EWU grad Jessica Lakritz published in Slate.  There are nineteen others, but clearly, this is the best one.  And that black dog in picture #2 looks awfully familiar.

Dan Kois adds his perspective to the Whorfian Fact.  His piece is very good, and if you read it, and you should, you’ll see why I can’t discuss it much without ruining it.  But at one point, he compares John D’Agata’s fudging/making up/ changing facts in his essay to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, “a hybrid of memoir and fiction that was a touchstone for a generation of writers looking for new ways to tell stories.”  I suppose it is fair to call TTTC a hybrid of memoir and fiction, the key difference is that O’Brien clearly states that the book is a work of fiction.  Of course, within the book, he creates the appearance of non-fiction, and you feel like you are reading memoir. There is a character named “Tim O’Brien,” who has had a very similar life to the author, Tim O’Brien.  And well before Dave Eggers got the idea for starting the creative part of a book before page one, O’Brien dedicated his book to the men of  Alpha company–all of whom are fictional characters.

I guess my point is, if you want to fudge the facts of a real-life story to make it better, to make it art, then call it fiction.  Naive?  Maybe. Read more »

In the CNBC guest blog, professional matchmaker Samantha Daniels provides some wonderful unintentional comedy in her post, “How to Date a Wall-Street Man.” Here’s a cliffnotes version: lose all self-respect and accept you’ll be treated like shit.  But if you want some specifics, here are a few choice passages that stuck out.

Tell stories that are short and sweet because the mind of a Wall Street man is always moving so rapidly and focusing on so many different things that his attention span for social stories is very short; don’t be insulted by this, just tell your stories in a way that he can listen. Save your long, draw-out stories for chit-chatting with your girlfriends.

His mind has adapted in a way that is able to make a lot of money, but with the attention-span of a dead flea.  Focus on the fact he is making a lot of money.

Unfortunately, a lot of guys on Wall Street have a hard time leaving work at the office; it’s your job to get his mind on you and off the S & P.

It pretty much impossible for a man to work hard all day and also be expected to make conversation on a date.

Be sexy. Wall Street men tend to like women who are attractive and that other men notice when they walk in the room. This does not mean that you should look sleazy or inappropriate…

Be hot enough that other men check you out, but don’t dress like a slut.  How hard is that? Read more »

Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

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 »

There’s been some controversy over the new website Texts From Bennett.  Sam Edmunds was a big fan.  I’ll admit, I did not see what was so hilarious about them, and figured they were fake.  The Smoking Gun says they are fake.  But maybe they’re not fake after all.  This all got me thinking about what is fake, what is real, and I remember the first time I thought something was fake (fiction) and found out it was real (biopic).

A couple years ago, a good friend recommended watching the movie American Splendor.  Not realizing Harvey Pekar is a real person, and the movie is based on/inspired by true events, I was blown away.  How could anyone think up this meta-fiction movie narrative?  At some point, perhaps when the movie used clips from his appearance on a TV show, I wondered aloud, and my friend cleared up that little mystery.  And laughed at my ignorance.  I still thought it was a great movie.  But I would have been more impressed if Harvey Pekar had never existed, and the screenwriter had thought the whole thing up.

Usually, people are more interested if something is “based on a true story,” or “inspired by real events.”  Why did Frey say “A Million Little Pieces” was true?  Because no one would have bought it if it was sold as fiction.

At least for me, if Texts From Bennett is real, I guess it’s funny, I’m glad people are laughing, etc.  But if the guy is making them all up…well, now I’m a bit more impressed, though I’m still not really seeing the humor.

Over at Slate, June Thomas discusses how to reach the magical 50,000 word minimum for NaNo success.  She cites Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, who gives the following techniques for padding the word count.

His strategies include giving a character a stutter (to expand “the girth of their dialogue”), temporary deafness(“necessitating that everything said to him or her be repeated”), and a fondness for quotation(“Give your protagonist a copy of Beowulf and an annoying habit of reading poetry out loud on their long commute to work”).

In addition, Thomas adds a few of her own.

I have some additional suggestions: amnesia (if one or more characters forgets everything that has happened in the narrative thus far, it’s only polite to remind them—at length), flashbacks (either to events before the action of the novel began or just a couple of chapters back), recollections (of a character’s earliest childhood memories or just about anything else apropos of nothing), lists (you don’t have to stick to a character’s favorite books, music, movies; why not list every friend they ever had?), and recipes (if someone is preparing a meal, don’t stint on the details—how hot should that oven be?).

I’ve got a few too: meta-fiction (after each sentence, write a paragraph explained what you are trying to accomplish and/or  include commentary on how you felt, as a novelist, writing the aforementioned sentence), spot the change (copy and paste each chapter, so there are two chapter ones, two chapter twos, etc, but make a few nominal changes and challenge the reader to spot the difference), language switch (have your main character learn another language and then include a translation (using google translator) of everything you’ve written).

Good Luck!

Not really.  Not yet, at least.  But you discover the strangest things when Googling yourself.  And don’t pretend that you don’t do it from time to time.  Apparently, my MFA thesis is listed on Google Books.

Title: Jersey summer and four short stories (worst title ever)

Author: Brendan Lynaugh

Publisher: Eastern Washington University

Length: 218 pages

There have been zero reviews.  To be fair, it did have a very limited print run of 2 copies.  There does not appear to be anyway to buy the book.  Nor a cover image. Nor a preview.  Google, in its quest to digitally map every book ever printed, certainly seems to be succeeding beyond rational expectations.

At a wedding in Vancouver, I started chatting with a woman, and one thing led to another, and we ended up chatting about writing (what, where did you think that sentence was going?).  She’d taken writing classes in school and still wrote stories from time to time, though had a successful corporate career, which involved writing.  I think my mention of NaNoWriMo and my plan to finally start a tennis novel reminded her of a recent ex-boyfriend, a writer, and she told me, if memory serves, that this dude once isolated himself in her apartment (she was out traveling or doing something fun) for several days in row, subsisted on cigarettes, whiskey, and things in that vein, and wrote until he fell asleep, woke up, and wrote some more.  When she related this story, I had to laugh, and point out this sounds exactly like how Hollywood depicts the writing process (and possibly some other not-so-complimentary things).  She shrugged, and said something like she supposed it worked for him, and I probably lamely agreed, and I don’t really know where our conversation veered at that point.

But today, walking through the upper west side of Manhattan toward a French bistro where I planned to purchase a cafe latte and write for an hour or so, I was reminded of the aforementioned conversation.  Since finishing a writing residency and then traveling for a wedding, it took me several weeks to find an apartment in New York City, and in that time I hardly got any writing done.  I realized for my writing life, I need my non-writing life (for lack of a better word) to be settled.  It doesn’t have to be boring; I’m one of those special, unique individuals who likes excitement and has a dry, sarcastic sense of humor.  But not knowing where I would be living, constantly checking Craigslist combined with my day-job teaching tennis being unstable as it typically is in the beginning of the fall season…all this left my mind scattered and unable to escape to the worlds of my stories for any sustained amount of time.

Things are better now, and I expect them to improve.  And I’m glad I don’t need forced isolation and various vices to get writing done.  But perhaps I have more understanding for the whiskey and cigarette fueled writer.  It’s an awful and lonely feeling when you can’t get yourself to write, even when you know the very act of writing is what will make you happy or satisfied again.  If he can live better through chemicals, I will try not to judge.

Daniel Polansky’s debut novel “Low-Town,” is fast-paced noir set in a dystopian alternative world, and features an anti-hero in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. “Polansky has managed to craft an assured, roaring, and rollicking hybrid, a cross-genre free-for-all that relishes its tropes while spitting out their bones,” writes Jason Heller at the A.V. Club.

I spoke to Daniel near downtown Vancouver, perhaps one of the least noir cities on the planet, on a sunny Monday morning in September. Despite giving a top-notch wedding toast, and lighting up the dance floor the night before at his older brother’s wedding, Daniel was kind enough to answer a few of my questions after refueling with a delicious brunch.

Let’s talk a little bit about the genesis of the book.  Do you remember when you first had the idea?

After college, I had a job managing a team of writers at an E-learning site and wrote in the evenings or on lunch breaks.  It started as an experiment that seemed to go okay.  I’d basically never written fiction.  I didn’t really have, well, almost any idea, even what the book would be about, which is not a great idea, obviously, its about the worst possible way. I wouldn’t recommend it.  It’s the sort of thing where you have to admit to yourself that you’re trying to write a book, and not just messing around in your room.  That took some time. It’s easier to say I’m just writing a few words here or a chapter here or a chapter there. You sit down, you write an outline, you set a goal for yourself. And if you don’t reach that goal, you haven’t succeeded.   Anyway, I finished a draft.  I quit my job.  I had some money saved so I thought I’d revise the heck out of this and then go traveling.

Did you outline much of the book once you decided to get serious?

Not really.  Looking back I did so many things wrong with that first draft.  I’m surprised the book is even legible.  I think it sort of carried its own momentum.  Once I got into it, I felt like I was always five chapters ahead in my mind. And I had a pretty good idea of the very end.  I never had a formal outline, which was, again, a bad idea. Read more »

The new Poets&Writers MFA rankings have generated plenty of discussion.  Earlier, almost 200 creative writing professors signed an open letter disputing the rankings.  Now, Scott Kenemore, possibly unaware of this criticism, pens a scathing attack on P&W at slate.com.  He draws a solid conclusion, but his arguments do not hold up.

To his credit, Kenemore is upfront with his personal reasons for writing this piece. “Year after year, their ranking of Columbia University—my alma mater—has steadily fallen.”

He points out that Columbia employs well-published writers as professors, leaving the reader to intuit that writers who have won literary awards are prima facie great teachers. Rarely, whether the discipline is writing, mathematics, sports, etc, are great talents also great teachers.  Often, mediocre talents are great teachers, and great talents are medicore if not lousy teachers.

Kenemore’s second argument (if you allow his first claim to be an argument) is that “(Columbia) is also located at the center of the book publishing, agenting, and editing universe. The guest speakers and visitors from New York’s literary scene offer an unmatched immersion into the world of professional writing.”  This is true, although, every MFA program within a short train ride from Manhattan matches this immersion.

Finally, Kenemore points out that Columbia “remains a top choice for applicants.”  But asking prospective students to rank schools is, as Leslie Epstein, novelist and Boston University program director and signer of aforemention open-letter said, “analogous to asking people who are standing outside a restaurant studying the menu how they liked the food.” Read more »