writing Archive

Critique of a Salesman

By amy ross | Filed in authors, books, writing

I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.”

The New Yorker’s new lit blog opens by talking about Death of a Salesman, and whether we should now come to the conclusion, after all these years, that it sucks. And I have to admit, he makes a compelling argument.

But I also think it’s significant that he opens the essay by quoting a teacher of creative writing. This is an issue that comes up frequently among the MFA set, and I think among all serious writers: to what extend does writing poison our appreciation for texts?

Because no matter that Harvey might not life Salesman, or that he can find specific faults with it — on some level, clearly it works. I don’t just mean in the cynical sense of, “Gee, it’s made a lot of money over the years, so it must be doing something right!” I mean, many many people have been moved, provoked — have generally found great worth in this play. So can we really come along now and declare it broken? Or maybe it is broken, and maybe that doesn’t matter all that much.

In writing courses and clubs, you can’t help but pick up a handful of writing “truisms”: “Never use adverbs.” “Use dialogue tags when only absolutely necessary.” “Never have a character look in a mirror.” And then, inevitably, writers go off into the world with their new found knowledge and declare, “I can’t read Nabokov — there are adverbs everywhere!” “I had to throw Anna Karenina away when she looked in a mirror.”

Being an editor is even worse. When I was fiction editor for Fugue, I developed countless pet peeves that usually resulted in insta-rejects. Second person narration was one, stories about bad relationships was another. Do I really think the world has exhausted the topic of the bad relationship? That there is no more to say about such a scenario? Of course not. It’s just that it’s (naturally enough) a common topic, and after the 500th one, they start to develop a certain sameness. I got sick of it. But a reader who only reads 5-10 short stories a year is probably not so sick of hearing about bad relationships.

Recently some writer friends of mine were discussing their desire to “turn off” this hypercritical side of themselves, to be able to enjoy things once again as “regular” people do. I have mixed feelings, I guess. It’s nice to have the tools to explain why a certain piece of art — even a very famous and admired piece — leaves us cold. But it can be dangerous to extrapolate “rules” for an endeavor which is, at its best, inherently lawless.

Be the first to comment

Are there good and bad writers?

By amy ross | Filed in authors, writing

Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today. Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I’m not a writer to be protected at all. I love science fiction, have all my life and it’s where I met Kafka. Angela Carter is swimming around in there too. Science fiction propelled me into poetry and writing in general and if I think of the children’s books I was exposed to I can’t see the difference between sci fi, poetry, Kafka or Angela Carter. Yet they all know each other very well. That’s all I’m saying. Are there good and bad writers? I’m not sure about that either.

Eileen Myles in the New Inquiry.

Be the first to comment

Punched in the Throat

By amy ross | Filed in books, publishing, writing

I’m super excited to announce that I have a piece up on The Millions!

Okay, it’s only The Millions’ tumblr… A short recap of Steve Almond‘s recent reading here in Moscow, ID to promote his new book, God Bless America. Still, it’s exciting for me because I adore The Millions and the way their posts feed my brain, so it’s exciting to contribute to that.

As it happens, inspired not by the giddy freedom of having at last turned in my thesis, I volunteered not only to do this write-up, but also to introduce Almond the same night. Here’s what I said, before I inelegantly dropped my notes on the floor just as Almond started for the mic.

Steve Almond is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He is also the author of five books of fiction, including the newly-released God Bless America, available for sale here. (God Bless America is published by Lookout Books, which happens to be run by Ben George, a 2005 graduate of the UofI MFA program). Almond has won two Pushcart awards and been featured in Best American Short Stories multiple times.

But as impressive as all that is, I volunteered to introduce Steve Almond tonight, because ever since he came here as Distinguished Visiting Writer my first year, I feel like his spirit has haunted this program. The younger generation can tell you how those of us who were in his class talk about Almond as if he were one of the Gods, stepped down from mt olympus to slum with us for a while. That week, my first semester here, he set an example for us of exactly what a writer should be.

He taught us to avoid unnamed narrators, not to keep secrets from the reader, and to never, ever use the word “beacon” in our writing. Ever. But even more than those nuggets of practical good sense, Almond taught us that a writer should be fearless. He taught us the importance of humility. And he taught us that when you have something really important, really big, and really discomfiting to say, laughter will always sweeten the pill.

An example. On I believe it was the second day of class, Almond stood in front of the student being workshopped and lambasted him to his face. In fiction worshops, we are usually very careful to be delicate, to focus on the text itself, and there is a convention that we behave as if the author were not in the room. Almond respected none of these conventions. Speaking directly to the student, he said, “You have allowed poetry and pretty language to get in the way of telling a story. I’m going to spend the next ten minutes humiliating you for doing this. But it is only because I hope that if I beat you up enough, you will never make this mistake again.”

The rest of us sat there in silence, in horror, listening to the diatribe and not knowing how to react. We were afraid the student might go to pieces over the beating he was getting. Then at last, around minute 8, he starts chuckling. Then giggling, then full out laughing. And at the end, he swears solemnly never to make the mistake again.

The rest of the week was spent with us all pretty much in stitches, because we knew now we had permission to laugh. And that was a good thing, because without that laughter, there might have been some tears. But the important thing was, we all walked away with a big dose of truth, and we’ve become better writers because of it.

Just to keep it in the family, I’ll close with a quote from Ben Percy, who was our fiction DVW this year:

“Steve Almond is one of our most prolific-fearless-political-hairy-intelligent-sexy-hilarious writers…. He makes me care deeply about his characters, so many of them wrong in the head and right in the heart, down on their luck but clinging to the desperate hope that the next hand of cards will turn up flush.”

Be the first to comment

My response to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain is appearing in the Journal Sexuality & Culture. Ooh, peer-reviewed — fancy! and the whole thing is available online.

It uses Deleuze and Guattari to address the uses and representations of masochism online…

A common-sense definition of pain would state first of all that pain is bad: pain is by definition what all living creatures most fundamentally seek to avoid. And yet, anyone with an average range of experience knows that much of what is ordinarily termed pain—from stretching to massage to exercise to childbirth—is not necessarily aversive. Self-proclaimed masochists are one group who embrace and embody the complex human relationship with pain as both an undeniably material experience, but also a practice deeply embedded in culture and rhetoric. Reading through Elaine Scarry and Deleuze and Guattari, this article seeks to engage the apparent paradox that makes pain both an irresistible weapon of torture and a mechanism towards an ecstatic restructuring of subjectivity. The article posits that it is precisely the complex discourse and rhetoric of pain which allows the material experience of it to be so radically contextually determined.

Sorry I only post these days when I have a publication, but there is thesis-ing to be done.

Be the first to comment

False Eyelashes for Everyone

By amy ross | Filed in publishing, writing

A paper I wrote is out in Transverse Journal. Even cooler, there’s a smart and pretty in depth discussion of it in the Editorial Introduction.

I also presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2011 Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media. It’s a queer take on composition pedagogy… Oh hey, why don’t I just throw in the abstract:

In order to advance our respective fields, all writers, academic or otherwise, must necessarily assume a position of authority that we may not yet feel comfortable claiming. When facing the challenge of a strange idea, a new approach, or a discipline-revolutionizing claim, we may all remember what it’s like to be a basic writer, struggling to find the right words, faking mastery over an unfamiliar vocabulary. In this paper, I hope to introduce the idea of “drag composition” as a way of managing the panic of the unfamiliar in all writers. I borrow from queer theory the idea of passing and performativity – of performing a role that feels false at first, but may eventually be added to the closet-full of identities possessed by any adventurous writer. But where passing – whether as a different sex or race, or as an authority in a field one hasn’t mastered – always brings with it the paralyzing possibility of discovery, drag performance wields the visible disconnect between the performer and the role as an effective rhetorical tool.

Be the first to comment

Summer Salad

By amy ross | Filed in microfiction, publishing, writing

I have a short short called Summer Salad out in this issue of 5×5. It’s print only, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the magazine if you want to read it… It’s about nostalgia and culture clashes and the pressures of the academic job market, and how the question of what to bring to an end of semester potluck can weigh heavy on a man’s heart. All that in 600 words!

Be the first to comment

A Brief History…

By amy ross | Filed in microfiction, publishing, writing

My (very!) short short is up now at the Journal of Microliterature: A Brief History of America According to Motel Marquees.

The piece is shorter than the title.

It got its start because I was brainstorming story ideas and decided I wanted to set something in an old highway motel. I love motels like these, and always get a weird, possibly perverse thrill out of staying in them during road trips. I prefer independent establishments to chains, and I’m especially pleased if they’re a bit on the gritty and desolate side. (Although I did once stay in a motel in DeKalb, IL that was too gritty even for me, what with the cold water showers and all.)

Anyway, I was trying to imagine what kind of story might take place in my fantasy motel — what would best capitalize the run-down, faded glamor I had in mind. And I was playing with some scenes, some characters, some scenarios, but I kept finding myself cutting stuff down, stripping stuff away. I didn’t care about the story, I just wanted the images. The pool emptied for winter, the patterened carpet in out of date colors… Then I started cutting away the images, too. I just wanted the feeling… Ultimately, I distilled the whole exercise down to the frisson of excitement I got as a kid when we drove by those motels on our way to some place more upscale, their marquees conjuring up all kinds of seamy stories in my imagination.

Once I got that idea, it was just a matter of nailing the tone of desperate promise that I associated with the marquees. When the Journal of Microliterature accepted it, the editor made a remark that appealed to me. He said that he didn’t view it as a short short story, but rather as a micro-essay. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it fits.

Be the first to comment

Microfiction Monday

By amy ross | Filed in microfiction, writing

Forgiveness Divine

He was jittery on their honeymoon, spilled a glass of red wine on her dress.  “I’m sorry,” he told her, but she smiled placidly back.  “I forgive you,” she said.

The next day when she was swimming, he stole her book to read, then misplaced it somewhere.  “I’m sorry,” he told her.  “I forgive you,” she said.

Their third year of marriage, he forgot their anniversary, while she surprised him with a brand new fishing rod.  “I’m so sorry,” he told her.  But she was unperturbed.  “I forgive you,” she said.

And so it went, over the years.  He screwed up, big things and little, and always her forgiveness came, swift and sure.  He told his friends, “My wife has the patience of a saint!  Nothing upsets her.”  And his friends were duly jealous, as their wives sulked and brooded and withheld affection for what seemed like the most insignificant of offenses.

Meanwhile, he began to wonder if there was any crime that would be outside the realm of her seemingly infinite mercy.  What if he broke her favorite antique tea pot?  What if he poisoned her roses?  What if he went on vacation without her?  What if he let her dog escape?  But each time apologies begat forgiveness, as naturally as night follows day.  The year he slept with her sister, there was a minor breakthrough – for one small moment, her beatific smile seemed to falter as she repeated the words once more: “I forgive you.”

Then a month before their thirtieth anniversary, he slipped and sloshed the steaming spaghetti water on her as she stood, chopping onions for the sauce.  An accident this time, a completely honest mistake, and the sorries spilled from his mouth even as the bright pink burn spread like a stain on her skin.  This time, however, she didn’t smile, didn’t open her mouth even to shriek in pain, but simply turned and lunged and ran him through with her knife.

And so he lay on the kitchen floor, blood squelching in a puddle beneath him, and she fell to her knees by his side, sobbing over his body.  “I’m sorry,” she wailed.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  He smiled up at her face.  “I forgive you.”

4 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

So this morning I followed a series of links around the internet about John Updike’s archive, and what may or may not be gleaned from it.

That question aside, a lot of people are pointing out that this whole concept of a writer’s archive of materials is becoming obsolete in the digital age. Says Adam Begley in the nytimes, “Updike’s archive may be the last great paper trail… Anyone interested in how a great writer works will find here as full an explanation as we’re likely to get.”

Ruth Franklin further comments in The New Republic that “the computer discourages the keeping of archives, at least in their traditional form. If Updike had been working in Word, he might have left no trace of the numerous emendations to the opening airport scene of Rabbit at Rest.”

Mark Athitakis then follows up by suggesting that in the future, writer’s archive’s might consist of their twitter posts and facebook “likes”.

This seems like an excessively grim prediction. The idea that technology has obscured the “trace” of the working writer is baffling to me. Why should the fact of working in Word mean that writers don’t save their drafts, false starts, and excisions?

I can only speak of my own process, but for this most recent book alone, I have accumulated:

  • Two notebooks (yes, real paper) worth of outlining, character sketches, problem-solving, etc.
  • A folder full of photos I took to help me visualize the clothing and living spaces of my characters
  • A file of links to articles and images from around the web that spurred bits and pieces of my story.  And perhaps most strikingly,
  • 123 individual files, including drafts at all stages, notes, dead-ended experiments, lists of words, ideas, concepts, places, and chunks of history I wanted to incorporate into the text, comments from critique partners, drafts of query letters, ever line I ever cut from the book but thought I might want to re-use later (I revive dead snippets all the time), paragraphs from other books I want to refer to for inspiration, lists of songs I found relevant while writing, excel sheets tracking character and theme development, and God only knows what other detritus.

And this is to say nothing of the vast number of emails, forum posts, and online journal entries I have racked up in the name of this enterprise. Egotist that I am, even I can’t imagine that any biographer would ever be compelled to sort through it all. And this is all for only one book!

I know not all writers work this way. I have some (very successful) friends who simply open up a fresh document, start writing, and from then on all their work is done in that one file, so there is indeed no record of their process. But even before computers, there were writers who burned their early drafts, or trashed all their notes the minute the book was sold.  Has so much really changed?  I’d say that the biggest change is that at least an electronic archive can be searched for relevant details as easily as hitting Ctrl+F.

How about you? When you’re famous and dead, will you have left anything behind for students of your work to sift through?

18 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Today (meaning Monday) is my nephew’s sixth birthday, so in his honor I’m posting a little microfic he wrote back when he was three.  It’s honestly better than I was going to come up with tonight.

Trains

The trains didn’t go anywhere. Nothing happened to them. There were green ones, blue ones, and coaches. Nothing. The end.

HPIM3146

Be the first to comment