Ad of the Week

And just in case you might be attempted to copy the actions of the ad and seek out a herd of office chairs, get injured and then sue the Ladders or their advertising firm, the legal department has given us a thoughtful "Do Not Attempt" warning at the bottom of the screen.

No post, post

No post today, I'm writing a text book article at the last minute. It wouldn't be me if it wasn't last minute. However, I'm still more punctual than my father: when he's asked to write or edit chapters for text books and journals, he usually starts after the deadline has passed.

Workshop (edited post)

Well, that went well.

That went shockingly well.

So well that twelve hours later I still find it hard to believe. So well that I wonder if I didn't get cheated somehow.

Usually for workshop we submit one piece of fiction (7-30 double spaced pages of prose) to the class by email 72 hours before the class takes place. This week, I submitted two pieces roughly 48 hours before workshop. Oops.

No, not "oops." I meant to do it. I just meant to do it earlier.

One piece was 550 words of flash fiction and the other was 13 pages of a nonfiction essay.

For the nonfiction piece, I really expected to take slack for a "sentimental" ending. I loved the ending even though I did see it's sentimentality -- but then again I cry at Kodak commercials. But it didn't happen. People loved the ending because it tied back in to the opening. Gah. Who knew?

The reception for the piece of nonfiction was generally warm although it wasn't unanimously so. I could tell from oral comments and written ones handed back to me that at least one person totally did not get it. Then again that person read it as a fiction story instead of a nonfiction essay which is a different form. [Essays can go on rambling, summary style tangents and get away with it instead of needing to express all information through scene. Other formats of creative nonfiction try to be entirely in scene.] I believe the warm reception was due to the humor and the fact that the instructor was fairly vocal in her approval.

What was really intriguing was the response to my piece of flash fiction. I didn't think that we would even talk about it but that's what we started off the night with. I had specifically asked for help with punctuation. At the beginning of discussion I explained why the punctuation was an issue: this was my alphabet exercise. Because the first sentence had to start with "A" the second with "B" and so on, the punctuation got sticky ... and then there was a required 100 word sentence which had even more inventive punctuation. I had edited the original piece to move it away from its aleatory origins (just learned what "aleatory" meant last night) but I was fairly certain some of the constructions I had made to fit the rules were making the piece awkward.

Having twelve pairs of fresh eyes look at it without knowing the exercise beforehand was awesome! However, once they did know the rules they were hunting through the entire piece looking for the remnants of the alphabet. Writers: always curious about words. But that hunting was also helpful. It made them think about why certain words were there and if they were still working (usually they weren't). All in all, it was amusing to see them sniff out the "alphabet words." Is 'verbalize' a remnant? What about 'quixotic'? 'Reciprocal?'

After workshop I went out to the bar with several of the other writers then came back home to edit the piece of flash fiction and submit it to the Kenyon Review "under 30" short fiction contest. I'm not going to lie when I say that submitting that piece to workshop this month had everything to do with wanting help getting it ready for this specific contest.

Reposted from the "Kenyon Review Online" Blog.

Nine Out of Ten Vikings Say… Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky February 19th 2009 Oslo (AP) — A recently-discovered survey of Vikings has revealed that libraries are unnecessary. A majority of the marauding Norsemen favored alternative uses for the resources, including bonfires, dragon hordes, and “út-tearin’ sheets to wipen your rumpe.” “We’ve found that Vikings mainly use libraries for meeting space,” said lead researcher Eric the Unpleasant. “They need a place to gather after a raid to divide the plunder. And vellum is apparently excellent for wiping blood from your axe.” “In today’s competitive business climate,” he went on, “who has time for illuminated manuscripts? After all, it’s not like we can learn anything from the past.”

After the Oscars

Every time I watch the Academy Awards I want to be an actress. It never fails. Although last night I also entertained the notion of being part of the design team for the great theatrical blitz that is the actual show part of the award show.

As predicted by everyone who was talking about it, Slumdog Millionaire just about swept it. I didn't make any predictions except on the one film of the nominees that I have seen: Wall-E.

Wall-E, as I predicted, won best animated feature. Me and Jack Black had a lot riding on that.

Ad of the Week

Oscars are coming up tomorrow.

Performance Readings

Being sick has really taken it out of me, but it's been a good excuse to sit around and watch too much TV.

I've been reading more essays from Sloane Crosley's collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake. Now that I think of it, I'm really impressed that she managed to publish a book with the word "there'd" in the title. It's a commonly used contraction but I don't think I've ever seen it in print.

My next submission for workshop is due on Sunday. I've been working on it on an off all February, but of course, I've left the hardest parts for last and, well, now it's time for them to rear up and bite me in the butt.

This time around I've chosen to submit a piece of nonfiction formatted as an essay, (which is undoubtedly Ms. Crosley's fault).

Tonight there is a reading downtown in a coffee shop/bar/pizza place (they're trying to cash in on all venues where students spend money). The readers are MFA candidates -- my turn comes a month from now -- tonight includes one of the writers I like in my fiction workshop. Hopefully he'll perform his piece instead of just read it off the page.

This next bit goes out to anyone who ever chooses to get up in front of a crowd and speak (I understand if it's not your choice that you might be less inclined to care about what I have to say): don't bore us.

We tend to think of "lecture" as speaking aloud to a group, giving instruction through a speech, something like that, but the word originates as a medieval term meaning to read. Yes, once upon a time education was conducted by the guy up front reading aloud from a book on the lectern. This seems silly to me; why not just read it yourself? The practice probably came from religion where the only person in town who was literate was the guy reading from the book and then the practice carried over to the university. Although why it stayed that way for as long as it did I'll never know (even back in the day people at university were literate).

Thankfully, we live in a different era. If I thought the old fuddy-duddy lecturing on political theory was hard to listen to, I doubt I would have survived him simply reading from the page.

[Side note: AWP's guidelines are that its panelists prepare a written speech and then read directly from that writing. Ug! Thankfully, most of the panelists don't follow that guideline.]

In an age of spoken lectures why would anyone read fiction straight from the page without emotion, inflection, pause or eye contact? Why would a writer hoping to promote himself and his work not do everything in his power to make it easier to consume by a listening audience?

I have no idea, and yet I'm seeing it time and again at these MFA candidate's readings.

At the readings at AWP (with an exception of some of the poets) the writers used inflection, they changed up their pacing, their volume, they looked up from their work and made eye contact with the whole room -- look up, look down, look back corner, back corner, near corner, down -- they create an experience where the audience feels like they're listening to an actor read, not like they feel that they themselves are reading the page.

We are hardwired to understand speech and speech patterns. We listen for tone, inflection, volume, pauses, rhythm to determine things that are underlying in the speaker's words. Does the writer have to do all that with mere words on the flat page? Yes. But that's no reason for the writer to believe that a listening audience will be able to subvert their hardwiring and care only for the nuances of words without tone, inflection, volume, pauses or rhythm.

AWP: prose poem vs. flash fiction

Me: still sick. It's a sinus thing. Yuck.

The AWP panel that claimed to discuss the differences between prose poems and flash fiction fell flat. Robert Olen Butler gave his personal definition, but no one else did. This may yet become a defining theory as he judges the Southeast Review's World's Best Short Short Fiction contest every year.

Butler's theory was that prose poems, like all poetry are about epiphanies, bright shining moments. And that flash fiction, like all fiction are narratives about yearning. The difference between long and short fiction is that the yearning becomes more condensed. That the moment when the character realizes the yearning is the end of the story in a piece of flash fiction. "Yearning" being his word for the deepest desires of the characters.

Ron Carlson said he always thought that he wrote stories not poems. But then someone approached him and asked to publish a collection of his poetry, so now Carlson supposes they're poems.

AWP: the short summary version

The conference was great!

I heard poets Paul Muldoon (reading + conversation about growing up in Ireland with all these crazy Irish poets), Donald Hall, and Nick Flynn (whom I'd heard at my undergrad and read his memoir) read poetry. Donald Hall has a collection of poems that are memoir and really cute because he's writing about being a little boy back in the day and some of it is compared to being an old man now. "When you're a little boy your socks slip down, and someone tells you 'Donny, pull up your socks' ... when you're an old man your socks slip down, but no one tells you to pull them up" -- I'm probably not doing it justice but it was lovely. He's also got this poof of crazy white hair that looks like it hasn't been brushed this side of the millennium. He's a character.

Art Spiegelman gave the keynote address. It encompassed a brief history of comics that explained his life, his influences and his eventual production of MAUS. It really got me interested in "comix" -- the term he likes because of its "mix" of mediums -- and caused me to listen to a panel of poets writing about superheroes the next day. They called to my attention the notion of comic book superheroes being the modern form of myth making. That right now we might not have a culture that understands references to Achilles but we understand them to Superman. This interested me because I've been thinking about that kind of myth-making in modern society, but I had only thought of it in terms of the boom of the fantasy and sci-fi genres in the decline of fairy tales and folk lore. Now I have another piece of the puzzle to consider and I'm anxious to do so.

I went to a literary 'rock n roll' reading with ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere), Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned), and Dorothy Alison (Bastard Out of Carolina) -- Alison gave an amazing! reading. She said when she was younger she wanted to be Janis Joplin; she's totally done it.

Robert Olen Butler and the wonderful Ron Carlson read flash fic/prose poems and then went head to head about what differentiates one form from the other. Which was amusing to listen to even if they didn't come to any consensus.

The NPR show Selected Shorts did a recording Saturday night. Actors read three short stories including Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" read by B D Wong (who's currently acting on Law & Order) and it was a WONDERFUL reading of the short story. I hadn't ever read "Cathedral" before and felt a little like I was the only one in the extremely literate audience who hadn't. I'm always a little annoyed with reading anything that people have put into the canon, so having it read to me by a good actor was a happy way of approaching it.

Then there were oodles of panels on theory, pedagogy, tips, jobs in academia, workshop in academia, comic books in literature and lots lots more. In fact, there were about 15 panels going on simultaneously every 90 minutes. And I got a bunch of free lit journals/books of poetry and one really off the wall sci-fi where women turn into dogs, dogs turn into women and men turn into rats ... I think.

But it wasn't all just literary heavyweights wandering around. I also ran into my undergraduate advisor, a kid I graduated college with, another professor from undergrad and a few familiar faces from Kenyon workshop. And then they all gave me their germs.

I'll spend the week recovering and unpacking some of the thoughts sparked by these panel discussions.

Before the Stuff

"In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better."
- Ellen DeGeneres

Your on tenterhooks waiting to hear how the AWP conference was -- I know -- but the good news is that those tenterhooks are study, and they will hold you over until tomorrow.

Definition of AWP

AWP: where 5,000 writers get together and share germs from across the country.

And to think, for all the virology conferences I've tagged along to, this may be the first conference where I've caught something!

Ad of the Week

Kenyon Contest

(still at AWP)

The Kenyon Review (to my knowledge) only holds one contest a year. Short fiction only, no entry fee, and you must be under 30 years-old. Oh and that short story has to be really short, 1200 words short.

http://www.kenyonreview.org/contests-sf.php

The contest is only open from February 1-28. (The shortest month of the year, eh? Smart move on their part.)

Prize includes publication and tuition to their summer workshop. The length requirement is a real kicker though. It's short enough that most "short" stories are too long, but long enough that most flash fiction seems too brief. It's the perfect length to get awkwardly caught between detail and plot and brevity, and not know how to get out. Hmm...

Write Your Heart Out

From Kirsten Ogden on the KRblog:

Did I clock in enough writing time to feel good about calling myself a writer? Or, as Rebecca McClanahan might phrase it, Why don’t we write our hearts out? In her book Write Your Heart Out, she says “There are so many reasons not to write, it’s a miracle this sentence appears.” She then goes on to share all of the misconceptions about writing that help put it all into perspective when we writers are thinking it’s a good idea to enjoy a Diners, Drive-ins and Dives marathon instead of sitting in the chair. (Hey, I like cheeseburgers!)

Misconception #1: Writing gets done without writing.

Misconception #2: Writers have time to write.

Read the whole blog entry.

--

I'm reading two books on my train ride to Chicago today, The Dark Mirror and Straw Into Gold. The former is a fantasy novel (the first in a trilogy as these things usually are) that I purchased because it promised talk of the protagonist's childhood and bore a blurb from Sara Douglass. Douglass = my fave Australian fantasy author. The latter is yet another young adult novel assigned in my folklore/fairy tales literature class. BTW the paper for that class went fairly well. I guess that BA I have in BS does mean something. I'll wait for the grade to come back before I say how much it means.

WOO! AWP!

blogger's note: this is the first and only time I have ever, or will ever [hopefully] write a title entirely in capital letters

The AWP Conference starts tomorrow! I'm packing.

Actually it starts today, but I'm not heading in to Chicago until tomorrow morning early.

I have little to no idea what I'm going to do once I get there. Let me rephrase. I intend to show up, check into the hotel, walk six blocks south, check in to the conference, and attend as many freakin readings and panels as I can. I have the phone numbers of several people in my program who will be there as well. But other than that, I have no idea what to expect.

The uber-jaded instructor I had class with last semester described it as a place to drink and get laid. He says that, but I'm betting it has a lot to do with the crowd you hang with. Team-beer-pong for example.

My friend who attending last year said it was essential in her choice of MFA program and that the panels were amazing. That it was eye-opening to see the (minimal) size of the writing community.

I don't know what it will be like for me. I intend to go to as many panels as I can and to go to the ones that interest me. That I'll be friendly to the person sitting next to me and hopefully all will go well.

Barrelhouse has their guide to the conference. They claim that as a newbie I should take their hand and let them show me around. That. Is. Not. My. Style.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing my part for the Obama administration: spending money. Wait, I mean, stimulating the economy. It turns out that the extra teaching gig I picked up covers approximately the cost of attending both AWP and the Kenyon Review workshop this summer. At this point, it's worth it. If it wasn't I wouldn't be spending the money.

On that note, I've decided not to go to Prague this summer. Western Michigan hosts the program and some of the faculty there is WMU regular faculty, some of the faculty there is special to the program but still listed on WMU advertisements (Stuart Dybek I'm looking at you). Not picking up the credit hours might hurt me eventually, but I don't have 1) the cash to get over to Europe and 2) any desire to be mugged. Maybe "mugged" implies too much violence. I have no desire to be pickpocketed.

Other than that, I hear the program is wonderful. People rave about it. They can rave all they want; I'm going back to Kenyon.

As the week winds down, I don't know how much day-to-day blogging I'll be doing at the AWP, as I'm not planning on taking my computer with me but I will report after the event. Next year the AWP is in Denver. And it's in April not February.

I've always wanted to go to Denver. Actually, I've always wanted to take a train out west even though it would kill a whole week travelling that way. Hmm.

What exactly are we saving?

"Save the Short Story" website -- again, I take issue with "saving" something that's been on the brink of extinction since the 1960s despite the dramatic increase in MFA programs churning out short stories, despite the rising number of independent lit magazines out there both in print and online; frankly it feels like adding the poodle to the endangered species list -- takes issue with agent Jeff Kleinman (by name) for his comments in the Jan/Feb 2009 Poets & Writers group interview of four "young literary agents."

1. That took freakin forever! Seriously. The rant against him went up on Feb. 3 ... but I read the article in Poets & Writers at Christmas. I actually had to hunt around my apartment for the magazine( it was buried under a stack of papers that need grading). All of a sudden, six weeks after the printing, there's issue being taken with it? Apparently not everyone got that whole "instant communication" memo regarding information and the use of the Internet.

2. The quoted statement was not that Kleinman hates the short story form but that they're boring and you [he] can't sell them in this market. I didn't find that whiny at all. Actually, I agreed with it.

First, it is hard to get involved in a new short story time and again. How much of yourself are you really willing to invest in a scene or setting or character that's not going to be around in twenty pages? If it disappoints you, there's no time, no place for it to make it up to you. It's a little bit like serial dating, knowing each time that you're never in it for the long haul. That wears on a person.

As a book-loving person, I need to say that I've only paid money for two single author short story collections in my life; both were required for class. I've checked a few dozen out of the library -- frequently collections by multiple authors like Best American Non-required Reading -- but I don't want to pay money for them any more than I want to pay for a box of chocolates I know is half coconut. When you don't end up finishing half the stories (chocolates) in the box, you really start to wonder why you paid for a whole box in the first place.

But that's only addressing the economic issue. I think the bigger issue is the fact that there's that much damn coconut.

I've had many discussions with Tanya over the past few months about this crazy notion that somehow got instilled in our brains: that to be "good" literary writers, to be "good" little MFAers, we have to write "serious" stories. So we kill off our characters, we rape them, we make them mentally unstable, we kill their kids, abort their babies, gag them when they should speak, we take away their money and hand them drug problems instead ... all because we need to be serious, serious, serious. We think we need to write about weighty topics in a nitty-gritty manner. It get so disgustingly realistic that we hit our readers' gag reflexes.

And, frankly, it pisses me off.

It also makes me not want to read short stories, because of the prevalence of this newspaper meets dirty realism stuff with a few hints of the insanely obscene thrown in. I just read a story in workshop where the narrator decides to tell the reader that his wife's nipples tasted like potato chips. Yeah. Not something I'm interested in paying money for.

Short story writers have been torturing the form for years -- not even Alice Munro is completely able to escape my scorn on this count. I'm sick of "art" being "what's good for you" not "what you enjoy." Why does the short story have to be dense and difficult? I know, I know, making every word count gets thrown around a lot, but why does counting mean it can't read easily? Why does making every word count have to taste like fiber supplement? Why are we drinking down heinous short stories saying it's good for us! when even real, honest to god fiber supplement is getting a face lift?

**(is coconut, by chance, fibrous? wouldn't it be sweet if it really was and all my half-ass, zany metaphors actually flowed together?)**

Are there some gems of short stories out there? Yes. I'm not debasing the form just what's been done to it. Those gems are far outweighed by tortured prose, much of it churned out by MFA programs instilling the same feeling in their students that's making me sick of "serious."

3. I take greater issue with agent Zuckerbrot's comment "[w]hat about the people who say, 'I don't have time to read a novel'? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time." I hate to point out the obvious here, but a 200 page short story collection takes as long (or longer) to read as a 200 page novel. Are we meant to assume that she meant you can finish a single short story in a short period of time? Yes. But if that's her point, then why buy a collection? Get a subscription to One Story they only send you one story a month. [The ex-law student in me refuses to let logic errors slip past.]



Are these nice things I'm saying about short story collections? No. But I'm sick of the fiber's good for you! pep talk the short story gets. If it tastes like bark, I'm not eating it. If it reads like bark, I'm not reading it.

Am I still writing short stories? I have to; I'm being graded on it. But I don't think I've ever thought of myself as a "short story-ist." I'm a writer, and the short form is a place where I can gain the technical skills to do so.

--

In more upbeat news from the same edition of P&W, one of the 12 featured "debut poets" is giving a reading at WMU this spring. Jericho Brown will be reading from his collection Please. I've requested the collection (again, from the library) and hopefully I'll get a look at it before the reading.

Super Bowl Ads

This has to have been my favorite ad of the Super Bowl for its whimsy, and its combination of Americana with the intended message of the commercial. Five Stars.



Although I just realized that it's Friday and I've not yet read my book for the week to fulfill my New Year's resolution! Eep! Hmm ... a day spent reading, that sounds lovely.

Super Bowl Ads

Ad fight! You pick the winner:

Super Bowl Ads

Today we have the best of the Budweiser Ads from this year. 2009 is the first year in a long time that Budweiser was not the top buyer of air time during the Super Bowl (it might have been e-trade, but I'm not sure).

Super Bowl Ads

Best of the Bridgestone Ads



Remind me to bring the tunes when I dune-buggy on the moon.

Super Bowl Ads

I love Super Bowl. Super Bowl ads that is.