Hey, Mom! Look what I did!

No longer a bridesmaid. Just a little tooting of yea old horn:

http://www.creamcityreview.org/

For those of you who know me, please don’t ask me to send the story to you in PDF or Word Doc/Docx/Txt. Just buy the damn thing when it comes out; support that little fledgling journal that was kind enough to publish my story.

In praise of Anthony Lane

Since I’ve been writing of book reviews and their role (if any) in the literary world, it seems only fitting to address the movie critique. Back in the spring, after a long period of growing bored by its contents and increasingly irritated by its elitism (which is its own kind of provincialism), I canceled my subscription of the New Yorker. What ensued afterward what was usually happens when I make these sorts of decisions: a friend said, “Did you read that Tessa Hadley story? HOLY SHIT.” My older sister said: “Can you believe Mavis Gallant was so poor she sold her clothes to eat?” The entire world was talking about Bruce Springsteen’s confession of chronic depression. All of these items were shared in the pages of none other than the New Yorker.

Checklist item #1: Renew New Yorker.

What I never even realized I missed were the movie reviews. Of the magazine’s two film critics, David Denby has always felt more my cinema soul mate. (As would Kenneth Turan if I lived in LA). He’s a tempered, wise, thoughtful voice; witty when situations permit, but generally serious in tone and undertaking. But opening up the pages of this week’s edition of the magazine, I was reminded too of my love for Anthony Lane.

Lane is snarky, snobbish, and hysterical. The latter is why I most admire him; I’ve never been good at writing humor into my own work and am generally in awe of others who are able to do it as effortlessly as Lane. Take, for example, the following from his review of “The Expendables 2.”:

…while the cast may have lost Mickey Rourke, it has gained Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris, who is described as a “lone wolf,” though to me he always seems more of a lone marmoset.

He’s a serious critic but only if a movie has earned it (clearly this one has not).

For a true taste of Lane, however, I urge you to read his review of Revenge of the Sith from several years back. I recall encountering it on the subway and laughing so hard the people around me squirmed; one woman sitting next to me eventually got up and moved to the other side of the car.

Should Lane ever get the urge to try something new, I’m sure he could find a job here.

 

And just so you know I’m serious about this

In the September/October 2012 issue of Poets and Writers, Daphne Kolotay wrote one of those thoughtful, well-articulated, persuasive pieces of prose I argued for in yesterday’s post. So good was it that it convinced me to check out the books of Gina Berriault.

Isn’t she pretty in pink?

This weekend, The NY Times Book Review reviewed a first book by a new literary fiction author named Molly Ringwald. In it, the reviewer Dan Kois spends a significant amount of time talking about Ringwald’s career as an actor and how, at an early age, she took risks to prove herself a serious actress. He notes that while some of those efforts, most especially the movie “Fresh Horses,” demonstrated her pluck and ambition, they were not in any way successful. So too does it appear to be with Ringwald’s novel in stories, “When It Happens to You,” which Kois says would have been criticized in the first week of an MFA program for its amateur mistakes and “is sort of bad. But! It’s not so bad that you don’t think she might get there someday.”

Kois is obviously a fan of the person if not the author, though he clearly wants to be a fan of both. He wants Ringwald to succeed in this newly tested terrain she’s entered. That’s sweet, but it’s also grossly misguided and is the fundamental reason why this review enraged me as much as it did.

Granted, it’s not the only reason for my rage. The most obvious, of course, is that the Times has taken up page space on a book that probably wouldn’t have been published had it not been written by a celebrity. That’s the petty, struggling writer in me, the one who is not only frustrated by her own challenges at getting her first book published, but also by the knowledge that there are literally hundreds and well likely thousands of more deserving writers, writers who could be judged on the artistic merit of their work alone, whose books will never be reviewed in the Times because those authors don’t have the connections or the persona to get themselves there.

Fine. I get it. It’s the way the world works.

But what troubles me more is this: sometimes, when I open up the Times Book Review, there’s not a single review of fiction in it. This past weekend, the same weekend that Ringwald’s book was reviewed, there was one other book included in the fiction category. In general, there are even fewer reviews of short story collections there and when there are these are in more often in the new hybrid  form of “a novel in stories” (which oftentimes is just a euphemism for “short story collection”). This is not just true for the Times, but it’s true everywhere. Several years back, The Atlantic Monthly ceased including short fiction in its monthly editions; now it is relegated to a single, special issue. There are fewer reviews of fiction than ever, even fewer for short fiction. And while we in the writing world may delude ourselves into thinking there are opportunities for us in the independent small press publishing world the delusion can’t go on forever, not only because books just aren’t getting reviewed as much there, but also because many of these presses won’t exist in five years. The ones that will exist, may only publish one or two works of fiction a year on their generally in-the-red budgets, and those will likely be novels.

Ultimately, do I believe that literary fiction will survive? Well, yeah, sure. But maybe not in mainstream culture and maybe not even anywhere where people may read it. It might just exist people’s basements where they secretly write it for hours. Who knows? But when the few remaining sources of influence choose to spend their valuable page space on a book by an actress that isn’t even (according to the reviewer) good, where does that leave us? It seems to me that it’s the imperative that places like the New York Times Book Review take time on books of present and potentially future value, books based on artistic merit, books they like. This last statement’s controversial, I know; a lot of people will disagree with me. But what’s the point of a book review anyway, if not ultimately to persuade others to read something you loved, even more so than to avoid something you didn’t? More than ever, readers need to hear about books worth loving–passionately, deeply, and for the long haul.

Dreams and other rule breakers

Last night I had a vivid dream of Bucharest covered in snow. Maybe it was the persistent heat of summer that inspired it, but what struck me most was how familiar it felt in sleep–the messy streets, the fuzzy, pink-hued light; the centuries’ old stone architecture wedged between jaundiced communist blocks. When I woke I immediately wanted to write it all down.

Dreams are not supposed to appear in fiction, at least not in fiction written by young writers. They’re a devise writers in workshops are frequently told not to use, a “rule” breaker (as if there were any rules in fiction to begin with). I thought of this this morning when I reflected on my dream. I once wrote a story based on a dream that I had. It ended up being my very first story ever accepted for publication.

This reminds me too of a conversation I had with an agent on Friday who said that while he took no issue with his clients writing short story collections, he would always advise them to write closely linked collections since that was all that truly sold. My collection has been accused by a handful of editors of being either too linked or not linked enough. And we can find linkages anywhere if we look closely enough. All the stories in Dubliners need is the title alone to link them; Paris Stories is about displacement–forced and voluntarily selected. Short story collections are all thematically linked because writers, like everyone else in the world, have their crosses to bare, ones that rarely escape their fiction.

Over time I have slowly realized how susceptible I am to rules like “no dreams,” feedback like the bit I got from that agent. I internalize it in ways that become counterproductive. I have always been, by nature and/or nurture, a good citizen. I do not carry a balance on my credit card bills, I eat veg before dessert, I turn off my cell phone when the signs posted around me ask that I do so. But in a world where being a good citizen rarely, if ever, sees rewards, breaking rules seems a necessity in order to just get by. And in fiction, following the rules may lead to competent stories but never interesting and compelling ones.

I’ve often thought that rather than telling students not to use dreams or flashback, not to include too many characters or extraneous details, that instructors should instead ask questions to get their students to be more thoughtful about the work they’re presenting. What’s the function of the dream in the larger context of the story? Is there one? Or is it just a writerly indulgence? Is it an easy out–are there more significant ways of presenting the epiphany the dream otherwise represents? Or does it actually demonstrate a writer working hard to get a significant piece of the story across? Asking questions helps us look more closely at our creative process and ultimately assists us in creating art worth reading.

Anatomy of restlessness

About a month ago I traveled to Chicago to visit my best friend from college. While the visit itself was sheer delight, traveling itself was anything but. Chalk it up to the airport security involving the usual shoe removal and plastic baggy of liquids, long lines of tense, bickering people and a full body x-ray; or the fact that when attempting to do advanced check-in from a remote computer the airline wanted to charge me an additional $20 for an aisle or window seat–a seat I’d already reserved when originally booking the flight. Or maybe it was that when I searched for something to eat my only options were gelatinous bourbon chicken, fast food burgers that looked about as palatable as hockey pucks, and wrinkled pizza that had clearly spent an entire day sitting under heating lamps. On two other separate trips, both by car, one via the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, the other via I-95 to Maine, I had similar discomfort–the bumper to bumper traffic, the exhaust from semis, the refueling at ubiquitous and identically-appearing rest stops that make you feel you’re traveling in circles, that it is some cruel trick of the universe to make you think you are going someplace when in reality you will never reach your destination.

It’s interesting that my traveling crankiness coincides with intense feelings of what I can only describe as wanderlust. In part, I attribute it to the book sitting by my bed, Pam Houston’s latest novel, Contents May Have Shifted. Houston’s book is broken into 100+ tiny chapters, the primary reason why I picked it up in the first place, thinking it might give me a sense of how to make many disparate parts of what might be my next book something cohesive, whole. And while it does do that, it also makes my heart ache for foreign tongues and foods, adventures in distant lands I’ve spent more time reading about this past decade of my life than experiencing first hand.

At the same time the book reminds me where wanderlust really comes from–that insatiable yearning (and I emphasize, insatiable) to fill some space inside that in reality we can only really reconcile inside ourselves when we remain still. It reminds me of how I felt when I was living overseas, traveling around, the thrill and adrenaline arm-in-arm with the isolation, a deep-seeded sense of being truly alone. It reminds me of how often I met people like myself, people who grew quickly wary of the physical place they found themselves in or–more accurately–wary of themselves in that particular place–and thought that by changing location they might miraculously get a do-over, become someone new. People always planning the next excursion despite whatever purity and beauty might have been shining directly in front of them because they were too terrified to stay with themselves for more than a week, month, year.

Houston’s book is proof enough of that anatomy of restlessness, an autobiography very thinly veiled as fiction, where the main character (“Pam”) hops from one continent to the next, tailing this yearning as it guides her willy-nilly to Tibet, Colorado, Alaska, the Bahamas, Mongolia, California, Laos, (to name just a very few). But even Pam sees through the adventure and, at one point in the book wonders “if I will ever grow up enough to realize that everything I’m searching for on the other side of the world I could find just as well on my own kitchen table.”

Contracts, cont.

I received a couple of messages in response to my writing contract. Some came from readers offering personal confessions of their own love of Oprah Magazine. Most others came from readers promising to draft their own writing contracts–just as soon as the kids went off to camp/returning from Honduras/the summer ends/August begins/September begins/2012 ends/2013 begins/I find a new job/I quit my old job…you get the picture. I hadn’t intended my post to be a source of guilt but apparently it cut a little too close. Some of my family members may disagree, but I sincerely believe that guilt is never all that good a motivator, so please, don’t write up a contract if you don’t absolutely, positively want to do it and might find it helpful.

One friend, however, did write up a draft of her own contract (in the beautiful legalese of a former lawyer no less). The interesting element to her contract is that unlike mine, which contains only stick, hers includes carrot and. (Clearly she’s far more up-to-date on her post-Cold War international negotiation strategy than I am.) If she completes her writing for the day, she adds money to a jar labeled “nice.” If she doesn’t, she adds money to the naughty jar. An interesting aspect of this is that the money entered into the naughty jar is twice the amount of what is added into the nice jar, presumably because she’ll be honoring her contract more often than not, and ultimately placing more money in the nice jar. But my most favorite aspect of her contract is that I, Lenore Myka, have final say as to how my friend’s naughty jar gets spent–selecting the most deplorable, wicked sort of punishment I deem appropriate.

Ah, the power!