marriage thoughts from a short story

A marriage unraveled. Alix Ohlin's title story, "Signs and Wonders," follows a familiar middle-aged couple whose only son is grown and self-sufficient and they discover they've been unhappy for years. Kathleen and Terence are both tenured professors of English literature at the same university, where the only thing they have in common is their "desire to spite their colleagues."

What struck me about their early characterization was not only how selfish they are, but how much they feel like they own the other person. In departmental meetings, Kathleen believes she has to defend Terence's opinions; at home, she thinks he prefers her to be mute audience for his monologues: "Anything she said in response, even her agreement, was liable to piss him off, and he'd storm away from the table, never clearing or washing the dishes, to scour the cable channels."

And later, when they realize they both want out of the marriage, Ohlin reveals Kathleen's former sense of ownership: "Terence said he wanted to take early retirement and drive a motorcycle to Central America. What a cliché, Kathleen thought. Then, realizing his behavior no longer implicated her, that she didn't need to be concerned, she told him it sounded like a great idea."

Terence has a friend, Dave, whom Kathleen finds vulgar. "What Terence saw in him was a mystery, but she no longer—thank God—felt required to plumb its depths." Kathleen realizes with the relief of someone almost free from a miserable marriage, that she doesn't have to own Terence's silly behaviors or undignified friends.

Ohlin has hit upon the heart of a failed marriage with excellent marksmanship. She shows Kathleen and Terence's unhappiness in ways many married people can relate to. They are both deeply disappointed with the mundane ways in which their lives have diverged.

But reading about Kathleen and Terence got me thinking: the sense of ownership over one's spouse, which they both demonstrated, is antiquated and unfair.

I've felt it, though. It's all too easy to live this way. Person A feels person B's habits or hobbies or character quirks reflect badly on person A. Person B takes offense if person A expresses a different opinion. Why can't we let each other be our own people?

When two people marry, they are in love with a person + dreams, expectations, fictions they've told themselves about each other, yes. That's unavoidable. But at the start, they fall in love with another person. Someone who is interesting, refreshing, attractive to them precisely because they are not themselves. Why then do we try to shape the other person into our own image after marriage?

Once I realized this, somewhere in the last nine years, I became far less anxious and uptight. I realized that Andrew had the good sense to let me be my own person from the get-go. Sometimes now one or the other of us will look at the other person and say with fresh insight and a smile, "I just remembered that you're a different person from me."

It's been good to remember that as often as possible. And I think it might have helped Kathleen and Terence (I know they're fictional people). Ohlin's story is excellent; go out and find the book. Revel in the surprising way she explores the rest of Kathleen & Terence's marriage. Enjoy the fifteen other heart-breaking, hilarious, and perceptive stories in the book. And don't forget to let your loved ones be their own people.

Review of The Rules of Inheritance, by Claire Bidwell Smith

The Rules of Inheritance: A Memoir by Claire Bidwell Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this will be a book I'll come back to again and again. I feel solidarity with Claire--I was born to older parents, with much older siblings, and raised as if an only child. Both parents have gone through serious health scares but have come through, though I know I'll be touched by loss sooner or later, in one way or another. We all are. The portrait of Claire's journey is moving, and I admire her honesty and her big heart. She's turned the blackness of her grief to gold, through writing this book and through her work as a grief counselor, to help others move through grief as gracefully, messily, honestly, as possible. There's a lot to learn here. Whether it's our own loss or a loss someone close to us experiences, I love what she says: "When I talk to grieving people, it's like looking at a negative image--the deeper the grief, the more evidence of love I see."

View all my reviews

Review of Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not a hiking guide.
This is not a trail log.
This is not a feel-good story.

But you will feel what it's like to hike up to 20 miles a day with a 50-pound pack on your back.
You will be able to imagine the desert, the scrub, the snow, the Douglas fir, the lakes, at different points along the trail.
And you will at times be very proud to be a fellow hiker through this thing we call life.

This is the story of Strayed's journey, both the one her battered feet made over 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and the one her heart made in beginning to mend from loss and more loss, from betrayal, from wounds received and given. The journey that made her who she is today. It's a human story of love, mistakes, trial, failure, and success, that happens to take place on a trail, that needed to take place on this particular trail.

Strayed spares no details of the trail when it's important to the story. But more importantly, she spares no detail of her own foibles and failures. The failures that led her to the trail in the first place and the failures that she stumbled through along the way. She is brave to have recorded this portrait of herself--a not always likable, but always lovable, always human, character in her own story. And finally, you get the sense that she's become the person now who has a bigger heart--a live, warm heart--a person who's forgiven her back-then self for such stumblings and has grace for others'. Because at the end of her journey, and if we let ourselves at the end of ours, we learn not only how to be a better person but how to forgive the person we were that helped make us.

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Decatur Book Festival - Part I

My journey began last night with hastily scribbled directions to Downtown Decatur in my little green notebook and a printout of events, many of which I traced with my Sharpie highlighter.

Fast forward to this morning, when I showed up at 10:20, halfway through the first event I picked and they turned me away at the door: "No more, too full, too late." Tardy as I always am, I kind of expected that. I smiled and said that's okay, because to me, it is. There's a certain amount of letting the fates guide me at things like this.

Rather than having a jam-packed schedule, I'm okay with not making it to a couple things so I can wander the booths and get lost in the crowd, open to whatever I might find (or finds me).

This is the AJC Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the country.

• After wandering the booths and sweating it up for thirty minutes, I found the library (air-conditioned, thank you!), where Margot Livesey would be reading from The Flight of Gemma Hardy and answering questions. For those who don't know, Gemma's story is Livesey's homage to Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Livesey joked that if you'd told her five years ago she'd be writing back to Charlotte Bronte, as it were, she'd have laughed it off. But once the idea came to her, she knew her first challenge would be two-fold: how not to irritate those fond of the original, and how not to exclude those unfamiliar with the story. She met the challenge by paralleling the structure, the situation, and the characters in the first chapter, and then in subsequent chapters allowing Gemma to become her own person in a way different from the character of Jane Eyre. In a way a young Scottish girl of the 1960s would have differed from a young north England girl in the early 1800s. Livesey also said, notably, that once she decided on the novel, she never looked at Jane Eyre or read about the Bronte's until she was done.  

• On the way out from Ms. Livesey's reading and q&a, I ran into the girl (young lady?) (female about my age) who'd eloquently introduced her, Laura, who mentioned she was with Vouched Books. I introduced myself, we talked a little, and she told me which booth to find her at. After lunch, and another missed session because I just couldn't eat my Thai food that fast, I headed toward my next event and finally located the booth Laura was stationed at. We started talking and it turned out that besides a love of books and small presses, we both graduated from colleges within a half-hour of each other in rural Indiana, and we both have connections to my hometown, Champaign-Urbana. I wanted to support Vouched and the work they do to support small presses and emerging authors, so I asked her to recommend a book of poetry. -THIS- is what I love about people who are in the book business because they are passionate about literature: she was a font of intimate knowledge of each of the books on her table. She'd read them all, and even turned to specific poems, read one to me from one book, and pointed me to specific poems in other books. She seemed to apologize a little for being too sale-sy (my word, not hers), but what I saw was a careful reader and raving fan of the books she was selling. I can smell a pushy sales-person a mile away (they hover around the book festival, too), but Laura, my friend, you are not one of those.

• After buying The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle, I said goodbye to Laura and headed to the Local Prose stage, which is a prosaic name for where local readers and writers get to hear, question, and mix-and-mingle with fellow Atlantans who've had novels published. First was Kimberly Brock, author of The River Witch. Unfortunately, I came in late so I heard the end of her q&a session, but she spoke about setting the book in the deep south, on an island off the coast of Georgia, and how she decided to stick with the title despite the risk it might sound like the kind of book it's not (i.e. paranormal romance-ish, anyone? Thankfully, not The River Witch). Next came an author by the name of Zoe Fishman, who shared from her most recent novel Saving Ruth. In her introductions and the discussion that followed, I found myself relating to Ms. Fishman. She always wanted to be a writer, but felt she lacked the drive to actually write that first novel, so she signed up for a marathon & trained for several months. Once she crossed the finish line at 26.2 miles she knew, if she could complete a marathon, she could commit to writing a novel. Sound familiar? I know in the back of my head, I'm thinking the same thing: if I can run a marathon, I can write a novel. If Zoe can do those things and felt the same way I do, like I just don't have enough drive, then maybe I can run a marathon and finish a novel!

There's something about meeting those local authors that jazzed me up, like here we all are, in Georgia, not New York, and we're all writing, and it happened to them, and with hard work and consistency it could happen to me, too.

• To round out my evening in Decatur, I set my course for Eddie's Attic, to hear "A Room of One's Own," a three-course meal of live story-telling around that theme, based on Virginia Woolf's essay. If you've ever listened to The Moth, it's kind of like that. Only Atlanta has some of their own versions, one of which is Carapace. Today the three raconteurs told "true personal stories about men, women, and the making of art." Their stories were funny, poignant, told without notes, and above all, inspiring. 

I wish I could include everything from today (technically yesterday, now), but I'm tired and I want to get well-rested for Decatur Book Festival - Part II. Come back in approximately 24 hours to catch the highlights of what me and my little green notebook find tomorrow (or what finds us!).

That thing you do: using action to show feeling

A couple days ago, I wrote about reading to learn and mentioned one way my writing needs to improve: 

"One of my tendencies in fiction is to summarize action in analytic, explanatory terms rather than using concrete, sensory details and in-the-moment action to let the reader jump into the story themselves."

And today I came across this in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. All you need to know is Portia is Doctor Copeland's grown daughter, William his son. Doctor Copeland, an enlightened, philosophical man, had high ideals but ended up alienating his four children with his intense hopes and expectations. Now that the children are adults, Portia is the only one who visits her father on occasion, and he clearly misses having a relationship with all of them. She is about to leave from one such visit while her husband (Highboy) and William wait outside Doctor Copeland's house.

"Wait a minute," said Doctor Copeland. "I have only seen your husband with you about two times and I believe we have never really met each other. And it has been three years since William has visited his father. Why not tell them to drop in for a little while?" 

Portia stood in the doorway, fingering her hair and her earrings. 

"Last time Willie come in here you hurted his feelings. You see you don't understand just how---" 

"Very well," said Doctor Copeland. "It was only a suggestion." 

"Wait," said Portia. "I going to call them. I going to invite them in right now." 

Doctor Copeland lighted a cigarette and walked up and down the room. He could not straighten his glasses to just the right position and his fingers kept trembling. From the front yard there was the sound of low voices. Then heavy footsteps were in the hall and Portia, William, and Highboy entered the kitchen.

I love how those two sentences I italicized show Doctor Copeland's feelings without using any analytical phrases, or even adjectives (other than "right position"). In fact, as a test, I read just those two sentences, with no background information, to my husband and asked him what he thought Doctor Copeland was feeling. "Stress, fear, nervousness?" Exactly!


A student writer (myself) would have written something like "Doctor Copeland paced nervously..." And that he fidgeted with his glasses. But those two sentences Carson McCullers wrote describe just the right actions to show nervous pacing and the kind of obsession with tiny details we do unconsciously when we're nervous. 


Plus, the actions carry a secondary meaning, a deeper weight. The Dr. didn't just fidget with his glasses--he couldn't "straighten his glasses to just the right position." That detail implies failure, the sense he had of really trying to do something right but never succeeding. He couldn't "straighten" his kids out either, nor could he seem to repair the damage once he'd done it. 


I love it!

saving daylight

So I realized today that this Sunday is the first day of daylight savings time. How come I accidentally happen upon this information twice a year? I still haven't missed it, miraculously. Just curious--does Canada have Daylight Savings time? (you know who you are, dear Canadian readers) ;) So if you have to change your clocks, make sure you set them all one hour later (8:00 to 9:00) Saturday night.

[Incidentally, I always forget whether "spring ahead" means skip ahead numerically (8 to 7--as in 7 comes before 8) or skip ahead chronologically (8 to 9). Am I the only one with this mnemonic dyslexia?]

 I was going to blog about the speed of reading, anyway, but what better segue than announcing daylight savings? Set your clocks, people....

***

So I've often felt that compared to other fiction readers, I'm fairly slow. You hear of the proverbial reader who devours a novel a week or something like that. It takes me a lot longer and I used to think that was bad.

Until now. It occurred to me that I read basically a little faster than the pace of someone speaking aloud. This is especially true of fiction, memoir, poetry, etc. But this might actually be a good thing. Writers who care about the words they're writing, who work over each one to make sure it's the right meaning, the right sound, the right rhythm, are working to make what literary people call the "voice" of a piece.

If I speed-read, skim, or otherwise hurry over the words, I might get enough words to know what the story is "about," but I've completely lost out on the voice--the story behind the words on the page. I'm not saying this as well as ROB, so I'll quote him:

You should read slowly. You should never read a work of literary art faster than would allow you to hear the narrative voice in your head. Speed-reading is one reason editors and, not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art. By their profession they are driven to speed-read....A speed-reader necessarily reads for concept, skipping "unnecessary" words; she is impervious to the rhythms of the prose and the revelations of narrative voice and the nuances of motif and irony. This makes a legitimate response to a work of art impossible.*

To me, it's like the difference between taking a plane from Maine to Georgia versus hiking the Appalachian Trail. On a plane you might get from the beginning to the end, but you know nothing about the flora, fauna, people and towns along the way. I think of A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, which describes his time traveling on foot along the back woods and cities of the US. I read it in high school, and his descriptions still stick with me. There's an intimacy to traveling on foot through a terrain, just as there's an intimacy to reading a book at a walking pace, hearing the words at the speed at which they would come from a storyteller's mouth. [See also Ireland, by Frank Delaney, as a great recreation of the beauty and intimacy of live story-telling.]

As a fiction writer, I appreciate a reader who takes their time. My first drafts (technically drafts 1-5ish) are full of easy word-choices, lazy turns of phrase, and cliches. I take pains to get more than the story onto the page. It takes me a while to figure out what the story's about, first of all, then how to polish it and let it shine and become something apart from me and my rough-hewn strivings. Because my fiction is so important to me, I spend a lot of time trying to make it more than words on a page.

So there it is: with the extra hour of daylight we'll get next week, take some time to slow down in that book you're reading. If you don't already read slowly, maybe try reading the book out loud to yourself or someone else. Let yourself hear more than just the story, let yourself into the voice, to walk about inside the book.

*Robert Olen Butler From Where You Dream, page 117

read to learn and read to see

I've been working toward this idea that might turn out to be a novel. I'm not sure yet. I haven't actually written anything except scene notes and characters' names and ages. I'm still trying to let the big picture work itself out in my head. Dreamstorming (instead of brainstorming). I'm trying this based on advice from Robert Olen Butler's book From Where You Dream. I recommend it.

I've been on a reading kick the last couple weeks, too. The Illumination, Train Dreams, now Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Next I want to read Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. Trying to study how characters come alive on the page, and how voice and action bring that about.

One of my tendencies in fiction is to summarize action in analytic, explanatory terms rather than using concrete, sensory details and in-the-moment action to let the reader jump into the story themselves. I'm too much "in my head," as ROB would say. Which breaks the fictional dream for the reader and puts them in their head too, rather than in the fictional world of senses and feelings. One of my other problems is writing stories where the characters aren't really longing for anything. Or what they long for is a tired, easy version of a deeper, more nuanced longing. So as I read, I'm also paying attention to what the characters lack, what they yearn for, what drives them and makes me feel with them.

The novels I've been reading lately all happen to share a strong affinity to place--especially Train Dreams and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And Swamplandia! before that (another of my recent favorites). This story in my head also happens in very specific places, places that affect and change the characters. So I'm alert to how the environment matters in these novels I'm reading.

Mostly, though, I've been reading for the aesthetic pleasure of it. I've been aware after-the-fact of not having read these books so much "in my head" as in my heart. But I'm still learning a lot about writing from them. When I was in the MFA program, I read primarily "in my head," which is valuable for learning how to learn from great writers. I had to write 8 craft annotations per semester, so I got a lot of practice reading in my head. But, again to paraphrase ROB, I can't learn to write without being in my head, until I read without being in my head. Maybe this is one of those "you have to follow the rules before you can break them" deals.

***

So, my work in progress. I stopped myself this morning with this thought: What am I doing, trying to write a novel? I've barely grasped the short story form. Besides, everybody says they have 4 or 5 crappy novels before they finally write the one that they're proud of, that gets published. Why all this work if it's just going to be one of my "drawer" novels?

But then this: Whatever I write next will be better than what I wrote last.

It may not be publishable, but it will be my truest work yet. Provided I keep tuned into the voices of the characters and the true, deep yearnings I hear in the world all around me. Provided I keep reading and keep learning how to see, hear, and communicate those yearnings most effectively.

the Quintessential short story

This coming January, as part of my graduating residency (!), I will present an elective seminar to other students on what length means for the structure and focus of a story (think flash fiction vs. short story vs. novella vs. novel). Anyway, I wanted to find an excellent short story to discuss--one which most people have probably already read. So, using the Internet in arguably one of its best contributions to this kind of research, I tweeted:

"INTERNET, name what u think is the 'quintessential' short story, one everyone's read or maybe seen a movie version of. GO!"

Here's a list of the titles friends and strangers sent me on Facebook and Twitter (thanks, everybody!):

• "What we talk about when we talk about love" by Raymond Carver
• "Where are you going, where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
• "A good man is hard to find" by Flannery O'Connor
• "Stand by me" by Stephen King
• "Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger (Franny is a short story; Zooey is a novella, technically)
• Any story from 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger
• "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• "The Swimmer" by John Cheever
• "The Lady or the Tiger" by Frank Stockton
• "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens (frequently classified as a novella)
• "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck (also frequently classified as a novella)
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar A. Poe
• The Jungle Book, a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling
• "Cinderella" or any of Grimm's fairy tales
• Aesop's fables

But the one story that kept coming up again and again,

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

This story stood out BY. FAR. And people recommending this title were the most enthusiastic about THIS being the story to stand for all stories--the one story most familiar and unforgettable.

But in addition to having a story I can now use in my seminar, I have a list of other stories to revisit. These hold a special place in the canon for many of us, whether we're writers or readers, or just human. So if you're a writer, a reader, or just human, go to your local library and read or re-read "The Lottery." Then visit the others again, or for the first time.

And, enjoy!

Tabs

I'm bending the rules a bit--need to be good and put school work before blogging, since I have a big deadline in a week! So I'm not going to finish this A-to-Z challenge in April. But I will finish. Aiming for posting every other day now. On to my topic!

Who else out there opens their internet browser--Chrome for me--with the sole intention of checking their email and ends up with a dozen or more tabs open? Just say the magic words, Open link in new tab, or Ctrl+t. And follow the rabbit down the hole.

Borrowing the idea from someone else's blog, I'm going to share what tabs I currently have open (or cheated and bookmarked on Friday when I came up with the idea). I think your browser tabs tell a kind of story, maybe about you, about your day, about what's happening in the world.

Most of my tabs have something to do with writing and books, which is unsurprising. Other pages relate to my other interests, like food and travel. The last tab is a little surprising, especially because I don't remember how I got there.

* * *

First there's my Gmail tab. Gotta take care of FreeCycle digests and school emails and friends' emails and, oh yeah, the endless stream of articles I send myself to read later, which I don't usually get to but I feel better knowing they're there.

Then Twitter. Between gmail and twitter came all the sites below.

A WSJ interview with Jennifer Egan, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Visit from the Good Squad.

Next is a peek at a creative ad campaign for a bookstore in Vilnius, Lithuania that specializes in classic books.

A Rumpus article on Self-Publishing Dos and Don'ts--haven't read it yet, but I'm curious since the "literary" world is pretty biased against self-publishing, from what I've seen. The Rumpus seems to tread an admirable line between the indie literary arts and "serious" literature, whatever that means for sure.

A YouTube video of record-setting mountain climber Ueli Steck speed-climbing an Alpine mountain face. Maybe I'll use this for a story. Apparently I like writing about extreme sports I've never tried. I already wrote one on freediving underwater based pretty much on research and watching YouTube videos.

My friend Erika's blog (chambanachik), on which an epigraph for a certain entry quotes Anais Nin: "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write." I went to high school with this girl but because we were a few years apart, I never really got to know her until I found her blog and realized what a talented writer she is. Go Erika!

Another one of the many blogs I enjoy following: clock&bell. A lovely writer, photographer, daydreamer, currently residing in Toronto, Canada. I found her through a story of hers that was published on Storychord, which I found when I read my friend Lindsey's story on that online literary magazine. Lovely people, they.

Next is a "Blogger of the Moment" feature on ModCloth.com, highlighting fashionable and crafty blogger Little Chief Honeybee.

Via The Rumpus once again: A link regarding a writer from Pittsburgh. My husband grew up in Pittsburgh and was kind of glad to leave, hence I was curious how this writer, a self-described Pittsburgher in exile, "explains why he wrote The Metropolis Case, 'set partially in Pittsburgh, [...] largely from memory.'"

Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the God's Politics blog, on his recent Hunger Fast for a Moral Budget.

A recipe for Veggie Pad Thai. I'll leave out the egg and the fish sauce, but otherwise, YUM!

And finally, a Google map of the town of Greystones, where I stayed during a week-long visit to Ireland in the fall of 2008. 

And, of course, my Blogger tab, which makes fourteen total tabs at one time.

Thanks for joining me on the ride! What kind of tabs do you find open after getting lost in the internet?

Nature writing

This semester I get to/have to (some days I can't decide) write a 15-20 page essay on some element of craft in fiction. Thanks to my gift of indecision (too many interesting possibilities), I took well into the first month of the semester before I decided on a topic, and once I decided, I bought a ton of books and essays on such a thing called "ecocriticism." In the field of literature study (or any art form perhaps), you have different modes of criticism: historical criticism, deconstructionist criticism, feminist criticism, marxist criticism. In the last 40 years, ecocriticism has emerged as a way to view art:

If the creation of literature is an important characteristic of the human species, it should be examined carefully and honestly to discover its influence upon human behavior and the natural environment—to determine what role, if any, it plays in the welfare and survival of mankind and what insight it offers into human relationships with other species and with the world around us. Is it an activity which adapts us better to the world or one which estranges us from it? 

- Joseph Meeker in The Comedy of Survival

I examine four short stories for what they say about the human relationship to the world around us: "The Last Good Country," by Ernest Hemingway; "Theories of Rain," by Andrea Barrett; "Phantom Pain," by Lydia Peelle; and "The Boundary," by Wendell Berry. Below is an adaptation of my rough-draft introduction to the essay, a little introduction to what ecocriticism and nature writing are good for. Thanks for letting me wax a little academic on you.


Most studies of “nature writing” focus on non-fiction books and essays and the pastoral wilderness setting. But literary fiction has plenty to add to the conversation about the non-human living world of which we are a part. Many novels and short stories show the natural world playing an important role. Whether their authors intentionally wrote “eco-literature” or not, the writers have represented the land, plants, animals, or weather in the story’s world as a vital actor in the narrative. 


“Ecocriticism becomes most interesting and useful…when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere” (Robert Kern in The ISLE Reader). Whether obvious or discreet, the environment acts upon the characters, and vice-versa, in a way that informs the reader about the characters, and ultimately about the reader him- or herself.


Fiction’s “made-up” narrative can often hold up a mirror truer than reality to remind us how intimately we are connected with the world around us. “Human beings are the earth’s only literary creatures,” writes Joseph Meeker in The Comedy of Survival. “From the unforgiving perspective of evolution and natural selection, does literature contribute more to our survival than it does to our extinction?” 


At the risk of sounding too utilitarian, eco-readers ask whether a piece of fiction is useful in teaching us how better to survive in the future, with as much of the earth still intact as possible. They might argue that fiction which regards the non-human world with only cursory interest, as a mere stage prop (or setting) for its human characters, tends to further the ego-centric view that has contributed to unchecked use of the resources we find in the world around us, with often disastrous consequences. 


On the other hand, fiction that quarrels with the dominant voice--the inherited ways of seeing the world--plumbs deeper than shared intellectual slogans of "going green" and contributes to a counter-cultural movement of eco-centric progress.

Essay

I was up till 3am this morning working on an essay for school. Today I mailed 10 pages of rough draft looking at representations of nature in fiction. I have read and re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Last Good Country," Andrea Barrett's "Theories of Rain," Lydia Peelle's "Phantom Pain," and Wendell Berry's "The Boundary."

That last story, "The Boundary," makes me weep every time I read it. On our camping trip, I read it to Andrew, and I could barely get out the last zinger of a sentence. Even when you know it's coming, it knocks the air out of you. If I could write just one story in my life that had that effect on people.

The New Nature Writing - Lydia Peelle

The following is an interview with Lydia Peelle which I found on the Evanston (Illinois) Public Library blog from a year ago January. I recently read her collection of short stories, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, which came out from Harper Perennial in 2009, as part of my school work for my essay on nature in fiction. From the very first story, I fell in love with her writing, with her love for her characters and the land they live in, for the animals they share it with. I kept turning to Andrew (I was reading on a long road trip), and saying "This is how I want to write someday." 

I will include excerpts of the interview here. Please visit the EPL blog site for the whole interview. She's my writing soul sister!

Many of your stories seem to deal (if not always explicitly) with history. It seems like in this country we’re constantly in the process of erasing our past. One of the things that struck me so deeply in your stories was this underlying sense of the past continually being paved over with strip malls and Wal-marts. What we end up with is a strange sort of limbo where we have few real reminders of our past, yet we live every day with the legacy of the past. Why do you think we’re so willing and able in this country to eliminate our past? Do you find this to be the case more or less in the South than in New England or other parts of the country?

I was in Ireland once and the old man I was staying with really enjoyed making the point that there was an outhouse on his property that was older than my country.  It is amazing, when you think about it, how young our country actually is – and yes, how much we’ve managed to plunder and pave over and cut down in that short amount of time, but also how recent our past is.  And what a great opportunity that gives us to connect to it. 

Another powerful aspect of your stories deals with people and our growing disconnect from nature and land, soil and animals. ... These issues seem more relevant today than ever. We, as a collective people, have very little connection to the earth, very little in the way of skills or knowledge of how to grow our own food and survive or even to step out into nature and feel at home. What do you think of our current relationship in this country to the natural world?

In two words, not good. We seem to think we exist physically separate of it, forgetting where the basic elements of our lives – food, water, air – come from. We also seem to think we can exist morally and spiritually separate from it, and in a deep way, I think we as a culture are suffering from a spiritual malaise caused by our disconnection from place and land.

For me, the natural world is where I go to seek mystery. I believe that we, as human beings, need mystery in our lives. Because only in mystery can we couch hope. And hope is essential to our survival as individuals, and as a species, and as a world. We need the unknowable places, and yes – the dangerous places – both physical and spiritual.

But modern-day life really beats the mystery out of things. You’ve got to search that much harder for it and find it any way you can – for me that’s out in the woods – or even just in a scrubby open lot behind the grocery store where I can watch a possum lumber up a tree and disappear in a hole. I think we’ve all got to search it out: whether in the woods, or the mountains, or in church, in temple, in private meditation – anywhere you can get in touch with that sense of the unknowable, and be a part of something much bigger than your own life.

Several of the stories in your book feature animals prominently, and in most of these cases the emotional power of the story is derived from a human-animal interaction. Most of the animals featured in your stories are used by humans (as farm machinery, as scientific research tool, as food source, as art, as plaything) to one end or the other, yet somehow transcend this role and end up emotionally, or even spiritually moving the humans who come in contact with them incredibly deeply. What do you think about how our society treats and interacts with animals? Why is it that our bonds with our animals are often deeper than our bonds with other human beings?

I am very interested in our relationship with animals, and, for that reason, I am drawn to the culture of agriculture, where animals are not only companions but partners in work and sources of food. I am interested in the culture (mostly disappearing in this country) where that husbandry is a noble and whole enterprise, rather than the (unsustainable and inhumane) current practice of factory farming and monoculture.

I agree that relationships with animals can be so much purer than the relationships we have with one another. Our domestic animals put ultimate trust in us (they have no choice), so there is great potential there for ultimate betrayal – as Charlie betrays the crippled kid in “Kidding Season.” For me, that signifies all the weight and responsibility of any human relationship. How we relate (or don’t relate) to animals can represent a lot about our failure to communicate well other humans.

I think about the time, ages ago – before agriculture and domestication – that we were much more in tune with all the other living beings we share the earth with. A time when we saw ourselves as part of that larger family, and therefore treated the land, other creatures, and each other with more respect. If we can do whatever we can to get back in touch with the non-human – with the consciousness that surrounds us, right down to the squirrel on the sidewalk – I believe it will make us better humans. It will be a step towards healing the planet we’ve so far ravaged. I also believe it will make us more compassionate about all the human suffering around us. Seeing things as a whole. Not to say we should go out and try to talk to trees. But that we should try to be still, and aware, and in touch with all that surrounds us. It’s a hard thing to do, in this day and age, but ultimately, we’ve got to fundamentally change our view of our place here on earth, get rid of this idea of utter entitlement. Becoming more compassionate towards the fellows we share it with is the first step. [emphasis mine]

Playing Literary Catch-Up: Or, Year 2011 Reading Resolution

Most of my life feels like "catching up." I don't know that I'm trying to catch up to anybody else. The feeling I have is of trying to catch up to where I should be had I known what I know now. Ie., had I had siblings my age, had I gone to a public school, had I started college as an English major, had I not been afraid to talk to boys in high school, had I been comfortable in my own skin at an earlier age.

I wouldn't wish away the path my life has taken, the particular timing of everything. But when I do discover something about myself or about the world, or about the fiction we make of the world, I feel this urgency to make up for lost time.

In regards to books, I feel I am racing to make up for approximately 16 years of ignorance. I feel like one of the least well-read students in my creative writing program. Not that I hadn't read a lot of books since the age of four, when I purportedly taught myself to read. But I grew up amidst a culture of poor taste in books, music, and movies. To be fair, I'm sure I was free to read wider, read better, but I just didn't know. I didn't have anybody around me to show me the way, to say "You should read Alice Munro" or J.D. Salinger, or Raymond Carver, or Sylvia Plath, or Grace Paley. Additionally, if they had, I probably would have discounted half of the suggestions after running them through my particularly Puritanical filter. Swearing? Any suggestion of sex? Dark and unwholesome themes? Forget it. Again, I don't remember anybody telling me these were the standards I should have, I just conglomerated these ideas through bits and pieces of overheard conversations and articles in Focus on the Family magazines.

Disclaimer and apology if I offend some of my friends here, but I'm gonna be honest. My idea of great fiction used to come from authors like Janette Oak, Francine Rivers, Lori Wick, Robin Jones Gunn, Lauraine Snelling. Feel-good Christian romances. Frank Peretti for the occasional suspense/thriller. Thank God I never could get into the Left Behind series. One author I don't regret spending time reading is C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, and a nostalgic favorite series of mine, The Chronicles of Narnia. He's kind of in a category with T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.

Halfway through college, I realized that I was reading fluff for the most part. I started reading more world literature, more classic fiction. When I switched majors from biology to English, I dove headfirst into a world of great, mysteriously rich, heretofore unknown modern fiction. Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Andrea Barrett, Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore. After college, I kept trying to play catch-up. But my pace slowed considerably. Till I started grad school--then the fun really began!

I read at least 29 books in 2010. Probably more. This list also includes poetry, non-fiction, and books on writing, but still, I don't think I've read as much since high school. Here's the list. Not all of these were required for school, either. I put an asterisk by the books that met me at a time when I particularly needed to read them. For whatever reason, they changed the way I thought about fiction and writing, about personal history, about the world.

*Adrienne Kennedy The People Who Led to My Plays
Norma Jean and Carole Darden Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine
Grace Paley The Collected Stories
William Zinsser On Writing Well
Mary Oliver Poetry Handbook
A.J. Verdelle The Good Negress
Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate
Bonni Goldberg Room to Write
Dorothea Brande Becoming a Writer
*Lydia Davis The Collected Stories
*Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Amy Hepel The Collected Stories
Brenda Ueland If You Want to Write
Joyce Carol Oates Black Water
*Alice Munro Open Secrets
*Lorrie Moore Birds of America
J.D. Salinger Nine Stories
*Andrea Barrett Servants of the Map
Charles Baxter A Relative Stranger
Mary Gaitskill Don't Cry
Lorraine Lopez Homicide Survivor's Picnic
*Ernest Hemingway The Nick Adams Stories
*Willa Cather My Antonia
Eugene O'Neill The Iceman Cometh and *Long Day's Journey Into Night
Sam Shepard *Buried Child, True West, and Curse of the Starving Class
Natasha Trethewey Native Guard...

...Not to mention other books and stories I've read that I don't have a record of...

I plan to read even more in 2011. I've already started through the Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, which so far deserves an asterisk as well!

Now if I could just catch up on all the music I missed out on through the 90s and early 2000s when I was busy listening to oldies and christian rock. Any suggestions?