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Short stories - what are they? How do they work? This is a topic I have been struggling with since I began writing for this website (almost) four years ago. The first short story I ever posted here was a re-posting of a terrible story I wrote for a creative writing class back in my university days (if you’re a glutton for punishment, here are parts one and two of that initial workshop).
Since that time I have carved out a dedicated space each year to simply read short story collections. Beginning with Jack London and Neil Gaiman, I later moved the “pivot” into these collections toward the end of each reading year before finally realizing this type of writing cannot be constrained to when I would like to think about it. I began reading pairs of authors but also spent some deeper time with those I thought were the best. I also posted a few more stories to the blog in that time. One was political in nature and got a few good responses, but without a doubt the story that made the biggest splash was “Flossing,” which I posted in September 2017. (Here is a link for those who’d like to read the original.) Since then I have continued working on it, combining aspects of another story and cleaning up the perspective and emotional tenor. To that end, I sent the revamped story to my “other” editor Anne Nerison of Inkstand Editorial to get her take on how this story could be improved. I also asked her if I could use some of our editing conversations for this post in order to try and show the process of how to write a short story, something that has bedeviled me for quite a while. Those who do choose to go back and read the original will see a clipped, single-perspective story concerning a man who has lost everything in his life. While I decided to keep that overall theme, I wanted to say more about the concept of toxic masculinity through what happens when we of the male gender act as is our wont. Thankfully this came through enough for Anne to see as well. Of course, every editing partnership contains some give and take. My “main” editor Libby could attest to that, as most of our early working relationship involved her telling me how to make my books better and me not being willing to listen to some (or all) of it. I have since learned how to trust her expertise, and I am trying to do the same here even on our points of divergence. In the case of this story, there were two places in which I told Anne I didn’t take her advice, and here was her very thoughtful consideration when we discussed the second case: “Everything I change or comment on are suggestions, for you to take or leave as you wish. After all, this is your story, and you know best what message you're trying to get across and how you want to get there. I see my role as being an outside eye and making those suggestions, but I certainly don't expect that every author will accept 100% of them.” The first case was more subjective, involving the main character getting a job at his (now ex-) wife’s father’s firm and how that led him into temptation. Anne suggested I cut most of this, and I decided to go a different way and pull more of a narrative from that. When I told her so, she actually said she liked the changes. This is an example of how sometimes you should stick to your original thought, but be respectful in exploring how you came to that understanding. I’m very grateful that Anne is such an amazing editor (you should follow her on Twitter too) and is very open to such a back and forth. There was also another point of contention regarding a change of setting, and while I’m still not sure I made the right decision in whether to keep it, sometimes writers are just bull-headed and want to keep stuff in their work. This is an impulse you should listen to every once in a while, but always keep it carefully weighed against what your (very smart, talented) editor has to say on the matter. Besides those points of divergence, every other suggestion Anne had made this story much better. It is my hope that in posting it to the blog readers can see how much it has changed in nearly two years. I am also open to any thoughts/criticism regarding the theme, which I am still not sure I have hit correctly even with this rewrite, but I am trying... In the interest of keeping this part to its own topic of introduction, I will be putting the actual story in its own post. And I look forward to any and all reader comments, since this thing will never see the light of day for publication in an actual literary journal but is a piece that will live on my blog for demonstration purposes. I do have a few other stories I have been circulating through journals and contests over the past month; more on that if I am lucky enough to hear back from any of those outlets (all rejections so far, but they’ve come with notes from editors which are usually great). Thanks as always, for reading my work.
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Hello readers and welcome to 2019. All right, we’re a month in but who’s counting? Just the calendars?
Long-time readers will recall that I’ve been doing some sort of fiction reading and posting since 2016, and last year I decided to just make this a regular series. And again, I’m back with a post looking over the year and what these authors taught me. Just a few quick hits: both Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel taught me how to write an incredible, dystopian tale; Donna Tartt showed me how to maintain such control over one’s writing that you can give away the ending; Virginia Woolf showed me (and many male authors of her own time) how to spin a dramatic life out of a single day; DeLillo quite simply blew me away with his immense talent; Joyce Carol Oates illustrated family life in ways I never thought possible; Flannery O’Connor deftly proved how to weave religious themes into secular morality tales; James Baldwin showed how to speak boldly and causticly about our racist American society; and Chekhov gave me a master class in short story writing at the end of the year (I also shoved in two more story collections into the first month of this year). I also delved into a brilliant Netflix series, took a detour into drama and finally made it to a graphic novel (albeit also not until this year). And I was again able to blast through a fair amount of phenomenal nonfiction at my day job, which this year included Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants, Naomi Klein’s climate polemic This Changes Everything, the late Anthony Bourdain's second collection The Nasty Bits, Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, Daniel Kahneman's masterful Thinking Fast and Slow, and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. All told, while I didn’t quite manage to get everything shoved into 2018 I read around 25 books, which if you’re keeping score at home is about twice the amount I have been able to get to in years past. Looking back, I’d have to say while I met the overall goal of reading more fiction, I still have a ways to go including non-white and female authors. While I made some strides in that direction this year, it is something I am going to continue to work on and include in my reading lists (and as always, I’m open to any recommendations). As I stated last year, the Reading List is going to be an ongoing, never-ending series for the rest of my career, so I am not concerned with promising a certain amount of titles per year anymore. This brings me to my second overall lesson, which is how to switch up this series. For three years now, with each work I have attempted to draw out at least two major lessons for writers. Some authors had many more than this, some barely made it at all. After all this time I have decided I have illustrated this enough, and now hope to do a more “review” style post on each work, describing what I liked and didn’t like, what worked for the story, and whether or not I would recommend this to other writers. Regarding some of my other goals from last year: I was able to begin a series called “How to Write a Book” - if you missed any of it the first time around part one (Ideas & Outline) is here, part two (Drafting) is here, and both of parts three (Editing) can be found here and here. The “Writing” series continues to be a no-show, mostly because I have been working on a blog post titled “What are writers for” for a few months and it’s still not done. But I hope to get that series at least begun in 2019. I also hope to keep broadening my horizons in terms of inspiration, and to that end I hope to cover more Netflix shows, and of course the other genre/types such as drama, poetry, and graphic novels. And now that I’m down to a single magazine subscription (Poets & Writers, which I would highly recommend) I would like to read even more nonfiction at work throughout the year. Overall I would say this was my most successful year of reading, both in terms of books read and in how much I learned. And even though I don’t work with her any more, I’d like to again extend a thank you to the coworker who encouraged me to include more contemporary women authors on my list. I hope to continue that trend with other non-gender-binary and non-white authors. As always, thanks for joining me on this journey. I hope you gained some writing insight through these posts, and I really hope I was able to encourage everyone to read more in what sure looks like America’s dark age. And as I posted last time, the first novel for the revamped Reading List will be Ann Patchett's 2011 novel State of Wonder. Thanks for reading! Hello readers and thank you for sticking with me as I jam the last bit of the 2018 Reading List into January before taking it in a little different direction. Last time I got through the Salinger collection Nine Stories, and while I am still planning on re-posting a short story to the blog I am wrapping up the collections in favor of novels for the next few months. But before I get into the 2019 Reading List I wanted to get to a type of work I had on deck for last year: the graphic novel.
Being a comic book fan for most of my life I have been familiar with the superhero genre in this area for years, but have yet to read much of the more “serious” fare that has gained national attention for decades. While I’ve caught up with a few over the past years (Maus and the first part of Persepolis for two examples) I have yet to actually write about one. So I chose an author and a work with which I thought I’d have some affinity: Craig Thompson and his 2003 mastework, Blankets. I want to try and do the usual thing here with respect to the lessons writers can get out of a work like this, but also want to say a little about the emotions evoked out of the story. The use of illustration. This is one of those lessons that, especially in this medium, probably gets a response of, “well duh.” And while that’s kind of the entire point of the medium, Thompson is a genius of the form. There are full page spreads devoted to various images such as angels, regular humans, humans in trees, and multitudes of Biblical images flowed on pages seamlessly into the “actual” story. In between these are the regular frames, filled with gorgeously rendered dialogue and exquisite character interactions. Use your pain. This ties in with the overall message of the book, which struck home with me in a few ways. Apparently Thompson wrote it as a way of telling his parents he was leaving his faith, which I have also had to do in various ways over my life; the way he tells the story resonated with me in ways few other pieces of art have. It didn’t hurt that he also grew up in a cold farmhouse, and with pressures coming from his family church and the places he would hang out, and youth group trips (similar to themes to those of my first novel, *cough* shameless plug *cough* Our Senior Year). This story is one of the best examples of using details of your life to make excellent work. This piece worked for me on several levels, I guess mostly because of the personal turmoil I have gone through in the last year, but really in my whole life. I too have struggled with leaving the Christian faith and understanding myself to be atheistic, and both Thompson’s art and the way he described his journey made me consider my own in different ways. While there were some bits I wish he would have explored more (what happened to Raina?!) overall this was one of the best graphic novels I have ever read. Well, that officially wraps up the 2018 Reading List! This series will continue in the new year, going back to novels written by females beginning with Ann Patchett's 2011 novel State of Wonder. I am also hoping to do a post on lessons learned this time around, similar to what I did at the beginning of the 2018 list, and pointing the way forward for this series. I am going to keep the type of works included as broad as possible, while changing up how I approach the posts at this juncture in my career. But more on all of that later. For now, I’d like to say thanks for coming along with me on this journey. When I started this as a series of experiments in 2016 I never could have imagined how important it would become to my career, and my life. Thanks for reading, writing, and thinking about all of it. Here’s to a happy and healthy (and maybe better?) 2019. Hello readers and thanks for sticking with me as I continue to jam in the rest of the 2018 Reading List into January before taking a different tack with it going forward. Last time I read through a collection it turns out was not recommended to me by my editor as I thought (although she has read some of the same stories): Rock Springs by Richard Ford. As my final collection of this period, I wanted to take a look at who may still be considered one of the greatest American short story writers, JD Salinger and his 1953 anthology, Nine Stories.
I thought this was indeed a collection much stronger than his novel Catcher in the Rye, and while I did have some issues overall with this author I want to envision some of the key lessons from this writer. Use of dialogue. This is without a doubt Salinger’s ultimate skill, and he weaves it deftly in and out of his prose. I would say the stories in which this works the strongest is “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” The conversational quality between characters is natural and believable, and he even includes things like writing something twice when a character repeats themselves, as we often do in real life. Use of character. I would have to say this complements the other lesson, in that Salinger can draw a character with just a few lines of simplicity far better than almost anyone. I found this especially true in the final story, “Teddy” in which he describes the youth’s features in a paragraph and lets his conversation do the rest. And this is obviously the case in “For Esme - with Love and Squalor,” which I must say found to be one of the greatest short stories I have ever read. The way the author captures the highs and lows of emotions resonates off the page, despite the fact that it was written by a fairly creepy guy. So about that. I kinda came to understand a more dark side of this author as I was reading this collection, and it made me come to think even more about criticism I’ve received about this reading list over the years. Mainly, it concentrates on a lot of dead old white dudes and not enough on contemporary, diverse, or otherwise non-gender-conforming work. Some of this I have tried to fix and I hope to do the same over the course of 2019. And if I’m really being honest I need to reexamine how I approach this matter in my own writing, especially in the manuscript I’ve been working on for the past half-year. I have come to understand that the Reading List will need to endure some changes this year, but will write a separate post on that after I finish the last bit of the 2018 list. To that end, I’m getting to one other genre/type of work I promised I would last year: the graphic novel. I’m going to take on an author in that realm I’ve admired from afar but read, Craig Thompson and his 2004 masterwork Blankets. (Supposedly the subject matter may hit home with me.) After that, I’ll be back with a post looking back at the last year and looking forward with how the 2019 Reading List is going to evolve. Thanks as always for coming along on this journey. Hello readers and thank you for hanging in with me as I front-load the remainder of the 2018 Reading List into January. Now that this series is continuous I hope to initiate further changes this year. But more on that later. First we need to take a look at another short story writer, who while maybe not as good as Chekhov definitely holds his own in a certain time and place: Richard Ford and his 1987 debut collection, Rock Springs. This book was initially recommended to me by my editor Libby and centers around small towns in Montana and the fascinating people that populate them. While I had some issues with decisions he made (more on that later), I want to take a look at what Ford gets right in these realist stories.
Use of character. Each of these tales contains at least a few memorable characters, people whom it is quite clear are based off those Ford must have encountered in his life, and situations that seem almost too ridiculous (and sublime) to have been totally made up from whole cloth. I would have to say the story “Winterkill” may be the best example of this, with a main character in a wheelchair snagging a dead deer in a river. This can work the other way too, though, with each story seeming to also contain different versions of the same character (which could also be considered a general running theme, along with…) Use of place. This Ford uses to his advantage perhaps even better, evoking a parched, dry and dirty landscape in which his seedy characters go about their business conducting affairs in motels, going into the wilderness, or generally living miserable lives in which there are glints of happiness. The final story (“Communist”) is a great example of how to build up to a scene of nature and wildlife and then let it play out around the characters. Overall I would have to say the main story “Rock Springs” was my overall favorite, a stunning almost thirty pages that shows this guy as a true master of the form. Unfortunately I found some (“Children”) to be downright creepy and one (“Empire”) that could have easily been cut in half, and for some reason contains an additional paragraph after what I thought should have been a masterful closing line. My bellyaching aside, there is more good to be found here than bad and a lot of instructions for those who want to follow in the Raymond Carver tradition of short story. Up next, I’m still going to take on Salinger’s Nine Stories and then I may take a brief pivot into the one genre/type I didn’t make it to in 2018: the graphic novel. I also have some more ideas (inspired by my wife) for the 2019 Reading List that I hope to be able to share in an upcoming piece looking back on last year and my goals. And for those who do enjoy my fiction writing, I got one back from my “other” editor Anne that I will be posting here again (last time it was called “Flossing” now it’s just “Floss”) to try and deconstruct the process. Happy New Year and let’s have a slightly better 2019! Hello readers and thank you for bearing with me as we march through this last part of the 2018 Reading List! After getting through a few pairs of books I made my annual “pivot” to short stories, taking on a writer highly admired by Francine Prose, whose book Reading Like a Writer I read two years back. She turned me onto the work of this 19th century Russian but I had no idea of Anton Chekhov’s true legacy until I read his stories. They are are that good. Normally I head into the major lessons to be learned from such a phenomenal writer (and I will) but the best lesson for me was: read Chekhov. You will be hard pressed to find a better short story author at any caliber, at any time period. So now let’s take a quick look at two major factors of why that is:
Use of setting. This is not arguably Chekhov’s strongest suite, but the playwright in him shines through in the introduction of many of these stories (I had Norton Critical Edition collecting his best known). Nature is described quite beautifully and flowing, but is only allowed a few sentences at the beginning of sections. This was all Chekhov considered was necessary in telling a story about human drama. The characters are also set in the stage in this literary way, placed either in favor or against each other, just as the master wants them. Use of character. This is what critics have spent their entire lives trying to figure out, and I’m hardly going to say it’s the use of one specific description or story that really shows it. It’s in all of them; that’s how amazing every story he wrote was. But for just a few examples - in “Misery” the poor carriage driver is reduced to explaining his daughter’s death to his horse because no one else cares; in “The Teacher of Literature” a man starts out in what he think is a great life only to end up miserable; and in “The Lady with the Dog” two people wind up in love at the worst possible time. These are but three examples of the incomparable control Chekhov exercised over these character’s lives in order to present life just as it is, not as we would like it. I also tremendously enjoyed “The Bishop,” “The Betrothed,” “Anna on the Neck,” “Sleepy,” the list goes on. I am at a loss to go any further than my first piece of advice regarding this author: read him. He wrote several hundred stories in his lifetime, so it’s possible you may encounter an entirely different collection than I did, and have your own experience. I also must add that in Reading Like a Writer, Prose recommends checking out Chekhov’s letters. In the edition I had there were quite a few excerpts he wrote to his contemporaries about writing that I found enormously interesting and helpful. Which goes back to my major point - if you are studying someone to see how they did what they did, take it all in, not just the stories but the process and how they accomplished it, and their own thoughts about it (if they offered them). Not all authors were good enough to leave such a trove when they passed. I also was lucky enough to read a few literary essays contained in this edition, which helped my understanding of the author and his stories. So what’s left to close out the year? Readers who have been with me for a while probably recognize that I usually get in a few more novels after “short story” time. Well I have realized that short stories are not something I am going to have the convenience of shoving into a certain part of the year, so they are now going to be worked on all year round. This means more short story collections added to the yearly Reading List, so send me your recommendations. This year, I hope to get through another few collections and get an essay done about them by the end of the year - Rock Springs by Richard Ford (recommended by my editor, Libby) and Nine Stories by JD Salinger. I have also sent a short story to my “other” editor and hope to get a post about that process up here in the coming weeks. To all my readers: thanks for sticking around while I spent close to two months poring over this legendary author. I still plan on mixing up the Reading List as I did somewhat this year, including adding more stage plays and graphic novels. And as always, thanks for reading and writing! Hello readers and welcome again to the second half of the 2018 Reading List. For this part of the year I’ve been combining authors or works, last time taking a detour into drama. I decided to wrap things up with two works from an author I had never read: Jack Kerouac, documenter of the so-called “beat” generation by reading his seminal 1957 novel On the Road and the follow up, 1958’s The Dharma Bums. I had read somewhere that these two works are kind of like sequels or “spiritual successors” but found them largely to be separate tales, one much better than the other. But before I get too critical, let’s get to some of the broad lessons from reading a pair of works like this:
Deciding to fictionalize. Famously, Kerouac wrestled for years with whether or not to fictionalize his road trips to discover himself and others, which for me were the most thrilling parts of the book. Wikipedia says the “original scroll” of the work was finally published in 2007 and does include both parts his publisher made him take out and the real names of the people involved. I read the regular version, and I had to say I was struck by why people think this is either a good novel or even a Great American Novel. While it was fascinating to read about Jack, er, Sal’s adventures with his writer friends, not much actually happens when they’re together except a lot of drunken hi jinks and stealing stuff. The life of a criminal apparently wasn’t that far from that of a beat, and while that in itself may be the lesson, it doesn’t seem very helpful. Use of description. This is probably the greatest strength of both novels, as Kerouac really was a great writer when it came to showing us what he was doing, and why. I liked The Dharma Bums a lot more and it was a much more realized book, written nearly ten years after the events of On the Road but only published a year after. The depictions of mountain climbing and the zen attitude that brings on in the Dharma Bums are amazing, and while Ray (Jack’s pseudonym in this one) does go on the road a bit he finds himself through eastern wisdom a lot more, and shows how he did grow as a person from one set of events to another. Using the novel to talk about your generation. I had to throw this one in there, as this is probably the most important point brought up about Kerouac, and especially about On the Road. I felt pressure to read this book, as if doing so would open my mind to the possibilities of literature and how it can be done in new and different ways, and I suppose for a certain generation that was true, especially as the victory in the Second World War led to the suppression and disillusionment of the Cold War. Kerouac could see what was coming in his society, and used the road to rebel. I’m not so certain a message like that resonates today, and if I’m being brutally honest I’m not sure his writing was as good as he thought it was in conveying it. This is all to say that while I wouldn’t recommend On the Road I definitely would The Dharma Bums, and any interest toward eastern religion or Buddhism in general, as all of these things have helped me cope with adult life. I found it really interesting to read and interpret Kerouac's prose as he encountered these concepts in his own life. And of course feel free to completely ignore what I say and read On the Road and draw your own literary conclusions about this piece of American literature. All of this musing aside, I am now ready to do the annual pivot toward short story land, starting with a legendary author Francine Prose recommended to me years ago via her amazing book Reading Like a Writer: Anton Chekhov. I’m nerding out on a Norton Critical Edition of his stories, which contains additional letters and essays. I am also going to use the next few months to work on some stories I have submitted (and others I have not so much yet) and track their progress through the blog. Sorry for a bit longer post than usual but I wanted to let you all know I’m still around and still reading. :-) Stay tuned for more updates on the stories, and for the rest of this year’s Reading List, which will get back to novels before I finish out the year. Thanks as always for reading and writing. Hello readers and welcome to the second half of the 2018 Reading List. For this portion I have been combining works of authors or genres, last time taking a look at two from James Baldwin. This time I decided to shake things up even more and take a “detour into drama,” reading some of what are considered the best stage plays of all time: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and a “novel in dramatic form” The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. The first two pieces should be pretty well known so I won’t spend much time going over the plot and characters in favor of comparing/contrasting these works.
Death of a Salesman. This was Arthur Miller’s first true masterpiece of the stage, and I was blown away upon reading it. The tale of Willy Loman and his slow spiral into depression and death over the course of a day is not only an amazing story, but the way Miller uses the medium to tell it is even more impressive. I would say the most important bits for writers were the use of repetition and the use of contradiction. Loman and his sons both stress things they believe to be true (Willy being “well liked,” his uncle “walked into the jungle and came out rich”) but also contradict themselves repeatedly (Loman curses his eldest son one minute, then praises him the next). This, combined with the radical use of the stage to show how memory operates, makes this a true landmark of the form. Our Town. This was an author I had never read, and decided to start with what is considered his greatest. While I was struck by the well-known properties of this piece (almost no props or settings - even for basic things like books, using ladders to evoke going upstairs, stage manager directly addressing the audience, etc) what really hit home for me was the underlying existential questions, especially those evoked in the third act. Viewed as a conversation with death, this was an extraordinary critique of the American way of viewing it and compares quite favorably with Miller’s consideration of the subject around a decade later. The Sunset Limited. This “novel in dramatic form” was recommended to me by my editor Libby after I showed her a (bad) short story I wrote a few years back called a “Conversation with God.” And while parts of this piece were instructive for me, I found overall the work not nearly as good as McCarthy’s “actual” books. While his impressive use of dialogue is present throughout, literally driving the action, I was struck by some of the choices McCarthy made. For one example, the characters are known as “white” and “black” because of their skin color and disposition on life, but he consistently refers to “the black” in his state instructions while referring to the other gentleman as “professor” or something of the like. While this may have been intentional to show that “black” actually represents the death that “white” seeks by throwing himself in front of a train (“the Sunset Ltd”) I still found it jarring and possibly beneath such a talent to portray race in such a way. That being said, I still found benefits to reading this work given my recent struggle to escape the religious indoctrination of my youth. All in all, while I think readers can find a lot more beneficial lessons in McCarthy’s novels, I would definitely recommend the other two dramatic works to anyone like me who has yet to read them or is interested in the stage. While the Reading List is always going to focus on books first and foremost, I enjoyed taking this little “detour” and hope to do the same with other literary genres as I close out this year and look to the next. Speaking of what’s coming up, I will be back into literary territory with another author I have never read - Jack Kerouac. I’ll be taking on both On the Road and its semi-sequel The Dharma Bums. As always, thanks for reading and writing! Back in 2015 when I started this blog, I wrote a piece about vacations that comes to mind every now and again. I penned it about a month after getting laid off and moving to a new apartment, and was quite uncertain about the direction of my life. My point here isn’t to really mess with that post (it holds its own lessons from the first time I went camping), but to rather find out how much I have changed since then. This week we got to spend the entire week at the resort near the Chippewa Flowage. My mother-in-law was kind enough to rent two cabins this year so my wife Mary and I got one pretty much all to ourselves. The view from this cabin was extraordinary, and I found myself doing little else than sitting around staring at the lake for parts of the day. While I enjoyed every minute of being out there this week, I did learn some more about myself as a human and as a writer that I thought I should detail here.  So without further ado, more lessons to be learned from the wilderness above and beyond my earlier post on vacations and how they matter. I may be going out into the woods for the third year, but I still have no idea what I’m doing. This became apparent the longer we spent out here, as the woodsy mentality accumulated by my wife’s family continued to overshadow any initiative I may have eked out. Most of them were constantly surveilling the fire pit making sure it was always going, they all knew how to get a rod ready for a line, and I wouldn’t have known the first thing about setting up a tent like their cousins do every year. I also almost hurt my wife in a dumb stunt with a canoe that taught me to listen up and pay attention to the people who are out here and know what they are doing. The woods are a great place to unplug, but you don’t have to all the time. I made a big point in the previous vacation post by saying how I turned off my phone the entire trip. While that worked back then, I decided to take a different tack this time around and not only leave the phone on (this was partially to keep in contact with the cat sitter each day) but to document some of the trip on Twitter. I also brought my laptop but managed to check my email once the whole time. Previous inebriations don’t do the trick. I once had a pretty unhealthy addiction to both cigarettes and alcohol, and while I have conquered both, this trip is always a gateway to getting back into both things. After a week I have it pretty well decided: I don’t like drinking and never will, and same with the smokes. I may have thought I needed such substances to have a good time (that was certainly my mindset circa 2006, and even somewhat circa 2015) but today I know that I don’t. I love my life. As mentioned, the previous post regarding this Wisconsin trip was written at a time in which my life felt very much in flux. Just got fired, new apartment, going out on vacation where I don’t know a thing (not everything has changed). This time I had a bit more of a revelation: we tried to plan out stuff to do all week but even though we had seven days of pretty much nothing to do, we still didn’t get it all done. This made me think differently about our own lives and how day-to-day we try to cram in as much as possible. We think this should be done in “real” life but in actuality, if most of us had all the free time a week could offer we still couldn’t prioritize it all. Part of the trick is to just enjoy it, and this trip has taught me all the more how to do just that: I love our apartment, my wife, our kitties, and my career. Getting away from it all is important, but so is understanding what “it all” really is. The next step now that I’m back in Minnesota and back to work, is continuing the work with a new perspective. Vacations (still) matter. It’s all in how you use the time, and what you get out of it. Hello readers and welcome to the second half of the 2018 Reading List. To wrap up the first half I took on another female author and read Wise Blood. For the latter half of the year I’m going to switch up the formula but still continue to get as many books read in this year as I can. To that end, I’m going to put some titles together and see how they combine to show deeper writing lessons. As I said last time, it felt right to read James Baldwin now, so I this month I took on his 1963 classic The Fire Next Time and his 1957 novel Giovanni’s Room. Both were stunning in their own ways, so I want to get to the major lessons writers can learn from this landmark American author.
Using the novel/essay to speak about society. This is the entire point of The Fire Next Time, and I must say even in 2018 I don’t think I have come across as searing a dissection of religion and the ways it is used to manipulate people. The poignancy here comes from Baldwin’s refusal to make this a color issue, as he denounces both whites’ use of Christianity to cover up their racist minds, and blacks’ relatively more recent use of Islam to further a similar goal. As he discusses at length, both religions were used to preach an idea of a separation of the races, which Baldwin denounces in very stark terms as the opposite of what is needed in this nation. As we can see even today, this vision proved incredibly prophetic. This lesson can also be found in Giovanni’s Room, especially involving the way homosexuality was viewed in the West around this time (the main character describes it as against the law, which in many states it was at the time). Use of imagery. This was possibly the highlight of Giovanni’s Room, as Baldwin uses basic language to describe the world of Paris (made up of stones that reflect light during the summer and repel it during the winter) and the people he meets (Giovanni and his “boyish” legs, his “leonine” figure, Jacques in his presence appears “very frail and old”), painting a world of intrigue the main character David is attempting to navigate. Though the story reflects Baldwin’s own of escaping cloistered America, David soon learns to resent most of Europe and its inhabitants as a scandal grows from his time in Paris. Using the novel to reflect your own life. This is a lesson I continue to learn in new and different ways, and without a doubt Giovanni’s Room is a huge example of this. It is well known this book is a parallel to Baldwin’s own time spent in Europe, but he digs even deeper to dissect his relationship with Giovanni, in whose room they both stay for a period, and his own internal shameful thoughts and what they are doing. This becomes even more enhanced when David’s fiancee Hella arrives and he attempts to lead a double life, which leads to Giovanni’s ruin and eventual killing of another character. The end chapters of the novel become incredibly moving and deep as David puzzles through what he should do and while the ending is quite tragic, it contains much to understand about life in the world at this time. I would highly recommend this author to anyone who seeks a better understanding of race and gender relations during the Cold War, and there were few more powerful American voices on this than Baldwin’s. I definitely will return to this author to gain more insight into these topics. Up next, as promised I’m shifting the Reading List into a different territory, but one I’ve become more interested in over the years: drama. To that end I will be reading a pair of the greatest stage plays even written, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as well as possibly another “sort-of” drama if I have time. And stay tuned for an essay concerning what writers are for (especially now), as I have approached the ten-year mark of doing it in one form or another. Thanks as always for reading. |
AuthorJohn Abraham is an author and freelance journalist located in the Twin Cities, where he lives with his wife Mary and their two cats. This blog is his attempt to catalog all the events that culminate a local writer's life. Archives
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