The first time I heard the song “Girls FM” by Happy Birthday (found at the bottom of the post), my hatred for it was akin to discovering you’re wearing one wet sock on your way to work 13 hours at a shitty job, or listening to a 4 year-old scream in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube while the mechanics replace the air filter you were tricked into paying twenty extra dollars for, in addition to an oil change. The tempo changes are jarring; the lead singer sounds like he has a sinus infection; the lyrics are stupid; the band’s name is Happy Birthday. There’s so little to like about this song that I’ve grown to love it for what it is, like how you grow to love a Kool-Aid lipped brat you babysit for, who thrashes through the living room, wears his shirt inside-out, spills milk on your commemorative Green Bay Packers Super Bowl XLV issue of Sports Illustrated, pulls down your pants, and asks you for five bucks for a booster pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! playing cards. The song misbehaves, throwing peculiar little tantrums (see 1:16 – 1:25), indulging itself in a creepy, geeked-out bridge (1:48 – 2:16), and never staying in one place too long. The great thing about this song, however, is how artfully sloppy it is.

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I spend way too much time contemplating my characters’ names and personal details. In a spreadsheet, I record with their names, ages, appearance, and other personal details to make sure they are consistent through a whole project. Sometimes a character changes their last name several times in this file, only to never have anything more than the first name ever mentioned in the final draft.

The other day, my friend showed me this cool website called the Fake Name Generator. By entering a gender, name subset, and geographical location, or just choosing “random” for all settings, the site returns a full set of personal descriptions including profession, social security number, password, website, and mother’s maiden name.

If you are looking for inspiration, create a full set of characters for a short story and start writing. My current “writing just to be writing” project is about Asta Mårtensson. She’s a sixty-two-years old small engine service technician from Oelwein, IA. Her blood type is B+ and her mother’s maiden name is Holmberg. The only thing the generator does not return is physical descriptions like hair and eye color (it does do weight and height), but as soon as I saw Asta’s personal details, an image of her formed in my mind. I saw her walking down the street in her hometown. Now I can’t wait to see what’s she’s doing next.

How do you come up with names and details about your characters and how do you keep track of your characters?

My favorite TV show is Jeopardy. When 7 p.m. rolls around, if the television is on, it gets turned just in time for the theme music to kick in, the contestants to be introduced and the categories to be revealed.

One of my greatest ambitions is to be on Jeopardy (big dreams, I know). I do the online test every year, and even though I’m pretty sure I get no more than 25 percent of the questions right (that test is hard), I still hope to one day stand behind the contestant podium and tell Alex Trebek my best anecdote.

But there’s one problem – in all my Jeopardy dream scenarios, I get stuck on the anecdote part. What would my interesting story be? Could I make it up? Would Alex Trebek know if I was lying?

NPR’s All Things Considered recently did a story on the anecdote development process, which made me feel a little better, for when, you know, I get to be on the show.

So, here’s your challenge: You’ve got 30 seconds. What interesting anecdote would you tell Alex Trebek?

I’ve never met Ben George in person, and yet I feel like I know him. Over the course of his editing a couple of my stories – helping to improve them in deep, significant ways – we had lots of phone conversations about art and parenthood. He has that rare ability to see deeply into a story, and to recognize its possibilities in the context of what’s there – a way of improving a piece by identifying and amplifying what’s best in its nature, rather than by merely identifying weaknesses. I look forward to the day when he’ll get his hands on my work again.

Ben is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA program. He was an editor at Tin House before leaving for Ecotone, a journal that’s established a high bar for excellence in its short history. Lookout, its book-publishing partner, recently published Edith Pearlman’s “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories,” to great acclaim.

Ben graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

How do you edit a story or piece of writing – how do you go about discovering how it might be improved? How do you manage the trick of suggesting significant changes, while making sure the author retains the sense of creative control?

I’ve heard writers say that much of what they learn while working on a novel does them no good when it comes time to write the next novel, because each novel presents its own unique obstacles, its own demands for how it needs to be written, thereby cruelly rendering useless some of the things that were learned on the last book. To some extent, the same might be said about editing. The “how” question is tough, then, because to be a good editor, meaning to hope to be of any use to the writer, you need to approach each piece of writing fresh. I’m overfond of the verb suss in this context—you suss out the particular intentions and pleasures of a story or essay. (I do this with the poems we publish as well, but I make suggestions less often on poetry.) It’s like very gratifying detective work. You’re trying to get to the heart of the mystery about this story and how it’s been conceived and made by the writer. Until you know that, you can have no real sense of whether and where it might be improved upon. Usually the first time through a story I’m just having a conversation with it, making little notes to myself about what I think it’s doing and why.

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I come from a fairly blue-collar background. Lot of machinists, carpenters, and truck-drivers in my family history, particularly on my father’s side, and being from the Rust Belt I married into much the same. I also come from a military background, and in both environments I’ve found that hard work and teamwork tend to matter more than intellect or creativity. As such, I’ve always sort of stuck out as the artist-type among men and women more accustomed to working with their hands. Still, though my family, friends, and former squadmates have rarely pretended to understand what I do, they’ve always been very interested and supportive. I suppose that makes me very lucky.

Writing is not always a sexy art form, I’ll admit. It lacks the brooding charisma of playing in a rock band, the eccentric flash of  planning an art exhibition, the Randian dynamism of designing as an architect. But it’s still a powerful form; indeed perhaps the most powerful and timeless in human experience. I think it’s easy for us to forget that, and this observation was reinforced recently while reading Sam Edmond’s piece “Construction Workers Are Assholes, and So Am I.” If you haven’t read it yet I suggest you do, as it’s very good and speaks to the discomfort I think many writers often feel when dealing with non-literary types, myself included. There’s a lot of culture shock and even defensiveness about about one’s course of study, and I even saw some fellow Barkers acknowledge questioning the worth of their own work, which I think is natural. I think it’s easy to develop a certain complex as a writer — to feel scorned and mislabeled by non-creatives, while also using their standards to judge our own work. Read more »

Last week, author Tao Lin and his wife Megan Boyle released an extremely low budget independent film called Mumblecore. A quick survey of the Interwebs suggest that this film is not actually scheduled to screen anywhere as of yet, but the DVD is available for purchase. A couple months ago, I wrote about how I don’t understand what Lin is aiming for in his writing, or any other projects he’s associated with, really. Still, when I first heard about this little flick, I was actually pretty excited because the mumblecore genre of film, from which Lin’s takes its name, is a big time favorite of mine. But then I watched the trailer and went back to not understanding Tao Lin in the slightest.

Mumblecore, for those who don’t know, is a style of filmmaking concerned, first and foremost, with failures of communication. Or, the description I once offered to a friend I was trying to convince to watch such a film with me: “movies where amateur actors sit around having awkward conversations with each other and there’s no discernible plot.”

This genre is, for understandable reasons, not terribly popular. Doubly so because the first mumblecore films, many of which debuted at South by Southwest between 2002-2006, focused almost exclusively on the lives of white, recent college grads living in major cities who spend their time playing music, going to house parties, and trying to have sex with one another (Mutual Appreciation (2005) directed by mumblecore godfather Andrew Bujalski is probably the best example of this…which I totally love, regardless). And when I first watched the trailer for Lin’s film, I actually thought it might be a parody – that he and Boyle had intentionally created a piece that was unwatchable as a comment on the obnoxiousness of films that aggrandize the awkward whining of urban hipsters. However, what limited press Mumblecore has gotten suggests this is not the case. So basically, it’s just Lin and Boyle wandering around yammering at each other while trying to look cool. Which leads me to believe that Mumblecore (and likely the two previous films the couple have made together) is not worth any more of our attention.

But other films from the mumblecore canon most certainly are.

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This past Sunday, at William Paterson University’s Hunziker Black Box Theatre, I attended the last performance a sold-out three weekend-run of “Disenchanted: Bitches of the Kingdom.”  The tag line–a brand new, fun-loving, hilarious musical revue in which the original fairy tale princesses bemoan the exploitation they’ve suffered in the Disney theme parks and films! Happily-ever-after can be a royal pain in the ass!– is accurate, if a bit saccharine, and also suffers from unnecessary punctuation disorder, but more importantly, fails to fully convey the many varieties of laughter the cognitive dissonance–at seeing childhood crushes: Princess Jasmin, Ariel, Pocahontas, Belle, swear, sing, and sarcastically bitch about their “real lives” Disney left out–produces.

Despite recent dating habits, I’m not a musical theater guy.  ”Just when it’s getting good,” I may have once said.  ”Everyone starts singing and dancing around.”  For me, the play is the thing, that captures the imagination of my consciousness (and rhymes with “thing”).  At least once a month, I try to see off or off-off broadway shows, and always feel like a lucky thief, getting to see unbelievably talented actors and actresses preform live for me. (and 20-40 other people) Read more »

Today’s the big day. Not the day I buy my first house (that was in April), not the day I celebrate being married five years (that was in May), not the day I see the first ultrasound of my child (that was two weeks ago). No, today is the day I see my other baby: the first book I signed as editor at Gray Dog Press is being released today.

There were others that saw the light of day first, several books that have my name on their contracts, but they were already accepted before I started at Gray Dog; my signature was merely a formalizing of a previous decision. My work on those was largely proofreading and light copyedits, some cover design. And there’s the Zafiro book, And Every Man Has to Die, that I signed after BP, but he’s penned several books and it, too, was pretty well accepted before I started here. Burning Paradise is different. I picked it out of the slushpile, vouched for it when the time came, and now I’ve seen it through from a twenty-year-old manuscript to a brand-new novel. In many ways it encapsulates my experience as Senior Editor at GDP. Along the way there were many moments of confusion, frustration, exhaustion, celebration, and primal piss-in-your-pants fear.

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My whole life I’ve idolized my older sister, Elise. She got her MFA in painting and was able to get a tenure track job teaching (she got tenure at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma this year). Since her life was going so well with her MFA, I decided to get one, too, though in poetry. Now I get to teach English at the college level, which I love, and also to present at academic conferences, which feels very grown up  to me (at age 37!). Of course, I always feel like an absolute imposter when I present to real academics.

I always dreamed of collaborating with my sister and finally, this weekend, it happened. We presented with our friends Toni Lefton, Tonya Delborne, and Bill Kupinse at ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in Bloomington, Indiana on the topic, Finding Eden: A Conversation between Artists and Poets. It was one of the most fun things I’ve done. What I’d like to share here are some images of Elise’s incredible paintings in which she explores her search for Eden through process and subject matter.

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There are spoilers in this post, but if you haven’t read Harry Potter by now, well—what’s wrong with you?

We’re less than three weeks away from the final installment of the Harry Potter movies: Deathly Hallows Part II hits theaters at midnight on July 15. I’ve already got my tickets for the midnight double header (Parts I and II), and I’ve gotten over my sadness that the Lansing-area does not have an all-day marathon like Grand Rapids, does (yes, I would have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. to watch all eight movies, I know that makes me a bit of a fangirl).

I started reading Harry Potter at about fifteen. My sister had the first two books, and I made fun of her for reading kid literature (never mind that she was a kid). My dad read books one and two to my sister, but since she was in the room next door, I eventually started listening in. Then, when the third book came out (we only had one copy of each book, at that point) I read it straight through one night because I knew I had to give it back to my sister in the morning. Book four we read aloud as a family then listened to on audio book in the car on the way to one of my soccer tournaments (24 hours in a car is not enough to listen to Goblet of Fire, by the way). The fifth book came out during a family reunion in Alabama, and there were no bookstores in a 50-mile radius. I waited in line at Walmart at 6:30 a.m. then promptly ignored my relatives for the remainder of the trip. (As a funny aside, this place was so hick that Walmart had only stocked a few copies, and the employees were surprised that they were over halfway sold out ten minutes after they opened. My family bought four copies. We don’t like to share.) The sixth book I bought at midnight the day before work selling Sunglasses, a day, I admit, that I wasn’t all that on the ball, because I’d been up until almost 7 a.m., repeatedly telling myself, “just one more chapter.” The seventh book I read over three days, because I didn’t want to admit it was all over.

My generation, my sister’s generation—we’re in an interesting spot. We grew up with the madness (even if some of us were just a touch older). It was the book that started midnight release events for books rather than relegating them to just movies. It was the book that got an entire generation to read, to love reading. But these are the things we all know about Harry Potter. These are the things in every news story.

Ever since I stayed up all night reading Prisoner of Azkaban ten-plus years ago, I’ve been waiting for the next piece to come. First it was the books, then the movies. And now even those are ending. I’ve always liked the suspense of waiting, of wondering what’s going to happen. This has become especially true since I started writing. The more I learned about stories, about plot and characters, about language, the more I was able to analyze the books, to critique, or guess what was coming next. I was too young, too inexperienced, when the fifth book came out to understand that Sirius needed to die, to get that heroes need to lose their mentors to be able to stand on their own. I don’t remember how I felt about Dumbledore’s death the next book, but that very fact makes me sure that it came as less of a surprise. By the time the seventh book came out, I had seen that big character twist coming. Snape, I’d argued for two years, had to be good. All evidence aside, the structure of Rowling’s world, the messages she was trying to convey, meant that he couldn’t possibly be bad. Otherwise the world really was black and white. (Also, I knew a Weasley had to go, by sheer odds).

I won’t argue that Harry Potter is some great work of literature on the language level. It was never supposed to be. Her writing does seem to reflect the fact that the books moved beyond children’s literature in the later books, but there is just as much of an argument that she simply got better through practice as there is that she upped her game for her adult audience (more, even, in my opinion). Yeah, some things are annoying (for instance, Rowling loves for Hermione to say things “waspishly,” usually to Ron, and if you can’t hear that tone in her voice without the adjective, you haven’t been paying attention). But there are other things she does well, even if they are heavy handed, if compared to adult literature. The scene in the seventh book where Ron walks out on Harry and Hermione is especially well done (so much so, in fact, that the movie version of it felt very flat to me), and it was the first time that I really noticed, as a writer, that you can accomplish a lot of things by having the characters’ surroundings reflect the mood you’re going for. (Also, the plotting is nothing short of astounding. I have nothing but respect for people who put together series where each book builds on the previous; I can hardly hold the form of a story in the palm of my hands.)

I’ve always been a firm believer that you can learn from any type of writing, good or bad, genre or literature (though this distinction makes me uncomfortable), for children or adults. Harry Potter has confirmed this to me. Whether you love or hate the books (or don’t really care), you can’t deny that there is something magical in the stories (pun totally intended). Anything that inspires such a multitude of readers deserves to be studied for that fact, if nothing else. (As an aside, I hate to make that argument, because it means that I will probably end up reading Twilight someday, no matter how that hurts me inside. But it’s still true.)

Is anyone else a Potter fan? Is anyone else doing anything special in preparation for the final movie? If, like me, you feel both excited and sad about the end, just remember, there’s still more coming.