Readings for Men of Winter scheduled, and some new titles
I’ve been actively trying to schedule some readings for Men of Winter, and I have two local dates set: One will be Wednesday, April 20, at Sherman Public Library, my “home away from home.” I’ll be reading along with my University of Illinois at Springfield colleague Lisa Higgs, whose collection of sonnets, Lodestar, has recently been released by Finishing Line Press. Lisa and I are working on setting up additional dual dates, but my other scheduled reading will be solo at Benedictine University at Springfield Thursday, May 26. The dates are listed on my Readings page at tedmorrissey.com. I read the first chapter of Men of Winter in Louisville last month, at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900; and I plan to read the first chapter at Sherman Public Library. However, I’ll do a different selection at BUS in May.
Not to dissuade any readers from coming to the Sherman Library event, but there is a video available of my reading chapter 1 at both Vimeo and YouTube (a slightly abridged version).
On the writing front, I was interviewed by The Fourth River, which (if I understand correctly) will run online this summer some time. The interviewer, Beth Gilstrap, talked with me about both Men of Winter and Weeping with an Ancient God, my novella that is slated for publication, along with a collection of short stories, next spring by Punkin House. Beth was a capable interviewer, asking intelligent and interesting questions (I only hope I responded in kind).
Meanwhile, I continue to work on the Authoress, the project name for my novel in progress. I’ve really been enjoying the writing process. I recently reached a climactic section that I’ve been working toward for 200 pages or thereabouts, and as such I’ve started getting up earlier just to leave myself a little extra time in the morning to write; if I get up at about 5:15, I can carve out 40 to 45 minutes to write, Monday through Friday. Generally, then, three or four evenings a week I can type up my handwritten pages produced in the mornings. It’s hardly a lightning-fast process, but with about two years’ work on the manuscript, I’m at the 375-page mark.
Having finished and truly enjoyed Anna Karenina, I dove right into War and Peace a couple of weeks ago. It’s taken me a little longer to develop an affinity for the text than it did for Anna Karenina, which happened from the first page, but I’m about 130 pages into War and Peace and am beginning to feel connected to the characters and the storyline. I think two features delayed my emotional attachment to the novel: one, Tolstoy introduces a plethora of characters in the opening chapters, and it was difficult for me to keep them all straight; also, he uses a lot of French in these same chapters, which is footnoted, but I found it cumbersome to keep glancing down to the bottom of the page, then back to my place in the text — as often Tolstoy has his characters speaking French, but the exposition between bits of dialogue is of course in English (Russian), or the characters shift back and forth between French and English/Russian, sometimes within the same sentence; so one must keeping jumping back and forth between the text of the novel and the translators’ footnotes. There is some French in Anna Karenina, of course, but it’s not so extensive, and not ladled on so thickly in the opening pages when one is trying to get one’s bearings. The French has slowed to a trickle in the last few chapters I’ve read of War and Peace, and that has helped me to embrace the novel more … affectionately.
I’ve decided that one of the things I should do with this blog is highlight some recent works of fiction and poetry that are available. One of my favorite pastimes when on campus at UIS is to go to Brookens Library and browse through the newly arrived books, many from small-press and university publishers. One book of poetry that I’ve found very engaging is Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book, which is the product of a group experiment in poetic composition. Another notable title is Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories, by Lydia Peelle. I’d also like to recommend two books from Coffee House Press: Extraordinary Renditions, a collection of three novellas, by Andrew Ervin; and Horse, Flower, Bird, an odd but engaging collection of very brief, fairy-tale-esque stories, by Kate Bernheimer (art byRikki Ducornet).
Pathfinding: a blog devoted to helping new writers find outlets for their work
Notes on the Louisville Conference 2011, and visiting poets
For a while I wasn’t posting much to this blog because frankly, in the depth of winter, there wasn’t much happening of note in terms of my reading and writing life — but the last few weeks have been so busy that I haven’t had time to keep up with documenting them. I will try to catch but will no doubt be giving people and things shorter shrift than they deserve.
I have just returned from the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held annually at the University of Louisville, and I want to report on some of the people I met and presentations I attended. First, however, in the interest of chronology I’m going to write about a trio of poets who, individually, visited Springfield over a two-week period. This no doubt is where the short shrifting will commence.
The first was Carrie Oeding, a writing fellow at the University of Houston. I was among a group who dined with her at Augie’s Front Burner in downtown Springfield. I enjoyed her discussing some of her writing and teaching techniques, and also the new sequence of poems she’s just beginning to work on. Carrie’s first book of poems, Our List of Solutions, is forthcoming from 42 Miles Press, a new addition to Indiana University Press. The publication is the result of her winning the 2010 Lester M. Wolfson Poetry Award. Some of her work appears in The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Book 15, available as a free download from Plastique.
Another poet visitor to our fair city was Jayson Iwen of Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. In addition to the dinner scene (at Lake Pointe Grill), I was able to attend Jayson’s presentation on cross-genre writing, which was especially interesting in that I consider myself something of a cross-genre writer. I enjoyed his easy-going, yet knowledgeable, manner. Among his published works is Six Trips in Two Directions, a poetry collection from Emergency Press. A brief excerpt from Six Trips can be read on the Woodland Pattern Book Center’s site. Another, longer, excerpt is available from webdelsol.com.
Last but far from least, I was able to attend a reading by Emma Bartholomew at historic Brinkerhoff Home on the campus of Benedictine University at Springfield, as part of the Quiddity visiting writers and artists series. Emma’s reading was delightful as she focused in particular on her interest in cartography and the poems that her interest has inspired. Some of the London-born poet’s work is available from 3:AM Magazine. Emma’s reading at Seersucker Live is also availabe on YouTube. It is very similar to her reading at Benedictine, which is fortunate because it was quite wonderful.
Continuing my short shrifting, I have just returned from the three-day Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. I attended and/or chaired several fascinating panels on a variety of topics, including experimental poetry, contemporary narrative theory, and trauma theory (which is one of my chief scholarly interests — it appears to be gaining momentum as there were several trauma-theory-related presentations). I also was able to hear some terrific prose and poetry readings, including Mike Barrett’s highly experimental — and imaginative! — work from his collection “Recto Verso”; Brent Jason Royster’s prose — and perfectly square, geometrically — poetry from his manuscript “A Rock and Two Boxes”; Mario Chard’s poems in progress from his “Caballero” series (at the risk of being redundant, quite wonderful); and Victoria Brockmeier’s readings from her manuscript “Magpie” (definitely risking redundancy, also quite wonderful). Just to say a touch more: Mario’s work focuses on immigrant experiences in the United States; and Victoria’s poetry is inspired in large part by classical mythology.
I also attended a reading by poet Rae Armantrout, winner of the 2010 Pulitizer Prize in poetry for her collection Versed (Wesleyan, 2009). She was relaxed and funny, making for a nice rapport with her audience. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend their readings due to scheduling conflicts, but I was happy to see my friend Jeremy (J. D.) Schraffenberger, poet and assistant poetry editor of North American Review; and also to meet poet Ewa Chrusciel, whose collection Strata will be out in just a few weeks from Emergency Press.
I read the first chapter of Men of Winter at the conference. Some readings/book signings for the novel seem to be taking shape, but I’ll wait until I have some firm dates before discussing them here. Meanwhile, there appears to be some interest in my novella and story collection Weeping with an Ancient God, which Punkin House plans to bring out in spring 2012.
Men of Winter (purchase at Punkin Books or Amazon)
Pathfinding (my Punkin House author’s blog)
Writer Meagan Cass in town, and some War and Peace
This past week I was delighted to be among a group who took writer Meagan Cass to dinner at Bella Milano in Springfield, Illinois. The table arrangement did not facilitate my being able to talk much writerly shop with Meagan, but she was warm and witty, all the things a young visiting writer is supposed to be, and we all stayed long after the meal was concluded to continue to talk, in fact about three hours all together — so clearly no one was in a rush to leave her company. Earlier in the day, at a presentation I was unable to attend, she spoke of contemporary narrative’s forebears, like myth and fairytale, and how they can inspire and inform technique today. I was able to touch upon her topic at dinner, and she mentioned that her story “The Candy House of Roscoe, New York” (published in Carve Magazine) makes use of fairytale tropes in particular. I brought up her “Candy House” story as I had read it earlier in the day and enjoyed it very much. One of Meagan’s stories that I enjoyed even more is “My Highest Recommendation” (published in Minnetonka Review). The story is funny and touching and intriguing — all the things a great short story ought to be, which is no doubt why it won the journal’s 2007 Editor’s Prize.
Meagan has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD from University of Louisville Lafayette, and she lives in California, where one of her interests, apparently, is the LA Feminist Book Club.
I finished reading Anna Karenina last weekend, and even though my life runneth over with great books I’m eager to read I had to run out and purchase War and Peace, as I’m still very much in a Tolstoy kind of mood. Our local Barnes & Noble had several versions available, and I took several minutes to look them over before deciding which I preferred. I’d read the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina and obviously liked it a lot, and her version of War and Peace was available in a couple of different editions; but ultimately I decided on the newer Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, published by Vintage Classics. So far I feel I chose wisely. I like the liveliness of the translation itself, and I appreciate many of the edition’s special features, like a list of principal characters, including their various nicknames and their relationships to one another — my only complaint is the book’s weight: holy cow, it’s softback, but it must weigh twelve pounds; it’s like holding a bowling ball while you read. I feel like I should wear steel-toed shoes while lugging it around just in case it slips from my grip.
On the writing front, I continue to work on my novel in progress, the Authoress, and I continue to like what’s happening on the page. I’ve still yet to set up a reading in association with the release of Men of Winter. I spoke to the owner of a coffeehouse in Galesburg, Illinois (Carl Sandburg’s and my hometown), and he sounded very enthusiastic about hosting a reading. In fact, I got off the phone thinking it was a done deal and it was just a matter of finding a date. He wanted me to email him further information, which I did immediately … it’s been going on two weeks and he hasn’t responded. Who knows? On a happier note, my publisher, Punkin House, has found a major distributor for its books, and I’m looking forward to finding out more details. In a couple of weeks I’ll be at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, where I will, among other things, read the first chapter of Men of Winter.
Also, an editor has expressed an interest in interviewing me with regards to my novella Weeping with an Ancient God, an excerpt of which was published in The Final Draft last fall under the title “Melvill in the Marquesas” (since archived at this blog); the interview is supposed to take place later this month or beginning of March, but we’ll have to see what happens there. I’m hoping to bring out the novella along with a collection of previously published stories later this year.
Men of Winter (purchase print paperback edition)
Pathfinding: a blog devoted to helping new writers find outlets for their work (my Punkin House author’s blog)
Getting Men of Winter out in the world, and more Tolstoy
I haven’t been writing this blog with regularity of late, largely because it’s that part of the calendar that is most irregular, especially for us academic types — with one semester’s ending and another’s beginning, and that whole holiday season thrown in to boot. But 2011 has settled into place, and my schedule is normalizing as well. Technically Men of Winter was released in November 2010, but it was very late and with all the academic and holiday hubbub, it was almost like it hadn’t been released at all. I was hoping to enter the novel into some contests, like for first novels or just fiction of 2010, but I was surprised to discover that just about all of those sorts of contests had mid to late December submission deadlines; and I had difficulty getting a significant batch from my publisher, Punkin House, (in fact it was only this past week that a shipment of fifty arrived), so I missed the deadlines, as even first novels have to be submitted in the year of their publication. C’est la vie.
I spent some time over break trying to arrange some readings/book signings, and I can’t say that’s going especially well. I’ve contacted about fifteen bookstores and coffeehouses (known for their readings) in Chicago, Peoria, and Galesburg, and only one has responded, at all, and that was in the negative (they no longer host such things because they’ve decided their establishment wasn’t well suited to them). I need to step up my efforts, and now that we’re getting settled into 2011 I will. Men of Winter has been listed on Amazon, but sold via Punkin House as an independent seller. Punkin House is working on an agreement with a book distributor, and once that happens it should become easier to place books in corporate bookstores, like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and on Amazon proper. The publisher had been trying to sell exclusively through its website, but that’s just too difficult in today’s web-based, corporate-controlled world.
Quite frankly, as I’ve written here before, my three-job lifestyle does not lend itself to vigorous promotion of my book. I’m not really at economic or professional liberty to be gallivanting around North America pitching my novel. It’s also tricky to be a small-town English teacher and also a writer of serious literature, as there certainly are elements in the community that would disapprove, at times, of my subject matter or even my language. It puts one in the awkward position of needing to fly both on and off the radar — I definitely want people being aware of and reading my writing, but I don’t need a mob with pitchforks and torches marching up my driveway, metaphorically speaking of course (I’m pretty sure). That is precisely why tenure was established: academics and others who work in the arena of the human intellect (I just like the way that sounds — not even sure what it means) need to be able to explore and express ideas without fear of losing their jobs because somebody with a little clout takes offense. Of course, if education “reformers,” including those in Illinois, get their way, tenure will be abolished. That would be a pleasant day.
I have been invited to read the first chapter of Men of Winter at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 next month at the University of Louisville. I’ve attended that conference, maybe, seven of the last eight years, and enjoy it very much. Normally I’ve presented an academic paper in addition to reading a creative piece, but I didn’t submit an academic abstract this time (though my brain runneth over with ideas for scholarly pursuits) because I knew I’d have to stop working on my novel in progress, the Authoress, for a month or longer to research and write a proper paper — and I don’t want to distract myself from my creative writing, which, by the way, is going along well. I just completed a draft of chapter 21 and am at work on the twenty-second chapter, with the manuscript now in excess of 350 pages (not that bulk in itself matters, but this is by far the most complex work I’ve done). I’ve contacted a couple of independent bookstores in Louisville in hopes of scheduling a reading while I’m in town for the conference, but, shockingly, I’ve heard from neither.
On the reading front, I’m still tackling Anna Karenina and enjoying it a lot. No doubt the snowy, frigid weather of the last few weeks has enhanced my enjoyment of Tolstoy’s novel even more. I was marveling at a scene I read this morning because of its being so applicable to today, even though it was written in the 1870s, in Russia. At a dinner party, a guest is envious of the “American way of doing business,” which in essence means an expedited, informal way, minus a lot of bureaucratic oversight — exactly the unregulated style of business that led to our economic near collapse two years ago — and the sort of style Republicans would have us return to in earnest now that Wall Street tycoons are back on their feet, thanks to taxpayers.
Also at the dinner party, which is in section 6, chapter 22, they discuss the latest innovations in agricultural technology, specifically a new threshing machine, and how Levin, a wealthy yet hands-on landowner, is opposed to these sorts of innovations as they will, in the long run, be detrimental to farming and, more profoundly, socioeconomics in Russia. Basically he asks, If we replace the peasant class with machinery, what will the peasant class do? This is precisely where the United States is at in the twenty-first century in that our emphasis on computer technology has made obsolete many manual-labor and even skilled-labor sorts of jobs, like in manufacturing, for example, and educators, therefore, are charged with the task of making certain every student is college bound and ready for a high-tech-related job (the thrust really of the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative). It all sounds quite lovely, except for the minor detail that not every student is geared to do that high-tech sort of work. Just as I will never be able to dunk a basketball, some students will never be able to write well or to work calculus (just as I cannot work calculus). But the sorts of decent jobs that these good young people could count on a generation ago are no longer available — they’ve gone overseas or have disappeared altogether.
In short, Tolstoy’s broad insights, from the economic workings of society to the romantic workings of the human heart, are quite remarkable, even a century and a half later.
Pathfinding: a blog devoted to helping new writers find outlets for their work
Tolstoy a century later; Men of Winter to be released soon
Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, and as a matter of coincidence I’ve been reading Anna Karenina. One of my followees on Twitter posted an English-language Russian news segment reporting on the author and what an industry he’s become, especially his home, Yasnaya Polyana, as a tourist destination. The news reporter interviewed Tolstoy’s great grandson, who talked about the irony of the fact that very few of the tourists who enthusiastically flock to Tolstoy’s home have in fact read any of his work. Then he went on to discuss how it’s a shame that the vast majority of people only read classics that are required of them in high school. He made sure to take nothing away from contemporary books and authors, who should be read too, but insisted that classics, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or War and Peace, still have much to offer modern readers. My favorite author, William H. Gass, also laments that too few people today read classic literature, which he believes helps to develop the mind in ways that popular fiction is unable to. I’m on the other end of the spectrum in that I’m drawn to classics and don’t read new authors as much as I feel I should — but there are only so many hours in the day: with working three jobs and giving daily attention to my own writing, there’s not nearly enough time left to read as I would alike. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t take a newspaper, though the idea of sitting down with a big thick paper, like The New York Times, and a good cup of coffee is very appealing. To find that time, however, I’d have to forfeit time spent reading other things (like the three hours I spent with Tolstoy this morning) that I find nourish both my intellect and my soul.
Speaking of my writing, Men of Winter is supposed to be out this week (though I’m not holding my breath). It is fair to say that it will be out soon. Meanwhile I’ve uploaded videos of my reading chapter 1 of the novel to both Vimeo and YouTube; so far neither site has garnered very many hits, not surprisingly. Also I launched Pathfinding: a blog devoted to helping new writers find outlets for their work as my Punkin House author’s blog, though I’m not yet listed among their blogging authors (I believe PHP is redoing their webpages). On the one hand, I’m looking forward to having my novel out in the world, but on the other I feel a bit handicapped in trying to promote it as neither my three-job lifestyle nor pocketbook easily lends itself to aggressive promotion in terms of scheduling readings and attending book fairs, etc. I will do my best, however. (This past week I did receive an invitation to read the first chapter of Men of Winter at The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in February — now just to find some way to pay for attending the conference. . . .)
I continue work on the Authoress, soldiering my way through chapter 19. It’s slow but I like what I have, which isn’t to say it won’t need much revision. It will.
In a bit I’m headed to the local Barnes & Noble for a school library fundraiser — just what I need: a good excuse to buy books.
More Turgenev and a proposed release date for Men of Winter
I’ve been reading from the collection of Ivan Turgenev’s stories (though some have been described as short novels). After reading the collection’s titular story, “First Love,” I read an earlier-written tale, “Bezhin Meadow” (1851), then skipped to the final tale in the collection “Clara Milich” (1882), and now I’m reading “Assya” (1857). There’s been little rhyme or reason as to which stories I’ve read and in what order. I suppose I’ve been guided somewhat by David Magarshack’s (that is, the translator’s) introduction, and his assessment of the evolution of Turgenev’s style as reflected in these stories that span more than thirty years. According to Magarshack, in his earliest stories Turgenev was especially interested in describing scenery:
The interesting stylistic feature of A Sportsman’s Sketches, as well as of Turgenev’s other stories belonging to the same period [early 1850s], is the presence of the long descriptive passages which have very little relation to the subject matter of the story. Indeed, Turgenev was for a time so obsessed with his ability to paint landscapes in words that even his letters of the period abound in descriptive passages of the same kind. (pp. x-xi, First Love and Other Tales, Norton 1968)
On the one hand, I see in the stories I’ve read so far what Magarshack is getting at. His assessment, though, that the “passages … have very little relation to the subject matter of the story” is not one that I would whole-heartedly embrace. There may be little direct relation to the plot of the story, but it seems to me that Turgenev is operating in a way that would soon become known as impressionism in painting, and a bit later as impressionism in literature. That is, the descriptive passages are often meant to reflect some meaningful aspect of the characters who are operating within or observing the scenery — that aspect may be the characters’ psychologies, or it may be foreshadowing their narrative advancement. In the story “Assya,” for example, the connection between scenery and characterization is overtly made by Turgenev when the narrator says of Gagin, a young Russian fellow he’s met in Germany and who’s awakened him early on a beautiful morning, “With his wavy, shiny hair, open neck, and rosy cheeks, he was as fresh as the morning himself” (94).
Needless to say, I’ve been enjoying the Turgenev stories. I read a bit of Turgenev as an undergraduate, but he’s one of the many authors who’ve been just on the edges of my academic radar all these years.
A couple of developments on the creative writing front: My story “The Composure of Death,” which I just began sending round last month, has been taken by Pisgah Review, a beautiful little journal associated with Brevard College, in Brevard, North Carolina. The journal is edited by Jubal Tiner, whom I met several years ago at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (though I’m not sure Jubal is making the connection just yet). According to Jubal’s email, the editorial staff is not in love with the title of the story so they’ve asked me to consider a different title, which I’m willing to do — I have no emotional investment in that specific title. I did reply with a brief explanation of the title’s origin, which is Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a story I allude to in my story, and why I’d chosen that phrase. I don’t know if that will change their feelings about the title, but, if not, I’ll put my thinking cap on and come up with another. With the acceptance of the story, each of the stories in my collection Weeping with an Ancient God, a novella with collected stories, has been published. I’ve also been shopping around the first chapter (under the title “Melvill in the Marquesas”) of the unpublished novella, but so far no one has offered to take it to the dance. It’s still very early in the process, and I’ve only gotten a couple of rejections so far.
The other development: According to Amy Ferrell, CEO of Punkin House Press, Men of Winter should be out in October. Still quite a ways to go in terms of laying out the pages and designing the cover, but that will apparently get intense in a hurry. PHP also wants to do some sort of online workshop/contest that I’ll lead and judge for publication, in part to promote my novel but also to help other writers find publication. Right now it’s just a concept, so that too will have to be fleshed out in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, I continue to work on the Authoress, my novel-in-progress. I’m about 265-manuscript pages in, and a couple of days ago I roughly mapped out the final sections of the story. I have a long way to go, but I must resist the urge to rush toward the finish line. In a sense I’ve been working on the novel for four-plus years, but that’s misleading because for three years I (almost literally) didn’t touch the manuscript as I finished my Ph.D., specifically preparing for and passing comprehensive exams, then getting the dissertation topic approved, and researching, writing, and defending it. So, really, this is only my second summer of working on the novel. I must keep in mind facts like it took Joyce seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, and William H. Gass worked on The Tunnel for nearly thirty years — not to imply that my book will be another Finnegans Wake or The Tunnel, but rather to remind myself that a novel worth its salt takes time to write, and rushing the process is counterproductive.
Notes from the Louisville Conference 2010
I’ve just returned from the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (LCLC)–ungainly title but terrific conference–and I wanted to share some of my finds and observations. For any literature folks who haven’t been, it’s a top-flight international conference and well worth the effort. It’s normally the last weekend in February and will be again in 2011. I didn’t hear any concrete numbers, but it seemed attendance was down a bit (as universities are being hit by the economic crisis as well, and departments are having to pare back their travel allowances–in times of economic downturn, humanities and the fine arts tend to find themselves on the bureaucratic chopping block); nevertheless, the panels that I attended and participated in were up to their usual standards. I chaired a panel on Joyce’s Ulysses on Thursday. Even though it was not a prearranged panel, all three papers dealt with Molly Bloom, offering new assessments of her character in the novel. Throughout the twentieth century, commentators tended to characterize her as a wanton woman, even a whore–but these papers were much more open-minded about her roles as wife, mother, woman. I was especially intrigued by Elizabeth Kate Switaj‘s paper on “Ulysses as Lesbian Text” as the writer, a doctoral student at Queen’s University, Belfast, dealt with an approach to reading that identifies “space” for interpretation in a text that may not, at the surface level, seem to support such a reading. One of the reasons I found this approach so attractively provocative is that my own pedagogical hobbyhorse in recent months has been to get my students to embrace ambiguity in their analyses of literature. It seems that in the last couple of years especially my brightest students are “mathy” and “sciencey” types who want to reduce every work of literature to some sort of calculus equation that can be definitively “solved.” I tell them that the humanities aren’t about simplifying everything down to its “correct” answer. Humans are complex, and therefore ambiguous, creatures who often don’t understand their own behaviors and attitudes, leave be the behaviors and attitudes of others. A sophisticated textual analysis doesn’t shy away from conflicting and conflicted conclusions–these sorts of conclusions are meaningful in their own right as long as they’re grounded in textual evidence.
I was also treated to some of Switaj’s poetry. Speaking of creative panels, I especially liked the work of a young poet named Jeremy Allan Hawkins, who read from the thesis manuscript he’d submitted the previous day for his MFA from the University of Alabama. I enjoyed the short story “Blue Sky White” by Tessa Mellas, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cincinnati. Deborah Adelman’s (College of DuPage) cross-genre piece “Fleshing out the Bones” was very engaging, being part memoir, part fiction; as was Greenfield Jones’s (Louisville, Ky.) novel excerpt from Rêve Américain; and Adam Prince’s (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) “Ugly around Him” from his book-length manuscript.
I attended several thought-provoking critical panels, including one on the graphic novel–an area of literature that seems to share a lot with postmodernism, especially postmodern texts as trauma texts. Graphic novels tend to be nonlinear and elliptical, thus putting the reader in the position of having to piece the narrative together in order for it to make sense. Victims of trauma, by the same token, tend to communicate the source event in nonlinear, elliptical “texts” that must be reconstructed by a listener/reader. Another paper (by April D. Fallon, Kentucky State University) has made me interested in e. e. cummings’s poetry in a way I hadn’t been previously.
My own presentations were well enough received. I read my story “Communion with the Dead,” which was published in the fall 2008 issue of The Chariton Review. I also presented it at the College English Association Conference in March 2008. I enjoy reading it aloud, but it’s a bit tricky. For one thing, at a couple of key places in the story I switch to unpunctuated stream of consciousness, and minus any visual cues for the audience, it may not make perfect sense (not to overuse the word, but it’s meant to be elliptical even when being read, as opposed to listened to); also, there are several Italian names that look interesting (and a bit exotic, I believe) on the page, but they can be challenging to read aloud fluidly. I also presented my critical paper “In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War: Cultural Trauma and the Fiction of William H. Gass.” It, too, was well enough received. I am attempting to turn it into a 30-page article for a European journal, and now that the Louisville Conference is over, I’ll be getting back to that project. My physical working on “The Authoress” also came to a halt this week because of my traveling–physical working, I say, because I think about the novel all the time and I have some ideas about how it should end, though the ending is still a long way off. Right now I’m working on a long central (I think) section that has been inspired, structurally at least, by Ulysses. I hope to complete a draft of the novel this summer. Meanwhile, an editor is interested in looking at my earlier written novella Weeping with an Ancient God for possible serial publication in her journal–which would be terrific, since trying to get a novella published is even more difficult than a first novel.
This morning I continued annotating Omensetter’s Luck.
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