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.
Jen Trynin & ‘Rocks Against My Window’
As a writer I’m hardly alone in sometimes turning to song lyrics for inspiration. In part because the words are married to music and thus able to sneak past the logical mind, a lyric can attach itself like a burr without your realizing it. I’ve launched a number of stories on the energy of a song lyric, and just published one, ‘Rocks Against My Window,’ at the new online zine Metazen.
The story started with a phrase, bouncing around in my head for years, from the song ‘Writing Notes’ by Boston rocker/writer Jen Trynin. In the mid 90’s, Jen’s first CD, Cockamamie, produced a modest indie hit, ‘Better Than Nothing’ (one of the best songs of the 90s), and a good deal of industry buzz. There was a bidding war for rights to her next record, and some insiders declared her The Next Big Thing. It didn’t happen–for a tangle of reasons Jen details in her terrific rock ‘n’ roll memoir, Everything I’m Cracked Up To Be.
It’s not surprising Jen’s a fine lyricist. She studied creative writing at Oberlin, and the Boston Phoenix printed an excerpt from one of her stories. Maybe we’ll all get lucky and she’ll start publishing some. In the meantime, check out her book and CDs at her website.
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.”
More Short Story News (2)
A word on numbering: A while back I had a post called Short Story News–followed up, later, by More Short Story News. I was going to label this post Still More Short Story News… but realized my post titles would soon enter the ranks of self-parody, with Son of Short Story News, Short Story News Strikes Back, and so on. So this is the third Short Story News posting–but the second More Short Story News. It’s kind of like the day you turn 39, you’re actually starting your 40th year. Or the argument by some purists that the new millenium started on Jan 1 2001. But this post is More Short Story News (2) and I’m standing by that.
- For a lover of short stories, what better heaven than someone who deigns a single short story worthy of a review? Five Star Literary Stories has been doing this for a while: they invite an editor of a literary journal to submit a story from their archives, recent or not, and introduce it; Five Star assigns an editor, who reviews it; a link to the full story is included. The reader is introduced, quite possibly, to a new story, a new writer, a new journal, and a new reviewer–all in a few quick keystrokes.
- Then my friend Sage Marsters (write that name down–her Pushcart Prize is just the beginning) tells me her story A Psychic, A Seizure, A Chair (how’s that for a title?) has been reviewed at The Delicate Rhino–which aims to, among other things, “record the experience of reading that story which got into your muscles.”
- Cliff Garstang offers many things at his Perpetual Folly blog: including capsule reviews of every short story published by the New Yorker. (Cliff has his own collection, In An Uncharted Country, coming out soon on Press 53.)
- I’ve been making a point of plugging the commitment of indies Dzanc and Press 53 to the short story–but let’s give it up as well to Harper Perennial and Fifty-Two Stories, their story-a-week site featuring selections from upcoming collections from current writers like Alex Burnett and Dennis Cooper–and rediscovered collections from Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Crane, Cather and Melville.
- Electric Literature is a new player on the litmag scene–making a big splash with a debut edition featuring Michael Cunningham, Jim Shephard and Lydia Millet; and a serious commitment to paying writers real money. Check them out. And by taking them up on their variously affordable options (paperback, Kindle, ebook and Iphone), prove them correct on their gamble of paying good writers good money for good stories. (Thanks to Book Fox for first bringing my attention to this new venture.)
- Perfect for summer-shortened attention spans: the August submission period for WW Norton’s projected 2010 anthology of “hint” fiction. Yes, there’s sudden fiction, quick fiction, flash fiction–and now hint fiction: stories of 25 words or less that tell a complete story, yet hint at a larger one.
- A reminder… LA’s live introduction to the best of new West Coast short fiction: the New Short Fiction Series, which this Friday features the stories of Jill Glass.
- Each month, The Short Review presents a new set of reviews devoted exclusively to short story collections–which this month includes my review of the anthology Visiting Hours.
- Finally, don’t forget a number of worthy short-story blogs: from The Short Review, American Short Fiction, and One Story among others.
And a late p.s… I just read word of an Esquire fiction contest that looks interesting. It opened up May 1, deadline Aug 1. Write a story based on one of three titles: “Twenty-Ten,” “An Insurrection,” or “Never, Ever Bring This Up Again.” Details here.
Random Notes
- Sunday 6/21 7pm, writing group mate J. Ryan Stradal reads at Book Party–a reading series I’m unfamiliar with, at the Mandrake Bar (2692 La Cienega in Culver City).
- Sunday 6/28, the New Short Fiction Series (LA’s ‘live literary magazine’) and Other Voices (formerly a top-notch literary journal, and now, as part of the Dzanc family, publisher of fine books) co-sponsor an evening of readings from Billy Lombardo’s How To Hold a Woman and Gina Frangello’s Slut Lullabies–wine & hors d’oeuvres at 7pm, readings at 7:30–at LIME Studios, 1528 20th Street, Santa Monica.
- Theatre 68 in Hollywood rolls on with their 13 By Shanley series, an ambitious rotation of 13 plays by Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer John Patrick Shanley (don’t be put off if you were, as I was, disappointed with the film version of Doubt), now extended through Aug. 16: I can personally vouch for the Deborah Geffner-directed Beggars in the House of Plenty, Shanley’s most autobiographical play. Check out this don’t vote-style promo on YouTube.
- The PEN Center Emerging Voices fellowship program is accepting applications through Aug. 14–the program provides supportive but rigorous mentoring for emerging voices from a culturally diverse background.
- Friend and Pushcart Prize-winner Sage Marsters (a writer to watch out for) has a new story online at Open Letters (a new journal to me) called Yellow–aspiring writers would do well to observe how Sage adeptly packs her stories with telling details.
- Long-time mentor and popular UCLA Writer’s Program instructor Lou Mathews has a new story, “At the DMV,” in the most recent issue of Short Story, one of my favorite literary journals.
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.”
Alix Ohlin (2)
I posted previously about Alix Ohlin’s amazing short story, “Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student,” and vowed to read and review the collection it’s from, Babylon and Other Stories. Well, finally, here is my review, in the April issue of The Short Review. This is a wonderful collection. Buy it at Powell’s or from you local independent bookseller.
Some Alix Ohlin interviews, and other odds & ends:
- a short interview at Hobart
- and a longer interview at About.com, which includes this fascinating metaphor: “When I’m writing I often think of the character as being underwater at the beginning of the story, and the action of the story is that character breaking the surface.”
- at Beatrice.com, her reflections on Greg Hollingshead’s The Roaring Girl
- a video of a talk she gave in 2007 as part of the Zocalo Public Square lecture series, called “Why Mysteries Matter: Detectives, Literature & Life” (it’s 53 minutes long, so wait until you have the time).
Ohlin is previously the author of a novel, The Missing Person.
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.
