Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »

1. The essayist will take pride in neuroses. He will go on an on about the joy of scratching his ear with a pencil or brag about how long he hasn’t driven a car.

2. Everyday outings, such as going to the grocery store, will become overwhelming adventures. Huge adventures, like swimming with whale sharks off the coast of the Yucatan, will sound like everyday activities.

3. You will never know where she is. She will insist on trying a diverse range of activities, from accordion lessons to firing a machine gun, claiming it is research for a “Never Have I Ever” column.

4. You will realize that your world is more bizarre than a postmodern short story. You will start anecdotes with, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

5. You will not know whom you’re with at any moment: the character, the narrator, the persona, or the person. You will begin to wonder if you are a character or a person and sometimes narrate the recent past as if a memory from childhood. He will hear you and violate your POV.
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My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt,  had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself. Read more »

I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »

You start to look a lot like Egon, when you're crazy.

Near the end of last school year, when I had run into a creative wall—long before the assignments stopped being due—I was doing everything I could to avoid writing. Mostly listening to hyper-emotional music. The sad stuff while lying on my back, under a sheet. The pop punk while jumping from my bed to my desk chair…because the floor was lava.

It all made sense at the time—unlike my final workshop story, which chronicled, among other things, an argument with my garden gnome, Armando, as to whether or not I was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele.

Sounds great, I know.

The piece may sound like it had no redeeming value, but there was this one anecdote from my actual childhood that stuck out through all the weirdness. It was about a time during high school when I tried to comfort Thomas, a victim of bullying, who was contemplating suicide, and how I ultimately failed to respond effectively. Read more »

if you’re anything like me (a reasonably well-read person who gets visibly excited when the president of the united states addresses the public), then you probably also tuned in to the state of the union and heard the president of the united states say on tuesday night that “anyone who tells you that america is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”  and then you immediately thought to yourself, “wtf.”

president obama is well known/regarded/maligned for his excellent oratorical skills.  so where the hell that line came from, i don’t know—but i sure as fuck hope he has polling data to show that voters in pennsylvania would respond well to that sort of playground bluster.  and the thing is, he probably does.

in any case, that odd/juvenile bit of phrasing got me wondering about what sort of political rhetoric appeals to me vs. my fellow americans, as well as the sort of things i like to read vs. my fellow americans’ taste in literature.  for example: i completely geek out about delillo; lots of my countrymen & women work themselves into a lather over dan brown & teenage wizards wearing color-coordinated scarves.  so i did some quick google searches to dig up speech transcripts from a few of the leading presidential candidates in 2012, then i plugged them into i write like to see if there were any interesting outcomes i could hastily assemble into a blog post, if not an actual voter’s guide (since you’ll likely learn as much here as you will from any televised debate sponsored by the likes of facebook).  here are my results:

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Although the boxing gym looks nothing like this, there's still a bit more fighting involved than I prefer.

On Monday, I went with three other EWU MFAers to a boxing gym. I know this sounds like the start of a joke – four writers walk into a boxing ring and – but it’s not. My friends joined the gym at the start of the quarter and have been working out there three times a week. At a party last weekend, they were singing the praises of the experience and I, a few drinks deep, said something along the lines of “Take me with you! I wanna punch some bitches!” So on Monday, they took me with them.

I got an introductory lesson on how to stand, how to protect my face, and how to throw a punch. This was pretty rad. I’m sure to anyone watching, I looked like a giant Gumby doll wearing boxing gloves – floppy, too-long limbs folded at awkward angles. But just being in a real boxing ring with my fists up made me feel kind of tough and cool. Plus, my tiny, feisty girl instructor shouted “get your shit together” every time I lost my balance, which is a surprisingly effective instruction. I wish some one would come by my desk once an hour and say it to me while I write. Anyway, it was a great workout. Afterward, the gym’s owner pulled me aside and asked me how I liked it and if I wanted to join the gym. I told him I did like it, but I would have to think about it.

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What stayed with me was the strangeness of it. Sarah’s story wasn’t especially well-written. There wasn’t much in it that was novel except the act of writing it down, heavy with mystery and a sense of loss, and sending it out into the world rudderless. It was like stumbling upon something secret, and I wanted to know more. To enter further into that mystery. So, naturally, I turned to the internet.

Last month, I wrote about Sarah’s story, which I found handwritten on the flyleaves of a used book I bought online. That post includes a transcript of what little she left for the amateur internet sleuth, so I won’t belabor the details here. But there are a couple highlights that, if this were a TV mini-series, would surely appear in the “Last Week on…” montage that rolls before the theme song:

1. Sarah met and fell in love with a man named Mike. Mike was a park ranger who, according to Sarah’s friend Stu, had started an Outward Bound program in Seward, Alaska, where Sarah’s story takes place. According to Sarah, Mike was “her second half.” He “changed [her] life… gave [her] pure love.”
2. Sarah misspells his name when she writes it out. Instead of Michael Adrian Vanbeek, the standard spelling of the two given names, she writes “Micheal Adrain Vanbeek.”
3. She writes in vague terms about the loss of the relationship. Twice in the draft, she approaches this subject and then jerks away from it, like she has accidentally brushed against a wound.

Mike Vanderbeek is the one who looks like he's being attacked by the guy in the jean shorts.

Since I didn’t have any helpful information about Sarah, I began by googling Mike. I made the rookie mistake of starting with his full name, both Sarah’s rendering and the spelling-corrected version. Of course, this yielded no real results. Then I tried “Mike Vanbeek”—too many results. Then I tried searching “Mike Vanbeek” and “Outward Bound” together. Here where it got interesting.

Google suggested that maybe I meant “Mike Vanderbeek” and Outward Bound, and it showed me what I would find there. Mike Vanderbeek, as it turns out, started Outward Bound’s Alaska program in Seward. He was indeed a park ranger, an advanced mountaineer, and he would’ve likely been in Seward in the summer of 1997, when Sarah sets her story. All of this fits, but all of this information is found around the edges of the articles. For Google, the thing you need to know about Mike Vanderbeek is that he is dead. Read more »

No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away. Read more »