New work, as Emily notes, from the Hopkins & Barton Book Trailer Manufactory: It is, as Emily says, the second installment in our book trailer manufacturing project, following the breakaway success of “They Don’t Have On Clothes, a Book Trailer for Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge.” “Breakaway success” in the sense of 130 views [...]
Or, a book trailer for They Don’t Have On, by Clothes. Possibly a new line of work for our family? Can three-year-olds sell literary fiction? I guess we’ll see how this one does first—test the waters—before we hang up the shingle for the Hopkins & Barton Book Trailer Manufactory.
Lower down on this page is a diagram I made in PowerPoint when I taught Fiction Writing: Level I at Gotham Writers Workshop five years ago, before Emily and I moved up to Kingston. (The JPEG is small, but if you click on it, it’ll open a larger version of the image as a new [...]
Coming home from the city on Amtrak last week, nodding off on the 4:40 out of Penn Station, I had an idea for a Web project: a site for a non-existent school called Fictional University (or FU for short, as Emily pointed out later when I was telling her about this idea). I was imagining [...]
Every time I read this (which is often—sometimes nightly; from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; p. 59 in the Beginner Books Book Club Edition, copyright 1958—our copy still in great shape and going strong!): Then the Voom… It went voom! And, oh boy! What a voom! Now, don’t ask me what [...]
1) From last week’s New Yorker, from David Remnick’s lead Talk of the Town essay (“A Man, a Plan,” on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu): Psychobiography in politics is ordinarily a mug’s game. 2) Which sent me to Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, which is where I remember first encountering the phrase; he mentions it [...]
I hesitate to call this found fiction, since the phrase implies inadvertency on the part of the author. What follows is a fiction that was definitely written by Dr. Ferber on purpose, one that I think succeeds as an analogy for what it’s like for a baby to fall asleep under certain circumstances and wake [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, three of three.) One last note—for now, anyway—about She Blows! And Sparm at That! I never knew my novelist great-grandfather, although my dad did; but in many parts of the novel, while reading it, I had this strange, quasi-mystical sense that I was reading something written by someone I was connected [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, two of three.) Another thing I wrote about last November, in my first note about one of my great-grandfather’s books, the one with one of the best titles ever, was that it had inadvertent gay overtones—which, again, is not to say that men did not have sexual relationships with each other [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, one of three.) A year and a day ago, I wrote a post about my great-grandfather’s novel She Blows! And Sparm at That! One of the things I wrote was that I thought he’d had some success as a writer, but that I didn’t really know for sure; I still don’t [...]
Read books that no one else is reading; that are out of print; that you check out of the library; that you find in a sad box of abandoned books by the side of the road, at the edge of a pile of the rest of a life’s abandoned detritus; that no one else has [...]
From Wonder Boys, p. 275 of the paperback (the movie tie-in edition, with Michael Douglas on the cover): a paragraph that ends with what I think is a great sentence, but one that’s hard to extract from what comes right before it—which, in turn, is somewhat impenetrable out of context. Here’s the opening: I looked [...]
Could someone really convince a security guard to let him into an office building every single day without an ID card simply on the basis of a pretended shared evangelistic faith? Could someone really convince the manager of a branch of a national business that he was working in that office every single day with [...]
From a letter I sent to Sharon Dynak, president of the Ucross Foundation, in October 2008: In answer to your question about whether we have any suggestions for improving the program: I do! In the two and a half years since I was there, I’ve become a husband and a father; Emily and I were [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, five of five.) The present-day poetry chapbook has a complex ancestry; its relations include, but are certainly not limited to, photocopied zines of the ’80s and ’90s, mimeographed literary journals of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, small-edition books made with cheap letterpress machines abandoned by the printing industry in the midcentury switch [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, four of five.) From a brief, undated (as far as I can tell) interview: The Short Review: How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection? J. Robert Lennon: About a year, all told. […] The Short Review: Did you have a collection in mind when you [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, three of five.) “The interesting thing about taking a lot of young people,” [Edward] Albee says, “is that so many people start out brilliantly, and then their careers just sort of fade away. So we’ve ended up with a lot of people who were wonderful at the very beginning, and then didn’t [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, two of five.) From the Glimmer Train Web site*: Aaron Gilbreath: You still get rejected, as you mentioned earlier. What’s your ratio right now, your miss-to-hit? Steve Almond: Probably five-to-one, something like that. Aaron Gilbreath: That’s pretty damn good. Steve Almond: It’s pretty damn good. It used to be like thirty-to-one. It [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, one of five.) The production of the full print run of each chapbook tends to cost hundreds of dollars, all of which comes out of [Ryan Murphy's] own pocket. But spending the money doesn’t bother him, nor is he bothered by the idea that the work isn’t reaching a wide audience. ‘For [...]
‘If you want to be a writer, it’s dangerous to have a job,’ [Wallace Shawn] says. ‘My own father was an example. He wanted to be writer. He ended up getting a job, and his life followed the direction of the job.’ Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He [...]
I copied down the following years ago from a photograph of sketches on the wall of Philip Guston’s studio (plate 70, specifically, bet. pp. 178 and 179 of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer, Penguin, 1988): I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole [...]
When J.D. Salinger’s obituary was published on the Web site of The New York Times a week ago this past Thursday, if you, like me, have an ongoing fascination with the practice of writing—with the details of why and how writers write, or don’t write, and when in their lives and careers they write and [...]
My great-grandfather, William John Hopkins—my father’s father’s father—was a novelist and short-story writer. I think his entire output was what is now called YA, but I’m not sure. We have copies of a lot of his books—The Clammer, Old Harbor, Burbury Stoke, Tumbleberry and Chick—all published by Houghton Mifflin in the early part of the [...]
From an era when not only did a writer have a reasonable shot at making money off a short story—if he or she really wanted to make the big bucks, he adapted it for the stage: the epigraph to the short story “The Day of Atonement,” by Sampson Raphaelson: So Sound and Dramatic Is this [...]
(New year catch-up post, four of five.) What was 8/17–8/21? It was Jess Anthony Week on the Powell’s Books Blog—and Jess very graciously asked me to be a part of it. Wednesday of that week was Jess and I talking about writing dares! So was Thursday! Also: have you read The Convalescent? Do you know [...]
The authorial intrusions, we were told, do not work. They are alienating, insipid, random, arbitrarily hostile, not working the right material. It is more than forty years, we were told, since John Barth wrote Lost in the Funhouse. Disembodied narrators have chastised readers for a generation now. It is not enough. Perhaps it will work [...]
I complained to Sean two years ago that I was, at the time, writing (or trying to write; or putting aside time to write—however you want to put it) for only forty-five minutes a day. Sean replied that forty-five minutes is infinitely better than nothing. It’s been a long time since I took math, but [...]
In December 2002 I went to an information session for the New School’s graduate creative writing program. I took some notes during the session, notes that I recently rediscovered while trying to purge old files. The best thing I jotted down was this: a question asked by a fellow participant—a young woman, if I remember [...]
My favorite of the frequently asked questions for the Creative Capital 2008 grant cycle letter of inquiry: FAQ #12. What do you mean by the “Final Form” my project will take? We have found that in the excitement of discussing the concepts behind their projects, many applicants forget to tell us how the project will [...]
During the strike, I was thinking that the number of hours that union management asked writers to put in on the picket line did not add up to a normal work week; and I’m more of a Neoclassicist than a Romantic when it comes to inspiration and time and words (if I’m using those terms [...]
A friend of mine discovered Judy Budnitz’s writing because he read and loved Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times, which has a blurb from her that reads: “Matthew Derby’s writing is a refreshing shock to the system. Read it and be entranced, enchanted, transported. He is truly one of a kind.” So my friend read her [...]
One thing that’s lost in the transition from excellent book to excellent film: great paragraphs like this: ‘Can we lie down?’ she said, and thereby murdered his illusion that she couldn’t make a false step. He didn’t want to lie down. He felt so spent, so old. This young woman was offering him a gift; [...]
If you read Louis Menand’s great article on Kerouac and the Beats in The New Yorker a couple months ago (“Drive, He Wrote”), and you read this passage: In his final appearance on television, a falling-down-drunk performance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” he insisted that his idea of beatness had nothing to do with [...]
About a month and a half ago, in the book review section of the paper of record of the city where I used to live, a woman whose two most recent novels have been published by the small press where I used to work reviewed a book—a novel told as a series of stories—by a [...]
An excerpt from a note I sent to the U.S. Copyright Office, via the “contact us” page on their Web site, in June: I registered a short-story collection […] with the U.S. Copyright Office a year and a half ago. […] I am writing you today because a few of times in the past year [...]
Kathryn Harrison, reviewing Joan Acocella’s Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints in the NYTBR (“Lives in the Arts,” February 18, 2007), quotes Acocella writing about Dorothy Parker in the last paragraph of her review, after which she closes with this kicker: [Acocella] has a distinct point of view, a refreshingly not-fashionable one—she salutes Sunday-school virtues!—and writes [...]
Last April, when I had a residency at the Ucross Foundation, one of the books in my studio was a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2005, which included eight very short stories by J. Robert Lennon under the title “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand,” which had originally run in Granta 85. The [...]
In the editors’ introduction to New Sudden Fiction, Robert Shapard and James Thomas note that, in the years since their most recent anthology of short-short stories came out, the World Wide Web has changed the way we write, publish, and read fiction, with scores of new online literary journals having started up since then. So [...]
About a month ago Emily and I were listening to the Leonard Lopate show; in the section of the show we heard, Lopate was interviewing Nora Ephron. About halfway through, they were talking about screenwriting, when Ephron, as an aside, said: “I once read this thing by a writer named Harry Crews who said that [...]
I went to a reading this fall where one of three writers, having been asked to read for no more than fifteen minutes, went for over half an hour. I went to a reading about a year ago where one of four writers read (at a breakneck pace, well aware of what she was doing, [...]
Emily says that when she tells people that she’s reading in February with Stephen Wright (the novelist) at the 92nd Street Y, they sometimes assume that she’s talking about Steven Wright (the comedian). They tend, she says, to get very excited at the prospect of this lineup. I personally think it’s a fantastic idea: fiction [...]
A review of the new Franzen in the NYTBR that runs to about eighteen hundred words, featuring plenty of nouns and adjectives and phrases presented in series, but never once invoking the ‘Times style book’s omission of the serial comma?: “clever, superior, smarty-pants;” “broken, awkward, imperfect;” “sheer, poignant, foolish;” “difficult, embittered, resentful;” “artistically brilliant, tormented, [...]
This past February I submitted two short-short stories to Another Chicago Magazine. Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, and Emily Raboteau have all had stories published in its pages, and although I’ve never been a subscriber, I’ve thought that the issues I’ve looked at before seemed interesting, well curated, and smartly put together. Then in March, while [...]
An idea: What about a Web site called “Am I Public Domain or Not?” At first I thought this could be something as simple as an algorithm that would generate a yes or no answer from the basic information required by this flow chart (or this, or this, etc.); when the work was published, when [...]
I am obsessed with stories of lost or destroyed writing—everything from Hughes burning Plath’s diary to the burning of the library of Alexandria to the loose manuscript pages blowing every which way in the wind at the end of Wonder Boys. I have a “destruction of writing” folder going in my files—not far from “Donald [...]
When I’m thinking about truth and nonfiction, I usually think about The Perfect Storm. In a good way, I mean. Then I wonder how much of the problem, in general, couldn’t be solved, or at least salved, with smarter graphic design. Sebastian Junger begins the foreword to his book by describing what he did not [...]
Maybe this won’t float your boat, but I love the United States Copyright Office’s descriptions of things that are not copyrightable. I’m probably reading too much into them, but it’s as if they’re governmental equivalent of a sensible, logical, patient librarian aunt. Like the circular on Names, Titles, and Short Phrases: even if “it lends [...]
A couple weeks ago The New Yorker had an eight-page special advertising section in it, taken out by Bantam Dell. The section begins with this copy: Great writers are great storytellers: they are rarely at a loss for words. The ability to unravel a yarn, deliver an adventure, and bring a voice alive is what [...]
Who reads these journals? asked my friend. We were sitting outside at the picnic table. Other writers, I said. For the most part, I think. It was late, the party was starting to die down. I’d mentioned some particular rejection slip I’d received recently, although I can’t remember which (they’ve been flooding in lately). Why [...]
Earlier this week, I wrote some notes on the Chang-Rae Lee and Lorrie Moore reading at the New Yorker Festival for Ms. Maud, here. As I mentioned before, I also got tickets for the “When Reality Fails” panel last Saturday morning. Apologies in advance for the inaccuracy of any quotes, hastily scrawled on index cards. [...]
From Ben Marcus’s article in the current issue of Harper’s, a provocative line break (on pg. 45): As a former art intern of the magazine, I’m perhaps better qualified than most to answer the question: with 11-point Goudy in a 16-pica column, couldn’t that line just be tracked back? Actually, to tell you the truth, [...]
1) Watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin; noticing Steve Carell, in the first (if I remember correctly) bookstore scene, walk past a face-out display of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian; wondering how this is possible, since the pub date on that was back in June, and the movie was released nationally in mid-August, so unless this was a [...]
I’m so excited. I just got tickets to this New Yorker Festival panel discussion: When Reality Fails Fantasy and invention in fiction. Deborah Treisman, moderator. With Martin Amis, Judy Budnitz, A. M. Homes, Stephen King, and George Saunders. I’m a little worried, though. These five writers all on stage together could mean a completely fascinating [...]
Do you know this feeling of serendipity, when your reading list starts talking to itself, books doing a tango in your brainpan? I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes right now (which is awesome), and in the story “Family Affair,” I read this passage: We talked for a while about airplanes. Having just read several [...]
1) I just went through the speediest version of the writing and publishing process I’ve ever experienced. It was like a lit journal sub on crack. As follows: Last week I noticed that Hobart is having a special themed issue; the guidelines, which are here at the moment (but most likely won’t be for more [...]
I think Cortázar had the last word on the too-many-writers, not-enough-readers problem over forty years ago: As the scribes will persist, the few readers there are in the world are going to have to change their roles and become scribes themselves. More and more countries will be made up of scribes, and more and more [...]
Dear poets, a favor: I’ve had this sudden realization that my education in, and familiarity with, twentieth-century poetry comes to an abrupt halt somewhere around Eliot and Stein, leapfrogs over World War II (using some kind of Modern-Postmodern, Joyce-Beckett sinew), and picks up again somewhere around the Beats and the New York School, with writers [...]
There’s little an editor could do, presumably, to prevent this, but it seems nonetheless lousy timing to run an ouvre-trashing review of a poet’s work approximately the same week that the guy’s getting married.
Passed from the divine Ms. Snyder. You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Yes. Bridget Jones (with whom I share a birthday, oddly). The last book you bought is: Breyten Breytenbach’s All One [...]
is trying to Google some funny anecdote that you remember having read on some literary weblog or other sometime in the past six months or so that was funny, in part, because it was written in dialect, which is a fuzziness that even Google can’t handle, but you remember the basic gist of the thing, [...]
As a fan of pirates (ridiculous mythical pirates, of course, not real, modern-day pirates, who are truly scary and evil), I was thrilled to discover in the OED not only that the word “argh” once actually existed in the English language, but also that the definition is awesome. I think needs to be brought back [...]
In the middle of a movies-about-writers kick (excluding, for my current purposes, movies about screenwriters and playwrights, and movies about writers derived from the work of Stephen King, which are both multitudinous and wholely different kettles of fish, I think). Here’s what I’ve got at the moment—movies about writers both fictional and real, movies where [...]
My current favorite nerdy distraction: trying to figure out exactly the etymology of the acronym TK. Chicago‘s online Q & A quotes a dictionary of abbreviations as saying that it stands for “to kum” and is “a printer’s expression.” But does that mean it originated as a misspelling? And if so, a purposeful one? Were [...]