Friday, October 30, 2009
How Could the Others Not Know It?
from "Mirrorings"
in the collection As Seen on TV
Lucy Grealy
When you are only ten, which is when the chemotherapy began, two and a half years can seem like your whole life, yet it did finally end, for the cancer was gone. I remember the last day of treatment clearly because it was the only day on which I succeeded in not crying and because afterward, in private, I cried harder than I had in years because I thought now I would no longer be 'special', that without the arena of chemotherapy in which to prove myself no one would ever love me, know I was worthy of love, and that I would fade unnoticed into the background. But this idea about not being different didn't last very long. Before, I had foolishly believed that people stared at me because I was bald. After my hair grew in, it didn't take long before I understood that I looked different for another reason. My face. People stared at me in stores, and other children made fun of me to the point that I came to expect such reactions constantly, wherever I went. School became a battleground.
Halloween became my favorite holiday because I could put on a mask and walk among the blessed for a few brief, sweet hours. Such freedom I felt, walking down the street, my face hidden. Through the imperfect oval holes I could peer out at other faces, masked or painted or not, and see on those faces nothing but the normal faces of childhood looking back at me, faces I mistakenly thought were the faces everyone else but me saw all the time, not the faces I usually braced myself for, the cruel, the lonely, vicious ones I spent every day other than Halloween waiting to see around each corner. As I breathed in the condensed, plastic-scented air beneath the mask, I thought I was breathing in normalcy, that this joy and weightlessness were what the world was composed of, and that it was only my face that kept me from it, my face that was my own mask that kept me from knowing the joy I felt sure everyone but me lived with intimately. How could the others not know it? Not know that to be free of the fear of taunts and the burden of knowing no one would ever love you was all that anyone could ever ask for? I was a pauper walking for a few brief hours in the clothes of the prince, and when the day ended and I gave up my disguise, I felt both sad and relieved. Sad because I had liked feeling those feelings and didn't want them to end. Relieved because I felt to no connection to that kind of happiness. I didn't deserve it and thus I shouldn't want it. It was easier to blame my face for everything.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
From Black Tickets to Lark and Termite
Debra Monroe has written a smart and thorough consideration of Jayne Anne Phillips's six wondrous books. To see it, click here. And below, a passage from Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne's fourth novel, finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction.
from Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips
Lark smells like the soap smell on her hands. She puts one bowl and another in his arms tight against him so the bowls don't move. Down the alley the ragged orange cat crawls low under Tuccis' house. The cat drags its flattened legs under the porch, steps and squeezes through webs and rotting leaves, over hard black beetles hiding from the light and the small scattered bones of harvested creatures. Mice bones and bird bones, bones of voles and flat-nosed moles, and rabbits too small to hop. The cat lies still on the cool dirt, safe in its litter of bones and scrap that smells of humid mold. Lark's soap smell is like white flowers. She stands behind him so the bowl stays tight and she holds the bottle of color in his hand. Two drops Lark says, pink instead of red. She tells him how the batter folds pastel pale, and he can feel the heat outside, wavering over the grass and the alley. The heat glints on stones and gravel and presses hard to cut. Too hot to be out, Lark says. Plants droop and the grass sighs like something squeezed, but the clean almond air of the soup in the bowl lifts in the weighted heat. Lark pushes his chair away because the oven racks slide out hot, but the fan blurring side to side blows the sweet smell in circles. He sits by the window and hears the faint roots of the grass in the berm of the alley, long veiny threads that reach deep in the ground to drink where no one sees. He holds the radio to say with sounds.
from Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips
Lark smells like the soap smell on her hands. She puts one bowl and another in his arms tight against him so the bowls don't move. Down the alley the ragged orange cat crawls low under Tuccis' house. The cat drags its flattened legs under the porch, steps and squeezes through webs and rotting leaves, over hard black beetles hiding from the light and the small scattered bones of harvested creatures. Mice bones and bird bones, bones of voles and flat-nosed moles, and rabbits too small to hop. The cat lies still on the cool dirt, safe in its litter of bones and scrap that smells of humid mold. Lark's soap smell is like white flowers. She stands behind him so the bowl stays tight and she holds the bottle of color in his hand. Two drops Lark says, pink instead of red. She tells him how the batter folds pastel pale, and he can feel the heat outside, wavering over the grass and the alley. The heat glints on stones and gravel and presses hard to cut. Too hot to be out, Lark says. Plants droop and the grass sighs like something squeezed, but the clean almond air of the soup in the bowl lifts in the weighted heat. Lark pushes his chair away because the oven racks slide out hot, but the fan blurring side to side blows the sweet smell in circles. He sits by the window and hears the faint roots of the grass in the berm of the alley, long veiny threads that reach deep in the ground to drink where no one sees. He holds the radio to say with sounds.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
You Dead?
A Love Supreme
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
* * *
You beautiful, broke-
back horse of my heart. Proud,
debonair, not quite there
in the head. You current
with no river in sight.
Current as confetti
after parades. You
small-town. Italian
ice shop next to brothels
beside the highway.
Sweet and sweaty. You high
as a kite coming
down. You suburban sprawled
on the bed. You dead? Not
nearly. Not yet.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
* * *
You beautiful, broke-
back horse of my heart. Proud,
debonair, not quite there
in the head. You current
with no river in sight.
Current as confetti
after parades. You
small-town. Italian
ice shop next to brothels
beside the highway.
Sweet and sweaty. You high
as a kite coming
down. You suburban sprawled
on the bed. You dead? Not
nearly. Not yet.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Blue Was Beating
from Bluets
Maggie Nelson
22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.
Maggie Nelson
22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Micro-Fiction, Literary Hybrids, The Devil in Miss Jones
And, if you can stand it, another interview, this one from the current Prairie Schooner blog. Thanks to Timothy Schaffert for his thoughtful questions.
PS: There are a number of micro-fiction sites online (such as the sleek fifty word fiction, a venue for what one might call micro-minis). Your work has appeared in flash-fiction and micro-fiction anthologies. What is the current state of the genre?
Paul Lisicky: I just finished reading James Wood’s rave of Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories in the New Yorker. Among other things, he calls the book “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” and compares her to Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, and J.F. Powers. Does that translate to the form’s coming of age? Mainstream cred? I’m not sure, but it isn’t news that the short from is everywhere these days, both in print and on-line. I think readers are hungry for something new, something that doesn’t feel like it’s repeating the same old patterns. Of course there are probably curmudgeons out there linking the trend to the decreasing attention span in the age of the Internet but I think the explanation is more complicated than that. A good short might ask the mind to work harder than a story of more conventional duration. And maybe that’s central to the appeal of the form: the puzzle and play of the reading experience. It’s like reading poetry. If you’re not paying attention, the work’s going to go right over your head.
PS: What are some particular qualities of the short-short form that appeal to you, as a reader and as a writer?
Paul Lisicky: I’m drawn to any kind of work that invites me to reread it again and again. Compression, musicality of language, potency of image—those things are important to me. The best shorts feel like they’re making themselves up, at least structurally. Part poem, part story, part essay. There’s something compelling about participating in that energy, or more precisely, watching a hybrid come into being.
I just wish we had a better name for them. I can’t think of short-short without thinking, I don’t know, Daisy Dukes.
PS: Your story, “What Might Life Be Like in the 21st Century,” appears in the Baby Boomer issue of Prairie Schooner. So here’s an impossible question to answer: How has being of that generation informed your fiction?
Paul Lisicky: Well, I was a teenager at the height of the era depicted in The Ice Storm. By that I mean I saw sexual mores changing overnight. My father, for instance, was someone whose look couldn’t have been more conservative during my childhood: big blocky glasses, flat-top crew cut. And he became someone else in the matter of a month. He grew his hair long, exchanged his old glasses for wire-rim aviators, and started wearing patterned shirts. I remember my parents deciding to see Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, which in those days played in the cinema at the shopping center down the street. And that seemed like a perfectly fine thing to do. They were like new people. That seemed huge and bewildering to me at the time. I think most of my writing has been about the tension between control and letting go of the old systems that have constrained us. Which is an ongoing story, of course.
PS: The writer Francisco Goldman once wrote that “First novels, as I understood it back when I first dreamed of writing one, were for getting back at everybody you hated in high school.” Your short story, contrarily, is a reflective meditation on a high school experience, the narrator glancing back at a particularly difficult moment for the narrator and his mother. Yet the narrator seems to almost cherish this miserable moment, and the insights it eventually offers him. How did you arrive at this particular story, and this particular moment? What was the genesis?
Paul Lisicky: In seventh grade I actually worked on a school project called “What Might Life Be Like in the 21st Century.” The mother was based on my late mother, and Mr. Science was inspired by my teacher, Mr. Fitzgerald. There also was a science fair, but for some reason, I wasn’t there. Mr. Fitzgerald was one of those strange male junior high teachers who made a habit of pinpointing the freaks and gayboys in his class and doing what he could to get them to conform. But what interested me, in memory, was my mother. Why would she pass on his words to me, especially without any overt resentment of him? That wasn’t like her; she was incredibly protective of her sons. I thought of Mr. Fitzgerald’s blue eyes and black hair and wondered, could my mother have been attracted to him on some level? For some reason that notion struck me as poignant, especially from the distance of so many years. That speculation became the kernel of the story, which is otherwise an act of imagination.
PS: There are a number of micro-fiction sites online (such as the sleek fifty word fiction, a venue for what one might call micro-minis). Your work has appeared in flash-fiction and micro-fiction anthologies. What is the current state of the genre?
Paul Lisicky: I just finished reading James Wood’s rave of Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories in the New Yorker. Among other things, he calls the book “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” and compares her to Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, and J.F. Powers. Does that translate to the form’s coming of age? Mainstream cred? I’m not sure, but it isn’t news that the short from is everywhere these days, both in print and on-line. I think readers are hungry for something new, something that doesn’t feel like it’s repeating the same old patterns. Of course there are probably curmudgeons out there linking the trend to the decreasing attention span in the age of the Internet but I think the explanation is more complicated than that. A good short might ask the mind to work harder than a story of more conventional duration. And maybe that’s central to the appeal of the form: the puzzle and play of the reading experience. It’s like reading poetry. If you’re not paying attention, the work’s going to go right over your head.
PS: What are some particular qualities of the short-short form that appeal to you, as a reader and as a writer?
Paul Lisicky: I’m drawn to any kind of work that invites me to reread it again and again. Compression, musicality of language, potency of image—those things are important to me. The best shorts feel like they’re making themselves up, at least structurally. Part poem, part story, part essay. There’s something compelling about participating in that energy, or more precisely, watching a hybrid come into being.
I just wish we had a better name for them. I can’t think of short-short without thinking, I don’t know, Daisy Dukes.
PS: Your story, “What Might Life Be Like in the 21st Century,” appears in the Baby Boomer issue of Prairie Schooner. So here’s an impossible question to answer: How has being of that generation informed your fiction?
Paul Lisicky: Well, I was a teenager at the height of the era depicted in The Ice Storm. By that I mean I saw sexual mores changing overnight. My father, for instance, was someone whose look couldn’t have been more conservative during my childhood: big blocky glasses, flat-top crew cut. And he became someone else in the matter of a month. He grew his hair long, exchanged his old glasses for wire-rim aviators, and started wearing patterned shirts. I remember my parents deciding to see Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, which in those days played in the cinema at the shopping center down the street. And that seemed like a perfectly fine thing to do. They were like new people. That seemed huge and bewildering to me at the time. I think most of my writing has been about the tension between control and letting go of the old systems that have constrained us. Which is an ongoing story, of course.
PS: The writer Francisco Goldman once wrote that “First novels, as I understood it back when I first dreamed of writing one, were for getting back at everybody you hated in high school.” Your short story, contrarily, is a reflective meditation on a high school experience, the narrator glancing back at a particularly difficult moment for the narrator and his mother. Yet the narrator seems to almost cherish this miserable moment, and the insights it eventually offers him. How did you arrive at this particular story, and this particular moment? What was the genesis?
Paul Lisicky: In seventh grade I actually worked on a school project called “What Might Life Be Like in the 21st Century.” The mother was based on my late mother, and Mr. Science was inspired by my teacher, Mr. Fitzgerald. There also was a science fair, but for some reason, I wasn’t there. Mr. Fitzgerald was one of those strange male junior high teachers who made a habit of pinpointing the freaks and gayboys in his class and doing what he could to get them to conform. But what interested me, in memory, was my mother. Why would she pass on his words to me, especially without any overt resentment of him? That wasn’t like her; she was incredibly protective of her sons. I thought of Mr. Fitzgerald’s blue eyes and black hair and wondered, could my mother have been attracted to him on some level? For some reason that notion struck me as poignant, especially from the distance of so many years. That speculation became the kernel of the story, which is otherwise an act of imagination.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
A Matter of Accident
Looking through some files, I wandered onto the interview below, which I thought I'd post because my late friend Denise [Gess] is a presence in it. The interviewer is Tim Carr, who was one of Denise's students at Rowan University. Our talk was related to my visit to that campus two years ago.
I'm about to put the visiting writer's hat on again. Hello from Baltimore, where I'm reading at Loyola College, in the McManus Theater at 5:00 PM today.
***
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LISICKY
(April 2007)
Tim Carr: How did you first become involved in the writing world? From a young age, did you know you wanted to be a writer? Or was writing a later discovery?
Paul Lisicky: I came to writing through music—it was a matter of accident. I spent my growing up years playing keyboards and guitar--and writing probably hundreds of songs. At a certain point in college I decided to take a creative writing course on a lark and I was lucky enough to find a few inspiring teachers who took me seriously. And slowly, over time, music receded into the background.
I certainly never expected to be a writer as a kid—growing up in Cherry Hill, I’d never met a living writer; I’d never even been to a reading. My parents valued academic achievement, but they weren’t dedicated readers. Still, the arts in general—music, acting, architecture--were very much encouraged in our household, and I knew from early on that my life would involve making things.
TC: Do you remember your first creative writing attempt?
PL: I remember writing quick satirical novels in high school solely for my entertainment. I never intended to show them to anyone. One was about a terrorist-turned-movie star loosely based on Patti Hearst, whom I was obsessed with as a teenager. Later for a Spanish class I wrote a story, a sequel to some novel, in the same outrageous spirit, and I remember my teachers and classmates laughing and laughing as it was read aloud. This was a big deal for a shy, awkward kid who hadn’t attracted much notice before that.
TC: When Mark [Doty] visited our campus in Fall 2006 he told the open discussion group to “meet an adult who organizes his or her life around an art…someone who is physical evidence of the life of making.” Is there a person/s who modeled the artistic life for you (in education, in personal life), who captivated you with a passion you hadn’t experienced?
PL: My biggest role model as a young person was Joni Mitchell, and I’m not embarrassed to say that she still means a lot to me. Her dedication to documenting her shifting self, as well as her risk, her reach—all those things continue to teach me how to keep myself interested.
TC: As you started writing Lawnboy did you have a model you wanted to achieve? When I interviewed Denise [Gess] she said Great Gatsby and Flannery O’Connor’s work were influential for Good Deeds, passionate and socially conscious writing without fake sentimentality.
PL: Well, I did know I wanted to write the book that didn’t yet exist on my bookshelf—the book that I wanted to read but couldn’t find. The original conception for Lawnboy was so different from the final product. I wanted it be a chorus of voices, something in the manner of Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, but after working for almost four years, I realized I was giving the most interesting character the short shrift. So ironically the voices of Peter and Holly ended up in the recycling heap. Aside from Michael Cunningham, I think Joy Williams was crucial to me—I don’t think I sound like her, but her use of landscape was a huge influence. Landscape is practically a character in Joy Williams.
TC: How do you begin a large work, whether fiction or nonfiction? In your interview with Valerie Mejer you said, “for years [Lawnboy] was just a collection of non-linear scraps, emblematic scenes.” Does the idea usually start scenically with random film clips playing in your mind, or with a line of dialogue, perhaps a static character portrait to be brought to life? Is it not until you work through a draft that you know where to truly begin or how to create cohesive structure?
PL: Well, the scene that triggered Lawnboy was of a fight between the two brothers. They were driving across the Card Sound Bridge to the Florida Keys, and the fight was so extreme that the car had to be stopped and the fight continued outside. I don’t even know what was said, but I still see that scene in my imagination—the turbulent sky behind it, the greenish water below, the mangrove roots along the shoreline--even though it never made it into the book.
TC: John Irving writes that writing a novel for him “is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” Denise said writing a novel for her is “falling in love. After the blindness and belovedness of the first draft, I think ‘Now what have I done?’” Can you metaphorically describe your novel writing process?
PL: That’s a hard one. I’m afraid I’m going to say something hackneyed. To me it’s sort of like walking through the woods at night and keeping myself open to the unexpected. I don’t want to look away from what I can’t see or what I don’t have a name for.
TC: I agree, from my own frustration, when you say, “The freedom of fiction can be oppressive.” When everything is on the table, how do you choose what details and incidents to foreground over others?
(I love the sentences, “A spoon glinted among the mounds of used tissue. It troubled and interested me for some reason- that single instrument held up to so many mouths so many times, a little vessel of pleasure- and I was tempted to wade down the garbaged slope to retrieve it.”)
PL: So many of those structural choices are intuitive to me—they’re based on what sounds right, where the energy is. And then you have to have enough distance to see what the work wants to be. What repetitions occur, what kind of meaning is made within the arc of a single scene?—your themes are already there. My guess is that your work knows what it wants to be before you do. So the work of the writer finally is to keep negotiating between the two sides of the brain: you have to pay attention to gut feeling, and you have to use the rational mind to articulate those feelings. I think there has to be some balance at play, at all times. Too much of the rational mind and the choices can feel willed and programmatic.
(I’m glad, by the way, that you like the sentences quoted above.)
TC: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you? (mentally & physically draining work? too critical of your own work?)
PL: It’s all hard but it’s a good hard. I feel cranky and unmoored when I haven’t done it in a while. I’ve learned over time not to put too much pressure on myself when I sit down to do it; that can help. It doesn’t matter if it’s lousy—if you’re lucky you’ll have one good sentence or description to pull out of that hour’s work. Lately, I’ve been trying to make a habit of sitting down to write when I’m not trying, when I don’t have a window of time ahead of me—say when I come home from the gym, or in the minutes before dinner—and I think that has been good for the work. You know, it doesn’t have to be hell. I think it’s drummed into us that the more punishing the process the better the work, and that’s horseshit. If you’re tense when you’re working, it’s going to reflect in the writing. Imagine yourself as a singer, who’s both open enough to be spontaneous and in command of the craft.
TC: Is there a place especially conducive to your writing? Any idiosyncratic rituals before or during your writing?
PL: Before we lived in Manhattan, I used to work at my desk with the shades drawn, my back to the window. It seems ridiculous to me now. Living in Manhattan, you don’t have the luxury of space. Most of us live in small spaces, and you have to be more flexible. You have to learn to shut out the noise, or to make use of it, to resist it. Large parts of my new novel, were written at the Starbucks at West 16th Street and Eighth Avenue. And for some reason, the New Jersey Transit train between Penn Station and the Central Jersey shore has been very lucky for me. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to write anywhere. If you keep waiting for the perfect time, the perfect situation, it’s never going to come.
TC: In Lawnboy Evan’s interiority, his emotional life, seems to literally harden as he makes these continual connections and estrangements. In the flashback scene in which Evan’s friends heckle Stan Laskin, Evan feels “something bony and sharp [push] deep inside [his] chest. Hector tells Evan to “Buck up” as he’s entering “the world colder, meaner, more ragged than before.” As Evan continues to (re)invent himself, do you feel this hardened experience crumbles to release a reborn identity, or does this constant move from innocence to experience always stick with the person, “tied up together in one sticky knot”?
PL: That’s an interesting question. Evan’s emotional life never really moves in a straight line, does it? It defies the notion of progress, even though many read the ending as happy. I think he goes back and forth throughout the book between closing himself off and opening himself up again. That’s his dynamic. Thank God that the latter part always seems to win out, or else he’d be losing out on the possibility of adventure and contact.
TC: Lawnboy explores Evan’s inner inquires, both satisfying and terrifying, but it also addresses many social issues (destruction of nature, man’s view as dominant over nature, dismissing the past, AIDS and how we as a culture are willing or not to confront the problem…). Ursula’s nose-job comment, “Character, shmaracter. What do I care about character?” seems to encapsulate this larger view, and Evan is concerned with maintaining a fading character/style (Hector’s chartreuse shirt, the nursery). Do you intend to address these social issues before you begin writing, or are these points that emerge as you continue to explore character?
PL: Great question. Insightful. I couldn’t imagine starting a novel with the intention of writing about social issues, even though I think the social issues you mention are important to my thinking. I always start from bodies, gestures, sensory particulars, place—the concrete rather than the rhetorical. All of those issues do emerge from character; all of us are implicated in the social conditions of our time; politics isn’t somewhere “out there” while we’re here la-la-la in our bubble. I never wanted to be one of those writers who consciously kept the stuff of the larger world out of his work. At the same time, you don’t want to tell your readers how to think. You want the work to invite questions, a complexity of seeing, the multiple-sides-to-the story. When Evan has an opinion about environmental degradation or homophobia, it’s my hope that you’re not seeing him as the writer’s mouthpiece—there’s a gap between writer and character. Instead, the book is asking you to think and talk back to it.
TC: You said Lawnboy is “emotionally autobiographical” and the Famous Builder voice is “a version of me.” Proust writes “A book is the product of a different ‘self’ from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices.” When you write do you find that you even surprise yourself with the “version” of Paul Lisicky that is on the page even when the material is autobiographical?
PL: Well, you’re asking for the real truth. I think he’s probably more self-deprecating and vulnerable than I am. Not that I don’t have those traits in me, but they’re foregrounded in that voice. In some ways he’s a better me. I’ve never articulated this before, but I think the voice creates its own meaning. Any literary work is engaged in some kind of tug of war between accuracy and the life-force of the voice. You can get yourself into trouble if you give in too much to the force of the voice.
TC: Can you define your role as a writing teacher and what you strive to instill in your students? Denise said she is a “pathfinder, the guy that goes ahead in the mine with a light and illuminates it a little.”
PL: It’s important to encourage—not to offer easy support, but to help that writer learn what’s authentically his in terms of voice, imagery, content, theme--all that. I think it’s my responsibility to introduce my students to a range of work, from linear narratives to experimental forms, to teach them to become more attentive readers, attuned to quirks. And to guide them to other art forms, as well—poetry, music, visual art, film—for writerly inspiration.
TC: And as Mark said, “If you’ve ever taught there’s a lot of junk, but there are also the moments.” Any moments that stay with you- or – types of moments?
PL: One of my favorite moments happened ten years ago at the Houston High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I taught a creative writing workshop to classical musicians, and in the middle of the room sat a very quiet girl who tilted her head to the right and never looked at me. Not in an aggressive way, but she was one of those people who could barely stand to be in her skin. I’d say her writing was at best “well behaved.” Not all there. I was more or less convinced that we’d never be able to make contact. And one day, three weeks before the end of the year, I brought in some poems by Li-Young Lee, and she loved them; I could see the way she sat up straight when they were read aloud. She was so taken by the example of that work—their precision of language and emotionality--that she ended up being one of the best writers in the class.
TC: What would a review of your works look like if you were the critic?
PL: I’d like the ideas suggested by the structure of the work to be seen. I often get “beautiful writing” which I suppose one should be grateful for, but occasionally it feels like it’s delivered as a fault—as if attention to craft is a mask for slightness at the core. My hope is that the writing suggests a vision, an idiosyncratic point of view. The poet James Hall wrote a beautiful academic essay on Famous Builder a few years back in which he talks about the book’s relationship to queer theory. There’s something thrilling about being seen like that. Sure, Famous Builder is in part about a nerdy kid learning to be in artist in the South Jersey suburbs, but that’s only the content. Theme is another matter.
TC: What are you reading? (What’s in the “to read” pile?)
PL: Right now I’m on a panel for a fiction fellowship, and I have literally hundreds of pages of work to read within the next two weeks, so my book reading is on hold right now. But recent books I’ve loved include: Kathryn Davis’s THE THIN PLACE, Mary Gaitskill’s VERNONICA, Sigrid Nunez’s THE LAST OF HER KIND. And waiting for me is Chris Adrian’s THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, which I’ve heard amazing things about.
I'm about to put the visiting writer's hat on again. Hello from Baltimore, where I'm reading at Loyola College, in the McManus Theater at 5:00 PM today.
***
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LISICKY
(April 2007)
Tim Carr: How did you first become involved in the writing world? From a young age, did you know you wanted to be a writer? Or was writing a later discovery?
Paul Lisicky: I came to writing through music—it was a matter of accident. I spent my growing up years playing keyboards and guitar--and writing probably hundreds of songs. At a certain point in college I decided to take a creative writing course on a lark and I was lucky enough to find a few inspiring teachers who took me seriously. And slowly, over time, music receded into the background.
I certainly never expected to be a writer as a kid—growing up in Cherry Hill, I’d never met a living writer; I’d never even been to a reading. My parents valued academic achievement, but they weren’t dedicated readers. Still, the arts in general—music, acting, architecture--were very much encouraged in our household, and I knew from early on that my life would involve making things.
TC: Do you remember your first creative writing attempt?
PL: I remember writing quick satirical novels in high school solely for my entertainment. I never intended to show them to anyone. One was about a terrorist-turned-movie star loosely based on Patti Hearst, whom I was obsessed with as a teenager. Later for a Spanish class I wrote a story, a sequel to some novel, in the same outrageous spirit, and I remember my teachers and classmates laughing and laughing as it was read aloud. This was a big deal for a shy, awkward kid who hadn’t attracted much notice before that.
TC: When Mark [Doty] visited our campus in Fall 2006 he told the open discussion group to “meet an adult who organizes his or her life around an art…someone who is physical evidence of the life of making.” Is there a person/s who modeled the artistic life for you (in education, in personal life), who captivated you with a passion you hadn’t experienced?
PL: My biggest role model as a young person was Joni Mitchell, and I’m not embarrassed to say that she still means a lot to me. Her dedication to documenting her shifting self, as well as her risk, her reach—all those things continue to teach me how to keep myself interested.
TC: As you started writing Lawnboy did you have a model you wanted to achieve? When I interviewed Denise [Gess] she said Great Gatsby and Flannery O’Connor’s work were influential for Good Deeds, passionate and socially conscious writing without fake sentimentality.
PL: Well, I did know I wanted to write the book that didn’t yet exist on my bookshelf—the book that I wanted to read but couldn’t find. The original conception for Lawnboy was so different from the final product. I wanted it be a chorus of voices, something in the manner of Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, but after working for almost four years, I realized I was giving the most interesting character the short shrift. So ironically the voices of Peter and Holly ended up in the recycling heap. Aside from Michael Cunningham, I think Joy Williams was crucial to me—I don’t think I sound like her, but her use of landscape was a huge influence. Landscape is practically a character in Joy Williams.
TC: How do you begin a large work, whether fiction or nonfiction? In your interview with Valerie Mejer you said, “for years [Lawnboy] was just a collection of non-linear scraps, emblematic scenes.” Does the idea usually start scenically with random film clips playing in your mind, or with a line of dialogue, perhaps a static character portrait to be brought to life? Is it not until you work through a draft that you know where to truly begin or how to create cohesive structure?
PL: Well, the scene that triggered Lawnboy was of a fight between the two brothers. They were driving across the Card Sound Bridge to the Florida Keys, and the fight was so extreme that the car had to be stopped and the fight continued outside. I don’t even know what was said, but I still see that scene in my imagination—the turbulent sky behind it, the greenish water below, the mangrove roots along the shoreline--even though it never made it into the book.
TC: John Irving writes that writing a novel for him “is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” Denise said writing a novel for her is “falling in love. After the blindness and belovedness of the first draft, I think ‘Now what have I done?’” Can you metaphorically describe your novel writing process?
PL: That’s a hard one. I’m afraid I’m going to say something hackneyed. To me it’s sort of like walking through the woods at night and keeping myself open to the unexpected. I don’t want to look away from what I can’t see or what I don’t have a name for.
TC: I agree, from my own frustration, when you say, “The freedom of fiction can be oppressive.” When everything is on the table, how do you choose what details and incidents to foreground over others?
(I love the sentences, “A spoon glinted among the mounds of used tissue. It troubled and interested me for some reason- that single instrument held up to so many mouths so many times, a little vessel of pleasure- and I was tempted to wade down the garbaged slope to retrieve it.”)
PL: So many of those structural choices are intuitive to me—they’re based on what sounds right, where the energy is. And then you have to have enough distance to see what the work wants to be. What repetitions occur, what kind of meaning is made within the arc of a single scene?—your themes are already there. My guess is that your work knows what it wants to be before you do. So the work of the writer finally is to keep negotiating between the two sides of the brain: you have to pay attention to gut feeling, and you have to use the rational mind to articulate those feelings. I think there has to be some balance at play, at all times. Too much of the rational mind and the choices can feel willed and programmatic.
(I’m glad, by the way, that you like the sentences quoted above.)
TC: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you? (mentally & physically draining work? too critical of your own work?)
PL: It’s all hard but it’s a good hard. I feel cranky and unmoored when I haven’t done it in a while. I’ve learned over time not to put too much pressure on myself when I sit down to do it; that can help. It doesn’t matter if it’s lousy—if you’re lucky you’ll have one good sentence or description to pull out of that hour’s work. Lately, I’ve been trying to make a habit of sitting down to write when I’m not trying, when I don’t have a window of time ahead of me—say when I come home from the gym, or in the minutes before dinner—and I think that has been good for the work. You know, it doesn’t have to be hell. I think it’s drummed into us that the more punishing the process the better the work, and that’s horseshit. If you’re tense when you’re working, it’s going to reflect in the writing. Imagine yourself as a singer, who’s both open enough to be spontaneous and in command of the craft.
TC: Is there a place especially conducive to your writing? Any idiosyncratic rituals before or during your writing?
PL: Before we lived in Manhattan, I used to work at my desk with the shades drawn, my back to the window. It seems ridiculous to me now. Living in Manhattan, you don’t have the luxury of space. Most of us live in small spaces, and you have to be more flexible. You have to learn to shut out the noise, or to make use of it, to resist it. Large parts of my new novel, were written at the Starbucks at West 16th Street and Eighth Avenue. And for some reason, the New Jersey Transit train between Penn Station and the Central Jersey shore has been very lucky for me. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to write anywhere. If you keep waiting for the perfect time, the perfect situation, it’s never going to come.
TC: In Lawnboy Evan’s interiority, his emotional life, seems to literally harden as he makes these continual connections and estrangements. In the flashback scene in which Evan’s friends heckle Stan Laskin, Evan feels “something bony and sharp [push] deep inside [his] chest. Hector tells Evan to “Buck up” as he’s entering “the world colder, meaner, more ragged than before.” As Evan continues to (re)invent himself, do you feel this hardened experience crumbles to release a reborn identity, or does this constant move from innocence to experience always stick with the person, “tied up together in one sticky knot”?
PL: That’s an interesting question. Evan’s emotional life never really moves in a straight line, does it? It defies the notion of progress, even though many read the ending as happy. I think he goes back and forth throughout the book between closing himself off and opening himself up again. That’s his dynamic. Thank God that the latter part always seems to win out, or else he’d be losing out on the possibility of adventure and contact.
TC: Lawnboy explores Evan’s inner inquires, both satisfying and terrifying, but it also addresses many social issues (destruction of nature, man’s view as dominant over nature, dismissing the past, AIDS and how we as a culture are willing or not to confront the problem…). Ursula’s nose-job comment, “Character, shmaracter. What do I care about character?” seems to encapsulate this larger view, and Evan is concerned with maintaining a fading character/style (Hector’s chartreuse shirt, the nursery). Do you intend to address these social issues before you begin writing, or are these points that emerge as you continue to explore character?
PL: Great question. Insightful. I couldn’t imagine starting a novel with the intention of writing about social issues, even though I think the social issues you mention are important to my thinking. I always start from bodies, gestures, sensory particulars, place—the concrete rather than the rhetorical. All of those issues do emerge from character; all of us are implicated in the social conditions of our time; politics isn’t somewhere “out there” while we’re here la-la-la in our bubble. I never wanted to be one of those writers who consciously kept the stuff of the larger world out of his work. At the same time, you don’t want to tell your readers how to think. You want the work to invite questions, a complexity of seeing, the multiple-sides-to-the story. When Evan has an opinion about environmental degradation or homophobia, it’s my hope that you’re not seeing him as the writer’s mouthpiece—there’s a gap between writer and character. Instead, the book is asking you to think and talk back to it.
TC: You said Lawnboy is “emotionally autobiographical” and the Famous Builder voice is “a version of me.” Proust writes “A book is the product of a different ‘self’ from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices.” When you write do you find that you even surprise yourself with the “version” of Paul Lisicky that is on the page even when the material is autobiographical?
PL: Well, you’re asking for the real truth. I think he’s probably more self-deprecating and vulnerable than I am. Not that I don’t have those traits in me, but they’re foregrounded in that voice. In some ways he’s a better me. I’ve never articulated this before, but I think the voice creates its own meaning. Any literary work is engaged in some kind of tug of war between accuracy and the life-force of the voice. You can get yourself into trouble if you give in too much to the force of the voice.
TC: Can you define your role as a writing teacher and what you strive to instill in your students? Denise said she is a “pathfinder, the guy that goes ahead in the mine with a light and illuminates it a little.”
PL: It’s important to encourage—not to offer easy support, but to help that writer learn what’s authentically his in terms of voice, imagery, content, theme--all that. I think it’s my responsibility to introduce my students to a range of work, from linear narratives to experimental forms, to teach them to become more attentive readers, attuned to quirks. And to guide them to other art forms, as well—poetry, music, visual art, film—for writerly inspiration.
TC: And as Mark said, “If you’ve ever taught there’s a lot of junk, but there are also the moments.” Any moments that stay with you- or – types of moments?
PL: One of my favorite moments happened ten years ago at the Houston High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I taught a creative writing workshop to classical musicians, and in the middle of the room sat a very quiet girl who tilted her head to the right and never looked at me. Not in an aggressive way, but she was one of those people who could barely stand to be in her skin. I’d say her writing was at best “well behaved.” Not all there. I was more or less convinced that we’d never be able to make contact. And one day, three weeks before the end of the year, I brought in some poems by Li-Young Lee, and she loved them; I could see the way she sat up straight when they were read aloud. She was so taken by the example of that work—their precision of language and emotionality--that she ended up being one of the best writers in the class.
TC: What would a review of your works look like if you were the critic?
PL: I’d like the ideas suggested by the structure of the work to be seen. I often get “beautiful writing” which I suppose one should be grateful for, but occasionally it feels like it’s delivered as a fault—as if attention to craft is a mask for slightness at the core. My hope is that the writing suggests a vision, an idiosyncratic point of view. The poet James Hall wrote a beautiful academic essay on Famous Builder a few years back in which he talks about the book’s relationship to queer theory. There’s something thrilling about being seen like that. Sure, Famous Builder is in part about a nerdy kid learning to be in artist in the South Jersey suburbs, but that’s only the content. Theme is another matter.
TC: What are you reading? (What’s in the “to read” pile?)
PL: Right now I’m on a panel for a fiction fellowship, and I have literally hundreds of pages of work to read within the next two weeks, so my book reading is on hold right now. But recent books I’ve loved include: Kathryn Davis’s THE THIN PLACE, Mary Gaitskill’s VERNONICA, Sigrid Nunez’s THE LAST OF HER KIND. And waiting for me is Chris Adrian’s THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, which I’ve heard amazing things about.
Monday, October 19, 2009
And All Through My Coffee Break Time
1. from Big Machine
Victor LaValle
"My brother threw me out," Ronny said. "Everyone just tossed me away."
I don't know how I would've reacted to Ronny's stories a few years earlier. Not too sympathetically. We all got troubles, as Peach Tree once said to me. But by that time, in that break room, I wasn't the same man I used to be. I'd never shaken the image of that nut standing on the side of the highway after we'd kicked him off our Greyhound bus. We'd sacrificed him. And there, sitting with Ronny, I felt I was on the verge of that choice again. Sacrifice this guy, or... And just like that, snap, the Voice's commandment made sense to me.
Invite them back in.
How long would it be before Ronny told this story again, in another break room or a run-down bar, and after he was done, the folks listening would commiserate, pat his shoulder, lean in close, and ask if he'd ever heard about a man, a martyr, named Solomon Clay.
Or who knew if the Dean might not become less of a race man in the future, and sometime soon Ravi Arapurakal gets a mysterious invitation in the mail.
This was our moment.
But what to do? How to invite Ronny back in? It's not like we were going to have him move in with us. Or, even if we did, what would we do for the next Ronny? The next woman or man we found teetering at the edge. Even the Washburn estate couldn't house them all. Maybe what Ronny needed right then, in the depths of his own turmoil, was just the possibility of relief. The hope that he might climb out rather than keep falling. In his warped way that's all Solomon had been offering his followers. I wondered if we could redeem the best aspects of his message.
2. I Say a Little Prayer
Aretha Franklin, 1970
Victor LaValle
"My brother threw me out," Ronny said. "Everyone just tossed me away."
I don't know how I would've reacted to Ronny's stories a few years earlier. Not too sympathetically. We all got troubles, as Peach Tree once said to me. But by that time, in that break room, I wasn't the same man I used to be. I'd never shaken the image of that nut standing on the side of the highway after we'd kicked him off our Greyhound bus. We'd sacrificed him. And there, sitting with Ronny, I felt I was on the verge of that choice again. Sacrifice this guy, or... And just like that, snap, the Voice's commandment made sense to me.
Invite them back in.
How long would it be before Ronny told this story again, in another break room or a run-down bar, and after he was done, the folks listening would commiserate, pat his shoulder, lean in close, and ask if he'd ever heard about a man, a martyr, named Solomon Clay.
Or who knew if the Dean might not become less of a race man in the future, and sometime soon Ravi Arapurakal gets a mysterious invitation in the mail.
This was our moment.
But what to do? How to invite Ronny back in? It's not like we were going to have him move in with us. Or, even if we did, what would we do for the next Ronny? The next woman or man we found teetering at the edge. Even the Washburn estate couldn't house them all. Maybe what Ronny needed right then, in the depths of his own turmoil, was just the possibility of relief. The hope that he might climb out rather than keep falling. In his warped way that's all Solomon had been offering his followers. I wondered if we could redeem the best aspects of his message.
2. I Say a Little Prayer
Aretha Franklin, 1970
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Flash and Yearn
Dream Song 14
John Berryman
from The Dream Songs
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
(Poem begins at 4:24.)
John Berryman
from The Dream Songs
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
(Poem begins at 4:24.)
In the Space Between Storms
The trees are thrashing outside, but that's no surprise: the Weather Service had been predicting back-to-back northeasters all week. But, oddly, we woke to a window of sun yesterday morning. Without thinking, we stepped into our pants, threw on our coats, and took a walk in the nature preserve down the road. The flooding was already underway, as was the overwash from Gardiners Bay, which we checked out later. I did my best to capture it, but the waves refused my camera--or was it the other way around? And I stepped back into the car in a salt-saturated coat.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Between Body and Name
RR Lyrae: Matter
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
from ] Open Interval [
He still exists as flesh; it's the idea
that's dissipated--: husband: -- what was he?
But a word I loved? There is no panacea
for missing syllables: his body: we
all know what matter's mostly made of --: space
obtains--: One day I realized I believe--:
the space in everything is God: that force
of present absence: pen: expanse: I grieve--
] old fashioned: distance: squinting it into view [
between body and name--in here!--I'm loose
as love is--: nebulous--: what good
this pointillism--: our eyes won't do--:
Sometimes the absences in us seem so profuse,
I wonder we don't pass through wood.
Click here to see a video of Lyrae reading.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
from ] Open Interval [
He still exists as flesh; it's the idea
that's dissipated--: husband: -- what was he?
But a word I loved? There is no panacea
for missing syllables: his body: we
all know what matter's mostly made of --: space
obtains--: One day I realized I believe--:
the space in everything is God: that force
of present absence: pen: expanse: I grieve--
] old fashioned: distance: squinting it into view [
between body and name--in here!--I'm loose
as love is--: nebulous--: what good
this pointillism--: our eyes won't do--:
Sometimes the absences in us seem so profuse,
I wonder we don't pass through wood.
Click here to see a video of Lyrae reading.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Empire State
From the window of my workshop at Rutgers-Newark yesterday afternoon--
From Sixth Avenue and West 16th Street tonight--
From Sixth Avenue and West 16th Street tonight--
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Undiscovered Country
I've been thinking all morning about Gary Percesepe's essay "In the Hamptons," which takes in, among other things, The Great Gatsby, social aspiration, The Hamptons, September 11th, and the plight of the Montauk nation. It appears in the current Mississippi Review. Below, an excerpt, and a link to the full piece.
from "In the Hamptons"
Gary Percesepe
One semester at Wittenberg University—in September 2001, in fact--I taught an 8:00 A.M. class. I mention this because it concerns hope in a dark time, a subject which is of some interest to me. And because it concerns my students. On the morning in question, the room was dark, and the windows open. It was chilly, and I shivered as I laid my umbrella on the lectern. Outside, rain was falling straight down, as heavy as I have ever seen it. One young woman sitting in the front row was drenched completely. She had no umbrella. Her long hair was dripping onto her desk, and the bottoms of her blue jeans were dark and soaked. Her bare arms were pale and smooth, glistening with water. She had two pieces of wheat bread in her hands. Her breakfast had been interrupted. She was, just before I looked away, reaching for her notebook, ready for class to start. She was on time. She looked ready.
To teach is to hope, just as to pray is to change. I teach and I pray for change. I teach and I discover that it is me who is changing. I believe—as much as I believe in anything—in the young. My teaching is itself a kind of prayer. To teach is to believe and to invest in the future, and the future is the undiscovered country, where hope lives, if it lives at all.
The Women of Lockerbie
Listening to the radio one day, I heard about a play written by Deborah Baley Brevoort, called The Women of Lockerbie. One day in December the sky exploded and the remains of Pan Am Flight 103 fell upon Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the many horrors one stood out for its seeming insignificance: what to do about the 11,000 articles of clothing belonging to the victims? The clothing, of course, was filthy and stained with jet fuel, clothing that carried the stench of death; the authorities called the clothes "contaminated" and decided that it must be incinerated. But the women of Lockerbie prevailed upon the U.S. government to release the clothing to them. Over one year’s time, 11,000 items of clothing were washed in streams before being packed and shipped back to the families.
When asked why they had done this, one Lockerbie woman explained that every act of evil must be turned into an act of love.
Until recently I didn’t know anything about this clothing or the women of Lockerbie who washed it, but right now I am wondering what their thoughts are this week, and, more importantly, what they are doing. It seems urgent to me to find out.
from "In the Hamptons"
Gary Percesepe
One semester at Wittenberg University—in September 2001, in fact--I taught an 8:00 A.M. class. I mention this because it concerns hope in a dark time, a subject which is of some interest to me. And because it concerns my students. On the morning in question, the room was dark, and the windows open. It was chilly, and I shivered as I laid my umbrella on the lectern. Outside, rain was falling straight down, as heavy as I have ever seen it. One young woman sitting in the front row was drenched completely. She had no umbrella. Her long hair was dripping onto her desk, and the bottoms of her blue jeans were dark and soaked. Her bare arms were pale and smooth, glistening with water. She had two pieces of wheat bread in her hands. Her breakfast had been interrupted. She was, just before I looked away, reaching for her notebook, ready for class to start. She was on time. She looked ready.
To teach is to hope, just as to pray is to change. I teach and I pray for change. I teach and I discover that it is me who is changing. I believe—as much as I believe in anything—in the young. My teaching is itself a kind of prayer. To teach is to believe and to invest in the future, and the future is the undiscovered country, where hope lives, if it lives at all.
The Women of Lockerbie
Listening to the radio one day, I heard about a play written by Deborah Baley Brevoort, called The Women of Lockerbie. One day in December the sky exploded and the remains of Pan Am Flight 103 fell upon Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the many horrors one stood out for its seeming insignificance: what to do about the 11,000 articles of clothing belonging to the victims? The clothing, of course, was filthy and stained with jet fuel, clothing that carried the stench of death; the authorities called the clothes "contaminated" and decided that it must be incinerated. But the women of Lockerbie prevailed upon the U.S. government to release the clothing to them. Over one year’s time, 11,000 items of clothing were washed in streams before being packed and shipped back to the families.
When asked why they had done this, one Lockerbie woman explained that every act of evil must be turned into an act of love.
Until recently I didn’t know anything about this clothing or the women of Lockerbie who washed it, but right now I am wondering what their thoughts are this week, and, more importantly, what they are doing. It seems urgent to me to find out.
Monday, October 12, 2009
I Will Not Leave This Damn Canoe
Nick Ripatrazone from my Writers at Newark seminar (or craft class, as I tend to call it) has been publishing excellent work in places like Esquire and Mississippi Review. (In fact, his story "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again" was a runner-up in the most recent Esquire Fiction Contest.) Here are two links, one to the Esquire story, one to "Patriots' Path," a nonfiction piece, a portion of which appears below.
Click here to read "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again" from Esquire.
Click here to read "Patriots' Path" from Mississippi Review.
From "Patriots' Path"
Nick Ripatrazone
Our canoe is stuck in the milkshake mud, and the dock is a quarter mile’s paddle away. We drifted here in part because of the dusk wind, but also because Clint has been delinquent in his paddling duties. His sixth-grade hands have been digging into his jacket pockets and backpack to fish the Marlboros he had planned to smoke underneath the willows on the other side of the lake. I am happy he has lost his smokes: after the onion-bagel body odor of my bunkmate, I have had enough of smells for the weekend. This trip to Stokes State Forest is a welcome break from sentence diagrams and obtuse angles, and word was that Kevin Bacon was killed here in 1980 by some jerk named Jason. Last night Tom told me Friday the 13th was actually filmed 20 miles south in Blairstown, thus ending the welcome legend, although the weekend had not totally been worthless: the long wooden tables in the mess hall looked as if they had been plucked from Medieval Times, and my gym teacher relished the opportunity to spasm a solitary square dance. Now all was lost. My oar is bogged in gunk: the standing fin looks like a nautical mile marker. Two community college counselors wave us to shore, but we are not moving. Clint ends his search with a sigh and says he needs a puff because his mouth is dry. I accept the contradiction and dig my hands between my wool hat and my damp hair. I will not leave this damn canoe. Although I brought enough tissues and t-shirts to last me a month, this is my only pair of socks. Soon Clint has one boot in the water. His hands are already fists from the cold; he says the lake is only knee high. I say there could be dips. He gives me the finger and stomps away. The willows pull the sun completely behind their green, and the moon paces Clint’s waddle toward shore.
Click here to read "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again" from Esquire.
Click here to read "Patriots' Path" from Mississippi Review.
From "Patriots' Path"
Nick Ripatrazone
Our canoe is stuck in the milkshake mud, and the dock is a quarter mile’s paddle away. We drifted here in part because of the dusk wind, but also because Clint has been delinquent in his paddling duties. His sixth-grade hands have been digging into his jacket pockets and backpack to fish the Marlboros he had planned to smoke underneath the willows on the other side of the lake. I am happy he has lost his smokes: after the onion-bagel body odor of my bunkmate, I have had enough of smells for the weekend. This trip to Stokes State Forest is a welcome break from sentence diagrams and obtuse angles, and word was that Kevin Bacon was killed here in 1980 by some jerk named Jason. Last night Tom told me Friday the 13th was actually filmed 20 miles south in Blairstown, thus ending the welcome legend, although the weekend had not totally been worthless: the long wooden tables in the mess hall looked as if they had been plucked from Medieval Times, and my gym teacher relished the opportunity to spasm a solitary square dance. Now all was lost. My oar is bogged in gunk: the standing fin looks like a nautical mile marker. Two community college counselors wave us to shore, but we are not moving. Clint ends his search with a sigh and says he needs a puff because his mouth is dry. I accept the contradiction and dig my hands between my wool hat and my damp hair. I will not leave this damn canoe. Although I brought enough tissues and t-shirts to last me a month, this is my only pair of socks. Soon Clint has one boot in the water. His hands are already fists from the cold; he says the lake is only knee high. I say there could be dips. He gives me the finger and stomps away. The willows pull the sun completely behind their green, and the moon paces Clint’s waddle toward shore.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
The Longer Your Lightbulbs Will Last
Photos from this afternoon: the lion is in our living room, the chickens and peppers are down the road, at Quail Hill Farm.
Without a Similar Condition Including This Condition
Dara Wier
from Selected Poems
The farther away from the center of power
you build your house
the longer your lightbulbs will last.
An electrician told me.
Through fog, through buds
and leaves touched with red
before they turn colors,
I ponder the blind horse
as it follows the flanks of its mate
through the pasture.
The horse with good eyes
grazes.
I've never seen it run.
The blind horse keeps its head
never more than a few feet away
from its friend.
Without a Similar Condition Including This Condition
Dara Wier
from Selected Poems
The farther away from the center of power
you build your house
the longer your lightbulbs will last.
An electrician told me.
Through fog, through buds
and leaves touched with red
before they turn colors,
I ponder the blind horse
as it follows the flanks of its mate
through the pasture.
The horse with good eyes
grazes.
I've never seen it run.
The blind horse keeps its head
never more than a few feet away
from its friend.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Power Outage
I'm still remembering what it was like to wake up to the power going off Wednesday, the appliances beeping, the house going deeply silent. And the calm in me, as if I'd held a glass of water inside. And it didn't matter that I had a three-hour train ride ahead of me, and it didn't matter that I still had to reread three stories for workshop that night. I listened to the quiet in the house, the quiet in my body. Outside, the wind lashed the leaves off the trees. The house cupped itself. And, six hours later, when I stepped out of the subway, I imagined the whole city losing its lights. Two guys played congas on the platform. My body went calm again.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The River Reads Its Poem
In Michael Robins’s Class Minus One
Bob Hicok
from This Clumsy Living
At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.
Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy’s cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses?
because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
round things, why would leaving come back to itself
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy.
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape
to the ocean.
Bob Hicok
from This Clumsy Living
At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.
Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy’s cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses?
because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
round things, why would leaving come back to itself
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy.
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape
to the ocean.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Feisty Cat, Holy Cat, Sad Cat
1. Feisty Cat
2. Holy Cat
From "Jubilate Agno"
Christopher Smart
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in
his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with
elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God
upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to
consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon
the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin
and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness
he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit
without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking
in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure
of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God
to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence
perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it
in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants
in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends
from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other
quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
(Click here to read Robert Pinsky's piece on this poem in yesterday's Slate. )
3. Sad Cat
(Note: stay tuned till end.)
2. Holy Cat
From "Jubilate Agno"
Christopher Smart
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in
his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with
elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God
upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to
consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon
the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin
and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness
he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit
without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking
in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure
of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God
to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence
perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it
in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants
in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends
from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other
quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
(Click here to read Robert Pinsky's piece on this poem in yesterday's Slate. )
3. Sad Cat
(Note: stay tuned till end.)
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Illuminating Fiction
My copy of Sherry Ellis's Illuminating Fiction, in which yours truly is interviewed, appeared in the mail today, and it's a beautiful thing. I've pasted the publisher's description below, along with a link to order the book. Its official release date is next month, but you should be able to get it immediately through Red Hen Press.
*****
Conducting author interviews was not part of her plan, but one day when she was perusing a writing publication she came across an announcement about an upcoming workshop in which author interviews would be the focus. Motivated by her long-term love of fiction, her ever-expanding love of writing, and her quest for authorial knowledge, she decided to take the workshop. Initially she interviewed Paul Lisicky and Jill McCorkle, writers with whom she had already studied. After these interviews were accepted by a prestigious art magazine and literary journal, she interviewed other writers with whom she had studied: Ron Carlson and Margot Livesey. Ellis then started reaching out to authors she had never met before: Edward P. Jones, Julia Glass, Steve Almond, Amy Bloom, Chris Abani, to name a few. And the amazing thing was that the majority of authors she approached agreed to be interviewed. After she realized she had nearly enough interviews for an anthology the concept of Illuminating Fiction was born....
Interviews with:
Chris Abani, Steve Almond, Amy Bloom, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Julia Glass, Arthur Golden, Lise Haines, Edward P. Jones, Fred Leebron, Joan Leegant, Yiyun Li, Paul Lisicky, Margot Livesey, Jill McCorkle, Elizabeth Searle, Matthew Sharpe, Kathleen Spivack, Mary Yukari Waters
*****
Conducting author interviews was not part of her plan, but one day when she was perusing a writing publication she came across an announcement about an upcoming workshop in which author interviews would be the focus. Motivated by her long-term love of fiction, her ever-expanding love of writing, and her quest for authorial knowledge, she decided to take the workshop. Initially she interviewed Paul Lisicky and Jill McCorkle, writers with whom she had already studied. After these interviews were accepted by a prestigious art magazine and literary journal, she interviewed other writers with whom she had studied: Ron Carlson and Margot Livesey. Ellis then started reaching out to authors she had never met before: Edward P. Jones, Julia Glass, Steve Almond, Amy Bloom, Chris Abani, to name a few. And the amazing thing was that the majority of authors she approached agreed to be interviewed. After she realized she had nearly enough interviews for an anthology the concept of Illuminating Fiction was born....
Interviews with:
Chris Abani, Steve Almond, Amy Bloom, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Julia Glass, Arthur Golden, Lise Haines, Edward P. Jones, Fred Leebron, Joan Leegant, Yiyun Li, Paul Lisicky, Margot Livesey, Jill McCorkle, Elizabeth Searle, Matthew Sharpe, Kathleen Spivack, Mary Yukari Waters
Monday, October 5, 2009
I Looked Out the Window and I Saw That [???] Soul Take Flight
What does it mean to lose a word in one of your favorite songs?
Maybe it's not a big deal if the song in question's about being abraded from travel, and you yourself are abraded from travel. I took a ferry to a highway / and I drove to a pontoon plane / I took a plane to a taxi / and a taxi to a train. Or maybe the lost word's a warning bell: Language has been too much with you. Maybe the chasm holds your name inside. Such was the case early this morning as I slouched on the train out to Amagansett, singing Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow" in my head. But why that word? Why refuse "ragged?"
In truth, just about any other two-syllable adjective wanted to fill that space.
Here, another consideration of spaces between things: my introduction for H.G. Carrillo, who read at Rutgers-Newark's Writers at Newark series two weeks ago.
****
A mother can’t move beyond a space inside the thought. The word is lost to her—if just for that minute. And her memory? Well, who can tell the difference between the Chicago of her present and the Cuba of her childhood. The disaster is not just her own, but her son’s, whose whole of way of knowing is under siege. Her son, our narrator, teaches high school history, and the shredding of his mother’s mind threatens everything: his vocation, his tie to his lost childhood, his way of constructing stories, which can’t help but be challenged by her leaps across time. But there’s another, no less crucial tragedy, at work here. Isn’t it true that his late lover is almost irretrievable, in memory, after being gone for 12 years? A portrait in a frame on the dinner table. A collection of gestures, glimpses: the index finger rubbing the knuckle of the right thumb. A way of curling the mouth. A presence so cherished and distant that the lover’s name becomes prayer, spoken over and over, as if that might be a way to close up the space between them.
That’s the predicament of Oscar Delossantos from H.G. Carrillo’s brave, distinctive novel, Loosing My Espanish. If the body’s own betrayal weren’t enough, Oscar’s been dismissed from his teaching job at a Jesuit high school. He has 34 days to give his students a final lesson, part personal history, part portrait of Cuba, from the perspective of the exiled. He knows all too well that his students are indifferent, but that’s not going to stop him from speaking. “Why remain las victimas de la historia,” he asks them, “when it’s yours to write, yours to control?” They might not have cared enough to listen, but he’s thrown it out there, this little gift, gleaming in air.
How to go on writing at a time when we’ve lost our ability to listen? What’s the point of narrative when the culture conspires to distract us at every turn, compromising our attention, our concentration, our ability to name. These are the central questions of Carrillo’s work, whether he’s writing about Cuban Americans in Chicago, or about a band of Washington D.C. journalists in his story “Andalucia.” As to how his work wants to defy this situation? Hache writes structurally-adventurous sentences that compel the reader to slow down, to inhabit their music. He evokes the senses, his regard for the body in time. He pays attention to place, to weather, the appalling condition of our weather. He’s not afraid to be political. He keeps on speaking into that awe-inspiring space between people, whether they’re here, or whether they’ve gone on, in the hopes that someone out there will be willing to close that gap, mind to mind.
****
Ditch Plains in Montauk at around 3:30 PM today.
Maybe it's not a big deal if the song in question's about being abraded from travel, and you yourself are abraded from travel. I took a ferry to a highway / and I drove to a pontoon plane / I took a plane to a taxi / and a taxi to a train. Or maybe the lost word's a warning bell: Language has been too much with you. Maybe the chasm holds your name inside. Such was the case early this morning as I slouched on the train out to Amagansett, singing Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow" in my head. But why that word? Why refuse "ragged?"
In truth, just about any other two-syllable adjective wanted to fill that space.
Here, another consideration of spaces between things: my introduction for H.G. Carrillo, who read at Rutgers-Newark's Writers at Newark series two weeks ago.
****
A mother can’t move beyond a space inside the thought. The word is lost to her—if just for that minute. And her memory? Well, who can tell the difference between the Chicago of her present and the Cuba of her childhood. The disaster is not just her own, but her son’s, whose whole of way of knowing is under siege. Her son, our narrator, teaches high school history, and the shredding of his mother’s mind threatens everything: his vocation, his tie to his lost childhood, his way of constructing stories, which can’t help but be challenged by her leaps across time. But there’s another, no less crucial tragedy, at work here. Isn’t it true that his late lover is almost irretrievable, in memory, after being gone for 12 years? A portrait in a frame on the dinner table. A collection of gestures, glimpses: the index finger rubbing the knuckle of the right thumb. A way of curling the mouth. A presence so cherished and distant that the lover’s name becomes prayer, spoken over and over, as if that might be a way to close up the space between them.
That’s the predicament of Oscar Delossantos from H.G. Carrillo’s brave, distinctive novel, Loosing My Espanish. If the body’s own betrayal weren’t enough, Oscar’s been dismissed from his teaching job at a Jesuit high school. He has 34 days to give his students a final lesson, part personal history, part portrait of Cuba, from the perspective of the exiled. He knows all too well that his students are indifferent, but that’s not going to stop him from speaking. “Why remain las victimas de la historia,” he asks them, “when it’s yours to write, yours to control?” They might not have cared enough to listen, but he’s thrown it out there, this little gift, gleaming in air.
How to go on writing at a time when we’ve lost our ability to listen? What’s the point of narrative when the culture conspires to distract us at every turn, compromising our attention, our concentration, our ability to name. These are the central questions of Carrillo’s work, whether he’s writing about Cuban Americans in Chicago, or about a band of Washington D.C. journalists in his story “Andalucia.” As to how his work wants to defy this situation? Hache writes structurally-adventurous sentences that compel the reader to slow down, to inhabit their music. He evokes the senses, his regard for the body in time. He pays attention to place, to weather, the appalling condition of our weather. He’s not afraid to be political. He keeps on speaking into that awe-inspiring space between people, whether they’re here, or whether they’ve gone on, in the hopes that someone out there will be willing to close that gap, mind to mind.
****
Ditch Plains in Montauk at around 3:30 PM today.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
And So It Was I Entered the Broken World
Our trip to Northeastern Ohio has been a bit of a whirlwind: a joint reading at Cleveland State on Thursday night, a joint craft talk at Akron State last night. (In the midst of this, Mark has been teaching a four-day workshop at CSU, and I've been attending to the second round of my Fairfield packets back in the hotel room). Earlier yesterday, along with Michael Dumanis and a band of other poets and scholars, we toured Hart Crane's hometown of Garrettsville out in the country northeast of Akron. We saw his grandfather's house, now the rectory of St. Ambrose's Catholic Church. We saw Hart's house, now a private home, whose owners, Dave and Kym Kirk, were kind enough to let us inside. The small dark birthing room into which Hart came into the world houses a padded raspberry-colored table, with an oval cutout at one end. Instantly I thought, Hart Crane was born on that table? born through that oval?--before I recognized it as a massage table. Maybe I hadn't had enough to eat. Still, hours later, I couldn't quite shake off the connection between birth and massage, which seems to cry out for a poem I wouldn't know how to start.
Click here for Mark's post and a fuller account of the day.
Click here for Mark's post and a fuller account of the day.
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