You think you have a problem with hoarding books? The above short film, by Sergey Stefanovich, walks you through the library of writer and critic Duncan Fallowell, which “has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right.” (Via.)

Fallowell narrates, with lots of meditative insights on reading and writing: “I’m so glad I haven’t read everything–I have such a wonderful future awaiting me.”

However, if you really need to clear out some space, perhaps this post by Jodi Chromey, “How I Learned to Stop Hoarding and Give Away Books,” provides the solution.

• More on writers’ writing spaces

Further advice on culling your collection

• And, further bookshelf porn

Jim Shepard, Credit: Michael Lionstar

A secret affair on board a zeppelin. Three brothers involved in the Chernobyl incident. A Nazi expedition in search of the Yeti. It’s a rule: any discussion of Jim Shepard’s work must eventually turn toward the range of ground covered. In hyper-condensed story after hyper-condensed story, he pushes through new subject matter that could easily have taken a whole novel to explore, and when you’ve read enough of his stories, you start to wonder if there are boundaries to his empathy. They must be somewhere, because we’ve all got them, but they certainly don’t seem to involve gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, time, or space. Maybe it’s the human-animal divide? No, he wrote from the point of view of the swamp monster. Maybe it’s the fourth dimension? I can’t remember anything about string theory in his oeuvre. But, then, he’s still going.

Those familiar with Shepard’s past work will recognize this trend in his latest collection, You Think That’s Bad (Knopf, 2011), which could almost be read as an exercise in oneupsmanship—he invokes the voice of a “Black World” ops man embroiled in a touchy conversation with his wife and friend, an engineer made helpless in the face of a crumbling marriage and the rising sea level in the Netherlands, and even a servant of Gilles de Rais, the Breton knight and fellow of Joan of Arc accused of the serial killing of children. His narrators are thrown up against even more dire circumstances than previouisly, and while Shepard continues to take the careful time to feel for their predicaments, he also continues to spare them no sorrow (in a good kind of way).

Like a lot of my fellow MFA students and friends, I came across Jim Shepard’s work only a few years ago. I’d stumbled across a copy of Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) in the Staff Recommends section at McNally Jackson booksellers in Soho, and was immediately grabbed by the title story regarding two gay men aboard a zeppelin. But Shepard has been at this long before those National Book Award Finalist and Story Prize winner stickers were slapped on the cover of Like You’d Understand Anyway (Knopf, 2008). He’s the author of six novels and four story collections, and the editor of several anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and everywhere else, and he was a columnist on film for The Believer. His stories have appeared four times in the Best American Short Stories and once in the Pushcart series. Additionally, he teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA program at Williams College and is a husband, a father, and the caretaker of two beagles.

Despite all that he was kind enough to take time to talk with me, a fan-boy and MFA candidate. Via e-mail and phone we got a chance to discuss his early career, his process, where he might take his narrators next, and how he feels his mustache measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Interview

Shawn Andrew Mitchell: In your essay, “An Appreciation of John Hawkes,” up over at The Rumpus, you discussed your mentorship under Hawkes during your time as an MFA candidate at Brown University. Had you done much writing before this? If it existed, what was Jim Shepard juvenilia like?

Jim Shepard: By that point I’d written my whole life, as short as it was. I’d always written, for myself, and occasionally for the nuns at Our Lady of Peace School, when I’d finished all of my English in-class assignments early. I wrote mostly about war and monsters. I remember Sister Justine being bemused at one story of mine entitled “Save That Blood!” I think it involved G.I.’s fighting werewolves. As you can see, I haven’t come very far in terms of subjects.

What sort of things did you read at that time?

Nobody in my family went to college, so I only read what books my parents had in the house, which were almost entirely nonfiction. What that meant was that because nobody had taught them about literature or encouraged them to read literature, they thought “Well, of course you want to read because you want to be an intelligent human being, but if you’re going to read you want to learn stuff, and the way you learn stuff is you read nonfiction.” So I grew up reading all about volcanoes and dinosaurs in little science or history books for kids. Every so often I read a sort of summarized version of Viking myths or Greek Myths. I didn’t really know about the world of children’s books until I got to college and people would say “I love Where the Wild Things Are,” and I would say “What’s that?”

Do you still go back and read about mythology?

Not really, no. I’ve read Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino and stuff like that, but I don’t do that kind of folkloric wandering very often. I wouldn’t pick it up as a kind of curiosity. Normally there are so many other things I’ve got to get to that I don’t think, “You know, I don’t know any South Seas myths, I think I’ll read some of those.”

If the internet is to be trusted, you graduated from Brown in 1980 and your first book, the novel Flights, came out in 1983. What were you up to during those three years, creatively and professionally? I ask partially because I’m about to exit my MFA program, and there seems to be a yawning void ahead.

I got a job right out of Brown, at the last minute, teaching at the University of Michigan. I was finishing the final year of my MFA and facing the void you describe when Michigan asked Brown for the names of two or three students they might invite to apply to teach. I agreed to the interview because it meant a free trip to New York; I never really imagined they’d offer me the job. Then when Michigan did, I accepted, since I had no other prospects. The hubris of what I was doing never really hit me until I arrived in Ann Arbor. I spent the next three years working eighteen hours a day to keep up with what I had agreed to teach. (As in, “Hey: I’m lecturing on Lolita on Thursday. Oh, shit.”) During the summers, I tried to prepare for the upcoming fall semesters, and worked on Flights.

Flights was followed by three more novels: Paper Doll [1987], Lights out in the Reptile House [1990], and Kiss of the Wolf [1994]. Then, in 1996, Knopf published your first collection, Batting Against Castro. Were you working on short stories concurrently with the novels, or did you break from those entirely until you began work on Batting?

I wrote stories as an undergraduate and a graduate student, so a number of stories that are in Batting Against Castro are quite old. Some of them are older than my first novel. There’s a story in there called “Eustace,” which was the first story I published. There’s also a story called “Messiah,” which was probably the first decent story I wrote after a whole lot of bad stories. So Batting Against Castro, unlike a lot of the other story collections, really took about fifteen or twenty years to come together. It’s probably my weakest story collection if I had to judge, mostly because I think I’ve gotten better as a story writer. But whereas You Think That’s Bad took two and a half years, Batting probably took twenty. Mostly because I was writing novels along the way.

Along with the teaching load.

Along with the teaching and having children and bothering the dog and stuff like that.

Do you find it hard to switch between working on short stories and working on a novel? I’m having to work on stories for workshop right now, but I’m focusing on a novel for my thesis. It’s a tough balancing act.

No, I think what the stories were doing was allowing me to write when I didn’t have a novel idea or when the novel idea that I had didn’t seem to be working. So I didn’t really feel like I was switching. I felt like I was saying, “Well, since you don’t have a novel, why don’t you try to do something?” Or I might have come across an idea that I thought was cool but I knew wouldn’t be a novel. So it didn’t feel much like switching. It felt like trying to keep myself working in some capacity.

What sort of ideas do you feel could shape into a novel and which ones do you know are going to be short storyish?

It’s hard to say, really. Certainly some of the longer stories I’ve written lately have had a huge amount of narrative that could have been developed and a huge amount of research that went into them. A lot of my writer friends have said, “You’re crazy for not making this a 500 page novel.” So it’s not exactly inherent in the narrative itself. It has a lot more to do with how long I want to maintain the obsessive intensity of staring into that world. I think as I’ve gotten darker in terms of subject matter, the desire to stay in that world has diminished as well. If you’re writing about the servant of a mass murderer, the energy involved in trying to stay empathetic is such that five months is probably enough and three years might be too much.

Why do you think your subject matter has gotten darker as you’ve gone along?

I don’t know, but I think in general my sense of the world is becoming more apocalyptic. The despairing or angry sense you have that things are going down the toilet, which I suppose is a characteristic of getting old and crotchety, is a little bit exaggerated by a situation whereby you can almost confirm that sense just by empirical standards or even just by watching the news. It was always the case when I was growing up that people would say “America’s not what it used to be; the world’s going to hell.” It seemed back then that it was pretty easy to claim that was a controversial position. Now I don’t think it is. I guess I have a sense of powerlessness in the face of that. Very few people are in any position to stop it, but writing literature is a particularly good way to feel like you have no impact on the culture.

Was there a time when you felt that fiction could influence the culture in a positive way?

I recently visited Notre Dame. And some faculty there told me that on the day that Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, all of the major news services were frantically calling South Bend because apparently Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wright Morris were all there for the literary conference, and the national media urgently needed some American fiction writers’ responses to what had happened. The assumption was—as it still is in Europe—that  literary fiction writers, having engaged with some care the social issues of the day, had something to contribute to the national conversation. Try to imagine something like that today.

That’s uplifting to think about… Maybe we should switch topics to something jollier like “craft.” How about research? At what point in the process does your research begin to coalesce into fiction? Does the research continue into the drafting time, or do you get it done beforehand?

I do a lot of reading of weird shit just because I like to, and some of that never coalesces into anything.  At some point, though, sometimes various human dilemmas I’ve come across in my reading start to haunt me—resonate with some of my own emotional history—and at that point I might start researching more pointedly. Research continues all the way through the writing process, and even the final revisions.

Speaking of, McSweeney’s sent you to the Netherlands for a few weeks to do research for “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” one of the short stories included in You Think That’s Bad. How did your process differ for that story vs. stories where your research typically involves more reading than travel?

It didn’t, really. Being in the Netherlands led me to other sources of information – taught me about other sources of information – the same way books would have. Maybe I developed a more visceral sense of Rotterdam from being there for as long as I was; I don’t know.

Have you done a lot of traveling in your life otherwise?

I never traveled at all until after I got my first decent-paying job, at the aforementioned University of Michigan. Since then I’ve gone to Europe a lot, and around the US. And the Caribbean. That’s about it.

Do those trips spur an interest in writing stories set there at all? Or does that still come mostly via your off-the-wall reading?

With some stories a trip is certainly a help. It would help if you’re writing a story about an executioner in Paris if you had actually been in Paris and wandered the streets. But for the most part these are research and imagination-based stories. I’ve written about Tibet and never been to Tibet. I’ve written about Australia and never been in Australia. I’ve written about Japan and never been in Japan. I don’t feel the impulse to have to be there. There have been times when I thought I should make the trip but the cost and rigmarole were such that I thought “You’re better off writing than going through all that energy.”

Have you ever tried your hand at more straightforward nonfiction or journalism instead of stories?

I’ve done essay writing on politics and film. I haven’t been that interested in journalism because I think other people can do it as well as I can if not better, and nobody’s offering. Nobody’s saying “Jim, do you want go study this or study that?” I also don’t know if there’s that many outlets for it. If I said, “Gee, would you pay me to go on site at Fukushima and report on the reactor breakdown?”, I think most nonfiction or journalism outlets would go, “Well, you’re a fiction writer, what do we get out of that?” So then it becomes a question of if I want to do all of that on spec or put in all of that money up front and write this piece and hope somebody somewhere runs it. And I’m not sure there’s too many things, facing limitations like that, where I think, “If I don’t do it, no one will.” I also understand why, if I were a newspaper or magazine editor, I might say, “I’d rather have a physicist who can write travel to Fukushima rather than send a fiction writer to chat with physicists.”

It seems that a large majority of your stories are in first person. Has it always been that way? What draws you to that point of view more than others?

My first three novels were in the close third person, which seemed to me much more flexible. Lately, though, I’ve been attracted to the perversity of highlighting the chutzpah involved in some of my choices of narrators. Maybe it raises the stakes for me.

Related to that, it’s often struck me while reading your stories that what might be even harder than crafting a story around so much factual research is getting the human tone right for that time and place. Do you think about this while you work? How much do you change your tone and style for each story?

I think about that a lot, because that’s really what’s on the page. In a lot of ways, if I’m writing a story about Tsuburaya, the Japanese special effects wizard, it’s really more important that I get his voice right than if I get the Japanese details right, at least at first. And the two are not very separable. So I’m much more interested in trying to nail that down, especially now that I’m doing more first person stories than third person stories. Although that story is in third person, there’s still a quality where you want to provide the illusion of a very different sensibility, but a sensibility that is still apprehensible to the American reader. So that’s really a matter of very careful moderation of tone. Tone is partly based on concrete details, but also on how that voice presents information.

So a lot of energy goes into that at a very early stage. Do I have what seems to me persuasively strange in the way I want it to be strange? Do these sound like Poles even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Polish people? Do these sound like Japanese people even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Japanese people?

It seems like it could become a question of nature vs. nurture, as in how much is specific to a culture and how much you can just assume is a kind of cultural universal in regards to “human nature.”

Right. There’s a slight of hand there because literature is supposed to be universal, but you also believe that you’re learning very specific cultural eccentricities. So you can relate to Tsuburaya because he’s a human being too, but you also feel sometimes reading him “God, that’s so Japanese,” and you’re not even sure what you mean by that in some ways. What you mean is a combination of insight and stereotype and any number of other things.

But stereotype is just a kind of brutish way of gathering together empirical data and insights about a particular group. So you say Italians tend to be warmer than Germans or Germans tend to be more organized than Italians, and of course those are generalities and stereotypes, but the Italians and Germans would also be the first ones to tell you, “Yeah, that’s sort of true.” So you’re trying in some way to interrogate the stereotypes and explode the stereotypes even as you make use of them.

There’s a subtle difference between stereotype and archetype, maybe?

Yeah, that’s a part of it. Archetype I try to avoid because it has so much of a Jungian grandiosity to it. I think of archetype not so much as German as The King or The Son or something like that.

What is it about the chutzpah-filled and somewhat self-deceiving character that attracts you?

I like the tension that comes when somebody who is quite self-conscious and quite smart still doesn’t seem to get it about himself or herself. I like the way that highlights and muddles those issues of responsibility and agency. I think a story where someone simply doesn’t know any better and so he does something wrong is a much simpler story, because that seems to suggest that if you just gave them the right information, that would solve the problem. I don’t think a lot of human behavior that’s very interesting operates that way. I think there’s a lot of examples where the person knows what he or she should be doing, tries to do it, and fails, and that’s very interesting.

You’ve talked in other interviews about how writers need to broaden their empathetic range, aka how deeply they can feel about how broad a swath of the world’s people. Do you have any advice as to how we might go about this? What do you encourage writers to do to develop it?

The usual: read more, and read more widely. Observe more carefully. What’s that great Walker Evans line? “Die knowing something. You’re not here long.”

You’ve also lectured that the writer should provide operating instructions for the reader to be able to navigate the story. What kind of instructions?

Each story creates its own special set of expectations, I think, and I’m always grateful when a design that I thought I’d begun to discern is confirmed, gracefully, by the story itself. What we don’t need is to be told stuff we already know, or have intuited.

What sort of things do you find your students telling the reader over and over again? What do they often leave out that seems essential?

It really depends on the model they’re trying to build. But when you’re trying different things, you want to reassure the reader that the weird thing they’ve started to notice, you meant that to be there. There are all sorts of way to reassure the reader of that kind of thing, but I’ll give you an example. You might have a person wander onto stage and start saying stereotypical things about Chinese people, and the reader reading that goes, “Is that the story’s agenda?” But as soon as a secondary character says, “You realize you sound like an idiot, right?”, the reader has a great sigh of relief and says, “Oh, OK, this story knows that it’s doing that.” That’s a really simple way that operating instructions might work. You basically say, “I know you thought it sounded weird, but in fact, I know that too,” and the reader suddenly feels a lot more confident in the design as you go along.

It’s that moment in Ulysses where you go, “Oh, this isn’t a guy who doesn’t understand punctuation. This is being done for a reason and paying off, and there’s a consistency to it.”

Another element of your teaching is that the writer should control the “rate of revelation” in the story, or how fast how many things are revealed as the story progresses. For the sake of facts and numbers, what’s the ideal rate of revelation in terms of revelations per page (r.p.p.)? How much character, conflict, background, and factual data can the reader digest at a time?

Ha! How do you measure such a thing? I suppose I’d say that everything in a short story should be accomplishing multiple tasks at once, in terms of informing the reader, and that everything should be continually enlarging, as opposed to confirming, our understanding.

Going back to the weird shit you read, what have you gotten into recently?

To give you a sense of how weird my shit can get, lately I’ve been reading about 17th and 18th century farming in America. If you want to talk about a subject where people think, “Why on Earth would you do that?” That’s the kind of weird stuff that I’ll just get into and start nosing around and not even be sure why. I don’t know how long it lasts. I do know that the good news is that if I do it for awhile and think, “Alright, I’ve done enough of that,” I don’t beat myself up over it and go, “What was the point?” Because I do think it’s interesting while I’m doing it and it’s in some way enlarging my concept of the world.

Are you working on another novel now, or do you plan to continue blowing up the short story form? What are we going to see next?

I have only the most tentative plans for a novel at this point, so I’d expect more stories. Bad news for anyone who depends on me in economic terms.

You’ve been at this now for quite some time. What have you noticed in those who keep at it versus those who don’t?

Quite some time? Jeez. Now I’m depressed. If it’s not too circular in terms of reasoning, I think I’d suggest that the main thing those who’ve kept at it have going for them has not been talent but the willingness or the determination to persevere. Not only in the face of rejection from the outside world, but also in the face of their own disappointments with themselves.

Maybe we should end this on a lighter note than our deep, deep disappointment in ourselves. My friend wanted me to ask you about your mustache, specifically how you feel yours measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Oh, man: it’s not even close. Toby’s  mustache is epic. He could star in a western series for HBO. I look like the skeevy guy with the unmarked van.

A Western-style mustache that belongs to neither Shepard nor Wolff.

Further Links and Resources:

Do you know Bookfessions? This Tumblr offers confessions of voracious and passionate readers. If you’re such a reader, you’ll find many of these confessions strike a chord with you.

These, and many more, at Bookfessions. (All images: Bookfessions.) And if you’ve got book-related confessions of your own, share them with us in the comments.

The woman is Marina Singh, a researcher in a Minnesota pharmaceutical lab who embarks on a mission to the Amazon. She is dispatched there to recover the details of her coworker’s recent death, and to evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle, a team headed up by her former mentor, Dr. Swenson. The checkered relationship between mentor and mentee, between student and teacher, is at the fulcrum of the novel’s central tension.

Deposited in the South American city of Manaus, Marina sets out to track down Dr. Swenson, whose work on developing a controversial new fertility drug suggests a  scientific quest for progress, and the invasion and potential exploitation of the Lakashi, a fictional population indigenous to the Amazon.

As in all odysseys, what particularize Marina’s journey are the hurdles, and how she reacts to them. Speed bumps along the way are also what give a story literary traction, and, as in Bel Canto, Patchett is a master of creating extraordinary circumstances for seemingly ordinary characters.  Marina loses her suitcases, her clothes, reading materials, cell phone, and ties to the outside. Once in Manaus, she must endure numerous tests of will in order to find Dr. Swenson’s whereabouts, including scorching heat and a debilitating fever. Divested of her creature comforts, we see her at a vulnerable state and one that is ripe for transformation.

Throughout, Marina is plagued with nightmares—a reaction to the anti-malaria drug Lariam—and these nightly rebellions of the psyche provide a recurring connotative trope:

Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the blood stream, in the tissues.  All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside.

The persistence of the drug’s nightmarish side effects raises questions about what exactly medicine does, if the supposed “therapy” spawns new, harder-to-cure maladies (in this case, nightmares). Conversely, Marina ingests a shaman’s cup of river liquid to bring down a near-fatal fever, and after a delirious, death-like trance, is pretty much healed. This paradox of modernization versus preservation recurs throughout the novel.

The Lariam also acts as a metaphoric stand-in for how journeys linger in your blood, even after the trip is over, as a psychological breeding ground for illness or health. The idea that a place could live inside you, ripe with disaster or amelioration, internalizes the external arc of the story, layering conflict upon conflict. Good stories, too, are likely to linger, as this one does, even after the act of reading them has ended.

In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, State of Wonder proves the delineation between civilization and jungle is a murky one. Once among the Lakashi, Marina and Dr. Swenson face medical challenges and ethical choices about the boundaries of science and its rippling implications. As Dr. Swanson sums up, their work is a slippery slope between progress and dependency:

What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever…

Through the formidable Dr. Swenson, Patchett challenges the assumption that progress be defined through academic or capitalistic objectives: Is a hot pharmaceutical commodity worth the human price exacted for its potential distribution? Is scientific innovation worth taking down an entire self-sustaining society? In posing questions such as these, State of Wonder cautions against easy answers.

One explanation offered between the jungle and civilization is the existence of art. Before trekking to the jungle, Marina comes to see the Manaus opera house as a kind of sacred space:

There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

One would hope after having lived with the Lakashi, Marina’s definition of civilization and the jungle’s menacing reach of influence would surely be more measured and less imperialistic. However, the idea that art is what creates a society or separates civilization from savagery is notable:

In these past few days of fever, Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her.

Words and sentences, then, like bows and strings, can bring us back to ourselves. The act of reading is an act of salvation; narrative and expression are lifeboats on a meandering river.

Patchett’s magic is in weaving these details so effortlessly that they never register as constructed. Her use of language and voice; the development of a wide range of characters who differ in race, age, and gender; and the elements of mystery and suspense all contribute to a bona fide page turner, an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction.

Her gift for capturing emotional nuance registers throughout, as in these two (of many possible!) examples:

At that moment she understood why people say You may want to sit down. There was inside her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips wee all being brought together at closer angles.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The character’s modest physical collapse and the thousand small pin-pricks of loss both register with instant clarity—the universality of the feeling is rendered in such a concise, precise way, that you wonder why nobody thought to express it as such before.

Great authors can infuse a physical setting with the emotional undercurrents of their story. State of Wonder, drawing from its “exotic” locale, capitalizes on this notion that the perception of our surroundings is inflected by our emotional state. A figure undergoing transformation, then, sees the strange as familiar, the familiar as strange:

Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light.

This de-familiarization is crucial to convey the change necessary for all protagonists – the idea that a truly powerful experience upends the very definition of what we think we know. Everything, down to “such things as stars” must be redefined. Old expectations are washed clean, and we’re left with something new and dangerous and beautiful.

The title is never fully explained, but we can infer that this state of wonder is in part a reference to the magical qualities of the jungle and its inhabitants. In addition, the concrete noun “state/statehood” mixed with the dreamy uncertainty of “wonder” offers a useful dichotomy for Marina’s predicament. She is a doctor, a scientist, but, inserted into the jungle, she possesses a child’s capacity for awe and terror:

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage—an insect? A bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her… she excelled not through bright bursts of imagination but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.

Reading (or writing) a book is itself a kind of odyssey. Most writers would tell you the bulk of their work is not all bright bursts of inspiration and light, but something closer to excavation. You go down to find something, to suss something out, and you come back changed, different than you were before. It is more plow pulling and less harvest. But what is lovely about this particular paragraph, and, indeed, Patchett’s latest novel, is that, in a different setting, the everyday mechanics of charting lipids and a putting your faith in data take on a larger significance, their own poetic magnitude. A lab in the Amazon is not the same as a lab in Minnesota. The charts and studies come to carry their own sacred connotations, so much so, that even when you yourself have returned to the original state, the journey is still with you.  Perhaps by being dropped down into an entirely new environment, some of our chipped-away astonishment can be restored.

As readers, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the spell a good book casts, and, if we’re lucky, that spell puts us in a state of—yes—wonder.

Further Links and Resources

At Milk + Bookies^TM events, boys and girls are provided the opportunity to select, purchase and inscribe books that are then donated to their peers who do not have access to books of their own. The fun-filled events feature music, story time and, of course, milk and cookies. [...]

Milk + Bookies^TM combines two essential and worthwhile efforts: literacy promotion and service learning. While the book donations are imperative to our mission, just as important is instilling the seed of giving into each host and their young guests, sparking feelings of importance, self-confidence and the desire to give and give again.

For example, the site offers suggestions on throwing a Milk + Bookies birthday party, in which guests bring a book to donate in lieu of a gift. My son recently had his first birthday, and my husband and I decided that for each subsequent birthday, we’d teach him to give a gift to someone else as part of his celebration. Giving books might be a good way to start!

For more information on Milk + Bookies, watch this video and visit their website:

Further Reading:

• Visit our archives to learn about other organizations that bring literature to children, including Reader to Reader and Read This.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/milk-bookies/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:00:11 +0000 Sharon Harrigan http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=27008

George Saunders by jrmyst, on Flickr

George Saunders is dangerous. A friend once said, “Whenever I read him, I can’t stop writing like him.” I’d go further: I can’t stop thinking like him. Every bizarre object I encounter starts to resemble a Saunders dystopic landscape, terrifying and hilarious.  The Game Bus: a seatless, windowless vehicle filled with videogame equipment, where teenage boys enjoy the absence of all human and environmental contact. The Make-Over Playdate: a day spa for little girls with cucumber facials and pretend Botox. The list is endless.

The last book I read that made the world over in its image was The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God by Etgar Keret. I couldn’t get on a plane without recounting the plot of one of the stories to my unsuspecting seatmate—flight attendant claims love at first sight, jet nose-dives toward doom. Wells Tower made me see everyone as anti-hero. But Saunders’s ability to leave a dent, to filter not only what I read and write next, but what I see, is all his own.

It helps that I live in Virginia. This is Civilwarland–driving distance to a dozen battlefields, walking distance to statues of Confederate generals. Of course the theme park in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” the title story of Saunders’s first collection, doesn’t exist. Can you imagine? An employee/actor in full military garb pretending to be a soldier in the Civil War, trying to convince tourists it is still 1863? (OK, I’ve seen it, too, at Appomatox.)

The Civilwarland story is so goofily and scarily realistic that Saunders’s supernatural addition—the ghostly McKinnon family—feels like a wink to assure us it’s not real. He wants readers to be absolutely sure this is fiction, not Nostradamus for the 21^st century.

Saunders writes satire, but he does it with heart. His characters commit awful deeds, they hack off a boy’s candy-stealing arm, stuff “a Baggie full of human ears,” pose as conservations and fill mass graves of raccoons, and slice a boy to bits in a wave machine. But they are also capable of atonement and even self-sacrifice.

The narrator of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” erases forty years of his memory to care for an aging stranger. Characters feel “sick in [their] guts as the guiltless stars wheel by.” In “The Wavemaker Falters” the dismembered boy, Clive, reassembles all his minced body parts to visit his murderer. A“400 pound CEO” concludes: “At least I’m not cruel to the point of being satanic.”

Thank you, George Saunders, for giving me this mantra. Because I’m so entrenched in your really weird and weirdly real world—of Verisimilitude Directors and personal interactive holography and Centers for Wayward Nuns—I’m starting to lose all perspective.

I told you this guy is dangerous.

Further Links & Resources

• Read “George Saunders’s Wild Ride.” In this December 2010 conversation with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker blog, Saunders says, “I think the writer’s main job is to provide a wild ride for the reader. So most of what I’m doing on a given day is just trying to ensure that the wild ride happens, trusting and hopeful that the thematics will take care of themselves.”
• For all things Saunders, visit his website: Saunders!Saunders!Saunders!
• On The Colbert Report, Saunders explains the concept behind his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays in terms of a cocktail party. Enjoy.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
George Saunders
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-don%e2%80%99t-tell-me-i-didn%e2%80%99t-warn-you-on-reading-george-saunders/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:07 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=27081

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response:

Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker’s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes:

[William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge to read. This strikes him as crazy. “There’s an analogy there that I haven’t been able to complete,” he said:

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.

He’d come up with a couple, unsatisfying answers, one involving race cars, one involving sex (he wouldn’t tell us what they were). But he threw it out to the audience to ponder, and now I’m throwing it out to you. What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.

(Via.) Why would budding writers hate to read? Can you really write without reading? And for those of you who teach writing: if the answer is no, do you have trouble convincing your students that reading is useful?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/writing-without-reading/feed 4 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:00:32 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24287

For those of us trying to sneak reading into our busy lives, DailyLit is a great resource: choose any of its 1000ish titles, and it will email you a snippet a day until you finish the book. (See our blog archive for more details.) But what if you want to read something that’s not in DailyLit’s library–or if you’ve already read all of DailyLit’s titles, you speed-reader, you?

Enter dripread, which functions in much the same way but, in addition to a library of titles, allows you to upload a book of your own choosing in ePub format. Says the site’s FAQ:

What does dripread mean?
The word ‘dripread’ is an adaptation of the word dripfeed, with the word ‘feed’ replaced by the word ‘read’. If you like, a dripfeed of reading material. A slow steady stream of information which is easy to process in the normal flow of life.

How does dripread work?
Readers first create a free account and upload their own ebooks (or select a book from the existing library), dripread will then store the ebook and serialise a page to the readers email address, simple.

As the parent of a young child, most things I do—from revising my novel to writing emails to doing laundry—end up happening in ten- or twenty-minute bursts. So the ability to upload a book and nibble my way through it, bite by bite (or drip by drip) is definitely appealing! In fact, once I’m finished with my latest draft, I can even imagine using dripread to send me a small chunk of it per day to re-read and re-edit—sort of like a teacher assigning a chunk of homework a day.

Has anyone out there given dripread a try?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/literature-drop-by-drop-on-dripread/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:00:35 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=23310

NPR commentator Linda Holmes has a beautiful essay on how we’re going to miss almost everything—and why that’s okay:

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

When I was in grad school, one of my advisors told us that—except for books by students and friends—he’d decided not to read anything new. For the rest of his life, he would devote himself to re-reading books he had already read and loved. At the time I thought this was a strange thing to do for a man who’d devoted his life to writing books and teaching others to write more books. Didn’t he know he was going to miss thousands of wonderful books? But this particular professor is, without a doubt, extremely well-read already. After reading Holmes’s essay, I can kind of see his point.

(If you are the kind of person who wants to make sure you absolutely do not miss ANYTHING that’s offered, though, perhaps this bookstore is for you.)

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/were-going-to-miss-almost-everything/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/reading-bad-why-writers-should-read-bad-books http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/reading-bad-why-writers-should-read-bad-books#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:00:09 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24046

Most writers agree that in order to write, you must also read. Author Allison Winn Scotch raised this point in a recent blog post titled just that:

I think being a successful writer means reading your peers and learning from them too – I can’t tell you how much reading authors whom I admire has helped me up my game. Additionally, I think it’s hard to get into a literary state of mind without, well, being literary.

And Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan agreed, saying in an interview (via):

My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read. I don’t think the problem is that they need to read more; I think they might need to readjust their life goals. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. To be reading good things. I feel that you should be reading what you want to write. Nothing less.

But can writers also learn from reading books they’d never want to write? Say, that bestseller most reviled by “literary” writers… Twilight? Here I’m going to take a controversial stance: Twi-hard or Twi-hater, you should read Twilight.

GalleyCat recently wrote about a literature professor who–after mocking Twilight as an example of bad writing–finally picked up the books to read them. Said the professor:

“I’m really not looking forward to reading these … Every time I reference low forms of literature, I always use Twilight as the example. Today a student asked if I’ve actually read them, and I had to say no. They demanded that I do.”

I admit I’m not a Dan Brown fan, and after I found myself citing his books in class as examples of terrible writing, I did feel guilty–so I got a copy of The Da Vinci Code. And now I can not only feel justified in my mockery, I can dissect specific sentences for my students as examples of what not to do.

So what do you think? Can you learn something positive about writing by reading a book you believe is bad?

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