The Narrative, The Associative, The Lyrical (and Other Things)

Kelly Coveny, an MFA student at Fairfield University, recently asked me to participate in a project she calls the Turning Point. I couldn't have known how timely it was, as it helped me to think about the panel I was on this past Thursday here at Tomales Bay. The title of the panel? Modes of Meaning: The Narrative, The Associative, The Lyrical. I started off by saying that when I was in grad school we never used such terms. You either wrote Linear Realism or you were wrong--though we never called it Linear Realism. I say that without disparaging my grad school education. I say that simply because the One-Way-of-Doing-Things never felt right to me at all, and set me off on this long conversation (or argument) I've had with form through four books. Of course, as we soon found out, the Narrative, the Associative, and the Lyrical are never all that distinct from one another, which is its own kind of relief.

Anyway, here are Kelly's questions followed by my stabs at answers:

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What is it called? What is the 'turning point' or ‘leap of imagination’ or ‘sacred event’ or ‘subconscious flash’ or whatever one is to call that point in writing where the author discovers what he or she is ‘really’ writing about? What name would you give it? ‘Turning Point’ feels so flat, so one-dimensional and unimaginative. What IS this transformational experience that the writer has and then gives to the reader? - this mysterious experience or event or epiphany that ‘surprise’ Robert Frost refers to? This seems important, as ‘naming’ it is the very most basic building block. The ‘name’ shapes how we think and feel and behave toward the concept of it. So what we call it feels critical.

QUESTION: What craft techniques do you use to achieve it?

PL: My first education as an artist was as a musician. So figuratively I think of that moment as a key change, a gesture that lifts and revises everything that came before it. I'm always drawn to music that revises its terms along the way. (Think: certain Beatles songs, certain Laura Nyro songs, certain Tori Amos songs.) I'd like to do that kind of thing in prose. If I find myself extending a pattern, a mode of thinking to the point where the form is doing all the work for me, I try to be open to disjunction. In other words, what happens if I pit this unlikely event, image, meditation up against the matter at hand? Think of what comes after it as a shifting of keys.

QUESTION: What ‘ways in’ do you use to access this experience? (e.g., digging into a scene’s detail, the five senses, personal events, cultural context, dwelling in the moment.) What personal practices, hobbies, etc. (running, meditation, yoga, therapy) do you use to augment access to this sometimes very elusive realization/ epiphany?

PL: It helps not to try too hard. Animation seems to resist deliberateness. Sometimes these shifts take place when I'm not actually sitting down to write per se, but running, doing or something physical. Other times it happens when I already have ten thousand other things going on, and there I am jotting something into my phone on the subway on the way to an appointment.

QUESTION: Are there any writing exercises you give yourself to dig deeper?

PL: I feel a little resistant to the metaphors of "depth" or "digging" if only because they're so entrenched (ha!) in our thinking. I also think we're likely to associate depth with duration, and the gesture we're talking about doesn't necessarily require more words, more pages. If we think of juxtaposition or disjunction, then our work can be thought of as lateral: moving sideways or outward, rather than downward into the ground.

But a writing exercise? How about taking something already written and breaking up the concrete? Using a few existing paragraphs as a departure point to the unsayable, the undefinable. What if it we wrote into a emotional space where we didn't know where we were going from sentence to sentence? Imagine, walking through the forest without a flashlight. Think of the energy that's created when a writer gives himself permission not to know. A book like Nick Flynn's THE TICKING IS THE BOMB wants to do just that. It’s driven by inquiry, but it’s not afraid to dwell in uncertainty for as long as possible.

QUESTION: What do you do when it just isn’t coming together that hour or day?

PL: Well, I don't think it ever hurts to sit still, to pay attention, to try to name and acknowledge even if that naming and acknowledgement isn't coming. I've heard it said that when we're feeling like that, it's usually the case that we have so much going on that we don't know how to process it. That said, I don't think it's the wisest thing to sentence oneself to one's desk day after day, hour after hour. Sometimes the animation we're talking about happens when we get up, attend to another task. Again, when we're not trying too hard.

QUESTION: What do you do if you can’t seem to find your ‘way in’ despite multiple efforts?

PL: I'd work on something else. A different part of the book, or something else entirely different.

Here's an idea: what if you tried to reimagine that troubling passage in another genre. What if you wrote it as fiction, or a poem? What might you learn?

QUESTION: Does it change your mood, outlook, day when you are able to access ‘it’?

PL: Yes! Life is back!

Redwoods and Rain

The quickest post from the land of redwoods and rain, where we're at the Tomales Bay Workshops till Sunday. Actually, the moment of sun was so startling this morning--and it really was a moment--that I probably chased it off by holding my camera up to it. Still, there's nothing else like that thick pool of cold I associate with forests like these. Though that cold strikes me as static, my mind is never static in relationship to it. I'm always thinking into it. I'm always saying, why do I resist you, why do I want sun, wind, and weather to break you up and push you on? Meanwhile, the thick pool of cold hovers just above the ground, ghosty, indifferent.

That moment:

Only Half There

I've been writing about the eighties for the first time ever, and I can't even say you how glad I'll be to be out of the eighties. I'm closing in on a finished draft of the first part of this new nonfiction book. Once I reach the end, the book leaps ahead to the present after a floating, lyric section. Why didn't I ever write about the eighties before? In memory, it's a road giving out. I'm only half there, which is close to the heart of what I'm writing about. I need to get into the woods beyond that road, if that makes one bit of sense. The plan is to finish Part I this weekend, which is a long way of saying that that's my life right now, though we did have a lovely visit with Kathy Graber yesterday and another with Michael Carter today. And yes, there was the Wilde Boys last night, where Mark answered questions about James L. White and "The Unwriteable." And this afternoon? Running--well, walking fast, very fast--down to school to turn in the midterm grades and hour and a half after I was supposed to. So, yes, a lot going on, both inner and outer. No surprise I am that road giving out tonight, and practically forgetting the reason for this post: a piece about Michael Cunningham from today's Washington Post, in which I say a few things on the second page.


Mark and I looking at--what?--at Tom Healy's last night.

In Front of Me, Ahead of Me

I had a happy, sweet Friday and Saturday at the fourth annual Philadelphia Stories conference at Rosemont College, where I was keynote speaker. Here's a short interview about the event, and a longer one by Jessica Jeffers from the current issue of Philadelphia Stories.

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Jessica Jeffers: Your website says only that The Burning House is "a novel about the complexities of longing and desire." What else can you tell us about the story?

Paul Lisicky: The story is about a man whose life unravels once his sister-in-law moves in. She evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife, and he’s a wreck about it, because he doesn’t want to tear up his settled life, doesn’t want to hurt his wife. On another level, the story is about the relationship between home and community life; the community where the story takes place is undergoing redevelopment, houses torn down right and left, houses turned into commodities. How does all that affect the life at home?

JJ: From where do you draw inspiration?

PL: The moment in front of me, the moment ahead of me, the wish to transform that moment into something felt, active, remembered.

JJ: As the keynote speaker for Push to Publish, you will be sharing advice and wisdom with aspiring writers. What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever received?

PL: I spent years writing what I thought I should write, what I imagined to be publishable. Things changed once I was given permission to write what (and how) I needed to write. I think that’s when my real writing began.

JJ: What made you want to write a memoir? How did you approach this project differently than your fiction?

PL: I didn’t want to do another version of the novel I’d just written, and the shift in voice and stance helped me to access aspects of my character I’d never put on the page before. I don’t mean to be disingenuous, but it didn’t feel so much like a decision. I just happened to be writing an essay for fun one day, a piece about my childhood next door neighbor, who happened to be both an avatar of style and a bit of a nutbasket, and the voice that came out sounded looser than anything I’d done before.

JJ: How much do your novels reflect your real life?

PL: I’d say they’re emotionally autobiographical but they’re not literally autobiographical. The feelings are certainly real, but not the facts.

JJ: You are releasing a collection called Unbuilt Projects. Given the similarity in titles, is there any connection to Famous Builder? What binds the pieces together into a unit?

PL: The thread of building and community planning certainly binds all my books. And I deliberately wanted Unbuilt Projects to talk back to Famous Builder. Famous Builder is my attempt to locate my family in time, to think about how a certain historical moment informed how we thought about identity, memory, social aspiration, art. Unbuilt Projects, on the other hand, deconstructs the family narrative. My mother developed senile dementia in the last years of her life, and once she lost the major signposts of her memory, the whole family story seemed to go down with it. We didn’t know that her allegiance to story was in fact holding us together, and once her mind went, who were we?

Oh, The Renters!

I don't how you could go back into the house you once loved and not feel bewildered, stirred up, invaded. Oh, the renters! What is it about seeing that lamp brought to the living room, rubber car mats used as welcome mats? It is part of the contract, we all know that: what you love is not necessarily what someone else wants or gets. The world, more often than not, is hard and indifferent. It would be much better to sell the place you've been trying to sell for as long as you lived in it, but the gods of economy seem to have a different plan in mind. In a little while, after putting that candlestick on that table, those birch logs beside the fireplace, the house of weight seemed to lift a little off the pilings. I threw out someone's moldy flip flops, put away some broken flower pots. Ned seemed to be happy on the island that could have been his, and found it especially amusing that the punch they'd left behind wasn't just Powerade but something a hell of a lot harder.

Second Love (Or: On Trespasses)

I was asked by the editors of Story Quarterly to write an introduction to my friend Denise Gess's story, Trespasses, as they're re-publishing it in the next issue. So I thought I'd preview it here in the hopes that you'll buy, or at the very least, look for and read the issue when it comes out soon.

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A writer works on a novel for years. She wakes up with it, she goes to bed with it. She loves it like a person, tenderly, even if that person is recalcitrant, a bit of a shithead, with ideas of his own of where he'd like to go. The writer gives up so much to tend to this person. He won't answer her phone calls when she needs him, won't bring her a cup of green tea when she has strep throat. But he'll be there when she has seventeen comp essays to grade that night. Or he'll sit beside her on her bed twenty minutes before her family's about to come across the river for a holiday dinner. She's grateful for those times, though. Her life has meaning in those times, all of her wanting alchemized into order, drama, logic, beauty.

Not that those times are enough. The novel must be shared, as a holiday dinner must be shared: simple as that. It's not alive if it ends up on a hard drive on some outdated computer in the back of a garage. But the sharing part is hard. What if she's done everything she could to make that sharing happen? She's written a good book, of course. And all the editors like it but never enough to buy it. Well, what do you do but blame yourself and decide to write the damn thing all over again? Over and over and over again, and even give it a different name: Second Love. But how do you write it over again when your head is already onto the next thing, and new things are tugging at your coat, not the least of which is a terminal illness, which must be taken care of with all the tenderness of a novel.

This is the story of Denise Gess's third novel, Trespasses, a lovely book that should have found its way into the world while she was alive, but didn't because of external reasons: bad timing, a distracted agent, a greedy publishing industry. This is what we have of it: the opening chapter, originally published in the North American Review back in 1990. In these pages we meet Rosalie Rucci, who's content with Lenny, her husband of many years, who has a secret life, a life that will undo the orderly, comfortable retirement they've been working toward. So much happens in these pages: we see Rosalie's dedication to routine, we see Rosalie's shock, and then the heat of confrontation, where Rosalie probably learns that she has more ferocity and commitment than she knew.

One thing that shines here is Denise's refusal to categorize these characters. I think a less generous writer would be prone to patronizing Lenny and Rosalie, to seeing them through some restricting blue collar lens, as if their struggles would somehow be related to the fact that they didn't have much money, that they weren't educated at Princeton, and didn't spend their summers on Nantucket or The Vineyard. Denise writes about these characters as John Cheever would write about his own, with elegance, detachment, and a little wit. They might as well be from Greenwich not Somerdale, New Jersey, and in doing that, she does a political thing, but doesn't a wave a sign about it. She makes it all look easy: the language, the confrontation, the unexpected urge toward possibility. She writes with the grace of a singer who's sure of her phrasing and never needs to push too hard.

Great Days

I think Donald Barthelme called them Great Days.

For me, a Great Day is a day in which I can write, in which I can get some correspondence done. It's a day I can spend with a good friend; it's a day I can go somewhere, somewhere beautiful, but not beautiful in the expected ways, and talk. Talk and think, be silent and silly, and look. It helps if the weather is good. It helps if one comes upon strange things: a bonfire within sight of a ruin, a view of a metropolis across acres of burnished dunes. Yesterday was one of those Great Days, a day in which all the dumb things we do to distract ourselves from death fell away. And if death was hanging around the edges of things, it was only because we were more present than usual, present in our skin, present in our looking, and we could tell ourselves, at least for a little bit, that money, jobs, recommendations, tenure committee requests, unanswered emails, dentist appointments, doctors appointments--all of that was very, very, very far away.

Where's Paul?

In his five months of dog life, Ned has already been to Nantucket, Asbury Park, Ocean City, Baltimore. He has travelled on four separate ferries. He has stayed in two different inns, an urban hotel and a resort motel. He has stayed in my childhood summerhouse; he has been walked at the service area--the Walt Whitman Service Area--down the turnpike from where I grew up in Cherry Hill. He has been a dog beach, several dog parks, and two dog runs in Manhattan, Union Square and Washington Square. He has been to the Hudson River Park, where he was scolded by a ranger for rolling on the grass after chewing the heel of a very expensive shoe. He has had some babysitters. All this in addition to going back and forth regularly by car between Manhattan and the East End of Long Island. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? This is best summed up in Ned's complicated response to bags being packed. He wants to go along; he wants to stay. And is that any different from the rest of us? It is our condition, or the condition of those who need to move around in order to pay the bills. But at least he knows what home is--or what one aspect of home is. Mark routinely uses the hands-free phone device in the car, so when we're talking, my voice broadcasts through the car speakers. And every time I talk to Ned, every time I say, good boy, his face apparently changes; his spine straightens. He looks attentively at the dashboard and wonders where I am.

Starmaker Machinery

In between writing and prepping to teach, I've been enjoying Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, which has been out for almost a week now. Among other things, the novel is especially good when it comes to depicting the New York of the current moment, the New York of diminishing expectations, the New York of stores, restaurants, and galleries closing down overnight. At the same time it's also an engrossing take on the starmaker machinery of the art world, as you can tell from the following passage.

from By Nightfall
Michael Cunningham

Peter is still amazed to the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellwegger--moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if there ever was one--was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception--the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness--but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renee Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and sculptures are about, it seems, to become not just intriguing and amusing but significant.

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(Two photos, which have nothing to do with the matter at hand, at least as far as I can see, but I wanted to put them up.
Top: The Hideaway in Montauk Saturday night.
Below: Ned on the Atlantic Avenue beach in Amagansett on Sunday.)