"You lie!"

No, this isn’t about Joe Wilson’s rude outburst during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. It’s about one of my many pet peeves (imagine that, a house full of peeves running around, crying for attention, making a mess everywhere) – the verb “to lie.”

My students get this wrong all the time and they groan in frustration whenever I bring it up, because (a) they don’t get it, and (b) they don’t understand why it matters. Actually, lots of people don’t understand why it matters, but for writers I don’t understand how you could not aspire to write with precision. Precision means clarity, clarity means understanding, and anything else is sloppy. I know I frequently make mistakes on this blog, although I try to avoid them, but that’s the hazard of writing quickly and without an editor. Still, my errors tend to the typographical, I think, rather than the grammatical, and there’s a difference.

What prompts this mini-rant is an article that ran in today’s Staunton News Leader, our local daily newspaper. I see frequent errors in this paper, and those disturb me, but I know that the paper has a tiny staff of young writers, and I give it some leeway. But this article, about Tiger Woods’s automobile accident yesterday, was an Associated Press story, and AP should know better. It reads in part: “Windermere police chief Daniel Saylor told The Associated Press that officers found the 33-year-old PGA star laying in the street with his wife, Elin hovering over him.” Laying what, you are entitled to ask.

I am about half way through Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, a book that I intend to finish but am not enjoying. (I put it down to read several other books, but I will get back to it.) On page 2 is this sentence: “They went in the front room and Doc laid down on the couch and Shasta stayed on her feet and sort of drifted around the place.” Laid what down?

The verb “to lay” is a transitive verb. The past tense is “laid” and the past participle is also “laid.” I lay the book on the table, I am laying the book on the table, yesterday I laid the book on the table, I had laid the book on the table. Given the sexual connotation of “lay” and “laid” you’d think people would remember that it’s a transitive verb (but then, that would require them to know what a transitive verb is). The verb “to lie” (meaning to place oneself in a horizontal position) on the other hand, is intransitive. No doubt people get confused because of the past tense of “to lie” but it just isn’t that hard to get it right: I lie down, I am lying down, yesterday I lay down, I had just lain down when the phone rang.

Bryan Garner in Modern American Usage has this to say about the distinction between lie and lay: “Very simply, lie is intransitive—it can’t take a direct object. But lay is always transitive—it needs a direct object . . . To use lay without a direct object, in the sense of lie, is nonstandard.” He goes on to say that the error is common in speech, but that “using these verbs correctly is a mark of refinement.” I don’t know that “refinement” is something we necessarily need to aspire to, and in spoken English I’m not too worried about these words, but I expect writers, in writing, to get it right.

[/rant]

Status Update: Work in Progress

I've been working on my novel (all the livelong day . . .) and it's coming along. I'd say that it's coming along nicely, except I'm pretty sure it's too soon to judge. Today I'm working on the penultimate chapter and this weekend I expect to work on THE END. In both cases, I'm adding to drafts that are already complete, layering in some developments that I've been building throughout the current draft of the book.

This doesn't mean that I'll be done this weekend, although I AM getting close. I've got to go back and strengthen some characters, etch in a few threads that I let get fuzzy in the middle of the novel, reinforce a trope or two, etc. I hope to get a lot of that work done over the next 10 days so that when I begin my residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on December 10, I'll be able to really inhabit the story and figure out what remains to be done before I send it off in the new year.

Target date for completion: January 10.

Giving Thanks

It's the day, after all, and here it is:

Life is good. I am a very fortunate man. I worked very hard for years at a couple of jobs that I mostly loved, that took me to fascinating places and brought me in contact with equally fascinating people. As a result, I feel that I have much more to say now than I did when I was in my early 20s, at the time when I thought I might pursue a career in writing. I wasn't ready then, and so it's just as well that I realized I needed to pursue other interests.

But now here I am. I'm able to spend most of my time writing, and because of that investment of time in my earlier years I find that I have no shortage of stories to tell. I'm also fortunate that I realized, when I embarked on this new life, that I needed help. I didn't know how to write fiction, even though I'd been reading good literature all my life. That realization caused me to look outside myself, and there I found more support than I ever could have dreamed of. Although I don't see my writing friends often, it's a blessing to know they're there. And I shouldn't overlook my friends who don't write, either--some of the best friends anyone could have. Thank you.

I'm also thankful for a wonderful family. We have our quirks, as all families do, but, but my sisters and I have done a pretty good job of making our way. I guess we have our parents to thank for that.

Happy Thanksgiving.

NYT 100 Notable Books of 2009

Here's the list of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year.

Surprises?

I'm happy to see Brad Leithauser's new book, The Art Student's War, but I didn't know it was out yet. The review will appear on Nov. 27.

There are a bunch of short story collections, including those by Wells Tower, Jean Thompson, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Aleksandr Hemon, John Updike, Kazuo Ishiguro, Antonya Nelson, Paul Yoon, Alice Munro, and Mary Gaitskill. That's a lot of stories!! (And, by the way, it's so great to see Paul Yoon on this list; congratulations, Paul!)

In addition to this list, and Janet Maslin's top ten (posted yesterday), we now have top ten lists from Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner.

Top Books of 2009

Lots of lists floating around about the best books of the year. I haven't really focused on them much, but here's a manageable list of just ten: Janet Maslin's Top Ten Books of 2009. Congratulations to Dan Chaon for making this list with his Await Your Reply. As that's the only one here I own, it's likely to be the only one I'll read any time soon . . .

Reading at Blue Ridge Community College -- December 1

On Tuesday, December 1, at 12:30 pm, as part of the Blue Ridge Community College Brown Bag Speaker Series, I'll be giving a reading from In an Uncharted Country and will also discuss linked short story collections generally. I hope a lot of people will turn out, and I'm grateful to BRCC for giving me this opportunity. The College bookstore will be on hand with copies!

The New Yorker Story of the Year -- 2009: Nominations are Open

For the past couple of years I have been commenting on each piece of fiction appearing in The New Yorker, and I've also been naming at Story of the Year with the help of my readers. The winner of the New Yorker Story of the Year for 2008 was the terrific "Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris. And now it is time to turn our attention to this year's stories. Please leave a comment here, or send me an email, nominating a story for the Top Ten. Voting will take place in the last half of December.

Will the winner be Yiyun Li? Jonathan Lethem? Will Antonya Nelson become the award's first two-time winner? Or will Joshua Ferris make it two in a row?

Let me hear from you!

New Issue: Ginosoko #9

Ginosko #9 is available for download (in a pdf file). I don't recognize the names of any of the contributors, but I like the cover and I also like being able to download the magazine. Check it out!

Guest Blogger: R.A. Riekki

R.A. Riekki is author of the novels U.P. and the forthcoming Portrait of the Artist as a Bogey Man. He held a gun to my head and threatened to pierce both my ears if I didn't publish the following interview. [Rolling Stone? Cool! Um . . .]

THE WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW OF AUTHOR R.A. RIEKKI USING THE QUESTIONS POSED TO TWILIGHT STAR ROBERT PATTISON

Rolling Stone: How is the Twilight fandom different from the Harry Potter movies? I think you've mentioned that the sound of the screams is even different.

R.A. Riekki: People scream during Harry Potter? Really? If you're screaming during Harry Potter, I think it's really important that you never watch any of the Evil Dead films or you might commit suicide from fear. Screaming at Harry Potter would be sort of like laughing hysterically at a book of limericks. You're entertainment deprived or something. But I should add that I never said anything about those movies or books though, because I've never read them and I've only seen one Harry Potter movie and it was just OK. It was like a C if I had to grade it. I'm kind of off-guard because, you know, this is Rolling Stone so I figured you'd have fact-checkers and stuff. Where does it say I said that?

Rolling Stone: Is it weird to have girls that are so young have this incredibly sexualized thing around you?

R.A. Riekki: Whoa. Really? Like who? I've never heard that before. This actress Patricia Grant in L.A. recently said that I should do modeling and I was like, "You think?" Because I've never seen myself as that hot, but who are these young girls that you're talking about. I mean, sounds like an episode of MSNBC's To Catch a Predator or something. I like women my age. But did they see the author photo on the back of U.P. or something, because I kind of look goofy in it, I thought. Must be those same girls that are screaming during Harry Potter.

Rolling Stone: Do you think that's part of it, though? One of the things that seems to make Edward so attractive to younger girls is that you can have it both ways. He's the ultimate bad boy, and someone that you shouldn't want, who would never harm you.

R.A. Riekki: Do you mean Craig? My character Craig in U.P.? Because there was this heavy metal DJ in I think Georgia that thought he was hot. You know. And in the book he is definitely a bad boy and gets all the girls. But they're not exactly the type of girls I would want to get, if you know what I mean. He tends to have abused females fall for him, like Bobbie in the novel. You know, the abusive relationship. That's been an extension of the relationship they witnessed their parents having. But yeah, Craig's definitely a bad boy. Maybe an evil boy. But he probably wouldn't harm any females. Males, yes, absolutely. And females, emotionally, but not physically. Unless he was really mad. I sure the heck wouldn't want to date him. That'd be a nightmare. I'm actually glad I'm a male. Dating males would suck. We smell, tend not to communicate well, and I think look kind of gross. Where women are just beautiful. OK, I'm on a tangent for a Rolling Stone interview.

Rolling Stone: And why did you want to push it in that direction?

R.A. Riekki: Which direction? The bad boy direction? For Craig or for me or I'm assuming you mean Craig. I wanted Craig to be a bad boy because that was his character. That's who he is. He's a seducer. He seduces Antony into violence at the end. And worse. That's a large part of who he is.

Rolling Stone: Were there any risks that you wanted to take that you ended up just not being able to do?

R.A. Riekki: Oh my God, good question. And hard to answer. I mean, as far as the novel as a whole, the first draft was insane. I had different fonts and visually it was accompanied with this collage artwork that an artist at the University of Virginia did to go along with it. It was this art piece of a book, but not something I could ever get published. So I pulled back and made it more of a standard novel visually. But on the page, I was brutal and avant-garde and tried to be very, very original. Which is one of the compliments about the book. I wanted to write a book I'd never read before. Because so many novels are derivative, a bit carbon copy, cookie-cutter. So, if you read it, you'll see the neologisms and hip-hop linguistics and abandonment of punctuation for antony's chapters, you know. And with Craig, he's a racist misogynist homophobe and I felt uncomfortable writing some of the things he says, a bit like reading Irvine Welsh's Filth, but I did pull back on his anti-Semitism. I was reading Holocaust literature at the time and it affected me, but what really made me pull out some of those lines he said were that I didn't feel it deepened the character, that it was not necessary to who he was, whereas, Craig's racism is central to the novel's plot, physically central as well, it seems it emerges at the halfway point in the novel.

Rolling Stone: Right.

R.A. Riekki: You've read it? That's great. Now I can say I've been read by Rolling Stone. What did you think?

Rolling Stone: Stephenie Meyer talked about the influence of a lot of Victorian literature, which definitely seems obvious in Twilight, even the fact that his name is Edward. Do you see that there's a Victorian quality to Edward?

R.A. Riekki: I've never read Twilight.

Rolling Stone: What's attractive about that kind of character that made him popular then and still popular now?

R.A. Riekki: I . . . I just said, you know, I've never read it. Why, are you a huge fan or something?

Rolling Stone: You're in this position where you're playing this character who's attractive because of that mystique and then don't have that luxury.

R.A. Riekki: Uhhhh, you're losing me here. I really don't know what you're talking about.

Rolling Stone: Why do you think he's attracted to Bella?

R.A. Riekki: Who? . . . are you talking about Twilight, because I've never read it! I started to read some of the screenplay, but I thought it was horribly written. I got about ten pages in, maybe nine, and couldn't stomach it anymore. It was just too . . . simple. It didn't pull me in. I had read the screenplay to Milk right before that and that was one of the best scripts I'd ever read, so when I started Twilight, it was like going from Dostoevsky to Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is great, but it was a bit like whiplash for me. I'm not a big vampire fan though, although I do like Poppy Z Brite and some Anne Rice. I'm not aversive to horror. My next novel that Ghost Road Press is publishing is a horror novel entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Bogey Man, so I like the genre, but it's key that that novel is really an attempt to run as much against the grain of mainstream contemporary horror as possible. And Stephenie Meyer is so parallel to the grain that we're almost antithetical in the way we approach writing. She's the Mitt Romney of horror fiction and I'm the Dennis Kucinich of horror. Or the Malcolm X of horror.

Rolling Stone: Do you think that's why it seems to have a stronger following because she's not fixed at the end, and people can identify with that?

R.A. Riekki: I have not read Twilight, so for my first big break to get interviewed by Rolling Stone and then talk almost the whole time about a book I've never read is really hard. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it. I'm not interested in it. It seems very, I dunno, very cotton candy and I don't like cotton candy. I get headaches from too much sweets. I wish I didn't, but I do. I really don't have anything insightful to say about Twilight. And in fact, I don't hate it. I'm more apathetic to it. I'm just not interested.

Rolling Stone: Have you ever had a situation where fans sent you something kind of crazy or very extreme?

R.A. Riekki: Only once. I had one, well, very weird person do something along those lines, but I don't want to encourage that person, so maybe it's best if I'm just vague and not talk about it. But thank you for moving on from that last topic.

Rolling Stone: What did they say?

R.A. Riekki: Well, no, I'd rather not talk about it. It was a very, very weird fan. I wouldn't even say fan, just an odd person. That's one of the reasons I like to use R.A. Riekki rather than use my actual first name. I like pseudonyms. But the publisher screwed up and put my first name on the cover anyway, so I guess the initials are kind of pointless, except I like the whole J.D. Salinger, S.E. Hinton vibe to initials. Seems cool. e.e. cummings.

Rolling Stone: Did you read the whole thing?

R.A. Riekki: Of? e.e. cummings? Or you talking about what the crazy fan person sent, because let's move on from that. I'd rather go back to Twilight than talk about that.

Rolling Stone: Do you think people have trouble distinguishing you from your character?
R.A. Riekki: I'm not a character in U.P. Are you talking about A Portrait of the Artist as a Bogey Man, because if so how did you get a copy or even hear about that? It doesn't come out 'til 2010.

Rolling Stone: You said that when you read the fan sites that they're all kind of similar voice.

R.A. Riekki: I don't really have any fan sites. I mean, I've gotten great reviews and got to do a ton of interviews, over a hundred, but I haven't seen a fan site yet about me. I wish.

Rolling Stone: Do you have any gay teenagers contacting you?

R.A. Riekki: Now why would you ask me that? Seriously, why would you ask that? . . . This is easily the weirdest interview I've ever had.

Rolling Stone: Tell me about an experience you had where you just found someone hiding and watching when you were on set.

R.A. Riekki: What set? Are you talking about Pushing Daisies on ABC? You do your research. I was a juggler on the "Circus, Circus" episode, but there wasn't any stalker there or anything. It was a closed set. You know, security would have grabbed 'em. That's another weird question to ask.

Rolling Stone: But there's something to be said by it being different group than the people who scream at Jonas Brothers shows.

R.A. Riekki: People who stalk me during extra shoots for ABC TV shows are different than screaming Jonas Brother fans. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. I need a physicist to explain that sentence to me.

Rolling Stone: Who do you think is more intense, the Twilight moms or the younger girls?

R.A. Riekki: Remind me to never do another Rolling Stone interview. Who is more intense, a Twilight mom or a Twilight girl? That's really a question you're going to ask me? You know, I have producers in L.A. who are interested in turning my novel into a movie. We could talk about that. We could talk about moms and girls and their responses to my novel. Could you please ask me anything, anything that does not have to do with vampires? We can even go back to your fascination with people stalking me. OK. But if you really want to impress me, ask me a question that has nothing to do with Twilight or about people stalking me. You're Rolling Stone! I figured you'd be one of the best interviews I've ever had in my life!

Rolling Stone: But then outsiders who also aren't really outsiders.

R.A. Riekki: A non sequitir. A nonsense sentence. A non-sentence. That's your last question? A statement that makes no sense . . . OK, then I'll do it too: Penguins like to go shopping in restaurants. How's that? Let me ask Rolling Stone some questions now. Now it's my turn. Your first question: The television has a black shoe on its clock. Your reponse. Question two: Backgammon grows in X-ray machines. Oh, and here's a good question: Have you ever been stalked by a character in the novel Twilight and if so which character was it? Riveting! Riveting questions for you. That's it, I'm out of here. Apparently I have to go read freakin' Twilight. It's Moby Dick but with vampires. It's the fifth Gospel. It's such an important book!!
[Riekki overturns table, leaves. Rolling Stone interviewer takes out a brand new copy of Twilight, takes out bookmark on page 8 and starts reading]

The management of Perpetual Folly is not responsible for any damage caused by overturned tables or any other aspects of this interview.

Gourevitch to leave Paris Review

The Paris Review announced earlier this month that Philip Gourevitch, editor of the magazine for the past five years, will step down. I only today got around to visiting the website to read the Nov. 6 press release, and it is full of praise for Gourevitch and what he has accomplished during his tenure. What I find very interesting is that he is described as a worthy successor to George Plimpton, the magazine's longtime editor, as if Plimpton had handed the reins to him directly. There is no mention made of Brigid Hughes, who was named editor after Plimpton's death and then forced to leave a year later. Hughes has acquitted herself nicely by launching A Public Space, another fine magazine.

A search committee will find a successor to Gourevitch.

New (to me) Litmag: Emprise Review

Emprise Review isn't new--the current issue is the magazine's 11th--but I'm just hearing about it. Or maybe I'm just now paying attention, because I know a lot of the names who have appeared in recent numbers. Check it out--I'll be watching now.

New LitMag Reviews

Check out NewPages for some recent reviews of literary magazines. None that I'm in, but I still like to see what's happening in magazines to which I don't subscribe.

Henry IV, Part 1 (again)

When, on Friday morning, I ordered my ticket for the Saturday night performance of American Shakespeare Center's production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Pt. 1 (which I also saw six weeks ago and discussed here), I was told I was getting the last reserved seat in the house. It's always exciting to see a big crowd at this little theater, so I was looking forward to the show.

It turns out that the reason for the packed house was a group: a reunion of participants from James Madison University's Semester in London Program, and they were clearly having a good time. In fact, there was so much energy in the theater that it was difficult to hear the pre-show music, which was too bad, but I suppose the actors appreciated the buzz in the audience even if no one could hear the songs.

But what a wonderful show it was. Again. The entire cast is terrific, but the main reason I wanted to see this production a second time is the fantastic job that James Keegan and Luke Eddy do as Falstaff and Prince Hal. They didn't write the amazing dialogue, of course, but they speak the beautiful (well, not always beautiful--these are some of Shakespeare's best and most disgusting insults) lines with such warmth and affection toward each other that it's impossible not to love them both. In fact, at the height of their banter, when they are acting out the likely scene in which King Henry will lecture Prince Hal about his companions, I choked up a little. Falstaff says:

No, my good lord; banish Peto,
banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack
Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff,
valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant,
being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him
thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's
company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

To which Hal replies:

I do, I will.

And in that moment, Hal isn't speaking as the present King--he realizes that he is going to have to grow up and take responsibility for governance, even if it means banishing his friend. It doesn't look like much on paper, but it's an amazing moment on stage, thanks to Keegan and Eddy. Worth the price of admission.

The New Yorker: "Indianapolis (Highway 74)" by Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard has a story collection coming out in January, called Day Out of Days, and I get the impression that it’s full of road trips. In September, The New Yorker published a story from the collection, “Land of the Living”, which I discussed here, and another story, “Thor’s Day (Highway 81 North, Staunton, Virginia),” appeared in Zoetrope: All Story this Fall, and I discussed it here. I didn't love either one.

The current story takes place on the bypass around Indianapolis where the narrator, Stuart, has stopped on his drive south from Minnesota. But winter weather and a hot rod convention have conspired to leave him without a hotel room, so he’s sitting in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, trying to ignore the unignorable true crime reality show blaring from the big screen TV(s). We know that he’s “crisscrossing the country again, without much reason,” but there seems to be more reason than we’re allowed to know. In walks a talk skinny woman wearing a bandanna, and they exchange glances but he doesn’t recognize her. But she recognizes him, as it is revealed when she returns a few moments later. Although they had once lived together, Becky doesn’t seem too upset that he doesn’t remember her. They swap quick histories—he has 5 children by a couple of women, she has two daughters, but that’s why she’s in the hotel: they’ve been kidnapped by her husband, she thinks they’re on the run to Florida, and she can’t stay in her house because the police are investigating. Whoa!

Okay, goodnight then, nice to see you. Huh? After this monstrous news, that’s it?
So Stuart goes out to his car to drive on to somewhere in search of a motel, which is when he remembers that not only did he leave his car running (it’s still there?), but his dog is inside. They head down the highway into deteriorating weather and the past comes flooding back to Stuart, unleashed, apparently, by his chance (way too much chance, if you ask me) meeting with Becky. He seems to be falling apart while driving, and it isn’t all because of the snow. In any case, he turns around and comes back to the Holiday Inn, calls Becky on the house phone, and starts crying. Not just crying, but weeping.

Sorry, Sam Shepard fans, I don’t buy it. I believe that he’s got something going on his life that has made him this vulnerable, but Shepard doesn’t get to just make us assume it’s there. So he had 5 children with two women. So he doesn’t remember Becky. So there’s a murder loop on reality TV. We need to know more about this Stuart guy. Moreover, the kidnapping of Becky’s daughters? Is that a crazy plot device? Wouldn’t it be better if her house had burned down?

Should I put some of this crazy stuff in my next story? Is that how you get a piece into The New Yorker?

November 23, 2009: “Indianapolis (Highway 74)” by Sam Shepard

The Missing Link Project: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

I had read parts of this book before, including the title story, which is widely anthologized. I’d also heard the author read the book’s final story, “The Lives of the Dead,” at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2008. It is a wonderful book, and if you haven’t read it I encourage you to do so.

It is a fictional memoir, I suppose. The narrator has a lot in common with the author—name, profession, background, service in Vietnam. And it is impossible for a reader to separate fact from fiction. One thing the author is saying—explicitly in some cases, such as in “How to Tell a True War Story,” is that truth and facts aren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s an important lesson for writers of fiction, and for readers of fiction, for that matter: what fiction can and should do is get to the emotional truth, and the facts, what really happened, don’t matter very much.

The primary linkage in this book is the narrator, Tim, but the stories are also linked by their Vietnam setting—for a the most part, although in a few places they jump forward in time to the postwar period—and by the recurring characters, the narrator’s comrades: Kiowa, Jimmy Cross, Ted Lavender, Mitchell Sanders, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Norman Bowker. All of these characters are introduced in the opening story, “The Things They Carried,” and each features prominently in a subsequent story, but they all drift in and out of the stories right to the end.

I could find a passage to quote from almost any page of this book, but here’s one that sticks with me: “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

Great stuff. A book to be read again and again.

Holiday Book Fair at Stone Soup

1st Annual Holiday Book Fair featuring Local Authors

Join Stone Soup Books for a little local literary shopping experience with all the trimmings of mulled cider & molasses cookies. Pick up that specially inscribed book gift - local cookbooks, dog books, bird books, local history, or local fiction. Authors will be on hand to write custom gift inscriptions and answer questions. Usher in the spirit of the season with a lovely book from one of our local authors.

I'll be there!

National Book Awards

The National Book Awards were announced tonight at a banquet in New York. In Fiction, the winner was Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin

The Missing Link Project: Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

I first read Jesus's Son in 2000 (it first appeared in 1992) and my reaction at the time was simple: I hated it. What stayed with me over the years was the excessive drug use and the violence. I understand that these things are real and it all seemed authentic enough, but it just didn't appeal to me. Whenever I told people that I didn't like the book, they gave me strange looks, as if I was out of my mind. Earlier in The Missing Link Project some people reacted the same way to my negative comments about Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff, which I also didn't like, for pretty much the same reason.

So, I've just re-read Jesus' Son and while I can see the skill in the stories--in a way that I probably didn't appreciate nine years ago (before I was paying attention to writing)--I still don't like the book. I'm allowed, right? I just can't relate. I'm sorry.

I do, however, like the Point of View here, and the way the book stands out as an example of the linked story sub-genre. Unlike most such collections, these stories aren't unified by setting, unless you count the narrator's drug-addled brain as the setting, in which case it's exactly like other examples. But the geographical setting bounces around the country, even while the narrator--presumably the same person--stays the same. I also found the final story in the collection far more hopeful than I remember (I wonder if I didn't give up before I got to the last paragraph?), which almost redeems the narrator and the book. Even though I still don't love it, I'm glad I gave the book another chance.

Next up: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The New Yorker: "Alone" by Yiyun Li

I’m not sure what to make of this story. It’s skillfully written, but it seems to lack emotion. Or perhaps that’s the point? (But then, of course, we’d have an imitative fallacy problem!) Suchen is a U.S. resident, originally from China, but she has put China in her past because of an incident that occurred when she was a girl. She and five other girls had entered into a suicide pact—the reasons aren’t clear to Suchen and if she doesn’t know, the readers certainly don’t know—and carried their plan out. Except that Suchen survived. Since then, an outcast, she’s been haunted by what happened, but not, it seems, with sadness. She doesn’t understand, but neither does she really seem to grieve.

At the time of the story, though, she is on her way to join her classmates. She has abandoned her possessions, granted her husband a divorce, and intends to sink beneath the surface of the ocean, never to be seen again.

Except . . . she meets Walt, an older gentleman who latches onto her. He is still hurting from the death of his wife from leukemia, and his wife had asked for a divorce when her prognosis became clear. The end of their marriage parallels the end of Suchen’s, and Walt understands no more than Suchen’s ex-husband why such a split was desired. Suchen claims not to understand, too, but surely she does. In the end, it isn’t clear that Suchen will carry out her plan, although the last line, I think, suggests that she will—despite a series of delays.

And what do we make of the beginning. There is a fire in the hills, the smoke from which threatens the visitors to the ski resort where Suchen meets Walt. Suchen, however, can’t smell it or see it. Is the smoke meant to represent something? A “smoke screen” perhaps? One that Suchen can’t herself recognize? She seems to feel at the end that she has let her husband go for his own good. But is that true? Or is she kidding herself?

This isn’t, in my opinion one of the year’s best New Yorker stories, but it’s far from the worst.

November 16, 2009: “Alone” by Yiyun Li

A Writer's Guide to Microsoft Office

Here's something I learned at Winter Wheat this weekend: Poet Joannie Stangeland, who works at Microsoft, hosts a series of online videos to help writers take advantage of Microsoft Office. Although I'm fairly comfortable with Office (still learning 2007!), I know that I'm using only a fraction of the tools it offers writers. I'm looking forward to learning from Joannie! A Writer's Guide to Microsoft Office

And here's the premiere episode:

Winter Wheat

I've just returned from a weekend in Bowling Green Ohio where I attended this year's Winter Wheat--The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing. I gave a presentation on the subject of Strategies for the Story Cycle in which we discussed linked short story collections. It seemed to be a good discussion and, in any event, I was glad to have spent the time organizing my thoughts on the subject. I attended many interesting presentations, including a few on methods for stimulating ideas.

The Festival also included readings by several writers. On Thursday night, before I got to town, Pamela Painter read. On Friday, Bruce Cohen and Khaled Mattawa read. And on Saturday, James Braziel and Alan Michael Parker read.

Congratulations to the the staff of Mid-American Review for a well-organized event.

Library Talk

This afternoon at 5:30 pm I will be giving a talk at the Middlebrook Branch of the Augusta Country Library about my book, In an Uncharted Country. I hear that refreshments will be served!

Review of In an Uncharted Country

There's a very nice review of In an Uncharted Country at the blog Coarse Cracked Corn. The kind words are much appreciated!