March 2014 – Page 2

Guest Post, Kevin Hanlon: A Reading by Melissa Pritchard

March 13, 2014March 20, 2014Kevin Hanlon

“She has come to Villa il Palmerino, betrayed and alone, to write about love.”

-Melissa Pritchard, Palmerino

I arrived having only the slightest inclination of what to expect. A former student of Melissa’s, I have grown accustomed to her animated readings and her unbounded enthusiasm towards creation. However, it was on this night that I would finally be hearing my professor read her own work. The evening started as Melissa lit candles, sipped wine, and greeted audience members who came to hear her read at Changing Hands Bookstore. Here, she was no teacher, but rather an artist sharing her work with me, the reader. There was no need to teach or explain and no need to answer questions. There was only Melissa and the page in front of her.

Our audience was about fifty people. We took our seats and quietly discussed what we had in store for the evening: Palmerino. Pritchard’s fourth novel is set in rural Italy and follows the protagonist, a present-day biographer and writer, Sylvia, through a time-transcending journey of discovery that unfolds both her own life and the life of her subject, the poet Vernon Lee. Palmerino explores sexuality and emotion while inviting the reader to get thoroughly lost in the gracefully assembled Italian dreamscape of both past and present.

We enjoyed refreshments and biscotti provided by Pritchard to help further immerse ourselves into her novel’s 19th century Italian setting. She read with power and beauty, adjusting her tone to distinguish between characters and narration. Pritchard’s writing is lyrical. Each word is carefully chosen and allows her to paint deliberate, detailed pictures in the reader’s mind. Throughout the book, tones shift as we slip back and forth through both time and voice.

The poeticism of the writing is obviously characteristic of Pritchard as it worked effortlessly with her theatric reading. From the excerpt she read, we learned of a dinner party with Vernon Lee, her family, and her lover Clementina, or Kit. They dined on sweet antiquities and spoke of passion and truth of the time period.

Pritchard’s voice guided us back in time to this wondrous place of enchantment and poetic love, and with her, if just for a moment, we escaped.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Joe Neal

March 11, 2014March 6, 2014Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Joe Neal.

Joe Neal has fiction forthcoming in Salamander Magazine. He is pursuing an MFA in fiction at Cornell University and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. He is originally from Franklin, Ohio.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

Guest Post, Michael Berberich: Ernie and Abe

March 9, 2014March 9, 2014Michael Berberich

America loves Hemingway. I love Hemingway. But I cannot write like Hemingway. When I try to write like Hemingway, my words ring with all the hollowness of a tin gong.

The voices that pulse through my literary being are the voices of the American West. They are the voices that celebrate tall tales and oral traditions. They are voices rural, voices plural, voices discursive, meandering, exploratory. They are voices at play, voices that sing. Think of the boisterous sounds at a Thanksgiving dinner table where tales are told, interjections are bold, and laughter abounds. Place names echo Español. Libations flow and, best of all, the night might run til the first cock crows. No one’s in a hurry. Why should they be? Efficiency is not the name of the game. The raconteur reigns.

I was once in a serious relationship where everything seemed to be going right yet ultimately fell apart. There was no centripetal hold. The feeble best I could offer about the breakup to friends who cared for us both was to say that she loved forests, I loved deserts. That worked. It was art, or at least artful. While the words function at a literal level, the force and weight of their meaning loom beneath the surface. The image appeals to our experiences more so than to our logic.

Please read these words aloud: “What is it the wind seeks, sweeping among the leaves, prowling round and round this house, knocking at the doors and wailing in the shutters? O Charity! Every frozen morning for awhile in winter you had a thin little winter moon slung like a slice of a silver Rocky Ford cantaloupe over the sawmill; and then I would go out to the well in the yard and snap off the silver thorns of ice from the pump muzzle and jack up the morning water and stand and look over across the fairy fields at you where you lay like a storybook town, and know that on all the little wooden roofs of houses there was a delicate trail of lacelike rime on the shingles. Then all the chickens and guineas of Charity would be crowing and calling and all the cattle lowing, and the Charity dogs barking (all with a sound that china animals might make if they could crow or call or low), and in that crystal and moonhaunted moment I would stand, dazzling in the first sunray of morning, and wonder what would ever happen to us all.”

The passage opens the second chapter of Texas writer William Goyen’s lyrical novel The House of Breath. The novel, with prose that sings, stands as an exemplar of American belles lettres. Hemingway this ain’t. Often praised by his contemporaries yet overlooked by the broad public, Goyen is mostly forgotten now. He shouldn’t be. His writing, redolent of uniquely American voices, stands outside the mainstream of American prose, the tonal center of which still remains in what Perry Miller once labeled “the Puritan plain style.” In other words say it straight, say it true, and find beauty in simplicity. At its most eloquent best, we get Abraham Lincoln.

Yet it is, as Goyen’s passage illustrates, a limited aesthetic. The admonishments of decades of eighth grade schoolmarms aside, we don’t all need to write like Ernie and Abe. There is a certain irony in the general exclusion of the discursive voices of the oral traditions. Voices quintessentially American find themselves outside of the plain style tonal center of American literature. To shift metaphors, there have been occasional cracks in the concrete, places where orality and discursiveness poke through, a nimble weed here and there sets root, takes hold, and pushes apart a jagged break in the sidewalk. Twain and Whitman come first to mind as writers who have written discursively (Roughing It, anyone?) and celebrated the vernacular. Yet even Twain gets nudged to the margin as a “regional” writer, i.e., as one writing in a voice that comes from those places (“out West”) never quite reached by the Puritans.

So where today are those whose taproots push apart the sidewalks? Some writers that accomplish this today are actually discoveries from the neglected past, e.g., Zora Neale Hurston. Others are recognized as great writers of voice. Sandra Cisneros, for example, is that skinny tree who displaced concrete to grow tall and sturdy. Her wonderfully plotless (wonderful because it is plotless) House on Mango Street carries itself as a tour-de-force of voice. Listen: “But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread.”

Cisneros’ lilting rhythms find kinship in Goyen. Her aesthetic is the aesthetic of Mexican flower pots lining the porch, pots adorned with stylized birds in shiny bold primary colors. No plain style here!

I like to count myself as writing against the predominant tradition as well. My successes as a writer have been modestly steady, if limited. I attribute that more to teaching 5 and 6 classes per semester for 30 years than to the fact that I write against a 400-year-deep current of tradition. But writing against tradition does make demands of readers accustomed to the literary comfort food of reading within a predominant tradition and that fact alone will limit publication. The feeble best I can offer in explanation of that condition is to say that in a culture of readers that love dense forests, I write from a love of sere deserts. It’s a much smaller audience.

Guest Post, Mary Sojourner: The First Teacher, My Perfect Imperfect Mom

March 8, 2014March 11, 2014Mary Sojourner

The little girl in the picture is a serious child – and already a woman. By the time the picture is taken, her mother has suffered her first psychotic break and survived her first suicide attempt. These days her mom would have been diagnosed with postpartum depression, barbiturate addiction and bi-polar psychosis. In 1945, the psychiatrists named her a hysteric and depressive, and told her she liked her depression because it got her attention. They prescribed electric shock treatments (a terrifying and brutal regime in those days) – and the family doctor prescribed sleeping pills.

I grew up with three mothers: the bright-eyed mom who played jazz piano, drew abstract designs for me to color, learned to stencil the folk-art of her Pennsyvania-Dutch origins, hand-painted Easter eggs and turned our home into a candle-lit shrine during the winter holidays; the sallow mother who grew more and more silent, who took to the living-room couch on long winter afternoons, who burned our dinners and closed the cover over the piano keys; the thing that looked like my mother but contained a howling void.

All three mothers were the perfect teachers for what I do best, for that which seems to be the only act that fills my soul, for what I do in this perfectly imperfect moment – writing. My bright-eyed mom read, not just to me and my brother, but for herself. She took me to the library when I was six and introduced me to the librarians. She told me they held the keys to magic – and since she had introduced me to Scheherezade, the women who told stories to save her life, I knew the librarians were guardians of an endlessly replenished treasure chest. When I begged off washing dishes or doing chores because I had a book to read, my mother shrugged, laughed and said to my father, “You know Liz. She always has her nose in a book.” And when I began to write my own stories, she read them. She never pushed me to write them or snooped in my diary. But when I brought her my writing, she read it carefully and told me what she liked.

My silent mother gave me more than she could have ever guessed. When she came home from the hospital, she, my father and I must have believed that it – the “nervous breakdown” – would never happen again. We were wrong. Two years later, the color began to leave her face. There was strained quiet at our dinner table. I came home from school to find my mom stretched out on the couch. And then, I was waked in the middle of the night to the sound of her retching. I pulled the pillow around my ears and struggled back into sleep. In the morning, my mother was gone. My father told me she was back in the hospital. Then, for reasons I can’t fathom to this day, he said, “She took too many sleeping pills. She wanted to die. I made her drink a quart of milk so she would throw up.”

In that instant, I became a radar screen. I learned to pay scrupulous attention, to monitor people and surroundings as accurately as any creature who relies on external information to survive. And I learned to store away what I learned. It would be years before I would hear the political slogan: To Understand the Present, Study the Past. At eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen and eighteen, I became an encyclopedia that contained every nuance of my mother’s face, moods, laughter and silences.

The mother skin bag that contained a black hole gave me the third great gift. I was five. I’d been kept home from kindergarten. I sat in my parents’ big bed with a coloring book in my lap. I didn’t read yet. My mother was in the kitchen. Someone was singing, a tuneless, wordless high-pitched croon. Then there were footsteps coming toward me. I knew my mother was the only other person in the apartment. I tightened my hands on the coloring book and stared down at the page. There was a tree, a little house, smoke coming out of the chimney. I began to tell myself the story of whoever was in the house. That’s the last thing I remember of that morning.

My mother and I made peace when I was fifty-five and she was eighty-three. We were brought to a sisterly ease with each other through miracles, hard work and, as we would have told you, “Who Knows What.” For the next two years of her life, we talked openly and with love about our time together as mother and daughter. She died at eighty-five. I was with her a few weeks before her death when she gave me the second most valuable thing she has given me.

She was drifting in and out of consciousness. I held her hand. She came wide awake, looked into my eyes and smiled. Her eyes were wet with tears. “Oh Liz,” she said, “I don’t have many regrets, but the one I have is so big.” I waited. “It breaks my heart,” she said, “that the god-damned depression robbed me of being able to be the mother I longed to be.” We were quiet. Her hand was warm in mine; mine warm in hers. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

And the greatest gift? The writing. My bright-eyed mother gave me trust in what I write. My silent mother unwittingly taught me to become a gathering net. The not-mother jolted me out of the ordinary and into the world of story. Trust, curiosity, infinite possibility. And one regret – I wish she were here to read this post.

Lillie Foltz Mammosser, thank you.
Note: This piece first appeared in my former Psychology Today blog. I thought I might re-work it, but as I read it, I knew I would not change one word. All of it is even more true today than it was in 2010 when it was published. And, as I read it I found myself paraphrasing an old saying: “That which doesn’t kill us makes some of us writers.”
You can find more of my work – and weekly writing tips and exercises on my new website: http://www.breakthroughwriting.net

Guest Post, Lori Brack: A Spider Season

March 6, 2014March 11, 2014Lori Brack

In July, just outside the back door at elbow height, I discovered an orb weaver, Argiope aurantia, growing more and more enormous each week, clinging to its web. The pattern of its weaving was mostly invisible except for one thick white zigzag down the web’s vertical axis. Each time I opened the door, the whole edifice swayed and swung. The spider hung in wait.

A bestiary I found on the plush seat of a chair in a used bookstore in August opened naturally to a full-page photograph of this very spider, as if the book had been placed there, marked for me. Aha, I thought. Now I’ll know what it is and whether I should be afraid. The book, however, was written in Spanish and so I noted araña tejedora and came home to look up the second word, not a cognate like the arachnid that I imagine poses in araña. The search engine brought back “weaving machine,” “loom” when I typed in tejedora. Where I had hoped for clarity, I found only the obvious. So, it must be its beauty and the peach-pit size of its body, its long striped legs, I decided, that rate a whole page in full color. But once I knew its Spanish name, I had other questions: How long would it last, protected under the roof of the porch? Would it go before I needed the rake and snow shovel, their handles bound with spider silk to make one pillar holding up the web?

Then, September sun began to brighten lawns with its slight touch of yellow. Crickets increased their volume. I watched from my chair a patch where leaf shadow flickered through the doomed leaves of a pin oak. That moving light fanned from chair legs to table legs, disappeared soon, and on the loom of days autumn came on.

I discovered the spider has other names: garden spider, corn spider, writing spider, the one who reweaves her web, or at least the zigzag, every night. I noticed in mid-October as nights began to cool that she was a bit off-center in her web and found myself thinking that her death must be near, caught myself, made sure I didn’t wish it, having known her so long. A day or two later, I found the web empty. I worried she had tried to get into my warm house, so I glanced at my feet and the rugs on both sides of the door. I looked for her under the web on the porch step. Finally, I looked up and found her body hanging high over the web, legs bent toward her huge torso. It was near freezing the night before. I wondered if she is built only for summer, her fragile mechanism like a watch’s once-wound gears. I don’t know how she lived, and then I needed some explanation of how she died.

A naturalist would have more to say than genus and species, scrupulous research standing in where I have only this willingness to look, and a list of mysteries:

Did I watch because I recognized the spider or her labor? Did I covet her design because I strain to find my own? Or did I envy the sharpness of her zigzag, that she could resay it every night, whiter, cleaner, clearer each time, and that saying it seemed to make her bigger and more powerful each day?

What do I know about the spider? Only my response to her, my fascination and desire to see up against my side-eye fear of looking too close. I know this: scale is part of my bafflement – I could never get small enough or close enough to understand or feel how it is to be her. And part of this puzzle is my revulsion when I leaned in to see. I loved her web more than I love her? No. I loved them both – but I was able to see web and zigzag in ways I could not see the spider.

The day after I mourned her empty web, I wrote: The spider awakes! As the day warmed, I watched her flex one or two of her folded legs, then another two or three. By dusk, she was back at the center of her web, gathering her silken glamor. I tried to lean closer to memorize her shape before the frost, but her size and grasp made something tickle at the back of my throat.

November, and the spider’s egg sac hangs like a plum from the porch roof. She spent her last days suspended near it, abandoning the summer web, its white line tattered and blurred. Each day of her death I opened the door slowly, looked for her before stepping out, watched as each cold night left her smaller, long legs folding closer to her body.

I read that her nearly violet brown sac could contain up to a thousand offspring. The females will emerge in spring looking just like her, only much tinier, and will grow a leg-span almost as wide as my hand over a summer, carrying the knowledge of web and weave in their impossibly expendable bodies. If they survive, every night they will remake like their mother from the substance of their spider selves a thick white line in even stitches, and when it’s time, they will construct the fruit-shaped sac to shelter their eggs.

A web yawns wide as out-flung arms. An egg sac keeps its secrets, dangling purse holding everything she spent.

Across the room, the little thrift shop Royal I bought for its sleek silver chrome despite its broken mechanism catches on its fancy keys a glint of sun as it rises. A naturalist would remind us that it is we who descend, our dangling pod turning out here, fixed to the star.

I did not rescue her body after it fell, after it lost its beauty and symmetry and became simply fearful. I cannot make my home out of the elements of my body as the spider taught. I use my house, solid uninspired stucco and plaster, to shelter the meander of my thoughts, the pattern I make with my notebooks and the flexible net of intention. She is gone now, blown away or crushed to dust. I keep vigil by marking off each writing day of oncoming winter, holding close with these stitches the seethe and foment of life inside.

#AWP14 Recap

March 5, 2014October 10, 2022Erin Regan

I’ve been back in Arizona for a solid 24 hours and have had time to defrost and debrief on my time at the 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle. I have been reflecting on my experiences as an AWP novice and wanted to share my thoughts. Plus, spending three days with poets and writers really makes you want to scribble something down.

When I boarded the flight to Seattle last week, I was a bag of nerves. Why was I so unprepared? How was I going to speak coherently to the brilliant minds I was about to meet? What’s my name again? I settled in my seat, repeating “Erin Regan – I’m just an undergraduate” in my head, when I realized that I was sitting next to Benjamin Saenz, an author whose work I was introduced to last year in a Chicano literature class. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t say anything, so I introduced myself and complimented his work. We ended up chatting for the rest of the flight – him sharing stories about selling his mother’s homemade burritos for cigarettes as a child and offering me advice for the conference/life, me laughing and nodding and trying to take everything in. By the time he was suggesting I nurse my cold with a cocktail of bourbon and honey and texting Sherman Alexie, my nerves were abandoned.

Since that flight, I had the opportunity to be in the same room as some of my other favorite writers, people I’ve been reading for years like Sherman Alexie, Chuck Palahnuik, Ursula Le Guin, and Gary Snyder. Yes, some of those rooms were pretty big, but that’s okay. It was magical to hear them read from their work and speak about their experiences, but even more inspiring was being in the company of thousands of writers practicing their craft with such love.

As a literature and journalism major, and an undergraduate no less, I felt a bit on the outside this weekend. I’m a stranger to the workshop process and I’m not sure where/when/if I’m getting my MFA. When people asked me what I write, I had a hard time giving them a straight answer, stumbling over my words until landing on “I try to write fiction.” On Saturday, the final day of the conference, I offered this answer to a man behind his table at the book fair. He gave me a look and asked what that meant. Flustered and inarticulate as I was at this point (come on, it was the third day of this), I shrugged. He asked me if I liked to write, and when I said yes, he said, “I dub you a fiction writer.” I will continue to write and will begin to submit my work to literary journals, but regardless of whether or I get published, this weekend has made me a much more devoted reader and supporter of the literary community. This weekend, I realized that I am a writer among writers, a member of a community that is thriving.

On Friday, I was able to witness just how strong and spirited that community is during what is becoming an infamous moment in AWP history. Past Student Editor-in-Chief Sydni Budelier and I were sitting in the aisle of a packed room for a panel titled “Magic and the Intellect.” Lucy Corin was reading an excerpt from her novel-in-progress The Swank Hotel. The piece was rich with dark and disturbing images, a stream of dead baby jokes that showed us something powerful about the nature of humanity and pain. You can read a thoughtful summary of the panel by Naomi Williams here. In the middle of Corin’s reading, a voice from the back of the room, obviously offended, interrupted her and began a rant that accused Corin of “traumatizing” her audience. While the outburst was shocking, the support for Corin in response was truly stunning. People urged her to finish the excerpt, take her time, and someone even shouted “start over!” I, and many others, had tears in our eyes as a quaking-voiced Corin finished her reading to fierce applause.

This, I believe, is what we were celebrating at the AWP Conference: the communality of writers supporting other writers, creators praising and inspiring other creators. I’m thrilled to have been able to meet so many of our own brilliant contributors at the book fair as well – thank you to everyone who stopped by our table to say hello. I’m honored to share a community with all of you.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Catherine Martin

March 4, 2014November 15, 2013Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Catherine Martin.

Catherine Martin is currently a grad student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing MA program. She has a BA in English and Spanish from Smith College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Nimrod and Else Where magazines. Catherine grew up in Athens, Georgia, but has spent the past five years in Massachusetts. She regularly returns to the South, but is building a career in publishing in Boston. Catherine has been writing poems since she was 13.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

Guest Post, Barbara Crooker: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem

March 2, 2014February 13, 2014Barbara Crooker

1. A poem is a journey, not a destination. If you think you can see where your poem is going, start there. Don’t be in a rush to finish the poem. The world isn’t starving for want of poems. The world is starving for want of good poems.
Write through the body; use your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin. Think of the image as the driving engine of the poem.
Don’t be afraid to engage the heart: “If you don’t risk sentimentality, you’re not in the ballpark.” (Richard Hugo) Dive deeper into the wreck.
Banish the internal editor, the one that says, “This isn’t any good. This has been done before. This is boring.” Keep your pen moving; let that pony run. Don’t impose your will on the poem; the poem knows what it wants to become. Be open to everything that comes your way.
Think of the line length as a unit of breath. Read out loud when you’re revising. Find your best line rhythmically, and try and cast the other lines in a similar rhythm. Experiment with regular meter. Try syllabics.
If you’re using rhyme, mix it up with off-rhymes, near rhymes, slant rhymes. Don’t invert sentence structure just to get a rhyme in, and avoid “poetic” phrasing. (Avoid the word “poetic!”) Fall in love with sounds. And the sound of sounds.
Go for concrete Anglo-Saxon words rather than the fancier Latinate ones.
Try using enjambment; break expectations.
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” (Stephen King) and I’d add adjectives to that advice. Nouns and verbs are your power words.
Always be open to revision. “Revision is not just cleaning up after the party; revision is the party.” (William Matthews) Something to try: cut the first three and last three lines of a draft. Think about how you throw out the eggshells in order to make an omelet. Remember less is more. Less is always more.
Try changing the tense of the poem. Try changing the pronoun of the speaker. Notice the different effect you get between “I said / you said / she said / the woman said.”
“Don’t ask yourself if the poem pleases you. Ask instead, “Have I done everything this poem requires of me?” (William Dickey)
The poem on the page will never measure up to the poem in your head. Learn to live with this.

Guest Post, Roger Boylan: The Making of a Farce

March 1, 2014February 13, 2014Roger Boylan

My novel The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad has never found its rightful audience, and that pisses me off. I mean, it’s one thing to be a midlist author with a modest seller on your hands, but it’s quite another to have a book published by an eminent publisher (Grove/Atlantic, in this case) who then does no publicity for it. None. And at the time it was published I had a family and a full-time job with a 100-mile daily commute and could do little to publicize. The novel lay there, like a beached whale. Such a book dies a slow death, and its fate is the kiss of death for the next one. Amazingly, it’s still in print, and I no longer have a job, so there’s still hope.

Of course, part of the problem is that it’s a farce, and a literary one. What makes it literary? Well, it’s “critically acclaimed” and “serious;” in its structure and its language it refers to its own literary predecessors; it contains cultural and artistic allusions; etc. Sounds like highbrow stuff, sure enough. Then there’s the “farce” part: associated with frilly undies and doors opening and closing amid giggling. In short, I could hardly have chosen a less marketable niche if I’d tried, but I didn’t.

As I explain to people who ask me why I don’t just knock off a bestseller or two, then go back to my quirky comedies, if I could knock off a bestseller, don’t you think I would? Quirky comedies are what I write. Farce is what I do. It’s an essential ingredient of literature, specifically comic literature. Actually, it’s an essential ingredient of life, which makes comic fiction the most realistic genre of all.

First, all about me. I’m an American of Irish heritage, a Southerner by birth (Florida), but between the ages of six and twenty-eight I only set foot in this country once, for two weeks, long enough to marvel at air conditioning, even in cars, and huge color TV sets, which were scarcer then where I grew up. Over the years I lived–first with both my parents, then briefly with just one (dad), then for longer, again with just one (mom), then all on my lonesome–in Paris, Geneva, Dublin, Coleraine, Edinburgh, and London. I had an unusual childhood that seemed ordinary at the time, as do all childhoods, but that glows in the irretrievable past, the older I get, like sunset over the Bay of Naples.

Speaking of Italy, when he was around I accompanied my father on excursions to old churches throughout that country, in which he installed electronic carillon bells. Some churches were obscure and decrepit; others, famous and thriving, like St. Peter’s in Rome, where he met and schmoozed with the house priest, a.k.a. Pope John XXIII, who consented to a photograph. Another time I remember us being the only two males in the blacked-out dining hall of a large convent in the high Apennines, while a massive spring thunderstorm raged outside. Power went out just as dinner was beginning. The black-clad nuns’ faces were zombie-pale in the episodic flashes of lightning. They all sat still, pending the pleasure of Providence, until eventually candles were produced, illuminating the good sisters from below, like a painting by Georges de la Tour (creating a de la Tour + zombie effect).

Another bestseller I missed writing was a memoir detailing gross childhood abuse, because there was none. Mine was a peripatetic childhood about which I have no complaints. The memoir I did write, Run Like Blazes, available at your friendly Amazon corner store, mostly describes the picaresque and feckless life I later led, all blame and/or credit accruing to me. There are no painful secrets I’ve never confronted, or if there are they’re secret to me, and long may they remain so. I grew up yearning for girls to fall in love with and failing miserably to get them to fall in love with me, yelling “I love you” at the desired object while (in one case) hiding behind garbage cans outside her house, my fat parts plainly visible behind the cans and thereby eliciting hilarity rather than reciprocal passion. I switched my emotional investment to cars, then books.

But I never felt a belt, or the back of a hand. The worst my dad ever did at home when I was bad, which I seldom was, was snarl quietly, retreat into his den, drink beer and fill the air with blue tobacco smoke while listening to tapes of the bells he had installed. They were filed under their respective countries: Austria; Belgium; Denmark; France; Germany; Greece; Italy. I inherited many of them when he died. By far the biggest were those for Germany and Italy.

My mother was a woman of great inner resources. In the 1940s she became a sports writer for her hometown paper and interviewed Joe DiMaggio and Primo Carnera. Later, in the ’50s, soon after I was born, she got her pilot’s license and made money on the side by flying high-rollers in her Piper Cub from Miami to the Tropicana and other casinos in Havana. (One of her passengers was Al Capp, creator of the Li’l Abner comic strip.) Many years later, when her marriage with Dad was crashing into pieces, she needed the same spine to get a job at the U.N. in Geneva, which she did when I was 15 or so. Then she told the old man to hit the road. He’d been spending an inordinate amount of time in Germany, probably not installing bells. I went with him once, to Heidelberg, and he introduced me to ladies whose livelihood was on their person. Unless Memory is gilding the lily, we stayed at the Hotel Venus. Again, it all seemed ordinary to me.

So, as a child I lived in beautiful places and learned to speak French fluently and Italian and German passably, with smatterings of Spanish and Russian that, alas, have stayed smatterings. One of the advantages of my mongrel upbringing was the enshrinement of a split personality, a great boon to a writer, especially a comic novelist.

But my international upbringing was a mixed blessing, as it came to mean that I was equally at home nowhere; more importantly, as I realized that I would probably become a writer, I had no homeland to draw upon, of which to become an intimate and authoritative interpreter. So I made up two: the first was Ireland, the land of my ancestors, where I lived with my dad for a year in Dublin, post-expulsion, and later on my own as a student at the University of Ulster and would-be soldier of the IRA. (I took off when the going got tough.) The second homeland was Farce. It seemed an appropriate–indeed, the only appropriate–standpoint from which to observe Life.

I moved from France to New York at the age of 28 to become a writer. First I became a deadbeat, another valuable milestone along the way. Then, inevitably, like father like son, a drinker and a womanizer, although success in the latter pursuit was for the most part more fictitious than the fiction I embarked on. I published my first short story, a close imitation of Frank O’Connor, in The Literary Review in 1987, payment: five free copies of The Literary Review. Gee, thanks, Literary Review! There was, of course, the big payoff, the future prospect of glory. But I’ve never made money from my writing. It’s scant consolation, but no one does, unless they win a big prize. I’ve made ends meet in traditional ways, tending bar, teaching, editing, working in a bookstore. These days I’m semi-retired, although not from writing, and living in Texas, although not voluntarily.

Along the way I’ve written five novels, three Irish, one European, and one American. Apart from The Adorations, subtitled A Novel in Double Time, they all have subtitles including the word “farce:” Killoyle, An Irish Farce; The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, A Mostly Irish Farce; The Maladjusted Terrorist, An Irish-American Farce; and Ohiowa Impromptu, A Multicultural Farce.

The first has been published in English, German, and Italian; the second in English and German; the third in German only; and the last, in no language yet, but my agent is trying. I think.

My novels, again with the exception of The Adorations, which is my sole attempt to date to produce a serious, sprawling kind of magnum opus (there’s plenty of satire in it, but no farce), are no less farcical, or comic because of serious content like bomb explosions and murder–indeed, slightly more so, because The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad is basically a thriller with comic extrusions. And the focus on terrorism and craziness in it and in its successor, The Maladjusted Terrorist, heightens rather than detracts from the farcical elements, because extreme situations are always the prime incubators of comedy. It’s important to attend to the details when people fuck up. If you can’t get that right, forget about being a comic novelist. If you’re too squeamish to enact failure and embarrassment in your characters’ lives, forget about being a comic novelist–or even just a novelist.

I’m currently about one-third of the way through another novel, also set in Ohiowa, tentatively titled What A View! and subtitled An Artistic Farce.

But at the present rate I may have to bribe publishers to publish it–that’s called self-publishing, isn’t it? Such is the condition of publishing. Mind you, it’s never been easy to break in, especially as a comic novelist. Howard Jacobson is one of the pre-eminent comic novelists of the day. He once said, back in the days before he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, “It has always bewildered me that people don’t want to read me in large numbers.” Now they do, of course, because of the Booker. But being non-Bookered myself, I share his prior sentiment. I suspect it’s partly to do with being pigeonholed: Oh, that old Jewish guy who writes funny books. Forget him, unless you’re an old Jewish guy who likes funny books. Oh, that Irish guy who writes the so-called funny books with footnotes. Forget him, unless you’re an Irish guy who likes funny books with footnotes. Or even: Oh, the guy who always writes farces. Who wants to read farces?

So anyway: what’s up with farce?

Farce, declares the Encyclopædia Britannica, is “a form of the comic in dramatic art, the object of which is to excite laughter by ridiculous situations and incidents.” Wikipedia tells us that farce “aims [to entertain] the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, and thus improbable. Farces are often … incomprehensible plot-wise (due to the large number of plot twists and random events that occur), but viewers are encouraged not to try to follow the plot in order to avoid becoming confused and overwhelmed.”

I would go further: Go ahead, become confused and overwhelmed. For farce is life, only more so. Life, with its disregard for human dignity, may be tragic, comic, majestic, or mundane, or all at once, but farce can be counted on to show up.

s [r] blog

Month: March 2014