On Being Hard

Publishers Weekly has posted a list of the ten most difficult books selected by two editors of The Millions. These books may be difficult to read, but they aren’t difficult to own, and you get the same reward. I have a copy of Finnegan’s Wake and when someone sees it and asks me if I’ve read it, I just regard them curiously.

– David Schuman

Cool Interactive Kids’ Storytelling Project

I’d like to recommend a kids’ interactive storytelling project – All Fixed Up – that is close to its money raising goal on Kickstarter.

This children’s book app is designed to encourage kids to explore, discover, and create — as well as to help them deal with complex emotions about a parent who’s away at work.

– Martin Ott

Writeliving Interview – Laura Kasischke

I am excited to introduce the next writer in our interview series – Laura Kasischke. She is talented and prolific in the forms I love most (poetry and novels). She also calls the mitten state, where I grew up, home. Laura was also kind enough to recently provide a blurb to John F. Buckley and myself for our upcoming book Poets Guide to America.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

There have been so many influences, it’s pretty difficult to single something out. Even the poems/stories/novels I’ve read and disliked have influenced me. That’s the great thing about calling yourself a writer:  everyone else is just wasting time reading trash and lying on the couch, but I’m studying my craft! I think every poem I read as a child, or had read to me, was a factor in my wanting to write poet. I was so jealous of anything and everything that made its way into print. But when I was in college, I fell in love with Yeats and Plath and Dylan Thomas; Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Those writers, of course, have influenced us all.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

Before I begin a poem, I usually have some idea what it will concern, but it’s during the writing process that I figure out its form, so I guess you could say my process is associative. If I sit down to write a poem, and the associative process doesn’t work for me, no amount of revision will ever help it.  I don’t, of course, write a great first draft–I need to revise a lot–but if I don’t figure out, in that first draft, what the poem *is*, I never will. With novel writing, I just sit down and write every day, and every novel I’ve written has been written differently–Some have been plotted;  some have been intuited;  some worked out, loosely, in a first draft, and others too a hundred grueling revisions.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

My first novel is under the bed. No. Actually, it’s long lost. I worked on that novel for years, and finally had to admit that it wasn’t going to be read by anyone but me.  I started a new novel, and called that one my ‘first.’

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I’m a conspiracy theorist. I’m one of those people reading those websites you hear about and listening to those radio stations. If I ever talked about my actual opinions to anyone sane, well….Let’s just say, I don’t, except with a pseudonym….If you and I sat down to talk about politics, I would spare you my thoughts…

About the Author:  

Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels.  She received the National Book Critics Award for her collection, Space, in Chains.  She teaches at the University of Michigan.

Lying to Librarians and Post-It Review

I went into the public library here on the Outer Banks, which is where I’m spending a few weeks before returning to the neo-Dust Bowl. I didn’t pack any books for the trip, thinking I might try not reading for a change. But nothing shields your face from the apocalyptic sun like a good book, so I borrowed my mother-in-law’s library card (she lives here year round, at least until all of this is under water—see link below). My first thought was that I might take out Karen Thompson Walker’s Age of Miracles, because I’m in an end-timey state of mind ever since reading this: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

 But it wasn’t in, so I selected a few other books from the new fiction stacks—including Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander, which I had wanted to read back when it came out and then completely forgot about until I saw it sitting there. I asked the librarian if I could use my mother’s card—I don’t know why I said mother and not mother-in-law. I guess it was partly that it seemed over-complicated to get into the whole “in-law” thing, but also I think I’m more comfortable when there’s a tiny bit of dishonesty involved in my transactions.

The librarian informed me cheerfully that the card had expired, but if I could just give her my mom’s birthday, she’d renew it. “Um,” I said.

The librarian was a nice older woman with the most sensible haircut I’d ever seen. Anyone could have this haircut—man, woman or child, in times of peace or war. She blinked at me pleasantly, expectantly. “I’m blanking.” I said.

The truth is, I have no idea when my mother-in-law’s birthday is. Which makes me a bad son-in-law, I guess, but certainly a horrible son, which is what I was pretending to be. “It’ll come,” she said. “I know what that’s like. I call it a senior moment.”  There was nothing condescending in her tone. I would have preferred there had been, I think.

I spent a few more moments staring up at the fluorescent lights. Finally I said I didn’t know it. Didn’t know my own mother’s birthday. The librarian looked at me and clucked her tongue. She knew I was lying, that I had essentially come to the library to take books under false pretenses—to steal. Perhaps I had even murdered someone. She seemed to be reaching for something under the counter, a panic button that would summon local law-enforcement. I was literally sweating, which means sweating during a criminal act involving literature.

“Not a very good son, are you?” she said. “No,” I said, with a rush of relief. She didn’t think I was a book thief, just a bad boy. “We’ll forgive you this time. Do you at least have her address?” I had to look in my phone, but I had it. It granted me some legitimacy, having the address in my phone. I even held it up to show her. As I left with my books she said, “You should do something nice for your mother today.”

I did do something. I did it for my fake mother, my real mother, and mothers everywhere. I read a book. Isn’t that the kind of thing mothers want from their sons, to be a good boy and be quiet and go read a book?

Someone had placed a post-it on the title page of the Auslander book. “It’s really weird! –MGT” Is that something people do—leave reviews in library books? I liked getting it, as subjective and misleading and obvious as it may have been. But it was comforting to get this communication from another borrower, kind of like finding a floating message in a bottle. Before I return Hope: A Tragedy, I’m going to annotate this review, just to keep the conversation going.

– David Schuman

Pin It on Starbucks?

I don’t want to be that guy. You know the one – who rants about the good old days and what we have lost from mega corporations. Unfortunately, I can’t help myself.

I drink too much caffeine for my own good. And while I try to support by local coffee establishments, I have a Starbucks several blocks from my work and home. Sometimes, the convenience pulls me in. While I am waiting for my double latte (non-fat!), I can’t help but notice that Starbucks has taken down the pin-up boards that held neighborhood posts for  local writers, musicians, yoga teachers, acting classes, etc.

Someone in Starbucks marketing must have determined that it was a pretty messy business, and replaced the pin up boards with a magnetic board (with only a couple of magnets per location). I remember reading that the original intent of Starbucks was to create community, and like many grown-up companies, its corporate brand police has caught up to insure consistency of look and feel.

Funny, thing is that the crowds at both Starbucks I occasionally visit may also not be interested in community. The coffee sippers stare down at their screens, content with their free wifi, and barely anyone says a word. I’d like to pin this trend on Starbucks, but we are the ones that are deciding who to give our business to and what kind of communities we want to have and live in.

– Martin Ott

Writeliving Interview – Rick Bursky

The next writer in the Writeliving interview series is one of LA’s best poets: Rick Bursky. Not only is he a triple threat – poet, ad guy, photographer – but he has also been a good friend and great source of inspiration.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

There are so many poets, writers, painters, photographers and musicians whose work I’ve leaned on for inspiration, influence and just plain pleasure. Though the word pleasure seems so thin in this context. But it’s important to constantly immerse ourselves in art, to read great stuff to be reminded of the possibility of beauty and the challenges that come with it. Just some of the poets include Nin Andrews, Charles Simic, Richard Garcia, Laura Kasischke, David Young, David Keplinger, Yannis Ritsos, Alexis Orgera, Dean Young, Stan Rice, Edward Hopper; Rene Magritte, Ian Randall Wilson, Michael Kenna, Lorca; the list can go on and on. Just answering your question reminds me of the debt I owe so many others. Sometimes I think of myself as a reader who sometimes writes. Teaching has also been a wonderful influence on my writing. For instance, teaching the prose poem and introducing students to its many possibilities has sent me on a prose poem binge. Same thing for the ghazal. One of a teachers responsibilities it to inspire students and instill enthusiasm, I’m also a student in my classes.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

My poems probably fall into four or five categories. For most of them it starts with a line. In the first couple of drafts that’s the opening line of the poem but in subsequent versions it moves down or disappears, the line is simply a trigger. I try to write line by line. Make as statement, a line, move on. I’ll often change the subject from line to line. Write a line. Move on. That’s my preferred way to work. I’m writing poems, not stories. I really like the quote, “narrative in a poem is like a almond in a Hershey bar, nice but not necessary,” I think it was Charles Wright who said that. I’m always looking, searching praying, begging for a line to start with. My notebooks are filled with failed starts.  For instance, “it’s simply a coincidence that all the women I’ve ever loved kept anteaters as pets” is a line that floated around for years before it became a poem.

Another way into a poem for me is an image. A man stands on street corner balancing a bowling pin on his head. I just wrote that as an example but I sort of like it. I’ll probably spend the next couple of weeks seeing where that goes. I used to be a photographer. Now I think of myself as a photographer too lazy to go out and look for photographs so I write them out, poems.

Someone once accused me of simply finding strange or interesting historical facts and calling them prose poems. For instance, I wrote about how people first got started photographing children on ponies, wrote about the Brotherhood of Travelling Postcard Photographers in France and how they helped the allied air forces bomb the Germans, wrote that according to the United Nations being killed by bee stings is the 247^th most common way to be killed, explained what happened to the single photograph that was taken of George Washington, etc, etc – it’s all made up. But that’s another way I work, an unusual faux fact filtered through language.

Then there’s another poem, a series of poems, I’ve been writing for about twenty years, though I didn’t know they were connected in any way for the first eight or so years. All of these poems take place on a small, ignored island in the Mediterranean where the main source of work is fishing. They could be Greeks, Italians or who knows. I write about life on there.

No matter which poems I’m working on they all start as scribbled lines in a notebook, and I write everything with a fountain pen. I don’t write on a computer, I type on that. Once I get past a couple of good drafts of a poem I type it on the computer, then carrying it in my pocket for a week making revisions and notes. Once I’m sort of happy I let a couple of friends read it and see what they think. Then back to revising.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

Your question suggests that I’ve overcome adversity. The jury is still out on that one. Life is always uphill, if it’s not one thing it’s another. I don’t think I’ve had any more adversity it my life than any other person, perhaps even less than some. You get up in the morning and to work. Some day’s it’s harder than others. Bills come in the mail. Death comes. Lovers leave. Things happen. You can’t sleep, spend nights staring at the ceiling and wondering what comes next. But if you’re a writer you write. No excuses. You write something, anything, sometimes it’s even good. Writing has never been a dream, it’s what I do. Winning the lottery is something I dream of. And come to think of it, as soon as I win I’ll revise this and write that winning the lottery has helped me overcome adversity. Until then, ouch. Of course, good friends, good cigars, good wine and good poetry are essentials.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I don’t believe in talent or inspiration. If you want to be a writer you write. Anyone could be a good poet. Great poet is another story. I make up for lack of talent by working hard. And inspiration? Nonsense. A poet should live an inspired life.  That’s not something you wait for. That’s something you go out and get.

About the Author:

Rick Bursky’s most recent book , Death Obscura was published by Sarabande Books.  His previous book, The Soup of Something Missing, was published by Bear Star Press. He’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. His poems have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, Field, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Conduit, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, and Hotel Amerika. Bursky works in advertising and is an adjunct at USC and teaches at UCLA Extension.

Fiction Spotlight – Eugenio Volpe

Lately, Facebook has become more and more a great source of writing inspiration as friends share articles, poems and stories. Yesterday, Colette Sartor posted a link for a short shory American Idle by Eugenio Volpe on Spork Press, which I have since read several times.

The story is a great example of an author using humor to lower the reader’s guard against a powerful dramatic storyline, as well as creating a lens – favorite songs – as a way to quickly create multi-dimensional characters. Please give American Idle a try, and let me know what you think.

– Martin Ott

The Cool Feel of Santa Monica Review

I like literary magazines with classic paper covers. It’s not that I don’t like design-y magazines, it’s just that there’s something great about journals that look like they were created to gather dust in the basement of a university library (isn’t that kind of romantic?) instead of occupying a place of prominence on mid-century modern coffee tables in Dumbo. It’s like, “Look, I found this weird pamphlet thingy in my grandfather’s attic and it has a short story he wrote from 1952!” Yeah, I like those kinds of journals.

The Spring 2012 issue of Santa Monica Review has a nice cream paper cover with artwork by Mark Vallen; sort of Patrick Nagel meets Edvard Munch.

There’s a great story by Roberto Ontiveros called Curfew, which challenges the idea that a protagonist needs to want something, or at least that what he or she wants needs to be clear. Curfew is murky, all the relationships inside it are slightly askew: a neighbor the narrator doesn’t know well, a woman in a strange not-romance with said neighbor. Nobody matters all that much to each other in the story, and yet yearning pulses throughout. There’s also a great story from the madly inventive storyist, Katya Apekina, My Smell Journal: [orange peels, ink, coffee filters]. Full disclosure—I know Katya—but I don’t think it’s illegal for me to say she’s madly inventive. Read it and see for yourself. There’s a machine in it that records smells and an oily whale stuck in the Gowanus Canal. There are other good stories and nonfiction in SMR. Order a copy, read it, let it get lost and grow a little dusty.

– David Schuman

Writeliving Interview – Pam Houston

I am thrilled to feature our first fiction writer in our interview series – Pam Houston. I have been reading her work for almost 20 years now (better be careful not to date me or Pam too much!).

Soon, I plan on announcing a new blogger to join the Writeliving team. In the meantime, enjoy the interview and feel free to comment.

– Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

It has been suggested to me that the poet, Larry Levis has been the very most influential writer to my work, and it may be true. He taught poetry at Utah when I was there studying fiction, and though I was too scared to take a class from him, (and man, do I regret that) he was writing The Widening Spell of the Leaves at that time, and I paid really close attention to how he made that book. That book taught me about making associative leaps (wild ones, and yet, in retrospect, inevitable somehow), which is, in my opinion, the most fun a writer can have, the thing that keeps the process always new and exciting. It may be true that he, more than anyone else, taught me what to reach for in my work. I feel like there could never be a conclusive list of writers whose work I have read that has left an imprint on my own, but a few of my strongest influences follow: Ron Carlson’s work taught me pacing, and how to bump humor right up against pathos as many times as the story can bear. Lorie Moore’s work taught me the particular way humor works for a female. Toni Morrison taught me the importance of making my characters multiple, no heroes, no villains, and also the unlimited number of layers a story can have. Russell Banks’ stories taught me how form follows function. Richard Ford’s Rock Springs taught me that the landscape of the west has its own voice, and Gretel Ehrlich convinced me that I had a place in it. Tim O’Brien’s work introduced me to the rich territory that exists between fiction and nonfiction. Jack Driscoll taught me that if you don’t risk sentimentality you are not in the ballpark.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?


I feel like my first job as a writer is to pay really strict attention out in the world, and then to bring the resonant images, scenes, moments, glimmers, back to the page with me and turn them into language. Every single thing I have ever written has begun with the question, “What glimmered at me lately?” In this way I am sort of a collagist. I don’t ever say, for example, “I think I would like to write a story about…., or, “I have an idea for a character who…” I pay strict attention, both to what is going on in my physical proximity, and also to whenever something that is happening out there in the exterior landscape resonates with what is happening in my interior landscape. I trust those shivers of recognition more than I trust anything. Whether I am at a sky burial in Tibet, or in the check out line at the Whole Foods, hearing the crack of my turned ankle on an ancient stair in Greece, or listening to the sound of goat bells over the sound of the waves of the Agean…I collect those, and do my best to represent them fully in language, and then combine them with other resonant glimmers and they cook for a while in there and over time, a story emerges.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?


Well, I am not sure this really qualifies as adversity, but it is a nice story. I went to graduate school at the University of Utah, and my work was pretty much uniformly disliked by all of the fiction teachers there. David Kranes, the playwright, liked it pretty well, but in my years there I collected a stack of evaluations, the worst of which said, no kidding, “Pam should find something else to do with her hands.” It was my class at Utah, along with some professors, that started the conference called Writers At Work in Park City, and one of the things we got in exchange for our volunteer work on the conference was a 30 minute one-on-one with a visiting writer, editor, or agent. Because I had become so convinced at Utah that my work was awful, I had turned in the name of three writers on my preference sheet, and when they hung up the pairings I didn’t find my name anywhere, and when I asked, the woman at the desk said, “Oh, sorry, all of the people you chose had full plates, so we couldn’t get you in.”
This was pretty much the way I was used to being treated at Utah, and it was pretty much the way I had been treated in my family of origin, which is likely why I picked Utah, so I just sucked it up and walked away. But Shannon Ravenel, who was one of the editors at the conference (Best American Short Stories series editor all through the 80’s, founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.) followed me out of the ballroom, and said, “You know, my plate is not full. If you have a copy of a story you want to give me, I would be happy to read it.” Now let me just say that this was an entirely unprompted act of kindness on Shannon’s part. She had no reason to think I was any good, in fact, I was not, at that time, very good (though not quite as bad as my professors said). She had simply witnessed my dismissal by the pairing lady, and reached out to me in a human way.
 Shannon read my story, and was so excited about it, she showed it to Carol Houck Smith, a W.W. Norton editor at that conference. She also called her friend, agent Liz Darhansoff, and told her to contact me. Pretty much my entire career grew out of that moment of un-asked for kindness. Carol was my editor until the time of her death, and I have published five books with W.W. Norton. Liz Darhansoff is still my editor to this day.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?


That I was Chaplin of Delta Delta Delta sorority at Denison University, which meant I was in charge of 80 girls “spirituality” when I was little more than a girl myself. But perhaps you mean something less silly than that. When I was four years old and my mother was a night club singer, I would go to the bar with her, wearing my thigh high white boots and sing “These Boots Were Made For Walking,” and at the part in the song where Nancy Sinatra always said, “Come on, Boots, start walkin!” I would walk across the top of the baby grand. Only marginally less silly. How about this? Nothing terrifies me quite like the prospect of playing co-ed softball.

About the author:

Pam Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012, by W.W. Norton.  She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century.  She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards.  She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world.  She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

What’s in the Black Box by Jennifer Egan

Originally, I thought I was going to write a blog post about what it was like to read Jennifer Egan’s story Black Box on Twitter, but I actually found that my attention span made it impossible for me to read it that way. For me, the jury is out on Twitter as a delivery method for either poems or fiction.

However, after I finished the story Black Box the old-fashioned way in the actual The New Yorker magazine, it struck me that Egan’s story reminded me a form of poetry: instructions. There are many examples of different poems with “lessons” and poets giving instructions on how to sing, love,  or even drown.

That got me to thinking about other similarities between poetic and short fiction forms. Jeffrey Levine, editor of Tupelo Press, once said in a workshop that all poems are really list poems. Some fiction writers have tapped into this reservoir of inspiration as well. One of my all-time favorite stories – The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien – is nothing more than a list.

One thing that Egan and O’Brien both did in tapping into these forms was to keep a narrative arc moving, something that Sandra Cisneros also manages to do in her short story Eleven, which uses another staple of the poet, repetition, to help describe the frustration of her young narrator.

All of this has now got me wondering whether I can create a short story that’s a recipe, incantation or curse. There is value in looking for inspiration outside of your own form to help you think outside of the (black) box in your own writing.

– Martin Ott