Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Spending NaPoWriMo Writing with Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

April 13, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have the incredibly good fortune to be spending a few days in the San Juan Islands for a writing residency. When I arrived, I didn’t know which of three projects I’d be working on: 1. getting a solid draft together for my second novel, 2. writing and revising a book of poetry I’ve been playing with, or 3. whatever random thing struck my fancy along the way. So I packed a large box of books and all of the scraps of paper that comprise those various projects and headed off to devote some time to writing. What I should have realized is that the presence of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio and Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs by Stephen Dunn in that box, together with the fact that it’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) would prove to be an irresistible shove in the direction of the poetry book.

NaPoWriMo

I’d actually been making really good progress on writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo before I got on the ferry to come here. I think I’d created first drafts of seven or eight poems in eight days. Some of those days I’d written two poems. But throughout the process I’ve become even more keenly aware of my limitations as a poet. Talking with Nicole Hardy and Karen Finneyfrock (both poets who also write prose) last night, I kept saying things like “I haven’t written poetry since high school” and hearing how that sounded. I know that the time I’ve spent improving my fiction has definitely helped my poetry, I can feel that, but it’s far from good yet. I knew I needed help. Admitting that is the first step, right?

Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs

I’d actually placed Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs on my Christmas list this year and then forgotten about the book. I think I heard about it through ModPo but I can’t even remember the context. My husband scoured the internet for a copy for me and I’m so glad because it’s exactly what I needed right now. Dunn’s essays are about life and poetry in this way that makes them completely wonderful for an aspiring poet. I fell in love with the book on the first page of the introduction when Dunn describes as essayist as “a person who believes there’s value in being overheard clarifying things for himself.” That line was humorous and self-deprecating and true in all the ways that told me I could trust this man to teach me about writing and the world.

The essays in this book are accessible in the best of ways whether he’s discussing the “ambiguities that poets must honor” or how poems “must make available the strangeness that is our lives.” This is not a how-to book, but he does delve into some poems that work and some that don’t, and he writes frankly about both. And the book is filled with useful insights like, “The poem is not written in natural speech. Few successful poems are. But it does give the illusion of natural speech.” I don’t always agree with Dunn’s assessments, but the mere fact that he’s brought me to a level where I feel like I have an educated opinion about poetry is a triumph for me.

“There’s hope for someone who can be embarrassed by poor word choice.” – Stephen Dunn

His essays about life are equally good. I particularly loved “A History of My Silence” which is an essay about Dunn’s shyness. I’ve only recently realized how deeply shy I am and have always been, although I’ve covered it up pretty well at times, and reading lines like, “What a pleasure reading was: the world received in silence, at my own pace” made me feel that my shyness is a trait not a deficit, and I was so glad to know that I’m not the only one with a “history of letting you know only what is useful for me to let you know.” That’s something I fight to get past in my writing, but it feels functional in my day to day life.

Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

Whereas Dunn’s book is so rich that I could only read a few pages at a time before passing out (seriously, I couldn’t even finish an essay), Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio is so delightful and quick that I couldn’t put it down. This is much more of a how-to book, but it’s written so conversationally and intelligently that she can impart three lessons where you thought you were learning one. I’m savoring both books a bit, but Addonizio has already taught me about the traffic signals of punctuation in a poem and answered a question about word spacing that had bothered me so much I’d actually been running around asking people about it. I’m learning about music and detail and how rhyme is related to echo. She’s opening my work up already.

As I’ve worked my way through the book, I’ve written so many first drafts of poems I didn’t even know I had inside me. I’ll take her advice about revision seriously and take heart that some poems “are supposed to fail, to teach you that you have to keep going and try out new strategies.” I’ll even try plodding through meter, a bit.

“Dare to feel like a beginner–unsure and clumsy at first, but having a good time and doing your best to learn.” – Kim Addonizio

Ordinary Genius is also more than a how-to book–it’s a book where an established artist talks openly with an aspiring one. Addonizio’s advice on publishing is priceless to writers of all genres. And insights like, “While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is therapeutic. It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself” make me want to keep writing forever and ever and ever.

I’m off to make some space outside of myself for these projects. I’d love to hear about how you’re experiencing NaNoWriMo or how you’re challenging yourself in the comments.

If this review made you want to read Walking with Light or Ordinary Genius pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Suspended Inside The Appointment by Herta Müller

April 6, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

When I woke this morning, I didn’t want to pick up The Appointment by Herta Müller even though I only had a few pages left to read. I successfully avoided the book all day yesterday, too. But not for the reasons you might think. I set the book aside because it was so good, so cleanly and smartly written, that I didn’t want it to end.

Constructing Time

The narrator of The Appointment, a woman living under Ceauşescu’s regime in Romania, is riding a tram on her way to an interrogation with a man called Albu. The ride across town is to take two hours, and the way that the narrator digresses into flashback, I started to wonder if the trip would also take the entire book.

A teacher once told me, “If the bulk of your story takes place in flashback, you have a problem.” In almost every other case, I would agree. But here Müller has created this incredible sense of suspense that carried me through the labyrinthine back story back to the tram (as a touchstone, a grounding point) and then back into this woman’s life history again. It works because the stories are so fascinating. It works because she can be trusted to bring us back to that forward momentum of time. And it works because it conveys the stalled sense of her life under communism. If the narrator makes it to the appointment today, there will just be another in the future. There is no escape. The continuum is a circle.

I became so enthralled with the way time was working in the book that I had to start drawing it out for myself.

Teaching the Reader to Read

Another teacher told me, “The best books teach us how to read them.” The Appointment is an excellent example of this and I can see why Müller won the Nobel. The careful orchestration of time wouldn’t work if Müller hadn’t already shown us that the digressions lead somewhere. In the first few pages of the novel, she lays the groundwork of waiting for the tram and a brief look into the interrogation that waits on the other side.

Then she takes a brief step to the side to describe the routine of insomnia that precedes these interrogations. That aside evolves into a description of her life with Paul. And then a description of a label of brandy with two plums on in. I only had her to guide me, and I was willing to follow this narration because it was early in the book and I was still trying to decide if Müller was someone I wanted to follow. The narrator then gives a glimpse of her wedding to Paul (her second) and compares their faces to the two plums on the bottle of brandy. All in four pages.

That was the moment I knew that Müller was the type of writer who is laying these seemingly random details not to obfuscate, but as breadcrumbs. I knew I could trust that every detail she’d share, no matter how dizzying, would be carefully chosen and that I could trust her to bring them back around for me if only I paid close enough attention.

I was hooked and invested and I didn’t want to leave the world of the book.

Rich Characters

Then I realized that a few pages earlier, as the narrator had dipped very briefly into a memory of her father-in-law while describing the first minutes of an interrogation with Albu, Müller was also carefully setting something up. “The Perfumed Commissar” will come back later and every time we see either Albu or her father-in-law, we will think of the other. There is a relationship between the way the narrator sees the two men that enriches our understanding of each of them as individuals. When we later learn the back story of her father-in-law, it makes Albu seem even more sinister.

Müller does something similar with Lilli, the narrator’s best friend, by setting up a comparison between Lilli’s seduction of her stepfather and the narrator’s witness of her father’s adultery. These comparisons charge the text with extra meaning and they also provide contrasts to highlight where characters diverge. The narrator does have deep feelings about her father and about sex and I feared that she would mimic Lilli. What she does instead (which I won’t spoil for you here) becomes even more poignant in comparison.

Creating Order and Meaning in the World

I recently had a fantastic conversation with my husband where he told me he can see how I like to take bits of the world and digest them down into something I can understand. This distillation for me is how I create and understand order in my world. It’s how I create meaning. As a writer, drafts are my method of pruning information until I find and understand the truth hidden beneath.

One of the reasons I love writers like Müller is that I feel her process is similar. Although she drops thousands of images of daily life in Communist Romania throughout this book, and each adds to a greater feeling of life at that time in that place, I feel like the book itself is a distillation of the feeling of charged stasis.

I am glad I finished the book this morning. I am even more glad that I have the opportunity to re-open it here for you and to share with you what I love about this book and what that teaches me about myself, about writing, and about life. Next week I’ll bite off another chunk, probably Stephen Dunn’s fantastic essays on poetry in Walking Light. In the meantime, I’d love to hear more about how you process the world and about what you’re reading in the comments below.

If you can see the beauty of being trapped on a tram for the length of an entire book, pick up a copy of The Appointment from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

How Denise Levertov’s Poems 1972-1982 Made Me Stop Judging Myself

March 30, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

There are many ways I will fall in love with a book. Mysteries like Fletch wrap me up in their comforting blanket of action. Mind-bending fiction like The Trial make me question the world around me and help me learn to see. And then some books unlock the tumblers in my brain and make me want to write. Poems 1972-1982 by Denise Levertovis one of the latter. This book hit me at just the right time and it’s the first thing in a long while that made me put pen to paper on my own behalf.

The Wrong Poetry at the Wrong Time

The book of poetry I read just before Poems 1972-1982, Transfer by Naomi Shihab-Nye did not make me write. Recommended by a friend, I enjoyed some of Shihab-Nye’s language. I even related to the way she looked at the world, but her work was almost too close to me. As I read her poems, I kept wanting to edit them, to give them that last gloss that would make them mine. And as I read about her grief, I wanted it to be more resolved. That’s not to say that I’m a better poet than she–I’m a complete amateur in comparison–but I couldn’t distance myself enough from her work to let it exist on its own. It was almost like that unhealthy relationship you get into with a friend or loved one–the one where you know they could be perfect if they were just a little more like you.

It’s possible that Shihab-Nye’s work would be perfect for me at a later date when I’m more secure in my own writing, but I was not able to enjoy the work the way I hoped I would.

The Rules of Poetry

Levertov, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. I’ve recently finished reading The Body Electric: 25 Years of America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review to gain a better understanding of poetry, especially what I like, what I don’t, and what I might like to imitate. I annotated the book heavily with little rules about what makes a poem “good” in my eyes. I don’t like poems composed mostly of full sentences. I like language that isn’t too highfaluting. I like poems that are aware of themselves as poems.

In Denise Levertov: Poems 1972-1982, Levertov breaks every single one of those rules and shows me just how silly I was being. In the first poem of the collection, “From a Plane,” she uses the phrase “alluvial silvers” and I wanted to react and say that there’s a simpler word, but it was perfect. It was the perfect word for me. I had created some system for an imagined poetry I would someday write that negated all the things I like about me, and here is Levertov just doing what she’s doing and blowing my mind along the way.

Fanaticism for Beginners

Of course rules are something that many beginners cling to and proselytize–alcoholics, religious converts, and writers alike–but I’m excited to get beyond that “judging myself and others” phase and into the “judging my work for its own effect” phase. I’ll be a little patient for now because poetry is in many ways new for me. I haven’t devoted real time to writing poetry since high school and am still trying to shake some of those teacher-imparted rules (start your line with an active word and be sure to capitalize it) out of my head.

Imitation as Flattery

Levertov gave me a good start to writing my own poems in “Metamorphic Journal.” She writes:

Let me say
it is I who am a river.
Someone is walking along
the shore of me.

And that phrase, “I who am a river” struck me and stuck with me in my twilight sleep. The metaphor and how she develops it in the following lines wouldn’t let me go. Although it was far too late at night, I found a pen and wrote the words, “I who am an ocean” and several lines to follow. My poem–even in its raw state–is and is not like hers, but we are separate enough and close enough that I can see parts of who I might be in her without trying to make her me.

For some lovely synchronicity on this, read Levertov’s “Writing in the Dark” halfway down the page here.

Retreating to Write

I’m going on my first writing retreat in a couple of weeks. I swore to myself that I’d use that time to finally piece together the first draft of my next novel. But poetry is calling me and I have a project that I might be feeling brave enough to finally make some progress on. In this moment, in my writing chair where I’ve spent most of the morning looking for answers in my phone, the idea of delving into any kind of writing for myself seems pretty delicious. Maybe I’ll curl up with the rest of Poems 1972-1982 to get a head start.

Will you be celebrating National Poetry Month in April? Please share your plans–reading, writing, or avoiding–in the comments.

If you want to see if Levertov is the right poet for you, pick up a copy of Poems 1972-1982 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Finding Community in BOMB: The Author Interviews

March 23, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

The first clue (or at least an early one) that I wanted to be a writer should have been when I started reading, then heavily underlining, author interviews in The Paris Review. I loved reading about the writing lives of major writers like Joan Didion and William Faulkner so much that I collected every edition of The Paris Review Interviews and then started putting the editions of Writers at Work (an earlier collection of interviews from The Paris Review) on my Christmas list.

I still love reading author interviews, but the ones that get me most excited these days are in BOMB, so when I saw an advance sampler of BOMB: The Author Interviews at AWP, I had to have it.

The Difference Between BOMB and The Paris Review

I flat-out love both of these magazines and the interviews therein, but I read them for different reasons. Where The Paris Review is polished and full of names that have been accepted into the literary world (and often elevated to the canon) and often focuses on the craft of writing, BOMB is edgier–frequently introducing me to people I haven’t yet heard of–and can veer into whatever the writers want to discuss. Many of the writers interviewed in BOMB are well known in some circles, but they haven’t broken through the mainstream for whatever reason. That’s true of the interviewers too.

What I mean is that in The Paris Review Interviews, especially the collected interviews, you’re likely to learn more about the best writers you encountered in high school. In BOMB, you’re more likely to encounter writers that your really in-the-know college lit professor talks about. BOMB is where I first heard of Heidi Julavits, who I’ve gushed about here and here.

One of the things I love about both magazines is that they cross artistic genres. And I don’t mean poetry vs. fiction (although they do that). Both thoughtfully incorporate visual art too. BOMB takes it a step further by going into performance art, sculpture, and video, and one of my favorite things is reading interviews between artists who work in media I’ll never attempt. I like to see in what ways their discussions of art and process are the same and different as the ways writers talk about their work. And it’s all edgy and I hate (don’t understand) 80% of the artwork, but I learn from what they’re doing and become a more thoughtful artist as a result.

“Reading BOMB interviews was one of the ways I began to conceive of myself as an artist.” – Miranda July

Discussions Between Writers

Where The Paris Review seems to send an up-and-coming writer (who is often barely present in the interview except in the shape of the questions) out to focus on the writer they are interviewing, the interviews in BOMB: The Author Interviews are a collaboration and a discussion. I think that’s part of the reason I like them at this stage in my writing life.

Watching Edwidge Danticat riff off of Junot Diaz (or was it the other way around) teaches me so much more about life on Hispaniola (the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic) than I could ever learn if one or the other was being interviewed by someone who was expected to facilitate the interview instead of being part of the conversation. So you often get introduced to two great authors at once and to see them in context.

Danticat’s first question of Diaz is “What the heck took you so long?” in writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and he responds, “I’m a slow writer. Which is bad enough but given that I’m in a world where it’s considered abnormal if a writer doesn’t produce a book every year or two–it makes me look even worse.”

“I’m a crazy perfectionist. I suffer from crippling bouts of depression. I write two score pages for every one I keep. I hear this question and want to laugh and cry because there’s no answer.” – Junot Diaz, BOMB: The Author Interviews

The conversation feels real and revealing. Diaz talks about everything from his use of the N-word (which I know is a question he speaks to often) to the relationship between writers and dictators.

Meanwhile, when Mark Magill interviews Kathy Acker, the short, almost bullet-like back and forth comes off like performance art. He asks her about everything from her biographical facts to quotidian things like how often she brushes. It could be (and is) really weird, but it works and it speaks to the experimental nature of Acker’s work. At one point Magill gives her multiple choice questions on preferred dinner table discussions and what to do with the last bit of pie. The interview is revealing in an unexpected way.

A Writing Community on the Page

The thing about being a writer is that it’s lonely. You both need people and you need to be alone. BOMB: The Author Interviews lets me poke my head up on a writing break and learn about what other writers are thinking and how they approach their art even when my writing friends are holed up creating their masterpieces. It’s not a substitute for an actual community, but it’s a fantastic addendum.

I’m only reading a sample copy of BOMB: The Author Interviews right now, but the full edition will contain interviews by and with writers like Chris Abani, Oscar Hijuelos, Ben Marcus, Heidi Julavits, and Amy Hempel. I can’t wait to get the full book when it comes out in November and highly recommend it to anyone who loves author interviews as much as I do.

If you want to commune with some fantastic authors, pre-order a copy of BOMB: The Author Interviews from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Capturing Anomie in City Water Light & Power

March 17, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Matt Pine’s first novel City Water Light & Power so clearly captures the experience of living in a modern day city that at times I wasn’t sure I could go on reading it. The basic gist is that friends Jake and Michelle navigate the city of Chicago as it changes and they do. Touching on everything from urban renewal to mental illness, the book provides insight into what creates a lost generation.

Capturing a City (and a Life) in Transition

The central metaphor that pairs the changes in Jake’s and Michelle’s lives to the changes in Jake’s neighborhood is strong. It’s fascinating to read as Jake’s neighborhood bar and everything he loves about the place he is living starts to give way to gentrification while he faces a personal struggle with how he fits in the shiny corporate world. You hope that his chances are better than that of his favorite bar, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Meanwhile, Michelle seems as wrapped up in the opportunities of urban renewal as she is in her developer boyfriend. Wrapped up in, but also succumbing, albeit in a more socially acceptable way.

If you’ve lived in a city and worked too many hours just to pay too much money for the roof over your head and a bunch of trappings you’re not sure you even want, this book will feel familiar.

Reading for Escape

At times, the book felt altogether too familiar. I don’t normally consider myself an escapist reader. Sure, I spend the odd afternoon with Fletch, but usually I’m chasing big ideas from far away. Reading City Water Light & Power made me realize how much emphasis I put on the “far away” in my reading.

I started this book on the bus the morning after the time change. I was running late and feeling frustrated about rushing in to a day that I felt I had no control over. I wanted to meet expectations and be on time, but I wasn’t sure what those expectations were and I wondered where I left mine along the way (or whether 20 minutes really mattered to anyone). As Jake works his soul-crushing job doing QA for a call center, Pine does an excellent job of showing just how hard we’ve all worked to take the meaning straight out of life.

At the same time, Michelle spends much of her time drunk or stoned enough to tolerate her job as a paralegal with a jerk of a boyfriend. There is a glimmer of hope as she gets accepted to law school, but given how much she hates the people she works with, you have to wonder what she’s rushing toward.

Reading about the suffering of others gives me a way to think about the way the world works and how we can all work to improve it. It affords me a macro-level view because I can sympathize while maintaining my own experience. Reading about Jake and Michelle hit too close to home. The book is well written, but I found myself wanting to get away from it before I became mired in self pity.

This might be an excellent read if you have better boundaries with books than I do. It might also be good for a reader of a different generation or from a rural area or even another country who wants to understand why people who seem to have it all are so freaking miserable. But if you’re in the rat race, it will likely hit too close to home.

A book has to be well written to elicit this kind of visceral response in me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to read it again soon. Maybe I’ll pick it up when I’m old and retired to see what ever I was whining about.

Passive Characters

Passive characters are a huge no-no in fiction workshops, but it often feels like they abound in modern stories and novels. At a panel I attended at AWP, a professor confronted the idea that passive characters can serve as a political statement–to show how oppressive a situation is. City Water Light & Power definitely wants to fall into this category.

And while this sense of oppression is well portrayed, the passivity (especially of Michelle) was absolutely maddening to me. That must have been the point. But the book did not incite me to revolt against my corporate life or the world around me. And for this passive character as political statement thing to have worked for me, I would have had to come out of the book feeling that rush to change rather than the urge to drink myself into oblivion.

What do you think about passivity as political statement? Did Pine succeed when he made me feel stuck or should the book have done something else? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

If you want to see if I’m being a wimp, pick up a copy of City Water Light & Power from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.