A Variation on the Writing Path: Part I

When I first began writing, on my own, with no teachers, no schools, no resources other than the friends I gave pages of carefully formatted prose to, I didn’t know even the tip of the iceberg when it came to the business of writing. In fact, it might be said that finding the resources for tapping into this information were scarce. This has been nearly 25 years ago. It’s often a wonder to me that, coming as far as I have, there are young writers starting out now who have all of these resources at their fingertips thanks to the internet. The writer’s path is much more deliberate now if you choose it, since writing has essentially become popularized, a desired career in itself, though the irony is of course, in order to really excel at it, it requires hours of solitude and discipline, commodities that would seem to be lacking in the culture that so fetishizes the writer as the kind of ultimate creative force. In other words, so many taking part in it seem to be heavily versed and immersed in the social media that invokes this conversation, that I begin to wonder--how do these people actually put any time in for writing? (The truth of this of course is that a writer doesn’t normally spend their allotted time--be it 8 hours a day or more if they are fortunate or supported, by writing--at writing; though social media, even if I were a full time writer, would still be a draining time suck to me).

I didn’t begin sending workout until probably ten years ago, already well a decade into my pursuit of writing; I’m not sure I even knew or understood before then that this was a regular thing that aspiring writers such as myself should or could do. Maybe part of this was really fear of rejection, though I genuinely think I had no concept that you would simply write a story and submit it to one of dozens, if not hundreds, of journals (now it is accurate to say, thousands, as there must be this many markets out there). If I scratch the surface, I might have erroneously believed that any fiction, like journalism and essay writing, was solicited. On the other hand, I’m not certain I had any familiarity with literary journals. I do remember my writing group talking about one of our members being “ready to send a story around.” I recall a distinct feeling of, “How dare he? That work isn’t worthwhile.” Or, at seeing the kind of hand made xeroxed “journal” they were in, I didn’t want anything to do with it. I’m sure I knew of institutions like the Paris Review, but again, I assumed anyone who wrote for them was approached by an editor and commissioned, possibly. So again, my pre-1997 approach to a literary market place was to imagine it as an off limits, almost hallowed place that for some reason I didn’t feel I was worthy of. As much as I began writing short fiction as a piece I might submit--and because it fit the writing group aesthetic--I’m not sure I was interested in it as much as I was a novel I’d been working on for years, which was known as Passenger. I was geared toward being a novelist, though one who had no apparent connection to the outside world (!).

When I applied to the top five or six graduate programs for an MFA in creative writing in ‘97, I remember being miffed by the letter from Brown University. It had said something like, “Most of our applicants have established themselves through publication in literary journals…” and my feeling then was, frankly, f___ you, Brown. Though the writing was, essentially, in the letter, it would still be a few years--at least seven--until I finally began to send work out to literary journals. This would only happen after moving to San Francisco, bathing in the light of the burgeoning writing community, amoebic and otherwise, that was suddenly, everywhere. Zyzzyva was one of the prominent journals I knew of--I’d picked up discarded copies at the local thrift store and pored over the work Vollmann had in them. Also, my boss had played on a softball team with Howard Junker in the seventies; he had encouraged me to send Junker stuff, calling his number at work and telling him I was going to do so. All I ever received were rejections with “Onward” on them. (Zyzzyva, by the way, has really become an elitist establishment literary journal since Junker left; their objective is to be a NY-arriviste-centric publication, or maybe another hyphen to add is--Bay Area elitist.)

Soon, I took a writing class or two at U.C. Berkeley Extension, with the hopes of applying again. I applied for the Stegner after learning about it from reading Stephen Elliott, and of course, I pursued the top programs again. After this, my second failed attempt at grad school applications, something must have clicked. I took a writing class at the Writer’s Salon with the wonderfully encouraging Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and thereafter, I began to submit my work to journals whose names were coming up among fellow writers. Now, to be shamefully honest, I only took the class because I wanted and needed someone to write me a letter of recommendation. Miraculously, or because I had genuinely showed promise, I asked Linda for this on the second class meeting, and she was happy to do it for me. But again, I was already looking down the road before I’d even had the tools to get my vehicle there. This time, saying to hell with my elitist aspirations, I applied to Goddard, a low residency program in Vermont, and got in. I was ecstatic.

Now, you’d have to be living under a rock, or perhaps on Mars, to not recognize the vastness of literary culture that is pervasive in 2015. I think it can make people who are not familiar with it or not all that interested in literature imagine it as a career or vocation that is readily available to anyone should they so desire it. And the culture itself doesn’t help to dispel this mythology, making genius writers of everyone from a promiscuous geriatric memoirist writing about her year of abandon, to an autistic child writing inspirational self-help.

Interested in reading Part II: The MFA? Check it out here.

The Life of Reading

I recently finished volume four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s beguiling and satisfying My Struggle. I was reluctant to get to the end, feeling the immense, possibly false affinity that I get as a reader, believing I’ve found a friend in the writer. (It didn’t help that I pitched him my novel when he was at City Arts and Lectures, and he graciously heard me out.) Eventually, I had to finish the book. But what I realized is that, while reading My Struggle, I had no desire to read anything else.

Now I’m in that strange predicament of looking for another book to whet my reading appetite, and am randomly reading five books at the same time because I cannot entirely give myself over to one as I sort of like them all a bit, and am still unsure where I stand with any one of them. I find myself in that space a lot, probably because there isn’t one book I am wrapped up in. In fact, I’d say I usually read several books at one time, as if a model of my mind and thought process. If a book is good enough, I’ll make the time to read.

I find it hard to just read any book--the time and usefulness trade off is too considerable for me--though I know a lot of people on Goodreads and such that seem to read a lot and varied and widely. I guess I just trust that everyone reads all of the books they claim to read as they indicate on social media, but perhaps this is a facade. I have a hard time not being honest about what I have or have not read (Ulysses: read; Infinite Jest: 4/5ths read; Magic Mountain: One third read; Moby Dick: read; The Brothers Karamazov: half read) Did I read enough of these novels, or do I intend to finish them some day? There’s something of a moral complacency I feel, as a serious writer and reader, by copping out as I must have, and probably will, on so much of my serious literary fiction reading. And then there is the question of which unread masterworks I still, one day, intend to read.

I don’t usually give up. In the case of many of those aforementioned books, I began reading them years ago, and it was years ago when I stopped reading them. My tendency is to find a reason to finish a book: guilt, having to review it (or wanting to), or simply because I like it. Maybe I would be more equipped to see them through to the end, now--or maybe not.

Much of the time I’m doing wide reading hoping one of the books will catch on, though because I’m reading fiction and non-fiction simultaneously, much of what I choose to read then is based on my mood. If these five books I’m considering now had the Knausgaard magic, I’d love them, too. The odd thing is that My Struggle is comprised of 450 page volumes, of which I’ve read four. I can’t quite get through any of the other long works I have had on my night table for awhile (Murakami’s 1Q84 and Vollmann’s Imperial, though I dip into them occasionally.)

I’ve also made a habit of reading toward reviewing, and so I gravitate toward books under 150 pages since I can probably read them reasonably fast. Also, if I am to review it, I will read it right away, even if this means forcing myself to finish it, which might mean that the book is a slog, and thus I probably shouldn’t review it. I usually won’t review it then if I can help it, because somewhere along the line I decided if I can’t say anything nice about a book, I shouldn’t say anything at all. I’m actually wondering if I should reconsider this approach.

When I solicited a number of name authors who I’ve had glancing acquaintance with (which might be considered low level stalking) to read my novel ImpossibleLives of Basher Thomas, in the hopes of getting them to blurb it, they all said one of three things. Either a.) they didn’t read other writers’ work for the purpose of blurbing; b.) they only read their students’ work; c.) they were too busy, etcetera. I got the distinct sense that, having not heard of me, or not remembering me, rather, they were afraid of reading execrable work. So they nip it in the bud. As it is, I happened to have read much of these writers’ work, so in some way, you’d think they might have been willing to humor me, but alas, no.

I’m not one to be given recommendations to, and in this I take heed when I try to recommend a book to someone. I’ll only recommend a book if asked, usually, and then I tend to pile on caveats. I somehow don’t want to be responsible for someone’s bad reading experience--though if that reading experience is good, I’ll gladly take credit. There are some people I naturally can suggest books to, possibly because I’ve had success getting them to read a book I recommended (and they, either truthfully or just playing along, loved it too.) The last book I recommended to so many people was David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Even with that book, I came to feel I suggested it to a few too many people who were not prepared to read a 500 page novel, and couldn’t appreciate the language and story, among dozens of other possible reasons why I liked it so much. There are some friends who have read so much and in such synchronicity with me and my reading, that I might take their recommendations--or used to--without question. Now I’m so selective that I just rely on my gut and a strong sniff test. There are some people who recommend heartily to me a book, going so far as to give me a copy, and rare is the occasion when I will actually crack the thing open and read it. There’s some guilt in not reading it, but not too much. I’m usually already busy reading several other books.

Publishers Weekly's glowing assessment of IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF BASHER THOMAS a novel by Robert Detman

Here, in its entirety, is the review from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on the novel:

"Detman pulls together various forms and styles in an ambitious novel composed of transcripts, letters, and footnotes, told in sharp prose. On August 17, 1982, renowned photojournalist Nathan “Basher” Thomas is fatally shot. Decades later, Harry Ogletree, one of Basher’s closest friends, decides to write a screenplay about the murder. Harry visits Basher’s mother to speak with her about the project and collect a box of Basher’s personal effects. The contents of the box spur recollections of a road trip across the Mexican Baja peninsula, arguments in Michigan, and drug abuse in Paris, and also provide insight into Basher’s death. Harry follows these clues to Rancho Nacon, a mysterious Guatemalan jungle villa with an enigmatic caretaker. On his pilgrimage, Harry hopes the people he questions and memories he uncovers will help to deconstruct the mystery of Basher Thomas. Because of the book’s unconventional structure, the narrative is fragmented. Although the disjointedness complements Harry’s fractured search for information and meaning, the story’s momentum is often slowed by passages that are needed to prevent confusion and explain earlier elements of the novel. The best scenes focus on the intimate details and relationships between the characters. Detman’s stylistic choices succeed in the moments when Harry’s memories and Basher’s documents blur into the present, layering various methods of storytelling to create a fresh and intriguing work." 

Link to this review: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-692-24349-7

Please help me out and go to the link, link back, tweet, and like. 

Exploring Vollmann’s Labyrinth

There can be a mesmerizing appeal to novels in which something is slightly off. Frankly, this could be from the mind of the author, but it's never easy to pin down. This sounds like it could be a disastrous attraction, but the “off” sense seems to come out of the writing process more than from any plan the author might have had (although, who knows--it could as well be an affectation), and rather than detract from the art of it, this quality usually makes  the novel a more powerful and compelling read. So often, the best writing is rarely picked dry bones perfect; what is better, to my reading, is the bold idiosyncrasy of the writer’s mind revealed in the prose.

A cult-ish and high literary writer generally overlooked by the establishment, and an unclassifiable counterpoint to all of the squeaky clean novelists--whom usually fail to live up to their hype--is William T. Vollmann.

Vollmann is poly-literary: essays, manifestoes, calculi, and novels that he subtitles enigmatically “dreams” that wildly blur the line between fiction and reality. Vollmann riddles text with the footnotes and epigraphs of a lifetimes’ reading, which helps deny convenient demarcations. Notorious for his prodigality, and with a remarkable willingness for excess, I recall him in an interview talking about how he’s nearly destroyed his own hands with carpel tunel from his marathon writing labors.

In The Rifles, Vollmann imagines himself as a member of a failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage that met its tragic end over one hundred and fifty years ago. Vollmann writes as William the Blind, Captain Subzero, Wm. Franklin, et al. Vollmann portrays living a parallel existence in two time periods as he delivers history, critiques of the rampant blood thirsty hunting culture introduced by the repeating rifle, and personal asides, including an inadvisable affair with a partially deaf mute Inuit woman. 

In one of the gripping chapters of The Rifles is a perfunctory survival tale that shouldn’t be. This is when Vollmann went to the defunct weather station at Isachsen on Ellef Ringnes Island near the North Pole with plainly insufficient cold weather gear and tried to replicate the experience of those in that failed Northwest Passage expedition. Why Vollmann would have needlessly subjected himself to an almost suicidal series of decisions that delivers a kind of campfire tale with shaggy dog proportions seems like nothing less than the writer trying to prove himself to himself first, and the interested reader, second. It’s as if he wanted to experience his characters’ ill-fated turns. Vollmann strives, at all times, to make a virtue of fallibility, with a survivalist’s indomitable resourcefulness.

The narrative seems to grow organically and out of its own imperative, and doesn’t feel hemmed and hewed by needless story boarding or scene peddling. A Vollmann narrative can feel less like a development than a conflagration, an uncontrolled burn. In a less confident writer this can come off as stultifying and mannered, and at its worst, arbitrary. But Vollmann trusts his logorrhea, perhaps, an obsessive pursuit of specific, charged detail.

Often defying logic in terms of straight ahead narrative, his novels are mythmaking in their self-references and staggering in their encyclopedic breadth. Some of his thousand pages plus tomes with their dense pages often makes them prohibitive to casual reading, but for the welcome they offer once you are fully engaged with it.

Vollmann the artist illustrates his texts with distinctive pen and ink sketches that reveal a skilled and highly idiosyncratic translation of the world that map, diagram and render talismanic and symbolic self-portraits.

Vollmann’s crackling sentences are of an honest writer seemingly without peer, seeing a world he has as much chosen as made, through an idealistic lens he wishes to translate faithfully. Vollmann makes his poetry incidental, and he’s not self-conscious about it, as in this passage from The Rifles: “He had to wear his headlamp, and it gleamed cheerlessly ahead, reflecting his own black shape in the glass of dead exit signs so that some monster was always coming toward him.”

Once venturing into the Vollmann labyrinth, it is, to me, a very comforting place. He makes no apologies for his investigations and presents himself as the steadfast hero in his formidable travels. His approach is that the “world is my world (and you are welcome to come along)", with frequent ill-advised border crossings, side trips and harrowing misadventures.

The apparent faith Vollmann puts in his fellow beings reveals a rare and magnanimous character, burdened by avid appreciation for the underappreciated of humanity. Though he is presenting what at times seems to be a persona, as a writer he doesn’t seem any less reliable because of it. Vollmann makes no excuses for his predilections, and out-quirks his contemporaries who have got to be thinking: any self-respecting writer would avoid such a profile or risk being labeled a narcissist. To quote Vollmann in the collection of writings, Expelled from Eden: “It is not so hard to be honest, merely a little embarrassing.” Vollmann is often brave, foolish, bawdy and a touch unsettling, but I never question his sincerity. He’s a writer I am grateful to, and read with as much awe as deliberation. But his writing style, inspiring in its risks, often reminds me of the virtue in being passionate, and in particular, how as a writer of vital things one should grasp how big a waste of time it is to worry about what anyone thinks of you. How as a writer of vital things one should trust in their inspirations, however unusual.