November 5th, 2010

A Matter of Influence

Earlier this week, I did a short talk and Q&A with a short story class that’s studying some pieces from Once. The theme I was asked to discuss was influence–what short stories and short-story writers had I learned from, and what, and how much. Well, I extrapolated those questions from the theme given; I think I got it more or less right.

There are so many writers I tried to learn from…ok, imitate…when I was younger. Ok, and I still do. I have never ever been called out on any of this rampant imitation, and here’s why: my mimicry is not good enough to remind any of the writing that I’m supposed to be mimicking. I’m not that good–it takes talent to make your voice sound like someone else’s, a weird and specific talent that few possess.

This is why the old teenage justification–“I don’t want to read other people, because it’ll influence me and my work will be derivative”–is so hilarious. Yeah, you read too much Sylvia Plath or JD Salinger, and you are in *real* danger of sounding exactly like that genius person. That’s the problem.

I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in sounding like much of anyone except myself. But the writers that I choose to mimic–and thus to read closely and repeatedly and with care–teach me things in small and subtle ways, and point me in directions I never good have found all on my untutored own. I am a firm believer that imitation is a perfectly excellent way to begin; the places where we first hear are own voices in our work are the places where we’ve utterly failed to sound like someone else.

The influencer I chose to talk about with the students is Leon Rooke, and the stories we took up were Leon’s A Bolt of White Cloth, probably one of my favourite stories ever (it’s a long list of faves), and a story of my own that Leon pushed me (both figurively, by inspiring me with his own work, and literally, by tapping my arm and saying, “Hey, this is what you should write!”), “Linh Lai” (sorry, it’s not online).

What’s funny is that I started the talk with the same basic material on “influence” as above, talked about and read from “Bolt,” then talked about and read from “Linh,” then asked if they could see a connection. Partly, I think the students were nervous to have a stranger teaching them (they loosened up later and the Q&A was really fun) but also, the connection is not obvious.

My writing is not very Rookian, more’s the pity. I don’t have that swing to my prose, usually, and Leon’s background and experiences take him to places I can’t go. But *I* feel the connection, and know how much I learned about quotidan magic and wet-laundry romance from Leon, not to mention how to set a scene with just a glimpse of the sky. Just because my imitation is a 99% failure, doesn’t mean that that 1% isn’t in there, beating for all it’s worth.

This is *not* to say that I take my story as a failed story (I love that one, and all my published stories, actually; modesty ought to have forbid me saying that but oh well!)–just that the imitation didn’t work. But nor should it. We already have one human who can write like Leon Rooke, and he carries the mantel admirably. I am happy to just write like me, which is of course the sum everything I’ve known and seen, and everyone I’ve learned from.

October 5th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Light Lifting*

There is pleasure in liking something other people like too–who doesn’t want to stand for an ovation for something great and think, “All these people are feeling what I’m feeling.” Which is why I was so happy reading Alexander MacLeod’s *Light Lifting* in the midst of the of all the wonderful press the book has been getting. It was a pleasure to nod and agree to all the praise–it’s not hype if it’s true. And I’m not really sure I can add much to the general consensus that this book is excellent, but it’s that shared ovational feeling that makes me want to try.

It’s no secret that I thought I was going to like this ahead of time. The first story–and some say the strongest–in the collection is “The Miracle Mile,” which Lee Henderson, Camilla Gibb, and I chose to include in The Journey Prize Stories 21. I love that story, as I do all those in JP21, but since I’ve read those pieces (and another dozen that almost made it) more times and with more intensity than I’ve read perhaps anything ever, I’m afraid I don’t have much more to say. “Miracle Mile” is a brilliant story about passion finely channeled into long distance running, and as many times as I’ve been over it, I read it again in the collection (because when I read a book I read every word, including the copyright page; is that weird?) and it’s still brilliant.

It was exciting to keep going this time, though, and find that the next story is completely different. “Wonder About Parents” is written in choppy elliptical fragments, way out of chronology, and a reader just has to work it out for herself. And it makes total sense–the narrator is an exhausted young father coping with three kids and a houseful of lice, looking back on a time when things were far worse. The prose reads like the thoughts of someone so tired, looking back on something terrible that has been somewhat softened by time and distance. The unusual prose style also keeps what is essentially a story about parents’ fierce and baffled love for their kids from becoming even a tiny bit sappy. This is my favourite part:

“Delousing. Then rinse. Naked kids, braced between our legs, standing under the shower. Facecloths over their eyes and mouths. Don’t swallow any of this water. Spit it out. Spit right now. A scar on our daughter’s stomach from before.”

Choppy, gross, a snag of memory on something the reader doesn’t understand, no setting off of dialogue–but, it’s so sweet and funny, too! It’s that “Spit right now!” that kills me.

It’s silly to pick a favourite story in a collection this uniformly strong, but because I always do it, let’s say it’s the title piece. A grim, detailed, slow-moving story about brick-workers in the summer, “Light Lifting” ends with a horrific depiction of brutality that I was convinced I had never seen coming. However, flipping back to the beginning (I do that sometimes when I’m freaked out by an ending), I found that it was all there from the start. How could a story that starts like this end any other way but brutal?

“Nobody deserved a sunburn like that. Especially not a kid. You could see it right through his shirt. Like grease coming through waxed paper. Wet and thick like that, sticking to him. Purple. It was a worn out, see-through shirt and the blisters he had from the day before had opened up again.”

Shudder–no wonder I tried to forget about that as quickly as possible, but how great is that prose? So exact, so precisely something you can see. (Thought: didn’t Pasha Malla have a great gross moment with sunburn in *The Withdrawal Method* too? What is it with short story writers and this topic?)

Even if this collection weren’t near as good as it is, I would probably still like it for the care it gives the subject matter nearest my own prose-writing heart (currently): work, how it’s done and how people feel while doing it. You can tell so much about a human from how she or he relates to the work at hand. This bit about working on a van assembly line is from “The Number Three”, which some have said is the weakest in the book. Maybe it is, but it’s still pretty stellar:

“People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it’s not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundreth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty.”

This collection blew me away, start to finish.

July 14th, 2010

New Literary Critic

Yes, I am aware there is another CanLit deba(te/cle) going on right now, and of course I am following it even though I find it depressing. Smart people *are* making astute points, but when it’s criticism of criticism of criticism, I find it hard to believe their efforts aren’t better spend elsewhere.

Thus, I won’t link to it, in case you are as-yet undepressed (I just checked and googling “literary debate canadian” doesn’t bring this one up–it’s mainly Canada Reads, though the first one is about the Salon des Refuses!)

Instead I’ll just share this nice little short-story shout-out from my current most favourite band, The New Pornographers. Since I think AC Newman is a genius, it makes me happy to think he likes the thing I do. And I think he describes it pretty well, too:

You always love short story form
The science behind it, the hidden doors

(from MY Shepherd on the album Togetherness)

May 27th, 2010

Some Links

Did you read La Vita Nuova by Allegra Goodman in *The New Yorker* last month? I think you should. I feel like I’ve read 35 versions of the “woman bereft in love struggles to reconnect with her life” story in the past couple years, and this is the best one. It’s simple, short, and specific–no straining for universality or “deep” meaning–when being really sad is examined with enough care and humour, that’s deep enough.

I can’t believe I forgot about Sinead O’Connor’s song The Emperor’s New Clothes, one of the favourites of my youth, for ten or so years. I had never seen the video before I went looking for a link for you guys (why is it you can always find video links and not audio ones?) and it’s actually sort of odd, but the song is brill. I actually didn’t recall what she looked like (I was never a fan–just the one song) before watching the video, and was shocked at how pretty she is! How come no one ever mentions that?

I did one of Alex Boyd’s One Question Interviews over at BoydBlog. The OQI is a really good idea, no?

March 19th, 2010

The Weatherboy

Now this is just lovely: the Rattling Books podcast of my story, The Weatherboy, as read by Gerard Whelan. I know, it’s bad manners to say something I wrote myself is lovely, but it’s actually Whelan’s delicate reading of the story that I’m in love with. It makes me so happy to hear the story doing things I hadn’t quite thought of, yet are perfect for it anyway.

This story originally appeared in echolocation 7, and I’m so pleased it’s getting another life.

RR

March 18th, 2010

Collectors’ Items

I am so pleased to announce that my very first chapbook, Road Trips is forthcoming with Frog Hollow Press. It’ll be out in May–maybe in time for my birthday! The book consists of two stories, “From an Eastern University” and “The Least of Love”, and I am very honoured to have them published in what will no doubt be a beautiful edition, as all FHP publications are. So exciting! If you too are very very excited, you can preorder from the title link above!

An open secret around here is that I have written a great many stories about a character named Isobel, and even thought I was writing a collection about her at one point, although that has not worked out too well (*yet*–I’m certainly not done trying). Anyway, “The Least of Love” is one of those stories. Quite often, people get excited when I tell them certain stories of mine are connected, but other times I explain the connections and they don’t care at all–a story begins on the first page and ends on the last for them, and that’s that. For the sake of those in the first category (if any) I thought I’d list the (published) Isobel stories here–then you can feel free to ignore and read the stories as standalones, or to track them all down and read in order. Or not to read them at all, that’s totally an option too.

These are in the order they happen chronologically in time for the characters, not the order they were written or published in. Places you can find them are beside the titles, should you care to do so.

“Dykadelic”–forthcoming in *The Milan Review” (May 2010)
“Fruit Factory”–*The New Quarterly* 102 Summer 2007; *Best Canadian Stories 2008* Oberon Press; *Once* Biblioasis 2008
“ContEd”–*Coming Attractions 2008* Oberon Press; *Once*; *The Fiddlehead* Summer 2009
“Christmas with My Mother”–*Earlit Shorts 4* Rattling Books December 2009; *Best Canadian Stories 2009*
“Far from Downtown”–forthcoming in *The New Quarterly* summer 2010
“The Least of Love”–forthcoming in *Road Trips* from Frog Hollow Press

So now you know, if you collect these stories, where you can collect them from, including a book that is itself going to be a beautiful collectors’ item.

If you, you know, dig that sort of thing.

RR

February 17th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Lizard* by Michael Bryson

Do you miss The Danforth Review, that awesome online literary quarterly that published such a wide range of fiction, criticism and interviews? Yeah, I miss it too, but it’s cool to know that (one of) the reason(s) it is currently on hiatus is is in favour of founding publisher and editor Michael Bryson‘s “struggling attempts at creating literature.”

I just finished reading Bryson’s third book, a collection of short stories called The Lizard and I think it’s worth the struggle. This is a small spare book, 117 pages of generously leaded pages, and spare also in terms of details. One of the ways I think of the short story is as a bright spotlight, trained on the ground. A character approaches it in darkness, then when s/he enters it, is brilliantly illuminated for the time it takes to cross the spotlight, then returns to darkness. The shape of the story is how and where the author trains the spotlight; the character(s)’s actual actions and dialogue just life going forward.

I think the best stories in this collection are the ones that remind me of expertly focussed spotlights. From a man whose relationship is probably disintegrating while his father’s love life takes off (“May the Road Rise”–great title) to a guy who sees his childhood friend resorting to violence (maybe) (“Hit”), there aren’t a lot of resolutions here, or many answers.

If you are familiar with the term tolerance for ambiguity, you probably learned it in a psychology or education class, but a reader of my acquaintance uses it to describe a reading style. Readers with a high tolerance for ambiguity don’t mind not having much backstory in a piece of fiction, provided we have some sense that there is a logical one. In a good story, we’re fine with not knowing why things happened, nor what the outcome is–if the author can shape the piece so that it works without those things.

“Six Million Million Miles” was, to me, the perfect story for the ambiguously tolerant (like me), because Bryson counters the randomness of writing any story about a few moments in anyone’s life with how random anyone’s life actually is. This story is only a couple guys sitting around, talking. They’re both around forty, both in relationships that are uncertain, talking about a going into business together as soon as they can decide what that business should be. Then a house down the street explodes.

They worry about it, talk about it, watch the flames shooting into the sky. Then they go back inside because one of the guys’ sort of girlfriends has arrived. She has brought someone with her–a date? The evening progresses, the other guy’s girlfriend comes over too, there’s another explosion, they order some pizza.

What a terrible summary! But this is a beautiful story, so much more as a whole than as the sum of it’s parts–I noticed that, reading it over in bits and pieces just now to write this review. The story works because it feels random, just a bunch of stuff that happened over a few hours, but the end I was left with a powerful feeling of how anyone’s life is so much more than he or she can understand, let alone explain.

Not every story worked on me with this intensity, but I think that might have been partly my fault. *The Lizard* is an easy book to like, and I think I read it too fast, missing some of the bigger payoffs because I was enjoying the little ones: a toddler falling down in the park, the ins and outs of work in a pet store, a quiet reaction to 9/11.

This is why Rose-coloured reviews are not real reviews–if this were professional, I’d reread immediately and get it all worked out. But since I’m happily unprofessional me, I’m going to mull it over for a while, fill in some ambiguities in my own head, and look forward to when I eventually work my way back to this fascinating book.

RR

January 30th, 2010

Talking Stories

Last night at dinner, my friend Scott explained to someone, “Becky writes short stories–short stories are to the point, but you don’t always know what the point *is*.” Such a good summation of the strengths and weaknesses of stories.

This morning I read Andrew Hood saying in Canadian Notes and Queries that “What the short story can do better than any form is romance the effects of life without having to belabour the causes.” He went on to quote Clark Blaise’s comment that, “[short story writers] are not in the business of establishing any of the whys… The story traces what lingers after the whirlwind, after the fracture. Or before it. We’re not in the business of establishing the reasons…why things happen. They’ve already happened.”

Today is, I feel, a good day for stories!
RR

January 26th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Bech at Bay* by John Updike

I first encountered Henry Bech in Updike’s first collection of stories about the fellow, Bech: a book, when I was about 10. I had pulled it off my parents’ shelves because the name was somewhat close to Becky and, likely, because I was very bored on some rainy day. I flipped around until I encountered the word “orgasm”–one of Bech’s mistresses could have one on the New York subway, but only certain lines–and I realized it was not a book I was up to. I put it back wishing I was a kid who went *towards* the dirty bits, rather than being alarmed by them and fleeing.

Imagine my surprise when, last winter, a fellow-writer enthused over Bech, and said I had to read it. Imagine my surprise when I loved it! Bech is such a slow, sleepy, dopey guy in this book, his life largely structure by the success of a book he wrote when he was so young he can’t relate to it, and by the baffling, aggressive, subway-orgasm-having women in his life. There’s tonnes of lit-gossip in the book–largely about fictional writers, but occasionally Roth or some similar mid century man will turn up. Bech can be a malicious gossip inside his own head, but terribly funny. The character is Jewish, and Updike isn’t, and I know some criticism has turned on whether this portrait is a caricature, but I find it too human, too intelligent and funny, for that. The Jewish thing does come up an awful lot, though. We keep get a few too many lines like, “It was hard to tell with Wasp males how old they were; they don’t stop being boys.” “Bech Presides”

I received the two sequels, Bech Is Back and Bech at Bay (that second link there has the book labelled “family saga”–what??) for my birthday, and read the first last fall and the second just now (I thought this would complete my Bech reading, but apparently there is one other story hiding in The Complete Henry Bech. They always do that with compilations of old work–how annoying! How am I going to get it??)

I really enjoyed *Bech Is Back.” It had all his usual staples, my favourite of which is baffled yet sardonic interior monologue while being on literary or “cultural” tours of foreign countries. And *Bech at Bay* promised more of the same, starting with, “Bech in Czech,” which is about what you’d expect (oh, that sentence rhymed!) Detractors of these Bech Abroad stories (there are perhaps half a dozen such stories; I’m not sure how many detractors) might claim that these seem to be too much simply Updike’s own observations on the book-tour life, thinly veiled in a Jew’d up, less-successful, more-venal form.

I don’t, usually, think that–Bech is a pretty well-fleshed, uniquely voiced character. And his work diverges pretty sharply with Updike’s (Bech is far less self-referential!) Occasionally, their sensibilities collide and you think either could be narrating, but that’s all right–all authors have at least a few things in common with all their characters. Also, then we get passages like this:

“The historical fullness of Prague, layer on layer, castles and bridges and that large vaulted hall with splintered floorboards where jousts and knightly elections used to be held; museums holding halls of icons and cases of bluish Bohemian glass and painted panoramas of the saga of the all-enduring Slavs; tilted streets of flaking plasterwork masked by acres of scaffolding; that clock in Old Town Square where with a barely audible whirring a puppet skeleton tolls the hour and the twelve apostles and that ultimate bogeyman Jesus Christ twitchily appear in two little windows above and, one by one, bestow baleful wooden stares upon the assembled tourists; the incredible visual patisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompe-l’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism–all this overstuffed Christian past afflicted Beck like a void, a chasm that he could float across in the dew-fresh mornings as he walked the otherwise untrod oval path but which, over the course of each day, like pain inflicted under anaesthesia, worked terror upon his subconscious.” “Bech in Czech”

Pretty good, huh?

People who know these books are often a bit surprised that I’m such a Bech fan–I mean, they get why I like the language and the structure and the jokes, but why do I like *Bech*? It’s the morality that gets a few, but I wasn’t troubled even when he cheated on his (very recent) wife at the end of *Bech Is Back*. In the third set of stories, Henry’s in his 60s and 70s, dallying with ever-younger women, who are quite susceptible to his charms. It’s unlovely behaviour, but he is as often seduced as seducer and I found I bought it–all the dalliances seemed in keeping with the character Updike created, and while a little yucky, I think one of the joys of fiction is finding empathy with people we would not care to resemble, or even know, in real life.

*However*, there was a story in *Bech at Bay* that broke all these rules, and I hated it. It’s the second-last in the collection–thus, in the series (except for that lost one in *The Complete*)–and it’s called “Bech Noir.” Straight from the title, the piece announces itself as a genre spoof, and though it hasn’t much to do with Dashell Hammett, it has only slightly more to do with Bech. The piece concerns the same guy we’ve been reading about straight along–smart but pretentious, shy but vain, lecherous, envious, easily swayed–only now he gives in to his worst instincts and deliberately shoves a critic who had panned his work off a subway platform.

!!!

Not only would the character of the last 2-and-2/3 books not have been capable of doing that, *no one* would have been capable of doing a lot of what comes next–this first success launches a murderous spree that, if not impossible, is at least preposterous. And silly, and totally out of keeping with the other stories in the series.

In truth, if I came upon “Bech Noir” printed alone somewhere and read it having never seen the characters, I would have enjoyed it mildly, as a piece of highly erudite showing-off–a literary author taking a kooky excursion into genre to see how well he does. And that probably *is* what this is–Updike doing an experiment with a character he knows and feels comfortable with.

Obviously, his editors didn’t find the disjoint too jarring to keep the piece in–but then again, it is Updike, so who would argue? But it doesn’t work, fictionally, to have most of the pieces be seriously realistic fiction, and then have one be a writing-workshop lark! I feel sort of maimed as a reader, as if I had a relationship with someone on the Internet whose photo turned out to be from the Sears catalogue. I invested in Bech as a multi-dimensional, nuanced character, and I feel like “Bech Noir” says, “ha, fooled ya–he’s not realistic at all!”

The thing is, you can’t even mentally excise it from the canon , because the final story in the collection, “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden” builds on certain events that took place in “Bech Noir.” What’s interesting here is that the latter story is a return to form–Bech baffled and passive and interacting with the world like human being instead of a plot device. “Sweden” is also very funny and wise, with an ending (thus, the ending of the book) that is just perfect–hopeful and funny and strange and true.

So, what then? A good book with one story I disliked, right–no problem? Except that one story casts doubt on my whole understanding of the fictional project the author was undertaking? Or the project of fiction, period? Or what? Mr. Updike, how could you do this to me?

On the whole, though, it was a pretty good book.
RR

January 9th, 2010

Better

The promised improvement report: I am feeling a good bit better about the world today, owing in large part to have found somewhere else to sleep last night where I didn’t have to wear a hood to bed. This is not a permanent solution, I know, but I’ll work on one of those next week. It may involve an oil drum; stay tuned.

In keeping with my theme of devastating literature, yesterday I read Joyce Carol Oates’s Where are you going, where have you been? and may never get over it. What she achieves in this story is amazingly harrowing, and then you pull out of the story and feel like you’ve gone so far from reality, but really you haven’t at all. Bizarre, amazing, and not for the timid–you were warned.

Warmly,
RR