“I worked the night shift for a dating/matchmaking service before it was done by computers. Had to go to the homes and apartments of depressed and lonely people who called at 2 in the morning and wanted to find out how to meet a mate. Had to keep calling in to the main office so they knew I hadn’t been ravaged. Never would tell me if they actually had matches for the women. I didn’t interview any men that would have been dateworthy. Quit as soon as I sold a short story.”
“Singing birthday/anniversary/congratulation tunes to total strangers in a gorilla suit. (The only way it could have been worse was if they’d made me wear the Tarzan loincloth, but I didn’t have the abs for it.)”
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Jeremy for getting a free copy of Man’s Companions by Joanna Ruocco.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Recipes for Endangered Species by Traci O. Connor. In Recipes for Endagered Species, a dying lover plans to become a zombie. An anxious woman cant decide if she’s animal or human. A Jesus the size of a pencil lurks beneath the bed. Monsters, monsters, everywhere, and yet Publishers Weekly calls these fictions “tender, aching love stories” populated with “curious specimens who don’t quite fit in, but have rich inner lives” and who—along with the black-and-white photographs and cocktail recipes that conclude each of the stories—combine to create a “varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection.” Lyrical, darkly funny, sometimes outright disturbing, this collection explores the secret desires that render people not only imperfect and dangerous, but also authentically human. Says Melanie Rae Thon: “Traci O. Connors subject matter is never easy. Her work cuts to the core, exposing cultural taboos and psychic turmoil . . . compelling the reader to face her own fears and prejudices, to embrace the monstrous within herself, to live with greater curiosity and compassion.” These are strangely beautiful stories obsessed with the unreasonable, the monstrous, and the extraordinary living amongand withinus. “These deftly written stories rear and buck against the confines of the traditional story collection, bursting out in images and recipes, galloping back and forth between traditional paragraphs and alternate forms. . . . Even though youre moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connors thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime. This is a marvelous debut” (Brian Evenson).
I don’t mean to rehash the whole “is-the-MFA-degree-in-creative-writing-useless” issue, but I do want to suggest some solutions to one of the commonly cited arguments against getting an MFA. [Full Disclosure: I'm getting my MFA at Columbia University.]
I’ve often heard that MFA programs produce cookie-cutter writers. Because students are all taught by the same professors, reading the same assigned readings (most often, from the mainstream canon of literature), and critiquing each others work within a closed loop, they end up all sounding like one another and like the influences that are hoisted upon them within the courses.
Like I said, I don’t intend to rehash this debate. Instead, I want to propose some solutions I’ve come up with.
If, in fact, people come out of MFA programs sounding like “MFA-ey writers,” with cautious language, similar influences, and a lack of risk and experimentation, here are some ideas of how to diversify your influences while in an MFA program and avoid robotic writing:
Read translated literature. Read works in English by authors from other cultures, countries, languages, and periods of time. Bring in some of that foreign-ness into your English. Push the boundaries of what English is expected to be able to do. Or hell, if you have the skills, just read non-English works in their original language! Certainly the majority of people around you aren’t doing this in most traditional MFA programs.
Translate literature yourself, if you have sufficient language skills. In the process, you’re forced to become super acquainted with another author (do one you admire) and you’ll end up soaking up some of their literary influences, ones that stand outside of the English stuff everyone else is reading.
Read things that might not be categorized, necessarily, as literary. What about the works of oral history by Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich? In reading those transcriptions of monologues by people who survived the Great Depression and the Chernobyl disaster, I learned a lot about dialogue, tone, being sparse, and forcing myself to cut out the unnecessary fat of my paragraphs.
Maintain ties with writers, editors, and friends who are good readers of your work outside of the MFA program. Have people outside your program read your work. Go to readings of people who aren’t your classmates. SheWrites is a great online community for women writers, for example.
Get a part-time job (or dreaded internship) that exposes you to worlds beyond the classroom. Try journalism. Try teaching. Be a grant writer. Work as the editor for a literary journal. Obviously easier said than done, especially in this (transitional) job market.
Take classes or workshops in other genres! Be friends with writers across genres! This is a big one, I think. Who says you can only write in one form? Challenge yourself to try out other forms, and even if that’s not your style, allow the tools and tricks you learn from one to inform the other. Sentences in literary nonfiction have to sing just like they do in poetry. Side note: I found that teaching multi-genre creative writing to high school students made me confident enough to try writing fiction for the first time in years. If I can teach it, hell, I should be able to do it.
Any other ideas?
Thanks to Idra Novey for some of the ideas about translation.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Jason for getting a free copy of Where I Stay by Andrew Zornoza.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Man’s Companions by Joanna Ruocco. “Ruocco’s understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal” (Publishers Weekly) luring readers through what Brian Evenson calls a “marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark”—a book, says Evenson, that is “not to be missed.” By turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, Man’s Companions manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes. “Reading this work I imagine what it must have been like for people reading Donald Barthelme for the first time, that fully formed stylist suddenly sprung as if from nothing, this vision or version of the world that is our world and also isn’t—it’s wonderful and peculiar and radiant and much funnier and maybe a little bit sadder. Each of Ruocco’s tales is its own little triumph” (Danielle Dutton). “Early Lydia Davis seems not unfairly applicable, as does Amy Hempel, not merely for their separately singular abilities to convey a tremendous amount of information and a great emotional range with an economy of text, but also for the alternately insouciant and piercingly human wit with which they do so” (Art + Culture).
It was a Sunday night. I was exhausted and on my second glass of wine and that’s probably why I didn’t protest when someone suggested putting on a movie starring Gerald Butler, Jamie Fox and the worst plot ever imagined.
I knew this film would suck. I could just tell by looking at the DVD cover. Also, I remembered critics panning it months back. Two strikes. But like I said: wine and exhaustion. So someone slipped it into the TV and we all sat back to watch what turned out to be exactly the kind of lame, violent, stupidly plotted movie I thought it would.
What frustrated me about this film wasn’t the acting, or the surprise violence (I’d like to be warned before a bullet makes a person’s head explode, thank you very much), it was the fact that it even got made in the first place.
As freshly minted writers, every opportunity that comes our way is always packaged in a “this is your one chance so don’t screw it up” kind of way. We work our asses off writing, rewriting, swallowing mind-numbing critique and even giving up scenes we’d practically date if given the chance. We run mental triathlons because, well, our art has to be perfect – or no one’s going to give it a second thought.
So we beat ourselves up to create this expressive masterpiece, and then someone brings over a DVD that’s so full of every writing Don’t it makes our mouths hang open in disbelief. How the hell does something like this get made?! It’s awful. Don’t tell me this was someone’s magnum opus. It’s impossible. The only way this makes sense is if a bunch of big execs came up with it in the back of a party van on the way to a strip club. Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Sheri for getting a free copy of Nylund, the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Where I Stay by Andrew Zornoza. In black-and-white photos and in prose “as haunting as it is gritty” (Small Press Reviews), the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of Where I Stay travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. Guided by Zornoza’s “refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering” (Blake Butler, HTML Giant), Where I Stay is “a gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing, but most of all those borderlands crossed and recrossed on the West’s back roadsthe kind that always exist just off the grid, just below the radar, and always in beautiful pieces” (Lance Olsen). Where I Stay is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and lovea story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything. “Hesitate to simply call it a book,” writes Small Press Reviews: “Its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts.”
Satan Is a Huge Asshole…Literally!, Analyze That, and Jews Ruin Parties, aka Dante’s The Inferno, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Sun Also Rises, brought to you by Better Book Titles.
Aaaaand because the week is almost over, hipster dinosaurs: Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Abe for getting a free copy of Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Nylund, the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney. “If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he’d read her Nylund one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey” (Kate Bernheimer). Nylund, the Sarcographer is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. Like negative capability on steroids, Nylund’s ultra-susceptibility entangles him in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister—plots, such as they are, that read as “flights of campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose” where “language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again” (Stephen Burt, Poetry Foundation Blog). “Caution,” warns Bookslut: “If you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. . . . Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I’m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney’s usage.” Says Michael Martone: “You thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use” (Michael Martone).
It was a Sunday night. I was exhausted and on my second glass of wine and that’s probably why I didn’t protest when someone suggested putting on a movie starring Gerald Butler, Jamie Fox and the worst plot ever imagined.
