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Chee Conquers His Autobiography

7/19/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Everybody has parents. As a dramatist, whenever you write a character, you must write their parents as well, even if the parents aren't there.
Mark O’Donnell
Born July 19, 1954

M. O'Donnell

My Book World

Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical
Novel: Essays. Boston: Houghton, 2018.

This collection of essays is a staggering one. In the way that fiction writers link short stories, Chee links essays to explicate how he works as a fiction writer. His metaphors are simple yet profound. His advice is wrenched from the heart, and yet at no time does he allow sentimentality to interfere with his message. The entire collection—like a group of short stories, like a novel—possesses a narrative arc that is subtle, inching readers toward the climax, easing into a quiet denouement. The book seems nonlinear, but Chee glides readers from a few youthful months spent in Mexico becoming fluent in Spanish, to his older youth in college with Annie Dillard as a professor, to his maturation into an astute, caring professor of creative writing, to the publication of his first novel and how it explores and ultimately exposes the biggest secret of his life.

The Publishing Triangle, a long-established organization for LGBTQ writers based in New York, recently awarded this work the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. I hope, as a tour de force, it will win even more accolades in the coming months or years. Chee is a remarkable writer, and anyone who takes a seminar from him ought to feel fortunate.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-41 Nevada

A Writer's Wit

7/18/2019

There are two kinds of marriages—where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.
Clifford Odets
Born July 18, 1906

C. Odets

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

My Journey of States-40 Idaho

7/17/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
Born October 30, 1885 Hailey, Idaho
Died November 1, 1972 Venice, Italy

E. Pound

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fortieth post of fifty.

Idaho (2008, 2010, 2015)

Some places you visit because you know people who live there. In teaching graduate students at Texas Tech summer school, my partner Ken introduced one of his female students to a young English professor who was teaching creative writing at the same time (I believe this to be true). The couple later married, and the professor was instrumental in getting me into the MA program at TTU. Before I could finish my degree, Ann and Daryl moved to Boise, and years later, after Ken and I retired, we visited them at their home, once in summer and once in autumn.

Boise is a well-kept secret, with a fine university. A river running through it (couldn't resist), in fact, a cultivated green belt for athletes, zoo-goers, museum attendees, and fresh-air breathers of all kinds. A great center for cinema, especially the Egyptian Theatre. A breeding ground for writers and authors. Most of all, a humane population. One night, after the four of us had attended a play at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival Amphitheater, the crowd strolled toward a huge parking lot. I figured, as in Texas, that there would be a huge push—cars streaming in all directions—to scramble to the closest exit. I was astounded when, as we reached a certain nexus, a four-way stop, each line of drivers took his or her turn heading for the exit. Ken and I asked if that was normal, and our friends quietly insisted it was. A state that uses a saying like “Drive Friendly” could sure learn something from that genteel bunch of Idahoans. Ken and I confessed that if we’d only encountered the place ten years earlier, we might have retired there. Of course, it just could have been a bunch of talk.

Idaho was the forty-third state to be admitted into the Union on July 3, 1890. Its state bird is the Mountain Bluebird, and it boasts a population of 1.7 million people.

HISTORIC POSTCARDS AND TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota 39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

A Writer's Wit

7/16/2019

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.
Tony Kushner
Born July 16, 1956

T. Kushner

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-40 Idaho

Anna Burns's 'Milkman' Is Stunning Novel

7/12/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Adam Johnson
Born July 12, 1967

A. Johnson

My Book World

Burns , Anna. Milkman. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018.

This winner of the UK’s Man Booker Prize is a stunning read. From the outset, one is struck by this Irish writer’s Joycean style or even point of view. The novel is ostensibly set in Northern Ireland of the 1970s. Her stream-of-consciousness prose includes the practice of keeping her characters anonymous. The narrator calls herself middle sister, one of several female siblings, and refers to them as First Sister and so forth. Other characters include Milkman, the real milkman, and Somebody McSomebody. Such a practice paints a society of strict norms, in which everyone is judged by whom they associate with or don’t associate with, why one isn’t married to a particular man by a certain age. The practice keeps the reader at a distance, viewing this particular time period of strife with as much objectivity as possible. The novel might have been reduced by pages if the author had chosen real names instead of hyphenated characters like maybe-boyfriend being repeated hundreds of times, yet after establishing its own pace, the prose swoops in and snatches the reader up. At times you cannot put down the book. The narrator is her own Stephen Daedalus, striving to know her world, but also afraid to find out too much. Finding out too much might get her killed. A must read for 2019 and always.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-40 Idaho

A Writer's Wit

7/11/2019

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
E. B. White
Born July 11, 1899

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Milkman by Anna Burns

My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

7/10/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.
Galway Kinnell
Born February 1, 1927
Providence, Rhode Island
Died October 28, 2014
Sheffield, Vermont

G. Kinnell

MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-ninth post of fifty.

Rhode Island (2003)

I must admit that Rhode Island is one of the fifty states through which I made one of those pass-through visits, as I did with Delaware. However, I feel a literary connection with the state because of one writer, Edith Wharton. If Ken and I had had time, we most surely would have visited her former residence, Land’s End, located in Newport and portrayed in her novel, The Age of Innocence. I visited her other home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts three times over the period of a decade, and so, upon my return to the state Newport shall be my first stop.

Rhode Island became thirteenth of the original thirteen states, in 1790, and its official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Milkman by Anna Burns, Booker Prize Winner

A Writer's Wit

7/9/2019

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
June Jordan
Born July 9, 1936

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

Back in the Saddle

7/8/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers—to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.
Shirley Ann Grau
Born July 8, 1929

This and That

THIS: I haven't posted for over five months for the reasons I stated at the end of January. First, my longtime partner of forty-three years, Ken Dixon, was diagnosed with a BIG spur on his C5 vertebra which was crowding his spinal cord in a BIG way. In order to knock it off in the least invasive way, the surgeon came in from the front, and removed C6 to get at the spur and screwed in a spacer between 5 and 7, filling it with bone debris that has and will continue to make new bone material. The surgery and recovery went well, but being in charge of everything made me a very busy boy. The procedure, a corpectomy reduced his pain and stabilized his blood pressure, yet he continues to work with other professionals solving the riddle of vertigo. He's back in the studio for limited sessions.

THAT: I spent the entire month of June at a dandy place in the Texas Hill Country known as Hacienda Maria, what I refer to as a mini-villa that one can lease from the Native American Seed company of Junction, Texas. Just rural enough to enjoy the pastoral nature of the country roads, it was also a short six miles into town to buy groceries or mail a letter. ¶ I was able to read ALOUD my 550-page manuscript twice, literally finding my voice for the book. I made and entered in the computer numerous corrections, attempting to smooth out clunky language, as well as other problems which I shall not go into here. Anyway, I probably accomplished four months of work in one, putting me closer to finishing the monster.

MORE THIS: I plan to post regularly again, continuing my Tuesday/Thursday posts of A Writer's Wit, advice other writers have offered either about their work or the writing process in general. On Wednesdays, I shall continue my series, My Journey of States, until I have finished with all fifty! And finally, on Fridays, I offer profiles of new (or vintage) titles in My Book World series.

THE LAST OF THAT: A year ago I deleted my Facebook page primarily because I was disgusted with their cavalier approach to running a business. During that time, their corporate leaders have done even more to make me glad I dropped out. Personally, I believe the organization will have to shut down and do a FB 2.0 to build a more secure Web site from the ground up. Until it's improved at least, I remain a departed client. HOWEVER, I do miss seeing what's happening with family and friends. Drop a line, plee hee heez. ¶ I also deleted my Twitter account. I never was able to garner more than two hundred fifty followers, and, because I'd made the mistake of following some political operatives instead of sticking to purely literary interests, I was having to read a lot of negative stuff. It wasn't my followers' words but those of people "commenting." Negative. Negative. Negative. My only social media presence is now on LinkedIn, and if anyone can tell me how to make the most of THAT, I'd appreciate it. WHEW! I've said more than I wished to. I look forward to seeing and hearing from you as I regain my Internet presence.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

A Writer's Wit

7/4/2019

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.
Tracy Letts
Born July 4, 1965

T. Letts

NEXT TIME: My Book World

A Writer's Wit

7/2/2019

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
From Siddhartha By Herman Hesse
Born July 2, 1877

H. Hesse

NEXT TIME: My Book World