Much like life, Write or Die gives you two options: Write, or Die. The main difference between Write or Die and real life is that in real life your two options are “write, then die” or “then die” so if you think about it, Write or Die actually is a bit generous.

I’m not a big believer in magical rituals for writing. Thinking about writing is where I get the sudden ideas that I want instantly to turn into words and the best places for this are showers, drives, cooking, and reading, but if I’m sitting in front of a blank screen I feel like I should be outputting words at an incredible velocity, turning all those ideas real. What I actually do, however, is look at animated gifs of cats posted on twitter.

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Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air. 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?
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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?

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I cannot be the only person who has had this experience on more than one occasion. I’m sure you know what I mean: You and some other polite stranger are waiting in line for something—maybe at a busy Starbucks, or, like me, to board a plane yesterday morning for Texas—when you have something on your person that alerts this stranger that you are still a student. In my case, I was putting away my student I.D. after it had fallen out of my wallet.

Standing next to me was a really attractive elderly woman, with expensive Gucci glasses that I would’ve loved to have stolen for myself and perfectly coiffed white-streaked silver hair. Ever since my own hair tragedy three days ago, I’m envious of anyone who looks even marginally better than I think I do.

She gave me a smile and said, “Still in school?” I said yeah, I’m in grad school, actually. “For what?” Creative writing.

Then it happened, as it did every time. Her smile sort of faded and she said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and the conversation was over.

Yeah, I know, Cat. That was my reaction too.

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I love Twitter. If you have spoken with me and I somehow didn’t talk about video games, I may have dropped an excited/incomprehensible explanation of Twitter and how much I like it on you, and for that, I thank you for humoring me. It’s difficult to explain how to use Twitter. Using Twitter is like telling a joke at a party. The difference is that with Twitter, you can see if your audience really liked your joke, and weren’t just being polite, and, even better, you can see if they liked it enough to tell all their friends about it. In the barren wasteland of Internet-speak, these everyday actions are called “Faving” and “retweeting” respectively, but they are very much like the human behaviors they resemble. And because you can see how many people faved or retweeted you, it encourages people to say funny or insightful or strange things (or sometimes all three at once), like a no-stakes poetry contest that lasts all day and never ends. Read more »

I identify very strongly with place and often write about it, so I was interested in Kathryn’s post last week since I seem to have opposite feelings about place, and it got me thinking about some things. What does it mean to belong to a place, and what does it mean for a place to belong to you?

Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate, writes often about theMidwest. He grew up in Iowa and lives in Nebraska now, and the stories of his grandmother, his mother, his father, and others that appear in his poems are set in the prairie farmland of his home. In general, his work exists in a very Midwestern landscape (as anyone who’s lived there can attest), but he says that he doesn’t consider himself a regional poet. I can understand the aversion to the label. Kooser wants to write things that transcend one specific place, that allow people to connect to the poems no matter where they’re from, and I think he succeeds at that. But I still consider him a Midwestern writer. At the very minimum, he’s a Midwestern poet because he understands that place, but it extends far beyond subject matter. Kooser is Midwestern in his whole approach to language, the way he eases you in and uses the landscape as a catalyst for what he really wants to say.

Plenty of well-known writers have been linked to a region or even a specific city—Faulkner, Joyce, etc.—but I’m interested in the idea of a regional writer as it exists today. 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.

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I spent three years in deep East Texas, at Stephen F. Austin State University, getting my BFA in creative writing. For those last two years, I had two roommates in a three-bed/three-bath apartment. One of those roommates was often naked.

This is pre-nudity, in which she is abiding by our roommate-agreed zombie contingency plan.

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I will not be the first person to smuggle discussion of video games onto Bark, but I will be the first to ask its readers to make them.

At first this suggestion will seem crazy. “But Andrew,” you say, “not only am I unable to program a computer, I also lack millions of dollars and furthermore, if I had that kind of scratch, I would pay off my student loans and buy a macbook made out of solid gold before creating a video game, because most of those are a simulation of man pointing a gun at a face and shooting it, over and over, until the end of time.”

The video game literati will be happy to inform you that there are plenty of games not about face shooting or about bird flinging, that are about more sophisticated things or at least slightly less embarrassing ones. These games are good, but these games also cost millions of dollars to make.  But what I’m actually here to talk about is how it is now possible to make a video game with no programing skill and no money, and how, because of that, people are now starting to make games for and about people who would otherwise have no interest in video games. There are very few of them, and they are hard to find, but they exist, and they are doing wonderful things. They tend to have names like  “Space Marine Pet Shop” in which you guide a hulking video game protagonist on a journey to buy a kitten without dying on too many spikes, or “A Soul-Crushing Drive Through the Bowels of Kotzebue, Alaska” which is the most accurate portrayal of a soul-crushing drive through the bowels of Kotzebue, Alaska ever created. Read more »