“The Life of the Imagination”

Two weeks ago today was the birthday of author E. B. White, author of the children’s novel Charlotte’s Web and coauthor of the venerable style manual The Elements of Style. The LA Times book blog Jacket Copy ran a nice story about him (which you can see here), and one part of it especially caught my eye:

White recieved so many inquiries about the spider Charlotte, Wilbur the pig and the other characters in his children’s books that his publisher sent a form letter he’d drafted in response. It read in part, “‘Are my stories true, you ask? No, they are imaginary tales, containing fantastic characters and events. In real life, a family doesn’t have a child who looks like a mouse; in real life, a spider doesn’t spin words in her web. In real life, a swan doesn’t blow a trumpet. But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination. And although my stories are imaginary, I like to think that there is some truth in them, too—truth about the way people and animals feel and think and act.”

Isn’t that a lovely passage? I think so, and I hope you do too, but not everyone is friendly to the life of the imagination. Presented for your consideration: Mr. Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Kurtz, as you might guess from the name of his organization, is no friend of psychics, faith healers, or religious fundamentalists. But he took his crusade beyond the paranormal and revealed his truer, deeper colors when he said, in an interview with LiveScience.com: “‘Who needs Harry Potter?’ Kurtz laughs. ‘The world itself is really unbelievably enticing and mysterious and exhilarating when you investigate it.’”

So not only is the paranormal a giant crock of unicorn poop; even fictional depictions of the paranormal are also a bad thing and to be avoided. Aw, come on, Kurtz. You already used your mean sciencey mind to debunk everything I used to believe in when I was in junior high school; now I can’t even read about it, for old times’ sake?

But seriously, what could an investigator of the paranormal possibly have against a young adult fantasy novel? Why would he even have an opinion on the matter? Because he’s a scientific fundamentalist, that’s why, who is just as intolerant of unhygienic, unapproved concepts as the most straightlaced religious fundamentalists—and they hate Harry Potter too, by the way. Check out “Harry Potter: Seduction into the Dark World of the Occult” (actual title) for all the lurid proof. In both cases, they so hate what Harry Potter stands for–a fictional narrative that doesn’t conform to their worldview–that they want the books themselves to just go away. (Sound chillingly familiar?)

I say down with the fundamentalists, religious or scientific, who want to give us a list of approved thoughts to think, approved beliefs to hold, approved books to read. I cast my lot with E. B. White and the life of the imagination. I cast my lot with Charlotte, and Wilbur, and other fantastic creatures yet to be imagined. And I wish E. B. White a belated, but well-deserved, happy birthday.

You Must Pay the Rent!

I suppose the real culprit behind my recent drastic reduction in posts is the Internal Revenue Service. My wife and I recently did our taxes, which forced me to take a hard look at how much I made last year and how much I’ve made so far this year. For a freelancer, those are particularly vexed questions, because those numbers tend to fluctuate—a lot. And for me those numbers have been fluctuating at too low a range. I need to work more, bill more, and keep a much closer eye on cash flow. I sound like a businessperson, don’t I? Well, I am one, in the eyes of the IRS—a sole proprietor, technically speaking.

So I’ve been doing lots of freelance work, some writing, and very little blogging. It feels good to get my sole-proprietor house in better order, and it feels even better to watch my financial situation improve right before my eyes. And I haven’t decreased my writing at all, other than the 10 days or so that I took off between projects. I’m hard at work on a new project now and cranking away on it every day, just as I did for the screenplay.

I tell you all this both to explain my decreased blogging and to share what it’s like to continue to progress through the stages of trying forge a creative life amid a host of other obligations. Very few writers earn all their money from writing, and I’m sure that’s true for any other creative pursuit. Jobs, kids, relationships—we’re all being tugged in multiple directions at once. If we want to live creatively, we’re going to have to struggle to make it work, unless we’ve got a wealthy patron on tap (and I am taking applications, if you’re interested in the position). So my ongoing struggle has entered a new phase.

Brief update on the work itself: the screenplay draft is complete but needs revising (especially cutting the length), so my partner on the screenplay is leading that effort. Oddly, I miss the screenplay, like one might miss an out-of-town friend; but I’m also glad not to have it on my desk anymore, as if the friend had stayed with me a bit too long before leaving.

Now I’m revising a short story that I wrote years ago, while I was still in the MFA program at NC State. Much of what I wrote back then should remain undisturbed in the vault of history, where it cannot disturb others; but a few pieces may have some potential, and I’ve exhumed one of them to see whether I can breathe life into it. It’s one of the few full-on sci-fi/fantasy pieces I’ve written as an adult (although I wrote my share of them when I was younger), so it’s fun to re-enter the realm of the genre. I’m revising it with an eye toward publication. I want the story to be in print one day. We’ll see.

And I’ve decided that even if I can’t get any other blogging done during a given week, I can at least do Five-Minute Friday. So I’ll see you Friday!

Travel Dispatch: Looking for my Tribe

The term “tribe” has become a popular buzzword that refers to groups of like-minded people, often banded together in support of the same goal. There’s a social-networking service called tribe, and guru-of-the-moment Seth Godin has written a book called Tribes. (There’s also a bar called Tribe, billed as Nashville’s “best place to meet single men.” You’re welcome.)

I first encountered the term during my hippie days in Boulder, lo these twenty years ago, when there was a guy in town who looked so much like me that people would mistake us for each other on the street and at parties. He and I knew some of the same people, so eventually we met, our mutual reputations having preceded us. My twin was even more of a hippie than I was. Accordingly, he had a particularly hippiefied explanation for why our marked similarities had showed up at the same place and time: we were part of the same “tribe.”

“What tribe is that?” I said.

“You know, guys like us.”

Your faithful correspondent undergoes a phase. It is a colorful phase.

I was soon to learn that details and explanations were not my twin’s strong suits; but at the time, I felt like I knew what he was talking about. You could look at us both and see what our deal was: we were twentysomething guys from middle-class backgrounds who were exploring a particularly outdoorsy version of the neo-hippie lifestyle. We were probably liberal, possibly vegetarian, definitely getting high. We were letting our hair grow, having fun, experimenting. He was right: we were part of the same tribe.

I left that tribe long ago, although significant vestiges of it remain, as those of you who know me can attest. And that was my second lesson to learn about tribes (after learning that they existed): you can leave a tribe. My third lesson was that there are lots and lots of tribes. And all three lessons together lead me now to this question: Is the whole notion of the tribe just spurious shorthand for commonalities that people want to blow out of proportion? Are people ginning up a thinly sourced sense of belonging because they want to belong to something? Or is it really valid and useful to talk about which tribes you’re in, and which ones you’re not?

I’ve been thinking about tribes because I have to decide whether to go to the upcoming yearly conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, to be held in February 2011 in Washington, DC. The AWP conference is the closest thing to a yearly trade conference that literary writers have, although they have to share it with lots of academic types who are mainly concerned with university creative writing and with a minority of genre writers who care little about mainstream literary writing.

So, should I go? I’ve got an MFA in creative writing, which gives me a little academic cred; and I’ve had a poem published in a literary journal, so that might give me some basis for claiming to be a literary writer. But when I went to AWP in New York in 2008 and in Denver in 2010, I didn’t feel like I had much in common with the literary writers or the academics. Most of them seemed more nervous and introverted than I am (no offense, just saying). Plus, I’ve only got one literary publication to my credit, and no desire to pursue a tenure-track job. And the very recent rejection of my poems by Sentence is making me feel less “literary” than I have in a long time.

When it comes to genre writing, I’ve had a ghost story published in one newspaper and a vampire story published in another, and I’m working on a genre screenplay; but if I’m really a genre writer, shouldn’t I be going to the Science Fiction Writers of America conference, or the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, or the Fairies and Vampires and Robots Oh My conference? (Sorry, no link for that one.) And besides, many of the genre fans and writers of my acquaintance have had little use for literary writing, which is definitely not my attitude. I got more out of For Whom the Bell Tolls, all by itself, than I’ve gotten out of 90 percent of all the genre writing I’ve ever read put together.

So where does that leave me? Where do I belong? Where is my tribe?

Such thoughts were on my mind in San Francisco when, the Sentence rejection still stinging fresh, I left Grace Cathedral with Angela and Alison. We walked downtown to meet Alison’s husband for dinner, and we had some time to kill, so we popped into a restaurant along the way and sat at the bar. I told Alison about my screenplay, and she’s working on a play, so it felt good to compare notes on similar genres. It also felt good to talk about an area of my writing where I felt more secure, or perhaps just less insecure. We drank wine, ate bread, and asked the barback if he could find out who was doing the cool cover of the MGMT song “Electric Feel.” (Turned out it was Katy Perry. Who knew.)

Later, when we were paying up and getting ready to leave, the barback said to me, “I couldn’t help but overhear that you’re working on a screenplay. I am too.”

I perked right up. “Really? That’s awesome! Good for you. How far into it are you?” We started comparing notes, just as Alison and I had done, and as we talked I felt touched that this young man–he had to be fifteen or twenty years younger than I was–had extended himself to me, a customer, a stranger; yet we had something in common, something important. I don’t know how much to make of that commonality, but I will say it felt quite good to be talking about screenwriting so unexpectedly, with that guy at that time and place.

During our conversation, I recommended my favorite screenwriting book (Robert McKee’s Story) to him, and he got a pen and a coaster and wrote it down. Then I reached across the bar and shook his hand, and just like that, the pain of the rejection was—well, it wasn’t gone, but at least it was contextualized. It was placed within a larger perspective. I’m still not sure what the core of my writing will be about in the long term, but for now it’s the screenplay. If, along the way, some poems get rejected, that sucks; but that’s not my main concern. My main concern, just like the barback’s, is my screenplay. Good luck to him, and good luck to me. We need it.

The Editor Rejects Your Story; You Take Fourteen Points of Damage

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I first ran across this quote a long time ago, and I’ve always thought it was a good one; but today it became sharply poignant to me in a brand-new way.

I was innocently eating an apple and cruising through my blogroll when I saw this notice in Luna Digest, a weekly review of literary journals that appears on Fictionaut:

“The Dungeon Master has detention.” New RPG fiction from Sam Lipsyte in the latest New Yorker. Yep: New Yorker fiction with Dungeons & Dragons as the subject.

I stopped chewing and swallowed so I could focus on the complicated swirl of emotions boiling through me. I had once written a Dungeons and Dragons story. It was the first serious full-length story I’d written after a several-year period when I didn’t write a single word. For a while there, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a writer, so I just set the whole thing down and walked away from it and focused on other things in life.

Then I decided I wanted to finish my bachelor’s degree, so I went to community college and took a literature course where we read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that, my friends, that book blew my mind. That was the book that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me until my teeth clicked and woke me the hell up. That was the book that made me want to be a writer again.

So I transferred to a four-year school and started taking creative writing classes, and in one of those classes the teacher had us do an exercise where we wrote a close physical description of doing something that we knew well how to do. I wrote two descriptions: what it was like to work as a restaurant line cook in the middle of a serious slam, and what it was like to play Dungeons and Dragons. The idea was to use one of these descriptions as a grain of sand around which the pearl of a narrative could accrete. Something about the D&D scenario lodged in my brain, and that little exercise became the basis of a story titled “Dungeon.” (The line-cook scenario eventually fostered its own story, too, called “The White Horse.”)

“Dungeon” was not an unqualified success, but it marked a major turning point in my development as a writer. It was my most serious attempt yet to plumb the “mystery of human personality,” as Flannery O’Connor said all fiction should do. It drew on autobiographical material that was difficult to write about, teaching me just how painful it can be to excavate the very substance of your life and put it on the page, reshaped. It was another chapter in my long and ongoing love/hate relationship with the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres. And, most important, it was the first time I had ever felt really vulnerable in showing a story to others, not least because it dealt fairly extensively with D&D—that acme of the pyramid of nerdhood.

I submitted the story as my fiction sample to get into MFA programs, and I did successfully get into one, and a professor in the program praised the story in very strong terms. Thus emboldened, I submitted “Dungeon” to a number of literary journals and magazines, all of whom rejected it. One of those magazines was The New Yorker.

That’s why I thought of Emerson’s quote when I read the notice in Fictionaut about the new story. Emerson was talking about when you reject your own thoughts, not when others reject them; but I think the quote still applies.

So, angst, memories, hoopla, strange emotions, etc.: how’s the story? The one that got published? It’s titled “The Dungeon Master,” by Sam Lipsyte, and it’s damn good, of course, like nearly all fiction in The New Yorker. It’s better than my story, that’s for sure. There are a number of interesting similarities between the two stories, and some interesting differences; overall, it’s just better, and well worth a read. I recommend it.

Dream: True Blood in a Castle

I dreamed that I was walking down a passageway in a castle made of stone. As I walked, I came upon a chubby, dark-complected kid, ten or twelve years old, who had long, fake-looking hair that had to be a wig. The wig hair was black and very shaggy, with blond highlights at the tips. The kid was also wearing a brown robe and a horned viking helmet, and he was carrying a spear in one hand. When he saw me, he smiled at me, and he used his free hand to brush at his hair as if he was trying to preen. I understood that, in some way, I had the power to choose this boy to be sent somewhere that he wanted to go, and he was trying to catch my attention so I would choose him to be sent. I smiled and said to him, “Don’t bother; I hear Europe isn’t so great this time of year.”

I walked on past him and entered a room where a tall blond man in modern attire was sitting at a big wooden table, shuffling through papers and doing figures. In the opposite wall there was an open doorway that gave onto a balcony overlooking the ocean. The man in the room was my business partner, and the castle was our place of business. Also, the man was the vampire Eric Northman from the True Blood television show. It was daytime, and I was surprised to see that Eric was sitting relatively close to the doorway that opened onto the balcony. He wasn’t directly in the sunlight, but he wasn’t very far from it, either.

Eric and I began talking, and it became apparent that we were running some sort of international trade business—perhaps slave-trading? I looked out the open doorway, over the balcony, and saw that it was now nighttime. The moonlight shone on the rippling ocean waves, and masted sailing ships were heaving through the silvered surf, heading out to sea. Some of those ships were likely ours, carrying cargo to foreign ports.

I turned back to Eric, who was his usual sullen self, and I wondered how he would react if the statues of the armored soldiers downstairs were instead real soldiers, and if I were to summon one of them here to do battle with him, like in the old days. (I understood that humans and vampires got along tolerably well nowadays, but in the far past they had fought many battles.) Then something caught my attention in my peripheral vision, and I realized that one of the walls in the room was a fresco with a painting of a soldier on it. The weird thing was that the painting of the soldier had suddenly begun to take three-dimensional form and was now partially projecting out of the wall; the tip of the soldier’s lance and the top of his helmet were protruding into the room. And what was even weirder, I understood that my idle imagining had caused this to happen. By simply speculating about the soldier statues being real people, I had accidentally caused the soldier fresco to begin to take solid form.

Eric looked up, saw the lance tip and helmet sticking out of the wall, and sighed exasperatedly. I smiled and said, “Sorry about this.”

Dream: “Cthulhu! Coming to Get You!”

I was in a building on a university campus where all the buildings were made of stone and covered in ivy. It was an atmospheric place, steeped in history and erudition. I was with a group of friends in a long, wide, open gallery that was full of light from high windows. None of these people were real friends of mine in waking life, except for one guy whom I went to a private Christian school with in elementary and junior high.

We looked up and saw that about twenty feet away from us, on the floor, there was a small, squidlike creature oozing toward us. The creature was maybe three or four feet long; it glistened as it moved. It would have been scary to see in real life, and we were startled, but for some reason we all started laughing excitedly too.

My private-school friend and I took off running. We ran past the creature, down the length of the gallery and toward the double doors at the other end. As we ran, our friends laughingly called out, “Cthulhu! Coming to get you!” (If you don’t know who Cthulhu is, read this Wikipedia page. And then read this pamphlet for some very important Cthulhu-related news.)

My friend and I burst through the double doors, made a sharp right, burst through another set of double doors, and ran down another long gallery that adjoined the one we had just left. We looked through the glass wall between the galleries and saw that Cthulhu, as we now called the creature, had turned around and was trying to chase us. It was still oozing along the floor, but it had picked up speed. Our friends laughed and cheered us on, and my friend and I laughed too.

We made it to the other end of the gallery and burst through yet another set of double doors, which we then shut behind us and leaned against. The doors had small rectangular windows in them, so I looked through and saw that Cthulu had made it into our gallery and was heading for us fast.

My friend said, “TV!” I looked around and saw that there was an old-style projection TV in the room, not far away. (By “old-style” I mean the kind that my college dorm had in 1984: five feet tall, four feet wide, and a foot deep.) We dashed over to the TV, dragged it across the floor, and pushed it up against the doors. About a second later there was a thump on the doors as Cthulhu threw his body into them; but the TV braced the doors, and they stayed shut. My friend and I laughed and said, “Yeah! Yeah!”

[Remember, you can always send me your dreams as a comment on this post or via the Contact Me link on the main page.]

The Literary Thing Part II: Nonfiction

I posted a few days ago about a conversation my wife and I had with author Pat MacEnulty (Pat’s most recent book is Picara) wherein we agreed that most literary fiction published these days is somewhat boring. I’m here to report that the contagion has spread to literary nonfiction as well.

I’ve been trying to read more literature lately in an effort to learn something about writing by reading good prose, so recently I picked up the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. The book is very successful and has gotten all sorts of critical acclaim, and besides which, I’m considering writing a memoir—a considerably fraught topic with me, about which more in later posts—so I thought I should read this one to help me get a feel for how it’s done.

But I was surprised to discover that I had kind of a hard time slogging through it. Mind you, The Glass Castle is well-written at the sentence level, and Walls should get maximum reward in heaven and on earth for her breathtaking honesty. Besides which, the woman had such a hard life as a child that I find it amazing she’s even a whole human being, much less an acclaimed author. But the book just didn’t grab me. It didn’t awake a spark in my heart.

At first I thought, is it me? Am I so out of the habit of reading for pleasure—which I sort of am, because I read for a living—that it’s difficult for me to enjoy a book-length work of literature? Do I prefer fiction, or genre fiction—or, heaven forfend, do I just not want to read at all anymore? Have I become a person who only wants to encounter narratives in movies and TV?

But as I continued to read Walls’s book, feeling somewhat shut out by it, I ran across the following passage, which I believe provides an indication of why this book didn’t absorb me:

Lori [the author’s sister] was the most obsessive reader. Fantasy and science fiction dazzled her, especially The Lord of the Rings. When she wasn’t reading, she was drawing orcs or hobbits. She tried to get everyone in the family to read the books. “They transport you to a different world,” she’d say.

I didn’t want to be transported to another world. My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships. I loved The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and especially A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

When I was going through my own hardships in childhood—those hardships that I want to write a memoir about—it was fantasy and science fiction that got me through, especially The Lord of the Rings, just like Walls’s sister. I, too, was transported to a different world—a place that was not free of hardship but that was still very different from this world. But Walls, in her time of hardship, wanted to read The Grapes of Wrath; she wanted to read a faithful simulacrum of hardships like those she encountered every single day. I find it interesting that Walls counterpoises being “transported to another world” (The Lord of the Rings) against “people dealing with hardships” (The Grapes of Wrath), as if the former excludes the latter. Has she ever read The Lord of the Rings? The story’s main hobbit characters undergo a long series of hardships that eventually bring them to the very brink of death: being hunted and stabbed and poisoned and bitten, fighting in wars and going thirsty and starving. The arduous quest was the main thing that made the book interesting. If the quest had been easy—in other words, if there were no hardships—the book would have been boring (and the movie version would not have been rated PG-13).

But maybe by “hardships” Walls meant “realistic hardships.” Maybe she didn’t care about hardships involving orcs and trolls and magic swords; maybe for her as a reader, a fictional hardship has to issue from a story element the likes of which exist in real life, such as cruel children or an alcoholic father.

De gustibus non est disputandum, of course. My point is that I think there might be a connection between Walls’s shunning of fantasy as a child and the curious flatness of her memoir. Let me characterize that flatness more specifically: I think the overall problem with The Glass Castle is that the narrator’s emotions seem to be largely missing from it, especially given the many traumatic events she describes herself as undergoing. Other people’s emotions are described through their behavior (laughing, weeping, shouting, and the like), but the narrator’s emotions are often missing from the scene. External events are depicted with a painstaking honesty, but the narrator’s inner life is mostly restricted to depictions of thoughts, not emotions. I think the book as a whole constitutes a largely intellectualized account of her childhood. And the intellectualization is what I don’t like about it.

Is there a connection between a shunning of fantasy as a reader and a shunning of emotion as a writer? I’m not sure, but I can say that The Lord of the Rings is a very emotional book, sometimes extravagantly so. Maybe, when Walls escaped into a book, she didn’t want to experience a lot of strong emotion along the way. Maybe she wanted a more intellectualized experience because (maybe) that was how she coped with her own hardships; that’s certainly how she wrote about them.

But that’s just me. Anybody out there read The Glass Castle? What did you think of it?

UPDATE: I wrote this post a while back, but today before I posted it I read on another blog, Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, about how Penelope, too, was disappointed in The Glass Castle. In her post, Penelope is arguing against the value of redemption in memoir, so it’s a different issue, and she’s probably not really supporting the points I’m making; but this was too much of a synchronicity to ignore, so I’m linking to Penelope’s post. Besides which, I like her blog a lot and think you should check it out.

The Literary Thing

Recently I went to a reading by author Pat MacEnulty, whose latest book, Picara, has just been published. After the reading, Pat, my wife, and I had a great conversation about writing, books, and literature. We all talked about how, when we were young, we used to read all the time, obsessively, relentlessly; but we almost never read that way anymore. I asked Pat and my wife why we had changed like that. Pat said, “I think it’s because most of the literature being written for adults these days just isn’t that absorbing. It’s the young-adult books and the fantasies that really pull you in.”

We talked about the truly absorbing books we’d read in our lives, and sure enough, most of them were either fantasy/sci-fi or young adult books. The last two absorbing books I’ve read are Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, in 2007; and the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass et al.), by Philip Pullman, in 2004. Yes, that’s three and six years ago, and yes, that’s how rarely I come across a book I would describe as “absorbing.” (For those of you who aren’t familiar with those books, both of them are fantasies, and His Dark Materials is young adult to boot.)

Pat said, “I think those books were written to be that way, to be absorbing, but most adult literature isn’t.” Oh how true. Pat’s comment reminded me of a line from Milan Kundera’s book The Art of the Novel: “Ever since Flaubert, novelists have tried to do away with plot devices, with the result that the novel is often duller than the dullest life.” Oh snap!

And here’s Kundera on entertainment in the novel as an art form, from a Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER: Why did you choose the farce form for a novel that is not at all meant to be an entertainment?

KUNDERA: But it is an entertainment! I don’t understand the contempt that the French have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word divertissement. They run less risk of being entertaining than of being boring. . . . The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes!

Flannery O’Connor made remarks along the same line in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” which appears in her anthology Mystery and Manners: “In a good deal of popular criticism, there is the notion operating that all fiction has to be about the Average Man, and has to depict average ordinary everyday life, that every fiction writer must produce what used to be called a ‘slice of life.’ But if life, in that sense, satisfied us, there would be no sense in producing literature at all.” Good point, when you think about it. If literature perfectly mimicked life, there would be no need for literature; it would be redundant.

My wife said to Pat, “When you were reading from your book, I was absorbed like that. I was really seeing the pictures in my head.” I agreed, and Pat nodded and said, “You know, there’s the literary thing.” She made a funny face as she said the words. “And I’m not trying to do that. With my writing, I think I’m trying to write absorbing stories like the ones we fell in love with when we were younger.” And thank God for that, say I.