I’m busy figuring out how in the fuck to use Twitter and trying to get my voice back for fall quarter after reading so much Anthony Powell the last few months (I can be a bit of an imitator, and believe me – brandishing wordy, pseudo-British-Twentieth-Century elevated language in an essay/memoir in which one huffs nail polish remover preceding a three-way at 10:30 in the morning on Labor Day just doesn’t work), so I’ll leave you with Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold talking about fear of success in writing, a topic that seems to have popped up in one capacity or other over the weekend on Bark. I’ll be back in a week, quite possibly on the topic of regaining your voice after reading one so drastically different from your own, though I’ll try to think of something cooler, like this. Rock the Casbah, y’all.
I know we usually talk writing and literature around these parts, about the erosion/evolution of pages to pixels, and so on. I’m gonna go ahead and not talk about any of that at all and instead discuss Monday iPod night at Spokane’s Baby Bar, and how ridiculous the battle of wills can get between people who want to play their music.
A friend and I were slugging back gulps of Maker’s Mark from the bottle one night last week during Squaw Valley’s unbelievably fun and helpful summer writer’s conference. I told her I considered myself not so much a writer, but a fraud. She absolutely agreed with me – that she felt like a fraud as well. The amount of alcohol we drank that night prevents me from remembering subsequent details of our conversation, but I wondered if anyone else felt the same way the following afternoon and I asked around. Everyone I asked said yes, their eyes widened, they nodded emphatically, and seemed as though they’d spent extended periods of time thinking the matter over. By fraud, I don’t mean fabricating memoirs, or taking credit for other peoples’ stories, or anything like that, but for a long time, I’ve had this overwhelming guilt for being a writer. Hell, I didn’t even refer to myself as a writer until sometime last year. I’d call myself “a guy who writes,” or even say, “I write,” but calling myself a writer, the actual word, smelt of a lie. (Also, I’m sure we’ve come into contact with folks in college workshops, for example, who say things like, “As a WRITER, I feel that…”, followed by a litany of self-indulgent details about their life, which have little or nothing to do with whoever’s piece is being workshopped, so perhaps there’s some preference for dissociation in certain circumstances, but I digress.)
When I read submissions for Willow Springs, certain words and phrases kill off my interest in the narrative entirely, dismissing the prose as sentimental drivel: cancer, realize, hospital, grandmother, English major, “I felt”, shimmering, and so on (okay, English major doesn’t denote sentimentality, necessarily, but oftentimes in a story/essay, after a grandmother dies of cancer in the hospital, the narrator realizes that she needs to major in English and write shimmering prose that makes her feel…[insert digressive cliche here]); it’s like using the phrase, “In today’s society” – people know better, but they do it anyway. I was in Hutchinson, Kansas, this past weekend among 18 immediate and extended family members – the largest family reunion I remember being a part of, thanks to nieces and nephews and once-removed cousins born in the last few years – to see my grandfather. Prior to arriving, 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.
As summer pushes spring’s face in the dirt, friends pile in cars, hop on planes, and move away, revel in respite on coasts and in log cabins, kissing the unexpected slap of humidity as they step into the new sun. Amid the departure of those I’ve spent my year with, I’ve rekindled one of my oldest hobbies – the art of making music mixes to send friends off. What I discovered last week, while rearranging songs on a buddy’s road trip playlist, before burning it to a CD, is how similar today’s mp3 mix-making process is to today’s writing process. Gone are the days when we taped songs off the radio, leaving off the beginning of “Motown Philly,” because we were too young to recognize the beginning, or using the gabby white noise of the DJ as transition from song to song. Gone are the days of writers’ trashcans barfing crumpled wads of spidery ink. Nowadays, we move songs around, find ways to crossfade, smooth the transitions, so we don’t make the mistake of following, say, Neko Case with Three 6 Mafia. Mixes are like stories and essays, in that they have to take the audience somewhere unexpected, but make them feel cool and comfortable at the same time, happy that they took the time to listen, hopefully with plans to re-listen. It’s sad to see the days of making mix tapes go, but the craft has become more conducive to success through drafting and editing. So, at the risk of High Fidelity-ing, I’m going to list some of my personal rules for making 60 – 75 minute mixes, and attempt to liken them, perhaps stretching in a few cases, to the writing process.
So I’ve been writing a lot the last few weeks, dodging the portentous summer slump of which the recent EWU graduates warned me. I’ve velcroed waterproof cleats to my feet, tied a lifejacket around my waist, and spent a beautiful afternoon in Lake Wawasee, kicking through the bellies of bulbous sturgeons, steeping the water red with their stupid entrails; I’ve accidentally shown my friends a gay porn, after pulling down my sweatpants to show them how many pubes I’ve sprouted; I’ve forced my younger sister to chew stick after stick of blue wintergreen gum and stick the wads to a color-by-numbers American flag thumbtacked to my bedroom door for an art project of which my dad, Warren, disapproves. The only problem is, none of it’s real – it’s fiction.
Above is a trailer for Bad Writing, an upcoming indiedoc I learned about today, while trawling YouTube for videos to upload in lieu of writing a full blog post. This is probably old hype, but I’m nonetheless curious.
Riding on the coattails of Amaris’ recent post, I took the eavesdropping process to stalkerish levels last night, and wound up getting six pages, which, with a little research, can probably be weaved into an essay.
I was at the Globe Bar and Grill after class, having a gin and tonic and catching up on pleasure reading, when I heard three men, yelling vulgarities in the emphatic way of one who wants to attract the attention of an outside party – in their case, a blond girl playing Photo Hunt by herself on one of those touch screen video game machines often found in bars like the Globe. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about, as they were on the other side of a bar, so I walked by to get a better listen, deciding instead to step outside and “check my voicemail” to
A few months ago, essayist/poet/fiction writer/superhero Ira Sukrungruang told us the following, during a guest workshop: “Don’t write like a suburb.” In other words, don’t write bulky, indistinguishable paragraphs akin to what comprises the thesis-body-conclusion essays we were taught to write in freshman English. Perhaps I’m a providential airhead, who galumphed into a graduate program without quite knowing how I did so, but I found this advice to be groundbreaking. (Suburb-detonating?) I have since made it a point to look for meaning not only in the words, but also in the physical structure of the prose on the page, much like one looks at clouds to find shapes.
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