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Hi Stacey! I just finished reading My Date with Satan, and am starting Twin Study. I love your work.It's got so much heart and it's so imaginative. While I think a lot of writers can come up with the crazy scenarios present in your work, it's a rare gift to be able to pull it off. How are you able to make that sort of material manageable? Katie p.s. You are on my thesis reading list.
I guess I can understand if you didn't like the book, but if you ever want to try again, try just reading the last chapter - it's the best (or at least my favorite) part.)
Thanks for the recommendation. I will! I love the idea of starting at the end.
I figure if I can sit around and watch L'Age d'Or, as I did the other night, then I can certainly get into Story of the Eye. If you haven't seen L'Age d'Or, the 1930 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, I recommend it. It caused riots and outrage when it was first released. You know those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but you keep getting interrupted? It's basically a film of that. It's surprisingly sexual and scatalogical while having almost no sex or poop it in. But it does have a cow sleeping in a people bed and a man kicking a violin down the street--just idly, like it's a stone.
I'm doing an analysis on The Beauty Treatment and I find it interesting that I do not see many reviews with the racial aspect of the story. Katie the B is described as a very well to do black girl indicating she wants to get back to her homey roots. When writing this did you mean this as focus? I picked it out right away.
Both girls are white girls, but Katie the B is going through a wanna-be homegirl period. I agree with you though; one of the themes of the story is race and no one has ever had much to say about that, at least not to me.
i smell bad...
From sea to shining sea.
Have you ever read Story of the Eye? Some really wild stuff goes down in that one, let me tell you. Really off the chain. It kind of reminded me of your writing, only much less realistic. Anyways, I've realized that you haven't been answering questions here that often anymore, and I really hope you return soon. We miss you!
Thank you? I have not read Story of the Eye, at least not all of it. I seem to half-remember starting it once upon a time and finding it tedious, which is hard to believe since it sounds pretty darn racy. It has a wonderful Wikipedia entry which includes, as part of the plot summary, this sentence: "Sir Edmund enucleates one of the dead priests' eyes, and Simone inserts it within her vagina, while she and the narrator have sex."
what is the story tiffany by stacey richter talking about.? (sic)
It's a short story. It can be found in this issue of Spork: http://sporkpress.com/1_1/pieces/Richter.htm
Dear Stacey, I am so sorry to hear about your chronic pain. That must make even everyday stuff challenging. They say that when early humans started walking upright, many of these types of physical problems began (back pain, knee pain, etc.), which you probably know from your interest in cavemen. What do you think is the correlation between being a good writer and a good writing teacher? Can someone who’s just an OK writer be a good writing teacher, or can a great writer be a mediocre teacher? I read that Donald Barthelme never questioned anyone’s storyline, but focused on line editing their language to get that just right, which I thought was interesting.
Dear Gloria,
Thank you for the sympathy. Yes, my interest in cavemen extends to the skeleton, and I’ve heard that theory too, about how stressful walking upright is. After mulling it over for a long time, I’ve decided it’s probably not true. We’re not German Shepherds, so heartily inbred that our hips are constantly popping loose. We’re wild types that evolved over a long period of time, so why should our backs/knees/hips hurt any more than those of, say, elephants? I think it’s a disease of modernity, largely caused by hardcore, early use of the chair. Shoes are also a possibility, as are beds—really anything we relentlessly do to our bodies that we didn’t evolve doing—but I’m going with hours and hours in the chair, starting at six years of age. I think it leads to a pattern of imbalance in many ways. I also have a cracked and mis-healed vertebra, which makes it worse for my body. Nowadays, I try to change my position as often as possible, from sitting to reclining to standing to kneeling. That helps.
Your question about teaching is interesting and vexing. So much of the quality of teaching relies on the enthusiasm and commitment of the teacher, on their flexibility and willingness to engage with their students’ work—qualities that don’t necessarily track with the quality of the teacher’s writing. Teaching well takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy, and sometimes writers, good and bad, withdraw from that because they need to preserve their mojo for their own work. In other words, not everyone tries, and sometimes good writers find reasons to try even less.
Aside from effort, it's also a matter of talent. I think the deck gets shuffled and people draw different cards. Some people are gifted writers. Others are gifted teachers. Some people get both cards, some get one. Then there’s the problem that some good writers don’t understand how they manage to do it—their sense of language and narrative are a part of their personality, and they don’t really know how to explain it. They just do it. Others have to break it down into steps—potentially a good trait for teachers.
Then again, a little brilliance goes a long way, and given the choice, I’d probably choose the better writer as a teacher on the off chance she might say something stunning.
I bet those Barthelme classes were interesting. But what if one of his students really needed help with their storyline? A lot of people find it relatively easy to write neat little paragraphs but difficult to assemble them into a narrative. It seems a little self-centered too, you know? Language was what Barthelme was interested in, but maybe some of his students were more absorbed in plot. Then again, it’s possible he was useless at plotting and was just doing the best he could.
Your link for the reading of The Minimalist isn't working, just thought I'd let you know. :(
Meow.
Hi Stacey. How are you? As always, your wisdom and encouragement means so much to me. I will have more to say about dating and my social life in October or December. I am going to follow your tips and recommendations.
Here I have a series of questions and problems about writing creative nonfiction, especially the essay. My questions pertain to specific aspects of crafting personal essays. Things I've come up against. I've organized and segmented my post.
Genre
There is a through line running through works of fiction - be it a play, novel, TV show. A character who yearns, wants, desires. Perfect. Poetry is defined by sound and silence, density and intensity, metaphor and form. The white space means just as much as the text. I like what Janet Burroway says, Poetry is memorable speech. I like this definition. That's our plot of land. No one can take that away from us.
That leaves us with Literary or Creative Nonfiction. What is our definition of the genre? What is our plot of land? I like what Dinty Moore says, "Writing the personal essay is like chasing mental rabbits." All good. But you realize you have to enact this on the page. This is probably as helpful as saying show don't tell or raise the stakes. Slogans.
In the end, you're always left with the logistics of the work. Point A to B. What is going to appeal to readers and editors? In fiction, characterization, conflict and stakes are pleasurable. But excavating those in an essay doesn't come readily or naturally.
As a genre, the personal essay branches out in many directions. Autobiographical meditation, nature science regional eco writing, lit crit, travel and mores, humor, food. If you look across the Atlantic, the tradition of the speculative and philosophical essay owing a lot to Nietzsche. And there are the physician's or scientist's turned essayist: Lewis Thomas, Richard Selzer, Stephen Jay Gould, F Gonzalez-Crussi, Oliver Sacks. Look at the entry The Essay in America in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Anything Goes.
Where do we start? How do we start? Even an outline doesn't present itself clearly, cleanly. An essay doesn't have the same moving parts as a novel or script - plot points, beats, structure. We consider the journey and change of the characters. There will be a pattern of discovery and decision, connection and disconnection. A pattern of change. An essay is challenging because the conflict and change aren't apparent.
Scene construction
I'm having trouble writing about myself, my life and memories. I avoid writing about what's close to me. I've never really even tried or come close to writing about my family, personal life, memories. You know I like writing summaries and brainstorming plots. I go cold. How can we avoid the cold? You don't have the neat plot to fall back on in an essay. How do you retrieve memories? How do you write about the past?
It might be helpful to step back. How do we start from scratch. How to develop from an image, idea, point, memory, question. The development of an essay is different than a short story. You have to elevate the material. How do you tap into feeling and emotion in your writing? When I'm drafting, a lot of the writing just reads like a journaling. It ends up sweeping, broad, general, vague.
Navel gazing
If you're not a well-known personality and especially if you're writing a personal essay, then you have to ask yourself how are you going to engage readers? You can write an essay about an illness, a wedding, a date, a restaurant, the history of main street. But you still have to address the question of why we ought to care. Very early on you have to ask how is your essay going to stand out?
Fiction can be a screen or buffer between the writer and their surroundings, circumstances, relationships. You have to go deep. That's the most challenging aspect of creative nonfiction. What the writer ought to worry about is: What do I want to say? And how am I going to say it? I've come to believe the how is just as important as the what. How can we avoid “navel gazing” in a personal essay?
Dear Michael Henry,
I know you’ve read a lot of books about writing, but I’m going to recommend one more to you because it’s the only one I’ve found that addresses your questions: what to write about, how to start, and how to know what it is you have to say. It’s called Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I recommend it with some reservations, because it’s long and has a lot of unhelpful parts, but Buhner is nevertheless kind of amazing in his attentiveness to the small details and nuances of both the inner and outer life; he’s also written a book about how plants think that has pretty much convinced me that, well, plants really do think, in their own way, if you pay enough attention to them. I don’t agree with many of the judgments Buhner makes in Ensouling Language, but that’s bound to happen with someone like him. He’s a true original and an iconoclastic thinker. My theory is that someone would probably give him a MacArthur award if he would just take off his ear cuff and put on a suit. But don’t get too attached to his opinions. He will show two examples of prose and identify the best as the worst and vice versa. He’s really into, you know, uplifting shit. I, on the other hand, would argue for the compelling power of specificity, even if it’s more of a downer. Also, it’s okay to skip the first four chapters if you feel like it.
Dear Stacey, I am a huge, huge fan of your work! Somewhere you said you don't particularly enjoy teaching. Does that include one-week workshops, like at writing festivals, which don't involve a long-term commitment to daily preparation and onerous grading of lengthy student papers? (amateur short story writer here.) Also, what will you be working on next?
Thanks Gloria! Yeah, that's not going to happen. I have chronic back pain, which makes traveling difficult. In fact, it makes everything difficult, so I tend to avoid...I don't know....most things? Yeah, what will I be working on next? Good question.