I realized something kind of disturbing about myself recently. I rarely remember words. As a matter of fact, I have such a hard time remembering my students’ names that sometimes after being with them for weeks and thinking I’ve got their names embedded in my mind, I will go and do something embarrassing like call Ashley Jessica. Who knows why. Somehow my brain computes these names as similar, the same even. I did the same thing with Cassandra and Natasha. Both are three syllables, end in “a,” and have a stress on the second syllable. They must be the same name, right? No, not even close, especially if you’re the girls in my class looking at each other like I’m a fool. Turns out I do a similar thing with poetry. I rarely remember words. Instead, I remember feelings, images, the gist of it. The poem will form a shape in my brain. I’ll feel around for the details in no particular order and pull out a diner, Albert Goldbarth as the speaker, and the story of a woman who practiced trephination (the act of drilling a hole in ones head) in the 1970s. I also remember, and this is quite a feat, that the poem is called “Ancestored-Back Is the Overpresiding Spirit of this Poem.” This is one of my all time favorite poems, and I can’t quote one damn line from it. My father would say that I inherited his bad memory, but I think it’s more than that. I think that maybe this has something to do with how my senses make sense of the world, and as far as I can tell, words are the last things to make connections in my brain. I almost always think and remember in pictures. Maybe this makes me a child of the Imagists, those Modernists who said…what did they say again, something about no_____ but in things. See, I’d have to look it up or sit here anguishing over the blank spots in my mind for…wait, is it “No ideas but in things”? Whew. I think that’s it. I wonder what this says about my writing process, about the fact that I translate images and feelings into words instead of…well, how do other people do it?

My primary Bible is a large-print edition.

(You learned: I have a large-print Bible. Break that down and you also learn that I have multiple Bibles and probably poor eyesight. These things are likely unrelated. You may also make the assumption that I am interested in the Bible either scholastically or religiously, or both.)

I bought it years ago when I started studying my faith more seriously. I found that reading that tiny, tiny print on those thin pages was unbearable for more than a few chapters. I’ve always had poor eyesight (I have no memories of not wearing glasses), and there’s about a 50/50 chance that I will eventually go blind. Yay, degenerative eye conditions. But the point is I found it much easier to read the large-print Bible simply because the default font for most Bibles is so damn small.

Most books don’t have this problem. In fact, pick up most bestseller hardcovers and the type is actually pretty large. The Jane Smiley book I’m reading right now happened to be printed in about 12-pt type, I think, which is fine for a book. On my Kindle I use the second-smallest font size setting. But every so often I’ll come across a book that is just too small for me to read without straining my eyes. Mass-market paperbacks are worse than most, and though I don’t’ read them often, I have to wonder if that’s partly because of the strain on my eyes.

But try to find a large-print edition of most books. You can’t. If you’re lucky, the book you want is published by one of the big houses and is written by a big author. By that I mean James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Knopf/Doubleday, etc. But Amy Hempel? No. Tobias Wolff? Not a chance. Raymond Carver? Not even him. Lorrie Moore? You’re lucky there—one of her books is available in large print, though it illustrates the problem with large-print editions: prohibitive cost. Read more »

I tore open my first rejection letter ever this afternoon and Scotch taped it to my bathroom wall. I know the bathroom wall’s not a particularly original home for rejection letters here at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers (my TV screen would have been better – the more rejections, the less I’m able to watch), and it’s probably pathetic that I haven’t submitted any manuscripts in four years, but whatever – Samuel Beckett. I probably should have been inspired to write/revise after such an awesome Get Lit! a few weekends ago, but I’m drawn more toward failure, much like a buzzard is drawn to a corpse, so I fought back this afternoon at the Rocket Bakery, took the revised draft of the essay, which is quite frankly about to petrify, or is going to sink if I poke any more holes in it, or is about to be euthanized if it doesn’t find a home, or whatever stupid metaphor you wanna use (is wanna all right? Is gonna alright? I use both alot. They’re both alike, and certainly not a like. Fuck – I hate to compromise prescriptivist tendencies, but you’ve gotta [see?] be descriptive, too, or else thou wilt find thyself drawn and quartered in the grammar wars. Thank you for addressing this, by the way, Kathryn. Just in time for galleys, too. *high-five*), attached it accordingly with cover letters to five journals, and left-clicked my subs into uncharted waters. (I know. Sorry. Puns have become a guilty pleasure, thanks to a certain second year nonfictioneer, whose first name begins with Erik and last name begins with Johnson.) There was discussion a little over a week ago about over-drafting, under-drafting, and when we know if a manuscript is ready to be (e)mailed. I don’t know if mine was ready. I think it was, but it could also be 1,000 times better. Or worse. “My essays are like my children,” I sometimes hear writers say. I understand the sentiment – doting over lines, rearranging, nurturing, planting, and so on. I also hear writers say they never reread their published pieces, because they wind up hating them, and are more concerned about churning out new work. What a thing to say! “Yeah, my son got accepted to Harvard, but I’m pretty upset about the way he turned out, in spite of his praise, so I’m never going to talk to him again. In the meantime, I’m working on impregnating (or giving birth to) like six other babies, who will hopefully be better.”

What’s your take on rejection? I know this has been addressed before, but I’m always a little late to the game, so you’ll have to forgive me.

This Book, My Hands

Yesterday I went on a quest to find the old classic, Exodus, by Leon Uris. It felt funny to look for a book that tells Israel’s creation story with such romantic regard in a time when the country’s actions are vehemently condemned. These days, even using the word “Israel” is a political act that can get one accused of being anti-Palestine, anti Palestinian.

Which I absolutely am not. And the responses I got when scouring second-hand bookstores looking for a romantic story about Palesrael (how about I call it that?) amused me and made me somewhat uncomfortable. When asked if they had Exodus, booksellers let their heads fell to the side like they were remembering an old lover or Woodstock, someone or something sentimental and seeped with significance that has since receded.

“We always used to carry that book,” they said, or, “We stopped buying it because it seemed like everyone had it already.” They all knew the book, the author, and the story. In wanting it, I felt cast in their eyes as a young, idealistic, Jew-girl, someone who wanted to learn about her story, to have an ancestral history to believe in.

This does not describe me very well, but it does describe a character in a story I’m currently writing. This character wants to believe that there is significance in being Jewish, in being tied to a specific country outside of the United States. I think she’ll affirm these sentiments by reading Exodus. In order to let the book inform this character, I have to re-read it. Read more »

When I stop and think of what grammar errors drive me the most insane, I think the misuse of words like your/you’re and their/there/they’re and its/it’s are at the top of my list, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I get snarky when I see these mistakes, such as

Your driving me nuts with your ineptitude!

or

Its time you learned how to writer properly!

and say things like, “My what again?”

These are the obvious ones, and I think it’s the apostrophe that usually throws people off, but as a grammarian, there are quite a few other blunders (and some things that I know are nothing more than pet peeves) that are sure to make my blood pressure shoot up, at least a bit. Here are a few:

• in the U.S., we use toward, not towards, just like it’s (see how I did that?) color, not colour
• punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless it’s (again!) an exception, of course
• IM speak or text speak or whatever it’s called these days (but lolspeak is acceptable in certain circumstances, including the Bible)
• not capitalizing the word I (I’m looking at you, McDonalds)
• the absence of the serial comma, because my parents, Angelina Jolie and God means something totally different than my parents, Angelina Jolie, and God

So what drives you insane?

Today I wade in over my head. Or wade into a place where my head is no longer running things. Or wade into a place where my head is running things without me.

But what does it mean?

I want to talk about work that makes – or seems to make – no literal sense, but which accumulate another kind of sense. A seeming nonsense that you feel is not really nonsense after all, but is pointing to a deeper, truer sense. A trance logic or dream reason. A procession of synaptic leaps that feel connected despite an apparent lack of meaning – like stones of different shapes rising out of a river.

My favorite example of this is Kafka’s A Country Doctor. The narrator proceeds as if in a dream, as if he cannot control his fate. He needs horses for a journey, cannot find them anywhere, then they emerge, along with a groom, from a long-unused pigsty. His patient is first well, then fatally ill; he wants to die, then he wants to be saved. Contradiction and paradox emerge casually, unremarked. The village strips the doctor bare and chants at him: “Only a doctor, only a doctor.” In this story, as in the rest of his work, Kafka manages a wondrous trick, working between mystery and clarity, between punishing illogic and a sense of a hidden possible logic. You feel comprehension is at your fingertips, barely out of reach. And so you come back to it. Read more »

An interview with Charles Baxter, in the current issue of Willow Springs.

“I think that we’re all conscious of the fact that when we enter a novel, we are going into a kind of dream, like Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland reading a book and then getting drowsy and then going down the rabbit hole. Reading is like going down the rabbit hole.”

Vampires are literally everywhere I look the last two weeks.  It started with those silly Twilight novels.  (Don’t get me wrong when I say silly, I’m totally for them even though I hope never to read them.  People read them and right now the fact that anybody is reading anything is just pure awesomeness) Then the second movie is making it to DVD so anytime I go anywhere/open a web page/open my eyes, people are talking about them.  Then, in this class I’ve kind of been teaching (sort of), we are reading Dracula.  If you haven’t been forced to read it yet, I highly suggest picking up a copy.  I am thoroughly enjoying my experience and it is a surprisingly quick read.

So anyways, the class is set up so that my fellow TAs and I mostly just run online discussion boards and then we get to have two “breakout sessions” where we actually get to talk to the students face to face.    Let me tell you, it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to say anything about the book.  Personally, I feel like I had this set-up pretty well.  I had the class arranged so we were sitting in a circle to encourage a Socratic discussion, I showed a video clip, and I had my discussion points laid out pretty well and pulled them from places like Spark Notes so I knew they weren’t too hard.  But when push came to shove no one would say anything except for few of the older women in class.  Finally, I had to do it, I asked them if they read the pages they were supposed to.  All of the eyes in the class immediately looked away from me.    I think only four people in a group of 19 read the mere 150 pages they had a week and a half to read.  So I asked if they were struggling with reading or if they were confused about something.  The only answer I got was reading was really stupid and they didn’t think they should have to read a book.  It was too much work.  It was terrifying.  Not to sound crotchety or anything, but what is with kids today? Is it laziness?  Is it that they really don’t know how to read?  Is it that no one has ever failed them?  There have been times in my life when I didn’t do my homework, sure, but when I screwed up I got a bad grade.  No one felt sorry for me.  I got what I deserved.

What really bothers me is that we are raising a generation of illiterate people and giving them a diploma because we want to say we have an educated workforce.  I used to think that the reason people weren’t reading anymore was because writers write stuff that only writers would like.  Now I think that as a society we are becoming illiterate and so books that are anything more than juvenile vampire literature is too much to handle.

If I had to pick the most common gripe I’ve heard about MFA workshops, it’s this: students write the same stories over and over again.  That isn’t to say that all students write the same stories, but that each student has a story that seems to come out time and time again.

It makes sense to me.  When a writer has something to say, he or she is going to keep trying to say it until it comes out right.  Even if it comes out right once, the idea might still be nagging at them.  They might repeat themselves over and over again.

Look at Dickens.  He wrote the story of the poor London orphan nearly every time he put pen to paper.  Look at Alice Munro.  She writes consistently about rural women’s struggles.  Look at Richard Russo.  More than half of his books take place in New England mill towns. Read more »

Willow Springs is about to hit full production mode on issue 66–which means rounds of galley meetings, debating commas and finer points of capitalization. Uncapping my pen and letting the red ink spill makes me a little nostalgic for years ago, when I taught a two-semester class on the publishing process. The students made a fine literary magazine as the final project, and since the class was regionally sponsored, we even had enough funds to add color signatures.

Read more »