Sarah Wrote That

Novel revisions. I’ve been thinking about the photo of...

Mon, 27 May 2013 18:24:00 -0400

Construction, Grand Central Terminal, New York, N.Y., 1912

Versions: Nov. 2012 vs May 2013

Adobe Fournier

Novel revisions. I’ve been thinking about the photo of half-finished Grand Central Terminal that was recently on the Tumblr radar, the façade already clad in stone, the lower tracks and platforms and the loop for trains to turn around on still exposed, and how the terminal’s circulatory system justified the expense, indeed the existence of the façade and concourse. The second half of my manuscript is color-coded with edits, mine in red, my thesis committee’s in blue and green, but it’s looking over the first half where the tracks are covered over, the new text unmarked, that I fret: does it work?

I splurged and bought Adobe Fournier to edit with. I’d fallen in love with it, reading Alice Munro’s Dear Life (I first encountered it in her 2001 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage). I like its irregularity, how close it lets letters cling without words seeming tight, the beautiful dip in its lower case ‘g’, the crook in the serif on its ‘r’. I’ve ended up retyping almost my entire manuscript so far—even the sections where who did what remains as yet intact need thorough sentence work. Fournier is different enough from the typefaces in most web pages and in my earlier drafts that opening my current Word files I enter a space with changed air.

I’ve changed over half my characters’ names. I had too many beginning with too few letters. The oldest of my main characters were born in the 1960s, the youngest in the late 1990s. In 1963 Rhonda (a name I considered and decided not to use) was the 45th most popular female name in the U.S.; by 1994 it was 965th, and after that fell out of the top 1000. Similarly for Beth, Anne, and for men, Donald. Christopher was in the top 10 from 1967 through 2009; Sophia, Emma, Jacob, and Ethan have all jumped to the top since the mid ’90s. Michael and Elizabeth remain resilient. (My thesis advisor said one can’t name characters Mike—everyone is named Mike).

I recently reread Victoria Mixon’s “Everything You Need To Know About Writing A Novel, In 1000 Words.” I remembered it as incredibly spot on, but didn’t realize just how much until I had my own draft to compare it to.

I’m going to be online fairly sparingly over the summer. I’m so wrapped up with this revision, most days it’s the only writing I’m good for, and I have this time—so little—to give it.

Photo

Sun, 26 May 2013 13:11:00 -0400

Storm after storm today.

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:29:00 -0400

Storm after storm today.

"The average reader is pleased to observe anybody’s wooden leg being stolen."

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:11:00 -0400

“The average reader is pleased to observe anybody’s wooden leg being stolen.”

- Flannery O’Connor, with what continues to strike me as an incredibly succinct and useful piece of plot advice. (via mttbll) The entire essay (“Writing Short Stories,” collected in Mystery and Manners), is the most refreshing tonic.

sundoglit: Issue Three | May 2013 We bring you Issue Three of...

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:44:00 -0400

sundoglit:

Issue Three | May 2013

We bring you Issue Three of Sundog Lit. This is a really great issue, and we’re so proud…

Read on →

I’m so pleased to have a poem, “Sugaring,” in this beautiful issue:

In one state I was born knowing how to nest
potted in small duties
in a crooked porch town
I grew buttoned against the wind

kateoplis: 5th Ave, 1905 So awesome. For once, the Flatiron...

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:57:00 -0400

kateoplis:

5th Ave, 1905

So awesome. For once, the Flatiron from the South, Madison Square Park angling in above it. Kind of feel I lost some sort of cred, how long I took to recognize it.

A Letter to Young Writers: After Mary Ruefle's "Remarks on Letters"

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:02:00 -0400

katepetersen:

Last night, I taught my last class as a graduate instructor at the University of Minnesota. I had struggled with how to end class—how to tell them what I wanted them to know—and I told them so.

We sat in a circle as evening came on, on a lawn that had been under snow as late as last week. This is a rough transcript of the letter I read them. (feel free to share with attribution, and please note I quote from Mary Ruefle’s “Remarks on Letters.” Big debts to my teacher Charles Baxter, as well, for his good thoughts on stories.)

Read on →

This is wonderful.

sameskysametime: gmp3

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:32:16 -0400

sameskysametime:

gmp3

#coverflip for Alice Munro’s Dear Life photo by Charles...

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:19:00 -0400

#coverflip for Alice Munro’s Dear Life

photo by Charles O’Reardon

Lake George, earlier this week.

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:11:00 -0400

Lake George, earlier this week.

We cannot be sure

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:08:00 -0400

We cannot be sure

"It would be nice if you were a little softer here and there, world."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:15:00 -0400

carrieabigstick:

Mud Luscious Press shuttered its doors very suddenly and sadly just as the forty millionth fucktonsnowstorm started fucksnowing outside my window. I am grading papers and listening to a Fleetwood Mac record. I am thinking of the 3rd years in my cohort who turned in all their great thesis work today. I am fixing tiny errors and moving little stuff very quietly inside my cows before I send off my final, final edits to Magic Helicopter tonight. It’s bruising to hear Russ has lost his book on the night I feel like my chapbook is one step closer to being actually real. All I did at AWP was take drinks of whiskey and then cry happiness. I also kept saying, “I am so afraid it’s going to be taken away from me somehow.” To know that that has actually happened to another writer, much less one who I have been collaborating poems with for over a year, who has been hugely important to my poetry being any kind of smidgen of visible in this dumb, shitty world, is rib breaking.

It’s sad because MLP is one of the first presses I ever really understood as being this small press that was DOING IT, that was publishing the exciting writers they really believed could show us something about Livinglanguage with that capital L.

[…]

Go buy out the rest of MLP’s stock here. Go show them your love everywhere.

Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp was due from Mud Luscious next month. Gabe was the first writer I met at UMass. Fun Camp has been in the works as long as I’ve known him. I read an early draft of it for workshop on a spring night as clear as tonight and could feel its plot and rhythms homing true on their good, funny, tragic work. Somebody needs to pick it up. I’ve never read anything like it and I have yet to read it whole.

Some Benefits of Rationing

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:51:00 -0400

No one said times were good, but words
got us a long way. Some said out east,
some back east, and rightly or not we guessed
which skies they were pointed toward and which
they assumed we, too, ignored. Wonder was
at all times preferable—had you ever seen
such silent contrails? Something
in the sense of a late decade.
You could reach all the back shelves
with years to spare. Most likely
tastes were as canned as they seem now
but they were the latest we had.
Daylight held hours after the sun.
We turned off TVs. Someone had a Frisbee and
someone sparklers, and the same kids cycled past
until only their voices showed in the dark—
no sound of traffic, and I thought how it would be
if in fact everyone was where they were going.

photo: Doug Wilson, “Smog Covers Tacoma, Obscuring the Foothills Below Mount Rainier, 6/1973” | Documerica Project

That Spring

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:20:00 -0400

I cannot say what anyone wore. Were skirts
about the knee? Was it the year of crochet
or of failed pants no matter how we belted?
I remember we had squirrels. The weed killer men
arrived while we slept. You rushed undressed
and though we were soon hidden
the way you stormed back to me I wondered
who had seen you and what they would say
if I knew who to ask. Later that week or the next
you said: where did the squirrels go?
We have the worst answers.
In the passenger seat of a Honda Civic
at dire speed over half New Jersey
I felt the weather compel our flight while NPR
considered all things except what we were thinking.

The opening of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, forthcoming...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:11:00 -0400

The opening of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, forthcoming fall 2013.

I’ve been intensely curious about Pynchon’s next novel since learning its setting—nervously, because it overlaps disconcertingly with my manuscript, and with intense curiosity: how will Pynchon, whose work is so artificed, and who uses the epic so artfully to bolster passages of unabashed sentiment, work closer to his present home?

I love the complexity of point of view in the first paragraph, how the reader’s knowledge is assumed, and how the shift from the narrator’s perspective more directly into Maxine’s happens through the expression of resentment of a unspoken sentiment by an absent speaker.

Zig’s “Doesn’t suck”—yeah, we’re ready for that (though, Zig?)

The blurry reflections from apartment windows—I’m so on board for that patience. That’s from someone who knows, loves their neighborhood, its brick and mortar and texture of light.

The cops dealing with bagel deficiencies—I hear a syntactic echo of Harold Brodkey:

The local macrobiotic restaurant was crowded with people dealing macrobiotically with the virility and exoticism factors

Most of all I’m struck by the quotidian-ness that it is so warned against by the cinematic, put-us-in-the-action, what’s-the-conflict school of How To Write (and of course the page has plenty of conflict, or things impending—the first paragraph’s resentment, and the reader’s knowledge of 2001 bearing down. But after a page, are we even to the end of the block?)

For me, it’s the pear trees. I’m sold because the days of white blossoms are so few, and a boy named Zig probably thinks he’s being pretty nine-year-old cool to grant that the moment doesn’t suck.

[via Biblioklept: Gothamist: Penguin [PDF]]

juliafierro: (Twitter / illuminator99: In NYC our thoughts are...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

juliafierro:

(Twitter / illuminator99: In NYC our thoughts are with Boston)

On this coast houses are clearly references.One winter was for a...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:34:00 -0400

On this coast houses are clearly references.
One winter was for a long while like the last.
No one meant to vacuum away the old calendar.
Still, by the time I wanted the habit
it was gone. Now every method shifts
with practice. The best chords are suspended.
They sustain the absence of a root. The tone
of this moment takes seven or eight dubs. Each replay,
the note I want seems like the first note.

"Context removed, everything becomes equally strange."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:23:00 -0400

“Context removed, everything becomes equally strange.”

- I wrote about Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark in The Common

Photo

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 09:41:00 -0400

A morning in the 1980s, before the pasture went to houses.

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:57:00 -0400

A morning in the 1980s, before the pasture went to houses.