Espresso Book Machine, Muse and The Marketplace, Downward Facing Dog

Long time, no blog – it’s been a frenetic semester, though my classes at Boston College were exceptionally rewarding – I had two super-talented sets of students. So super-talented, in fact, that I went and got an anthology of their work published through the Espresso Book Machine in the Harvard Bookstore. I asked each student to select 5 pages of their best work from the semester and compiled each class’ work into a PDF file, which I emailed to the Harvard Book Store. Poof! Like magic, the following day I picked up 15 copies of each file, hot off the press and looking like real paperback books. The vibrant covers were each designed by a student also.

Aside from teaching, I’ve been doing a few readings - at the terrific “Art to Art” monthly series at The Piano Factory in the South End, and at a “Fantastical Literary Salon” with the literary luminaries Ethan Gilsdorf, Chip Cheek, KL Pereira, Cam Terwilliger and Sue Williams. Last weekend I also moderated a panel at the Muse and the Marketplace Panel in the Park Plaza Hotel:
“Agents on the Hot Seat – Fiction Focus with Lisa Grubka, PJMark, Denise Shannon and Rachel Sussman.” Despite being hot shot New York agents, they were each incredibly warm and down to earth and the panel was a delight to chair. The weekend was a wonderful, inspirational whirlwind and my friend Gail Waldstein was also in town from Denver, and gave me a copy of her exquisite, brave gem of a memoir: “To Quit This Calling: Firsthand Tales of a Pediatric Pathologist”.

On a separate note, I’m seriously thinking of getting my yoga license, to teach in prisons. I’ve been taking yoga classes at Exhale Spa every day (my favorite teachers being Amy Leydon and David Magone) and I’ve been learning mindful meditation with Jennifer Wade. Both yoga and meditation are profoundly changing my life. Aside from making my healthier, they are giving me tools for controlling and changing unhelpful mind and behavioral patterns that have been hindering me my entire life. They are both so self-empowering and freeing and a wonderful compliment to writing which is empowering in its own way, but also very sedentary and ungrounding at times (especially if you focus on fantastical fiction, like I often do). I’ll be teaching a creative writing workshop at a correction center in the fall and I’d love to teach a yoga/meditation course to prisoners next year – Downward Facing Dog hits the spot even better than a double vodka.

p.s. Two fresh/funny articles on the writing life, if you haven't already read them: 1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one (from the series http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/rules-for-writers) 2) http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/23/readers_advice_to_writers

Fantasy Freaks... (as published in The Fiction Writers Review)

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms by Ethan Gilsdorf

BY SOPHIE POWELL

Ethan Gilsdorf, a former Dungeons and Dragons addict and seasoned pop-culture and travel journalist, chronicles his international odyssey through the worlds ofHarry Potter bands, medieval reenactment societies, World of Warcraft guilds and massive fantasy conventions, to name only a few. In the process he learns to come to terms with his own attachment to the imaginary that has persisted into his forties. As a dedicated fairytale and myth fanatic myself, my curiosity was piqued by the title of the book which is at once a memoir, an insider’s guide to the world of gaming, and a quest that takes him all around the world to find answers not only to his own life, but to the larger question of why tens of millions of people turn away from reality and fully embrace fantastical other-existences.

What makes Fantasy Freaks And Gaming Geeks so arresting is not only the diverse, vibrant role-player communities which Gilsdorf introduces us to and provides insightful commentary on, but the hybrid nature of his text – both on a substantive and emotional level. Gilsdorf effortlessly bounces between fun, vivid-picture-painting journalistic narrative jam-packed with juicy facts and anecdotes of others, to deeply personal confessions about his own real life. The book opens with a heart-breaking scene from his early childhood in the aftermath of his mother’s brain aneurysm that completely altered her personality. This sudden and tragic metamorphosis, which left Gilsdorf and his two siblings to fend for themselves, is presented as the impetus for his retreat into Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and a predilection for fantastical worlds that he is unable to shake off, even, to his anxiety, at forty.

Harry and the Potters / copyright: Ethan Gilsdorf

Indeed, most of the individuals whom Gilsdorf interviews and befriends express how fantasy, particularly fantasy role-playing, has empowered them in some way – to find a release in hard times, to learn lessons/skills that have enabled them to lead a richer real life. The way we really get to know so many of these individuals whom so many (including myself) had previously written off as weirdo geeks, forces a reassessment of our prejudices. There is Phyllis Priestly, who holds a PhD in Greek mythology and founded a primary school; she compared playing World of Warcraft to “breathing for the first time”. As Gilsdorf summarizes it, “After countless hours of playing, Priestly felt she had become a better person. The game leaked into her real world. All that rapid-fire picking off of wolves, quilboars, and troggs had sharpened her reflexes, quickened her reaction time, and heightened her senses. She claimed gaming had made her a better driver.” And, most movingly, there is Nissa Ludwig, a church music director who suffered from a debilitating muscular disorder that kept her at home most of the day. “The muscles in my body are slowly rotting,” she said, “but I type really well.” As Gilsdorf writes, “Online gaming created an alternate world where no one saw her crutches or wheelchair. And that was, in her words, ‘a beautiful thing.’”

Through Gilsdorf’s expeditions and interviews we see that there is no definitive answer to why so many of us embrace fantasy. Everyone has their different reasons, their different impulses–and even if for some, it is just straightforward escapist entertainment, we should certainly not dismiss all fantasy and gaming enthusiasts as geeks or freaks. As with most things, there are no simple, straight-forward answers, but by examining this genre more carefully (with open minds), our reading lives can only be richer and our journeys, if not always entirely successful, at least more fantastic.

Field Guide To Flash Fiction

My review of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Flash Fiction, as published in The Fiction Writers Review:

“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every short story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.” So Jane Smiley, a judge on the2009 Man Booker International Prize, told of its beloved Canadian winner last month. It was the first time a writer who exclusively produces short stories was awarded this prestigious prize. Times are turning and shorter forms of fiction are not only finally being given the eminence they deserve, but becoming increasingly more in vogue. It was therefore with keen interest that I picked up The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, an unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field that includes a lively, comprehensive history of the hybrid genre by editor Tara L. Masih.

As a creative writing professor at Boston College, I frequently use collections of flash fiction, stories which usually run 1000 words or less. Given time limitations and the varying writing experience of my students, these versatile, word-limited pieces are a very approachable and satisfying form to work within. However, I always find myself floundering about when I try to explain and define this genre for the first time. As Pamelyn Casto, one of the thought-provoking, inspiring contributors, puts it: “Flash fiction is difficult if not impossible to define – and should be allowed to remain so – because this type of writing is protean… it takes on various shapes and uses different strategies to achieve its goals.” This is why this collection is so successful, and so essential, to anyone in the field of short fiction who teaches, writes, and is interested in its history and practice. These essays are probing and explorative rather than reductive and constrictive. A true ‘field guide’ in spirit, I came away thoroughly more equipped to teach and write short fiction in a richer, more illuminating way.

Tara L. Masih / Photo Credit: Elizabeth Sullivan

This book is an Aladdin’s cave of gems, a brilliantly versatile guide to invigorate any written piece, any writer’s working life. Flash fiction is the impetus for all these essays, and the fantastic prompts and exercises that each includes, yet most of the commentary and advice can be applied to stimulate and aid any creative writer. For example, Vanessa Gebbieencourages us to try writing freely and continuously, without pausing and censoring our words, in responses to certain prompts, telling us “I have seen whole stories written in this way in a very few minutes. And in my own case, I know that work produced like this has a liveliness that writing I agonize over for days just does not”. Jayne Anne Philips suggests using photos, in particular a photo of our parents’ wedding, to produce a one-page fiction piece. Randall Brown challenges us to begin with different types of “encounters – highly charged, interesting, rare.” Lex Williford, who sees flash fiction as “usually begin[ning] in image and end[ing] with something akin to the lyricism of poetry”, ingeniously instructs us to make an “inkblot”, to write down at least ten images from the pattern that it produces, and then to write a 15-minute fiction using as many of the images as we can. Pamelyn Casto invites us to dive into the kingdoms of myth. The book becomes a Field Guide To Stimulating The Imagination and I was thoroughly transformed by the many rainbows of inspiration on the ride.

It is a testament to the book’s impact that I am using it as a set text for my creative writing classes next year. Hopefully the day is not too far away when we will see a flash fiction collection win a prestigious literary prize like the Booker. The best things do often come in small packages.

A Fortunate Age

My review of A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, as published on The Rumpus.net: 

“With their shining hair and bright, clear eyes, they, all of them, were the dewy flowers of the upper middle class…” writes Joanna Smith Rakoff in the first chapter of her superb, acutely insightful first novel, A Fortunate Age. “But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents… [they] were interested in art, though they wouldn’t have put it like that.”

Rakoff, who has contributed her keen commentary on contemporary society to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue and The Oprah Magazine, has written a modern-day version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, or an intellectual Sex and the City. Acknowledging her debts to Sylvia Plath, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy, Rakoff brilliantly captures and tracks the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates in New York around the turn of the 21^st century, as they pursue their dreams, marry, and start families, crossing the boundary into “the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood.”

The five protagonists are Lil, the pretty poet, whose wedding cheerfully opens the novel but later catapults into tragedy (“She was a perfect, devoted, obsessive friend, who always remembered birthdays and brought too many perfectly chosen gifts… The light of her affection shined too brightly for any one friend to bear”); Beth, a loveable academic who struggles between her love for a complicated Englishman and a narcissistic musician (“Beth had a nurturing personality and blossomed when she had someone to take care of; and yet, by the same token, she was also a fragile girl and needed someone to look out for her, to remind her to rest and take her vitamins”); Emily, a struggling actress who lives with her mentally ill sister, and whose life contrasts starkly with that of Tal, whose budding acting career takes him all over the world; and Sadie Peregrine, “with the aspect of a serious child—a child from a Dutch painting, prematurely aged by the rigors and politics of court.”

Joanna Smith Rakoff

Although ultimately Sadie’s story, Rakoff’s novel rotates through these viewpoints, making for intensely and vividly imagined character portraits. She is particularly skillful at illustrating the dilemma these women face between ambition and independence on the one hand, love and dependency on the other:

“But once you settled on someone—settled in with someone—you lost the contentment and confidence that attracted him in the first place. You began worrying abouthis happiness, and his goals and wants, so that you internalized them, and your own happiness and goals and wants were banished to some dark and musty part of yourself.”

The different ways the friends navigate these choices affect their relationships and generate tension as they compare themselves to one another:

“They were, [Emily] supposed, the Ghosts of Marriage Future, with their glib, superficial chatter; they seemed positively terrified that she might engage them in some sort of real conversation and pierce the fragile bubble of their unions. And yet—and yet—she was jealous, stupidly, embarrassingly jealous of their clichéd resentments and their domestic squabbles and even their boredom…”

Rakoff is also very funny, a gentle (or sometimes not-so-gentle) mocker of various bourgeois disguises. The vegan/wannabe-reactionary Caitlin Green inhabits an unnecessarily modest apartment with her trust-fund boyfriend, “subsisting on various grains and nuts and legumes.” In a similar vein is the “mommies group” Sadie encounters, “which met each Wednesday afternoon at various pet-free, peanut-free apartments, to drink watery decaf, debate the merits of Huggies versus Pampers (versus the sleeper, Seventh Generation), and compare notes about the various tradespeople they employed to renovate and clean their apartments.”

One of the achievements of A Fortunate Age is its ability to encompass so many different tones and moods. Like the lives it so compassionately describes, Rakoff’s story is deeply complex in its layering, twisting and unpredictable, beautiful and magical, as well as dark.

Ultimately, this is a novel about growing up, about a group of young people waking up to the realities of adult life. When they reunite for a funeral, Sadie reflects upon the six years that have past since Lil’s wedding. “How long ago it seemed, how impervious they’d thought themselves to the pedestrian dangers of adult life… How stupid they had been.” This is an important debut from a serious and accomplished new voice. A Fortunate Age will stay with you long after you’ve read the final, heart-wrenching page.

Listening Below The Noise

My review of Anne LeClaire's magical new book "Listening Below The Noise: A Meditation On The Practice Of Silence", as  published on http://www.therumpus.net, the new Harper's:

 

Anne LeClaire’s new book explores the many faces of silence

I have never felt comfortable with silence. Alone in the house, I insist on having the radio or television playing in the background. I write in cafés, not in libraries or log cabins in the middle of nowhere. If there is a gap in a conversation, I feel the need to quickly fill it, even with some dull observation about the weather.

It was therefore with much curiosity that I witnessed novelist and journalist Anne LeClaire practicing an entire day of silence. We were at a writing workshop in France in the summer of 2005; I had begun her latest novel, The Law of Bound Hearts, and wanted to tell her how much I was loving it. When I approached her, I was greeted by a placard that read, “I am having a day of silence.” LeClaire smiled serenely whilst I, perplexed and awkward, struggled to remember what I had come to say.

Listening below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence is LeClaire’s first book-length work of nonfiction. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, it discusses her extraordinary decision seventeen years ago to spend two days a month in total silence. Each neatly themed chapter opens with an evocative photograph by her son, photographer Christopher D. LeClaire; the poetic and intimate prose that follows describes the rewards and the struggles of her practice, and the reactions of her family, friends, and strangers.

Woven into her own experiences and musings are engaging stories and quotations from history, literature, and religion that place her exploration in context. From Saint Arsenius: “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent.” Herman Melville: “Silence is the one and only voice of God.” Confucius: “Silence is the friend who never betrays.”

Anne LeClaire

Listening below the Noise resists simple classification as it richly draws on this “history of silence” as much as it does LeClaire’s personal journey. Her keen self-awareness helps her see subtleties and make important distinctions. She is careful to emphasize the two-fold “Janus” face of silence, to place voluntary silence in sharp opposition to imposed silence: “To be silenced is crippling, constricting, disempowering. Chosen stillness can be healing, expansive, instructive.”

And silence, of course, enables other activities, helping one to develop important skills. There is a wonderful chapter on differentiating “the four kinds of listening”: “1) Listening but not hearing, 2) Listening and connecting with one’s own agenda, 3) Listening and hearing without a personal agenda, 4) Intuitive listening, meaning not only hearing what is being spoken but what is not being said. Deep listening.”

Other chapters explore different boundaries—between aloneness and loneliness, a busy life and a meaningful life, mindful and mindless living— and how silence can help us get, and stay, on the right side of the fence. “Silence, along with the attention it fosters, is our anchor to the present, to the here and now… I [found] in [the practice of silence] the meaning of commitment and attentiveness, the center of soul.” A writer by profession, LeClaire also has much to say about the relationship between silence and writing: “Creativity and imagination require space to flower, and I had long known the truth of Picasso’s statement, ‘Without great solitude no serious work is possible.’”

Listening below the Noise is a refreshing and important book for an age in which people increasingly tend to avoid silence, continually tuning in to noise and information: cell phones, iPods, the Internet. In this context, silence can seem strange, even magical—as it does in Kevin Brockmeier’s story “The Year of Silence,” featured in last year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. It is precisely this magic that LeClaire urges us to seek in her closing chapter, offering advice about how we can carve out time to devote to silence in the midst of our demanding modern lives.

There are many ways to sow the seeds. Listen and in the quiet you will hear the direction of your heart.
The garden of silence is always there.
Patiently waiting.
We only have to claim it.

Abroad Writers Conference Calcutta, new NEA study, Aisling O'Neill

Happy New Year! Economy aside, there are so many wonderful things happening this year, and with Obama in charge things can only get better.
As for me, I’m particularly excited about my role as Assistant Director of Abroad Writers Conferences (http://www.abroad-crwf.com). We have an incredible conference in Calcutta planned for September, with an outstanding array of Pulitzer/Booker/National Book Award winners. Currently on board are: Junot Diaz, Chris Abani, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Ariel Dorfman, Laura Esquivel, Karen Joy Fowler, Jane Hamilton, Jane Harris, Russell Celyn Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Yiyum Li, Paul Muldoon, Richard Powers, Michele Roberts, Joan Silber, Gail Tsuikyama, Rebecca Walker.
We are working with Mr Anup Matilal, Chief Minister of West Bengal, to make this one of the year’s most exciting literary events.
I was also heartened by today’s Wall Street Journal article “The Triumph Of The Readers” by Ann Patchett: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123214794600191819.html
Here she refers to the recent report from the National Endowment For The Arts that for the first time in more than 25 years, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise:
http://www.nea.gov/news/news09/ReadingonRise.html
Interestingly, Patchett draws attention to how the most heartening rise is in the 18-24-year-old reading group “the ones who seem to have been born with IPod buds stuck in their ears.”
I am particularly struck with the explosion of popularity in fantasy fiction. Harry Potters seems to have set a steady trend. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series – about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, have met with outstanding success, and her latest, “Breaking Dawn”, sold more than 3.6 copies in hardcover. Vogue magazine also had a fantasy-themed January issue kicking off the year, and editor Alexandra Shulman notes in her letter how “In testing times, we all need to dream and to have an emotional escape route.” Fantasy seems to be the literary zeitgeist and as a fairy/myth enthusiast this is very good news for me. I am having lots of fun with my novel-in-progress The Poppy Queen, set in a superstitious village in the remote Brecon Beacons.
I also want to officially congratulate my phenomenally talented friend Aisling O’Neill who has seen two of her songs on two of the most popular shows in the US (her song ‘California’ aired on The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy). See http://www.myspace.com/aboneill. Ash is on the verge of superstardom and it’s very exciting to see her abundant talent being rewarded. Her voice and lyrics are truly magical and her songs are precious, dazzling gems.
p.s. Whilst in Abu Dhabi this Christmas, we drove to Dubai, to its Atlantis Hotel on The Palm, where we walked around the aquarium there. I thought the Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) were truly enchanting. From the pamphlet: “These graceful and beautiful drifters have neither eyes nor brains yet serve an important role in oceans. They are a major source of food for sea turtles, other jellyfish and even people.”

Emails from Colombia (as posted on the Words Without Borders website)

The past few weeks I have been in a fascinating email dialogue with Hernan Torres, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán, Colombia. Previously a Fulbright Scholar and Research Fellow at Washington University in St Louis, he is now in charge of editing Cuadernos de Antropologia y Poética, an interdisciplinary publication on poetics and interpretive anthropology. He also translates English, French and German poets into Spanish. He explained that his reasons for translating were rooted in his work as an interpretive anthropologist: “I have always been very interested in symbols and their multiple meanings. I have attempted to employ poetic translations—language into language—as a metaphor to better explain the various problems and complexities involved in the process of translating cultures.”

Torres is also the grandson of Guillermo Valenica (1873-1943), the significant Colombian poet and translator who was one of the leaders of modernismo. This experimental movement in Spanish literature was distinguished by its exotic imagery and its rejection of the materialist world of the day. It provoked a striking intellectual awaking in Latin America and its effects could be felt even in politics and economics. Notably, although Valencia’s poetry dealt predominantly with the fate of the poet in an indifferent world, he led an active political career as a statesman and diplomat and was twice a candidate for the presidency of Colombia. He is best known for his first volume of poetry, Ritos (1898, rev. ed. 1914), which contained both original poems and free translations from French, Italian and Portuguese. In his later years he abandoned original poetry almost entirely, concentrating on translations. Unfortunately his work has not been formally translated into English, although you can view some of his poems online in Spanish: http://www.los-poetas.com/e/vale.htm.

Torres also mentioned to me that he himself writes poetry and is putting together “a small text” which he plans possibly to name Homo Poeta (antología minima). His son-in-law, Andre Torres, who is friends with my husband, tells me that he is exceptionally talented. I look forward to reading it. I also hope to continue our email dialogue and further, to understand the merits and constraints of translation from an anthropological perspective.