Pam and Jess Walter discuss stuff at my house. Hopefully they're not talking about the weird smell.

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget.

Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life.

The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss.

What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  Read more »

It’s a little-known fact that Ezra Pound once proposed that some of the greats of American Literature compete in a boxing tournament. OK, that’s not true, but if such a tournament had been held, here’s what would have happened.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

Read more »

I have more than a minor crush on Scott. (He prefers Scott—no one calls him Francis, hence the initial.) We are two peas in a pod, and I suspect if I had lived in the glorious Jazz Age, it would have been me running around and getting plastered with him in New York and Paris instead of Zelda. He was arrogant, selfish, hopelessly idealistic, notoriously careless with his money, and he desperately wanted to be loved—everything I look for in a man.

I read The Great Gatsby after I got tired of people bringing it up when no one had made me read it in high school. A year later, I bought The Beautiful and Damned for three Euros in Amsterdam, a beat-up old copy with yellow pages and dramatically posed figures on the cover and a note on the back that says “For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.”  Then I read This Side of Paradise and then a biography of him and then I got his collected letters. He’s the only man I could ever love who’s a terrible speller. Nowhere is his self-centeredness more obvious than in the letters, but I’ve also found them hilarious and tender and full of moments of genius. I can’t get enough. I’m just plain fascinated by him—the man and the myth.

Sometimes we just stare deeply into each other's eyes.

Maybe it’s his arcane language that I find so delightful: “tight” (aka drunk) and “soda-jerker” and all the sentences that start with “Why” (as in, “Why, I think that’s outrageous” which I can only hear spoken in Cary Grant’s voice). Maybe it’s his shrewd analysis of people, probably the best I’ve ever read. Maybe it’s his hair parted down the center and combed back in silly waves on both sides of his head. Or maybe I feel a kinship with Fitzgerald because he desperately wanted fame, wealth, and lasting idolization in return for his writing, and there is a small, shamed part of me that hopes for the same things. Read more »

I’m nervous about writing, and perhaps I should be.

Growing up I never liked to read.  Neither of my parents went to college.  Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.

All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me.  I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word.  And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off.  Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end.  Hence:  my apprehension!

What if I fuck it up?

Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller.  Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable.  For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784.  For an African-American that’s especially intriguing.  Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral.   (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.)  He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997.  And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred.  It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt.  It would have been hot.  It would have gone on for hours.  It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…

I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother.  While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane.  And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious.  Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?
Read more »

A Brave New Book

I can understand why some Germans would like it if the rest of the world’s fascination with Hitler, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Nazis would dissipate. One German woman told me the Germans find talk of all of this “boring.” I was supposed to be helping her with her English so I probably should have helped her determine if boring was the word she really meant. Another German woman told me that what happened in WWII wasn’t the fault of her generation and she wishes people could stop talking about it.

At the same time, some people are engaging with and adding to our knowledge of this particular part of history impressively. One such project is a book written by a German historian called, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939-1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (My Grandfather in the War: 1939-1945: Memory and Facts Compared). In the book, Moritz Pfeiffer, who is a historian, interviews his grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht infantry. Read more »

The Millions posted an interesting essay this morning called “In Defense of Autobiography” by fiction writer Jennifer Miller. She writes:

This is perhaps the the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar.

This may be a familiar topic of conversation for you. It’s come up in form & theory courses or  dinner conversations or late-night debates at the bar. It’s something I find fascinating: there seems to be a prevailing attitude that knowing a work of fiction is rooted in autobiography makes it lesser than. People argue that knowing it’s autobiographical distracts the reader, prevents them from suspending disbelief and embracing the world of the novel. Knowing it’s autobiographical means it was less finely crafted, that the author has less skill, imagination, or both, and (my favorite) must mean that it was therapy for the writer.

But wait, we might say. Didn’t Hemingway advise to write what you know? Isn’t all fiction, to a degree, autobiographical? Isn’t writing fiction about exploring what it means to be human? Aren’t all fiction writers like crows, picking up the shiny, unusual things we come across in our own lives, taking them back to our nest and hoarding them until we decide what to do with them?

Read more »

Non-Fiction’s tether to the facts has always been frayed.  And we’re just now getting nervous about it?

A federal judge in Montana has saved the non-fiction writer’s proverbial ass.  (Not really!)

He has, for the foreseeable-future, allowed the authors of memoirs, essays and sundry ‘aboutnesses’ to ostensibly do what novelists and poets do all the time.  That is, tell little fibs.  That is, craft big ones through which we can see, but the gist of which we want to believe so desperately, we pretend there are no holes.  That is, fabricate the truth.  That is, construct a world in which the center may not hold.  That is, present the narrator as the legendary hero he, or heroine she, always imagined him or herself to be.

Yes, we have Sam Haddon to thank for the barrage of mythic forays to come.  The U.S. District Gavel-Swinger has thrown out the suit filed on behalf of a million (alright, four) non-fiction readers, a suit that may have required author, Greg Mortenson, to pay damages to those who understood his Three Cups of Tea bestseller to be entirely factual (and cough up $15 per disillusioned reader), a suit initially brought to bear by another writer, Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit… (Boo!  Hiss!  What a party-pooper!).

And so, where do we go from here?

I, for one, am not going to take this lying (down).  To my credit I have an entire half of a graduate course with Natalie Kusz, and the topic of embellishing on the events and adventures of our lives has been raised every Tuesday.  Tonight we’ll do it again.   We’ll say that we can’t make stuff up.  But what puts the Creative in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is how we beautify the gory details of our fragmented days, weeks, months and years.   Then, of course, someone will wrinkle his brow and it will be assumed that in streamlining the crap of our experience we, as writers, have made everything up.  This is as it should be.

Read more »

April 23 is World Book Night. Are you giving out books? Which book and where?

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Haven’t heard of it? The idea is to hand out free books to people in your community, ideally those who aren’t already regular readers– essentially, to take a book you’re passionate about and put it in the hands of someone else. People could sign up as “givers” through the WBN website a while ago, and everyone who signed up as a giver received a box of 20 books that they can give out beginning today. The books themselves are special not-for-resale editions that neither the publishers or authors receive any royalties from, and the “givers” can distribute their books wherever in the community they want. When I picked up my box at Auntie’s Bookstore, one person was headed to Fairchild Airforce Base, another to a women’s shelter, one to a halfway house for teens, etc. One person said they were going to a grocery store to stand outside and distribute the books, because that way they could have a conversation with each person who came by and really talk about the book. This is the first year they’ve tried this in the US, and it seems like it’s been tough for them to get the word out with zero marketing money, but this seems like a clear win: giving out books for free. And ideally, a book that you really liked. (They have a list of titles, you pick your top 3, they award you one of those based on availability when you signed up). My box contains twenty copies of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I already have a few places in mind to take copies to, but any suggestions, Spokanites?

Your local independent bookstore is most likely the distribution site, and Auntie’s Bookstore here in Spokane is having a WBN celebration Tuesday, 4/24, 7 p.m. at the flagship store on Main.

Poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín will read tonight at Gonzaga University. While she might be more wildly known for her poetry and activism, I recently read and enjoyed Agosín’s nonfiction book Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir, which I bought from the University of Arizona Press.

I was quickly absorbed by Agosín’s lyrical imagery and her unique relationship with Chile’s stunning landscape. However, what most intrigued me about the book was its unusual structure. Agosín crafts a flowing series of intimate vignettes reminiscent of Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. Beginning in the south-central city of Osorno, she travels through the country’s narrow geography, using important dates, locations, people, and objects to tell the story of her double exile–daughter of Jewish immigrants and Allende supporter. She skillfully layers her personal history with the political climate of her family’s adopted country and her own search for identity and belonging.

Tonight’s reading will be diverse in content, and its language will be rich and memorable. For more information about the event visit http://news.gonzaga.edu/2012/celebrated-human-rights-activist-gonzaga-u.

We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write.
When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

–Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, p. 64

There’s an institution, which shall remain nameless, whose H.R. Dept. has asked for a philosophy of teaching.

I thought I’d offer the readers of Bark both the ‘Erasure’ version (followed by the thing that I submitted for the job)…

Thinking The Other

Commodities want
to know
shelter with flesh.

You ask the kind
of reward
virtually.  Through-

out we are known, feel
exposed, full of
weeds worth even more.

The what splintered

too and filth-strewn
glitz grammar

seek partners already
exhausted

and roll.

Why:

To Cultivate Critical Thinking and Imaginative Engagement with The Other

Not all questions are equal. In North America, for example, we often pursue answers like commodities, as if we’re constantly in the market for the idea or the semblance of thought that will make life easier or more convenient. Other answers are born into the marriage of curiosity and vulnerability. We want to know something that matters, that persists throughout generations, a thing that binds us to their pursuit of truth and makes it our pursuit too. Moreover, we feel exposed to the social vicissitudes of life and death without at least trying to find shelter with other flesh and blood participants. Where, you ask, do we find such shelter?

Read more »