American Dream Machine

book by Matthew Specktor

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I dove right into American Dream Machine from its first pages, which open at the Beverly Hills Hamburger Hamlet on Doheny Drive, where I did about a year of waitressing in 1992 before heading into the film industry. But while this book was thrilling as it rang all of the familiar bells and whistles of Hollywood for me (After Doheny, I worked at WMA and a few production companies–all of the tertiary characters based in life were names I recognized), there were larger things afoot that made this a terrific book.

Matthew Specktor gives a crap about sentences. In a major way. There is an elegance that comes to his simple descriptions of the city and city dwelling that stopped me:

“A hot wind kicked up around us, one of those sinus-rattling Santa Anas that meddle with the mood of the city.”(85)

“The sky was lilac, the soft-brushed color of six o’clock. By the time they reached the lot it was proper twilight, all of them stumbling out of the car in a daze of wind and travel.” (130)

Even character moments are embedded with rhythm. Our narrator, Nate notices the subtle, but important moments that reveal so much:

“Right before he ducked back out to go retrieve the first aid kit that rattled around in the trunk, Bactine and Band-Aids in a white plastic box, right before I burst into tears, I saw it. Williams’s eyes flashed green, his pale lips tugged down at the corners. A wince or a grimace that was nothing like Beau, the fat man I automatically, if not yet consciously, associated with him. It was a terrible expression, small and involuntary: in it were fear and hunger, and some private pain that must’ve mirrored my own, else I would never have noticed it.”(136)

 This line about Hollywood in the eighties sings:

“They went to Charmer’s Market, to Jimmy’s, to Orlando Orsini’s and L’Orangerie; later, to Tony Bill’s place in Venice. They were fed and fat and fucked and fortunate: for a while, at least, they were happy indeed.” (208)

Even a scene of junior high kids at a skate park in the early eighties has its own poetry:

“His knees, which were white from ceaseless battering, came up tight to his chest as he grabbed his skate and flashed back into the air. This was more eloquent than anything any one of us could say: the clop and clatter of the skateboard, as stately in its way as a horse’s hooves.” (231)

But the writing is not twee, nor precious. The story pulls you along chapter by chapter with a careful weaving that lays not only a larger tension, but the tension from different moods of different scenes matched up against each other. We can be left breathless from one scene and are suddenly plunged into the past or the future to pick up a scene we had left before.

Specktor is terrific at keeping a large number of interconnected characters afloat over a fifty-year span, weaving the past with the present and creating an overall movement and pacing akin to a broad opera about Hollywood and three interlinked families. Things are not divided, like movies, into three simple acts. The book’s sections are balanced against each other by something a bit more ineffable and yet extremely satisfying.

The story is told by a Hollywood son, Nate, an observer of Nick Carraway distance and intimacy. The book is so engrossing, we often forget who is narrating, but Specktor pulls us back with a stray, “My father said,” –little reminders that this is from Nate’s perspective, years later. Nate is privy to a number of intimate scenes from his father’s life and he speaks from such authority and such distance of space that we believe it. While I figured (because I always have to figure) that Nate’s character had gone around and interviewed everyone with questions about his father in order to be telling us this story, there is really no need to establish the whys and wheretofores when the voice is grounded in such authority. We are given an explanation for Nate’s queries in the end that serves the larger story as well, but even had that not been supplied, the voice would have worked.

It is a good lesson when taking on a larger novel in remembering to think about how old your narrator is when he/she is relating the story, how long after the story happened, WHY, he or she is relating the story and to whom. While you need reveal none of these to your reader, the knowledge in the writer creates that narrator’s authority, which owns the page. It took me until draft three of my novel Alterations to figure that one out and once my character found her age, voice and distance, the whole story came together despite its three different points of view.

Nate’s narration has a tendency frequented by magical realists, to jump out into omniscient observations, which gives the novel a lovely dreamy feeling:

“His sensibilities were too vulgar, too crassly in line, really, with Waxmorton and Sam and even Davis, who by the end of the decade would be playing rascally rum runners and smug Southern cops.”(131)

“Picture three boys gathered over one comic book, the Spanish-style schoolhouse dissolved in Santa Monica fog, its milk-colored interior walls covered in construction paper, time lines, dinosaur dioramas, silver foil.”(169)

As a reader, I felt I was in good hands, that although I didn’t know where the journey was going every minute, the writer did and I could sit back and enjoy the ride. A few of these omniscient stingers also put Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” in otherwise peaceful scenes. A bucolic camping trip, where the Hollywood boys finally get out of their stoned skateboard city life and into the country becomes fraught with worry with one line:  “These were ten days of heaven, the last of a childhood that died hard in stages.” (281)

Through the various characters’ stories, Specktor gives us an intimate view of Hollywood, but also of how people’s interwoven lives, especially in an industry where business and personal are so perilously mixed, can, over a long period of time, have repercussions throughout a number of families. There is remarkable contrast in the fact that when catastrophic life-changing things befall our characters, Hollywood ticks on, same as it ever was. Beau, our central study who covers those fifty years, learns that when you give your life to the hustle, to that business, and the phone stops ringing, it is its own kind of death.

In a panel on books about Hollywood at April’s LA Times Festival Of Books, Matthew Specktor said that after seeing so many stereotypes, he wanted to write about Hollywood as “a real place, where real people live.” He succeeded by bringing a number of multi-layered characters to the page and braiding their lives thoroughly. The son of a talent agent, he grew up in the industry and later worked in it for a while. He could probably have written a scathing expose, or avoided the topic entirely for fear of offending. Instead, he took a world he knew well and wove a story with fictional characters into it.

This book is a strong reminder that any world we grow up in–a small town, a big city, an intricate extended family, a trailer park or an apartment building–is rife with a network of people living complex lives. People within a community have stories that are all interwoven, have an affect on each other and might seem too close for us to want to write about. But if we step back, without betraying specific stories of friends and family, we have a rich knowledge of relationships, a functioning society and an intimate knowledge of the gears that keep a place ticking. And that is narrative gold. That is a place you can take completely fictional characters and set them loose, see how they function and bump into each other. And most important, that is a place that no one knows better than you and is therefore a place you can share completely.

It is the specificity of the manner in which people’s lives rub up against each other in certain cultures that makes human stories so rich and interesting. We should all take another look at our upbringings and relationships–the ones we aren’t writing about because no one would find it interesting–and write.

As Nate puts it so well:

“We were all the custodians of each other’s catastrophes, after all.” (436)

In the Lake of the Woods

Book by Tim O’Brien

Annotation by W. Ross Feeler

 

The angle makes the dream.

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (286)

Experimental writing—and more specifically, experimental points of view—in fiction are often denigrated as interfering with what Coleridge calls the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Elsewhere, John Gardner talks about fiction as a ”vivid and continuous dream.” Deviations from the literary norms wake the reader up, break that sense of disbelief. Or so the story goes.

Tim O’Brien, however, subverts conventional wisdom concerning POV in same way he subverts conventional wisdom concerning Vietnam. This is in full display in his 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods, in which chapters are told from a variety of angles.

One set of chapters is told from a close-third, present-day perspective of John Wade, the focal character in the novel. This is traditional, what we’ve come to expect from American authors.

Contrastingly, another set, labeled Evidence, is comprised of an array from quotations—from historical figures, literary works, fictional characters from the novel, psychological studies, and various books on magic. While this might initially seem disorienting, the expertly juxtaposed quotations solidify, rather than undercut, the reader’s suspension of disbelief. By allowing fictional characters to speak alongside historical figures, the narrative is endowed with a sense of historical legitimacy one rarely encounters in literary fiction.

This legitimacy also comes, in part, from the footnotes in the Evidence chapters. Rather than destabilizing the narrative, as footnotes are wont to do in many postmodern novels, the footnotes in Woods give the reader a sense of groundedness. This is because the footnotes, rather than being presented as coming from an outside, objective observer are presented as coming from the author himself—Tim O’Brien. This is similar to the way that O’Brien’s persona shows up in The Things They Carried; similar, but not the same. In Things, the persona of the author is a more active character in the story. In Woods, the persona of the author is more concerned with the compilation of evidence and the conclusions one can come to based on that evidence.

This allows O’Brien to take even more POV risks in the novel, such as the inclusion of a set of chapters labeled “Hypothesis.” These chapters are guesses: the persona of the author is trying to imagine what might have happened to Kathy Wade, John’s wife, who disappears early in the novel. This, too, has the feeling of history—it reminded me, for instance, of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which is essentially a guessed-at biography of Shakespeare based on the evidence. The difference in Woods is that the author is coming up with guesses that seem contrary to the evidence, which seems to incriminate John Wade in his wife’s murder. The alternative reality becomes as important—perhaps more important—than reality as such.

The novel also moves centripetally, circling its subjects from varying distances to give the reader different vistas. When, near the end of the book, we hit the center, we find that the center is not what we expected: there is no great reveal that ties up the issue of the murder. Instead of discovering the answer to the mystery, we find an ever-expanding mystery—because In the Lake of the Woods is not a whodunit, though it uses elements of that genre. It is about the mystery of human nature, love and evil co-existing at close quarters. And that sort of mystery is insoluble.

O’Brien’s gutsy POV shifts have inspired me to take more risks in my own work. This doesn’t mean, of course, I’ve inserted chapters labeled Evidence into my novel labeled. This would be theft, not experimentation. Rather, I’ve been bolstered to do creative things on my own. In one of my recent short stories, the first section is told from the traditional, close-third, the second from the second-person POV, and the third from a roving semi-authorial POV. This isn’t incredibly groundbreaking, as all of these POVs have long histories in literature, except that these sorts of shifts rarely pop up in short stories. Additionally, I include an embedded essay written for  a freshman English class (one of the protagonists is a teacher).

POV experimentation is not dead, and it’s not something that works within the strict confines of the ivory tower. Woods was a national bestseller. In this case, the evidence speaks for itself: experimentation and accessibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Out of the Woods: Stories

 

book by Chris Offutt

annotation by Lee Stoops

“His arms were sore and his back hurt, but anything

was better than prison, even moving graves in Idaho.”

~ Chris Offutt, “Moscow, Idaho” from Out of the Woods (55)

 

Chris Offutt makes me want to write about the mountains of Idaho. Not because the mountains of Idaho are home for him, but because they’re home for me. Offutt’s characters are Kentucky hill people. Outcasted, exodused, escaped, and sometimes boomeranged, their stories happen out of Kentucky and in Kentucky all at the same time. The deep hills of Kentucky are Home. Home becomes the lens through which Offutt’s people see their lives, and it’s because it’s the lens through which Offutt writes to make sense of everything else.

I opened the collection knowing nothing of hill families of Kentucky, and while I learned a thing or two about the culture through his stories, what mattered more was the sense I began to feel for the importance of something intimate from the writer and his characters. Home. It means – in a variety of senses – everything. And while that lesson whets a specific creative appetite, it’s Offutt’s writing that succeeded in teaching. His prose is rhythmic, full of short beats and direct sentences. His dialogue roots in a name-based culture where stories are shared down generations by people who need to say very little to get across a point. His stories rely on characters comparing new experiences to the things they know from a place proudly isolated. I found it impossible to put the book down, and impossible, once I did, to slow the feelings stirred in me.

Short, strong sentences fill the pages of this book. Offutt’s rhythms are brief but anything but staccato. In fact, for the lack of unnecessary lettering, his work’s pacing begs even the fastest reader to slow down and let the gravity of direct language do its work. It bothers me to no end when someone describes writing such as this as “simple.” Simple implies easy. It implies an absence of complexity. It implies little or no work. Offutt’s work is the opposite of simple. He has (not) simply determined the essence of his stories and chosen to deliver the leanest forms. I want my own work to be distilled to the point where it cannot be distilled further. Another word for this? Pure.

Tilden wondered if a view of the river made men sadder or gave them hope. He figured the prison psychologist would like it, since he favored anything that was different, even a new coat of paint. Tilden had learned to give the shrink what he wanted, which was mainly the impression that you wouldn’t shank the first son of a bitch who looked at you mad-dog. Getting through the joint took the ability to make everyone think you were crazy enough to be dangerous. Getting out was the opposite. Tilden wasn’t sure what it took to stay out (57, “Moscow, Idaho”).

 

I examined the bird. Both legs, the skull, each wing, its neck and ribs – all were broken. It’s [sic] head hung from several shattered vertebrae. I’d never seen a creature so clean on the outside and so tore up on the inside. It had died pretty hard (121, “Barred Owl”).

 

Dialogue is hard. And it’s funny that’s the case considering we spend our lives talking. There’s a point to be made here that might be bigger than the point I’m after in Offutt’s work, so I’ll stick to the book. Dialogue needs to elucidate both characters and narrative without becoming something the narrative or characters rely on. That’s the first part of why dialogue is hard. The second part is this: people need to talk the way people really talk without talking the way people really talk. Throw into the mix vernacular or dialect, and it’s easy for dialogue to destroy an otherwise powerful piece of fiction. Offutt’s figured it out. Moreover, he’s made it look easy. Here’s an example between a man, formerly of the hills, working in a jail in town and a man fresh from the hills who wants to be locked in the jail for reasons unclear at the meeting’s onset:

“I heard tell a Goins worked here.”

“That’s me. Ephraim Goins.”

“Well, I’m fit for the pokey. What’s a man got to do to go?”

“Drunk mostly.”

“Don’t drink.”

“Speeding.”

“Ain’t got nary a car.”

“Stealing’ll do it.”

“I don’t reckon.”

The man kept his head turned and his eyes down. Goins decided that he was a chucklehead who’d wandered away from his family.

“Why don’t you let me call your kin,” Goins said.

“No phone.” The man jerked his chin to the corridor where the cells were. “What if I cussed you?”

“I’d cuss back.”

“Ain’t they nothing?”

“Let’s see,” Goins said. “Defacing public property is on the books, but it’d be hard to hurt this place.”

The man walked to the door and stood with his back turned. “Come here a minute,” he said.

Goins joined him. The man had unzipped his pants and was urinating on the plank steps leading to the door. Goins whistled low, shaking his head.

“You’ve force put me, sure enough,” he said, hoping to scare the man away. “Looks like you’re arrested. Lucky they ain’t no lynch mob handy.”

The man inhaled deeply and hurried down the hall to a cell. Goins opened the heavy door. The man stepped in and quickly pulled it shut behind him.

“Name? said Goins.

“Gipson. Haze Gipson.”

He lifted his head, showing blue eyes in rough contrast with his black hair and smooth, swarthy skin. They watched each other for a long time. The name Gipson was like Goins, a Melungeon name, and Goins knew the man’s home ridge deep in the hills. He glanced along the dim hall and lowered his voice.

“Say you’re a Gipson?”

“Least I ain’t the law.”

“What’s your why of getting locked up?”

“You been towned so long,” Gipson said, “I don’t know that I can say. I surely don’t” (36-38, “Melungeons”).

The above also touches on Offutt’s characters’ processing difference in the world. Writers are slammed continually with conflicting messages of writing what they know, what they don’t know, what they want to know. But it’s in processing, in weighing something seemingly understood, at least experienced, with something yet to be understood or experienced that writers often find that elusive element of what to write about.

Offutt left a small community of hill people at an early age, traveled the country and worked more odd jobs than many people work in a life time. So in writing characters from these proud and thin lines looking for something – meaning, affirmation, surprise, reconciliation – in places removed from what they know, Offutt’s exemplifying his message to other writers. It’s not about what you know – it’s about how what you know looks when it’s aligned with what you don’t know or what you want to know (or, better, what you don’t want to know).

I went back to the motel and stopped at the bar. It was called the Sip & Dip, and had a tropical décor with plastic parrots, bamboo walls, and fake torches. Any minute you expected a cannibal to jump out at you. An older couple was arguing at a table shaped like a kidney bean. A tall man about forty came in, ordered a whiskey ditch, and began talking to me. He was from Mississippi. His southern accent made me feel good, as if I were talking to a countryman.

“Luck always turns,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do when you’re running bad but develop yourself a leather ass. How did you happen to be here for the Tough Man Contest?”

“I borrowed a car from a guy at work. Me and Lynn wanted to get out of Billings and run around.”

He told the bartender to bring a couple of drinks.

“On me,” he said. “You’re a guy who needs a lot of outs right now.”

“You know I can’t buy the next round.”

“There was a time when all I owned was on my back. So you and Lynn were on the loose?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We had a couple hundred bucks and four days off from work. We’re thinking maybe we’ll hit the Chico Hot Springs when bang, we’re pulled over by the Highway Patrol. I’m sober and we’re not carrying dope, so I’m not worried. I’m good with cops, I say yes sir and no sir, and all that. They have a tough job. I respect that because my job ain’t the best. When you’re a cook, everything will cut you or burn you.”

He said he understood. The older couple who’d been arguing were kissing now, pecking at each other’s faces like a pair of chickens.

“Do you live here?” I said.

“No. I have a cabin up in Big Sandy. I’ll do some bird hunting this week.”

“There’s a river in Kentucky with the same name.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” he said. He looked at me like he was gauging my worth. “Is Lynn beautiful?”

“Definitely.”

“Beautiful women make me fear death.”

I sat and studied on that for a while. Dying never scared me, but life does every day. I couldn’t tell him that, though. I wondered if he was sick with some disease, or maybe he was older than I thought (159-160, “Tough People”).

 

Everything I read instills in me something I can take to my own searching for story, but it’s rare that someone else’s words will so astoundingly flourish in my imagination. The response Offutt’s evoked in me is the response I want to evoke in others. It goes beyond stories that compel or infect. It goes deeper, even, than connecting with the other, the human experience, or even the self. It’s the response of “I have stories I have to tell, and I am the only one to tell them.”As much as we need our stories, our homes, we must be held accountable for sharing our needs, for writing our stories, for owning whatever is Home.

Beautiful Ruins

book by Jess Walter

annotation by Maggie Downs

Both are balmy, sun-soaked locales. Both are surrounded by hills and ridges, switchbacks and shorelines. And both are situated on tenuous earth that threatens to break off and drift into the sea. But the similarities end there for Porto Vergogna, Italy, and Los Angeles, Calif., the two main settings of Jess Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins.”

One is a “rumor of a town,” inhabited mostly by anchovy fisherman and their families. The other is a glittering panorama of “green-and-glassed hills,” where “every table is sporting a sullen white screenwriter in glasses, every pair of glasses aimed at a MacPro laptop.” Together, the two places form the yin and yang of this novel, the opposing but complimentary forces that make this book work.

First there’s Porto Vergogna, a place where people arrive deliberately. “The dying actress arrived in his village the only way one could come directly — in a boat that motored into the cove, lurched past the rock jetty, and bumped against the end of the pier.” (p1)

The few visitors who do come to Porto Vergogna and its one crumbling hotel are seeking more than simple rest and relaxation. They arrive for spiritual recovery and redemption. One of the characters, in describing what makes the location so special, says, “‘Here, on this coast, your walls were made by God — or volcanoes. You can’t tear them down. And you can’t build outside them. This town can never be more than a few barnacles on the rocks.’” (p63) The people here are constrained by the rules of a higher power.

On the other hand, Los Angeles, our second setting, is a place where religion has been co-opted by men. One character describes his pilgrimage to Los Angeles like this: “Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway — its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later with the same experience, same guided emotions, same morals? … Flickering pictures stitched in our minds that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?” (p21)

Claire, one of the main characters, shows up for a job interview, only to be asked, “Claire, how much do you know about Scientology?” (p23)

Los Angeles is perplexing and illogical. One of the characters is perpetually confounded by the sprinklers that go off at 5 a.m. each day to water piles of rocks. “Before sunrise — before Guatemalan gardeners in dirty dinged lawn trucks, before Caribbeans come to cook, clean, and clothe, before Montessori, Pilates and Coffee Bean, before Benzes and BMWs nose onto palmed streets and the blue-toothed sharks resume their endless business — the gentrification of the American mind — there are the sprinklers: rising from the ground to spit-spray the northwest corner of Greater Los Angeles, airport to the hills, downtown to the beaches, the slumbering rubble of the entertainment regime.” (p15)

Also, unlike Porto Vergogna, this is not a place that requires deliberation, a place that necessitates the skill of experienced sailors over choppy waters. Rather, it is a city that zombies could navigate. “Her commute to the studio is a second-nature maze of cut-offs and lane changes, shoulders, commuter lanes, residential streets, alleys, bike lanes, and parking lots, devised to get her to the studio each day precisely eighteen minutes after she leaves her condo.” (p24)

The Italian city makes no promises. It is humble. “Porto Vergogna was a tight cluster of a dozen old whitewashed houses, an abandoned chapel, and the town’s only commercial interest — the tiny hotel and cafe owned by Pasquale’s family — all huddled like a herd of sleeping goats in a crease in the sheer cliffs … The hoteliers and restaurateurs to the north had their own pet name for the tiny village pinched in the vertical seam: baldracca culo — the whore’s crack.” (p2) There is just one place for lodging, The Hotel Adequate View, where expectations are lowered so they are forever exceeded.

In contrast, Los Angeles is a delicate house of cards, hope balanced on top of promises, all positioned on a stack of speculation and possibility. “To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can’t afford, and when they’re caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success, car dealerships pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest.” (p28)

In Los Angeles, those who follow their dreams almost certainly find a ruinous end: “He got caught in several traffic snarls and took the wrong exit. By the time the security guard shrugs and informs him that his destiny is at the other gate, he is 24 minutes late.” (p35)

In Porto Vergogna those dreams — no matter how frivolous or ridiculous — are met with support, even admiration. “With nothing but steep cliff faces to work with, Pasquale knew that a golf course was out of the question. But there was a natural shelf of three boulders near his hotel, and if he could level the tops and cantilever the rest, he thought he could build forms and pour enough concrete to connect the boulders into a flat rectangle and create — like a vision rising out of the rocky cliffs — a tennis court.” (p6)

There are two distinct story lines that run parallel throughout “Beautiful Ruins” and finally meet in the end, and neither one of those story lines could have existed without the other. The romance that blooms in Italy would not have happened without the Hollywood dreams; and had there been no ambition for fame and fortune, a hotelier in Italy would have never had a shot at love with an American actress. This was only made possible by Walter’s masterful use of two contrasting locations that formed a more dynamic, balanced ecosystem.

The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing

book by Alice La Plante

annotation by Andromeda Romano-Lax

I must have about fifty trade-edition writing craft books on my shelves, but I still keep buying them, in search of some hidden magic that will help me as a writer, or a clearer articulation of some venerable craft topic (like POV) that I can steal—I mean, emulate—to improve my own teaching. For a long while, I avoided textbooks at all costs: too impersonally written, too dense, too much under one cover, and those bland discussion questions scattered throughout, reminding me not of college, but of high school–yuck. But the more I teach, the more I accept that textbooks do have a place. If only they weren’t so ridiculously expensive!

This newer one by Alice Plante (author of the novel, Turn of Mind), I am happy to say, is not. Marketed, priced, and designed as a general reference but structured as a comprehensive textbook, LaPlante’s 677-page guide covers creative writing process and composition strategies (including purpose of writing, coming up with ideas), craft (characterization, narration, scenic construction, point of view, dialogue, beginnings, revision), and anthology (learning from masters, with full texts of 26 short stories and nonfiction essays).

While focused mainly on fiction, a limited number of anthologized works and one chapter at the end are dedicated to creative nonfiction, and LaPlante frequently makes mention of ethical concerns and crossover issues between the genres. She also uses a nonfiction essay by novelist Francine Prose to elucidate creative writing concepts. Numerous shorter passages from notable authors are also used as examples throughout each chapter. Generative exercises are provided, as are strong examples of students’ responses to the exercises. Not included are more conventional textbook-like discussion questions at the end of each chapter. Instead, a general questioning tone and points to consider (for example, “is it possible to define a short story?”) are woven throughout the discussions of craft.

The elements covered and stories anthologized position this text as appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate study, while the personal voice and non-dogmatic, highly readable text as well as non-textbook style design throughout seem to aim for a wider, general audience. (Not to be overlooked is the more affordable price, $21.95 for the first edition, in comparison with expensive textbooks with similar craft and anthology content, such as Burroway’s Writing Fiction, 8^th edition, priced at $96.33.) Discussion of craft is pitched at a sophisticated level, with a spirited, opinionated tone and an occasional emphasis on debunking writerly myths or oversimplifications, as well as an openness to questions that have no easy answers. On the subject of metaphor exercises, for example, LaPlante (a successful novelist as well as experienced teacher) is refreshingly unapologetic (123): “There is absolutely no way to do a metaphor writing exercise, because that defeats the purpose. If it doesn’t come up organically, within the creative process of the story, then it isn’t worth anything. Its only value is within context.”

Technique overviews that stand out as more distinctive or nuanced in comparison with many classroom-oriented writing guides include LaPlante’s  discussion of imagery that works at both the concrete and abstract or emotional level (chapter 3); a defense of narration and a clearer explanation of the showing-telling continuum (in contrast with the too-often quoted simplication, “show don’t tell,” (chapter 5) including bolded passages by authors Smiley, Proulx, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Wolff that help the reader distinguish between showing and telling; a more rigorous explanation of the unreliable narrator and types of reliability (chapter 7); explanation of story versus plot (chapter 9); and the art of transferring true emotions onto sensory events (chapter 12). LaPlante is candid about drawbacks to the workshop method, and carefully defines the multiple developmental stages of a creative work, advocating a more cautious approach to the giving and receiving of feedback, as well as a more process-oriented “anti-workshop method” (551) for “exploding” works in progress using exercises, in contrast with product-oriented editing or polishing. By contrast, a less distinguished chapter on characters (chapter 10) included mostly pedestrian explanations (flat versus round, general versus specific, wants and needs) and few surprises or insights in comparison with other craft chapters in this book.

More commonly anthologized story choices in this guide include Chekhov’s “Lady with the Little Dog,” Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” as well as stories by Lorrie Moore, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Raymond Carver, and the much-anthologized “Shitty First Drafts” essay by Anne Lamott. There are also some less-obvious choices, including Katha Politt’s “Learning to Drive,” plus a nonfiction essay by D. T. Max about the Raymond Carver-Gordon Lish editing relationship.

In my own teaching, I will consider LaPlante’s guide as a strong alternative to better-selling textbooks. I appreciated in particular the voice used to address writers at all levels (complex explanations clarified by well-chosen examples, without condescension), more nuanced craft discussions on elusive topics, strong examples of student writings (which would help me choose between exercises and frame my own expectations for student work), and the inclusion of creative nonfiction examples and issues within the larger discussion of fiction craft. Bravo to LaPlante, and to Norton, for putting out a more affordable textbook-style reference guide that any writer in any setting can use.

 

 

My Antonia

book by Willa Cather

annotation by Christin Merwald

I chose to read this book as an example of how to utilize place as force in my work. Cather’s turn-of-the-century Nebraska prairie and its small towns affected tone, plot and characterization in My Antonia. Her vivid, panoramic descriptions of the prairie also created memorable images that stay with the reader long after finishing the book.

We’re introduced to Nebraska with this passage, “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields…There was nothing but land:  not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” (12) This glimpse of Jim’s new home sets the tone and introduces the book’s plot. Jim’s Nebraska was raw and empty when he first arrived and throughout the story we watch not only him and the other main characters develop into adults, but also the land become inhabited and developed.

Throughout the book Cather uses the changing of seasons to create changes in tone and plot. Jim’s description of spring brings a new feeling of awakening. “When spring came…one could not get enough of the nimble air…There was only—spring itself: the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.” (95) Upon this change in season Jim and Antonia begin feeling differently about each other, more independent and less connected. As this spring unfolds the plot unfolds into Antonia becoming a hard working daughter, helping to provide for the family as Jim enjoys the comforts of living in an established farmstead and then in town.

Cather is also able to adjust tone by contrasting prairie passages with town passages. She juxtaposes the difference between winter on the prairie and in a small town at the start of Chapter 7. “On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.” (142) She uses setting to develop characters; most notably the hired girls who move from doing arduous work in the country to the city to find work as maids. “The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief that they were ‘refined,’ and that the country girls, who ‘worked out,’ were not…The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten…One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous.” (154)

Place not only develops characters in this novel, but becomes a character in some places. For example, “The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others.” (45) Here Cather uses the fierce prairie wind to illustrate the desperation to help and then the sad retreat of the characters that watch illness defeat their friend, Pavel.

Place often plays the role of antagonist in the book. When Jim takes the Shimerda girls on what is supposed to be a fun sleigh ride they quickly learn that the bitter Nebraska winter can be a force to be reckoned with. “…The east wind grew stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky became gray and somber…Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time…The next day I came down with an attack of quinsy…I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed.” (54) The reader is pulled into many scenes hoping that the characters can overcome the adversity they face on the prairie and we learn quickly that they may not overcome.

My favorite scene is when Jim describes the July heat. “It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green…The burning sun of those few weeks, with occasional rains at night, secured the corn.” (108) The image Cather creates of the cornfields in July is so imaginative yet so realistic. It is a very accurate portrayal that only one who’s experienced it can know. Her intimate knowledge of the landscape, the feeling of being in a cornfield at that time of year makes for a truly unique and memorable image, which is the case throughout the book.

What I learned from this book was to think of place as a character. How can I use the setting to develop my characters, move the story forward and create adversity? Each description of a character’s surroundings can create a mood or affect on the reader. As I work on my current piece I’m trying to go about scene descriptions very slowly, thinking carefully about what sights, sounds, smells to include and how they can move the story forward. Also, I’m considering where to juxtapose place to accomplish something in the manuscript and where to insert relevant details that establish my characters in time and place in order to place the reader more firmly in the world of my characters. And, finally, I’m trying to incorporate both tight descriptions of place with panoramic views to create sweeping scenes like Cather.

 

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

book by Wells Tower

annotation by Lee Stoops

“He considered for a moment the many miles that lay between him and

his own wife, and what it would take to cinch that distance up again.”

~ Wells Tower, “The Brown Coast” from Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (17)

His real name is Wells Tower of Power. Like the funk group, he has a signature sound. Tower has enviable ability to deliver a reader from this world into his imagined one. The voices of his narrators are individual, well-rendered, real. The content and delivery of his stories – whether sentimental, blackly comic, or savage – left me taking notes and contriving ideas, all while having a hell of a good time reading. And maybe that’s what struck me with Tower’s book – the fun of it. He’s a remarkable writer, an instinctual storyteller, and a craftsman worthy of study. However, the most important thing to me in finishing his collection was that it was something I enjoyed and lamented ending. It seems rarer and rarer that happens, especially with the growing darkness of contemporary literary fiction. It’s not to say Tower’s collection isn’t imbued with darkness – it’s thick with anger, loss, violence, and fatalism. But, again like Tower of Power, it brought me up and started some good funk brewing in my brain. Because of this, it was easy to identify the elements of his stories that worked for me: the sentiments and perspectives of characters struggling but (in ways) winning, his vocabulary of description and imagery, and dark (in most cases, black) humor.

When I read, I’m on the lookout for characters I can admire. While I might admire the character for who he/she is, what I admire most when I find one is the way the author has given life to someone invented. It’s easy to come up with caricatures or stereotypes or tropes, but it shows real craftsmanship on the writer’s part when a character is familiar enough that I can plug in, yet de-familiar enough that I can’t stop thinking about him/her. Tower, despite sometimes overwriting or explaining his metaphors, loves (and loves to challenge) his characters. Their lives, their mind machinations, their experiences, fights, arguments, emotions fill the pages to the point where the stories themselves don’t matter as much as how the reader comes to know Tower’s people by the end of a story. I’m glad not all short story collections are like this, but if some end up this way, Tower is the guy to do it. Here are some examples of character reality:

Already, I was regretting doing Jane this favor. My mind was wandering. You can’t sit in a little Datsun car with your wife’s new lover without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you’d do better not to haul up. her belly slumping against the small of you back on a cold morning. The slippery marvel of her soaped up in the shower. A night long ago when you moved on each other so sincerely that you sheared off two quarter-inch lag bolts that held your bed together. But start playing back all the old footage, and pretty soon Mendocino Barry steals into the frame, his bare dark-brindled haunches in your bed, candles and an incense stencher fuming on the nightstand. You can see him tucking a yellow thumbnail under the scalloped elastic of her bikini underpants and shucking them down slow, maybe with a word or two about lotus blossoms. You don’t want to picture how she lifts her hips off the bed, the openmouthed anticipatory shivers, or Barry rearing up in a sun salute between her splayed knees, his tongue lolling like a tiki god in ugly throes (97-98, “Down Through the Valley”).

If you say no to your stepfather when he asks you to drop everything to do some chore, this is known as “lip.” “I’m sick of your lip,” he says, or “I’ve had it with your fucking lip.” He is a thin, delicate man with wire-frame glasses, but neither his slightness nor his way of talking like a corny Hollywood thug makes you any less afraid of him. He has slapped you a few times. Not long ago, you father stopped by to pick you up and your stepfather argued with him. He pushed your father down, and then he picked up a stone the size of a football and made like he was going to throw it at your father’s head. But he just tossed it away and laughed. For many years to come, whenever you think of your father, the image of him cowering on the lawn, his hands clutching his skull in forlorn defense against the crushing stone, will be part of the picture. You are counting the days until you turn sixteen, which you’ve arbitrarily chosen as the age at which you’ll be able to take you stepfather in a fight (117, “Leopard”).

In the above examples, the characters come to life, but there are other ways Tower paints pictures. His images burned into my head and still won’t leave. As a writer, I value that ability above most others. The work a writer does with language to let readers see what the writer values as needing to be seen is one of the great challenges of the craft. It’s also one of the most necessary. Our imaginations rely on memory, and our memories tend to rely on our imaginations, and the emotive responses the writer is counting on from the reader can only become fully realized when the writer does his or her job of empowering the reader to see, remember, and extrapolate meaning by unearthing the roots of the meaning in memory. So, the writer has at his or her disposal words, countless words and combinations, that charge the imagination. Blend them well, and he’s got imagery that brings a story into experience-mode.

Bold as an athlete, she shrugged off her top and pushed her skirt down. Across her breasts and oval hips, her skin looked soft and new and pale as paraffin (17, “The Brown Coast”).

The men stepped back to give Djarf room to work. He placed the point of his sword to one side of Naddod’s spine. He leaned into it and worked the steel in gingerly, delicately crunching through one rib at a time until he’d made an incision about a foot long. He paused to wipe sweat from his brow, and made a parallel cut on the other side of the backbone. Then he knelt and put his hands into the cuts. He fumbled around in there a second, and then drew Naddod’s lungs out through the slits. As Naddod huffed and gasped, the lungs flapped, looking sort of like a pair of wings (229, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”).

I spotted my stepmother by the dry fountain, where she was watching some young people make a film. I left my cistern at my father’s feet and jogged to her. Since I’d seen her last, Lucy had reached a new status of tiredness and age. Looking at her, “lady” is what I thought, a word that summed up her sparse, dry hair, her mottled cheeks, her many clattering bracelets and her lipstick, an alarming coral shade leaking into fresh hairline rills around her mouth. Her right eye was bloodshot and brimming with brine. We embraced. All she wore against the chill was a lame’ shawl over a flimsy black top, so thin I could feel the gooseflesh on her hard arms (73, “Executors of Important Energies”).

While Tower’s work is full of other solid linguistic displays and craft examples, I’d rather spend a little bit of time addressing his use of (dark) humor. The stories in the collection are all tragic – death, grief, adultery, violence, grunge and grit and hate. And, I love that stuff, but it also tends to get so heavy in short story collections that the stories usually end up depressing the reader rather than giving the reader perspective for his or her own life/writing. Tower’s stories don’t drag the reader down, even though the fatalism he employs is some of the best contemporary fatalism I can call to mind. It’s the humor, subtle (and often not subtle) that does it – the funny moments or lines or even the delivery of an entire train of thought bring a twisted levity to the stories. And they satisfy.

Derrick came back from the kitchen, talking into a cordless phone, his voice loud with expertise. “Say what? Did you take a look? Can you see the head? Uh-huh. Red or whitish? Yeah, that’s natural. Sounds like she’s getting ready to domino. I’ll be over.”

Derrick came back into the living room. “Gotta take a ride over the bridge,” he said. “Need to go pull something out of a horse’s pussy.”

“What kind of thing?” Bob asked.

“A baby horse, I hope” (11, “The Brown Coast”).

My daughter, the very first night I was in her house, she wanted right off to put me in a state of fear (133, “Door in Your Eye”).

“Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his hair. He jogged in place for a minute, shivered, and then straightened up. “Mercy, that was a spree. Not so much loot to speak of, but a hell of a god-damn spree.” He massaged his thighs and spat a few times. Then he said, “So, you do much killing?”

“Nah,” I said. “Haakon killed that little what’s-his-name lying over there, but no, we’ve just been sort of taking it easy.”

“Hm. What about in there?” he asked, indicated Bruce’s cottage. “Who lives there? You kill them?”

“No, we didn’t,” Orl said. “They helped put Haakon back together and everything. Seem like good folks.”

“Nobody’s killing them,” Gnut said.

“So everybody’s back at the monastery, then?” I asked.

“Well, most of them. Those young men had a disagreement over some damn thing and fell to cutting each other. Gonna make for a tough row out of here. Pray for wind I guess.”

Brown smoke was heavy in the sky, and I could hear dim sounds of people screaming (234-235, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”).

As far as contemporary (and young) short story writers go, Tower is a strong talent, and I think we’re only seeing the beginning of a huge body of work. I hope as he continues to write and publish that he doesn’t lose the fun he’s written into these stories. And, while I don’t like to cut any slack for overwriting or explaining or ruining metaphors with explicitness, I had to in this book for the sheer enjoyment of believable characters, strong imagery, and humor that won’t let the reader forget that life is really one big, dark joke.