The Hotel Could Have a Better Billboard

So the dream speech/sleep walking incident in the restaurant--

Elizabeth wrote out everything I said and passed it along. (See previous post if this isn't making sense.) It is a relief, I guess, that nothing soul-garbaging came out of my mouth. But it seems to me that I could have been a little wickeder, more subterranean, more image-centered. So much for the uncensored mind broken open by exhaustion. I take no responsibility for the dotty individual who said these things!

I saw that play. The one about the difficulties of getting into Catholic School.

No, I didn't read his last book. Oh. Oh. [------]? I did read [------]. But he has a travel book. He's always banging out travel books.

It's hard to find a place in Cherry Hill where the washer-dryer hook up is turned the right way. I think the hotel could have a better billboard. The hotel could have a better billboard.

Americans aren't interested in semantic names for things. Oh, I think I'm drifting off again...

I don't think [P------] approves of [wild beautiful] rambunctious children. [------- --------]. Nix's boyfriend. What am I saying? Nix? Who's Nix?

I am back home after having arrived at the Austin Airport at the beautiful hour of 5:30 AM. In addition to the images above, mostly I will remember this trip by the sound of laughter: Elizabeth, Edward, Gus, Matilda, and I making each other crack up.

Heat and Brightness

A 3:45 AM start to the day if I'm not counting the reflexive, once-every-hour time checks. It's hard not to be wary of the early morning clarity, as I have to give a reading later tonight, and I don't want the storehouse to deplete itself. I'm on the way to Austin right now, high up above Kentucky, where the plane I'm on has all of thirty people on board, and, for whatever reason, no gd snack boxes left--thank you Continental Airlines. But the good thing is that I'll be met at the airport by my dear Elizabeth McCracken in just a few hours now. Heat and brightness are just starting to seem real. First there is work to do: a visit to Elizabeth's memoir class this afternoon, then a reading at UT Austin tonight. (Here's a smart profile by Madeleine Crum.) And then the fun: hanging out with Elizabeth's husband, Edward, their son, Gus, whom I haven't seen since he was all of a year or so old, and his sister Matilda, whom I haven't yet met. And maybe, if there's time, bats and bars and music. But before any more about Austin, I wanted to pass on these final pictures of last week's stay in Provincetown before they passed completely out of memory and beyond. These are for Elizabeth, who knows these sights as well as I.

[The above, I should say, was written yesterday. I meant to post it last night, but was so tired at dinner, after the reading, which turned out to be a huge pleasure, that I apparently started speaking gibberish--dream speech, Elizabeth called it. And I'd only had one glass of wine! More about that soon.]

Trailer

My standard line of the week has been: I got more writing done in the past five days than I did during my first Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. Which is not exactly true, but almost. Back when I was a Fellow I could barely sit still. A book, a boyfriend, a life--I wanted so much I spent half my first seven months walking up and down the street, looking for and not getting much of anything. That might have something to do with the fact that Evan does so much walking in Lawnboy, which had its origins back then, in the second floor of the steel-blue cape on Fishburn Court.

It's a cliche to say it, but time is cherished when you've been around for a while, and that might have something to do with the fact that I'm better at balancing my desk time and taking-a-break time. I have gotten to be out-and-about, and on one of those out-and-abouts, I went to the Beech Forest for a walk. I hadn't been to the Beech Forest in nine years, not since our late dog, Arden, went on one of his last walks there. I walked up the bike path, turned off, trudged up the hill through the tunnel of pines. It got it in me to do the "book trailer" I've talked about making for weeks, something home-made and spontaneous: the opening sentences of The Burning House. I did one version and then another. In one the wind blasted away my words. In another my voice went shaky as I tried not to slip on the ice. One version took me out onto the pond, and who knew whether the surface would give way beneath me? By the time I was on version six, I was high up on a dune within sight of the National Seashore Visitor Center, Race Point Light, and the wild, wide sea. The trees were twisted. My hands were frozen, and there were no fresh shoe marks on the sand beneath my boots. It was getting dark. I thought of whales out there, though I couldn't possibly see them.

After a half hour I did make it back to the parking lot, just as the streetlight went on, and wouldn't you know I didn't use any of those videos, but a video I made the next day, on the Hatches Harbor fire road. A friendlier, flat road, also bordered by pines, but closer to the landscape of the book, even though there's still some crusts of snow on the ground. (The book, I should say, is a spring and summer book, but we can be figurative about all that.) Just one take, and that's what you'll see if you care to look at the video posted in the column to your right.

Head to Tail (Or: New York vs. Seattle)

Maybe some of you saw Bob Morris's piece about dogs and beds in yesterday's New York Times, which came with a photo of Ned, Mark, and me. The biggest surprise is that the Seattle Times ran another version of that same article today, with a completely different photo. It is so tempting to make broad observations about West Coast vs. East Coast, New York vs. Seattle style based on the choice of photos. But I am curious as to what you think. Photo decisions were likely made in ten seconds or less but they are not unimportant decisions. Honestly, I prefer the Seattle photo, but that doesn't mean that I don't think of myself as aligned with New York, as someone with an East Coast sensibility. It is all too confusing. Which might have something to do with the fact that Ned was apparently more riled up on the sidewalk than usual this morning. I talked to him through speaker phone, as I walked into Provincetown's Land's End Hardware to buy a pair of black thermal socks and a yellow legal pad, and soon enough he stopped barking at all the dogs who weren't allowed to play with him. To be a young dog and to intuit so many projections, interpretations, onto him. And yet how his body relaxes, head to tail, once he hears the ticking of the camera.

The New York Times photo:


The Seattle Times photo:

The Top of the Town

It's a bit like being on the receiving end of a magic trick: I'm walking down Bradford Street, in Provincetown, at ten o'clock on a deep February night to Tedeschi. At Tedeschi, I will buy an apple, two packs of sugarless gum, some Powerade, the latest issue of The Banner. I will walk back home. The town will be so quiet that I'll hear nothing but the sound of my boots on the sandy pavement. Maybe some geese will be calling out on the Harbor. Someone will walk by, but we won't even look in each other's direction, or say hello. It might be someone I know, but that doesn't matter. It's just not done. It is winter, we've been inside all day writing, or something. We've been by ourselves, with our thoughts, and our wires are too exposed.

This isn't a magic trick. And I'm not actually writing about my first winter in Provincetown back in the early 90s, though it feels like that sometimes. I'm here for the week as part of the Fine Arts Work Center's Returning Residency program, tweaking my new book, adding a passage here and there--also working on some short prose pieces, which I haven't written in close to two years. Of all the places I'd lived in Provincetown--I'm counting four in addition to the house Mark and I shared for ten years--this might be my favorite place to work. Why? I'm at the top of the town, quite literally, on the third floor of the Brewster Street compound, with a view of roofs, and the Harbor beyond. To have a view, in Provincetown--unthinkable. It's staggering to wake up to the sight of the wharf, the library steeple, the breakwater out the bedroom window. And when it's clear, I can actually see all the way across to what? Plymouth? White Horse Beach? The mainland. Sunglasses are needed because it's that bright, even inside the house.

Great Forests Fell Like Buffalo

It is akin to finding a beautiful wood floor beneath a pasture of bright orange carpet. That bright orange carpet probably looked amazing in its day until it didn't. I'm talking about coming upon these bare-bones, acoustic performances of Joni Mitchell's "The Three Great Stimulants" and "Dog Eat Dog," which I've been listening to all week. These come from 1985's Dog Eat Dog. I'd always thought this period marked a wrong turn in the life of her music. Wrong turns are to be expected, I suppose, when you're restless and hungry for new, when you don't want to rely on your old patterns--listen to what Joy Williams says about a writer's style being his doppelganger below. But this turn always struck me as more disappointing than the usual wrong turn, if only because it seemed to mark a point when the music seemed less self-attuned when she'd always struck me as being rigorously, strictly self-attuned. Too many hands were in the recorded performance--she, for one, has talked about the frustration of working with Thomas Dolby, who was given producer's credit for the album. The recorded performances seemed to have escaped her, and not in the good way. They held a wet finger out to the wind to feel what was out there, what was next, when the music had always been too confident for that kind of thing. They were heavy on the electronics, puzzling given the songs' anxieties about nuclear power and environmental waste. The gestures seemed too broad, without much of the nuance or texture we'd heard in Hejira or For the Roses or Don Juan's Reckless Daughter or even Wild Things Run Fast, which had just preceded it.

Or so I thought.

It is humbling to hear what might be the original versions of these songs. She is back. You can hear the commitment in her voice, you can hear vocal turns and music patterns that are entirely hers. Yes, she is probably chewing gum, and yes, she is a little pissed at the talkers in the audience ("you can't hear if you're not listening"--or something like that.) But this is music, hers and beyond hers all at once.

A Fugitive in His Cabin, His Cave

I'm sure I must have talked about Joy Williams' "Why I Write" more than once here, but I can't help bringing it up again, especially now that there's a podcast of her reading the full text at last year's Tin House Summer Conference. She sounds incredibly present here, and at some point along the way, ideas transmute into something else. Music is the only word I can think of.

An excerpt:

The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is – what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be reckless and patient and daring and dull – for what is duller than writing, trying to write? And he must never care – caring spoils everything. It compromises the work. It shows the writers’ hand.

The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.

The writer doesn’t trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn’t trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes – it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow.

The Other Place

Every once in a while, I come across a story or poem that I'm so enthralled by that I can't help but read pieces of it aloud. Such is the case with Mary Gaitskill's new story, "The Other Place," which runs in the current New Yorker. Before doing such a thing, I read it on my phone, something I'd never done with a longer story before. The link came in through Twitter, and there I was in the restaurant, scrolling, scrolling down, my face fixed to the phone's face. I don't think I lifted my face once during the whole meal, and when I did, the restaurant before me looked blurry and slightly skewed. It smelled of seaweed, not in a bad way (this was a Japanese restaurant) but in a sweet, salty, pungent way. The bowls were empty on the table, the chopsticks in the far right corner. I felt simultaneously exhausted and very awake.

This is the passage I read aloud to Mark when I walked back to the apartment:

When I was a kid, I liked walking through neighborhoods alone, looking at houses, seeing what people did to make them homes: the gardens, the statuary, the potted plants, the wind chimes. Late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I would sometimes slip out my bedroom window and just spend an hour or so walking around. I loved it, especially in late spring, when it was starting to be warm and there were night sounds—crickets, birds, the whirring of bats, the occasional whooshing car, some lonely person’s TV. I loved the mysterious darkness of the trees, the way they moved against the sky if there was wind—big and heavy movements, but delicate, too, in all the subtle, reactive leaves. In that soft, blurry weather, people slept with their windows open; it was a small town and they weren’t afraid....

Instantly he said, that sounds like you. In retrospect I suppose I could say, uh-oh, narcissism confirmed. But at the moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone could have ever said to me--at that moment. I felt very peaceful and quiet within myself, and I didn't move.

Anyway, I woke up this morning to read Deborah Triesman's Book Bench interview with MG about the story. I think it says some of the smartest things I've ever read about the mystery of human emotions--feeling vs. nonfeeling, the darknesses we all hold inside us. I read this passage aloud to Mark:

Part of what I loved about the HBO series “The Wire” was the way the characters embodied qualities of power and vulnerability, feeling and total non-feeling, between people and within each person, and showed how feeling can clash with the practical demands of where you are in life. These polarities are perhaps the most dramatic thing at the root of human life, the most anguishing, poignant, and occasionally beautiful. Sometimes, frightening. Especially the question of feeling and non-feeling. No matter how big or small the life is, by whatever social standard, how these dualities play out, run up against each other, run together, or reverse themselves is always a story. “The Wire” had a scene that just killed me, where a middle-aged security guard foolishly stands up to a young psychopath named Marlo, not knowing what he’s dealing with, trying to reach Marlo, who has no heart, on a heart level, to assert his self-respect and his sense of the world as a decent place. Marlo ends the conversation saying, “You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.” Marlo’s muscle arrives and he walks off, and we realize that the guard is going to be murdered for this small, noble act, leaving behind a wife and child. It’s a futile, terrible loss—in a way, plain stupid. We feel the helpless quality of that kind of big heart, but we also feel the strength of the gesture.

It's astonishing to read such emotional intelligence so clearly articulated, plain and accessible, alert, available. I don't often use the word "astonished," as it's been overused and emptied, but I have no qualms about using it here. I'll be thinking of this passage, in so many different contexts, from the here on out.

Needless to say, this time Mark didn't say that that sounded like me.

Red Cravat, First League, Sweet Hours

This past Sunday, the morning after AWP, my brother Michael picked me up at my hotel, and we drove north to Columbia, Maryland. It seemed strange that I'd never been to Columbia, Maryland, given my early interest in planned cities and the fact that I'd once pored over the map of the place for hours and hours, mesmerized by its nutty street names, sections named for the images in Dickinson's poems, images in Amy Lowell, Tolkien, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frost, etc. (Red Cravat, First League, Sweet Hours Way.) I was too wiped out from the conference to expect much of anything, but once we turned left into The Birches, with its lake and its woodsided, modernist houses, my early desire to build cities of my own rose up in me. How had I become what I'd become? I couldn't speak for a minute, literally. Then we drove on to the supermarket, and it was just another American suburban supermarket, the people in the aisles no different from the people you'd see on the outskirts of any other city. So much for James Rouse's plan to eliminate racial, religious, and income segregation (sigh). It was a relief that I didn't have to think for one minute about cutting down trees, or displacing any deer, or dirtying any ponds or streams or wells. We got back in the car. We went on to Baltimore, where I got on the train, and I was fast asleep before we'd ever crossed the first branch of the Chesapeake.

Outward, Inward

A few people asked to see the text of what I read at the Representing the Erotic in Literary Fiction panel (see AWP-Land post below), so here goes. I think of this as in-progress work, but I'm passing it along anyway. The bracketed sections are the sections I omitted from my presentation for the sake of time.

(Photos: Above, Red Line Metro Station; Below, From My Hotel Room Window, Saturday Night)

1 Sometime in the early nineties, I have a revelation. I can write about sex--and certainly the book I’m writing can’t be afraid of sex--if I put the characters who don't talk about sex up front. In that way the reader will be a friend to me by the time I do talk about sex. She won’t think I’m a pervert and put the book down before she’s even gotten to those sweet scenes a third of the way through.

[2 Or worse than a pervert: a writer whose work isn’t serious. A writer whose book is carted to the dullest aisle of the superstore, if there at all, where the covers are more corny than transgressive-- a college boy’s bare butt, egads. To be lost back there with with the kinds of books I’d never pick up. Back then, if I wanted something truly filthy, I was going to buy a magazine with pictures in it. I’d look at a movie, not some book.]

3 So I write and I write the other voices, the older brother of the teenage boy, the voice of the older brother’s girlfriend. I am pretty good at sounding like the people I’m supposed to sound like---the literary voices of the hour. The same contours, the same scene endings, the same clutch of images, the same voices, blunted of too much expression. But I am bored out of my skull when I try to sound like x and x. It takes a lot of energy and persistence not to write about sex, but I keep at it like that, day after day, with my pick and my shovel for close to four years. When people ask me what I’m writing, I say I’m writing about The Predicament of Desire in the 1990s, and inevitably they look at me with both sorrow and a little embarrassment, as if I’ve said a most tragic, pathetic thing.

4 Screw it, Enough. On Day 30 of my residency at The Artist Colony, I’ve had had enough. I’m tired of walking past the vacant racetrack, tired of driving to Rite Aid to buy more gum. I throw out 400 pages and throwing out 400 pages never felt so good. I’m giving the book over to the character I’ve been afraid of. I’m writing the book I need to write, where the sex isn’t subordinate to the main drama, a tasteful ellipsis, an excuse for us to turn our backs and clear our throats. Where sex is a stage of vulnerability and awe, where the shifting nature of power is enacted and contained. A place where people slip the skin of personality and became something different, and are confused and energized by that something else, whatever it is. What is he, larger, smaller, without those old traits: name, street address, the hole in the hem of his sweater? Is he still on earth? Who is the person who might say, in the moments after sex, hard sex, something like “how I wanted to lift the bowl in his moment of peace and kill him,” and not even know what such a thing might mean. I don’t even want to know what that means, but I want to write a character who’s able to say such things, if it feels true to consciousness, his consciousness.

5 As for the problem of giving the book over to this character? It’s literally the last days of a world without an internet, though most of us don’t know that yet. So many lives unrepresented, unspoken. Not to mention so many lives disappearing from some lethal disease. What are my responsibilities? Years later, I’ll feel brash and irreverent when I suggest something like, the writer has no responsibilities to anyone or anything, except to writing itself, but it doesn’t feel like that back then. My book needs to say: a gay person kept on in spite of the fact that all his potential lovers and friends were dying. But how does one write such a thing without inadvertently writing a character who’s seen as a representative character? How can a character be both representative and be allowed to have a mind that’s anarchic, uncertain, scared, and angry, angry enough to cut into himself or convert that anger into raw need. Two impulses in collision--his outward self, his inward self--and I don’t know how to keep them in the same room without a murder.

6 And back to the old question, how to keep the reader from putting the book down. This book, this book which must also speak to straight women, gay women, straight men-- oh, these tired terms. What I mean to say is the kind of reader who wouldn’t usually come to such a book, with a character who thinks and talks like that.

7 We do our best; that’s as much as we can do. The Book, The Writer, The Character. We speak every sentence, before we go on to the next. We stand apart from each sentence and listen; we hold it up and out for our consideration. It seems less important that each sentence be true to his speech pattern than to be true to how he perceives. His soul voice, I’ll call it. Or the Undervoice, as Jean Valentine might call it. And thus, we’ll have made a space for all the things that those readers might not otherwise want to hear about, know about.

[8 A novel about AIDS in which none of the characters die of AIDS.]

[9 Though there are readers who put the book down, who might still put the book down, for reasons other than the story, the language, the craft stuff, I am lucky enough to be spared those reactions. For the most part.]

[10 To be tested in fire, as they say. To imagine the face of that reader whose mouth might turn down, tighten, then lift into a straight crease. And I’m not talking about some fundamentalist Christian face, but someone who thinks of himself as enlightened, progressive, and urbane--all the traits many of us would like to think we are.]

11 Ten years after the first book I am writing THE BURNING HOUSE, another book about sex and desire. I don’t want to write that other book all over again, don’t simply want to substitute a different name for Evan’s name, a different place for Southern Florida, beech trees for palm trees--any of that. This narrator of this book is older than that other narrator, he’s well into this thirties. It doesn’t take long to find out that the narrator isn’t drawn to other men, but to women, which seems like the ultimate taboo to me--am I allowed to write this story? The gay actor playing the straight lead. I’m not sure if people will let me. But the strange taboo of writing such a voice ends up feeding the work. Who is this person who talks about women’s bodies, who stays up half the night, dreaming of a women’s body that isn’t his wife’s body, but his sister-in-laws? I don’t know what I’m doing writing such things, but I do know that it makes me feel unexpectedly thrilled when I’m inside the dark dream of it.

Writing!

12 Though it feels like taboo to me, I also know that certain safeguards are off. By which I mean that I can write about a particular heterosexual man without feeling the burden and pressure of writing about all heterosexual men. I could not have planned that. And as such, I might be more deeply inside this character’s mind and voice than before. This time I’m not holding up each sentence for consideration. And I’m not always listening to how he speaks each word.

13 Is that to say it is easier to write about a straight man’s sexual experience, than a gay man’s or a woman’s. No, that is too simple. And yet we do have a tradition of men who have written explicitly about sex, without apparent cost: Roth, Brodkey, Updike, and the list goes on.

14 Maybe we are clearer in 2012 than we were in the 1990s. Maybe we can write anything now and expect to be met with distance and maturity. Then I think of the student who lost it in class when we talked about “The Girl on the Plane” last year. Whose agitation was so real that she couldn’t even talk specifically about why the story didn’t work for her, other than the fact that she couldn’t stand Mary Gaitskill, the person, the author. No. To think we’re more worldly today than we were just a few years ago. No.

15 Rage boils over when a book blogger accuses novelists under 40 of minimizing sex in their work. The reaction on Twitter is indignant, instantaneous. What is this woman trying to say? cry any number of my friends, as if the finger has been shaken at them. I don’t like the curmudgeonly tone either, but it is possible that she is onto something. I know what she means: It is always preferable to hurry past human questions too troubling to see.

16 Long past the age of sex as transport or rebellion. Long past the initial years of the AIDS epidemic. The age of crystal meth, which seems like it’s long over, and then it’s not over at all, not by a long shot. Sex enmeshed with addiction, drug addiction--at least for some. It gets better, we tell our young people. It gets better. Well, for some. For others, not. You move to the city, you use the most personal parts of yourself to hit back at all that trauma, brutality, and erasure. You fuck your brains out. Then you have the problems that everyone else has--and where is that better that was promised you? So no wonder it’s hard not to hurry past sex in our writing. Zone of possibility, zone of danger, beauty, warmth, exploitation, comradeship, tenderness, bearing it, bored by it, pimping it, using it as a lure then tossing that lure away. Rubbing your face in it. Oh, human hunger, the aching song of it, which somehow refuses to stop, in spite of how we sing it, or not.

Shepherd

Just a few pictures of the VIDA reading at the Black Cat on Thursday night. Plus, the opening paragraphs of what I read, Joy Williams' incredible "Shepherd."

*****

It had been three weeks since the girl's German shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn't get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend's beach house and looked at the water.

It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

The girl's boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatches plates and glasses, several large oak beds, an assortment of green wicker furniture and an art deco ice bucket with its handles in the shape of penguins.

The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay. The house had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

The girl's boyfriend's last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He was in his mid-thirties. The girl realized she was no kid herself. She was five years younger than he was. Chester favored trousers with legs of different colors and wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. He wore them day and night like a blind man. Chester had a catamaran. He loved to cook. "It's just another way to cook eggs," he'd say as he produced staggeringly delicious blintzes on Sunday morning. Chester had a writing dentist who had serviced the Weathermen in college. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage on which he didn't owe a dime.

"You have fallen into the pie," the girl's friends told her.

Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. "I love you," he said, "let's get married." They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

The girl sat on the rusted glider with faded cushions and drank bourbon from a glass printed with orange suns and pink flamingos. She wore skimpy flowered shorts and a blank T-shirt. Tears ran down her face.

The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, "Do you love me?" he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

Tom Healy, reading Dara Weir

Terrance Hayes, reading Yona Harvey

Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin, the founders of VIDA

AWP-Land

I thought I'd have it in me to put actual paragraphs together, but I'll just say the quickest goodnight from AWP-land in D.C., where I'm pretty much sacked out in the hotel room, having chewed so much React gum--twenty-five sticks in a row--my jaw is exhausted. It's a relief to have made it here without too much of a fuss, given all the ice and snow and frozen slop. The biggest day tomorrow--a panel and two off-site readings--then another panel Friday afternoon, but just thought I'd pass along the descriptions of the events I'm a part of, in case you're here. If you see me wandering confused in the hallways, grab me and say hi--or point me in the right direction. And safe travels if you're still on the way.

Tomorrow: Pictures!

Thursday, Feb. 3, 1:30-2:45
R174. Representing the Erotic in Literary Fiction. (Varley O’Connor, Phillip Lopate, Michelle Latiolais, Carol Moldaw, Paul Lisicky) How do writers approach and render sex believably and inventively in a society of sexual saturation? Our panel of fiction writers will analyze sexuality in their work across cultures, generations, and in relation to disability. They will discuss the impact of sexual orientation on characterization and point of view; examine how desire may drive narrative and influence image and voice; and consider sex as a lens to evoke fresh perspectives on gender.

Thursday, Feb. 3, 7:30-10:30 PM
3 Dollar Bill (AWP Queer Reading)
Location: Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum, 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC
Cost: Free
Website: Here
Description: Join us for a night of rapid-fire readings by some of the LGBT community's most talented and dynamic writers. Thirty readers of poetry and prose will each read two minutes of their work: Francisco Aragón, Ilse Bendorf, Tamiko Beyer, Regie Cabico, Cynn Chadwick, Julie Enszer, Danielle Evennou, Gina Evers, Reginald Harris, Natalie E. Illum Charles Jensen, Saeed Jones, Eloise Klein Healy, Rickey Laurentiis, Paul Lisicky, Michael Montlack, Eileen Myles, Kristin Naca, Achy Obejas, Christa Orth, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Radclyffe, Douglas Ray, Jason Schneiderman, Joseph Shapiro, Ely Shipley, Justin Torres, Dan Vera, and V Wetlaufer. Sponsored by Arktoi Books, BLOOM Literary Journal, Human Rights Campaign, Knockout Literary Magazine, The Lambda Literary Foundation, A Midsummer Night’s Press, The Publishing Triangle, Sibling Rivalry Press/Assarcus Journal, Sinister Wisdom Literary Journal, White Crane Institute, and The Writer’s Center.

Thursday, 9:00 PM-12:00 AM
VIDA and the Men Who Love Us: Reading and Dance Party
Location: The Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW, Washington, DC
Cost: $10
Website: Here
Description: Support the work of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts! Sixteen fabulous male writers will read short selections by women writers they admire, followed by a dance party hosted by DJs Mark Bibbins and Adam Boles at the coolest spot in town.

Friday, Feb. 4, 3:00-4:15 PM
F195. Flinging the Ink Pot: Resisting Messages About Off-Limits Subjects in Memoir. (Jill Christman, Kate Hopper, Paul Lisicky, Joe Mackall, Sue William Silverman) This panel of memoirists will consider what happens when we write about subjects that are commonly lumped together and dismissed by the publishing industry. It seems we shouldn’t talk about abuse, addiction, or parenting of any stripe. Why are certain subjects seen as played out, clichéd, and sensational? We will consider whether we can avoid categorizing giant facets of human experience as literary no-nos, and find our way back to the serious writing of the stories we need to tell.

UPDATE: A Room with a View. Good morning.