Kurt Vonnegut: Writing With Style

Dave Eggers, author of many highly-touted books, screenwriter for Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go, and creator of McSweeney's (a literary journal) shared his review of Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by the late Kurt Vonnegut in the New York Times Book Review (11/1/09).

I discovered (and fell in love with) Vonnegut's short fiction long before I ever seriously considered that storytelling could be a viable function of my life. I was always intrigued--and greatly influenced--by what my much more talented, creative and over-achieving sisters and brother were reading. One rainy day, I remember sneaking into my brother's room, scouring his bookshelves and borrowing his copy of Vonnegut's short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House. (The title is what lured me.) "Long Walk to Forever" is the story from that collection that stole my heart. It is a tale of stark realism about the possibilities of love. It's told simply and straightforwardly--no gimmicks or tricks--and the dialogue is pitch-perfect. I loved each story in Monkey House--the shifts in point-of-view were so refreshing, as were Vonnegut's dips into satire and futuristic fantasy--that I never did return that book to my brother's room. To this day, that well-read and worn paperback still sits on a shelf over my writing desk with many other books that have been my greatest teachers--in craft and in life.

If you want to read more about what Vonnegut had to say about the art of storytelling, San Diego State University published "How to Write With Style"--an excerpt from Vonnegut's book of essays, Palm Sunday (New York: Dial Press, 1999). In the piece, Mr. V suggests the following seven points to improve your writing:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Link to the article for more insight into the above.

Great advice for writers--of all genres.

Photo of Kurt Vonnegut from State University of San Diego

The Horton Foote Legacy

The New Yorker recently featured an article on the life and work of Horton Foote (10/26/09 by John Lahr). In his writing, Foote "made meaning of the world he sought to preserve." He believed the first lesson of good writing was an ability to listen--to really listen. An inquisitive person by nature, he was "haunted by the often inexplicable result of how a person's life turned out." It led him to become a master storyteller for both the stage and screen. He won a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards.

I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with Mr. Foote after seeing a revival of A Trip to Bountiful a few years ago. He was a strikingly humble and gracious man. (I also saw the last play he wrote before his death in March 2009, Dividing the Estate; I think it's his best.) In Foote's plays, "the big dramatic events happen offstage." Foote examined "the ripple not the wave. He was a quiet voice in noisy times." He won numerous awards and was probably best known for Tender Mercies, a film starring Robert Duvall, and for having written the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird (by Harper Lee). He is also credited for writing a brilliantly-inspired film adaption of "Tomorrow," a short story by William Faulkner.

Lahr states in the article: "It was not (Foote's) style, in life or in writing, to call attention to himself. As a result the quality of his work is high; the public awareness is low." If you're not familiar with Horton Foote's plays and/or his writing, you might want to catch "The Orphans' Home Cycle," a play in three parts that Foote wrote to "understand and forgive" his own father. It is currently being featured at the Signature Theater, which is honoring the Horton Foote Legacy for the 2009-2010 season.

Photo of Horton Foote by Marion Ettlinger/Corbis Outline

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Head, Heart

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Hearts feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

--a short story by Lydia Davis

There's been a lot of buzz over The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis recently released (as a 752-page tome) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The longest story tops out at nine pages (3-4 is the average), while others are as short as a single sentence. Each story--long or short--is a gem. The range of Davis's prose is intellectual, insightful, witty, poetic and always profound. It takes surgical-like precision to work in such brevity, and Davis is a master of language and form.

The New Yorker recently ran a feature on the book, as did The Village Voice.

A Stairway to Bibliophile Heaven

Too many books?

Too little space?

The Bookshelf Staircase has become a London icon sporting "a classic design that frees up space in any small flat."

Levitate Architects remodeled this London apartment by creating "a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one-third." The staircase is both the way to access the bedroom and a great place to store books. "With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome," says Levitate's Tim Sloan, who also pointed out the unique structure of each step, allowing for anyone to comfortably sit down while searching for the perfect read . . . Something, huh?

Memorial Service for Frank McCourt

"In school if they told me write an essay of 150 words,

I'd write 500 words."

Frank McCourt

Symphony Space and the nationally-syndicated NPR radio program "Selected Shorts" announced today that they will be featuring a webcast of the memorial service (from 10/6/09)honoring the late author, Frank McCourt. Below is the press release:

Click here to view the event entitled, "Remembering the Remarkable Frank McCourt: An Evening of Reminiscence, Music, Poetry and Laughter." The video will be available until November 4th, courtesy of Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner Books.

This memorial service celebrates Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish-American writer and educator. Mr. McCourt shared many memorable evenings at Symphony Space, performing passages of James Joyce’s Ulysses each year at Bloomsday on Broadway, and performing short stories at Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story.

Mr. McCourt, who passed away July 19 at age 78, taught in New York City’s school system for nearly 30 years; he is perhaps best known for Angela’s Ashes, his best-selling memoir of growing up in Limerick, Ireland, as well as his subsequent memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man, and his children’s book, Angela and the Baby Jesus.

The (Professional) Bookworm

" . . . An interview on the air is so much more than what gets said. You hear the laughter, the emotional flow. And it’s only then that the listener starts to feel comfortable and really listens. That’s the point at which they say, 'I might read that book.' And I want to get the reader to that point. And it really involves a lot of give and take, a lot of emotional sharing. I generally read about six to eight hours a day, and try to read the author’s complete work before I interview them. And you’d be surprised at how few authors have ever met someone who’s read everything they’ve written. I’m like a mirror to them. Then they start trying to see themselves in the mirror, and then we’re really in something like the equivalent of a psychoanalytic transaction between a person and their image. That’s when you get the things that are generally interesting.

"I think we have a spiritual and imaginal dimension that I never hear referred to, so I wanted my half-hour to be a place where every kind of seriousness about the value of life — its preciousness or its wastefulness, its insanity, its possibility — could be a valued subject for conversation. And I wanted listeners to say, “God, I never hear people talking about this.” --from Malibu Magazine

He only talks about books he likes. He has an engaging voice--quiet, slightly nasal, yet somehow hypnotic--that epitomizes understatement. He asks sensitive, insightful questions that probe the foundations of literature--text and technique. Who is he? He's Michael Silverblatt, the host of Bookworm, a nationally-syndicated half-hour radio program (broadcast on KCRW in Los Angeles, CA) where he sits down with authors--with names like T.C. Boyle, Marilynne Robinson, Junot Diaz and Joan Didion--and talks, compellingly and personally, about books.

Silverblatt was always a "reading geek," as he calls himself. He studied literature at SUNY Buffalo and started grad school at Johns Hopkins University. Disillusioned with academia, he dropped out and headed for New York, but he found "the publishing world too insular and too peopled with young trust-fund-subsidized editors for his taste." In the 1980s, he moved to California and tried to write screenplays. During that time--to support himself, he worked at bookstores and read voraciously--his life took an unexpected turn. At a dinner party, the general manager from KCRW overheard Silverblatt discussing Russian poetry and, sensing his passion for literature, she invited Silverblatt to start a radio program that would later become Bookworm. That was 20 years ago. The rest is history.

I download podcasts of Bookworm regularly. This month, Oprah Magazine is running a profile on Silverblatt and his program. A great feature--it sheds light on the man who helps readers look through writers' eyes.

EVENT: Upcoming Reading in The Village

I'm pleased to announce that I will be participating in a literary reading to celebrate the launch of the current issue of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana (Volume 20, November 2009). This literary journal--published for the past 20 years by the University of Central Florida and Bordighera Press--features a short story of mine.

I'll be reading a short section of the piece, along with other prose writers and poets whose work is also featured in VIA (Vol 20) including:

Phyllis Carito

Michael Cirelli

Edward DeFranco

Joanna Clapps Herman

Mary Giaimo

Maria Terrone

Robert Viscusi

The event is hosted by the new VIA Poetry Editor, Peter Covino

and

George Guida, Director

Copies of the latest issue of VIA will be on sale at the event!

Please join us @

Small's Jazz Club

183 W. 10th Street at 7th Avenue

Greenwich Village

NYC

Saturday, October 10 from 5-7 pm ($6 cover charge)

The Elegance of Muriel Barbery

When The Elegance of the Hedgehog by French writer Muriel Barbery was released last year, I devoured the novel in one sitting. The structure intrigued me--very short chapters, confessional and intimate-like essays, which overlap to tell the story of Renee Michel, a 54 year-old concierge at a posh Paris apartment building. "I'm a widow, short, ugly, chubby; I have bunions on my feet and, on certain difficult mornings, it seems, the breath of a mammoth. But above all, I conform to the image assigned to concierges. It would never occur to anyone that I am better read than all these self-satisfied rich people." What a voice! This is a novel about social class, how people can be isolated (and misunderstood) even though they live together, and the power of art, literature and philosophy. Over the course of the story, Renee befriends Paloma, a 12 year-old girl from the building. She is a young idealist--disillusioned and cynical about the self-importance and vanity of the people who populate her world (her tone is slightly reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, if he were a bit more philosophical)--who intends to commit suicide by her 13th birthday. Not to fret. In the union of these two (very different, solitary) souls there resides great comic relief and in the end, a life-affirming message.

Just released is Gourmet Rhapsody, the novel Muriel Barbery wrote prior to The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Both books share a similar literary structure, many of the same characters and they are both set in the same Paris apartment building on Rue de Grenelle. The themes, too, remain but in Gourmet Rhapsody, Barbery adds the sensuality of food and mortality to the story of the last 48-hours in the life of a powerful, famous (and very arrogant) French food critic. "I am the greatest food critic in the world," Pierre Arthens, the protagonist announces at the beginning of the book. "I am going to die and there is a flavor that has been teasing my taste buds and my heart and I simply cannot recall it." In the story, Arthens, a brilliant yet heartless man, confronts his mortality by "rhapsodizing" about his experiences with food--recalling, in luscious detail, foods such as bread, tomatoes, sushi and mayonnaise, as well as mentally revisiting his grandmother's table, a country farmhouse and a mistress' kitchen. But another side of Arthens emerges via monologues from the people who willingly (and unwillingly) shared their lives with him--his devoted and long-suffering wife; his bitter, drug-addicted son; his unloved daughter and grand-daughter; two mistresses; and even his cat. It's a fascinating, beautifully-rendered story about a complicated man, his life and death, and how, in the end, the evocation of his experiences with food defined his desires, emotions and the goals of his life.

Muriel Barbery is an intelligent, colorful writer, one to watch. Do yourself a favor and don't miss either of these bittersweet, redemptive books.

The Best of the Best

The National Book Foundation is allowing the general public to vote for The Best of the National Book Awards in Fiction. The nominees are comprised of past winners and they are:

1) The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)

2) Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)

3) Collected Stories of William Faulkner (William Faulkner)

4) Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories (Flannery O'Connor)

5) Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

6) The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Eudora Welty)

So far, Flannery O'Connor is the front runner...Hooray! Cast your vote here. By doing so, you might win a trip to the NBA ceremony in NYC!

Once on the site, be sure to click on the pictures of each author to link to other information about each book and author--as well as thoughts about each books from other writers, former nominees, and acclaimed NBA Judges like Alice Elliott Dark.

What Makes A Reader Care?

A creative writing instructor of mine once stressed how important it was to read books to the very end—even if we didn't like them. He believed writers could learn from work that didn't really appeal to them and/or hold their interests—possibly as much or more than work that did. As a disciplined person—at least in my reading and writing habits (red wine and extra-cheese pizza do not apply)—I’ve tried to hold fast to that rule. When I close a book, I sit with things in order to pin-point what worked and what didn't in order to apply what I’ve learned to my own writing. We bring so much of our own lives to what we read, as well as to our interpretations and the judgments we make about what we read. I've come to the conclusion that it always helps a reader's journey if they care about a character, but what makes a reader care . . . A sense of familiarity? Empathy? Anger? Frustration? A redeeming quality? Hoping the character will transform in a way that will be fulfilling to us by the end of the book? All of which leads me to the larger question of do you really have to "like" a character and agree with his/her choices in order to enjoy and fully appreciate a book?

I recently finished The Film Club by David Gilmour, a Canadian novelist and film critic. This thought-provoking memoir is about a father who allows his troubled, 15 year-old son to drop out of school with the stipulation that he'll watch three movies a week with Dad, and together, they will discuss them, in depth. I really looked forward to this read, as I was raised on a steady diet of movies since I was kid. The premise of Gilmour’s ultimatum to his son was the hook that enticed me. And while the plot appeared to be about a father and son who spend time together watching great movies, the story evolved into one more about a father trying to understand a son (and vice-versa) and parenthood—the challenges, joys, and the tendency to make mistakes.

I am a reader of mostly female-themed domestic fiction and it makes me wonder what kept me engaged through all 240 pages of this memoir. I am not a father or a son, and my own father (or mother, for that matter) would never have proposed such an educational ultimatum to me nor would they have been so liberal about alcohol and drug use and teenage sexual exploits. There were times during the read when I fiercely disagreed with Gilmour’s parenting style and the choices he made. But he did offer me an honest glimpse of an unfamiliar world. In straightforward, deft prose—and through candid, often heart-wrenching, storytelling—Gilmour revealed his foibles, as well as those of his son, as they both grappled with “the experiment” and tried to find their respective places in the world. Flawed characters trying to learn and grow—and do the right thing . . . in that, there is great universality.

The Film Club (a memoir) by David Gilmour
(Twelve, Hardcover, 9780446199292, 256pp.)
Publication Date: May 2008
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

What Becomes A Novel Most?

Writing is a subjective business. While one person might love a book, another might find they can’t get beyond Chapter One. In a review in The Washington Post of A Gate at the Stairs—a much-anticipated novel by Lorrie Moore, a coveted and acclaimed short story writer—Ron Charles hailed the book, but referred to it as "an unhurried tale." Further on in the review, Charles states, "I should warn you that Moore is a lot more interested in her narrator than her plot. There is a fair amount of precocious riffing in this novel, a syncopation of sweet and mordant beats. Things do happen--even startling, gripping things--but any reader who needs that to stay engaged will have drifted away 200 pages earlier during one of Tassie's (the protagonist’s) soliloquies. Much of her fascination with words and wordplay is amusing, but some of it seems too clever by half, along with her super-duper writing-seminar descriptions of the weather that are polished to distracting brilliance."

I admire Ron Charles's reviews. He is a conscientious, sensitive reader. He obviously spends quality time with books and takes great pains to fully absorb them in order to write such thoughtful reviews. But in a world (and an industry) where sensationalism often prevails, Charles's assessment of A Gate at the Stairs accommodates contemporary reader expectations. I'm well aware that publishing has become less about writing and more about book sales. But it seems that novels vying for bookstores must strive, first and foremost, for hook and page-turning ability—why else would Ron Charles need to issue that "warning"? Of course, an author of Lorrie Moore's literary stature and caliber of craft can cry herself to the bank. But why should it be that some books—gently-paced, well-written books by lesser-known or even unknown writers—those that serve quiet shifts in plot and subtle character transformations, are often considered of inferior quality and marginalized?

The Spare Room

"My initial reason for writing is that I need to shape things so I can make them bearable or comprehensible to myself. It's my way of making sense of things that I've lived and seen other people live, things I'm afraid of, or that I long for."~Helen Garner

PREMISE: A woman in Melbourne, Australia offers her spare room to an old friend who lives in Sydney and is seeking an alternative medical treatment to battle terminal cancer.

In The Spare Room, Australian author Helen Garner returns to fiction for the first time in 15 years. It was surely worth the wait, as her latest offers a realistic (often wry) examination of the tug-of-war between life and death, patients and caregivers. The plot of this very brief (192 page) novel, that reads more like a memoir, is obvious. However, if you are a conscientious reader you will recognize (and appreciate) how small, subtle moments change lives, and you'll be rapt by Garner's attention to detail. Her best scenes are understated but nuanced in such a way that they become immensely powerful. Take note of the graceful, concise writing in Chapter One (a few short paragraphs on pages 4-5), where Helen, in the midst of preparing her spare room for her friend's arrival, breaks a mirror. It is a chilling moment that foreshadows, on many different levels, all that is to come between two, very different women--Helen, the caregiver, who has lived a "traditional" life as a wife and mother and Nicola, the patient, who has lived (or has she?) a more artistic, "bohemian" lifestyle. The circumstances that reunite these two old friends will test their strengths and weaknesses, their belief systems and coping mechanisms. Helen Garner has written a deeply-affecting novel that is a beautiful tribute to the power and frailty of friendship and how it can transform amid the challenges of life.