Due to a combination of school responsibilities and some possibly ill-timed structural blog shenanigans, I am quiet. I will be, for a short while, quiet.
If you have something to say about You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon, by all means, leave your thoughts in the comments. Anything that appears before 1pm Eastern Time may make its way into my paper, due Tuesday night.
Last night was Readings in Contemporary Fiction. This is my favorite grad school class, because we get to read new(ish) books and then talk about them as writers. Our professor* treats us like we're smart people who are thoughtful about reading and writing, and it's kind of the idyll of grad school that I'd imagined.
One thing we have to do for the class is take careful notes about the structure of what we're reading and, for three books, write really short papers about that structure and how we might apply it to our own writing. I had no idea how hard this would be. I find myself thinking about theme and character and language when I'm supposed to be outlining flashbacks and plot and pacing. My trouble is I fall in love with this story thing. Is it that unpacking structure feels like pulling back the curtain and seeing that Oz is just a dumpy guy with a big machine? I don't think I'm afraid to figure out how things work, but I found it really hard to write 6 compelling pages about structure (6 pages! that's nothing!).
Maybe you could have the same structure for two completely different books and end up with one being wonderful and the other simply garbage. Maybe that's my problem.
Eh, whatever. Gotta get over it. Another paper is due next week. And anyway, I love the class to pieces. It really makes grad school worthwhile.
* The professor is novelist Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter.
When I was a not-writer, just a kid with a bad attitude, OK hair and a baggy t-shirt, I hung out with a bunch of writers. Poets, mostly. They lived in a historic victorian house that they treated with as little care as possible. They slept on grimy futons on the floor. They ate off paper plates to avoid doing dishes. Hot sauce was a major food group.
The main decoration in the house were flags, long colored nylon flags that hung from the ceiling and reached almost to the ground, creating false, beautifully transluscent walls. The flags were faded and dusty. They had hung from lightpoles during the Olympics. I never could tell if they had been rescued from the garbage or stolen right off the poles. I loved sitting in rooms with them. Sometimes tho you'd get positioned under one and it would be a drag, you'd brush it aside fruitelessly until, in frustration, you tied it up in a knot, or stuffed it behind a door, and then it would be all crumply wrinkled the next time you came over.
At parties the guys, the poet-writers, they'd drink a lot or do drugs, whatever was around, and eventually someone would reach for a blank notebook. They called the first one a Trip Book and after it was filled up there were more Trip Books, each one passed from hand to hand at parties. A conversation would be bursting all around but for one bent head, someone intent on a drawing or a poem or a nasty commentary they were scrawling in the Trip Book.
Every time a Trip Book was passed to me I froze up. I never knew what to write. I wanted to narrate what was happening, which wasn't creative on the level of drawing 6-headed bats with split penises (penii?) or a 10-page poem that used bubblegum as a motif. I'd gamely jot down a crummy poem of my own, or sketch something I saw, or draw a little maze -- as a 13-year old, I'd drawn elaborate mazes that were published in the local paper -- but it wasn't anything serious. I was just trying to make a mark and pass the book along. Because to me, a blank book making the rounds at a party wasn't going to capture anything true.
Most of the Trip Books are gone. Most of what filled them was crap. But I tell you, in an MFA workshop, you can be forced to do exercises less interesting, with more empty results, than those spacey-bullshit Trip Books. This week, for the first time, I was surprised to find myself missing them.
Last night the ritual of having first-year MFA students read our work in public began, and I wouldn't consider it hazing but for the loud Steelers fans on the floor above.
That's Julie Granum at the mic. She's a fine poet.
April Line, who is very funny, read a serious story about being a single mom. Adri Ramirez, who is also very funny, read a funny story about being a brick house (that's me trying to be funny. It was more involved than that).
Nonfictioneers Helen Gerhardt and Mark Kramer deftly handled weighty issues (don't ask/don't tell and identity in the Balkans, respectively). But nonfiction isn't always serious, as Dan McMillan proved with his story of getting a ride from Jehova's Witnesses.
I'm up next week. Come on down to the Fuel & Fuddle basement Thursday if you dare.
When I went to the first class of my MFA degree I was surprised to find that the professor spent a lot of time focusing on Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who established the Order of the Interbeing. This is not a joke, not a funny. It is simply poignant Interbeing.
(people who've met me and plied me with liquor have heard my "poignant" harangue)
So you might say I was a bit taken aback. My writing workshop is a buddhist haven. We have three -- or is it four? -- meditation periods per workshop. We will meditate a lot. We will meditate to a bell.
Taken aback, I was, as I said. Rattled. Had drinks with students after. Some left early, others needed rides. So I offered. Driving home, we were talking about a whole lot of nothing, really, because this buddhist thing might work out. As skeptical as I sound, I withhold judgement; I think inside the jargon is quite a lot of truth. And then, apparently, I said,
"Oh my god..."
And then the minivan smashed into us as we were sitting there at the red light.
The two passengers, they said they were OK. The bumper is in shreds, the left taillight dead dead dead, and quite honestly my neck is a bit stiff. I have numbers in my pocket and will deal with things tomorrow.
For tonight, just picture it, me running to the back of his car in the storm to see his license plate, vaguely wondering what he's doing with those two lanky little daughters out at 11:30pm, rain splat splat on the black asphalt and the tremor of regret shimmering all around.
There is, sure, more to the story. Will students be mallebeable and meditate? Will the driver of the smashmobile pay up? Will I be able to sit up tomorrow without terrible pain -- and will my passengers?
Tune in tomorrrow(ish), my friends.
Just got the reading list for the contemporary fiction class I'm taking in the fall. I've only read one (Life of Pi) and of the other authors, I've only read Tim O'Brien and Proulx's New Yorker stories. I think I'm excited. I'm getting started as soon as Powell's delivers them to my damp doorstep. (It's raining; it rains a lot in Pittsburgh).
Susan Perabo, Who I Was Supposed to Be
Dan Chaon, Among the Missing
George Saunders, Pastoralia
Annie Proulx, Close Range
Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me
Stuart Dybek, I Sailed with Magellan
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Yann Martel, Life of Pi or Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy
Francine Prose, Blue Angel
This is my favorite photo from the roadtrip to Pittsburgh. The sunset behind me was so spectacular that I had to pull out the camera while driving a 17-foot U-Haul at 75mph. The pic may not have truly captured the sunset, but it does pretty fairly represent the U-Haul. Some more pics are here.
When I arrived in Pittsburgh, after several, painful days without net access (at one point interrupted by a stint on the floor of a truck stop's video game room -- swank) I found that the head of the program I'll be starting in the fall had e-mailed everyone and told us to start talking to each other. We range from a girl just out of undergrad to a guy who's lived both out of his car and at an ashram. Cool.
I signed a lease today on an apartment that has a lovely attic that's wide open with lots of light. Do I sleep there or write there? Or both?
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