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Stories We Love: “The Showrunner”

Celeste Ng — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:09 +0000

I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural references—I expected the story to be as flimsy as the TV show at its center.

I was completely wrong. Within half a page, I was unable to put the piece down. (No joke: I was late to pick up my son from daycare, I was that immersed.)

Roger, the showrunner of the title, takes Peter Lane—the adolescent, adorably innocent, unabashedly gay kid he casts—under his wing, promising himself to protect Peter from everything bad that he himself has experienced in show business:

Roger looks over at Peter, who’s sitting there strapped into the passenger seat at groping distance from Roger, humming along, his eyes closed and his legs apart. It’s strange to think that Peter is the same age that Roger was when he ran away from San Antonio, and that Roger is now older than the guys who fucked him back then. Peter would never expect to be fucked the way Roger was—no, Peter expects to be loved, and why shouldn’t he? Peter was born to be loved.

How easy it would be for Roger to drive home instead, talk Peter into coming inside, pour the kid a drink and sweet-talk him and undress him and then pound him into the mattress so hard he’ll never smile that trusting smile again for the rest of his life. It scares the shit out of Roger, how easy it would be and how much he must not let it happen, never, not to Peter Lane.

In fact, the story has only one thing in common with tween sitcoms: you can see where it’s going almost from the first scene. And yet, unlike with those sitcoms, you won’t be able to look away. You have to keep reading, keep watching, even as the story hurtles to its shattering conclusion, even as it breaks your heart.

Read “The Showrunner” online at At Length. (No, seriously. Read this.)

Serving the Story: An Interview with Richard Bausch

Emily Besh — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Richard Bausch, © Mark Weber

Richard Bausch is an exacting writer. With precise language that lends a breathtaking verisimilitude to his fiction, Bausch lays the groundwork in which settings and characters—their smallest actions and passing conversations—seem not only memorable, but inevitable. Immersed in his books, you see with new clarity.

I recently had the privilege of joining him in the Moss Workshop at the University of Memphis, a model he began more than sixteen years ago. Just in time, too. He has recently accepted a position with the faculty at Chapman University in California, a post he assumes in August.

Bausch is colorful, uncensored, and opinionated—unruly, even—like someone who would (and did) leave his car idling by railroad tracks to jump a passing train. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, beneath which his eyes have a mischievous gleam. He’s willing, always, to try his hand at something new: the guitar, say, or stand-up comedy. He loves theater and film, often tossing out a quick quote or recounting a salient scene. Through eleven published novels and eight collections of short stories, Bausch has proven to be not only prolific but consistently excellent, a writer whose discipline equals his passion.

Bausch’s dexterity with short stories elevates the form. His straightforward, minimalistic style doesn’t pull shazaam endings, or plot pyrotechnics. But a story like the O’Henry-winning “What Feels Like the World” chokes me with emotion every time. Using simple, direct dialogue, Bausch fixes his stories’ terrain in the mind. It’s as if he turns your head and says “There. Now look.”

Interview

Emily Besh: Who ignited your desire to write, and when did you begin to identify yourself as a writer?

Richard Bausch: I had a teacher named Helen Garson when I was in my first year of college, who looked at me after reading something I’d written and said, “You’re a Southern writer by definition with all this family stuff in here, and you’re going to be a great one, I can tell.” I lived on that for a long time—through a lot of bad times. I ended up teaching with her for twenty years, and sending my own students to her. And she got a signed copy of every book as it came out, and with every one she wrote me a lovely letter, appreciating what she found in it. A great teacher.

And there was another, Lorraine Brown, who one day when I said I didn’t think I had it in me to write one more scholarly paper, smiled at me and said, “All right then, write me a verse play, like Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.” That was the Yeats we were reading. She was another great one.

As to when I truly began to identify myself as a writer, it must have been when I sold the first novel. I remember going to the door and pushing it wide open and standing in it with my legs slightly apart, like a man expecting a high wind, and cupped my hands to the sides of my mouth and shouted “Listen up everybody! I’m a novelist!”

When I was a lot younger than that, I went around a lot with the suspicion that I might be a writer, afraid to think about it too directly, and feeling presumptuous and pretentious for the thought.

And of course the doubt is always heavy and never goes away, nor does the tentativeness about it ALL.

You give subtle attention to seemingly minor moments in your narratives. How often do you find yourself saying “too much,” rather than “not enough?”

I seldom question or edit much as I’m writing. During the process of thinking about it all and trying to revise and be sharp, I go back and forth, sometimes feeling it is too much (usually in this case it is more about showing off my own skill, or giving forth the best and most flattering sense of my tender soul and my ‘bag of sorrows,’ as Frederick Busch put it once—than contributing to the reader’s visceral feeling of the events I’m describing)—sometimes feeling it is too much, and sometimes feeling it is not enough, anemic because I’ve gone past it without looking at it coldly and as a stranger might. I want there to be enough for the reader to care what happens; and I want the words to disappear, in a way, so the reader is not so much aware that he is reading. It is indeed a fine line, but when you go through it 75 times, it gets a little clearer. You’re better able to tell the difference between the anemic or slipshod, and the self-indulgent or excessive for its own sake. Everything should be subservient to the story, including all my opinions and all my attitudes and all my ambitions, too.

You hit the literary world running—your first two novels published back-to-back. Could you tell us about that? With eleven novels and eight collections of short stories, it doesn’t seem like you’ve slowed down much.

It went like this: I sold my first novel, Real Presence, under the title, The Vineyard Keeper in early April of 1979. I was 33 years old, about to turn 34. James Dickey, having read the book, called me and suggested the title Real Presence. I didn’t like it at first, but can see now that it is the only possible title for that book. Later that summer, after experiencing the heady validation of selling the first one, and on the good advise of my pal Susan Richards Shreve, who already had two books out, I began a second novel.

I was calling that one I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back, because it began with a kid obsessed with baseball. I finished that one in early January, under the title Take Me Back. Just as I delivered that novel, news came in that Real Presence would be a Book of The Month Club Alternate Selection. And then in early June, after the book came out, it was reviewed in Time. Take Me Back was sold and in galleys before Real Presence appeared. And when in May a year later Take Me Back came out, Jane Smiley said to a mutual friend, “Maybe he’s dying, and trying to get them all out before it happens.” That’s Jane’s humor, and I laughed when I heard it.

Anyway, because the second one came so quickly, I got it into my head that I had it figured out now, and would be delivering a novel roughly every four months. Take Me Back got nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, with a citation written by Walker Percy. I got to know him at the awards ceremony. And pretty soon I was walking around trying to write a philosophical novel a la Mr. Percy, and it was my wife, Karen, who finally called me on it, after two years of misery and four different manuscripts that I never let out of the house.

Now I don’t know what the average is, and am not inclined to use the math necessary to figure it. I do know that I have never gone longer than three years without publishing a book since 1980. And if I can finish the present novel and deliver it and have it accepted, I will publish it in 2013, probably, which keeps to the never-more-than three years pattern.

How does the germ of a story begin? Does the process still surprise you?

They come in different ways and with different matters trailing along in them. I carried “What Feels Like The World” around—the floor of it: a man and his overweight daughter, and the sorrow parents feel watching their children go into a building where they can have no immediate effect on what happens to them in there—I carried that around for a year or so, because each day for a long while I’d seen this heavy man with his overweight daughter walking up to the door of my kids’ school. There was a special bond between them. And then carrying that around as I was, that image and that sense of the helpless love I knew he felt in the circumstance, his heavy darling walking up to the door and in, where, children being as they are, she would suffer all that they both knew she would suffer the whole day long, and it was in their faces, too.

Carrying that around as I was, I happened to be at a gymnastics demonstration at that very school, where about nine of the seventy kids ran around the vaulting horse instead of going over it. (I think the heavy girl was in an earlier class, or was absent.) But of course there were other heavy kids and watching them go around the vaulting horse, I had an image of this man, this father of the heavy girl throwing a fit in the hallway of the school about his child, saying “What the hell. Everybody can do SOMETHING, can’t they? Why put her through this humiliation?” I had that picture of him shouting down the hallway of the school, and I knew then that I would write the story. Or, a story. Something to do with that helpless feeling the parent suffers when his child has to go through the badness of that kind of situation.

When I got to the end, I read the last paragraphs to my wife, who said, “You can’t leave it there.” I read the end to some friends, all of whom said, “No, you can’t leave it there. The reader will want to know.”

So I tried like hell to render the rest of the scene, and I did it both ways. [The first], where I wrote her sailing over the vaulting horse, felt like cheating, like treacley television Hollywood cotton candy reality existing only to pander to the already asleep. The second way, where she failed to get over, felt like cheating it another way, rubbing a smart reader’s nose in it purely for the self-indulgent pleasure I could get out of what I could do with English sentences to make him squirm and hurt past the experience. So I left the end as it was and sold it to The Atlantic a couple of weeks later. And it won an O. Henry Award and I still get people who want to know if she gets over that vaulting horse.

It was after it had been in the magazine, and sometime just before it appeared in my first book of stories, that I was visiting a class my friend the poet Roland Flint was teaching and he pointed out what the story was really about: “It is soaked in grief,” he said. “And of course grief, the thing you can’t get over, is that vaulting horse.” I did not know this in the writing of it and this is why I talk so much about trying to let go of what you think and just feel your way through it like a child making that drawing, seeing it directly and without attitudes or opinions or, really, beliefs, either.

I never sketch out any plot, and will only make a note as to the next minute or so in the life of a character or some idea of where he/she’ll go in the next couple of pages, if I have some sense that I won’t be able to call it up when I sit down again. If the story does not surprise me, I do not trust it, and will usually not let it go until it does surprise me. The surprises are all the fun of it. And if you trust them enough you’ll write a lot of stuff that will please you every time you look at it for the surprises it gave you. Somehow they always stay fresh.

When you return to a scene, how do you go about adding to depth and texture?

There is a simple answer to this one, though it is difficult as hell in practice. In re-writing, along with paying attention to the writing, the sentences line by line, I also try to see if I am involving all the senses, how it feels on the skin, texture, smells, sounds, sight. All of it. And then in looking at what is said I try to make sure that every line of dialogue is doing more than one thing. That is, carrying the story forward, giving character, leaking in history and the matters that are at issue, the what’s-wrong, as it were, but keeping all this artifice from being visible to the reader. Then having worked all that, and gone over and over it, I go over it still again, looking at the writing again, the words and lines. I want all the artifice to disappear; I want everything to disappear except these people in their trouble, whatever it is. And it is always some kind of trouble because that is the province of the human story, and news of the spirit in narrative can only arrive through the abrasions of conflict. Conflict, which scrapes the barnacles from the soul and lays it bare.

What do you grow against? The classics?

Oh, yes, of course the classics—and books, books, books, all the time. Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—War And Peace for the fifth time, Anna Karenina, for the third; Kawabata—Thousand Cranes; Shakespeare—over these last five months, King Lear six or seven times, listening and reading; Romeo and Juliet four times, listening and reading; As You Like It twice, Macbeth three or four times; Hamlet four or five times; Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar; Graham Greene—The Power And The Glory for the third time; Eudora Welty—Delta Wedding; Percival Everett – Assumption; Alix Ohlin—Signs And Wonders; Trollope—The Eustace Diamonds for the first time (and I’ve been reading it for a year); and Philip Roth—Indignation, and I just finished Nemesis and Everyman.

In the workshop you once said it would be a “sin” for us not to write. Could you elaborate?

We live in a culture that sees trying to write as some sort of indulgence of the ego, when not a plain presumption. But if you have talent for it, you are morally obligated to do it, and all one need do is look at that passage in the Bible about the ten talents: it’s where we get the word. The very word implies responsibility.

I had a dear friend, gone now, the poet Roland Flint, who called me one night crying, because he’d had this thing happen on his way home from school: he saw a little toddler on the island between two lanes of traffic. Stopped to keep him from wandering into the road. Held his hand and walked him across the street, thinking all the while about his son, Ethan, who was run over by a car and killed before his eyes twelve years earlier. The toddler’s parents came running from a house in the opposite direction of where Roland was walking the child, and the father got down on one knee and yelled at the child. “Don’t EVER go out of the house without Mommy and Daddy.” And Roland had to say, “I think he’s very frightened now.” And the parents stood there, the mother holding the child, now, and Roland went on to say, “I must tell you, I lost my son in this way, twelve years ago.” The parents said they were sorry and went on to their house and in, and Roland went, crying, back to his car, got in, drove home, wrote about the event in his journal, then wrote a poem about it, still crying, and finally called me.

He said, “To think that I could cheapen Ethan’s death by writing a goddamned poem about it. To think that I could use it in that way.” And I listened, and told him I loved him and understood, and we hung up. But then I thought about it and I called him back. “Roland, you’re supposed to write the poem. You’re morally obligated to do it. You must do it. For Ethan, and for all those people out there who don’t have the words, who’ve gone through this very thing. It’s what you’re absolutely supposed to do now.”

And he wrote his poem, “Stubborn.” And had it printed in a large picture frame, and inscribed it to me like this: “I wondered who I’d sign this first copy to, but of course should have known all along it would have to go to the Bausch who made me write it.”

It was one of my proudest possessions for all the years I was in that house in Virginia, and as far as I know, it is still on the wall there.

But that’s what it really means: the ten talents and us, who have this talent.

Further Links & Resources

Follow Richard Bausch’s Ten Commandments for writers.
Get Baush’s latest book, the collection Something Is Out There. [Amazon. Powell's. Indiebound.]
Read Roland Flint’s poem “Stubborn” (scroll down to the second poem on the page).

Stories We Love: “To Build a Fire”

Erika Dreifus — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:00:43 +0000

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, in the case of London’s story, that “the man” won’t break through the ice—and that the fire won’t go out.

Perhaps part of the story’s great appeal is how very different it is from my own lived experience and writerly tendencies. My version of the great outdoors is Manhattan’s Central Park. My stories are set in New York and Berlin and Paris. I’m not particularly fond of animals (and neither, it seems, are my characters, since I cannot think of a single one who even has a pet). So it is difficult to imagine myself somewhere to the side of “the main Yukon trail” in subzero (way subzero) temperatures, let alone accompanied only by “a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf.”

London’s story makes me feel life-threatening cold. It makes me visualize unfamiliar geography and landscape. Like Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection, it teaches me about animals and their instincts—without requiring me to get up close and personal with them. In short, “To Build a Fire” accomplishes one of fiction’s most noble goals: allowing me to broaden my understanding of life and experience. Even if, in the end, the man always dies, and the dog always turns around, trotting “in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.”

Further Reading:

Read “To Build a Fire” online
Want more Stories We Love? Read the whole series—and keep checking back all month for more as we celebrate Short Story Month
Like Erika’s taste? See more of her recommended reading.

First Looks, April 2012: Goliath and HHhH

Erika Dreifus — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:00:33 +0000

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series, “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

Susan Woodring and I are graduates of the same low-residency MFA program. Although we overlapped for a couple of semesters, we were never assigned to the same workshop. Still, I’ve been expecting her to become a “big name” in the literary world for about a decade now, since a long-ago evening when a group of us students gathered in the dorm living room for an informal reading. It was the first time I encountered Susan’s writing. I knew instantly that her fiction was already at a level different from—superior to—almost everything the rest of us were doing. Some things you just can’t explain.

So I wasn’t surprised to watch from afar as Susan’s excellent stories showed up in journals, won contests, and were gathered in a collection (which was, incidentally, one of my very first e-book purchases). And I’m not surprised that on April 24, St. Martin’s Press is releasing Susan’s second novel: Goliath.

I’d be eager to read this novel even without Bret Lott’s endorsement: “Goliath is a beautiful and quietly moving story of love, grief, forgiveness and redemption—heady themes handled here with a big heart and a deft hand. In prose exquisitely clear and with details that will make your heart ache, Susan Woodring has written a meaningful portrait of small town life, and what it means to move through grief toward love.” Which reminds me that I should also recommend Susan’s wonderful blog posts, where I first read of Bret Lott’s influence on her work.

I’d love to tell you all about another new book scheduled for imminent release—but I’ve already reviewed it for another publication, and until that review is published, I shouldn’t spill too many beans. But I will say that I can’t wait to see the other reviews that will be published about HHhH, a debut novel by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor), simply because I’m eager to see how other readers respond to it. And I’ll say this, too: If I ever teach historical fiction again, I’ll be assigning this novel, which blends historical fiction and metafiction as it reconstructs Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.

Until next month…

Further Reading

You can read the first chapter of Susan Woodring’s Goliath online.
You can also find some of Susan’s short stories online, in journals including Ruminate and turnrow.
If you’d like to learn more about HHhH, you can read its starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Staff Picks: Matrimony, by Joshua Henkin

Jackie Reitzes — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:00:48 +0000

As a fiction writer, I have a litmus test for knowing if a book is one I love love love versus one that is merely admirable. A book that is truly fantastic for me is one that also makes me want to write. It’s not that I go into the reading experience looking to be bitten by contagious writing. But I’ve found that when I read certain writers—Jennifer Egan, Jo Ann Beard, Susan Minot, to name a few—the reverie of their prose is so intense, so real, that I find myself wanting to continue the conversation on my side of the computer screen. It’s been this way for me since I was twelve, when reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees propelled me into my family’s garden, atop our playhouse getting bitten by mosquitoes and fervently mimicking her verdant descriptions of fauna in my journal.

Matrimony, by Joshua Henkin, is one such book. In short, I wanted to marry it.

The love story—between a Waspy New York City boy and a Jewish Montreal girl who meet in a small fictional New England college town their freshman year of school—is at the heart of the novel. The book touches down for sections in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Iowa City, and New York with the kind of sparkling specificity that made me long for my college hotdog joint.

Henkin is also a master of capturing the emotional minutia of particular times in one’s life and how they shape relationships. The portrait of a typical grad student party, for example —with couples and singles draped on a sagging couch, complaining about their students, while a spouse labored over the stove—was so familiar, so rich in textural detail, that I wanted to crawl into the warmth of that room and pour myself a glass of wine.

The fluidity throughout Matrimony—between sentences, between scenes, sections, time and place, was remarkable. The central relationship reads as both highly particular to these characters and universal in their struggles. You come to care about their fate as you would your college roommates’. In an oft-quoted (in yearbooks, fittingly) Mary Oliver poem, the speaker states, “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.” And so it is as reader, too.

Further Reading:

Learn more about Joshua Henkin at his author website, or find a copy of Matrimony at an indie bookstore near you.
Like Jackie’s taste in lit? Read more of her reviews on FWR.

First Looks, March 2012: The Pretty Girl and Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Erika Dreifus — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:00:59 +0000

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the second installment of our new blog series, “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

Here are just two of the many intriguing books scheduled to be released before we meet again one month from now:

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Debra Spark, an author familiar to me mainly through her impressive craft book, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and through my attendance at a lively AWP panel some years back that featured her. Spark was writing to me, she said, because she has a new book publishing soon and someone had told her that I know a few things about the Jewish book-blogging world. (Flattery may not get you everywhere, but it is getting Debra Spark into this post!)

All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to reading the new book, The Pretty Girl, a collection comprising six stories and a novella which, I understand, “revolve around artists, artistry, and the magical—sometimes malicious—deceptions they create.” (Check out the trailer here.) But maybe before I do that, I should perhaps read Spark’s 2009 Michigan Literary Award-winning novel, Good for the Jews, which intrigued me not only when I saw its title but also when I learned that it was loosely modeled on the Book of Esther. (Esther is the heroine of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which was celebrated last week.)

Next: Sometimes, it’s still a little hard to believe that David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is no longer among us. “The Depressed Person,” a short story that appeared in Harper’s before it was collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, remains, for reasons unnecessary to detail here, one of the most memorable stories I’ve ever read. If you, too, have been affected as a reader and/or as a writer by Wallace, you’ll want to take note of Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a collection of interviews and profiles coming from the University Press of Mississippi. Edited by Steven J. Burn, the book promises a previously unpublished interview (from 2005) and an expanded version of an interview originally published in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Warning: I’ve read through it already courtesy of NetGalley, and I wasn’t able to bring myself to finish the concluding piece, David Lipsky’s well-known Rolling Stone article, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” which was published after Wallace’s death. The preceding profiles and interviews were too vibrant, too engaged in the life and work and genius of this brilliant writer, to permit such a sad about-face.

Until next month…

Further Reading:

Here on FWR, Eric Moe writes about his long, strange journey in writing Tri-Stan, a musical setting of David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko.”
Scott F. Parker reads DFW’s “Good Old Neon” in light of the author’s suicide.
Watch the trailer for Debra Spark’s The Pretty Girl.
Catch up on all of Erika’s First Looks columns.

The Idea that has Entered the Flesh: Melanie Rae Thon and The Voice of the River

Aaron Cance — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:23 +0000

Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent books are the novel The Voice of the River (September 2011) and In This Light: New and Selected Stories (June 2011). She is also the author of the novels Sweet Hearts, Meteors in August, and Iona Moon, and the story collections First, Body and Girls in the Grass. Thon’s work has been included in Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Writer’s Residency from the Lannan Foundation, and a fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center. Thon’s fiction has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Croatian, Finnish, Japanese, and Farsi. Originally from Montana, Thon now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches in the Creative Writing and Environmental Humanities programs at the University of Utah. She spoke with FWR contributor Aaron Cance in the fall of 2011.

Interview

Aaron Cance: Hello, Melanie! Thank you so much for agreeing to discuss The Voice of the River with me. Reading it was a beautiful and haunting experience, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this story. I’d like to start with a few general questions, then perhaps shift into a few, more specific, ones about the new novel. I’m always curious about, and interested in, the formative years of writers whose work I enjoy and respect. Who were some of your earliest influences?

Melanie Rae Thon: By the time I started high school, I was not only reading but memorizing poems by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and e. e. cummings, passionate scenes from Wuthering Heights, quirky stories I found in journals. I rewrote sections of Johnny Got His Gun, imagining the speaker not as a soldier, but as girl my own age. I read the King James Bible without the filter of a minister or Sunday School teacher, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and a history of the Holocaust. These encounters jolted me into wakefulness, but also, strangely, miraculously, into love and wonder, a hunger to understand the gloriously diverse, mysteriously transient world around me.

Who are writers who continue to influence and inform your writing today?

My dear and beautiful friend Mark Robbins once told me, “Writing is prayer, the dedicated concentration of your being on that which will help you become the person you know you should be.” This is very close to the teachings of the Desert Fathers who described Lectio Divina, divine reading, as the meditative approach, ”by which the reader seeks to taste and savor the beauty and truth of every phrase and passage.” The writers who inform my writing are the ones who guide me toward a deeper contemplation of how I wish to live, to be, in the world. There are so many, and each is unique and important in his or her influence, but lately I’ve found myself reading or rereading something by Thich Nhat Hanh (the Buddhist monk) and John Berger every few months. James Agee, Tillie Olsen, and John Wideman help me understand the transcendent possibilities of inner speech and multivocal narratives, the importance of listening to everyone. When I enter the smoke and flames of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, I am transformed and inspired by his commitment to storytelling and research. There’s a gorgeous passage in a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother from prison:

Brother, I am not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is Life, Life is in Ourselves and not in the External. There will be people near me, and to be Human among Human Beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter, this is what Life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered my flesh and blood. . . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of Spiritual Life throbbed in me.

The Brothers Karamazov is a gloriously expansive exploration of this vision, and the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky restores the nuance and complexity of Dostoevsky’s language.

I could go on for days about books that inspire me to live fully, with compassion and curiosity and infinite wonder: the poems of Mary Oliver, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Touching the Rock by John Hull, The Gospel According to Jesus: for Believers and Unbelievers, translation and guide by Stephen Mitchell . . . the more books I list, the more I leave out!

How has your conceptualization of, and personal philosophy about, writing craft evolved and changed over time, from your earliest efforts to your approach to The Voice of the River?

My own writing grows more spare, more elliptical all the time, closer, I hope, to the music of poetry. At seventeen weeks, the ears of the human fetus are open, ready to receive, exquisitely developed. We awaken in a waterworld, immersed in vibration and sound: the unceasing whoosh of blood through the uterine artery, our mother’s heart and breath, the surprising syncopation of our own miraculous heartbeat. We know the exaltation and pitch of voice: anger, fear, love, sorrow. Language to us is a polyphonic murmuration. We speak not only mind to mind, but body to body. Until each sentence sings, my work is unfinished. I read every line aloud—twenty, thirty, a hundred times—seeking not only sense, but tone and timbre and rhythm, hoping that through the fusion of meaning and music my words can touch anyone, fetus or mother.

In your acknowledgments for both The Voice of the River and In This Light, you’ve written that your students have shattered all opinions and challenged all assumptions. Describe a couple of ways that teaching has had a profound impact on your life?

My students constantly remind me how diverse human experience and perception can be, how little I know about anyone or anything! These revelations may be quiet or extreme. Last year my students and I were reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness. One woman described practicing mindful breathing while she was reading to her autistic son. A miracle indeed! Never before had he remained attentive while she read, but when she used her breath to calm her spirit, he too became tranquil. A thousand times a semester my students deliver to me a new understanding of grace.

Several years ago I taught a class called Healing Into Life and Death, exploring the ways people of different cultures understand spiritual and physical healing, the cycle of life and death, and the lives of individuals as they relate to the life of the family, the community, and the natural environment. Every student in that class amazed me! One woman gave bone marrow to her older sister when she was still an infant. Before she could speak, my student had saved a life! We performed poems from The Gift by the Sufi mystic Hafiz. A 200-pound tattooed video game addict read one poem in the voice of Sean Connery, and another in the voice of John Wayne. Hafiz is a holy man with a subversive sense of humor. My brilliant student brought his fourteenth-century work into the present through his wildly perfect interpretation. It’s endless, truly endless, the surprise and gratitude I feel in the community of the classroom.

You’ve been guiding writers in their formative years much longer than I’ve known you. Just since we first met, I’ve seen Jacob Paul’s moving debut, Sara/Sarah, come to fruition and was profoundly impressed to discover that Bruce Machart, author of the astonishing debut The Wake of Forgiveness, was a friend and former pupil of yours. I haven’t met very many people that have a heart as big and as encompassing as yours, and I know that you probably celebrate your students’ successes even more than your own. How has their success fueled your own work? Do your students motivate you just as much as you motivate them?

I always hope my friends and students will survive their “successes.” In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it does so only as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds true for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer—or any artist—who didn’t long for external validation, but these rewards are fleeting at best, and never come close to the rapture one feels in the process of creation. Perhaps this is what fuels the desperate craving: when we abandon a piece of work, when we call it “finished,” we face the sudden loss of this passion.

I couldn’t agree more. I was having lunch with Jacob just a few days ago, and we were speaking to this. We discussed the challenges of producing fiction that has any significant degree of abstraction, how mainstream audiences don’t find it palatable and commercial publishers don’t see it as a viable publishing endeavor. A writer shouldn’t create art with the expectation of an audience, renown, or financial reward. A writer shouldn’t refrain from creating art because these things may never follow. A writer shouldn’t change the art with these things in mind. We agreed that you can only write to make art, to experience the miraculous act of creating, to discover something about yourself through your creation.

My friends and students inspire and motivate me when I see that they are able to stay true to their own visions and hear their inner voices, when they are not swayed by external rewards or dispirited by the stunning silence of absolute incomprehension. In one of the first classes I taught, a research report writing on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America, many of my older, nontraditional students were learning to do research for the first time. (This was in the late 80s, in the days before students did research on the Internet, so these endeavors were infinitely more challenging!) Their discoveries and accomplishments were as thrilling as any I’ve ever experienced.

Yes, many of them composed impressive essays, but what remains with me even now is the awe we all experienced as we learned more about the movement, the incredible sacrifices, the history of violence and oppression. We were transformed together. Together we found the courage to take a difficult journey. We became a community, bound by shared purpose and dedication. Writing is always about discovery, and exploration allows for the possibility of transfiguration, the dynamic convergence of humility and enlightenment. The classroom is a place where we join hearts and minds and senses to become larger, more open than we are alone, more bold than we ever thought possible.

On a related note, I’ve gotten the sense from my own experiences in your novel workshop that your belief in the interconnectedness of every living thing is not a philosophy that begins when a reader opens The Voice of the River and ends when he or she turns the last page, but is something that you live every day.

Try to live! This is why I have to keep rereading and teaching books by Thich Nhat Hanh. This is why my students and I split our reading between science, spiritual texts, and literature. To be reminded, yes, again and again: we are intimately bound to everything that is, was, and will be. Even our bodies are complex biotic communities. Bacteria outnumber other cells ten to one, and without them we wouldn’t be able to digest our food or defend ourselves against many infections. Remnants of extinct retroviruses remain in our DNA, fossil records of the multitude of beings that influenced the course of our evolution. A fish that pushed itself out of the sea is our distant relative. The embryos of bats, lizards, birds, and humans are astonishingly similar.

There is a beautiful African proverb: I am because you are, and you are because we are. I like to think of this idea in the broadest terms possible: we are all part of the jeweled net: nothing exists except by connection to everything else in the infinitely miraculous universe. We mourn intimate loss, the deaths of ones we love, the extinction of species, but we are exalted by the spiritual belief and scientific understanding that through time and across space everything changes and continues. In The Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates this idea with stunning simplicity. His example is a piece of paper, and he shows how all forms and forces in the universe are here: tree, soil, sun, rain—the logger who cut the tree, the wind that pollinated the wheat that made the bread that sustains him—all his ancestors are here, as are the worms who made the soil fertile. We can begin anywhere, with any being or any entity, and we will discover a web like this that opens forever in every direction.

In the film Planet Earth, Doctor Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury says, “Wilderness always speaks to human beings of Transcendence: in the widest possible sense it says, You as a Human Being are part of a System which is not just about your needs and your concerns. Like it or not, you’re part of something immense and very mysterious.”

I think the single most painful image in The Voice of the River is the hole in the ice. It seems dark and beautiful in its own way as a doorway to some other place, but it is a heartbreaking image because it seems to also represent the hole that Kai Dionne’s disappearance has left in the fabric of the life that he left behind, perhaps we could say that it represents a hole in the jeweled net, an absence felt by all who were close to him. It almost seems to function in the story like a wound in the world that he inhabited.

Thank you, Aaron! This is a beautiful way to express the sense of loss I felt. Kai’s sections (the chapters in second person) are composed as love songs. I wanted to explore the different ways his love is manifested, the unique relationships he has with his cousins Iris and Tulanie Rey, his uncles Griffin and Roy, his half-sisters Juliana and Roxie, his dog Talia. This is what’s lost when a person disappears from our lives, the ongoing action of his physical love in the world. Juliana and Roxie will be forever changed by their love for Kai. His love for his sisters, his spiritual presence in their lives, will continue to transform them as they remember and reinvent shared experiences. But they will never again ride him up and down the stairs pretending he’s their pony. The hole in the ice reminds us of this profound physical absence.

You’ve written, in notes about The Voice of the River, of the way that the search for a missing child “becomes holy: a missing [emphasis mine] child belongs to, and is loved by, a whole community.” Had Kai not bolted out on the ice over the river to save his beloved dog, Talia, the community of searchers in the novel would never have come together, would never have had the shared experience of the search, a shared experience that has been revelatory for some of them. Is this novel also, perhaps, an impassioned plea to its readers to be mindful of the love that is possible all around them? To foster an awareness of a broader human family that we could all have if we would just come out of hiding long enough to embrace it?

A follower asked Jesus, “When will the Kingdom of God come?”And Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the Kingdom of God is within you.”

I believe this with my whole heart. During the last thirteen days of my father’s life on earth, I had a profoundly simple revelation: every moment of every day my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my mother and I had nothing to do except come here (to his hospital room) and love him and love one another. Despite the toxins flooding his body, my father gave and received love perfectly. Tolstoy says, “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.” When we are faced with extreme circumstances, we know this, we live this truth.

I carried my awareness everywhere: to the grocery store, the crowded street, down to the park in early morning. Everything and everyone seemed holy. I remained on the path in the months after my father’s transcendence. But as time passed, I wavered, I failed to love with that clarity. Love one another. It’s so simple to say; so challenging to practice in the frenzy and distraction of our daily lives! This is another reason teaching sustains me: it’s easy to love in the classroom; my generous students lift love lightly out of me.

I have always really been proud of my ability to stop anywhere and at any time I needed to in order to witness the beauty of the world around me reveal itself to me, whether it is by watching a prolonged process or being present mindfully to experience a single, shimmering moment that makes itself manifest to me, and is gone. In the novel workshop, that was reinforced, reinvigorated. The Voice of the River is flush with luminescent, transient moments that the reader witnesses. But the project as a whole was larger than that, wasn’t it? This seems, to me, to be a book about being a witness. Every revelation the reader has about one of its characters seems to encourage seeing with new eyes.

For more than twenty years I’ve been keeping what I call the Book of Wonders. Life begins here, in joy and astonishment. I see deer up to their ears in snow; a pigeon dying on my porch the day after Christmas; reflections of trees in the river, brilliant fish swimming in the treetops. One tanager swoops tree to tree, gold and orange, black-winged, silent: as I watch him fly, I feel my body rise as if I too have wings, a heart as strong as his to lift me.

In the park, a woman drags a drunken man into the grass, feathering his face with kisses from her fingers before she leaves him. The x-ray of my sister’s back shows enormous bolts in her narrow spine, her fragile body transfigured.

I learn of medical miracles: marrow taken from the bone of a small girl, injected into the vein of her brother or sister; titanium ribs perfectly formed for scoliosis patients; a baby who thrives in her mother’s womb after the woman is shot in the belly. My father survives nine coronary bypasses, three heart attacks, five strokes. When all his organs finally fail, we learn his precious pacemaker cannot be transplanted to a human being, so we offer it to a golden Labrador. Now every dog I see fills me with spontaneous delight, my father’s love, a living vision of his resilience.

My work as a writer begins here, with strange and miraculous tales, the daily prayer of attention. I’ve filled more than seventy volumes. Making stories is not the goal: I wish only to be more alive, more mindful, more reverent. Keeping The Book of Wonders restores me to the possibility of grace in every moment.

So yes, you’re right, the project as a whole becomes larger, but it begins with “attention taken to its highest degree.” Simone Weil says this is the same thing as prayer: “it presupposes faith and love.”

The presence of the lost children in The Voice of the River is tragically fitting. Each of these children, present though they may be in the story, is missing to someone. Missing children appear in your 1997 collection, First, Body, and in the new story, “Heavenly Creatures,” that appears in In This Light, the story collection published by Graywolf Press just a bit earlier this year. Talk about the presence of missing children in your work. Is their presence in the writing a way of giving voice to the voiceless? Of giving presence to the absent or of rediscovering the lost?

I want to go back to your comment on witnessing. I had my first intimate encounter with homeless children when I was sixteen and a friend of mine was sent to a juvenile detention center. (I’ve fictionalized his story in “Iona Moon,” another piece in the collection In This Light.) When he returned a year later, he was irrevocably altered, brain damaged from fights or drugs or beatings—he could never tell me. His parents refused to let him come home, and he lived in sheds he found or made shelters from sticks and garbage bags.

Years later, when I lived in Boston, my “apartment” was an attic room without insulation. I froze in winter, fried in summer. Still I knew how lucky I was to have shelter, food, a job, a doctor. I walked everywhere, miles and miles every day, through all parts of town, tame and dangerous, in all kinds of weather. I encountered the homeless, the poor, the extravagantly wealthy, the addicted, the recently immigrated, the excessively educated.

One brutal winter, a storm surged up the coast every weekend. I lost power for days at a time. Pigeons flapped at my dark windows. I walked. And there they were: the kids, throwaways and runaways, the unloved and unlucky. The emaciated Haitian refugee shivered in Harvard Square, playing his guitar, trying to earn a few dollars. He was a brilliant musician, but his eyes were yellow where they should have been white. I thought he would die soon. The man with no fingers slept in a doorway and could barely move; as I passed, he opened his bare palm and lurched toward me.

The lives of the people I saw on the street became vivid to me, intensely personal. I began to imagine how those children might survive, who they might love, why they were out there. I began composing “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” (another piece included in In This Light), dreaming the lives of Nadine and Emile.

In 1998, I worked with a juvenile prosecutor in my hometown (Kalispell, Montana), doing research for my novel Sweet Hearts. He told me he believed there were 300 homeless kids in the area. These are the children in “Heavenly Creatures.” By the time I started exploring The Voice of the River, I imagined their numbers swelled to 700. But it’s strange: as numbers increase, they become even more abstract, weirdly inconsequential. Stories remind us that each life is precious. Nadine, Emile, Matt Fry, Trace, Peter Fleury, Flint Zimmer: each missing child has a history of love and loss, a passionate story to tell us.

Like you, like all humans and perhaps many other creatures, I have received the gift of mirror neurons, pathways in our brains that allow us to experience “Kinetic Empathy,” the sense that when you witness something, you “feel” as if it is happening to you. This may be physical (you watch someone fall and scrape skin on gravel and you flinch in pain), or emotional (you see a teacher ridicule a classmate and feel the burn of humiliation). Kinetic empathy may become unbearable: powerless or paralyzed by fear, you watch one person torture another. Years later, the memory continues to haunt you: you see yourself as both victim and perpetrator.

This too must be transformed by love, a willingness to remember, to re-invent and re-imagine. Anna Deavere Smith says she recognizes the gap between herself and the people she represents in her plays. The thrill of the experience for writer or actor, viewer or reader, is to move into that space, to become other than oneself while still acknowledging and respecting the infinite unknowable mystery of every living being.

Rumi says: You become bewildered; then suddenly Love comes saying, “I will deliver you this instant from yourself.” Love, not art, is the purpose; but for some, witnessing and rendering and imagining stories is the process and the path to understanding.

You’ve been working on The Voice of the River for quite some time. Looking back at the entire process, were there points of its development that stand out to you as particularly profound or important? Were there any points in its development that were revelatory to you?

I loved going to the park in early morning and speaking with the pigeons in their language, trying to imitate their tender voices. When I composed Daniel Sidoti’s sections, I loved the owls and the mountain goats, the ways Daniel taught me to perceive them. Every moment of the experience still feels revelatory to me. I could open the book at random, point to any passage and tell you a story about the ways in which that exploration continues to open my vision and deepen my sense of awe for all the living beings and potent entities I encounter. When I imagined the hibernating bear giving birth to two cubs, I lived inside the den, trying to render every detail from their perspective. I can’t really know what bears sense and think, but I can move outside myself, and this freedom, this joy, is extravagant.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the experience of reading this novel. Will these characters continue to haunt you?

I hope all the living beings, human and more-than-human, will continue to change and open me. I believe they will. I trust them.

Further Links and Resources

Read Melanie Rae Thon’s story “Love Song for the Mother of No Children” in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

The Iowa Review has a review of the short story collection In This Light.

Read a short essay by Thon about John Berger’s influence on her fiction.

Stories We’re Thankful For: “Pilgrims”

Celeste Ng — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:00:55 +0000

I’m thankful for many things this Thansksgiving–friends, family, bits of good fortune large and small that have come my way over the past year. But in terms of stories, there’s one I’m eternally grateful for: Julie Orringer’s “Pilgrims.”

I first encountered “Pilgrims” in The Best New American Voices 2001, where it was the lead-off story. It begins simply enough: a family–father, mother, sister, brother–are headed to Thanksgiving dinner. But within paragraphs, you feel less and less at ease. The mother is gravely ill, as are many of the parents at the group dinner. Brother and sister must contend with a pack of motherless, lawless children roaming the huge treehouse in the backyard. The story’s conclusion is so shocking that the first time I read it, I literally had to sit down. Once you read this story, certain images will stay with you forever: paper pilgrim-buckles taped to sock feet. A glass of red water. A tiny tooth clutched in a palm.

In some ways every story I’ve written since has been influenced by “Pilgrims.” It prodded me to delve deeper and darker in my own writing, to follow characters into terrifying places, to allow terrible things to happen–even to characters I loved, even to children–if that’s where the story led. It gave me permission–no, it dared me–to see how far I could take a story. Thank you, Julie Orringer.

Further reading:

Read the first few pages of “Pilgrims” online, and find the complete story in Julie Oringer’s collection How to Breathe Underwater
Erika Dreifus reviews Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge
More “stories we love”

One book to rule them all

Celeste Ng — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:00:32 +0000

A recent discussion on the community blog Metafilter asked, “Please tell me one book you think everyone should read and why. Fiction or nonfiction, doesn’t matter. I’m not so interested in hearing about your favorite book or your desert island book, but a book you think everyone would benefit from reading.”

In a matter of hours, over a hundred people responded with their recommendations. Many suggested nonfiction—from Richard Dawkins to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond to The Art of War to the Bible—but surprise! Many others felt that the one book everyone should read would be fiction.

Here’s a sampling of novels and collections recommended by posters as the One Book, and why. Notice anything?

Where I’m Calling From, by Raymond Carver (”Honed gems of short stories about the human condition” and “Wonderful insights into human behavior, in some cases simply within a drunken conversation. They show us what we’re capable of.”)
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (”It portrays the inescapable absurdity and irrationality of life, and different ways human beings can respond to that. Hilariously, and movingly.”)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (”It is, for me, a How To Survive as a Member of A Larger Society Handbook.”)
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (”These beautifully written novels (the latter is practically musical) are entirely different, yet comparably profound explorations of human desire, motivation, and angst”)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (”Because most of us are invisible. And if we are not, we should try to understand the invisible ones.”)
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (”to hopefully begin a dialogue on race and class matters, and how much (or how little) has changed since the book was written in 1960″)

All of these suggestions look at fiction as a way to explore and understand our humanness and our place in the larger world. I’m not sure I could name One Book Everyone Should Read, but I’d agree that few things can explore the human condition better, and more lastingly, than fiction.

What would you recommend as the one book everyone should read, and why?

Further Reading:

In his Quotes and Notes column, Steven Wingate looks at the links between fiction, history, and self-examination.
Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society.
Why fiction is important, even in a world of memoirs
Author Dean Bakopoulos on why fiction matters, and another excellent discussion (also on Metafilter) on why people read fiction

Halloween lit

Celeste Ng — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:00:06 +0000

We don’t usually think of Halloween as a “reading” kind of day, but I can think of at least a couple of Halloween-related stories.

In Lorrie Moore’s classic short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” a history professor escapes her life by visiting her sister over Halloween weekend–to attend what may be the most painfully awkward Halloween party in literature:

Zoe put on her bonehead. [...]

When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool glued stretegically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.

“Zoe, this is Earl,” said Evan.

“Good to meet you,” said Earl, circling Evan to shake Zoe’s hand. He stared at the top of Zoe’s head. “Great bone.”

Zoe nodded. “Great tits,” she said.

And Rick Moody’s short story “Demonology” begins with trick-or-treaters:

They came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, Protean, shape–shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, I’m really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets…

and hurtles towards a terrifying familial heartbreak. This is one of a few stories that I literally cannot read without crying.

There must be more that I’m forgetting. What other Halloween-related stories can you think of? Tell us in the comments!

Further reading:

Want more chilling reads? FWR contributor Forrest Anderson recommends three favorite stories that scare (and be sure to read the comments for a scary real-life story about one of the authors!).