Category: Reading

On the Tiring Fun of AWP

~ plainswriter ~ 1 Comment

I’m preparing to depart for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Annual Conference, which will be held in Los Angeles. It’s an event I look forward to each year I’m able to attend, and each year the conference is larger and more overwhelming than the previous one.

I view AWP similar to the various races I’ve run. Baltimore (’03), Vancouver, BC (’05), Denver (’10), Washington, D.C. (’11), Boston (’13), Seattle (’14), & Minneapolis (’15). Rather than racing medals, however, there are the canvas bags, but unlike with my handful of racing medals, I have not kept all of my bags.

This will be my 4th year bringing Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature to the bookfair, and overall, my conversations with people have been pleasant and meaningful. Because of those bookfair duties, I’m able to attend only a few panels during my time, but I’m okay with that.

I enjoy meeting current and past contributors, putting a face with the name. I enjoy meeting folks who are excited to discover the journal. I enjoy the challenge of explaining what we’re about and what we’re not about.

I enjoy walking around the bookfair before it opens, conversing with fellow editors, discovering new journals. At my first AWP, I went wild grabbing free back issues of journals or buying copies for $1 or $2. I returned with over 30 journals. (That was one heavy suitcase.)

Perhaps the best thing about AWP is not the journals or the books themselves, but the people. There are familiar faces: my grad-school and undergrad profs. People who were in my MFA or PhD program. Fellow writers and editors, many of whom I see once a year at this event.

I’ve met so many other people through attending the conference, as much as the conference overwhelms my introverted self. I’ve developed (and am developing) meaningful friendships with these fellow writers and editors, friendships that (through the wonder of social media and email) I am able to sustain between each conference. But for the 3-4 days that I’m there, I laugh more than in any other timespan of the year.

I return home exhausted, but inspired. New ideas to pursue, new journals to read, new people to maintain contact with. And then I’m already plotting for next year.

Confronting the Darkness

~ plainswriter ~ 3 Comments

Night-Driving-Synchroblog

My writing in this space over these 6 years has focused mainly on writing, reading, and place. Occasionally I’ve ventured beyond those core topics (such as with music or running or teaching), and today is another venture, one that is long overdue.

I just finished reading Addie Zierman’s Night Driving, her second memoir, released on Tuesday. It is a thoughtful, honest book that doesn’t flinch in the face of darkness, silence, or ambiguity. Moreover, it has urged me to begin my own memoir, one that will deal largely with my own darkness. But first, I have to acknowledge that her first book, When We Were on Fire, helped me realize I had my own unacknowledged darkness. More bluntly, through rereading and teaching the book last summer I was finally able to admit something: I have an eating disorder.

These words after the colon are not necessarily “easy” words to write, but in so doing, I am speaking truth to the lie that I am who I am because of how/when/what I eat (and/or don’t eat). And I know that I am surely not the only middle-aged man who has confronted such an issue, but one wouldn’t necessarily know that from the ways eating disorders are frequently discussed.

So I am in therapy, yes, and I have made substantial progress since July, but I also know that I have further to go and that I have to guard against relapses, against the return to prior destructive patterns of behavior. There is a sense that therapy has, for me, cast its own searching beam through the hallways and rooms of my past, illuminating choices and situations that contributed to the disorder I now fight. At the same time, this detective work, as uncomfortable as it has been at times, has provided more freedom and joy than I thought possible.

I have learned that my disorder doesn’t define who I am. No, my definition, my identity, my worth stems from this truth: Imago Dei. So I press on, watching the landscape around me gradually lighten, sometimes barely perceptibly, but enough for me to keep on towards my destination.

(You can read this piece where I first confronted this issue here: http://www.altarwork.com/the-night-it-culminates/)

 

 

On Raymond Carver

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I was first introduced to Raymond Carver’s fiction in a “Craft of Prose” class nearly 15 years ago when my professor, Alan Davis, distributed photocopies of Carver’s “Popular Mechanics.” We read and discussed the story, and I was shocked by the drama’s high stakes, and even more so by the story’s matter-of-fact ending line: “In this manner, the issue was decided.” We talked about the parallel with the Old Testament story of Solomon trying to determine the true mother of an infant when two women both claimed they were the rightful mother.

A year later in a “Fiction Seminar” was Carver’s “Cathedral,” a story that has become one of my favorites to teach. Something beautiful and transcendent happens in that story, just as in the much darker “A Small Good Thing,” heart-wrenching as it is. (Side note: it’s such a better story than “The Bath,” the version first published but not before it had been gutted by his editor, Gordon Lish.)

Two summers ago I read Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories. I was reading his (and others’) stories while also working on revising my own short stories. I felt simultaneously inspired and dejected–in awe of the craft and the character; in despair of my own seeming inability to create something faintly comparable. It’s a humbling yet instructive experience to read and learn from a master as you devote yourself to your own stories.

I recently read a collection of critical essays called New Paths to Raymond Carver. With pieces written by various critics, the book is a great read. Like the best criticism, these analyses cultivated in me a yearning to read the objects of the criticism. I joked to my wife that I wanted to (somehow) spend a week doing nothing but reading Carver.

Over my years of reading and studying Carver’s writings, I’ve learned much about dialogue, pacing, story structure, characterization, and even humor. The writing’s strong without preventing me from caring about the characters and what’s at stake for them. Some of my stories have been inspired by his work, not so much the scenarios, but more so the portrayal of characters that are not overly successful people. One of the things I appreciate (among many) about his work is his depiction of people (often) who are down on their luck in various ways, and he does so while avoiding authorial smugness.

Lastly, a statement from his essay “On Writing” is on a 3 x 5 notecard in my brain: “I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover.”

I apply this to my own work, I preach it to my students, and I consider how that applies to my daily interactions with people.