Your Writing Family Tree

On Tuesday, Marjorie Sandor (who you’ll remember as the topic of Tuesday’s post) came to the Fiction Workshop. While in workshop, she gave us the writing and reading exercise of exploring our writing family tree.

The easiest way to do this is to read an interview of a writer you admire and note who they list as influences in general, or what works influenced them that you also especially admire.  So, let’s use Jonathan Franzen as an example. Let’s say you really admired the dinner table scene in The Corrections. You might then read Franzen’s interview with The Paris Review and read that he feels that he was directly inspired by Don DeLillo’s writing in Underworld while writing that scene. If you’re lucky, you’ve already read some Don DeLillo. If you’re even more lucky, you’ve read Underworld and can then completely grasp Franzen’s commentary on DeLillo’s writing in that work enough to agree or disagree with his statements. (Or if you’re me and you’ve been waiting to read Underworld during Winter Break, you’re now considering whether or not you have the free time to read Underworld and do all your other writing and reading. You will conclude by the end of this sentence that you don’t have the time and that’s sort of OK.) So, then, you can either continue down your literary family tree by reading an interview with Don DeLillo or you can try to do an exercise now if you’ve already read both works. Here’s the first round of the exercise: try to think about the ways DeLillo has influenced Franzen who has influenced you. Write a piece that directly uses and explores those influences on your writing. Or, if you want to keep reading interviews and stories and books, you’ll read that linked DeLillo interview and choose either a) comic books b) Faulkner or c) James Joyce.  We’ll choose Faulkner because Faulkner’s Paris Review Interview will also lead us straight to Joyce. Now, you’ll have to consider whether there are similarities from Franzen–>DeLillo–> Faulkner.  And if you can find those similarities, what are they and how have you made them your own? So, you then write again, using those similarities in your voice.

I haven’t tried it yet, but hope to try it out this weekend. If you’ve done this before or try it out, please feel free to post about your results–or if you’re adventurous, share your results–in the comments.

Marjorie Sandor Tonight at the Leonard Theater

Tonight, Marjorie Sandor will be reading at the Leonard Theater in Peabody Hall at 7:30 PM. I could give you a long post enumerating Marjorie’s accomplishments (publications in Best American Short Stories! A pushcart prize!),  but let me instead share with you an excerpt from The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction.

(From “Visitation”) “One February morning, not long after I left your father, my own father came to visit me. He’d been dead over twenty years by then, and you were barely six. Do you remember, before we moved into this house, the apartment we occupied for a while, with its linens and forks and pans all furnished, the woodstove we used every night in fall and winter? Rooms that felt like sanctuary but never quite home, that held the strange delights of the temporary bivouac but also the underbelly of fear, for it was the place to which you came every other week without promise or choice, under your parents’ agreement of joint custody. It spooked me, i can tell you, now that you’re a little older. Under my feeling of temporary safety lay a darker note I never let rise up: a feeling of deep insecurity that maybe underlies all our dwelling places, maybe underlies our passion for ‘decorating’ once we convince ourselves that we own a space, and can somehow control what happens in it.

How appropriate that my father should visit here. A ghost in a ghostly, in-between place.”

If you want to hear more:  Be there at 7:30 in Peabody Hall’s Leonard Theater. Bring your fall flannels, your reading glasses, and your love of beautiful prose.

(photo courtesy of MarjorieSandor.com)

Erica Bernheim Goes the Distance

A big congratulations to Oxford Magazine contributor Erica Bernheim, whose manuscript The Mimic Sea has just been named winner of the 2011 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize. Along with a cash award, Erica’s manuscript will be published under the 42 Miles Press imprint. Erica’s poetry has previously appeared in Boston Review, The Canary, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review and, of course, issue 27 of Oxford Magazine.

Expect to find The Mimic Sea on the shelves sometime in 2012. In the meantime, here’s Erica reading her work at Miami University’s Bicentennial Writer’s Festival in 2009, compliments of meshworks. Dig it.

BLOOMSDAY

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Ryan’s Tavern (241 High St, Hamilton)

6 – 10 PM

Readings From James Joyce’s Ulysses

Music / Merriment/ Etc.

 

“yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Organized by Margaret Luongo

Made possible by drunkenness and the stream of consciousness

Chris Bachelder Reading

Chris Bachelder

“The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence. From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed.” –from Abbott Awaits

Fiction writer Chris Bachelder will read from his third novel, Abbott Awaits (LSU Press 2011) Wednesday, March 30 at 8 PM in Leonard Theater.

His novels Bear v. Shark (Scribner 2002) and U.S.! (Bloomsbury USA 2006) ask us to consider the consequences of an entertainment-drenched existence and the nature of hope. Abbott Awaits offers a sublimely heartbreaking meditation on domesticity, from a lively, inventive, and humane satirist.

Bachelder teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he will be in residence at Miami the week of his reading, teaching a graduate sprint course. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Mother Jones, Harper’s, The Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, and other journals.

Read an excerpt from Abbott Awaits here, and a 2008 interview with OxMag here.

NEW ISSUE! Oxford Magazine Winter 2011 OUT NOW!

Cover art: Sinking and Shrinking by Cat Lynch

The Winter 2011 issue of Oxford Magazine is out–at last, at last!  Click here or on the image to read the new issue!

This issue features fiction about motherhood and the harshness of nature and rural life, new poetry from Erica Bernheim and Eugene Gloria and many others, nonfiction of the lunar and arboreal variety, multimedia, and interviews with authors Ron Hansen and Padgett Powell among so much more. And holy smokes, none too soon, because here comes spring with the birds and the bees and my allergies!

The OxMag editors and staff would like to thank all the contributors, Miami University faculty and staff in the English Department, friends and family who helped put this together. None of this would have been possible without your talent, patience, hard work and, above all, kindness.

Video: Todd Hasak-Lowy reads from “Jewpordy”

“Despite all their play, they had yet to swap gender or experiment with homosexuality. Barry reluctantly got dressed and admired himself as an extra from Fiddler on the Roof.”

Do you like Jewish quiz shows, having sex with historical figures, corduroy jackets?

Todd Hasak-Lowry’s writing is fast-paced and funny, riddled with ridiculous circumstance and hard-biting truth.  Author of the novel Captives and the short-story collection The Task of This Translator and an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature at the University of Florida,  Hasak-Lowry explores the most grisly and horrifying experiences in humankind through sexual role-play. It seems to be Hasak-Lowry’s task to find bizarre yet entertaining ways to explore the depths of humanity, mockery and sympathy. We see real human beings in their vulnerable states, trying to cope with a world somehow unfit for them, eschew before they were born.

Lowry is unafraid of approaching the possibility that ordinary people think about and have to deal with crazy shit.  History not only influences the most powerful, but the meekest as well, as in the first story from The Task of This Translator in which two failing people meet and carry out a short drama within the “massive complex commemorating the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.” Above all, Lowry’s writing is honest, showing the hilarity and sadness that follows every human being trying to come to terms with the history and circumstance around them.

Click on the video to watch Hasak-Lowy read part of a story tentatively titled “Jewpordy.” The reading delivers on its promise of being “very Jewish” and “very sexy.” ~ Evan Steuber