A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Ambiguity and The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits

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Confession time. I have a crush on . I’ve never met her and can’t really conjure up an image of what she looks like–no, it’s her brain that I love. I adored both The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment because they opened up a whole world of literature for me that exists between science fiction and conventional narrative. She delves so deeply into the complex ways that our thoughts shape us, that her stories almost become alternate realities. Anyway, I was casting about for something to read this week and when I saw The Effect of Living Backwards on my shelf, I knew I had to read it.

Casting About

Unmoored, lost… all these words come up a lot lately in my reviews. I’ve been searching. This has been a really crazy year for me as I’ve published two books, started to write for the LA Review of Books, and most recently as I’ve accepted a new job. A really wonderful year, but also one that’s upended just about everything and I find myself seeking balance, consistency, and stability. None of that is likely to happen in the near term and I’m trying to embrace how wonderful change can be. Maybe that’s why I sought out The Effect of Living Backwards this week–because I knew that Julavits would force me to think deeply and in new ways.

Alice, the protagonist of The Effect of Living Backwards, is in the middle of her own mind fuck. So much so that I don’t know why I questioned for a second if her name was a Carroll reference. She’s at The International Institute for Terrorist Studies and she’s being asked to question everything about her life. Not just the events themselves–most importantly a hijacking that she and her sister were involved in–but her perceptions of those events. She’s asked to flip everything on its head and try and uncover what’s really real.

“After four more bewildering sessions with Clifford, my autobiography lay in penciled tatters on her metal desk. I admitted to the possibility… that the Moroccan Air plan on which my sister and I were passengers had never been a proper part of the Moroccan Air fleet. The pilots on Flight 919 were part of the hijacking, as were the other passengers, as were the police.” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Crazy as this is going to sound, I could relate to this complete and total deconstruction of her life. At this point I don’t know whether it was having a professor for a father or being raised around a bunch of gifted and talented kids, but the impulse to take every aspect of my life apart and look at each component from all angles (including the “it was all a dream” approach) is ingrained in me. Sometimes to a paralyzing degree. This kind of flexible, deep thought is part of what makes me a novelist (for which I’m grateful), but it’s also something that leads me to watch shows like Alias and Orphan Black and start to develop (paranoid) theories about my upbringing.

Part of the mastery of The Effect of Living Backwards is that although Alice is going through this process of casting about to see what is (or might be) real, the story of the hijacking (which occupies much more of the book than I anticipated) feels deeply real. It takes real craft to be able to portray indecision and confusion on the part of a character in a way that feels concrete and relatable. This is not a comfortable book to read. And I’m so glad I read it anyway.

Ars Poetica

“Because we were our father’s daughters, I continued, which was to say because we were attracted to the justified manipulation of the scientific method, we decided to initiate our own secular Shame Book project” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Alice and her sister Edith concoct (or do they transcribe?) stories of the shame experienced by people in their lives. Alice recounts tales of her entire life for Dr. Clifford. The hijackers and hostage negotiator create conflicting narratives about what’s happening with the plane.

This book is, on one level, about the art of storytelling. Alice’s questioning and unraveling of characters and actions and motivations felt very much like the process of writing a book. As I was hunting for the significant detail in the hostage negotiator’s calls, I was remembering carefully selecting these types of details in my own writing so that they would give my readers the information they need to ground themselves in time. And the same happened when I encountered a repeated passage, or, more interestingly, a passage that was slightly torqued in its repetition.

“People do not tell accurate stories about themselves when they are given the chance. They tell, as Miles Keebler called them, ‘representative anecdotes.'” – Heidi Julavits, The Effect of Living Backwards

Reading this book, I realized that I use fiction to create stability and comprehension in my world. I narrow the threads of the narrative down. I eliminate nonessential characters. I seek the themes and also the wonder so that the book is coherent without being didactic. By reading about Alice’s “childhood of theoretical decision-making,” I was starting to understand what an asset all those hours of brain games were. As uncomfortable as I was in a narrative that did not have a concrete reality, The Effect of Living Backwards upended my thinking just enough to see the bright side of having he ability to see–and ultimately parse–all the possibilities.

Ambiguity Done Well

I still don’t fully know the truth of this book. And I’m fine with that. I think on a second and third read, The Effect of Living Backwards would continue to unfold. It’s the type of book I could write a dissertation about. Creating those layers of nuance and potentiality is a true art. One I appreciated even more this week when watching the season finale of Hannibal. Although at first I really loved that show, I’ve begun to feel more and more like even the writers don’t know what’s happening next. And in the final scene of the season (which I will not reveal here), I was left with yet another moment of “what the hell, why?”

As much I don’t know which version of reality to trust in Julavits’ book, I trust Julavits to have embedded the right details and motivations to make the story ambiguous rather than arbitrary. I may never read deeper into the book and get beyond the ambiguity (turns out I might like living in this state more than I thought), but I love knowing that the possibility exists.

As I’m working to delve into my next writing project, I’m also living my life a little backwards right now. I’m so glad I read this book at this time. I needed to see that ability to first see and then winnow all the factors as a strength rather than as the instrument of paralysis it can sometimes seem like. I don’t know what I’ll publish next (or when), but I hope it’s at least a tiny bit as transformational and intelligent as Julavits’ writing is.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Effect of Living Backwards from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

My Writing Process (A Blog Tour)

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I’ve been tagged in the My Writing Process Blog Tour by Ann Hedreen, filmmaker, soon-to-be author of Her Beautiful Brain, and all-around great human being.

What am I working on?

My first novel, Polska, 1994 publishes this Thursday and I want to be able to tell you about the gorgeous next novel I have queued up and waiting for the masses to demand it. But I’m also realizing that there isn’t a lot of conversation around the postpartum slump that some authors (me!) experience.

I spent six years perfecting that book and it’s based on ideas I’ve been mulling for almost two decades. I’m not saying I don’t have another book in me, I do (more on that in a second), but the transition from gorgeously polished work to starting over with a blank page is flat-out brutal. And I just wanted to acknowledge that for a minute before telling you about projects that are so nascent they are basically ephemeral right now. They may well take the shape I describe and they might morph and change into something else entirely. My challenge is to not get impatient with myself and force them into being something they either aren’t or aren’t ready to be.

There are two projects I’ve been playing with since finishing Polska, 1994. One is a second novel entitled Hungry Ghosts. I sometimes say this book is about the way we change ourselves to be loved. I often believe this book is my final embrace of feminism. Right now it’s 50,000 words of starts and ideas. I’m hoping there are some gems in there, but it’s not fair to call it a novel yet. I have a structure in mind, but I’ve had many structures in mind in the nearly four years I’ve been mulling the idea. I think it will be an experimental book that draws (somehow) on the style of Alain Robbe-Grillet, but it’s really too early to say.

The second project is a book of poetry entitled Port Townsend Elegy which investigates my unfurling as an artist (and human) in grad school as well as my deep personal connection to Port Townsend, WA. This book is actually a lot more formed in terms of drafts (thanks to a lovely writing residency at The Whiteley Center in Friday Harbor), but it’s my first foray into poetry since high school and I don’t trust yet that I have the craft to pull off the book in the way I want to. So I’m learning about poetry as I write and rewrite the poems in this book. I don’t know when I’ll be comfortable to let it fly, but I do know this book is far from ready for the public eye.

I’ve also been considering writing a memoir about how living abroad changed my life. That sounds much more pat than it is. Maybe? That project is still just a glimmer in my eye.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is actually a really good question, because the way we write tends to determine the genre we write in. I write in what I consider to be a literary style, which means I pay a lot of attention to observation and the language that observation is expressed in. Plot is never the first thing I think of when writing (though it’s something I focus a lot on when editing because it is important to a certain extent). I find the writers I am most closely drawn to are novelist-poets, so I hope I don’t differ from them all that much.

But saying that your work is just like someone else’s rankles, doesn’t it? I suppose my unique “blend” comes from the fact that I read so very widely, I pay so much attention to the language (the various languages I’ve spoken over the years has taught me a syntactic flexibility that I’m proud of), and also that I’m deeply interested in culture and how that affects a character’s circumstances. That last bit is most often expressed as an obsession with oppression which leads us naturally to the next question…

Why do I write what I do?

Micheline Aharonian Marcom once said, “Write into the heat.” She also talked a lot about obsessions. After putting the final, final edit on Polska, 1994 this weekend, I can’t see how people write literature about things they aren’t obsessed with, because to work that deeply in a project for so long, you’d murder the writing (or perhaps a family member) if the story wasn’t something you needed to tell.

My obsession is oppression–both political and personal. I’m a quiet person which means it’s often easy for people to run themselves right over me (intentionally or not). I don’t usually push back too hard because I have a strong sense of who I am (and am not all that concerned with what others think). But still, over time you want someone to notice who you are and acknowledge that you matter. I especially want some sort of shared purpose and understanding and I’m learning that in order to get that, I have to assert myself more.

And I’ve lived in both Chile and Poland–experiences that changed my perspective–helped me see how governments and corporations sometimes run right over people. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how oppression also happens on a gender level.

I write about becoming. About rising up and blossoming. I write about creating the world that I want to live in and the ways I can and cannot help others live in that world too.

How does your writing process work?

I could tell you about how I split up my day to get the most writing time possible while still holding down a full time job. I could write about the hour of writing time in the morning I too often sleep through or the hour in the evening I often give up because I just want to see my husband before I pass out on the couch.

Instead I want to write about ideas and how a project comes about. A poem or story starts for me with a nagging question or feeling. Something that isn’t sitting just right either because it’s something that feels wrong or even simply alien (without judgment). Oftentimes I’ll mull it over for a significant period of time (though not always decades) and fuss about it and read about it and talk about it. But nothing ever feels resolved until I finally sit down with paper and pen. It’s funny how even a few minutes can make everything feel all better or more comprehensible or manageable. I don’t solve the problem there in the first few minutes or in the first draft (or really ever), but each time I sit down and write about one of these rubs, I learn more about it and how I feel about it. I keep digging and learning and often discover that the “problem” is something entirely different than I even imagined. Eventually I have a narrative or a pretty good capture of the feeling and then I edit, edit, edit. The honing of language and shaping of elements that happen during the editing process are very important to the end product and with Polska, 1994, I went through over twenty drafts to get it just right.

By nature, a blog tour should have a “here’s who’s up next,” but it’s been a crazy busy month and every chain letter has to end somewhere, right? Instead, here are a few of my favorite bloggers (besides, Ann, of course):

SILENCE & HONEYSUCKLE by Gwendolyn Jerris
PEACE & CENTER by Natasha Oliver
PURPLE HOUSES by Nikki Kallio
REWRITING HISTORY by Roxana Arama
A LITTLE ELBOW ROOM by Kim Mayer

They may not be answering this same set of questions directly, but their work nourishes me all the time and I think it will do the same for you.

Coping with a Personal Apocalypse in The End of the City

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Some events so change a generation, a society, that it’s difficult to imagine how you’d even write about them or their aftermath. In The End of the City, introduces us to one boy who’s rebuilding his life after losing his dad in events that may or may not be precipitated by the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Alternate Realities

The narrative of this book actually takes place in two realities that alternate throughout the book. One is the land of teenaged Ben Moor living in Reston, VA and dealing with his dad’s death. He’s a pretty typical teenager–trying to mask the hurt while also trying to build a life of his own. Nevertheless, the world is carefully created and well imagined which makes it all very interesting, immediate, and personal. While Ben, Bobby Jihad (Ben’s brother) and their friends are living it up on spiked ginger ales and track meets, I worried about Ben’s sadness. I worried more about Bobby Jihad’s bravado. And sometimes I wanted to see Kitty kick Ben in the nuts.

The secondary world, that of an assassin in New York who has just been ordered to knock off one of his own crew. Although the action here takes place in 2011 New York, it’s so dark that I frequently wondered if it was an alternate history. I actually spent a lot of time wondering about its relationship to the first story. But even as the back of my brain puzzled over why both main characters drank ginger ale and had strangely similar ill-fitting suits, I was wrapped up in the cinematic pace of the action.

The Voice of a Generation

“I look down on you from the ridge, on you and what remains of you, and in your blood I see a map of your own making (and mine). I recognize it; I’m quite sure I at least half understand the language.” – David Bendernagel, The End of the City

Part what makes these two worlds so effective is the dense and evocative language Bendernagel uses. Although not as turgid as the dialogue in Rian Johnson’s Brick, The End of the City has a lingo all its own. The language–a kind of disaffected shorthand that feels very male and very much set in its generation–sets the mood immediately. It also forces the reader to slow down and inhabit what’s happening or be lost forever. For example, Ben’s reference to the events of September 11, 2001, “Jet fuel goes up. Two towers collapse.” is cryptic, but there’s a lot of story (and emotion) held just below that surface.

Cultural Referents

One distinctive aspect of that voice is the cultural referents Bendernagel uses. I beamed when reading how one character “pulled a McConaughey” and also wondered how many readers would miss the reference to Dazed and Confused. This decision between being specific (which sometimes means being oblique) is something I’ve struggled with in my own writing. Reading The End of the City, I realized how close the connection between writer and reader can feel when you’re on the inside of the jokes.

The other side of cultural referents is that they can easily be misunderstood. I struggled with this as I tried to reconcile the two story lines in this book. Bendernagel kept dropping references to Back to the Future and 12 Monkeys: two referents that signaled to me that time travel was imminent. When I finally understood the actual relationship between the narratives, I felt a little led astray.

Writing about Tragedy

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Ben’s dad’s death is suicide, a heart attack, or an accident. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to 9/11 or not. What matters is the personal tragedy to Ben of losing his dad at twelve. And that’s the perfect approach and what I love about novels–they take the whole big world and break it down into individual characters and experiences we can get inside and empathize with. I mostly avoid books about 9/11 (and, actually, the phrase “9/11”) either because I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with it or because I’m terrified of the sanctified air we apply to that day. I really appreciated how, by dealing not with the tidy euphemisms we’ve developed to talk about that day but instead with the loss experienced by one boy, Bendernagel let me feel the pure weight of the emotion. He let me get inside the feeling.

While the voice in The End of the City was so strongly male and so American that for a couple of weeks after finishing this book I found myself drawn to books about foreign lands written by women just to balance myself out, it was a treat to read something so different than what I’d been reading lately. When Bendernagel offered me this review copy, he said people had compared the book to the work of Jonathan Lethem. There’s some of that, but I’d say it’s even more grounded in the gritty and weird movies of the late 1990s like 12 Monkeys, Heat, and even Se7en. That may sound like a stretch for all the emotional impact I promised in the previous paragraph, but for a someone who fell in love with her husband while watching and discussing those very films so many years ago, it’s all a pretty good fit.

Spending NaPoWriMo Writing with Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

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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 Light or Ordinary Genius pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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

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denise levertov poems 1972-1982There 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 Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.