summer reading

“The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” — Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

My summer reading, which I had looked forward to all spring, is over. Today I opened Three Cups of Tea, which I’ll be teaching in the fall and which promises to be wonderful, but summer reading has the allure of being completely my own. So begins lesson planning and required reading.

I had wanted to read page-turning, feel good stories such as Water for Elephants, with a few classics thrown in to make me feel less like I’ve been schlepping through my reading life. But between writing, working, and Anna Karenina, I only made it through Joyce’s Dubliners, Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift, Moore’s Sleeping Beauties, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Choi’s Foreign Student, and the massive Anna.

People with English degrees continue to tell me that I must read the classics so that I can understand what’s come before me. And I can say, from this limited sample, that I preferred the contemporary stories to the classic ones. Granted, I chose them because they touched on things I’m interested in right now, mostly self-exile. I loved Fugard, Moore, Ondaatje and Choi, and I learned a great deal about technique from Joyce and Tolstoy. Making this distinction, reading for pleasure versus reading for form, makes me feel as if I’m growing as a reader.

This is not to say that I did not learn from the contemporary writers as well, it’s just they had the added bonus of being hard to put down. I inhaled, as always, Moore’s work; I seriously pondered Choi’s characters, I reveled at the brilliant POV shifts of Fugard, and felt lost in the beautiful poetry of Ondaatje’s novel.

Also (since the Tolstoy read deserves a mention), what’s wonderful about Anna Karenina is it’s breadth; it’s wonderful, intersecting story lines that have the pace of real life. Things take time. His characters are distinct, three-dimensional, with wonderful interior monologue. His humor and tragedy is spot on. I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again as its student.

In all, it was a wonderful summer of reading. Francine Prose, in her Reading Like a Writer, states that we read for courage. I believe that. There’s a world full of books that break the rules, that show us how it can be done and it’s sometimes more beneficial than a classroom full of people to tell you how it can’t.

hello, slush pile!

So after a hiatus, I’m back. To be honest, I went from having too little time on my hands during the school year, to having too much. My goal was to use the time to begin the novel, read a bunch of literary magazines, send out stories, and read some Russians.

I don’t do well with lots of time, and I’m gladly returning to work next week. But I’ve made a decent dent in the novel, and sent out my first batch of submissions last night. I’ve read that it takes an average of 20 rejections before a magazine accepts a piece, so I’m reminding myself to persevere. Of course, in my rush to finish things before work begins, I forgot to stamp my self-addressed envelopes. Many of these magazines state that they’ll outright reject manuscripts without them. So I panicked, called the man at the post office depot at midnight. The store had just closed. It’s okay, he said. No problem. Come now.

So I’m running across the street, braless in Hillcrest. He opened the envelopes, I stamped the ones nestled inside with my mss., and he taped them up again. We were an assembly line. He said next time I come after midnight I have to bring him tequila. I love this man.

He reminds me of the proprietor of my favorite Middle Eastern deli in San Jose. Kindness and playfulness behind his gruff demeanor, single-handedly running a business. He works endlessly. I used to give him the vegetables in my garden, and he would share his recipes with me. I always felt humbled by his work ethic, warmed by his honesty. The last time I saw him, his father had died that morning. He was oceans and continents away, tied to his business, and couldn’t return for the funeral. He hugged me, anyway, told me to come back.

And here’s this man in San Diego, telling me, Sleep is for losers. Hearty laugh. I like to work, he says. But not for other people. Just for myself, I work.

So the stories were sent. Anna Karenina’s next on the book queue. Then Fathers and Sons.

becoming un-stuck

With school canceled for the week due to the fires, I was a very lazy girl. Well, at least in that productive write-your-research-paper way. I did start writing my next short story, however, since my last story was workshopped a few weeks ago. I found myself stalking my characters, trying to get to know them. I wandered around the apartment thinking of what they would say to each other, and then, questioning their decisions. I fretted over structure, told myself something has to happen (action’s not my strong suit) and more or less banged my head against the wall for a few days. Godammit, why won’t they just tell me what they want?

At the same time, I started reading for myself, finally putting a dent into Granta’s Best Young Novelists 2, beginning Kaui Hemmings Hart’s House of Thieves, and slowly plodding away at One Hundred Years of Solitude (again) for class. It was there, in those pages, rather than the blank ones on my computer screen, that prompted me to keep going. While my stories begin with germ of an idea—a dream, an image—these texts inspired me by breaking up a the traditional narrative, by offering that one telling detail, by showing me worlds beyond my own, a lens in which to see my characters. And of course, they’re just so damn good.

And so I finished the first full draft a few days ago. Of course, now I’ve got the emotional lull because it’s not really mine anymore. Not exclusively. But mostly, I hope this is a lesson: When stuck, go back to the books. Keep reading.

It reminded me of something I read from Julia Glass, after I read her novel, Three Junes. Here’s what she had to say (the truncated version) about reading while writing.

But inspiration, that’s a kinder, gentler matter — and if I turn a less covetous eye on my list, I could say it’s a list of writers who inspire me: amplify my senses of the physical world, my joy in language, my faith in the power of make-believe. The only impediment to reading their books is the urge — the almost literal itch — they sometimes give me to heave them aside like burning coals and get to work on mine.

I have heard writers claim that while they’re working on a new book, they won’t read anything contemporary, won’t read anything they haven’t read before, or simply won’t read at all. They’re too impressionable, they claim. I find such restrictions as absurd as protesting that you can’t eat out if you’re the household cook or can’t give birth if you’re an obstetrician. And when, after all, is a writer not working? In my head at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters’ lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams…all arrive unbidden when I’m getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape — affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark. This kind of inspiration struck, perfectly timed, when I was about two-thirds of the way through writing Three Junes. … I went right out and bought a collection of Cameron’s stories and his previous novel, The Weekend, a book that would prove fortuitous to the completion of mine.

I was also facing down the true challenge of writing a novel: ending it. I knew who the characters were in the final third of the book, I knew the present action would take place over a weekend at that house on Long Island, I knew the alliances as they would stand at the end and that the end would be hopeful, but I did not know quite how the characters would get there. In The Weekend, I was surprised (and a little unnerved) to encounter a cast of characters from the very same world, even (as in Three Junes) a man still mourning the loss of another man to AIDS and a mother preoccupied with the fate of a small child. More remarkably, the novel ended, as I knew mine would, with the main character’s return to New York City. I might have been depressed at the similarities, but I was energized.

I felt as if I had traveled abroad and run into next-door neighbors I’d never met at home or as if my characters, drifting about in my head, had discovered a gang of soul mates — souls who seemed not frivolous but tragically weighted. I was heartened by this kinship, even though Cameron’s writing has a conciseness I could only envy. And now I confess to an act of theft.

the great stories

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things