Sam Edmonds brought up something in his last post that I’ve been struggling with, too: Aboutness. When does a piece of writing cease to be a narrative and become an essay? I’m not saying I’ve learned when that happens, because everyone who’s ever workshopped me knows I’m still getting to that part. What I have learned, just to show I’m not a complete non-erudite, is how to craft sentences, to make them sound just as good out loud as they do in my head. I think I have an affinity for rhythm, repetition, punctuation, and diction. So I can tell a story really prettily, no problem. But if you ask me what it’s really a-BOUT, I might say something cheesy like “it’s a coming of age story,” or “I was trying to create a feeling.”
pretty much everyone i know has seen inception at this point. and pretty much everyone i know not only loved it, but loved it enough that they had to start talking about it with everyone else they knew. and pretty much everyone i know, and the people they knew, all immediately took to the internets after seeing it to see what other people were saying about it. i am pretty much like pretty much everyone i know in this regard. here is what i found:
Gil Adamson’s book, The Outlander, took me by surprise. It was a recommended book at Powell’s bookstore, and I had heard that Adamson was by trade a poet. It brought to mind other books written by poets, the most famous of which was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a sprawling, glacial eight-hundred pages. The Outlander clocked in at around three hundred and seventy pages, and I put off reading it for a few months. When I finally did sit down to read it, I expected a turgid, image driven book that suffered from a dearth of character. I was completely wrong.
The plot (a dirty word to most literati) is established in the first four paragraphs. The widow murdered her husband and she is running from her brother-in-laws—twin red heads that feel like they came straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel—who are hunting her: simple, straightforward, and spare. Once the broad strokes of the plot have been established, Adamson subtly fills in successively finer details in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s withholding critical information.
In many ways, this book has the immediacy of James Dickey’s (also a poet) Deliverance, the spare, diction driven prose of McCarthy’s The Road, and the hallucinatory nature of Mempo Giardinelli’s Sultry Moon. It’s a quick, rewarding read that is difficult to put down.
And also speaker. And also screamer. I saw this “band” over a year ago, and they kicked my face in. I write aggressively, with muscular language some would say, but these fellas are intense. I mean, do you bring a washer and an axe handle/bat with you everywhere?
The charm for me here is that aggressiveness. They’re bluegrass and metal at the same time. Minimalist yet thick. It’s got all the angst one could want in the lyrics, and dude performs amazingly, almost uncomfortably in the moment of the lyrics.
It’s an exciting challenge to work with slam poets on their pieces. It’s freeing to forget about the line. I get to consider sound and emotion and pacing when I would usually be in there with a safety pin and tweezers trying to do something sneaky with enjambment or connotation.
Like Shawn, my muse is on vacation. Like Shawn, I will be in the Vice-Kartz wedding this weekend. Like Shawn, all I have for you is a video that previews things to expect at said wedding.
I’ve officially climbed out of the tower. I finished my third degree, and I’m done with academia, at least as a student. And I have to say, I kind of feel like I want to give my brain a bath, get all that academic nonsense outta there. Only the nonsense, not the good sense. But sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.
Example: My boyfriend and I have been writing language arts lessons for a website for pay this summer. The way it works is you write a lesson, turn it in to the online submission manager, and wait. They give the lesson to three reviewers who then give you feedback. You’re supposed to take that feedback and use it to revise your lesson. Pretty simple really. But yesterday Dylan received reviews of his very first lesson. Two of them were very positive, didn’t want him to change much, but one of them was kind of scathing (if something can be kind of scathing) as if this reviewer (who we’ve decided is a little old lady who hates creativity and fun) was out to get him from the start. Everything was wrong, according to this reviewer, the whole lesson a failure.
Unfortunately, this reminded me of graduate poetry workshops. Read more »
This will be brief, as I’m still on vacation. Last summer, before moving out to Spokane to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock of life (i.e. go to grad school), I got drunk and stayed out till 5 AM every single night with very few exceptions. I’ve been back in the Midwest for a little over two weeks, playing kickball, breaking into and getting kicked out of swimming pools, riding bikes through rush hour traffic without a helmet, eating my friend’s “prescribed” Vicodins from time to time, writing fiction, watching TV, and getting drunk almost every single night. And I’m exhausted – I have no idea how I did it last summer. So basically, this post is a confession and an apology for having not Barked the last few weeks. The Midwest is a dangerous place for hedonists who know better; I can’t wait to return to Spokane and be an adult again. Next week, after spending a weekend with my 94 year-old Satsangi grandfather who lives in Kansas, I’ll be posting about the grandfather essay (or grandmother, father, mother, etc.) and trying to figure out how in the hell one can make such an essay fresh and unnarcissistic and about something. Or maybe I’ll write about how much I hate the word ‘about,’ because I have such a hard time figuring out what my essays are about, which frightens me. I miss you all.
Some people get published without even trying. I’m thinking about my dad. About fifteen years ago, he took a fiction writing class at the University of Washington’s Extension program. His teacher asked if she could send his story, “Peep Show,” to the editor of Literal Latte. My dad agreed, and it was published. It was about a guy who cleans out the booths in a strip club.
“Peep Show” was hilarious and brilliant and today I’m cursing my dad for not writing. He’s a genius, one of the funniest people to ever live, in addition to being wise, insightful, compassionate, and sensitive. I cry easily, a trait I got from him. He is super tough, has a swagger, listens to rap, and teaches gang members in the Seattle Public Schools, but he is not afraid to tear up in public.
My dad has been on hiatus from writing since he started teaching high school. And I know what he is doing is important. His students love him and have ridiculously high graduation rates. He teaches students who are not welcome in the regular schools. I just hope that someday my dad will write again and share his hundreds of crazy stories, which he can fictionalize or not. Either way, they will bring readers to dark places and make them laugh there. Read more »
As a self-professed grammar geek, I was a little upset to realize that I had somehow missed the news that the 16th edition of The Best Style Book Ever (aka the Chicago Manual of Style) was given a publishing date of August 1 (although Amazon claims I can have it tomorrow if I select one-day shipping—and yes, that hyphen is necessary). Had I known about this glorious event sooner, I might have thrown a party, at which the main form of entertainment would have been sharing our most despised grammar, style, and usage pet peeves (a recent one of mine is unnecessary quotation marks). I even might have served these cupcakes.
But all that aside, I can’t wait to see what additions and changes are included in this new edition. More guidelines for electronic mediums and sources is a given, and Amazon tells me there will even be something called a hyphenation table, which makes me more excited than I care to admit.
The bad news, though, is that without a job I can’t afford this marvelous piece of editorial genius (okay, that might be overdoing it slightly—maybe). Until such time that I can spend over $40 on a reference manual, I know what to ask for for my birthday.
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