Monty Python as Self-Help, Lesson One: How NOT To Not Be Seen

Monty Python's "How Not To Be Seen" is a satire of 60s-era, government-produced educational films, which have their corollaries here in the U.S.



However, as an American, I am bound to derive a simple moral lesson from this absurdist sketch. And so I choose: Do Not Be Afraid.

OK, in all seriousness, I've been thinking about my own fear lately. Though I don't feel my life has been particularly traumatic, I've noticed how much fear has been the prevailing weather of my existence. It's mostly a matter of cultural heritage. My people are self-effacing. As Midwesterners we're accustomed to trudging out in two feet of snow to scrape off our car, and our neighbor's*--but not to sparking any form of controversy. In all situations, we keep our heads down.

I also don't doubt that being female has something to do with this. "Don't make anybody mad" has larger implications for us, as #yesallwomen has made so eloquently clear; that warning dovetails nicely with "No one cares what you have to say anyway."

So I tried to stay quiet. I really did. But then I wrote a book, and now I have to admit, I'm worried about what people will think.

Except, as Rachel Thompson reminds us powerfully, if you write through your fear instead of against it, people will thank you for your authenticity. Also, the people whose reactions you fear most may well surprise you with what they already understand and accept.

And, as Monty Python reminds us ridiculously, we're all going to die someday. More broadly, you will, in the end, be seen and (metaphorically) killed. The fact is, some people are going to dislike you no matter what you do. They won't like your hair, or your voice, or who you remind them of (possibly themselves). They won't like your role at work. In other words, by merely existing, you'll just rub some people the wrong way. As for others, perhaps you'll upset them more by your secretive, apparently withholding behavior. Why aren't you being more open with them? If you're a writer, why aren't you sharing your work?

In short, trying not to be seen is pointless and possibly even harmful in itself. So quit with the hiding, already.

*Note: I now live in California and haven't scraped off a car in nearly three decades.

A good word from ForeWord Reviews ...

ForeWord Reviews calls Bigfoot and the Baby "a delightful black satire." Read the full review here.

Tongue and Groove Reading Series: Lineup for June 22

LA friends--please join us, and help spread the word!

SPREADING THE WORD for 10 YEARS!

A monthly offering of short fiction, personal essays, poetry, spoken word + music produced by Conrad Romo. This  month features:  Ann Gelder "Bigfoot and the Baby", Chris Wells - Secret City, Adrian Todd Zuniga - Literary Death Match, Xavier Cavazos "Barbarian at the Gate", Amanda Montell and our  musical guest is Josephine Johnson

Sunday June 22nd  

6-7:30 pm

The Hotel Cafe

1623 1/2 No. Cahuenga Blvd.

Hollywood, Ca 90028

$6.00

https://www.facebook.com/events/640114956071341/

Ann Gelder's work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Flavorwire, The Millions, The Rumpus, Tin House, and other publications. She has taught literature at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked as an online producer and marketing consultant. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bigfoot and the Baby is both a love song and a Molotov cocktail to the American myth of self-reinvention

Chris Wells is an award winning writer/performer who divides his time between New York and Los Angeles. As host of The Secret City, an Obie-award winning gathering for artists and art lovers, Wells curates, produces and emcees a monthly event that is part salon, part cabaret and part ceremony. As a writer, Wells creates original solo work and first person stories about his life. He lives in Woodstock with his boyfriend, Bobby Lucy, where he is at work on his first book, The Bermuda Triangle Inn, a Memoir in 29 Stories. www.thesecretcity.org

Adrian Todd Zuniga is the host/creator/CCO of Literary Death Match (a literary event now featured in 53 cities worldwide), and founding editor of Opium Magazine. His fiction has been featured in Readux, Gopher Illustrated and Stymie, and online at Lost Magazine and McSweeney's. He lives between Los Angeles and guest rooms all over Europe. He longs for a Chicago Cubs World Series and an EU passport.

Amanda Montell is an East Coast-born writer, blogger and pizza enthusiast living in Los Angeles. She graduated magna cum laude from NYU in December 2013. She has work published in Thought Catalog, Underwater New York and Trop magazine. One day she'll have an MFA and a book, but until then, you can find her at Instagram.com/elysianplain.Xavier Cavazos is a former Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion. He is the author of "Barbarian at the Gate" and "Diamond Grove Slave Tree", was awarded the inaugural Ice Cube Press Prairie Seed Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in 2015. He currently teaches in the Writing Specialization Program at Central Washington University.

Josephine Johnson grew up in Greentown, Indiana, a small farming community where she learned to work hard and follow through with things. She first sang to trees and listened for the melodies in the nature around her to tell the stories of the things she'd heard and seen.

Come early!  Seating is limited and we start on time! tongueandgroovela.com

There is usually ample street parking, but meters need to be fed till 8pm.  Read the signs carefully, but don't park on Cahuenga other than a parking lot or on Selma. 

Going to see the rooster: on meandering in short stories

As I've said on this blog before, I'm a fan of Werner Herzog. That is to say, a fan of the more recent, oddball documentaries, as well as of Wild Blue Yonder, and not so much of the weird, freakish, screaming-in-white-makeup, German expressionist whatever. Call me a philistine.

Anyway, as I've also said, what I like best about Herzog is the way he allows his storylines to meander. In the middle of telling what seems to be an urgent story, he'll often allow the camera to linger on a field of waving grass or a waterfall. These moments provide no information about plot or character, or even necessarily about the setting, of which we've already seen plenty. Herzog just finds the motion beautiful and therefore worth recording.

One of my favorite moments in all his films occurs in The White Diamond, a documentary about an engineering team in Guyana trying to build an airship to fly above the rainforest canopy. It's a dangerous undertaking, as an engineer who attempted it previously crashed and died. But as all this tension builds, Herzog keeps hearing from one of the local team members about his rooster.

I should've had my rooster here with me for the world to see. His name is Red. He has five wives, five hens. So, I get five eggs every morning. Yeah, my rooster's good.

We begin to realize, with Herzog, that he cannot not go and see this creature. So, in the middle of their thrilling tale, they take a day to film the rooster. And he is, indeed, a fine rooster, though he does not appear, to the untrained eye, exceptional in himself. What makes him exceptional is how much his owner loves him. And that love, in some tangential way, is part of the story.

I've been thinking about this moment particularly as I write a new short story. It's always seemed to me that meandering is permissible in novels, but not stories. You don't have enough time. A novel--if we can switch to an other animal metaphor for a moment--can be like taking a long walk with a not-very-well-behaved dog (i.e., your imagination). You and your dog/imagination can wander off the path, stop and stiff the bushes, pee on something, chase something, bark at something, and still get home in reasonably good shape. But a story, I've thought, is an arrow you shoot at a target. Beginning, middle, end. Wham. Everything in service of the relentless forward motion-otherwise, you miss the mark.

Yet the stories I love best, just like novels, don't fly straight and narrow. They, too, meander. Perhaps not as often, or for as long--but they, too, wander off the path to examine something the writer (via a character or the narrator) is irresistibly attracted to. They pause, lurch, and restart, delivering surprising, not completely necessary information. They have an odd, lumpy shape, rather than the dreaded Freytag pyramid.

So here's your permission slip, from me and Werner, to ditch the pyramid. Whether you're writing a novel or a story, I say: go and see the rooster.

Bigfoot is real (almost) ...

My debut novel, heading out to distributors this week! Available for sale June 13 (preorder here).

A summer of Bigfoot and the Baby--updated and corrected

Like summer, Bigfoot is just around the corner. Here is a partial list of events and readings for my debut novel:

• Friday, June 13, 7 p.m.: Bigfoot and the Baby Tahoe Launch,Lake Tahoe Community College Library, South Lake Tahoe. More information here.
• Saturday, June 14, 10 a.m. - 1 p.m..: Making It Strange: A Workshop for Fiction Writers, Bona Fide Books office, South Lake Tahoe. Sign up here.
• Sunday, June 22, 6 p.m.: Tongue and Groove, The Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 No. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.
• Thursday, June 26, 6-8 p.m., Bigfoot and the Baby Bay Area Launch, Village House of Books, 326 Village Lane, Los Gatos.
• Thursday, July 10, 7-9 p.m., Folio Books, 3957 24th St., San Francisco.
• Thursday, August 14, 7 p.m., Why There Are Words, Studio 333, Caledonia Street, Sausalito.
• Sunday, August 17, afternoon (time TBA), Litquake debut novelists panel, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto.

Come to one, or come to all! I would love to see you there.

Must unconventional female characters be punished?

So I just finished reading Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. I almost didn't buy it because of this cover:


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Someday I will write a screed about literalism and book covers, but, OK, it was the 80s. And Moon Tiger won the 1987 Booker Prize, which struck me as a good sign.

Still, when reading the back cover copy, I had my doubts: if this was "the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends," was I in for a tale of this woman's eventual comeuppance? As Claudia Hampton "lies alone in a London hospital bed," reviewing her life, will she come to regret her choices--her aloneness, above all, showing how wrong she has been?

[SPOILER]
No. And, therefore, yay!

Claudia, a best-selling history writer, worked as a war correspondent in Egypt during World War II, where she met the love of her life and, soon enough, lost him. And while this love affair is presented as the heart of the story, and of Claudia's life, it doesn't represent Claudia's one chance to settle down and have the normal life she secretly wanted--it wasn't, and she didn't. Her loss doesn't impede her from going on to a successful career, despite the obstacles that stopped less determined--and less abrasive--women at that time. The affair ultimately is no more and no less than heartbreak, which all of us, conventional or not, will experience at some point in this life.

Claudia does have a child with another man, whom she never marries. But motherhood doesn't change her. She doesn't find it, or her daughter, Lisa, very interesting--and here's where I think Lively does an especially good job of criticizing without condemning or pitying. The story is told from multiple points of view, so we sense the daughter's pain as her mother once again brusquely dismisses her. But we are also discouraged from making easy judgments. We come to understand that these two are simply made of different stuff, and they're doing the best they can under those circumstances. Lisa craves convention as much as Claudia loathes it. Perhaps Lisa's conformity is her rebellion against her mother, much as nonconformists rebel against their straight-laced families, but no matter. As the novel unfolds, we see both of them accepting their own and each other's limitations, while not being exactly happy about them.

And in the end Claudia [SPOILER] does die alone. But this is not a punishment or comeuppance, but, as I read it, a kind of triumph. Lively suggests that aloneness can be beautiful and satisfying--at any rate, no more imperfect than "proper" family life.

This is where Moon Tiger departs from another, more recent story with a non-conforming female protagonist, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs. This book sparked a much-needed conversation about "likable" female characters; in a now famous interview, Messud sharply pointed out that "likability" is an absurd, sexist, and shallow demand that male authors and characters don't have to contend with. Still, I read The Woman Upstairs as ultimately supporting traditional definitions of female success. Nora defies conventions for female protagonists, but not convention itself: she is angry because she hasn't been able to get married and have kids and succeed as an artist by her early forties. Lively, in contrast, allows her protagonist to suffer the downsides of defiance while still showing that defiance was worth it.

I don't mean to suggest that novels should have a particular political agenda, or that Moon Tiger is "better" than The Woman Upstairs because the former is more radical. But I do think that more books like Moon Tiger would be good for us all.



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How do you create an alternative world?

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam (the third installment of the trilogy), and marveling at how complete her post-apocalyptic world is--how thoroughly thought-out, how detailed, how true to its own internal logic. How the hell, I ask myself whenever I encounter such a world, does a writer accomplish this?

For Bigfoot and the Baby, I did end up creating a somewhat alternative world, mostly but not entirely like Southern California in the 80s. Apart from providing a sort-of habitat for a sort-of real Bigfoot, that world differs from ours by containing a domed city in the Mojave Desert. So I had to posit a technology to do that, though I don't explore the technology's plausibility in any great detail (it's not that kind of book). Other than that, I don't remember setting out to build an alternative world as such; it just sort of arose, over time, from the needs of the narrative.

I don't know if that's how Atwood proceeded. And I really don't know how, say, China Mieville created the far more alien world of Embassytown, or how any number of so-called "hard" science fiction writers do it. You probably have to know more than I do about ecosystems, architecture, ancient civilizations, high tech, low tech, organizational psychology, and everything else besides.

One strategy I've heard of, which I suspect came from the Poets and Writers writing prompts page, is to consider a world exactly like our own, except with one difference. That difference, I suppose, could be big or seemingly small--an entirely different government in the US, or people walking on four legs rather than two, or trees having black leaves instead of green. This difference becomes a seed that, as it grows and sends tendrils throughout your story, changes almost everything in subtle or enormous ways.

You could probably go really small-scale with this, too. Say, imagine the room you're in, with one thing different. My God, what if this very room were ... clean?




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No Idea of Order at Key West

In my sudden zeal to relive the heady days as an undergraduate English major, I came across this relic in my Norton Anthology:

Here we see a long-ago incarnation of yours truly, taking notes on Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West," most likely in Intro to Poetry, circa 1985. It's clear from the flat, dutiful quality of these notes that I was recording my professor's statements as he walked us through the poem. That is to say, I had literally no idea what he, or Stevens, was talking about. The interpretation of the poem was as incomprehensible to me as the poem itself. Yes, this is auditory. Yes, this is conditional. This is spiritual language. So what? I didn't understand how any of these concepts elucidated the poem, or vice versa. Thanks in part to the New Critical practices my teachers were steeped in at the time, the whole discussion became an echo chamber of abstractions.

The final proof of how lost I was lies in the title of the next poem, "The Poems of Our Climate," where you see my younger self filling in the o's. Now, I was not normally one to engage in this activity. In fact, I recall thinking at various times in my youth that filling in o's and p's and e's in printed text was a sure sign of idiocy. Yet here I am, not only doing that very thing, but carefully shading the o's for a 3-D effect. I had completely thrown in the towel on Stevens.

Rereading the poem now, I find both more and less here than these notes suggest. I'm certainly less intimidated by it, and can sort of relate to it without being able to articulate exactly what it's "about." And that's probably because I simply have much more experience, with poetry and with life. Also I don't have to write a paper about this, which reduces the anxiety level considerably; but if I did have to write one, I would likely spend a lot more time on the poem's aesthetic qualities, and how they create an experience that doesn't necessarily represent anything beyond itself. That is, poetry happens within the poem. It is not always, or at least not solely, a pointer.

With this hindsight, it seems critical that anyone teaching such poems in high school and college remember how increasingly distant our young charges' experiences and concerns are from those of a middle-aged white poet in 1935. How might we bridge the gap?

I think we could start with the advice Dean Bakopoulos gives in this marvelous piece from the NYT. Before even beginning to wrestle with a story or poem's "meaning," whatever we're trying to get at with that, first let students select sentences or phrases or words that move them. They don't have to know why these words speak to them, only that they do on some level other than pure logic. They might like the words, in fact, because they're confusing. They present a new, unfamiliar experience.

After a while, you might begin to introduce some context, like Stevens's particular interests and concerns, and some general concerns of his time and place and class and culture. How is this individual mind interacting with external ideas and questions, as well as with physical places and experiences like hearing and seeing and feeling?

I frankly have little experience teaching poetry, and find more experimental pieces much harder to deal with than this one. But it does behoove us, when we teach, to try to put ourselves in our students' shoes, remembering how little we knew, back in the day, about the lives of those to whom this poem speaks more readily.

Empathy vs. justice for characters

I just finished reading Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History.* I found it almost insanely absorbing. The characters felt realistic and compellingly distinct.

Yet I did not care about them in the same way I care about, say, Ivan Karamazov or Oscar Wao. Yes, I cared what happened to them, but what I wanted to happen was comeuppance. While feeling some sympathy for their plight--which was entirely of their own making--I also wanted them to be caught or at least punished somehow. This seems rather different from the awkward situation of rooting for an anti-hero to get away with a crime, which can also be an interesting reading experience.

I'm not exactly sure how Tartt creates this sort of double-consciousness in the reader. I suspect it has to do with her precise attention to detail in every aspect of the story. We know quite clearly what the characters look like, which is often not the case in literary fiction. We understand the social milieu, its arcane hierarchies, its dangerous gray areas. We see, feel, and breathe the Vermont setting, the crushing winter and the hopeful--and then also, suddenly, crushing--advent of spring. These elements, rather than any aspect of the characters' (including the narrators') almost entirely self-serving behavior, draw us into the story. I really did feel, at every single moment, like I was there.

At the same time, I, at least, take some satisfaction in knowing--knowing--I would not fall into the particular trap the characters find themselves in. Often, fiction makes me wonder what I would do when faced with some extreme moral dilemma. Not in this case. These people are vivid and palpable, but they're really and truly not like me. Maybe it's just good old class resentment at work. I can't deny there's a certain pleasure in seeing fictional rich preppies and wannabes doing stupid, violent things to each other.

Several years ago I wrote a post about "altruistic punishment," which is the scholar William Flesch's term for a particularly satisfying plot formula. Readers, according to this theory, love seeing wrongdoers discover the error of their ways. They much prefer this outcome to virtue rewarded (sorry, Pamela). However, they also want justice meted out, well, judiciously. The punishment can't be too severe, or readers begin to feel sorry for the punishee. In fictional practice, this means "just" endings have to somehow feel a little ambiguous; a simple eye-for-an-eye won't do. I won't give away how, but Tartt mainly succeeds in striking this balance.

What's my point here? I suppose that we don't always have to empathize with characters in order to engage with them. We can stand very near them without actually stepping into their shoes. And we can care what happens to them by rooting against them rather than for them.

So this is just another permission slip to create unlikable characters. You have other, powerful mechanisms for engaging your reader.

*No, I haven't read The Goldfinch yet. I attribute this to two factors: 1) The Secret History, not The Goldfinch, was under the T's at my favorite used bookstore. 2) Frankly the plot of TSH appealed to me more than that of TG; at the time of purchase, I strongly wanted to read a story about preppie killers at a second-tier liberal arts college. In fact, I only wanted to read stories about preppie killers at second-tier liberal arts colleges. That desire more or less continues today. Any suggestions?

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What does "write what you know" mean?

Glad to see the NYT Book Review taking on another workshop canard. Actually "workshop canard" is itself a canard. I've taken many workshops that never offered such formulaic advice, at least not uncritically. And both of these NYT pieces more or less lead to the conclusion that "know" is a tricky term. What does it mean to "know" something in the first place? How, and how well, must you "know" it in order to write about it? Zoe Heller puts the matter succinctly:

You can mine your own life, yes. But you can also sympathetically observe other people’s experiences. You can read and research. And you can use your imagination. What good writers know about their subjects is usually drawn from some combination of these sources.

Just because you have never been to outer space does not mean you cannot write about an astronaut--or an alien. Still, for a writer just starting out, the injunction to "write what you know" does seem to mean "mining your own life," and that can just about shut you down. It almost did me.
At least from an external point of view, and frequently enough from my own, my life seemed to be pretty boring. Writing about a girl or a woman who grows up in the suburbs, gets good grades, plays the flute, almost becomes a bowling champion but soon becomes too embarrassed to continue with this particular endeavor, goes to college, goes to grad school ... well, I, for one, couldn't find a hell of a lot of material in these events as events. (I did write a bowling story, though.)

But, as Mohsin Hamid explains:

It may be that the DNA of fiction is, like our own DNA, a double helix, a two-stranded beast. One strand is born of what writers have experienced. The other is born of what writers wish to experience, of the impulse to write in order to know.

I have similarly learned that it's the interaction of known and unknown experiences that makes characters and events believable. Like Hamid, I think some element of not knowing is central to creating a successful story. The act of stretching to make something you don't know into something you do forces you to consider viewpoints, details, and sensations you might otherwise overlook.

So, for example, I could put a nervous, overthinking type like myself into a situation I've never actually been in--say, on a moon colony. Now, I'll have to do some research to make that moon colony plausible, though I don't feel I have to understand every element of the ventilation system and what have you. What's more important is how someone like me would inhabit a place like that. Would I become obsessed with ventilation, and air, and is there air? what is air? why can't I see it? am I going to die in the next two seconds? I imagine so.

Or flip the terms: how would a person completely unlike me--or a talking dog or a lobster from Titan--live the life I've led thus far? Would the dog ignore taunts about bowling as a working-class non-sport and proudly lead his team to the Ohio state championship? How would the lobster handle literary event-planning? (Better than I did--that's one thing I know for sure.)

Good vs. interesting characters

I've been meaning for some time to take up this discussion again. How does a writer make her readers feel empathy, or compassion (maybe the same thing, maybe not) for her characters? The question goes hand-in-hand with recent discussions of how/why/whether characters must be "likable." I'm glad that conversation is finally well underway; it feels like I've been grousing about how stupid that terminology is for years. And one thing I never really grasped till recently was how gendered the "likable" requirement is. Women characters, it seems, must be "good," while men are only required to be interesting. Let's make "interesting" our universal standard from now on, shall we?*

On Glimmer Train's website, Geoff Wyss writes: "[M]y favorite characters in literature are those mysteriously human enough to startle me into empathy. It's that word mystery that seems to be the point: The characters that most powerfully evoke my compassion are the ones who, paradoxically, most resist being known." This resistance to being known is precisely what makes the characters appear realistic, because, Wyss points out, "we don't understand people in real life, not in the sense of comprehending them and holding their keys, not even our friends, not even our husbands and wives, not even close."

I agree. Compassion and empathy arise, first and foremost, out of curiosity. You may never "like" a character or a person, much less understand them, but you can find him--or let's say, for the sake of advancing our feminist agenda, her--interesting. And, at least for fiction, that's enough. Better than enough--necessary.

Wyss further addresses another little peeve of mine, that old saw that "story begins with character" (perhaps a mistranslation of the maxim "character is plot," which Wyss restates here). What that *cannot* mean is first constructing a character outside of any context, or, in Wyss's words, "monstering characters together from a charnel pile of traits—'Let's make him bigoted but sentimental, obsessed with film noir, and hypochondriacal'—and sending them into my stories with their stitch-lines showing." I swear, in writing workshops, I've been told to do exactly this, and it does not work. For me, character and context evolve together in a close, unending dialetic. Personally I like to start with the situation and see who shows up there; then I turn the character back to face the situation and see what she does to it, what it does to her in turn, and on and on.

But I have still created monsters from time to time. In fact, early in writing my first novel, I was hell-bent on creating a female villain, who is now the story's hero. I found I'd assembled Jackie from an inorganic collection of "traits" to serve my predetermined theme, and she turned out both unbelievable and boring. So I gave her some of my own physical characteristics. And all of a sudden, I was much more concerned with how someone might come to think in these ways I totally disagreed with. I didn't like being a straw woman very much at all, and as a result, that character started insisting on her own mystery and autonomy.

*I'm talking about fiction here. All real people have to be good, according to my definition.

Thoughts on re-watching Season One of Battlestar Galactica after 10 (!) years

So we've been re-watching Battlestar Galactica.

1.) The rebooted series started in 2003. Just think about that. I feel like we watched it, oh, five or six years ago. Not freakin 10-plus. Jesus.

2.) This is a post-9-11 show if ever there was one. Everything about it is 9-11, 9-11, 9-11. Terrorism. Torture. Religion. Realization that "we" can't always tell who "they" are, and that "we" don't always have the moral upper hand. General dread and claustrophobia.

3.) So far, the show holds up really, really well, apart from a few things (see 4, below). For the most part the acting and dialog are excellent. Olmos rules. Michael Hogan still possesses the most outsized Canadian accent I have ever heard.

4.) Way, way too much of Boomer and Helo running around in the rain on Caprica. Now as then, it feels like the directors said, "We can't resolve this plotline till Episode 13, so, um, OK, run that way for awhile, and now run this way, and that'll be it for this episode." Novelists have something of an advantage in cases like these; if we have a plotline we don't want to resolve till later, we can just *not write about it* for awhile, or just mention it cryptically or briefly every so often. On a TV series we have to be visually reminded of these characters' existence and what they are doing--and if they're just biding their time on behalf of the storytelling, that shows.

5.) How does one portray a butch, straight female character in a typically male profession? I remember the ruckus (and adulation) when BSG fans learned the new Starbuck would be a woman. For the most part, she's an appealing character, believable in her toughness ... except that we are given to understand that, as with all women, that toughness hides a deep vulnerability. Every now and again we're treated to the sight of Starbuck crying or crumpling into a ball and sort of squealing. We also see her in an evening gown, knocking the space socks off Apollo. Do "tough" male characters show vulnerability in any similar ways, or just pour themselves another drink and/or race off on their motorcycles? Do these brief bursts of stereotypical feminine behavior add dimension to Starbuck, or reassure us that she's really a little girl at heart? And straight! Don't forget straight! Though having a butch woman turn out to *be* straight also challenges stereotypes, I think in 2003 they were more worried about having one of our heroes be gay. OK, they're still worried about that in 2014.

That is all for now. Galactica out.

Why writers must become better actors

For two reasons.

One: writing is quite a bit like acting. Your characters inhabit you, of course, but you also inhabit your characters. As you write them, you see the world through their eyes, acting and reacting as they would. For this reason alone, it seems to me, learning a bit more about how actors practice their craft can only benefit writers. How do actors access and express those parts of themselves that coincide with their characters'? How can you convey emotions and concepts indirectly yet effectively through body language, voice, pacing, etc.--all of which you can convert into words?

Two: at some point in your life, you are most likely going to have to read your work in public. And by "read," I actually mean "perform." For a long time, it has been something of a mystery to me why people go to author readings. I mean, we can read the book ourselves, right? So what's the value in having something read to us, especially in the rushed, hushed, even apologetic monotone that too many authors employ? Does having the words come out of the author's mouth really add anything to the story?

It can, if the author interprets the story through her performance. Now, here come the caveats: we are writers, not actual actors. We can't be expected to put on costumes and cavort around the narrow and labyrinthine confines of, say, a bookstore. However, we can learn to read from our work to help the audience better understand and--this is no small thing--more fully enjoy our presentation. We can learn to use pace, timing, eye contact, gesture (within reason), voice modulation, and other techniques to convey not just the words but the meaning of the story as we understand it.* This is why series in which actors, not authors, read short stories--such as Word for Word in San Francisco or the New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles--are so damn fun.

And this is also why I've signed up for some private coaching from actor and teacher Valerie Weak as I prepare to read at various venues this summer. Having experienced just a single session thus far, I can say that learning to perform one's fiction is, first of all, exhausting. The level of concentration required just about drained me, to the point where I spent the rest of the day on the couch (not the casting couch, ha, ha). However, as I worked to inhabit, not just quote, my characters, I began to discover layers of emotional nuance in them that I hadn't actually been aware of. As Valerie told me, even small physical gestures can help you unlock the voice and meaning of the words--even if the audience can't see the gestures, which a podium might obscure. These discoveries alone have amazed and even thrilled me. I can now say I'm truly looking forward to upcoming readings, rather than mildly fearing them.

So, I say, fellow writers, get your actor on!

*Which is not to say that writers own the meanings of their stories, or that public readings serve the purpose of instilling a particular interpretation in the audience's mind. We're just offering some possibly helpful or provocative insights, which the reader can then respond to at his leisure.

Bona Fide at AWP -- through Amy Tan's lens!

Look who's front and center in this Twitter pic from Amy Tan!

#AWP14 is massive. Many small press and writing programs--and about 12,000 attendees who love to read and write. pic.twitter.com/xakQ0zpdDm
— Amy Tan (@AmyTan) February 28, 2014

Learning to trust the laughter

In selecting parts of my novel to read at events, I've been running up against a particular prejudice I didn't realize I harbored. It's actually really stupid. A lot of times, when I read my work to an audience, they laugh. Now, a lot of my work is satirical, which implies that if my audience laughs, I've succeeded. Besides, I personally like funny books, though my idea of funny may not be everyone's. Dostoevsky is funny. So is Richard Powers's new book, Orfeo. I didn't expect that, because these guys have long worn the mantel of Serious Artists who write about Serious Subjects.

So why does it make me nervous when people laugh? Because deep down, I fear the laughter means my work isn't serious. If you're laughing, you're making light of something, evading, skating on the surface rather than diving in.

But this isn't true! George Saunders talks about this all the time, possibly because the question comes up for him, too: are you really "just" making jokes? He recently said in Salon:

[Y]ou can’t play it large unless you play it small. And you also can’t eradicate one or the other. An amateur eradicates one or the other. A real writer would say, “No, both exist. Of course they do. Serious and funny. Hunger and satiation, they exist.” In a certain sense, you just have to see where you are in that cycle, and the story is an entity and response to itself.

The complexity is in saying, “Oh, this story is so funny. Is it a little too funny? Is it too silly?” And the writer goes, “Maybe.” Boom! And then something really significant happens, and the reader goes, “Oh, I misjudged you.” That’s a wonderful artistic feeling, when you’ve said to the artist, “I’m sorry, I misjudged you.”

There are different kinds of funniness, of course. What Saunders is getting at is that life's staggering complexity encompasses laughter as well as earnestness, and that one powerfully can set off the other--or incorporate it. Laughter isn't just a way of dismissing something--it can be a reaction of surprised recognition, a sign of empathy between reader and author. It can also contain deep darkness. I remember laughing hysterically with my mom at my dying father's bedside. But that's another story.

The point is, trust the laughter. Your own, and your reader/listener's.

Anyway, here's my cat, Bella, sitting on page proofs of Bigfoot and the Baby.

The ambivalent academic, round 2,671

I can never get enough of these "what's wrong with the academic profession and what should we do about it" discussions, for pretty obvious reasons (I'm a PhD, doing "other stuff" besides teaching at a university). When Nicholas Kristof's column lamenting the lack of public intellectuals came out, I thought, God, he's right! Then came a flurry of both outraged and more nuanced rebuttals, like this one, and I thought, Those are all right, too! And so is Josh Marshall's new post!

Whether we stay in academia or leave, I can't help thinking a lot of us who went to grad school end up disillusioned in some way. I venture to suggest that we're a more idealistic lot than most, attracted by the prospect of a lifelong job creating and disseminating ideas--not products; not shareholder value; not, God help us, lies to induce others to buy products. We loved thinking, talking, writing, mentoring, discovering, sharing. And then, at some point, we realized that the profession involved lots of activities other than these, time-consuming efforts which even ran counter to our ideals. There was unfairness. There was infighting. There was insincere schmoozing and jockeying for position. There was pettiness and envy and full-on stupidity and grossness. Sure, such conditions existed elsewhere, but we joined this rarified world to get away from all that. When it showed up in our world, we felt particularly betrayed. Whatever decisions we made after the scales fell from our eyes, we were never the same again. Call us naive, or at least call me that. I was.

Still, one thing is different today: we have the Internet, and we're not afraid to use it--at least if we're not aiming for tenure. It's already changed the equation for people like Josh Marshall, and it will continue to do so. I find this very hopeful--those who enter grad school will do so less innocently, with a wider view, I hope, of their eventual options.

Review copies are now available!

Ordering information is here.

When reality imitating fiction creates a new reality altogether ... or something

I thoroughly enjoyed Susan Orlean's piece in last week's New Yorker on net art. Recently, Orlean played a crucial role in revealing that the most successful example of net art thus far, Twitter's beloved spam account, @Horse_ebooks, was in fact a human mimicking a spammer. In fact, @Horse_ebooks originated as a genuine spambot but the net artist/prankster Jacob Bakkila bought access to the account and then posted snatches of truncated text from other sites, just as the original software had done. The resulting phrases, like "Everything happens so much," were at once deeply meaningful and hilarious.

I came late to @Horse_ebooks, but when I found out a human was behind it, I was delighted--I thought the work, or stunt, or game, was brilliant. Others, however, expressed outrage. To them, the fascinating phrases could only have meaning if a machine had randomly created them. That they were selected by a human being pretending to function like a randomizing machine rendered the whole business inauthentic.

Have we not, then, come full circle, if the machine is authentic and the human is not?

Not yet. For now we have another insanely delightful phenomenon that I would also put under the net art category: I speak, of course, of Dogecoin. A "satirical cryptocurrency," meant to parody Bitcoin, which is already a sort of parody but also a real thing, to the extent that any form of money is real, and that extent is highly debatable, Dogecoin, too, can be exchanged for goods and services in the real world.

In yesterday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd says, of Paddy Chayevsky:

Chayefsky warned against “comicalizing the news,” noting “To make a gag out of the news is disreputable and extremely destructive.” But real news became so diminished that young people turned to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to learn about what was going on in the world.

But what if, via the Internet, comedy becomes the news, as jokes commenting on the world begin to reshape the world?

I suppose there's a lot to worry about in all of this. Yet when I think of @Horse_ebooks and Dogecoin, my heart swells with hope for the human race. Seriously.

Consuming ambivalence

Do a Google search on "consumer culture ambivalence," and you will get "about 245,000 results." So, apparently, this is an issue.

But perhaps I don't need to tell you that. Because there seems to be something deeply ingrained in the experience of buying anything--other than, perhaps, food--that induces discomfort. At least for me. Do I really need this thing? I mean, really, really, need it? Or am I just adding to the stuff that surrounds me, separating me from a more authentic experience of life? I desired this thing, which is why I bought it, but now I kind of hate it, because it tricked me. I wanted it, but I didn't really, really, really need it. The thing made me confuse want with need.

Thoreau, of course, was quite the scold on this topic:

I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. 

However, we know Thoreau was kind of a nut. Admirable, but impossible to imitate; in fact, not even he could really walk the talk. As Paul Theroux says of his near-namesake, 

During his famous experiment in his cabin at Walden, moralizing about his solitude, he did not mention that he brought his mother his dirty laundry and went on enjoying her apple pies.

Did he also occasionally buy some snappy new boots in downtown Concord? But I ramble. My point, or my question, is: how do we decide when our consumption has gone overboard?

A book called The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, says the decision is cultural:

People believe consumption has become excessive ... when it threatens a culturally understood "balance" with morality, citizenship, production, saving, or the environment.

I'm at the point where any consumption feels like too much. Yes, deep inside, I'm Henry David. And yet, under these circumstances, buying feels somehow gleefully naughty, like an act of defiance, or a piece of apple pie. There's just no way out.

The things will always get us in the end.


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An author I will keep reading till I decide if I like his writing

Because of my now almost year-long obsession with Iris Murdoch, whenever I go into a bookstore, I head straight for the M's. A few months ago, at my favorite used bookstore, while staring disappointedly at the space that should have contained several Murdoch novels, but didn't, I discovered a novel called Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosely. I knew nothing about him, including that he is the son of renowned British fascist Oswald Mosley ... but of course I am going to pick up any book called "Hopeful Monsters" that promises to be a "pyrotechnically accomplished novel of ideas, in which communism, psychoanalytic theory, uncertainty, and relativity obtain visceral emotional force," according to the book jacket.

I liked it. I think.  It contained extraordinary, stunning images, including an unforgettable extended scene of a small child being rolled down a hill in a tire. But overall, the book managed to be both fascinating and oddly distancing. Perhaps it suffered from that common criticism aimed at all "novels of ideas," whatever those are: that they are bloodless, that readers really want novels "about character" (as if that's somehow opposed to "ideas"). Yet what if your characters themselves live lives of the mind? What if their greatest passion in life is ideas, the search for the truth about the universe?

Anyway, I couldn't decide if I liked the book or not, so I got another one, The Hesperides Tree, which I'm reading now. Here's a sample passage:

This section contains a couple of the distinctive, sometimes baffling quirks of Mosley's style. That "I thought -- " appears at least once on nearly every page of both novels, and it has the effect, for me, of kicking me out of the narrative. A cardinal sin, as any writing workshop will gleefully inform you. But that effect has to be intentional. These characters, themselves, have the habit of stepping back, even in the middle of very intense experiences, and reflecting on what the events mean. They, like us, are in and out of their own stories at the same time.  Mosley also likes repetition, as here, with the vaguely hypnotic recurrence of "wildlife station." Again, you end up paying attention to the language as much as to what the language conveys--which lends the whole story an edge of unreality.

It's not that the story becomes less compelling because of these techniques; what's compelling is the telling of the story. Which is why we don't get to pretend that we're seeing straight through the words into some alternate but completely believable world, populated by people just like us. The story is the story. And that makes for a different but still deeply intriguing reading experience.

On the fictional continuum

Now that "having my hair done" is an hours-long process, entailing extended periods of sitting, enfoiled and baked-potato-like, I have occasion to catch up on various celebrities' lives. Last week, I learned (from I forget which magazine) that Drew Barrymore has made peace with her tumultuous past, formed the family she's always wanted, and embarked on an array of successful business ventures. In other words, she has finally found redemption. And I felt good for her, and hopeful that maybe I, too, can redeem myself, though I've had a much less tumultuous past, still there's stuff I should probably overcome in order to be more at peace, more successful, more ... I dunno. Better. If Drew can do it, why not me?

Then I got to thinking about the redemption narrative in general, and how central it seems to be in fiction. Even in the tiniest doses, we still somehow demand it from the stories we read and tell. Is there really no way out for this character? Can you possibly just let a little light in? Otherwise, why are we reading? Why, indeed? Do stories exist to give us hope? Do we stop reading if there's no hope, just as we might want to stop living for that same reason? Is living like reading? Is life a story we tell ourselves?

Drew Barrymore, like all celebrities, is a story for the rest of us. The Drew I read about, while steeping my hair in (natural, organic) chemicals, is a creation, a collaboration shaped by Drew herself, her "handlers," the writer, the editor, me, and probably other people as well. But, on some level, aren't we all? Creations, I mean--intentional and otherwise, shaped by ourselves and others. The fact that we really can't know what goes on in anyone else's mind means that we have to make fictions of others to a certain extent. And we fictionalize ourselves every day, these days more than ever (hello, Facebook).

If all that's true, maybe there's no clear division between fiction and real life, but more of a continuum, on which novels (or movies) occupy one end, non-famous people the other, and celebrities some middle ground. The effort and intention that go into creating the fictions make the difference.

My book has a cover!

Coming from Bona Fide Books in June 2014 ...
Design by Vicky Shea at Ponderosa Pine Design.

Disturbing Christmas Carols, 2013 Edition

The holidays are upon us, and it's time to take a closer look at some of the strange messages being piped into our innocent ears and souls. This year, I'm finding "Frosty the Snowman" particularly unsettling, though perhaps no more so than "Rudolph" or "Little Drummer Boy."

To recap:

Frosty the Snowman, was a jolly happy soul,
With a corn cob pipe and a button nose, and two eyes made of coal.

Frosty the Snowman, is a fairytale, they say.
He was made of snow, but the children know he came to life one day.

There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found,

For when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around!

Oh, Frosty, the Snowman, was alive as he could be;
and the children say he could laugh and play,
just the same as you and me.

Thumpety thump, thump, thumpety thump, thump,
look at Frosty go.

Thumpety thump, thump, thumpety thump, thump,
over the hills of snow.

Frosty the Snowman, knew the sun was hot that day,
so he said, "Let's run, and we'll have some fun now, before I melt away."

Down to the village, with a broomstick in his hand,
Running here and there, all around the square,
sayin', "Catch me if you can."

He led them down the streets of town, right to the traffic cop;

and only paused a moment, when he heard him holler, "Stop!"

For Frosty, the Snowman, had to hurry on his way,
But he waved goodbye, sayin' "Don't cry, I'll be back again some day."

I will not dwell on the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy regarding the silk hat, though I'll note that the lyrics cleverly gloss over the dilemma with that odd conditional, "must have." Is the song firmly committing to the existence of magic, or only speculating, toying with our desire to know for certain? We cannot say. Like Frosty himself, the song dances on the knife edge of being/not being.

No, what strikes me in this season of enforced cheer is the idea of Frosty as memento mori, specifically aimed at children. As he begins to melt, his running and cavorting grow ever more frantic, until the weeping children watch their dwindling friend disappear over the hills. Here we sense the tragic nature of Frosty, who knows he's dying but is determined to entertain till the end; he is the archetypal sad clown. The carpe diem message comes through clearly, and that's a lesson it's never too early to learn.

Yet perhaps Frosty would have been more heroic had he not announced to the children that this was his last day (for now, anyway) on earth. Couldn't he have simply made an excuse that he had an appointment or something? Yes, the children would perhaps have felt confused and hurt. Where is he going? Doesn't he like us anymore? Are we too boring for Frosty, who appears afflicted with ADHD? But now, whenever they see snow, they will think of loss and death intertwined with, and perhaps overshadowing, the fun and beauty of the season.

On the other hand, as Wallace Stephens said, "Death is the mother of beauty." Perhaps winter and snow become more beautiful as we learn to connect them with aging, impermanence, and the witless brutality of nature. Perhaps Frosty sensed these children were old enough to understand this; and perhaps he's a Buddhist and expects to be reincarnated. As, indeed, he may be, every time someone builds a snowman.

All I'm saying is, this is a lot for a young person to take in. I don't believe in shielding kids from reality, but this deceptively jolly song is an odd way to deliver it.

I do not know how to write short stories

... in case you were wondering. I have published stories, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing.* In fact, each time I start one, I have less of an idea of what is supposed to happen. There's supposed to be an arc, I gather. You're supposed to create interesting characters that the reader--quickly!--comes to care about. The story should create an overall experience of surprised satisfaction--the reader did not see that ending coming, but at the same time realizes no other ending could be possible. Some kind of turning point should arise; some permanent (even if seemingly minor) change should occur.

Or not. You can throw together a bunch of seemingly unrelated fragments (although I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't number them). You can take on a persona and rant in character. You can obsessively attend to the details of the story's setting, and then never actually tell the story. You can write the story all in dialog, or write no dialog at all.

I find this lack of parameters disturbing. And I do not understand how some people can just produce one story after another, one collection after another, all of them quite good. Do they have some kind of basic formula in their heads, which they alter and bend and break, but still at least start with? Because I feel like I'm starting from scratch every time. I don't trust conventional arcs, but I still want something to hang my hat on. Lots of people will say that hat-hook is character, but I don't really trust that, either. To me, character--outside of a specific setting, situation, tone, voice, structure, and purpose--doesn't mean much. I need all of it to come together, and that never happens in the same way twice. I'm not sure how to make it happen, other than to be patient and make lots of mistakes, and accept that some stories, as originally conceived, will never succeed.

Which brings me to the only other technique that sometimes helps me: smushing together two failed stories or story fragments. On their own, these stories don't suffice, but together they generate enough friction to start a fire.

*I also don't know how to write novels, although I've written two (well, 1.75). But having more room to maneuver within the novel somehow makes this not-knowing less dire. All the fumbling around eventually becomes the novel itself. Which is why the novel imitates life, right? Fumbling = living. But a story can't fumble. Or can it?

Where does self-reflection come from?

This post on the Zimmerman verdict by William Saletan makes the insane suggestion that both parties in the murder of Trayvon Martin were equally at fault because each made a snap judgment about the other. Yes, Saletan says, Zimmerman "profiled" Martin, but Martin also "profiled" Zimmerman, assuming he was a pervert out to get him. Well, Zimmerman was out to get him--expressly so. Martin's assumption that Zimmerman was dangerous was entirely correct.

Nevertheless, Saletan did make one point that got me thinking:

In Zimmerman’s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn’t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone. Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin’s criminal intent that he hadn’t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.

Saletan wants us all to be more reflective, to pause to see ourselves as others might see us before we go flying off the handle and shoot somebody, or maybe call them a name. That's all well and fine. But what could have happened differently in Zimmerman's life that would have enabled him to consider how Martin might have seen him?

Here's where people like me often go into a high-minded spiel about the value of a humanities education. Sure, it won't get you a job, especially in this economy, but it's these intangible things that make the study of literature and philosophy so worthwhile. Studying fine literature (as opposed to, say, genre fiction populated by vigilante cop-heroes), presumably under the wise tutelage of an expert in the field, would have helped Zimmerman take a step outside himself. He would have thought, "Aha--if some stranger were chasing me and reaching for something, I might feel threatened! Therefore, I ought to back off!" Or, even better, he would never have blended the rather modest position of neighborhood-watch volunteer with his Dirty Harry fantasies. He would know the difference between life and (bad) art.

But that all sounds rather feeble to me right now. Because what would motivate someone like Zimmerman to take such classes in the first place? Why would he even care how he appears to others? (And by "how he appears" I do not mean Do I look cool? Do I look manly?--which he plainly does care about in abundance. It means genuinely seeing another person's point of view as legitimate and important.) Self-reflection holds little appeal in our culture; it seems opposed to action and suggests dithering and weakness. Why would someone who feels weak to begin with want to become more so?

Does it all come down to parenting and one's earliest experiences? And if so, what would motivate parents to teach their children empathy, as opposed to always being tough and, you know, standing your ground (which somehow seems to imply encroaching on others')? I don't think God and religion help here, either, since Zimmerman said his killing Martin was "God's plan." A different interpretation of God might help, but then we're back to asking where that interpretation comes from. So, what to do? How to make reflection--that least visible of human activities--cool? We can't make TV shows about people thinking. Even I would be bored by those. More shows that suggest negative consequences of violence and vigilantism might be nice. But, again, how to interpret those, assuming one already loves that craggy old vigilante sheriff in the battered old hat?

So I guess education--free, excellent, public education, from pre-k through, oh hell, college--remains our best bet. I still hope that education can help people use words rather than guns to solve conflicts.

Giving your characters an inner life

This lovely piece about James Gandolfini got me thinking about literary characters and what makes them seem real to us. My former students know I've been grinding this ax a long time. But this is another way that writing fiction very much resembles acting: in both cases, you can't reveal everything there is to know about a character. Good characters (like good stories, according to Hemingway) are icebergs; much more of them exists below the surface than above. And, let's face it, that's true of actual human beings as well. That's why, in fact, fictional characters who seem to have a lot going on inside them feel more real than those whose thoughts, beliefs, and actions are always transparent and aligned.

So, keeping Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in mind as an example, here are some ways we fiction writers can make our characters more real--as opposed to, God help us, more likeable.

• Embrace contradiction. Tony was a wildly violent man who fretted over his violent tendencies, took his daughter to visit colleges, and became quite fond of a family of ducks. We all fret about certain characteristics we possess; we don't think they're quite honorable or consistent or helpful, yet we can't quite smooth ourselves out. Your characters can be the same way: an elementary school teacher who fears children, a doctor who's addicted to cocaine ... Let them be aware of these contradictions without knowing how to resolve them.
  
• Use interior monologue. The psychiatrist in The Sopranos was a device than enabled us to hear what went on inside Tony's head. In fiction, we can just write that stuff out. Where else but in fiction do we have direct access to another person's thoughts? Take advantage of that opportunity. After all, I think, therefore I am: that's how I know that I, at least, am real. Of course, you can overdo interior monologue or use it as an excuse to tell rather than show. The test is whether it reveals character, rather than explaining it.
  
• Let characters wonder what each other thinks. It's my sense (isn't it yours, too?) that we humans spend a lot of time wondering what other people think. It might be one reason why some of us read fiction--to at least have the sense that we're inside someone else's head. So a realistic fictional character would probably have this desire also--to know what her husband is really thinking about when he shrugs and says "nothing." Our common, everyday tragedy is that none of us can ever really know this for certain. In their world, your characters live this tragedy, too.
  
• Explore emotion. As Gandolfini said, let your characters really feel emotions. Those emotions can be confusing, "wrong," in conflict with one another, etc. They can explode volcanically, or the character can work hard at suppressing them, but the emotions themselves never go away.

The "broken windows" theory of feminism?

I haven't read Lean In yet, because, until recently, I felt it didn't apply to me. I actually do work in corporate America, though as a consultant, and offsite, and for a small, woman-led company where all but one employee is a woman. Also, though I used to be "in management," I have since leaned out on that score altogether. I have determined that I do not like managing others. In my case, I would argue that this is not an entirely gender-based decision; my father always refused leadership positions throughout his career, preferring to focus on "the work itself." My mother stopped working outside the home after I was born. That is a whole other roiling kettle of fish and worms and what have you, which I will perhaps address elsewhere.

Anyway, I'm now thinking Lean In might have relevance for me, and for a lot of us, after all. As Frank Bruni put it in a recent column, we've received a deluge of reminders of "how often women are still victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty male chauvinism endures." But I still find myself shrugging my shoulders, thinking "what do you expect?," when I encounter such resentment and chauvinism personally. For me, such experiences feel like "no big deal" in the scheme of things. Millions of women deal with much harsher forms of belittlement and victimization than I do. Yet why shouldn't those of us who are relatively privileged stand up against those little, supposedly meaningless slights? Why wouldn't this lead, ever so quietly and gradually, to improvement, in the same way that repairing broken windows in crime-ridden neighborhoods seems to lead to a reduction in crime? Why not chip away, in our own small way, at the gigantic edifice of subtly demeaning rhetoric that we all participate in?

I'm thinking, for instance, of a moment a few months back when I went to observe a class of second-graders. The teacher introduced me to the class, and quickly asked me if I went by "Mrs." or "Ms." She actually might have offered "Miss" as the second option; I didn't quite hear. I have a Ph.D., so my correct honorific is "Doctor." But I felt I could not say that without sounding like a horrible snot. I don't use my husband's last name, so I can never be a Mrs. That left me with "Ms.," which I chose, hitting the "zzz" sound as hard as I comfortably could. The teacher introduced me, and the whole stupid moment was over in a second.

Except. Those second graders didn't get to see a woman called "Doctor." And I dismissed my own accomplishment in earning this degree, because I was afraid of looking obnoxious and possibly making the teacher herself feel diminished.

I gather that Lean In, though more focused on corporate settings, addresses these kinds of seemingly small snafus that professional women get entangled in all the time. Trying to avoid discomfort, our own and others' (and others' discomfort further contributes to our own, doesn't it?), we "lean out" of situations where we could be setting forth our qualifications and furthering our own--and other women's--interests.

Even now, I feel somewhat foolish for writing this post. Who cares what that class of second-graders thought my title was? I was only there for fifteen minutes; none of them will even remember me. And I did a nice thing, didn't I, by not contradicting their teacher in front of them?

But all these little stupid moments add up.

To Nook or not to Nook?

About six months ago I got myself a Samsung tablet. I intended to use it mostly for editing work, because at the time I was editing a lot of PDFs. And the Samsung had this very cool app for marking up PDFs and taking notes by hand.

But I've ended up using it mostly for the Nook app (and surfing the web, but that goes without saying). I realized that with any e-reader, the time lag between reading an interesting book review and owning the book in question goes from approximately a week (if one orders online, and even remembers to buy the book at all) to twenty seconds. After reading Broken Harbor, for instance, I immediately yanked from the ether all the remaining Tana French Dublin Murder Squad novels, the last of which I'm saving for my next long plane trip. I'm now champing at the bit for Suzanne Rindell's The Other Typist.

And yet. On the Samsung, at least, e-books can inject some serious aesthetic problems into the reading experience that you'd never experience with a physical book. As Joe Hill mentioned on Twitter, subtle but necessary formatting cues can go haywire in an e-book.

A certain percentage of the eBook readers come to chapters in NOS4A2 that end mid-sentence and believe they have a broken file.
— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) May 17, 2013

No one reading the physical book reads that. The use of form is immediately obvious to their eye.
— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) May 17, 2013

I'm about to finish Jo Walton's Among Others, which I happen to have in paperback form, and have found myself calmly immersed in a way I haven't achieved with the e-books. Much as I like Among Others, I don't think this is due to the writing alone. Hill goes on to make the point that while most of us don't really notice the formatting of novels (unless they have illustrations or other overt formatting effects), we do notice it when it's off. I now rather dread going back to the e-reader, even though I want The Other Typist asap.

There is also the awkwardness of holding the tablet. The Samsung is too heavy to hold with one hand, so I usually end up folding back the cover and balancing the thing on a pillow on my stomach while lying down. (Not that I wouldn't read lying down anyway, but the balance here is more delicate.) Finally there's the whole business of staring at a screen, which I've already been doing more or less all day, and the kind of cognitive buzzing that the screen creates in the background of the reading experience.

In short, add e-books to the list of Things I Am Ambivalent About. And add me to the list of People Who Are Ambivalent about E-books.

Bigfoot and the Baby ... coming from Bona Fide Books

I am thrilled to report that my first novel, Bigfoot and the Baby, will be published by Bona Fide Books in spring 2014. Bona Fide is an innovative, exuberant small press, committed to literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a particular interest in the environment and the American West.

Ray Harryhausen and writing

In the NYT obituary for legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, I found myself dwelling on this statement:

“There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in ‘King Kong,’ that adds to the fantasy,” he said in 2006. “If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.” 

As a fiction writer--and reader--I've always agreed with this, without ever quite knowing why. Now I actually suspect it's because I grew up watching Harryhausen's movies, often on the big screen, in gorgeous Technicolor. The way Harryhausen's monsters moved impressed the hell out of me--at once faster and slower than humans, with starker contrasts between light and shadow. I don't remember precisely how they looked. The movement was what made them otherworldly, and therefore more real, in the sense of more plausible as monsters. Why would something from another world (or from the imagination) move as we do, and exist in precisely the same plane? The movements of Harryhausen's creatures made them seem both here and somewhere else at the same time--and that lent them real power and real magic. And as he suggests, the more realistic CG effects become, the more disappointing they become, even as we marvel at the technical achievement. The monsters really have been brought down to Earth.

That's probably not the *only* reason that I prefer a veneer of unreality in fiction. But if you're going to go ahead and create a world, why not let it shimmer and quake a little around the edges? Because you have made something. You have brought something into our world from another one--your imagination. That wonder and that strangeness, it seems to me, deserve attention.

Zap the "to be" verbs

Not until I started working for a marketing firm (yes!) did I realize the full insidiousness of "to be" verbs. Not only do they make your prose static, they can obscure the true meaning of your sentence by preventing you from finding the right verb--and with it, the right noun(s), adjective(s), adverb(s), and phrasing. I've noticed that, particularly when I write in a rush, "to be" verbs proliferate--because I don't take the time to ponder exactly what I want to say. And maybe that kind of rushing works for a first draft, when you don't want to pause and ponder, but simply "get it down." But during revisions, you can make a lot of amazing improvements by scrutinizing and replacing "to be" whenever possible.

OK, once and for all: Is getting a Ph.D. in literature a waste of time?

Yes. No. Oh, who can say?

Well, in theory, I should be able to say. I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature [redacted] years ago, and I'm one of those twisted yet oddly grateful souls who didn't become a professor. I ought to have warnings and/or encouragement to offer those on the front end of the process--not to mention solace and/or encouragement to those, possibly drifting in adjunct limbo, who are now thinking of stepping all the way out. 

But I must start by saying: are we really still having these arguments? Really? Literally these same laments, and dismissals thereof, have been flying about for longer than the [redacted] years since I first ignored the warnings aimed at me. Nothing has changed. Tenure-track jobs still prove more elusive than starring roles in feature films. Universities continue to admit more grad students than they can ever hope to place in such jobs--because they supply cheap academic labor, because they represent the next generation of a culture and philosophy that at least some people hope to preserve, and because they still want to come. So it shall ever be, evidently. And while we non-professors--eventually--generally find satisfying alternative careers, we still seem to have no good answer to the question, What is a literature Ph.D. for?

My experience is just one experience. And even [redacted] years later, I find myself unable to wrap it in a comprehensive, persuasive ball of wisdom. Here, then, are some random questions and the answers I would give you, today, if you asked.

Would you do it over again, knowing what you know now?
No.

Are you still glad you did it?
Most days, yes. It has undoubtedly opened doors, though the person on the other side has often been surprised to see me there. I've learned to use that surprise to my advantage.

Did you learn to think better?
Probably. Yes. What kind of a question is that? I will say I learned to pay very close attention to language, although the attention was focused through a very narrow lens. Emotional reactions, including simply taking pleasure in an author's beautiful words, were right out. I hope that's changing. I now believe that this is a much better way to think about--and with--literature.

Did you learn to write better?
God, no.

Could you have tried harder to get a tenure-track job?
Yes. But the answer is always yes, isn't it? The best advice I ever heard was: If you can do something else, you should. I felt that I could, indeed, do something else, though it took me awhile to figure out what that was. Not everyone has the luxury of that kind of time, though.

Did others fail to warn you sufficiently?
I doubt it. We all think we're the exception. Sometimes we are. Warnings can scare off the ambivalent, but not the truly determined.

On writing and feeling "unhoused"

Via Andrew Sullivan, The Paris Review's lovely interview with Andrea Barrett offers these lines:

I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it.

The question is, does('nt) everyone feel this way? Or just writers/artists? I suspect the circle of the emotionally "unhoused" is larger. But I'm really wondering who actually feels "housed." Wall Street types? Oncologists? Priests? Cheerleaders? And do they know they feel this way?