WE ARE ALL FICTIONAL OH NO.

Rawther ironically, the most useful piece of advice I've gotten from Butler's From Where You Dream is solidly stylistic. The white hot center doesn't enter into it. HORRORS.

I found it in Chapter 8, the Anecdote Experience, where Butler is doing a sharp bit of on-the-fly editing for his writing students as they try to describe a personal experience. It takes some brave writers to get up there with him, I gotta say. I wish I could say I'd have the courage to but....UM.
OKAY. MAYBE IN A MINUTE, PROFESSOR.

Anyway, it was a little revealing I think to hear Butler walk the walk like this. It made a lot of his WHITE HOT CENTER stuff concrete. And one piece of that advice really jumped out at me. You've all probably read this chapter and everything by now but I thought it deserved it own little bloggy spotlight:

ROB: Let his face turn to you. Let me see his face in the moment.
SANDRA: He is not surprised to see me.
ROB: OK, you have just analyzed his face. He's not surprised to see you. We're not seeing a not-there; what are we seeing?
SANDRA: He's looking as though he was expecting me to walk in.
ROB: You just analyzed it again. What do you reading the face? Because the little girl standing there perhaps rightly analyzes the look on his face, but what is it that's on the face she sees that leads her to that analysis? That's what we're after.
SANDRA: That's abstraction?
ROB: That's abstraction.


As I see it, there are two mad nuggets of advice here. The first is very important, and overarching: write through your characters, not at them. Let them tell us what they see and what they feel -- don't speak for them! LET YOUR PEOPLE GO, ETC.

But secondly, more specifically and
(I think) much more helpfully....DON'T WRITE WHAT DOESN'T HAPPEN. WRITE HOW IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. I've already been catching myself with this. "She looked like she was trying to lift the rock." How can someone look like they are not doing something Laurel be more specific. Course, this isn't to say that this is never right, or useful. I mean, I think in negative actions all the time. But that's my own internal narration, like my character's internal narration. It is not THE LITERARY VOICE.

Ahhh jeeze, I went on for way to long here. What a surprise. In any case, tell me your thoughts! Is this bullpoo?

FYI, your intructor and his best friend, live, Tuesday (not Monday, as I previously may have told you)

(I'm just getting back to the blog after a haywire couple of weeks, and look forward to reading your posts this weekend - jb)

Writing Butterfield, the undergraduate writing community at UMass, proudly presents:

"Bo's Arts, The Powerpoint Presentation!"

UMass MFA candidate Jamie Berger will read from his book,

"Bo's Arts: Visual Interpretations of a Soft Dog".

The evening will include a Powerpoint presentation about

the making of "Bo's Arts"

and the art in the book

and the dog who led to the art show in San Francisco that led to the book that led to the Powerpoint presentation!

Mr. Berger will also discuss a new, groundbreaking genre: Powerpointalism!

Bo (the dog!) will be at the show, and both author and dog/muse will field your questions.

All this takes place on Tuesday, November 6th at 7pm in Butterfield Hall (room 007)!

The event will be catered -- free food!!!!

For more information, please call 413-577-0546.

Instead of saying answer you should say questionment.

did anyone not get that the thing that I posted below (Mourning) was about someone who died and not something like a breakup?

Side note 1: you know you are a lit nerd when your favorite kind of gift certificate is to Amazon.com and you have memories of spending most of your Christmas money on books.

Side note 2: I'm posting one of my favorite poems below. Ironically enough, I saw it on the 1 train in New York one day on my way to work.

A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

When My Brain Left Yesterday

My brain seemed to leave yesterday, sometime during the hockey game, and all that was left was my heart, and it was trying to make up for the empty space inside of me by pushing itself into my throat. It only made things worse.

And this morning, amid all of the uncertainty, the only thing I wanted to know, but couldn't remember, was what was the poem I gave to my Dad for his birthday years ago-because my brain left, and my heart is working double-duty, and it only makes it worse, because hearts don't think.


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

flimsy concrete

has anybody else noticed that when it rains, Lederle and the FAC look like they are made out of wet cardboard?

i think that this is the cutest, most whimsical architectural quirk about UMass.

Mourning

My computer crashed just as I was about to finish this. I cannot describe my frustration. Finally, I can write cathartically about something so important, and my computer crashes and I lose it.

Sigh.

Anyway, I'd like to request comments on it. People's reactions. Thanksabunch.



Mourning
~~~~~~~~

This is semi fiction.

It's kind of like a semi-autobiography. Maybe it's not exactly how things happened. Maybe it's something that you wish happened. Maybe it's something that happened just a little bit differently in your life. Maybe it's a few things, all mixed together, intermingling like the feelings in your head, and it's not exactly true, but it means so much to you.

You say "pie" when you hang up the phone because it's too difficult to say "bye," and it is really time to go now, it's been time for so long, you really have to be going, so "I miss you" and then in a small unwilling voice, "pie." And you tell yourself, I've only met this person once, a really good once, but it was only just once. But then you tell yourself, it was good, it was so good, I haven't felt this connected in years, I haven't lost myself so completely in anyone in so long. Maybe ever. And then you tell yourself that it helps so much with the other thing, with the death. And now you're having a conversation with yourself. But really, it's a conversation with her still. You're always having a conversation with her in the back of your head. The only time it really stops is when you see her again and you're talking to her for real. It's better than you remember. It's better than you remember because your memory can't hold it, can't contain it. But you don't need your memory to hold it because every time you talk to her, every moment in between when you even think of her, you feel it in your chest. It moves you. It moves you so much that it feels like your guts are actually shifting in concert with your heart. It moves you so much that when you do talk to her again you have to say "pie" because you can't say "bye."

I knew her for five years of my life. Five years of drifting back and forth. You can look at it two ways: I had a series of relationships, and saw her in between. Or, I saw her off and on again, and had a series of relationships in between. Really, it's both of those, and neither. Really, talking about it like this is missing the point.

It's two weeks now. Two difficult weeks. The other thing is helping. And it's the first time you can talk about her, even just a little. You miss little things about her, because you've known her for so long and so intimately. You can tell when you haven't spoken for months and you're hanging out again, you can tell exactly what's going on, the subtext is familiar and good. When she's touching her hair that way, it means she's hoping you'll kiss her. And a thousand other tender little things.

And in your mind you have a map of the landscape. It's not a topographically correct map. It doesn't have all the mountains or all the rivers or all the the towns. But you can see it clearer than you can when you try to think of one of those. It only exists in your mind. It's all the places that ever meant anything to you together. That place you went that time in the summer when you were young that you kept coming back to, exploring, mapping together, claiming. All the sites you saw and sounds you heard and things you said and things you did together. This used to be a wonderful thing. She always used to be there on this map, at a distance. You always used to be able to think that someday you'd find each other again against the backdrop of a chaotic life, even if just for a while.

I believe that all change is good. I try to. I try so hard. I tell myself that all change is good. I tell myself that I should be happy for all these wonderful memories. That I should be happy that she's so important to who I am now. That I'll take it all forward with me. And now I'm having a conversation with myself. But really, it's missing having a conversation with her. Will I always be talking to her in the back of my head? Will how good it was fade from my memory?

I think back to that time before I left. She told me that after those four weeks, those four glorious weeks, she was mine then. She was moving her hips to the music I gave her, and thinking about me all the time, wanting to spend lazy afternoons making love, wanting to be with me. I was moving to New York to leave everything behind, to start a new life. She told me, so much after the fact, when it wasn't important anymore, not in the same way at least, but so important in this other way, she told me that if I'd stayed, she would've been mine heart and soul. And I told her that if she'd told me that, if I'd suspected even just a little, I would've stayed. I've never meant anything more. And she cried a little, and I cried a little, and that's one of the last things I ever said to her.

writing about music

"you, you're a history in rust" by do make say think is just plain amazing. I mean, the individual songs are great... but I just finished listening through it the entire way for the first time in the five days that I've had it. After the last song faded, something seized my heart, and I could not move or speak or do anything: it was as if the happiest moment in my life had just brushed up against my chest, surprising me completely, stopping me, breath held, just before tears rushed to my eyes.

That is one good album.

As a multi-instrumentalist myself, I know that creating music with moments like that is difficult, let alone making an entire album have that effect. I feel like this difference can be likened to the difference between a really good short story, and a really good novel. I've been trying to quantify what I like about some writing more than other writing lately,and the best that I've been able to come up with is the idea of things that aren't said explicitly but are nonetheless received. For instance, throughout the album, there are little moments... for instance: a really pretty instrumental section coming to an end with people making funny noises with their mouths. Only you don't realize that it's people making these noises. And then all of a sudden they stop, and they laugh good-naturedly in the one second of silence before a guitar picks up the melody again. It shows the humanity behind the music, but it fits so perfectly. This is a poor example...

Also, of supreme relavence: http://xkcd.com/304/

Slightly wonderful?

Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

-Robert Hass

I know this is poetry, but it inspired me- the language, the tone, the twists on perspective- I even recommended it to Lindsey in workshop today... Maybe you'll like it, too. :-)

Hello, I was just writing to see if everyone received the story I sent out last week and if they were able to open the attachment okay? I don't have microsoft word right now, so I wrote it in this strange word processor, I don't even know what it's called, and then converted it to a word document. So hopefully the conversion worked okay, but if anyone had trouble with it just let me know!

Andy

Swooning

over this:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060320/flying-f.shtml

New story love.

Butler

"Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin."
a.) this seems like sage advice
b.) it seems like sage advice, for literary fiction writers, that is, there it is, Butler is fully admitting that this is what he's talking about, writing literary fiction. And yes, he's a snob who looks down on "genre" fiction like romance and sci-fi/fantasy, etc., but his advice will let your (if that's what you want to write, those of you whom I think of as wanting to write) "genre" work rise, like Kelly Link's, above it's little "genre" ghetto and be thought of as literature, and what writer doesn't want her/his work to be thought of as great literature? None that I know. Stephen King may like making the money, but he wants to be thought of as a serious and talented writer, I'm guessing, more than anything else in the world.
(The photo is of Robert Lax, poet, who went from NYC success to a hermetic life on a Greek island. For too long, I thought that this is what you had to look like to be a "real" writer, more or less.)

Yes, those of you who've somehow heard, I will be reading for about 15 minutes at Amherst Books this Friday, along with two colleagues. Show starts at 8.

George Saunders on The Colbert Report

Click here.

inspiration

a little exercise.

I don't have anything left to say. I'm hollowed out. I just want to stop, right here, stop hard and fast and hollow. Wait for my heart to stop pounding, and then to stop beating. And then just wait in the silence.

workshop deadlines

Lest ye forget, if you're story is being workshopped in session two (Virginia, Khristie, Mark), you have to give copies out to everyone week one. That is, Tuesday week-two-ers need to hand out stories in class this coming Tuesday, Thursday week-tw0-ers need to hand out stories this coming Thursday. And, once again, Alexander-Leake are Tuesday people, Lindquist-Waid, you're Thursday people. And don't forget to read and mark up and write a note to the people going this week, y'all, it's really important.

boring teacher-y stuff

Please check your UMass email (I sent to a class list generated by spire) for reiteration of workshop instructions. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

For those of you who weren't sure what that other picture was of, here's a pretty good hint. And here's another.

p.s. no office hours tomorrow (weds, 9/whateveritis) me sicker still, ugh. Thursday I will be back with bells on!

Musings of a Writer-Actress

Acting was my first love. It was there for me when I was that painfully shy kid in elementary school, it was there for me after I broke up with my first boyfriend, it’s still there for me now as a relatively well-adjusted young adult. Throughout my childhood and majority-of-teenagerdom, I never really had a problem getting cast in the shows I wanted. It sounds terribly jaded of me, but I was one of the few kids in my school that took acting seriously and actually worked to not-suck. However, I find myself in recent months questioning my abilities as an actor. Am I as good as I like to think myself? Am I simply a two-bit character actor? What makes a good actor?

My first semester freshman year at UMass, I was cast in a show. I was the Third Witch in Macbeth. I remember being simply elated. It proved to me I was good, I could act. My acting in shows growing up wasn’t just a case of directors latching onto simply the faintest glimmer, and glimmer alone, of talent. I was good enough to get into a college production. Macbeth turned out to be, quite possibly, one of the best experiences an incoming college freshman could have. I loved everyone in the cast, and it was through the show that I made all of my closest friends.

However, since Macbeth, I haven’t been cast anywhere else. Given, there have only been two shows I’ve auditioned for since then, and I know I can’t be cast in everything, but my worry is still there. Recently, I was called back for a second audition, which any actor will tell you is an awesome thing; it means the director thinks he sees something there. I am not so sure though. I have the faintest suspicion that the only reason I was called back was because the show contained a “creepy” role; Death. I was marvelously creepy in Macbeth. People came up to me afterwards and told me that I honestly scared them. They know I can do creepy. While everyone else was called back for two, three, even four roles, Death was the only one I was called back for. I think I’ve become their go-to girl for creepy. I’ve been reduced to a character actor.

I’m not sure that this should surprise me. I mean, I make certain choices with my appearance that might constitute type-casting. My personality might also lead to this. I’m a regular 19-year-old girl, but I do have an off-beat sense of humour, and I sometimes revel in creeping others out. I know this. I accept this. I had just always thought that my acting abilities spanned a wider range than “that mysterious, creepy, possibly not human” role. Now maybe I think I’m wrong. Maybe creepy is all I can do, and this bothers me.

I want to be an actress. I want to be that lady up on stage that inspires such a reaction out of a crowded room. I want people to laugh when I laugh, to cry when I cry. Am I good enough to inspire such a reaction? Even if I am, I suspect that if I succeed I will become that token famous alternative chick. I’ll be the next Christina Ricci or Fairuza Balk with her tattoos and weird piercings. I think I might have to work on being alright with that, should I ever achieve success.

I did my senior project in high school on acting. I remember my mentor told me something during one of my meetings, something which has always stuck with me. She was working with this kid, an actor, with emotional problems. His emotional problems caused him to be stuck in a rut, acting-wise. It was her job to help him out of it. She told me that you can’t be comfortable as someone else onstage until you’re comfortable with yourself offstage. I still remember that. This might be my problem. I may very well be stuck in this giant Catch-22 cycle. I don’t get cast in anything because I’m not comfortable with my abilities as an actor, and it shows, and since it shows that I’m not comfortable with my abilities as an actor, I don’t get cast.

I’m really not sure what will break this cycle, but I need to find it, or it’s curtains for my acting career (bad pun is bad).

On Feel-good Feelings

A friend once described me as "crying over milk that hasn't even spilled yet". I wish I could protest that that was exaggeration. But it isn't. It is so apt that it is even on my Facebook page. And we all know how important that makes it. We always, as students, when reading a book or a story, whatever it may be, try to figure out something about the author's life to put that piece of writing in some kind of personal context. Here's my personal context: My boyfriend is in basic training for the army reserves, and we have spent 37 minutes on the phone total since he's been gone (nearly 2 months), and I get his letters when Umass mail deigns to deliver them, and he gets mine when there isn't an army-imposed embargo for some delightful reason like, "one of you might get a distressing letter from home and since we're working with live fire we're worried about suicide".

He called Sunday. It's funny how when you have to give an oral report for 10 minutes it seems like eternity, but when you only get 17 minutes to talk to the one person you really want to talk to it goes by in a flash. After we hung up, I was so mad at myself for not asking why his voice sounded kind of different. Why did his voice sound different? I asked myself at 1:30 in the morning and again today starting at 9:30 AM. Is it some cold that the army is ignoring? Will it turn into a flu? Is it pneumonia and he just has no idea? Was he just trying to sound all tough with all of the other soldiers and drill sargeants around him? If it were just him and me would his very deep voice have taken on that sweeter quality he sometimes gets for me? Is it allergies? I have claritin in my purse, but what use is that when you just aren't here?! And I forgot to ask in the letter I already sealed, are you sick? is it just that you're not used to the southern flora? were you trying not to cry?
But last night, amid the worry, amid waiting for the glass of milk to be put a little unevenly on the edge, I was looking up tree kangaroos. I had sent him a national geographic picture of one, asking, "isn't this cute?" Upon my further research into "what exactly are they" I realized that there are ten different kinds, all fabulously adorable. Distractingly so. And for a moment, I had a feel-good feeling. And forgot.

Brian

Have any of you ever not known how to spell a simple word that 2 minutes ago you could have? I was sitting down today thinking of how to spell a word, a simple two syllable word. I sometimes think of a word too hard and double guess myself or focus on the punctuation too deep.

I knew there was something wrong when even the almighty spell-check didn’t even know what I was saying. I sat, thinking. How can I not spell this word…I can say it, I can visually see what it is, an 8 year old could spell it.

Five minutes go by. I have already bitten off 3 nails and hit my keyboard thinking of this word that will be the death of me. “Tollar”, nope. How can I not spell this little word! I will not look it up, I am smarter than this. “Tallar”…fuck you I say to my brain and I start to sweat thinking that this mystery will never be solved. I yell to my roommate the word and ask him how to spell it. He laughs and I slam the door and start to pace. Is this possible? Will my brain ever snap out of this world of thought?

This word is even in one of my favorite movies, I can see the cover, there’s Aragon, Saruman, Froto, Gandalf…how do you spell that word!? I should see it but its not there. “Tohller”…nope.

Wait, hold on. I tell my mind to stop right there at this new thought that struck my head like a smack to the back of my head. I am thinking of ‘Twin’ and ‘Two’ before the word. I am seeing two, or twin, ‘l’s. This is incorrect. Your trying to fool me aren’t you Brian the Brain? “Towar”…close. TOWERS! I yell it at my Family Guy poster in my room.

I hate Brian sometimes.

sea oak, fyi

This delicate Rhodophyte is composed of blades whose margins are deeply lobed giving them an appearance similar to that of an oak leaf.

how far to stray

One of you all emailed to ask me just how far she could stray from the original nonfiction 911 piece - could it be almost totally different? Yes yes yes yes yes. So long as you were moved to write the fiction by the nonfiction you wrote and the stuff it brought up from your gooey chocolate centers, goferit! This photo is an example of someone starting with something and ending up with something very different from what he had planned to shoot.