“I would write and people would feed me out of pity”

Jim Shepard recently told the The Morning News he “didn’t really have a career plan.” In conversation with Robert Birnbaum, Shepard said his writing took off when he first found the chutzpah to write the way he wanted to write. “I stopped doing what I imagined my undergraduate teachers wanted and just thought, ‘If I am going to go down in flames then I am going to do what I want to do.’”

Winner of the 2011 O. Henry Prize and currently the J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence at Williams College, Shepard said he landed his first teaching position in part because he didn’t think he’d ever actually get the job. “Nobody is going to hire me to teach at the college level,” Shepard remembered thinking. “So I’m sure I gave the most relaxed interview anyone has ever given.”

As far his writing career goes, Shepard went on to note that he’s fortunate to have operated under “semi-obscurity,” saying his limited recognition helped him dodge negative book reviews. “There is so little review space that if the people don’t love it they go, ‘Why bother?’ They don’t need to review me. They need to review Richard Ford. They need to review Alice Munro.”

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Riding with Jesus Part VI: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of badbadbad, is blogging his book tour. This is his sixth installment.

 

Arrested in Virginia Beach

Hell is Real. Billboards in the Dirty South tell us so. Jesus is hope. If you’re pregnant, we can help. I’m a baby, not a choice. Adult Superstore next exit.

Here’s our statement from a Virginia Beach jail:

It was a beautiful night. I expected to be in town for just a few hours en route to Baltimore. Leah’s an old friend from elementary school. We hadn’t seen each other since eighth grade. She suggested the boardwalk for freak-preaching from my badbadbad novel, a story about identity politics and hypocrisy. There’s this Reverend character who gives fiery sermons. The Word of God on sexual morality. I sometimes do these live performances with a bullhorn. We thought we’d entertain the tourists, maybe sell some books. DIY tours are expensive.

This Christian group was proselytizing on “works of the flesh” and eternal damnation. Hatred and anger were said to be no-no’s alongside sorcery, drunkenness and fornication. I like to drink bourbon and make love to Harry Potter audiobooks. One of the Christians handing out pamphlets said we were all sinners who would never get to heaven when we died unless we were born again in Jesus today. I tried to explain that the Kingdom of God, as I understand it, lies in the here and now. The Kingdom of God is helping the poor and the afflicted. It’s loving-kindness on Earth. Jesus was a Buddhist, I said. This made the Christian angry.

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In Soviet Russia, Phone Have Sex on You

1. The Madonnas of Echo Park author Brando Skyhorse and James Langlois admiring Juliet Grames, senior editor at Soho Press and the only reader to commie it up for KGB. 2. James Langlois opening the night with the tale of a young man trying to get to the bottom of his twin’s suicide. “Don’t worry. It’s funnier than it sounds.”

 

All seats were taken at KGB Bar Tuesday night and standing room was limited, as we literary types stood shoulder to shoulder, pushing closer to the front to get a look at the night’s three readers.

James Langlois kicked off the event with an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, a beautifully-written story of identical Dominican-American twins and the search for answers after one of them dies.  There was laughter, as promised, but the depth of feeling and the mastery of prose made this story genuinely captivating. 
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Riding with Jesus Part V: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of badbadbad, is blogging his book tour. This is his fifth installment.

 

Southern Hospitality & Redemption in the ATL

Big upside to the DIY tour is meeting online friends in flesh-and-blood realtime. You can’t know people until you see how they live, crash on their floor, soap up in their shower. Typing about sharing a virtual beer is not even close to toasting from a chipped coffee mug in an unfamiliar kitchen, storytelling on a cat-clawed sofa until the break of dawn. You can’t embrace zeroes and ones. Hugs not drugs, well, not too many drugs. I love glimpsing the 50,000 ways we each move through the world. Up-close camaraderie is palpable. After a less than satisfying performance in Nashville, I was hungry for redemption. I found it in Atlanta where Southern hospitality still rules.

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Writers Behaving Badly

Writers are a sensitive bunch:

According to Bill Peschel’s post “Where Have All The Good Literary Feuds Gone,” when legendary writers like Mailer and Hemingway weren’t hammering away at their typewriters, they were hammering away at each other. But the fights have fizzled out in recent years. Perhaps it’s because we’ve decided the pen is, in fact, mightier, or perhaps it’s because (somehow) we’re not drinking enough.

“Something worth bleeding for”:

Bolaño, at least, wasn’t fearful of offending his fellow writers. In a review of Between Parentheses for The Faster Times, Lincoln Michel highlights some of the writer’s candor when discussing his contemporaries. Bolaño called Isabel Allende’s writing “anemic,” and of Osvaldo Soriano said, “You have to have a brain full of fecal matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can be built.”

Although it hasn’t been very long since Bolaño was calling out his cohort, it seems this level audacity has already died out. A. L. Kennedy recently lamented that during interviews authors must not “say anything that inadvertently damages or embarrasses a friend or loved one, [...] mention anything inept or controversial, or comment on anything to do with the Wonderful World of Literature that might blow up in his or her face later, causing untold woe.”

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Where Have All The Good Literary Feuds Gone?

The history of literature is littered with blood spatters and broken noses. Ben Jonson, Alexander Dumas and Marcel Proust fought duels. Alexander Pope slipped a pirate bookseller an emetic. The Earl of Rochester was suspected of hiring thugs to beat John Dryden.

But the sad truth, as I discovered researching Writers Gone Wild is that authors don’t get into nearly as much trouble as they used to.

It was a time when Ernest Hemingway traded punches with Wallace Stevens on a Key West dock after Wallace had humiliated Hemingway’s sister at a party. Not that Ernest needed an excuse to knock anyone down, but this was more ennobling than wrestling a critic on his editor’s desk at Scribner’s about a negative review.

Then there was the time Theodore Dreiser slapped a drunken Sinclair Lewis after Lewis called him a “son of a bitch who stole three thousand words from my wife’s book” at a literary dinner. That slap, fueled not only by alcohol, but Lewis’ suspicion that Dreiser had also slept with his wife, made national headlines.

And then there’s Norman Mailer. He would have filled a chapter in my book, but pressed for space, I resorted to reciting his record: against Bruce Jay Friedman (a victory against Friedman, a draw against Friedman’s Jaguar); songwriter Jerry Leiber (stopped by the restaurant owner); and Gore Vidal (two bouts, two KOs, but losing the rematch on points to Vidal’s verbal riposte: “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”).

When the most violent attack in recent years was Richard Ford goobering Colson Whitehead at a Poet & Writers party, the mystery is: why?

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REVIEW: Left Glove by Mac Wellman

Left Glove

Mac Wellman

Solid Objects

56 pp / $12

Resolved, that:
It must first be said that reading a Mac Wellman play is a much different experience than watching one. Wellman delights in creating problems and challenges for his fellow artists to surmount and—as with most theater—any competent production of one of his plays has already done some of the hard work for its audience; the actors, designers and director have already collaborated in order to realize Wellman’s dizzying, idiosyncratic form. Producing one of Wellman’s plays is a true act of theater, a band of artists coming together to make sense and order from a dense and complex text. But when reading one of Wellman’s plays, the reader is on one’s own. Where there ought to be collaboration, there is instead a hall of mirrors and echoes. At points it can even become unclear whether one is reading a stage direction or a line of dialogue (forget for a moment the possibility that it could even be a stage direction meant to be read as a line of dialogue.)

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On Writers’ Heroism and Humiliation

Another Vicious Cycle

In his latest dispatch from the road, writer Jesús Ángel Garcia informs us that writing takes courage. Beyond the terrifying confrontation with the blank page, there’s the ceaseless struggle for publication: “…submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission… acceptance! Rinse (drink), repeat.” Not to mention the bravery it takes to go on tour, peddling your printed soul before crowds of curious readers (if you’re lucky). And then there are those who, like Garcia, can heroically sidle onto the stage after a rock band brings down the house.

Does This Interview Make Me Look Fat?

Over at The Guardian, in her latest column, novelist A. L. Kennedy muses on the perils of promoting her work. From treacherous interviews to dreadful photo shoots, the exposure can be paralyzing. “In fact,” Kennedy writes, “interviews have – over the years – informed me that I dress badly, look ill, have a dingy flat and illogical furniture, while creating an alternative persona for me which is mildly useful as a way of being myself in public without getting threadbare…”

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Happy Birthday, Vol. 1

1. Tobias Carroll is the Managing Editor of Vol. 1 and one of Time Out New York’s most eligible singles. Jason Diamond is Vol 1′s founding editor, and a mensch. 2. Authors and readers Maud Newton, Deb Olin Unferth and Jami Attenberg gamely pose for a photo.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn turned two last week, a milestone celebrated in the back room of Brooklyn Winery in Williamsburg.

Jason Diamond, author/editor/internet dude and founder of Vol. 1 emceed the festivities, which included a reading and a raffle to benefit Girls Write Now, a mentoring program for young women writers.

By coincidence or design, the night’s authors were also all women. The excerpts they read plumbed their childhood, driving home the point that the girls writing now may well be the women publishing later. Each of the scenes centered on a moment when the line between girl and woman blurred, reminders that while the past is prologue, it can also become prose.

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Riding with Jesus Part IV: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of badbadbad, is blogging his book tour. This is his fourth installment.

 

Blown off the Stage in Nashville

I’ve been hearing the word courage lately in conversation about doing live lit in a non-traditional way. Not sure it applies, though. As I understand it, courage is about facing down fear, real or imagined: turning a blind corner in Afghanistan, powering up for a job interview after too many months out of work, chatting up the six-foot Czech blond at the end of the bar. But why do we need courage? What is there to be afraid of? On a superficial level, it’s rejection, I guess. Writers are used to that. You know the refrain: submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission… acceptance! Rinse (drink), repeat. On the other end, what? Coming to terms with the possibility that death can take us when we least expect it? And?

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