I do not read enough poetry. I really have no good reason why. It has simply been by default, as I love and relish novels so much. But this week, I was intrigued by an interview with our country's newly named poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, in Garden & Gun Magazine.
First things first, though. You will do well to seek out and read this publication if you have not already. Do not let the name of this periodical fool you; it is about far more than gardens and guns. The title aptly encompasses the magazine's focus on all we can appreciate about living in the South: good food, clean, quiet living, the sporting life, and the outdoors. I never believed it would be possible for me to love a magazine, but this one is a treasure. Everything about it smacks of the highest quality, from the paper it is printed on to the level of writing and the stunning photography found on every page. Just when you think it is getting ready to cross the line into haughty pretentiousness, you will come across something that delves into the complexities of the South in an unadulterated way, while at the same time expressing completely the very deep sense of place that connects people in this part of the country. And they cover it all--arts, books, music, food, travel, even current and weightier issues of conservation and environmentalism. The arrival of each new issue to our mailbox always brings me to the same conundrum. Do I devour it right away or mete it out a little at a time in order to savor it?
You can explore Garden & Gun and read the article about Natasha Trethewey here. What stood out for me were a couple of her responses that spoke to many of the things I have written about here of late regarding the natures of memory and fiction.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
Even as I think of myself as a rememberer, I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better. In my new book, Thrall, there is a poem, "Calling," where I am dealing with these ideas. Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? My earliest memory from childhood, I don't know whether it is real or a conglomeration, and I have to challenge the nature of it. And explore why I've kept what I've kept.
Some things get rehearsed. Some get revised. What part is something I know myself? And what part has been given to me? It is wise for people to acknowledge that. That what we think we know as fact is probably not. And that's where some of the best writing comes from. You try to convince, but even as you are doing the convincing, you recognize that you are untrustworthy.
The same day I read her interview, I went to the library to find as much of Trethewey's work as I could. In reading her collection called Bellocq's Ophelia, in which she imagines the letters and words of a mulatto prostitute in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, I was reminded of the gifts poetry gives us. One of those gifts is something I love most about literary fiction--the possibility of stumbling upon a unique marriage of words otherwise unimagined. Things like this from her poem February 1911,
Only my shivering
and the chattering of my teeth
jar me back, my skin gooseflesh,
the Braille text of my future.
Or a small phrase like " . . . dredges the silt of my memory . . ." from another, an example of the ability of ordinary words to be molded together to form something entirely new and exceedingly vivid. There is also, of course, the unstructured freedom poetry offers for exploring the unlimited and magical possibilities of rhythm in language. Reading Trethewey's work has allowed me to renew once again my appreciation for the craft of writing--the seemingly simple act of arranging and rearranging letters into words into sentences into a living, breathing whole, something that we could not see before.
What luck. After the post from last week in which I wrote much about Wallace Stegner, I was pointed to a 1990 interview with him in The Paris Review. It seems fitting that my conversation should continue in light of this. Please take some time to read the interview here. Following this post are some of the highlights for me and there is much to enjoy and to learn from in this piece. Stegner talks extensively about the publishing world, how age affects a writer, about the tedious process--the grinding it out, and about some very technical aspects of writing. His gifts as a teacher of writing are apparent.
First and briefly though, having now actually finished Ivan Doig's The Bartender's Tale, I feel that I may have been far too dismissive in my comments about it. I still love his older work first and foremost, but there is little doubt that this book is also a fine example of his outstanding craftsmanship. The last few pages are nothing short of jaw-dropping in the way he brings together his story, tying it all up neatly in that way that Hemingway referred to as the magic that must be performed over and over again at the finish. The ending to this Doig novel will stun you just when you think you have a seemingly simple story all figured out. That seems to be a tool and technique that he has perfected, as his earlier work, Bucking the Sun, is one of the best examples of such that I have ever read.
From the Stegner interview:
"I am a writer by sheerest accident. . . I sat down one afternoon and wrote a story just because I wanted to write a story. I wrote it in about two hours and sent it off to the Virginia Quarterly, I think, and they published it. Then you know you're hooked."
He speaks vividly about creating truthful fiction. Part of the mystery behind good writing is that it feels and seems real--it is truthful in that it convinces the reader of a reality that is another country entirely.
"It had to have some forward motion . . . That's a technical problem: by the pure force of the writing to create a sense of involvement in real events . . . In making fiction, one of the things a writer must do is to make absolutely certain that he knows the mind he's dealing through . . . I have to try to become that person as far as possible. If I succeed, I get the tone of voice and the quality of mind that will persuade a reader to see and hear a real and credible human being, not a mouthpiece or a construct.
"Every morning you have to read over what you did yesterday, and if it doesn't persuade you, it has to be redone. Sometimes it takes three hours in the morning to get over the feeling that I've been wasting my time for the past week and that everything I've written up to that point is drivel. Until I can convince myself that I am speaking in the plausible, believable voice of the person I have invented, I can't go on. So the first job is to convince yourself, the second is to convince the reader. If you do the first, the second more or less follows."
In response to a question about how much of his fiction is autobiographical:
"What does Wallace Stegner have to do with it? The very fact that some of my experience goes into the book is all but inescapable, and true for almost any writer I can name. Which is real and which is invented is a, nobody's business, and b, a rather silly preoccupation, and c, impossible to answer. By the time I'm through converting my life to fiction, it's half fiction at least and maybe more. People still come to me and say, 'Oh, it's too bad about your son who drowned in that surfing accident." Because some of All the Little Live Things reflects my immediate circumstances, they assume all of it does. People ought to learn to read better than that.
"You don't put placards up for the reader saying, This is my meaning. The whole business of writing is an attempt to arrive at truth, insofar as you can see it, as far as your capacity to unearth it permits. Truth is to be handled gingerly. That's an egg with a very thin shell. I'm not writing fables--where the moral is literally part of the form. I'm writing something from which the reader is supposed to deduce or induce any moral that's there. The moral value ought to be hiding in the material.
"When I was in my prime, so to speak, I would generally get anywhere from three to five or six pages a day, stuff that might have to be rewritten tomorrow, but that would essentially stay. That doesn't happen now. It takes more combing to do it now."
"It's important to get on with the writing, particularly when you're young and you can hardly wait to get down to work because you're boiling with something. But I'm not boiling that hard anymore. The critic is taking charge, and I'm just driving the cab. That's why it takes me so much longer now."
Some of what I enjoyed most came in his responses about teaching writing, specifically about what is the most difficult lesson to impart and what is most important in developing a course of study for writers. This in spite of his generalizations about gender, of course.
"Assuming that a student is at a stage where he is still teachable--there is a time when you shouldn't try to teach him, when he is technically proficient and subtle and has his own ways for going about what he wants to say--one of the hardest things to teach him is Revise! Revise! Revise! And they won't revise, often. Many of them would rather write a new book than revise the old one. Revision is what separates the men from the boys. Sooner or later, you've got to learn to revise.
"It might be different for every individual. I would ask some questions. I suppose I would ask, Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer . . . Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it."
I dream of Montana. I have since I read for the first time Ivan Doig's memoir of growing up there, This House of Sky. Then, I read his novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and I loved a place I have never been all the more. Doig's first three Montana novels, called the McCaskill Trilogy, are English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. The first two of those, especially, are favorites of mine enough to make it into that category of books that I do not mind to read again and again.
Is not one of the many joys of being a reader the fact that you can come to love and inhabit a place you have never been? Or, a place that does not actually exist? It is one of the miracles of fiction, and it is how I feel about Wendell Berry's Port William. I can walk around that community in my head. I can visualize its citizens and how they would greet me and what we would talk about. I remember its past. This is a place that only exists in words. And in the minds of thousands of people who have read about it. It must also exist, then, in a thousand different ways. Being human, in spite of all its sufferings, can give us so much in the way of profound gifts. Inhabiting places in our minds is one of them, I think.
And so, thanks to Ivan Doig, I can inhabit Montana in my mind as well. I first came to know Doig as a writer because of a nearly offhand recommendation by a friend, and now I consider his prompt to be one of the great gifts of that friendship, which has stood for so many years now. As I mentioned in my hastily and lazily written previous post, Doig is a successor to Wallace Stegner, who many refer to as the "Dean of Western Writers." Stegner studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to found the writing program at Stanford University. His novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and created a stir among the literature community that still reverberates. In spite of that, it is a brilliant work and one you should read. Central also to his legacy is his work and activism related to water conservation in the American West, an issue of a magnitude that we in the eastern part of the country are blissfully ignorant. The Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University is named in honor of his life and work and many on the list of recipients of that award rank among the most prominent of American letters. I tell you all of this because I am fascinated by this lineage of writers, which I might even trace further back to A.B. Guthrie, also a winner of the Pulitzer for his 1950 novel The Way West. Stegner Fellows and those who have studied at Iowa form the largest portion of my list of favorite and beloved writers and these kinds of connections among them are fun for me to discover and explore.
What links Stegner and Berry and Doig and what draws me to their work in particular is the importance of place to their writing. For them, the landscape is as significant as any of their characters. This comes through not only in their description of terrain and in their skill at writing the authentic language of a place, but also in the unspoken implication that the history of the people in their writing only begins after the history of the place itself begins. In other words, our natural and self-centered inclination to think of humanity as the starting point for all else is turned upside down, or more accurately, right side up. When one fully considers the story of a place, and I mean the complete and long, long story of a place, it becomes quickly impossible to ignore the fact that the human beings there are only inhabitants of the temporary sort. And, more to the point, they are but a small blip on the timeline of that history which, if ever fully written, will reduce them to barely a footnote.
I am not sure anything for me will ever top Doig's earlier work. There is simply no other book out there like This House of Sky and Bucking the Sun and The Sea Runners are two of the best stories to have ever been told. And, without question, I could read anytime his first two Montana novels, English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and still feel them as deeply as I did the first time I read them. His latest that I am currently in the middle of is called The Bartender's Tale and returns to the same town of his Montana novels in the middle of the last century. It is enjoyable for me in a sentimental way, taking me back to one of those communities that I inhabit in my mind. I am eternally grateful for such a thing, though, and this is another reason I am drawn to writing that is centered around place. It is a gift writers can give to us, to write a place so well and so true that we can walk around it in our head for a bit.
When I started the ToFGT blog, it was my absolute intention to post every week. One of the reasons I had for starting the site, after all, was to give myself a self-imposed writing deadline with no room for excuses for not exercising writing muscles. Alas, my day job has kept me away. Though I offer no excuse, I take a small amount of comfort in the fact that my day job does involve books--reading books, talking about books, being surrounded by books and by people who write and read and teach books. So, at least there is that. Mostly, though, I take comfort in the fact that I have also been kept away by my other writing. I have had a good streak going lately of working the fiction writing muscles in what time I have had available to write at all. It is highly important to me that I make progress on that front. More on that . . . someday.
For now, I do have a couple of things on my mind this week highly relevant to the literary world that I wish to share with you.
One of my favorite books from this year, discussed in a post entitled DAWN, is Amor Towles' Rules of Civility. It is a fine New York novel and a fine gathering of words into sentences from a first-time author who, fascinatingly enough, has a day job that is distinctly unliterary. For this reason, I am amazed as much by the fact that he wrote a book as by the actual book itself. And, I admire him greatly for his commitment and plan for getting a novel written and then for seeing that plan through. What he produced was a pleasure to read. goodreads.com recently hosted a live chat with Towles about his work and it was a tremendous opportunity to hear a writer answer questions about his book and discuss his craft. I hope you will read the book, but definitely take a few moments to watch the chat here.
Also, I am excited to have lying on the top of my t0-be-read pile the newest novel from Ivan Doig, called The Bartender's Tale. This one is on loan from our local library, so I am worried about getting it read in time, especially since I am at this point only about a sixth of the way through the big Hemingway biography I am reading. I have discussed Wendell Berry in great depth here as one of my favorite authors. Doig, for me, ranks just as highly. Berry, early in his career, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Doig has been called a successor to Wallace Stegner, whose long life and career were highly influential for not only subsequent generations of so-called Western writers, but also for writing in general and for land-use policy and environmental issues. I look forward to sharing much more about this latest book and about the Stegner line of authors in a forthcoming post.
