"Husbands are combination animals."

I am back from AWP, with many books to read and talk about. But also I met a lot of great people, Laura Ellen Scott among them. I'm not sure if we literally high-fived -- I was sitting behind a table -- but we did strategize about getting you -- you -- to read Curio and spread the word about it. I would tell you the plan but it's happening to you right now. (I guess it's a pretty simple plan.)

Anyway, the new story, "Witch," is great and short and sweet.

Fabricants and Fabrication

From "An Orison of Sonmi~451" in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas:

An ascending fabricant absorbs language, thirstily, in spite of amnesiads. During my ascension, I was often shocked to hear new words fly from my own mouth, gleaned from consumers, Seer Rhee, AdV, and Papa Song himself. A dinery is not a hermetic world: every prison has jailers and walls. Jailers are ducts and walls conduct.

Just barely into this section, but I'm sort of thunderstruck by Mitchell's ability to enter into this voice after having followed him through a pious notary, a sarcastic composer, a spunky girl reporter (through the eyes, apparently, of a whack-job novelist), and a smarmy old publisher. There's nothing I love more in a fiction writer than a penchant for trying on different voices; I like range, and more than experimentation with form or language or genre I tend to find myself fully entranced when a writer can convincingly experiment with someone else's voice in place of their own.

There's an extent, of course, to which every voice a writer takes on is made his or her own, but this seems to fall back on the kind of essentializing that happens when people talk about writing as a medium that exists for writers--that writing is for voices, for being heard, for preserving one's words. And its related caveat: that therefore nobody can write like Joyce. Nobody can imitate Toni Morrison. Well, maybe not, but what a depressing view for contemporary writers to hold as they try to write something as lasting, as great. The old idea of a writer as half painfully humble, half disgustingly vain helps explain it--how gratifying to view ourselves as outclassed on the one hand and scrappy underdog champions on the other!--but I think I'm happier to imagine myself as an utter fabricator from the start. A dramatist. Sure, it's my voice, but I don't have to worry about being "true" to my voice if the only thing "me" about it is that it's coming out of my mouth. As I see it, writing fiction is pretty much about putting on a show anyway, and the results for me are more satisfying the less they sound like me. One time a judge for a fiction contest said he thought my story was written by a 40-year-old man, and I was like, Amazing, This is what I want to make people say for the rest of my life. I didn't know it was you.

Range as a writer isn't lauded so much in the academy, in my experience. I can see why--it's not like the semester structure really supports the study of an author's full range, or even their development over time. The object tends to be to get good as fast as possible, preferably without taking on extra years and extra debt. The short story collection or the novel-in-stories is usually as close as it gets, and these, in my experience, tend to be selected more for their unifying aspects (their discernible, and teachable, patterns of form, language, characterization) than for their broadness, variety, or range. There have been two counterexamples: The Wavering Knife, by Brian Evenson, and now Cloud Atlas. They are both great, and I feel like I learned more from them than from, say, a collection of William Trevor stories, which I now look back on and fail to discern. There was the one with the guy falling down the stairs; did that happen after the dinner date, or in the same book...?

Range also can pose readership problems, I'm told. People who loved you for your book where you wrote like an 18th-century pirate might have a harder time falling in love with your 1920s speakeasy operator or your go-go '90s businesswoman. And genre set entirely aside, maybe literary audiences got to know you for your quiet, penetrating stories of rural life and now you're throwing them a curveball with your novel about a young woman's struggle to survive in the big city. Same deep understanding, same keen penetration into the mysteries of character, perhaps, but those readers thought they knew you, thought they were getting to some heart of you, and the fact that the situations have changed has necessarily changed the way you write about them. They opened their hearts enough to perceive you as an individual with a spirit and not just the invisible force that guides the pen. Now they don't know what to think.

I'm inclined to think these are fake problems. It seems like musicians encounter them and survive all the time. If you are a big Sufjan Stevens fan, for example, and you don't like the new Sufjan Stevens albums with its differences in character, then you don't like that particular effort and probably you try again next time, and if he disappoints you again, well, you're not a Sufjan Stevens fan anymore. But you still liked those first few albums, and somebody else really liked those next two albums. It could potentially ruin a career, but it wouldn't ruin any particular effort retrospectively. But I do know enough people who honestly feel as if they're reading the effort of a particular soul when they're reading that I'm wary of saying that it doesn't matter at all, that it's a fake phenomenon, and that all you're ever in love with when you read is whatever's been put there on the page for you. I mean, I think it's self-evident that you're never really "getting to know" the author as a person, regardless of how their work makes you feel, or how much you read of it. But personalities can matter. Kurt Vonnegut as a person, not just a writer, has profoundly influenced Mike's life. I like to think William Goldman as a personality, at least, and not just a writer, has influenced mine.

But still I appreciate and admire range in an artist more than almost anything else. We have the opportunity to masquerade ourselves--convincingly--as almost anything, and I think that's thrilling. Why consistently pretend to be someone who is in fact very, very much like ourselves? Aren't there more entities, more personalities worth "getting to know," even in the very limited sense--the very limited kind of knowledge I suspect we as writers are able to provide?

Goodbye, AWP Pedagogy Forum

Mike tells me, and I kind of can't believe this isn't all over the Internet, that the moderator at his session this morning announced the official end of the AWP pedagogy forums. Seems like the official line on this is a little underdeveloped right now: they're saying it'll allow them to focus on more pedagogy-related panels. Which seems impossible, as the pedagogy forums currently subsist on volunteers (the moderators may get paid a little something--I can't imagine it's much) and take place in all of two hours and four rooms--so it's difficult to see how they'd be freeing up either money or conference time to dedicate to other forms of pedagogy discussion. It's difficult to imagine much of a motive, period, unless they just feel like the pedagogy forum is too insular, or lacks mass appeal, and that they could lure more registrations by having big names come to talk about pedagogy. Your guess is as good as mine, and I hope you'll share it, as I'm expecting either a brief statement on the website with no further explanation or no statement at all--just word of mouth.

Again, knowing so little about AWP's motives and plans for pedagogy makes it hard to say too much at this point, or to get up in arms and super-righteous about it. Pedagogy is good for AWP, though, I'll say that much--while they're always clearly trying to market the conference to writers outside the university, there's no denying that writers who also teach or who someday desire to teach or who are currently being taught are the main AWP attendees. And the pedagogy forum has given those who can't sell a panel on the strength of their name or affiliation a place to pitch new ideas--ideas that, from my reading and mingling at last year's pedagogy forum, are starting to take discussion about creative writing pedagogy in a new direction, focusing on concepts, philosophies, and methods of teaching rather than strictly on assignments and activities. 

This is what creative writing as an academic discipline needs. The more we rely on established teachers, many of whom, by the time they earn their reputation, are leaving their teaching days behind and moving on to jobs as directors of departments, only teaching classes here and there, or only teaching at retreats and camps--or retiring from teaching altogether--the less we're really talking about the current needs and climates of the creative writing classroom. I think it's plain that the creative writing classroom is a different place now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Students are often savvier in certain ways, having read the usual literature earlier and earlier, or having had full-period creative writing classes as early as middle school. They are also more diverse, both in where they come from and in what they write--to make room for different forms, genres, and creative aspirations in the writing classroom is hardly avoidable, and I am amazed when teachers treat these differences as invisible. Sure, to teach "Show not tell" and realistic, vivid description theoretically works for any person's story. But eventually you've got to deal with the fact, and plan your class around the fact, that the people in your creative writing classroom are there for different reasons, with different expectations, and often, with very different needs. "Show not tell" is going to be utterly elementary for some, where some may actually need to be taught how to tell, how to narrate logically and authoritatively, before they can learn to show. We need new teachers--the people teaching the Intro to Creative Writing courses--and attentive and changeable teachers--the people taking notes and paying attention to whether their methods are having positive effects--to help boost and maintain our discipline.     

Check out more fun Nin Andrews AWP drawings.

That's not to say old pedagogy isn't good pedagogy. Good exercises are good exercises, and good teaching skills die hard. Charles Baxter's advice wears well, and when I had the pleasure of having him sit in on one of my fiction workshops at Butler, his advice was outstanding, thoroughly and broadly applicable, and his teaching manner was that of somebody still very much "in" the classroom--he was paying attention to our classroom, not just using a packaged lecture or handing out a time-worn diagram of the model short story. (Have seen one of these used in a mock workshop by a job applicant. Was mortified.) There are plenty of renowned creative writing teachers who deserve every ounce of their reputation. But taking away the opportunity for fledging teachers, aspiring teachers, to help define our pedagogy takes away our ability as a group of educators to respond in relevant ways to the problems that confront us. More and more, just like every other non-professional program on the college campus, we are going to be asked to define and defend our value, and we do that by defining and defending our pedagogy. If we can't clearly and convincingly articulate what it is we aim to do, and more importantly, how we aim to do it, then campuses will increasingly find reason to cut us out.

Though if we can't do that--if we can't do more than point to a tired handbook of tried-and-true methods as evidence of our teaching efficacy--we probably don't deserve to call what we do a "discipline" in the first place. This is the question I think writers in the academy, and AWP as an entity, has to answer. If writing is a discipline, it must allow ample time and space for serious discussion of practices and methods. If it's not a discipline, then it may be it's only a hobby. And if its only a hobby, there's no real reason for a conference--AWP would be a retreat, a camp, an elaborate yearly meeting of a massive writer's help group.

Interested to see if we'll hear more on this after the conference is over.

"'The ghost baby lives in a cup and instead of legs it has a tail'"

...and "beagle Louise kills Paris the G-pig. In a dramatic turn of events."

"37 lbs.", our next in Laura Ellen Scott's Curio, is up for your enjoyment.

"Total Eclipse"

Annie Dillard:

I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist's version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. Gary was light-years away, gesturing inside a circle of darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the stringy crinkles around his eyes moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our generation's turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it. Gary was chuting away across space, moving and talking and catching my eye, chuting down the long corridor of separation. The skin on his face moved like thin bronze plating that would peel.

...

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world's dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

Would have taught this essay tomorrow for a creative nonfiction class, but our campus is closed again so the city can save electricity. I really hope the students read it anyway. It's fantastic.

Things I Like and Have Been Liking

Sitting around the house without work, power, or your spouse tends to lead of ruminating by candlelight over things you've enjoyed more or things you think you might enjoy more. Here is a list of things I've enjoyed more than sitting at home alone with the power out (which is not to be taken as any indictment of their enjoyability). 

The Count of Monte Cristo

Not the book, but the anime. Mike got me this series for Christmas, and though it's only 24 episodes long we've been slowly taking it in for over a month, and just finished two days ago. It's not that the series lacks appeal, but that it does seem to require some acclimation, some digestion, and some adjustment of our general TV-watching mood. It's animated essentially in layers--hand-drawn over CG, textures and patterns over the hand-drawn, so that the characters tend to look as if they've been in a fight with a Geocities wallpaper. 

It took me about four episodes to get used to this, and to the telling itself, which is centered on the Count's mistress's son Albert rather than on Edmund Dantes and his gradual transformation into the Count. The series tends to emphasize the sordid intrigues of Paris and of a world (spoken of with gravity and dread: "Eastern Space") meant to stand in for the lawless, pirate-haunted, desert islands that populate the book. This for me was a little difficult to follow--not so much because I'm familiar with the book, but because to follow Albert is to follow this sweet little rich boy, naive of the plotting and manipulating that is immediately and obviously apparent to us. Eventually, that focus is earned as we watch Albert shed some of his spoiled and self-important naivete about the world while retaining his idealism and strengthening his youthful exuberance and passions. I don't mean this to be a spoiler, and hopefully if you watch the show it won't be--but Albert literally hugs away the final problem of the series. It is the kind of ending Mike and I have always marveled at in anime, where the character saves the world by the sheer power of their refusal to compromise one single thing. It is at once inspiring and ludicrous. 

And, in a way, so is this show. I came to enjoy the gratuitous animation and found it suited the melodrama of the plot. There's a club girl with hair made out of sequins, a newsman with a shirt made of sensational headlines. Once I got used to it, these exaggerations complemented the storytelling well. 

Besides, there is something I love deeply about revenge stories. My next novel will be one if I can come up with a situation solid enough to support the explicit plotting and impossibly high emotion that revenge brings with it. Would you ever pursue revenge? I don't think I would. I love imagining the person who is otherwise like me, but would, under the right circumstances, devote the entirety of their lives to one ludicrously single-minded pursuit. Most of the best books I can think of are revenge books on some level. Go! Do the outsized and complicated deed that could never resolve the past! I am in love with reading about that quest.

The Simpsons, Season 7

In planning my writing class on The Simpsons, I began to feel that my collection was just a little lacking, and I had to decide which season was most needed to bring it up to par. This was the one I chose. It's full of classics, of course; you've got Bart selling his soul, Lisa becoming a vegetarian, Homer making himself obese to get on disability, Mr. Burns finally waking from a coma and naming his shooter, and Selma entering a sham marriage with Troy McClure. But what I found out after rewatching this season (and this one I moved through quickly; I've already watched a few of these three times, plus commentary) was that I really bought this season for Marge. Marge's character develops in really stunning ways this season. 

There's "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield," where she finds a Chanel suit on clearance and uses it to fit in to higher society--I about lose it when we find out that Springfield has a luxury clothing district, and that Marge drives herself there in secrecy and desperation to obtain a Chanel dress for her initiation into high society, this time at the regular price. It helps that Marge is my mom--naturally selfless, fiercely loving, fully committed to the life that she was kind of trapped in (my mom is old enough that she was never going to get to be much other than a clerk, a teller, a teacher, even if she had great aptitude for other things, which she did). So when Marge buys a dress she can't afford, I think of my mom doing that, and I think of how very much she must have wanted what wearing that dress would mean for her. And how sad when she gives that up. But how hard it would have been to carry out what she wanted anyway. How sad for Marge that nothing can really ever change, and what a testament to her that she finds joy for herself in other ways, making it work for her anyway. 

There's also "Marge Be Not Proud," where Bart shoplifts and Marge briefly grows distant from him. Watching these two in tandem is telling, I think--if Marge can't have anything outside her family, and if her family lets her down, then what's she got? They really got to the heart of her this season, I think--much more so than the Marge-centered episodes that center on reversals, where she gets a boob job, or becomes a cop or an Olympic curling champion, or starts weightlifting, and so on. Reversals of her character aren't nearly as interesting as the kinds of explorations you see in Season 7. But they do help, in the scheme of things, to show us how hard she works to "be" Marge Simpson, all the performances she puts on, and what other kinds of performances she might like to try for a day. That kind of thing. I could write feminist love songs about Marge all day. Not that she represents a feminist, or even a kind of feminism. It's just that she sort of explains all the things, closeted and tamped-down things, women really need in order to take their right and full place in the world. Marge doesn't need a different job, or a different husband. She needs something of her own to put her faith in.

I do read, as well, not just watch TV--I promise. I just haven't finished anything recently. I'm gearing up for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which we're reading in our master's workshop, and I hope to get some time soon to finish Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, a book of stories that are sometimes fables, sometimes fantasy, sometimes sci-fi, all pretty impeccably imagined and made to matter. Looking forward to be able to say more about these soon.

"They called themselves the Ark of the Moon"

Story 11 in Curio, "Moon Walk," is up. Beat the Snowpocalypse with hay moons, brutal summers, and white-clad girls in barefoot procession.

Bear with us

With Mike at AWP and New Mexico under the effects a bizarrely severe winter storm, posting may be sparse the next few days. Power is back on now, and the Internet seems to be improving--though, as a rule, southern New Mexico doesn't tend to be very prepared for the roadway and power demands of a snowstorm. I'll be preemptively cooking and stockpiling blankets in the event we go off the grid again.

In the meantime, here is your 2011 AWP bingo card from We Who Are About to Die. I will be playing at home, and attending panels on the academic job search and the defense of sci-fi/fantasy in my mind.

illegible undecipherable

Story 11 in Curio is up: "illegible undecipherable." This is one of the strangest stories in the thing in terms of form, and also one of my favorites.

Best. Movie. Ever.

Guys, get ready to go on the journey of a lifetime. I think I've been spoiled for other films.

Thanks to Ned for the tip.

Nobody tells me what anything is about.

Guys: let's talk marketing for a second. I know it's unpleasant, but when you're an editor, a publisher, or a writer, these questions become of significant practical importance.

The thing is, I hate being asked what my books or stories are "about." Like most writers, I even mentally enclose the word "about" in quotation marks, as if the very concept of aboutness -- of a story having a subject -- is somehow illegitimate. This problem started when I was young, because I was having a hell of a time structuring my work, which was a very strange compromise between realist literary fiction (inspired by early John Irving and similar writers) and surrealism (inspired, more than anything, by film) and genre (China Mieville, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, etc.). Of course it still is, but this was before I'd figured out how to make it work, and so everything I wrote was rather shapeless, something I still fight today; it tended to be that the only way I could get a structure going was to hide a second book within the first, or rather, to designate a point at which the story behind the story would reveal itself; the new story wouldn't be very well formed either, but the pressures associated with getting from one place to the other was energizing in a way that almost simulated structure.

At any rate, when people asked me what my books were about, I would say the first (written at sixteen) was about a guy who shrank until he disappeared. This is not very helpful. The second, I said, was about a world where all the women had died out; this was accurate and sounded maybe a little helpful but in fact it told you almost nothing about the actual story (it was about a guy who was considering a sex change operation because he wanted to be loved by other men, and also, it turned out, because he had been disguised as a little girl by his father, a Hollywood makeup artist, for most of his childhood; also, in the third act, pink starfish aliens invade). I said my third book was about "eating disorders and God." This was rather conceptual and abstracted.

I've improved slowly at this game, to the point where my current book -- my sixth -- tends to get a really satisfying, slightly bug-eyed expression from the people to whom I describe it: "It's about the atom bombs Fat Man and Little Boy reincarnated as people," I say. They nod and then it registers and suddenly they become interested in what I'm saying. This reaction is why I believe this will probably be my first published novel. Some editor is going to make that face somewhere at work, and then it'll all be over.

I have a friend who works at Barnes & Noble, who on hearing the premise said that it had the advantage he could actually sell the book: if you can quickly express what a book is "about," you can get someone to have a look at it now and again.

Writers resist this for many reasons, some better than others. We resent aboutness because it can be such hard work: hewing to a subject generally requires sustained plotting, which few institutions teach and few writers enjoy learning. The writers with the best command of plot are often stigmatized, and in the independent publishing community especially we are, it seems, eternally frozen in the adolescent moment of discovery that a novel need not have plot or even story at all. This is true. However, most of us need story and even plot, and even a fair amount of it, to generate something very interesting. And if we want someone to look at our work, it's even more important; if it's impossible to communicate what the thing is about, then there's little reason for your potential reader to prefer one thing over another.

What writers want to do instead of finding and expressing aboutness is to build brands: their own, and the brands of their publications. And so I will see notes on Facebook suggesting I check out "the new story by Steve Stevenson in Wigleaf," or whatever. They don't tell me what the story is about. They don't tell me anything, in fact, apart from the name of the writer and the venue in which the thing was published. Some people and some publishers have strong enough brands that they can get away with this: I know what a Blake Butler story or a Matt Bell story or an Amelia Gray story is enough that I can decide, on the basis of that writer alone, whether or not to click that link. And the same goes for, say, elimae: there's a fairly well-defined aesthetic there that lets me know what I'm in for when I read elimae. However, it wouldn't be bragging exactly to call myself a high-information consumer: for the average person, the concept of a Matt Bell story is meaningless and elimae is maybe a girl's name. If you're big enough to rely on brand alone, you're not reading this post: you're flying to Europe on a jet filled with greased-up topless dancers or some such. For the rest of us, identifying the aboutness of our writing is essential if we want to get readers.

Our culture of writing and publishing, however, is allergic to aboutness at every level. If you look at a given literary magazine's cover you will generally see two things: an evocative cover image (or, worse yet, a boring one) that you know has exactly nothing to do with the contents, and, on the back, a list of names you maybe half-recognize if you're an expert in this shit. The high-level literary decoding ring required to understand anything you're seeing such that you have any idea whether or not you should purchase the book takes years to acquire, and even then you're often wrong. I would suggest that it's time we start putting brief excerpts on the covers (back, and sometimes front) of our magazines. The idea that putting our names on it is sufficient is based on the false premise that anyone knows or cares who we are. They don't.

I've been thinking about which links I click versus which I don't on Facebook, Twitter, and etc., and it occurred to me that I pretty consistently visit On Earth As it Is when someone reminds me to do so. Why is that? It's not because Matthew Simmons and Bryan Furuness edit the thing, although I've had somewhat personal interactions with both and they seem like very nice guys and good writers. And it's not because people I know and like, such as Gabriel Blackwell, are publishing there: I haven't read everything Gabe has written, though I know and like him and his work. I think the reason I go is I know, in a very basic way, what I'm there for: On Earth As it Is is about prayer. Every week, they publish a "prayer narrative." What is a prayer narrative? It's whatever they publish. You can see commonalities between the stories but the commonalities aren't especially strong. The point is there's a constraint, a sort of aboutness: I know why I'm supposed to go there. In a world where my eyes are the currency and that currency is asked for thousands of times more often than I can afford to give it, that makes all the difference. Bring actual cash into the equation, as in ask me to purchase your book, and we're in real trouble: I'll definitely need to know why I'm supposed to care, and the fact that you wrote or edited it isn't sufficient as an answer.

I write this partly, maybe chiefly, as an admonishment to myself: I am terrible about remembering to say what the things I'm trying to sell or convince you to click are about. I very rarely summarize my own stories when self-promoting, and I do it even more rarely for the works of others. Sometimes this is legitimate, online: with very short works, description can often be destruction. Usually, however, it's not. And when I see other people linking to "the new Steve Stevenson story at Wigleaf" without any sort of description at all apart maybe from a very general claim that the story is good, I become suspicious, as I often am, that no one involved has actually read the damn thing: that we are publishing and sharing purely as a mode of self-promotion, that none of us actually care about each other. Surely this isn't true. But when nobody can go to the trouble of describing something such that I will actually consider reading it, I become suspicious.

Friday Night Dance Party