I love my local library. (Latest @MFAProject assignment on top)
Next up on my teacher-directed reading list: The Turning and Aquifer, two stories that appear in Tim Winton’s collection, The Turning.
Here’s Pam Houston on why she chose these two pieces for me to read:
I first discovered Tim Winton in the Beacon Best of Anthology. The story was Aquifer, and I was so impressed with the marriage of technical prowess and deep emotional resonance it pulls off. The story is designed like a Swiss watch, every metaphor finely made, and then returned to the exact right number of times, and yet nothing about the story feels mechanical. Form following function and vice versa, every step of the way. When he says, “Alan Mannering had gotten into everything. He was artesian,” it is such a perfect completion of the aquifer metaphor without being in any way heavy handed…it takes my breath away, even to remember it now.
I wanted to accompany this story with The Turning because it succeeds on entirely different terms than Aquifer. If Aquifer is a Swiss watch then The Turning is an alpine avalanche of a story, driven by big emotions, ever gaining speed toward its staggeringly risky conclusion. The two stories are, I believe, Winton’s finest, and yet they succeed on entirely different terms. You may want to read the whole collection. There are plenty of other good stories in it, and the collection as a whole works together in very interesting ways, but I’m interested especially in what you have to say about these two. Happy reading.
photo credit: Adam Karsten
One of my goals in starting The MFA Project was to create the ideal reading list—and motivate myself to read more often and to read closely. Another was to curate my own little faculty of dream teachers. So I am honored to announce that my second teacher is Pam Houston.
I’ve been a fan of Houston’s writing for years—I started with Cowboys Are My Weakness and thought that the stories were the most authentic depictions of modern relationships I’d ever read. (By that, I mean they showed men and women being messy, enthralled, intoxicated, soul-deflating and painfully honest.)
Next, I was wooed by Sight Hound and Houston’s poignant, vivid-right-down-to-the-feel-of-the fur descriptions of Irish wolfhounds.
I daydreamed of heading to one of the many retreats Houston teaches around the world, but never got around to it.
Last month, I read her latest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, and this time I was wowed by Houston’s ability to bring far-flung corners of the world to the page so viscerally. As I wrote on Twitter, as soon as I’d put the book down:
Best writing in years: in “Contents May Have Shifted.” She makes so many corners of the world seem… Otherworldly.
In short, Houston writes about the things I love, in one of the clearest, most distinctive and hilarious voices in fiction today. I’m so glad she said yes to being part of this project.
Houston teaches in the graduate writing program at University of California, Davis and also makes regular appearances at workshops and conferences around the world. You should totally sign up to one of them. I’ll probably see you there.
Stay tuned this week to find out what Houston assigned for my MFA Project reading…
I’m starting to approach some of my favorite writers to see if they’ll become one of my MFA Project teachers. Perhaps you’re interested, too?
It’s really quite simple. Just click on the Teach Me! tab above for a rundown on how it works.
Easy peasy, right? Now you’re convinced, all you have to do to make your valuable contribution to the MFA Project is email me and we’ll get things rolling.
Cheers,
Rebecca
Introducing a new regular section of the MFA Project, where writers and my teachers here discuss their own MFAs. Starting, of course, with my teacher on- and offline, Dani Shapiro.
What was the most memorable part of getting your own MFA?
The total immersion of those two years when I was in my MFA program are what was most valuable about that time for me. It’s so hard for fledgling writers to think of themselves as writers at all, and the MFA program allows for that time of taking oneself and one’s work seriously, without yet worrying about what the rest of the world will think.
I’m sorry to say that I think this has changed a lot in the twenty years since I received my MFA, and that students are much more inclined to think of their MFA as a graduate training program, a professional training program, if you will. When that happens, the real opportunities are lost — the chance to think and live and eat and breathe the work, to be part of a community in which that is the whole point.
Jim Shepard on a subject dear to the MFA Project’s heart, close reading. Recorded at the inimitable Sirenland Writers Conference in 2010. This year’s conference starts on Sunday at the dreamy Le Sirenuse in Positano. Ever since its conception by Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren and Hannah Tinti, I’ve ummed and ahhed about applying, never quite feeling like I could take the time off or spend the money—or that I was at the right place in what I’m writing to share it with a new audience. But one day… One day I will get there! And in the meantime, I’m grateful to the Sirenland team for bringing me a little piece of the experience with this video.
Schwartz uses some wonderful scenarios to emphasize the darkness that permeates his story and one of the most effective, in ramping up the tension of the story and leading it to its crescendo, is the parents’ visit to the fortune teller’s booth—the father not wanting to go and the fortuneteller’s insistent begging of the mother to stay and hear the future. But I love two other moments even more: the one where the parents are watching the waves and their visit to the photographer’s booth.
First, we find out that “the ocean seems merry” to the mother and that the “tides does not reach as far as the boardwalk.” It is not dangerous. And yet, to the narrator, the sea is a thing of horror:
“My mother and father lean on the rail of the boardwalk and absently stare at the ocean. The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable. They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled. My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean, I forget my parents.”
I’ve tried to write about the slamming of waves onto the beach before and it’s not easy. Schwartz not only paints a beautiful picture of nature but simultaneously creates an incredibly ominous mood linked directly to the fate to the fate of his parents. This may be my favorite part of the whole story.
I’ve also written about photography in my fiction—tried to use it to help create mood and to deepen character. Schwartz uses the photo booth scene in a different way than I did — but it’s extremely effective. For me, it’s all summed up in the photographer’s inability to capture the narrator’s parents in a pose he likes. He tries re-posing the couple, and adding props, but nothing is quite right.
“But he is not satisfied with their appearance. He feels with certainty that somehow there is something wrong in their pose.”
The fact that the narrator feels an affinity with the photographer, and even with the fortuneteller although he doesn’t say as much, is poignant and tremendously sad.
These two passages definitely have me rethinking how to create and dial up mood in my own work. And, just like with Flannery O’Connor, I’m reminded to not fear getting dark. Following characters into their darkest moments has given us some of the best literature we know. For lots of us, it’s why we read—and even more of us, why we write.
There’s no question that there’s a darkness to this story—pessimism and even horror. It’s what I responded to so viscerally on the first read. Some of this is obvious—like the narrator jumping up to shout at the screen, “Don’t do it” and “Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
(I love how there’s no need for exclamation marks here, by the way. The words and the narrator’s action does all the work.)
But there are other places where I felt a murkiness that became foreboding with each new read of the story, too:
“They walk towards the boardwalk, and my father commands my mother to inhale the pungent air from the sea. They both breathe in deeply, both of them laughing as they do so.”
The word commands overrides that laugh. We get an uneasy feeling about how the father relates to the woman who will become his wife.
Later in the story, there’s more:
When they are on the merry-go-round, “for the single purpose of snatching the nickel rings which are attached to the arm of one of the posts”…
“My father has acquired ten rings, my mother only two, although it was my mother who really wanted them.”
Who can read this and not think: what an asshole? Why doesn’t he give them to her?
“They look for a place to have dinner. My father suggests the best one on the boardwalk and my mother demurs, in accordance with her principles.
However they do go to the best place…”
Yet again, the father gets his way—feeling “omnipotent as he places a quarter in the waiter’s hand as he asks for a table.”
The discordance between the father and the mother is apparent in many ways in the story but what I love is that some of the most powerful are the least obvious.
Specific details always differentiate a good story from a great one, and I’m always zeroing in on unexpected descriptions and telling details.
I’m ravenous for this stuff, because I want to be constantly reminded to use it in my own writing. (As my teacher Dani Shapiro reminds herself: Begin your day by reading something nourishing, remembering Jane Kenyon’s advice to always have good sentences in your ears.)
The details that stood out for me in Schwartz’s story were the mundane ones, and the surprise was in the fact that he even used them. Schwartz has this knack for sharing everyday tics and what seem like benign details of his characters’—the narrator’s parents’—behavior. The accumulation of these details starts to feel more ominous and ruthless than each one taken at face value. They’re not just benign things the parents do—the narrator is using them to paint an unflattering view of their personalities. He lays them bare by sharing their attitudes towards money and etiquette, marriage and the best way to spend a Sunday by the shore.
I don’t consider myself a lyrical writer, so I appreciate telling details conveyed in plainly told language. That’s why I loved descriptions like these:
“His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar. He jingles the coins in his pockets, thinking of the witty things he will say.”
And the scathing tone bubbling away under these:
“My mother is holding my father’s arm and telling him of the novel which she has been reading; and my father utters judgement of the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much enjoys, for he feels the utmost superiority and confidence when he approves and condemns the behavior of other people.”
“My mother feels satisfied by the interest which she has awakened; she is showing my father how intelligent she is, and how interesting.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations of the first-person voice and how the third-person allows for more interpretation, more judgment—more fun as a writer!—so to read lines like these was a timely reminder of how the tone, that extra layer that can be used in the third-person, can be so effective and so efficient when used well.
Challenge to myself: learn how to use a seemingly innocuous detail with as much punch as Schwartz does. Hey, you’ve got to set the bar high!
