Sissee Nar sees herself fatally reflected in mirrored sunglasses, and she is “…transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal.” In contrast, I like to think I might have given DFW a mirror to see one facet of the beauty and depth of his own story. I like to imagine his pleasant surprised smile, a mirror of my own wild Keatsian surmise upon reading “Tri-Stan” for the first time.

Further Links & Resources

Composer Eric Moe, Cr: Mara Rago

• Visit Eric Moe’s website – ericmoe.net – for more about his work and compositions, visit Suzie Silver’s site – harpsilver.com -  for videos from Tri-Stan and stills from her Ultra-Titles® for the opera.
• Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review of Eric Moe’s Tri-Stan here.

• Read contributor Scott F. Parker’s essay / homage to David Foster Wallace, “The Real Question” (FWR, 1/7/2010). In it Parker describes the powerful impact of Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” and the fragile, mysterious connection between writer and reader.

• A New York Times mention of a brand new staging of Moe’s “miniature monodrama” titled, “Jozaphine Freedom,” by the ensemble Sequitor.
• Interested in questions of translation? Jennifer Solheim unearths the inspiration required to convert one art form to another, in her essay, “The Seamless Skin: Translation’s Halting Flow.”

The French words we used were foreign to both of us, from now on it was a language we had to bend to what was in our own minds, to what we wanted to say, no longer, as at school, simply decoding and repeating. We were both making the same effort to communicate and we were doing it slowly, patiently, which may be why we were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.

So begins the short friendship of Raj and David, two young boys in Nathacha Appanah’s novel The Last Brother, whose names both mean “the king.” Both boys are also malnourished and suffering from traumatic losses: Raj has recently lost two brothers in a catastrophic storm that devastated a large portion of the island of Mauritius, where he and his family live, and David, a ten-year-old Jewish Czech boy orphaned by the death of his parents in the concentration camps, has been sent into prison exile on the island with a small number of other European Jews. David also suffers from malaria, and then becomes sick with dysentery, which ultimately leads to his death.

I should say that it is giving nothing away to mention that David dies late in the novel; the reader learns this in the first chapter when Raj describes the sharpness and immediacy of his grief as he stands before his friend’s grave some sixty years later. In fact, this graveside remembrance is the narrative occasion for this novel. For it is the older Raj who relates the story of their friendship and who, to the day of the story’s telling, still does not know how David managed to escape the camps and be exiled to the Beau-Bassin prison camp in Mauritius, where Raj’s tyrannical father once worked as a guard.

As readers we are meant to presume that Raj, the narrator sixty years hence, is relating the story to us in French. What is shared and communicated to the reader has been, for the most part, related in one language: French in the original, and English in the translation. But The Last Brother is polyphonic in two senses of the term. First, a number of languages are spoken throughout the novel, even if they are rendered almost entirely in one language in both the translated and original text. Raj refers to the language he spoke with his family as his mother or native tongue without ever explicitly naming that other language. Second, the narration and dialogue suggest amongst the characters a range of voices and moods, which change depending on who they are speaking to, in what language, and why. The major example of this second point is the fact that French is the only common language between the boys, and they both learned the language in school rather than at home. So there is a hesitancy and deliberation to the boys’ conversations as a result: they are able to adequately articulate themselves in French, but neither is fluent. The deliberateness with which the boys communicate feeds the motif of linguistic difference in Appanah’s novel, and their deliberateness in speaking to one another propels the story emotionally as well.

Appanah’s rendering of language issues and translation strategies in the original work also seems to have influenced award-winning translator Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the novel. In translating Appanah’s words, Strachan had to do more than find a way of rendering the author’s lyrical prose in English. He also had to preserve the moments when the language the characters are using shifts from one to another. How to do this while preserving the lyrical, poetic, dreamlike quality of Raj’s recollections is the trick to a successful communication scheme.

As I read The Last Brother with an eye toward the polyphony of both the novel and the translation process, several questions and insights were sparked for me as a fiction writer, a translator, and a literary critic. Although I have yet to translate a work that requires translation communication schemes, in the novel I’m writing, which is set in the immigrant neighborhoods of contemporary Paris, several of the characters are fluent in English and French, and a few of them are fluent in Kabyle (the language of indigenous Algerian Berbers). Arabic peppers the linguistic landscape of the city as well. I write with the presumption that my readership will be primarily Anglophones with little to no background in French or Arabic, and no background in Kabyle. So, I face several tasks in constructing polyphonic dialogue for readers. For instance, if I include a line or two of dialogue in the “original” French, how can I seamlessly convey the meaning of these lines through the narrator’s or other characters’ reactions? If I include lines of dialogue in English that were spoken in French or Kabyle, what strategies can I use to make it clear that the conversation is either taking place in a language other than English? What does it mean to write “Sofiane replied in French,” rather than to include his words in French? In both the original and the translation, The Last Brother offers several strategies that respond to these sorts of questions.

Here is an early scene in The Last Brother featuring Raj, his mother, and his schoolteacher that sets the terms for the representations of power dynamics through language, and the emotional stakes of speaking French in the novel. This scene offers one example of how Appanah’s original work seems to have informed Strachan’s decisions about translation strategies for language shifts. Shortly after the deaths of his two older brothers, Raj moves across the island with his mother and father for his father’s new job as a guard at Beau-Bassin. There, Raj enrolls at the local school. His teacher, Mademoiselle Elsa, approaches Raj’s mother soon after Raj’s arrival to emphasize the boy’s scholarly promise. She says that Raj is one of the best students in French and English in school, which is impressive, she asserts, given how much catch-up he had to do as a late arrival in the school year. She entices Raj’s mother to support and encourage Raj in his studies in a poignant way that introduces a motif that courses throughout the novel: the connection between language fluency and basic survival. Raj was talented and smart enough that he held great promise to receive a prestigious scholarship, she assures his mother. With this scholarship, Raj would have a place at “the best high school,” and the scholarship would also provide money for books. But more importantly, the teacher emphasizes, some of this money would be left over for food for the family. So Raj’s proficiency in languages offers potential financial remuneration, which could provide nourishment and sustenance for a family who would pick mangoes from trees and “crouch down, eating our mangoes with both hands, with the juice trickling down our forearms, quickly catching it with our tongues… we ate the whole mango, the skin, the little, rather hard tip that had held it to the branch and we sucked the stone for a long, long time until it was rough and insipid, good only to throw on the fire.”  So in this scene with the schoolteacher, language is transformed into manna.

In turn, the French language in particular is marked in The Last Brother, not only as a means to scholarly success and potential sustenance, but also as a language that can offer indicators of and subsequently level unfairly wielded power differentials. At rare but regular intervals, Raj’s father would drink and then return home to beat Raj and his mother so severely that both of them would be left exhausted and unable to function for days. An especially harsh beating lands Raj in the hospital with broken ribs and a fever, among other injuries, and it is in the prison hospital that Raj formally meets David, who has been admitted with malaria. (As the novel progresses it becomes clear that, similar to the potential for Raj’s language abilities to feed the family, the fact that David suffers from malaria and then develops a fatal case of dysentery underscores the silence and mystery surrounding his and the other Jewish prisoners’ experiences of exile and imprisonment on the island of Mauritius).

Raj explains that his father beat him particularly badly on December 26, 1944. In fact, Raj’s injuries from his father’s beating are so severe that he can neither move nor speak. When the father delivers Raj to the hospital for medical attention, the man speaks to one of the prison hospital nurses:

He stopped several times and each time in his womanish voice he said, in French, fell out of the tree. I did not know my father spoke French, enough, at least, to lie and cover up what he had inflicted on his own son. Indeed, maybe he spoke English or Spanish or Chinese as well, nothing would have surprised me, the truth was I did not know him at all.

In a different scene, the father’s boss comes to the house to speak to him. There, we see how his use of French reveals his own precarious position of power at the prison. And in both cases, Raj gleans new perspective on his father as he reflects upon the father’s use of French. The perspective offers Raj some emotional distance in the moment, and in retrospect, Raj can see how powerless his father was.

This passage about the father speaking French gives way to the scene in which Raj and David meet for the first time. This is the passage in which both boys are in the hospital. They are able to speak to one another as Raj recovers from his father’s beating and David nurses his malaria. Their initial communiqués are awkward for Raj, and seemingly for David as well:

I had the impression that he was waiting for me to speak and so I said, speaking in French, as I had learned to in school, separating out the syllables, with a picture in my head of the sentence being written out by an imaginary hand as I spoke it, ‘My name is Raj and I live in Beau-Bassin.’

David looked at me and said to me, just as slowly, ‘My name is David and I live here. But I used to live in Prague.’

As I read this scene the first time, I knew right away that I would use a later part of Raj’s description of their meeting as the epigraph for this essay. I worked through a close reading of the passage I quoted in the epigraph; I was curious to see whether or not I could determine how Strachan’s translation and Appanah’s original intersected and diverged.

I realized that this scene’s emotional impact in fact comes to fruition through the translation communication scheme that Strachan used. It might seem odd that such a strategic and practical concept within the rewriting of a passage from one language to another could lend a scene its emotional power and depth. But it might help to look first at a few examples of how communication schemes are used in other scenes of the novel before returning to the scene of the boys’ first meeting.

Typography—and particularly italics—is a fairly standard way of offsetting the use of foreign words and phrases. In Strachan’s translation of The Last Brother, italics are used first to offset phrases in the original French, which establishes the expectation that when a word or phrase is set in italics, we can understand that it was originally in French. In speaking with Madame Ghislaine, a local aristocrat of sorts for whom Raj’s mother works and for whom Raj has begun working in late 1944, he recounts that “for several weeks I had only opened my mouth to say, as my mother had taught me, Bonjour, Madame. Merci, Madame. À demain, Madame.”  The shift between Raj’s native language and French as he speaks to Madame Ghislaine is represented through this common use of italics. In the English translation, Strachan further underscores this shift by preserving the original French, assuming the reader’s familiarity with basic French salutations.

It’s worth noting that this is a far cry from the use of modern European languages in English-language literary works such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937). In flipping through the first few chapters of Barnes’ novel, the foreign phrases jump out from the page; they, too, are set in italics, for example, “Roba vecchia!”, “Wir seltzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss—”, “Garde tout!” Nightwood was written during a period when an educated, literary American readership could be assumed to have a more-than-basic handle upon reading several European languages. I bring this up because French serves as the unspoken, universal language in The Last Brother, and the fact that Strachan only left untranslated the most basic communication phrases not only underscores Raj’s hesitancy in the language, but also speaks to how expectations of American readers have changed over the past century, and how cultural context can inform the way in which a translator approaches a communication scheme.

The italics in this passage of The Last Brother, thus, offer a typographical example of how to denote linguistic difference within both the original literary text and its translation. It is a simple and effective means of communicating to the reader of the translation, in turn, that throughout the rest of the novel, when italics are employed, it can be assumed that the original language was French, as is the case later in the novel when Raj describes the blue and white sign that hangs over the prison gate, which reads Welcome to the State Prison of Beau-Bassin.

This is an issue I am considering but have not yet addressed as I work through revising the current draft of my own novel. In the earliest drafts, I tried to avoid italics in order to underscore the fact that the linguistic landscape in contemporary Paris is a polyphonic one, but I decided that making a critical point in such a subtle manner serves the novel neither emotionally nor aesthetically. Another possibility would be to use italics early on in order to suggest how disorienting the range of languages beyond French and English is to the American narrator. Again, this ultimately strikes me as too subtle. At this point, I’m considering italics for the foreign phrases and words that the American narrator does not understand, whether in French, Kabyle, or Arabic. It remains to be seen, but Strachan’s use of italics in his translation here offers another possibility: once it is established that italics connote, say, French, the words and phrases in italics will be understood by the reader to be in French from that point forward.

Another strategy for denoting linguistic difference while maintaining the same language within the text is to simply alert the reader that the dialogue they are about to read was spoken in a particular language. I had been trying to avoid this strategy in my own writing; it struck me as obvious and inelegant reportage. But the ways in which the phrase “in French” is used in The Last Brother serves as both a communication scheme and a means of establishing details about the setting. In the prison hospital, French is the lingua franca between staff and patients. We learn this when “[The nurse] placed her hand on my brow, took out a thermometer from one of her pockets, thrust it under my tongue for a moment, and said, in French, ‘Your fever’s gone. You’ll be able to go home soon.’” The use of this communication scheme at this moment in the story and its translation suggests several things. First, of course, Strachan assumes that his translation’s readership’s knowledge of French is limited to the most common phrases. So his approach in this case could not be to simply leave the French in the original, as he did with the initial italicized phrases spoken to Madame Ghislaine. It for this reason that he directly translated Appanah’s “en français” to indicate to the reader what language the nurse was speaking.

Even more interesting here, however, is the fact that the nurse’s voice is not described: she is quoted directly, where Raj’s father was not. Nor does Raj reflect retrospectively here on what it means for the nurse to speak to him in French. It is a means of offering further details about the atmosphere and culture in the prison hospital, one that sets us up the reason for why David and Raj speak French together without prompting on either of their parts. The “in French” strategy, thus, offers a means of relating to the reader which language will be privileged in a given setting without directly stating it as such.

With this example from The Last Brother in mind, I experimented with revising a scene in my novel in which the narrator, who speaks French quite well, listens to and becomes lost in a conversation that shifts between French and Kabyle. Since she understands and has the context for only snippets of what is being discussed, her reactions are limited to confusion and, in moments, tuning out the conversation in order to pay attention to what’s going on around her otherwise. To address directly the fact that other characters were moving back and forth between French and Kabyle offered me a moment where I could elaborate on the narrator’s fears of appearing to not understand, to be lost. So for my purposes, this strategy opened up the possibility for further character development.

So, then, here is how the translation communication scheme employed by Strachan in the hospital meeting scene between the boys resonated with me. In this scene, Raj’s use of the phrase “speaking in French” suggests a deliberateness, an attempt to make contact with someone unknown and clearly foreign (Raj notes in an early description of David how striking his pale hair and skin were to him). Raj’s deliberation is underscored by the intentionality of his own strategy for parsing through the French: the separation of syllables, the pictures of the sentence in his head, written by an imaginary hand. It is as if, in speaking to David in French, his deliberateness with the language is the medium through which their communication must pass. They cannot establish direct contact.

In this powerful moment in both the novel and the translation, the older narrator Raj explains that the boys “were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.” There is an urgency in their need to communicate the desperation of their respective situations. Raj has lost his older brothers, and is subject to his father’s violent whims, and his family survives on the edge of starvation. David, meanwhile, is sick, malnourished, in exile and imprisoned, and completely alone in the world. The desire to speak to one another becomes a basic need for both characters. The leveling of power dynamics and social and cultural difference is an intrinsic part of the polyphony of The Last Brother, and almost nowhere in the novel does this resonate as deeply as in the passage in which Raj and David first speak. When I arrived at the final lines of this passage, I heard the French in my head, like an echo of the English translation, as if I were there with Raj and David as they said to one another, “Je suis tout seul.” “Moi aussi.” The echo literally sent a shiver through me.

As the novel progresses beyond their early interactions, their common language continues to offer both bridges and barriers to their rapprochement and increasing dependence on one another. For Raj, David becomes a surrogate brother. Raj “others” David, in a sense, referring to him in near angelic terms as pale and ephemeral, and yet his grief over David’s death sixty years later seems to far outweigh any grief he feels—or allows himself to feel—over the death of his brothers. David, meanwhile, escapes from prison with Raj’s help, and so becomes completely dependent on Raj’s assistance to navigate and attempt to flee the island. In the latter third of the story, the boys seek a port in which there is, allegedly, a ship bound for Palestine, which David calls Eretz (presumably short for Eretz Yisrael, a common name for the Jewish promised land before the state of Israel was established). This port is never found. But in the meantime, the boys’ fascination and frustration with one another’s differences are palpable. As Raj recalls:

The words collided with one another in my throat, came tumbling out of my mouth in a chaotic fashion, just as in a dream, when one is desperately trying to speak. I longed for him to understand my mother tongue so that what I was saying might flow more freely, so that I might use just the right word, express my precise feelings to him.

This description of the limitations of Raj’s scholastic proficiency in the French language suggests, wrenchingly, the linguistic scrim that remains between the boys, which also limits their ability to relate to one another the things they have experienced and lived. Of the star of David that he wears around his neck, David explains to Raj that David was the king of his people. Raj is at first annoyed by and skeptical of this assertion, since David cannot conclusively prove it true. Raj is just as frustrated by the fact that his name also means “king,” and he has even less proof than David, since there is no river or symbol named Raj to parallel the star. This passage underscores the importance of objects and symbols in their conversations, and reminds the reader of the scrim of French.

The older Raj who relates the story of his friendship with and the death of David longs for the other boy to be able to tell his story “in his own words and with the things that he alone could see.” Part of what Raj imagines David might relate (the italics are original, and following the communication strategy established by Appanah and maintained in translation by Strachan, they suggest that the older Raj believes that David’s “own words” sixty years later would have been uttered in a language different from Raj’s): “On the other side of the barbed wire I saw a dark boy with black hair…his eyes as black as billiard balls…if he’d not been weeping he would have frightened me with his face like a savage’s.”

The linguistic difference between the two boys remains tangible and painful for the aged Raj who recounts the story, and the fact that he imagines David describing him as a savage underscores two things: first, that the narrator Raj (who lives in Europe and is widely traveled) is now well aware of the social perceptions of him as a man of color; and second, that French as a common language can only take them so far in Raj’s imagination. So painful is this barrier that later in his life, Raj orders a French-Yiddish dictionary, and can only go so far as to look up the words for “hunger,” “brother,” and “mother” before he begins to weep. One of the most intense images in the novel is the dictionary sitting on a kitchen counter, still wrapped in bubble wrap. Raj’s hands are shaking so badly that he asks his wife to open the package for him.

One curiosity remains for me about polyphony in The Last Brother: in the later chapters of the novel, Raj’s linguistic limitations seemingly fall away while David’s remain. When Raj describes the way in which he relates details of his life with his brothers, and his brothers’ subsequent deaths, he seems to leap ahead of David in his ability to communicate in French. Following a full page of specific details and emotional complexities that Raj relates to David about the lives and deaths of his brothers, he tells the reader, “And David’s eyes wet with tears and questions, David did not understand, he got everything mixed up, he said only one body, two brothers… maybe he’s still alive your elder brother.” The rush of emotions that the young Raj experiences upon hearing David’s hope that one of his brothers survived is represented by the subsequent run-on sentence of which his reaction to Raj’s story is a part. The rush of words and suggestions establish yet another facet of the novel’s polyphony. Here, perhaps, we can assume that the narrator Raj, in relating this moment, is overcome with emotion once more. The rushed tone that is suggested by the run-on is altogether distinct from the quiet, sparse, poetic quality of the narrative voice employed throughout much of the novel. Yet what purpose did it serve here for Raj to suddenly recall himself as speaking far more proficiently in French than he had previously been capable? Particularly since David’s response is fairly wooden in the translation, suggested by the construction of the italicized sentence, and possibly the use of the word “elder,” although I don’t claim to know if this word was less anachronistic in early 1945 than when Raj relates the story sixty years later.

In fiction, dialogue often acts as conduit and conductor between characters. But in the case of The Last Brother and its translation, the linguistic choices that characters make go beyond communication and character development. In a kind of narrative alchemy, both the direct and indirect dialogue seems to take on physical properties. Once manipulated in the mouths of the characters, language serves to transform and develop the setting, themes, motifs, and—perhaps most importantly—the act of speaking in and of itself. The Last Brother is as much about the power of language as the ineffability of historical trauma. Yet there were several moments later in the novel, such as the passage in which Raj seems to leap ahead of David linguistically in describing his brothers’ deaths, when I was pulled out of the narrative due to stylistic choices that seemed intended to underscore the balance between what is articulated and what goes unspoken. Was this a deliberate choice on the part of Appanah that was then faithfully conveyed in Strachan’s translation? As deliberate a choice, perhaps, as Raj’s and David’s early moments of French conversation were marked by deliberation out of necessity? Was this choice, then, a means of conveying to the reader how painful the linguistic scrim between the boys remains for Raj, sixty years hence? As a literary critic, I find myself posing these questions, recoiling from them, and then embracing them as unanswerable. The fact that I cannot answer these questions is likely part of the point. And as both critic and fiction writer, coming to this conclusion excites me. I wonder about how my own decisions about communication schemes will be received by my readers, and what they might see in my work that I might not. It also serves as a possible cautionary tale: ought I to be careful with how far I try to take critical points within my fiction writing? I would be interested to hear what other writers think.

Perhaps the seemingly obtuse moments of more eloquent communication in The Last Brother are meant to throw into relief the experience of being unable to fully comprehend what it would be like to live through the experiences that David did. One of the most compelling things about The Last Brother as a novel is its basic premise: nine-year-old Raj has no idea that a war is raging on three continents. It is through knowing David (and David’s recollections of the ghettoization and imprisonment of his family, followed by the death of his parents) that Raj first learns of the Second World War and the Shoah, and he is still grappling with it sixty years later. The novel concludes on what could be dismissed as a contrived or cliché statement, given all that Raj has related to the reader: “I tell myself that in a minute I shall recount David’s story to my son, so that he, too, may remember.” But what can be intuited from this final statement, perhaps, is that such cataclysmic world events exceed language, and can never be fully explained or retold enough times. The words must pour from Raj’s mouth again. Perhaps his assertion that he will repeat his own version of the boys’ story then underscores David’s silence within the story, and the absence of the exiled prisoners at Beau-Bassin from history.

Further Links and Resources

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Like many people, my desire to reinvent the workshop started with the very first workshop I was in.

This wasn’t because of the methods by which we discussed our stories, but rather, because of one story in particular that the professor, a very fine fiction writer, told at the beginning of class about his days as a graduate student.

He was assigned a composition class and told to do whatever he wanted, so he did. On the first day of the first fifty-minute class, he had everyone draw numbers out of a hat. Then he told them to go home and write five pages about something they loved. They sat there, blinking, and so he rewound back to the point where he told them to “go home,” and eventually they all did. There were approximately forty-five minutes left in class at this point and the room was empty.

You can see why this method already attracted me.

But the real genius started at the second class meeting. He told everyone to sit in numerical order, and then asked them to come up one at a time with whatever they’d written. He then talked with each student privately for however long it took, going through their essays line by line. He’d arranged his office hours so that they fell immediately after class, and so he just worked straight through, until he’d seen all the students.

This one-on-one method took longer, but only at first. The department’s requirements were that each student had to write five essays over the course of the semester. Some students, that first day, had produced an essay that was just fine. So he accepted it right then and there and sent them off with instructions to write essay number two. If they brought back that essay and it, too, was shipshape, he accepted it and sent them on to essay three—and four and five.

But wait, you ask—and they asked—what if a student wrote so well that they finished all their essays by the end of September?

Then they were done. Really: he sent those students away and told them never to return. They’d written their five essays, and they’d earned their final grade. And then he turned back to the ever-dwindling number of students in the class, and he continued to meet with them one-on-one, one by one, until they’d all written five satisfactory essays.

By November, it was just him and a handful of students—students who’d needed the most attention, students who were, by dint of this system, getting the most attention.

*

Now, as I said, this professor was—and is—a very fine fiction writer. He may very well have made up this entire pedagogical anecdote. But I’m a very fine fiction reader.  Which is to say, I don’t care if he made it up: fiction, for me, has always possessed the greater share of truth.

And the truth is, my own undergraduate creative writing workshop needed some reinventing a few semesters back. As I rummaged around for ideas, I thought back to his story of this magical composition class, and decided I liked the model. I then commenced to attempt the impossible: to create a structure that was just as smart he’d described, but which satisfied the dull demands of reality (and university administration).

Our undergraduate creative writing program is an all-comers affair. If you enroll, you’re in, and if you don’t flunk out, you stay in (unless your parents insist you switch to the accounting). The result, of course, is that we get students of widely varying talents. And while our introductory suite of courses is supposed to sand off the rough edges, we nevertheless get students at the intermediate level (and beyond) who need different levels of attention. Some of that can be addressed in office hours, but it can be hard enough to get students to show up for class.

So I set up a new workshop model for my intermediate fiction writing class that was designed to give more critical review and writing time to students who needed it.

In the past, I’d let the order of workshopping be dictated by the sophisticated means of…whoever was sitting to closest to me got to sign-up first. But this often meant that the last slots to be claimed were the earliest on the schedule, and often went to people who were rarely ready. Worse still were those people who wanted to go first, because they had 100 pages of vampiric zombie softcore ready to go, right now—in their backpack at that moment, in fact, did I want to take a look…?

No.

Instead, I swiped an old device from, appropriately, composition: a day one diagnostic writing exercise. After discussing some basics, I passed out a short-short story such as Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” or Grace Paley’s “Wants” and asked students to write a pastiche—just riff on it, I told them. Nothing more necessary than just a paragraph or two; as much as they could manage. I then asked them to expand on that writing as homework and e-mail the results to me, along with an answer to what I admittedly phrased as a leading question: “How much time will you need to prepare your first story for this class?” A lot, a little, none.

The next class, we workshopped these initial efforts in small groups and also discussed, in class as a whole, what sort of cues we took from the original text, thus completing a lesson in close reading alongside the writing exercise.

Then I went home with all the writing samples I’d collected and sorted them, most promising to least. The most accomplished pieces earned their authors the earliest slots in the workshop schedule. The least accomplished pieces were scheduled the furthest out.

Interestingly, my schedule almost always matched their requests—less confident writers who’d asked for more time really did need more time. And in those cases where a student’s plans and mine didn’t match, I wrote individual e-mails to them. “I know you’d asked for more time, but I think you have enough momentum here to go earlier.”

So one part was solved: the students who showed the greatest need were going to get the most lead time to produce their story. But I wanted them to use that lead time productively, which led to another change.

Rather than follow the usual format of assigning x number of students to a class period and discussing them for scrupulously equal amounts of time—indeed, I’m waiting for the creative writing conference pedagogy panel entitled, “Reinventing the Stopwatch: What to Do About Students Who Complain that Someone Else Got Four More Minutes”—I assigned only one student per class to have their full story workshopped. Three other students, meanwhile, were assigned to bring in only a story fragment, and we spent the balance of our time discussing them.

To review (since we’re talking pedagogy), the best students had their full pieces considered first. The students who needed the most work had portions of their stories, fragments—the beginnings—workshopped first. Students rotated through the fragment/mini-workshops repeatedly, until their full story was up for discussion. Then they dropped out of the mini-workshop rotation. By the end of the first half of the semester, the students who’d shown the least promise at the outset had their full stories workshopped—but only after we’d already discussed and helped them with their openings, their middle sections, and finally, their conclusions. Indeed, these mini-workshops became a space where the “teaching” of the class occurred, where we discussed the fundamentals of craft—not just how to structure a beginning, middle and end, but how to introduce characters, how to plot, and, most important, how to revise.

So what was the result of this workshop experiment?

I love that line in John Gardner’s book On Becoming a Novelist where he talks about his novel workshop, how it ran them all ragged, how each student ended up dropping all their other classes, but how, in the end, eight of his ten students wound up publishing their novels.

For my part, I’m happy to report that all sixteen of my students in that first reinvented workshop now support themselves solely through their writing, have movie deals—are married to movie stars, in fact—and, when voting in national or local elections, always consider how their ballots will impact funding for the arts.

What can I say? I’m a fiction writer, too.

The truth is, it did work, but it’s a work in progress. What worked is that the students who needed the most time to write their pieces got that time—and got that feedback.

Indeed, another challenge I’d had previously was that lower-performing students only got to be workshopped a handful of times. That is, they got workshopped the same number of times as everyone else, which wasn’t enough. They learned little about revision; it was easier for them to simply abandon a piece and move on.

Not in my new model, however: they learned what needed fixing and they fixed it. And if they fixed it wrong, they got a chance—and another, and another—to fix it again.

But, of course, there are those times when the best course is to abandon a piece and move on, and my new model doesn’t easily allow for that. The fragments that students workshopped were all supposed to be fragments from the same story. Ultimately, I did make exceptions—if someone wanted to “start over,” I let them, but it upset the equilibrium a bit.

There was also the matter of holding readers’ interest. While some of these pieces definitely did change over time, students were liable to lose interest in their role as critics if they felt a piece wasn’t changing enough—or, even if changed, wasn’t changed enough to engage them.

The biggest challenge, though, was that this model made explicit what a lot of workshops leave implicit: some writers in this room…are better than the others. I never said that out loud, of course, and I was able to remind any students who raised the point that I’d asked them, after all, if they needed more time, and so the schedule was, in part, reacting to their own requests. But some students did chafe that they’d been asked to do more small pieces (and thus revise more) than other people. At the same time, it became obvious to all—even those students who remained the longest in the mini-workshop or fragment rounds—that they needed that feedback to be successful.

Finally, although my critical antenna proved fairly well tuned, there were a few cases where I’d made the wrong call based on the day one writing diagnostic. The ranking, best to worst, wasn’t perfect. It was close, though.

Nevertheless, I’ve been working on refining this model (which I’ve been calling chiastic, after chiasmus, which is really just me chasing after a poetic term to describe this criss-cross approach; I’ll need to revise the name, too). I’ll stick with two rounds; in each round, each student will workshop at least one ‘full” story and multiple fragments as I described earlier, but I’ll play with the slots assignments a bit. The first part of the semester, I’ll assign randomly: who does a “full story” and who does a “story fragment” will be determined by chance. The second part of the semester, I’ll have them choose. And now that they know how it works, the ones who need extra time and feedback—which they know from their first round experience—should seek out those slots that allow them to have that additional feedback. The ones who need less will pick earlier slots.

We’ll see how it goes; I know it won’t go perfectly. But it will get some writers who need help, more help. That said, I don’t know that I would employ this for a more advanced class, and definitely not for a graduate class (unless my grad students read this and clamor for it). And my reinvention still doesn’t get me to the point where I’ve dismissed the majority of the class long before the semester’s end, and I spend those final weeks meeting with three or four students, each of us working out, with painstaking care, just where this word or that should go, all in the service of what we all acknowledge by then is a goal that glitters brighter because the path toward it stretched longer.

But then, that first workshop I took with that wonderful writer with his wonderful story of his 1970s do-it-my-way class, ended not with some similar grand revolutionary scheme for us in his 1990s graduate fiction workshop.

Rather he just surveyed the room after he finished his anecdote and asked, “So, who’s going first?”

Which is also a good method. I like to think that he was just acknowledging that the teaching side of this business can be a lot like the creative side: we’re just making it up as we go.

Further Links & Resources

• If you want to read the real experts on reinventing the workshop, I defer to my intrepid graduate students Chris Drew, Joe Rein and Dave Yost, who have gone and published an anthology on the subject — it’s truly terrific: Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011).
• The John Gardner book I reference, On Becoming a Novelist, doesn’t get read as much as his Art of Fiction, but you can help right this wrong . The Raymond Carver foreword is worth a look alone.
• If you give me an hour, I could explain why “chiastic” is the perfect word for this method, but as you probably don’t have the time, I’ll refer you to the Poetry Foundation’s definition of chiasmus and let you mull from there.
• I live and write in Milwaukee and on the web at liamcallanan.com .

I’ve always loved the connotations of the word workshop. There’s refinement in a seminar and hierarchy in a master-class, but a workshop brings to mind sawdust and power tools. A bunch of unshaven people in greasy jumpsuits. To call a class a workshop implies that we’ll replace or reinforce theoretical lessons with the practical work of making and fixing tangible objects: the machines that texts are.

At advanced levels especially, workshop courses tend to proceed manuscript by manuscript, like a fix-it shop where we poke around under the hood, trying to understand how this particular engine works and what can be done to make it run better.

For people who love workshops, like me, this problem-solving methodology is not just instructive, it’s fun. Stimulating. In fact, part of what made me sure I wanted to be a writer—and a writing teacher—was the pleasure I experienced in workshop, helping my peers and students solve those problems.

But a funny thing happened after I spent a few years loving life in writing workshops. With each semester my work grew more careful, more conventional, more narrowly proscribed. My weirdest, most experimental work came and went before I’d finished my first semester of grad school. Back then I would have said my writing was becoming more refined, and that’s certainly true. But in retrospect I also think that my fears were setting in, eroding the courage borne of naïveté that I had enjoyed as a younger writer.

I had genuinely masterful teachers, and they ran their workshops with respect, imagination, generosity, and vast expertise. I honestly don’t think they could have done a better job. And yet by the time I graduated, whenever I sat down to write a sentence, my head was instantly flooded with the voices of my workshop peers and teachers. The biggest thing I learned in grad school, it seemed, was a powerful, paralyzing sense of all the mistakes I was about to make in my next paragraph. Ideas for stories kept coming and coming, but when I tried to put them on paper I didn’t just dry up—I experienced genuine panic. This lasted for years.

The worst part was, I could hardly admit it to anyone. The very notion of writer’s block is often treated, in serious academic workshops, as a weakness or lack of discipline experienced only by hacks and amateurs. And maybe it is. But something tells me it strikes the best and worst of us. And if writers don’t learn to overcome the anxieties that stop them from writing, then every other skill we teach them will be for naught.

**

Conversations about process, self-motivation, and confidence sometimes crop up in private student-teacher conversations, but they rarely find an official place in the curriculum of advanced academic workshops. A lot of us—students included—consider those touchy-feely, self-expression, free-your-imagination conversations and exercises to be well beneath us. We relegate them to the domain of adult-education workshops and Write Your Novel in 30 Days! books, and to the self-help land of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way franchise.

In college I took a one-day workshop with a National Book Award-winning visiting writer who asked if we could take a moment at the beginning of class to meditate. She rang a bell. After she closed her eyes, we all shot hysterical glances at one another and tried to keep straight faces. And, I’m ashamed to say, we pretty much wrote off everything she said for the next hour as the rantings of a weird hippie.

Some of my peers later studied with a wonderful writer and teacher who asked them, on the first night of workshop, to map out their story ideas in crayon on big sheets of paper. They left the classroom incensed. “I didn’t go to grad school,” one student said, “to draw pictures.” Perhaps she’d been trying to release them from their normal approach to story creating. Who knows. But that professor spent the rest of the semester trying, and never quite succeeding, to rebuild her credibility, her authority.

In “serious” academic workshops, the actual act of writing occurs at home, in secret—or it doesn’t occur at all. Everyone jokingly acknowledges that “Of course you’ll spend the first few days after workshop or the first several months after grad school feeling overwhelmed, defeated, reluctant to write. That’s just how it goes.” The tough ones will find a way back to their computers and notebooks, and the rest, well… who knows what happens to them? The rare student who works up the nerve to actually ask how to overcome writer’s block risks shame, risks being written off. And anyway, the usual response boils down to little more than, “Sit at your desk and just do it.”

Despite all our declarations to students that masterful texts result from rigorous revision and don’t just fall from the sky, academic workshops imply that first drafts, at least, fall from the sky. Beyond the stage of “Intro to Creative Writing,” we spend very little time helping students develop the skills to generate those first drafts.

I suspect this is partly because the pedagogy associated with overcoming doubt and generating raw material is tainted by its associations with self-help, therapy, nurturing, self-expression, and spirituality. I sense, too, that each of these areas is tinged with connotations of femininity. I know part of what makes me afraid to engage with those topics in workshop is my reluctance to play the nurturing female role. To teach these psychological, or yes, even spiritual skills is to risk losing our credibility as serious writers and professors. But if we continue to cede this territory to “unserious” workshops and, out of fear, convention, or prejudice, avoid teaching the psychological strategies required of life-long writers, I think our students miss out on some skills that are essential to the success, survival and sanity of any writer.

**

During my painful, frightened, depressed years as a blocked writer, I ended up spending quite a bit of time watching TV. The Tennis Channel, to be specific. Watching the two to five hours of a tennis match, you can actually see and hear (as you can’t in most sports) the tremendous physical and emotional highs and lows that players go through. They are unhidden by helmets or pads, and the downtime between points and games allows for intense close-ups of each player as she strategizes, scolds herself, or simply melts down. Most importantly: each player is alone. Coaching of any kind during a match is prohibited in most pro tournaments. Whatever strategy, motivation, support, or composure a coach in any other sport might offer has to come, in tennis, from within the player herself.

In other words, the coach’s job involves teaching players to develop the inner resources to overcome fear and frustration, to maintain confidence, and to keep a clear, focused mind under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.

When a player fails at this, when a wildly talented, well-trained player loses his confidence or the rhythm of his serve, everyone watching can see it, plain as day. The coach grits his teeth in impossible frustration, and spectators scream advice and encouragement, but the player has already lost, in his head, and hears none of this. Players who truly lose their confidence, for good, stumble from loss to loss, all their talent and training and a lifetime of grueling work made meaningless because their brains have gotten in the way. Head cases, people call them. Every sport has them, every fan mourns them. Sportscasters whistle under their breath and suggest sports psychologists, a change of coaches, a change of racquets, a change of anything.

Sometimes when I watch a player I love lose a tough, pivotal match I think, “Thank God as writers the game never ends; there is always the chance to revise something and get it right.” The story will wait until we get our heads on straight—or so we like to think.

Other times, in periods of frustration or boredom with my writing, I think, “What a great thing it would be to have the game just be over and done with. Take a shower, go to bed, start over the next day with a clean slate. No manuscript hanging over your head, unfinished, unfinished, unfinished.”

A player might review a lost match on game tape or in her bad dreams for years to come, but she cannot actually revise it. The psychological make-up of the successful athlete has to include the ability to put the last match behind her. To learn from it and drop it and move forward.

In the academic, manuscript-based workshop, we tend to train students in a different psychology: revise, revise, and then revise some more. As the writer and pedagogy theorist Anna Leahy writes in a description of her teaching methods, “Most importantly, I treat everyone’s work as unfinished, always.”¹ The typical methodology of the academic workshop puts the manuscript before the writer; people talk about “what the text is trying to do” and sometimes don’t even look at the writer when they offer their feedback. Sometimes it seems that the serious workshop serves to perfect texts, not develop writers. Or, it serves texts directly, and writers only indirectly. We tend to disregard the fact that some manuscripts aren’t worth perfecting and should perhaps be chalked up as a loss so the writer can freely move on to the next match.

If the primary focus of academic workshops is to highlight what isn’t working in the manuscript, and through constant emphasis on revision imply that the work is never done, may never be done, after a few years of taking workshops students must end up feeling that they’ve been on one interminable losing streak. No wonder they walk through the halls in despair; no wonder they lose their confidence and retreat, relying on skill sets they’ve been told they are good at, rather than expanding the limits of their art. Who wouldn’t?

I’m not saying that revision—and the endurance needed for multiple revisions—isn’t important. Of course it is. My point is merely that there are psychological components to teaching and learning to write, whether we acknowledge them openly in our classrooms or not. And if we focus mainly on fixing the fleeting problems of each manuscript, we may overlook the more enduring problems of each student. And that’s dangerous and inefficient, because the problems in each student of course create—and recreate—the flaws and limitations in their manuscripts, or sometimes prevent them from producing a text in the first place. We acknowledge that athletes need psychological strength and skills as much as physical ones. Why would writers—those “athletes of perception,” to quote Robert Stone—be any different?

_{Leahy, Anna. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005, p. 14.}

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared, in slightly different form, as part of the AWP 2011 Panel “Beyond the Workshop: Revising, Revamping, Rejecting the Workshop Model.” The panel also included fellow writers and teachers, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Charles Baxter, Liam Callanan, and Patrick O’Keeffe. Please check back this Friday, September 23, when FWR will publish Liam Callanan’s talk from that same panel.

Further Links & Resources

• Interested in pedagogy? C’mon, we won’t rat you out. FWR published an extensive round-table discussion on teaching creative writing in the 21st Century with Cathy Day, Anna Leahy and Stephanie Vanderslice. Here are links to Part I and Part II.
• Read Kate Kostelnik’s review of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?, which takes a look not only at the current workshop model, but the potential for change – nay, revolution – of the system.



• Valerie Laken is the author of the novel, Dream House, and the 2010 story collection Separate Kingdoms. Read a 2009 interview with Valerie here on FWR, and check out additional interviews, reviews, and more at valerielaken.com.