Watch Me Go - Abundant Possibilities

Watch Me Go - Abundant Possibilities

July 24, 2016

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Mark Fabiano

Watch Me Go, the 2015 novel by Mark Wisniewski, illuminates not only the lives of its characters in a tour de force of literary suspense, but so too does it reflect, and refract the issues of racism, gender inequality and more.

These themes play out at the stables and race courses, the inner city and by ways of the New York area. Narrated in turns by the ill-fated, yet sensitive Deesh an African-American youth - implicated in the murder of a retired jockey - and Jan, the young Caucasian female who wants to race horses and who lives on the jockey's horse ranch where she falls for his son. 

Their stories, characters, and almost impossible connections jump right from the  headlines of today's 24 hour news cycle.  But thankfully, Wisniewski loves his characters, and their truths, and his prose reveals a deeper perspective about those headlines by giving us the stories from the hearts and minds of his two principal protagonists.  

here are two passages as an exhibit of how Wisnieski renders voice, character and tone and a sense of place for each:

Deesh: 

"And here's where I both believe we'll win but also wish we wouldn't. I wish we could just get in Bark's truck and go home. I want to start the day over. I want to go back in time even before that, and meet the pigeon-toed woman before whatever happened in her life that forced her to call Bark. I want to make love to her back then, night after night, so often and well the drum will stay empty, and mostly I want to go all the way back to Madalynn." (33). 

At this early stage, we empathize with Deesh as he taunts himself with regrets and about the past and misgivings of the present. Not only will that perspective enlarge, but so too will the consequences. 

Jan:

"The way the Corcorans had it set up then was the three upstairs went one each to Tug and my mother and Tug's parents, whereas Id sleep on the first-floor summer porch, a long narrow room surrounded by three walls of windows, the widest facing the lake. During the day, this room was the best because all around were thick oak trunks and shiny rhododendrons and white blooming wisteria, and there was a family of chipmunks who spied on you and redheaded woodpeckers who charmed you by working upside down, and at any time a metallic green hummingbird with a scarlet throat might zing past as fast as a falling star, sip from a purple clematis, then dart to a lily the color of a conch shell's throat, with jade and aqua and shimmering lake behind everything. " (38).

While her voice gives the impression of an idyllic setting, the fact she and her mother live with another family, and that Jan, the young female has no room of her own per se, should give the reader pause that Jan's life is anything but perfect. 

But the point here is the how the tone and style reflect the different voices, their environments, backgrounds and problems.  And you could read and enjoy Wisnieski's novel just to observe and appreciate his craft, though as I found, Watch Me Go provides a glimpse into an abundance of possibility, plausible and real, for readers to gain an inside and humane perspective of these two characters in these racially charged and violent times. 

Writer's know motivation secret is no secret. Not really!

According to the NYT Sunday Review article (7/4/14) entitled, "The Secret of Effective Motivation," there are two main types of motives-internal and instrumental. Well, what we might call intrinsic, that is to say, originating from an authentic desire to perform a task-write a short story, poem, novel, essay-just for the sake of the doing, and well, extrinsic, meaning, for the money!

The study is curious because they found that among these West Point cadets those who performed tasks internally only and not both internally and instrumentally, were the most effective and satisfied.  No secret here for writers, artists, musicians, dancers etc.

Sure we like praise. We love to bask in the rare sunny day that is a publication or award or even an "atta boy or girl!"  But that is NOT why we do what we do.

Why we write is anyone's guess, but I'd venture to say that it has something to do with the same internal mechanisms at work that we use for things like breathing, seeing, loving and living. We MUST write. Its who we are and what we do when we are being who we are. Period.

Still, it is interesting to read articles like this to see the truth of the ages validated. That when you do what you love, your doing is more effective and satisfactory.

So back to writing!

:)

Lorrie Moore's “Referential:” Quintessentially Contemporary, but Satisfying?

Though Lorrie Moore’s short story, “Referential,” in the May 28th issue of The New Yorker, shares the certain plot elements with Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” Moore's story seems more like a Raymond Carver or Anne Beattie story-a quintessential contemporary piece. Is it an updating of Nabokov, a homage, a full blown story on its own?

I can't answer any of these questions. I can only observe that the style, and the tone, are Moore, and that if she meant to "refer" to Nabokov, it doesn't really show. We always run the risk of letting too much of an original master's story elements sneak in whenever we work to pastiche or redo or well, just fricking play around with it. Joyce carol Oates did this with Chekhov's "Lady with the Pet Dog" to create a kind of contemporary offshoot that is pretty damned cool! I have tried it with Chekhov's "Heartache," and I'm still waiting for the editors to accept it. Ha!

But I guess what I mean about contemporary here is that minuscule architecture described some time ago by Lee K. Abbott. Something to do with of course beginning en medias res, then something happens-sometimes-then a massive compression of conflict-climax-resolution. You aren't supposed to have much exposition, or back-story. But if you do add a smattering, it needs to be in just the right place at the right time and nothing more. Poor Edgar Allen Poe has been likely scratching at his casket cover ever since.

I'm not saying that every contemporary story follows this format, or that it should, or that Abbott advocates that, but its just one of those things one hears about in workshops and leads a writer to think "Are we constructing broken stories?"

Well, back to Moore's "Referential."

First, it’s very short. It begins with a dramatic line whose promise leads the reader to want to read more and expect something, well very dramatic to occur. But then the story promptly delves into two columns of back-story about visiting rules, about the focal character’s son, about Pete, about Pete and her son, about Pete and her, and then about Pete and her visiting her son. The story enters a full scene with the three of them at a visit. Through dialogue and non-dialogue we get the sense of how the focal character and Pete are coming to some kind of trouble. Or that they have but haven’t and won’t talk directly about it, as in the next scene of the drive home.

Finally the last scene continues in the same vein of communicating everything by communicating nothing almost to the point of a Hemingway cliché. In fact, a little of the back and forth in this scene is reminiscent of an Updike “Maple’s” story. The story’s ends with a nod to perhaps Cheever’s "The Country Husband," but instead of kings, elephants, and mountains, Moore's narrator gives us “A Monkey’s Paw. A lady. A tiger.” Then, the last line, that there is nothing means of course there is an implied something.

Endings like this, when they work, force us to review the protagonist’s actions, choices, beliefs, in the hopes that this will refer us inward. Although the “referential” trope within the tiny map of this story reveals interesting networks of emotional pain among, as well as, within the characters, I didn’t find the conclusion as satisfying as the first line promised.

Of course, one could argue that this is the point. That Moore's short story is reflecting the lack of satisfaction that people feel around them, given all their efforts to find gratification in the weft and weave of contemporary life. I like that notion. And I appreciate Moore's craft here, building her story on the bulwark of a classic story.

Either way, not a bad read for a very short piece.

What do you think?

Why Read Joyce's Dubliners, Damn you!?

Why read James Joyce?



He never won the Nobel. He only published a collection of stories, three novels, some poems. And for all that, who can read Ulysses but a PhD in mythology or literature? Who can read Finnegan's Wake but the few remaining readers of Gaelic texts? All this blather about him being so great and Ulysses being the greatest novel ever? (Modern Library Top 100). What's really behind it all? I bet his estate is involved. His heirs trying capitalize on his name?

His own country wouldn't let his body be buried on its soil. He must have really sucked right?

Even his story collection took over 5 years to get published. It kept getting started and stopped and rejected and censored by different publishers, until the very last one burned ALL but one of the manuscripts. The one that he was able to sneak away with. The one that eventually got published.

You can download a copy of it here: Dubliners (1914)


So what is all the fuss then? What can we learn from this fossilized writer?

Perhaps looking at some of his work, and his own ideas might help answer the question.



From Dubliners:



-"No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse." -The Sisters

-"She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male." - A Mother

-"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" -The Dead

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." - The Dead

"When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street."
-Araby

- "There's no friends like the old friends." - The Sisters

-"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood." -Araby

-"It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow." - A Painful Case

- "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." -A Painful Case

-"I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." -Araby

- "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense." -A Little Cloud

-"He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition." -Eveline

-"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." -The Dead



Whoa! These lines don't just illuminate character, place, plot, voice and story. They MOVE the reader. Talk about your heart-mind connection-the veritable font of creative energy.



MORE! What about his other works:

-"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." ― Ulysses

-"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home." ― Ulysses

-"You can still die when the sun is shining." ― A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man



Just in these passages, and further then in the stories themselves, its easy to see what happened. Isn't it? Joyce's work created experience for the reader. Prior to Joyce, even the best of them like Chekhov, Flaubert, and others, could only get the reader so far into a story. The tale form ruled, and based on oral traditions, created a sense of story-telling in which the reader had certain expectations and knew the boundaries of those stories or tales. Then Joyce comes along and creates a few texts that overturn this whole style. His work creates illuminating experiences-epiphanies, not just in terms of the characters on the page, but for the reader as well.

Think going from print to radio. From Radio to TV. From cable TV to today's technologies. That is what Joyce's work must have felt like for the turn of the century readers. It was disorienting. Not just in content, but in form, in experience, in nature.

He wasn't the only of course. And he didn't do it in isolation, for this was the era of Modernism. Read The Waves by Virginia Woolf to find a comparable experience today.

I've always found it so astonishing that the "progression" of literary styles has become so regressive in the post-modern era. That is, most of the stuff being published and promoted from the 40s onward is clearly in the realist vein. And much of it, though not all, as if Modernism was a blip or an inconvenient detour.

Yet no literary movement has come close to providing reader experience, and depth of field expression, perspective, and artistry as modernism.

But I digress. And if Woolf had spent time writing more stories perhaps we would read a collection. And asking you all to read a novel would be painful. Besides, Dubliners is mostly, if not soley, in the realist vein.


Back to Joyce. What of other quotes about writing, reading, etc….


-"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

-"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." (On Ulysses)

-"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."

-"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

-"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."

-"[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."



Lofty if not original. His plan for Dubliners was:



"My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to be the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under its four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written in for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness...."

The Modern Word


If this were a reading discussion group we'd have to ask. Did he succeed? If so how? But we are craft of fiction writing group. So we can ask "HOW did he achieve this? What does he mean by scrupulous meanness and why is it important that he did that What does that mean for our own writing, now in the 21st century?"


Web resources for James Joyce's & Dubliners


Concordance of Dubliners

James Joyce Centre

Bloomsday in Photos: Joyce's Dublin


Ok. Enough of the academe from me.



I leave you with two more Joyce quotes. Perhaps we will be tempted to write our own loveliness damn it!



"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."

"Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?"

Chekhov's Misery: Heartache in Third Person Limited

The Creative Writing Symposium: Writing under the Influence - Chekhov’s Use of Point of View in Short Fiction at OSU on 12/4/10 was great!

We each described how we came to Chekhov, and then proceeded one at a time to discuss particular aspects of Chekhov's fiction. The seminar was well attended because the other concurrent presentation had been cancelled.

The give and take from the audience though was cool. A lot of brilliant people, with more knowledge than we about Chekhov. It was a meeting between Creatives and Scholars.

For my part, I explained that I came to Chekhov via my first fiction writing class wherein Bob Canzoneri used the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and we read among others, Lady with the Pet Dog. Ironically, and sadly, and unknown by me at the time, Bob Canzoneri passed away that very day in Columbus. He was a great teacher, writer and encourager.

My presentation basically amounted to reading aloud a small section of Chekhov's Misery, then my 1st person pastiche of it that takes place in 1980s Sri Lanka with a Trishaw driver, then the 3rd person version of my story that I eventually ended up with. I discussed the challenge of doing this project and why I chose to stay with 3rd person.

I began this project because n the back of that same Norton Anthology, the editor, Cassill recommended doing pastiche. Take a story and tell it from another perspective, character, time frame, setting, era. So I tried doing a couple. Different era and different culture. 1980s Sri Lanka. From Horse drawn carriage to smelly smoky noise tri-shaw. From snowy Russian streets to busy Fort Streets bathed in full moon light. And the full moon has special cultural and religious and social significances that are disclosed as the story progresses.

The final version, mentioned below, has only been sent out to a few magazines and contests. So far, no go. ;( However a couple of readers at The New Yorker did add some handwritten notes about two different versions. On a previous version with a magical realism ending they wrote: This story had us up to the very end but we were disappointed in the direction that it took. (Or something like that.) Not taking no for an answer I revised the ending (more in line with a previous version anyway, and sent that realist version packing for the New Yorker. Result: Another handwritten note complimenting it and rejecting it (I can't recall the reasons. I will try to locate that letter and insert the comments here.) Lesson? Just keep sending.

Here are excerpts I read:

Excerpt from "Misery" aka "Heartache" by Anton Chekhov

"To whom shall I tell my grief?"

THE twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses' backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off. His little mare is white and motionless too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this slough, full of monstrous lights, of
unceasing uproar and hurrying people, is bound to think.

It is a long time since Iona and his nag have budged. They came out of the yard before dinnertime and not a single fare yet. But now the shades of evening are falling on the town. The pale light of the street lamps changes to a vivid color, and the bustle of the street grows noisier.

-----------------------COMMENT: I referred to the line about grief at the front as Russian Blues. I did not carry that over into any of my versions but strove to capture the essence of that statement in the whole narrative.


Excerpt from 3rd person POV of "Full Moon Heartbreak" by Mark Fabiano

Poya moonlight. Silver light glistens off the tall trunks of the coconut palms, the jagged leaves dip in the breeze over the chalky outlines of a dagoba, shops and streets, worker’s sarongs, and faces. Lenny Samaradivakra hunches behind the wheel of his trishaw, the skeleton of a man. Even if the Buddha’s face appeared in the full moon above Colombo town right now he would not feel the need to budge. His trishaw is quiet, too, and with its small wheels and green stripes it looks like a mechanical toy beetle. It too, is bathed in moonlight. Perhaps it is resting, he thinks. Anything that is tossed about the busy streets of this lurid city cannot help but seek rest.

Lenny and his trishaw have not moved for a while. They’d left the company lot before the evening meal and still hadn’t gotten a fare. The full moon washes over the feeble light of the street lamps. The streets fill with traffic and people.

-------------COMMENT: Well yes it is nearly identical. Just an update to contemporary times and a cultural swap. Though some of the details in this first version begin to move the piece in its own direction, due to the elements of Buddhism, technology, and place.

--------------------------
Excerpt from 1st person POV of "Full Moon Heartbreak" by Mark Fabiano


The Poya moon is here. It’s silver glistens off the coconut palms, the dagoba and over the shops and streets; but Lord Buddha has abandoned me. I can’t rest even in my little trishaw. It is at rest. Like me it is tired. It can’t feel like me. Perhaps it thinks to itself ‘why isn’t my master driving me?’ The streets are getting busy but I don’t care. My son is dead and I am alive. The gods must be angry with me from a previous life. We haven’t gotten any fares though it’s been hours since we left the yard.

------------------------------COMMENT: So here the narrative line streamlines the trouble because we are in the POV of the father and thus he reveals immediately what has happened. In critiques, this was seen as a detriment to the plot and suspense. I kind of agreed, though of course, I like how the voice is in sync with the character's POV.

--------------------------After many variations, edits, revisions, workshops I came upon this version which as you will see has now become its own real story with its own germinating structure, however bare the original structure remains.

Excerpt from most recent and final polished version of "The Poya Moon Heartache" by Mark Fabiano

The Poya Moon glistened upon the streets of the Dutch Fort in Galle, illuminating all it touched with a chalky whiteness; from the tall trunks of the coconut palms whose jagged leaves dipped in the night breeze, to the squat kadees and shops along Hospital Street, to the trishaw parked just near the Old Gate. In the cab, the moonlight shimmered off of the postcard-sized Buddha, a joss stick holder, and colored beads. The driver, Lenny Premadasa, searched the crowd for an auspicious sign, or at the very least, a passenger. He wanted to get something off his chest; there seemed no way for him to express the deep sadness in his heart. He was tired but not sleepy. His chest ached. His trishaw was quiet. With its small wheels and green stripes it looked like a mechanical toy beetle.

Although he loved to look at people, the sight brought him no pleasure. He leaned over the wheel. He looked for a hopeful omen. A soldier, his M16 carelessly bouncing against his waist, walked by. Lenny imagined that his son would never have carried his rifle so thoughtlessly. Several youths shouted, taunting each other, as they zigzagged their way through the crowd. One of them, cupping his mouth in his hands, yelled into Lenny’s cab as he ran past.

“Wake up.”

Lenny sighed, but kept his eyes on the solider. The youths ran on. In his driver’s side mirror, he followed the soldier’s movements until he got lost in the crowd. Lenny leaned over his steering wheel.

Workers, from the construction yards nearby, sauntered to street vendors whose skillets smoked with rotis and pol sambal. A tall man dressed in the ceremonial garb of a village exorcist, whose leather satchel bounced against his black sarong, exchanged looks with Lenny several times. Lenny sat up thinking the man wanted a ride. He wondered if he had given him a ride in the past, or perhaps seen the man perform at a nearby Devil Dance ceremony. The exorcist approached his cab. He leaned his face in, and Lenny picked up the odors of alcohol, flowers, and coconut oil.

----------------COMMENT: So this exorcist character began appearing in some early drafts and I kept deleting him. Then I let him speak and the interaction between him and Lennie here, and then at the end of the story, provided a new structure and timbre to the piece that transcends the original idea of the Misery pastiche.

Since the I have had the chance to do a lot more pastiche thanks to my MFA craft class with Alan Chuese at George Mason. He was also valuable soundboard for ideas about the presentation for this conference.

Well then, there it is for what its worth. Have any of you who write fiction done or experienced similar process and challenges with your pastiches? If you are a scholar, what is your take on the ethics and or aesthetics of creative writers developing original works based in whole or in part on pastiches like these?

If it ever gets published I will update this post.

До свидания

das Svadanya?!!

Is Plot a Function of Character and Place?

"Place, then, has the most delicate control over character too: by confining character it defines it," writers Eudora Welty in her famous essay "Place in Fiction," and this reminds me of something I think I learned about ages ago in a writing workshop by Robert Canzoneri, or John Stewart, or maybe even Ernest Lockridge: Character + Place = Plot.

The idea behind this formula, though I admit it was never presented to me like this by any of these teachers, is that once you have a character in mind, and that character is rooted in a place, the story itself organically develops then to suggest a plot for that particular character, in that particular place at that particular time. Perhaps I should add (+ time) before the equals sign. For in her not as popular essay, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," Welty writes that "in the face of time, life is always at stake."

Of course, most of us who write fiction know these well enough. Recently, I finished re-reading Saul Bellow's "Looking for Mr. Green" and I found that the character Mr. Grebe as conceived by Bellow and rendered to us is a kind of nexus, not only of place, character and time, but also of something more. Something that exists outside the story itself, but upon reading, my thoughts and emotions somehow consider.

Basically, Bellow takes a simple task, deliver a relief check to a hard to find client in a run-down all-black neighborhood of Chicago during the Depression, and by virtue of his choice for his focal character, Mr. Grebe, an-ex Classics professor, and salesman, Bellows can wax philosophical about everything under the sun and turn this story into a quest for the grail. It is really built upon the formula of character and place = plot. If the character were an ex-cop the whole dynamics would differ. As would the story and the plot. But in keeping with the world-view of this ex-professor, he is able to let the main character go ahead and think freely of transcendent notions, and entertain dissertations on wealth and class and the system. Race. And more. These are the reasons why this story is a classic, great story for Bellows is successful at delivering on the promise of both dramatic arc and presenting a deepening transcendence into human nature, history, being and meaning.

So how do you feel about any of this? Welty's ideas for character, place and time? Bellow's Mr. Grebe? Or perhaps you have your own story to compare this to.

Feel free to post anything. :)

Post-secondary education: Reading and Writing for democracy?

More validation about the bad news for reading. When I read "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" by Professor X in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly I had to do a double-take. "Did I write this and send it in because it sure sounds a hell of a lot like my adjunct teaching stories!," I thought. But no it's not me. Whoever Professor X may be, he or she is dead on about the reality that most of us who strive to teach literature and composition face daily. Perhaps the most profound quote in his or her argument that generally a college education may not be for everyone is when Professor X states, "Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."

What's worse is that some schools actually do not care. They just want to keep their enrollment numbers up, come hell or high water, but not brighter students. There are administrators who might as well be running a diploma printing factory rather than an educational institution.

My opinion? Well, actually what I would love to see is a system that would not let a student into an Eng 101 course until they have in fact mastered more than the basics, even if it means they repeat Developmental English. In fact, at some point, students should be given a reading/writing counselor....someone who works with them on their individual Language learning issues the same way a therapist would work with their emotional issues. This type of micro developmental approach, coupled with well-designed developmental courses, and inter-disciplinary curricula, could go a long way to helping those who might not really be cut out for college actually learn and master enough of reading and writing that they may pass English 101.

After all, we do need as a society...police officers, LPNs, chefs, automotive engineers, and others who can express themselves in writing, and who can read through TV ads, newspapers and magazines with critical awareness. That is what Jefferson meant when he stated that democracy only works if the populace is informed.

So, in this political season, with education again not being the number 1 priority, should we reconsider our post-secondary education? Should there be some pre-college developmental schools for those who have problems with learning? Shouldn't post-secondary educations be for anyone who wants it and is willing to try? Won't our democracy advance further if our populace en masse can read critically, and write effectively?

Is Anyone Out There Reading Anything?

According to Matt Burriesci's article, "NEA Report Shows that Steep Decline in American Reading Skills Will Have Significant Long-Term Negative Effects on Society," in the February 2008 issue of The Writer's Chronicle online, the answer is no....not really. Burriesci cites a recent NEA study that finds, " Americans in almost every demographic group were reading fiction, poetry, and drama at significantly lower rates than 10 or 20 years earlier."

How uncool is news for a fiction writer? Who do we expect will read all these fabulously written stories and novels? Are we writing merely for ourselves-- for our peers? The report is dismal news for all writers on the one hand, and even worse news for the democracy.

Like many who teach English, I have observed a real deterrioration of student writing-- even an increasing lack of tolerance for learning about reading and writing essays. It appears that English is in their way....they have to study and pass basic composition to get that degree. They just want it to be as less painful as possible. After all, who really cares about all those grammatical rules, rhetorical strategies, writings from people long dead before the rise of IMing, or even God forbid EMAIL. (Can anyone from the pre-WEB era really have anything important to say to me? they may ask themselves.) What could those voices possibly have to say to me a 21st Century student when they don't even know about 9/11 or MP3 players or even Brittany?

Its an impossible wall of ignorance and intolerance to mount. But writers, and educators alike, must strive to do so....the democracy is at stake. To say nothing of our own skins......

So what do you think? Should a task force be developed to promote ways of reaching into the new media and directing youth to read more....or is reading a dead or dying art?

The Short Story....living, dying, staying the same...

I don't know how often I've seen writers' lamenting the death of the short story but it has not been a little, so that reading Stephen King's essay,"What Ails the Short Story," which is no doubt just the preface for the collection he edited..nice marketing, in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (30 Sept 2007), we are reminded that the literature is dying theme is alive and well.

A choppy start no doubt to a live issue from a live wire of a writer....but King has enjoyed the success of fame and fortune as a writer, with a peppering of literary merit tossed in for an O'Henry there and an anthologized story there. Still, on the one hand one can't argue with success. And on the other, King probably could settle down and write that great american novel he dreamed of doing before becomming wildly successful as a horror master. But I haven't read his fiction, yet I've enjoyed some films based on his work, as well as, his book on writing. I'm kind of a literary snob and he knows the type. English major, still holding on to the delusion that I may write something lasting, something literary, etc....

King hits the nail on the head in terms of the economics and editorial stunting of American short fiction. Its nice to see that a fellow workshop participant , Randy DeVito is included in his pick for the "Best of..." series. What can a poor boy do? It is just that ironic twist that King would be picked to edit a series that typically consists of big name "literary types" over and over again, with a smattering of us small fellas trying to break in. A blockbuster novelist like King is no less qualified than the head of the Iowa Writing Workshop. No doubt there will be names that both would pick for as King says, there are lots of good, and even some great stories still being written.

So anyway...I pose the question here about the state of short fiction...(basically meaning the literary short story....) is it living, thriving, dying, or staying the same....?

Welcome to my blog...

What can be written that is not already written somewhere on the web? You could say that there are as many ways of saying the exact same thing as there are people. You could say that the utterance of some phrase, a few sentences, done artfully, makes culture happen. You could say that we all have an artistic sensibility, or an idea about what it means to be clever with words. So, what do you say...can everyone who blogs be considered an artist? Are there criteria to blogging that define what is artful in that domain? Or can artists just get a blog going with the usual suspects (content) and call it art?