This week, we’ve had the privilege of hosting J.C. Hallman at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. You think he’d be busy plugging his new book IN UTOPIA (out August 3rd), but he’s made some time to continue the crusade he began with THE STORY ABOUT THE STORY: GREAT WRITERS EXPLORE GREAT LITERATURE.

Just the other day, I was heartened when I stumbled across the following passage in Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life; Almond is criticizing a piece of rock criticism in The New Yorker:

Frere-Jones is certainly not messing around.  He covers instrumentation, performance style, and lyrical content.  True, he risks losing those of us who are musical dolts…but the real problem here is emotional.  The prose, for all its technical fidelity, conveys almost nothing about what the music feels like.

What heartens me about this is less Almond’s call for emotion than his implication that to write well about rock and roll you really need to employ metaphor, figurative language.  In other words, I would have italicized like instead of feels.

As it happened, I needed a good heartening.  I needed it because I’d just read Helen Vendler’s review of C.K. Williams’s On Whitman in the New York Times Review of Books. (Link below).  Admittedly, I haven’t read On Whitman, and I’m not attempting to defend Williams here.  Vendler’s review, however, speaks to two things.  First, it confirms the continued existence of a perennial problem in the business of book reviewing: like that guy in your workplace who seems unable to prevent himself from speaking aloud the very thought he should keep to himself, book review editors again and again exhibit the terrible tic – let’s call it literary Tourette’s – of assigning books to precisely that reviewer least prepared to appreciate what it is they’ve been asked to assess.  Second, and more important, I think, Vendler’s review accidentally measures the dimensions of the chasm that separates writers and critics on the question of how we should write about literature.  This is the same chasm that Almond politely maps.

From what I can tell, On Whitman is Williams’s take on Whitman, of course, and a few other poets.  Apparently Williams, on a number of occasions, permits himself the luxury of Almond’s advice: he writes about what it’s like to read Whitman.  More simply put, Williams writes enthusiastically about an enthusiastic poet – which makes both logical and aesthetic sense.  Yet it’s this that gets Vendler’s back up.

Her review trains its sights from the outset: “Enthusiasm is an appealing quality, but it calls out for some accompanying astringency, and the exclamatory nature of Williams’s prose can become excessive.”

What’s notable here is that even as Vendler’s tone can be said to be astringent, she relies entirely on pathos to make her point.  She offers no explanation at all for how or why enthusiasm calls out for astringency.  She simply asserts it, and her assertion is that assertions, particularly enthusiastic ones, ought to be checked in some way, by something, by her, apparently.  We’re barely fifty words into her review and her logic has already come full circle.

Vendler’s astringent prose not only lacks enthusiasm – it contains its opposite.  Reacting to Williams’s characterization of the 1960s, Vendler tries to shed a light she thinks Williams overlooked.  She reminds us that the sixties also saw “many good minds lost to drugs, red-eyed students stoned in classrooms and careless one-night stands.”  The prose here is scrunched, smothered, downright conservative.  It’s as though someone has shown Vendler some sexy pictures and she’s decided to be grossed out by them.  And all she has really done is borrow and de-enthuze the first lines of “Howl.”

Vendler finds C.K. Williams kind of adolescent.  She says: “Something of [Williams’s] adolescent passion for Whitman governs the prose of this book: ‘How wildly exciting, how really exalting it must have been to him when his poetry first offered him a way to see and record so much — it can feel like everything. Just reading it, the brilliance of the moments of inspiration are like raw synaptic explosions, like flashbulbs going off in the brain, in the mind: pop, pop, pop.’  There is perhaps too much of this…” [Italics mine]

Too much of this?  Too much good writing and metaphor?  That’s about like saying it’s okay to watch porn, and it’s even okay to talk about it and write about it, but under no circumstances should you actually imitate the acts that get your juices flowing.  Or, if you feel any actual ecstasy in response to ecstatic work, you should sublimate all of it when you attempt t communicate any of it.

In one fell swoop, Vendler has positioned herself in relation to Williams’s adolescent: she has become the aging schoolmarm playing chaperone at a middle school dance.  There she is, scrunched out on the dance floor, eagle eyes wandering, watching some young boy really get off on the music – he’s dancing, he’s lost himself in the moment – and the old schoolmarm can remember only vaguely when she herself danced, that dancing was the whole point.  But now it’s lost.  “These kids, these kids,” she seethes.  “They’re just having too much fun!”

Vendler acknowledges that Williams lifts his style from his subject: “Williams’s prose here, as elsewhere, has been raised to Whitman’s own oratorical pitch, as he reaches a startling conclusion…”  But it’s not something Vendler can bring herself to do.  Claiming to articulate poetry’s real purpose, she astringently claims that poetry “necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction.”

Thud.  Thud, thud, thud.  Technical fidelity, no feeling.

My concern here is less for Vendler than what she represents: the kind of writing – astringent – that we demand students employ when they first write about books.  That’s central, I think, to nature of the chasm between writers and critics.  A number of writers have commented on this very thing.

Seamus Heaney, in “Learning from Eliot,” describes his first experience of “The Hollow Men”:

Whatever happened within my reader’s skin was the equivalent of what happens in an otherwise warm and well-wrapped body once a cold wind gets at its ankles.  A shiver that fleetingly registered itself as more pertinent and more acutely pleasurable than the prevailing warmth….But, of course, we were not encouraged to talk like that in English class.”

And William Gass in the The Tunnel:

When I was in high school I had to write an essay duplicating the manner and subject of Bacon’s “On Reading,” and I remember including all the comfortable clichés.  I said nothing about how books made me masturbate.

Both Gass and Heaney long for the license Almond would enthusiastically issue them.  For metaphor.  Heaney explicitly, and Gass, well, while it’s not strictly metaphoric, masturbation requires an extensive use of the imagination, I’d say – and I think that may be his point.  And that’s the thing.  Vendler’s call for “astringency” betrays an almost allergic response to the use of the imagination in response to works of the imagination.  This – this – strikes her as adolescent.

But who’s really the new kid on the block, putting on airs?

Alas, it’s Aristotle (seconded by Demetrius, and Horace, and Isocrates) who called the use of metaphor “the mark of genius.”

Helen Vendler’s review of Williams proves that even a schoolmarm remembers how to throw a child’s tantrum.

Link to Vendler Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/books/review/Vendler-t.html

Like many of you, we here at Tin House have been obsessing over the World Cup. Accompanied by the blissful sounds of sixty thousand Vuvuzelas, blasting from the television bar at seven in the morning, we have been watching all the blown calls, beautiful goals, and culturally informative hairstyles with the sense of enjoyment that comes from participating in something that only comes around every four years.

Luckily you don’t have to wait that long to once again enjoy the magic that is the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, which coincidently begins the same day (Sunday, July 11) the Dutch (fingers crossed) will be crowned champions of World Soccer. And while all the Workshop slots have been filled for a couple of months now, due in large part to our amazing faculty line-up, those of you in the Portland area can still experience some of the brilliance of the week by attending our afternoon seminars and evening readings, which are open to the public. The full schedule after the jump.

SEMINARS AND PANELS 2010

Monday, July 12 2010

2 p.m. THE AGENT GAME

Panel with Sarah Burnes, Amy Williams, and Renee Zuckerbrot, moderated by Rob Spillman

Finding an agent to represent your work can be a time-consuming and hair-raising endeavor. Ideally, the relationship between agent and author is both professional and personal, providing a writer with much-needed support and encouragement. In this seminar, New York agents talk about what writers should know before seeking representation and offer unique insight into their profession.

3 p.m. ENGINEERING IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURES, WITH KAREN RUSSELL

The Kansas to Oz ratio: structuring an imaginary world
Fiction writers get to create new worlds out of the pure oil of the imagination. “Alternative” authors, those genre-benders who draw from fables and myths and science fiction, can transport us to wonderlands and alien planets, as well as to the darkest labyrinths of their characters’ interiors. But this generative pleasure comes with some serious responsibilities for the writer. According to Flannery O’Connor: “The person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein: because the greater the strain on the credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.” We will be taking a look at how authors transform an incredible landscape into a vibrant, grounded, real place on the page. We will also do a short creative writing exercise centered around the NYPL digital galleries. With exemplary texts by such architects of the unreal as Italo Calvino, Kelly Link, Jorge Luis Borges, and Steven Millhauser.

Tuesday, July 13 2010

2 p.m. ON HUMOR, WITH LARRY DOYLE

At wit’s end

What’s funny, and what’s not, and how might one put that into words? Larry Doyle has no idea but he has done it often enough—as a writer on The Simpsons, in his frequent appearances in the New Yorker, in his Thurber award-winning novel, “I Love You, Beth Cooper” and in his upcoming “Go, Mutants!”—so he will talk for a set period of time on this topic.

3 p.m. BEGINNINGS

A panel with Ann Hood, Joy Williams, J.C. Hallman, moderated by Michelle Wildgen

Wittgenstein once wrote, “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.” This is true of writers at all levels of development. One thing that’s commonly said of an unfinished story is that it “didn’t even really start until page 5” or something like that. We’ll discuss how to tell a good beginning from a false start, and examine classic great beginnings to discover what a story demands at its outset.

Wednesday, July 14 2010

2 p.m. EVERYTHING THEY TOLD YOU IN MFA SCHOOL IS WRONG, WITH STEVE ALMOND

Except the part about the debt…

Do I really mean this? Of course I don’t. I’m just being “provocative.” But I do believe that writing programs do a pretty woeful job of talking about the psychological and emotional issues that writers face every day at the keyboard. So consider this your crash course. We’ll cover all the biggies: writer’s block, the inevitability of guilt, the ascent of self-loathing, the development of a bullshit detector, the myth of the found voice, and where—if all else fails—to sell your plasma. There will be plenty of time for questions and the throwing of rotten fruit.

3 p.m. STRATEGIC CONFESSIONS, WITH MARY SZYBIST

Poetry, of course, is not simply concerned with emotional expression.  A poem can be, and often is, an argument.  We will consider one of poetry’s most common rhetorical tools: the concession.  To concede something in a poem is a move toward vulnerability, and it is a risk that can have enormous pay-off.  We will examine ways in which poets use concessions to reach, persuade, and move their readers.

Thursday, July 15 2010

2 p.m. THE SHORT-STORY WRITING PROCESS: A TEN-STEP PROGRAM, WITH ANTONYA NELSON

Time yet for a hundred indecisions

The process of writing is the process of revision. This class will provide a methodology for revision, steps by which a writer might move through a short story from initial impulse to polished draft, with stops along the way to consider form, texture, conscious and unconscious decisions, point of view, props and objects, setting and atmosphere, and other layering techniques specific to the particular material at hand.

3 p.m. ENDINGS

A panel with Elissa Schappell, David Leavitt, and Charles D’Ambrosio, moderated by Cheston Knapp

Good stories and novels contain what John Gardner called “profluence,” or the forward motion, literal and emotional, “best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events,” that is, a plot. Characters are pressed; they act; tension builds in the reader until it’s almost unbearable. But this movement must finally come to a halt. But how? How does a good story end?

Friday, July 16 2010

2 p.m. ON MORALITY AND COMPLEXITY IN FICTION NOWADAYS, WITH ANTHONY DOERR

Don’t Leave the Frickin’ Path

In this lecture we’ll look at some early fairy tales and wonder what has happened to the idea of examining right and wrong through storytelling. Can art still serve as a vehicle for a moral instruction? Can serious poets and writers continue to play (to any degree) the role of sermonizing storyteller, instructing our readers, saving them from mistakes they might make in their own lives? Or have things changed irrevocably since the days of the Brothers Grimm?

3 p.m. ON THE MOVEMENT OF LINE BREAKS AND STANZAS, WITH D. A. POWELL

Saturday, July 17 2010

2 p.m. STRUCTURES OF THE NOVEL, WITH WHITNEY OTTO

Blue-prints for building imaginary castles

Having a story but being unsure about how to structure the story is rather like having all the perfect household furnishings and no house. This seminar is designed to offer suggestions for how to tell your story.  We will talk about various novel structures, as well as point of view, and the importance of not allowing any structure to overshadow what you are trying to say.

3 p.m. COMPLEX MOMENTS IN FICTION, WITH ROBERT BOSWELL

Mining for how meaning means

Now and again a story or novel features a moment that startles and amazes us, a moment that we never forget. There is no formula for the creation of such a moment, but this lecture will look at several such moments and see what there is to learn about their formation.

All seminars and panels, unless otherwise noted, will be held in Vollum Lecture Hall on Reed College Campus. Door charge to seminars is $15.

READINGS

Sunday, July 11th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with Nick Flynn, Elissa Schappell, Robert Boswell

Monday, July 12th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with Anthony Doerr, Brenda Shaughnessy, Charles D’Ambrosio

Tuesday, July 13th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with J.C. Hallman, Ann Hood, Larry Doyle

Wednesday, July 14th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with Karen Russell, Dorianne Laux, David Leavitt

Thursday, July 15th 2010

8:00 p.m. Reading and signing with Tom Grimes, Whitney Otto, David Shields

Friday, July 16th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with Jon Raymond, Matthew Dickman, Antonya Nelson

Saturday, July 17th 2010

8 p.m. Reading and signing with Steve Almond, D.A. Powell, Joy Williams

All readings to be held in Cerf Amphitheater on Reed College Campus
Door charge to readings is $5.

And soccer fans, think the vuvuzela horn is The Worst Part about South Africa hosting the world cup? Marlene begs to differ:

We can’t thank you enough for your support over the years–you read our magazine, you buy our books, you attend our workshops. And we’d like to give back to you–we really would. We want to look to the future and continue to innovate; we want move you with the stories, poems, and books we publish; we want to foster communities of people who love literature. But (from what Cheston’s told me) all healthy relationships depend on clear communication between parties. And to be honest, we could really use your help. As we start to invest more in the digital arena, we need to hear what it is that you’re looking for. What would you like to see in a new-and-improved tinhouse.com? What do you look for in your eBook-reading experience? What kind of features do you like in iPhone/Android/iPad apps? How come no one will add me on Friendster?

All bullshit aside, we could really use your input. Please comment below, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter.

David Markson is going down fighting, and he’s not giving an inch to convention, zeitgeist, or potential sales. Born in 1927, Markson found success early with a series of genre novels; it helped that he was friends with Malcolm Lowry (about whom he wrote his Columbia dissertation, in 1952), Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, and Jack Kerouac. One of his early novels, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, a parody of a Western, was turned into a mostly forgettable movie starring Frank Sinatra. At the time it would have been hard to imagine that his prose style would evolve, à la Mondrian, from crowd-pleasing genre fiction to spare, postmodern blocks of text, first with Springer’s Progress, a nasty little novel about a middle-aged novelist, then to Wittgenstein’s Mistress, an apocalyptic meta-novel featuring one- or two-sentence thought blasts, a book that David Foster Wallace called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country” and upon which Markson could have built a po-mo empire. Instead, he refined his pointillism into a quartet of “novels,” Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, which feature a near total abandonment of narrative.

Published in paperback by three small presses (god bless you Counterpoint, Dalkey Archive, and Shoemaker & Hoard), each of these end-game novels is made up of one- or two-sentence blocks regarding various intellectual subjects, including:

• Facts about famous writers and artists–“Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared. And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.”

• Anti-Semitism–“Knut Hamsun was an anti-Semite. And was so blatantly sympathetic with the Germans in both world wars that thousands of Norwegians mailed him back copies of his novels in contempt.”

• The nature of narrative–“Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.”

• The Classics–“Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae. Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse—to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.”

• Big ideas, mainly in the form of unattributed quotes, many of which are not in English–“Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins.”

• Morality–“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.”

• And, always, the starving artist and his legacy–“Raphael, Caravaggio, Watteau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec each died at thirty-seven.”

• With occasional nods to the “author” and “reader”–“Should he give him children, if he is still being autobiographical?”

Reading these novels is like spending hours with a crazy uncle who happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every book ever written, every painting ever painted, and every piece of music ever composed. And who disgorges bits of knowledge in an endless, unfathomable pattern. And yet! Yet, somehow, Markson spins this erudition and intelligence into self-conscious webs, narratives without narratives, micro-poems that miraculously accrue and cohere into meditations on the creative life, art, and intellectualism.

What emerges is a portrait of sickly, lonely, deviant genius, with “nothing now, but my books.” These novels are a remarkable achievement, what should be required reading for anyone aspiring to create.

Here is how Reader’s Block ends:

And Reader? And Reader?

In the end one experiences only one’s self.

Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

The perfect gift for the men in your life, The Tin House Father-and-Son pack includes The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto and How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself.

-One part celebration, one part history, two parts manifesto, Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour is a comic and unequivocal treatise on how and why we drink—properly. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author turns his shrewd wit on the spirits and attitudes that cause his stomach to turn and his eyes to roll (Warning: this book is NOT for rum drinkers).

“The Hour is not simply a piece of humorous cultural patriotism either. It is a manual of witchcraft, a book of spells and observances.”
—Wallace Stegner, author of Angle of Repose

-How to Do Nothing literally tells “how to do nothing with nobody all alone by yourself”— real things, fascinating things, the things that you did when you were a kid, or your parents did when they were kids. This is a book to free your kid from video games for a few hours, a handbook on the avoidance of boredom, a primer on the uses of solitude, a child’s declaration of independence.

“Every great book reminds us that we’re all alone in the world. At least this one provides us with the means to entertain ourselves while we’re here.”
—Lemony Snicket

NOTE: A slightly abridged version of this interview appears in the print edition of Issue #44.  The complete, unabridged interview is an online exclusive.

In 1996, David Shields published his first book of nonfiction, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity. Since then—six nonfiction books later—Shields has helped to reconfigure the essay form by enlarging its capacity to discover while shedding its more antiquated properties. His prose eschews transitions and conceit while retaining (and ever deepening) insight and mystery. You never know where it might go; it goes wherever it needs to. It comprises not only argument and memoir but reportage, confession, philosophical inquiry, imaginative stance, literary and cultural criticism, rant, documentary motifs (snapshots, portraits, media images), and list making. His prose is achingly self-reflexive—a voice speaking, listening to its own timbre, then responding. Shields’s work accumulates not through dramatic instance but through theme, through the ruminant experience of sustained meditation.

His most recent book is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,which is an ars poeticafor a burgeoning and disparate group of artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever-larger chunks of “reality” into their work. The themes Shields explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a rigorous, radical reframing of how we might think about this “truthiness”: about literary license, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels. Reality Hunger explores and defines the ways in which reality-based art has bloomed in the last several decades while showing how our once-rigid cultural understanding of “reality” and “fiction” as two mutually exclusive concepts has begun to disintegrate.

Other books include The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, aNew York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

For going on ten years, David and I have been having what appears to be a single conversation. It began in a lecture hall in Asheville, North Carolina, continued in car rides and on walks in Portland, Oregon, burgeoned over tea and over countless emails. What I present here both epitomizes and extends that conversation.

Jay Ponteri: One of the great pleasures of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is its beautifully incendiary tone, its call to passionate action. A manifesto places the reader in a different kind of role. How do you envision the role of the reader of Reality Hunger?

David Shields: Sure, if Reality Hunger were a traditional manifesto, but I don’t see it as such at all, do you, Jay? To me, it’s crucial that the manifesto constantly contradict itself, expose the weaknesses in its own argument. I want the reader to participate rather than merely agree or disagree; my hope is that the reader will begin to question his or her own artistic intentions, aesthetic preferences. In that way the book operates as a lens to examine the self as well as a reflection on our popular and literary cultures. If the book is any good, it’s actually an anti-manifesto manifesto.

JP: It seems obvious that many writers and readers interested in essay or lyric essay (or poetry, or philosophy, or cultural studies) will read Reality Hunger, but did you have a specific audience in mind?

DS: I really was not aware of any audience for the book, as I was working on it, to be honest. I just wanted to make sense of hundreds upon hundreds of paragraphs—my own and others’—that I loved and that I wanted to organize in such a way to make an argument regarding fiction, nonfiction, genre, unknowability, et cetera. The three epigraphs pretty much establish the entire, unfolding argument of the book: “Art is theft”; “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one”: “When we are not sure, we are alive.” If anything, the audience was myself in that I wanted to explain, to my own satisfaction, why I am no longer a fiction writer per se and what is so interesting and exciting about nonfiction when it’s framed in an epistemologically rich, that is to say complicated, way. For twenty years, I was hugely invested in the idea of myself as a fiction writer, and though it might not seem like much of a drama to other people, to me it was a major cataclysm that that mode of writing and thinking went dark for me.

JP: What about those more market-driven novelists and memoirists that so densely populate the American literary landscape? It seems like they must have been in your thoughts as you wrote this book.

DS: I am aware of certain novelists like Jonathan Franzen being the book’s via negativa. As I say in Reality Hunger, I couldn’t read The Corrections if my life depended on it (I tried, and by page fifty I was gasping for air). So, too, very straightforward memoirists of the Mary Karr school are, to me, not by any means the richest way to frame nonfiction. As I’ve started giving readings and lectures from the book, I’m aware of certain sorts of writers tending to stand up and argue against me: nonfiction writers who believe that there is such thing as “reality” (there isn’t) and fiction writers who think we should still construct completely seamless and transparent narratives along the lines established by Flaubert 150 years ago.

JP: Reality Hunger certainly critiques the more conventional forms of the memoir and novel, but at a deeper level it argues that so much contemporary writing is wholly devoid of more private notions of narrative (or thought), of ego, of that first person. What in our American literary culture has contributed to this near absence of the ego?

DS: I think I would frame it slightly differently, that is to say, it’s hard to imagine any aspect of American culture—including literary culture—whose primary problem is its egolessness. Rather, I’d say the problem is the near absence of true personality. Certainly, the origins go all the way back to Ben Franklin. Business R Us. We want to be the round peg in the round hole. We want to fit in the prevailing categories so that we stay productive. I once heard Vladimir Posner say that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he goes on and on about how he’s actually feeling; when an American is asked the same question, he invariably says, “Fine.” We’re doing fine. We’re A-OK. We’re moving forward, moving ahead, no problems, unto death. We’re egomaniacal, but we’re afraid of the shadowed psyche.

JP: To what degree is the publishing industry complicit in our culture’s need to fit round pegs into round holes?

DS: I hate to say “in Europe,” but “in Europe” they do seem to order these things differently. To take just two examples, Naipaul’s A Way in the World and Sebald’s The Emigrants are, so far as I can determine, published simply as books when published in England or Germany. Published here, they tend to carry a generic label, such as “novel” or “fiction.” We want the category determined before we experience the thing. I also think the dominance of chain bookstores has had a huge influence as well. So many times when books of mine have been submitted to publishers, editors worry about the way in which the book “defies genre,” to use Geoff Dyer’s wonderful, throwing-down-the-gauntlet phrase. Of course, virtually without exception, the books that I love do exactly that: everything from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. We’re back, I think, to Walter Benjamin: “All great works either dissolve a genre or invent one.” So much of what Reality Hunger is arguing for, I think, is for people to allow their work to find its own form: not to pour the work into ready-mades.

JP: How about writing workshops—especially workshops in prose? At the university level, they largely espouse Chekhovian (as opposed to Proustian) models and craft lessons, as in, leave out exposition and “Show—don’t tell.”

DS: For me, it’s exactly the opposite: Tell—don’t show. The moment you start showing, I’m almost always bored out of my mind, whereas the manner of your telling will probably interest me. Yeats said, more or less, that we can’t articulate the truth, but we can embody it. I think that’s wrong or at least beside the point. What’s of interest for me is precisely how we try to articulate the truth, and what that tells about us, and about “truth.”

In Reality Hunger, I paraphrase the wonderful answer David Foster Wallace gave to Laura Miller in a Salon interview more than a dozen years ago; she asked him what’s valuable about fiction, and he talked beautifully about the existential abyss that divides you from me. We can never know completely what’s inside another person, what it’s really like to occupy that consciousness, and he argued that fiction is a way to bridge that gap: the very best work assuages that loneliness. I’d say his diagnosis is exactly right, but his solution for me is faulty. I think he states the problem perfectly—human loneliness—but he had way more faith (pseudo-faith?) than I do in the function of fiction’s carnival ride as part of the loneliness-assuaging operation.

So often, in so many novels, scene marches after scene, each one exactly four-and-a-half pages long. We’ve entered an amazingly pro forma field here. I want the assuaging of human loneliness, and I get that when I feel, indelibly, the press of a human consciousness, whether in a book that’s a quasi-novel, Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, or a putative memoir, Bouillier’s unutterably great The Mystery Guest, or even Camus’ The Fall, pretty much a novel. The key is that in each work I’m surrounded by an acute human consciousness. What I want to get above all is how another human being thinks.

JP: How, as a teacher of writing, have you made changes in the classroom? Do you still teach fiction classes or consider yourself a teacher of fiction writing?

DS: In many ways, I think my teaching has driven my writing. That is, very early on, early 1990s, I was weary unto death of teaching fiction writing. I would teach standardly great stories, and I would admire them from afar, and sometimes students would really love the stories, but I had no real passion anymore for, say, Joyce’s “The Dead.” I could see what made such stories “great” or at least good, or well-made, but I had and have zero interest in doing something similar. I was watching self-reflexive documentary films, reading a lot of anthropological autobiographies, listening to and watching a lot of stand-up comedy and performance art. This was the kind of work that truly excited me, and there was a radical disjunction between the books I was pseudo-espousing in class and the books that I loved outside of class and was trying to do on my own—Handbook For Drowning, then Remote. The teaching—the falsity of the teaching—forced me to confront and find and define and refine and extend my own aesthetic. It was thrilling. I once was lost and now am found. (Now I’m lost again, but that’s another “story.”) What I read and write and teach and see are now all one pretty seamless whole—the contemplative gesture, the essayistic mode across the board: in film, essayistic fiction, collage nonfiction, literary nonfiction, stand-up, self-reflexive documentary film. I never teach fiction per se anymore and haven’t for a very long time. I’ve developed a curriculum—an enormous course packet—that I love and that is, in a way, the weed out of which grew Reality Hunger.

JP: You dedicate an entire chapter to the Oprah-James Frey debacle, and you do something so few American writers seem willing to do: take Oprah to task. She vilified Frey, and Frey, as you say, voluntarily took his beating. You say, mockingly, that Oprah would never tell us a story that isn’t true. What’s the difference between Oprah’s brand of truth (as you see it) and the kind of truth essayists seek out?

DS: It’s complicated, because James Frey isn’t a good writer at all, and it’s a shame that he didn’t have the chops to completely turn the world upside down when called to the principal’s office. A crucial aspect of this is complicity. There’s almost no willingness on, say, Oprah’s part to analyze her own self-creation, which is where I wish Frey had stepped in: explained what an utterly fictional and fascinating persona she herself has created. So, too, the impossibility of getting at any final truth, the utter inaccessibility of absolute knowledge, would be a crucial given for me that was not much at play in that entire discussion.

JP: You’ve used collage to structure your last several books. It seems to me that inReality Hunger, your sense of collage has grown even wilder, which, in turn, involves the reader even more. Can you speak to how your sense of collage has shifted or grown over your writing career?

DS: A big rip in the fabric for me was Handbook for Drowning, with its odd amalgam of essays and stories; it was published as a collection of stories, and recently reissued as a novel-in-stories, but looking at that book now, seventeen years after it was originally published, I see it as a pivot point—many traditional stories, but several pieces that are quite essayistic and several essays and stories that are pretty collage-like:  “The War on Poverty,” “The Sixties,” and especially “A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire.” In many ways, the latter is the map of all the books that followed for me. When writing it, I had the sudden intuition that I could take various fragments of things—aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, lit-crit—and build a story out of them. I really had no idea what the story would be about; I just knew I needed to see what it would look like to set certain shards in juxtaposition with other shards. All literary possibilities opened up for me with this story-essay. The way my mind thinks—everything is connected to everything else—suddenly seemed transportable into my writing. I could play all the roles I wanted to play (reporter, fantasist, autobiographer, essayist, critic). I could call on my strengths (meditation and analysis), hide my weaknesses (plot and plot), be as smart on the page as I wanted to be. I’d found a way to write that seemed true to how I am in the world.

I think about something Robert Towers said in his review of Dead Languagesin the New York Review of Books: “In the end, I missed the pleasure of a fully imagined work in which the impulse to shape experience seems as strong as the impulse to reveal it.” That was an oddly crucial crossroads for me: I realized I was and am so much more interested in the impulse to reveal than I was supposed to be, that is to say, I’m an essayist.

JP: What influenced you as you wrote Remote—your first book of true essay?

DS: For Remote, the influences were deeply contemplative and pointillistic autobiographies like Renata Adler’s Speedboat and George W. S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context. Also stand-up comedians and performance artists like Sandra Bernhard and Spalding Gray, along with self-reflexive documentary filmmakers like Ross McElwee, whose Sherman’s March is critical to me. I wrote what I told myself were digressions from the book: meditations on my ambivalence vis-à-vis celebrity culture. Those meditations became, of course, the book, from which I’ve never recovered; that was my Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole moment.

Reality Hunger takes all of this, I guess, and sends it to its most extreme: a huge amount of quotation, a constant mixing of the realms and modes, an evacuation of the self, in a way, or a rephrasing of the self as a concatenation of many selves. So many of these formal gestures seem to me a way to get beyond self. I marry the self, through braided collage gestures, to the cultural warp and woof. That seems to me one of collage’s blessings, its potential for multiplicity of investigative modes: personal, cultural, anthropological, mythical, etc. Collage is for me not a refuge for the compositionally disabled; it’s simply an evolution beyond narrative.

JP: In Reality Hunger, you appropriate other people’s words (like sampling in hip-hop music) sans quotation marks, so that it’s not just your voice but a chorus of voices, all singular and strong, like a good heart beat.

DS: The book attempts to embody what it theorizes about: the excitement of vertiginous ambiguity, and of course the uncertain provenance of all the quotes is a good way to dramatize this, to “prove” this. Reality Hunger weds the question of appropriation to the question of authorial ambiguity and generic slippage. This technique shadows the entire book. Most readers will spot only a handful of the most obvious quotations, suspect that a lot of the paragraphs are quotations (even when they can’t quite place them), and come to regard the first-person singular as a floating umbrella self, sheltering simultaneously one voice (“my own”) and multiple voices. The possibility that every word in the book might be quotation and not “original” to the author should arise. (I say “should,” since at the end of the book is a forced-at-gun-point-by-the-publisher appendix of citations that I’ve tried to make as minimal and unhelpful as possible and that is prefaced by my renunciation of what follows, e.g., “Stop, don’t read any further.”) This continuous uncertainty or constant ambiguity is and was meant to be both unsettling and exciting, making the reader feel on his or her own pulse the dubiety of the first-person pronoun: it’s me (you thought it was); no, it’s not, it’s Sonny Rollins; no, in an important sense, it’s neither of us. It’s both of us. It’s “all of us.”

The book’s best reader isn’t going to be a quote-spotter but somebody who grasps and relishes the ambiguous authorship of the text. The whole argument of the book is to put reality within quadruple quotation marks. Reality here isn’t straightforward or easily accessible; it’s slippery, evasive. Just as authorship is ambiguous, knowledge is dubious, and truth is unknown, or at the very least, relative.

JP: The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead meditates on the body’s ungraceful trek to death by considering your daughter’s athleticism, your waning physicality at middle age, and your father’s insatiable virility. After having written this book, after having discovered all of this about life, your life, do you feel any less anxious about death and about your own physicality? Another way to ask this is to say, does self-awareness mitigate fixation?

DS: Embarrassing to admit, but yes, completely. As I say when I give readings, this is my ninth book and the one that has changed me the most, by far. I now see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, and I find I can’t. It’s very odd, but the book’s ostensible subject is grim, dire, even morbid. And yet if the book works at all, I and the reader somehow “come out the other end.” The book is for me oddly joyful. Not sure how or why. It is about looking at death with zero scrim between yourself and the abyss, but coming to love this (relatively) unillusioned existence. Not sure my formulation is much beyond “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero” (Seize the day and place no trust in tomorrow), but all I can say is that the heaviness has lifted. The self-awareness has completely mitigated the fixation, at least for now. Next year, when I find I have a nodule on my index finger, my equanimity may well melt away, but for the nonce I feel like the accidental Buddhist—aware of the emptiness within and without and eerily accepting of it, if that doesn’t sound way too evolved. I think it must be that old thing that when you write about a subject, you tend to retire it by exhausting it; I think something like that must have happened here.

JP: I’m struck by the immense admiration and generosity you show toward your relationship with your father.

DS: My sister would say and does say that I was way, way too easy on him. A few readers thought I was too harsh toward him. My favorite take on this comes from my writer-friend Megan Staffel, who said, “It’s as though there is a large and wise personality generating it all, someone who is obviously you but almost bigger than you.” That just seems to me right: it’s a kind of projected equanimity. It’s a fictional generosity that, once articulated, becomes real. I wasn’t interested, really, in all the baseline animosity between me and my father, though I also wanted to make sure the book didn’t become Fridays with Miltie.

Not very consciously, I knew that as the book moved from a book of essays about the body—to a book of essays about the body with data—to a book of essays about the body with data and “wisdom”—to, finally, a book of essays about the body with data and “wisdom” with my father added as blocking figure, I needed to make sure that local complaints were kept to a minimum. My father and I are vectors on the grid of cellular life in the book, which is in no way a memoir; it’s a meditation on mortality. And as such I had to come to the point that I got his “life force.” No other pose or posture would do. Clinching irony: having posed that way, the attitude permeated the book and my life. The attitude took, oddly enough. I feel like I’m now much more forgiving than I ever was toward my own weaknesses, my human failings. Other people’s as well. We’re all mortal Bozos on this bus.

JP: How has the book informed your life as a father to a daughter?

DS: She’s now sixteen, and writing the book helped me hugely to understand her. I used to take very personally every little mini-flare-up she might have with me or my wife. But I now see it or tend to see or try to see it through the lens of biological imperative, biological necessity, sex drive; e.g., she needs to quarrel with us now and again, often, constantly, in order to create “space” for herself to decamp.

JP: In his foreword to the Soft Skull Press re-issue of your book Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography, film director Ross McElwee mentions his struggle of living a split existence—the person who experiences life versus the artist who witnesses and reports. Do you feel this split in your life? Does the writer-self often interrupt or at the least distract the self that’s trying to be a husband, father, son, teacher, and friend?

DS: I’d emphasize that Ross McElwee isn’t just a film director, but a documentary film director, and in particular a self-reflexive documentary filmmaker. My writing life has been enormously influenced by his work, especially Sherman’s March, which completely changed my writing life. What I learned from McElwee—among many other things—is how to enlarge the material by bouncing it off your own lens cap. It’s counterintuitive, but Sherman’s March becomes a much larger film by being as self-reflexive as it is. The film thereby becomes about everyone and everything—in particular, the relation between filmmaking, war, machinery, and the male sex drive—rather than being just about, say, General Sherman. This may not look like an answer to your question, but it really is. Does the writer-self interrupt, et cetera? I’d say if anything the opposite. The writer-self is never not foregrounded for me, alas.

JP: Enough About You considers the reader’s role (the “you”) in autobiography. As in Reality Hunger, the reader is more than a detached witness or voyeur; you intend your thoughts of self (and other) to point readers towards their thoughts of self.

DS: Yes, exactly, I quote virtually every hour Montaigne’s sentence, that every man contains within himself the entire human condition. That is the essayist’s temerity and arrogance—to make that claim. Somehow, the windows open out. The metaphor ramifies. “It must go further still: that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp.” The mirror turn lamp—that is everything to me.

JP: I asked you a few years ago what you considered dangerous writing; you mentioned “psychic revelation” and “cultural dread” as qualities of dangerous expression. Three years later, can you add to that?

DS: Yes, I’m drilling down into self, but also attaching that self to some larger thematic matrix so that the investigation is doing, I hope, at least double duty—exploring “myself” but also American culture and also, one would hope, some larger notion of the human animal, human society. I love that line in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, in which Phillip Lopate talks about how you don’t matter; all that matters is how you might elucidate some larger human trait and therefore make others feel less lonely, less freakish. Or as V. S. Pritchett said, “It’s all in the art. You don’t get any credit for living.”

To me, risk also must carry a formal element; q.v. again the Walter Benjamin line. When I think of books I love, some amazing alchemy has taken place: the writer is aware that he or she will pass this way but once, and all possibilities are available; we’re outside genre and we’re also outside certain expectations of what the writer can say, and in this special space—often, interestingly, filled with spaces—the author, narrator, speaker manages, in hundreds of little paragraphs, to convey for me, indelibly, what it feels like for one human being to be alive, and if explored fully enough, by implication, all human beings. That for me is a danger worth trying for.

JP: In Body Politic, Heroes, and Black Planet, you write about the culture of sport and physicality in America and the places in which sport intersects often with desire and style. How do you see that intersection between desire (sex) and sports?

DS: I think here a lot about George W. S. Trow’s discussion of the oceanic force of mass culture in Within the Context of No Context and Kundera’s discussion of being loved by one versus being loved by many in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I think that’s what all of these examples are getting at. Here are these iconic figures: Ichiro Suzuki, Gary Payton, Belvyn Menkus, whoever. And I think about making love with my girlfriend in graduate school and listening at the same time to the University of Iowa basketball games, to which we were also greatly, weirdly devoted. There’s a confusion here of realms—private and public, erotic and athletic, intimate and televised. On another level, obviously, sports are physical and sex is physical, and there’s an attempt to use one’s own body to travel into this other realm. I’m very interested in the essentially religious nature of sports fandom, the way in which, absent other gods, we project our fantasy lives onto these physically miraculous bodies.

JP: In some ways Black Planet seems like a true revision (i.e., re-seeing) of Heroes. Both books recount a man’s obsession over a single athlete. Do you feel Black Planet took you to a place Heroes didn’t? Or vice versa?

DS: The former. Weirdly, I wasn’t aware at the time of Black Planet as a re-imagining ofHeroes per se. Only much afterward did I see the obvious parallel. When I startedBlack Planet, I just thought it would be a book “about the Sonics.” But Gary Payton and especially race hijacked the book. I’d even say that race per se isn’t the topic of the book but rather otherness: how men and women see each other, see past each other as other, parents and children, athletes and fans, black and white, coach and player, East and West, human and other human. That is what that book is about, and in Antonya Nelson’s great phrase in another context, it’s how the book “got lucky,” how it “jumped the tracks,” got to material that I and it hadn’t counted on.

I think Heroes is way too invested in the bric-a-brac of narrative operation and so what I wanted to get to—my crazy investment in Ronnie Lester, the star player on the Iowa basketball team—got explored, but only somewhat tangentially.

JP: Do you miss the Supersonics?

DS: No.

JP: After you wrote Black Planet, did your interest in Gary Payton wax or wane?

DS: Wane. I haven’t attended a sporting event since writing that book more than ten years ago. Again, cure by overdose.

JP: Some of my favorite parts of Remote are the various lists (e.g., the bumper stickers) that appear. Why does the list appeal to you? Reality Hunger seems like a giant inventory, a blossoming litany of evidence and insight.

DS: I love [Gregory] Burnham’s “Subtotals,” Lucas Cooper’s “Class Notes,” Paul Theroux’s “Acknowledgments,” Joe Brainard’s I Remember, so many other list-like works. For me, above all, I like the pseudo-foundness of such books, stories, essays. I love work that looks like a phone directory and is really a tone poem. It looks like life, but juxtaposed, altered, repositioned, and thematized, it’s art. That appeals to me, bottomlessly.

JP: Another favorite moment in Remote for me comes in “Why We Live at the Movies,” a prose poem describing the experience of wearing sunglasses and adjusting to this new way of seeing. Below the text is a snapshot of a boy wearing a Lone Ranger costume followed by a beautiful essay on women who wear glasses.

DS: One thing that interests me here about these three sections is not so much the mixing of photos and texts as the mixing of “me,” “not-me,” my work, and others’ work—the beginning of my interest (manifest most in Reality Hunger)—in incorporating, appropriating, remixing other people’s voices. The prose poem about sunglasses is my remix of a former student’s riff on sunglasses. The photo of the boy in Lone Ranger garb appears, I agree, to be me, but it’s my half brother, Joseph. Then comes the essay on women wearing glasses—how erotically obsessed I am with women wearing glasses. Vogue asked me to write about a fetish, and this is what I came up with (seemed more interesting than, say, fishnet stockings or French braids). That is to say, once I said I was obsessed with women wearing glasses, I found the language to embody the notion. And now having written this, I sort of am. But am I or was I really? Not especially. Composition is a fiction-making operation; memory is a dream-machine.

JP: At what point did you begin to mix in snapshots from your childhood and photos of various celebrities? Was it late in the process or was that your plan from the beginning?

DS: I noticed that in the liner notes of a lot of grunge-rock CDs there were heartbreaking photos of band members as little kids—all that hope and energy and innocence in photos of Kurt Cobain at age seven were an implicit rebuke to what had happened to the lead singer-protagonist by the grand old age of twenty-six. I was and am interested in that contrast; where did all that light in the eyes go? I wanted to use photos in something like the same way. Then it occurred to me how powerful it was to contrast the childhood photos with celebrity photos. The celebrity photos seemed so unbeautiful, so airbrushed. Where was iconic meaning here—in childhood photos or in rictus-smile photos of celebrities? That’s putting it somewhat more polemically than the book does, but I was very interested in the gap between the celebrity photos and the family-album photos. This turned the whole thing into the David Shields channel on a very odd cable package; the reader-viewer should get seriously confused as to which photos are gorgeous and which are embarrassing.

JP: Your novel Dead Languages makes the connection between stuttering and the narrator’s love (presumably your love) for language. Have you connected your experience as a stutterer to your displeasure with more conventional modes of storytelling (e.g., plot and dramatic encounters)?

DS: I think stuttering prepared me for worship of voice, and through voice, I got to essay; also, stuttering gave me the benefit and curse of paralytic self-consciousness. For quite a while, stuttering seemed to trigger for me an extremely strong interest in pure voice-prints: e.g., Ford Madox Ford, [Joeseph] Conrad, [John] Barth, Emily Brontë, [Vladimir] Nabokov, [John] Hawkes, [Albert] Camus. Novels that are extremely and strongly voiced. I was always interested in the page being sort of my loud revenge on stuttering. As my aesthetic altered, I got increasingly interested in works of pure voice and tried to work within fiction as pure voice, but I came to see how counterproductive that was. Given my lack of interest in scene and plot, why make fake gestures toward fiction? So this interest shifted toward works that are so purely voice as to be essayistic.

I also think I was sort of a six-year-old deconstructionist; even as a child, I was terribly aware of language’s reverb. I could feel on my nerve endings and on my tongue how language communicates primarily language; in Dead Languages, I talk about how being a stutterer means that when you’re expressing major feelings such as love, pain, joy, et cetera, you’re primarily aware first of the attempt to express it rather than the naked feeling itself. As a result, huge self-consciousness has been part of my tool kit, for better and worse. At best, it’s this great metaphor for what it feels like to be alive now. At worst, it’s just the stutterer’s impasse.

JP: What I like about writing essay is that I don’t obsess over reliable narration (sometimes I expect readers will feel attached to what I’m saying while other times they’ll be detached, just as I am in reality); nor do I feel the need to control (in a hyper-rational way) the prose in a way I felt I had to with fiction, as if I had to be a director of my work. So I wonder—what do I, as essayist, submit control to? The work? The subject matter? The language? How might you articulate that relationship?

DS: I love how in serious or literary or contemplative nonfiction or lyric essay, the question is: how deeply into the material did the writer bore? That to me is everything. That’s why I’m a “nonfiction writer.” It is not that the work is about the ostensible subject; it’s that the work is about how deeply the subject is explored and, by implication, transformed. If I think about the degree to which I like or do not like certain books of mine, it’s all about the degree to which I think I investigated the topic from every possible angle and at the deepest possible level. Whereas for me in fiction, that investigation inevitably takes a severe backseat, which is to me way less interesting.

JP: Do you think self-inquiry has become more prevalent as all of these mass (and massive) cultures threaten to shrink the self?

DS: I’d say a lot of cultural forces have led us into the self, but at a very shallow level. The way I say it in Reality Hunger is: “Capitalism implies and induces insecurity, which is constantly being exploited, of course, by all sorts of people selling things. Therapy lit, victim lit, faux-helpful talk shows, self-help books: all of these prey on our essential insecurity. The great book, though—Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, say—takes us down into the deepest levels of human insecurity, and there we find that we all dwell. Autobiography at its very best is a serious handshake or even full embrace between the writer willing to face him or herself and the reader doing the same. At a lower level, it’s a sentimental narrative about fall and forgiveness.”

Everything from the Oprah Book Club to the Wall Street bailout to YouTube pushes us toward self. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this about us more than two hundred years ago: “Democracy turns man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate on himself alone. Democratic peoples may amuse themselves momentarily by looking at nature, but it is about themselves that they are really excited. Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” But then he went on to say, “Here, and here alone, are the true springs of poetry among them, and those poets, I believe, who will not draw inspiration from these springs will lose their hold over the audience they intend to charm.” I don’t know about “charm,” but on a variety of levels the culture is pushing us toward shallow self-inquiry. I can only point to good work that is seriously self-excavating; perhaps more importantly, there’s a distance in good work, an irony, a complicity—a sense that self isn’t being explored for self’s sake, but for readers’ sake; there is an acute sense of the writer knowing that he or she is guilty as charged, guilty before being charged.

JP: You and Bradford Morrow are editing an anthology of essays titled Death: Contemporary Writers Confront the Inevitable [forthcoming in December, 2010]. In the introduction, you describe the anthology as:

…an early 21st-century attempt to look at death from twenty, distinctly different, and dizzying points of view, but all of which see death as a brute biological fact rather than a passageway to eternity. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. But look at the bravery of all these writers diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.

This project seems to be a natural follow-up to Reality Hunger, a book that also includes myriad other “dizzying viewpoints” in the form of quotes sans footnotes or quotation marks (at least in the version of the book that you intended). I admire the way your work embodies a chorus of voices. I wonder if you could speak to your interest in mixing and mashing your voice with the voices of others.

DS: New voices, documentary voices, found voices, counter-voices, stolen voices, recorded voices, other voices competing with mine—all seem to me to be a way to cross-pollinate, cross-fertilize, counter-program, opening up the broadcast to all speakers while wiring the whole thing through my own megaphone.

Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique, forty-year relationship between Milla, a sixty-seven-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. In 1950s South Africa, life for white farmers was full of promise—young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside with Agaat by her side.

By the 1990s, Milla’s family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate guardian. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene van Niekerk creates a story about love and loyalty.

Click above more more photos on Flickr

So, basically, we love you Powells, and Annie Blooms, and McNally Jackson, and Word, and Book Soup, and Skylight, and Housing Works, and Bookworks, and Square Books, and Prairie Lights, and City Lights, and The Tattered Cover, and The Strand, and Greenlight, and Book Passage, and Book People, and RiverRun, and Fountain, and all you other awesome and supportive stores. We love you all. But in the spirit full disclosure, Tin House is having an illicit, epistolary affair with Pepper Parker (lets pause for a moment and acknowledge how great that name is…she could play short stop for the 1972 Cincinnati Reds) from Vintage Books in Vancouver, WA. This morning, her lovely note was in our inbox (stand by for a shameless plug of our forthcoming novel, Agaat, available, I hope, in all of the aforementioned stores come May):

Thank you for sending us a copy of Agaat.  I have everyone I know reading it.  It floored me.  I found it to be the most astonishing thing I’ve read in a long, long time, and as a bookseller, I read all the time.  We are handselling it here, of course, and wishing it the very best.  We have nominated it for the IndieNext List. It deserves every award it receives…I hope it wins something here in the states. PLEASE pass on our utter gratitude to Ms. van Niekerk. Her work is achingly beautiful. Wish we could see it in hardcover.

And thanks again,

Pepper Parker
Vintage Books
6613 E Mill Plain Boulevard
Vancouver, Washington  98661

I take back all the awful things I yelled (alone, unreasonable, and  in traffic on I-5 North) about Vancouver. I’m coming to visit you soon. Without support from the indies, the books we love would have a hard time finding the readers they deserve.

Love,

Tony

Milla, the main character, is a fifth-generation, I think it’s fifth-generation, owner of this farm—a farm that’s been passed down through the female line—called Grootmoedersdrift. Grandmother’s Drift, Grandmother’s Crossing. And so she certainly feels, and her mother feels, that they are a kind of aristocracy. And what Marlene is plugging into here is a very strong tradition of the farm novel in Afrikaans, a tradition that goes back to C. M. van den Heever, who wrote these very grueling stories called Droogte which is “Drought” and Laat vrugte which is “Late Fruit”—stories that are very much rooted in the naked earth, and tend to be about very strong, dour, survivors.

Anyway, Marlene is subverting [this tradition] because the story of Agaat is what is happening now in a new dispensation. Milla is still in charge. Her son has left the farm in disgust, really, of the political system, he is not interested in inheriting the farm. Milla’s husband has become a bit of a cipher. He is a very traditional sort of male chauvinist pig, but he is, in fact, emasculated, really, by Milla’s power and Milla uses her sexuality . . .

Then of course there is Agaat, who is the girl—”a little colored,” as they would have been called in South Africa—whom Milla takes into the house. Milla finds this little girl on her mother’s farm, absolutely destitute, desperately ill, with a misshapen little arm. And Milla takes pity on the child, takes the child into the house, raises her, and teaches her to speak. Agaat can hardly speak when she comes into the house [a fact that echoes Milla's later loss of speech].

Now this section, Marlene has told in the second person. And Marlene debated this for a long time and then decided that the second person was interesting in that it has an almost confessional, even accusatory inflection. . . . Milla is recalling what she herself did as you did this, then you did this, and then you did that.

But, of course, yes, in the sex scene there’s distance as well. And it’s a helpful distance because it helps you (the reader) not to take sides. And that’s why I stopped you when you said accusatory, because I thought that Marlene was trying to set it up so that you’re not just sympathetic with Milla, but perhaps also with Jak. And, weirdly, I ended up sympathetic with Jak (Milla’s male chauvinist husband) precisely because of that voice. Maybe more sympathetic than I should have been? (Laughter)

MH: Yes, so the two voices. Then the third voice is the diaries. These diaries start when Milla adopts Agaat. When Agaat is taken into the house, Milla decides she must keep a record of this. But, just to confuse us, these diaries are re-read, read back to us in reverse order. Another aspect of T.S. Eliot that Marlene likes is in the end is my beginning because the novel does exactly that, it eats its own tail. And it retraces events. So when we get to the end of the novel, Milla’s death, it is also recounting the tale of the beginning, which is Milla’s adopting of Agaat.

MH: She sees it as a kind of covenant with God. She has undertaken it, and she writes a solemn little bit, “And on this day . . . I, Milla, undertook this, and may God help me in this.” It is all very pious. And for that reason, perhaps, she thinks she must keep a record of every day, of Agaat’s development. So we have a very detailed account of how Agaat starts to talk, and Milla’s pleasure in teaching Agaat, and Agaat’s pleasure in things. And that would be hard to see as merely an exercise of power on Milla’s part. And Milla shares, in fact, her knowledge of the land, so that Agaat, by the end of the novel, is as well informed on the plants, the animals, farming techniques as Milla herself was. And Milla learned all these things from her father.

Illustration by Jacob Weinstein

I wrote this Lost & Found piece for our “Games People Play” theme issue (on newsstands now!) right on the brink of the season. The playoffs start this weekend, and if you followed the NBA this year, you’ll know life hasn’t gotten any easier. (If you’re not familiar with my agony, please scroll down for a collage of woe.) -Tony Perez

Why Disney has not turned the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers’ championship season into one of its inspirational sports movies is beyond me. David Anspaugh would direct, Jerry Bruckheimer would produce, and Alan Alda would give a spirited performance as hard-assed coach “Dr. Jack” Ramsay. Obstacles would be overcome, egos put aside, race relations glossed over. A shaggy redheaded center would espouse leftist politics and listen to the Grateful Dead, and players from And1 mix tapes would sign on to depict the rival 76ers. Guards Lionel Hollins and Dave Twardzik would cut down the nets to an uplifting and very Forest-Gumpian Alan Silvestri score while Bill Walton tossed his massive jersey into the crowd. The box office numbers would be fair; cable syndication would be excellent. The Academy would, rightly, ignore it, but youth league coaches would point and nod. People would be inspired.

But three seasons later, I suppose, that source material becomes a bit problematic—my hypothetical script a bit complicated. By the time David Halberstam embeds himself in the 1980 Blazers to write The Breaks of the Game (a departure from his political writings and war correspondence and, to my mind, the greatest book ever written about basketball), the stars of that movie are hardly recognizable. Walton, the literal and figurative center of the team, has cut his hair, rebranded himself a “born-again capitalist,” signed with the Clippers, and moved to Southern California. Power forward Maurice Lucas, the team’s enforcer and spark plug—the player who got himself kicked out of game two of the ’77 championship for picking a fight on his teammates’ behalf—has refocused his scrap and aggression on contract negotiations. Dr. Jack, in his plaids and patterned suits, seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown and can no longer control the play, or soul, of his team. “Portland,” Halberstam writes, “in its short ten-year history had known mostly the frustration of defeat and then in one magic year, briefly, the absolute joy of championship. That championship had come, and then almost as quickly been lost again.”

To comprehend why a single championship would mean so much, and why the squandering of that talent would feel so devastating, a rough understanding of the region is essential. Northwesterners, of my generation anyway, have grown accustomed to minor victories among more prevalent defeat. We have a nuanced view of accomplishment. Our successes and celebrities, by major-market standards, are B-list or lower. And on the brink of superstardom, our local heroes—those who don’t move themselves to New York or LA—blow out a knee or their brains. We resent them and we adore them. We are, Halberstam writes, “accustomed to losing and accustomed as well to loving [our] losers.”

Reared on the franchises and college teams of Oregon and Washington, this has been my burden to carry. Born half a decade after our one, true shining moment, I’ve never had the privilege of a victory parade. Close calls have come—Super Bowl XL, the 2001 ALCS, the Blazers in ’90 and ’92—but I own no commemorative mug.

“A spiritual crusade,” Ron Culp, the team’s trainer, called the ’77 season. “Unselfish players playing with great generosity and moral conviction, who were close off the court as well as on and who . . . seemed to symbolize athletic and racial togetherness.”

For Culp, that team transcended mere sport. Halberstam tells us that “he did not merely minister to these athletes, he believed in them, not just their victories, but in their larger purpose.” But where Halberstam picks the story up, Culp is at the center of serious—though likely exaggerated—allegations. Walton had accused the Blazer management and medical staff of pushing him toward the needle and thereby causing long-term damage to his chronically injured foot for their short-term needs. Having considered Walton one of his closest friends, Culp quickly grew jaded: “He realized that he had been wrong—that what he thought he had been a part of, and had not, simply did not exist . . . . He was not, as he had once believed, part of some spiritual community.”

With Walton gone, the center could not hold. Or rebound. Only one team in the league averaged fewer points per game. The driving concern wasn’t advancing in the playoffs, but advancing individual careers. Lucas endlessly speculated about where he’d be playing next—he wanted a large market, a stage to increase his fame. He obsessed over publicity (what he called “the pub”). Older players worried about where they’d retire. Mychal Thompson, after a promising rookie year, sat out the whole season with a broken leg. Hollins spent a good portion of the year on the bench nursing a knee injury, its degree of seriousness a point of contention between coach and player. Ramsay’s famous structure and discipline ceased to provide a winning framework.

Halberstam, of course, sets his sights higher than providing color commentary to a disappointing season. The real subject, thank God, is something greater. The Blazers’ problems are a microcosm of a certain breakdown in the NBA, and the NBA stands in for a certain breakdown in modern American life. Not unlike the film and publishing industries, Halberstam says, the league had devolved—its active impulse no longer quality of product, but simply the bottom line. “For in American Sports in 1980,” Halberstam writes, “there was no God but Madison Avenue and A.C. Nielson was his prophet.”

Larry Weinberg, the Trail Blazers’ owner, “had entered professional basketball thinking it would be fun, and it had become, in his own sardonic word, interesting.” Halberstam explores that euphemism. The changing economics of the league—due in no small part to the growing dependence on TV executives and the leverage of the newly created players’ union—played a major role, as did race relations, as did class. Though he paces the book with the Blazers’ schedule, Halberstam crafts perfectly arced backstories—seemingly anecdotal at first but quickly claiming your total focus—to provide context for the characters and the history of the league. The reader forgets he’s reading about a specific year and a specific team until the page break comes and he’s back in the Blazer locker room, only now pretty much equipped to fill out forward Kermit Washington’s tax return and medical history forms.

For contemporary fans, The Breaks of the Game shouldn’t provoke a smug look-how-far-we’ve-come attitude. Anyone who thinks race now only plays a part in the sports commentary of Rush Limbaugh, count how many times a white point guard is described as “smart” while a black guard is characterized as “instinctual.” Red Aurbach’s fear that ballooning guaranteed contracts would diminish the drive of talented players is personified by Tracy McGrady. The Knicks are once again playing the ugliest, most self-indulgent basketball in the league. Still, at the time of his death (a car accident) in 2007, Halberstam was on his way to interview a Hall of Fame quarterback for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship. He recognized that there was something special in athletics, even after witnessing everything that was not.

Victory parades end, and deep down I understand that seeing my team win would provide no lasting spiritual nourishment. Satisfaction is the end of desire, et cetera, et cetera. But in sports, as in other entertainments, we need a certain suspension of disbelief to properly enjoy the built-in drama of a game, the arc of a season. We need to believe momentarily that we are the good guys and the Lakers are the bad guys. With five seconds left and the ball in our stars’ hands, we need to believe that no size of signing bonus would lure him to Miami, or Houston. And we do.

By 1980, the playoffs had been expanded to include twelve of the twenty-two NBA teams, “one more example of the league’s cheapening of a product in order to get instant revenues.” Ramsay knew this. Still, when his 38–44 Blazers secured that last playoff spot, he refused to accept his friends’ suggestions that they weren’t really a “playoff team.” Sitting in a motel room, watching Walton’s Clippers play the Golden State Warriors on a tiny television set, Ramsay snapped at a reporter who suggested that Walton had lost a step. The reporter pushed, insisting that Walton seemed a bit slow. “‘No one playing understands the game like he does,’ Ramsay said flatly. When he finished the silence in the room was complete. The lesson was clear: criticize Walton’s game and in a primal way you were criticizing Ramsay. The championship season lived.” In spite of all the evidence, he had to believe that Walton was special, that his team had been, somehow, different.

The 1980 playoffs didn’t last long for the Blazers. Portland lost the three-game series to Seattle, a team coming off its own, and only, championship season. (They went on to lose as well—their stars complained and moved, and eventually the whole team relocated to Oklahoma City, leaving Seattle’s basketball community bitter, wet, and with nothing to follow but college kids—like Nirvana fans left with nothing but Pearl Jam.)

“It was,” Halberstam writes, “a long season for a troubled team in a troubled league.”

Why did The Breaks of the Game slip out of print for so many years? Maybe the book-buying public subscribes to George Plimpton’s “small ball theory” of sports literature: the smaller the ball as its subject, the better the book produced. (While his theory is itself an argument ripe for a graduate thesis on class bias, Plimpton did grant Halberstam a place on his “slim basketball shelf.”) Maybe it was just the invisible hand; our small market didn’t demand more copies than our denizens could find on Amazon Marketplace. Or maybe it was a desire to romanticize history, an athletic equivalent of a first-grade Columbus Day lesson plan. We want to remember our underdogs tearing down the nets and spraying champagne, not tearing their ligaments and crying over their paychecks.

But what of those of us who know better? Like Halberstam. Like Ramsay. Like me. Every October I come back looking for 1977. I write this on the brink of another season—my hopes pinned on the back of another injury-prone center and a Northwest native son who can’t quite break the glass ceiling of our region—and I can’t help but suspend that disbelief. A fair quid pro quo for eighty-two games and, with some luck, the playoffs. The sentimental underdog stories, the narratives of team unity and epic seasons—I know it’s the stuff of hack screenwriters. I know it’s bullshit. But even so, with full knowledge of how interesting professional basketball was and is, I can’t help but believe it’s also fun.

BONUS: A RUNDOWN OF OUR SEASON!

via Dan Sweet, www.dan-sweet.com

TH43_int_p135-139

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=819 8 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=749 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=749#comments Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:10:12 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=749

For those of you who didn’t make it to Denver, you can follow our live Twitter stream. Those here, use an #AWP10 tag to tell those suckers back home who you’re drinking with at the hotel bar. We’re in booth 513 if you’d like to stop by and compliment Cheston’s hair.

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=749 4 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=787 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=787#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:48:43 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=787

Keith Lee Morris’s new collection CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT will be popping up at your local bookstore/preferred internet retailer this week.  Keith has been kind enough to give our readers a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into choosing a title, or lack thereof:

Let’s talk about what a pain in the butt it is to name things. First, this book I have out with Tin House, which is called Call It What You Want—why do you suppose it’s called that? Because we couldn’t come up with a frigging name for the thing and we were hoping maybe you could! That’s how desperate we got, me and my editors, who probably wanted to set me on fire or at the very least maim me before we were through. I didn’t like anything! Because I’m the author! And authors never like things, especially the names they come up with for stuff, at least in my experience. You ask an author why’d you name it that? and they’ll most likely say I don’t know. It sucks.

Ok, there are reasons for this particular book’s name other than the fact that we couldn’t seem to name it. One of the stories, “What I Want from You,” (which, by the way, was not the story’s original name) is about a man’s death and whether that death can or cannot be termed a suicide. So there was that. Then there was the moral and ethical indefiniteness of a lot of the action in the stories—in the first story, “Testimony,” it’s unclear, even after all the information is out in the open, whether a witness’s role in his friend’s death could or should be considered grounds for prosecution. In “The Cyclist,” the narrator sees his life as an endless series of almost randomly chosen possibilities, from which it becomes impossible to extract the most appropriate or even the most real one. In several of the stories—“Tired Heart,” in which a man takes a mysterious journey across the country while possibly being followed by an evil spirit of some sort; “Blackout,” in which the main character loses his memory during his high school reunion and can no longer be certain of any of his own actions; and ultimately “The Culvert,” in which the narrator drops down his own private rabbit hole of sorts, finding there what may be reality or fantasy, life or death—there’s real uncertainty about what’s actually occurring. So there’s an awful lot of stuff that’s very hard to name, is what I’m saying. I’m not even mentioning “My Roommate Kevin Is Awesome,” which I couldn’t even begin to describe in any way that made any sense, and I wrote the damn thing. Overall, the stories in the collection want to walk a fine line between waking and dreaming.

Tough Call...

Beyond all that, there’s just this naming thing in general. My oldest son, London (let’s stop and think about that one for a minute—why would we name a kid London, you ask? Because he’s British? Nope, though his grandfather was. Because it’s a family name? Nope. Because his dad’s favorite author is Jack London? Nope, not really, although I am attracted to narratives in which people and animals freeze to death. Why is he named London? Because my wife said, “What about Paris?” and I said, “Are you joking? I’d rather name a kid London than Paris,” and then we both kind of went, “Hmm,” and then she went into labor)—so anyway, my son London, who fortunately likes his name just fine despite its being totally illogical, is a budding musician, and he’s in a band, a band that has now remained nameless for the better part of a year! London explains it this way—“Band names always suck, Dad.” I agree! Let all things remain nameless!

But that’s not an option, apparently. There would be the problem of all those personal pronouns piling up one on top of another, especially in Russian novels of over 1000 pages. For my part, the names of people and places in my fiction either come to me immediately or serve as the basis for recurring nightmares all the way up until (and sometimes even afterward) publication. I knew the name of my first novel, The Greyhound God, within about 30 seconds of writing the opening sentence. My second novel, The Dart League King, started off as a short story called “Russell’s Thursday Night,” then became a book called The Thursday Night Dart League, then Dart Night, then finally arrived at its current title, after extensive consultation with all sorts of people who were sometimes just this side of total strangers. Weird character names sometimes pop into my head—“Beebo” in the story “Guests.” “Deeder” in “Ayudame.” Maybe I just have a preoccupation with double “e”s. Sometimes the names are based on real things—we really did have a tailless pet squirrel named Jim, just like the family in “What I Want from You.” I had a student named Dave Baker who for some reason supplied the name of the main character in “Guests.” I don’t how or why names come into being most of the time. I’m not one of those writers who writes down names in a journal or thumbs endlessly through the Yellow Pages. They just kind of happen, in the act of writing things down, and then later, when I put together an entire collection of stories, I discover that all the female character names start with the letter J, and half the male characters are named Michael, and I have to go right back to naming again.

Anyway, names are trouble, trouble, and more trouble according to me, so I invite anyone reading this blog to send in awesome names for people, towns, restaurants, public parks, and elementary schools. Any names that find their way into my next book will be considered reason for the contributor to appear in the acknowledgments, I swear to God (or whatever you want to call him (or her, or it, as the case may be)).

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=787 2 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=745 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=745#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:32:03 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=745 Kind of like an author appearing on Oprah today (if she were a chain smoker). Edward R. Murrow talks to Robert Paul Smith about HOW TO DO NOTHING WITH NOBODY ALL ALONE BY YOURSELF, his classic 1950’s compendium of cool stuff for kids to do. If you want to be the favorite parent, or aunt, or uncle, or weird neighbor, you really should consider buying a copy for your child, or niece, or nephew, or neighbor kid.

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=745 1 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=733 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=733#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:38:32 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=733 Tin House’s Games People Play issue hits stands this week, just in time for baseball’s spring training.  Among new fiction by Jennifer Egan, poetry from Matthew Zapruder, and essays by Tom Bissell and Karen Russell, writer Brian James Barr unearths the memoirs of Bill “The Spaceman” Lee, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos in the 1970s and early ’80s who is probably the only player in MLB history to be immortalized in song by Warren Zevon.  As the below clip shows, pro sports were a bit different in 1979.  The Spaceman’s pre-game regimen?  “I went out and had a beer and a steak, and go get ‘em.” –Brian DeLeeuw

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=733 1 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=724 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=724#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:18:56 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=724 One of our great writers, Barry Hannah, died yesterday at age 67. Tin House had the privilege of publishing an interview last summer, conducted by Tom Franklin. They discussed Hannah’s vast body of work, his illness, fishing, and firearms. At one point, Franklin asked if shooting, a hobby of Hannah’s, got him closer to his characters. “The wholesale shooting has become so awful in America,” Hannah said. “Not only are guns cheap and used by cowards but they’re also too convenient to end things or give tension to stories.” True. Then again, at the beginning of the conversation, Hannah produced a derringer that sat between the two men while they spoke. As a tribute, we’ll considering an editorial policy that mandates all interviews be conducted as so.

Below is the interview that first appeared in our Tenth Anniversary Issue, Summer ‘09:

Barry Hannah: You’ve got to be good and lucky too, to catch a good fish. I’ve been neither in the five years that we’ve tried. You’re talking two charmed fishermen here, and we cancel it out of each other.

Tom Franklin: I used to be a good fisherman, until you came along.

BH: Yeah. That was my story.

TF: A couple of the times we’ve fished, at Wall Doxey State Park, I noticed our different styles, approaches. I’d go to one corner of the dock and put a cork out there, or two corks out there, and just watch them the whole time, moving one here or there, a few feet maybe. And you’re wandering all over the docks and around the banks, climbing onto limbs.

BH: Probably trying for the big bass.

TF: You’re not going to let me make this a metaphor, are you? How most of the rest of us find our little spot and sit there safely on the dock. And you’re on the other side of the lake, on a log, about to fall in, casting some lubed-up space-age lure?

BH: [Laughs.] As the writer, I’m always the last to know. I’m just doing what I can at the time.

TF: You’ve had at least one fishing story in each of your collections. What is it about fishing that draws you to that subject in your writing?

BH: The pull of the unknown, underwater. That tug, that tug. Ever since I was old enough to hold a cane pole, fishing’s been a joyful, natural sport and feast, you know. And you also gotta be crafty to catch a good fish, one you want to eat. We ate largemouth bass here in those days. Nowadays I let them go because I don’t need them.

TF: [pointing his pencil at the pistol on the table]: You’re a collector of firearms—pistols, rifles, shotguns. Does shooting get you closer to your characters?

BH [looks stricken]: No, no. Shooting is just a hobby, a target hobby. Now I shoot beer cans, not mammals. I get a peckerwood thrill out of seeing this thing in my hand lurch and blow something up in the air. That’s all.

It may get me closer to history if I hold a weapon of an era, so you would know how heavy the weapon was, say the derringer in the 1880s. Or up to the 1920s. But you don’t really need to own it, all you need to do is see it. But lately I’m horrified by guns. The wholesale shooting has become so awful in America. Not only are guns cheap and used by cowards but they’re also just too convenient to end things or give you tension in stories.

TF: Can you talk about how your short stories, as you see them, have progressed? How, say, are the stories in High Lonesome different from the ones in Airships?

BH: I know my Bats Out of Hell stories are longer. I just had a fit of writing after my father’s death. And it was almost like glossololia or something, I couldn’t quit writing stories, they just kept coming. Short, long. I’m typing like a fiend, or writing by hand. Which is something I trust. And Airships was edited beautifully by Gordon Lish. He was getting me the most out of every sentence. He would have probably pared down the stories of High Lonesome a good deal. I became my own short story editor after learning from Gordon, in workshop. I like a long story, but nobody wants to publish a long story unless you’re, say, Richard Ford. It’s just a mode that’s unfortunately not hot now.

The short story was what it absolutely was when I was in college: Hemingway, Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Faulkner. Their short works were, I guess, the best to teach in the classroom. I mean, I’m like most dudes, I didn’t read much in college that wasn’t assigned. I thought I was doing plenty. I’d read the things that were assigned in other courses and just hated them—what I didn’t want to know, I didn’t learn.

TF: You mentioned Gordon Lish, and I wanted to ask, in a little more detail, about your own editing process.

BH: The Sick Soldier at Your Door has come back from my editor at Grove—

TF: This is the new book.

BH: Yeah. And I was in such despair. I love the voice so much, but I’d forgotten what I try to teach students, and what I love myself. I had done the book in monologues and forgotten the tension a book needs all the way through. Monologues were the wrong way to do it . . .

TF: Can you describe your process of working on The Sick Soldier At Your Door?

BH: The overview took a long time on this book. Now, after seven years of dither, Sick Soldier will be short stories. It was never a novel. I just couldn’t find this simple truth and punished myself needlessly by thinking too much, gathering too much. I’ve done this for three years before so this was a record and hell to live. However, I’m excited by the stories. Now, I can jump to with zeal and purpose every morning.

TF: I’ve heard it was a sequel to Ray.

BH: The book will be no sequel. A possible son of Ray, El Burden, appears in one story as a lay preacher on a yellow Triumph motorcycle. He has fallen on hard times. His alcoholic nephew is an arsonist holding Burden’s last forty thousand dollars.

TF: So how will you go about putting the tension in, or—

BH: Well, it’s there already, just buried. I need to cut it down to a nub, I hope, about like Ray. The original Ray, where I started with about seven hundred pages. And now it [The Sick Soldier] is around three hundred pages. In the end I’ll probably get it down to a 130-page book. I hope. That’s what it needs. A reason to read it.

TF: Is that typical for your process, to write a lot more than you use? With both novels and stories?

BH: Yep. I can’t bear to revise. I want to give it away to an editor. “Please, do it for me!” I can’t revise myself very well. [Richard] Bausch, a very fine writer, he hates the first draft. But me? I love the first draft. It’s just different with us. Richard Ford, I asked his wife, does he ever sit down and dash off a story? She says, “Absolutely not.” He’s very meticulous. For Tim O’Brien, a paragraph a day is a miracle. He works slowly, like a gem cutter, to see if this is true—if this is true, if it’s natural, if it’s right. And that’s the way, that’s the measure of a writer.

TF: Can you talk about the autobiographical aspects of Ray and Sick Soldier?

BH: I’ve fought autobiography because, in my sick days, it’s kind of shut-in literature I don’t like. My work always requires me in the world, living and trying. Otherwise I might end up writing self-conscious meditative poetry, for God’s sake.

TF: What’s it like when you’re on fire with a story? Like the ones in Bats Out of Hell?

BH: I’m typing like a fiend. Or writing longhand in a number of school journals.

###

TF: How has illness affected your work?

BH: Lately, I think medication has gotten in my way. I’m in remission, but there’s still some pain, some depression. But there are no excuses, finally; you don’t lose a minute, if you’re alive. It’ll all count. Every sentence. If you become one of the suffering, you’re apt to become more tender in your stories. The illnesses, having been lived, do not invite me as a subject. Sickness stops my creativity. I’m no Proust. I must feel a mild ecstasy for my writing to be any good. You don’t get this with catheters, depressive trips to the doctor’s offices, chemotherapy—believe me.

I mean, finally I got of an age where age was interfering with my work. I don’t have the energy for everything. And I don’t think I was born to be more than a lieutenant. Possibly. I don’t like responsibility for everybody, I don’t want to know everybody, I don’t want to micromanage, I don’t have these—I don’t need power.

TF: Obviously you have less time and energy, but has it affected your writing process?

BH: I’ve become a major movie buff. I used to scorn people like me. But now I have all kinds of videos, DVDs, and I passively sit back and watch them. Even a bad movie can teach you something. They are the art of our day.

[William] Harrison taught me that back in the sixties. But for a writer the Hollywood experience is so stupid and devastating. Harrison’s spent much time out there. And had a little success, finally, one or two financial bonanzas.

TF: Does becoming a movie buff make you want to go back and start writing movies again?

BH: No. I made the mistake of trying—well, it wasn’t a mistake, it was a financial necessity—of wanting to be a screenplay writer, with [Robert] Altman getting me some jobs. There was a writers’ strike going on out there then, and I wasn’t a member of the union. We were just pitching back and forth at each other and being pleasant. But I was no good at it because I depend on everything else that a screenplay does not do. None of my good stuff is in a screenplay, nothing of it.

TF: And your work would be very hard to adapt, for obvious reasons.

BH: See, things are so simple. I think Altman won an Oscar once for a screenplay he did overnight. See? The great smash Aliens, Tom McGuane told me, was written by a couple of guys on speed in about two days. I don’t doubt it, but it’s so simple, I might not be able to do it. And I think that’s what writers often realize—that is so simple, so true, what have I been thinking man, this guy is on it, he’s on the bean. It’s the simplicity we’re after, isn’t it?

TF: Yeah. Why is it so hard to achieve?

BH: Noise. You allow the world to get in. When I was young, I drank socially, in revelry, but I got into trouble with booze because it closed things out beautifully for me. It was a medication, and you even get physically deaf—I didn’t know that until a few years ago—through beer. That’s why people at bars are just screaming, it seems. See, if you’re straight and you go in there, everybody’s screaming at each other, even if there’s not a band. You actually go deaf, and it’s not just because you’re hard of hearing; the alcohol numbs the hearing. So, it was getting in that zone, the quietness where I could find my own voice, and alcohol helped. It’s a crying shame that it’s bad for you, or that you must increase the quantity if you’ve got a disease, you know, you must increase until you’re ill.

TF: And people worried that you wouldn’t be able to write more when you stopped drinking.

BH: I did, hugely. That was one of the major problems I had stopping. I was in great fear that I would lose all of my stuff.

TF: But then, Bats Out of Hell.

BH: Yeah. I really put more effort or was more on fire with natural juice for Bats Out of Hell, so I like that book probably a little better than Airships, because Airships was thirty years ago. I love it that Airships has gotten fame and notoriety now that it is being taught.

TF: You know, you’ve had some famous students over the years. I thought you might just talk about Larry Brown a little bit, you know—what’s it been like seeing him start, and then seeing his entire career?

BH: Okay, number one, Larry was never my student in a class. But it’s like my relationship to Jim Whitehead up at Arkansas—he’s a beautiful poet but he never taught me. Except he taught me everything, he taught me when we shot pool, he taught me in the bar at Roger’s Recreation [in Fayetteville, Arkansas]. Big, tall man, passionate about poetry, quoted Yeats, you know. He was a bad pool shot, though. [Laughs] But I said, “My God, you know, that’s a good life.” If you’re that big and athletic and feel that much for poems, I mean, they gave me a shot in the arm and I’m a smaller guy, but I never had any interest in being ultra-sensitive. But I wanted to write—so did Larry.

Larry started out wanting to be Stephen King, wanting to entertain so hugely, that he wrote for vast financial success, which is a really wonderful motive. Except he hadn’t found the voice yet. He took a course here at Ole Miss under Josephine Haxton—whose nom de plume is Ellen Douglas—and that’s the only college course he had as far as I know, ever. But he started reading Conrad and Flannery O’Connor, and he found his own voice, that natural Mississippi hill country voice, after a hundred failures. All of his early stories were deeply bad, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings because he was so sincere. So I looked them over, and I don’t remember teaching him anything, but maybe he learned something. He learned that he wanted a little pain and that he wanted out of that fire station [Brown was a fireman for nineteen years], didn’t want to be trapped there anymore, that was part of his life that he’d like to quit. But his financial motivation was right honest, and the fact that he finally learned all the craft he needed in one class is not surprising. Because he was a brilliant learner, a fast learner. At the firehouse, you don’t get to be a captain just for showing up. And he was in his thirties when he was captain. That’s pretty good, I think.

TF: How has your teaching changed over the years?

BH: It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what else is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.

It’s impossible for me to behave as if I were thirty-five when I was writing Airships—it’s impossible. And I must say you don’t necessarily gain a lot by age; you sometimes are in danger of becoming the old hack plagiarizing his own former work. That’s probably why the old often bore people, they just say the same damn things over and over, and they just deal in truisms. That’s the mass of America, one truism after another. For instance, the word motherfucker is a truism now. It’s just empty. It used to be an exciting word because it’s the worst thing you can imagine, you know? But now it’s just a weak flat noun.

It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten a lot better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=724 5 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=714 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=714#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:50:15 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=714

Lance Cleland’s new series of posts designed to make you salivate for warmer weather, gross Sacramento-style beer cocktails, and–most importantly–the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop.

We tend to get a little ahead of ourselves here in Portland.  The sun shines for a day, a few flowers in the courtyard bloom, and suddenly every lumberjack with a fixie is sporting denim cut-offs, assured by their lack of braking that another long winter has passed.  It hasn’t. It is going to rain here for another three months. Still, we understand our bearded brethrens longing for summer.  We too have been dreaming about warmer days, PBR’s over ice and lemon, and of course, the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, which kicks off July 11th on the idyllic campus of Reed.

Returning to this year’s faculty line-up is Tin House favorite and Anderson Varejao disciple, Anthony Doerr, whose arrival in Portland will coincide with the publication of his eagerly anticipated new short story collection, Memory Wall. Can’t wait until summer for your Anthony Doerr fix? Then try his delightful new essay on pebble collecting or his brief reflections on travel, both of which have just enough warmth in them to make you forget that Punxsutawney Phil saw his own shadow.

]]> http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=714 1 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=705 http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=705#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:19:28 +0000 Tony http://tinhousebooks.com/blog/?p=705 Geoffrey Becker’s Hot Springs has had quite the warm welcome to the world–gushing reviews in the New York Times, the LA Times, Elle, PW, etc. If you haven’t been convinced by now, I suppose there’s no accounting for taste. For those of you who have had the privilege, you might be interested in Tin House Books editor Meg Storey’s Q&A with the author. Enjoy:

1. The University of Georgia just published your second collection of short stories, Black Elvis, and Hot Springs is your second novel. Do you have a preference for either form, and if so, why? I don’t have a preference—I like both.  I’ve always enjoyed poetry for its compression and emphasis on language itself, and the story form leans in that direction.  I also like the mystery of stories.  We don’t know what came before, we don’t know what happens after, we just get this intense glimpse of a world that lasts ten or fifteen pages.  If writing a story is going on a hike, writing a novel is more like walking from Paris to Istanbul.  I don’t believe an author is the same person when he finishes a novel as when he began.  Too much time has elapsed.
2. Three of the main characters in Hot Springs are two women and a little girl. How did you approach writing from a woman’s point of view, especially about potentially cliché issues such as motherhood and mother-daughter relationships?There is also a male protagonist, Landis, but I guess it’s true that he’s outnumbered.  I approached point of view in this story the way I always do, which is to try to imagine what it would be like to be a particular person and go from there.  I’ve never worried a lot about who that person is—male, female, young, old.  I just try to do my best, to believe in the material, to put as much of myself in there as I can.  Yes, men and women are different, but I think we have more in common than we do separating us.  I don’t believe in clichéd situations, only in clichéd writing.
   
3. You’ve described Hot Springs as “part road trip novel” and throughout the work place and setting feel almost as important as the plot and the characters. How do you choose the settings for your work? It’s easier to write convincingly about a place if you have some firsthand knowledge of it.  I’ve lived in Colorado and the Southwest.  Elephant Butte is a volcanic rock formation, not far from Truth or Consequences.  The first time I saw it from the highway, it seemed to me somehow numinous (they don’t call New Mexico “The Land of Enchantment” for nothing).  The novel began with my imagining three people in a broken-down car within sight of it.  Baltimore, where I have been for ten years now, is full of conflict.  There are neighborhoods here with million-dollar mansions within strolling (if not thinking) distance of ones with boarded-up row homes and corner take out joints advertising a “Hog Maw Dinner” for $4.95.
4. The adoptive parents in the novel, Tessa and David, are conservative Christians. Did you have any concerns as to how to portray them objectively, especially given the current rise of Christian evangelism in the United States? Did outside sources influence your decisions about their actions?I hope I respect all my characters enough to make them believable, regardless of their beliefs.
5. Are there any books that influenced your writing of Hot Springs?None in particular.  I knew I wanted to try something with multiple points of view.  I also knew I did not want to do multiple narrators—I wanted to write the book in third person.  But there’s no denying that when you read something, it influences you.  I’ve heard Doctorow say that when he’s writing fiction, he doesn’t read fiction.  That’s probably wise, but given that I also have a teaching job, it’s not really an option for me. At some point while I was writing Hot Springs, I read John Williams’s novel Stoner, which I admired, and even though it is completely unlike my novel, his themes—dedication, the importance of work in defining who you are, the search for some kind of meaning for your life—resonated with me.  Probably some of that crept in.
6. You have won several prizes for your work, including the Flannery O’Connor award and the Parthenon Prize. Do you feel awards help your writing and your work? If so, how? When I won the Drue Heinz prize, which led to the publication of my first book of stories,Dangerous Men, I did some fist-pumping in the rented room I was living in (this was Atlanta), then had to go for a long jog to try to calm down.  I am so grateful for that prize, and for the O’Connor, and for the Parthenon, and for every other nice thing that has happened to me.  Prizes are validation.  Some mean publication; most mean at least a little bit of money.  Like anyone else who has ever tried to write something, and particularly in the past when I was un- or serially employed, I’ve had times when I wondered what I was doing, and why I was bothering to do it.  Winning a prize can remind you that there are people out there who like what you are writing, who think you are doing something worthwhile.
7. How many endings did you consider for the novel? How did you know when you had the right one?The first draft of Hot Springs had a different ending.  My agent didn’t think it was strong, and I respect her opinions and I’d already had my own doubts, so I thought hard about it and wrote another one.  I kept working the material and experimenting until I eventually came up with an ending that felt right.  It’s a little mysterious to me how all of this works.  I think part of being any good as an artist is learning to improvise and play around while at the same time keeping a critical eye on the overall proceedings, and knowing when to call a halt to them.
8. There is a lot of music in Hot Springs. One of the main characters is a sound man and part of the novel takes place during an open mike. Are you a musician? What kind of role do you think music can serve in literature?I have played guitar, both solo and in various bands, on and off since I was thirteen.  I’ve hosted open mikes.  If I hadn’t had something of a second life as a musician all these years, I probably wouldn’t have had anything to write about.  That said, I also think that music—along with visual art—is extraordinarily hard to describe with words.  There’s a funny quote (I’ve seen it attributed to both Martin Mull and Frank Zappa): “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”  It may not be that impossible, but since the only way to approach the subject is through analogy and figurative language, it’s easy to run off the rails.  I try to stick mostly to writing about the people involved rather than attempting to describe the sounds they are making.  One of my favorite pieces of writing about music, by the way, is the final few pages of James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues.”  Baldwin gets elaborately poetic and metaphorical, but in the process he really nails the interaction of the guys in the band.
9. A portion of Hot Springs was originally published as a short story with the same title in Ploughshares. Did you always intend for it to be a novel? I did not.  I thought it was a story.  Turns out I was wrong.
10. What have you read recently that you would recommend? I mentioned Stoner, which I loved, but I’m not sure I’d tell everyone to go out and read it.  It’s quite sad, so you have to be a person who likes sad stories, which I am, although I like to laugh, too, so if a book combines both those elements, then I’m really going to love it.  The Remains of the Day is a favorite that I recently reread. Again, though, it’s not for everyone.  My friend Jim Magruder has a new novel out, Sugarless, that’s wonderfully funny and well-written, and captures a point in time—the mid-1970s—extremely well.  Part of why I liked it so much was that I related to it and shared so many of the references.  I think Elizabeth Strout is an excellent writer and recommend her books, all of them.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Maine, and I like how good she is at understanding that place, and its people.  After reading a story I’d written about football, a friend of mine loaned me his copy of Delillo’s second novel, End Zone, which I thought was great, and which also stopped me from ever wanting to write anything about football again, since Delillo’s thoughts on the subject put my own philosophical musings to shame.  Lately, having had the opportunity to visit Andalusia, the house where Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother after she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to Milledgeville, Georgia, I’ve been reading her letters in The Habit of Being and imagining her life in a way I couldn’t have before. Behind the main house there’s a weathered barn with a hayloft, and you just know that’s where old Hulga had her wooden leg stolen by that traveling Bible salesman.

Our own Zak Smith has a blog about playing Dungeon’s and Dragons with Porn Stars. It’s called “Playing D&D With Porn Stars.” Take the quiz and see if you can guess whether Sasha Grey is a Half-Orc Wizard or a Dark-Elf Cleric. NSFW (if your boss is a prude)

W.H. Auden’s “A Preface to Kierkegaard” is up on The New Republic site. If you’re a fan of wither man, this is worth your time. SFW (unless your boss is this guy)

“[W]e need to write compressed stories that produce a ton of thought rather than elaborate stories that produce none.” David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, is interviewed over at the Rumpus. Good conversation going on in the comments as well.

The Three Percent blog should be added to your RSS feed and visited on a regular basis. Fantastic resource for international literature.

Finally, if you missed it this weekend, Geoffrey Becker’s Hot Springs got a gushing review in the Sunday New York Times. You can buy it here.

Tin House Summer Writers Workshop faculty member, D. A. Powell recently won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts award for his fantastic collection, Chronic. We’re all excited to have him back to Portland this summer!

In the off chance you’re still wondering whether you should apply to study with him this summer, we dug through our archives to find this choice photo of Powell engaged in a nuanced argument with Cheston about the meta-poetical implications of enjambment:

A semi-regular roundup of stuff we like from the internets and youtubes:

-Dolly Freed has been blogging for Powells this week. If you ever wanted to know how to prepare that bird that kamikazeed into your window, now’s your chance.

-Poet Heather Christie is doing a live reading/Q&A tonight at htmlgiant. She won me over last time she read in Portland, and her collection, A Difficult Farm, is fantastic.

-Our pal Steve Almond on DIY publishing.

-R.I.P. J.D. (also Howard Zinn)

-Preview of the new Walker Percy documentary (!) via Maud Newton

-Stephen Elliott takes down Taylor Antrim’s take down of Nick Flynn and Alex Lemon (both of whom we adore).

RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

TAO LIN, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel

DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Vacation

JUSTIN TAYLOR, author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever

STEPHEN ELLIOTT, The Rumpus’s own editor and author of The Adderall Diaries.

With music by ALINA SIMONE, DIANE LOUVEL

and, just added, JEFFREY LEWIS

DJ: LINCOLN MICHEL

Special Guest DJ: KHAELA MARICICH of THE BLOW

And video art installation by MONOFONUS PRESS curated by JILL PANGALLO

WHERE: Broadway East, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side. 171 East Broadway (nr. Rutgers). View Map. Kitchen will be open with a light menu of snacks.

WHEN: January 21, 2010

7:00pm – 10:00pm

$5

Advance tickets available here.

Dragged Kicking and Screaming Into The 21st Century

Back in 1978, when I was 18, I wrote a book on living frugally and happily.  At the time, there was a raging recession, imploding job markets, and rampant concerns about foreign competition and natural resources.  Meanwhile, my dad and I were living a simple life on a half-acre outside of Philadelphia, gardening, raising rabbits and chickens, and enjoying ourselves all while being self supporting, lazy, and completely unconcerned about the national economy.

"This Is Not Nasa Technology"

Given current economic conditions, when a reprint was suggested by Tin House Books, it sounded like a good idea. People who wanted to stop having their whole life jerked around by a fickle job market could learn how we became financially independent without having a fortune or running off to live in the woods.  People who wanted to keep their jobs could take comfort in knowing that we lived a good life on very, very little money and so could they, if needed.

In the past 30+ years, I found that knowing how to live happily without much money gave me the confidence to try all sorts of ventures including becoming a NASA engineer, an award-winning environmental educator, a college professor, and a business owner.  With the addition of an afterword to the new edition of Possum Living, I got to add the lessons I’ve learned from these experiences to the voice of my younger self.

But there was a price to pay for the reprinting.  The publisher wanted me to start a blog.  I would have to join the 21st century.

Mind you, I had a telephone and even Internet access, which I thought was quite progressive.  My dial-up service may have been terribly slow but it was cheap and reliable.  In the morning, I’d sit down in my recliner, prop my feet up, open my laptop, dial up the Internet, drink my coffee, watch the birds at the feeder, nibble on my breakfast, and read a couple of chapters of a book while very slowly cruising the Internet.

The fact that we still used dial-up drove many people crazy.  Our neighbor was so frustrated, he told us to use his wireless service.  In order to pull it in, my husband, Pete, had to set up his own antenna.  He took a wire fruit basket, covered it in tinfoil, put it on a music stand, attached the wireless receiver with jumper cable clamps, and pointed the whole thing at the neighbor’s house.  With a lot of fiddling, repositioning, and tweaking, he was able to get a dribble of wireless Internet.  When I told him we had to get DSL, he was very happy.  We switched services, got a new wireless thing-a-majig, and breathlessly awaited the rush of progress.

Now when I sit down in the morning, I connect instantly with the Internet.  I start to read an article and the connection dies.  I curse.  I try again.  It pops back up.  It dies.  I curse some more.  I get up and reboot the thing-a-majig.  I sit down and try again.  The connection dies in the middle of an email exchange.  I curse.  I get up and jiggle some wires.  I sit back down.  It still doesn’t work.  I use the telephone to call the person I was trying to email.  Then I watch the birds at the feeder to calm down.

I suspect that there are several problems going on.  I’ll bet you that the wiring is messed up, the receiver is screwy, and the provider unreliable. This may take a bit of time to fix.  Meanwhile, I’ll do my best and try to get some good discussions started.  But here’s the deal; no name calling, no blaming the Republicans, the Democrats, or this or that president, no cursing, and no put downs.

Let’s hear what you have to say…

What do these two magazines have in common? So far as I can tell…Nothing. Well, almost nothing. While their editorial positions on merkins may differ, they’re both enthusiastic about Dolly Freed’s Possum Living:

The Vice Interview

The O Magazine Review

There was really no question of Dolly being who she said she was. The New York Times sent their own photographers to take pictures of Dolly at her home. Any fact-checker should have been able to compare those photos to Dolly’s appearance on the Merv Griffin show. (Those interested can view some of the original press at Dolly’s own website, http://www.possumliving.net/) Williams spent a several days with Dolly and her family, as did Tin House editor Nanci McCloskey. This wasn’t a James Frey scenario.

Still, the Times killed the story two days before the spread was supposed to run because Williams refused to break her promise to Dolly and reveal her real identity. (Dolly acknowledged that, yes, someone could likely track her down after the photos were published, but figured it wouldn’t have as widespread of an effect in her community or on her family.) Though it was a shame for Williams, for Dolly, and for us (the publicity couldn’t have hurt book sales) The silver lining was that Williams had the opportunity to experiment with a DIY style of journalism she’d been considering for some time. She’s created a website that allows readers, if they like the story, to donate whatever they feel it is worth in order to help her recuperate her expenses. An excerpt of her “About The Dolly Freed Story” is after the jump, but you can read the piece, as well as a description of the process on her website, http://www.paige-williams.com. If nothing else (other than the fact that it’s a really, really good piece), it’s an experiment in a different type of financial model for journalism.  As we get more and more of our information from non-paying aggregation sites (i.e. Huffington Post), journalists are going to need to figure out some way to pay for the costs of original reporting.

From Paige Williams’ Website:

I’m self-publishing this story because it had no other home. I wanted it to live in the world, not die in my notebook.

Usually, freelance journalists find a buyer for their work before digging into the reporting, but when I heard about Dolly Freed I launched this piece on spec. I most love reporting and writing stories about truly original characters , about authenticity, and Dolly is one of the most interesting people I’ve met in years.

I pitched the idea for this piece all over the place: The New York Times magazine (rejected), Texas Monthly (rejected), The New Yorker (rejected), Philadelphia magazine (rejected), Slate.com (crickets), and others. Nobody was interested. In November, theTimes accepted the piece for one of its Style sections; two days before publication, during edits, editors pulled the piece because “Dolly Freed” is a pseudonym, and Dolly declined to allow her real name to be published. I had told the Times from the start that “Dolly” was a pseudonym, but apparently I had failed to make it clear that I’d not be reneging on my word to Dolly and her family that I wouldn’t violate her decision to remain anonymous. The Times didn’t make it clear that they expected me to. In agreeing to tell her story and have her book reissued, Dolly sought a balance between being helpful and maintaining her privacy. She doesn’t want kooks showing up at her home. When I told her that people will probably figure out her identity eventually, she said, “Maybe, but I don’t have to make it easy for them.”

I had been thinking about self-publishing a magazine-length piece of independent journalism, and the orphaning of Dolly’s story created the perfect opportunity. CONTINUE READING…

To tide you over, here’s Geoff Nicholson’s Lost & Found essay on David Carradine’s Endless Highway.

“When I was a little kid, I had a problem with God.” This, I suggest, is a rather surprising opening line for a Hollywood movie star autobiography, although since the author is David Carradine, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at all. The autobiography, Endless Highway, was published in 1995, at a time when he was in the middle of the comeback TV series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Commercially, this was no doubt a good time to release the book, though it’s a long way from being a quick TV tie-in. It runs to nearly 650 pages, and even if some parts of it feel a bit rushed, it’s clearly a work of great effort and genuine commitment.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, in 2003, I went to a “Hollywood Collectors and Celebrities Show” in Burbank, an event at which movie and TV stars (some far more famous than you’d imagine) sat behind tables, peddling their wares: signed photographs, posters, DVDs, and, in some cases, autobiographies. And there was David Carradine.

His career was perhaps in the doldrums at the time—Kill Bill would have been completed though not yet released—but even so I was amazed to see him there. Was he really so desperate for money or attention that he had to make nice with a bunch of rubbernecking plebs? Apparently not. He didn’t make nice at all. He sat there doing a crossword, head and eyes down, oozing hostility, daring anyone to approach. I certainly didn’t dare, though I wanted to. Consequently, it was a while later that I bought Endless Highway from a used bookstore.

The fact that it’s dedicated to a bunch of people including Plato, Shakespeare, and James Dean didn’t bode well. But it’s also dedicated to Dad—and that’s very significant. Dad was the legendary bad-boy actor John Carradine, the man who, according to his son, said to Katherine Hepburn, “Why don’t you take your Connecticut station-wagon accent and go home?” And she did.

The book tells us that the Carradine household was predictably troubled. Father was a jobbing actor who came and went, and even when he was there he was otherwise occupied. David writes, “When he was home, it was usually ‘don’t bother him . . .’ The only time I could really depend on having a real talk with him was when I needed discipline. It was almost worth a whipping just to get his attention.”

After his parents’ divorce, he was bounced around various dodgy educational establishments, including a trade school, Straubenmuller Textile High, in Manhattan, where “between classes, I would be jumped in the halls and beaten. It had something to do with my dad being famous; specifically, with the fact that he had shot Jesse James.” Of course, he told them his dad was a hero.

The father remained elusive, and even after the son had grown up and become successful, their relationship was as difficult as ever. David came up with the idea for a theatrical season in which he’d direct Dad in King Lear, then Dad would direct him in Hamlet. It sounds like a crowd pleaser to me, but unfortunately it never came off. David writes, “He asked me, ‘How do I know you can play Hamlet?’ I asked him, ‘How do I know you can play Lear?’ Then we got into a big fight—family stuff.”

David organizes a party at Morton’s restaurant and Dad, aged seventy-six, arrives, picks up a twenty-two-year-old German girl, and by the end of the evening is necking with her in the back of a Rolls Royce. I guess not every son would think this was endearing behavior, but when Dad comes up with the line “You’re only young once,” all is likely to be forgiven. And, of course, he had actually turned up at the party.

Inevitably an actor’s early struggles tend to be more interesting than his later successes, but Carradine remains consistently skeptical, and just this side of cynical, when it comes to his own career. In the army he enters a talent show, delivering the abdication speech from Richard II, but loses to a Hopi hoop dancer. Carradine can see why it happened: “Well, he jumped through fire, I just talked loud.”

Later, when he’s a success, he meets Marlon Brando and finds him utterly compelling. “He was looking right through my soul. His face was colored with a golden light. I was transfixed. Suddenly the golden light faded . . . I turned around and realized the sun had just set behind me. He hadn’t been looking at my soul, he had been watching the setting sun.”

He agrees to play a cop in the movie Q: The Winged Serpent. Then he reads the script. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this. It will destroy my career. But I have to, I said I would—I need the money, my house is in foreclosure, Linda will lose her Ferrari. We’ve got to keep one Ferrari in the family.’”

Ah yes, the Ferraris. The Carradine lifestyle requires a lot of expensive props, a lot of expenditure. He spends several small fortunes on houses, fine wines, drugs, guitars, and cars; the rest he just wastes. Somehow it never sounds like boasting. The fact that he enjoys his toys so much, and that he’s only ever one step away from financial disaster, even collecting unemployment at one point, makes it all bearable.

And just once in a while he’s a pretty shrewd social observer. He was in San Francisco at the time of the Beat Generation, and he didn’t fall for that one. “The ‘generation’ consisted of, as far as I could tell, about fifty people, mostly male—the scene was a little rough for girls.” And then he finds himself in newly independent Zimbabwe: “Everywhere were happy faces in fatigues carrying automatic weapons.”

Look, I’m not trying to pretend that Endless Highway is some high point in Western art, but by the standards of most Hollywood autobiographies, it’s downright Proustian. There’s something about Carradine in print that’s very similar to Carradine on screen. He’s compelling; likeable without begging to be liked: he commands your attention.

After his sensationalized death in a hotel room in Bangkok earlier this year I went back to the book. It had been a while and there were gaps in my memory, and yet how could I have forgotten, there on the first page, below the paragraph about having trouble with God: “When I was five, I tried to hang myself in the garage by jumping off the bumper of the Duesenberg.” He failed, obviously. His dad burned his comic book collection as punishment. Of course, as a five-year-old, he probably didn’t really intend to commit suicide. Equally, most of us don’t believe he actually committed suicide in that hotel room in Bangkok either.

I’ve been on a literary biography kick lately.  I don’t know why.  These are my favorites:

1-Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley
2-Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
3-Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
4-The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr
5-A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey