Murmurs of the River Archives - A Geography of Reading

The Next Big Thing Blog Series: Murmurs of the River

February 10, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

Elissa Washuta, author of the forthcoming My Body Is a Book of Rules, tagged me to respond to ten questions about what I’m working on. Elissa is a memoirist and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Elissa is deeply involved with Seattle’s writing community including Richard Hugo House. She reminds me always of the importance of community and how very welcoming and generous other writers can be.

1. What is your working title of your book?

It was Murmurs of the River, and the final title is Polska, 1994

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Ideas always come from obsessions, don’t they? Having spent time growing up in Pinochet’s Chile and post-Cold War Poland, I am obsessed with oppression on a personal and a national level. I am interested in the secrets we keep and those we ask others to keep for us.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Assuming a production in English, I’d love to see someone young and smartly vulnerable like Elle Fanning play Magda. It would be fun to see Ryan Gosling explore his meaner side as Paweł and Aidan Turner would make a beautiful Jacek. Because many of the main characters are young, it would also be great to see some new talent in the movie. Fionnula Flanagan would make a wonderful Babcia.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Thirteen years ago, Magda witnessed the arrest of her mother by the Polish secret police; now, as her country emerges from behind the Iron Curtain, a tip from a neighbor starts Magda on her quest to find out what would make a mother sacrifice her family.

See that semicolon? That’s where I cheated.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Ideally, the book will be represented by an agency. I’m still querying, so if you know someone… let me know.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The real honest-to-God first draft took me a year and a half. I dinked around with the characters and story in various forms for about two years before that. Polishing the book into its final form only took another 17 or so drafts.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I carried The Lover by Marguerite Duras very close to my heart while writing this book, so there are many similarities between the two. Murmurs of the River is also comparable to Chris Abani’s Song for Night (which, not coincidentally, is also inspired by The Lover).

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I spent a year in Poland on high school foreign exchange during the 1990s. It was a crazy time after the fall of the Berlin Wall when Poland was trying to become part of the West but was facing some real questions about what that actually meant and if it was a good thing. I fell in love with the people of Poland and wanted to understand what it was like for them to grow up in a closed society. Although my explorations of the Polish experience are fictional, a lot of the peripheral events in the novel are based on conversations I had during the year I spent there.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The Poland I write about doesn’t exist any longer. I hope this book tells the story of how it was. I structured the narrative around lines from Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and mood in the three sections of the book recalls Chopin’s Murmures de la Seine.

Murmurs of the River is a coming of age novel about love, so although it’s set in a land and time that are unfamiliar to most, Magda’s struggle to define herself inside (and outside) the context of her family is universal.

Next Up on The Next Big Thing

Thanks for your curiosity about Murmurs of the River. Check in with the following writers next week to learn more about their upcoming projects.

Roxana Arama is a novelist, mother, and dedicated member of Louisa’s Writers. Originally from Romania, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College and writes in beautiful English. Roxana is one of my favorite people to talk with about editing and how to make the most of the little time we writers have. The spreadsheet she uses to organize her latest novel is legendary.

February 18, 2013 update: Roxana bravely decided her novel isn’t ready for public discussion, so she introduced me to Mindy Halleck, who also writes at Louisa’s. Mindy’s blog, Literary Liaisons, is a great resource for tips about writing and revising. I’m looking forward to getting to know Mindy better through her work and blog and maybe, just maybe, we’ll meet in person someday soon at Louisa’s.

Kim Brown has a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Science in Written Communications. She has published with Chicago Tribune, Today’s Chicago Woman, and Contemporary Fashion, among others, and she co-founded Minerva Rising. Someday she will reveal her Jazz Age novel to the world. Kim is like your mom and your best friend all rolled into one and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

You may recognize Ann Hedreen as a contributor to A Geography of Reading. She also uses her Master of Fine Arts and writing talent for commentaries on KBCS radio, making documentary films, and teaching the craft to writers of all ages. Her memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, is a heartbreaking story of how a parent-child relationship changes when Alzheimer’s sets in. I am grateful to Ann for helping me learn that a creative life and a working life do not have to be separate things.

Ondaatje Illustrates the Life of Billy the Kid, or Does He?

July 24, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I was struck by Michael Ondaatje’s inclusion of photographs with the text. The text itself was an interesting patchwork of poetry and prose and I can see that Ondaatje was using visual matter as another layer of that patchwork.

In works of nonfiction, I’m used to seeing batches of photographs grouped in one section or two (likely for ease of collation of the glossy pages) with captions and arranged in more or less chronological order. In fiction, I am unused to pictures at all.

I was distracted but intrigued while reading Ondaatje by having the pictures strewn throughout the text without captions. The placement of the images seemed to be related to the text rather than in chronological or any other order.

What is Authentic?

I found myself wondering if the pictures were actual representations of the real people and the real places. For example, on page 91 there is a picture of a bed with a gun leaning against it. It looks like a period photograph and on the previous page is a description from the point of view of Pat Garrett in a room with a straw mattress. On the page following the picture Ondaatje writes, “This is a diagram then of Maxwell’s” which combined with the photo of the bedroom put me in a visual place and made me want to believe the picture was actually of that room where Garrett shot at Billy.

I got hung up in some of the details and started thinking that the blanket looked authentic and if the picture had been faked then they had done it well. So in some ways the incorporation of visual matter into the text enhanced my experience and in some ways it distracted from it.

Using Images in My Book

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I considered incorporating some memorabilia as souvenirs in the most French sense, but I was concerned it would become too scrapbook‑y. I also worried about the mixing authentic mementos with a fictional narrative.

How Max Frisch Incorporated Images

It is important that extraneous material incorporated into a text become an organic and necessary part of the whole. Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch uses scraps of encyclopedia entries as part of the narrative. These scraps are seamlessly integrated into the narrative because Geiser is clipping things that matter to him from his books and pasting them to his walls as he is slowly losing his memory. For example, one of the scraps is a definition, “Weakness of memory is the deterioration of the faculty of recalling earlier experiences.”

It isn’t until much later in the book that Frisch has Geiser recognize that he is in fact losing his memory. The visual pieces serve to tell part of the story. It was easier for me to enter the fictional dream because the visual elements are mostly text and Geiser was a fully fictional character.

When I studied visual arts, it was always stressed to me that the piece should speak for itself. I was discouraged from including words in painting or sculpture. I am carrying that baggage but I am also starting to see that like most hard and fast rules, it is merely cautionary. Anything done well is worth doing.

Are pictures the new adverbs—verboten because they are seen as easy shorthand? Or are Ondaatje and Frisch telling me to loosen up and work with whatever material tells the best story?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Intimate Lives of Munro’s Girls and Women

July 9, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro exposes the reader to the inner world of her first-person narrator, Della Jordan. The psychic distance throughout the book is always close, as I would expect in a first person narrative. However, Munro makes use of a full range of narrative distance from distant: “[t]he snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them” to close: “the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment.” When Munro presents scenes of Della’s burgeoning sexuality, she uses the combination of the close psychic distance and a close narrative distance to explore the fullness of Della’s contradictory feelings.

As Della begins to fantasize about Mr. Chamberlain, we are treated to thoughts like: “Mr. Chamberlain’s voice in my mind…acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired.” The reader falls in with Della and is treated to her most intimate thoughts as she first begins to see herself as a sexual creature. I felt her naïveté as she mulls over the implications of the conversation she has just heard: “[t]hey mature earlier in those hot climates…A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say? Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself?” The questions she is asking herself reveal the shallowness of her experience, but her observations about Mr. Chamberlain imply how willing she is to explore this new, forbidden realm farther.

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.” -Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Della begins to fantasize about being seduced by Mr. Chamberlain, but “[t]he moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light….in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.” Because I am deep inside Della’s thoughts, I am privy to the innocence of her inability to fully imagine the scene and also to the lustiness and force of her emotions. Although Della’s hormones are coursing through her like mad, she has no concrete experience on which to base her fantasies. If Munro did not place the reader so deep in Della’s mind, it would be difficult to convey the same complexity of Della’s childlike lasciviousness. She could be a Lolita through Humbert’s eyes or a victim, but not as fully both.

I was involved with Della as she read through Fern’s papers and finds the bawdy poetry. I understand Della’s relationship with the word “fuck, which I had never been able to look at….I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.” Della is taking a word that she has seen and for the first time is really starting to understand. Mr. Chamberlain has already groped her and she has willingly gotten in the car with him and the word sits out there as a possibility rather than a profanity. Della is on the cusp of asserting her sexuality.

I enjoyed being so intimate with Della. I think more so because this came so late in the book. She was already a friend and I understood her to a certain extent. I felt like I was willing to grow with her through her contradictory emotions. At some points I felt like Munro was pulling thoughts out of my own adolescent head and I think that is due to the tortured duality of the thoughts. As people, especially as adolescents, we experience uncertainty. When Mr. Chamberlain finally exposes himself to Della, her observation that his penis is “[n]ot at all like marble David’s” says everything. The parts of the fantasy she couldn’t quite imagine are right there in front of her and she could (would) never have imagined them in that way.

My narrator in Polska, 1994, Magda, is of a similar age and sexual experience level as Della. As I think back on this book, I realize how much I learned from the realism of the contradictions in Della’s thoughts. And the stark contrast between the fantasy of sexuality and the reality made the reality of Mr. Chamberlain even more grotesque than a grown man molesting a teenager would stereotypically be. At the same time, the naturalness with which Della faces her sexual desires portends the healthy sexual relationship she will have with Garnet. She is not victimized by Mr. Chamberlain, he is simply one step on her path toward sexual awakening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Lives of Girls and Women from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Edan Lepucki and Remembering Why I Love Reading (and Writing) Novellas

June 25, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

Reading Edan Lepucki’s If You’re Not Yet Like Me this weekend reminded me why I love reading novellas. Many of my favorite books are novellas (The Lover, Franny and Zooey, Cheri, The Awakening, A River Runs Through It). And though some stalwart presses (Melville House and Nouvella) are trying to keep novellas alive, most treat them like the bastard children of short stories.

In honor of Novella Month this June, let’s take a look at some reasons novellas rock.

Quick to Read

I love long books, but sometimes I need to know that I won’t get sucked into something that keeps me up until four in the morning. I read Lepucki’s entire book on a Saturday morning before my husband even woke up. It was engaging, I felt inspired, and I had the whole day left to mull it over.

Concise Writing

One of my favorite things about novellas is the adherence to (and fleshing out of) one theme. The narrator of If You’re Not Yet Like Me, Joellyn, is having some trouble finding the love of her life. Sure, her job probably sucks and her aunt may have cancer, but by focusing solely on Joellyn’s love life, Lepucki lets the reader fully experience the ups and downs of dating a nice guy without all the distractions we face in modern life.

Vivid Characters

Do you remember how many characters there were in Les Misérables? I don’t. You practically need a map to sort them all out. A novella usually has 2-5 characters and you can get deeply involved with each of them. Again, that narrowing of focus brings amazing detail to what is revealed, and a novella gives you the time to get to know those characters in a way you don’t have time to with a short story.

Size Matters

Whether you read on your back or your side, long books are heavy. Most of us spend all day on the computer—why make the carpal tunnel worse by reading tomes in bed? Plus, I love a book I can fit into my purse—it makes the bus ride so much more pleasant.

My first book, Polska, 1994, is a novella, but it didn’t start out that way. I found through revision how much I liked paring the story down to its essential elements. I liked taking out extraneous characters and finding the essential themes. It’s been awhile since I finished writing that book, and I’m grateful to Lepucki for helping me remember what I loved about writing it.

What are your favorite novellas?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of If You’re Not Yet Like Me from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Bare Suffering of Elie Wiesel in Night

June 7, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author describes the horror of his experience during the Holocaust with only the scantest details. The scant use of adjectives allows the reader to fill in their own worst fears and makes the story more poignant than shocking in its horror.

Wiesel grew up in an isolated part of Transylvania where the Jewish population was deported relatively late in the war. It wasn’t until 1944 that he and his family were removed to Auschwitz. But earlier in the war, there were indicators of the horrors to come, such as when one of the deported foreign Jews returned to Sighet and told Wiesel about what had happened to the rest of the deportees, “The Jews were ordered to get off [of the trains] and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed to a forest….Without passion or haste, [the Germans] shot their prisoners….Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets.” The events themselves are revolting, but that revulsion stems entirely from the action. The passage (including the omitted portion) contains only two adjectives: waiting (re: trucks) and huge (re: trenches). Wiesel is letting the events speak for themselves.

The description is similarly stark when Wiesel and his fellow travelers are unloaded at Auschwitz:

An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother….I didn’t know this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and [sister] forever.

He is remarking on the emotionlessness of the officer’s speech, and yet his own description here is emotionless. The emotion lies in the event itself—in the loss of his mother. He could have engaged in histrionics and described the horror of the loss, but somehow the flatness of the delivery and the lack of adjectives is more poignant than any full description could have been.

There are moments in the book where Wiesel elaborates on the description, but they tend to set scenes at the beginning of a section. For example, the chapter on his march out of the camp starts with these words: “An icy wind was blowing violently.” But the weight of the emotion in this chapter is not in the adjectives. This is how he describes the march: “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot.” The one adjective, “excruciating” takes on so much weight because it rests alone in the passage. I was left with the feeling that while he fails to mention the degree of pain elsewhere, this pain must truly be awful to be described at all.

Often when people experience trauma, there is a deadness to the experience afterwards and Wiesel’s spare use of adjectives reflects that experience. But he is trusting a sympathetic reader to interject their own feelings into the narrative. There is no room for ambiguity here. Babies used for target practice, being separated from your mother, running toward your death—Wiesel doesn’t have to convince the reader that these things are horrible. The story speaks for itself without heavy description. Although this is a work in translation, it seems unlikely that Wiesel’s wife (the translator) would have taken the initiative to remove his adjectives, so we can be relatively safe in assuming that this element of craft is attributable to Wiesel.

I am thinking about this in relation to my own novel, Polska, 1994. Magda undergoes two major moments of trauma—losing her mother and rape. She also re-lives those moments later. I think it is important that in the initial incident the detail is spare and that the events speak for themselves because these are also not ambiguous experiences. Wiesel also uses the tersest of sentences (several quoted above) and that really gives a sense of the character living in the moment and getting through it in any way he can. I have read many accounts of World War II and the Holocaust and to me this one in its spare-ness seemed among the most emotionally credible. How do you describe the indescribable? In contrast to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Night is less shocking, but more human.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Night from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.