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 »

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?

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Years ago, I heard a beautiful story on This American Life. It was the tale of two brothers and their pet armadillo, and it moved me. Even though I seem to remember the armadillo described as purple, for years I thought that the story was nonfiction. In my defense, I had never seen an armadillo before (perhaps in certain light they looked purple, as bluegrass appears blue?), and I grew up in a place where people kept raccoons and squirrels as indoor pets and placed housecats outside to live in barns. When I finally looked the radio essay up, I found out it that it was, in fact, a beautiful short story.

I felt a little foolish, but not foolish enough to question the veracity of a story I heard the first time I listened to Wire Tap and thought that the show was the Canadian version of This American Life with an open phone line. For weeks I told people about this guy who got addicted to eating rabbit food. By now you might think me gullible. But I had witnessed many improbable things and heard the wildest of confessions, so I didn’t doubt for a second the plausibility of someone needing timothy hay pellets—any dietary deficiency could have been the culprit.

Several weeks ago, I listened to a podcast about Apple factories in China. China has never sounded like an ideal place to work—all those stories come to mind about the production of flip-flops that give people lead poisoning, the quick big dam that destroyed whole villages, the creation/selling/inflation of World of Warcraft gold. Not to mention everyone was still touting Steve Jobs as some kind of bandit hero, forgetting that quintessential bandits give back to their communities. There is no “Jobs Foundation.” The Apple monopoly on beautiful design and good hardware needed to be knocked down a level with some nice, hard-hitting expose.

The hexane poisoning, underage employment, capitalism, globalization—the story felt right, down to the timing. David had become a Goliath, the story confirmed it. It’s rather un-American to like a Goliath; progressive people talked about boycotting Apple.

Last week, of course, This American Life aired a retraction.
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When I was a senior in high school, I had to fill out a form detailing my career goals. Based on this form, I was assigned a group for career day. Each group would spend first period in a classroom with a group of adults who had succeeded in their field of interest. I knew kids who spent their mornings with engineers, doctors, and teachers, but on my form, I said I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a director. That I’d like to start my own theater company. This put me in the miscellaneous group.

The miscellaneous group contained about fifteen kids out of the eight hundred who would graduate with me that year. We got the whole performing arts center to ourselves, presumably because it seemed aesthetically appropriate and not because we needed the space. We had speakers from a variety of careers in arts and letters: a radio personality, a journalist, a novelist, and a couple others whose presentations I can’t remember because I was busy counting the empty seats in the auditorium. The radio personality was the closest to an actor the school could scrounge up. They didn’t even bring in a drama teacher for the occasion, though a small handful of us had theatrical aspirations. Maybe they were trying to tell us something.

Of the presenters we had, the novelist interested me most. He was middle-aged, portly, and had put on a plaid button-down for the occasion. At that point, I hadn’t dreamed of being a writer since about sixth grade, when I wrote what I believed to be a novel (finding it years later, it was twenty-five pages in fourteen-point font) about a cute boy who fell inexplicably in love with a girl like me. I had been immersed in the theater for several years, moving from show to show with hardly a breather, often doing my homework in class or on breaks during rehearsal. I had no time for writing. But sitting in the cavernous PAC, listening to a man who finished a mystery novel every six months or so, I remembered how much I’d loved it. I listened with fascination as this man told us how many novels he’d published (I wish I could remember his name) and how, if you filled seven legal pads with fiction, bam! You’d have a novel. Read more »

According to eye witnesses, when I was born, my father was in two different places.

He was at the American Legion drinking when he got the call that I was on the way. By the time he arrived at the hospital, Mom had already squeezed me out. The whole ordeal was all over, and my dad missed it. BUT he says he caught a glimpse of my “monkey face” (his words) being rolled down the hallway in a cradle, as he had come racing in once he had realized his failure. Here was this adorable new baby all swaddled and wide awake, blinking up at him matter-of-factly and curious. He might’ve giggled (because Mom says he had surely been out drinking himself silly). Then he strolled his long legs into the hospital room to take the tongue-lashing my Mom was certainly entitled to give him. But, really, she was most likely already sleeping. Nonetheless, Dad insists that, in that moment, my monkey face touched him in a special way, and he will never forget it.

He was also actually IN the room AS I was being born, right there standing a few feet away from Mom’s distressed vagina but close enough to see all the blood when all Hell broke loose. And he wasn’t drunk, but he had probably smoked lots of cigarettes – right there in the hospital lounge because it was 1974 – and he (just as he had ended more than one long night at the bar) had to vomit up everything right there, right then. Mom says (with a little disdain) that a nurse left her side and rushed to assist him, and he sat and barfed his dinner
into the trash can while I was thrust into existence, all soppy in goo and mucus, my blue chord hanging to a gob of placenta. Then someone surely stuck a syringe up my nose – because that’s what happens when the world first sees you – and Dad eventually pulled himself together. And because Mom laughs a little now when she tells me her side of the story, like she’s getting one over on him by telling her truth, I imagine her laughing at Dad’s green face in between her contractions. Laugh, push! Laugh, push! And when I imagine Mom laughing and pushing, I imagine some bald doctor, sitting between my mother’s spread-eagle legs, as he’s throwing Dad a raised eyebrow over a pair of itty bitty doctorly glasses. My dad = tough, ole’ beer-drinkin’ veteran or skinny, puking wimp? Why am I even asking? Being both is acceptable and quite easy. Read more »

High Speed: 140 Kilometers per Hour

I drove on the Autobahn for the first time this week. We rented a car to go to Gernsheim, a town about 160 miles from Nuremberg, where we checked out a Mini Cooper we might buy. Tracy was driving the Ford Fiesta and asking periodically when I’d like to take the wheel.

“Would you like to drive now, before we get to Würzburg?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what Würzburg is. How do you know where it is?” I didn’t see anything about it on the GPS that kept falling off the window, off the dash, off of every place we thought to prop it. I was pretty nervous.

“I don’t mean to build driving up too much,” Tracy said and pulled off the highway at the next rest area. He got out of the car and I moved into the driver’s seat. I hadn’t driven in almost three months and was afraid I’d forgotten how. I looked down at the three pedals and couldn’t remember what they were or what my feet were supposed to do with them. Nevertheless, I looked up and my feet went to town, knew exactly where to go and when. Read more »

Dear friends and bark-family,

Hi, how are you? It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Did you miss me? I’ve been away. But I’ve been sneaking peeks at you sometimes, when you weren’t looking: Don’t be creeped out.

I’d like to take this moment of my triumphant return to talk to you a little bit about zombies. Hopefully Tyler has got you all excited about zombies with his post about genre.

You know me. Or maybe you don’t. But if you know me, you know I maybe have a bit of a thing for my sci fi and fantasy. Maybe a bit of a thing for zombies. Maybe not as much of a thing for pure literature. So, way back in last year when Jason Sommer told me that Colson Whitehead was coming out with a zombie novel, my reaction, naturally, was, “Isn’t he that literary writer that you love?” And that was pretty much it for me. I didn’t really go out of my way to track it down. You know, there are a lot (a LOT) of zombie stories in the world.
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Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

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A few days back, Kristina wrote a nice post about titles in which she says, “There’s a power in naming things.” I like this idea, especially as it pertains to written work (and perhaps it explains why I still struggle to work on my former-thesis manuscript; the title is dead awful). I used to read for Willow Springs and currently read for Hayden’s Ferry Review, and there are times, have been times, when I wished I could read the piece without noticing the title, because bad titles instantly put me in a bad mood toward the piece (for instance, I read a piece yesterday that had a word I didn’t recognize as the title, and when I looked it up in the dictionary and then on Google, I realized that it was a made up word).

So naming things is good. But on the other hand, I think it can sometimes be problematic, if not simply bad.

A few days ago, I met a writer friend of mine in a coffee shop near campus. We had decided to dodge the stress of Black Friday by writing together instead. Only, we didn’t end up doing much writing. It was so nice to be able to talk writing with someone else, that was all we ended up doing. It came out that he, like me, has a soft spot for genre writing—or for certain genres anyway—and has been given grief over the years for such a leaning. We both talked about writing classes where we weren’t allowed to write genre, and we talked about what that means.

You see, we distinguish different types of writing because bookstores like us to do so. But so many pieces don’t fit squarely into one genre or another. I think most writers agree that you can have literary work with genre elements (say, elements of magical realism, which is itself a problematic label to some), but less often do we recognize genre work with literary elements, which is what my friend feels like he is writing.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Matt Bell posted about it on Facebook the other day, too, wondering how we can apply the label of literary fiction to his work as well as to novels like The Help. The label here does us a disservice; it doesn’t actually tell us anything about a writer’s skills or a readers preferences.

My friend and I tried to define literary work, tossing parts of definitions back and forth for a few minutes before remembering that it’s a pointless discussion to have. “Character focused” some might say, but I’ve read genre work that focused on character development just as much as plot. It doesn’t help, not even to say that, like pornography, you know it when you see it, because, as Matt Bell pointed out, it depends on who is doing the looking.

In The Writer’s Chronicle this month I found an article called “The Inner Identity of Immersion Memoir” by Suzanne Farrell Smith.  It’s a good article focused on creating some sort of set of guidelines for the immersion memoir, with some good examples (Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, and Lucinda Frank’s My Father’s Secret War, all of which are going on my reading list).  She brings up an interesting point—is there such a thing as genre nonfiction?  Read more »