The Broadkill Review & John Milton Poetry Festival

Call for Submissions: Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

2011-08-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

CALLING ALL DELMARVA POETS!
THE NINTH ANNUAL DOGFISH HEAD POETRY PRIZE NOW UNDERWAY!
Submission Guidelines for the Ninth Annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prizes

The Ninth Annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for the winning chapbook-length poetry manuscript, by a poet residing on the Delmarva peninsula, will consist of $200, Two Cases of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Beer, Chapbook publication, 10 copies of the Chapbook (in lieu of royalties), and participation in the Thirteenth Annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry in Milton, Delaware, December 2011. The Prize will be officially awarded by Sam Calagione, Founder and CEO of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Distillery (or a Company official).

Send your manuscript in an MS Word document file attached to an e-mail to: dogfishheadpoetryprize@earthlink.net

Send two cover pages with each submission: one with the title of the manuscript, your name and address and phone numbers and e-mail address (if you have one), the second with just the manuscript title. This will be a blind judging by a jury of prominent, published poets. If you do not send the second title page with title only your manuscript will be dropped from consideration.

Include one page with dedication and acknowledgements for individual poems in the collection which were previously published, and another with the table of contents.

Send a check for $15 for a copy of the winning chapbook if you would like to receive one.

Dogfish Head Poetry Prize,
c/o John Milton and Company Books,
104 Federal Street,
Milton, DE 19968

(This includes the price of the chapbook plus shipping and handling.) Ordering of the winning chapbook will not affect your chances of winning.

Make your check payable to: The Broadkill Press, and note on the face of the check that it is for a copy of the winning chapbook.

The reading period for the Dogfish Head Prize Competition runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day, 2011. Manuscripts received after Labor Day will not be considered.

The author of the winning manuscript agrees to submit a color photograph suitable for use in promotion within five days of notification, and agrees to appear in person at the Thirteenth Annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry, on a date to be determined in December, 2010, in Milton, Delaware for awarding of the Prize.

The Publisher reserves the right to reprint and distribute the chapbook as demand warrants.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales retains the right to use any of the winning work in promotional materials.

Check out Gargoyle Literary Magazine

2011-08-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

Here.

Review of Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl in the Blue Beret

2011-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

BY JAMIE BROWN

Bobbie Ann Mason’s new novel, The Girl in the Blue Beret is a richly detailed and insightful look at the human capacity to -- if not recover, so much, then to soldier on after the most astonishing adversity, told through the eyes of a WWII aviator who sets out to retrace his steps in the hands of the resistance network which smuggled him out of occupied France after his bomber went down in Belgium. Marshall seeks to reconnect, where possible, with the surviving members of that network after retiring as a commercial pilot. Widowed, with his two children grown and on their own, he is rootless, and feels himself drawn back to the scene of his escape.

There is a phenomenon among survivors of war that makes the memories they have of their time in battle or survival far more vivid than those of their ordinary lives; it is why many men who survived the trauma of a combat tour in Viet-Nam signed up for another, and it is clear that, for Marshall (a deliberately chosen name, one suspects, for its resonance with that of General, and later Secretary of State, George C. Marshall) this is still the case.

But Bobbie Ann Mason is such a writer’s writer that her work is never what it simply appears to be on the surface. Like the work of Vladimir Nabokov, on whose work she wrote her graduate thesis, the subtle intricacies begin way below the visible layer.

What we have here, in addition to being an exceptionally well-researched and absorbing story, is, in fact the story of Odysseus some twenty-five years after his return to Ithaca.

In this reading, time has passed: faithful Penelope has died, Telemachus, never having bonded with his father, has drifted away (Marshall also has a daughter who is even less visibly a part of Marshall’s life), and Marshall/Odysseus remembers the horrors of the war and his remarkable journey home, but he also remembers his sojourn with Circe/Calypso/Nausicaa, in this case, Annette, the young member of the French resistance — the girl in the blue beret of the title — who is instrumental in his rescue, with great fondness, more fondness, perhaps, than he had felt at the time, when all he had wanted was to return home safely.

Annette is now widowed, and, also like Marshall, with children who have grown and left the nest, and they find themselves, in the narrative “now” of the mid-1970s, free to give themselves to each other without fear of abandonment or self-recrimination.

Marshall’s interest had been piqued by one of his last trans-Atlantic flights to Europe, when he revisited the crash site in Belgium, and found, to his surprise, the son of a farmer who had helped him evade capture, and who was, Marshall learned, subsequently shot by the German occupiers. At the point that he learns this, a wave of suppressed emotion begins to push its way to the surface of his awareness.

The loss of many of his crew — like Marshall, some escaped, but they were separated — chewed, euphemistically, by the Polyphemus of Nazi brutality, has come to be re-felt, re-examined in the pastoral countryside long after. That there had been no such time for reflection that was not colored by the danger to himself and his crew after the crash until now is a measure of how far Marshal has stuffed his feelings.

Was the monstrous threat as large in reality as it had been in his memory?

Yes, the answer comes, for he begins to understand that the war had taken its toll in many much worse ways than the temporary frights and discomforts and hardships which he had suffered. Annette, herself, and her mother were both imprisoned in a labor camp and subjected to atrocities to which Annette can only obliquely refer. The family’s having been betrayed by collaborators, her father had been summarily executed at the time of her arrest. The number of women who were literally worked to death in the hard, Baltic winter, forced to work without any protection from the elements other than the street clothes in which they had been arrested, causes Marshall to reappraise his own sense of fugitive deprivation and discomfort.

The Girl in the Blue Beret draws the reader in, but the author refuses to pander to the reader’s desire to know more about her characters; they are so compelling that you might find yourself wishing it had gone on for another hundred pages.

— JB

Call for Submissions: Regional Anthology

2011-02-25T02:26:00.000-08:00

Broadkill River Press Announces a Regional Poetry Anthology The Road Less Traveled

We often arrive at a crossroads in our lives—in relationships, career paths, or artistic directions, just to name a few. These choices can be a source either of despair or inspiration, and at times they spur us to greater creativity. Consequently, they may serve as the subjects of our most penetrating work. In recognition of the centrality of this theme to much of the poetry we read and write the Broadkill River Press is publishing an anthology titled The Road Less Traveled
to appear during the winter of 2011-2012. Authors are encouraged to
submit poems relevant to this theme, however they may interpret it according to their individual experience and aesthetic.

The Press invites writers within a one-hundred mile radius of Washington, D.C. to submit up to three poems, or no more than five pages of poetry, with a reading fee check for $12.00 made payable to Broadkill River Press, 104 Federal Street, Milton, Delaware, 19968. Send a self addressed stamped postcard for confirmation of receipt. James C. L. Brown is the General Editor, but a panel of readers will deliberate on the work. Each contributor selected will receive one
contributor’s copy and the right to purchase extra copies at a substantial discount over the suggested retail price of the volume. Submissions should be postmarked by July 15, 2011.

Inquiries may be directed through email to the_broadkill_press@earthlink.net

Broadkill River Press
an imprint of Broadkill Publishing Associates, LLC
104 Federal Street, Milton DE 19968
the_broadkill_press@earthlink.net

Check out our lit ephemera

2011-01-29T05:28:00.000-08:00

Check out the BKR's tumblr: a collection of pictures, quotes, artists re-interps, interviews, poems, story excerpts, as well as BKR's submission policies and email contacts.

We do not own any of the images, etc. on the tumblr site, they are simply re-blogged from the tumblr world.

Rehoboth Beach Summer Poetry Series Continues

2010-07-23T19:35:00.000-07:00

We have been remiss in reminding you all about Gary Hanna's excellent series Poetry at the Beach, which runs spring-fall. There's plenty of time to participate. Tuesday 7/27 will feature Denise Clemmons, Sherry Chapplle, and Scott Whitaker.

Have a great summer.

Check out our Tumblr page.

Check out our Tumblog

2010-07-23T19:27:00.001-07:00

Tumblr is a social networking site that is centered around the idea that those who blog share their work for adaptation, reposts, and re-mixing. Think of it as a gallery. A gallery of stuff you like. Our tumblr is a gallery of literary quotes, pictures, posts, augmented art, links and any other internet ephemera you can think of. You can see our submission procedures here, and the tumblog will be updated more frequently, as we do not have to rely on the submission process to catalog pre-published material. Come and join us.

The Broadkill Review

John Milton Inaugural Poetry Prize

2009-10-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

John Milton Annual Celebration of
Poets and Poetry Prize

The organizers of the John Milton Annual Celebration
of Poets and Poetry are pleased to announce the
festival’s inaugural poetry contest. The competition is
open to residents of the Delmarva Peninsula (including
New Castle County, Delaware) and the winning poet
will be invited to read at the John Milton poetry festival
held in Milton, Delaware, December 5, 2009, and their
poem will be published in The Broadkill Review. There
will be three runners-up.

Submissions will be accepted from September 1
2009 until October 15, 2009. Entries must be received
by the closing date. Include a cover page with name,
address, phone number, email address and the titles of
the poems submitted. Submit up to three previously
unpublished poems, one poem to a page. Do not put
the author’s name on the poems.

Mail entries to: Gary
Hanna, 143 Riverview Drive, Dagsboro, DE 19939.

For questions or further information, email lindablaskey@
aol.com with “poetry contest” in the subject
line.

Mark Your Calendars for the Eleventh Annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry

2009-10-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Organizing Committee of the Eleventh Annual
John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and
Poetry has released its tentative schedule of events.

December 5th will see poets and audience gather for
workshops and poetry the Milton Public Library on
Union Street in Milton, Delaware. The schedule itself
is subject to change , organizers caution.

The John Milton Memorial
Celebration of Poets and Poetry
Dec 5th 2009
Schedule

MILTON LIBRARY
Morning Workshops
10 – 1:00 Piotyr Florcyzk
10 -12:30 H.A. Maxson
12:30 – 1:15 Coffee Reception & Book Sales
1:15 – 1:130 Opening Remarks - Welcome by
Poet Laureate Joann Balingit &
JMMCoPaP Founder Jamie Brown
1:30 -1:45 Poetry Prize Award
Jamie presents award – Fleda’s Monographs
to Winner and 3 runners-up
1:45 – 2:00 – Winner Reads
Schedule (continued)
2:00 – 2:15 – Rick Peabody
2:15 – 2:30 – Piotyr Florcyzk
2:30 – 2:45- Liz Dolan
2:45 – 3:00 – Gail Cormorant
3:00 – 3:15 – Carol Bruce
3:15 – 3:30 – Joann Balingit

4:15 – Reading at the John Milton Statue
(dress warmly!)

IRISH EYES
4:30 – 6:30 – John Milton Day Dinner
Milton Community Foundation

DOGFISH HEAD BREWERY
6:30 – 7:15 Open Mic & Evening Reception
7:15 – 8:15 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize and
readings (Runners-up will be announced
and will read one poem each, winner
reads for 15 minutes)
8:15 – 9:15 DOGFISH HEAD CRAFT
BREWED ALES BEER TASTING

Mr. Bones. Fiction by Joshua B. Isard

2009-08-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Joshua D. Isard, of Philly, published the short story "Mr. Bones" in The Broadkill Review Volume One, Number Six, November, 2007.

Mr. Bones

Walking North on 17th Street in a misty rain: coffee in one hand, bag over the other shoulder, and glasses slowly collecting water vapor. The steel cloud line, foreboding an eventual downpour, provides him a great comfort. It seals people on the ground—no gazing at the sky, pondering the azure color, or marveling at the sun. An overcast forces one’s thoughts back to the street, but it’s still hard to see a tableau’s details with the collective droplets of a ten-minute walk in the rain on already small glasses. Details don’t usually matter much in a daily ritual walk, anyway. When they’re in plain sight, no one notices them. It takes an event to bring out the details.

17th and Chestnut, Northbound. Black coats avoid him on his way, everyone’s hair slicked back by default in a ubiquitous wetness which seems to surf on the wind rather than fall from the clouds. Dark pants emerge below the coats, ending in dark shoes, everything covered with a black umbrella. Designers should bring out colors in the winter fashions, it’s when people really need them. His dark overcoat coat remains open, revealing a blood-red oxford shirt, the top two buttons undone and exposing a black t-shirt. That’s at least something, the presence of a color. Not the happiest color, but a presence none the less, keeping the light reflecting off the humans on the street just above absolute zero.

He carries in his backpack The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Oxford Edition, and a legal pad. In four places on the book its binding is broken-in: Hamlet, Henry IV Part One, Richard III, and The Tempest. Who would fardles bare...

I guess I would. Grad students rehashing Will Shakespeare for the tenth time in their lives, it’s a weary life for me today. After all, who remembers the long diatribes Hal and the King have, the whole story revolves around the tavern scenes. The feign of indolence and shining of erudition in a young prince, no one cares for his acquiescence to his father. Falstaff, an achievement of literary genius in the public house, brings the thing to fucking reality, where we can think—

“Hey, Mr. Bones, spare some cash?”

His head snaps to the side, then down. Against a wall of Liberty Place, between 16th and 17th on Chestnut, sits a middle-aged man with a green cloth hat, fedora style, denim jacket and jeans, and a beard bushy enough to match a thick head of hair which must have been growing for two years before this interaction. This old man could have come up with “Mr. Bones” several ways, none of which matches his present audience. I’m not skinny, I’m not indigent, not carrying meat from the butchers, he’s got money in his cup, I can see it. But Berryman… how could he know The Dream Songs? I barely understand The Dream Songs.

“Where’d you come up with Mr. Bones?”

“Oh, you prefer Dr. Bones? Well, no time for love, Dr. Bones.”

“Ok, fuck it, just asking.”

When he turns to regain stride the beads of water resting on his hair stir, and one falls between his glasses, into his eye. He gets a clear view of a single drop approaching his eyeball, but can’t blink fast enough to prevent a collision. Not exactly saline solution what falls from the sky, and mixed with hair wax now. “Ah, shit,” he says to himself, but the pain eliminates his volume control for a split second as he bends over, peels his conveniently malleable frames off his face, and begins trying to get tears in his eyes.

“Well, pretty huffy now, aren’t we Henry.”

Who is this guy? Not one other person on the street knows how queer this situation is, except me. We’re the only two people here right now. It took ten seconds to remove a world and enter a poem. The only bridge we have is Henry Pussycat, and everyone else’s ignorance of our connection. It’s like saying a word too many times, suddenly it breaks down a thousand different ways, none of which are the way the word normally sounds. Removal from real life, from the absurd of my even talking to this tatterdemalion at 11:00 on Tuesday morning, and into our own worlds, via Berryman. The look, an epoché, becoming a knight of faith if I can keep in it. Here. If he’s what I think he is.

If this kid’s what I think he is, yeah, maybe I’ll land lunch today.

“What’s in the bag kiddo?”

Lie to him, walk away and get to class. There’s ten minutes for a three minute walk. He considers the options of arguing with graduates or arguing with a strange homeless man... Arguments with graduates happen every other day. Ok, a penny for the old guy, and off to class, on time today.

“Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare... William?”

“Yeah. Hey, here’s a quarter, I gotta get to class.”

“Wait. Just one more question. You read Dickie the Three yet?”

“Richard the Third? Yeah, I read it last night.”

“That was the best part for Burbage. But no one ever thinks of him. After all, William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third. He!”

You spend 25 years in school, and actually enjoy the reading. Teaching has become a means for your own creation, instilling ideas and possibilities, and having time to produce new material. A cross between academia and freelancing. A quarter century and Master’s degree later you’ve proven to yourself that you comprehend the greats, and have earned the right to at least try and join them, live up to them, say something they would accept or think about. Your heroes become your audience because you understand them, and you think they’ll understand you, and in the circle of understanding the major thoughts of the world you’ll gain not fame, not greatness, but significance. Exactly the significance this guy on the street understands.

“How do you know Shakespeare?”

“There’s a reason they call it the Free Library of Philadelphia.”

He stands before this person whose sharp mind utterly contradicts a tattered body. He, a man who studies words, now lost for words, does nothing but stare at the block of Liberty Place’s wall directly to the left of this anomaly’s ear. Eye contact means a continuation, if he doesn’t look at the man sitting before him, he can leave at will; without some sacred connection between the eyes to break, the experience will remain no more personal than depositing a check or buying a sandwich.

But the old man springs up and grabs him by the collar of his red shirt, looks each pore of his face over in a matter of three seconds, and locks contact with his pupil, dilated from the dominant clouds.

“When you read about King Richard you think of Shakespeare, you remember ‘My Kingdom for a horse!’ but as a phantom image in your mind. Will’s audience never did that, they heard Burbage. Burbage was Shakespeare, and the actor held the power of the words. It’s the same now, at the movies, like when you think of Tyler Durden, do you think of Brad Pitt or Chuck Palahniuk? What you have to ask yourself boy is how will these people hear your words? Will they abstract them off paper or will someone speak to them? You think you have power because you move the pen, but the power lies in the man giving the words. So who do you leave that up to boy, the editors, your pedantic classmates, the average reader? Remember who has the power over your work, or the whole process is a moot point.”

The old man throws him back two feet, turns West down Chestnut Street, never looking back, taking no risks with salt. He watches the old man’s hair flail out the back of the green hat, and watches the stained clothing blend into a single uniform of dirt and cotton about two blocks away. The man answers no cry to remain, and the last image he leaves is of the finger, high in the air, given from the corner of l9th and Chestnut. Where’s the coffee? Spilled, and no change left. Black on the sidewalk, slowly mixing with mist, draining down the street, but into nowhere. The direction I have to go. Just try and keep my head in the air, try and get a hold of my body first, of my actions.

Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason

2009-04-20T17:21:00.001-07:00

The Broadkill Review interviewed Bobbie Ann Mason over the last two-and-a-half months of 2007. Throughout the process she was a person with whom it was delightful to deal. TBR asks our interviewees to revise or edit the finished interview for clarity, but other than that, the questions originate from TBR’s editorial staff

TBR When did you first know that you were a writer? What were the circumstances?

BAM I always wanted to write, and I was always scribbling something, but I did not feel I had the privilege of calling myself a writer until Roger Angell at The New Yorker, in one of a long series of rejection letters, told me, point blank, that I was a writer. That vote of confidence was so uplifting and energizing that I flew into a dozen more stories until he finally accepted one of my stories. There's a mystique about being a writer; it seems that writers are often apologetic and unsure, but when they start to wear the label, they may get haughty and superior, as if they’ve found some rarefied calling available to only a few. I guess there’s less mystique about it to me now. Writers are just people. I don't know that our visions of the world make us superior. Writers, technically, are people who work with language. Bricklayers work with bricks.

TBR On another topic, whom do you write for? That is, writers, as storytellers, often talk about their audience as if they were familiar with them, even if in a somewhat amorphous form. Do you imagine an audience? I have to assume you write for a specific audience in your first journalstic endeavors.

BAM, No, I don't imagine an audience. It always surprises me that people read the stories. It is hard enough when writing to get into the world of the characters. To imagine their audience would probably make me too self-conscious. And then I'd start tailoring the story to suit this imagined audience. Along the way, in the revisions and corrections especially, one has to be aware of intelligibility, so that one doesn't unnecessarily exasperate the reader. For me, the true focus has to be the story.

TBR Who do you feel were the major literary influences on you; whom did you read?

BAM The early influences, in order: Louisa May Alcott, Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Joyce.

TBR In your Penguin Lives biography of Elvis, you mention that you were raised in a home where “(w)e had been listening to rhythm-and-blues late at night on the radio for years,..” You also mention “big bands, pop hits, country, the opera” and gospel music as being influential in your childhood. Do you feel that the music itself had any effect on the development of your literary style? (If so, in what way? Given that music has certain cadences and rhythms, a certain pace to the flow, if you will, is there a rhythm or -- to use a theater term - a “beat” to your narrative style? I do not wish to suggest that this is in any way the same for everything you write, but, rather, that each piece’s natural “heart-beat” may reflect your sense of musical grounding. Please feel free to elaborate in any way you like.)

BAM I don't know if I can analyze this. I do know that cadence, rhythm, pace --the sound of it--are paramount. The phrase has to have just the right number of syllables. I always say that I revise something until it sounds right. I'm not sure anyone else notices. But the sound of it is important to the design, the meaning, the characters, the language. I don't have to read it aloud. I hear it in my head.

TBR I went into some length about your Elvis book and your comments about music, but need to ask the obvious question. Why Elvis? Did Penguin ask you specifically, or was it your idea? If theirs, was it because they identified you as a "southern" writer, or was there more to it than that?

BAM: James Atlas, editor of the Penquin Lives series, asked me to write on Elvis. He tried to match contemporary writers with historical figures. Roy Blount, Jr., wrote about Robert E. Lee, Larry McMurtry wrote about Crazy Horse, and so on. I had written specifically about a region that was quite close to Elvis's homeground. In fact, I knew a lot about Elvis because I knew about the social class, the place, the sounds of the culture. Even though this was far from an easy book to write, I did have an access to the material that some writers might not have had. Other writers, like Peter Guralnick, for instance, had the advantage of perspective and distance, but I had the advantage of familiarity with the culture. I had a feeling for who Elvis was and why he did what he did. I was particularly fascinated by his parents, Vernon and Gladys. I really felt I knew who they were.

TBR Sticking with the Elvis thread, did writing the Elvis book -- you described it as a journey of discovery -- influence your later work (i.e., characters or events) or style?

BAM: No, I don't think it had any effect on my later writing, not that I can tell. It was a project that took longer than it should, and I was glad to be finished with it.

TBR I have to ask, now that you’ve had time to digest (my former student) Alex Anton’s theory that IN COUNTRY was influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, if you had read the (former) book, or had the book read to you, when young? Was Mr. Anton correct in thinking that this was one of your favorites?

BAM [you may want to explain this in a note]
The parallels between IN COUNTRY and ALICE were fun to see! OK, I'll take credit. But I never consciously thought of it. Besides, isn't Moon Pie (the all-important pie-faced cat in IN COUNTRY) the Cheshire Cat? I'm surprised to see these connections made, especially since I wrote a story (now lost) when I was in college about a party in someone's basement, and it was full of Alice allusions. Going down into the basement was like going down the rabbit hole. The cocktails were mind-bending. The character was named Alice. However, I don't ever remember reading Carroll's book until I was in college. I must have read it then because I had a younger brother and sister, and I read them POOH and DR. SEUSS. I hadn't read those before either. Or Beatrix Potter. My childhood reading consisted of the Honey Bunch Series, the Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew and those other mystery series.

TBR Scott Fitzgerald once said something to the effect that all he did was write autobiography – that, in a sense, because every character had to be filtered through his own creativity, he was revealing himself in each of his characters. In light of your own work, do you agree or disagree, and why? Would you be willing to give examples?

BAM I don't try to write about myself, but I do find that I sometimes give traits to characters that come from me, not them. If they're interested in wordplay, or cats, that might be a sign of me. Nancy Culpepper is the only character I really identify with, because she has a sensibility a lot like mine.

TBR The country setting of your fiction (I am thinking in particular of “Shiloh” and In Country) is filled with characters who are the antithesis of Flannery O’Connor’s “grotesques.” By that I mean that you seem to care for your characters, warts and all. I cannot speak to Ms. O’Connor’s sense of affection for her characters, but wonder if you feel that a writer has an obligation to “love” her/his character-creations.

BAM. No, I don't think there's any obligation. I don't know how much affection Faulkner, or his readers, have for Colonel Sutpen. And did Nabokov think he could be buddies with Humbert Humbert? No, a writer should keep enough distance to be able to write about a character deeply and truthfully. It's scary to write about a character who is a criminal, or who may have some unpleasant flaws. It would be hard to make him likeable. I'm not sure I've had the courage to write about one of these people yet. In "Midnight Magic," I was inspired by a scary-looking guy I saw in a parking lot, but by the time I got going on Steve, the main character, I couldn't pull it off. In humanizing him, I found that he might have some traits that, if not adorable, were understandable. It may usually be that way, but it's a big challenge for a writer to create somebody compelling, like Humbert Humbert, whom you might not really be fond of. The popular market seems to want to love the characters. But I don't think writers should promise that.

TBR Your comments about Humbert Humbert in response to my query about authorial affection (I thought the quotation marks around "love" carried an ironic intonation) for one's characters suggested to me that I missed the mark in my question. Flannery O'Connor writes wonderfully about people for whom the reader (speaking solely for myself here) has no attraction whatsoever -- and the reader (still me) is left with the question of why the author bothered. John Gardner's essay, On Moral Fiction, tries, I think, to address the same question. Isn't the world already full of enough ugliness and selfishness and greed and misanthropy? My feeling is that the very problem which you mention having had with Steve in "Midnight Magic" stems from this capacity to see that, as you said in your earlier interview with Lyons and Oliver, "We've all seen thousands of people who don't have any sense of responsibility but they want to be liked, they want to do right." In that capacity, that ability to see through to the whole personhood of the character for whose personality you may be searching for a key or linch-pin, I believe you can (here come the quotation marks again) "love" your characters. And while I'm not sure Nabokov could have been buddies with Humbert Humbert, I've always felt that HH was a manifestation of -- if not Nabokov's personally -- the male id. Is there nothing redeemable about Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's eyes? (I loved Ada by the way.)

BAM: Nabokov once said that Van and Ada, the main characters in ADA, were "terrible people." Obviously they were solipsistic, and they hurt Lucette. But as I understand Nabokov, the power and poignancy of the work always come from the way the character at the center is telling his story and going to great lengths to try to justify himself. The sheer verbal energy of the effort at creating the layers of self-deception draws the reader into feeling sympathy. I think it is usually true that it is more affecting to see someone trying to contain an emotion--grief, say--than to see him bawling and blubbering. The effort at containment is more complex and interesting.

TBR Back to O'Connor, her characters seem to be two-dimensional caricatures of ugliness, where your characters, despite their flaws, do not seem to be caricatures, but wholly realized and thus, at a certain level, sympathetic because wholly human.

BAM/ Thank you.

TBR A few years ago one of my students responded to something I said in the classroom by asking “What’s so great about the Sixties?” I answered by saying, “Sex drugs and rock’n’roll, right?” They agreed. “For starters, the Sixties were more than that,” I said. The classroom was filled with young people of every race, gender, region of the earth, sexual orientation. “Look around,” I said, “Take a look at your fellow students. Now imagine that they are all white hetero-sexual males with short hair. Is that preferable?” Stunned looks resulted. A healthy discussionabout the changes that had occurred as a result of “the Sixties” ensued. How much or to what extent do you feel that the Sixties, good or bad, affected you as a writer? (Other than with regard to the raw material from which you craft your fiction?)

BAM Any decade, whatever happens in your life, will affect your growth and vision. The Sixties were a time of searching and experimenting--and anguish and confusion and rebellion--among young people. I experienced all of that, even though the war did not intrude on me personally (family or friends). But it was there, in everything. The intensity of the sixties is what creates such powerful emotions looking back: the veterans who knew even when they were in the jungles of Vietnam that nothing else in their lives would ever be so intense; we look at the music that way; and Woodstock; and peace marches; and sit-ins on campus. It was all so intense. But what really powers the nostalgia is the memory of our youth. We were young then.

TBR Did you have the sense then that what you were experiencing was regionally different, say, than what your peers in the east-and-west-coast cities were experiencing?

BAM I was in graduate school on the East Coast during the Sixties, so I couldn't really say, except that I had the general sense that the Sixties were about ten years late in Kentucky. When things became fashionable--long hair, bell bottoms, and war protests--then they caught on.

TBR In his interview with TBR Robert Pinsky told us that he writes “Whenever it is inconvenient” and mentioned public transportation, or commuting in the car as examples of those inconvenient times. When do you write? Is there a particular time of day during which you feel most comfortable writing? Do you have set hours to which you adhere and/or to which you limit yourself?

BAM In the past, I have found more inspiration writing on a train or in a bus station than at a desk. But I rarely do that anymore. Rather, I write when it is convenient. On a given day, I can't get my energy focused until three or four o'clock. Then, I could probably go on until eight or so, but I get hungry and have to stop.

TBR How do you write? Ernest Hemingway is said to have written standing up (because of chronic back pain) with a number two pencil.

BAM Sitting down. I sit at my desk with two or three cats crowding around in front of me.

TBR Jill Kremnetz published a wonderful compilation of photographs of writers’ workspaces; where do you work, and is your workspace orderly, disorderly, piled high with reference material?

BAM No reference material, just stacks of stuff I can't deal with that have nothing to do with writing. (Catalogs, magazines). Actually, it is fairly uncluttered, except for the cats and all their beds. I have a computer desk that closes up to protect the computer from the cats. And I have a rolling table that gives me more flexibility. Now that I have a laptop, I can sit in front of the window, instead of huddling in the computer desk. But I have to be careful that the cats don't sit on the laptop. Or pee on it, which I'm sure they'd like to do.

TBR How do you get started? Do you ever have trouble beginning, or picking up where you left off the day before?

BAM I think waiting until four p.m. shows that I have trouble getting started. That's for a given day. Getting started on a project has its own impediments. Beginning a novel takes about a year, just to fool around and do everything but face the blank page. I tend to do too much research, and go off on unrelated tangents. Once I get really involved in something, then it's easier to plunge back in, day to day. But I'm easily distracted.

TBR Do your stories follow some plan or outline which you have composed before-hand, or do they generally come to you in the process of writing them? (Or a combination of both, sometimes to a lesser or greater degree one or the other?)

BAM Outlines can be deadly. The pleasure of writing a short story is just taking off and seeing what happens. An outline evolves as a novel begins to take shape, as a guide to what I'm doing, not as a program to follow. In writing a novel, at some point I start a notebook that tracks my discoveries of what I'm doing--the image patterns, the structure, the motifs. These are not imposed on the work, but as I begin to notice, for example, that images of dancing are cropping up frequently, I wonder what that's all about, and that helps me understand what to do with that thread. I get insight into the characters.

TBR When I asked about plans or outlines, I had in mind John irving's comment that he always writes the last sentence of each book first, and then writes to get to that sentence.

BAM: I think I would get really hung up if that last sentence were hanging over my head. I like to be surprised when I get to that last sentence. I like it when I don't see it coming. And suddenly it's there.

TBR In what way was your writing of the Elvis biography different for you from writing a short story or novel?

BAM I always find non-fiction much more difficult. It took a long time to write about Elvis, even though it seems to be a simple, brief essay. I spent more time than I should have just trying to get inside Elvis' life and figure him out and try to feel what it was like to be him. Writing non-fiction isn't simple and straightforward for me. I can't write chronologically or journalistically. I have to go in circles and spirals, with image patterns and allusions and setting and description. In other words, I have to write it like fiction. With fiction, you can fly around and take off in new directions. With non-fiction, you have an obligation to certain facts and ideas.

TBR Can biography fall into the category of “Creative Non-Fiction?

BAM I'm not sure about labels or the exact definition of that category. But I guess so, given what I just said before.

TBR You are at the University of Kentucky. Are you teaching currently, and, if so, how have you had to adjust your approach to your own work in order to take on the task of teaching in addition?

BAM I am not a teacher. I have limited experience teaching. I taught literature as a graduate student to freshmen; and I taught journalism for a while in the Seventies. I did two or three creative-writing workshops in the Eighties. I have a position at the University of Kentucky called Writer-in-Residence, where my job is to write. In exchange, I do some readings and visit some classes and a few other things that come up.

TBR What are you working on now? (Are you working on anything now?)

BAM I am beginning a novel. I've almost finished that first year of fooling around. I hope it is really going to take off in 2008.

TBR John Irving wrote of his “movie business” and I wondered if you were involved at all with the production of the film adaptation of In Country? Were you called upon to consult with the director? Did you visit the set? Get to observe the process?

BAM I was kept at arm's length. Those Hollywood people do an elaborate song-and-dance to make the writer feel petted and honored and in on it, but the truth is they don't trust the writer and are afraid the writer might try to interfere. I didn't want to interfere. I just wanted to be IN it. During the writing of the script, they consulted me for my reactions to the various scripts. And Norman Jewison asked me for some input on the production notes. But once it got started filming, I was not part of the process. They didn't even let the screenwriter, Frank Pearson, near the set. They allowed me to visit two or three scenes, toward the end of the filming. This movie was filmed in my hometown, and people were beside themselves with excitement. The movie, not the book, was the important thing. They probably thought I was too busy hobnobbing with movie stars to hang around. But I was kept away.

TBR How do feel Ms. Lloyd and cast did in representing the essence of your novel? Did Mr. Jewison share your vision as he shaped it for the screen?

BAM Emily Lloyd was a wonderful Sam, bringing to the character a special energy that really enlarged the character. I loved her. I think Norman Jewison's vision had more to do with the veterans than with Sam's story. In particular, it was more a movie for Bruce Willis. Norman spent more time with Willis than he did with Emily, who was an inexperienced actor and needed more direction and emotional support. I enjoyed the other cast members too--Peggy Rea, Jim Beaver, Joan Allen, John Terry, Judith Ivey. Bruce Willis was quite good.

TBR Finally, (and without regard to the previous two FILM questions) what happened to Sam when she returned to Hopewell with Mamaw and Uncle Emmett? Any chance of a “reunion” with her in the present-day?

BAM I don't know anything about what happened to them next. The novel ends at the wall in Washington.

TBR As a Viet-Nam-era vet who was lucky enough to be sent to Alaska to guard against the terrors of a n invasion of Soviet Moose, I have seen my peers (many of these friends) who DID serve “in country,” after their return, and I must say you got it SO right. Many who served came back apparently normal, and others came back obviously damaged or destroyed. The contention between those who served late, and were alienated from their peers and society, and those who served earlier, and were welcomed home, is a divide that separates us to this day.

BAM Thank you very much for this. I was in Washington DC on Veterans Day, 2007. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vietnam Memorial. There were so many Vietnam vets there, getting older. Many dignitaries--Jan Scruggs, Colin Powell. Maya Lin sent a message. It was a very moving scene. Then I went to hear Bruce Springsteen that night and the next. There were vets from the current wars backstage. A guy with no legs in a wheelchair was in the corridor. And then Bobby Muller, the former President of the Vietnam Veterans of America, rolled up in his wheelchair. It was something to see, for Bobby Muller has spent his career working to see that what happened in Vietnam doesn't happen again. And there was, right in front of him, this very young guy without legs. The next day Bruce went to Walter Reed Hospital and visited with the wounded soldiers, and he invited a bunch of them to the show, and there was a reception for them backstage. John Kerry was there. One of the songs on Bruce's new album, MAGIC, is "Who'll be the Last To Die For A Mistake?", which was John Kerry's line, from long ago. It's all so sad.

TBR Finally, whom do you read now? Are there any writers -- especially any new writers -- whose work excites you? Is the state of American literature moribund, as Philip Roth suggests is happening because people are no longer reading as they once did, or have you reason to believe otherwise? If you disagree, is this a difference in perception caused by age, gender, or regional orientation?

BAM. I am always eager to read books by Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee, Michael Chabon, Sebastian Faulks, and Alice Munro.
The best book I read this year was SUITE FRANCAISE, by Irene Némirovsky. Second best was A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry. You could say Némirovsky is a "new" writer in that her manuscript from 1942 was not read until quite recently, and people are calling it a masterpiece.
A new writer I came across this year is Michael Fitzgerald, whose RADIANT DAYS is unusual and perky, if not quirky. I liked the writing and the atmosphere.
I didn't read much American fiction this year, so I can't venture a conclusion about the state of American literature. There seem to be more good writers than I can keep up with. And there are certainly plenty of emerging writers and people who want to get published and who are in MFA programs. So people are writing and want to write. Are they also reading? I'm no expert on the demographics of reading. I have the impression that people don't have time to read.

TBR: Thank you so much for your cooperation. Our readers will appreciate getting to read your thoughtful comments.

BAM: Thanks for your challenging and thoughtful questions.
***

Poem a Day Challenge

2009-04-11T12:25:00.001-07:00

A networking acquaintance of mine, Robert Lee Brewer, of Writer's Digest, is sponsoring a Poem a Day Challenge on his blog. I'm participating and so far it's been fun. The prompts are basic, allowing novice poets a level of comfort, and the variety of styles, themes, and sophistication of the daily responses are encouraging. Over 400 people post newly composed poems a day, the first few days saw over 700...which is pretty cool. Sure it would be more impressive if there were 40,000 posts a day, but you can't complain about 400 eager poets, wanna-bes, and part-timers grinding verse out. You can check out his prompts here.

As a personal note: I haven't written anything to shout down the well, but it's fun jamming on the day's theme, even if it's only for a few minutes every night after the kids are asleep.

Poem A Day

2009-04-02T17:46:00.000-07:00

One way to celebrate National Poetry Month is to write poetry.

Poetic Asides, a blog by Robert Lee Brewer (of Writer's Digest), sponsors a poem a day challenge, open to anyone, to craft a poem a day based on a prompt.

I competed in one of his PAD challenges in the fall and enjoyed the mental exercise. Though much of what I wrote did not fit into my overall vision (of my current evolving manuscript) the exercises were helpful in another way entirely. It's important for artists to flex their muscles. I can understand the snide academic attitude many may feel about the quality of much of the entries,and some of the prompts (insert head nod and shiver) and the idea that writing a PAD might be beneath them (after all inspiration cannot happen on command, and certainly not for a prompt!), but the contest gets back to an essential cornerstone of writing: having fun with words.

And if that isn't why we write, then I'm a table lamp.

The format is easy, and there is a contest, though I believe no prizes are involved, and he's assembled many a fine judge (if that's your sort of party, including Mark Doty.

So if you be not of the house of Montague come and crush a cup of wine.

I'll be posting my entries on my blog, and I encourage others to submit to Jamie this month, or just assault him with poems. I don't think he'll mind. We can post some here or elsewhere.

Happy poetry!

"This is my language" A conversation with Robert Pinksy

2009-03-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

Robert Pinsky was appointed the thirty-ninth Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1997 and served for three years. During his appointment (the popular title is Poet Laureate of the United States) he started the still ongoing Favorite Poem Project in which Americans from every state submitted their favorite poems to be included in an anthology.

Mr. Pinsky was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and attended Long Branch High School. He received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and his master’s and doctorate from Stanford University. He taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley before coming to Boston University where he teaches in the graduate writing program.

He is a poet, essayist, translator and literary critic and has published numerous books, including seven volumes of poetry and a translation titled The Inferno of Dante for which he was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Translation Award. Among other awards are a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Poetry and the World and also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996.

He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post titled “Poet's Choice” and is poetry editor of the online magazine, Slate – and still has time to appear in an episode of The Simpsons.

The Broadkill Review (TBR) expresses its gratitude to Robert Pinsky (RP) for this interview.

TBR When did you begin to describe yourself as a poet?

RP Early on, I was struck by Robert Frost’s remark that you should not call yourself a poet: that was for other people to say about you. So for many years I avoided that, sometimes walking around saying “I write poems.”

But in the world where “poet” has become among other things an academic job category, that avoidance came to seem an affectation. So pretty late on – it may have been after I published my first book, I started using the word about myself. Sometimes I still avoid it, which does seem a bit silly. And yet there’s something to what Frost says, something reverent, if not superstitious, about the art.

TBR How did you feel when your first poem was accepted for publication(which poem, when)?

RP Poetry accepted some poems when I was in my early twenties. I knew that Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Williams had published important work there. Its page design had authority. I remember feeling consciously that I was at least on the record. It was a magazine that could be found in libraries, the back issues bound as books. In some sense, I now existed.

TBR After taking an informal survey, it seems that writers are very curious about other writers’ work habits. I suspect that is so they can compare and perhaps improve their own habits. What do you think?

RP I have no habits. I think any set of habits you name – early riser or sleeps all day; tireless reviser or first draft only; longhand or machine; planning or impulse – someone has written great work with those habits.

But I myself have no patterns of behavior.

… (Or so I habitually tell myself.)

TBR And so….when do you write? every day? pen, pencil, computer? And how do you fit your writing time into a busy schedule?

RP I write whenever it is inconvenient.

Too much time or too quiet a space, the inviting cabin in the woods –that kind of thing gives me stage fright, or bores me. I like to compose in my head while driving, or in the shower. Sorry to boast, but my prose book The Sounds of Poetry was written almost entirely in airport lounges and on airplanes.

Poetry for me, before it is written with pen or pencil or computer, is written with my voice, my actual or imagined voice trying out the words.

TBR What are you reading now?

RP Ulysses. The Song of the Lark. “Spring and All.” Stevens’ “ Madame La Fleurie.” Daniel Pearl’s pieces in At Home in the World. Tobias Wolff’s Old School. Most of my reading is re-reading.

TBR Tell us about Slate and your duties as poetry editor.

RP I pick the poems, with the assistance of Maggie Dietz. Occasionally, I do a mini-anthology for Valentine’s day, or an anthology of poems against poetry for Poetry Month. Readers can click on an audio file and hear the poet read the weekly poem. Coming up, an anthology more or less celebrating difficulty.

TBR Kathryn Starbuck, in an interview with Poets and Writers, said that through grief (the loss of her parents, brother and husband) she began “scribbling things” and that “they looked like poems”. She has since published a book of poems. Is that enough to start with –that writing takes the shape of a poem?

RP Where else would one start? With reading something that feels great, I suppose. But isn’t that how a very young gent wandered into his back yard one evening and wrote “Ode to a Nightingale”? Kathryn’s account sounds right to me. I might substitute “hearing” or “sounding like a poem” for “looking like.”

TBR She began writing and publishing at 60. This seems to be a great encouragement to late starting writers. Is it ever too late to begin?

RP There are no rules in these things, I think.

TBR Camille Paglia, in the Winter 2006 – 2007 issue of Philadelphia Stories, says that she is “appalled at how weak and shoddy so much poetry has become – including the work of tediously over praised figures…….those pets of the academic elite.” And “No wonder the general public has lost interest in reading poetry…” How do you feel about that?

RP Shallow nostalgia, a cliché. Does she yearn for the days when the “general public” read Edgar Guest? Or is it Rod McKuen’s heyday she longs for? Or is it the days when the general public read Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams?

I agree with over-praised pets of professors, but has she read James McMichael? Anne Winters?

Has Prof. Paglia seen the Favorite Poem Project video of Seph Rodney reading Sylvia Plath?

A forthcoming book by the historian Joan Rubin, Songs of Ourselves, is a history of American taste in poetry. It dispels the myth of a Good Old Days pretty thoroughly.

TBR This makes me think of your essay “Poetry and American Memory”. In it you mention a lack of myth of origin and that our founding fathers were “intellectually inclined planters and merchants” that gave us “great national documents”. You ask the question ”How are they (documents) related to people, or us as a people?” Do you think that American poetry needs to leave the academic and return to the people? Be more accessible to the general public?

RP No, that doesn’t make any sense to me. Is it that “the people” are reading “Paradise Lost” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Well, in fact, many of them are. But “accessible to the general public” characterizes Lawrence Welk, not Sid Caesar.

Anti-intellectualism is an unattractive, persistent strain in American life. Disguised as “getting back to the people” it remains obnoxious to me.

Dumbing-down is not the alternative to an equally obnoxious elitism.

The best demonstration of what I mean – and I guess of what I advocate -is my new anthology from Norton, An Invitation to Poetry, with the DVD in the back: on the DVD, video segments of a construction worker discussing Whitman, the segment on Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick” that I mentioned in my response to the previous question.

TBR Since The Situation of Poetry was published in 1976 (and reprinted in paper in 1978) has anything in contemporary poetry changed, or anything in your opinion of it since then?

RP Styles and tastes change; essential matters endure.

In Poetry and the World (1988 or 89?) I tried to take up some things that the earlier prose book left out.

TBR You wrote in The Situation of Poetry, that contemporary poets have “a dissatisfaction with the abstract, discursive and conventional nature of words as medium for the particulars of experience.” Have contemporary poets, in your view, moved beyond their rejection of the Moderns’ modeling of meaning? (Is contemporary poetry of today still the same contemporary poetry it was then?)

RP Maybe this is a good question for someone who is now the age I was –early thirties – when I was working on The Situation of Poetry. If I write another book about poetry, it would be about a different set of ideas, maybe picking up ideas that have been in my “Poet’s Choice” columns for the Washington Post.

TBR Speaking of your column for the Washington Post, it is a wonderful “textbook” on how to look at poetry, how to read it and how, even, to become a better writer. Do you intend that?

RP What you say pleases me a lot. The “Poet’s Choice” column above all must be interesting. It must choose and present a poem or two in a way that attracts and rewards the newspaper reader. In addition to that primary responsibility, I do want to make the column a welcoming, teacherly means for readers to enhance their ways of reading and hearing – and yes, of writing.

I hope someday to expand ideas in some of the columns into a book of that kind: not a textbook, but an essay that would take a fresh, helpful approach to the art.

TBR In your poem “First Things to Hand” I love the lines: And if Socrates leaves/His house in the morning,/When he returns in the evening/He will find Socrates waiting/On the doorstep. These lines are like a koan, wonderful to ponder. How did you come to them?

RP I don’t know. It’s a philosophical tag, I think. Something I read or heard somewhere. I tend to be a kind of random collector, a picker-up of things. I truly wish I were more scholarly.

TBR “Shirt” is a poem that demands to be read aloud. Is that because the listings – The back, the yoke, the yardage and The presser, the cutter, the wringer, the mangle, to show a few – set such a strong tempo?

RP In its own way, the poem is in classic English measure – a kind of sneaky, contemporary version of blank verse. It sort of plays the changes on the way Shakespeare puts speech (and prose) to lines.

TBR The visuals in this poem are staggering. Do you think that poems gain their strength, build their scaffolding, from such specifics?

RP Sometimes it’s visual, sometimes it’s auditory, sometimes it’s an idea, or a tune, or a joke. Poetry is omnivorous, it imitates speech, and a poem might use anything that might make conversation or oratory or gossip or love-talk or bickering interesting or moving or effective. Whatever serves the purpose. (And sometimes you prop open a window with a hammer, or bang something into place with a wrench.) Your scaffolding is how it sounds…literally or physically.

TBR Do you feel that by paying close attention to and by writing about the everyday things in life, like a shirt, that poems can lead us to the sublime?

RP Yes. As the achievement of W.C. Williams demonstrates, the ordinarily unremarked can be a doorway or path to the sublime.

TBR Are you still influenced by your years as Poet Laureate? Tell us what it was like being appointed.

RP I have never thought highly of titles, honors, official grades, prizes. Am I vain to think that the title was an anomalous, uncharacteristic episode in my life? In high school, I was very, very far from and all-A’s student. Definitely not National Honor Society or the Good Kids Club. My destiny, I have always felt, was not to be the darling of committees or officials.

Yet here was that title. Some practical, brisk side of me found a way to use it, by which I mean that it made possible the Favorite Poem Project, those three anthologies, the videos, the FPP readings at many schools, libraries, the White House.

For politicians, a title or position may be a goal. For the artist, it is incidental, and sometimes even a little absurd. I am grateful for the opportunities and benefits that arose from the title.

TBR What do you say to writers, in moments of self-doubt, that admire another’s work and think “I wish I could write like that”?

RP That kind of moment is absolutely essential to practicing an art, and improving one’s work in the art. Two of my favorite quotations – I have used them very often –are Yeats’ dictum “Sailing to Byzantium” that there is no “singing school” but “studying/monuments of its own magnificence” and Dexter Gordon’s response to “Where do you get your inspiration?” He says, “Lester Young,” goes on to mention the Ellington band.

The point is that these moments of admiration, with feelings of self-doubt, are how one grows in the art. In my experience, it can happen with a work from the distant past (Keats, Shakespeare, Horace in translation), works in other arts (Kurosawa, Cather), or by friends and contemporaries.

Recently, while watching Almodovar’s “Volver”, I saw a certain expression come over Carmen Maura’s face, a kind of fatalistic blend of relief and regret at the survival of something from the past. I felt very moved. At the same time I was thinking that I don’t know how to do that thing in a poem, and I wish I did….

TBR Any final words of encouragement to fledgling writers?

RP Find works of art you love, and apprentice yourself to them. Memorize things you admire, type them out. Take inspiration from greatness, in all arts.

-- Linda Blaskey conducted this interview for The Broadkill Review

Note: this interview was conducted during Feb./March 2007 via email *The title of this interview is a line from the poem "In Berkeley" by Robert Pinsky The Figured Wheel, New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 The Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A Life Well Lived: An Interview with Maxine Kumin

2009-03-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

And indeed, Maxine Kumin has lived well as evidenced by her work, her devotion to her family, friends and farm and her commitment to social causes (…old friend from Vietnam sit-in days,/the rain-soaked marches to stamp out Jim Crow,…from the poem “Elegy”, Still to Mow, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). Ms. Kumin has published sixteen volumes of poetry including Up Country (Harper & Row, 1972) for which she received the Pulitzer Prize and Still to Mow, her latest volume released in September of this year.

She is quoted in a 1994 interview by Daina Savage in Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, as saying “I think it’s good for a poet to write prose, to confront the simple declarative sentence. So often poets deal in ellipses. It’s what we leave out that’s important. So it’s so easy to forget grammatical structure.” Following her own advice, she has published four novels, a collection of short stories, two essay collections, an essay and story collection and a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W.W.Norton, 2000), about her near fatal carriage driving accident in 1998 at the age of 73. Her doctor later informed her that ninety-five percent of people with her injuries don’t survive and that ninety-five percent of those survivors are permanently paralyzed.

Fully recovered, she lives on a 200 acre farm in New Hampshire with her husband, Victor, where she continues to care for her horses and dogs, muck out stalls, mend fences, tend to her organic vegetable gardens and to write. She has won the Aiken Taylor Prize, the Poet’s Prize and the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize.

So how does a woman born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia become New Hampshire’s poet laureate (1989 – 1994) and the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1981 – 1982),a position later renamed Poet Laureate of the United States? Read her work. It is a journal of a life well lived.

(A special thank you for their assistance to Jenny Waltz and Vanessa Schneider of W. W. Norton & Company, NYC; Giles Anderson of The Anderson Literary Agency, NYC; Sherry Chappelle of Chappelle’s lending library, Rehoboth Beach, DE)

TBR:
In your essay “First Loves” (Always Beginning, Copper Canyon Press, 2000) you talk about memorizing and reciting poems. You say…”I am grateful for those old-fashioned teachers who revered the poems of a bygone era and by exacting from us our twenty-odd lines a week gave us an inner library to draw on for the rest of our lives.” I don’t think memorization or recitation is done much in schools anymore. Do you think this is a loss for present day students?

MK:
I think the dearth of memorization requirements today is a distinct loss. Rote learning provided an unconscious but strong sense of meter and paved the way for some lessons in prosody.

TBR:
And was it teachers like Mrs. Blomberg, in “First Loves,” that started you on the path to writing?

MK:
Yes, I suppose. I started to write seriously in high school, then stopped during four years in college where I was flat out taking in information in a number of fields – history, French language, 19th century literature in French and Russian, etc. Creative writing was rather dismissed as frivolous, something to do outside the university.

TBR:
In many current literary journals poetry does not appear in any particular form (villanelle, sonnet, pantoum) but is rather free form. Sometimes, even, without a strong sense of rhyme or meter. Is this an “easier” path taken by many poets today? Or is it, rather, a fashion of the times?

MK:
I think the absence of formal poetry is simply the fashion of the times. Postmodernism squelched metrical patterns for a couple of decades but I think interest in these forms is slowly reviving.

TBR:
How important is it for beginning writers to learn about forms and to practice writing in them?

MK:
I think it is vital information even if the young writer never seriously writes in form, just as the good abstractionist painter has behind him or her long sessions drawing from life, learning anatomy, doing still lifes. Then the painter has something to abstract from.

TBR:
Speaking of literary journals, very few pay poets, except in copies. Does this seem fair? Or even respectful of all the work that the writers have put into perfecting their work?

MK:
It is what it is. Many editors of literary journals work for free.

TBR:
Do you see any trends in current poetry?

MK:
More poems that concern current events.

TBR:
Some poems are about large themes – love, war, religion – while others are about, say, a cricket sitting on a woodpile. Are they all equally important?

MK:
All are equally important.

TBR:
Why is that?

MK:
I’ve said all are equally important because for the poet they are. The impulse that led to their creation doesn’t vary from poem to poem and who knows? The cricket (or cockroach) poem may outlast one of the grander poems about war or religion.

TBR:
You have written and published essays, mysteries, children’s books, novels, memoir, short stories and yet poetry appears to be your favorite genre. What is it about poetry that makes this so?

MK:
Poetry is the most succinct, most metaphorical, possesses a music prose cannot, indeed should not match.

TBR:
Is that what saves good poetry from sentimentality – its exactness?

MK:
Yes, their exactitude and inner music.

TBR:
In a recent article written for The News Journal, Fleda Brown, Delaware’s poet laureate, comments “Poetry (all art) isn’t frivolous. It’s the human mind working beyond itself, trying other ways of being.…Poetry teaches the mind to be flexible and adventurous….” Do you agree with this, and if so, why?

MK:
I do agree though I’m not sure poetry teaches the mind anything. Poetry comes up out of inchoate feeling, the mind structures it, talent and tact shape it, but it may be the mind teaches poetry, just to confound the statement. We are on the same page, nevertheless.

TBR:
Who was Amanda and what was it about her that inspired the series of Amanda poems?

MK:
Actually, her real name was Tasha and she was the first horse who lived here at the farm. Thus she got the high beam of my attention.

TBR:
A friend recently asked me what a martingale was. After I described it to him he said that he had read it a long time ago in one of your poems (he has forgotten the poem’s title). Don’t you find that powerful – that someone can read a poem and several years later recall not only the poem but a specific word in it?

MK:
Yes.

TBR:
Do you have specific writing habits?

MK:
I’m a morning person so I like to write in the morning. I used to be quite disciplined and worked every day. Now I am more casual (also older).

TBR:
And what do you do when nothing comes to you? Wait it out or force the issue?

MK:
When nothing comes I either turn to something waiting in the wings in another genre or simply kick back and read, a great pleasure.

TBR:
If you had one piece of advice to give to writers, prose or poetry, what would it be?

MK:
My one piece of advice to writers in whatever genre is to read widely in another genre. Most of us would benefit from reading in the sciences; I know I would.

***
— Linda Blaskey

Broadkill Review Interview with Linda Pastan

2009-03-19T11:44:00.000-07:00

BREVITY: expression in few words*

An Interview with Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan likes brevity. So much, in fact, that she says that’s why she chose poetry over prose. We, the readers, writers, and lovers of poetry, are the lucky beneficiaries of that choice.

Linda Pastan graduated from Radcliffe College (and later received a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award) and received her M.A. from Brandeis University. She is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, the most recent being Queen of a Rainy Country. Of those twelve volumes, two, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 and PM/AM: New and Selected Poems, were nominated for the National Book Award, and An Imperfect Paradise was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

She has been widely honored, receiving the Dylan Thomas Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Maurice English Award, Beth Hokin Prize, Virginia Faulkner Award and the Di Castagnola Award. She has also received fellowships from the Maryland Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995.

Ted Kooser has said, in his online American Life in Poetry column, that Linda Pastan “…..is a master of the kind of water-clear writing that enables us to see into the depths” The Broadkill Review wishes to thank Linda Pastan for granting us this interview.

(This interview was conducted in May, 2007)

*Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Fifth Edition)

Interview with Linda Pastan

TBR
You taught at Bread Loaf for many years so you obviously feel that
workshops such as this are important. In what ways do you think
they benefit writers?

LP
I think it's difficult for writers of any age or experience to be objective about their own work – particularly new work. A workshop can give them some perspective as well as some new ways of looking at poems – their own and other’s.

TBR
Should beginning writers consider workshops like Bread Loaf?

LP
It depends on what you mean by “beginning writers.” I think Bread Loaf is probably better for people who have been writing for some time. But the lectures and readings would be a help, and an education, for anyone.

TBR
What has the teaching experience in general been like for you? And are you still teaching?

LP
Though I have gotten many satisfactions from teaching, I find that when I teach I don’t write poems. So the 12 days at Bread Loaf were perfect for me. I don’t teach now, though I do talk with students at places I go to give readings.

TBR
Would you give us examples of some exercises you have given your students?

LP
I might give students a poem with three stanzas, having cut the stanzas apart with a scissors. They must then decide which order they prefer and why.

TBR
Do you have a daily writing schedule? Ritual?

LP
From 1965 when I decided to seriously dedicate myself to my poetry to 1992 when I turned 60, I worked in my study every morning. Since then I am more relaxed about when and how I do my writing.

TBR
How long before that committed dedication did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

LP
I knew I wanted to be a writer since age 12, but I didn’t take the possibility seriously until I was 30.

TBR
And was there something pivotal in your life that turned you towards poetry? (For me it was hearing the mother of one of my classmates read “The Highwayman” by Noyes to my seventh grade class).

LP
There was nothing pivotal in my life that turned me towards poetry, but do look at my poem “Bess” in The Last Uncle. It’s about “The Highwayman”.

TBR
What is the hardest part of writing for you?

LP
Getting started.

TBR
What do you feel was the best accomplishment to come out of your years as Maryland’s poet laureate?

LP
Bringing poetry to those who would otherwise not be able to hear it. (People in a prison, or old age home, or even in a psychiatric hospital, for example.)

TBR
You have been awarded the Maurice English Award, the Pushcart Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, to name a few. How important are these prizes in the career of a writer?

LP
All writers, I think, tend to doubt themselves at times. The prizes give them a momentary sense that they are indeed doing good work. And I stress “momentary.”

TBR
Can the push for a prize sometimes lead writers down the wrong path, effecting the quality of their work?

LP
I don’t really think so. In any case, who knows what some judge will or won’t like.

TBR
Every poet struggles to find their own voice, so is it possibly a negative thing to have their work compared to another's?

LP
I think I found my “voice,” whatever it is, early, so I don’t find it a problem.

TBR
In your poem “A Rainy Country” you say “I am like the queen of a rainy county,/powerless and grown old.” and yet this is a very powerful poem. Don’t you think that is some of the beauty of poetry – its sheer power to evoke emotion, to influence?

LP
We could go on forever discussing whether poetry can “make things happen.”

I’m back and forth on the matter.

TBR
The cover of your latest collection, Queen of a Rainy Country, is very impressive. At first glance, the photograph (by Richard Kalvar) seems pretty stark but then you see flowers blooming and a crop ripening; the woman is protected fro the rain by her boots and umbrella; and the muddy path she is on leads to a hopeful horizon with trees and a clearing sky. It suits this collection of poems perfectly. Did you have that in mind when you chose this photo – the combination of struggle and hope? That one must look deeper than just the surface?

LP
I looked at many, many possible cover pictures. My daughter-in-law, Amy Pastan, found this one for me, and without much analysis I just knew it was perfect.

TBR
You have read at poetry festivals such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Do you think festivals such as this play an important role in keeping poetry alive and in the mainstream? (Editor’s note: The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, held in New Jersey every two years, draws approximately 20,000 people).

LP
Absolutely!

TBR
And what about smaller festivals around the country? Do they play an important role?

LP
Of course any festival, big or small, that brings people to poems helps.

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (part eight)

2009-03-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (part eight)

How many times have I heard this as part of a spirited explanation of why the workshop reader/critic is wrong in their criticism: "...and that’s how it actually happened." People usually say this defensively, when what they should be trying to do is understand what the critic means. Frequently the critic him/herself won't know what they mean, but I will be happy to tell you.

What actually happened isn't good enough. Even Ernest Hemingway said that the writer’s job was to make it truer than true, realer than real. That the writer had an obligation to improve on reality.

The importance of the event that "actually happened" is obvious to YOU, who have lived with the reality of "what actually happened" lo these many days or weeks or years. Problematically, the reader is NOT inside your head, and so CAN'T know "what actually happened" the way YOU know it.

James Michael Robbins, Publisher of The Sulphur River Literary Review, said, of the first line of my story, "Leaving the Station," ("Adrianna left this morning, like the trains she used to love to watch from our window as they traveled silently in the night between Lausanne and Geneva.") "Down here in Texas trains make a lot of noise. So are they a) electric, or b) way off in the distance?" To which I responded, "c) both of the above."

I had written the scene exactly as it happened, because my wife, Joanie, and I were house-sitting a friend's apartment there in the little Swiss village of Gilly-Bursinel, and both she and I had admired the view down the long slope to the Lake of Geneva (Lac Leman) and the "blue-gray hounds-teeth of the lesser Alps." The fact that the trains (electric) were far off way down the hill, just before the M road (a super-highway), DIDN'T NEED TO BE EXPLAINED BECAUSE ANYBODY WHO'D EVER SEEN IT WOULD UNDERSTAND.

Obviously, things which YOU'VE experienced and therefore KNOW, are, oftener than we think, things which the ordinary reader, WHO LACKS YOUR PARTICULAR EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE, CANNOT POSSIBLY KNOW.

This means, incidentally, that you must take the responsibility for shortening the story (or novel) by writing MORE and making it longer. See my earlier note re: Frank Conroy and his feedback on one of my short stories.

Or, as Davey Marlin-Jones was fond of saying, “Fix act three in act one.”

So here’s a little writing assignment from a workshop in creative writing which my father took in 1949. I quote from his notes in italics.
1) Write of a real experience
2) No plot
3) Any length
4) Must be about an emotional conflict
Then turn it into a piece of fiction with these conditions.
1) Avoid trite and dated ideas
2) Avoid weak plots
3) Avoid a dull style

Remember Poe’s three rules, especially the one about not being too long, and getting rid of anything which does not directly lead the reader where you want them to wind up emotionally.

In one of my many anonymous roles, I read poetry and fiction for another publication, and give the publisher, a personal friend, my feedback on whether or not I think the work is a) good enough to be published in his magazine, b) the right sort of good-enough story for his magazine, which has a specific thematic content, and c) if meeting those criteria, whether there are any places in the poem or story which could be improved upon through some revision on the part of the author. I suggest the kind of revision which I think will help clarity, whether in grammar, word selection, punctuation, or just plain scribal error. These last are of (at least) three types. Where a) a word is misspelled, or b) where the word is misused, or c) where an insertion or deletion was made in the text and a transition is lost entirely.

Clarity is perhaps the most important thing you need in writing, whether you are writing poetry, fiction, or even a college paper. As my former students can tell you, the purpose of a short story (Uzzell) is to evoke an emotional response from the reader. Lack of clarity leads to confusion, and confusion is NOT a valid emotional response!

What, after all, is the point of antagonizing your readers by confusing them? They’ll merely hate you and never want to read your work again.

(from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 2 No. 4, July 2008)

On Writing the Novel: Fiction (Part Seven)

2009-03-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

On Writing the Novel: Fiction, (Part Seven)

I recently agreed to be the judge in a national competition for writers. I offered to take on three categories: non-fiction book, verse published in a magazine, and novel. Believe it or not, the first two are easy. The third is not so easy, in part because it is so painfully obvious that most of the candidates don’t understand the basics.

So here, if you care, are some of Professor Brown’s rules for the writers of novels.

Learn to write a short story first. Here, at least, you can work on correcting mistakes in narrative technique without losing the desire to become a writer. Trying to correct a novel that is full of such mistakes will, perhaps, appear so daunting that you find it easier to pitch the whole thing in the drawer and forget it. On second thought, if you’re not serious about your writing, maybe this is the preferable option.

Read John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. Then read it again. Highlight it and refer to it often.

Start at the beginning of the story. Don’t give us interminable pages of introductory material; start where it gets interesting! I once took a student’s story which everyone had praised and tore the first seven pages off and threw them over my shoulder. As everyone else recoiled in horror, she said, “Too much set-up, hey?” She understood. She cut the first seven pages and the story, much improved by this simple act, got quickly published the first place to which it was sent!

Read Thomas Uzzell’s Narrative Technique. You may be able to order a copy from abe.com. This is a classic of writing instruction, and although it was written in 1923 (that’s right, 1923), you will learn more about how to write fiction-that-will-move-the-reader from this book than from any other.

Show, don’t tell. This is the most-often repeated phrase in creative writing classrooms for good reason. You are hereby forbidden to interpret any of your characters’ feelings for your readers. Provide a description of the person’s response and the reader will get it!

Learn to write dialogue! People don’t speak perfect English! By the same token, don’t write dialogue the way people actually talk! No one wants to read “’Uh,’ he stammered, ‘I-uh-really, like, think that—uh—I-uh don’t want to like, have to like, really do it, you know?’” When you sit in the company lunch room, or in a crowded restaurant, or on a crowded bus or subway train, take notes. Write down dialogue you actually hear. You will quickly hear the difference in the way two different people speak. The writer need not explain everything in order to differentiate between characters if the dialogue is clearly spoken by different people clearly enough drawn!

SEPARATE DIALOGUE SPOKEN BY DIFFERENT CHARACTERS INTO DIFFERENT PARAGRAPHS! Do NOT write endless dialogue that all melds together. Each new speaker should begin a new paragraph! You are NOT to confuse your reader! Refer to John Gardner in Rule #2.
Learn to punctuate properly; punctuate consistently! The number of folks who don’t understand punctuation astonishes me.

Read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and keep this book handy as you write! I tell my students that this is “Cliff Notes” for grammar. It’s also “Cliff Notes” for punctuation. If you have trouble with #8 above, this is a real writer’s tool.
Be sure, if you describe a REAL PLACE, that you’ve actually been there in person! (or have read extensively about the place and seen every photograph in every travel magazine you can.) If you haven’t already, download Google Earth and go look at the layout and topography.

The over-use of stilted dialogue, overly descriptive, florid prose, explaining it all to the reader ad nauseum, and beginning long before the story actually begins, all make me fearful of the future of literature.

That said, let me also ‘fess up to being near the end of a novel which begins a quarter century before my protagonist is born, and which includes encyclopedic information not directly germane to the immediate plot, and all sorts of politically incorrect violence, none of which is gratuitous, incidentally, because it is a novel about the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. Let me also say that you may only actually break these rules once you know what you’re doing and are aware of the fact that you are breaking the rules.

If there is one rule that wraps up all of the others, it would be MASTER THE BASICS BEFORE YOU TACKLE A NOVEL!!!
(from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 2 No. 3, May 2008)

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (Part Six)

2009-03-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

On Construction the Short Story: Fiction (Part Six)

I occasionally review literary works for a friend’s magazine, offering criticisms and suggestions where I feel it would be helpful and, when asked, my opinion on whether or not the piece in question is worth publishing. I also am asked by friends and acquaintances to read their work, and I do so on the understanding that I’ll be honest.

So I’m quite frankly irked by writers who don’t seem to understand (or perhaps they don’t care) about such things as paragraph indents, closing a set of quotation marks (“I see what you mean he said. What are you going to do about it?”), or by being miserly with punctuation.

Really, if you consider yourself too much of an artist to be bothered by convention, why send your work out at all? And if, God forbid, you’re too lazy or inept to give your work an even casual edit, why on earth should an editor want to read your work?

The conventions of grammar and punctuation are, after all, merely unspoken contractual agreements between writer and reader, undertaken to facilitate clarity. Given that language is itself at best a slightly ambiguous, and at worst, an inexact method of communication, clarity is a must. Until we begin to communicate telepathically, the written and spoken word is the best we can achieve. Why muddy your meaning by using a vague or incorrect word when a precise and correct one will do?

People often ask me what it takes to get published. What they really ought to be asking themselves is, “What must I do in order that the editor not reject my work out of hand?”

So here is a list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for you.

Don’t fail to proofread your manuscript.

Remember, every quotation mark is part of a pair.

Speaker attribution is NOT part of the text that belongs within that pair of quotation marks (as in
the above example).

Indent every paragraph.

Each time you change the point of view, even if only after one single sentence, begin a new
paragraph.

Check your punctuation. Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and keep it near you
at all times when you are writing. This is “Cliff Notes” for grammar and punctuation.

Check for continuity. A story I recently read had a line like this. “’I’ll bet she’s forgotten my name,’
Bob thought as she approached. “Hi Bob,” she said, then introduced her boyfriend. ‘Bob, this
is Pete. Pete, Phil.’ ‘Yes, she had forgotten his name alright,’ Bob thought.” It is NOT a crime
to go back and add something to your story, but for Pete’s sake (or is it Bob’s? Or Phil’s?) check
to see that you’ve inserted it seamlessly and take corrective measures if you haven’t.

Don’t send your manuscript on pastel-tinted paper, or, worse yet, paper with floral patterns or bucolic scenes from nature in the background. This says you are not serious about your work. It also says that there may be something bizarre about you, and that if the editor were to publish your work you might become a stalker.

Don’t send your manuscript in non-traditional typefaces. No script Italics, No old English block lettering, and especially no special characters such as smiley faces in lieu of periods☺ This, too, says that you’re not a serious writer.

Remember John Gardner’s rule for writers of short stories – that it is YOUR JOB as a writer to effectively communicate the emotion of the story without pushing the readers away or breaking their concentration. It is YOUR JOB to invite the reader into your story and make the experience real enough that you keep them there in what Gardner calls “the waking-dream state.”

Incidentally, the title of this series of “how-to” articles is quite deliberate — constructing a short story is a lot like building a house, or, say, a bridge.

(from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 2 No. 2 March 2008)

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (Part Five)

2009-03-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (part five)

Let’s talk about your characters’ names. This is often a subject about which writers will not speak because it is a somewhat mysterious event which even experienced writers do not fully understand.

First, a question. Were you shaped by your name in any way when you were young? Many of us felt uncomfortable with our given names at an early age, and have only grown comfortable with them (if at all) as we mature. We are aware, as children, of how names shape us. In fact, I assign my students an exercise.

I write the names "Darrell, “Tanya,” “George,” “Helen,” “Alex,” “Jennifer,” “Dwayne,” “Tony,” “Amanda,” ”Ralph,” “Rita,” “Shawn,” “Leanne,” and “Tricia” on the blackboard. I ask the students to pick four names, two male and two female (note that some of these names are gender-neutral) and describe the person whom they immediately envision the person so named.

Invariably, where there is a name common to three or more students’ descriptions, (in a class of twenty this is rather likely), there will be obvious similarities in their characterizations. Not that their descriptions are identical, but that a general sense of an individual with that name emerges as the common perception.

Because we are shaped in subtle, psychological ways by how we perceive ourselves to be seen as a person with a name which either fits us, or, as in many cases, doesn’t fit us. Penelope may be a name a girl in grade school might well hate, preferring to go by “Penny,” but the experiences she has in childhood, (“Pene-lope, cantaloupe!” she might have been teased, for instance) makes it likely that her given name will harden part of her psyche, so that a woman named “Penelope” is likely to hold herself apart, and remain slightly aloof. At least, that’s what a character with that name might be like in a story I may someday write.

Someone named “George” might well be a stolid, feet firmly-planted-on-the-ground type of individual. Something about the name suggests this. Allow yourself time to think about these considerations, and understand that, as you progress, your characters’ names will not necessarily have to be chosen by you consciously. Because this psychological underpinning, our presuppositions about peoples’ names and their characters, is so much a part of our subconscious, learn to accept that by naming your characters before you have begun your story, you may be limiting how you think of them as the story unfolds.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this, and it may work quite successfully for you, but you are just as likely to find that the character you are writing about doesn’t need to be named, first, but can be named once the story is well underway. I find it helpful to continue writing a story until the moment another character, named or unnamed, calls out to the protagonist by name.

If you do this, understand that your first reaction is likely to be, “That can’t be my character’s name! He/She doesn’t seem like that to me at all!”

Once again, as I’ve said in earlier columns, you have to learn to shut up and stay out of the way. If the person so named could not be named that, remember, it was YOUR subconscious that heard the other character call out to your protagonist, and therefore there must, in fact, be a reason for it which your conscious mind just hasn’t yet gotten a chance to wrap itself around.

Your job is to delve deeper into the character’s make-up and find out why, indeed, that is the most appropriate name for your character. This fleshing out at that point in your own narrative (you need not put this material into the story; bear in mind Hemingway’s dictum about keeping 80% of the iceberg underwater) will enrich your story with a depth which it is unlikely to have had prior to this moment of discovery.

If what you’re writing isn’t important to you, you can’t expect it to be important to others. The “Moderns” were said to be writing in a new way and raising questions in their work that were important. But after a while, readers should, I think, begin to ask themselves whether or not someone’s mere verbal cleverness, their ability to be provocative by asking questions the answers to which were either self-evident or unknowable, is of much value.

I had a professor say to me once, when I complained that all the writer in whose work we were reading was doing was asking clever questions, “Yes, but what wonderful questions they are!”

Now don’t get me wrong. I was an existentialist at the age of five. A dysfunctional household makes children ask impossible questions fairly early in their lives; what I would far rather have is a writer who makes an attempt to actually answer some of those eternal questions. That way, at least, I’ve something with which to interact, with which to joust intellectually. You shouldn’t get strokes in public office for complaining that things aren’t better; you should be looking for ways to make things better! That’s your job.

Your job, as a writer, is to provide another avenue for seeing, clearing away the bramble and undergrowth and cultural and emotional detritus. This doesn’t mean that people should be expected to agree with you, but that what you have to say is said in such a way that what you mean can be seen clearly. By the same token, show, don’t tell; speak in parables, don’t preach.

I recently had an emerging writer ask me why I preferred one of their stories to another. “Because in the one case,” I said, “Your character, though reminiscing, is letting us see the world through the character’s eyes as the character remembered seeing things as a child. In the other, we were being told why the events were important to the character, so that there was a filter, a screed between the reader and the experience.

Yes, yes, I can hear you protest that “of course, everything the writer writes is filtered though the writer,” but the reality is something different indeed. For when one has the vicarious sense that they have actually experienced what the writer is writing about, it is as though it actually happened to them. The other is just a travelogue of a story, one in which the writer keeps saying, “Oh, you should have been there. It was so great!” but with none of the sense that the reader has of its really having happened. Sort of like being forced to sit through your neighbor’s interminable slide-shows of their trip to Disney World.

(from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 1, No. 5 September 2007)

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (Part Four)

2009-03-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

On Constructing the Short Story: Fiction (Part Four)

I am often asked “How do I get started on something if I have ‘writer’s block?’” Well, we’ve all been there, of course, but one of the “assignments” I will give my “students” in a creative writing workshop is a story that I begin by giving them the circumstances and then telling them to finish the story they are already writing in their heads. Everyone who tries this comes back with a different story, and that’s just perfect in my mind, because we all have different stories to tell.

Here is the start of the story, which is, incidentally, a TRUE STORY the ending of which is unknown, at least to me.

One wet fall night -- it had been raining on and off -- my wife, Joanie called from Union Station. She had just gotten off of the Metroliner from New York and was getting onto the subway. She asked if I could pick her up at Friendship Heights. I said sure, and fifteen minutes later, jumped into my car and drove the four blocks over to the Metro.

I parked on the Wisconsin Avenue side of the Metro office building there; Joanie always went down this escalator when I dropped her off and this was where I always picked her up. A bus pulled in behind me, so I vacated the bus lane and drove around the pie-wedge shaped building, turning right onto what is officially "Wisconsin Circle" even though it never described more that one sixth or one fifth of a pie. Then I turned right on Western Avenue and right again on Wisconsin just as the bus was leaving. All this time I was monitoring the escalator for Joanie's arrival.

A car pulled in behind me. I could see the silhouettes of a man behind the wheel and a woman on the passenger side of the front seat talking. The rear window of their car glowed with the headlights of traffic on Wisconsin. Then a hesitant peck, peck, and she got out of the vehicle, waved sadly, and went down the escalator with her hand luggage. Behind me I saw the driver's shoulders heave -- I imagine he sighed at this painful parting. Then he pulled out, drove past me, turned, and was gone.

I turned my attention to the escalator, since it was clear that Joanie must have missed the subway train by calling me, and had to wait another twenty minutes for the next one. But I wanted to jump out of the car and greet her and load her luggage in the car (if she had any -- I can't remember)

A few minutes passed. Then the woman who had gotten out of the car behind me re-emerged from the subway, creeping up the stairs rather than the escalator. She peered around, wondering, I suppose, if the driver had merely moved the car. She came completely out of the subway, looked up and down Wisconsin Avenue, turned, walked toward the intersection, crossed Wisconsin with the light, then crossed Western with the light, and turned right, walking down Western Avenue beside Mazza Gallerie until she was gone from my sight.

Then Joanie appeared, and I said, "You're not going to believe this."

Your assignment, then, is to finish the story about the woman who went down into the subway and reappeared. Where was she going and why? Who was the man in the car? Why the subterfuge? But you're already writing it in your head, I can tell.

So what are you waiting for? Get to work! And don’t stop writing until you’ve gotten to the end. Be open to any surprises you might encounter along the way, and don’t self-edit as you go along. Whatever comes to you comes to YOU and should be included, not dismissed. ONLY once you are done, may you put it down and stop. Then, in the cold light of the next day or so, print it out and reread what you have written. Correct only your grammar, spelling, and syntax, and do NOT tamper with your characters’ speech, especially so if you worry what people will think.

Once you’ve given yourself permission to free-associate in the creative process, you may come to understand that all you need do is find one thing to start writing about in order to open the floodgates.

In fact, if your stories are good enough, we might run the best of them in The Broadkill Review to demonstrate that what I’ve said about the uniqueness of your voices is true.

(from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 1, No. 4 July 2007)

High School Video Project: Larry Levis Poem Interp

2009-03-02T18:10:00.000-08:00

You Tube has some wonderful poetry readings available, and I came across this interp of a Larry Levis poem. I love the high school field hockey/lacrosse slide show that goes along with the reading. Random

Literary Birthdays

2009-03-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

Literary Birthdays Calendar

Jan. 1, 1879 E. M. Forster

Jan. 1, 1873 Mariano Azuela

Jan. 5, 1848 Khristo Botev

Jan. 8, 1824 Wilkie Collins

Jan. 9, 1873 Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Jan. 10, 1834 John E. E. Dahlberg Acton

Jan. 13, 1802 Eduard von Bauernfeld

Jan. 16, 1749 Vittorio Alfieri

Jan. 17, 1820 Anne Bronte

Jan. 19, 1790 Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom

Jan. 19, 1782 Michel Bibaud

Jan. 20, 1876 Henry Leon Gustave Charles Bernstein

Jan. 21, 1705 Isaac Hawkins Browne

Jan. 22, 1849 August Strindberg

Jan. 22, 1561 Francis Bacon

Jan. 23, 1783 Marie Henri Bryle (Stendahl)

Jan. 24, 1732 Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

Jan. 25, 1759 Robert Burns

Jan. 25, 1882 Virginia Woolf

Jan. 26, 1781 Achim Von Arnim

Jan. 28, 1841 Henry Morton Stanley

Jan. 31, 1923 Norman Mailer

Feb. 2, 1882 James Joyce

Feb. 3, 1874 Gertrude Stein

Feb. 4, 1805 William Harrison Ainsworth

Feb. 4, 1740 Carl Michael Bellman

Feb. 5, 1534 Giovanni Bardi

Feb 7, 1812 Charles Dickens

Feb. 7, 1885 Sinclair Lewis

Feb. 8, 1604 Francois Hedelin Aubignac

Feb. 10, 1609 Sir John Suckling

Feb. 15, 1764 Jens Immanuel Baggesen

Feb. 16, 1838 Henry Adams

Feb. 18, 1825 Mor Jokai

Feb. 20, 1870 Pieter Cornelis Boutiens

Feb. 21, 1907 Wystan Hugh Auden

Feb. 22, 1801 William Barnes

Feb. 23, 1899 Erich Kastner

Feb. 23, 1613 Samuel Pepys

Feb. 24, 1804 Charles de Bernard

Feb. 25, 1917 Anthony Burgess

Feb. 26, 1802 Victor Hugo

Feb. 27, 1902 John Steinbeck

Feb. 28, 1865 Arthur Symons

Mar. 1, 1917 Robert Lowell

Mar. 2, 1942 John Winslow Irving

Mar. 3, 1800 Evgeni Abramovich Baratynski

Mar. 5, 1922 Pier Paolo Paolini

Mar. 6, 1885 Ring Lardner

Mar. 6, 1806 Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mar. 11, 1544 Torquato Tasso

Mar. 13, 1892 Janet Flanner (Genet)

Mar. 14, 1823 Theodore de Banville

Mar. 16, 1585 Gerbrand A. Bredero

Mar. 18, 1932 John Hoyer Updike

Mar. 19, 1933 Philip Milton Roth

Mar. 20, 1823 Edward Judson (Ned Buntline)

Mar. 26, 1911 Tennessee Williams

Mar. 27, 1746 Michael Bruce

Mar. 29, 1831 Amelia Edith Barr

Apr. 2 1725 Giacomo Casanova

Apr. 2, 1805 Hans Christian Andersen

Apr. 3, 1798 John Banim

Apr. 4, 1785 Bettina von Arnim

Apr. 4, 1574 Gabriel Bataille

Apr. 5, 1834 Frank Stockton

Apr. 6, 1866 Lincoln Steffens

Apr. 9, 1821 Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Apr. 10, 1950 H. A. Maxson

Apr. 11, 1905 Attila Jozsef

Apr. 14, 1900 Karin Maria Boye

Apr. 16, 1871 John Millington Synge

Apr. 17, 1863 Constantine Cavafy

Apr. 18, 1837 Henry Francois Becque

Apr. 20, 1807 Jacques Louis Napoleon Bertrand

Apr. 21, 1837 Fredrik Baje

Apr. 21, 1816 Charlotte Bronte

Apr. 22, 1816 Philip James Bailey

Apr. 22, 1819 Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt

Apr. 23, 1564 William Shakespeare

Apr. 24, 1825 Robert Michael Ballantyne

Apr. 24, 1815 Anthony Trollope

Apr. 25, 1914 Ross Lockridge, Jr.

Apr. 27, 1874 Maurice Baring

May 3, 1912 May Sarton

May 5, 1867 Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran)

May 6, 1861 Rabindranath Tagore

May 7, 1812 Robert Browning

May 7, 1857 Jose Valentim Fialho de Almeida

May 7, 1776 Daniel Berzsenyi

May 8, 1698 Henry Baker

May 9, 1860 Sir James Matthew Barrie

May 12, 1907 Daphne Du Maurier

May 12, 1812 Edward Lear

May 15, 1890 Katherine Anne Porter

May 17, 1873 Henri Barbusse

May 20, 1799 Honore de Balzac

May 22, 1688 Alexander Pope

May 26, 1799 Alexander Pushkin

May 27, 1867 Arnold Bennett

May 30, 1835 Alfred Austin

Jun 2. 1816 Grace Aguilar

Jun 3, 1867 Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont

Jun 6, 1799 Alexander Pushkin

Jun. 8, 1874 Jose Martinex Ruiz (Azorin)

Jun. 10, 1832 Sir Edwin Arnold

Jun. 12, 1827 Johanna Spyri

Jun. 13, 1752 Fanny Burney

Jun. 13, 1574 Richard Barnfield

Jun. 14, 1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe

Jun. 18, 1896 Philip Barry

Jun. 20, 1905 Lillian Hellman

Jun. 20, 1743 Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Jun. 21, 1912 Mary McCarthy

Jun. 21, 1813 William Edmondstoune Aytoun

Jun. 23, 1910 Jean Anouilh

Jun. 23, 1889 Anna Akhmatova

Jun. 24, 1842 Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

Jun. 25, 1875 Sir Ernest John Pickstone

Jun. 29, 1809 Petrus Borel

Jun. 29, 1900 Antoine St. Exupery

Jun. 30, 1803 Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Jul. 3, 1883 Franz Kafka

Jul. 3, 1860 Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Jul. 9, 1843 Bertha Felicie Sophie

Jul. 12, 1602 Edward Benlowes

Jul. 19, 1863 Hermann Bahr

Jul 21, 1899 Ernest Hemingway

Jul. 22, 1898 Stephen Vincent Benet

Jul. 24, 1900 Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

Jul. 26, 1856 George Bernard Shaw

Jul. 27, 1870 Hillaire Belloc

Jul. 29, 1869 Booth Tarkington

Jul. 30, 1818 Emily Bronte

Jul. 30, 1888 Jean Jacques Bernard

Aug. 3, 1887 Rupert Brooke

Aug. 5, 1889 Conrad Aiken

Aug. 5, 1796 Michael Banim

Aug. 8, 1884 Sara Teasdale

Aug. 10, 1860 Laurence Binyon

Aug. 12, 1866 Jacinto Benevente y Martinez

Aug. 14, 1867 John Galsworthy

Aug. 14, 1836 Sir Walter Besant

Aug. 15, 1888 T. E. Lawrence

Aug. 17, 1840 Wilfred Scawen Blunt

Aug. 18, 1856 Asher Ginzberg (Ahad Haam)

Aug. 19, 1686 Eustace Budgell

Aug. 24, 1872 Sir Max Beerbohm

Aug. 26, 1830 Guillaume Apollinaire

Sep. 1, 1789 Marguerite Blessington

Sep. 3, 1745 Karl Viktor von Bonstetten

Sep. 6, 1860 Jane Addams

Sep. 7, 1866 Tristan Bernard

Sep. 7, 1756 Willem Bilderdijk

Sep. 9, 11778 Clemens Brentano

Sep. 11, 1885 D. H. Lawrence

Sep. 11, 1762 Joanna Baillie

Sep. 12, 1649 Sir Thomas Pope Blount

Sep. 13, 1876 Sherwood Anderson

Sep. 15, 1867 Oetr Bezruc

Sep. 17, 1883 William Carlos Williams

Sep. 18, 1709 Samuel Johnson

Sep. 20, 1884 Maxwell Evarts Perkins

Sep. 22, 1680 Barthold H. Brockes

Sep. 24, 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sep. 25, 1897 William Faulkner

Sep. 26, 1888 T. S. Eliot

Sep. 26, 1859 Irving Addison Bacheller

Sep. 27, 1821 Henri Frederic Amiel

Sep. 28, 1840 Rudolf Baumbach

Oct. 1, 1760 William Beckford

Oct. 2, 1879 Wallace Stevens

Oct. 4, 1797 Albert Bitzius (Jeremias Gotthelf)

Oct. 6, 1869 Bo Hjalmar Bergman

Oct. 8, 1833 Edmund Clarence Stedman

Oct. 9, 1863 Edward William Bok

Oct. 10, 1870 Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

Oct. 11, 1782 Steen Steensen Blicher

Oct. 13, 1817 William Kirby

Oct. 13, 1797 Thomas Haynes Bayly

Oct. 16, 1854 Oscar Wilde

Oct. 17, 1792 Sir John Bowring

Oct. 20, 1554 Balint Balassi

Oct. 22, 1919 Doris Lessing

Oct. 25, 1884 Eduardo Barrios

Oct. 25, 1941 Anne Tyler

Oct. 26, 1880 Andrei Bely

Oct. 27, 1914 Dylan Thomas

Oct. 27, 1932 Sylvia Plath

Oct. 28, 1659 Nicholas Brady

Oct. 28, 1903 Evelyn Waugh

Oct. 29, 1740 James Boswell

Oct. 30, 1885 Ezra Pound

Oct. 31, 1795 John Keats

Nov. 1, 1880 Sholem Asch

Nov. 2, 1808 Jules Amadee Barbey D’Aurevilly

Nov. 3, 1794 William Cullen Bryant

Nov. 5, 1735 James Beattie

Nov. 8, 1806 Roger de Beauvoir

Nov. 9, 1721 Mark Akenside

Nov. 9, 1928 Anne Sexton

Nov. 10, 1883 Olaf Jacob Martin Luther Bull

Nov. 11, 1791 Jozsef Katona

Nov. 11, 1922 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Nov. 13, 1850 Robert Louis Stevenson

Nov. 15, 1897 Sacheverell Sitwell

Nov. 16, 1889 George S, Kaufman

Nov. 19, 1899 Allen Tate

Nov. 20, 1757 Philippe S. Bridel

Nov. 21, 1495 John Bale

Nov. 22, 1877 Endre Ady

Nov. 24, 1713 Laurence Sterne

Nov. 26, 1883 Mihaly Babits

Nov. 28, 1757 William Blake

Nov. 28, 1793 Carl Jonas Love Almqvist

Nov. 29, 1832 Louisa May Alcott

Nov. 29, 1781 Andres Bello

Nov. 30, 1667 Jonathan Swift

Nov. 30, 1813 Louise Victorine Ackermann

Dec. 1, 1935 Woody Allen

Dec. 2, 1885 Nikos Kazantzakis

Dec. 6, 1886 Joyce Kilmer

Dec. 6, 1788 Richard Harris Barham

Dec. 7, 1873 Willa Cather

Dec. 8, 1832 Bjornstjerne Martinus Bjornson

Dec. 9, 1608 John Milton

Dec. 11, 1824 Victor Balaguer

Dec.12, 1766 Nikolai Karamzin

Dec. 15, 1888 Maxwell Anderson

Dec. 16, 1775 Jane Austen

Dec. 21, 1849 James Lane Allen

Dec. 21, 1804 Benjamin Disraeli

Dec. 24, 1822 Matthew Arnold

Dec. 25, 1665 Lady Grizel Baillie

Dec. 26, 1853 Rene Bazin

Dec. 28, 1872 Pio Baroja

Dec. 30, 1865 Rudyard Kipling

Dec. 31, 1747 Gottfried August Burger

Constructing the Short Story (Fiction: Part Two) From The Broadkill Review Vol. 1, No. 2 March 2007

2009-02-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

The first flaw the novice makes in writing a short story is in wanting to write a short story about (fill in the blank). The idea for a setting, or a scene, or an event, may seem particularly significant for a variety of what are generally rather personal reasons. Often this is an idea that has taken hold with the vague notion that “someone ought to write a story about it (whatever “it” is).”

That’s not enough. The work comes, as with anything of value, after you spend some time with it, develop ideas about plot threads, characters, how they mesh, and how events unfold. About how this unfolding effects or changes which of the characters, and why. How this alters the character who is, surprise, the protagonist, or the person whom the story is about, and, vicariously, the reader.

Why do you want to write this particular story? “Because it is important.“ “Important to whom?” I ask. “Important to me,” the green writer will reply. That’s good, for if it isn’t really important to you, don’t start. Not, at least, with your first attempt at fiction. Those who are experienced writers know that they can get interested, occasionally, in a story which is not initially interesting to them, but that approach is just a waste of time for the novice.

Understand that the most important rule for writing a short story, other than Edgar Allan Poe’s three rules lined out in the previous issue of The Broadkill Review, is to learn to stop thinking about the story and let it begin to write itself.

Do not make the mistake of bringing your rational and analytical powers to bear on the story as it evolves. Far too many short stories die still-born because the writer is thinking like an editor before he or she even gets started. The time for editorial review is after the story is finished, not one second before!

If you have done your job correctly,the thing which is so important that it has motivated you to want to share it with others as a short story will guide the development of plot and help flesh out characters for you. Now there is nothing mysterious about this. It is just that most apprentice “fictioneers” have yet to learn to trust that their subconscious will have made some connection with the material, too. It is the subconscious which provides inspiration, not the conscious.

The effect of this learning to trust all of your mind’s fabulous creativity is that you need not struggle to name a character. Someone in the story will undoubtedly call to your character by name in dialogue. And you should stick with that name, because it will be the most important name that character can have for what he or she does.

(Nearly everyone has at one time or another in their childhood wished that they had been named something else. Names, after all, dictate much our sense of ourselves — and names will dictate much of the characters’ senses of themselves as well — ask anyone named “Darryl” or “Esme” or “Petunia” or “Dick.” My name is “James Brown,” after all.)

At any rate, you cannot begin, the first time this sort of serendipitous thing happens to you, to understand the enormous complexity and richness to which this can lead.

A minor character in my short story, “Feria,” wound up named “Dory,” short, I guessed, for “Doreen” or some such. I didn’t analyze it, but trusted my subconscious. It helped to shape her character, and then, when the first draft was finished, I realized that the importance of her character is that she throws the protagonist a life-ring, euphemistically speaking, and the “dory = lifeboat” connection was something with which I was quite happy. No one seems to have noticed, and it probably wouldn’t matter to anyone but me anyway; nonetheless, I think it makes the text richer.

The axiom of all good writers is “write what you know.” This does not mean that you should write it down “exactly as it happened in real life.” Hemingway, I think it was, once said something to the effect that the writer’s job was to “make it truer than true, realer than real.” This means, specifically, that reality and what you know should be the starting point for your story, and not the ending point.

So when a new writer says, “I have trouble finishing a story,” or “I have trouble with making my characters do what I want,” or “I can’t seem to keep going,” or any number of similar complaints, I’m fairly certain that the person making the statement is over-thinking whatever the situation is with which they are having trouble. What they really have trouble doing is letting go of their own sense of themselves as the creator of the story, thinking, of course, that anything which they create they must remain in absolute control of, and that, of course, is nearly impossible. (Even God, I am told, allows for free will.)

So let your characters breathe on their own, and they will begin to think and act on their own, and not always in ways which you expect. (Not consciously, at least. Your subconscious will be taking care of this all by itself and offering your conscious mind its creative efforts.)

Just at the point when you find yourself thinking, “Oh no. My character would never say something like that!” you should smack yourself in the face with a cold wet rag, tell yourself to stop thinking, and start writing it down exactly as it begins to come to you because, even if you (or your conscious mind) don’t understand how or why the character says or does something, if you trust your subconscious, creative mind, you will eventually learn exactly why he or she or they say or do exactly what you don’t think they ever could.

Just shut up and get out of the way. The story will tell itself.

Constructing a Short Story (Fiction: Part One) from The Broadkill Review Vol. 1, No. 1 January, 2007

2009-02-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

For eight years I taught a creative writing workshop in advanced fiction at Georgetown University’s School for Summer and Continuing Education. Over the course of that time several important ideas framed themselves as principles for the writer of short fiction. Let me start by saying that I owe much of this approach to Edgar Allan Poe, who is rightfully recognized as America’s first literary theorist. Poe, you see, edited, over his lifetime, several literary magazines, and it was in the course of these jobs that he codified his three rules for the writer of the short story. I ground each of my workshops in his three principles.

First, Poe said, the short story must be short. This was undoubtedly a response to writers like Melville and Hawthorne, whose “short stories” read to him like mini-novels, and are, in fact, recognized as such today, although we know them as “novellas.” Poe believed that this new form, “the short story,” should be about the length that could be read at one sitting. Secondly, Poe believed that the short story must not try to do too much. The story writer, he felt, should strive to achieve a single emotional effect in the reader. Anything more complex or layered should take a novel to achieve.

Any writing, no matter how beautiful or emotionally significant to the author, which does not promote that end, should be stricken. (This does not mean that you should erase what you have written by any means. Just move it out of that particular short story.)

Thirdly, the short story must not be so short as to fail to achieve the second objective, and the writer must be careful not to sacrifice what must be told in order to achieve for the sake of brevity alone.

I believe that in a workshop of creative writers, the individual must not dissemble when speaking of their intent, for how can the workshop assess the result without knowing what was intended? (Let me assert here that confusion is not an emotional effect.) This takes a self- discipline which every novice writer should master.
No matter how important or significant a point in the a story is to you, the author, if it does not move the story itself forward, it should be eliminated. Remember always that writing is the first interactive medium, that the reader must be encouraged to invest of themselves in the story which you are trying to tell.
Pushing the reader away with highly stilted or artificial prose cannot serve the purpose of the writer who seeks to engage the reader in what John Gardner calls “the waking dream.” That is the sense that almost everyone who has been engrossed in a good book has experienced, where the synapses are making connections with the experiential part of the brain without your having to be consciously aware of it. Where the story “becomes” real for the reader.

John Updike wrote in one of his short stories of the face of a young woman reading on the bus “who had just emerged from a work of fiction,” an image which suggests (to me at least) the face of a competitive diver who has just come to the surface of a pool after a dive from the 10 meter platform.

As readers, we emerge from the fictive world created by the author, and it is a feeling which we like. Whether endorphins are released by this state and reward us for becoming absorbed in other peoples’ lives is irrelevant to the satisfaction we feel when we have had that experience.

Gardner argues that to forcibly evict the reader from that state of mind, that space they inhabit, is a direct violation of the unwritten contract the writer has established with the reader. This is connected with Poe’s Second Rule, insofar as to push the reader away from the text effectively prevents the story’s evoking any emotional effect in the reader whatsoever.

The contractual understanding is where the reader, having invested in reading the beginning of the story, now feels a sense of trust in the writer. It is this trust in the writer which the writer must not undercut or devalue. It affects the reader like a slap in the face. And why should anyone continue to read someone who assaults them in this way? The answer is, they shouldn’t, and most readers won’t. They’ll just put down the story or novel and go on to read something else, or, worse yet, stop reading and turn on the television.

So remember Poe’s three rules as you write, and Gardner’s admonition against pushing the reader away from the text.

Happy Birthday to...

2009-02-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

February 27 - John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) (right)

February 27 - N. Scott Momaday (1934 - ) (middle)

February 27 - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) (top)

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