Sarah Wrote That

Two Imaginary Writers Discuss Endings

Writer 1:	Finishing a good draft of a story is better than sex.
Writer 2:	You need to have better sex.
Writer 1:	You need to have better stories.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

-  F. Scott Fitzgerald

This week I’ve been editing one story about a newcomer to New York and writing a new story about a different woman, years later, slowly realizing that her image of her life there is far from the actual city or her actual life.  New York, the newbie and the hardened careerist are all such well-trodden ground; I hope mine are particular enough to make the stories unique.  With the city a real actor as well, there’s the double challenge of getting it right but saying something new.

I was trying to remember what it was like, coming to the city for the first time on my own.  Dizzying.  Cold, this time of year, windy; nowhere to sit down without buying something to eat or drink.

In a way, Fitzgerald got it backwards: can one ever see the city for the first time, anymore?  Most of us who come to New York already have so many semi-mythical versions of it that instead, at first, we are hyper aware of the fact of perceiving it—I’m in New York!—and less aware of what, exactly, we’re perceiving.  Plus the sheer sensory overload, before you’re used to it.  Forget peripheral vision for a while.  When I’m new to a place my sense of scale and perspective is completely off.  Those early days come back to me in El Greco elongation, in splotches of Hopper color, at weird skews, snatches of people and architectural detail detached like Chagall’s flying goats from silly encumbrances such as gravity.

I was there for a job interview in the old New York Central building, which from where I was standing on Forty-fifth Street after arriving by a too-early train seemed far less squat than I later realized it is.  I sat in the L.A. Coffee Shop feeling a little sick to my stomach until it was time to go upstairs.  Most of the rest of the day I spent there and in a second interview across midtown, in tiny rooms that were stuffed with binders of financial data.  By the time I caught a train home it was well after dark.

Very little about my early interactions did anything to confirm that the aesthetic bliss of arrival had any bearing on the kind of life I would lead there.  Petty tyranny, back-office cruelty, naïve ambition, impatience, boredom and drunkenness.  But I was certain!  Hope and even expectation for what I would achieve, be a part of and experience fused indivisibly with anxiety lest none of it come to pass, and suspicion that I’d come to late to the party, that all around me was evidence that the best had already happened, and I would only ever be able to guess how it had been.

That receded pretty quickly.  Instead, now, occasionally, there’s retrieving that first, sharp intensity—as Joan Didion wrote, “was anyone ever so young?  I am here to tell you that someone was.”

This afternoon I was rearranging my office and decided I preferred the furniture where it had been.  And there was definitely an instant in which my fingers did the keyboard shortcut for ‘undo.’

We’re going to be very strange as old people.

The Spine Of The Story

We’re reading Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes in my fiction workshop this week, which I’m really glad of, as I would otherwise have been unlikely to re-visit it, and I would have missed a lot that I didn’t get on my first reading, when the book came out in 2006.  I was really into Eisenberg’s previous work then, but for some reason—the title story, I think; more on that below—I decided that since I preferred her earlier collections I didn’t “need” this one and in a fit of misdirected organization sold my hardcover copy, so now I’m reading from a trade paperback.  I miss the hardcover vibe of I AM IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO BE IN HARDCOVER AND HAVE DECKLED EDGES.  DECKLED!

But—reading Eisenberg.  It’s like treading water in a sea of smart.

Read More

I Had A Farm In Africa…

I’m moving tomorrow, on unexpectedly short notice—locally, thank goodness, so my glassware and china only had to be wrapped well enough to make it across town in the back seat of the car.

I’ve moved more than I like to think about, seven times within New York City alone, and the last night in a house or apartment never gets any less strange.  Twenty-four, forty-eight hours before, everything was in its usual place; now, stripped of your things, the rooms have their foreignness back.  Boxes are stacked, little mountain ranges of boxes, where it was convenient to pack them or where you imagine it will be convenient for the movers; in the meantime, you thread circuitous passes around them.

The last night before moving, I always think of Out Of Africa, when Meryl Karen is sitting in her empty living room, the record player (now, the iPod dock) left for last, by wine and candle light.

My spring independent study reading list.

MFA programs prompt strong opinions, for and against (also: qualified—in both senses of the word—opinions).  Above all what MFA programs offer is a chance to spend relatively a lot of time reading, thinking about and discussing literature, and trying to write it, with—hopefully—a simpatico group of cohorts to give you comments you’d need an editor to get otherwise.  That’s no guarantee of anything.  But it can be pretty wonderful.

I’m In The New Yorker…

…events listings:

In Soviet Russia, Story Revise You

At a certain point when revising stories, I find they begin to work in ways it never occurred to me to attempt.  I don’t think I’ll ever tire of this recognition that a story is coherent and complex and mysterious enough to breathe on its own and no longer needs—or has room for—my impetus or desires.  It’s ready to send out—not done; nothing is ever done.  But complete.

I’ve been revising three long-ish stories over the last few weeks, all of which resolutely refused to cohere as I’d originally envisioned.  The one that’s given me the most trouble began in first person plural, with a too-clever title that I tried to make the plot adhere to… stupid, stupid, stupid.  Three title changes later, minus one character, with time-changes, dips into close and far perspective and an extended journey in one character’s less than honest imagination, I think it may be something.

It’s good to have a map, but you don’t want to end up where you’re headed.

(more Russian reversals here)

A Week From Tonight

I’ll be reading at KGB Bar in New York, and I’d love to see you there:

Wednesday, January 27, 7pm
85 E. 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Ave)
FREE

Also reading:

Ben Nachumi (poetry)
Christopher Sorrentino (fiction - National Book Award finalist)

Part of the Open City KGB reading series.

"After some long years of a general feeling in the publishing world that “nobody” was reading anymore, that literary dialogue was dying, and so on… new technological forums and opportunities have breathed new life into this community and into the discussions over the past 5 years or so."

Gina Frangello

Part of a long, remarkably un-flame-war-y discussion in the comments to VQR editor Ted Genoways’s Mother Jones piece on the troubles of old-school literary journals.  A smart discussion on the state of small presses and online vs. print literary journals is ably continued by Roxane Gay and others over at HTML Giant.