I’ve raved here before about the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop (I just attended my fourth). This video gives you a glimpse of what goes on at the conference–and at Aimee Bender’s mean croquet form.
Live from Tin House
The week-long Tin House Summer Writers Workshop is wrapping up, and I wanted to file a brief report before heading out on a hiking trip. It’s my fourth year here, each more than well worth it.
At the online discussion board established so students can download each other’s work and introduce themselves, the conference coordinator dubs each workshop leader with a title. I studied this year with Dorothy Allison. Her title, the Shepard, could not have been more fitting. She is tough, but it’s out of love: love for you, for the characters, for story. She’s a keen reader with an eye both for detail and for what I can only call a larger cosmic vision of where writing fits in the larger scheme.
The week juggles morning workshops with afternoon seminars and evening readings–and then all the informal stuff that makes such a conference so valuable. Highlights included, as in past years, Charles D’Ambrosio packing more challenging thoughts into one hour than many teachers might in a whole week (more on this later, sometime); Bret Anthony Johnston introducing writing exercises from his fine book Naming the World; a very good panel on beginnings (“the beginning is a question for which everything that follows is some kind of answer”); a talk by Aimee Bender on “fructification”; and a party marking the magazine’s 10th anniversary (a lifetime in litmag years) where, among other things, Steve Almond treated us to a tour-de-force deconstruction of the Toto song “Africa.”
Kate Milliken
Kate is a Los Angeles writer whose stories will be featured this Friday, June 12 in the New Short Fiction Series, LA’s “live literary magazine.” Beverly Hills Public Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills. Doors at 7:30pm, show at 8. $10 admission, free parking.
Kate has been published in a number of fine literary magazines, including Other Voices, Cream City Review, Santa Monica Review, and Meridian. I had an opportunity recently to read some of those stories and to interview her, and I am more than a little impressed: her stories are mysterious and carefully constructed, and she’s extremely thoughtful about her craft. Read the interview here.
Available online are her stories The Whole World and Man Down Below.
Is The Short Story Becoming Hip?
In noting, earlier this month, the appearance of major articles in both the New York Times and the Guardian on the short story (on the same day no less), Short Review editor Tania Hershman asked, “Have we slipped through a wormhole into another dimension?” Maybe not, but April was a good month for the short story:
- In the New York Times, A.O. Scott’s “In Praise of the American Short Story” acknowledges the commercial limitations of the form, but also warns against undervaluing it. The appearance of biographies of Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme offers occasion to look back at 20th century masters. And Wells Towers’ new Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (getting a lot of attention these days) “provides the most vivid recent example of the way a good story, or a solid collection of them, can do more than a novel to illuminate the textures of ordinary life and the possibilities of language.”
- In his Guardian piece, James Lasdun “celebrates growing confidence in an often overlooked form.” He does so with a tough look at five recent story collection debuts from around the world: the Wells Tower from America, but also authors from Ukraine, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
- The 2009 Pulitzer for Fiction, just announced, went to Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories “set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.”
- Finally, the online journal The Rumpus earlier this week premiered a new column by Peter Orner (Esther Stories) called The Lonely Voice focused on… the short story (and, of course, taking its name from Frank O’Connor’s classic study of the form). His plan is to check in every week or so with thoughts about a particular story. This week: Peter Taylor’s “Allegiance.”
Writing Quote
Here, reluctantly, begins a series of quotations about writing, and the art and craft and mystery thereof. Reluctant, I say, because half of the impulse (we all love collecting and sharing these quotes) is wrong- headed: we are somehow looking for some essential distillation, some essential clue, to the secret alchemy of great writing. But half of the impulse is good: we know how much a sentence or two can hold.
The playwright Jami Brandli recently brought to my attention a website I’d stumbled on and then forgotten: Garrison Keillor and NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, a daily post with poems, prose, literary history, literary birthdays, and much more. Subscribe to a daily newsletter, listen and read online. Today is the birthday of a number of writers, most notably (sorry Nick Hornby) Cynthia Ozick, who contributes a quote we would all do well to live by:
The sentence is my primary element, my tool, goal, bliss. Each new sentence is a heart-in-the mouth experiment.
Amen.
Harold Digs His Way to China
I have a new story up at the online companion to the literary journal 580 Split (they are calling it their Webjournal). Check it out.
Normally I am not much into the story of where a story came from–my own or anyone else’s. But this is an origin story I’m fond of, and it illustrates just how little you need as a writer to be launched into a world not your own.
Having owned an independent bookstore, I am fierce about supporting them. But I do enjoy browsing the Amazon site, not so much for the reviews as for the lists. One day I was researching graphic novels, and one of the lists that came up was by a precocious high school girl who clearly felt she wasn’t get a well-rounded education at school, and so had set about putting together her own alternative education–which included everything from Classics to graphic novels. Here is her profile, which I simply could not get out of my head, and which eventually bloomed into this story:
I’m Kitty, a 15-year-old girl built for speed and eating chocolate. Dad says I have an artist’s fingers so I must create constantly. I’m not the best artist, but some of my work is very nice. I draw manga and anime for a hobby, and to get extra money I write books, but none are successful. All I’ve ever gotten are rejection letters, so if you look up Kitty W in the author search… I won’t be there.
