“You’re all standing around like mannequins! If Sam Shepard were here right now he’d shit his fucking pants!”
If John Waters needed to cast an understudy for Divine, he’d choose Irina-the-Hun Kaas, student-director of Sam Shepard’s The Unseen Hand, performed by the Footlights Ensemble at Bellevue Community College.
“B A N G!” Irina simulated the shooting of a pistol. “You’re mad, see. Really, really mad, okay?! Here, give me your gun.” Irina took up Trevor’s pistol, while the rest of us tried to keep from laughing. “Now, it’s like this: Bang, bang, bang!” Irina strutted across the stage in her rhinestone-studded heels and leopard-print see-through blouse. “Okay, watch me, shoot him like this, BANG…” Gordon murmured, “Chitty, Chitty,” under his breath and right on cue Irina finished…“BANG, BANG!” It was hilarious. “Oh shit!” Irina set the pistol down in a panic. “Is this thing loaded?”
Irina drove a baby blue Firebird convertible, and when she waved goodbye in the parking lot she looked like she was cruising down Hollywood Boulevard in a parade, a movie starlet, her blonde ringlets stock still from hairspray abuse.
She started a fling with Jerry, the theater’s distinguished alcoholic windbag in residence. Their affair had been unofficially announced during a cast party when the two of them — clearly not sticklers for discretion, or ones to put on airs — niched themselves away in a bedroom where their exertions were well heard by all. And if anyone had any doubts that the two were an item, those were swiftly put to rest when Jerry sauntered out to the party sans shirt, unbuckled pants, lit up a cigarette and proceeded to show off the long, bloody scratches running down his back.
Two weeks later, Irina flew into a panic and dragged everyone into her drama: Jerry got her pregnant. Her plight was broadcast like an Orange Alert. We all pooled our money so she could get an abortion but she miscarried and spent all our money on drugs. Eventually Irina and Jerry were banished from the theater department after getting caught shooting up in the green room.
lil’ abner
I pined for the role of Moonbeam McSwine, I wanted sleeping out with hogs to be MY line. I wanted the fellers to squire me only in fine weather. I wanted to be Moonbeam almost as much as I wanted to play the crazy cat girl Janice Vickery, from The Effect of the Gamma Rays on the Man and the Moon Marigolds. Janice, who boiled the skin off a cat she supposedly got from the animal shelter, and had to scrape the gristle off the joints with a knife. Janice Vickery, who wryly said “you have no idea how difficult it is to get right down to the bones.” I liked to imagine Janice Vickery not as the sociopath everyone made her out to be, but as a misunderstood genius! A scientist! I wanted to play Janice Vickery as much as I wanted to play Petra from A Little Night Music. Petra, portrayed as the housemaid who liked to have a good time, in that good way, that fun way, her song about marrying the miller’s son, or maybe the business man, or maybe not anyone, maybe Petra would rather have “a wink and a wiggle and a giggle in the grass, a girl has to celebrate what passes by, there are mouths to be kissed,” you know. But there was no Moonbeam for me, because at fifteen, with a father who was playing the role of Earthquake McGoon, the village lech, who chased after Daisy Mae, pawed at her like cat toy, and literally licked her, the director wasn’t willing to let me slop the hogs. I was much too innocent. So I became instead just another Dogpatcher. Certainly not Stupifying Jones! But the dogpatcher who gets fat-shamed by Mamie: “We wants to broaden our horizons!” I squawked with my Indian corn hillbilly grin. And Mamie replied, “Yer horizons are broad enough already!”
brigadoon
Our regular Towne Theater crowd were instructed to dress up as pagans and peasants for the Saturday night May Day Celebration. I wore my old Natalia costume from one of my Chekhov one-acts and a pink pair of ballet slippers. My father dressed as a farmer, wearing his red satin Earthquake McGoon pants with the big orange patches on the butt and somehow he managed to herd his ornery old ram into the back of his Volvo hatchback.
“Somebody get that ram a drink!”
I never fully appreciated the kind of social caché that livestock can bring to a hosted affair until that night, and I was reminded of it when years later my best friend Evie brought a Bay City Roller lookalike and his eighteen pound boa constrictor to my house party, a literary soiree, held in honor of the first real poet I ever kissed. Really, a good hostess will never underestimate the festive potential of live reptiles, or farm animals, as my father had proved. What wine pairs with reptiles? You might ask. I found box wine to be the perfect complement.
bye bye birdie
Conrad Birdie was going into the army and I was part of a raucous chorus of idol-worshipping teenagers replete in poodle skirts and saddle shoes. I screamed so loudly and so often during the three-month run that I developed a permanent voice scorch. During the run I acquired a boyfriend, a troubled but sweet seventeen-year-old whose Christian-conservative parents had exiled him to a halfway house with other wayward boys who also had behavioral and drug and alcohol problems. The lost boys, I call them. Boys who break into houses. Boys who rob gas stations and sell drugs. Boys who became mythic in my recollection, because only in literature and films can lost boys ever hope for redemption. But I never stopped trying. I ended up losing this lost boy to a drowning accident. The last time I saw him alive, he gave me a gift — an hourglass.
one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
My father co-opted one of my mother’s old wigs to play Chief Bromden, the mute Indian, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for a local theater production. Although he had plenty of cultural insider awareness, he played mostly to stereotype, and his Bromden was stiff as a cigar store Indian. I like to think he tried to bring some relevancy to the role, having been married to a Native woman, my mother, for all those years, but he was by no means a Will Sampson or Jason Momoa.
He had the kind of blue-eyed and bronzed-skin intensity often displayed by other white men playing Indians. Henry Brandon in The Searchers (1953). Burt Lancaster in Apache (1954). Iron Eyes Cody, in those crying Indian commercials (1970–1971). Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger (2013). The list, sadly, goes on and on.
Years later, my father was arrested and sent to prison where he started up an institutional theater group. I imagine it to be called Bards Behind Bars. His letters to me mentioned his fellow inmates, his recruits, some Native, some Black, and how they were studying different plays and scenes from Shakespeare, and performing them to receptive audiences of their peers. Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. I want to know if there was a figurative Chief Bromden, or an R.P. McMurphy in residence. Maybe my father was the figurative R.P. McMurphy, sent to the Forks Correctional Facility to rouse his incarcerated colleagues from their dormancy, the catalyst who stirred things up, a trickster who changed everything.
It sounds like the makings for the perfect Hollywood movie in the vein of the white savior narrative, the all-too-familiar trope in which a heroic white character rescues folks of color from their plight. (The best exception that I can think of is Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, and maybe Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me.)
Movie Pitch: a white savior, convicted felon and drama teacher, directs and stages Shakespearean productions with his fellow inmates. Oz meets Stand and Deliver crossed with Kevin Costner, crossed with The Shawshank Redemption. Call it Stand and Deliver a Soliloquy. Call it The Shakespeare Redemption. Call it Dances with Inmates. Call it Taming of the Screws. Call it All’s Well That Ends Well in the Clink. Call it The Thespian of Oz.
It’s time to re-stock your shelves, fire up the old cable (or streaming device of your choice) and settle in for another copacetic year of books on TV.
Peak TV’s appetite for established “IP” is borderline insatiable, so there’s a decent chance that by around 2020, FX and Amazon Prime will be battling over the rights to your middle-school diary entries, but for the time being big names and big books still dominate the small screen adaptation racket.
2016 saw some notable successes. FX hit paydirt with Ryan Murphy’s take on Jeffrey Toobin’s Ride of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. With any luck AMC will keep working through the John Le Carré oeuvre after its success with The Night Manager. Luke Cage added to a complex and socially relevant Marvel/Netflix universe, and AMC’s Preacher was one of the strangest and most enjoyable things on television. Failure might not be the right word for Fox’s Neil Gaiman adaptation (Lucifer) or Hulu’s foray into Stephen King-land (11.22.63), though you’d be hard-pressed to find many people singing the praises of those particular shows. In any case, that’s all old news.
2017 is here. With it comes a new crop of shows ripped-from-the-endsheets.
This year we’ll see more Neil Gaiman and more smart comic book stories, but don’t worry, there’s going to be something for everyone: the kids, the crime fanatics, the vampire devotees, the historical fiction nuts, the book-ish liberals wondering what’s become of their country, and the Ian McShane lover residing in all of us. Is 2017 going to redeem the year that just passed? No, almost certainly things will get worse. But the marriage of good books and good television holds strong. High quality, thoughtful entertainment is a daily event now, and dammit, even the bookish people need their opiates.
So, here they are, TV’s most anticipated literary adaptations for 2017.
1. A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix)
Premiere — January 13, 2017
Did the world need more from Lemony Snicket? (long pause…) In any case, Netflix has been trumpeting their newest adaptation for quite some time, and while the unfortunately twee trailer struggles to hold any kind of interest over the course of its 2 1/2 minute run time, Neil Patrick Harris looks like he’s having fun, doesn’t he? The man has charm and charisma, there’s no denying it. So, maybe tune in next week? The show might have some early-Burton, recent-Wes Anderson upside, if that’s your cup of tea.
2. Legion (FX)
Premiere — February 8, 2017
After a well-received screening at New York Comic Con back in October, Legion is one of the most eagerly-anticipated shows on the calendar. For those suffering superhero fatigue, yes, we know it’s part of the Marvel universe (the show’s exact placement vis-à-vis X-Men is still unclear), but there’s reason for optimism. First, Legion has long been one of Marvel’s most complex characters — the mutant son of Prof. Charles Xavier (no word yet whether this plot strand will be adopted by the show), Legion suffers from various mental health conditions. Different aspects of his (very eccentric) personality control his many, many superpowers. Second, and even more important here , Noah Hawley, creator of FX’s Fargo, is at the helm. That means 2017 will see Legion, a new season of Fargo, and the continued success of Hawley’s most recent 400-page novel, Before the Fall. The man is cut from a different cloth. Dan Stevens — aka Cousin Matthew — is set to star in the show’s title role. Legion promises to be smarter and — this is key — weirder than any comic book adaptation we’ve seen in quite some time.
3. Big Little Lies (HBO)
Premiere Date — February 19, 2017
Liane Moriarty’s story of female friendship, cheating, bullying and seaside murder was a breakout hit in 2014, and in 2017 it promises to be the most pedigreed production on television. Created by David E. Kelley (of Picket Fences fame, and probably other stuff…) and directed by Wild’s Jean-Marc Vallée, HBO’s newest limited series has a hell of an impressive cast, too, with Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley at the top of the sheet and Alexander Skarsgård, Laura Dern, Adam Scott, and Zoë Kravitz right behind them. The premiere is only weeks away now. Steel yourselves.
4. The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Premiere Date — April 26, 2017
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale was already enjoying a resurgence in the pop culture thanks to the rise of Donald Trump and a wretched brand of American fascism. In 2017, the story is coming to Hulu in a 10-episode series starring Elizabeth Moss, Samira Wiley and Joseph Fiennes. The story is set in a near-future New England fallen under the thumb of a misogynist theocracy that has overthrown the U.S. political order. The show’s premiere is set for April, and all signs point to a high quality product, possibly the star Hulu has been waiting for, but let’s be frank: there’s no way it can outdo the 1990 movie poster, a work of art in its own right, featuring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, and Aidan Quinn.
5. Midnight, Texas (NBC)
Premiere Date — April 30, 2017
Author Charlaine Harris is back with another hot-and-steamy supernatural series for all those True Blood fans jonesing aftewr a fix since the finale in 2014. This time it’s Internet-beloved Quebecer François Arnaud filling the lead role as the spectacularly named “Manfred Bernardo,” a medium who moves to Midnight, Texas, where all manner of vampires and other (vaguely erotic) creatures are running wild and in need of a hero. Who knows, NBC did a pretty decent job with Grimm, but let’s be honest — we’d all be a lot more excited about this show if it were on, say, Netflix, instead of broadcast.
6. American Gods (Starz)
Premiere Date — “early” 2017
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, rumored to be in pre-production almost since the book’s release in 2001, is finally coming to our screens in 2017, and damn if the trailer doesn’t look promising. Here’s the basic story: Shadow Moon, a recently widowed ex-con is recruited by a mysterious con-man who turns out to be a Norse god gathering up all the old deities hiding in plain sight in modern America. Not bad, huh? With Ricky Whittle and prestige-drama-icon Ian McShane playing the leads and a couple of sure hands running show (Bryan Fuller and Michael Green), American Gods has break-out potential. Add this program to the lineup of Outlander and The Girlfriend Experience, and 2017 might just be the year you get a Starz password of your own.
7. Sharp Objects (HBO)
Premiere Date —TBA 2017
Here’s what you need to know about Sharp Objects: it’s going to be on HBO; thriller superstar Gillian Flynn wrote it (the book and the show); UnReal’s Marti Noxon is signed on as showrunner; and Amy Adams — queen of the prestige literary adaptation — is set to star as a reporter fresh out of the pysch ward and returned to her hometown to investigate the murder of two girls. This is shaping up to be the year women took over hard drama at HBO.
8. The Terror (AMC)
Premiere Date — TBA 2017
AMC’s newest one hour stalking-monsters program is adapted from Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel, which imagined life within Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition across the Arctic, in search of a Northwest Passage. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were locked into the ice near King William Island in 1845 and the crew was never heard from again. (A little inconveniently for AMC, the HMS Terror was found in September at the bottom of the Arctic Bay. All 129 crew members are believed to have died.) Simmons’ version of the story was never purely fact-based, though. In the novel, and the AMC show, a mysterious monster trails the expedition across the ice. The usual — in-fighting, betrayal, cannibalism — ensues. Tobias Menzies and Jared Harris star. No word yet on the premiere date.
The first John Hughes movie I remember seeing is probably Home Alone, but given that I was born in 1983, the same year Mr. Mom hit theaters, and the fact that I have three older siblings, there’s a good chance his films were a backdrop to much of my childhood. Of course, I am not alone in this or Jason Diamond’s stunning memoir, Searching for John Hughes wouldn’t exist.
Personally, while I find Hughes’ films entertaining (my favorite being Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), I’ve never thought of him as a touchstone for my cinematic proclivities. Recently we introduced our eight year old son to Home Alone and that was the first time I’ve watched a Hughes film in more than a decade. That said, when I first heard about Diamond’s memoir I was excited. Though I don’t remember much about the 80's (the grunge years were more aligned with my early memories of childhood), I find myself nostalgic for the decade. Another byproduct of having older siblings, I’m sure.
I was instantly glad I picked up Searching for John Hughes. It was evident from the start that the book was more than just a reverie. Diamond has created a memoir that makes you, the reader, one of his closest friends. He is intimate and vulnerable, yet he keeps his humor and optimism. It is a trick all the more impressive given Diamond’s turbulent adolescence and nomadic early adulthood. With John Hughes to guide him and the backdrops of Chicago and New York to provide a counterpoint of stability, Diamond brings readers into his efforts to create both an homage to Hughes and a niche for himself as a writer. I found myself inspired at every turn, impressed by the balancing act and the precision with which he creates beauty out of struggle and a love for the films of an 80’s auteur.
Ryan W. Bradley: I believe celebrities — from athletes to movie stars — are the modern equivalent of mythological pantheons. I think our connections to celebrity go beyond entertainment. In ancient cultures myths were a way of understanding what we had no basis for understanding. Do you feel that way about your connection to Hughes’ films, and pop culture at large? What has your connection to his films helped you understand?
Jason Diamond: Oh yeah, for sure. I tend to interact with celebrities and famous people somewhat frequently in my line of work these days, and I’m still taken aback when I see them in person for the first time. They’re not the person on that little electric picture box in my living room anymore. It takes a few seconds to adjust.
As for the Hughes films, it’s pretty simple: they were filmed in the part of the Chicagoland area I grew up in. That, and I was first exposed to them by teens around the time films like Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink were released, so it sort of felt like they were letting me into their cool world. I’d watch those movies and think, “Ah, so this is what life is going to be like one day. Not bad.”
Bradley: That connection led you to a really interesting journey as a writer, from the effort of writing a biography of Hughes to eventually writing a memoir informed by that endeavor. The framing seems natural, and there was a sense that even early on you were drifting that way, even if you didn’t notice it at the time. Was it difficult to switch gears and let yourself be the focus?
Diamond: I’m glad you think that. I felt like it was a really weird idea, but people have been telling me it makes sense. I really wanted the book to be about failure, embracing the things that seem like huge screw ups and wastes of time, but in the end make us who we are. I also wanted to look at myself and frame those years spent trying to write the biography as some cross between Larry David and Don Quixote or Ignatius J. Reilly. Some guy so obsessed with this one goal that he doesn’t see how silly or shitty he’s being. I thought that was a funny idea.
In terms of switching focus, I don’t think it was that difficult. I’d toyed with the idea of writing a book of essays about growing up so I went back and looked at those notes and outlines, and sort of thought about how if I’m going to write a book about myself and my obsession with these movies, I need to write it in such a way that anything I write about my life somehow connects back to his films. I’ve read too many memoirs where it’s supposed to be about the writer and X, but you don’t get much about X. Since his films had such a profound impact on me, I really needed to make sure I could connect any life event back to his movies and what they’ve meant to me over the years.
What sort of took me by surprise is how much all of the books I’ve read and loved kinda came back to help me in certain ways. Like I’d think “How would Didion say this” or “How would Waugh frame this scene.” Obviously I never came close to writing like those people, but it showed me just how much obsessively reading throughout my life has helped me as a writer. Like little parts, maybe a sentence or two, I’d call up those books and writers and they really helped.
Bradley: For many people the hardest part about writing memoir is including the people around them, that worry about how family and friends will feel about what they’ve written. You don’t necessarily have relationships with the people who come out the worst in your book, but I imagine there was still some anxiety about putting that on the page. Although even when you had the right to be negative you didn’t dwell on it. There’s a lot of hope in the book. How much of that balance was conscious and did it help alleviate any potential worries about what you were making public?
Diamond: Weirdly enough, the anxiety didn’t pop up while I was writing it. I feel pretty free when I’m writing, like it’s my own thing even though I’m writing about real people and events. I think after it came out, when the first of many friends was like, “I never knew all this stuff,” and another said I made them cry, that was a weird feeling. It made me a little anxious. I didn’t really think much of how the book might affect people.
I’m a pretty hopeful person for the most part, and being anything other than that in the book would have been dishonest. Being hopeful and also incredibly stubborn helped me get through some difficult times, and I feel like that mix comes out in the book. I was ultimately able to see that I want things to turn out good in the end, no matter how silly that might seem. Looking at it that way, more than anything, helped alleviate any fears I may have developed along the way. Like I was happy in the end that I presented my story in a way that says things can suck but things can also get better. It’s so easy to lose sight of that in our day to day, and as a writer, it’s our job to present the truths of an often sad and ugly world, I recognize that. But I’m also a fan of the beauty and the little glimmers of goodness you see from time to time.
“It’s our job to present the truths of an often sad and ugly world, I recognize that. But I’m also a fan of the beauty and the little glimmers of goodness…”
Bradley: That was really present in the book. I got the feeling that I wasn’t just learning about your life, but also hearing your voice. As someone who has written bits and pieces of a memoir over the last few years, I find I get really hung up on that part, on the voice that I present. I try to tell myself I can write it the way I write fiction, but still find it difficult to do. You had obviously written fiction and nonfiction for years, but how much did you pay attention to the style of the narrative? Did it take experimenting with your voice to find the fit for the material?
Diamond: Actually, it’s a funny thing, but I write so much that I really just sat down with my outline, my ideas of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to do it, and let it come out organically. One thing I noticed that I found really interesting was that things I consider influences would pop up as I was writing, certain writers or books I’ve read, I’d notice little faint traces of influence here and there. Also, as somebody who writes and edits for a living, I found it really interesting to just sit with one thing for a long time instead of an essay that I write and edit in a week or two that’s 2000 words. Trying to maintain the one clear voice was something I was worried about, but as I kept writing I realized it was pretty easy for me to do since I was writing mostly about myself. I’m not so sure I’d be able to do that if I was writing fiction, or at least it would take me a lot of time and editing to accomplish it.
Bradley: You mention your work as an editor, which is a skill set and art form that is very different from writing. Was there any particular editorial advice you’ve given other writers that you made a point of keeping in mind with your own work?
Diamond: For longer stuff, I tend to tell them not to go back and edit while they’re writing. I know every writer tends to do things differently, but nine times out of ten when a writer comes to me and says they’re stuck on something, I’ll ask if they’re editing as they write and they usually say yes.
Another trick, one that I really had to stick to, is being able to walk away. I can write and write and write all day, but you do hit a wall, and you need to walk away, go for a walk, read a book, anything.
Bradley: That’s interesting. I have talked to so many writers who either edit as they go or start a writing session by editing the previous session’s output (which I am guilty of as well). The walking away makes perfect sense to me. I’m always surprised by writers who are super consistent in their routine. I can’t make myself write, I have to actually want to do it or it’s going to be a case of me feeling like I’m doing homework, which I barely did when I was in school. Sometimes that means doing something — anything — else.
You tell a lot of stories in the book and they span a large portion of your life. Were there stories you wanted to tell but had to hold out of the project because they didn’t fit within the framework and theme of the book? Do you have more personal stories you are looking to tell in a subsequent memoir?
Diamond: Yeah, I sort of wanted to write more about fucking up as a teen, but I think I’ll save that all for the next thing. I think I was trying to connect my life with those movies so much, and since Hughes is connected with teen films, I had to have some of my own teenage life in there. But when I was sketching things out, I kept thinking how funny or weird certain experiences I had were. I’d love to write about them somehow. I learned a lot about restraint before I wrote this book and I’m glad I did. Learning not to squeeze every little thing in and also being able to let go of certain ideas or paragraphs or passages. I had to do a lot of that.
The book world reacted with dismay to reports yesterday that Milo Yiannopoulos — a leading white nationalist, Breitbart staffer and one of the Internet’s loudest, nastiest trolls — had secured a $250,000 advance on a book to be published by the Simon & Schuster imprint, Threshold Editions.
Threshold described its new title in a press release: “Dangerous will be a book on free speech by the outspoken and controversial gay British writer and editor at Breitbart News who describes himself as ‘the most fabulous supervillain on the internet.’” Yiannopoulos is most famous for championing abhorrent far-right views on the Internet and being kicked off Twitter after leading a harassment campaign against Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones.
The book world recoiled at the news. Carolyn Kellog, Book Editor for the Los Angeles Times tweeted: “If you approved a $250K book deal for the troll promoting racist, sexist views so extreme he got thrown off this platform — we need to talk.” She also asked authors who had received $5K-$25K advances from big publishers to reach out to her. Saeed Jones, BuzzFeedNews’ Executive Editor, Culture and author of a forthcoming book set to be released by Simon & Schuster, lamented his new affiliation and reminded social media followers that “The publishing industry as of this year is 79% white. Being racist is quite profitable.” Author Danielle Henderson, who also has a book forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, tweeted: “I’m looking at my @simonschuster contract, and unfortunately there’s no clause for ‘what if we decide to publish a white nationalist.’” She invited the publisher to contact her regarding the state of their relationship.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, which had an exclusive on the story, Yiannopoulos said: “I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions. I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”
At The New Republic, Alex Shephard wondered whether the move to get in bed with Milo Yiannopoulos might ultimately cost Simon & Schuster more than the $250,000 advance currently dominating headlines.
Threshold’s history and mission are described on the website: “Threshold Editions was founded in 2006 with a mission to ‘provide a forum for the creative people, bedrock principles, and innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism’ and to chronicle the historic reforms those people and principles would bring.” Its other recent titles include Glenn Beck’s Liars, more junk from Beck, some Trump propaganda and Oliver North’s thrillers.
Yiannopoulos’ book, titled Dangerous, will be rushed out in March and has ridden the wave of publicity into the top-5 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
I did a selfish thing. I’m a graduate student in Comparative Literature and I needed to come up with a class to teach. Winter semester. 14 weeks. What I wanted more than anything, though, was an excuse to enlist the hungry undergraduate minds at my fancy elite university to help me figure out the 2016 presidential election. So that’s what I did.
I called it “‘Welcome to the Monkey House’: How Politics Becomes a Reality Show.” The monkey house part I stole from a Kurt Vonnegut story. It felt appropriate, and I didn’t think he’d mind. It had the feel of a class you’d see on a college campus. In Political Science, probably — maybe History. Twice as many students as the course could accommodate showed up to the first day of class. And while all of them were clearly fired up about the topic, many of them had the same question: why the hell was this being taught in a literature department? It was a valid question. And I want to try to answer it now.
There was a more obvious path we could have taken: we could have focused on the politics of literature — plays, stories, novels, creative nonfiction dealing with or intervening in heavy political issues. Instead, though, I wanted to focus on the literature of politics. “What we’re gonna do,” I told my students, “is read politics with the same kinds of critical tools we use to analyze literature.”
We could have focused on the politics of literature. But I wanted to focus on the literature of politics.
There was one novel on the syllabus (it was by Kurt Vonnegut, which only seemed fair). For the most part, though, the primary material we analyzed included things like: the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, Eisenhower’s farewell address, images of protests in the ’60s, political attack ads, Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech (and a Captain America comic in which Reagan turns into a snake monster), the Colbert Report, news reports of 9/11. And Donald Trump. We talked about Trump a lot.
What does it mean to read politics like we read literature? Why bother? To start, politics in America tries hard to make itself literary. “Every candidate has a story,” I told my students. “Those stories are very carefully crafted to create specific effects. And the candidate has teams of people coming up with ways to edit their life and turn them into the protagonist in a plot we can all recognize. They all do it. Every candidate has a story.”
“And every movement has one,” a student piped in.
“Yup,” I said.
“And every country, really.”
“Yup.”
One could argue that politics itself is a battle over stories — which ones get told and how, and what gets left out. But this is just the beginning. Because, once a person starts to see how much their understanding of politics is controlled by powerful storytellers — candidates, journalists, speech writers, history textbooks, movies, national monuments — they start to get more suspicious. It’s like noticing a scratch on the lenses of glasses they didn’t even know they were wearing. They start asking different questions. They start thinking like a reader.
One could argue that politics itself is a battle over stories — which ones get told and how, and what gets left out.
In one sense, students know this already. They’re aware that every news source connecting them to what’s going on in the world is going to have some kind of bias. And it’s pretty easy to connect this to the question most of them remember from their high school literature classes: how “reliable” is the narrator? The biases of unreliable narrators (newscasters, candidates, uncles) may be glaringly obvious. But often they’re much harder to see, especially in narratives that claim to be objective. They’re often hidden in the details, in the language used, in specific word choices, in the things a narrator chooses to emphasize and the things she chooses to leave out, in tone, etc. To get at that stuff requires what literature scholars call “close reading.”
Students are pretty much always taught that the main goal of reading literature is to find out what the story “means.” This is a metaphor for that. Such and such character represents X. While reading for this kind of symbolism can be fun, it’s much more important to ask: how does literature work? To read the literature of politics, one has to move beyond asking what literature means and ask what it does.
To read the literature of politics, one has to move beyond asking what literature means and ask what it does.
Analyzing what literature means isn’t inherently a bad thing. But if that’s as far as things go, literature becomes a museum exhibit students can look at from behind glass. A book and its “meaning” exist on their own, like a historical artifact with a description on the panel next to it. Analyzing how literature works, though, removes the glass. It makes the individual reader part of the exhibit, and the exhibit part of the reader’s world. I’ve stopped asking my students what they think this or that passage means. They get much more animated when I ask how this or that thing made them feel, how it changed the way they think, how it affected them and why. These, I told them, are exactly the kinds of questions people following the election need to ask.
To read literature is to be transformed, however slightly, through language. The millions of particles that make up a person are readjusted; they come out as something, even microscopically, different than what they were going in. The words on the page hot-wire new feelings to old memories, they challenge “common knowledge,” they connect people as they are to visions of what might be, or what might have been, they let people see through skulls other than their own. They let people imagine worlds that don’t yet exist, and reimagine ones that do. This is the power of language itself as one of the basic chemicals of our cultural life. Even one word on a dumb billboard, for example, can make me feel enormous things. Perhaps what we call literature is just better at harnessing this power, concentrating it. But so is politics.
To read literature is to be transformed, however slightly, through language.
The language of politics matters immensely. Not just because of all the things it could “mean,” but because of what it can do. Language is largely how people experience the political world. Politicians say stuff, newscasters talk about it, journalists and bloggers write about it, people discuss it — these language games shape our very perception of politics. In his book Constructing the Political Spectacle, political scientist Murray Edelman writes, “It is language about political events, not the events in any other sense, that people experience… political language is political reality.”
Like literature, political speeches are drafted and redrafted. Teams of people argue over the right adjective or verb. Because the words matter. The narrative matters. Narratives help people make sense of the garbage heap that is piling up every second of every day. There’s always too much. Citizen-consumers who have less and less time to sort through everything themselves rely on others to explain what the main plot points are, who the key characters are, what the conflict is, what resolution should be hoped for, etc. A nation of readers needs narrators to structure the flow of information in ways that inform but also entertain, that keep their attention. But a nation of close readers questions the power of influence those narratives have.
A nation of close readers questions the power of influence those narratives have.
What is being left out of these narratives, and why? Which characters are being painted as the protagonists/antagonists? What is the perspective (who is speaking?) and who is the intended audience? Where does the plot start/end, and how does that affect the story itself? (Stories of the evolution of ISIS, for example, or the nature of Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe today vary wildly depending on who is doing the telling and where they start the story. And who is listening). Lastly, how is language being specifically used to manipulate the audience? Because every narrative manipulates (or at least tries to). The ones that pretend they don’t are the ones people should be suspicious of.
Here’s a simple example: many candidates during this election season tried to fit their life story into the “underdog” narrative. Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz (even, yes, Hillary Clinton) would downplay momentum and repeat phrases like “They counted us out, but…” or “Who would have believed that…?” The implication was that each candidate and his/her supporters had overcome some big obstacle “against all odds” (Trump’s “victory tour” is already an ongoing masturbatory exercise in this kind of narrative manipulation). Such rhetorical conventions feel painfully familiar and obvious, because they work. But why? Why is this so much more appealing to audiences than, say, proclaiming, “Everyone expected us to win, and we DID!”? This is a very literary question.
Americans love the underdog narrative, which is at least as old as David and Goliath (and thus carries a whole lot of religious/existential baggage). It’s also carved into the origin story of America itself: Puritans were outcasts facing unbearable odds in a new, harsh land (including the “savage” natives they all but eradicated); America’s revolutionary forefathers were schoolteachers and scrappy farmers facing a gargantuan empire; so on. From the beginning, the American identity fused itself with the underdog narrative. There’s a righteousness and good feeling that comes with the narrative, “proof through the night that our flag was still there.” And when candidates paint themselves as the underdogs they are deliberately trying to associate themselves with that righteousness, that good feeling. It gives all the pleasure of triumph without the guilt of being the bully.
There’s a righteousness and good feeling that comes with the underdog narrative, “proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
To understand how these kinds of narratives workinvolves more than analyzing the ways that political language — speeches, textbooks, songs, etc. — structure reality to fit into such narratives. That’s part of the job, but it mostly focuses on the ones crafting the message (i.e. the “author”). To focus on the “reader’” involves analyzing how and why people respond (or don’t respond) to that message, how and why certain narratives make people feel/think/act certain ways. Narratives manipulate, but they only succeed under the right conditions. If people don’t identify with the elements of a story, they won’t allow themselves to be manipulated by it. The only way to make sense of this election is to read closely for the emotions, the hopes and anxieties, the prejudices and values that prop up the narratives Americans buy into and politicians use — to understand how and why the narratives work.
I’ve said the same about Donald Trump. People who chalked up Trump’s political success only to his supporters’ ignorance and bigotry were missing all the conditions (cultural, personal, economic) that made so many people more receptive to the narrative he was peddling. To quote Murray Edelman again, “The human mind readily rationalizes any political position in a way that will be persuasive for an audience that wants to be convinced.” It’s an obvious point, but so many commentators seem to overlook how Trump’s narrative of national humiliation, domestic chaos, “political correctness,” free trade disasters, and the need for an “outsider” to fix the Washington establishment struck a chord in people who saw something in it they could identify with for complex reasons. They “wanted to be convinced.”
The ills, fractures, and power struggles this election brought to the surface aren’t going to go away. And it’s necessary to teach them in literature classes. To read them closely, even when it’s tremendously uncomfortable, and discuss them productively requires that people respond to the lives and perspectives of others with true empathy, openness, and appreciation for complexity. People have reasons for believing the things they do. And when others don’t see that, when they reduce people to simplistic things (“racists,” “losers,” “whiners,” etc.), it makes it easier for them to hate one another. This is the kind of tendency literature fights against.
The ills, fractures, and power struggles this election brought to the surface aren’t going to go away. And it’s necessary to teach them in literature classes.
This doesn’t mean that empathy and understanding will solve everything — this is just where the work begins. Nor does it mean that all world-views and narratives, especially those that pose a clear physical and existential threat to others, should be treated equally. This is about teaching students the real-world, no-bullshit value of exercising the critical understanding and narrative analysis they learn in literature courses.
Especially since the invention of television, as time and deep attention have become increasingly rare and the most entertaining stuff gets the most airtime, politics in America has driven itself away from complexity. It relies more and more on reducing unbearably complicated realities to spectacular content and pre-packaged narratives that people recognize. The scariest time for American politics was probably after the collapse of the Soviet Union — suddenly the great villain, the competitor that had given U.S. “progress” meaning, was gone. Suddenly America had fewer narrative tricks to justify its worldwide military-industrial complex. But, true to form, American politics found ways to fit new realities into old plots. When George W. Bush declared “war on terror,” he created the basis for the most successful political story-telling franchise in existence: an episodic, world-historical narrative in which the U.S. could be the perpetual hero fighting a villain that could never be completely killed.
Students can learn to see the narratives that influence them and how to open those narratives up to different interpretations.
The point is not to excuse terrorism, of course; it’s to understand how narratives work and the real political consequences they have. Narratives tell people how to see reality, how to see themselves, what to sympathize with, what’s important, which people/characters to hate, which values are worth fighting for, even killing for, so on. Politicians craft narratives to justify things that would be unjustifiable otherwise. Newscasters reproduce narratives that stoke anxieties and make people fear their fellow citizens but, nonetheless, keep them watching attentively. “In our time,” George Orwell wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
But close readers can deconstruct these narratives. Word by word, brick by brick. Students can learn there are other options. They can learn how to see the narratives that influence them and how to open those narratives up to different interpretations and craft alternate endings. They can become better equipped to connect to other people with radically different lives and to explore the hard complexities of a world that changes drastically when looked at from different angles, when told through different narratives. They can find a way out of the monkey house. And literature can help get them there.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing 2016.
I’ve been alive for a long time and I have to say 2016 is my favorite year so far. In fairness to some of the other years, I can’t remember them that well because they were so long ago. It’s sad how much of one’s life is forgotten.
There were a lot of great moments this year, from Britain gaining independence from the European Union to Josh Duggar being cured of his desire to molest people.
But what’s foremost on our minds this week is the recent string of celebrity deaths. Have you ever noticed how celebrities die together? So do elderly couples, twins, and even strangers. When one stranger dies, another dies almost instantly. It’s spooky.
While all the celebrity deaths were certainly sad, the bright side is those celebrities got to become celebrities. And if that wasn’t enough, now they’ve moved on to whatever they think the next stage of life is, which is usually much better than regular life.
As a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince died hoping to beone of the 144,000 allowed into Heaven. If Heaven isn’t full already, I think he had a good chance of getting in. Much better than the odds of someone without a ticket trying to get into a Prince concert.
Selfishly, I miss some of the celebrities who passed, especially Gene Wilder and Anton Yelchin. They both had such a gentle and kind manner about them. It was nice to be reminded that people like that still exist.
The newest President of the United States was elected this year, and while I’m personally not a fan of electing people suffering from severe mental illnesses into office, many voters disagree. The good news is these voters are now so filled with enthusiasm to see their candidate elected, that their joy and cheer is bound to spread across the nation!
Scientists discovered a new species of octopus which they are calling a ghost octopus. This is exciting news for people who like ghosts, and exciting news for the ghost octopus population. It must be lonely to be an undiscovered species on this planet — living among 7.5 billion humans and none of them even knowing you exist. Congratulations and welcome to our consciousness, ghost octopi!
One great thing that happened this year is I got a new car. I already had one but wanted to challenge myself by learning to drive two at once. It’s both a physical and mental challenge.
The best solution I could find — while not perfect — is to put one car in neutral and push it with the other car. If I need to turn, I pull to the side of the empty car as it’s coasting and nudge it gently. To stop, I pull in front of that car and let it smash against my rear bumper. I plan to buy a third car to see how far I can take this.
There were a few more wonderful things that probably happened this year but I have no proof of: 1. An orphan was adopted and given a puppy. 2. A thief successfully stole the iPhone she needed to feed her family. 3. You loved someone even if they didn’t know it or love you back.
BEST FEATURE: Pretty sure I saw a UFO. May have been a lightning bug. Pretty neat either way. WORST FEATURE: Westworld.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing 2015.
The worlds of Game of Thrones, Watership Down & Star Wars are united in grief, while the fantasy master wishes 2016 away.
It’s often said that nothing brings a community together quite like tragedy, and the old adage holds true for writers. 2016 has been fraught with the loss of artists of all stripes, beginning with the death of the enigmatic literary legend, Harper Lee in February. Shortly after, Alan Rickman, the half-blood prince of the Harry Potter franchise, lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. Now, in the final week of what has popularly been deemed the worst year in recent memory, the world is collectively mourning the latest creative casualty, beloved Star Wars princess, Carrie Fisher.
George R.R. Martin, a titan in the realm of fantasy authors, took to his blog to express his heartfelt grief:
There is not much I can say about the death of Carrie Fisher that a thousand other people have not said already. She was way too young. A bright, beautiful, talented actress, and a strong, witty, outspoken woman. Princess Leia will live as long as STAR WARS does… probably forever…
Along with her extraordinary talent for acting, Fisher will also be remembered for her touch with the written word. Throughout her career she penned several scripts, along with five novels, and three memoirs.
In his post, Martin likewise lamented the recent loss of another literary great, Richard Adams. The author of the classic adventure novel, Watership Down, passed away at 96. Martin wrote:
Adams was not ‘one of us,’ in the sense that he was never a convention-goer or part of our genre fantasy community, which may be why he was never honored with a life achievement award by the World Fantasy Convention. Nonetheless, he deserved one.
He regrets that now he will never have an opportunity to meet Adams, whom he admired greatly.
While we wish it were under happier circumstances, it is moving to see the unification of the fantasy worlds of Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Watership Down in Martin’s blurb. No matter what 2017 may bring, writers will have to continue to stick together and fight against the power.
László Krasznahorkai writes the kinds of books you need to be in the mood to read. Once labeled the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, the title has stuck as a kind of badge of honor, reprinted on cover after cover of the English translations of his novels. For the uninitiated, a “Krasznahorkai book” is almost universally choked with despair and poverty and alcohol and grime, from his magnum opus Satantango to his 2015 Man Booker International Prize-winner, War and War.
By comparison, Krasznahorkai’s newest releases in English, The Last Wolf (translated by George Szirtes)and Herman (translated by John Batki), are basically binge-reads, both not even clocking 100 pages in length. Even the label “novella,” as publisher New Directions is calling them, feels like a misnomer — in length, The Last Wolf and Herman could have practically fit in as vignettes in Krasznahorkai’s Seibo There Below. But readers sighing in relief over the publication of the first “digestible” Krasznahorkais ought to be forewarned: both books are a journey, yet neither is a walk in the park.
The Last Wolf is just one sentence long, but it is a mammoth, labyrinthine sentence, encompassing both the breathless monologue of a once-famous author and the interjected actions and questions of the bartender, to whom the narrator is relaying his adventure. The whole ordeal began quite mistakenly, the author explains, when he received an invitation to Extremadura, Spain, from a mysterious and nameless foundation, which insisted he memorialize their lifeless Eden in writing. “…He knew that the whole place, Extremadura, was outside of the world,” Krasznahorkai writes, “because extre means outside, out of, you get it?”
If you do, it might be the last clear signpost you get. In this “mercilessly barren, flat place,” the author finally decides to write about the last wolf to be killed in Extremadura, although it is a task easier said than done:
“…it was south of the River Duero in 1983 that the last wolf had perished” and it might have been the unusual tone of the sentence that stuck in his memory, since scientists didn’t tend to write quite so poetically in articles of this sort, did they? didn’t tend to talk in terms like “the last wolf…”
What is a “last wolf, “anyway? As a game warden explains, the lobos actually died one by one, with the penultimate — a pregnant female — being smashed by a car, as she was too heavy with pups to run across the road.
While the image has an almost Biblical weight — “…he could remember it clearly, could see that young she-wolf as clear as if it were yesterday, her guts spilled, her crushed belly with the dead cub inside it…” — The Last Wolf is maddeningly indecipherable, with even its conclusion a dangling, unfinished mystery. “What is most disquieting and, in a way, most melancholy, is that the wolf is not a symbol for anything,” Chrstine Smallwood writes for Harper’s. Instead, the story is finger-trap for the analytic mind, a sort of maze with no way out: You end up chasing your own tail looking for meaning, around and around, right up until the final, and only, period.
Herman is thematically The Last Wolf’s twin, although the novella itself is a pair of stories — “The Game Warden” and “The Death of a Craft.” Both halves concern the hunter, Herman, who sets off into the woods to destroy the park’s last “noxious beasts,” only to seemingly go mad, turning his traps on the people he’d promised to protect:
“The first sporadic cases of broken legs did not cause the hospital to notify the proper authorities, until in early February law enforcement got wind of rumors being retailed far and wide about the nocturnal depredations of a maniac at large among the residences of peaceful citizens, or possibly it was some kids to young to realize the gravity of their acts. The investigation soon established that the culprit or culprits were using standard, if extremely dangerous steel-jawed traps, placed in front of the homes of unwary people with the most perverse cunning and inexhaustible inventiveness, superbly camouflaged so that a person leaving the house in the morning was bound to step in it.”
In the first version of the tale, Herman ultimately becomes the quarry of the townspeople; in the second, amorous aristocrats set aside their canoodling to search for the fabled madman-hunter, only for Herman to vanish without a trace. It is an unsettling pairing of accounts, as the two don’t quite match up in detail, and once again leave the reader searching for hidden meaning where perhaps there is none.
The Last Wolf and Herman take no time at all to read. But each novella is like the literary equivalent of a Rubik’s cube: unintimidating when held in the hand, and yet somehow impossible to get straight once you start trying. Don’t underestimate the pair; they might look flimsy enough to finish during a long commute but they’ll haunt you — or perhaps hunt you — long after the final full-stop has been left behind.
2. Everything You Wanted to Know about Book Sales (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Electric Literature editor-in-chief Lincoln Michel breaks down the hows, whats, and whys of book selling, and challenges some myths about book selling with hard data.
3. 12 Things I Noticed While Reading Every Short Story Published in 2014–15
Electric Literature contributing editor Kelly Luce explains what she learned reading for the O. Henry Prize anthology, and decides that “For a form whose death is continually prophesied, the story is doing pretty damn well.”
6. Let’s Get to Work: Practical Ways for Writers and Teachers to Get Involved Right Now
In the wake of the 2016 election, Electric Literature contributing editor Anu Jindal looks at resources and organizations that writers can get involved with to help make the world a better place.
A man missing an arm and part of his jaw knocks on the door. He smells like a brewery and claims he’s a family relation. That’s how the story “Related” begins. It’s under 500 words. Or consider “Oriole,” which opens, “My father’s hands fit around my throat” and lays bare what’s going on at home in under 1,000 words. These stories feature hookups and breakups, substance abuse, and violence so casual it’s as natural as jagged breathing.
This is the work of Len Kuntz, sui generis even in the gonzo world of flash fiction, and he’s published a lot of stories to prove it. When David Galef, a fiction writer and critic, set out to write Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook (Columbia University Press), this was the kind of material he was searching for: visceral as a gut-punch but with a real narrative to pursue, a turn in someone’s life encapsulated in a couple of pages. Flash fiction is ubiquitous these days, but it can still turn up something new, like a small miracle. We recently asked Kuntz and Galef to chat about the world and the art of flash fiction: where the form stands, where it’s headed, whether brevity can be pushed further, and which were their favorite one-line stories of the year.
David Galef: Flash fiction is all over the place, from classrooms to the web, in contests and in anthologies. You’ve published a slew of work in this genre. Got an opinion on what’s new in the field?
Len Kuntz: There are certainly new zines popping up every week and just as many going defunct. Micro fiction, as well as Twitter fiction, was a recent development, but they’ve been around for some time now. What’s new are the emerging writers, the fresh voices, and there’s a plethora of them online.
Galef: I agree. I don’t see any way to push the vanishing point beyond 140 characters, two- or one-sentence pieces, and that sort of thing. But I do wonder about hybrid forms, combining text and image or — well, we should really insert a YouTube video link here. How would you describe the kind of flash fiction you write, and how has your work evolved?
Kuntz: When I started out, I had no idea what I was doing. Most of the things I was reading with regard to flash were quite odd, bordering on bizarro fiction, or else they were pretty experimental, where the narrative came in second to the language. I tried mimicking that, with a little success, but really when I caught my stride was when I learned how to wind a tight plot point into the piece. In almost all of my writing, someone is in trouble, or else they’re wounded or will soon be wounded. One of the guys in my writing group says I torture my characters better than anyone he knows. I suppose that’s true. If you can get the reader to care about the character, then the reader really becomes invested in what happens to the character when things go wrong, when they struggle. I guess I’ve evolved to where I no longer apologize for writing things with a dark bent. I go for the emotional tug. My readers might not be smiling when they’re done with a piece of mine, but hopefully they come away having their heart shook, if even just a little.
Galef: I like a sum-up of your work I read recently about how no one does damaged-kid stories as well as you. I don’t mean to be reductive, but it’s something you do really well in an amazingly small space. I see it in The Dark Sunshine and also in I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You. That’s one main reason I included you in Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook.
Kuntz: Thank you for the kind words about my writing. It’s true that I mostly write about damaged people. But I’ve come to say that I write about people wrestling with their problems. It’s vague enough yet interesting enough that people remain somewhat interested. And I’m happy to be in that handbook.
Galef: Of course, the handbook is an attempt to cram as many different ways of looking at flash fiction as possible into a fairly slim volume. So I’m curious as to your thoughts on the limits of the form. What can’t you do in flash fiction?
Kuntz: Obviously length is a limit, but other than that, I don’t think there are any rules per se. As a fiction editor at Literary Orphans, I get a lot of submissions that lack complexity, that don’t tell a story. Many people think all that’s required of flash fiction is that it be short. But it can’t just be a description of something or a sketch. What I look for is rich language or a fresh voice. And I want to feel a connection to the story and characters. The writing needs to evoke some kind of emotion, and that can be anything — grief, shock, humor. At the end of the piece, I want to have a sense of “Wow.”
Galef: But sometimes that comes from a sheer lyric burst. Is there anything about flash fiction that frustrates you? What would you like to see done differently, or more frequently with the form?
Kuntz: Personally, I’d like to see more mystery in a lot of the pieces I see. By mystery, I mean endings that aren’t always tidy and obvious. When it’s done intentionally by the author, I think it’s wonderful to have several different readers come to opposite conclusions. Much of Bob Dylan’s catalog does this. I have long, drawn out conversations about Tangled Up in Blue, Visions of Johanna, and many others. Each of us debating the true meanings of those songs is adamant that their version is correct. If nothing else, this sort of nebulous work reinvigorates passions about it.
Galef:But one incontrovertible aspect of Dylan’s lyrics is that they tell us stories. I feel as you do about some of what’s out there: there should be some kind of narrative drive, or else why call it flash fiction? And I also like verbal verve, and I’m therefore a bit nonplused when I read a piece that’s wasteful with language. Ezra Pound once looked at one of Louis Zukofsky’s poems and said something like “I see you’ve used 64 words when you could get by with 49.” But a lot of the old page limits have sort of disappeared with the web. Tell me, how has the internet changed flash fiction?
Kuntz: Certainly the internet has hastened the popularity of flash. There are literally hundreds of online magazines that cater to the form. Many only publish flash. So it’s created this incredible universe where there’s always fiction to read at the click of a mouse. On the flip side, it’s opened up the publishing stream for writers looking to place their work. One other added dimension is the ability to learn from other writers and also to see where they are being published.
Galef: I see a lot more communication and commerce among readers and writers, what some sites call user-provided content. That’s fine as long as it doesn’t get too incestuous. And I do mourn the passing of the old general reader, who had no artistic aspirations and simply loved to read.
Kuntz: It’s interesting you bring up the word incestuous. Cliques definitely exist in the writing world, in publishing, etc. There are boys’ and girls’ clubs that, while they don’t overtly say it, nevertheless make it clear that admission is only meant for a certain type of person they favor, and most times I don’t think it’s about the art that person produces. And it can get incestuous, because we’re all in the same ocean, maybe on different boats, but we run up against each other. For instance, I’m and editor and writer, so invariably I’ll submit to a house where I know the editor. The reverse happens, as well. It’s difficult to reject a friend, but I still do it if I don’t think the work matches our aesthetic or if it’s not good work. I hope they do the same for me, and for the most part, I do think that’s been the case.
Galef: With all those boats bumping about on the ocean, as you note, how does anyone get anywhere. In fact, what’s the future of the form? Saturation?
Kuntz: I don’t know if flash has peaked, but it sure proliferated just as the internet was becoming a vessel that everyone used. Short attention spans helped flash, as well. It’s also difficult to stick with a longish story — say 4,000 words — when you’re reading it onscreen. But to the point of saturation, I don’t think so. In my opinion, flash is here to stay in the same way that hip hop is. It might evolve, but it’s not going anywhere. My only worry is about the quality of the work. I see a lot of average or less-than-average work being published. That’s subjective, obviously, yet a great piece is unquestionably good, and sometimes I wonder if publishers aren’t just trying to scrounge up enough stories to fill an issue. Knowing many publishers, I can tell you this happens far more than it should, and so there’s a settling that occurs. The bar gets lowered, and if that continues to happen on a grander scale, the reader might eventually be turned off. If there’s a saturation having to do with the form, I’d say it has to do with the amount of magazines and zines there are without any distinct aesthetic. It’s like having 40 car rental places to choose from that are all essentially the same. Or, like in my small town of Snohomish, WA, where we have over 30 banks that all provide the same service: why do we need 30 banks that — other than their logo — are indistinguishable?
Galef: Not much to do about proliferation going hand in hand with lowered standards. It happens in making widgets, and it happens in making stories. More breeds more, and “they can’t all be gems,” as they used to say. But we can hope for some classy sites that — what’s the verb nowadays? — curate well. A lot depends on the iron whim of the editor. And since you’re in the business of continually selecting what other people will eventually read, who are some of your favorite flash fiction authors, and why?
Kuntz: This is always a difficult question to answer because I must have well over a hundred. But there’s a book that came out from Unknown Press called RIFT, which is a masterwork in the area of flash. It’s by Robert Vaughan and Kathy Fish. Throughout the book, they have alternating pieces, and each one is riveting in its own way. We get all the best things flash has to offer: lush language, pathos, quirk, surprises, wonderful phrasing, unique characters, spot-on dialogue, and so much more. I defy anyone to read this book and not be blown away. Even for the novice just breaking into the craft, RIFT is tool box and a manual for how to write flash that sings.
Galef: I’ll have to check it out. One of my favorite collections is still the original volume of Sudden Fiction that came out in 1986, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, billed as “American Short-Short Stories.” It’s got Grace Paley, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, Roy Blount, Jr., John Updike, Langston Hughes, Tobias Wolff, T. C. Boyle, Bernard Malamud, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lydia Davis, George Garrett, Joyce Carol Oates, Tennessee Williams . . . and I could go on.
Kuntz: I have Sudden Fiction on the shelf right behind me. It was one of the first books I bought when I started learning about flash and just writing in general. It’s a wonderful book, as is The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. There are so many others that don’t necessarily have to do with flash but are still so inspirational and educational for aspiring writers: Bird By Bird — Anne Lamott; Writing Down The Bones — Natalie Goldberg; That Triggering Town — Richard Hugo. When I first starting studying the craft, I probably read and marked up close to 100 books about writing. It was invaluable. I highly recommend that to anyone starting out, or really, anyone who considers themself a writer. I still go back to many of the volumes, and invariably I find new nuggets here and there.
Galef: There certainly are a lot of books on writing fiction out there, and in flash fiction, a growing number of anthologies.
Kuntz: But here’s an issue: If flash fiction has gained so much popularity, why hasn’t that translated into higher sales of flash collections?
Galef: This is a tantalizing question, but one that also bedevils short story writers. Practitioners and readers of short material are always being told that novels sell and short story collections don’t. Editors often acquire a short story collection with the understanding that the author’s next book by the press will be a novel. The funny thing is that, back in the golden age of the short story, say the 1920s to the 1950s, with magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald would bankroll their novels by selling enough short stories to allow them to produce a long manuscript. But that hasn’t been true for many decades. Maybe the larger question is why the American reading public, what’s left of it, prefers novels. Blame the American aesthetic (and business model) of bigger is better?
Kuntz: It is a paradox. Even as late as the 1980’s most magazines published short stories — Playboy, Esquire, Ms., Redbook, etc. They’ve since stopped, and yet, at least in my circles, short fiction abounds. I think if the artists themselves felt a stronger sense of supporting the work, it would help turn the tide at least some. Most writers are limited financially, yet buying a dozen or so collections a year couldn’t be that big a burden. A writer friend of mine said this a while back, and I’ve found it so true: “I always laugh when a friend says they don’t have $15 to buy my book, but then their next sentence is, ‘Do you want to go grab a few drinks?’” What’s more important, a latte every day, or supporting the art community that you’re a part of? A related issue for flash fiction is that anyone thinks they’re capable of writing a piece, when it might just be a statement or sketch as opposed to a fully formed idea.
Galef: True, very. I’ve published two children’s picture books, and the same idea holds there: a lot of people think they can put together a kid’s book, have someone else illustrate it, and voila! The unstated assumption is that it’s short, so how difficult can it be? That’s valid insofar as it’s easier to rig up a piece of flash fiction than it is to put a novel to bed, but even the shortest story should have some kind of narrative drive, as well as a beginning, middle, and end — something to give it body and shape. That said, a lot of fiction exists in sketches, rants, dialogues, and so forth. It’s hard to pin down what flash ought to be without thinking of some talented exception.
Kuntz: I agree that it’s hard to pin down. I do think, however, that it ought to be able to stand alone, and stand out on its own merit and still have a sense of wholeness. The proverbial micro attributed to Hemingway — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — does just that in only six words. Here are a couple of other examples I found in Dime Show Review, which just came out in print:
“Bare toes on rotted linoleum. Roaches scurry.” ‘Mommy I’m hungry.’” — “Rooms-$7 A Night,” by Jayne Martin
“Sitting outside the home. Junkie mother’s four hours late, again.” — “I Wait,” by Daniel Green
“The computer displays images, among them my death mask.” — “Images,” by Clyde Liffey
“She beat me again for my own good. It wasn’t.” — “Tough Love,” by Paul Beckman
“Waking on bloody sheets — Bells toll. I’m twelve, refusing marriage.” — “Warrior Caste,” by Claire Lawrence
“Finally he met her, but the ring said: Too late.” — “The One,” by Rebecca Long
I think these are all good examples of the very shortest fiction that still tells a complete story while also packing a wallop.
Galef: It is kind of amazing what a talented writer can accomplish in just ten words. I read flash fiction before it had that label, in work like Aesop’s fables, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Biblical parables. But those texts are rather stylized. The first time I read a tiny, realistic story with a twist at the end was in a collection featuring MacKinlay Cantor’s “A Man Who Had No Eyes,” about an exchange between two former factory workers who meet on the street. I was amazed at how much character and incident was packed into just over 1,000 words. It’s still an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser, though a bit dated for a slam crowd. As I read more of what was out there, my reaction for the stuff that worked was the same: Look at what that writer can do in such a small space! These days I like a lot of the material on Ben White’s nanoism site. It’s like a world opening, then another, then another.
Kuntz: Yes, but I wonder whether flash fiction writers get as much credit, as say, traditional short story writers, and if not, will they ever?
Galef: Too many critics consciously or unconsciously equate bulk with importance. We talk about the Great American Novel, not Great American Flash Fiction. The traditional-length short story is somewhere in between. The few flash fictioneers who get credit, like Hemingway, made their reputation in regulation-length stories and novels. I’m not sure that’s ever going to change much.
Kuntz: Yet Alice Munro recently won the Nobel Prize and George Saunders the National Book Award. Both won for short fiction, and while it’s not flash, it does seem as if there’s a new appreciation for brevity in writing. Certainly a lot of people are reading and writing it. I’m still holding out hope that flash fiction writers will soon get their due.
About the Authors
David Galef has published over a dozen books, including the novels Flesh and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (one of Kirkus’sBest 30 Books in 2006) and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (winner of Dzanc Books’ inaugural short-story collection award). His latest book is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He directs the creative writing program at Montclair State University.
Len Kuntz is the author of over 1,000 pieces of flash fiction published in places ranging from PANK to Word Riot and Eunoia Review. Len Kuntz’s two collections are The Dark Sunshine (Connotations Press) and I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You (Unknown Press). He’s also the fiction editor at Literary Orphans.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Mondays, strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
