Holly Goddard Jones

Literary Fraternity

2012-01-16T06:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

Speechless

2011-11-22T16:14:00.001-08:00

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

2011-11-09T09:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

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.

On the scent

2011-06-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

Last week, two handlers for the search-and-rescue organization Triad Bloodhounds, Mary Lou Stevens and Polly Duggan, were kind enough to introduce me to their dogs and walk me through some tracking scenarios for both missing persons and human remains. Mary Lou’s dog, Otis, is a bloodhound, a big, sweet, loving guy who also happens to be able to sniff out the trails of wandering children, burglars, and other lost souls who need finding. Polly’s dog, Ellie, a bull terrier, is a more unusual breed in this sphere, but she happens to have quite a nose and is cross-trained for man-trailing and cadaver/human remains sniffing. (Also a sweetie—a very merry dog with a sturdy body and what Polly called a “football” head.) I was amazed by both the dogs’ abilities and by Mary Lou’s and Polly’s dedication to SAR efforts. Among the many things I learned from our meeting was this: that a dog-and-person team is truly a team. The dog has the talented nose, but the human has to have the patience and sensitivity to understand the dog’s “indications” or “alerts.” Mary Lou and Polly clearly loved their dogs, and the success of their teams seemed to be built on affection and trust.

I was conducting this research in service of my novel, which is almost complete. That’s a subject I’m too superstitious to tackle with much specificity, but I’ll say this: I’m getting to a point where this kind of research feels not just important to the project’s authenticity but integral to its most basic construction. I do believe in the importance of letting characters drive plot, but when a character’s motives are temporarily elusive, the right kind of research provides a narrative signpost. One of those moments of discovery I most enjoy as a writer is when the right odd detail suddenly presents itself, and it unexpectedly deepens my understanding of a character.

If you’re interested in supporting Triad Bloodhounds, check out the website for more information: http://triadbloodhound.org/28.html.

I fail the Bechdel Test

2011-05-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

Kevin Wilson, author of the terrific book of short stories Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, wrote a thoughtful post on his blog about trying to add more women writers to his literary diet. He was moved to make this effort in part because he realized, following a study by the organization VIDA, which quantified the underrepresentation of women writers in literary journals, that he himself was guilty of reading something like four times as many male writers in 2010 than female writers. I really appreciated his straightforward admission and his even more straightforward solution, which was simply to make an effort to read more books by women.

I appreciated Kevin’s post, too, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic myself—perhaps because of the VIDA study but also because it’s impossible to be a woman writer with a book called Girl Trouble and not get confronted with lots of questions and comments about gender, or about the label of “domestic fiction.” I said in an interview recently, in response to a question about whether or not I felt marginalized as a woman writing “domestic” stories, that

I’m honestly not even sure what domestic fiction means. I don’t know when a relationship story becomes a domestic story. Most stories are about relationships. What’s the other option—a work story? The problem, to me, is not that men’s domestic fiction is better respected. It’s that “domestic fiction” is just a code for “women’s literature,” whether the fiction being described is actually domestic or not. I mean, my book depicts two men acting out a rape and murder. Is that domestic? Is the story about the coach sleeping with his student, which takes place as much on the basketball court as it does in his home, domestic? Maybe they are, and that’s fine, but the term in that case seems too broad to be useful.

Which is still basically my take on the subject. But I’ve been thinking longer and harder about that word, domestic, and about why I cringe a little every time I hear it; and I’ve been thinking, as I finish my novel-in-progress, about what I want for this new book, how it might be better than the book of stories, and why the stories ended up being what they are, and how they represent a record of my writing life in my mid-to-late 20s.

Strangely enough, the impetus for this new line of thought is the movie Bridesmaids. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m tapped enough into social media sites such as Jezebel to know that there’s considerable attention being paid to what is basically just a crude, slapstick movie that happens to star women. The big, burning question: Will men go see a movie about women? And: Can women be funny? A reviewer on television said yesterday, as a compliment, that the film wasn’t merely a romantic comedy and that “It’s funny enough for men and women.” This reminds me of the old Secret deodorant slogan, “Strong enough for a man, PH balanced for a woman.” It’s infuriating, and yet this is the world we live in: if a book or a movie can’t be pleasing to most men, it’s relegated to some kind of secondary genre or niche status.

Anyway, in reading about Bridesmaids and all the hype surrounding it, I was introduced for the first time to a 20-some-year-old comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which included something that is now getting called the “Bechdel Rule” for portrayals of women in movies. In the strip, two women talk about going to see a film, and one states that her criteria for a movie include: 1) It has to have at least two women in it; and 2) the women talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. As many others have already pointed out, this isn’t a foolproof measure of whether or not a movie is good, feminist, or even relatively positive in its portrayal of women—but it is an eye-opener, because it drives home how many movies we experience through the male perspective and how often women are merely tangential to some man’s experience. If the attention being paid to Bridesmaids proves anything, it’s perhaps that lingering inequalities (and I’d bet that you could develop a variation on the Bechdel Rule for race as depicted in film and television) are most obvious in our commercial and lowbrow culture.

Troublingly, though, these inequalities are insidiously apparent in so-called high brow culture, too, and—as the VIDA study began to point out—in literary fiction and poetry, at least in terms of authorship. But not just authorship, which is the point this post will eventually and unfortunately get to. I applied the Bechdel Rule to my own book of stories, and here’s what I came up with. Out of eight stories, four could be argued to pass, though it seems to me that only two transcend a bunch of qualification. Of those two, one, “An Upright Man,” has two women in light conversation along with two men, and they seem otherwise in the story to not much like one another. The other story, “Theory of Realty,” is about pre-teens. That one I’ll take credit for. But why, I wonder, couldn’t I give adult women the same means for connecting with one another as adolescent girls?

What I have to admit to myself is that somewhere down the line I got in my head that I would be taken more seriously writing stories about men—or maybe I was so used to experiencing the word through a male gaze that taking it on in fiction didn’t even seem like an unusual or meaningful choice. Five of the eight stories in Girl Trouble have male point-of-view characters. At the time I rationalized my attraction to male perspectives as coming from a desire to be challenged, to try on different personas, and to avoid anything in the universe of semi-autobiographical fiction, which I had a tendency at the time to sneer at. I also remember struggling with the issue of “stakes” in a story. It had not escaped my notice that the stories I wrote about big, societal-level issues, such as rape and murder, were enthusiastically received in my graduate workshops, whereas the stories I wrote about marriage or friendship—the conventionally “domestic” subjects—drew comparatively lukewarm response.

Now, I want to say here in my own defense that the quiet, observational, fleeting moment-of-truth story was never a good fit for me, and so it’s not totally surprising that I turned away from the relationship stories to more sensational matter that gave me the room to go bigger, more expansive—to engage in the little tricks and tics I like, such as moving in a grand way through exposition, playing with narrative time, or offering quirky character histories. But what I’m realizing now is that my style can accommodate those other subjects, too; there’s no reason why it can’t. Now that I’m trying out that juxtaposition, I find myself pretty damned attracted to it. In addition to my novel, which is nearing completion, I’ve spent the last year working on some new short stories. All three are about women point-of-view characters. All, purely unconsciously on my part, pass the Bechdel test. Does this mean that I've grown up some? That I'm far enough away from the pressures of grad school to write whatever I please? I don't know, but I hope it represents some kind of evolution, and if it does, I welcome it.

Reading and Craft Talk in Nashville

2011-02-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'll be pretty close to home tomorrow, reading and giving a craft talk at Vanderbilt University. The reading is at 7:00 pm in Buttrick 102, and it's open to the public.

Here's a link to an email interview I did with Susannah Felts for Chapter 16, in anticipation of the event:

http://www.chapter16.org/content/beyond-domestic-fiction

The Real Roma

2011-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

I hope to soon write a real post about my wonderful week in Rome, but I have enough catching-up work on my plate to make that difficult right now. I do want to post a few pictures, while everything is still so fresh, and to say how grateful I am for the care Brandon and I were shown by the staff of Fazi. The time we spent with them added a dimension to our experience of the country that we could not have had otherwise.


From the second level of the Coliseo--Brandon, me, part of the Fori Romani.

At the foot of the Spanish Steps.

A view of the Piazza del Popolo during a demonstration against Berlusconi. We were too overwhelmed by the crowds to stay very long, but it was pretty exciting to see.

Brandon in front of St. Peter's Basilica.

Italian Translation cover

2011-01-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

My collection of stories, Girl Trouble, is being released next month in Italy by Fazi Editore. The title, Questa America, translates as This America. There's also something about Pizza Hut in the jacket copy, but I'm going to content myself with not knowing what it is.

Necessary Uncertainty

2011-01-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

I have nothing new or truly valuable to add to the discussion of yesterday’s shooting in Arizona, except to say that, like most, I’m horrified, and I’m having a hard time not thinking about it.

Also like so many today, when I have a hard time thinking about a story that is currently in the news, I have a tendency to go online and seek out as much information as I can find about it. The Internet, and interactive news or social media and networking sights on it, are designed to gratify such desires. If I used the Internet in 2001 the way I use it now—if it hadn’t taken me several minutes then to dial up a connection and twenty or thirty seconds for each page view to load—I wonder how I would have spent the weeks after 9/11. I remember Southpark making a careful joke about how people couldn’t move away from CNN for days on end; I imagine now that people would not be able to move away from comment boards, Twitter, and Facebook, where extremists on both sides can rile each other up and theorize where no information exists. Such has certainly been the case since the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

I am, for reasons that continue to mystify me, a regular reader of Gawker. For a while I was also a commenter, though I did not last long enough to attain coveted “starred” status, and who knows if I ever would have, since I’m rural, centrist on certain political issues, and not equipped with enough time or wit to be regularly clever. I’ve written on this blog about giving up on Facebook; well, Gawker has pressed a lot of those same problematic buttons. Trading Facebook for Gawker was kind of like an alcoholic deciding to limit herself exclusively to beer instead of wine: an addiction is an addiction, and changing the poison doesn’t cure the disease. The difference, though, was that I had gone from seeking the attention and validation of people that I knew (if, in some cases, only distantly) to strangers with jokey screen names and profile pictures. And make no mistake—a site like Gawker, I’m convinced, is not popular because it offers much in the way of breaking, exclusive, or insightfully written news. Most of what appears on the site is, like content on The Huffington Post, culled from other, often more conventional journalistic outlets or from reader tips, which can also be traced back, more often than not, to sources relying on the work of reporters (people close enough to the news story to research it, interview witnesses, visit the scene, etc.). Occasionally Gawker posts an “exclusive”—these articles are generally gossipy, more anecdotal than substantive, and dependent on electronic content such as email exchanges. One such Gawker Exclusive, for instance, was a series of photos of Christine O’Donnell partying with younger men at Halloween. Another was a woman sharing emails she exchanged during an extended flirtation years ago with Julian Assange. Not real news, or the cousin of real news, but a second cousin, twice removed.

No, news isn’t Gawker’s true specialty. Some would probably say that the site’s specialty is snark, and that is certainly true. The vibe is sarcastic, shrill, sometimes playful, and often amusingly world-weary, given the youth of its staff writers. The political slant of the page is leftwing, and Gawker media controls the feminist social media site Jezebel (which I like more), but the governing structure is decidedly totalitarian—or perhaps that’s too fancy a way to put it. It’s totalitarian in the way that high school was totalitarian, which is to say that its design is a status structure in which content is shaped and policed at the highest level by paid Gawker staff but the most effective form of control happens lower in the ranks, by the commenters, whose services are paid for with bumps in status (stars, which give them the ability to approve, promote, or report comments, and hearts, which are the Gawker equivalent of “friending”) and occasional rare distinctions such as “Comment of the Day.”

It’s a brilliant system, not only because commenters help to govern the site but because they create, for free, at the same time they are absorbing its advertising, most of its content. The articles themselves, as I’ve stated, are generally rehashed from other news outlets; they’re very short, usually 50 to 300 words, or are sometimes just a photograph with a funny caption beneath it. The editors’ talents are not in writing or reporting, then, but in finding the right lens for presenting the material so that it will elicit the liveliest discussion. Now, Gawker is not so blatantly incendiary as Huffington Post—for an excellent case study in the latter’s low tactics for drawing page views, check out Roger Ebert’s most recent Journal blog here: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/roger_eberts_n-wordcontroversy.html) --but its writers take their cues from strategies more often used in entertainment tabloids and personal blogs than hard journalism: a dash of innuendo, a soupcon of speculation, and lots of righteous anger. This was certainly true yesterday, as news of Giffords’s shooting spread and the public's desire for answers exceeded the media’s ability to give them to us. Gawker posted, not long after its first, more straightforward article on the shooting and the status of the investigation, a second article titled, “Shot Congresswoman Was in Sarah Palin’s ‘Crosshairs.’” The writer included a careful qualifier, “There's no indication that the gunman who shot down Rep. Giffords was motivated by politics,” but no matter: the commenters had been armed, and they started firing off indiscriminate theories immediately and gleefully, many of the “down with Palin” variety. A nine-year-old girl was soon reported dead, but the important thing was that Palin’s dangerous rhetoric had caused all of this and her chickens were coming home to roost.

I’m no Palin fan, and I agree 100% that her “crosshairs” rhetoric is dangerous (and panders to the lowest common denominator of her constituency). Because—not in spite of—this fact, I cringed as soon as the Gawkerites started trying and convicting her for the crime in their comments, and vilifying anyone who dared sound a call for moderation, well before the shooter had been identified, much less proven to subscribe to one political ideology over another. I knew that there was a very good chance that the facts as they became public would fail to live up to these speculations that Jared Lee Loughner was a Palin-inspired Tea Party nutter, and eventually the facts—whatever they proved to be—wouldn’t matter. In the new media, the public creates a narrative based on the world as they already see it, and if details emerge to complicate that narrative—Loughner’s self-professed love of The Communist Manifesto, evidence that he suffered from mental illness, or the fact that Giffords was a moderate Democrat who advocated for Second Amendment rights—no matter. And this happens on both sides of the aisle, certainly. If you’re wondering why Gawker is receiving the bulk of my critique, the reason is that Gawker is a site that I can bring myself to read. I don’t doubt for a second that just as much distortion is coming from the far right, and if I were feeling particularly masochistic, I would float over to Fox News to prove it. But I’m not. It was enough for me to see on CNN.com one anonymous commenter’s assertion that Barack Obama was sending the FBI to Arizona to distort the facts and make a case against the Tea Party; or another who offered, with admiration, that the shot at Giffords was the “first in a revolution.” It’s enough to keep you up late at night.

On Face the Nation this morning, Bob Schieffer gave an eloquent commentary, a portion of which I’ll transcribe below:

“Democracy’s arguments have never been pretty, but technology has changed the American dialogue. Because we can now know a problem instantly, we expect answers immediately, and when we don’t get them we let everyone know in no uncertain terms. We scream and shout and hurl charges without proof. Those on the other side of the argument become not opponents but enemies. Dangerous, inflammatory words are used with no thought of consequence. All’s fair if it makes the point. Worse, some make great profit just fanning the flame.”

Here’s a link to the video: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7228146n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

Uncertainty is not always a weakness, though I understand why one would want to avoid the helpless feeling it engenders. The Internet has made it easy to feign certainty, to manufacture it where there is none, and this applies to our ideologies as much as it does to how the new media handle stories like this one. There isn’t any nuance. Is this why fiction is decreasingly popular? I used to tell my students that a good story lives in the gray areas, but that’s not a space that Americans seem interested in anymore.

Easy Entertaining?

2011-01-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

The domestic goddess.

When I left home for good at the age of 19 to get married, I was determined not to be conventionally domestic—probably because I was so aware of being perceived as a “child bride.” I had a few ideas about what marital equality would entail, and they were mostly shaped in blind resistance to the way my mother and my aunts lived. In my marriage, for instance, I decided that I would do most of the driving; what was this stuff with the woman going automatically to the passenger seat, even in her own car? In my marriage, I wouldn’t be the cook or the housekeeper, and in fact, Brandon did most of the cooking that got done in those early days, and he had a knack for it, though too often we opted instead for Popeye’s or Frisch’s Big Boy. As housekeeping went, there wasn’t much house to keep. We had a one-bedroom apartment full of other people’s castoff furniture and a bank account only getting refilled with student loan money, so we couldn’t keep up with the other Joneses even if we wanted to.

In the eleven years since getting married, I’ve learned to cook, and I enjoy cooking, though I’ve taken to it the way I take to every task I’m determined to be good at: aggressively and self-consciously, with lots of hand-wringing and melodrama. I feel as much ownership of a meal I’m making as I do of a story I’m writing: I think that it would be cheating to let my husband play sous chef, and so I am always absurdly disappointed with myself when I have to ask him to chop or whisk. I know another couple, wonderful, wonderful hosts, who seem to be equal collaborators on each meal they put together. They are so relaxed, so in synch; I would never come over to find the female half of this partnership stalking around the kitchen with a tight smile on her face, repeating “It’ll just be a sec” or “I hope this comes out all right.”

That’s me, though: the woman whose apron strings are tied too tight. I like having company over the way I “like” giving a reading: I worry and worry about it in advance, I’m a nervous wreck the entire time it’s happening, and after, when the event is done and everyone is fuzzy on wine, I think, “Oh, that was fun!” (Or, I think, “They hated it. They hated it. Why did I make/read that?)

Look! REAL potatoes.

Brandon and I cooked for company twice early in our marriage, when we still lived in that one-bedroom apartment and were getting our undergraduate degrees. The first time, we made lasagna from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and if memory serves me right, it turned out OK. The second time, Brandon grilled steaks, and we prepared potatoes au gratin out of a Better Crocker box. Classy! But don’t be too hard on us. Not only were we still practically babies, we had both grown up in households that didn’t do dinner parties, and my own parents just weren’t social, period. The only time I ever remember anyone outside of my immediate family consuming food in my childhood home was at Thanksgiving, when my grandmother came over, or when my friends stayed overnight, which usually meant we ordered pizza. Dinner parties were what the people on my mother’s soap operas were always doing, in places with chandeliers and candlelight and a little mirrored bar where the men poured themselves Scotch. They may as well have been on a rocket ship for all the relevance such settings had to me.

I’ve found myself now at an age and in a profession that normalizes certain behaviors in the domestic arena. Many of my peers are buying or have just bought houses (and Brandon and I bought our second house just this past March), or are renovating or furnishing their houses. Many have traded in their beaten-up college cars for grown-up cars. I find myself thinking about mere stuff—the trappings of middle class success—in a way that I haven’t since the earliest days of my marriage, when I was young enough to think that I was a failure for being married but not having a real house. Suddenly, stuff is important in a way that it wasn’t when my good friends and I were all in graduate school, and living on little was something we all shared and made the best of. The one dinner I remember hosting then, in Ohio, was at Thanksgiving. We set a folding table up in our living room, because our small dining area was Brandon’s office, and we made a turkey. The four people who came over each contributed a dish, and we ate crowded around that folding table, and it was fine. Better than fine. I was probably doing some frenzied vacuuming before the company’s arrival, but I seem to remember the whole thing coming together fairly sanely. I wasn’t worried if the dishes looked nice or if the silverware matched. I was just happy that the turkey was cooked all the way through.

Sanity is something I could use more of. I’m a writer and a teacher, and those two occupations are demanding. I have a husband to spend time with, two dogs who require play and exercise, and my own somewhat regular running routine. I’d like to take a drawing class and learn a foreign language and travel. I’d like to update this blog more often than once every couple of months. I have a house now, and I’m currently sitting in a room full of dirty laundry; the dogs have taken to nesting in it. Our kitchen is either clean, because one of us has decided that we can’t take it any longer, or it is piled with dirty dishes. Tumbleweeds of white dog hair collect in the corners of the rooms, under furniture, and anywhere there’s a throw rug. Which is to say, I’m not much of a housekeeper, and neither is my beloved. I tend to tackle housework in manic episodes; Brandon tends to wait for direct orders, or for absolute necessity. I like to cook, but I’m not a naturally talented cook, and what I’m successful at—following recipes—is within the reach of any person who can read and select a decent, user-friendly cookbook, such as those by Ina Garten or Mark Bitman. Thank God Brandon and I don’t have any children. I don’t have a clue how a child would fit into our lives as we currently live them. Perhaps we’d nestle it in the dirty laundry pile?

And yet, somewhere and sometime I’ve come to believe that I have to be, in addition to a full-time academic and writer, wife, pet-parent, amateur runner (don’t get me started on the pressures among that crowd), and potential drawing student and language-learner, a housekeeper and gourmand. I have to pretend that my house always looks like it does when we clean for visitors, and I have to pretend that the meals I spent a lot of time worrying about and trying to get right were actually effortless. Though I am acknowledging now this divide between how I am and what I present (and I don’t kid myself that my presentation is flawless, that my anxiety isn’t apparent to my guests), I usually believe that this isn’t true for any of my friends, whose houses look nice even when I’m just popping by on short notice to drop something off, and whose meals are not just tasty and beautifully presented but easeful, as if my friends know the recipes by heart and don’t doubt how they’ll turn out.

My mother is a homemaker, and my husband’s mother had a full-time job. His mother, though, also did all of the cooking and most of the housework in that marriage, and I think that was very common of her generation of women, and it’s why the women of the 80s so often groused about trying to “have it all.” I had no idea for a long time what that concept of “having it all” meant. It seemed absurd to me that a true feminist would feel torn between her duties at work and at home, because it’s only logical that any person devoting herself to out-of-home employment cannot be expected to also be a domestic goddess. So what happened to me? Or is something happening to all of us? And if it is, are we talking about a new set of gender expectations (these more unacknowledged and insidious) or something else, something that has nothing to do with traditional gender roles?

Exotic cuisine.

This fancy home cooking trend is relatively recent, after all—a cultural movement with all kinds of root causes and factions, many quite worthy: resistance to processed foods (and emphasis on whole/organic foods), wider acceptance of dietary lifestyle choices and greater commercial facilitation of them, environmentalism, blogging (in which home cooks everywhere can proudly display, in beautiful digital photography, their latest restaurant-worthy plate), food television. Let’s stop on the topic of food TV for a moment. If you’ve watched the Food Network, and you’ve seen enough of those shows with their natural light and soft lenses and their hosts who make cooking seem downright sensuous, it’s easy to buy in to a very different picture of meal preparation than the one that I grew up with. My mother cooked on a tight budget in a town whose most exotic grocery offerings were La Choy and Old El Paso. She made cornbread and mashed potatoes several nights a week; I have sweet memories of her peeling potatoes in the living room while she watched afternoon TV. She was raised and expected to cook a small number of dishes the same way every time, and she cooked for a family whose tastes were adamantly limited and bland. (My dad could tolerate the occasional spaghetti dinner, and that was about as crazy as things got in the Goddard household.) She worked over cast iron, in a small, hot kitchen, and she filled in the empty spots of a dinner with canned vegetables, so that the only fresh veggies I can remember consistently eating as a child were summertime corn on the cob or sliced tomatoes.

Now compare that to the images proffered on the Food Network: those modern kitchens of stainless steel, cutting boards the size of car doors, big Japanese-style cutting knives, bright, ripe vegetables, good-looking, smiling hosts who talk about food as though preparing it is an act of creativity and intellect and not just a chore. And these shows are never just cooking anymore—they always have a story. Giada’s best friends are coming over for a light brunch, or Ina’s husband Jeffrey is home from his New York work week; Michael Chiarello (Mr. Easy Entertaining himself) is having a dozen of his most fashionable, intimate friends over for games and wine, he’s going to whip up some super-easy snacks on the fly. How fun and elegant cooking seems in this context! How pleased Ina’s and Giada’s and Michael’s friends are! The shows end with smiles and toasts and accolades for the host, who is always—let’s face it—just a bit smug. The dinner party is simply another arena in which people have to prove their skill and sophistication, and I suspect that it’s especially stressful for those of us who grew up thinking that an hors d'oeuvre is a Bloomin’ Onion.

I love good food, and, despite some misanthropic tendencies that I constantly struggle against, I love and value my friends. It’s a privilege to cook for them, and it makes me very happy when I feel like I did something to help them have a nice time. But entertaining is not easy, and it doesn’t come naturally to all of us. To buy into the dinner party ritual as the default social situation of my age and class, and the couple as the default social unit, makes me sad sometimes. Or maybe what I’m sad about is not the ritual but the age. I was so much better at after-workshop drink specials and Chinese take-out, and I liked getting out without my husband every now and then. I'm sure he'd say the same.

Meet the New Website

2010-09-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

In 2008, when I was getting ready for the debut of my first book, it seemed logical for me to have a website. I had for the first time in my writing career something to promote, and building a website with my husband, in addition to being a constructive distraction from the anxieties leading up to the book’s release, was a way to play dress up, to present myself as not just a writer but an Author. A whole collection of activities went under that same umbrella: setting up bookstore readings (and choosing the outfits to wear to them), soliciting blurbs, having jacket photos taken, sending out little Facebook missives about the cover design and so forth and getting a zing of pleasure each time I received positive acknowledgment. Writers are not supposed to enjoy the marketing process; the writer of pure artistic vision wishes to toil in private and must be dragged into public so that people may admire her. But I enjoyed it, I’ll admit, and the months leading up to my book’s release were some of the most exciting in my life. There was no reality to contend with: no reviews (or, worse, lack of them); no sales figures; no readings attended by one friend and one uncomfortable bookstore associate. Just the hope for excellent things and the small tasks, like a website, that gave me a way to extend the thrill of anticipation into as many of the nooks and crannies of my waking life as I could manage.

Now it’s about a year after the book’s release, and it seems as appropriate a symbol as anything that, after some pressing on my husband’s part, met with mostly indifference on mine, we’ve shut down the website proper and redirected its traffic to this free Blogger account. Let me back up a bit and explain: our accounts with a web host will expire in October, and Brandon, who managed all of this stuff for me, was pressing me simply to make a decision about whether or not to renew. My indifference was strong enough that, facing the prospect of a couple of hundred dollars in various charges, I was content to just drop the website entirely. It had been almost a year since we’d updated it, I was sick to death of the look of it (especially the photo that ended up on my story collection), and it wasn’t apparent to me that the website was doing anything to further promote a book that has pretty much run its course. Why mess with it? And really, what are the chances that www.hollygoddardjones.com will get snapped up by anyone other than my friend Will, who promised me he would buy it and then charge me “tens of dollars” not to put porn on it?

In the end, with both Brandon and Will convincing me that it wouldn’t hurt to hold on to the domain name, we decided to connect to my existing Blogger account, which is why, if you did come to this page seeking my good old black-and-white page with the nifty big artsy photo of me, you got this instead. I don’t update my blog very often, but it’s a regular Daily News compared to the activity on my old website. What I also like about this change—and who knows how long it will last?—is that I tend in my blog to put my focus on subjects other than what I have to promote. It’s no less an act of ego to assume that my musings on these subjects will interest you, but they have to be a touch better than a static third-person biography, a dreamy-looking author photo, and a link to the Amazon page for a book that you’ve probably already discovered if you were ever going to discover it.

A year after my book’s release, I’m feeling good, actually—I hasten to say that in case the tone of this message is too defeated. I was useless the month or two surrounding the release date, as we waited to hear who would review the book and what they would have to say about it. I had highs, like the day I learned that O Magazine would be featuring it, and lows, which were, for the most part, more like slow realizations than any kind of sudden understanding: when I finally gave up on a NYT book review, for instance. I gave readings to warmly supportive crowds of friends and family, and then I went home a year later, for a funeral, to have one of those loved ones say to me, having at this point actually read the book, “I didn’t like it. I don’t know why you wrote about those things.” (This conversation took place in front of the casket of a dead relative, which seems fitting.) I did enough interviews and Q&As that what felt like enormous fun at first eventually grew tiresome; I found myself making the same sorts of responses again and again, so that these statements, which had once seemed so true to me, started to take on a veneered, rehearsed quality, even when that wasn't my intention.

The problem wasn’t other people—the reviews, the readers, the relatives, the reporters—it was me, and how I reacted to them. As with the website, I started to enjoy the process of promotion less and less, and I worried that I wasn’t doing enough of the actual work that being a writer, much less an Author, requires. I could feel so dismayed by the reaction (or lack of) to the first book that I was stymied in my desire to produce the second.

But I’m back to work. I’m still full of anxiety about the new book and its fate, but I’m looking forward instead of back, and this webpage/blog, which will so quickly archive the older posts, is a good way to emphasize that.

And now, a final adieu to that photo with the doors:

48 Writers, 4 Winners: Win a Year of Books!

2010-06-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to be participating in this book giveaway, which is the brainchild of my friend Leah Stewart, a terrific writer whose new book Husband and Wife just pub'd. What follows is copied from Leah's original blog post, and it includes a link to a mailing list if, like yours truly, you're not on Facebook or Twitter. Good luck and happy reading!

Writing is such a solitary pursuit, it’s nice when you’re reminded that you’re part of a community. That’s what happened a couple weeks ago when Allison Winn Scotch put together a contest with twenty-seven other writers. I enjoyed the response and the conversation with the other writers so much, I thought we should do it again. And because I’m the type of person who plants 16 tomato plants in her garden, I asked even more people to join in.

If you’re in a book club, looking to start one, or anxious to stockpile birthday presents for the next five years, this is the contest for you. We—forty-eight of us—are each giving away ten copies of one of our books, so that four very lucky people can win book club picks for a year. That’s 120 books to each winner. And that’s not all! We’ll also set up calls between the writers and your club when you meet to discuss our books.

On the list below you’ll find novels, memoirs, and story collections, several of which aren’t even out yet. Among the writers are award winners, bestsellers, and Oprah, Target, and IndieNext picks—and all of them are terrific, talented people who are thrilled to connect with readers. Over the next several days I’ll be featuring them individually here. In the meantime, please look through the list below, check out our websites, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The contest closes at 5 p.m. EST on Friday, July 2. There are three ways to enter, and you can use them all (though please don’t use #1 or #3 more than once):

1) Comment on or like the post announcing the contest here.

2) Tweet or retweet info on our writers and the contest (you can use the link http://bit.ly/90QmVW). So that I can find your entry, be sure to include our hashtag, #yearofbooks.

3) Join our mailing list for information on future publications and promotions here.

You do not have to be in a book club to enter, although if you win it would certainly be a good time to start one. If you are in a book club, encourage other members to enter to increase your club’s chances of winning.

And now (drumroll, please) the books up for grabs are:

Husband and Wife, by me
@leahcstewart, http://www.leahstewart.com/

The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey
http://www.margotlivesey.com/

The One That I Want, by Allison Winn Scotch
@aswinn, http://www.allisonwinn.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Allison-Winn-Scotch/49841196684?ref=ts

I See You Everywhere, by Julia Glass

Love in Mid Air, by Kim Wright
@kimwright, http://www.loveinmidair.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/LOVE-IN-MID-AIR-by-Kim-Wright/359234790765?ref=ts

Diamond Ruby, by Joseph Wallace
@joe_wallace, http://www.josephwallace.com/index.html

Belong to Me, by Marisa de los Santos
http://www.marisadelossantos.com/
http://www.facebook.com/marisa.delossantos?ref=ts

Pictures of You, by Caroline Leavitt
@leavittnovelist, http://www.carolineleavitt.com/, http://carolineleavitt.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/carolineleavitt?ref=ts

Good Things I Wish You, by A. Manette Ansay
@amanetteansay, http://www.amanetteansay.com/

The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, by Erin McGraw
http://www.erinmcgraw.com/

Girl Trouble, by Holly Goddard Jones
http://www.hollygoddardjones.com/, http://hollygoddardjones.blogspot.com/

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, by Kevin Wilson
http://www.wilsonkevin.com/, http://wilsonkevin.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4712089&ref=ts

Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
http://milesfromnowherethenovel.wordpress.com/bio/

The Nobodies Album, by Carolyn Parkhurst
@CParkhurst1, http://www.carolynparkhurst.com/, http://www.octaviafrost.com/

Red Hook Road, by Ayelet Waldman
@ayeletwaldman, http://www.ayeletwaldman.com/
http://www.facebook.com/ayeletwaldman?ref=ts

Disaster Preparedness, by Heather Havrilesky
@hhavrilesky, http://www.rabbitblog.com/, http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/heather_havrilesky/index.html
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heather-Havrilesky/134199349937433

Stiltsville, by Susanna Daniel
@susannadaniel, http://www.susannadaniel.com/

My American Unhappiness, by Dean Bakopoulos
http://www.deanbakopoulos.com/index.html
http://www.facebook.com/dean.bakopoulos?ref=ts

Sea Escape, by Lynne Griffin
@lynne_griffin, http://www.Family-Life-Stories.com/
http://www.facebook.com/LynneGriffin?ref=ts

Real Life & Liars, by Kristina Riggle
@krisriggle, http://www.kristinariggle.net/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Novels-of-Kristina-Riggle/250614105762?ref=search&sid=540474396.407354928..1

The First Husband, by Laura Dave
@lauradave, http://www.lauradave.com/

The Local News, by Miriam Gershow
@miriamgershow, http://www.miriamgershow.com/
http://artist.to/miriamgershow

Good Enough to Eat, by Stacey Ballis
http://www.thepolymathchronicles.blogspot.com/

How to Sleep Alone in a King-Sized Bed, by Theo Nestor
@howtosleepalone, http://www.theopaulinenestor.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/How-to-Sleep-Alone-in-a-King-Size-Bed/226636320553?ref=ts

The Truth About Delilah Blue, by Tish Cohen
@tishcohen
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tish-Cohen/118720878150252

A Maze of Grace, by Trish Ryan
@trishryan, http://www.trishryanonline.com/

The Love Goddess’s Cooking School, by Melissa Senate
@melissasenate, http://www.melissasenate.com/
http://www.facebook.com/MelissaSenate

The Embers, by Hyatt Bass
@hyattbass, http://www.hyattbass.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hyatt-Bass/121019377925649?ref=ts

[TBA], by Jason Pinter

@jasonpinter, http://www.jasonpinter.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-pinter/

The Last Will of Moira Leahy, by Therese Walsh
@theresewalsh, http://theresewalsh.com/, http://writerunboxed.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Therese-Walsh/135862286426942

Life After Yes, by Aidan Donnelley Rowley
@ADonnRowley, http://ivyleagueinsecurities.com/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000061574617

Not Ready for Mom Jeans, by Maureen Lipinski
@maureenlipinski, http://www.maureenlipinski.com/

After You, by Julie Buxbaum
@juliebux, http://www.juliebuxbaum.com/blog/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julie-Buxbaum/119804978055852

The Lost Girls, by Amanda Pressner, Holly Corbett, & Jennifer Baggett
@lostgirlsworld, http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lost-Girls/155815108248?ref=ts

Refresh, Refresh, by Benjamin Percy
http://www.benjaminpercy.com/

The Seven Year Switch, by Claire Cook
@ClaireCookbooks, http://www.ClaireCook.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Claire-Cook/24954647610?ref=ts

Stay, by Allie Larkin
@AlliesAnswers, http://www.AllieLarkinWrites.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Allie-Larkin-Writes/116227021725680?ref=ts

Pieces of Happily Ever After, by Irene Zutell
@irenezutell, http://www.irenezutell.com/
http://www.facebook.com/irene.zutell?ref=ts

Pug Hill, by Alison Pace
@alisonpace, http://www.alisonpace.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison-Pace/110942295604233?ref=mf

The Opposite of Me, Sarah Pekkanen
@sarahpekkanen, http://www.sarahpekkanen.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sarah-Pekkanen/215202723761?ref=mf

Exley, by Brock Clarke
http://arsonistsguide.com/author-blog

The Transformation of Things, by Jillian Cantor
@jilliancantor, http://www.jilliancantor.com/

Out of the Shadows, by Joanne Rendell
@joannerendell, http://www.joannerendell.com/

Love Stories in This Town, by Amanda Eyre Ward
@amandaeyreward, http://www.amandaward.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amanda-Eyre-Ward/69247505328?ref=ts

Trophy, by Michael Griffith

Tethered, by Amy MacKinnon
@amymackinnon, http://www.amymackinnon.com/
http://www.facebook.com/amy.mackinnon1?ref=ts

The Language of Light, by Meg Waite Clayton
@megwaiteclayton, http://www.megwaiteclayton.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Meg-Waite-Clayton-Author/112212312160522?created

Miss Me When I’m Gone, by Philip Stephens
http://www.philipstephensauthor.com/

Rural Dictionary: Woolin'

2010-06-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the word “woolin’,” which entered my life, best as I can recollect, around the time my baby brother started walking and talking. There’s quite an age gap between us—I’d have been around 13—and so I have vivid memories of “getting wooled” (to use the term in a participial phrase). “He’s woolin’ ya!” my parents would say when Eric, wild creature that he was*, attacked me. These early toddler attacks usually involved some kind of head-butting and wrestling (wrastlin’, if you want to be perfectly proper here), sometimes accompanied by the emphatic grunts of a child determined to best a much larger person. If I were in a good mood, I’d tickle him in retaliation. If in a bad mood, I’d cry something to the effect of, “Get ‘im off of me! Mom!”

Once I grew up, I realized that I had never heard this word uttered outside of my childhood home. I’d heard, phonetically, “woolen”—but woolin’? Nope. My husband, who grew up in the same small town as I, among folks equally country, had never once used it. It’s a word that I don’t think I could employ sensibly outside of the company of a few close blood relatives, a word that doesn’t even have the distinction of wider, humorous disdain, the way phrases such as “fixin’ to” do.

The shame is that it’s such a good, funny, versatile word. My husband (who’s adopted it) and I use it mostly in application to our dogs. We find that it works nicely in both the transitive and intransitive sense. After Bishop and Martha eat, they will frequently express their full-bellied delight by either finding a soft spot to start rolling on their backs (“Bishop’s woolin’,” we might say, the act being solitary) or will come over and actually start rolling on us. That is, I might be sitting on the couch, and Bishop, usually, will come up and rub his back against my shins, all the while making a chortling sound. (If this is some kind of dog sexual dominance behavior, please don’t tell me so.) In this case, “He’s woolin’ me,” would be the appropriate expression. The dogs will occasionally wool one another, but I don’t consider it to be woolin’ any longer when the behavior transitions into growling and/or humping. Woolin’ in the Goddard-Jones household is a joyful, innocent act.

I finally asked my dad about the word. Where did it come from? “Well, I reckon it comes from wooling sheep,” he said. “To wool a sheep, you’ve got to take it by the legs and flip it on its back, then you shave the hair off.” He pantomimed. It made sense.

I got on the internet to see what I could turn up, and this was the best I could do, via the Urban Dictionary:

“A word used in the Northwest of England to describe a good old fashioned hiding.”

And here’s the sentence that illustrates usage. I think that it makes up for spelling with panache:

“If he carrys on talking to me in that mannor, he'll end up with a woolin.”

I like the idea that “woolin” might have come over from the island. Lends the word some sophistication.

*I should note that the "wild creature" just graduated from high school with a full scholarship to a very nice private university.

Image credit: New York Times

House Poor

2010-06-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

“Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.” –Proverbs 21.9

My husband and I purchased a house—our second, with a year of rental-living in-between—in mid-March, and we moved into it finally just last week. At the first house, which we owned for the two years I taught at Murray State University in Kentucky, there were a few problems, all of which seemed amplified because we’d never been homeowners before. Within days of moving in, for instance, the toilet stopped flushing and dirty laundry water (I hope that’s all it was) backed up into the bathtub and a second stand-in shower. I think it amounted to about $2200 of plumbing work, which felt then like a hard and unfair hit. Miraculously, the previous owner agreed to split the costs with us.

But that was the worst of it. The house was built in the 60s, some work had been put into it, and the most major renovation we took on ourselves was new windows and doors, a process that was fast, eerily effortless, and immediately gratifying. It wasn’t cheap, but we got the work done through Lowe’s, and everything was clear and itemized and set in stone before the first hammer was lifted. I don’t remember anything about those contractors; most of the job happened while I was at work.

Our new house, which is actually an old-ish house—built in 1937—has been another matter. We’ve already tackled plumbing and structural. We’ve repainted most of the rooms ourselves after getting a $6000 quote that made me boil with outraged surprise. And just when we got to the point where it seemed that we were a Murphy’s Oil Soaping away from moving boxes into rooms, we came in one day to find a brand-new, brown stain on the dining room ceiling. The why and the how of what follows are too long to go into, but the climax of this sad story is that a chunk of ceiling fell down a few feet away from where I was cutting in paint, and it became suddenly necessary to rebuild our one full bathroom from the studs in.

Renovation stories aren’t interesting stories. They’re like vacations and wrecked cars—carefully documented with photographic evidence by those involved but wholly irrelevant to anyone but the person who enjoyed or endured the experience (and perhaps, in the latter case, an insurance adjuster). So I know that it’s tedious to subject a reader to my complaints about contractors and delays and drywall dust—not just tedious but offensive, even, because the fact that this work (however unplanned and financially inconvenient it is) is even happening is perhaps garishly excessive in these hard times, when NPR reports to me daily how little the economy has grown, how few the jobs, how slumped the housing market.

I register the fact that I’ve become the kind of person who complains about a renovation and I feel disappointed with myself. I was tearfully complaining over the phone to my mother and father the other day about the fact that, now living in the house, we still don’t have a working shower, and my dad—kindly but sensibly—informed me of how, as a young working man, he would come home and bathe with a rag and a bucket of water. “Just get a good night’s rest tonight,” he said. “It’s not so bad. You can wash your head in the sink.”

I don’t wanna wash my head in the sink, I might have whined, but I restrained myself.

There are two other problems with this situation. The first, which follows naturally on my previous complaints, is the sense of displacement one feels when contractors have become a regular part of your house and your life. The dogs barely bark when they enter now. In the mornings, I have to get up, quickly don clothes, and be ready, because we never know when they’ll arrive. One day it was 8:00 am, and I’d just had my first sip of coffee. On other days its 9:30, or 10, or they call to say that they’ve been delayed and it won’t be until after lunch—or the next day. There are scratches on the hardwood floors, drywall leaned roughly against walls that it took me a coat of primer and three layers of thin, pale paint to cover. I came home one afternoon to find my measuring cup on the front porch, where a worker had used it to pour water onto tile he was cutting. It was just a measuring cup—plastic, old, not worth a buck—but it had been transferred from my kitchen drainer to my porch without my permission. This is not the kind of thing that a reasonable woman gets angry about, but I keep having these flare-ups of something like anger, unreasonable anger.

And this gets to the second problem, the harder problem to discuss with any tact. It’s the problem of being a “reasonable woman,” or merely a woman in a house with men making cuts and holes and fart jokes and decisions. There’s a paradox here, I’ve discovered. I don’t care how uncouth they are—if they curse or make fart jokes or if they belt their pants tightly enough or if they wipe their sneakers before entering—but they have a mindset that makes these behaviors both natural for men and offensive to women, and they treat me like a character: the “wifey,” a woman who doesn’t understand construction (and I don’t as well as Brandon, but architecture is Brandon’s field, for God’s sake) and nags at her husband and wants to see only results, not process. One guy actually said to me, “I was telling my wife about you guys. I told her that Brandon wears the pants in the family but his wife has her hand on the zipper.” (“I don’t know about that,” I stammered and fled, an inadequate reaction that I keep kicking myself over.) And that’s another thing: I’m the wife, not Holly. “Mrs. Brandon,” the head contractor calls when he needs me to look at something. Another guy referred to me with Brandon, though I was in the room, as “your old lady.”

I’m partly to blame. I’ve left the major decision-making and all of the construction management to my husband, who is not just a smarter designer and a person with actual, practical technical know-how—he can do most of the non-life-saving things on this irritating Popular Mechanics list (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/4221635) —but is often a more patient and tactful communicator than I. When I lose patience, he finesses. When I make demands, he makes suggestions so craftily and subtly that his idea becomes yours. He speaks my language, but he also speaks these guys’ language, and he’s played the role of interpreter beautifully, as well as one possibly could. For years, this sort of management—acting as a go-between for clients and contractors—was his career. But when you have an interpreter, you don’t have to learn the language, or you don’t have to admit that you kind of know the language already, that you feel—OK, switching to first person here—that I feel compelled to come across as less powerful, less forceful, less sure in what I want than I actually am. I’ve been treated like a character, but the sad and distressing thing is that I’m also playing a role. These men have boiled down Brandon’s and my little offhand comments about what I do and how we live into, “She’s a teacher,” a sentence that is true enough but only skirts the edge of who I am and what I consider my real vocation. When I’m trying to read a book over the whine of the buzz saw or the banging of a hammer, I worry that I look to them like a housewife with a romance novel, a woman with a life so decadent that she can spend her summer weekdays reading and taking long walks with her dogs while the fellas do real work. Never mind that there’s almost nothing else I can do while the contractors still live here. Why unpack boxes when the room their contents will occupy still requires cleaning and repainting, or when the room still has a gaping hole that has to be patched and sanded?

The thing is—and maybe this isn’t clear—I actually like these guys. I’ve been frustrated with them beyond measure, and I will not be sorry to see them pack up their tools and their van and leave us to our home, but they’re good-natured, honest-seeming men, and it’s evident to me that they mean no disrespect. That they, in fact, mean the opposite of disrespect, that they they’re striving to treat me like a lady, not knowing that their definition of that word differs from my own. I don’t know what it means about me that I endure and attempt to understand this. I was telling some friends, another married couple, about my displeasure at the way Brandon’s and my names were listed on the mortgage for the house—“Brandon Jones and his wife Holly Goddard Jones”—and it became apparent that these friends, who bought their house not long before we did, had insisted that their own contract not appear that way. Why hadn’t we insisted? There’s still a part of me who isn’t a boat-rocker, who accepts these minor defeats as trivial, thinking, again paradoxically, that the major war is what’s important. But, as my friend pointed out, it’s the little stands that eventually add up to the big one. If I can’t assert my agency with a contractor that I’m paying for a service, how will I assert it in the wider world?

Goodbye, Dixie

2010-05-01T16:11:00.001-07:00

“This is the South, and we’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them in the attic—we bring them right down into the living room and show them off.” – Julia Sugarbaker, Designing Women

I’ve been wanting to post a little tribute to Dixie Carter ever since hearing about her death, but the semester got in the way, as semesters tend to. So this comes late, but it’s still heartfelt.

I grew up on TV, and when I say that I mean that my family life pretty much revolved around it: we ate many, if not most, of our meals in the living room where we could watch it, it went on when we got out of bed, and it went off when we got ready to turn in. We subscribed to TV Guide. My family didn’t go to movies or football games or to play miniature golf. My parents didn’t, for most of the time I lived at home, have friends that they socialized with in the evenings or on weekends. They were wrapped up in each other, as a couple they focused on their children, and as a family we focused on the tube. There were a few other things in our lives—trips to the library and to Wal-Mart, a weekly excursion to Bowling Green for a meal out and a walk through the mall—but TV was the primary source of entertainment and instruction. It tended to be on even if no one was watching it.

A lot of the people in my life now don’t watch much TV or even have one, and so owning up to such a past—or ‘fessing up to my current guilty pleasures, because I do have them—can be hard. People who love to read tend to take for granted that TV truly is an idiot box. In lots of ways I agree, but I also think back to some of the long-running sitcoms of my childhood and I realize that I might owe a thing or two to television. In fact, I’m amazed when I do a quick mental tally of popular shows from my childhood. Who put them on the air? How on Earth were they successful? Golden Girls, which ran from ’85 to ’92, shouldn’t have had a thing to offer a little girl, but I loved it—and I also loved Dixie Carter’s Designing Women, which ran from ’86 to ’93. Murphy Brown (’88-’98) was a favorite, but the best of the best was Roseanne (’88-’97), a show that I felt an unsurprising kinship with because, as my mom liked to say, it was “about people like us.”

These shows were all helmed by women—a remarkable fact all on its own. But even better, the women on these programs were dynamic and interesting, and their concerns weren’t merely or even primarily romantic. Golden Girls was of course about retirees living in Florida, and Designing Women centered on a business and the female staff that owned and operated it. Murphy Brown was about a journalist, and Roseanne was about the home, work, money, and relationship problems of a working class woman and her family. None of the women on these shows was in her 20s; none was conventionally beautiful, and Roseanne, even after the actress portraying her had work done, was overweight and completely average—the woman you might see folding clothes at the table down from yours at the Laundromat or at the grocery, checking the expiration date on a red-tagged package of chicken thighs. None of the shows was set in New York or Los Angeles. And best yet, the characters were flawed, not saintly; they had backstories.

If you look at the current Nielsen ratings today, most of the network programs in the top 25 are either reality shows about dancing or singing, one-hour dramas such as House, CSI, and The Mentalist, which are anchored by a male lead, or sitcoms with male-heavy ensemble casts such as The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men. The very popular Glee, which I’ve watched intermittently, depicts its male characters as charmingly bumbling and well-intentioned and its female characters as narcissistic, deceptive, and bordering on sociopathic. I won’t say, of course, that there’s nothing on television that depicts women as strong and layered protagonists, but I think that I’m safe in suggesting that it’s not the norm.

Dixie Carter’s Julia Sugarbaker, then, along with Murphy Brown and Roseanne Connor, was one of my idols. Fans of Designing Women will recall that, at least once every few episodes, Julia would have A MOMENT, which Carter portrayed with a fiery, “I’ll never go hungry again” Southern over-the-topness that was saved from ridiculousness by Carter’s clear intellect and sense of ironic fun. I loved when Julia Sugarbaker got on her soapbox, because she was always saying with an unearthly eloquence something that mattered, usually to a person who really, really needed schooling. I went to YouTube and watched some old clips of Dixie Carter in Designing Women, and I still get goosebumps seeing her do her thing. To analyze it would be to kill it, but there’s some combo here—timbre of voice, the slow build, an oscillation between fast and slow that one associates with a Baptist preacher—that is surprising and, in the person of an elegant, mature woman, breathtaking. She reminds me a bit of another southern favorite of mine, Jerry Clower, whose comedy bits usually crescendoed in similar fashion. But Carter, as Julia, was all her own, and decidedly feminine. Her rhetorical power wasn’t merely a knock-off of masculine models: it was womanly and Biblical and intellectual, a combination pulled off between the writers of the show and this actress with the mind and heart to really feel what she was saying. I adored it. I still do.

As a girl, I pretty much knew from the start that I could do whatever I wanted to do with my life. That is due in large part to my wonderful parents, who, though cautionary realists, always encouraged me; but I also—can I say this?—was lucky to have good models on television, characters who cared about more than clubbing and texting and finding a new guy to pursue. I’m sorry for the young women raised on a diet of The Hills; even 90210 had more to redeem it. I’m glad for shows like Designing Women, and I’m sorry to have lost a woman like Dixie Carter, who brought to life Julia’s fire, smarts, and independence.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

2010-04-27T15:12:00.001-07:00

Thanks to my friend Dan Wickett, I learned today that GIRL TROUBLE made the long list for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, which, according to the website, is "the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for the form." Here's the really strange thing: Sam Shepard's also on the list. I didn't even realize that he writes fiction. I had, however, heard that he is starring in the Chris Offutt-penned series-in-development TOUGH TRADE, which sounds awesome, and he sure is purty to look at.

Here's the link to the prize website:

http://www.munsterlit.ie/

And to some eye candy:

http://www.sam-shepard.com/

Book giveaway and table signing at AWP

2010-04-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

If you’re planning to attend AWP this coming weekend in Denver, make sure to visit my friends at The Kenyon Review table, which will be in Exhibit Hall A, Table C23. Per the KR newsletter:

“We'll have an outrageous subscription discount offer, copies of the Winter 2010 special issue guest-edited by Simon Ortiz and featuring a host of indigenous writers, and limited edition miniside give-aways handmade on the brand new KR letterpress.”

KR published two of the eight stories in Girl Trouble, “Life Expectancy” and “Retrospective,” and Nancy Zafris’s 2007 interview with me appears in the book’s “P.S.” section of supplementary materials. I’m excited, then, that I’ll be signing copies of Girl Trouble at the KR table on Friday, April 9th, 10 am to noon. I’m doubly excited that, because of the generosity of my publisher, we’ll be giving away 40 copies of the book, one with each outrageously discounted KR subscription!

Novel Excerpt up at GUERNICA

2010-02-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to have an excerpt from my novel-in-progress up at Guernica: A Magazine of Politics and Arts. The guest editor for fiction is Claire Messud, a writer whose work I deeply admire, and so it's an honor to have her highlight my work along with six other up-and-coming women writers. Here's the link to Ms. Messud's introductory essay:

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/1528/seven_remarkable_women_claire/

And to my novel excerpt, "Suspension":

http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/1525/suspension/

Another excerpt from the novel is in the current issue of Copper Nickel.

If you can't say something nice

2010-01-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

A friend and I were corresponding recently about the problem of workshopping as a “grown-up” writer. What I mean by “grown-up” isn’t age but experience, since several of my peers and students took up writing later in life and benefited enormously from hearing their fiction discussed by a group of peers. And by “experience” I don’t mean publication, though sometimes the two go together. These are the questions I’m batting about: How many workshops are too many? When does workshop stop benefiting one’s growth as a writer? Could I ever put myself through the workshop wringer again?

If you’re a non-writer or a writer outside of academia who is happening upon this blog, a writing workshop is a class, usually but not always offered at a university, in which a group of students read and discuss one another’s work. The discussion is generally headed by a teacher, professor, or published writer, and it might take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the parameters of the class and the liveliness of discussion. There are a few conventions in the average fiction workshop. Generally, there are two phases—a short congratulatory session, which one of my graduate school professors called “The Circle of Love,” and a longer session of critique. The writer is often asked not to speak until the end of the discussion, at which point he or she may ask questions, make comments, or run crying out of the room.

There are variations. Some professors dispense with The Circle of Love entirely. Some workshops that are helmed by strong personalities or big names are less of a discussion than they are one person’s opinion getting witnessed, painfully, by an audience of 10 to 15 others. Some professors are gentler, even sloppy, in their critique. In my graduate school days, our weeklong sessions with visiting writers often fell into one of the above extremes. The visiting writer was either God, proposing and disposing and giving us the Word, or (s)he was vaguely supportive, making suggestions that could be refreshingly odd or merely perplexing depending on the context. We took the classes as much to bask in the person’s brilliance, as if it might rub off on us, as we did to get real help on a specific story, and I think that the writers had to have sensed that. Or—worse—we took the class hoping that we would be DISCOVERED. The big name would love our work, introduce us to her agent, blurb our book! Did I think and hope that way? Absolutely.

After a rough calculation, it looks as though I’ve participated as a student in 16 workshops. I’ve taught about the same number of workshops, a figure that doesn’t include short 1- or 2-day craft sessions. That’s a lot of time to sit in a circle thinking about other people’s stories and novel chapters. After all of that workshopping and all of that teaching, the thought of going through the workshop process again—of having my 30 pages dissected and torn apart by 10 or 15 other people—frankly makes me ill. But why is that? Shouldn’t my skin have gotten thicker instead of thinner with time? I don’t think that I’ve outgrown critique, and some of my most fulfilling relationships are with people with whom I once shared a workshop—my graduate school friends, one of my graduate professors—or people, like my editor Sally, who became part of my life as a reader and critic of my fiction. When I finish a draft of something now, I always send it to my two graduate school friends and, if she’s available, a former colleague. I read my work aloud to my husband, an intimacy we’ve shared since our undergraduate days at UK and one of my favorite parts of the writing process. Reading to Brandon has always had the effect on me of stimulating, rather than flattening, my desire to return to the page. Is he always a fan of my work? Well, sure. Usually. But he also asks questions and has insights that force me to think—hard—about what I’m doing. And when he compliments me, it is so particular and so personal and honestly felt that I know for little instances who I am as a writer and why I do what I do. That’s not always the case in The Circle of Love, where even the compliments come in the form of worn-out workshop homilies such as “complex characterization” or “strong pacing” or “clever concept.” Brandon has never uttered the words “characterization” or “pacing” to me. I’m not saying that those are bad words, and my students can tell you that I use them—a lot—but Lord knows that they don’t equal, for my buck, the pleasure of hearing from your beloved, “When you write, I can always see exactly what you’re describing—it’s like I’m there” or “I just can’t believe sometimes that all of this is in your head. It just amazes me.”

Every writer should have a person in her life like Brandon. I’m lucky.

The problem with workshop is that the “love” is often perfunctory, so it’s no wonder that it gets expressed in clichés. Hardcore workshoppers—and I was once one—believe that the meat of the exercise is in the critique, and the more rigorous that critique, the better. Well, for me, this was true at least when I was doing the critiquing. When my own story was getting discussed, I wanted—sure!—to be admired, to be the exception. Workshop was a test that I either passed or failed. It’s not surprising, then, that so many of our hours post-workshop were spent in a bar across the street from campus.

I hate to think of how I must have been then, how I must have come across to my peers—or at least to the peers who were more mature and enlightened than I. I read my peers’ stories in a haze of defensiveness and jealousy and anxiety; I read suspiciously instead of sincerely; I read with a closed mind instead of an open one. This was true not just of workshop stories but of many of the books put in front of me by professors as models of the form. In class, we tore the stories in Best American Short Stories to tatters. Best? I would think, sneering. Really? Many of us had pet writers, writers who could do in our eyes no wrong, writers who were antidotes to everything we thought was wrong with contemporary American fiction. But even these favorite writers were chosen to highlight our aesthetic philosophy, to exclude as much as to include. As we workshopped, we took pains to make sure that our stories weren’t too “workshoppy.” I must tell you, it’s strange business to take a workshop and not be workshoppy, to believe in the process but not in its product.

In those years, I came to believe that a critique was the ultimate expression of intellect. Critiques were smarter than compliments; compliments were pandering and stupid and leveling. Compliments were issued by uninspired minds (unless, of course, I was on the receiving end).

My attitude has begun to change in recent years, probably because I’m the teacher now, and I find this attitude among students to be so sad and exhausting. They are cheating themselves of the pleasure of appreciation. Appreciation isn’t a stupid reaction to a work of art. In fact, well-expressed appreciation is much harder to issue than well-expressed criticism, which is probably why the complimentary reviews you see in publications such as The New Yorker, which do more than just blurb a rave in 200 words, tend to summarize the subject matter of a book more than address, specifically, what the author did right. Pans, on the other hand, tend to be exacting and articulate. To appreciate is to lower yourself before another person’s skill; to critique is to suggest that you see something that the writer did not.

My point here isn’t that workshop is bad or that negative feedback is bad but that I wish, when I was still workshopping, that I had the humility and smarts to say, honestly and articulately, why I liked what I liked. By the time writers understand this, though, we don’t want to workshop any longer—and so it seems to me that the cycle of negativity perpetuates, because the will of the class will always supersede the approval or disapproval of a professor, though it hardly seemed that way to me at the time.

Chicago Tribune

2010-01-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

Girl Trouble is Elizabeth Taylor's Editor's Choice selection this week at the Chicago Tribune's Printer's Row blog:

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/printers-row/2010/01/editors-choice-girl-trouble.html

They've been good to me over there. In December, Tribune columnist Julia Keller picked GT as one of her favorite books of 2009.

One last post about Facebook

2010-01-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

I wasn't planning to write about Facebook again, but the other night I had a dream about Facebook--or rather, I had a nightmare about it, and I awoke unnerved about both the dream and the fact that Facebook had made its way into a dream. I don't think that Facebook belongs in my subconscious life, especially now that I've banished it from my waking one.

The dream was this: I was on the computer, it occurred to me that I'd lost a bunch of time reading stuff--it gradually occurred to me that the "stuff" was status updates--and then I realized, horrified, that I was on Facebook. I had accidentally logged on and reactivated my account, and now I'd have to start the account deletion all over again! (In my dream that seemed like a really hard thing to do.) The emotion accompanying this realization was despair, and the relief I felt upon awaking was profound.

Life without Facebook has been just fine. On a few occasions I've unconsciously navigated to the home page after completing my email correspondence, because that was always my habit before, but even that little tic is receding. I miss FB most when I'm obviously looking for a way to distract myself from work that needs doing: my writing, or the writing and reading I have to do for teaching. It's evident to me now that at least half of my attraction to social networking was that it gave me the illusion of doing something when what I honestly wanted to do was nothing.

Now, when I say "nothing," I'm not alluding merely to laziness, though the impulse is occasionally a lazy one. I'm talking about those moments when we're not consumed with some activity that requires thought or action or that offers instant gratification. Cat-napping can be nothing. Going for a run, staring out the window. Meditating, though I've never been very good at meditating. The moments when I first sit down to write are necessarily nothing moments, as I stare at the screen, zone out, and try to recapture the thread of my last good rally by essentially not trying. It's a process too mysterious for concrete language, which is frustrating, because I'm wary of abstractions.

I'm teaching right now as a guest at Centre College, a liberal arts school near Lexington, KY, and I asked my students the other day to talk a bit about their personal history with technology, and how technology has influenced their thinking--not the content of their thinking but their mode of thinking, the way they solve problems, have ideas, analyze, interpret. The pace at which these activities occur. The students agreed, of course, that they'd been using computers since they were very young and that the internet is a technology that they've grown up taking for granted--the way, I suppose, that I grew up with the telephone or cassette tapes or television. Take that last as an example: I was a TV baby--there is a photograph of me hunched about a foot from the screen, watching Sesame Street, mouth ajar--and yet I grew up to be a lover of books and words, a writer. Television never seemed like an addiction, a vice to be overcome; it was just another way to entertain myself, a conduit for information. Was it the same for my grandparents, who grew up without it? I have no good way of asking them now, but I wonder. What I'm trying to figure out, I guess, is if these new technologies are insidious and dangerous and bad for the brain or if folks from my generation, and the generations before us, are just not evolved enough to use them. Or maybe I'm just not evolved enough to use them and do the kind of thinking I want to do and need to do for my life's vocation.

What's indisputable is that people seem to be reading less fiction for pleasure, with the exception of some name brand writers and blockbuster books, most of which seem to belong to extended series or franchises. I see the evidence of this in my creative writing classes, where embarrassment about not knowing and liking the "right" writers has given way to embarrassment about not enjoying the process of reading much at all. These students--rare, but not as rare as they used to be--come to fiction classes because they were inspired by movies and even narrative video games, not books. I feel destined to disappoint them.

How essential is a quiet center to the act of writing or the act of reading? How essential is it to modern life? Are you restless when an hour passes, or two hours pass, or three, and you haven't gotten an email or a text or a "notification"? If so, can you remember when this started to be true for you?

On teeth

2009-12-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

The most troubling thing about getting older has been seeing the evidence on my face. I think from a few feet away that I probably don’t look much different than I did a few years ago. Up close, though—the distance, say, from my face to the bathroom mirror, where I do most of my scrutinizing—one can make out lines between my eyebrows and around my mouth. The lines around my mouth are most dismaying and curious, because I can see how this new source of insecurity is the product, at least in part, of an old insecurity.

I noticed early on that the line on the left side of my mouth was significantly more pronounced than the one on my right side. Why? I tried some faces and realized that I have a crooked smile—the left side pulls higher and wider than the right. Well, once I’d made the observation the reason was obvious: I have a crooked tooth—a snaggletooth—on the right side, and over the years I’ve gotten so used to trying to hide it that my face unconsciously cooperated, doing its job effectively enough that the left side spent years and years working harder than the right. I couldn’t have imagined such a result when, at 12, my right eye tooth began pushing against the pink gum above my baby tooth. I know that adolescents weather all kinds of difficult situations, and I know that I could have been inflicted with a far worse fate than a crooked tooth, but the situation seemed huge and devastating to me then. I went in a matter of weeks from having a set of mostly straight teeth to having a bright white triangle of bone jutting out too high and too far.

Braces were never really an option. I pleaded with my parents long enough and hard enough to get an appointment with the town’s one orthodontist, the guy that all of my classmates had gone to, and I dimly remember him saying, cheerfully, “You’re lucky that you’ve got good insurance. This will only end up costing you about fifteen-hundred.” It was a price my dad wasn’t willing, or able, to pay. Dad also quibbled with the fact that the doctor insisted I’d need braces on my lower teeth as well as my upper teeth, since adjusting the top would shift the alignment of my bite. “I just don’t think that’s necessary,” he kept saying. “He could just do the top. There’s no reason why he couldn’t just do the top.”

At any rate, I didn’t get bottom or top. I didn’t experience the agony or thrill of braces, of little multicolored plastic spacers, of rubber bands. And it seemed to me then that everyone had braces, even the kids who hadn’t seemed to really need them. Most of them had nothing more than a tilt here, a space there—nothing so garish as a snaggletooth.

There were lots of ways then that I measured my peers’ wealth against my family’s lack of wealth. I spent so much time being embarrassed, feeling denied. I didn’t get braces. I didn’t get to go to the New Kids on the Block concert. My dad drove a green 70s-era Nova with threadbare upholstery, and none of his vehicles had air conditioning until after I graduated from high school. I didn’t have the name brand clothes or the name brand boxes of cereal. There are a thousand ways that my parents spoiled me and provided me with the best kind of growing up a girl could hope for, so don’t mistake this as a pity-party; I’m just trying to recreate for you now the way I felt then. I felt poor. I was convinced that my peers saw me as poor, too.

I can be a bit of class warrior now. I abhor snobbery. Even so, it occurred to me the other day, out of nowhere—I was walking through a TJ Maxx, in fact, looking for a few last-minute Christmas presents—that my teeth make me look poor. How’s that for a painfully honest thought? I caught my reflection, thought that I could look fairly dignified if my mouth was shut, but felt that I gave away something about myself, whether I wanted to or not, whenever I opened it to speak or smile.

Americans care about teeth. A lot. When Kirsten Dunst is photographed at just the right angle, you can make out that she has the slightest little snaggleteeth. Poor Jewel, Empress of Yodeling, has long been skewered for her bad teeth, as evidenced in a feature from Blender magazine, which says that Jewel "should have invested in some dental work and fixed that snaggle tooth as soon as she went platinum," adding, "Now that her pop career has gone bust, maybe her hillbilly teeth will fare better in Nashville." And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with our straight-teeth obsession, since Americans also associate bad teeth with rednecks, hillbillies, and drug addicts. It’s one of the many, many ways that we tend to associate—or confuse—good breeding with good thinking.

I sometimes contemplate braces, now that I could just buy them for myself, but I think I’m too far-gone for those little clear plastic things, and I just can’t imagine myself suffering the particularly adolescent indignity of wires and bands and scratched, chapped lips. Pragmatically, it seems to me that I’m past the point of really needing them; my husband likes me the way I am, and if people look at me and make assumptions, at least I can usually count on exceeding their expectations rather than falling short of them. And yes, there’s probably a part of me—the class warrior in me—who’s proud to be sporting the set of flawed chompers that God gave her, particularly because they seem to be an artifact from a time when certain technologies, though prevalent, weren’t automatic. I wanted braces but I got over not having them. I wonder if we do that often enough: get over not having the things we want.

Why I Quit Facebook

2009-12-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

My dad once told me that the only thing worse than a drunk is a recovered drunk. That’s why I’ve hesitated to write about my decision to leave Facebook (and how serious that sounds! as if I’ve declared that I’m leaving my political party or religion!), and that’s why I decided to not even announce my exit last week before finally finding the magic button on the site that not only deactivates the account (which is meaningless; the moment you log on again you’re “reactivated”) but deletes it entirely. (Well, at the risk of wearing out the parenthetical comments, I should add that there’s a two-week grace period—or perhaps we should call it a two-week curse period?—during which I can change my mind. I feel certain that I won’t.)

But I got a message today from a nice person, a Facebook friend, who’d noticed me missing and assumed I’d unfriended him, which made me feel very sorry for stealing out of social networking under the cover of darkness. So here’s my announcement and my explanation, and I’ll try not to sound sanctimonious, mostly because I have nothing yet to be sanctimonious about. This is Day Five on the wagon after two years of status-updating my little heart out. When I first got Facebook ages and ages ago, you had a home page full of applications like “Give Snow Globes and Hatching Eggs” and “Send Karma!” and “What breed of dog are you?” There was no “like” button for status updates. We’re talking dark ages, people. And how do I talk about my Facebook life without embarrassing myself? Well, I can’t. But I’m steeled by my certainty that at least some of you will recognize the more dangerous patterns of my Facebook addiction, such as:

A. Thinking, even in the real world, in status updates—then racing to the computer to post a particularly clever one;

B. Then checking compulsively for an hour or two after to see if the little red flag had popped up on my Notifications box;

C. Getting a comment on my status as I’m on FB, wanting to reply immediately to it, but worrying that it would be pathetic to be both on FB at 12:00 to update my status and on FB at 2:30 to reply to a comment made in response to my status, and so deciding arbitrarily to wait an hour or so before posting my reply. As if—you know—I had a life. Then follows as in B;

D. Reading the Very Conservative status update of a guy I went to high school with, working myself up into a rage of self-righteousness, spending twenty minutes formulating a beautifully written, coolheaded, logical response, getting scared, deleting it, rewriting a more vanilla version, deleting that one too, finally posting the most vanilla version. Then follows as in B;

E. Losing twenty minutes to clicking, zombie-like, through seventy-five vacation photos posted by a person I barely know, not because they’re great photos, or because I truly care, but because…I can?

It’s that last kind of thing that bothers me most. Writing a funny status, commenting on a funny status, arguing politics: those actions require a brain cell or two. But it’s the endless, mindless clicking—the way that I could sit down in front of Facebook and just zone out, emerging minutes or even hours later with absolutely nothing to show for my time. I’m a writer: I value, in theory, narrative and causality. But Facebook is a story with no plot, no climax, and no end. It’s a story that doesn’t even have a point of view, despite the emphasis on, the celebration of, self. Do I update my status in first person or third? Who am I? To whom am I speaking? How close is this public version of me to the real me? There are people with whom I’ve had pleasant, even rewarding FB correspondences that simply don’t connect to me—or to whom I don’t connect—in the real world. This doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, and it’s curious. And no wonder! In the real world, we have the luxury of being many different persons. I have a daughter persona, a wife persona, a teaching persona. Most of the time, I don’t have to have a writing persona, unless I’m standing, uncomfortably, in the lobby of the AWP conference hotel, pretending to belong. I have friends with whom I deepen my accent and laugh more loudly; I have friends who bring out in me quiet and carefulness. All of these selves are real; all are me. I’m not designed to be all things to all people all the time.

Facebook, though, makes that demand. Now, some people are of course less savvy than others—or just care less than I do. You might know the woman who posts inappropriate status updates about her custody battle with her ex-husband, or the former student who thinks it’s fine to pose for his profile picture in a Speedo and trench coat. But I have a developed enough sense of self-preservation to try, at least most of the time, to consider my audience. And, at my peak of 500-something friends (a modest number by some standards), that audience included high school friends, grad school friends, former teachers, current colleagues, former colleagues, former students, fellow writers, people who’d read my book, my mother-in-law, my step mother-in-law, a guy I met on an airplane ride from Louisville to Atlanta. My friends are Marxists and capitalists and atheists and deeply religious and they have doctorates or they haven’t finished high school and they eat meat or they don’t eat meat and they love Quentin Tarantino or they don’t. It’s not that I want to please everyone—but most of the time, yes, I like to avoid offending them. In that way, it sometimes seemed to me that Facebook stripped me of much of what makes me particular and interesting. I didn’t even want to post a list of my favorite television shows. Who wants to be judged by her affection for How I Met Your Mother?

In the end, it seemed to me that Facebook was taking a lot away from me. Time, certainly. My honest sense of myself—ditto. But finally, and most frighteningly, it was stripping me of my patience, my ability to slowly and methodically think, my ability to go for ten minutes without being validated. It feels good to be liked; that’s as true in life as it is online. But on Facebook, it’s so damn clear. Like! Thumbs up! I was addicted to that instant and constant gratification.

So that’s my story. Now that I’m off Facebook—and it took me months to work up the courage to delete the account—I don’t even miss it very much, though I’ll miss having such easy access to a community of writers. It was so lovely to be able to ask for story or book recommendations and get, within an hour, twenty great responses. But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if it means that I can reclaim even an hour or two of extra writing and thinking time a week. I’m surprised that it took me so long to realize that. I’m disappointed in myself.

If you’re on Facebook, do you ever regret it? Do you contemplate leaving? What would you gain? What would you miss?

PS: If you want to really delete your FB account, go to the bottom of the page, click “Help,” and search “delete account.” Instructions, along with a hyperlink to the delete page, will appear in the list of results.

Vote for GIRL TROUBLE!

2009-11-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

My book is one of five titles currently in contention to be the December Book Club selection on the website AUTHOR EXPOSURE. Please go to the link below by Thursday, November 9th to vote for Girl Trouble:

http://www.authorexposure.com/

Thanks!

The trouble with GIRL TROUBLE

2009-11-10T16:48:00.000-08:00

I'm home from what's left of my official "tour" for Girl Trouble. Last Saturday I signed books for most of the day at the Kentucky Book Fair, a task made pleasant by the presence of fellow writer Karen McElmurray, author most recently of the novel Motel of the Stars (Sarabande)--we worked together for two years at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference--and Bethany Griffin, author of the young adult novel Handcuffs. I met nice people, got the book out to some folks who were already curious about it, and even, miraculously, sold a couple of copies to people who were merely on the browse. I say "miraculously "because it became apparent to me, that day more than any other, how badly my book's title is getting misinterpreted. Several people looked at the cover, read the back copy for a few moments, and then said something to the effect of, "Oh, I thought that my 12-year-old might like this, but I guess not." One group of three women, all huddled around one copy of the book, finished their perusal by making horrified faces, then shaking their heads as if to clear them of troubling images. "I don't need anyone getting any ideas," one of them said, smacking the book back down on top of a stack.

And then there were the men. "Now, I don't have anything against chick lit," one said.

"It's not chick lit," I told him. "It's a book of literary short stories."

"About women?"

"About women and men."

It got kind of ridiculous. As soon as a man approached my table and made eye contact, I started declaring, "Now, this isn't chick lit! It's actually rather dark. There are as many male point of view characters as there are female characters." It's not that I was even so desperate to sell copies, though of course I wanted to make the giant pile look at least a little smaller after seven hours of table duty. I just wanted to be understood. I wanted my book to be accepted or rejected based on what it is.

Secondary to this desperation and frustration, I feel guilt. In adamently rejecting the label of "chick lit," am I suggesting that there's something wrong with chick lit or with domestic fiction more generally? "Domestic" seems to be the literary label for women's writing, and I'm not sure what that even means anymore. I mean, I hear Alice Munro occasionally referred to as a writer of domestic fictions, but could you possibly apply that label to recent stories such as "Dimension," "Child's Play," and "Free Radicals"? Is what makes them domestic the fact that they center on female point of view characters?

Some folks are upset that Publishers Weekly's round-up of the ten best books of 2009 features only male writers.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6704263.html

I've only read on that list Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply--and I have to say, I loved it--so I don't want to disparage the other writers by implying that their slots should have gone to Lorrie Moore or Margaret Atwood or Jayne Anne Phillips or Jill McCorkle (and of course I'm just listing fiction writers). I don't know if mention of the PW list even belongs in the same meditation as my "girl trouble" troubles, though I guess I'm suggesting, in a roundabout way, that a woman writer automatically battles the perception that her work is designed only for women, making it lesser. Of course, in a way all fiction is designed for a primarily female audience, because women are book buyers. Women control the industry. I was delighted to no end when I realized, scanning the credits on my back cover, how many women were involved in making the book happen. A woman took the cover photo; another woman (my friend Morgan Miller) took the author photo. A woman designed the cover. A woman acquired and edited the book. A woman agented it. A woman publicized it. My dearest mentor is a woman. My dearest friends and readers are women. This is cause for celebration.

But the book Girl Trouble isn't about teenagers talking on the phone about boys. It's just not. Maybe the biggest insult to me and to my fellow women writers is the assumption that "girl trouble" is lesser trouble, trifling trouble. Would the response have been much better if I'd titled the book Woman Trouble? I doubt it.

I talk about this issue a bit in my recent interview with BOMB magazine:

http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5927

What constitutes female fiction? Domestic fiction? What do you think about PW's "Best of 2009" list?

Guest blog at the Huffington Post

2009-10-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/holly-goddard-jones/women-gather-to-celebrate_b_326871.html

Boy, are my arms tired.

2009-10-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

I had every intention of blogging along with the various points of my Girl Trouble book tour: posting pics, passing along funny anecdotes, using my little reunions with old friends and school teachers and so forth as a way to talk about Significant Moments in my writing and reading history, like the time I wrote that poem and the time I drew that picture and the other time when someone lifted me up when I was down. You know, inspirational stuff.

The problem is that bookstore signings are like first dates (not that I've had many of those--married at 19, you may recall). You put on a nice outfit and fix your hair and get all of your good stories ready, and you show up, and either it goes well or it doesn't. There were readings that I suspected would at least be well attended, and I was right about Bowling Green and Russellville, for instance. There were readings that pleasantly surprised me, such as my event at Louisville's Carmichael's, which drew a surprisingly good crowd. My reading at Columbus's Barnes and Noble far exceded my expectations, but I didn't get any pics of it because my husband, back in Greensboro taking classes, wasn't along to point the camera. And, of course, there were those readings--and most of us have heard stories about them--that were so poorly attended that I wanted to go back to my rental car and hide in shame. You start to get a gut instinct for them; you know, driving to the bookstore, that you're about to encounter one kind, embarrassed, shoulder-shrugging events manager and--if you're lucky!--two or three people looking around at the empty chairs and wondering if they've come in on the wrong night.

So there's that. And the other reason I've not blogged is simply that I haven't had the time to. I've been driving or flying between the full-time job of teaching and the part-time job of promoting my book of stories, and when I'm home I'm hugging my husband and my dogs and catching up on episodes of Dexter.

But the occasions shouldn't go without remark. I did events in Lexington, KY (Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Kentucky Women Writers' Conference), Durham, NC, Columbus, OH, Louisville, KY, Bowling Green, KY, and Nashville (Davis-Kidd Booksellers and the Southern Festival of Books). I met lots of nice people and caught up with lots of old friends and family. I met the new crop of students in the MFA program at Ohio State, my alma mater. I read with a former professor (and cried at her beautiful introduction of me--it was so good that I don't know if I could bear to hear it again), drank daiquiris with another former professor, met, at the Southern Festival of Books, writers I've so long admired that I was quaking with nervousness in their presence.

If you'd like to check out a more detailed rundown of my recent Nashville and Russellville, KY, weekend, check out my guest blog at Book Club Girl:

http://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2009/10/national-reading-group-month-and-southern-festival-of-books-guest-post-from-holly-goddard-jones.html

Here's what we didn't have the space to include in that blog, to my disappointment:

Due to a delayed flight and a subsequent missed connection, I didn’t make it to BNA until almost 11 p.m. on Thursday, and I still had an hour and fifteen minute’s drive to Russellville, KY, my hometown. I fell into my childhood bed after midnight, with a pounding headache, and set my cell phone alarm. My mother had turned down the covers and placed a bottle of water on the bedside table. A card was on my pillow. It read, “Holly, sleep good, Love Mom.”

Early the next morning, Mom and I drove over to WRUS, the local AM radio station, so that I could be interviewed by Don Neagle on his program, Feedback. Feedback has been on the air since as long as I can remember, and it’s one of those radio shows that has achieved a beautiful sort of harmony with the small town it serves. Don, who looks much younger than the 70-something years he claims, could do the show blindfolded and with one hand tied behind his back. He is kind, smart, unflappable. He tells me right after we go on the air to let people know who my parents are and who my husband is and who my husband’s parents are. I do.

“Well, now that we’ve got that all straightened out,” he begins, shifting to questions. Don’s questions are good, and he’s read up on me and the book enough to fill more than a half-hour’s worth of air time. But the funniest responses come from the callers, who want to tell me that they know my parents, or that they lived for sixteen years in the subdivision where I’d said I grew up. My fifth grade reading teacher called in. So did my uncle David. So did the woman who worked at the Laundromat where my mother washed clothes.

Here, too, is a photo from my SFB reading with George Bishop, author of the forthcoming novel Letter to My Daughter.

And some shots from my Russellville and signings:

I am grateful to the stores that hosted me, the events managers and booksellers and (in one case) librarian and her volunteers who welcomed me, the friends, family, and even strangers who came out to support the book, and of course to my publisher for making this possible. I have three more appearances scheduled this fall:

Thursday, October 22, 7:30 PM
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Ave., Raleigh, NC 27607
Thursday, October 30, 2:00 PM

McIntyre's Fine Books
2000 Fearrington Village
Pittsboro, NC 27312
Saturday, November 07, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Kentucky Book Fair
Frankfort Convention Center
405 Mero Street
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
1:00 p.m.: Reading in the Glass Room of the Capital Plaza hotel
9:00 – 1:00 and 2 – 4:00, Signing in the Convention Center

Feature on Coffee with a Canine

2009-09-14T06:06:00.001-07:00

I have an interview up on blogger Marshal Zeringue's "Coffee with a Canine," wherein you'll learn important stuff like

- what I feed my dogs;
- the dogs' favorite toys;
- and how Martha (left) shamed me on the WWW.

http://coffeecanine.blogspot.com/2009/09/holly-goddard-jones-bishop-and-martha.html

It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Marshal for including me.

Lexington

2009-09-05T07:58:00.001-07:00

Girl Trouble's official pub date was on Tuesday, but the real fun--scary fun?--starts next week, as I return to Lexington, KY, for the first time in three years to read at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and to teach at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. My husband and I started our married life ten years ago in Lexington, as students at University of Kentucky. What good, oddly fresh memories those are. We honeymooned in August 1999 at Cumberland Lake and Cumberland Falls--four days, paid for by Brandon's brother and mother as a wedding present, that had seemed then an incredible luxury.

Those were hard, poor times, I know now. We were undergraduates, surviving on my Pell grants and Brandon's student loans, and we lived in a dreadful one-bedroom apartment off Virginia Avenue--the kind of place designed for single undergraduates, not young marrieds who might occasionally need an extra room in which to hide from one another. We totaled our car in an accident that first December, and we were overdrawn by the time school let out for holiday break. So we took an extended holiday at our parents' houses, crossing our fingers and waiting for the spring semester check to arrive from Financial Aid. We ate lots of free meals, did lots of laundry. We were still kids, basically. I was 19.

But we were inexplicably happy. I was taking writing workshops and Brandon was in architectural studios. We splurged on Friday night dates that often began at Joseph-Beth, continued at a restaurant like Bella Notte (whose $10 pastas could provide us with two more meals' worth of leftovers), and ended at the movie theatre. Brandon picked me up from class one day with a rose pushed through the band of a wristwatch, purchased to replace the one I'd lost on our honeymoon. He cooked steak in a toaster oven. I poured Boone's Farm into champagne glasses.

There's a part in my short story "Retrospective" when a middle-aged woman, looking at old photographs, remembers the long-ago honeymoon of her one failed marriage:

"They drove into the nearby hills, land bordering the eastern Appalachians, and parked whenever they saw a trail marker that looked promising. They took photos of waterfalls and startling vistas. They took some pictures of each other in front of the waterfalls and the vistas, and when they met another hiker on the trail, they occasionally posed together, faces serious, because the business of marriage was serious."

Yet here we are, in August on our 10th anniversary vacation to the Outer Banks, yukking it up. We take our marriage seriously, and we take each other seriously, but we spend an awful lot of our time laughing.

Brandon has classes that he can't get out of next week, so I'll be traveling back to the Bluegrass alone this time. It's especially disappointing to me that he'll miss my Joseph-Beth reading, after spending so many of his Friday nights following me gamely through the store, encouraging me to buy the books he knew I wanted but that we really couldn't afford.

My Jo-Beth reading, free and open to the public (of course), will be on Wednesday, September 9th at 7:00 pm.

Guest Blog up at ReadingGroupGuides.com

2009-09-02T06:17:00.001-07:00

My short essay on "truth" in fiction appears today on the blog at ReadingGroupGuides.com:

ReadingGroupGuides.com - Blog

Shared via AddThis

Reading Guide for GIRL TROUBLE

2009-08-28T07:49:00.001-07:00

In anticipation of next week's release, I thought I'd post the interesting Reading Guide my publisher developed for Girl Trouble:

Introduction

A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant—with his child. The nightmare of a college student's rape and murder is relived by both her mother and her killer, whose contradictory accounts call to question the very nature of victimhood. In these eight stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

Questions for Discussion

1. How do you interpret the title of the collection, Girl Trouble? How do you think it encompasses or excludes the issues that also face the men in these stories?

2. There is a heavy theme of "goodness" throughout these stories—"good girl," "good man"—but what do you think marks the goodness in these characters? For instance, do you believe that Simon, in spite of being a killer, is ultimately sympathetic in some ways? What do you make of Theo starting an affair with Josie two weeks before his daughter's diagnosis in "Life Expectancy," Ben's father's choice of a field trip in "Allegory of a Cave," or Stephen's coldness in "Retrospective?"

3. In "Parts," Felicia's mother mentions that "sex is always violent." Would you agree with that statement in the context of these stories? Do you see the sexual encounters between the men and women here as acts of violence?

4. What do you make of the placement of the linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God"? Why does Simon's story, which precedes "Parts" chronologically, come at the end of the collection? How did your feelings about Simon change after reading "Proof of God?" Who do you think vandalized Simon's car at the very end?

5. In "Parts," Simon doesn't recognize Felicia's mother and they don't have the confrontation that a part of her yearns for. Did that surprise or disappoint you, or was that even needed as a release in the story? If such a confrontation did occur, what would you expect would happen?

6. Do you see these stories as parts of a whole, or as separate entities? What do you make of the chronology of this collection? If you had to draw links between these stories, what would they be?

7. Do you see mothers and fathers as having separate roles in these stories? How do you think they are differentiated? Felicia's mother's approach to Felicia's death in "Parts" versus Art's, for example, or in "Allegory of a Cave" when Ben says, "His father was, as fathers tend to be, another case."

8. In "Theory of Realty," what do you think might have happened if Ellen had given in to Ray's protests and hadn't left Ray's house during their sleepover?

9. For these stories, Jones has been praised for her ability to capture intangible feelings: sadness, loss, love. How do you think the physical markers in these stories—the dog in "Good Girl," the house in "Retrospective"—help to capture these feelings? How did they help with your understanding of the story's themes? What are some other memorable markers?

10. In "Retrospective," when Libby goes through the memorabilia from her marriage to Stephen, she looks back on "her old and better self." The theme of parts and selves is prevalent in these stories—how would you describe the different selves of some of the characters in the book: Jacob in "Good Girl," Theo in "Life Expectancy," Art in "Parts," Ben's father in "Allegory of a Cave," Ellen in "Theory of Realty"?

11. A higher power and/or a greater plan seems to be a consistent thread throughout these stories—Ben's eyesight, Theo's baby's "life expectancy," Libby mentioning "the hand" she's been dealt. Do you think that these stories suggest that there is a higher power at work? A "proof of God," so to speak? Which characters do you think have the agency to determine the course of their lives?

The real, actual book.

2009-08-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

This is what was waiting on my doorstep Friday afternoon: my first copy, fresh off the presses, of Girl Trouble. How did it feel? On the one hand, wonderful: this is the culmination of about five years of writing and revising and a lifetime of dreaming. I've wanted to have a book of my own since I first learned how to read books. I feel lucky, not only because the artifact now exists, but because the team of people who got me here--teachers, friends, my fantastic editor at Harper, Sally--were so unfailingly wonderful.

On the other hand, I panicked a little. The book pubs on September 1, so this quiet time of just me and it seems precious and fleeting. Soon, the world will be weighing in. It will either be successful (and believe me, my standards for success are low), or it won't. I'm ashamed to feel anything but unqualified joy--at the same time, though, I hear from my writing mentors that this is common.

But I'm still about 90% out-of-my-mind thrilled.

People seem to be interested in the story behind book covers--I always am--so I'll share here what little there is to say about mine. First, I've been asked a few times if the young woman on the cover is me. This is almost flattering (aside from the assumption that I'd have the ego to pose for my own book cover), as the subject of the photo is, I'd estimate, in her early to mid-teens, with a size 4 waist. So no, it's not yours truly. I must admit, though, that when I first saw the cover image, I was shaken by a strong sense of recognition. It was as though I was looking at a snapshot of an earlier time in my life, when I was young and vulnerable like the girl, when I self-consciously walked the neighborhoods of my own gray subdivision because I couldn't drive and there was nothing better to do. The title Girl Trouble was, for a while, controversial at my publisher. My editor liked it; others seemed to think it trite or misleading, suggestive of (potentially offensive term coming) "chick lit." I was willing to come up with something better, but I worried the problem for at least a month, and this title, it seemed, was the only right fit. I couldn't wrap my mind around another without reconceiving the whole book concept.

This is one of those rare instances when the packaging for the book saved it (and me). As soon as my title was juxtaposed against this arresting image of a girl--herself both troubled and trouble, potential victim and potential aggressor--we knew that Girl Trouble was right. I don't think you can look at the combination of image, color, and font without feeling a trifle unsettled.

Fall readings, with apologies for Bad Blogging

2009-07-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

I've discovered that I'm no good at writing a blog that anybody would actually want to read. The blogs I most enjoy, such as Rebecca Barry's "The Main Street Diaries" (http://mainstreetdiaries.blogspot.com/) have a theme--hers is "attempts at eco-parenting in a small town in upstate New York," to quote the banner--and another one I've discovered, "Gina Is Eating" (http://ginaiseating.wordpress.com/) is basically about every meal that its author cooks and consumes. May not sound exciting, but boy, am I hooked. I want to know if she has the Fage and berries for breakfast. I want to know!

In short, these smart ladies write about their lives through what appears, at first, to be a narrow lens. They do so wittily and bravely. They find the universal in the particular.

I, on the other hand, am blogging to promote my book. (Which will be out on September 1--have you pre-ordered your copy?) I am not witty or brave enough to spin these entries, usually, into much more than Shameless Self-Promotion. Part of the problem is that I'm very, very nervous about pissing someone off. Were I to honestly review the new books I've read or the stories I've crossed in lit journals, I might at some point do so. The other part is that I'm a bit wary of memoir; I want to trust it and so often don't. I'm a fuddy-duddy, a purist--I want what I'm told to REALLY BE THE WAY IT HAPPENED. And as soon as I read one of those lines, often of dialogue, that ring falsely, I get mad. When I'm writing one of those false lines, I give up. In theory, I'm OK with a writer conflating two friends (or sisters, or cities) into one if the narrative necessates doing so; in practice, as a writer, I get queasy.

So, in the spirit of SSP, here's my list of fall events to promote GIRL TROUBLE. I'm hitting the Triangle in NC (twice--Durham and Raleigh), Lexington, KY, Columbus, OH, Louisville, KY, Bowling Green, KY, Nashville, TN (twice), Frankfort, KY, and my very own hometown, Russellville, KY, where I've been welcomed at the Logan County Public Library so sweetly that I could tear up overthinking it. Please come out and say hello.

Wednesday, September 09, 7:00 PM
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
161 Lexington Green Circle, Lexington, KY, 40503

Saturday, September 11, 2009
Kentucky Women Writers Conference
10:30 AM to 11:45 AM EST
Text and Subtext Fiction Workshop 1 at the
Lexington Public Library

4:30 PM to 5:45 PM ESTReading with Nikky Finney at the Lexington
Public Library

Saturday, September 12, 2009
Kentucky Women Writers Conference
10:30 AM to 11:45 AM EST
Text and Subtext Fiction Workshop 2 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning

Wednesday, September 16, 7:00 PM
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth Street, Durham, NC, 27705

Wednesday, September 23, 7:00 PM
Barnes and Noble
1739 Olentangy River Road, Columbus, Ohio

Thursday, September 24, 7:00 PM
Carmichaels
2720 Frankfort Ave, Louisville, KY, 40206

Sunday, September 27, 2:00 PM
Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Campbell Lane
1680 Campbell Lane, Bowling Green, KY 42104

Monday, September 28, 7:00 PM
Davis-Kidd Booksellers
2121 Green Hills Village Drive, Nashville, TN, 37215

Friday, October 09, 12:00 PM
Logan County Public Library
201 W 6th Street, Russellville, KY 42276

Saturday, October 10, 9:00 AM
Women's National Book Association, Nashville Chapter
Davis Kidd, 2121 Green Hills Village Dr, Nashville, TN

Saturday, October 10, Time TBD
Southern Festival of Books
War Memorial Plaza, Nashville, TN 37219

Thursday, October 22, 7:30 PM
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Ave., Raleigh, NC 27607

Saturday, November 07, 9:00 PM
Kentucky Book Fair
Frankfort, Kentucky

Moving

2009-05-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

By the end of this week, the bulk of my earthly possessions will be sitting in a rental house in Greensboro, NC. By the end of next week, my husband and I will have handed over the keys to our first and beloved house in Murray, KY, where we've spent two years that rushed by so quickly and tiringly (though not unhappily) that I can barely account for them. I taught many classes, read many student papers, took many walks with my dogs. These were the first years that felt for me like true adulthood, in both the fine ways (home ownership, student loans being paid off) and the not-so-fine ways: the sameness of days, the wishing-away of work weeks in anticipation of too-quickly-spent weekends. These were the first years that I awoke at 6:30 or 7 without needing to set the alarm; my body wouldn't let me sleep any later. The mornings when, measuring coffee grounds, I'd think, "Wasn't I just doing this? Has it been 24 hours?" Then, "Has it been a week? A semester?" And finally, even that sense of anxiety about time became predictable, so that now I shake it off--or try to--when I find myself doing such useless, painful math.

The house, as I said, has been our joy. We sat on our back porch today while it rained, dogs at our feet, the light oddly bright to the west, where it shone through the row of tall pines in our backyard. We won't have a covered porch at the rental house in Greensboro (or a dishwasher, or hardwood floors, or a vegetable garden), so we say to one another things like, "Let's enjoy it while we can," which is always the kind of sentiment that precedes contrived gestures--at best--or out-and-out heartbreak at worst. Did we "enjoy" our moments of quiet, watching the rain? Sort of. But there were many boxes inside waiting to be packed, and the porch feels borrowed now, anyhow.

Our move to Greensboro is a great thing, the very best thing, in a hundred ways that I don't care to account for now, because such would constitute the kind of Christmas letter-type stuff that this blog--let's be realistic--is otherwise designed for. For now, though, I just want to say that leaving Murray, leaving Kentucky, has me just a little bit blue. Certainly because of the home we made and the friends we made, the students I taught, the many meals we cooked in our little kitchen--also, though, because leaving a place, choosing to be elsewhere, makes one do that cruel math I talked about before. Has it been two years? Did we make the best of them? How will we see this time of our lives later on, when it already seems, as we've lived it, half-dreamt?

In the category of surreal

2009-04-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

I'm a preliminary judge for this year's Flannery O'Connor Award, which is a strange and humbling experience; had things with Girl Trouble gone differently, my own manuscript might have been in the current pile. University of Georgia Press will be accepting submissions until May 31 (postmark), and full submission guidelines are available here: http://www.ugapress.org/FOC.html

I am being so open about my participation in the judging process because Nancy Zafris, the series editor, posted full biographies and interviews with the judges this week on UGA Press's website. She even asked us all, helpfully (I think), what we're looking for in story collections and how we went about structuring our own. Here's my response to the former question:

Variety is good, both in technique and tone. My favorite collections aren’t monotonous; I feel that each new story is creating its own mood, putting me in a distinct character’s world, playing with some of the same general themes but presenting those themes to me in new ways. I want to be entertained. That’s not to say that the reading shouldn’t be work, but it ought to be good work, pleasurable work. I am always happily surprised by stories that feel complete, that don’t just leave me puzzling over some elliptical image. I feel frustrated by stories that play coy for the sake of being coy. I am happily surprised by humor, and I say this as a writer who doesn’t do humor too well.

You can read the full interview here: http://www.ugapress.org/FOC_Jones.html

Also in the category of surreal, galleys for Girl Trouble arrived this week from my publisher. They're lovely, bound, and undeniably book-like--I'm still a bit rattled to see them sitting on my kitchen table.

This is the dream: a book with your name on the cover. I'm thrilled that I'll get to play a small part in making that dream come true for another writer.

Other preliminary judges this year are H. G. Carrillo (a big year for H.G.s, huh?), Brad Kessler, and Anne Panning.

Cover

2009-03-30T08:10:00.001-07:00

Tolstoy

2009-02-24T05:56:00.000-08:00

Harper Perennial will be publishing my short story "Life Expectancy" in a reissued volume of short stories by Leo Tolstoy titled Family Happiness. Here's the copy from Harper's website:

Family Happiness: Stories features a selection of Leo Tolstoy's greatest short works in a beautiful new package.

Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) is probably best known in the Western world for his epic War and Peace and the splendid Anna Karenina, but during his long lifetime, Tolstoy also wrote enough shorter works to fill many volumes. Reprinted here are several of his finest short stories, including "Master and Man," "Alyosha the Pot," and the title story, "Family Happiness."

A bonus story, "Life Expectancy," from Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones, appears in the back of the book.

Follow this link to pre-order: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061773730/Family_Happiness/index.aspx?AA=index_RecentBooks_9900

BAMS and "Proof of God" get thumbs-up from CHICAGO TRIBUNE

2008-11-23T09:11:00.000-08:00

In a write-up of the nine newest volumes in Houghton Mifflin’s “Best of Series,” Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller deems George Pelicanos’s Best American Mystery Stories 2008 “best of the best” and takes special note of my story, “Proof of God”:

“This year, though, "The Best American Mystery Stories 2008" is the best of "The Best." It is, moreover, one of the finest anthologies—in any genre—in recent memory….The great crime writer George Pelecanos served as guest editor for "The Best American Mystery Stories 2008," and he has a lot to be proud of: With only a few exceptions, these stories are amazing. To call them "mysteries" is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Yes, the stories are suspenseful, and many involve traditional crimes—robbery, murder, arson—but they manage to wrap their burly arms around the whole spectrum of the human experience, from love to rage, from ecstasy to grief, from boredom to malice, from sex to death, in just a few densely packed pages. No two of these stories sound remotely similar—and yet, taken all in all, they keep you more up-to-the-minute about contemporary life than even those news-flash crawls at the bottom of your TV screen.

“Holly Goddard Jones' "Proof of God" is a harrowing, note-perfect depiction of a confused college student whose life changes forever on one terrible night.”

See the article at:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-lit-life-1123nov23,0,6275589.column

“Proof of God” is also one of three works excerpted in the article:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-lit-life-side-1123nov23,0,6020312.column

Website is up

2008-11-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

My husband has been hard at work the last couple of weeks on a website for me and my writing, and it's now up and running:

www.hollygoddardjones.com

He did a beautiful job--even more impressive when you consider that he was learning the design program as he went along.

The photos on the site were taken by a childhood friend of mine, Morgan M. Miller, who now has her own photography business out of Russellville, Kentucky. I took the photos on the weekend of the Tobacco Festival and my ten-year high school reunion (see post below), so it was an interesting convergence of past and present. Morgan and I were friends way back in the day--I'm talking Slip-n-Slides and Barbies and Super Mario Brothers 1--and I hadn't ever seen her as a grown-up, period. She's a stunner, and she's incredibly talented. Check out her work at http://www.myspace.com/morganmariephoto.

Full Circle

2008-10-13T13:26:00.001-07:00

I went home this weekend to Russellville, Kentucky--and realize, writing this, that Russellville must still be home to me, or else that opener wouldn't have come so naturally. I haven't lived in Russellville for 10 years, and I spent 4 of those years in Ohio, but it's the place I know best and sometimes like least, perhaps because I know it so well.

My high school reunion was this weekend, and so was the Tobacco Festival, now being dubbed, perhaps for the sake of an eventual shift to political correctness, the Tobacco and Heritage Festival. Funny. Tobacco and Heritage. Russellville is great about weird pairings, weird juxtapositions. Back in the day we had two newspapers, The News Democrat and The Logan Leader, and they eventually combined to become The News Democrat & Leader, a title that still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And you can see in the above photograph that Russellville's Democratic and Republic headquarters are now stationed side-by-side on Main Street, which made for an irresistable photo opportunity. Both parties had parade floats featuring old dudes pushing a plow. I mean, they were almost identitical. Did they compare notes? Is it just really, really obvious that a political parade float in Logan County, Kentucky, ought to feature an old dude pushing a plow?

The reunion was fun, in large part because I got to spend some quality time with my best friend from high school, Amanda. Here we are, standing outside my folks' front door.

I can't start to talk about Amanda and our friendship in those days without going much deeper and sappier than I care to now. I will say, though, that you tend to take friends--to take friendship--for granted when you're young. You feel entitled. But I've had a hard time making close friends in my adult life, so I no longer casually accept the remarkable good luck of knowing Amanda, who is now a jeweler in Texas with a nice husband and house and cat. I'd almost convinced myself that Amanda, who always sparkled, had grown even more outgoing than she was back then--but then, seeing her at the reunion, she seemed so darned Amanda, gesturing theatrically and making people laugh, saying exactly what was on her mind and in her heart when the more natural fallback for me is to hold back. I felt proud of her and proud of myself for knowing her. I think it's also funny to look at the symmetry in that picture of us and the picture on the top of the blog, because if you flip positions, you pretty much have Amanda and me and where we've veered since our vague political identifications in high school. We came close to arguing about the election the other day, but then we became calm and sane and started to make sense to one another. And I thought, you know what? If we can do it, America can do it.

A Worm Curled in a Pit

2008-10-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

I didn’t want to post on BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES until I had received my contributor’s copies, which arrived Saturday. So I’m excited. The flap copy on the hardcover edition mentions my story:

“The award-winning author and Emmy-nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre-expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past year’s most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.

"A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly’s ‘Mulholland Dive.’ A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro’s masterful ‘Child’s Play.’ James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in ‘Mist.’ And in Holly Goddard Jones’s ‘Proof of God,’ a young man’s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he’d never willingly reveal. As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty ‘original and unique voices’ in this collection pay homage to the genre’s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. ‘But make no mistake,’ he says, ‘we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.’”

I like that teaser for “Proof of God” a lot. It’s funny how someone—I don’t know who in this case—can see something really obvious and neat in your work that you didn’t intend or even recognize. The “proof” in the title references a recurring allusion in the story to Descartes; I hadn’t considered the other kinds of proof, like the items that the focal character, Simon, and his friend destroy in a fire, or that Simon and his father finish off later in a second fire. Heck, I hadn’t even considered until this moment that the story has those two fires. I just took them for granted.

There’s also a mention of “Proof of God,” in the KIRKUS review:

“The 12th annual edition of this anthology, whose general editor is Otto Penzler, collects 20 blue-ribbon entries, all dressed up in impeccable noir. In his introduction, Pelecanos calls the stories that make up the collection ‘wonderful,’ and it's true that the quality of the prose is unfailingly high. That's no surprise, for the names are stellar: James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, S.J. Rozan and, from outside the genre, Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates. These people can write. Unless you're a hardcore fan, 400 pages of unremitting, unrelenting noir can be daunting, particularly to worldviews on the fragile side. But you'll go a long way to find a story more moving and, yes, more unsettling than Hugh Sheehy's ‘The Invisibles,’ about what it means, and how it hurts, to be socially invisible. As the invisible 17-year-old heroine suggests, it's one of the ways serial killers are made. ‘Proof of God,’ Holly Goddard Jones's story about love gone disastrously wrong, manages to be at once ugly, brutal and deeply affecting. In Elizabeth Strout's poignant, painful ‘A Different Road,’ the aftermath of a hostage situation proves as destructive as the experience itself. And so it goes-a journey that will leave some readers delighted, others depressed, and most a little bit of both. An eminently worthwhile collection, though perhaps not for those prone to Weltschmerz.”

Here again, the reviewer nailed not only what I hoped people would see but perhaps also what I feared people would see. The story is, no doubt, about “love gone disastrously wrong”—and it’s also ugly and brutal. So ugly and brutal, in fact, that though I’ve read from it publicly, I know that there are parts that I’d never, ever dare read aloud. This story’s companion piece, “Parts,” is a similar case. I’ve never read from it at all. And it is, as I go through the revision process for the book, the piece that I’m spending the most time on. It’s going to end up being noticeably different from the version published in THE HUDSON REVIEW, and that’s good, because the changes I’m making are helping me solidify my larger vision for the book. I was never ashamed of the story in its published form, but I was never wholly comfortable with it, either. The discomfort was less a matter of craft than content—that “Weltschmerz,” perhaps, that the reviewer mentions. And the discomfort hasn’t disappeared. I like “Parts” more in this newly emerging form, but there’s still something about it that makes me uneasy. I have been trying to come up with a good analogy here, but the best I can do, weirdly, is quote Lorrie Moore’s story, “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People”:

“When Abby was a child, her mother had always repelled her a bit—the oily smell of her hair, her belly button like a worm curled in a pit, the sanitary napkins in the bathroom wastebasket, horrid as a war, then later strewn along the curb by raccoons who would tear them from the trash cans at night. Once at a restaurant, when she was little, Abby had burst into an unlatched ladies’ room stall, only to find her mother sitting there in a dazed and unseemly way, peering out at her from the toilet seat like a cuckoo in a clock.

“There were some things one should never know about another person.”

Writing can be like that, I think: You feel as though you’ve been walked in on while you’re “dazed and unseemly” and unprepared for scrutiny. You’ve had your garbage ransacked. The difference on that last count, of course, is that you, yourself, are doing the ransacking.

Am I saying that writers are raccoons? This is all very senseless.

So I’ll stop with that and pose a question for anyone who’d like to comment: Are you ever embarrassed by—or uncomfortable with—your writing? (I’m thinking here about your “real” writing, the writing you’d still claim, as opposed to sophomoric efforts.) Does this embarrassment only become a factor when the work’s made public, or does that even matter?

Dogs

2008-09-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have an unfortunate reputation for killing dogs in my fiction. I’ve only actually killed two dogs in everything I’ve ever written in my life, but those stories happen to occupy slots 1 and 2 in my forthcoming story collection—and they were the first two stories of the bunch to see print—so I can’t pretend to not see the point. The issue was worsened a couple of years ago at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, when at least three of the scholars (and maybe there were four of us) read from stories that included dog deaths as conflicts or major turning points in the plot. So of course the dead dog thing was turned, as these things tend to be, into a conference-wide joke, and I still hear about it every now and then. Year of the Dog. Year of the Dead Dog.

We didn’t have pets when I was growing up. There was a summer-long experiment with a smelly tank of goldfish, and my most vivid memory there is of accompanying my father to release them, half dead, into a nearby creek. My parents liked dogs in theory but made it clear that we’d never have one of our own. “Dogs are supposed to run free,” Daddy would say. “Dogs aren’t meant to be tied up to a stake all day.”

It didn’t bother me so much. Mom and Daddy insisted that I scrub my hands immediately after petting animals, so I got the impression hard and early that dogs were a little gross and a lot of work, and I wasn’t a big fan of grossness or work. I was afraid of most dogs, even the sweet-tempered ones. I didn’t want to be licked or scratched by toenails. I didn’t like their smell, their matted fur, the little damp puffs of kibble that fell out of their bowls.

So when I started “Good Girl,” the story I read from at Sewanee, I had never owned a dog. “Good Girl” begins like this:

“A year before Jacob’s son, Tommy, was arrested for raping a fifteen-year-old girl, the sheriff came to his shop about the dog. Tommy’s dog—a pit bull bitch. Tommy had brought her home the week he graduated from high school, a pup in an old Nike shoe box, eyes just opened. And Jacob had said, ‘You’re not bringing that dog here,’ but he soon gave in, letting his son keep her on a blanket in the toolshed; weeks later he said, ‘You’re not bringing that dog in the house,’ but he gave in on that, too, and the dog started sleeping on the living room couch, the same spot where his wife Nora had liked sitting when she was alive.”

You already know what happens to the dog. What I’ll save is why it happens, and how Jacob’s decision about the pit bull compares to a decision he’ll have to make about his own troubled son.

I started “Good Girl” dog free, but I completed it, months later, as the very-obsessed owner of a cocker spaniel named Bishop. How I got from 0 to 60 is a story for another time—and not all that interesting a story—but I’ll say, as I have more than a few times to friends, that the canine equivalent to a biological clock started ticking for me, and what followed was as powerful and sudden as a religious conversion. In spring of 2004, I began “Good Girl” as a writer using a dog purely as a metaphorical device; by autumn, when I finished it, I was a dog lover who could see Jacob’s loss of this animal as not just a device but a true, tragic sacrifice. If the story succeeds, it succeeds because I brought Bishop home and discovered that my heart was bigger than I’d realized.

Now I have two dogs, Bishop and a mutt-puppy (we’re approaching 7 months) named Martha. We live in my home state of Kentucky after four years in Columbus, Ohio, and for the first time we—husband, dogs, and I—have a house of our own and a neighborhood to roam. We have on one side of us the kindest, loveliest neighbors you can imagine. The husband, a retiree, is always coming outside to feed the dogs bacon or chicken through the fence, and the dogs spasm with joy, as you can imagine, at the sight of him. We all walk together to the farmers’ market when the weather is fair. I get asked at least once a week, “Are you walking the dogs, or are they walking you?”

We also pass on our walks much less lucky dogs, and this is the very, very difficult part of being back in rural Kentucky. There was the golden retriever, frightfully thin, with what looked like tar—some kind of infection, I can only guess—ringing his eyes. I notified the Humane Society and the dog disappeared a few days later; I don’t know where, or to what end, and couldn’t get more information. There was the daschund mix, a tiny puppy with no collar and no leash, that followed me and Bishop (back when there was only a Bishop) home, limping. I notified the Humane Society, took it to the vet—learned that it had a broken leg that was healing improperly—and had to surrender it back to the owners a day later, when they called the animal shelter. There are always dogs tied to stakes and dogs kept in tiny chain-link kennels, never exercised or given attention outside of the daily refills of kibble and water. This is too common to do much more than frown at.

And finally, a couple of weeks ago, there was another tiny puppy. This one was tied to a couple of feet of rope under the eave of a house, and it was obviously unwell: thin, listless. It barely responded when I walked over to pet it. Worse, a windstorm was picking up outside, the one that did so much damage throughout western Kentucky, and the sky was getting dark. “That’s not right,” I told my husband. “I should do something.”

“All you can do is call the Humane Society,” he said. “Call them when you get home.”

“It’s the weekend. They won’t be there.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Brandon said. “All you can do is call.”

We went on home, and I worried about the puppy, but I didn’t call. I figured I’d see how it looked on Monday and act then, if it looked like I needed to.

On Monday, the dogs and I circled the block. No puppy. A few days later, a kennel appeared in the backyard of the house, a new dog barking behind it. I convinced myself that the puppy had only been staying at the house temporarily—why else would the family build a brand-new kennel for a brand-new dog, when they hadn’t been willing to provide shelter for a 5-pound baby?

You know how this story ends. Yesterday, walking Bishop and Martha again, I ran into a little girl riding her bike. She asked to pet my dogs, which I allowed, and pointed to the new dog and the new enclosure. “That’s my dog,” she said.

“Didn’t you have a little spotted puppy tied up in front of the house?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I shouldn’t have asked, but I did anyway. “What happened to him?”

“He died,” she said casually, riding her bike in circles.

“How did he die?”

“I don’t know. He was sick, and Mama put him out, and then she didn’t even bring him in when the wind started blowing.” She added, “I miss him.”

I know a lot of folks don’t value the life of an animal the way I do. I know that I don’t value the life of an animal the way some I know—folks who refuse to eat meat, for example—do. My father said, all those years ago, that a dog isn’t meant to be tied up to a stake all day. He taught me, long before I knew that I’d want to care for an animal, that you can’t just accept responsibility for another life without understanding the commitment and preparing yourself for some inconveniences and outright sacrifices. I have no idea why a person would bring a dog home if her intention is to stick it in a kennel out back and never interact with it. I understand less how you could leave a baby out in a windstorm, find the dead body, and move on, unbothered. Maybe she was bothered. But I doubt it.

I am writing this because I don’t know how else to deal with the guilt I feel. If I’d been a braver and better person, I would have untied that puppy, brought him home with me, and accepted the consequences. At the very least, I wouldn’t have taken a wait-and-see approach to calling the Humane Society. I don’t write this to be talked out of that guilt, which I think I deserve and which I feel even a little grateful for, because this is what it means to be pro-life: understanding what it means to take responsibility for something alive and helpless, and committing to that responsibility even when it’s difficult.

Courier-Journal review of NSFS 2008

2008-09-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

The Louisville Courier-Journal published a favorable review of New Stories from the South 2008, including a detailed mention of my story, "Theory of Realty." Here's the link: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080927/FEATURES06/809270398/1010/FEATURES.