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Worlds Away: How Contemporary War Writing Helped Me Bridge the Gap Between Motherhood, the Military, and Making Stories | by Andria Williams

August 5, 2015 By Grist Journal

Worlds Away: How Contemporary War Writing Helped Me Bridge the Gap Between Motherhood, the Military, and Making Stories | by Andria Williams
Andria Williams Photo

Andria Williams

My husband joined the military about a year after I finished grad school. I was not a big fan of this idea.

He’d talked about joining for years, with varying degrees of seriousness. I tolerated his patriotism as a sort of quirk, a charming weakness. I was an aspiring writer raised by pacifists; my family were not military people. So I recycled his recruitment pamphlets when they’d land in our mailbox. I waited, really, for him to grow out of it.

And then the economy tanked, and Dave ended up working in a battery-recycling plant in an industrial sector of the Twin Cities. This job was serious Bruce Springsteen-lyric territory. Dave had to have his blood lead levels tested monthly. He stirred huge vats of molten lead so hot that in summer, he and the crew were given salt pills so they wouldn’t pass out. In the subzero cold of winter, driving a forklift between buildings, he was issued a headsuit that looked like chain mail and fit tightly along his hairline and down his neck: Sir Lancelot of the lead-lands.

Even I—typing the day away, talking shop with my writer friends, maybe enjoying some seeded artisanal muffin at my choice of cafe—had to admit that the disparity in our daily lives was not fair. Dave’s U.C. Berkeley history degree wasn’t seeing the light of day at the lead plant.

He told me he wanted to do something meaningful. He wanted to know what was going on in the world, he wanted to contribute. This was post-9/11 and his motivations were admirable. I just didn’t quite share them.

But. But.

I was tired of feeling selfish, following my own improbable (and—this was key at the time—completely non-paying) dream. I guess I can write anywhere, I said. All I need is a word processor, right? So into the U.S. Navy we went.

*

Back then, I couldn’t have dreamed up any worlds more different than the literary sphere and the military one. I didn’t know of any service members who were writing, let alone their spouses. But for me it didn’t matter much, because immersion in military life and then motherhood came hot on the heels of one another. Within months of entering the military we had our first baby. When she was three months old, Dave was deployed on six days’ notice to the Persian Gulf on the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan.

Certainly, the deployment could have been far worse, and we were quite lucky. However, in my own tiny world, writing was a distant memory. I had an infant on my own, and motherhood, plus the cross-country move, the total isolation from my comfy school-and-writing world, had done something to me. I wandered around, indoors with my infant all day, like a dumbstruck vessel of love and caretaking. Motherhood gave me some newfound skills, sure—the ability to sustain another human being with nothing more than my own self; the ability to, when faced with a blown-out diaper and wrecked onesie, actually cut the thing off the baby in such a way that you could peel the child out cleanly and salvage her freshly-bathed hair and face. But my old proficiencies, the things I felt had made me me—well, they were stirring around in there somewhere, making me a little dissatisfied and urgent in the sort of neurotic way a zoo animal might be (I know there is something else I am supposed to be doing, but what is it?). I couldn’t figure out how to get to them.

In any case, these were minor concerns. We were a military family now. The war was occupying our own and our friends’ thoughts and fears. It was dragging on and people were being sent out on deployment again, and again, and again. A year would turn into eighteen months. Some of my friends had babies their husbands didn’t meet til they were a year old. My civilian friends could not fathom why we had yoked ourselves to the military at such a time in history, and we were starting to think maybe we had been crazy too.

But. But—

We were starting to love these people. There was something about them (and in that way, we hoped, there was also something about us). The gallows humor. The endurance. My husband was in charge of folks eighteen, nineteen years old. Former foster kids. Escapees of abuse or poverty or maniacal religion. Ivy League grads. Nice kids from stable, patriotic homes. People who cared. People who had signed up the same way we had, from wherever they’d started – and now here we all were, and they were our friends, and it really hadn’t been so bad for us comparatively, so—how could we leave?

And then, finally—I learned about all the people in the military who were writing, and my worlds, for the first time, came together.

*

It started, probably, with Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds. “The war tried to kill us in the spring,” the novel famously begins. A traditional, arguably Tim O’Brien-influenced book from a veteran of Fallujah—everyone was reading it in 2012. I read it and felt the full disgust of war descend upon me, which without knowing it was probably what I wanted to feel, probably what any civilian reading it wanted too. The Yellow Birds stirred a strange hunger in me for narratives of the war, for every perspective I could find on this bizarre conflict that had shaped and pressured much of the past decade of our lives. I wanted to hear from writers who’d had “a dog in the fight,” so to speak—the veteran-writers (and, as I’d later discover, some military-spouse writers) who’d also had to engage, in varying degrees, in an international event that the vast majority of the American public had been lucky enough to sit out on.

That same year, I read what felt like The Yellow Birds’ brilliant and hilarious opposite: Fobbit, a satire of the war in Iraq by Army veteran David Abrams. Instead of going “house to house,” these soldiers go from computer to computer inside fictional FOB Triumph, near Baghdad. “Who the fuck fucked with my Power Point?” is a common battle cry. One of my favorite lines: as Staff Sgt. Gooding, “the Fobbitiest of the Fobbits” (he uses lavender-vanilla body wash!) types a report, his fingers “flew across the keyboard like he was playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11 and had only two minutes to finish the damned thing.” This kind of comedic relief (with the implicit doubts and criticisms of the war that it raises) felt absolutely necessary as we emerged from the endless slog of the second Iraq war. Reading it was a breath of fresh air. It also felt somehow liberating: All this shit had happened. We were each, in our variety of ways, a part of it. Was it okay to laugh at ourselves, to realize that at times we’d been in the midst of a truly absurd situation? I felt like Abrams was saying yes: that to process something that’s happened, to give you a way to contrast all that was horrible, you have to allow humor. Humor can, after all, be smarter than solemnity, and Fobbit is so damn smart I felt proud to the core that a soldier had written it.

A “golden age of war lit,” people started saying.

When Phil Klay’s Redeployment won the National Book Award for fiction this year, it started to seem that this was indeed so. And the books have just kept coming. There’s Jesse Goolsby’s June ’15 release I’d Walk With My Friends if I Could Find Them—a novel-in-stories by a writer with the heart of Walt Whitman. Poetry by talents like Brian Turner and Colin Halloran. Memoirs from women who served, such as Kayla Williams and Jess Goodell, with more coming down the pipeline from women veterans as I write (Teresa Fazio, Lauren Halloran, Jerri Bell, and on and on). Novels and story collections from non-American writers, such as Iraqi-born Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition. “Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power,” Blasim writes, “because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.”

It’s far from a homogeneous group. Some veteran writers are overtly critical of the wars and even of their fellow soldiers’ war writing, such as Roy Scranton, whose beef with much of the relatively-apolitical modern war writing is that “by focusing so insistently on the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure, we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for.”

It’s not what you love to hear, maybe, as a military spouse; but how meaningful it is, how much it says about the damage done by these recent wars, that a veteran is writing this way. Perhaps even more importantly: how much it says about this extraordinary crop of veteran-writers—smart, tolerant, big enough to handle criticism—and maybe even about the whole point of living in a country that lets you fight for it and still, in writing, eviscerate it.

*

A particularly exciting realization for me was that military spouses were writing nearly as much as the veterans themselves. Siobhan Fallon won a 2012 PEN award for her story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, a book that made me alternately chuckle and nearly weep. Chuckle, because her details of military life are so dead-on: the surreal FRG (Family Readiness Group) meetings, the chipper ombudsman in her perfectly-fitting khakis, the bizarre and archaic instructions for a service member’s homecoming. Weep, for characters like Kit who come home wounded to find a new wife who’s just not sure Army life is for her; for the woman who loses her husband and asks Kit, in a brief and heartbreaking moment, to serve as a stand-in.

There are military spouse poets, I learned, such as Jehanne Dubrow, who inhabits the persona of a modern-day Penelope in her collection “Stateside.” There’s novelist Tiffany Hawk, whose funny, sad debut Love Me Anyway taps into the life she led as a stewardess before marrying her pilot husband. There’s Lily Burana, an Army wife who makes great material out of the fact that she’s a former stripper; she even (when she’s not writing novels or memoir) has led burlesque dancing classes for women whose husbands are on deployment, just so we can have a little surprise in our back pockets (or not!) when they come home. Kathleen Rodgers, Jodie Cain Smith, R.H. Ramsey, Terri Barnes – the list of mil-spouse writers goes on and on.

There are so many writers within the military community that I could never possibly list them all here; these are merely some of the best-known, to serve as an intro for civilian readers. The best resource I can think of for learning more about recent war writing is Peter Molin’s fantastic blog, Time Now. For a more concise intro, Air Force officer Jesse Goolsby recently listed what he considers to be fifteen of the best books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (by service members and civilians alike) for The Daily Beast. (The official caveat at the end of his relatively innocent book list – “The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States government” – underscores the delicate line walked by the small handful of authors who are writing while still in the armed forces, as opposed to the much greater number who publish after their military separation.)

My own blog, The Military Spouse Book Review, lists every fellow military-spouse-writer I can uncover, and I’m always on the lookout for more.

*

If a nice and literary-minded civilian out there asked me, Should I start reading some stuff by you military people?, I would shout Yes, a thousand times yes!

What’s the importance of it, they might wonder. I know about the wars. I hate them/supported them/love the troops/think Dick Cheney was a genius/despise the military- industrial complex down to the cellular level/ eat nothing but Freedom Fries.

But most of all, I love the troops. Isn’t that good enough?

Yes and no. First of all, I’d say thank you for loving the troops—and I mean that sincerely. But there’s so much more to it. There’s “loving” someone—or what they seem to stand for—in a distanced way. Then there’s trying to understand them.

What I think is earnest and honorable and true about veterans’ writing—novels in particular, perhaps, because I can speak to these most comfortably—is that these authors are trying to close the military-civilian divide, not widen it through some kind of self- aggrandizement. None of what you will read is that “You’d better call me a hero, because I put it all on the line for you” bullshit. Veteran writing is absolutely not about giving civilians some massive guilt trip, nor is it about straining to maintain a cheerful spin on whatever has gone down these past 13+ years.

The gist of the writing to come out of these wars, for me, is that it’s only “about war” so much as it’s about being human. Novels and poems by veterans and military spouses are doing what the best novels and poems have always done: giving you a take on the human experiment that changes you, makes you stop and lose yourself in another life for a matter of minutes or hours. From one writer to another, I don’t think there’s anything more important.

*

For nearly a decade after my husband joined the military, I’d thought I was worlds away from the intellectual life I’d once led. I jealously guarded this perceived disadvantage—because some small aspect of it was real, I suppose, but also because it let me off the hook.

How dumb of me to think you had to be one thing or the other. How endless the excuses I could make. I can’t be a writer and have small children…I can’t be a writer and a military spouse. The people I’ve met, or whose works I’ve read, over the past year and a half have showed me time and again all the ways this isn’t true.

—————–

Andria Williams’ first novel, The Longest Night, is forthcoming from Random House in January 2016. She runs the Military Spouse Book Review, a blog that showcases military spouses and female veterans who write novels, memoir, and poetry.

 

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: military, motherhood, parenting, writing

The Business of Writing | by Heather Dobbins

May 18, 2015 By Grist Journal

The Business of Writing | by Heather Dobbins
Heather Dobbins author photo

Heather Dobbins
Photo by Shannon Bangham Dixon

I have friends who are true beasts of business, inciting much wonder from me for years. Some of these friends went to school with me, and some are former-teachers-turned-friends. I have learned from various publications about the necessity of making the time to submit work, apply to residencies and conferences, solicit readings, write reviews, and shape an online presence, but nearly everything of value I have learned is from friends.

I used to work at an art college, and I couldn’t help but notice that all students must take a professional practices class. They write statements, artist résumés, cover letters; and research galleries, representation, magazines, and internships. We writers, in contrast, chase after professors in parking lots with our manuscripts (Is the sequencing right this time?) and take over question-and-answer sessions after a great reading. Until we have a class dedicated to the business of writing in B.F.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. programs, where faculty and visiting writers dispense advice, share blogs, point out what they learned from other writers, and hand out Poets and Writers articles, we will remain in a haze, spinning from poor or absent counsel.

My poet friends rarely bring up business matters unless I do, lest it seem garish. When they do, however, they can list a dozen editors, journal aesthetics, and the changing politics of mastheads in less than a minute. If I am lucky, they have their own algorithm for me and can point to a few journals that may give me the time of day. That doesn’t happen unless a writer submits with great care and builds relationships. That doesn’t happen unless a writer puts in chair-time. Most of my poet friends fumble around like I do and prefer and love best to talk about new projects or books that have changed our lives, so when one of them talks about business, I pay attention.

Poets are already mighty busy. I spend most of my lectures defending poetry, healing past traumas from gruff high school teachers, and arguing for the relevance of our work. Add to this the mysticism and magic of being a poet. If Randall Jarrell says we are getting struck by lightning when we write, we are “the music / While the music lasts” (T.S. Eliot); we feel the Presence of other great poets with Theodore Roethke, strive for redefinition (Evie Shockley), create “word paintings” like Yusef Komunyakaa, and make a mess of everything with our incessant conjuring. Perhaps the business part of our lives can seem too much. Maybe our sensitivities work against us in this way.

I think of the business part of poetry like clerical conditioning. We can’t very well just show up for the game and expect to be our best selves. Judge me if you want, but I depend on my own reward system. I make playlists for when it’s poetry business time, and I use every kind of motivational trick I can. Sometimes I buy a new record that I’ll play on repeat till I’m done with a day’s deadlines. I am just like everyone else who thinks the business part of what we do is boring. Inspired by my brother who is a painter, I used to get up at 4:30 in the morning for years. It was truly horrible to get out of bed, and that did not get easier for me over time, but there was something about starting the day for me—doing research for grants, residencies, conferences taught by poets I admire, contests, and theme issues. I also didn’t have any of the I-should-be-doing-this-and-that-blues for the rest of day. Now I pick one Drudgery Day per week. I also travel to see friends and reward myself with supper and libation after a long day of business. I remember hanging out at Diesel Cafe in Somerville, Massachusetts, with a fiction-writing friend: we sat at this small table and did submissions for hours, and I looked up to see the laptop glow on his face, knowing we were taking care of each other by being there. We were demonstrating our investment in the other.

I had to decide when I thought I was ready for the business of poetry. I had been advised that the worst thing for a poet is ambition; the poem must always trump the ambition. This elicited numerous questions: Why and where did I want to publish? Was I letting others decide what I should do? What did I really want? As a poet, I never feel wise enough or good enough, but I had to decide when I was decent enough that I wouldn’t cringe a few years later after a poem was published. I had a flute teacher tell me once: “The saying’s wrong. Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” My writing has improved because I am immersed in the greatness of others: I constantly read poetry that’s better than my own, and I choose my friends and teachers for the strengths they have that I lack. But I wasn’t ready for the business side of poetry, frankly. I started asking my publishing-successful friends what they were doing. I studied how they spent their hours. The ones who have a good publishing history all make the time for business. Note I didn’t say successful. There are many successful poets out there who don’t submit. They are happy writing better poems every year. Publishing doesn’t equal success for everyone. That’s important to distinguish.

I’ve noticed that after we get a collection of poems published, we have the book launch, post elated pics of ourselves with towering boxes of new-book-smell glee for a month or two, but then we often don’t hustle the book. In Memphis, where I’m from, nearly everyone is a musician. I know what they have to do to make it because I’ve seen it my whole life. They do not make a record, have a release party, and then move on to the next project. Some poets are lucky to have book tours and guest poet gigs set up for them. We must take the time to set up readings in book stores, especially independent ones, reach out to book clubs, and ask for reviews. We can sleep in guest rooms and visit with loved ones in their cities and ask them to host readings and parties for us just like musicians do. You know that’s a good time. We’d come back rejuvenated and glad-hearted. This helps poetry overall because it brings more poetry to the people, as June Jordan advocated, and it keeps it read aloud, which our kind has always done superbly. It’s more fun than promoting this and that online. Also, isn’t it the best feeling when a poem isn’t just yours anymore, when someone else needs it more now?

Another part of the business is helping other poets. We have to take time to help poets sell their books by buying them for gifts. We must also write reviews. There are so many important books out there not being read because poets don’t have agents, and we are the worst about promoting ourselves and what we love. We are sensitive, and we aren’t pushy. We hate to ask folks to do anything because we don’t want to be a bother. Lastly, we have to stop giving our books away. Recently, a poet tried to sell me his book for his discounted price. He had driven to Memphis from Fayetteville with his family. I had a teacher friend tell me, “People know that quality is worth the money.” Think about all those degrees, all those dreams, all those books you bought, ink, envelopes, printers, AWP costs—you know this list all too well. We don’t even charge for drinks at readings. We leave a bowl out. A church or school would never survive that way. Money is one way to thank someone.

Recently, I talked to the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee. I was trying to pull them over to our side. I laid it on thick, explaining how they didn’t need to be an English major to need poetry. I shared poems by mathematicians, geologists, historians, and medical doctors. I also told them about Clare Morgan’s What Poetry Brings to Business, a book of studies showing that poetry readers further developed enhanced “self-monitoring” strategies, which bettered the “efficacy of their thinking processes.” She argues that the capabilities we gain from reading poetry are powerful, so much so that we can “help executives keep their organizations entrepreneurial, draw imaginative solutions, and navigate disruptive environments where data alone are insufficient to make progress.” Let’s help ourselves by applying these skills to the business side of poetry.

Heather Dobbins’s poems and poetry reviews have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, CutBank, Raleigh Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Tennessee), The Rumpus, and TriQuarterly Review, among others. She has been awarded scholarships and fellowships to Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts’ workshop in Auvillar, France. Dobbins graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After several years of earning graduate degrees in California and Vermont, she returned to her hometown of Memphis. Her debut, In the Low Houses, was published in 2014. For more information, visit heatherdobbins.com

Filed Under: Community, Essays

All Roads Leading Home | by Elwin Cotman

February 23, 2015 By Grist Journal

All Roads Leading Home | by Elwin Cotman
Elwin Cotman

Elwin Cotman

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For a long time, I avoided home. At least in my writing.

I wrote about the segregated South. Raven-haunted New England woods. Afghanistan in the 1980s. Faraway worlds unseen by mortal eyes. For me, writing was about letting the imagination soar, which seemed impossible if my stories were about hanging out at Monroeville Mall. Focusing on familiar people and places felt unchallenging. I was trying to avoid the autobiographical, having not yet realized that was impossible.

Pittsburgh found me, anyway, manifesting subconsciously in every story. No matter where I set it, the woods my characters traipsed through were the impenetrable thickets of Allegheny County. The scrapyards and hillside houses were those of suburbs like Carnegie and Coraopolis. The geography of Pittsburgh had imprinted itself on me.

Home informs my attraction to the fantastic. Pittsburgh was a city of mystery. A city of steam tunnels, ghost hotels, the inaccessible upper floors of the pretentiously-named lecture hall called the Cathedral of Learning. And the farther you ventured from downtown, the wilder the landscape became. Flora overwhelmed the vacant buildings until it sometimes felt like Narnia. The time-stopping, world-burying arctic winters reinforced this. Abandoned steel mills, abandoned ice rinks, abandoned schools: these fed my interest in the supernatural.

During my teen years, when home felt most oppressive, my stories flew to different ages and worlds. In college, I wrote about New York City, Cincinnati, and Mississippi. Every story drew me down a rabbit hole of research to find the unique regional details of these places. I’m a sucker for some archives, and enjoy discovering the small quirks and large events that shape an area.

In my mind, I’d done Pittsburgh every way there was to do it. I’d been a baby and a child and a man. I’d been a worker and a student. I’d seen the Rankin Mill, the top of Mt. Washington, and the inside of Allegheny County Jail. Familiarity breeds comfort, and writing should be a challenge, damnit.

What finally got me to write about my hometown was, oddly enough, an attempt to be universal. I have a novella called Graveyard Shift, dealing with the happenings in a Walmart style box store where half of the employees are zombies. It’s based on my three-week experience working for the notorious company (minus the undead). I intentionally kept the location vague to emphasize this could be any town in America.

The problem being Everytown, USA, does not exist. A famous literary Everytown is Smallville from the Superman comics. That’s not everywhere; that’s 1930s Kansas. Easy to picture for someone who grew up there, but entirely beyond my experience of blue-collar life. Main Street and wraparound porches and American flags? That’s not Liberty Avenue. If I wanted concrete details to ground my zombie story, I could not pull from an abstract place. People I had met in Pittsburgh and conversations we’d had seeped into the story. The characters explored abandoned malls and wildflower fields like I did as a kid. With these details, Graveyard Shift became simultaneously the most fantastical and realist piece I’ve published. Yes, the setting could be anywhere in America . . . but it’s not.

Another critical moment was when I wanted to write a DC punk novel that got waylaid when I realized my experience of punk was Pittsburgh. Different town, different punk ethics, even different music. DC is famous for hardcore while the Pittsburgh scene was decidedly crust punk. In spite of my best efforts, the characters kept turning into Pittsburghers.

Now I sit here, working on a semi-autobiographical novella about Allegheny County. It’s liberating to paint a picture of these places that have been in my head since childhood. At times, it feels more like reading than writing. The ease is what caused my trepidation; autobiography felt like a creative crutch.

The hardest part so far is keeping narrative focus while conveying the details of home. It is easy to fall into travelogue. Yet travelogue also seems the best way to move plot: having the characters in a variety of locales to show the diversity of the setting. I tend not to do in-depth outlines, and the Pittsburgh story is flowing faster than previous novel-length works.

Which makes me wonder: is the familiar necessary for the debut author? So many first novels are about where the author came from, an explosion of pent-up love and hate stored since the days of youth. I almost feel like I’m reading Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Chabon’s diaries when I crack open Less Than Zero or The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (lovely book, but needed both more mystery and more Pittsburgh). Those wunderkind authors were special in that, though fresh from home, they could write on it in a mature way. From there, their writing branched to different locales. Is this how the first-time novelist finds authenticity? Is coming home inevitable?

Karen Russell and Alissa Nutting both had amazing first novels that took place in their home state of Florida. Russell’s Swamplandia! is about gator wrestlers in the quasi-mythical Everglades. Nutting’s Tampa, about a female pedophile, takes place in the sinister world of the Floridian rich. In a way, these novels speak to each other, documenting rival cultures that occupy the same space. Both are also notable for being written by accomplished short story writers known for their big imaginations. It seems that, in order to make the leap from short stories to novels, both had to leave outer space and the Dust Bowl and take the Greyhound to where they came from.

It increasingly seems to me that home is the starting point for fully fleshed narratives. Being born an expert on a place (or at least your perception of it) is a strength. For example, I struggle to write about farms. Every once in a while I write a rural story and, sentence by sentence, I’m aware that I’m messing up. I know you don’t feed horses that way. That’s not how you cull a chicken. It’s all a promise of more struggles upon revision. I’ve got hours of research ahead, none of it having to do with the plot, and it’s maddening.

Of course, I’m not writing about life on farms. The details are always secondary to plot. A lot of my stories take place in the American South because of its importance in black history. My Southern stories feel more mythical and symbolic to me, the cotton fields more of a magical place than a lived-in place. They almost have to be plot-driven stories by necessity, because my expertise on grain storage sure ain’t gonna drive ‘em. And this works for the short story format.

Not only is home a place to write about, but it is a place to write. I go back every year to visit family and get away from the rat race. The city is small. Running into someone you know on an everyday errand is inevitable, so there’s plenty of chance for camaraderie. I go to the same libraries and bars to write. Because it’s cheap to get around, I can travel anywhere within or directly outside the city for inspiration.

But Pittsburgh is changing. The medical industry is taking over where Big Steel left off; gentrification is moving rapidly, rents are rising. The city is different than the one I grew up in and not just because I am older. This leads to the urgency of writing about home: the need to preserve. With so much changing, the home you remember could quickly become nostalgia. I kept a lot of newspapers from when I was in college that inform my Pittsburgh stories. Though the events they talk of were at the most twelve years ago, it feels longer. (I’ve also learned I need to start journaling. It’s frustrating having to do archival research for something you were physically present for.) The Pittsburgh that August Wilson made famous is now almost entirely of the nostalgic past.

One of my favorite authors of recent years is Tawni O’Dell. She grew up in Western Pennsylvania coal country, and her stories are about the people from that hard-scrabble area. There’s a humor and bluntness to her prose that feels uniquely Rust Belt to me, and she doesn’t ring a false note in her evocation of place, from the pageantry of a high school football game to the mass sorrow following a mine explosion.

Most of her novels are about the animosities and bitter memories that arise when prodigals return home. The former football star turned alcoholic cop in Coal Run. The teen mother turned jitney driver in Sister Mine. Demons of the past come roaring into the present. Another challenge in writing about home is balancing grim realities with the joys you experienced (usually connected to youth). Indeed, O’Dell melds domestic abuse and alcoholism with celebration of blue-collar domestic life. She has only managed to create a balanced view by, well, writing lots of books. Whether the coal towns prove to be her protagonist’s salvation or destruction depends on which novel you read.

Her books also speak to the danger of stasis. Characters end up drunks like their parents. The protagonists fall into self-destructive old patterns. And what about when home is a sinister place? A lot of the time, it is dissatisfaction with home that breeds great literature. To Kill a Mockingbird is not a flattering picture of Alabama. Harper Lee needed one book to say all she wanted about where she grew up, and we are all the better for her honesty.

It is useless to pretend like all writing isn’t autobiographical. Every character and scenario is something the writer has witnessed. And the writer has no control over inspiration. For me, it comes down to acknowledging where I come from and seeing where that foundation leads me. Joyce Carol Oates has her New England campuses. Alice Munro has her rural Ontario. I have Pittsburgh. And going home can lead you all manner of places.

A native of Pittsburgh, PA, Elwin Cotman is a performance artist, educator, activist, and the author of two collections of fantasy short stories. He has toured across North America doing readings, and has performed at venues such as Bluestockings, Artomatic, Quimby’s, TerPoets, and the Interdisciplinary Writers Workshop. He currently lives in Oakland, CA, and is at work on his first novel.

Filed Under: Craft, Essays

Advice to Beginning Writers: Be Quick and Take Your Chances | by Vanessa Blakeslee

March 4, 2014 By Grist Journal Leave a Comment

Advice to Beginning Writers: Be Quick and Take Your Chances | by Vanessa Blakeslee
Vanessa Blakeslee

Vanessa Blakeslee

“It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.” —John Steinbeck in a letter to a writer seeking his advice, circa 1963

If I could go back and sit down with the younger version of myself—say, the me who was flitting up and down the sidewalks of the Rollins College campus at nineteen or twenty, having just discovered that writing was not something one was left to struggle with alone at a keyboard but could be discussed with other like-minded souls around a long oak table—what might I say? What aspects of improving one’s writing most eluded me at the time, and if I had to boil down the most transformative implementations of craft or habit to a few key pieces of advice, what would they be?

Over the past several weeks I’ve flipped through dozens of tattered notebooks and files in my office, the sort of spring-cleaning that ought to happen every six months, but doesn’t (at least not very thoroughly); I get down to a serious purge in those years when there’s a dip in the compulsion to write, when my brain demands de-cluttering so it can imagine clearly, free from all those tired story-starts trapped beneath rusting paper clips. I came across drafts from the two years spent attending workshops at conferences and residences, studying for the MFA, and before that—frightening—drafts from my tenure as an undergrad. As a seasoned writer and college instructor, one can make the mistake of believing our own writing must have been superior to the drafts our wide-eyed students turn in. Certainly ours would have ranked among the best. Alas, a cursory glance or three over my papers on Modernism, early story attempts, and professors’ comments—spot-on, by the way—shattered this illusion for good.

For my whole career as a student and throughout college, I had always been told my writing was good. And it was, if by good one means competent with an occasional flash of style. But now, from my lofty perch as a creative writing instructor at that same college, I see that I wasn’t the best, in no way could have been. Like many, I had been a competent writer with more talent in the well than on the page; probably I hadn’t been the most innately talented in the Writing minor program, either. How does one transform from average “But-you’re-such-a-good-writer!” English major to something more—literary excellence. Not that I’m in the ranking of Alice Munro and George Saunders, mind you. But once you see how far you’ve come, it becomes easier to believe you might one day get there.

What I wish now, at thirty-four with my first story collection coming out, is that I had read more widely but also closely. For most of my life, I gobbled books up; not until I entered the MFA program at Vermont College did I earnestly learn how to slow down and see what writers were up to as architects of literature. Only after I saw their techniques could I grapple with implementing them (i.e. steal) in my own writing. That’s when my pages took a big leap forward. As for reading widely, I’d always thought I had—but again, not really. I hadn’t read comic books or plays or famous foreign writers, didn’t take literary magazines seriously until I wanted my work featured in them. So if I were to sit down for a straight-up talk with my younger writer self, I’d say: get on this, daylight’s burning. Practice the patience to read closely, to take more time agonizing over drafts, to honestly compare your writing to the best if your heart’s desire is for your work to rank among theirs. Because who are you, really, but another average English major?

This may sound stern. I don’t mean for the words to come across that way. But I’m one of those writers who ardently believed that she’d have at least one book out by thirty, and the fact that I’m having my first come out now, four years later, has inevitably unearthed insights both uneasy and reaffirming. I’m sure I’m not alone.

What’s been reaffirming? The observable truth that, while sifting through those bulging binders and faded drafts, that if one possesses a certain dollop of talent and keeps stubbornly working at improving one’s craft, keeps an open mind to criticism and hones his or her intuition on what to apply and what to ignore, that the average-good-writer-English-major can break through to something more—that beauty and truth which lives inside all of us, that is both of us and beyond us. Bullheadedness may work in one’s favor here, if one has the stuff (“it’s about 40% talent,” the writer Caroline Adderson admitted to me recently). So check your ego at the door, and be quick.

Vanessa Blakeslee’s debut short story collection, Train Shots, is now available from Burrow Press. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily,The Globe and Mail, and Kenyon Review Online, among many others. She has also been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Banff Centre, Ledig House, the Ragdale Foundation, and in 2013 received the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

Filed Under: Careers, Essays

Why Translate? | by Darren Jackson

February 22, 2014 By Grist Journal Leave a Comment

Why Translate? | by Darren Jackson

My friends often ask me “why translate?” with varying reasons for why not. My favorite is that Google can do it much more quickly, entailing as it does the criticism, “what use are you?” One friend, an architect, argues that Google performs at about 90 percent accuracy and that is good enough. And for his purposes, it is. There are basically two approaches to translation: what I will call here the literal and the expressive. Machines are capable only of the literal approach, which is sufficient for most tasks. However, I contend that literary translation is a special category, one for which the literal approach may not be sufficient.

Take the first two paragraphs of Rimbaud’s prose poem, “A Season in Hell,”

Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud by Jean-Louis Forain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud by Jean-Louis Forain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

for example. The syntax is straightforward and it lacks any effects such as rhyme or meter:

      Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient.

     Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. —Et je l’ai trouvée amère. —Et je l’ai injuriée.

Translated by Google, it becomes:

      Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast or opened all hearts, or vines all flowed.

     One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. —And I found her bitter. —And I cursed.

That seems to meet my friend’s 90 percent assessment, and more of the rhythm has survived than I would’ve expected. Compare that to Louise Varèse’s classic 1945 translation:

      Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

     One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.

The similarity demonstrates a shared approach with an emphasis on the literal level of language. Unlike Google, Varèse’s translation maintains the coherence of the original voice as well as its suggestive power simply by rendering the direct objects that Google leaves out. Bertrand Mathieu’s more recent work (1991) presents another approach:

     A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

     One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

Mathieu makes Rimbaud new again for an audience whose use of language had changed enough for Varèse’s voicing to seem old-fashioned (as Mathieu’s “galling” does now). I would also point out that Mathieu’s choice of “roughed up” for “injuriée” might take too much license, changing the gesture from insult to assault.

What if we test a traditional sample—something in rhymed, metrical lines with more complex syntax and other effects. For this experiment, I’ve chosen the first stanza of Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin”:

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,

Paul Valéry. By Pierre Choumoff, via Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Valéry. By Pierre Choumoff, via Wikimedia Commons.

Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencee
O récompense après une pensée
Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!

Translated by Google, it becomes:

This quiet roof, where doves walk,
Between the pines throbs between the graves;
Just composes the afternoon lights
The sea, the sea, constantly renewed
O reward after a thought
A long look at the calm of the gods!

Suddenly Google’s performance drops below that 90 percent mark—in this case, I’d say closer to 50 percent accuracy, and I’m not addressing any of those features, such as sound patterns, that account for much of the beauty in the original language.

C. Day Lewis’s 1932 translation demonstrates the literal approach to translation again, yet here we can see the difference between human and machine more clearly than in the Rimbaud examples:

This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame –
That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!

The difference between Lewis’s work and Google’s is striking. Ironically, this 80 year old translation defies one of my contentions regarding the role of translation: that each generation recasts a work in its own linguistic light. For fun, let’s compare this to a contemporary rendering—Tony Brinkley’s translation, published in the Summer 2011 issue of Cerise Press:

This tranquil roof, this quiet ceiling where doves
march among the graves, among fluttering pines —
midday, the just moment, writes in fires —
sea, the sea always — once again beginning —
recompense after thinking — the prolonged
regard across the quiet of the gods!

Brinkley’s approach might be described as expressive as opposed to literal as he attempts to recreate the same experience in a different language with different sounds and associations. While some things are inevitably “lost in translation,” focusing on the losses obscures the work of good translation, which is to find another way to produce the original effect for the reader in a new language. In “Reading Valéry in English,” Brinkley’s essay accompanying his translation, he discusses the inability of English to produce the same homonym of toit for toi, roof for you (or “thou” as he says), and describes his reasoning for the liberty he takes with with the poem’s first line: “For me the repetition is a kind of notice, a way of noticing, that the English is only a translation because repetition (as Wordsworth said) can be a way of indicating as an excess what the words themselves cannot say.” Negotiations like this require making the kinds of choices a machine cannot make and demonstrate why literary translation will remain essential work.

Darren Jackson’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Circumference, The Pinch, The Laurel Review, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and other journals. He has translated Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux (Wakefield Press, forthcoming Fall 2014); “The White Globe,” an essay by Bertrand Westphal, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century; and A Free Air by Albane Gellé. He also collaborated with Marilyn Kallet and J. Bradford Anderson on the translation of Chantal Bizzini’s Disenchanted City (Black Widow Press, September 2014).

Filed Under: Craft, Essays

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