Group Writing Advice from J. Robert Lennon

When I was in high school, I tried to collaborate on a novel with two of my friends, Jack and JJ. I can’t remember how it started—probably we were bored at lunch and one of us had an unused spiral notebook—but this project would become not only the first sustained (in both time and length) piece of fiction I attempted, but also the first serious artistic collaboration.

Okay—not serious. The novel was, in fact, ridiculous in the extreme—a Douglas-Adams-style bit of sci-fi slapstick featuring our own fictional avatars engaged in picaresque adventures with a rotating cast of extemporaneously generated fools and rogues, many of in possession of tentacles, or silicon for brains. We took turns, passing the notebook around between classes, or biking it over to each other’s houses on the weekend, and nothing we wrote was really any good. What was serious was the intensity of our efforts—for the better part of a year, work on the novel became far more important than school, than girls, than even our Dungeons & Dragons group. And you could tell it was serious because, when we started fucking with each other, we got really, really angry. Read the rest of this entry »

Larghearted Words from Greenpoint

1. Watching along with Will Boast (in front) as Gabe Levine plays. 2. Brian and Andrea here for some Electric Literature. 3. Eleanor Henderson closes the night with a trip to 1988.

  

This weekend WORD, Greenpoint’s independent book store (who just celebrated their 5th anniversary! congrats!), hosted Largehearted Lit, featuring readers Will Boast, Eleanor Henderson, and musician Gabe Levine. And, as the reading’s curator David Gutowski announced, “This is the only reading in the city that’s catered,” to chuckles from the packed room.

I found it a responsibility that if I were to write about the space, the fiction, and the music, it would only be appropriate if I tried (two) carrot-ginger cupcakes with orange cream cheese filling, courtesy of The Brooklyn Baker.

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Meanwhile from the LBC…Cheap Drinks, Surf Rock, Literary Contests and Sexual Tension at The Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour

1. On the right is poet, bouncer, proud Samsung employee, and charismatic stallion Andy Buell.  On the left is career criminal and art lover, Stephen Benz.  If you show up wearing cocktail attire, you only have to give Andy five dollars.  If you show up in street clothes, your dirty ass has to pay eight. 2. The lady in red herself, Adrian Wyatt~ one of LBM’s producers and one of its speakeasy-chic poetry girls.  She was armed with a full lineup of Write Bloody authors, and enough moxie to knock out an alpha male elephant walrus. 3. Poetic dynamo and inspired performer Brendan Constantine brandishing his artificial flower covered flyswatter.  He said he interpreted the invite’s call for formal attire to mean formal attire for rehab.

  

I descended the damp, steel basement steps of Harvelle’s in Long Beach, California and was given a blue poker chip by a dark haired woman in a red velvet dress.  Her eyes were full of burning embers and her cigarette tray was full of poetry.  The house band started playing “Fate” by Dr. Dog, and it was at that moment that I knew I was going to have a holy & a heartfelt Sunday night.  As I walked though the dark club filled with artists and other cool, well-dressed, sarcastic people, I realized I was feeling almost frightened about the amount of sheer talent I was going to be exposed to in one evening.  Many of the performers were writers that I could listen to for days and days, and with their powers combined they could have very well summoned a spirit wolf, or perhaps Captain Planet.

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Fence Magazine’s Spring Issue Launch at Housing Works

1. Novelist, short story writer, and editor Lynne Tillman. On Fiona Maazel: “I love your imagination. It also terrifies me.” 2. Fiona Maazel, reading from “Screen.” “I know what happens to boys in a public bathroom, I know the face of evil.”

 

Fence Magazine is primarily a poetry journal, but for fifteen issues the SUNY Albany publication has had the inimitable Lynne Tillman as its fiction editor, and the Spring 2012 issue launch reading at Housing Works in SoHo doubled as a farewell salute to Tillman, as the forthcoming issue is her last as Fence’s fiction editor. The readings from Fiona Maazel (Last, Last Chance; Woke Up Lonely, a novel, is forthcoming), James Yeh (co-founding editor of Gigantic; he also has a kickass story in the latest issue of NOON), Elizabeth Koch (co-founder of Opium Den and Black Balloon), and Paul Lisicky (Famous Builder, and the forthcoming title Unbuilt Projects) showcased Tillman’s fictive impetus for wryly imaginative stories that skate in darker corners of the psyche.

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A Practical Man: David Rees’ How to Sharpen Pencils at B&N Union Square

1. Sara Chicazul, a Maker of Things, including her pipe-cleaner pencil cup headdress, with Chase Gordon, a Motion Graphics Designer, who are sartorial mavens, in my opinion. 2. CBS was there filming B-Roll. That is a camera, book people, if you can believe it.

 

“I am not a novelty act. I sharpen pencils. And I’m pretty good at it,” said David Rees during the Q&A of his book’s launch last night at Barnes & Noble Union Square. How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisinal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, For Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, and Civil Servants, with Illustrations Showing Current Practice, is a “serious” look at artisanal pencil sharpening, and Rees is not joking. He makes money. For $15 a pop, you too can have your No. 2 pencil manually sharpened by Mr. Rees, who is best known for his political cartoons, replete with bagged and cataloged pencil shavings. With performances by Eugene Mirman (Delocated, Flight of the Conchords), Stacy London (What Not to Wear), and Sam Anderson (Critic-at-large for New York Times Magazine), last night was one of the most unorthodox literary events I’ve ever been to, and one of the best.

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Real Love and Cheetos Dust: A Night with Mike Doughty

1. Mississippi Street is my favorite place to scare passengers while parallel parking. 2. Dan and the ghost bartender of Mississippi Studio, who recommends very good beers for friends who aren’t specific and have given you beer money. 3. Eddie and Melissa held down the left side of front row with my friend and me.

  

On Friday night, Mike Doughty brought stage banter, memoir, and music to Mississippi Studio. No one took a cool seat towards the back. Everyone filled the main floor rows closest to the stage like a game of Tetris.

I got a seat in the front row and joked about losing my Ruby Vroom tape with a woman holding a copy of Doughty’s memoir, The Book of Drugs. I sat in the front row to get a good stage shot of Doughty for this write-up without getting up, but I was also more than a little excited to be at his feet. The man’s got great pipes and music capable of consuming the duller details of the moments around us. The woman with his book said he writes like he talks. She loves the way he talks.

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The Greatest 3-Minute Punk Stories Ever @ Public Assembly

1. Tobias Carroll opened up the evening. 2. The crowd, including Tobias.

Last night Williamsburg’s Public Assembly saw a good turnout for Volume 1 Brooklyn’s The Greatest 3-Minute Punk Stories Ever. Founding Editor Jason Diamond hosted. There was more comedy than anything else. We were treated to a seemingly endless (though appreciated) compilation of reminiscences from the punk scene, and the punk not-scene—which many storytellers made a point of.

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Atticus Lish Party

1. Screenshot of the introduction from the minisite. 2.  Norman and Barbara Charles, friends of Gordon Lish, deep in conversation with painter Shelton Walsmith.

KGB Bar on 4th st and 2nd ave was as crowded as it could likely ever legally get this past Saturday night. While normal circumstances would point towards the two hour long open bar, managed by an increasingly desolate lone bartender, it was all truly the work of one man- Gordon Lish, the literary icon for the ages, editor for Neal Cassidy and Alan Ginsberg, Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo, commanding reigns at Esquire and Knopf once upon a time, now the friendly man introducing himself, rather than the other way around, to every party guest walking through the door.

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Demisemiquavers: UNSAID 6 Launch @ KGB

1. Ian Lirenman, whose story “The Canadian” is in the new issue, asked me if he looked too baked. I didn’t think so. Can anyone really be too baked? 2. David McLendon being awesome. He gave me a pin. 3. Pamela Ryder. Every time she read “purveyor of boxes” I wanted to hide in fear. Sweet.

I walked into East Village’s Kraine Gallery Bar–otherwise known as KGB–while it was day outside, which was weird. Its red curtains and Soviet-era relics immediately separated me from the sunny glory outside, and then a Russian man with a camera wanted me to say some things for Russian (and Belarusian) TV, if I felt comfortable inside a bar called KGB. I said yes. This strange preface to last night’s incredible launch party for UNSAID’s sixth issue seems too perfect. The journal consistently publishes disarming, demanding, and elusively powerful fiction and poetry that delves deep into places many are afraid to wander, both as readers and writers. I compare a reader’s performance to a band’s often, but the pieces from Brian Kubarycz, Katherine Manderfield, Pamela Ryder and Robert Lopez  last night were the most metal in both content and tone I’ve ever heard. Sort of like these guys.

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INTERVIEW! Heidi Julavits, Author of The Vanishers

Photo by Jill Goldman

Somewhere in between co-editing The Believer, teaching MFA students the wonders/horrors of fiction writing, and being one-half of the literary power couple that is herself and Ben Marcus, writer Heidi Julavits has published her fourth novel, The Vanishers, which came out this March on Doubleday.

The Vanishers tells the story of Julia Severn, a young student at the most acclaimed psychic institute in the world. She finds herself the victim of a psychic attack, brought forth by her ex-mentor at the institute, and, throughout the majority of the book, Julia is struggling to break free from the attack. In between, there’s time traveling, plastic surgery, spas, missing mothers, phantom e-mails, and people who disappear from life by their own choosing. Sound weird? It is. It’s also delightfully readable — I found myself doing dangerous things with the book, like walking and reading at the same time. And, of course, it features Julavits’ signature expertly-crafted sentences, which are a joy to read in themselves. I got a chance to ask Julavits a few questions about the book, as well as a couple other very important topics, like fashion and mental illness.

Julia Jackson: I feel like it’s such an obvious question, to ask how ideas from a book came to you, but the thing that struck me most about The Vanishers was how imaginative it is so I have to ask anyway: What were the first seeds of the the psychic institute plot line? And that of the vanishing from life?

Heidi Julavits: The psychic attack thing (and the opening chapter, where there’s a bitter conflict between mentor and mentee at a psychic institute) came to me via a book called Psychic Self Defense by Dion Fortune, which is basically a ’30s occult self-help book. It has the same cover as AS Byatt’s Possession, so if you’re reading it on the train, your co-riders might not suspect you to be a health risk, and move away.

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