The Literary.

Website Relaunch 2012

2012-01-09T10:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve updated and relaunched my website robertmdetman.com, which has select publications links, a link to this blog, and a contact page. I’ve added a few quality blurbs from journal editors which will hopefully stir the cockles of potential readers, and I’ll be refining the design as I get the urge. I’m not going to tout it’s wonderful new features, or how it makes an optimal experience for the

Not Just Another . . .

2011-12-12T11:23:00.000-08:00

. . . 9/11 memoir, or is it? “The innocuous premise establishes There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, Bryan Charles’s atypical survivor memoir, is the classic struggle of a fledgling writer pursuing his dreams to New York City, and rife are the pains that accompany that pivotal confrontation with one’s future life of work. But there’s something more devastating in the memoir,

Salter's Aesthetic Economy

2011-12-01T15:16:00.000-08:00

Rodin, supposedly at wits end with the inquisitive Rilke, sent his young charge to the Jardin des Plantes to observe the animals there, expecting him to do so with such intensity until he’d be compelled to do nothing else but write. This is the romantic story behind the poems, anyway. At some point in a writer’s career, perhaps they can’t help but see and draw inspiration from less exotic animals

Lethem's Fortress Fanboy

2011-11-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

For all of my interest in difficult writers such as Beckett, Bernhard, or Barthes, pardon the alliteration--I can honestly say that my goal as a reader is to be thoroughly entertained. A lot of this turns into a negotiation with myself about whether I might be up to the task of writing the book I’m eagerly devouring. There’s often a reckoning that, maybe I can’t do it quite so effortlessly

Reading Geoff Dyer

2011-10-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

The essays in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition often seem fired off with the effortlessness of a pool shark making clever bank shots. Elusively show-offy, though also using a self-effacing sleight of hand, Geoff Dyer has made his own genre of personal essay, keeping the reader engaged the same way as someone very interesting at a party. This is a writer’s trick, a necessity, and a boon, to

Bob Dylan's Nobel

2011-10-05T09:18:00.000-07:00

I’m not usually interested in speculation--or writing about it, rather--but I feel compelled to say that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 will be Bob Dylan. Initially, my pick was based on a hunch: Why not Bob Dylan? And then, when I saw how upset it was making the fellow at The Literary Saloon, and that the odds at Ladbroke’s had jumped in Dylan’s favor, pushing him to the

I Heart Editing

2011-10-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in the heat of editing, I flash upon a feeling of utter despair and futility at the insurmountable task ahead of me. Maybe it’s the vestige of the memory of what I used to go through in the middle of two hundred plus pages of manuscript, long before I knew I would ever see a bit of my work (any work) in print. The feeling came out of wondering if I might be better off spending my time

Moment Of Clarity

2011-08-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

You can spend years learning how to write stories that someone will want to publish; you can analyze every story you read to the point where you draw the life out of it. One day you discover you are doing it--writing stories that someone wants to publish--and have done it. In the process, you realize not only have you done it, you’ve done it your own way. I don’t know if you can go so far and

The Antioch Review

2011-08-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Returning home from Maine this past weekend I received notice that The Antioch Review has selected "Under the Suns of a Million Everests" for publication in the Winter 2012 issue. I’m excited and immensely grateful to Editor Robert Fogarty for this honor. Talk about great company: over its seventy year history the Antioch Review has published Joyce Carol Oates, William Trevor, T. C. Boyle,

Third Anniversary Toast

2011-08-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

The most interesting writing projects, for me, have come about through experiment. It may spring from the thought: should I try this? But often that is enough to get the notes down on paper that will spark to life. The Literary, the blog you are reading which I started three years ago--begun before the first groans of the greatest recession of our era--was just such an occasion. I’d wanted a

The Publication Trail

2011-08-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

The paths a writer takes to publication can seem a unique combination of good luck, hard work and randomness. The following two items are from “22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing” by Blake Butler at HTML Giant that resonated with me: “9. If you really want to publish a book one day you will publish a book. The time that you spend getting there is kind of wonderful. Don’t cut it short.

Is Iowa Great?

2011-08-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

When in the dark night of my literary soul I sometimes wonder, what if I had gotten into Iowa? I console myself with this thought: I might have gotten into Iowa if I had tried, later (in other words, if I applied now). I know I have the confidence for it now. But it’s a stupid question. Still, I often wonder what I’ve missed for opportunity for having not gone to a “better” school. Is all of my

Slow Thought Movement

2011-06-29T15:05:00.001-07:00

Found this from the Aspen Ideas Festival website, a panel with Tobias Wolff, Jane Hirshfield and John Guare on "What happens to writing in the age of the internet." (I have concluded that I'm not worrying about it too much anymore.) Besides never having heard anything of John Guare, who seems like a fascinating playwright, what's really surprising, is at 72:32 when they pan back and you get a

Spouting Edifying Brilliance

2011-05-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

The work ethic is close to the one of craft. In the Midwest, where I’m from, it’s hard to escape the notion that you can't get anywhere unless you are willing to work hard at it. As much as I’d occasionally like to believe in innate genius, I no longer think there are so many of them walking around spouting edifying brilliance fully formed. If anything is lacking from the discussion of what makes

West of Here

2011-05-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

My review of Jonathan Evison’s West of Here is due in the forthcoming issue of Rain Taxi: “Bearing the hallmarks of an epic yarn, the novel boasts frontier exploits, Native American mysticism, Bigfoot, and an environmental cause wound into its myriad character stories.” Further, the novel manages to ask if a group of industrious settlers can be a detriment to the well-being of their descendants.

Writing Ad Infinitum

2011-03-03T09:53:00.001-08:00

Writing, like any craft, is something you do because you have to, at least in its most rewarding manifestation. Or, more generously, because you want to. This has nothing to do with writing for pay, for there’s little of that to go around. Yet, regarding writing for pay, no matter how good you are at it, you’ve got to get to certain unlikely heights or unquantifiable hype before a wide audience

Cheese Pizza Effect

2011-01-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

Nothing is more disheartening to a fiction writer than a rejection letter with a carefully worded reasoning that interprets the entirety of their three hundred and seventy-five page novel based on thirteen percent of it. And yet this is the norm in the industry. There is often talk of how if As I Lay Dying were submitted to a publisher today, it would never be published. Of course the

Memorable Nonfiction 2010

2011-01-02T14:43:00.000-08:00

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out

Memorable Novels 2010

2010-12-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

I read with intent and interest quite a few novels this year, notably those New York Time Book Review front pagers, and for all of the complaints about the imperiled state of publishing and the apparent evidence of a lack of good novels out there, I must conclude that the hype in that hallowed reviewed selection is often well-deserved. I thought about making a best of list this year, but I always

Boxing The Demons

2010-05-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

The tradition of maligning short fiction could have begun with John Cheever, following one of his early and persistent influences, Hemingway, though Hemingway might not have made a distinction between novels and stories as greater and lesser forms. In Blake Bailey’s expansive biography Cheever: A Life, it is apparent that Cheever thought writing short stories for the New Yorker year after year

Reality Hunger Refraction*

2010-04-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

1-618.Drawing from so many varied sources as Shields does, there is the question of, curiosity about, insistence upon, authority. 139. Writing fiction has little to do with telling someone how to live their life, or attempting to show them how, nor in edifying. It is a compulsion for turning out a possible reality, in words. (Maybe that should be, a variation of reality, or a supposition of

Feast Of Excess

2010-04-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

There is a notion that a novel has to be as healthy and bland as kale or else it isn’t literature. As if the unspoken rule is that it must only be sternly serious and if it happens to be enjoyable, then that must be an oversight on the writer’s part. This seems to be the root of a lot of the criticism of Ian Mc Ewan’s Solar, for what it is not. That Mc Ewan’s novels are elaborately constructed

A Beautiful Necessity

2010-04-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

"What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers." So says Richard Bausch in The Atlantic, regarding his one foray into contributing to an ill-fated how to collection of essays in which his work was unceremoniously left out. I think the impulse to offer how to advice is as much out of reminding oneself how it is done, as a form of practice; if someone finds it

McEwan On Process

2010-04-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

Ian McEwan, during his visit to San Francisco to promote Solar, was on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny this morning, and he responded to a few questions I asked about craft and process. I’ve transcribed his compelling response here: “My important bit of process is hesitation. If I get an idea, I sit on it. I don’t do anything with it. If it’s a good idea on Monday, it better be a good idea

McEwan Over London

2010-04-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

"Whichever direction his gaze fell, this was home, his native corner of the planet. The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants and eighteenth-century laborers, still visibly patterened the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence, and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with

Reality Hunger's Discontent

2010-04-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

The death warrant for the novel always seems to be a celebration. Literary forms grow and transform over time; undeniably, the novel may be the most open, enigmatic and constantly challenging of forms. Why would there be a need to pronounce the novel dead if it wasn’t in fact alive and well? One rarely hears novelists proclaiming the end of the memoir, or the end of poetry. In fact, so often

Death Of Craft

2010-03-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a lot of hand wringing and grief over the end of publishing in its traditional form. If you doubt you had a stake in it to begin with, it becomes easier to embrace the changes. I still don’t quite know what any of this means to me as a writer, but I’m worrying a lot less about what will come of it. And I’m glad to see that the book will never die. Maybe this should be considered

Return To Form?

2010-03-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

I’m getting ahead of myself before I’ve even had time to read the new Banville, but I enjoyed what Maureen Corrigan had to say on Fresh Air in her review of The Infinities: “I used to put a lot of stock in an adage about writing. It went roughly like this: "If a student says he wants to be a writer because he has something to say, discourage him. But if a student says she wants to be a writer

The Coetzee Reduction

2010-03-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

The affinity with Beckett, though not always obvious, is apparent in Coetzee. His work often feels like it is attended to by lab coated technicians. This precision in Coetzee might make his writing dull for some readers, but clean prose is appealing. In the kindest sense of the word, this sterility keeps the words measured, never wavering in pitch. He is writing from his own register, untouched

Books Once Loved

2010-02-18T14:58:00.000-08:00

The idea that I can’t love a book forever feels despairing to me. Or formative. There are a handful of books I claim to love. So it’s odd to go back to them. Does the love fade, or did my taste change, or is a book love good only for one brief moment in time? Mating, by Norman Rush, is feeling like that. When I first read the novel in 2001 or so, I remember feeling a lot more giddy with the

Two Thousand Ten

2010-01-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

The saying, “Do what you love and the success will follow,” is always one I’ve heeded, religiously. Primarily because my priority is to do work that I enjoy since I’m going to spend so much time doing it. Writing has certainly led this call for me, though after years of practice, the hankering for further extrinsic reward is undeniable. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily financial as some think

Esteemed Nicaraguan Novelist

2009-12-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

My review of Sergio Ramirez’s A Thousand Deaths Plus One is in the new print edition of Rain Taxi: "[...]The two short stories that open each half of the book link the cultural figures (in the novel) and provide a skein of themes that the novel elaborates upon . . . Ramirez channels a style similar to what W.G.Sebald conjures in his works of remembrance and soi-disant history." Here is the link

Character, Not Plot

2009-12-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

"I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don't give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there's a character who stays in my mind. It's a character with complexity that I want to know better." --Marilynne Robinson (Paris Review Interviews, IV)

Gravy. Or Icing.

2009-12-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

Flaubert suffered for his art. Why does this seem disingenuous? Is it really believable that Flaubert approached his writing so detached from the end results, as indicated by the entries that Barthes quotes in his essay, “Flaubert and the Sentence” (New Critical Essays)? For example, Flaubert writes: “...I don’t want to publish anything...I work with an absolute disinterestedness and without

Writing Every Day

2009-11-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

The first thing people have been asking me when I mention the novel I’m working on, is, “Do you use an outline?” I have an unpleasant visceral urge when I hear that word because I’m reminded of many years ago in school when we were told to do an outline for our essay that was supposed to be based on this pyramid thing which I won’t even try to explain as it’s probably ubiquitous for anyone who’s

A Novel Detour

2009-10-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

The reason for my absence from here: I’ve been working on a new novel, the first I’ve started since finishing my MFA three years ago. What I decided to do differently this time is largely about process, avoiding the pitfalls of my past forays into the novel. I think the MFA practice was useful because it forced me to think about producing writing, if not every day, at least weekly. My practice

The Edmonton Farrell

2009-06-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

At long last the Spring 2009 issue of Wisconsin Review is out, where my story “The Edmonton Farrell” can be found. Here’s the link to their page where this wonderful journal can be ordered.

Writing And Empowerment

2009-06-20T09:34:00.001-07:00

I have always known and accepted for myself that a high standard is the only one I'm interested in pursuing. Short of getting a message out (what this blog attempts to do), writing--fiction in particular--should aim to be art. I don't think this is so for the general population of wanna-be writers, a group I no longer include myself in. I think, because of the fame that is sometimes attached to

Some Great Advice

2009-05-26T20:40:00.001-07:00

Annoyingly pretentious, or maybe just ornery? I enjoyed the Annie Proulx interview in the latest Paris Review (unfortunately, to read the entire interview, you need a subscription) and decided to crib from it whole quotes because she says some great things about writing short stories. I've added my thoughts in parenthesis.On sentences: "A lot of the work I do is taking the bare sentence that

Must I Write?

2009-05-24T10:47:00.001-07:00

There is something almost self-defeating and pointless to the idea of producing art for a market place. One must either already be established or they have to get established, taking some slow road to publication through journals or the proliferation of web outlets. Blind optimism and dogged determination are the factors that must reign because if you don't want complete obscurity, you need to

Comforting Statistical Analysis

2009-05-17T20:42:00.001-07:00

Though I was mediocre in mathematics, I have a secret love for numbers. Since I embarked on writing short stories and publishing, I've compiled some statistics. In two years of submitting short stories to dozens of journals, I've had ten stories published (This is not counting non-fiction, commercial articles and book reviews). That's an average of one publication every ten weeks, or roughly

Wood Says So

2009-05-13T23:18:00.001-07:00

After reading James Wood's "How Fiction Works" months ago I started accumulating ideas and was attempting to articulate them when I came across this article in The Nation which convinces me I am on to something and should eventually post my thoughts on Wood and realism. Until then I quote directly from this well written deconstruction of James Wood's problem (well, one of them, anyway) by William

They Don't Sell

2009-05-12T23:20:00.001-07:00

The chair analogy, sort of disparaged (see my previous post, Crafting a Chair) in this review of Wells Tower's "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned". In contrast to what Deborah Eisenberg is saying, I was considering that the craft of a work of fiction wasn't at the expense of creating "something that has been transcribed from a revelatory vision." Tower, who very well may be related to me (

Short Story Openings

2009-05-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

I never intended to become a short story writer. In grad school, I didn't even bother with short stories, knowing they were the slow road to publication in the shadows of the more prestigious novel publication. Every serious writer usually wants to be known as a novelist, ultimately. There's just a stigma to short story writing. Of the successful short story writers I can think of, I'm sure there

Metamorphoses It Was

2009-05-01T21:30:00.001-07:00

A very short fiction, "Seven Dreams Under the Knife", is now available to read online, here. Never knowing whether to call this a short story or a poem, or unclassifiable, I submitted this piece under many forms--so thanks to editor John Burgess at Snow Monkey for taking it on. Also, to read some of my submission drama, look at my March 22nd post here.

Crafting a Chair

2009-04-28T08:31:00.001-07:00

When I'm working on short fiction, invariably I have half a dozen books lying open--a kind of loose reference to see how an accomplished writer evokes their magic in a turn of phrase or when utilizing tone--if only to remind myself what I'm attempting to do with my 6500 word story that is on the fourteenth draft, the fifth title change, and contains more mixed metaphors and false sentiment than a

Philosophy Made Me

2009-04-25T20:40:00.001-07:00

As I read this article, "Against Readings," in The Chronicle Review, it reminded me of my own literary beginnings, which really began with philosophy. While studying fiction in grad school for creative writing, there was an expectation to treat the books we were reading as academic exercises. But I felt there was something alienating with literary interpretation; as much as I would have liked to

The Little Book

2009-04-11T19:58:00.001-07:00

To someone who considers himself fly-by-night with grammar--or more aptly, as if a proficiency with grammar is a bit like dowsing for water--this critique of Strunk and White's esteemed little book is highly entertaining. Besides which leaving me further clueless on the subject.

International Super Hype

2009-04-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

With the economic meltdown there is constant talk of the publishing world collapsing, but you wouldn’t know it to read the reviews. The latest big books are still promoted and heralded--winning prestigious prizes in France, no less, a sure sign of literary inflation--and bid upon at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the book lovers get caught up in these things (I am one, usually). The latest hype is

Short Story Purgatory?

2009-04-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

A. O. Scott’s piece in the Times, “In Praise of the American Short Story,” trumps out yet again a silent consensus that the short story has been getting short shrift for far too long--note that’s the “American” Short Story. But to keep mentioning the denigration of the short story only ghettoizes it some more. The tide is probably turning as these things do, over time. For those of us in the

Under the Knife

2009-04-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Prescriptions for writing abound. “Eliminate repeated words.” “Never write a boring sentence.” These come from the Gordon Lish school of writing via n+1. In the Lish arena, the student would be asked to read their piece aloud until they came to a boring sentence--called out by the master with great mocking fanfare, undoubtedly--and the student would be forced to sit down. In my fiction, I was

Story Known As

2009-03-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased and astounded by this news--my story, “Seven Dreams Under the Knife,” was picked up by Snow Monkey for their May 2009 issue--this makes three publications in six weeks. This piece has taken an interesting route to publication. Initially I’d sent it out to a reception of wariness and general incomprehension. One journal offered that it generated "a lot of discussion." This is when it

Words Are Expendable

2009-03-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

One of the most important lessons I retained from my advisors was the idea of revision. That this work is almost as important as the actual writing. Some might say it is the writing. But how much is too much revision--and, how do you know when a piece is finished? I don’t know when a story is finished--maybe you rush it and finish it and find it’s not quite right. You could live with it for a

Neverending Iraq War

2009-03-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

It's been a lucky few weeks for my fiction submissions, and perhaps in conjunction with square root day (3-3-09), I've received word of another publication, for "What We Have Seen Waiting for the War to End," in Homestead Review.

Absurdist Shipwreck Tale

2009-02-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce that Wisconsin Review has picked up my short story, "The Edmonton Farrell," to be published in their spring issue, 2009. As a friend pointed out to me, they only accept twelve stories a year. The timing is apt, as it allows me to continue my application for an NEA grant--not that I necessarily have a chance, but why not?

Toward Ephemeral Criticism

2008-12-29T16:19:00.000-08:00

Reading with the intent to find something worthwhile to say about what I’m reading is unavoidable. What I am aiming to reveal is perhaps ephemeral. It is through this process that I became interested in writing, and this practice naturally led to wanting to write about books. Thus, I became by default, a book critic. Rather, I like to think, a book commentator. I’ve consciously avoided (

Bolaño Phenomenon Ambivalence

2008-12-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

Considering the recent state-side publication of 2666, which I have not yet read (and am still considering for a slot in my fickle holiday reading), I am devouring everything written on Roberto Bolaño, and enjoyed this (anonymous?) clearheaded take in n+1 on the late author’s oeuvre: “Why [...] you begin to wonder, are you reading these books? What for, if they are each going to eschew

Serendipitous Beckett Pilgrimage

2008-11-18T21:07:00.000-08:00