Big Tent at the Raven Bookstore
BIG TENT: Stories and Poems in Three Acts
Thursday, April 22
7PM @ The Raven
Grant Jenkins poetry
Cheryl Pallant poetry
Nate Barbarick fiction
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Grant Matthew Jenkins, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program, teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at the University of Tulsa. He has published two books of poetry, Joy of God and Other Series (Blackbird, 2003) and the most recent in collaboration with Cheryl Pallant, Morphs (Cracked Slab 2009). His poems appear in Birddog, Cannibal, Sugar Mule, Syntax, Action Yes, and Big Bridge. Other creative projects include work with digital flash poetry, image, and sound and can be found online at Turbulence.org and YouTube
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Cheryl Pallant is a writer and dancer with three poetry books, three chapbooks, and a book on dance. Her highly acclaimed books include Uncommon Grammar Cloth, Into Stillness, and Contact Improvisation. Her recently released work is the poetry collection Morphs, collaboratively written with Tulsan Grant Jenkins. Although Pallant calls Richmond, VA home, this year she holds the Lubell Visiting Assistant Professorship and teaches creative writing in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. See her website for more information http://cherylpallant.com/
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Nathan Clay Barbarick (pictured right) is a name I use in literary situations because it takes up the right amount of space. I study and teach writing at the university of the 2008 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Champions. Am also seeking summer 2010 employment. Not that I am desperate to work; I am only desperate to stay living. The human contains only so much fluid that can be sold, and if you wear a disguise or use a fake ID they will notice you anyways and turn you away. At the Raven I will read small pieces of (non)fiction, that is, fictions that shouldn’t be nor should have ever been, but somehow are.
“The Writer is Lost”
First of all, the serious novelist can seldom punch straight through, write from beginning to end, knock off a quick revision, and sell his book. The idea he's developing is too large for that, contains too many unmanageable elements--too many characters... too many scenes... too many moments... He may work for weeks, even months, without losing his focus and falling into confusion, but sooner or later--at least in my experience--the writer comes to the realization that he's lost.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
"The Writer's Nature, Part IV," Page 64
I have been writing a novel for the past eight weeks or so--maybe more like six--and three weeks ago, after my novel-fragment appeared in KU's MFA workshop, I became hopelessly lost. This loss of focus occurred around the same time my students' papers were due and around the time I was conferencing with those students. I was putting in an extra 13.6 hours a week on teaching. The novel, as it stands, is something like 14,397 words long. 51 pages, give or take, and I anticipate the final product being upwards of 60,000 words (between 200 and 250 pages long).
By the time I figured out where the narrative needed to go and what needed to be done with the writing--Thursday last week--I was kind of a mess. I needed a friend to tell me it was going to be all right. Luckily, my wife is supportive of my projects. She always helps me keep things in perspective.
I'd also been thinking a lot about the ghosts of writers, the "refined and distilled spirit" of a writer that Wallace Stegner talks about in On Teaching and Writing Fiction, and I wanted to talk to another writer by reading his or her books and hearing, from the mouth of a professional, that these things I was going through are normal. At the same time, I was wondering, with a sort of detached bemusement, why the hell I even came to an MFA program at all if what I really wanted was time to write. I chose KU's MFA because I was promised the chance to write, write, and write more; I have no interest in being a professional teacher, which, up to this point, is mostly what I've been studying.
And I thought, Wait a minute--where have I heard those things before? And then it hit me--I needed to commune with the refined and distilled spirit of John Gardner.
I picked up On Becoming a Novelist that day. Rather than tear apart and fix my novel, I needed to get my head on straight.
During my last years in college, my adviser--he was just an acquaintance at the time, a novelist from the Iowa Writers' Workshop--recommended Gardner's books to me. Talking with Gardner, the older, experienced critic and author, gave me insight into fiction. His books helped me make the first leap from bumbling amateur to a professional--if somewhat inexperienced--freelance writer. Somewhere in his books, I remembered, I had decided I wanted to become a novelist.
Probably it was in the "Preface," which detailed a strange issue "young novelists" face, one I hadn't thought of (but one I was dealing with at the time; am still dealing with, if you want to know the truth).
The young man or woman who announces an intention of becoming an M.D. or an electrical engineer or a forest ranger is not immediately bombarded with well-meant explanations of why the ambition is impractical, out of reach, a waste of time and intelligence. ... And the discouragement offered by other human beings is the least of it. Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time... The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow... Almost no one mentions that for a certain kind of person nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist... More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,
"Preface," Page xxiii - xxv
So, if you're wondering what's normal for a novelist, or for a writer, and you need some words of encouragement, you can't do better than the reassuring tone of Gardner, whose literary-firebrand-and-trouble-magnet reputation doesn't detract from his fierce, protective tone when he talks about the young novelists he taught in life--and that he continues to teach today.
The question one asks of the young writer who wants to know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is: Do it. In fact, he will anyway.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,
"The Writer's Nature, Part V," Page 72
Kansas Bathtub Writers’ Collective
Are you a writer in Kansas? A writer who loves Kansas? And do you feel lonely? Drift aimlessly no more -- the Kansas Bathtub is the place for you. Begun by students at the University of Kansas, especially the M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Creative Writing programs, the Bathtub collective is a group of writers who just want to have fun and write well. We gather at least every two weeks to talk about writing, organize community programs like Writers in the Schools, and to eat good food and drink good drinks.
If you're interested in the collective, which is not officially part of KU in any way, you can find out more about them by clicking over to KansasBathtub.org.
The Read Well Bookstore
Do you enjoy the posts on Write Well? The tips, essays, and, perhaps most importantly, the interviews on Ask the Writer? Did you happen to catch the interviews with Dennis Lehane, Kevin Brockmeier, and Benjamin Percy, among others?
Did it make you want to read their books?
And if you could give back -- at no cost or hassle to yourself -- would you?
I'm pleased to announce the Read Well Amazon-affiliate bookstore. It's just like Amazon, except a small percentage of the money you spend goes back to support the efforts of Write Well.
The prices are the same. It has the same hassle-free navigation as Amazon, the "We also recommend..." links, the customer and starred reviews, the ultra-secure shopping cart, check-out, and shipping. You can see the search box on the right -- an exact duplicate, isn't it?
You even use the same user name and password that you use on Amazon.
As a bonus, though, we've tailored the Read Well store to our site. For example, the opening page is populated by authors who answered questions on Ask the Writer. You can buy Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone, Ben Percy's Refresh, Refresh, and Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead, along with all the other books and movies featured on those pages (be sure to click over at the bottom of the page, so you can see all of the section).
The second link, A Writer's Toolbox (again, pictured on the right) features all the best books on fiction technique, especially the ones referenced in posts on this site -- John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist, Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer, and Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees. It also includes, on the second page, a link to the textbook Missouri State's Creative Writing faculty uses when we teach English 215: Introduction to Short Story Writing (this, of course, would be Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th Ed. by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French).
On Becoming a Novelist
Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural,
partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in
normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit, (a
tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency
towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people
know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and
serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless
lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, and unseemly
propensity for crying over nothing); remarkable powers of eidetic
recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and
mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally
intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a
criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness,
impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and
incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all
writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one
finds one who is not abnormally improvident.
John Gardner
On Becoming a Novelist
Toni Morrison Interview
On The Huffington Post I ran across an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning (and Nobel Prize-winning) novelist Toni Morrison, author of Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. The interview is reprinted from Time magazine. You can read the full article here. As they say, Toni Morrison will now take your questions.
Ivan Bunin (1870 – 1953)
Just off Harvard Square, we found an underground bookshop with a Russian poster in the window. I can't remember the name and I have lost the receipt. Inside the stacks were lined with piles of dusty books. This is where I bought The Gentleman From San Francisco & Other Stories by Ivan Bunin. That was two weeks ago.
I had no free moments to crack the spine and read a little. School and other projects have kept me busy since I returned from Boston. I was reading Anton Chekhov's short stories first and writing (or grading) papers. But this weekend I finally found time to open the little red book and read the introduction.
Ivan Bunin was a friend of Anton Chekhov. The two became friends when Bunin wrote to the famous writer and asked his opinion on some drafts. In this way, Bunin became the last in a long tradition of Russian literature. His literary influences include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorky. What struck me most about the introduction (to the 1963 edition) is that the author, Thompson Bradley, makes an intricate study of Ivan Bunin's unique and innovative style.
Bunin was trained as a poet. His prose is laconic, concise to the point of mystery, and steeped in what Bradley calls a physical lyricism. The stories are object-based. Bunin possessed an almost "pagan" delight in the physical, especially as concerned with erotic love. Almost all of the emotions in his stories are invoked directly as a sensory experience. "In successive clauses he will experiment with various aspects of a color, for example, as if he were sharpening the focus on a projector lens, until he achieves the desired clarity and exactness."
The obsession for correct words reminds me of Michael Chabon, who has been called "a young American Nabokov." Mr. Nabokov would certainly have been aware of Ivan Bunin and the rest of the Russian literary traditions (Nabokov himself often translated classic works from the original Russian, such as Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). The physical lyricism, the focus on objects and their impacts, reminds me very much of Cormac McCarthy's later novels (No Country for Old Men and The Road in particular).
None of Mr. Bunin's stories are longer than a novella. The man himself died in exile in 1953. He lived in Paris and strongly apposed Lenin's 1918 revolution. Despite this, Bradley writes, Bunin is largely unpublished outside the former Soviet Republics. He was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, he has been "apparently doomed to oblivion in the West."
Jim Whitehead
Writers will feature stories of writers that you may or may not have heard of. Short, to-the-point articles and biographical information. Sometimes the articles will feature interviews and links to an author's books or official sites.
In 1971, Jim Whitehead released his first and last novel: Joiner. The New York Times praised the novel and Mr. Whitehead himself as one of the Top 10 Southern Novels after Faulkner. Mr. Whitehead was a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and his editor was Bob Gottlieb. He founded the MFA workshop program at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville).
Although he was a fantastic writer and poet, Jim Whitehead's drafting process was laborious, and he often completed poems much easier than prose. He seems to be both a poet and a novelist, although his novels remain in unfinished draft form in Missouri State's Special Collections (in Meyer Library). The notepads are in pencil; Mr. Whitehead never used a typewriter if he could help it. Eric Sentell, who studied draft after draft of Mr. Whitehead's Coldstream (Joiner's sequel) with Kevin Luebbering, and who transcribed a draft of the first chapter of the book for The Moon City Review, has speculated that the intense drafting process is what kept Mr. Whitehead from ever publishing a second novel. In addition, Mr. Whitehead seems to have been bent on committing his novels to memory, as he often stressed young writers to do with famous works of literature.
Mr. Whitehead confessed in an interview that he would re-write 2,000 words just to fix a single paragraph.
Jim Whitehead was also a fairly heavy drinker, which is common in Southern culture, and some other scholars who helped to sort through his papers have suggested the heavy drinking also played a part in Mr. Whitehead never finishing any of Joiner's sequels. Mr. Whitehead did publish many books of poetry throughout his life.
Mr. Whitehead was a conscientious (and beloved) professor of Creative Writing. He took great care with his students and often helped to turn out award-winning writers from the University of Arkansas. He took great time to prepare for classes, to comment on student work, and to appear professional and helpful to those who came to him for help with their writing. This care may also have cut deeply into his time as a writer. He also raised a large family with his wife, and was very busy with all the responsibilities that implies.
Whatever the reason, this lovable professor, scholar, and poet never did publish another novel. He died in 2003. The papers he left behind fill 13 acid-free cardboard boxes. Most of the writing is on lined paper, white and yellow, covered with concentric coffee-stain circles and some of it illegible.
Those who wish to learn more about Jim Whitehead may do so here.
Recent Posts
- Burn Them Down
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- Big Tent at the Raven Bookstore
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