Literary Fraternity

In my first semester of graduate school, I took a class called Forms of Fiction with the man who would eventually become my thesis director, Lee K. Abbott. Lee’s a brilliant teacher—I’ve been thinking about that fact recently, because he’s in his last year of teaching before retirement—and I steal from him for my own classes all the time. This past week I used a reading he assigned me in that class eight years ago: the introduction to an anthology of fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times, published in Esquire back in 1973, when Gordon Lish was editor. This intro, written by Tom Wolfe, is a pretty entertaining document, and I feel moved to share a couple of quotes from it:

“The rules of the game in modern fiction changed decisively during the 1960s. In that brief interval the American short story moved from the vulgar stage to the poetic stage, in terms of cultural evolution, and the abruptness of the transition all but cost it its life….The upshot has been a type of short story that exhibits all the daring—and all the difficulties—of formalism. By the very nature of his task, the formalist is no longer writing for a vague ‘public.’ He is not out to entertain or arrest attention in the usual way. He is writing for a fraternity not merely of other writers but also of those readers who are sophisticated enough to appreciate form, technique, and the state of the art, who are able to read new work against the background of what has already been tried” (xx–xxii).

Stephen King talked about this same issue more recently in the introduction he wrote to Best American Short Stories 2007. You can read the intro in its entirety here if you missed the first time around, but he basically discusses the problem of writers writing for other writers, and reading not for the thrill of a story but for the sake of sizing up the marketplace, figuring out what sells. King calls it “copping-a-feel reading.”

You know, I’d like to write for a “vague ‘public’” rather than a fraternity, and I’d like to “entertain or arrest attention in the usual way.” The simple response to that is, of course, “Well, do it,” and I’ve tried. I tried it with my story collection, which seemed for the most part to only reach other writers, aspiring writers, and academics, and I guess I should just be happy that the fraternity ensures even that much of an audience. I’ve tried it again with my first novel, and maybe it stands a better chance, since (for now) general readers will still pick up a novel for entertainment’s sake. But who knows?

Wolfe’s Esquire introduction ends this way:

“Nihilism and Cosmic Anxiety are, after all, accepted literary conventions today, and conventions in literature are like conventions anywhere else: they are marks of grace and propriety, not wounds of the soul. Between the lines of this book, I am happy to report, I do not detect the slightest shred of real despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving, instead. I detect a group of fairly young writers, in good animal health, with high ambitions and cheery dispositions, people who have kept up their credit ratings and who buy their pillow shams at main-stem department stores and head for the French wine rack in the back of the liquor store and maintain god spirits and faith in the future, and who vote even in the primary….bringing, as ever, the rich and traditional glow of culture to those readers who are truly literate and sophisticated enough to belong to the noble fraternity” (xxviii). 

You can just feel the scorn radiating off of that quote, can’t you? I read it and think, “Guilty.” Almost forty years after the essay’s publication, here I am, me and my cohort: fairly young, healthy, ambitious, cheery (oh, basically—I understand it’s required of me, and I more or less deliver). The rest of the description fits in a general way, too. I don’t think that Wolfe, of all people, was trying to argue that only old, tormented, human wrecks can write good fiction, or have the agency to deal with subjects like despair, but I do think he’s pointing out an absurdity that occasionally troubles me—that troubles me more as I get older. Why’s a nice gal like me writing such dark, sad stories? Why do any of us? Most of the young writers I know are nice, and they have nice husbands and wives, and they toil very earnestly in university positions that they know they’re damned lucky to have. They have nice houses, and they drive Subarus and the like. Of course, I don’t know the private sadnesses of their lives, any more than they know the private sadnesses of mine. But it makes me groan a little to think of us—our hardened rural characters and wild landscapes and acts of sudden violence—snug in various versions of the middle class, going to AWP to pontificate on panels with topics such as “Writing Acts of Violence.” 

Or maybe I’m just dreading AWP. I generally do.

Holiday Card

Speechless

I watched this in tears, with chills. I am so happy for Nikky Finney that I can hardly type this. I'd rather just sit and beam.

Nikky Finney's 2011 National Book Awards in Poetry acceptance speech from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

News

I've gotten a few emails about this recent item under the "Deal News" heading in Publishers Lunch, so I thought I may as well post it:

Rona Jaffe Award Winner and author of the collection GIRL TROUBLE Holly Goddard Jones's THE REMAINS, about the people surprisingly connected to the discovery of a dead woman's body in a small Kentucky town, following her editor Sally Kim to Touchstone, by Gail Hochman at Brandt & Hochman (World English).

Dog-o-Lanterns

I'm not the kind of dog owner who dresses her dogs in clothes or carries them around in a handbag, but I do occasionally get cheesy. Case in point: these dog-o-lanterns, one for Bishop and one for Martha, which my husband and I carved at a recent gathering with friends.

Martha's face has already collapsed, because we didn't take Martha Stewart's advice and seal the cuts with petroleum jelly.

See also the adorable jack-o-lanterns made by Risa (one of my only blog readers--hello!) and Matt.

Also, randomly: my publisher, Harper Perennial, was highlighted in an interesting recent article on Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/16/the_harper_perennial_model/singleton/. I get a very brief shout-out as a "new-breed Southern author" (hmm), and my book cover is peeping behind the shoulder of another book in the graphic, not unlike the way I end up appearing in most group photos.

Thrifting

I’ve suspected for a while that I’ve been developing a thrifting problem, but the truth came home to me the other day, when my husband and I were on one of our not-infrequent scavenging trips to a local consignment store, and I turned to him and said, “I think I might start collecting teacups. You know, old, funky teacups.”

He said, “I think you’re turning into an old lady.”

I pondered the evidence. Contemplating a teacup collection? Not a good sign. Also, I’ve started hanging old plates on the wall in our kitchen. But they look nice!

I really, really hate shopping at the mall, but I get a big kick out of shopping at thrift stores, flea markets, and antique malls. I think it’s taken me so long to own up to this because of the Poor Person Paradox, whereby a person who can’t afford to shop full-price retail, and would benefit from shopping used, feels ashamed of buying used, and doesn’t. Even when I went through my late-high school/early-college phase of pseudo-hippiedom, I drew a distinction between thrift stores and vintage stores, and I saved my work money to buy crappy new stuff that looked old.

Many of the items my husband and I have acquired to furnish our house were bought used: the oriental rug in our living room, the secretary where we keep our bills, our dining room china hutch and sideboard, and (my favorite) our pale green, metal kitchenette set with vinyl-upholstered chairs. It was fairly easy for me to get into the mindset to do this kind of spending (though I sweated the rug a little—a used rug seems…used…in a way that a wooden piece of furniture does not), mostly because we couldn’t really afford to fill our house with new furniture, or at least new furniture that would last us more than a couple of years.

Deciding to thrift for clothes took me longer, and actually, I think the only reason I manage now is because I don’t care as much as I used to about how I dress. I was trying to figure out the other day if I even have a style anymore. Now, I should qualify this: I’ve never had good style. I’m too cheap to buy nice clothes, because I have ingrained in me a totally arbitrary list of figures for what certain items of clothing should cost brand new. For example:

T-shirt: $5

Nice blouse, the kind I could wear to work: $25

Jeans: $30

Nice pants, suitable for work: $30, maybe $40 if the cut is really flattering

Dress: $50, unless it’s a Special Occasion item.

Running shoes: $75 (and it pains me to spend that much)

Leather shoes: $40 - $50

Any other kind of shoe: <$20

There are only two categories of Special Occasion items, in which case I might be willing to spend $100 to $150:

Really Special Dress, purchased because I have to attend some kind of Really Special event, such as my graduate school farewell reading or, the once, when I went to the Rona Jaffe reception in NYC.

Interview Suit. I have two now, one which no longer fits, plus one velveteen jacket, all purchased for MLA conferences. I considered them investments each time, and I think they were worthwhile investments. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have gotten my job without a suit, but I'm sure it didn't hurt that I came looking as if I'd made an effort.

Anyway, I’m cheap, and I also don’t have good instincts. I know a delightful, adorable young woman who shops thrift and can pull off ensembles of funny old-man golf pants and layers of shirts and funky costume jewelry, but if I were to attempt such a thing, I’d look like I escaped the asylum. Also, it seems to me that the women who look delightful in garb like that look pretty much delightful in anything, because they have nice, slim figures and 22-year-old complexions and loads of confidence. No one wants to see me in the high-waisted, tapered trousers this girl was rocking over the summer, even if I paired them with a neat-o pair of high-top Chuck Taylors.

For most of my life, I’ve at least aspired to a certain style, even if I couldn’t exactly call myself stylish. I put thought into how I wanted to be perceived and made efforts toward that end. I favored certain brands, even if I wouldn’t often plunk down money to purchase them.

Now? Eh. I bought half a dozen short-sleeve, button-up, plaid shirts at the thrift store this summer because they were comfortable and not quite as sloppy as a t-shirt. Do I look like somebody’s kid brother in them? Perhaps. At another point in my life I would have cared about that, but now, not so much. At another point in my life, I also would have spent time most days fussing with my hair and applying make-up. Now I just wish I didn’t have these lines on my face.

Let’s end this on a cheerier note. In the category of random thrift purchases, I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up funny old cookbooks, and for some reason I tend to fix on the early 70s-era ones, perhaps because I find those 70s notions of entertaining so—well—entertaining. Here are two of the coolest:

Stewed to the Gills: Fish and Wine Cookery

I like the concept of this one--fish, booze, what's not to like?--but my first attempt at one of the recipes was so-so. I had bourbon on hand (as usual), and so I tried a recipe that called for bourbon, cream, and little tiny “salad shrimp” which taste (I rediscovered) like squishy metal.

Casseroles by Candlelight

Now this one was worth it just for the title, which I like to sing to the tune of “Ebony and Ivory.” One day, I definitely hope to delight my friends with a tasty casserole by candlelight, but for now, I’m just dipping into the offerings, experimenting. Again, the results have been mixed. The recipe for “Carbonnade Flamande,” which called for cubes of round steak, a full pound of onions, beer, and brown sugar, was…odd. Should I have been surprised that it was odd? That it tasted real oniony?

Summer in Sewanee

This is my sixth summer in Sewanee, Tennessee. My first year here was 2006, when I attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Then I spent three great years teaching for the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, which serves high school students, including my own little brother, Eric, in 2008. (Eric ended up deciding to attend University of the South for college, and he just completed his freshman year.) For the last two years I've been teaching for the Sewanee School of Letters, a brief-residency program offering both the M.A. and M.F.A. The summer session lasts six weeks--a long time to be away from home, but I've been very lucky both years to have both my husband and dogs with me. This summer we're staying in a little stone cottage about three miles out of town. It's situated on a rise, with a field stretching out behind it, where the dogs can play. It's a wonderful place to be in June and July.

View of sunset from our side yard

One of the many great things about teaching for School of Letters--and there is a long list that would probably have to be topped by the students, who are excellent--has been getting to know the Cumberland Plateau area better. With the conference and Young Writers, I barely made it off campus. There were too many activities crammed into the two weeks: daily classes, readings, meals at the dining hall. I remember, at my second Young Writers, leaving the mountain once for a Mexican meal in Winchester, and we acted like people who'd been denied years, not weeks, of good food and drink. That is, in a way, the delight of the experience. You come very quickly to feel isolated here, cut off--and it's a nice sort of cutting off. When I came to School of Letters last year and had the opportunity and means to travel out of town--to grocery shop in Winchester, See Rock City, shop for cast iron in South Pittsburg, walk around in downtown Chattanooga--it almost felt like cheating. Almost.

I've always found opportunities to hike portions of the Perimeter Trail here, or to run to certain favorite points, such as Memorial Cross or Morgan's Steep. Now, though, with Brandon to accompany me, I feel better about going on long excursions, and this summer we're seeing brand-new sections of the trail--brand new enough that I even took home a nasty case of poison ivy on my knee. We're bringing along the dogs for some of these walks, too, and it's fun, after so much time spent in a city, to be able to let them roam freely off-leash. Trails are ideal, because the human scent is so concentrated that they know where to go, usually, without being steered. The experience is surprisingly stress-free.

We also made it, finally, to Foster Falls, about twenty minutes's drive away, where we swam to the waterfall and stumbled around on rocks, including one where a snake of some kind was sunning itself. Foster Falls is the kind of gorgeous that I usually only encounter in movies--the long falls plummet into a rock-lined swimming hole, the water clear and very cold. We were beating ourselves up for not finding it sooner.

And thanks to a student in my workshop, a Sewanee professor who lives locally, we learned where we could gather wild raspberries. I've never had a raspberry that didn't come from the grocery store, and these are heaven.

We discovered that a bunch of blackberry bushes are growing near the cottage where we're staying, so we gathered a second bowl full, threw in some peaches, and made a cobbler. I don't have a lot of my cookware with me, so I used a cast iron skillet we brought, and that worked out perfectly. I may never cook cobbler in anything else from here on out.

Oh, and cicadas. Doesn't seem like a plague yet, but we've seen two, including this guy, who had just finished molting:

I hope you're enjoying your summer, wherever you are. Happy 4th of July.