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A Writer's Wit: Eudora Welty

4/13/2023

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever rally lost.
Eudora Welty
Author of One Writer’s Beginnings
Born April 13, 1909

E. Welty

Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Susan Faludi
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Hughes
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey de Grey

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Lahiri: Among the Best

3/3/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
I was raised in Catholic school where we were given a lot of heavy literature and a dense, weighty lyric wasn't strange to me.
Jennifer Warnes, Songwriter
Author of "Right Time of the Night"
Born March 3, 1947

J. Warnes

My Book World

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Knopf, 2008.

These are eight long stories that are reminiscent of Alice Munro’s long stories in that Lahiri seems to tell an entire lifetime in one. She neither leaves much out, nor does she include too much. Each word, each sentence, fits into each paragraph, each section, to make a complete and satisfying story. Her characters have depth, sometimes taking readers in surprising directions—in the same way that actual human beings can surprise us in our own lives. I tried to read each story in one sitting because quitting before it is done is like leaving a banquet after one or two courses. I admire her work for its craft and its deeply conveyed emotions.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Moon
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jeffrey Eugenides
THURS: A Writer's Wit |Vita Sackville-West
FRI: My Book World | Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On

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Basement Living

2/24/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
Jane Hirshfield
Author of Nine Gates
Born February 24, 1953

My Book World

Mosley, Walter. The Man in My Basement: A Novel. New York: Little, 2004.

A short but expansive novel with this premise: An odd little White man seeks out a Black man, Charles Blakey, because he has a large basement that is also windowless and contains only one door. Anniston Bennet’s proposition is this: that Charles will lock Anniston up in his basement for a certain amount of time. In return Charles will receive a large sum of money. Charles says no at first, but he reconsiders. Charles has inherited his two-hundred-year-old home, but it is his only asset. He’s never worked hard or steadily, in fact, has been fired from a bank for embezzling a small sum of money—thus being blackballed by the rest of the town. So Charles does agree to house the little man in his basement, basically serving as Bennet’s master. What follows is a much deeper story than what may think in the beginning. To say more would indeed spoil the read about how these two men come to terms with their pasts.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Tessa Hadley
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Lowell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Matt Taibbi
FRI: My Book World | Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

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Swim | Pond | Rain

2/3/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
The greatest mistake is the trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
Walter Bagehot
Author of The English Constitution
Born February 3, 1826

W. Bagehot

My Book World

Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random, 2021.

Saunders, if this book is any representation, is a talented teacher of writing. His brilliance as a writer always intimidates me a bit; I’m not sure I understand his own fiction all that well. However, here, as he examines seven stories of Russian writers Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, Saunders makes very clear through illustration and fine contemplation what it means to construct a solid story. And I use that word deliberately because for Saunders writing a short story is about constructing a work of art.

I can’t reveal everything he covers, but I can mention several concepts that struck me as being essential. If the reader is a novice writer, you can learn much (bring your pencil). If you’ve written lots of stories, perhaps Saunders’s ideas will be a refresher course for you or bring to light elements you’ve not considered before now.

One, Saunders is concerned with cause and effect. Each action in a story should be the result of some other action. Why is this character doing this or that? Second, Saunders contends that escalation is paramount—what may cause one to keep reading is that the stakes go up. Each major event should, in a cause-and-effect manner, escalate the story, fire it up, move it along. Third, he makes a simple list of major events for each story, demonstrating to himself how each may lead to the next. Of course, his ideas are not all about plotting; he’s ultimately concerned with the characters and why they act the way they do so that readers may get to the human heart of the story. A must-read for fiction writers.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Peter Carey
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Bishop
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Brendan Behan
FRI: My Book World | Willa Cather's The Professor’s House

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A Writer's Wit: Steven Millhauser

8/3/2022

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So imagine a fire going—wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green—the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains—and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys—and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.
Steven Millhauser
Author of Voices in the Night: Stories
Born August 3, 1943

Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRIDAY: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest

S. Millhauser

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Latinos Love Kissing Stories: Bésame Mucho

5/6/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment . . . . Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Author of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
Born May 6, 1947

M. C. Nussbaum

My Book World

Manrique, Jaime, ed. With Jesse Dorris. Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction. New York: Painted Leaf, 1999.

On my shelf for a long time, I finally took this collection down and enjoyed most of the stories very much. Among the best, I believe, are Manrique’s “Señoritas in Love,” “What’s Up, Father Infante?”, a gripping story by Miguel Falquez-Certain, and “Ruby Díaz” by Al Luján. The entire collection blends together a beautiful chorus of gay Latino voices, from South America to New York to California. So much that the non-Latino community has to learn what gay Latino men face with regard to their families, their communities, and their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. They face immense pressures to conform to cultural norms, even more so than the Anglo population, I would dare say. Kudos to these men for sharing their stories by way of lively and enlightening fiction. It never dates.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

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A Writer's Wit: Rick DeMarinis

5/3/2022

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Kings and cabbages go back to compost, but good deeds stay green forever.
Rick DeMarinis
Author of The Art and Craft of the Short Story
Born May 3, 1934

R. DeMarinis

FRIDAY: My Book World | Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

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Stories of Madness Everywhere

2/4/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
Betty Friedan
Author of The Feminine Mystique
Born February 4, 1921

B. Friedan

My Book World

Wolitzer, Hilma. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories. With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout. New York, Bloomsbury, 2021.

These thirteen delightful stories date from 1966 to 2020, from mid-sixties angst over the “woman’s place” to the best story I’ve yet read about the early days of the Covid pandemic. And yet, in terms of tone (humorous and sardonic) and theme (woman on the verge, but not, because the narrator must keep herself together), the stories all feel as if they could have been written at the same time—so unified is the writing. Wolitzer’s stories are a prose analogue to the perfect poem: they are compressed, metaphors are subtle, and each one brings pleasure that lasts.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?

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Lincoln: From Coast to Coast

1/28/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
Colette
Author of Claudine in Paris
Born January 28, 1873

Colette

My Book World

Towles, Amor. The Lincoln Highway: a Novel. New York: Viking, 2021.

This charming novel tells of the ten-day adventure of two brothers who head out from Kansas to California to build a new life, following the death of their father and one brother’s release from jail. Yet their plans are thwarted when two fellow inmates hide in the trunk of the warden’s car (and hop out when the warden isn’t looking). Well, from there the adventure heads east instead of west. Perhaps the most captivating character is Billy, the eight-year-old brother who is smarter than any other character in the book but also the most disarming. It is his idea to travel coast to coast from New York to California on the “historical” Lincoln Highway. And without revealing any spoilers, the two brothers do eventually get to do just that—even if that journey doesn’t begin until the very last sentence.

The Lincoln Highway is just as fascinating, though in different ways, as Towles’s previous book, A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles is a master at several things, all adding up to great writing. One, is characterization. Even characters with the smallest parts are developed so that readers know who they are. Second is structure. Towles’s intricate scaffolding keeps readers informed of where they are at all times in the novel’s unraveling, without making it too simple. By using multiple points of view, by way of a character per chapter, he, at times, overlaps the portrayal of certain scenes, from two different points of view—providing readers an interesting “truth.” By the way, the ten parts begin with Part Ten and work toward Part One. All POVs are written in the third person with the exception of one, Duchess’s, which may make him the main narrator though not the central character. And third, Towles’s dialog—represented by way of em dashes instead of quotation marks—harks back to the fiction of an earlier period. I’m not sure why Towles does it, perhaps to do just that, make the early 1950s seem farther back than they really are. Are we to expect Lincoln Highway II? It wouldn’t trouble me at all.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

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A Writer's Wit: Edna O'Brien

12/15/2021

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The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
Edna O’Brien
Author of Saints and Sinners
Born December 15, 1930

E. O'Brien

FRIDAY: My Book World | James Clear's Atomic Habits

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Capote's Stories Still Vibrant

7/30/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.
Patrick Modiano
Author of Un Pedigree
Born July 30, 1945

P. Modiano

My Book World

Capote, Truman. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. With an introduction by Reynolds Price. New York: Random, 2004.

Sad to say that Capote published only twenty stories (as this edition seems to indicate) in his lifetime. The “weakest” stories, if there are any, seem to be his early ones when he is barely twenty and the two written during the last decade of his life. The ones in the middle are for the most part knock-outs. Especially, I’m a sucker for his “orphan” stories: “A Christmas Memory,” “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and “One Christmas.” In all three he develops the character Sook, an old woman, “a cousin,” who cares for the boy narrating the stories. Apparently based on one of the relatives Capote lived with as a child when his parents abandoned him for a time, Sook can tear your heart out with her generosity and illiterate wisdom.

NEXT FRI: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I

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A Writer's Wit: Ambrose Bierce

6/24/2021

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In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale; diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
Ambrose Bierce
Author of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek"
Born June 24, 1842

A. Bierce

TOMORROW: My Book World | The Letters of John Cheever

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'The Prophets' More Than Slavery

4/16/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Wicked gave us a story that The Wizard of Oz did not. Two sides to every story.
Abbi Glines
Author of The Vincent Boys
Born April 16, 1977

A. Glines

My Book World

Jones, Robert Jr. The Prophets. New York: Putnam’s, 2021.

This tremendous first novel seems at once both realistic and impressionistic in its articulation. The former because Jones’s portrayal of slave life in the nineteenth-century American South stinks with human toil and sweat, both black and white: “Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky” (27). The only relief may be the Biblical-like Yazoo River’s coolness. The novel is impressionistic in large part because it is as nonlinear as a novel can get: there are slave ancestors, the lives of a female king, whose descendants populate this hot and sweaty setting. If readers think this is only a novel about two young male slaves who have “grown up” together on the Halifax plantation (slaves call it “Empty” or “That Fucking Place”) and become lovers at a young age, may they soon discover their mistake. Single chapters are devoted to various characters within this “kingdom” of depraved corruption of Capitalism. Slaves tell their own truth. Owners live out their own truths: their indifference to pain (except their own), their greed, their ultimate unhappiness brought on by the shame and disgust they must feel (deep inside and unrecognized) at the mistreatment of fellow human beings.

In this book, sex between Samuel and Isiah isn’t sex but a stunning line of poetry that indicates what has happened: their red-and-white barn is an Edenic setting for their love. You sense the act has taken place but it is communicated with ease and subtlety. Neither is the sex graphic, nor is it quotidian, like, say, John Cheever’s Then they rolled over and went to sleep.

I believe I shall read this novel again and again. More than ever, white people need to wake up and see what a terrible blight slavery has been on our country’s history, how its stories cripple our present and our future if we fail to deal with slavery's legacy. Jones’s novel opens wide a window into our history by way of a beautiful and savage piece of art that will only unfold more as time passes.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

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Forster: His Fiction Comes to Fruition

9/25/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
"Leningrad" Symphony, No. 7
Born September 25, 1906

D. Shostakovich

My Book World

Forster, E. M. The Life to Come: And Other Stories. New York: Norton, 1987 (1972).

Oliver Stallybrass offers in his introduction a bit of background concerning these stories. “On his death in June 1970, E. M. Forster left behind, at King’s College, Cambridge, England, a considerable corpus of unpublished literary work, complete and incomplete, and in a wide range of genres: novels (Maurice, published in 1971, and two substantial fragments), stories, plays, poems, essays, talks—to say nothing of letters, diaries and notebooks” (vii). A number of these stories—because Forster creates gay characters and situations that cannot be published at the time he writes them—are instructive for gay writers alive today. One, he is courageous, given his prodigious talent, to write them anyway, not to edit his mind, his heart, his soul. Even if he stashes them away or editors reject them, he senses perhaps that subsequent generations might read and appreciate them. The language and imagery are tame, of course, compared with any so-called gay fiction written since the early 1970s. But the fact that he is willing to portray two men together sexually, employing words like “member” for “penis,” is quite remarkable. Second, he provides a foundation for writers to come, people such as Paul Monette, who, in his book of essays, Last Watch of the Night, pays quick homage to Forster as a mentor. Forster is a formidable and lyrical writer whose work transcends all and deserves to be read by anyone, even fifty years following his death.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Marilynne Robinson's Novel Gilead

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Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
Susan Cheever
Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943

S. Cheever

My Book World

Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.

There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.

A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

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Thinking in Twelves

9/14/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
Geraldine Brooks
Born September 14, 1955

G. Brooks

My Book World

Houston, Pam. Contents May Have
Shifted: A Novel. New York: Norton,
2012.

Pam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos

I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.

I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out.

Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives?

Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move.

Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one.

And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee

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Strout's Endless Possibilities

7/20/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
Franklin Foer
Born July 20, 1974

F. Foer

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Anything is Possible.
New York: Random, 2017.

Strout is a master at creating simple stories that are riddled with complexities and nuance that are difficult to apprehend with one reading. You might think you’re finished reading about one character, and then he or she returns to another chapter. Charles Macauley, for example, has layer upon layer added to his part until we might think we understand him. In the meantime, we learn of others: Two sisters, one who marries well, one who does not. And a prodigal daughter/citizen, who becomes a famous author and returns to her humble beginnings to have more than a little abuse heaped upon her. But now Lucy Barton is ready to face it all.

NEXT TIME: Defeating A Fib at Last-3

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Life Among the Savages Still Delightful

4/20/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
One of the advantages of the book's [The Best Little Boy in the World] having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
Andrew Tobias
Born April 20, 1947

A. Tobias

My Book World

Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages.
New York: Farrar, 1948.

Jackson’s memoir about family life up through the birth of her fourth and final child is entertaining and timeless, though it is written in the 1940s. What contributes to this timelessness is Jackson’s grasp of the universal through developing the specific.

This is a woman’s story to tell, though it is for everyone to read. Jackson published many of these narratives in women’s magazines before releasing them in this book. She develops the universal by delving into the concrete. She never names her husband: it is always my husband this, my husband that, objectifying him as the head-in-the-clouds academic that he is, in the same manner in which she, as housewife, is objectified in this post-World War II period. She has pet names for her oldest three children: Laurie for Laurence (which he vehemently sluffs off at one point); Jannie for Joanne, and Sally for Sarah. It’s as if by naming them something more intimate, they cannot possibly belong to someone else, the world at large.

What saves her persona from being a martyr is that Jackson actually enjoys being a mother and wife while at the same time pursuing a serious career as a writer of fiction. She would be considered a permissive mother, but such a free household allows all her children to develop unfettered: Laurie is allowed to take on a boisterous, all-boy personality; Jannie develops as one who expresses herself as bluntly as Jackson herself does; and charming little Sally is a princess, who quotes fairy tales and talks in oblique sort of riddles when she is angry about something. To be sure, Jackson spars with her children (and her husband) on occasion, nudges them back and forth over the goal line, but she allows them simply to be. One would love to know how they developed as adults, and how their children fared.

This free and delightful yet sophisticated read is timeless and should be perused by everyone: women and men, old and young, especially those who think they know everything about raising children. They could learn a thing or two from the late Shirley Jackson.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-11 Maryland

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Using Texting as a Metaphor

1/29/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
Born January 29, 1860

A. Chekhov

My Literary World

Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”:

Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple.

“At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4).

Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier?

In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time.

At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings?

Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

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Award Winner Nails Story

1/15/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Osip Mandelstam
Born January 15, 1891

O. Mandelstam

My World of Short Fiction

January/February 2018, David Greendonner. “Lionel, for Worse”: This story, winner of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction 2017 competition, is a gem of understatement. Narrated by a woman, she tells of her husband, Lionel, who a month earlier has lost his best friend, Stan. The woman and Lionel discuss how they’d like to have their ashes disposed of someday. While making a trial run on the shore of Lake Michigan of just such a disposition, using ashes from their own hearth, they encounter some high school girls, one of whom says, “I’m so sorry for your loss” (5). The line is both humorous and subtly poignant concerning the man’s true loss.

Profile of author from contributor’s page: "David Greendonner is from Bridgman, Michigan, and is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in fiction. From 2015 to 2017 he was the managing editor of the literary magazine Third Coast" (115).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States | 2-Oklahoma

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Vacationing up a Lazy River

12/18/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.
Tom Parker Bowles
Born December 18, 1974

T. Parker Bowles

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 18 & 25, 2017, Zadie Smith, “The Lazy River”: A British family vacations on the metaphorical Lazy River in Almería, Spain. Smith’s latest novel is Swing Time, which came out last year.

NEXT TIME: ON HOLIDAY HIATUS UNTIL AFTER JANUARY 1, 2018

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Cat People Sneak Up On You

12/11/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination.
Devdutt Pattanaik
Born December 11, 1970

D. Pattanaik

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 11, 2017, Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”: Margot, a twenty-year-old college student who works at a movie theatre begins texting a young man who turns out to be thirty-four.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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A Dog Story

12/4/2017

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A WRITERS' WIT
Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.
Cornell Woolrich
Born December 4, 1903

C. Woolrich

new yorker FICTION 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

December 4, 2017, J. M. Coetzee, “The Dog”: A young woman who passes by the yard of a vicious guard dog each day confronts the owners about introducing her to the dog. Coetzee’s most recent novel is The Schooldays of Jesus.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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November 27th, 2017

11/27/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
Gail Sheehy
Born November 27, 1937

G. Sheehy

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 27, 2017, Will Mackin, “The Lost Troop,":The narrator unravels an episodic tale of American soldiers in Afghanistan, 2008, involving themselves in a series of very unwarlike events. Mackin’s collection, Bring Out the Dog, will come out in March 2018.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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The Perfect Couple

11/20/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Fiction is a report from the interior.
Deborah Eisenberg
Born November 20, 1945

D. Eisenberg

new yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 20, 2017, David Gilbert, “The Sightseers”: Robert and Paulette, residents of a newish high rise overlooking Central Park, prepare for and attend a party given by another couple in their social circle. Gilbert’s most recent novel is & Sons.

NEXT TIME: Farewell to a Piano

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