Memoir vs. Novel

People still ask me what memoir really is. Despite everyone loving to read memoirs recently, no one seems to be able to nail down the particulars of what it is they’re consuming. Then you go and add A Million Little Pieces and its “sequel” to the mix and you’ve got a big bag of WTF? So today I'm answering questions.

Memoir’s basically fiction, right?

No. Memoirs are not fiction. They are about real people and the things that actually happened in that person’s life.

But then why does it read like a novel?

In memoir the author employs all the devices and methods of a fiction writer. They deal in tone and selective description. The authors get into artistic imaginings of physical things. In factual writing an artistic description of how the wind sounded or the way the smoke swirled upward would never be printed, but memoir allows for such artistic flourishes. They build the story of the life around a theme, leaving out large parts of their lives that have nothing to do with the theme and focusing in on events that do.

The best example of theme in memoir that I know is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, where author Nick Flynn builds the memoir around the theme of homelessness. This means that he focuses on his experience working in homeless shelters and his father’s experience being homeless. Because the father-son relationship is viewed through this lens some aspects of his life come into sharper focus and some fade out. When asked about his relationship with his mother, the author stated that his relationship with his mother was extremely important to him and that he and his mother have always gotten along; however, you would not know this from reading the memoir because he allowed the narration of the mother-son relationship to fall away from the attention of the reader.

So how’s it different from an autobiography?

Autobiographies have (thankfully) gone out of style. Pretty much the only people who wrote autobiographies were people who had somehow been deemed “important” public persons, and because they were “important” we, the public, would then want to read all about the experiences that shaped their life and the events that lead to them being “important” and famous.

Memoirs have no such notion of importance. They are the (hopefully) entertaining and moving account of everyday people who have something special to say. Read The Black Dog of Fate if you don’t believe me; the first third of it is about watching baseball on TV with his grandmother. The second third is him realizing she survived the Armenian genocide.

It's not fiction, it's not autobiograph; I still don’t get it.

Most casual readers want to view memoirs as readable autobiographies, and therein lies the problem. An autobiography is fact checked at some point, extensive interviews with witnesses are done, and usually revolves around events so large and well documented that all of this is possible. Memoir doesn’t presume to be the entire truth.

The simplest and most succinct answer did not dawn on me until I read an interview with literary agent Lynn Nesbit where she stated that the thing about memoir is that it involves an unreliable narrator. That was the moment of truth for me.

Memoir is the truth, told with literary devices to make a good, interesting, solid story, told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. The narrator (author) is limited to only what he knows himself. He cannot know what those around him were thinking or what their reasons were, he can only assume them. He can assume reasons for actions toward him. He can assume people’s histories. He can assume events that went on with out him happened a certain way but the narrator will never know with any certainty because the narrator cannot leave his own mind.

What's an unreliable narrator look like?

Certainly you have a friend who always takes comments too critically, right down to the way someone greets her in a store. Because of this, when she tells you a story about her feeling slighted because of a store clerk you know to take it with a grain of salt. As goes that friend, so goes the memoir.

So why are people upset with this Frey guy?

I haven't read it and don't intend to. As I understand it his novels (which he sold as "memoir" after publishers didn't buy it as fiction), he dealt with a narrator who was a drug addict and overcame addiction, and a narrator who spent time in prison. Frey may have experimented with drugs but never was an addict, never went to rehab, and never spent time in prison. Addiction counselors are afraid that people will think they can deal with addiction on their own “like this guy did” when he really doesn’t know shit about rehab.

That and he made Oprah look like a fool. And you don’t mess with Oprah.

Up Next: Ad of the Week

Rejection Letters Go Out

There they are. Both arrived in today's mail.

Knowing as I did that Wisconsin supposedly mailed their rejection letters Feb. 22, I viewed each day that I did not get a letter from them as a blessing. A foolish little parcel of hope. Then -BAM!- I get two letters today along with fresh snow.

I'm not upset. I figured both schools were long shots anyway. Odds for Wisconsin were 3/200 (admitting six total) and Michigan states that this year they could accept less than 5% of applicants. All my gathered information conflicts but it would appear that there are somewhere between eight and fourteen prose seats offered at Michigan.

This post is to let anyone else in the same boat know that if you haven't gotten an acceptance email yet and you don't get a snail mail letter in the next couple of days you're probably on the wait list. I wish you luck while you're there.

I told my father and he was down right pissy. I then had to explain that having already received one acceptance that I was in pretty good shape. That many applicants appear to get admitted to one out of every four schools they apply to. (And these are the happy stories.) Now at 1/3 I feel okay. If I end up with another acceptance, and therefore allowed a choice, I will be thrilled. And if nothing else, at least I'm not the person panicking as I wait for late admitting schools to do their thing because all my early schools sent rejections.

Best wishes to all applicants! Unless you're applying to my programs, in which case you're on your own.

Email to MFA applicants

If you were one of the 400 people applying for one of six spots at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, MFA in creative writing, you received the lovely email today along with a link to a letter on the webpage that started:

Dear Tense and Worried People,

(I kid you not; that's how it started.)

Dear Tense and Worried People,

Stop calling us!!!!!!!

We've made no decisions! Leave us alone or we'll never have a moment of peace in which to make our decisions!

But I'm just paraphrasing here.

It was really a very polite letter explaining that you should not call them to ask if your application is "complete" when really what you want to squeeze out of whomever is unfortunate enough to answer the phone is whether or not they've sent out acceptances.

The lovely Judy Mitchell is even so kind as to completely skip over the fact that people are using such transparent pretenses for calling. And - like any woman skilled in the social dance we call manners - she states simply that any applicant with an incomplete file will be contacted. They won't reject you for a piece of paper gone missing; they'll ask you to replace it.

So you take a big sigh of relief. See? They're not the big bad machine! They'll even let you complete your file if you're a schmuck and forgot the department form.

(Ahem. Yes me, and, no, not for this school.)

This means you can stop having that reoccurring dream where you're the chick in the bad 80s work-out clothes reliving the Apple-Macintosh 1984 commercial; except that instead of throwing the hammer into Big Blue you're attacking the institutions withholding your MFA acceptance.

And not having that dream is good, because you really want to stop analyzing the fact that you're subconsciously attempting to destroy higher education. And the fact that you've made "The Man" an institution whose goal is supposed to be furthering creativity and thinking outside the box.



* In order to prevent concerned comments from my more regular readers who think I really am having the above dream, I will restate that all I want in life is to be a professional liar. I want to make up shit. And I just did. So there.

Tomorrow's Post: Memoir vs. Novel

In the News: Punctuation

NYTimes (brief) article "In praise of punctuation," regarding a street advertisement that actually used a semicolon properly. I think the advert should get an Oscar for its performance.

Opera anyone?

So I've got a friend from undergrad working to turn one of my short stories into a short opera!

He is working on projects for faculty at our Alma Mater and they suggested he look to writers who are also alumni. So then there's me and the crazy notion that I wrote something that someone wants to base a 30 minute opera on!

I find the entire thing far too amusing.

He tells me things like I'll finish the libretto and get it to you to review in a couple of days, and I'm like hmm, libretto... that's which part now? All these words are familiar to me but I'm never quite sure of their precise meanings. I have to be killing him with all my technical questions. I'm so not musical.

This is one of the short works I'm hoping to publish in a literary journal (the story not the opera). So far this month I'm well on my way to one submission per week! With this week's send out I'll have entered two contests and two regular submission cycles. And after that I have to go back to writing new material.

Commercial of the Week

From Finland.

Next on Project Runway?

Because I can't get enough of the design drama on Project Runway, I would like to share this news snippet from China. Can you say Season Five challenge?

End of Month Ralley and Pep Speech!

GOAL: finish the JanNo! Fill in the holes! And rewrite whatever I have to! By the end of February! Go team! ... well, more like Go me! but whatever works and puts you in the mood.

I know the characters in this novel a little better now so I can write the conversations that I left out before. Don't get me wrong: there was a lot of dialog before ... I just didn't cover a lot of the things I should have.

With a goal like this it will be a tough week, but I know I need it. I need this kind of quantifiable accomplishment to prove to myself that I'm working hard with the time I have and to silence the little voice that likes to point to any failure in my life and tell me I'm a quitter.

I'm pushing forward now as hard as I can because I know I need to make the most of this time to accomplish completed manuscripts and get myself into the habit of writing constantly and writing hard. I'm floored by the applicants that say they "took months off of writing" to recover from their MFA applications. You can't be serious, right? What do you expect you'll be doing for 2-3 years if you get in? Certainly not taking time off. And if you listen to the current MFA students, they all say they wish they had written more the months prior to starting their MFA. When I've asked them why one did say that having "back up material" that he could take to a workshop if need be would have been nice but for the most part they all agreed that the habit of writing, and writing hard prior to the MFA would have been a great thing to have in order to adjust to the pace.

Say hello to SpeakCoffee's work ethic: a 60,000 word novel first draft (and still going obviously), and for the month of February I am submitting one short story a week to a literary publication. I've researched my markets, edited my work and keeping my fingers crossed.

How many times have I read that talent is a dime a dozen. That the people who impress are the ones who take the time to learn their craft and employ it. And that the ones who succeed are the ones who persist when all the other talented, skilled writers have given up and packed it in to drive truck cross country.

At the moment, persistence means increased output. The chain of logic is kind of long but let me explain:

The goal is to be a writer and teach writing at a college level.

• To get a teaching position at most schools you need an advanced degree and a book length publication (they look at literary fiction not genre most of the time).
• To get a book length publication you need a manuscript and an agent.
• To get an agent you need A) extremely good luck or B) persistence and several magazine publications.
• To be published in magazines/literary journals you need short stories of appropriate length that are in good shape and possess a Wow! factor.

So right now:

• I have a BA in my chosen field.
• I've applied to get that advanced degree.
• I'm sending work to magazines/literary journals.

However, sending out work and hearing back is a very slow process, (for the very good reason that they're most often overwhelmed and underpaid). So to expedite the process you need to have one of three things happen:

1. The first mag I send it to buys my stuff and I don't have to worry about it.
2. I only choose markets that allow simultaneous submissions, to other markets.
3. I have a lot of work that can be out at several different markets at once.

Option (1) is ideal, (2) doesn't always work out and so I need to work my magic on option (3): high output.

I know some of my programs have begun contacting applicants that they want. This makes me nervous that they don't want me. All this nervousness is translating into a drive to work even harder. I need to use this time to churn out as much as I can. To work as hard as I can. Because if they don't want me, I know I'll have to work that much harder than I am now to achieve my goal. I refuse to lie around and be devastated. When I was on my varsity field hockey team in high school I was floored when I didn't make co-captain my senior year. The girls who did make co-captain were shocked that it was them not me. So I knew I would push harder than ever and try my damnedest to make All-State team and MVP that next season. The next season I made All-State team. I didn't make MVP, instead I was voted the played that always gave 110% -- obviously I was doing something right.

We only have so many dreams in our lives. This one is mine. Like field hockey was mine. I'm going hard and I'm not giving up. I might not make MVP, but you can't fault my work ethic.

Ways to Keep Writing

Here's a list of ideas and suggestions of ways to keep writing toward your goal. You'll never be able to completely get rid of all the disctractions in your life, here's some suggestions for working around life and occasionally for tricking yourself into writing anyway.

· Set a timer for a short period of time (15 minutes or 30) and stay at the keyboard--no matter what--until it dings. Then do it again. Only allow yourself to get up after the timer dings, and always set the timer again if you stay at the keyboard. This will hold you in place long enough for the first impulse toward work-avoidance to pass, and you'll often discover yourself eager to keep going when your time's up.

· Schedule your day's activities--and schedule writing hours first. This doesn't necessarily mean putting them first in the day, but putting them on the schedule itself first, so they get priority. Schedule everything: bathing, eating, sleeping, telephone time (outgoing calls, at least), walking the dog--everything. Then, if it's not on the schedule, don't do it. Schedule it tomorrow.

· Form a support/nagging network of other writers.

· Graph your hours and/or pages against those of your support group. Post the graph where you can see it when you write. Also post it where you can see it when you don't write.

· Challenge other writers to finish a story a week, losers to buy dinner (or dessert, or whatever) for winners.

· Generate story ideas mechanically. Roll dice and pick characters and settings from a list. Tumble a desktop encyclopedia downstairs and write about whatever it opens to when it lands. Throw darts at your bookshelf and write a homage to whatever you hit. The goal here is to demystify "idea" as a stumbling block. Ideas are a dime a dozen once you learn how to find them. Become a supplier rather than a consumer.

· If you've been sitting on an idea until you think you're good enough to do it justice, do it now! You may be run over by a bus tomorrow. Even if you aren't, by the time you think you're good enough, the passion for it will be gone. Write it now! Write all your good ideas as quickly as you can after you get them. Don't worry about getting more; they'll come faster and faster the more you write. Before you know it, you'll be begging people to take them, like a gardener with zucchini.

· Turn off the internet until you’ve met that day’s goals. No email or web surfing until the time/page count/word count is met.

· Carry a note pad or tape recorder with you wherever you go. Use it to record ideas as well as the actual text of stories. Make it your external memory. The idea here is to keep yourself focused on writing no matter what else you're doing.

· Keep more than one project going at once. Switch to another the moment you slow down on one.

Waiting, Watching, Stalking

You're still unaware of the MFAblog, you're a little behind the curve. I actually find it more useful and insightful than the crappy forums and message boards. Why? Probably because there's a group of people weeding out the wackos and picking which questions and thoughts get made into posts. Also there's a lack of hateful and disparaging ranting that is positively refreshing. So many people post in anger that it's enough to turn your stomach.

Don't drink and drive. Don't shop when you're hungry. And don't post when you're pissed off. Just because your life is crappy does not mean the rest of the world gives a shit. Stop, pause, breathe, and consider whether or not your response is actually useful information. Of course posting "thank yous" is acceptable even if the only information conveyed is that you found it helpful.

Then there's the lovely work of my new best friend Seth Abramson. He's complied a listing to the best of his ability of when MFA programs across the country have contacted applicants with acceptances over the past three years (06-08). Of course, it's not conclusive and it's not scientific. But he's done the dirty work of sorting and cataloging with lovely little symbols that don't detract, as well as cutting out all the crap about the applicant doing various happy dances across her living room floor and screeching into the phone upon receiving the call.

Everyone knows that you dance when you get the call. Stop posting about it on open threads. Save the story for your own personal blog. Thankyou and congratulations.

I've scanned my dear buddy chum wonderboy Seth's blog twice now. Only twice! And I'm proud of that restraint. Each time conjures up the same sick feeling in me. My throat closes up and I stop breathing until I reach the name of the first school I've applied to. It doesn't help that I haven't applied to a single school in the first half of the alphabet. So by the time I get to the M's I'm starting to turn funny colors if the page hasn't scrolled fast enough.

Then a deep woosh of air fills my lungs. No one in this application cycle has reported an acceptance to my school as of 2pm today! Close my eyes. Breathe in a couple more times. Remind my body what air feels like. Hey, it's still possible, keep breathing. Keep breathing.

Then I look to the next school. Same process. But thankfully shorter as there's less of a gap between the M school and the N school. The recovery for these next few schools is shorter. I don't have to encourage my own breathing quite as much because I didn't have to hold my breath as long. There's fewer schools with MFAs after the letter N. And my man Seth hasn't listed schools as the formal "University of ..." as much as just cutting to the chase and listing them under their popular names so there's hardly any U entries.

The good ol' boy Seth is my only indulgence in this process. Or my only weakness I should say. I refuse -- refuse! -- to get on the Poets&Writers boards because there is no filter and I would have to read about four years worth of BettySue and BobJoeFred dancing across their living room floor and screaming into the phone's mouth piece before I could get any idea of what was going on in the world of acceptances. I refuse to neuroticly waste away the next month of my life there.

I'm not usually clingy, but my new boyfriend Seth might disagree ... wait, what's that? Seth's not real and I can't date him out of my undying gratitude? Bummer. Oh well, I'll just have to keep stalking him anyway. ;)

Last Four Reads

A quick review of the last four books I've read for better or worse.

PS I Love You, Cecilia Ahern. So it's now a movie that I haven't seen. And that I don't intend to see. Word is that the movie is nothing like the book and that they lump the main character's family issues into her dealings with her mother. Truth is the mother character is present in the book but not an interesting character. The book really isn't even that much about the main character as it is about her realizations about her friends and family as she learns that her husband's death didn't just affect her. I think of this as more of an "ensemble cast" book and I'm certain that didn't translate over into the movie version.

Part of the ensemble feel comes from the fact that Ahern uses a peculiar type of omniscient narration. She slips into one character's inner thoughts, then pulls back and describes things as if seen from a far and then the next thing you know she is inside the head and thoughts of another character. It works for most of the book but there were a couple of chapters I had to reread because this type of narration made me stumble and misplace facts. Usually that was when the narration slipped into the head of a lesser character, like the barkeep we meet only for one scene of one chapter. I still don't know why he was important enough for me to need to know what he was actually thinking. If you're looking for an author that does this technically difficult form and does it well, check out another Irish author Brian Moore.

That said, Ahern has produced an extremely moving and emotional novel. The end may not "satisfy" but it is an emotional journey worth partaking in. I cried probably once every thirty pages or so. As it's over 400 pages there was a lot of sniffling going on in my house that week. How did she trip me into tears so often? Because we get to see inside the head of so many of the characters, and because the deceased husband has left her so much to go on. We even get an entire chapter from his point of view in flash back of course, where the reader is let into his thoughts where he considers how much stronger his wife is than him, and that he knows he couldn't do this without her but, in fact, he's not the one who is going to have to live without her. And that this is why he is writing her ten months of notes.

Undead and Unwed, MaryJanice Davidson. I picked up this book on a recommendation from a friend who reads Davidson's many books as she rides the T to and from work. Knowing this friend and the fact that it was train reading, I wasn't surprised to find a light plot and prose doused liberally with humor. The protagonist is a recently layed off young woman who wakes up one night to find herself dead and about to be burried in the world's tackiest outfit. In fact, she's more upset to realize that her step-mother has raider her designer shoe collection than to realize she is dead. Or, in this case, undead. The plot is thin, very thin in places and the secondary characters are flat at best. The one great reason to read this book is the strong, humorous voice of the narrator, determined that if she has to do this undead thing then she's going to do it with style.

The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella. Kinsella did all the Shopoholic books, which I've never read and after The Undomestic Goddess probably won't read. The main character is a young successful lawyer at a high prestige firm in London, until she makes a mistake that ends her career and then shoves off to the countryside and accidentally finds work scrubbing loos. Of course she finds blissful happiness and fulfillment in her new lifestyle. Why not? She also falls for the nearest avaliable man of an appropriate age. You know, the same person that your Aunt Margery would awkwardly pair you off with just because you're in the right proximity. But since it's the author and not Aunt Marge pulling the strings it happens. Even if it is fairly boring as it unfolds.

The one thing I rememer the most is the mention of an older brother character who had a "breakdown" and fell off the face of the high pressure world the rest of the family lives in. We never get to meet this brother and the only possible reason for him to be mentioned at all is for some foreshadowing. Not that the novel needs foreshadowing when the protagonists meltdown is clearly spelled out on the jacket blurb. I'm still sad that we never met the brother or learned anything of his plight.

The Undomestic Goddess puts a thin layer of new varnish an already old tale. At least when Mrs. Doubtfire did it there was an original spin.

Lastly, Crazy in Love, Lani Diane Rich. The reason I picked up this book was because of the fact that Chris Baty mentions her in an interview he did about NaNoWriMo. Apparently Rich decided one day to participate in NaNo, wrote her first novel ever, got it published and now produces at least two a year of these things. So I decided to check her out. This was the only copy of her work that my local library had and even as I write this I'm struggling to remember what the plot was or any details about the characters. I think this is the one where there's a ghost haunting the protagonist but not for any reason that is ever answered by the narration. I think the entire purpose of the ghost is to get the protagonist out of the cottage and into the hotel. There's also a minor/major plot line about crazy people embezzling money, kidnapping and murder. See, it sounds like those would be major events, but some how they weren't. I'd be much more interested to get my hands on a copy of The Fortune Quilt, also by Rich, which sounds like it at least has a more interesting plot.

In sum, nothing particularly bad ... okay, Crazy in Love really was just plain crazy ... but nothing particularly stellar either. PS I Love You was lovely, tender, funny at moments, but I have no intention of rereading it in the near future. However Ahern is an author that I'd like to keep an eye on for the future. She's only in her mid-twenties now and wrote PS I Love You when she was just 21. I'm interested to see what she'll produce as her style continutes to mature.

News Bank

This was the world during the writer's strike.
We have now moved on!

I could have posted a link to a serious news source about the writer's strike ending, but why do that when John Stewart sums it up so nicely?



But in all seriousness, apparently American's seriously don't like smart people. Considering the popularity of Jessica Simpson on "The Newlyweds" should this come as much of a surprise? NYTimes article here. Americans are getting statistically dumber not because of our school system but because it's the cool thing to do. I say screw it! I still want a Ph.D.!

Then there's John Grisham's interview. Now, I've never read a Grisham novel, but I think I've seen a movie or two that was based off of his books. Legal thrillers never were my thing. But the man has an interesting take on his writing. He knows he's doing it to entertain, and basically thumbs his nose at the idea of timelessness. And you can't really argue with someone who made $9 million last year alone. Despite this I know people who would continue to write off entertainment writers. These are the same people, mind you, who adore blockbuster actors who haven't done a serious or influencial movie in years, if ever. If the movie industry has moved past the idea of "intellectual" being so seperate (and superior) from "entertainment" why is it so prevelant in fiction writing? Assuming of course that you're talking about well written work. A bad movie is a bad movie regardless of content or intent and the same is true of a novel.

I'm still entertained by the amount of stigmas that remain in the publishing world. There's the "popular fiction" stigma, the "genre" stigma, the "straight to paperback" stigma. The latter of which is an increasing phenomena because of the expense of producing hardcover works and consumers being willing to wait until it comes out in paperback -- or better yet, as an ebook. A more lengthy discussion seen in the Jan.-Feb. Poets&Writer's Magazine.

What are MFA programs basing their decisions on?

Because this was a really good question I decided to give it its own post and push back my short review of my last three reads until tomorrow.

Applicants are asked to submit undergraduate grades, a statement of purpose, three letters of recommendation preferably one or two who have been your prior writing instructors, and the all important writing sample. Some schools ask for GRE scores but those are mostly a formality for acceptance into the Graduate School not the actual writing program. Sometimes they ask for a CV, for secondary essays on your "personal journey"* that brought you to that school or for your teaching philosophy to determine whether you'd make a good TA.

*Aside: My all time favorite is the "personal journey" essay, because after you write it you get to hold hands and skip, then the applicants take turns falling backwards into each other's arms -- all because they've found themselves through their personal journey essay. Ahem.

Despite all these collected bits of information, acceptance is based almost entirely on your submitted writing sample. For fiction programs that means two short stories totaling 25-40 pages (depending on the program). They estimate the writing sample is 75-90% of the admission criteria. Because if you can't write then it doesn't matter that you had a 4.0 from Harvard.

In the November/December Poets&Writers Magazine, there was an article titled something like "Confessions from a former application reader," in which it was stated that the preliminary reader of the application goes straight for the writing sample. If the sample fails miserably nothing else in the application packet is considered. A successful writing sample is generally a demonstration that the applicant is a storyteller. The program isn't looking for fancy technical work because that's what the program is there to teach, they're looking for potential. Again, prior publication isn't necessary because that's what the program hopes to help get you in position for. Another plus always seems to be the ability to establish a strong voice within a short piece, particularly if it is unique to the writer. The kiss of death, however, comes when applicants attempt to copy the voice of published faculty at the program thinking that they're working to flatter. Usually the unnatural assumption of the new voice does more to destroy the story and flatters the faculty like a muumuu.

Applicants get shuffled into "piles" by the preliminary reader and the better ones are then reviewed by a committee, often made up of faculty, program director and occasionally current MFA candidates. Some programs go straight for the committee and skip the preliminary reader. In committee, the writing sample once again reigns supreme. Borderline students are considered in light of their other submitted materials.

Of course, this is not to say that having a lousy undergrad GPA doesn't matter. Most schools require a 3.0 or higher and significant coursework in English or equivalent experience in writing outside of the classroom.

The focus on the writing sample makes the review process extremely subjective, not unlike the publication process -- so, in that respect, it's very fitting -- and almost the complete opposite of the law school application process, which is based entirely on the numbers game (GPA, LSAT, class rank and undergrad school ranking). But at the same time that subjectivity makes it that much more personal: you are allowed to be viewed not just as a name and a number but as a writer with potential for growth. On the flip side, it also makes rejection that much more personal, but we're trying not to think those thoughts just yet.

Note: My answer is gleaned from myriad sources; it is not first hand information and is in no way the definitive answer for any one program.

Valentine's Day

It's February 14, officially St. Valentine's Day and that means one thing in my world: it's officially open season on MFA acceptance/rejection notifications.

Let the nail biting begin!

Who has time to think about valentines and roses when there's potential disaster looming on the horizon? It's all we can do to keep out of the Poets&Writer's forums whenever we log on to the computer. What is the purpose of that, you might ask? To see what schools have started issuing acceptances, of course! And then to hype ourselves up as to whether that means that we're in or not. Then some strategy type deliberations as to whether it's better to hear back quickly or to not hear for a long time if you're not the recipient of the very first acceptance. I vote for waiting, with waiting there's still a chance someone might decline their seat, and let it become yours! ... Then again there's something to be said for ripping the bandage off quickly - but damnit I want to get an MFA!

Each school has their own time frame for these things. Obviously later deadlines won't be getting back as soon as the early deadlines, however I'm willing to bet an "early" deadline doesn't necessarily make a school contact applicants any sooner. Western Michigan was the only MFA that I can recall who gave an estimate as to when applicants would hear back. Their guidelines were "late February to early March." As the midway point of February, I'm willing to consider it the "late" half of the month.

The season opens on February 14, but when it closes is much more difficult to pin point. Certainly you're not going back out to hunt again when you've gotten a response from all your schools. But word on the web is that some schools have left students hanging as late as early May before giving them a definite answer. Obviously this wait time has to do with the size of the selection committee up front, but also the size of the program. Since most programs accept between 6 and 25 students per year and get many more applicants than that, wait listing, "holding," and just plain making students wait to hear anything is necessary to get a full class. These schools don't know how many of their first choice students may be someone else's first choice as well.

Until I hear something I can only hope that for some reason only idiots applied to the same programs I did thus making me look stellar by comparison. ... Well, not too many idiots, I'd like to have at least reasonably intelligent people in my workshops for the next two years. ;)

What is Chick Lit?

It’s a curse and a blessing.

Wikipedia defines it as “a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties”

However, in recent years the term “Chick Lit” has evolved and now applies to almost any contemporary novel written for an adult audience set in the here and now with a female narrator. Usually the author is female and under 50.

I explained this to my father and he replied “Oh, it’s books by chicks for chicks.”

Noooo!

As a curse:

It’s dismissive. Just because it’s market at women it implies that all content is only worthy as romantic fluff for women.

“Chick Lit” mostly has to do with marketing more than content. It is marketed mainly at women between the ages of 18 and 50. Which is a pretty big fricking chunk of the population when you think about it. But stuffing the word “chick” in there makes men think they would have no interest in any of it. The problem is that there is some amazing writing out there that is being marketed under the title “chick lit” that isn’t about finding the perfect man to match your designer shoes ... but the term “chick lit” encompasses both and thus limits and alienates.

Why is it also a blessing?

Because it’s how many young women are breaking into the publishing world. There’s also a set model now for marketing these things as “beach reads.” Walk into any chain book store and look at that “3 for 2” table. Locate a $13 paperback with some kind of fresh but funky cover art, an appropriately sassy title and a blurb meant to make the main character seem just like you. That’s chick lit marketing. And it pulls both ends of the spectrum into this more widely read category of “chick lit.”

So both literary fiction and romance fiction is getting pulled under the term. I believe there is a time and place for all types of writing. And if the new marketing style can get women to read a wider range of work that’s fabulous. But at the same time it’s limiting because it tells men not to bother.

Why is a story that concerns a woman dealing with real issues and problems suddenly not important to men as a story? How many stories have we read about men dealing with family issues but when it’s the woman dealing with the issues of grown siblings and perhaps her own marriage and children it’s “chick lit”?

I now find that any time I read a book with a female narrator and I want to recommend it as a very good novel, that I have to make the case for it that it is not “chick lit” otherwise people think I’m just recommending fluff.

Back to My Roots

I started this blog to write on writing. To write on the writing experience. To write on the experience of the MFA application process. To describe hardships I went through as a young writer and how I got through them for better or worse. And occasionally to post snippets of fiction when I had something short enough.

What happened to that?

Commercial Trend

The trend with commercials seems to be the less you understand the concept the more interesting they are. That and the fact that you can use anything and anyone not related to a beverage to sell a beverage.



Do you want to know the backstory to that commercial? Or what a day in the life is like for a dancer?



Because I love Goalies:


And I'm posting this one because I used to live with this woman. Not really. But close enough that you can get the picture. The scary, scary picture.

Two Day Rollercoaster

Thursday was atrocious. It was one of the most depressing days of winter for me. This had nothing to do with the weather which is typical February. So when I got up on Friday I didn’t feel much better.

I wondered how I was going to get through the day.

I began by failing miserably in my own kitchen. There was coffee on stuff. Coffee in stuff. I tried to make oatmeal twice and succeeded once. Then rushed out the door. Dusted snow and scrapped at ice. Where the hell does that stuff keep coming from? There's always just enough of it to make me remember why the scraper rides shotgun in my car all winter. I made the drive blissfully without incident. Which was good as my wipers were not wiping in a fashion that made visibility better.

I got there and forgot all about my problems for a while. Thank god. I just did my thing.

I got home feeling like at least I did something today. And since it wasn’t even 4:00pm I was energized for all the things I thought I was going to be doing with the rest of the evening. Not all of them happened. Damn life keeps getting in the way of my plans.

In the mail was a skinny little envelope from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I was pissed off: they’d sent me the skinny envelope!

No phone call and a skinny envelope. Everyone knows that the skinny envelope means. This was bad, very bad. So when I read the first like “Congratulations on your admission ...” I had to go back and read it twice more before I believed it.

It is an English MA program with a focus on creative writing. Which sounds a lot like what I did as an undergrad as the focus is more evenly divided between literature and writing. This is not an MFA. There is also a Ph.D. offered by this school in the same focus.

This was better than I'd hoped once because when they emailed me to say I had not submitted the application form the English Department wanted, I panicked. I had submitted the application form the Graduate School wanted but not separate program specific form because their website was like a rat warren. I had thought, if they know I'm not even smart enough to send the damn form, why would they ever admit me? And then I banged my head on my desk a few times for the wasted chance.

I didn’t worry too much or too long about the form mix up because it’s not my style. I prefer to shrug off things I can't change. Things I could potentially change I'm willing to tie myself in knots over if it suits my mood. I sent them their form as quickly as I could, it went in the mail that very night, and it appears that was enough to offset my stupidity.

Coffee Love

I find it highly necessary to share this video with everyone.



You want to know what gets worse than all this? Once people crack the Starbucks Code, they venture out to other coffee shops and attempt to use the same lingo. They hope that they've learned a language not just a regional dialect.

But they haven't.

Your special offer Starbucks Decoder Ring:
Short (8oz)
Tall (12oz)
Grande (16oz)
Venti (20oz)

However, you'll never see a short on their menu. If you accidentally order one, you'll soon find that you've just forked over $1.50 for a dixie cup worth of coffee. Oops.

Even more confusion ensues when you work in a new brand of coffee shop (as I did) and someone asks for Grande, then gets confused when you give them the big cup. Or they ask for tall and get the medium cup.

Customer: "No, I just want a tall."

Me: "This is the tall size."

Customer: "But I want the little one."

Me: "That's a short."

Customer: "Oh."

I think someone at the homeoffice decided to "be his own man" and rename all the cups with suitably coffee-sounding names. Because you can't call it Small, Medium, Large when you're charging that much for it. With the price comes the aura of mystery.

Then you get the old guy, the retiree who obviously reminisces about the "good old days" who learns that 10 oz. is a "short" at my store. He harumphs "At least you have the decency to call this puny thing a short." Ahem, apparently your manhood is in question, Starbucks.

Notes on Life

One.
One truck of tree trimmers in winter can lead to a fire truck, 5 power company trucks (3 with buckets) and over four hours without power.

Two.
We are completely and totally dependent on electricity.

Three.
All my "survival supplies" are dependent on some form of heat being applied to them. Frozen foods, cans of soup, canned vegetables and boxes of rice all require heat being applied to them. And I do not have a gas stove. And no there was no bread and peanut butter.

Four.
Coffee needs electricity. Or 16 hours in a cold press.

Five.
Giving up on the power coming back on and deciding to take a shower by candle light (and flash light) sounds a lot sexier than the reality. Pretty much it just leaves your eyes feeling strained from operating in low light.

Six.
Rearranging candles so that you don't blow them out with the hair dryer is only important until you remember that the hair dryer takes electricity too.

Seven.
Thank god my car runs on gas and isn't on the electrical grid somehow.

Eight.
Thank god my car is not trapped inside a garage with no juice to get the door open. Yes there's a key and a manual release. Do I know where that key is? Do I really want to look for it then stand outside in winter with my still damp hair trying different keys? No. I do not. And so I am thankful.

Nine.
Panera is on a different electrical grid than me. They have the power to properly heat my soup and run my laptop. They even have internet. More importantly, they have coffee. Lots and lots of warm coffee. In three flavors.

Groundhog Day

I think I understand the appeal of Punxsutawney Phil's life choice. He's not one of these New Year's Resolutions kinda guys. No, he waits it out until the craze is over, until most resolutions are broken and the majority of Americans have already quit dieting. That's when he comes out and reassesses his situation. Me? I've come out of my JanNoWriMo writing cave, taken a look around, accessed my real life situation and decided that shadow or no, I want back in my cave.

I love the intensity with which I threw myself into my 50,000 word goal. But without that intensity what do I have to fill my spare hours? Not too much that I'm proud of. Do you know what kind of crap is on TV these days? Have you ever seen an episode of "Extreme Makeover"? Omigd! Scary! But you stay glued to it like a train wreck. I'm fed up with TV. The writer's strike needs to be over now! End the reality TV madness! Bring me back sitcoms and dramas!

It took me about 48 hours to realize I was happier and healthier writing all the time than I was during my mental "break" from writing. I also downed a scary amount of refined carbs during that first 24 hours that quickly left me feeling weak and tired.

Refined carbs + boredom + "Extreme Makeover" = Ug.

Now if only I could find someway to make guys wear top hats and bow ties as part of my announcement that I am once again retreating into my Cave o' Writing for at least the next six weeks.

By the way, Punxsutawney saw his shadow too. We're both digging in for the rest of Winter.

Algebra is your friend

Actually, no, it's not. But it can make you friends.

I'd met City Girl before 8th grade algebra. She had moved to the area after me and we occasionally road the same bus to middle school. But we never really spent any time together until we started taking accelerated algebra. It was a 9th grade class offered to a select group of 8th graders. It was the one and only "tough" class offered for our year. The only one that the homework took more than 30 minutes.

I did pretty well at it in the first couple of weeks. This I know because our teacher posted a "Top 10" list combined for both sections of the class he taught, along with the "Up and Coming" 11-20th placed students.

As one of the few people City Girl new previously who was in the class with her she called me for algebra help. And for the first few months we'd talk on the phone every night or every other night entirely about math.

As the year progressed we'd call each other so regularly and stay on the line so long that our parents dispared. It got to the point that one of us would lift up the receiver to call the other and find the line had already connected because the other person had already dialed through.

We started talking about everything except math. And I had a 4th quarter grade to prove it. I never did make that "Top 10" board again.

Then came high school. We talked through everything between us. First boyfriends, first kiss, first car, lead in the play, varsity letter, annoying parental units, study groups. She was the person I took with me when I won tickets on the radio to go see my favorite band. (Which was the most teenage moment of my teenage years!) We always had other friends -- in retrospect we had an amazing group of friends -- and whom we were closest to varied over year to year but she and I were always present no matter who else was.

What can I say? She understood me.

Now she and I along with Paralith, another great friend of ours from high school, blog at http://lostyearexperience.blogspot.com/ about feeling adrift in the world after college. Apparently, we three are still pretty good at understanding each other.

One of the most amazing things about Paralith, City Girl and I in high school was that we found each other and nurtured this shared passion of writing fiction and building characters, their plots and the worlds they lived in. They were my first writing group. Not long ago Paralith made a comment about the serial nature of my TreeSinger posts. Namely that it reminded her of how we would pass stories between us in middle and high school.

In those days we didn't have full length drafts to circulate, so we handed off whatever we had finished the night before and read it in the spare minutes between passing bells before handing it off to the next person to read. City Girl would correct my spelling, Paralith would fill the page with questions about what is this? or where is this going? or that's an incredibly cool dodad you've created! while I would hand back pages that bled with wording suggestions.

I can't remember any of our other friends getting into it. They'd read occasionally but us three were the ones doing most of the writing. Although there was some sort of group written soap opera featuring real live high schoolers all written about with their code names. Only I don't recall much of that one.

We've all dabbled on and off with writing, but I'm the one who is taking it seriously these days. Paralith found biology. City Girl found acting and now PR. These other passion are pesky and detract from lengthy writing sessions.