My First Time: Askold Melnyczuk

Photo by Alex Johnson

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Askold Melnyczuk, author of several novels, including The House of Widows, Ambassador of the Dead, and What is Told. His latest novel is Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature. His stories, poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, APR, Poetry, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. Askold has received numerous awards for his fiction, as well as for his editorial work as founding editor of Agni and Arrowsmith Press. In 2011 he received the Garret Prize from AWP.

My First Dissident:

Daniel Berrigan’s Unconquerable Flame

to have gathered from the air a live tradition

or from the fine old eye the unconquered flame...

Ezra Pound

“To understand the truth about a society, always look to those at the bottom,” Daniel Berrigan advised us. “Always stand with those at the bottom,” he repeated.

We were sitting over lunch in the Casablanca with writers Alex Johnson and Maureen McLane. Arrowsmith had just published a collection of Dan’s poems, along with a short book of essays in his honor. We were on our way to the Friend’s Meeting House in Cambridge, where Dan was to read.

I had met him a year before, when PEN New England gave him an award. Though Fred Marchant and I said nothing about it to Dan, there had been a backroom battle between members of the board who wanted to invite Dan and those who believed he wasn’t sufficiently “literary,” despite the thirty or so books he’d published.

By then Dan had occupied a central place in my personal pantheon for nearly three decades. I first read him in a high school Theatre Arts class in 1971. Mr. Henry, a particularly progressive teacher, gave us The Trial of the Catonsville Nine to study. Dan’s play about the trial of the nine, including the two Berrigan brothers, accused of pouring homemade napalm over draft records, gave me my first taste of authentic American dissident literature. Reading it in tandem with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich helped me understand the different ways in which both governments flaunted their contempt for the values they professed to uphold. Burning draft records was criminal; immolating children was not. In what world did that look like a reasonable call? Craziness.

Berrigan’s understanding of the Gospels, his insistence on the importance of actively resisting the behaviors of a corrupt government by putting one’s body on the line, represented a Catholicism I could get behind. Had I met him earlier, I might not have been as quick to leave the Church, though my native resistance to authority was perhaps more deeply ingrained even than Dan’s.

I attribute this to my refugee parents’ experiences during World War II. Listening to their stories about friends arrested and executed, or made to disappear in Siberia or Auschwitz, I couldn’t imagine how much sorrow and anger they needed to put aside in order to make their way in this new world. They were grateful for the second chance this country provided. Gratitude, however, did little to mitigate the complex daily challenges posed by trying to master a language (the fourth for both my parents) they began learning only in the refugee camp in which they spent five years. But my parents were merely two among hundreds of other refugee families I knew through their church in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Everywhere I turned I saw the consequences of war playing out long after the bombs stopped falling. We didn’t have the term PTSD yet—it came into use only in the 70s, around the Vietnam war—but I’d bet that millions who lived through the myriad grotesqueries of WWII were afflicted by it. My parents fled a city bisected by a river, which became the boundary line separating the occupying German forces from the occupying Soviet ones. More than seventy years later, the damage inflicted then echoes in the psychological struggles of the survivors’ grandchildren.

Is there anything less Christian than war? And yet does any Catholic doctrine reek of bullshit more pungently than Augustine’s theory of just war? “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command,” wrote Augustine, “…have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government….such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” If you believe George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, or Barack Obama for that matter, heard divine commands and embodied the wisdom of government, then make your peace with the idea that God’s okay with the bombing of hospitals and schools, pleased by landmines blowing the feet off children thirty years after a war ended, and indifferent to all that comes with state-sanctioned violence. My grandmother was raped by soldiers—doesn’t matter which ones. Men, granted authority over the bodies of others, told they have the right to kill, surely also have the right to a little free sex along the way.

Discovering a member of the priesthood blessed with the clarity to see this, with the nerve to stand up to a man like his boss Cardinal Spellman, who supported American exceptionalism abroad, enthusiastically backed the Vietnam War, and opposed the work of unions in the United States as smacking of communism, was cause for rejoicing.

In the stand-off between individual conscience and the State, it’s the State which usually appears to triumph. But, as with many appearances, this is an illusion. Each time he was told to rise in a courtroom to hear yet another functionary pronounce him guilty as charged, Berrigan would stand with his back to the judge, unwilling even to pretend to render unto Caesar something over which no government had jurisdiction: his conscience. “The State,” which presents itself as an objective, monolithic entity, is comprised of individuals, each of whom makes choices they must live with. Hiding behind the rhetoric of the state to shield themselves from feeling responsible for their decisions, they never realize they’re hiding from themselves. It’s no accident that our little volume about Berrigan is titled Conscience, Consequence.

Dan’s example, and his decades of witness, have been a fortifying force throughout my life. During a weekend retreat in upstate New York, Dan spoke to us about his meditations on The Book of Kings, the Biblical narrative that begins with the death of David and the ascendancy of Solomon, and concludes with the razing of the First Temple. He’d just published a close reading of it, his textual analysis enlivened with prison letters from his brother Philip (I remember receiving a few of these after publishing a piece by him in Agni), as well as poems by Howard Nemerov and newspaper clips about G.W. Bush’s war on Iraq. The collage of materials was designed to suggest the parallels and lessons to be drawn between our day and the reign of the Kings of Judah, a period extending roughly from 960 to 560 BC. In his conversation, as in the book, Berrigan underscores “the pathology of power,” discovering in the chronicle myriad lessons on what not to do. As always, Berrigan underscores the meaning of Christ: “He speaks for the victims, the forgotten ones, those who live and die in the margin of the text, in the footnotes, the silence, the space between letters.”

*     *     *
As I write this, fire ravages the tar sands region of Alberta, leaving a landscape not even Hollywood CGI can recreate. In the face of this environmental devastation, I think of Dan’s commitment to all that longs to flower and grow. That’s what he hoped for for those “at the bottom.”

Berrigan’s death has elicited an outpouring of media attention. Having largely ignored the living man’s efforts to quicken our consciences, the media, believing the messenger neutralized at last, cozy up in hopes of sharing the warmth that flows naturally from a living soul even after the body ceases to function. But while the breath has gone out, the fire it breathed is far from extinguished.

I’ve heard stories about Berrigan’s self-righteousness, but what I remember is his humility that afternoon in Cambridge. After the lightest of lunches, we arrived at the Friend’s Meeting House, which stands across from Longfellow’s mansion on Brattle Street, to find the place overflowing with Dan’s countless friends, including Howard Zinn, James Carroll, and many others. When it came his time to read, Dan took the mike for no more than ten minutes so that the poets reading with him could have more time.

Berrigan at the book signing following the reading, with writer (and former priest) James Carroll

Berrigan’s work always seems to point in two directions at once. On one side stands Jeremiah, quivering with rage. On the other, the poet faces the unparsable miracle of being, on behalf of which he’s willing to suffer the tedium and insult of arrest and imprisonment as “something owed life/…small price, all said/handcuffed.” The prophet condemns; the poet inspires. He makes his reason for walking down this particular road clear enough:

Some stood up once, and sat down.
Some walked a mile, and walked away.

...Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth, they walked the waters,
they walked the air.

“Why do you stand,” they were asked,
“and why do you walk?”

“Because of the children,” they said,
“and because of the heart,
and because of the bread.”

“Because the cause
is the heart’s beat,
and the children born,
and the risen bread.”

Sunday Sentence: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

We pulled the strings on the people across the land and by god they got to their feet and they danced for us.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Friday Freebie: One From Without by Jack Fuller

Congratulations to James Stolen, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie giveaway: Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.

This week’s book contest is for the new novel by Jack Fuller, One From Without. The publisher, Unbridled Books, is generously offering three copies of the book to Quivering Pen readers. Here’s more about One From Without...

A large credit reporting company sees the era of Big Data coming. Its CEO dreams of knowing so much about the people it tracks that it will be able to predict what they will do. With the data, he believes, the company will know people better than they know themselves. Meantime, his chief financial officer has come to the corporate world in order to hide in the numbers on his spreadsheets, trying to escape a dark, ambiguous experience from his past in the CIA. Suddenly a hacker breaks into the company’s consumer database and alters individual files. This threatens not only the company future but its very existence. As senior executives struggle with what to do next, they find out who they really are.

Bestselling author Scott Turow had this to say about the book: “I love One From Without. To me it’s Jack’s best book since Convergence. Jack’s experience in corporate board rooms makes this book unmatched in authenticity and the only novel I know which fully deserves the label of “corporate intrigue.” The flashback portions detailing life in the intelligence services are on the level of LeCarre. Beyond that, the writing–and detail–are often flat-out beautiful and the characterizations deep and compelling. This is a book that pulls you in from the start and propels you through the pages. A truly wonderful novel.”

For more on the author, be sure to read Finding My Novel: Jack Fuller, the Vietnam War, and the Fragments of a Book published earlier here at The Quivering Pen.

If you’d like a chance at winning One From Without, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on June 9, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on June 10. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

The Days of Our Lives

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

That’s the guiding quote by Annie Dillard at the Catching Days blog, run by Cynthia Newberry Martin. The blog is built on a simple, beautiful concept: that by describing the activities of one particular day, writers will reveal deeper truths about themselves. Combined, the micro events of our lives add up to the macro pattern of our biographies. I’ve long been an admirer of what Cynthia is doing at Catching Days, and so when she invited me to contribute to the How We Spend Our Days feature, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough.

The day I chose to write about—Friday, May 27—was typical in many respects: I rose early, wrote for a couple of hours, went to work at the Day Job, came home to make dinner, and spent the evening watching TV with my wife. I talked about my cat, the treadmill in my basement, a particularly tasty pork roast, and my favorite coffee mug:

     I am weird about my coffee mugs. Whatever I choose for the day greatly influences my mood. Nearly all of my mugs are book-themed: there’s the Banned Books mug, the “Read Harder” mug from Book Riot, the mug with Charles Dickens’ bearded mug looking out at me, and the mug I bought when I visited the Library of Congress, which has a quote from Thomas Jefferson (“I cannot live without books.”). But when I want to have a serious, crack-the-knuckles-and-get-down-to-it kind of writing day, I choose my William Faulkner mug. This is the one I’ve owned for the longest time (more than a decade at this point) and though there’s a worrisome hairline fracture along the top of the handle, it has somehow survived the near-droppings and over-caffeinated hard set-downs. I love this mug with the kind of affection people usually reserve for their pets. I can’t explain my romance with this ceramic cup except to say I think it’s because I like drinking out of William Faulkner’s head. Somehow, I’ve taken the notion that my coffee will be infused with his linguistic talent. Poppycock, of course…but try telling that to my heart.
     I pick Faulkner today. I’m on deadline to turn in a short story commissioned for a new anthology in five days. It is not going well. The editors need a completed draft of a story between 3,000 and 6,000 words. Five days before it’s due, I have 853 limp, aimless words that stubbornly keep bashing their heads against a concrete wall. I don’t have writer’s block—I can write plenty of words, goddammit—I have story block. This narrative doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. I am depending on coffee from William Faulkner’s head to help me figure out this story’s identity.

The details of my “caught day,” however, were selective out of necessity. When I sat down to write the essay, I realized there were so many—too many—other things that happened to me on May 27 that I would leave the maximum allotted word length in the dust long before I even reached 9 a.m. So, I had to pick and choose what to include.

A partial list of what you won’t read about at Cynthia’s blog: my choice of clothes for the day, my impatience when I got stuck behind slow drivers on my way to work here in Butte, Montana, commentary about all the interesting things I read that day (from online articles to the novel currently on my nightstand), the hour-long phone call with my editor to discuss my new novel, the snacks I munched on at work, the “conversations” I had with my cat (which involve tongue-clicks on my part and a cocked head on his), the way the house smelled of slow-cooked pork roast when I came home, and all the things my wife and I said to each other in the hours between “Good morning” and “Good night.” Nor did I mention the fact that May 27 was my birthday, and all that milestone implies (appreciation for all the Facebook messages balanced with the omnipresent gloom of mortality). There just wasn’t enough room to catch all of my day. And that’s probably a good thing because you would have been bored to tears if I’d somehow been able to catalogue 17 hours of activities. So, I just gave you a few glittering chips hewn from the day.

Click here to read the essay

Here are highlights from some other authors who told Catching Days how they spent their hours:

I manage to get offline and work from 9:30 to 1 pm. I don’t mean steady work. I mean little bursts of fifteen or twenty minutes when I’m actually with the characters, present in the room you might say. I have no idea if the story’s any good or not. That all comes later. I just have to show up and keep my heroine moving through the world and see if she can get herself into some kind of honest trouble.
          ~Steve Almond

Our new home—for living, for my family—contains no place for me to write. So way back in September I bought an old camper-trailer, a 1959 Dalton, and put it down on the creek. Ever since, I’ve been trying to find time to get it in shape: run a line for the propane to the stove, build a rack for the solar panels, wire them to the batteries, fix the busted windows, build some bench seats, install a desk, jack the whole thing up on blocks. Now, a week before the New Year, there’s still a gas leak somewhere and the solar panels aren’t giving me a charge, but god it felt good to sit down, open my computer, pour some coffee into my mug, stare out the hoar-frosted window for a second, listen to the shushing of the creek, and start.
          ~Josh Weil

After my run, I pour a cup of tea, sit down with my laptop, and put on my headphones. I’m currently having a love affair with a Portland band called Fort Union. One of their songs, “That Part of Me,” was on repeat so much during the early chapters that I decided to name a place in the book after the band. I understand that other writers can’t listen to music with lyrics while they write, but I like it. I like hearing the rhythm of the words set to music while I write, and music can evoke atmosphere with the tiniest gestures: a change in key, an unusual harmony, the lilt of a singer’s voice, a cello behind the guitars, hand-clapping. It’s something I think about when I’m trying to translate the story I see and feel in my head into words on the page.
          ~Alexis M. Smith

I have seventy things to do, but one overrides them all: the copyedits of my new novel are due in three days. This is my last chance to incorporate any changes (beyond fixing typos) into the manuscript. I need to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and even change a last few major things for my editor. The novel is ninety thousand words long. I’m on page twelve. That’s twelve, as in one ten and two units. As in, three hundred pages away from the end.
          ~Rebecca Makkai

Click for the full list of Catching Days contributors

I Spy With My Little Eye: Surveillance Stories at Catapult

We like to watch.

That’s the consensus of the contributors to Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, edited by Bryan Hurt and recently published in a new edition by Catapult (long-time Quivering Pen readers may remember when the anthology was published by O/R Books last year). To celebrate the book’s release last month, our editor asked if we’d be interested in conducting a little experiment. Our assignment: “engage in an act of surveillance of some kind. Something super simple and not illegal” and then write about it for the Catapult website.

I said, “Sign me up! I already have a trench coat, fedora and dark sunglasses.”

For my clandestine operation, I chose to people-watch at the Perkins Bakery and Restaurant here in Butte, Montana. It begins like this:

This place bakes in the midmorning heat, and smells like our various coats. The sun, aslant through the plate-glass windows, weighs heavy in the maple-flavored air, blankets our heads with Sunday torpidity. A hostess guides me past tables filled with heathens who have skipped church this morning (as well as those who went to the early service and now stare in judgment at those who probably did not). I’m led to a sticky booth at the back of the restaurant. I sit, order coffee, water, pancakes, and something called the Big Country Smasher®. I open my notebook, unpocket my pen, and begin my observations.

A young girl walks her littler sister around the perimeter of booths on a leash. They both wear sweatshirts in varying shades of pink and purple: The older sister’s has a large white pony on it, rearing and clapping its front hooves; the leash-bound sister goes by too fast for me to be certain what hers depicts. A flower? A monkey? SpongeBob? She skips, happy as a puppy, while her sister keeps the leash taut. They do several laps until, somewhere on the other side of the restaurant, a wail rises like a siren and then here comes the big sister carrying—trying to carry—the younger girl, hurrying back to their parents at their table, narrating the whole way: “She was running and hit her head on the corner of a table. I told her, I told her! But she wouldn’t stop running!” The mother takes up the girl, smothers the sirens in her land-o-plenty bosom. The older sister waits for a word of thanks, appreciation, approbation—anything. Getting none, she glares at her mother, then throws the leash to the ground and stomps back to her seat.

Click here to read the rest of my Catapult essay

My fellow Watchlisters had some terrific stories to tell. Here are excerpts from those essays published at Catapult.

     The plan was to go to Columbus, look at some houses, maybe rifle through some homeowners’ personal things while my real estate agent wasn’t looking—an underwear drawer here, a medicine cabinet there—and report back. An easy way to fulfill my surveillance assignment for Catapult. Something that wouldn’t get me in too much trouble, but also a complete invasion of private space. What kinds of antidepressants do Midwesterners use nowadays? Do they prefer boxers or briefs? I was excited to find out.

Dirty Laundry by Bryan Hurt

     I had more success, once night had settled, in smoothly tracking a silver pickup as it swung to join the 101. I tried to maintain speed in a separate lane, though it wouldn’t be long before I had to pass. I hastily merged and allowed a third motorist between us. A few miles later, the truck swerved across the entire freeway to exit.
     Alarm split my brain. I sped into Universal City after them. The two men in the truck were arguing, I thought, and I may have locked eyes with one or both when they glanced up into their rearview. We slowed at an intersection so wide and desolate it struck me an invitation to murder.

Follow That Car by Miles Klee

     We were in another Starbucks. Antwerp Train Station, I think. We’d ordered in Dutch then, but otherwise it could have been here, in suburban Marietta. Georgia, East Cobb, where sports shorts are a staple and English words float around, bits of conversations sent into the air like ghosts. And Jan’s name is never spelled right. He has had Yan. And Yarn. Once, the barista wrote Juan. Or, if he spells it out, it is never pronounced right, so he doesn’t realize when his own name is called out. Often, he is called Djan? Djan? Once, a barista decided that Jan was short for Janet. That made me laugh. Now he has taken to calling himself Tom.

Overheard at Starbucks by Chika Unigwe

     I was there, in the café, as hours passed. I worked. Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate writing; I love having written.” Yes, I don’t always love writing, but I love having been to the café.
     Plus, the café is the ideal spot to do what writers always tell themselves is their job: observe the human condition. Or, you know, spy on people. Young lovers making out in the back corner, old lovers breaking up at the center table, a dozen not-yet-jaded twenty-somethings pounding out their individual artistic visions on identical Apple laptops: It’s all here. An infinite number of distractions to watch and to pretend are “research.”

A Baggie of Ice and the Human Condition by Lincoln Michel

     A pile of large kitchen knives (carried to register in an Easter basket. Basket was not purchased.)
     Cashier: “Don’t mess with you on the wrong day!”
     The man buying the knives, who has a Chicago accent, tells the following story: When he was young, he sold Cutco knives door-to-door. He did this in “the neighborhood.” He put on a good show, cutting pennies in half for housewives. He would dice up tomatoes real fast, like this. He was the top salesman in his district. This won him a trip on a riverboat cruise, where he gambled away his earnings at the blackjack table—oh no, right?—but he met his wife at the Spirit of the Mississippi bar while drinking away his sorrows so, hey, it all worked out.

Items Purchased at Abbott’s Thrift in Felton, California, from 11:10 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, and What the Editorializing Cashier Said While I Sat in a Rocking Chair by the Front Door by Kelly Luce

     Two months ago, someone moved into that house across the way. I discovered this one night while casually pulling a sweater off over my head in our bedroom. When my skull was loosed from the neckhole, I realized that not only was the room that faced us lit up, it was occupied: a white, narrow-shouldered, dark-haired man sitting at a desk.
     I dropped down to the floor like I’d been shot, army-crawled half-naked across the hardwood, and pulled myself up to the sill. There he was, typing in an unhurried fashion, the blue-white, luminous glow of the apple at the back of his laptop staring at me like an eye. Keeping low, I slid toward our hallway—my hand snaking up to the dresser to locate my pajamas—and finished undressing there.

The Novelist by Carmen Maria Machado

     Within an hour, the boy’s Twitter profile was gone. Then his Facebook page. I clicked back to the friend, and by lunchtime he was gone, too. Not a sign of either of them, their existence obliterated, the ball games and goofy meals at Sonic and prom pictures submerged without a ripple.
     The father, on the other hand, whose idea it was to go to the rally, emerged unscathed. As far as social media goes, he is still with us. And in a few hours the outrage had moved on to the next target—there were more Trump rallies, other folks to go after.
     By evening I felt queasy, as if I’d spent the day drinking red wine and eating Cheetos. My fingers were stained with grease. I was not pleased with myself. I hadn’t done any writing, or anything useful. Just stayed riveted to a sneaky look into a few lives and an online battle that clarified very little.

The Rule of the Mob by Katherine Karlin


Unlike the essays at Catapult, our stories in Watchlist are all fiction. They involved, to some degree or another, spying, surveillance, watching (and being watched), and the accompanying feelings of lust, curiosity and paranoia. I know I’m biased, but I think it’s a pretty damn good collection of short stories.  Shelf Awareness had this to say about the book: “In this diverse and daring fiction collection, writers of all stripes deal with the act of watching and being watched, subverting and challenging surveillance’s obvious connotations and raising questions about our intricate dance with privacy and transparency.” To order a copy of the book directly from the publisher, go to this address, then leave a briefcase of unmarked bills at the appointed time and location. We’ll be in touch to arrange delivery. And don’t forget to wear your trench coat.

Author portraits by Tyler Boss

Trailer Park Tuesday: To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Just as she did in her debut novel The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey marries magical realism with the cold realities of Alaska’s wilderness in her latest book To the Bright Edge of the World. Here’s how the publisher describes the story:

In the winter of 1885, Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester sets out with his men on an expedition into the newly acquired territory of Alaska. Their objective: to travel up the ferocious Wolverine River, mapping the interior and gathering information on the region’s potentially dangerous native tribes. With a young and newly pregnant wife at home, Forrester is anxious to complete the journey with all possible speed and return to her. But once the crew passes beyond the edge of the known world, there's no telling what awaits them.

The trailer, in which the camera flows like a river over an animated map, only serves to heighten my anticipation of To the Bright Edge of the World. “A sweeping, epic Alaskan tale with just a hint of magic,” the novel is constructed from letters and diary entries written by a young pioneering couple. In the opening letter sent to the curator of a historical museum, Lieutenant Colonel Forrester’s great-nephew writes: “The Colonel’s journey was a harrowing one. Maybe it was doomed from the beginning but I don’t see as to how that takes away from its importance. His expedition is surely the Alaskan equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s....Several of his private journal entries are downright fantastical and don’t align with his official reports. Some who have read these pages write off the odder occurrences as hallucinations, brought on by starvation and exposure to the elements. Others have accused the Colonel of embellishing his journals in order to gain notoriety....I’ve chosen to consider another possibility—that he described what he saw with his own two eyes. It takes a kind of arrogance to think everything in the world can be measured and weighed with our scientific instruments.” If you’d like to read more from the novel, which is due in bookstores in August, click here for a brief excerpt.

Sunday Sentence: Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

          Maybe we pray on our knees because god
          only listens when we’re this close
          to the devil.

“Untitled (Blue, Green, & Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
from Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Friday Freebie: Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Congratulations to Bart Zimmer and Thomas Baughman, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie giveaway: Safe From the Sea and The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye.

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975

This week’s book contest features the new poetry collection by Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, now out from Copper Canyon Press. Vuong is an incredibly vibrant poet; his lines writhe like snakes on the page—dangerous, mesmerizing, unpredictable. The New Yorker had this to say about his work: “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.” I’m currently working my way through the book, slowly so I can give time for each of the lines to sink their teeth into my heart. Night Sky With Exit Wounds is powerful, powerful stuff. Just take a look at an excerpt from Aubade With Burning City, which begins with this note: South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

     Milkflower petals on the street
                                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
               Open, he says.
                                     She opens.
                                                    Outside, a soldier spits out
              his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones
                                                                             fallen from the sky. May
all your Christmases be white
                                      as the traffic guard unstraps his holster.

I hope the erratic spacing comes through on your screen because form is vitally important to Vuong’s work: the way a poem looks influences the way you feel which in turn adds layers to what the poem means. As he said in a 2013 interview, cited at the Poetry Foundation website, “Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as...an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit.”

If you’d like a chance at winning Night Sky With Exit Wounds, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

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Soup and Salad: Hilary Mantel’s Writing Day, Write Your Way to Jackson Hole, George Saunders’ Debut Novel, How Books Can Help Us Survive A War, Charles Dickens Names Names, 12 Things Kelly Luce Noticed While Reading Every Short Story Published in 2014-15, Friends in Books

On today's menu:

1.  This piece by Hilary Mantel at The Guardian about how she spends her writing day went viral when it was published last month, but for those of you who missed it the first time around, here’s how it begins:

     Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves.
     This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews–any kind of non-fiction–seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.

Can I get an “Amen!”?

2.  From the Department of Having a Great Time, Wish You Were Here comes two writing opportunities in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (the granite-peaked paradise where I grew up).
     The first, a Nonfiction Book Writing Retreat, is led by Laura Bush and features two days of intensive writing (including a session called “Getting Down and Drafty”) in the historic Moulton Ranch cabins which lie in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Space is limited, so you need to sign up now. (Full disclosure: Laura is a friend and former classmate of mine, but I wouldn’t be telling you about this retreat if I didn’t think she had the energy and smarts to get you kickstarted on a draft of your book).
     The second event coming up next month is the renowned Jackson Hole Writers Conference, led by Tim Sandlin. As a past attendee, I can vouch for the value of this three-day conference: it’s inspiring, entertaining, and full of creative energy. In fact, I loved my time there so much, I even wrote two essays (actually one essay broken in half) for a new anthology about the conference called Writing It Right. This year’s conference features authors Gretel Ehrlich, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Brian Doyle and many others across a wide spectrum of genre. Go here to get registered.

3.  Four words: George Saunders’ debut novel.

Okay, here are a few more words about the inspiration behind Lincoln in the Bardo from an interview with Saunders at Vulture: A really long time ago, in the Bill Clinton era, my wife and I and my wife’s cousin were driving by Oak Hill Cemetery in D.C., and she just said casually, “Did you know that when Lincoln was president, his son died and he was buried right out there?” And she pointed up to the exact crypt where Willie Lincoln was. Several of the newspaper accounts said that Lincoln had been back to visit the crypt. And wow, this image came to mind of the Lincoln Memorial plus the Pietà. It just stuck with me for many, many years. I knew I couldn’t possibly do it justice, but after a while I thought, if it’s this insistent, it would be kind of dishonorable to not try.

4.  Over at Literary Hub, novelist Emily Gray Tedrowe (Blue Stars) has a beautiful essay called How Books Can Help Us Survive A War. Subtitled “A Sister Tries To Read Along With A Brother On The Front Lines,” it’s a good way to start your Memorial Day weekend, reflecting on the powerlessness military families feel when loved ones are deployed. Here’s how it starts:

     In the photo, my Marine brother is unshaven, wearing cammies, leaning wearily against the rough outer wall of a building. Around the corner you can see foothills of the Korengal Valley mountains, a remote and dangerous area in Kunar Province, rife with Taliban when Malcolm deployed there. A month ago as I was unpacking boxes in our new apartment, I found this picture that he’d mailed me. What my daughters noticed—with fearful delight—when I called them over to see it: Uncle Malcolm is smoking! He is. With a cigarette clamped in the middle of his mouth, my former track star brother is, like his fellow squadmate resting on the bench alongside, clearly taking a smoke break. What I immediately noticed, and the reason this photo is so precious to me: Malcolm is reading. His gaze isn’t fixed on the terrifying mountain behind him, where he’d just spent a sleepless rain-filled night at the Ops post, hearing the enemy all around him, and where he would be heading back shortly. Nor is he talking or joking around with the other guys in battle gear nearby. He’s focused only on the book he holds on his lap, in a moment of private concentration that I would recognize anywhere.
     What can reading do for us when we’re under the gun? When we are in the throes of an extreme experience, when we’re lost or grieving or sick? Or when we are deeply, deeply afraid, as I was during the seven months Malcolm spent in Afghanistan. As a writer, teacher, and life-long reader, I have built my life around books, and so I reached instinctively for novels and stories myself when my younger brother was deployed to war. But for the first time, reading failed me. Fear for his safety had torn my attention into jagged pieces, and suddenly I couldn’t find the mental energy to connect one part of a page, or even a sentence, with whatever followed.

5.  “Allow me to introduce Mr Plornishmaroontigoonter. Lord Podsnap, Count Smorltork, and Sir Clupkins Clogwog. Not to mention the dowager Lady Snuphanuph. As for Serjeant Buzfuz, Miss Snevellicci, Mrs. Wrymug, and the Porkenhams.” That’s how Chi Luu opens the essay Charles Dickens and the Linguistic Art of the Minor Character at JSTOR Daily. You don’t have to scratch deep below the surface of my own novel Fobbit to see how Chuck Dick influenced the christening of that book’s characters: Eustace Harkleroad, Chance Gooding Jr., Abe Shrinkle, et al. But my character names pale in comparison to those of the Great Baptizer. As Luu points out: “Even for minor characters who are but briefly mentioned, in the Dickensian world, knowing just their names is sometimes enough to know the most important features about them. What might you think of a Mr. Murdstone or a Mr. Pecksniff if you knew nothing else about them? Dickens was adept at linguistically manipulating a name in different memorable ways to persuade readers in one direction or another.”


6.  As we close out Short Story Month, Kelly Luce has a few things to say about reading compact fiction over at Electric Literature. The list, 12 Things I Noticed While Reading Every Short Story Published in 2014-15 (or, Extremely Long Titles That Are Complete Sentences Are Still Very Much a Thing), includes such gems like this: “There was a disconcerting number of stories by white male writers set at family lake houses, in which someone, usually a young girl, drowns. The surviving characters spend the remaining 2-3 pages feeling sad and fighting, usually with Dad.”


7.  At his blog, bookseller and author Gary D. Robson (Who Pooped in Central Park?) describes the joy of turning your friends into characters in a book: “Watching Dominique’s face when she saw herself in this book was a wonderful thing.”

The Truth About Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver (left) with his brother James

James Carver would like to set the record straight.

Over the years, his brother Raymond’s life has been distorted by those who’d like to hitch a ride on the famous writer’s coattails. “Everyone seems to have an agenda when writing about my brother,” James writes in a personal remembrance published at Electric Literature today, on what would have been Raymond Carver’s 78th birthday had he not died (much too early) in 1988. The essay, which has the Carveresque boiled-down title of “Reflections on Raymond Carver and My Family,” is an earnest, simply-told collection of family memories and includes several never-published photos of the Carver family (which Electric Literature has allowed me to reprint here, along with a brief excerpt below).

Though it’s unclear why younger brother James feels the sudden urge to purge the record of myths and lies, he casts a wide net when it comes to finding the source of rumors, including pointing a finger at Ray himself: “Ray embellished his childhood in interviews as well as in writings. He misrepresented facts, making our home life seem worse than it was. Perhaps he wanted to make his climb to fame appear more remarkable, or perhaps alcohol abuse clouded his memory.” James also blames John Updike for helping to taint the legacy by saying (at Carver’s memorial service, of all places) that Raymond grew up in a house of abuse and alcoholism. “Updike innocently picked that information up from others,” James writes. “This is how incorrect information perpetuates itself. If a lie is told often enough, it becomes the truth.”

He would probably be the first to admit he regrets the way he treated his sibling at times. In Carol Sklenicka’s biography (which James says is “the only serious and credible one written so far”), she describes the time when, shortly after Ray’s first wife Maryann kicked him out of their house, he turned to his younger brother for help:

Ray tried to live in an apartment by himself and hated it. Then he asked his brother, James, if he could stay in his Santa Clara apartment while James and his wife were on vacation. Concerned that Ray’s drinking, smoking, and partying might lead to damage at their home, James and Norma declined Ray’s request. Ray took it hard. He told his friends, “My brother forsook me, he forsook me”—lingering over the biblical phrase as much as he did over the wound. From their mother, James later learned that Ray never forgave him. He would come to regret putting “material possessions before my love for my brother.”

The Electric Literature essay seeks to mend some of those broken bridges and it can be quite moving at times, serving as a sort of eulogy—one which James perhaps wishes he could have delivered at his brother’s funeral. Instead, we can be grateful to Electric Literature for allowing us all to share in these small, good moments from a family’s history.

Here is just one of those memories from the time the Carvers lived in Washington state. To read the rest at Electric Literature, click the link at the end...

In Yakima, we had the best years of our family’s life. Our decline began in 1956, the year our father quit the Cascade Lumber Company in Yakima. He had been there for fifteen years or more, never missing a day’s work. Up until that moment, dad always paid his bills on time and provided his family with a good living. He was responsible, working since he was fourteen or fifteen years old and supporting his parents when they needed his help. Our family was living in a nice bungalow on Summitview Avenue, the better side of Yakima. We were settled, happy and doing well. Then dad’s brother Fred, who had been an institution at Cascade, was fired.

Our father quit Cascade and accepted a job as a saw filer with his brother, Fred, in Chester, California. That move started the decline of the Carver family, a slow insidious unraveling that cost all of us almost everything. Dad’s health began to deteriorate when he got blood poisoning from a saw while working for the Collins Pines Lumber Company in Chester. It caused our mother grief and hardship, forcing her to work full time to support the family when my father became too ill to work. It greatly affected my life, as I was in and out of many schools, with no roots, no friends and no permanency. I had wanted to attend the University of Washington, in Seattle and had taken all necessary preparatory courses in high school. If we hadn’t moved to California, I most likely would have graduated from the University of Washington, with my father’s help, and lived in Seattle. The move also affected Ray and Maryann’s life together for many years into the future. If Dad had not left Yakima, he might have been able to have helped them financially; maybe their lives wouldn’t have been such a painful financial struggle for all those years; it may even have averted Ray’s alcoholism.

Ray and I lost our beloved father in Crescent City, California, in June of 1967. Dad was working as a saw filer for Simpson Timber Company. The night of his death, he ate a big dinner and went to bed early. He didn’t wake up the next morning. Mom found him cold and blue. The doctor was called. Dad’s heart had failed; he was pronounced dead and taken to the local morgue. Fortunately, I was with my mother, between college semesters. We were both in a state of shock. We immediately called Maryann in Sacramento. She called Ray, who was in Iowa, enrolled in the university to work on his master’s degree. He withdrew from school and came to Crescent City. After arrangements were made, we all followed the hearse back to Yakima. It was our father’s last journey.

Click here to read the rest at Electric Literature

Trailer Park Tuesday: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (and Ang Lee)

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Movie trailers lie to us all the time. They promise one thing, but then sometimes deliver something altogether different by the time we’re settled into our seat with our half-gallon of Mountain Dew and tub of popcorn drenched in butter substitute. Remember the preview for Sweeney Todd? The unsuspecting moviegoer would have no idea that what looked like a Tim Burton and Johnny Depp Victorian slasher film would turn out to be a wall-to-wall musical. Or how about that Liam Neeson vs. wolves flick The Grey? Anyone watching that trailer would have thought they were in for a thriller rather than a disappointing borefest. But I can hardly fault movie trailers for all the lies they’ve spun over the years—after all, that’s the nature of their job: to tease us into the theater with smoke, mirrors and romantic montages set to Adele pop songs. Once we’ve shelled out our money, movie trailers can laugh all the way to the bank, deaf to our cries of disappointment. Which brings me to the trailer for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, based on the novel by Ben Fountain and directed by Ang Lee, which will hit theaters in November on Veterans Day. It is a very, very good movie preview, full of uniformed men marching across a football stadium to the cheers of thousands. There are fireworks, All-American cheerleaders, breeze-rippled flags, and the shiny tracks of tears flowing down the cheek of Billy Lynn (played by Joe Alwyn, who embodies everything I’d imagined Billy would be—at least looks-wise). With a new version of David Bowie’s song “Heroes” by Scala and Kolacny Brothers playing underneath the images, the trailer is chest-bursting with patriotism, vivid battle scenes, and Vin Diesel tenderly laying a hand on Billy’s shoulder. It’s enough to make a battle-hardened warrior cry. The only problem is, based on this trailer alone, the movie will not bear even the slightest resemblance to Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel. That book left me bleeding from a thousand cuts from its satire. In pithy, witty, withering sentences, Fountain captured everything wrong with the war and America’s reaction to it. By comparison, the trailer for Billy Lynn the movie is like a vat of syrup poured over a plate of knives. I just pray to God the preview is lying to us with sleight of hand and misdirection and that Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk turns out to be the kind of smart, witty movie that bites the hand of the too-sentimental public that’s feeding it. Given Ang Lee’s track record of stellar films (particularly literary adaptations), I’m betting there will be plenty of people walking out of the theater saying, “Well, that wasn’t nothin’ like the preview. It’s like he was criticizing ’Murica or somethin’.” One can only hope this is a bait-and-switch kind of trailer.