Over at The Return of the Reluctant readers have been treated recently to two installments of diary entries covering Richard Grayson’s experiences at the famed Bread Loaf Writers Conference–back in 1977. Excellent reads (especially with the hindsight factor factored in), but make sure you have the time to appreciate them sufficiently.
Thought I’d post again about some of the excellent work I’ve been reading via the literary journals I picked up at the recent AWP conference in Atlanta. Today’s selection is the Winter 2007 issue of The Cincinnati Review, a beautiful publication I’d love to see my own work in someday (believe me, I’ve tried). In the meantime, I’m happy enough that the new issue includes Susan Perabo’s extraordinary short story, “The Payoff.” And I’m happy to be able to point you to an excerpt online. Click here to get to the journal; then click “issues.” If you click on Susan’s name within the Winter 2007 listing (make sure pop-ups are enabled), you’ll get the excerpt.
I’ve been lucky enough to be in a classroom under Susan’s direction, and even luckier that I believe I may call her a friend. But even without that bias, I’d recommend her work wholeheartedly. I first read her story collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, about six years ago, and I’m still in awe of the ease (she makes it look easy, anyway) and skill with which Susan creates a true range of vivid characters and stories. (This particularly impresses me because I’ve often felt a little “caught” in work of my own that might most charitably be called slightly repetitive.) Fiction writers have a lot to learn from Susan’s prose, and all readers will find plenty to enjoy.
(For more on this issue of The Cincinnati Review [and Susan’s story in particular], see the review at NewPages.com)
Last week I promised to blog some more about the journals I picked up at the AWP conference in Atlanta, highlighting standout work that’s available online. And while I certainly have my flaws, those who know me also know that I always keep my promises!
So here’s a follow-up. The Chattahoochee Review (for which I am a contributing editor) generously sponsored my conference registration, and I spent quite a bit of time at the journal’s Bookfair table. Which means that I was able to pick up a hot-off-the-press copy of the fantastic (if teensy bit delayed) Fall 2006 issue.
Of course, I was happy to see my own review of Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (trans. Sarah Adams) within. But since that piece is not available online, I’ll point you instead to one that is: Amina Gautier’s short story, “Pan is Dead.” Click here to reach the journal, then click “Current Issue” to reach the list of Fall 2006 contributors. Click again as appropriate for Gautier’s piece. And go ahead and read.
As I told Marc Fitten, the journal’s editor, in an recent e-mail, Gautier’s is one of my two favorite pieces (by writers who aren’t named Erika Dreifus) in this issue. The other is Courtney Eldridge’s astonishing “Thanks, but No Thanks.” [UPDATE ON MARCH 31, 2007: Eldridge’s piece is now also online.]
Marc responded with the excellent news that he will be introducing Eldridge when she reads at the New York Public Library’s “Periodically Speaking” series on May 8 here in the city. I’ve marked the date on my calendar and if you’re going to be in the area, you should, too.
Some interesting writing about poetry I’ve caught this week:
David Orr’s essay in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review provides a compelling critique of Dana Goodyear’s recent New Yorker article (mentioned here) on “The Moneyed Muse.” By the way, a personage central to both pieces, Poetry Foundation president John Barr, also journeyed (rather bravely, I thought), to the recent AWP conference in Atlanta. In fact, I attended Barr’s presentation–he spoke alone, no co-panelists for this event–and I was disappointed that he fielded no questions from the audience. I think he could have handled them.
Also, I’ve just discovered Harriet, a poetry blog with multiple contributors (maintained by the aforementioned Poetry Foundation). I can’t say I find that all the posts there “speak” to me or my concepts of writing, but some do, and there’s an admirable variety of voices among the scribes.
(Third and last in a series of posts detailing panels I attended–and in which I took relatively decent notes–at last week’s AWP conference in Atlanta. Click here for the previous post.)
By Friday afternoon at 4:30 I was already pretty wiped out, but since historical fiction has long been one of my major writerly interests I rallied for a session titled “What Really Happened: Research and the Novel.” This is another case where the panelist list also really drew me in. Since reading Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil I’ve become a Cronin fan, and I was eager to hear what he had to say.
Unfortunately, one of Cronin’s fellow panelists was unable to attend (Julianna Baggott’s doctor proscribed travel to AWP so late in pregnancy). But I did also enjoy hearing from the rest of the crew–Tom Franklin, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Mark Winegardner, and I hope to read their work soon.
Here’s the panel description as printed in the AWP conference program:
Research manhandles plot and character while enriching setting, voice, and authenticity. Writers who have published novels set decades before their own births reveal the role of research in the creation of their fiction, sharing opinions on the perils of fact-cramming. They discuss what to look for and how to look for it, negotiating between historic fact and story-truth, portraying historic figures in fiction, approximating what can’t be looked up, what’s better made-up, and everybody’s favorite: what really happened.
To be honest, I can’t remember (and unfortunately the notes I thought were so promising don’t throw adequate light here) if they really did cover every aspect of that ambitious list. But here’s what stood out for me from the discussion:
Vanderbes warned against “the danger of treating the time period as a subject.” The time period is not your subject in historical fiction–the story is. This reminded me of something I once heard Allen Ballard say when presenting his historical novel, to the effect that such a work “has to fly as fiction first.” One must always resist the temptation to stuff in all those delightful “true” facts that may be historically fascinating but not necessarily relevant in storytelling’s service.
And yet sometimes those historical “facts,” in the form of story-enriching details, are irresistible. Franklin (whose humor really charmed me) told us how much a Sears Roebuck catalog from the time helped him in writing a novel set in Alabama during the 1890s, Hell at the Beach (click here for an interview in which Franklin addresses the work of creating that atmosphere).
When it comes to other facts–whether it rained on a certain day of a certain month in a certain year, for example–Cronin argued that a writer should not be “tyrannized by the facts.” Winegardner disagreed, leading to an interesting exchange. (I was reminded of a related essay on the topic by Thomas Mallon in his nonfiction collection, In Fact, which of course I’d love to read again right now but left stored in Massachusetts.)
Well into the session, Vanderbes raised one of the most intriguing (and, to my mind, most challenging) aspects of writing outside one’s own time: keeping characters within their own contemporary moral frameworks. Attitudes about social and cultural issues–race, gender, etc., in particular–have by no means remained constant over time. Here I thought immediately about a superb new novel I recently had the pleasure to read. Written by my friend Natalie Wexler, it’s set in the early national period of the United States and titled A More Obedient Wife: A Novel of the Early Supreme Court.
One of this novel’s strengths is its author’s careful control of her chief protagonist’s mindset (that character is a “real” North Carolina woman, Hannah Iredell). Reading the novel, I imagined how challenging it must have been for Natalie to put herself in Hannah Iredell’s frame of reference, which could also very well render the slaveholding Hannah considerably less likeable to readers in 2007. (Look for much more about Natalie’s new book in an author interview forthcoming in the April issue of the “Practicing Writer” newsletter.)
OK, now I’ll return to the panel account with a final, side note: I’ve long had an interest in how work/worklife is depicted in fiction, I was intrigued when that topic emerged in the discussion, perhaps more related to the topic of “research” in fiction than to researching historical novels more specifically. Vanderbes alluded to remarks from the late Frederick Busch to the effect that he could not start a work until he knew what his character’s job was. Cronin shared tales of adding texture to his fiction through talking to people from various fields.
So it was a lively discussion. After it ended I introduced myself to Cronin and told him how much I’d enjoyed Mary and O’Neil. That’s the kind of opportunity I love–the chance to tell an author in person how much his/her work impressed me–and of course it’s something AWP always affords, many times over.