fiction Archives - Word Café

Elisa Albert “Fearless Fiction”

November 18, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
ELISA ALBERT 11/12/15 – “FEARLESS FICTION”

elisa-albert-nina-shengold-word-cafe Elisa Albert read the opening of her extraordinary novel After Birth. Nina read a selection of phrases culled from rave reviews–blistering; merciless; edgy; ferociously funny, confrontational and dark; scathing; caustic; a romp through dangerous waters; scaldingly and exhilaratingly honest–including Elisa’s favorite quote by Shalom Auslander: “Bukowski wrote that he preferred people who scream when they burn, and nobody I know burns, or screams, like Elisa Albert. Dark, wise, funny–she is Bukowski with a vagina and a motherfucker of a hangover.”

Well, welcome!

Asked how it feels to be hailed as a literary Bad Girl, Elisa noted that she spends more time talking about that at author events than her characters and story. She attributes it to societal discomfort with anger and truth-telling, with women not toeing the line. “I get both ends of the spectrum–people crying and thanking me for writing this, and people who are furious and offended.” She calls After Birth “a female war novel, with the women in the trenches, and the men left at home.” Readers often want to know “how autobiographical” it is, and we talked about the double bind of assumptions that novels are thinly disguised autobiography, and memoirs are fictionalized. So you might as well write what you want. “If you’re invested in people liking it, or liking you, you’re in a bad place,” Elisa says. Writing is “between you and yourself. If you don’t tell your truth, what’s the point?”

For Elisa, that’s “subjects that come to me, whatever I’m obsessed with.” After she gave birth, it was the abrupt, falling-off-a-cliff life change and isolation of new motherhood. She noted that, as a culture, we prefer to avoid the messy beginnings and ends of lives. When her baby was born (as when her older brother died), she lost some friends, while others–including some surprises–“came and sat with me.” That phenomenon, the politics of birth, and women’s friendships became fertile subject matter, “a giant ball of clay. What can be done with this?”

Elisa talked about the importance of finding writers who spoke to her “without bullshit” when she was young: Maya Angelou, Ani DiFranco, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and more recently Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back.

THE EXERCISES:

Elisa asked participants to recall “the last time you totally lost your shit, an illogical, outsize, not admirable reaction” and write a first-person piece (fictional or not) in that voice. Don’t smooth it out to get to a place of calm acceptance, just let it rip.

Nina asked participants to write about being stuck in a place with something you fear, physically or emotionally.

Bonus quote from Abigail Thomas, speaking with Kim Wozencraft and Nina at SUNY Ulster’s writing panel this Tuesday: “Don’t try to put the whole Thanksgiving dinner on a slice of pizza.”

PAUL RUSSELL “PAST & PRESENT” 10/22/15

November 1, 2015 By Word Cafe

WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE
PAUL RUSSELL – PAST & PRESENT, 10/22/15

Novelist and Vassar professor Paul Russell led a terrific discussion of the many roles of past and present in fiction. His just-released novel Immaculate Blue centers on the wedding of longtime lovers Anatole and Rafael. Guests include Anatole’s close friend and Poughkeepsie neighbor Lydia and the elusive Chris, with whom they share a complex past and a love object named Leigh, aka Our Boy of the Mall. They also share another novel: younger versions of Chris, Anatole, Lydia, and Leigh appear in Paul’s first novel, The Salt Point, published in 1990.

Paul read the opening of Immaculate Blue, set in a changing Poughkeepsie. It’s narrated in present tense, with a swooping point of view that moves fluidly from one character’s thoughts to another; Paul favors “ensemble novels” over the “claustrophobia” of a single first-person narrator. Present tense has the advantage of immediacy–you’re right there with the narrator as events take place–but “can lack a certain reflective depth.” Paul’s writing professor James McConkey posited that literary use of present tense was a response to the atomic bomb; there’s no faith in the future. Past tense communicates an assurance that we’ve survived, and can look back on the events of the story from a safe distance. Present tense gives the feel of a story unfolding from moment to moment; its pace is more hectic than thoughtful.

Immaculate Blue’s wedding and reunion with long-absent Chris gives all the characters occasion to revisit the past in memories and in conversations with each other. Paul pointed out that good dialogue appears overheard, that characters talk “to each other, not to us” in a sort of shared shorthand–they don’t remind each other of things they already know. The reader does not need to get all the facts to be drawn in–in fact, quite the opposite. “We love puzzles,” Paul said. “We love putting the pieces together. If somebody hands you a jigsaw puzzle that’s already done, where’s the pleasure?” Nina added that a writer’s great place of power is making the reader want to find out what happened.

Paul observed that his characters’ versions of their shared past vary in often self-serving ways, so “there is no truth, only perspective.” Though he hadn’t revisited these characters in many years, when his agent proposed writing a sequel to The Salt Point, he caught up with them instantly. “It was as though there was a locked room in my brain where the characters had been living, and all I had to do was open the door.” Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with its ten-year gap between parts one and two, offered him inspiration.

THE EXERCISES:

— Paul read a short passage from Joyce’s story “The Dead,” in which Gabriel Conroy has an awkward conversation with Lily, a servant girl who answers his small talk about schooling and marriage with “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you,” revealing far more of her experience than he expects. Paul asked us to write a seemingly inconsequential encounter between two people in which the dialogue gives a hint of an unexpected history.

— Nina asked participants to think of a place they had been both as a young child and later in life (a relative’s house, a school, a vacation spot). Write a paragraph or section in present tense from the child’s perspective, beginning with “I am standing in…” and a second paragraph in past tense from the adult perspective, beginning with “When I went back, I noticed…” What is the effect of the switch in tenses?

Photo credit: Jana Martin

Pamela Erens “The Storyteller’s ‘I'”

May 13, 2015 By Word Cafe

May 7, 2015

Novelist Pamela Erens treated us to a reading of the opening of her brilliant novel The Virgins. Its narrator Bruce Bennett-Jones, a student at an elite 1970s prep school. Obsessed with the romance of fellow students Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung, Bruce not only describes his own encounters with these two outsiders (Jewish and Korean-American) but imagines what might have happened between them in sophisticated literary detail.

Pamela’s reading sparked a lively discussion on narrative voice, and the differences between first and third person. Nina observed that in cinematic terms, third person is a long shot or even an aerial view, where first person is a point-of-view shot, often a close-up. She also paraphrased Valerie Martin’s dictum that first person works especially well when someone is trying to justify their behavior.

The Virgins is narrated in first person by someone who uses third person to narrate scenes that he couldn’t have been privy to–Bruce is recreating the story of Seung and Aviva, for reasons that become evident as the story unfolds. This unusual narrative strategy was inspired by James Salter; Pamela named an English teacher at her fictional school after him in homage.

Her first novel, The Understory, also has a first-person male narrator, whose view of himself and the story’s events is extremely limited. She finds writing male narrators “very freeing. I felt less exposed because I knew they weren’t me.”

One of Pamela’s writing teachers assigned her to write prose in the style of various famous writers, including John Cheever and Eudora Welty. She found it a very useful way to analyze diction and prose rhythms, and took comfort in realizing that even when her classmates were imitating someone with a distinctive style, they still sounded like themselves.

There were some excellent questions from the group, including a discussion of writing first-person narration from the point of view of someone who wouldn’t have a sophisticated literary vocabulary, for instance a teenager. Pamela’s advice? “Don’t worry about it. The voice of a story is never identical to the voice of a character. It’s a translation of what that character is thinking and feeling. Prose that’s written as we really talk is not that interesting most of the time. Readers will always go with you if give more richness to the language.”

PAMELA’S EXERCISE:

1) List 4-6 basic attributes (gender, height, personality, etc) that are true of yourself.

2) Write a new list with the OPPOSITE of those attributes.

3) Choose an autobiographical event or situation you’ve wanted to write about and narrate it as this opposite persona.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Think of a recent encounter you had with another person (buying shoes, arguing with a sibling, spotting someone on a train platform) and write it from the other person’s point of view.