Great post by Bill Walsh at the Kenyon Review Blog. Really just a great essay.

A couple of weeks ago I went on a walk with my friend and sometimes-student Keith Dougherty to take photos.  Keith led me to what some call the UTF—a skate park turned shelter under the freeway, bordered by Division and Third and Fourth Avenues. I’d heard Keith talk about the UTF before—he’d written poems about it, told stories from it, drawn intricate pictures of it.

“What is it about this place?” I ask Keith.

“Probably a getaway,” he says. “Run away from my life.”

Keith is nineteen and goes to Crosswalk School to earn his GED. For the year and a half he was homeless, he took and sold drugs at the UTF.

We slide down a paint-splattered ramp to get into the park. The walls and ramps are covered in elaborate graffiti.

“I watched all this artwork go up,” he tells me.

While the UTF felt like a refuge from life—camping out sometimes in a tent near Highbridge Park, sometimes sleeping in a car (“not too comfortable,” Keith says)—it was also his livelihood: “Each of us were making two or three grand a day playing craps and selling drugs,” Keith says. “I was making money for my sister and my mom.” Read more »

In the last few week, on the behest of some fellow Bark bloggers, I’ve been prompted to stand in front of my bookshelf, to analyze its contents, and to examine what it says about me as a reader, and I’ve learned two things: 1) I am woefully behind on my reading, and 2) I am incredible inept in one area–the stage play.

I fancy myself a well-rounded reader and student of literature (what can I say, I’m a fancy lad). As an undergrad my course schedule leaned heavily toward poetry, in grad school my focus was fiction, and now that I work for Creative Nonfiction I’ve been learning a lot on the job. But what I realized, starring at my bookshelf, is that I’ve read maybe, maybe, five contemporary plays.

Sure, I’ve read some Shakespeare–the popular works, mostly–but Old Billy was more a poet than a playwright, and I’ve put some time in with the Greek masters, but my bookshelf houses only four stage plays: two by Tennessee Williams (“The Glass Menagerie” and “A Street Car Named Desire”), Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”–all of which were written in the 1940s–and this hole in my reading feels a bit shameful to me. Read more »

I happened upon an interesting conversation about why people do or don’t read poetry nowadays. It includes a great poem by Jack Gilbert called “Bring in the Gods” as well as some insights into why people are attracted to or turned off by poetry. One person blames language poetry for turning readers against poetry altogether; another thinks we should all read the classics (which include??) to improve the poetry that’s being written today. Someone else recommends ignoring the critics and listening to yourself when deciding what good poetry is. I appreciate that point of view. There are times when a poetry “expert” tells me that something is good or that a certain poet should be revered, and I’m willing to agree in a calculated, “okay, I can see why you would go for this poet” way, but ultimately, I think we should be more metacognative about our literary tastes so that we can separate what we like from what we may not like but still see merit in. I mean, I’m not a huge fan of language poetry, but I can read it and appreciate what it’s doing in an objective sense. I wouldn’t, on the other hand, call any of my poetry friends and excitedly read a Gertrude Stein poem, for example, over the phone, hoping for awe stricken sighs on the other end. Check out the conversation, and put in your two cents.

It took my wife three tries to get the text messaging capabilities on her phone turned off. We’re still not sure it worked. Part of the problem was the artificial ubiquity of the text message; try this—walk into a phone store and ask them what a text message is. If you’re under the age of 35, they’ll start laughing. After a moment they’ll realize that you weren’t joking with them. Then they will feel slightly mortified (always a good tactic when dealing with salesmen) and bumble out some answer that amounts to instant messaging on your phone, except without vowels. And that’s more or less accurate.

[Sidebar: this post will be periodically interrupted with a list of words that I hate. Word I hate #1: blogosphere. This makes no sense. There’s nothing spherical about it. Wouldn’t a riff on “ecosystem” be more true to the sense of it being a self-sufficient entity? Blogosphere sounds like a protective covering. How about “blogosystem”? That might need some work…]

Personally, I have nothing against text messages except the fact that they cost money and prompt people to remove all semblance of grammar. But a bit of research lately has put me in my place, because this isn’t a new phenomenon. I can’t blame the tweens of the early 21st century for this problem. No, it turns out the real culprit is Alexander Graham Bell’s dad.

Read more »

So apparently there’s a small, budding noise scene in Spokane, WA. Friend and fellow Barker Melina and I went to a sprawling art studio on the east side Saturday night to watch a series of noise alchemists craft rhythm out of static and reverb by twisting knobs, kicking delay pedals, and screaming to the audience, who gyrated like snake handlers full of venom. For anyone unfamiliar with noise, click on the video at the bottom of the page for an admittedly extreme example of what we watched, brought to you by Detroit noise contemporaries Wolf Eyes. (Or ask Sam Ligon for a crash course on Sonic Youth and No Wave.)

Read more »

These days I’m trying to figure out how to get out of my life. I’ve been grading papers for the last two weekends and I will be for at least the next two. I know teachers are always complaining. I hate to complain, but good lord.

I’ve been thinking about what other people do and have done to support their writing.

Of course, Chekhov and W.C. Williams were medical doctors. The contemporary poet, Fady Joudah, is, as well.

Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist.

Wallace Stevens was a lawyer.

Sid Miller, poet and editor of Burnside Review, is a bartender.

There are the journalists—Ernest Hemingway, Shawn Vestal, and Jess Walter to name the best.

Li-Young Lee worked in a warehouse for 22 years. I don’t know what he does now.

Sherwood Anderson was the manager of a paint factory.

Don’t a lot of writers these days have bios that read sort of like this: Joe Schmo has worked as a boot-licker, a star-lighter, a Read more »

I’m always wary when someone starts talking about the rules of writing, because I strongly believe that there are situations in which it’s better to throw all rules out the window. But I also believe that we need to start from some sort of base, that we need to understand these rules (or, let’s call them guidelines) before we start breaking them. Maybe it’s the grammarian in me, but I’ve never felt that ignorance is a good excuse to do whatever you want (such as demonstrated by the kill the apostrophe people).

So I was interested when I came across this link over the weekend. It’s a compilation of fiction rules as defined by a wide variety of writers, including Atwood, Franzen, and Gaiman, and it’s amazing how no two lists look even remotely alike. Some flat out contradict each other, such as on how widely you should read, or if you should use a thesaurus.

I found myself having strong reactions to some pieces of advice, and being turned off to some writers (Moorcock, I’m looking at you). And I wonder, looking at some lists, how the advice translates to the work, and what I think my list would look like. Read more »

Whenever I think about “rules” for writing, I think of the old Steve Martin gag where he’s about to relay a bit of advice, intoning pompously: “Always…. No, it was: Never …. ”

Writing is so full of difficulty, imprecision, ambiguity and mystery that it’s not surprising so many of us yearn for the clearcut. To be instructed: Do it this way. We yearn for the rules.

But then we see the rules – whether it’s some bit of Writer’s Digest nonsense or something we tell ourselves in a workshop. And we realize they are false.

They might be true sometimes. But every rule about writing eventually dies at some logical extreme or is revealed as mere personal preference.

Show, don’t tell? True as can be. Except for the many, many times it isn’t.

Start late in the action and exit early? Tell it to Alice Munro.

Kill your darlings? Well, maybe not all your darlings. You’ll want to leave something in there for the folks at Bartlett’s.

Still, a lot of writers want that certainty. Do it this way and it will be good. I do. I want to be relieved from the ambiguity of not knowing — of never knowing, not even when other people tell me what they think, whether what I’m doing as a writer is “right.” Or good. Or something. Even though I know it’s impossible, I want it.

Anyway, the very impossibility of such rules is probably the reason there are so many. And it can produce some hilarious stuff. How to Write Your Novel, Part 3: What Does Your Character Look Like? A lot of this is simply hack advice for fitting together plot machines. Here’s the start of “How to Plot a Novel,” one of the many pages of advice at ehow.com.

The easiest part of writing your first novel, is the plotting process. … In your notebook, write out a one sentence idea for the story. Highlight it, or write it in a really cool color. Make sure that you can see that sentence when ever you work on the story.

(OK, I think I might have found a rule that can survive all tests: The hardest part of giving writing advice, is not making grammatical mistakes in the first sentence.)

Read more »

I’m getting excited for summer reading season.  Memories of scholastic book order catalogs floating around the classroom are dancing in my head, as are fantasies of reading books on blankets in the sun, swimming pools, and working on my tan.  Being a little bit older and wiser I thought I’d take a better stab at not judging books by their covers by doing a little research to see if any of my favorite authors had new books coming out.

I think the answer is no.  Let me tell you after many wasted hours trying to navigate authors’ and publishing houses’ websites and I think I figured out part of why people don’t read anymore.  It is a lot of work to navigate through all the crap out there.  Thinking back to Marcus’s post about what author’s make hourly I understand why not a lot of money is being dropped on advertising, I really do but really how are we, the consumer, supposed to know what to buy if no one tells us what they are selling in a way that will reach us?  The way things work now book sales seem to rely almost entirely on covers, good placing in books stores, and mainly word of mouth/required reading lists.

A quarter of the population did not read a book last year, not one, but can we be surprised?  I bet if you asked people how many movies they watched it would just be ridiculous.   Why aren’t we selling the obvious, that books are pretty darn cost effective ways to entertain ourselves.  An average book costs what twenty bucks for maybe two hundred pages?  If you figure three minutes a page (depending on reader and the work) that is ten solid hours of entertainment for only twenty bucks.  If you share the book with a buddy it’s only a dollar per hour of stimulation, plus factor in time you spend discussing the book with your buddy and it’s practically free.  Movies on the other hand cost something like twelve dollars to see them on the big screen for maybe two hours, five dollars to rent, and if you want to buy them it’s more like twenty dollars.  I really did see Zombieland on sale for $19.38.  Possibly that’s a forty dollar investment for one movie.  Outrageous!  But people are buying it because every time they turn on their computer or their TV there is an advertisement telling them to buy it and where to buy it despite how illogical it is. But to find out what books are coming out, you have to wait for possibly years before you here someone tell you to read it.  If we could even come close in advertising books the way we advertise for movies, highlight the cost effectiveness I bet people would read at least one book a year and I would know how to shape my pool reading list.