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 »
Should literature make us feel like babies in the light of God?
Over the past couple weeks I’ve gone to AWP and many of the events at our local GetLit! Festival. I’ve witnessed writers reading work that is funny or thoughtful or emotionally moving or political…the list goes on. Really, anything from sexy poetry to ironic prose was being labeled literature in these forums. And why not, right? It all counts, right? Or does it? My last post mentioned one of the sessions I went to at AWP being about writing poetry in the age of Obama. This sparked a discussion about why we love to hate political writing. It also evoked this question: What does it mean to be political? One commenter noted that he hates to be preached to, implying that political writing is preaching, and he’s at least partially right. Some of it surely is, especially if your definition of political is confined to writing with a specific social/political agenda. But is that what political has to mean? How do you define it when you’re using the term to describe creative writing? If writing is edgy, is it political? If it makes readers uncomfortable, is it then? (Could you label Lolita or Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as being political?) Read more »
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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 »