A Good Day for Poetry

I’m a fairly cynical teacher.  At times, I feel as though what I say to my students, what I try to teach them about literature, about how to love literature, never makes it through.  I do my song and dance.  I try to project my enthusiasm for Shakespeare or Flannery O’Connor or Truman Capote or whomever, but I’m never sure if they’re buying what I’m selling.

During an extended assembly at my Flint Hill today, I watched fourteen contestants recite poems for the nationally sponsored Poetry Out Loud competition (Go NEA!), and I was astonished by the bravery of those kids.  Sporting events and even musical and theatrical events command a certain respect in high school culture, but a poetry recitation typically doesn’t appeal to a teenage audience.  But today my school proved itself to be anything but typical.

I was moved twice during the recitations.  First, by the passion that these students exhibited for the poems they were reciting.  Each contestant brought something of him or herself to the experience, often interpreting the poems in personal and meaningful ways.  Second, and perhaps even more remarkable, I was impressed by the audience:  500 hundred high school students—athletes to Latin scholars—remained respectful of the contestants for the duration; they seemed, even at times despite themselves, to get caught up in the poetry.

So, it was a good day for poetry and a reminder of the transformative power of literature.

Tending toward the dark

When I was a sophomore in at boarding school, my roommate’s mother thought I was suicidal.

For parents’ weekend, my English teacher collected stories from our creative writing journal and assembled a photocopied handout for parents.  I submitted a story about a bereaved man who decides to take a bottle of pills and end it all.  He wakes up and thinks he’s in heaven—everything is white and glow-y, warm and fuzzy—but he soon realizes that he’s in a hospital and that he failed to kill himself.  He feels depressed about this, of course, but concludes he shouldn’t try again.

My roommate’s mother read this, noticed a few Dungeons and Dragons guidebooks in my bookshelf (always a telltale sign), and immediately came to the only logical conclusion: her son’s roommate must be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown or, worse, suicide.  My roommate assured her that this wasn’t the case.  It really wasn’t.  I remember being plenty angry and frustrated in high school, but suicidal—no.

My imagination has always tended toward dark subject matter.  I’ve always been fascinated with the unknown and the gloomy.  It’s strange how, even as a teenager, I was getting the message that if you’re thinking and writing about grim topics, something must be wrong with you.  This didn’t deter me.  I’m still fascinated with violence, sadness, and grief.  I always will be.

In preparing a blog post for my Creative Writing class recently, I came across this quotation from Tobias Wolff.  It says so much about why writers continue to explore dark subject matter: “So many of the things in our world tend to lead us to despair.  It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts . . . A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.”

Perhaps, writing about suicide in 10th grade was an optimistic act, if fairly pessimistic subject matter?  I don’t know.  I just remember being entertained by that story, by loving the irony of my character waking up and thinking a hospital was heaven.  It never occurred to me that it might be taken so seriously.

A Look into the Future: Margaret Atwood re-imagines the reading

Last night—Friday, October 30th—I went to hear Margaret Atwood read at the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University, promoting her new book, Year of the Flood.  This novel is set in a future world, which has been devastated by a natural disaster that destroyed most human life.  Although I’ve not read it yet, I learned from the reading that much of the story centers around an eco-religion.

The reading itself was a forward-thinking experience.  Instead of just the novelist reading from her book, Atwood had GWU students performing characters’ narrative perspectives and musicians interpreting hymns, which she wrote for her invented eco-religion.  It transformed the book reading into a theatrical event, capturing the audience’s interest by setting the mood for the story and touching on central conflicts.

Margaret Atwood is a hero of mine.  One of my favorite novels is The Blind Assassin and one of my favorite short stories is “Death by Landscape.” So, I was particularly excited to hear her read.  Her natural wit and liveliness charmed me, but I was also excited to see such a well respected and established writer breaking the mold of a fiction reading.

I have a dirty secret.  I don’t particularly enjoy fiction readings.  I’d almost always rather hear a poet read.  I think this is because it’s so difficult for a novelist to offer enough of his or her story to really satisfy a listener.  Atwood seems to understand this and has managed to rethink the way a reading should go.  Much like the bizarre genetic hybrids in her novel, she’s managed to create a successful hybrid literary experience.

When my partner Jeff and I approached her to get our books signed, Jeff asked her to sign his Kindle.  She did so gladly, remarking that it was the first Kindle she had ever signed! (See Margaret Atwood’s blog) She seemed open to embracing the future of publishing – and she even asked him if she could take his picture to document the occasion.

Under the Gay WWII Literary Mystery Section: Part Two

As I’ve been revising my novel, Dodging and Burning, I’ve been returning to previous thoughts that I had this summer about who will be (I hope) the audience for my book.

Of course, it isn’t something a writer should ruminate on too much while he is writing, but it is, as I’ve mentioned before, something that a writer must think about once he has finished, or is coming close to finishing, his work.

Whenever I begin thinking about audience, I feel compelled to place my book:  Where does the bookstore shelve Dodging and Burning?  In the Mystery section, because it is a mystery?  Or in the Gay/Lesbian section, because it does have several gay characters at the center of the novel?  Or in the Literature section, because it is about society’s attitudes toward gays and war, and gays in war, which is timely, and—most important to me—about the odd, often unsettling co-existence of fantasy and reality in our lives, which is something that we all experience.

As a writer and as a reader, I’m pleased that my novel doesn’t fit neatly in any category.  That’s exciting, because its often the fiction which resists easy classification that most intrigues and surprises me.  But I wonder if it’s going to cause marketing problems when (and if) it finds an agent and a publisher?

I would love any feedback on this, either from a writer’s or reader’s perspective.  How do you feel about audience for your own work?  Or what sort of reader do you consider yourself?  Please let me know.

Beyond the Limitations of Mystery Fiction

This week I assigned two essays to my “Thrillers: Page to Screen” class, both of which were suggested to me by Art Taylor in his comment to my August 14th post, “My Philosophy about Mysteries.”

The first essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” by Raymond Chandler, makes a case for the literary merit of realistic, hard-boiled detective fiction, championing it as social commentary that sheds light on the dark, gritty life of urban America in the ’30s and ’40s.  He criticizes the hopelessly unrealistic classic deductive novel so popular in the Golden Age of mysteries during the World Wars.  In a nutshell, he claims that because a puzzle mystery must conform to its design and not to its characters’ emotions, it almost always blunders when trying to represent believable character motivations.

The second essay, “Literature High and Low: The Case of the Mystery Story” by Geoffrey Hartman, argues that the mystery story, as a type of story, is essentially flawed.  Hartman writes, “For a mystery story has always been a genre in which appalling facts are made to fit into a rational or realistic pattern.”  He insists that the mystery story, a slave to audience expectation, must close with a reasonable and ultimately reductive conclusion—the mask pulled of the murderer, the villain vanquished.  The mystery that most interests him is the absence of logic, the intangible, the sublime.

I find that I agree and disagree with both positions.  Chandler’s criticisms of the puzzle mystery are fair, but I don’t think one can cast an entire type of mystery to the side because of its frequent failures.  Hartman believes that for a work of literature to stand above other works, it must embody a mystery that the reader experiences but doesn’t fully discern, suggesting its greater and deeper truth.  I agree, but again, why does an entire genre need to be kicked to the curb?

I really do believe that mysteries and thrillers, if explored through character, can both comment on social conditions and contain bits of intangible truth.  Of course, this requires seeing a genre beyond its narrow marketplace descriptions, but I believe it can be done and has been done.  In fact, reach all the way back to Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone for a great example.

Confession of a Compulsive List-Maker

I’ve had an epiphany:  I live under the misconception that if I organize every moment of my life on my handy-dandy computer calendar, I’ll find enough time to be a good partner, be a good friend, be a good teacher, and of course, find enough time to write.

As of late, this hasn’t been happening.  If anything, my teaching has received the bulk of my time and energy.  It simply demands it.  Since students and colleagues depend on me on a daily basis, I can’t just ignore them.  I don’t want to ignore them.  The time I spend in the classroom with students is truly a pleasure (I teach a great bunch of kids), but I have little time to pay attention to other aspects of my life.

Of course, many people feel this way—it’s not just a teacher-writer syndrome—but in those few moments that I’m in the car driving to and from work, I’ve started thinking about why I can’t seem to find a balance between work and home, and work and writing, which brings me happiness instead of compulsive list-making.

Perhaps, it’s just a personality flaw.  I refuse let go of the notion that I can do it all.  Perhaps, it’s my approach.  I just need to be be less organized and take each day as it comes.  But even as I write that, I find myself reeling at the tendency for chaos in the world around me.  I desire to bang order into things, which I believe is one of the chief impulses that drives me as a writer.  That is, to capture expressive moments, but give them order and meaning . . . which I hope will lead to understanding and empathy in my future readers.  As nice as it sounds, I’ll never be able to live totally in the present.

There is something that brings me comfort, though.  One time, years ago, when I was grumbling about something or other, my mother told me: “Who ever said we were suppose to be happy.”  Of course, that sounds pessimistic, but it does take the pressure off.  I still want greater balance in my life, but I don’t have to feel like a failure because I haven’t achieved it yet.  It’s okay.  You’re supposed to be a little frustrated, a little grumpy, a little tired—maybe, at times, it’s even a good thing.

Implied Worlds

I’m teaching a film course for the first time this fall, and it has me thinking about what movies mean to me and to my writing.

In the first four weeks of my seminar, I planned a crash course on filmmaking, emphasizing cinematographic tools and techniques as well as insight into the editing process.  I’m in the midst of this now, and I find that it’s teaching me about the power of implied worlds.

When we go to a movie, we sit and focus our attention on a rectangle of moving light, which directs our eyes through a small slice of what appears to be another, complete world.  If the movie is well-made, we’ll believe in that world while we’re in front of it.

When writing fiction, of course, you want to harness that same sort of power.  You want readers to believe in the world that you’re showing them only a slice of.  You can create believable worlds simply by choosing the right details to show—something, if you’re writing historical fiction, such as I am, you have to be able to do well.

It seems to me, then, that good fiction, like good film, must rely on the power of details and imagery to imply a greater, more expansive world outside of itself—an entire universe beyond its sentences and paragraphs that the reader is left to imagine and complete on his or her own.

Revising for Voice—How I’m Doing It

"The Voice," Edvard Munch

So, as I mentioned in my post over at Squad365, “Revising to Land an Agent,” I’m undertaking another revision of Dodging and Burning before I continue with my plan to submit the manuscript to agents.  The focus of my revision is on voice.

The main concern, at this point, is that I distinguish between the voices of the two narrators who share the story.  In the original feedback I received, several of my trusted readers felt that I needed to make the two voices more distinct.  I thought I had accomplished this over the summer—but after I received feedback from Jeff Kleinman, an agent at Folio Literary Management, I realized that I had to dig in and go deeper with the revision.

So, I needed a plan.  Voice is something so organic and so a part of character that you can’t fake it.  I couldn’t simply distinguish between the voices by giving one of the characters a verbal tick or colloquial mannerism.  There had to be a significant reason why one woman sounded different from the other, even though they were both close to the same age and from the same region in Virginia.  My good friend (and reader) Rebecca Borden suggested that I should “think about what each [character] had gone through in the space between the first story and the end frame, and how that might have affected the way they talk and behave.”  I think this was great advice, because it had to do with character, not style.

The first thing I needed to do was to consider tone.  I had to distinguish between my two characters’ attitudes toward their past, particularly the incidents which concern the story.  For instance, Martha, the voice I’m primarily concerned with, needs to have a passionate, at times exuberant, tone.  Even as an old woman,  her imagination still tosses and turns restlessly.  Once I identified my narrators’ tones, then I had to decide how those attitudes would translate into style: Martha’s voice would have less control than the other narrator’s, and her sentences would wander a bit, closer to stream-of-consciousness.  She would also repeat words at exciting moments, creating a passionate rhythm to her voice.  Etc.

I allowed the stylistic qualities to grow from the emotional concerns of the character, which—at least so far—feels like the right choice.

Over at Squad365: “Revising to Land an Agent”

Over at Squad365, I blogged about the process that I’m going through in finding an agent.  A process which has taken me back into another revision of Dodging and Burning.  Read Marisha’s post “Can Beggers be Choosers? Find an Agent, Part 2.” and then read my post “Revising to Land an Agent” for the full story . . .

Breaking the ice . . . in the classroom

For the first six years of teaching sophomore English, I made my students keep handwritten journals.  I would post questions about the texts we were reading, and they would respond to these questions, at times with enthusiasm and at times perfunctorily.  This year I dove into the world of blogging, and now I’m taking my students with me.  Their handwritten journals have been replaced with blog comments . . . and so far, it’s a success.

Something that can’t be replicated in the classroom or in a traditional journal is the sort of written conversation that a blog format offers.  The conversation begins with a post—a question or quotation, which I provide the first few times and then ask the students to supply from that point forward.  Then the students must comment on the post.  Also, I let them know that if they “reply” to another student’s comment, it counts as a comment.  The idea is that the kids will begin the conversation among themselves before they walk in the classroom.

When I introduced this concept to them and signed them up on an invitation-only blog, it really surprised me how they fell right into it.  Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised.  They’ve grown up communicating like this on email, Facebook, and in text messages.  I often forget that it’s a mode of communication that is natural for them.  When they came to class, they were ready to extend the written conversation to a spoken discussion, and the result was an energized exploration of the origins of Beowulf.

It’s interesting to me that my blog works in a similar way.  Friends and colleagues will dip in now and then, and mention something I’ve posted.  This will lead to a conversation, perhaps initially about what I’ve posted or what I’m working on, but then will lead them to telling me about something they’re working on or reading.  It’s an instant ice-breaker, and it’ s already brought me closer to friends, family, colleagues, and friends of friends.  It’s one of the wonderful, unexpected things that has happened as a result of this experiment of mine.  It’s truly a great example of how my teaching life and writing life can overlap in a meaningful way.