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TextBOX and Teaching
Before I took over as editor of textBOX, The Missouri Review’s absolutely free online anthology of exceptional fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from its archives, I used the site for a few semesters in the fiction workshops I teach at the University of Missouri. It was a great accompaniment to a craft manual, which was, in my case, Janet Burroway’s excellent Writing Fiction. Burroway divides her book into chapters that cover big topics like plot, point of view, setting, and theme. Each chapter features two or three stories that serve as examples of each topic in action, but for especially sticky topics, I wanted more examples. For instance, to supplement the chapter on point of view, I gave students Seth Fried’s “Loeka Discovered,” which is written in collective first person.
I also found textBOX useful for troubling the conventions of the undergraduate workshop story. While it is generally easier for a student to write a successful short story that takes place over the course of a day or a few hours, there are many fine stories that unreel over months or years, moving characters across counties, countries, and continents. I gave students “Eleven Beds” by William Harrison to show them one way a story can cover vast temporal and literal ground. My students and I had a good time (well, I know I did) mapping the shifts in time and place and tracing the subtle way Harrison renders the shifting dynamics of the central romantic relationship.
Though I have not yet had the chance to use textBOX this way myself, I can envision it as fodder for a workshop organized thematically. Before textBOX’s inception, I taught an intermediate workshop on the literary fantastic. If the site had been available, I could have augmented my story selections with “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender (a devolving boyfriend!), “Drowned Edward Tug” by Mary Bucci Bush (ghosts!), and “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed” by Robert Olen Butler (just how it sounds!). There are twelve short stories on textBOX with more to come, and I can already see other thematic groupings: stories that have strong settings, stories that take place in a specific historical moment.
Interested in trying textBOX in your classroom? You could assign a textBOX piece to fill a spare day in your schedule. Each piece has accompanying discussion questions and writing prompts, reducing your prep time. Send your students a link to the piece, have them print out and bring to class the PDF that includes the piece and accompanying study materials, and you’re ready to go. Or you could use a textBOX piece to introduce students to another genre. Maybe you feel your fiction students could benefit from a discussion of a textBOX poem’s close attention to language or you’d like to get your poetry students thinking about the construction of narrative in nonfiction. TextBOX is an easy way to do so.
Have you used textBOX in your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry class? Can you think of other ways textBOX might be helpful to instructors?
NBCC Award Nominees
No doubt by now you have seen the nominees for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards. If not, they’re listed at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.
What you may not have known is that three of the nominees have had work or interviews appear in our pages.
Jeffrey Eugenides, a fiction nominee, was interviewed by James Schiff in our Fall 2006 issue (29.3). You can hear an audio clip from his nominated novel, The Marriage Plot, via our tumblr page.
Jonathan Lethem, a nominee in criticism, was interviewed in our Spring 2006 issue (29.1), also by James Schiff.
Laura Kasischke‘s poems have appeared in our pages twice, in 1993 and 2007. She is, suitably, a nominee in poetry.
If you’d like to read these poems and interviews, backissues are available.
Congratulations to these writers, and to all nominees.
In fact, congratulations to everyone everywhere – you’re doing a great job!
On Literary Readings and Community
The number of “Best of 2011″ lists is pretty daunting. Not only does ever major media outlet have a “Best of 2011″ list, some even have a “Worst of 2011.” There are lists for Most Overlooked and Underrated and Overrated and probably several others that my brain is unable to process at the moment. Often the effect of these lists is to remind me that there were many terrific books this past year that I did not read and, perhaps even worse, never heard of in the first place.
While I missed many books this year, I went to a ton of author readings. Last semester alone, I attended about seven events at the University of Missouri (new PhD student readings and visiting writers), probably three more at Orr Street Studios, and another, oh, let’s call it five at Get Lost Bookstore in Columbia. Over the last five months, I probably went to an average of a reading per week. If I sit and think about it for a while, there are also all the readings from this past summer and this past spring, which would then include readings I went to in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., where the AWP Conference was in February.
Believe me, all semester long, I bitched and moaned about going to readings. We all did. Hey, people like to complain. There was definitely a time this semester when I looked at my calendar, and there was something like seven readings in ten days. I tried to make all of them, too. But why? Why did I want to go to all these things? Especially when, as you probably can guess from this, more than once, I had the sinking feeling I didn’t want to go at all.
But readings aren’t just about me. They are about my literary community, my arts community, and even when I’m cranky, it was always the right decision to get myself in gear and attend.
Readings are, in many ways, just like editing a magazine journal. To paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, editing is a we, and one can get somewhat tired of an I. She was talking, of course, about the difference between being an editor and being a writer, and why being a magazine editor is an attractive vocation. But the same idea – being involved and being for other people rather than just yourself – applies to readings.
Writers, when writing, spend their time alone. The solitude is essential for deep thinking and the process of creation. Loneliness, of course, goes hand-in-hand with this quiet, and after spending years working on something – poems, a novel, stories – getting in front of an audience of people and sharing that work can be a welcome shift.
It can also be a disaster. Many of us, I’m sure, have been to readings that were … well, lackluster. We’ve also been to readings where people are trying a wee bit too hard to be “entertaining.” There are plenty of these stories. This makes the readings that are really and truly an amazing experience. For me, hearing Edward P. Jones read his work is still one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard.
Readings are the chance for writers to be outgoing, extroverted, friendly, celebratory. Listeners, often writers and avid readers too, are warm and gregarious. Alcohol is (hopefully) involved. We gossip. Laugh. Shake hands. We crave remarks and thoughts about the work, discover what other people are working on, what we’re reading: we want to know who and what is being read not just published. We’re eager to talk.
Here in Columbia, there are three regular spots for readings: any event our English Department holds, the Hearing Voices series at Orr Street Studios, and at Get Lost Bookshop down on Ninth Street. I attend as many as I can, and hope that wherever you’re reading this from, you’re doing the same in your part of the world.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
Eleven Rap Albums for 2011
I have enjoyed reading various best-of-2011 book lists online and I’ve found myself wishing I could make one too, but because my comprehensive exam was happening in the fall of 2011, I spent most of last year reading older things. Now that that’s done, I can finally check out The Sisters Brothers, The Devil All the Time, After the Apocalypse, etc.
Meyhem Lauren is hungry
Though I didn’t read many new books in 2011, I did listen to a lot of new rap music. 2011 wasn’t the best year for it. Tha Carter IV was not memorable; Action Bronson, while interesting, doesn’t deserve far more media attention than his Outdoorsmen comrade Meyhem Lauren; XXX grated after a few listens; and Drake is always terrible. Still, good music happened. Here in no special order are eleven rap LPs/mixtapes I liked in 2011 and still like in 2012:
- Meek Mill: Dreamchaser
- Main Attrakionz: 808s and Dark Grapes II
- Starlito & Don Trip: Stepbrothers
- Jay-Z and Kanye West: Watch the Throne
- Killa Kyleon: Candy Paint N Texas Plates II
- Juicy J: Rubba Band Business 2
- ASAP Rocky: LiveLoveA$AP
- Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
- Clams Casino: Instrumental Mixtape
- 2 Chainz: T.R.U. Realigion
- Meyhem Lauren: Self-Induced Illness
What are yours? You have to choose eleven.
What is Read and What is Remembered
In U and I, Nicholson Baker writes about the books of John Updike without actually looking back to reference the books of John Updike. Sometimes Baker tries to quote Updike from memory. He doesn’t do a good job of it, almost on purpose it seems, though footnotes are included so readers can look at Baker’s corrupted recollection of Updike side by side with Updike’s actual words. It’s funny, of course. Nicholson Baker is funny. In U and I, a lot of the humor comes from how much precision Baker devotes to his enormously imprecise task.
U and I brings up questions about brains and texts: What stays with the reader when the book is done? What determines what remains? What does it mean to write about the “anxiety of influence” while (as Baker does) aggressively refusing to read Harold Bloom, the guy who popularized the term? To what degree do we warp the memory of what we love to our own image? How do people enact texts with their bodies?
Like Baker, Billy-Billy Jump, the narrator of Rudy Wilson’s 1987 novel The Red Truck, wants to know how the intangible carves itself into the tangible. He thinks, at one point, “Our brains have lines on them from what we do…Probably born smooth and then the ditches began” (108).
I learned about Rudy Wilson only a couple of years ago. My MFA thesis advisor told me about Rudy, with whom she went to MFA school. Her writing professors would praise Rudy’s stories so highly that other student-writers started to feel jealous of what he could do.
When I found out that Ravenna Press had reprinted The Red Truck, I ordered it online. I read it and I read it again. I ordered Sonja’s Blue. I searched Abebooks.com for literary journals with more stories of his. I tried to find his novella A Girl Named Jesus but I couldn’t. I wrote a short note about Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads, the only review of Sonja’s Blue on Goodreads (which is ridiculous). Rudy saw it and he emailed me a message to say hello, and we emailed each other a few times, and I felt happy.
Now I am going to write about The Red Truck without looking back at the book.
I remember the narrator Billy-Billy, as a child, remembering an old merry-go-round. He thinks about it, sitting there in the dark, shiny, and then this sentence happens (I think): “Wind blew on it.” When I first read that, I couldn’t believe a sentence had been used just to say, “Wind blew on it.” It is amazing! Later, Billy-Billy is being held in the air by his father (I think) against a sky full of light, and Billy-Billy says (I think), “He held me. He looked at me.” It’s heartbreaking in its simplicity, but the precision is vital to the meaning–the act of father holding son and the act of father seeing son are miraculous enough alone; to inflate the language into anything more would clutter the import of the action. I remember a sex scene between Teddianne and Billy-Billy, built mostly (I think) with prepositions and uncertain objects and lines like (I think) “She was naked underneath,” and somehow through its surgical omission the scene grows so deeply and embarrassingly private that I recognize its truth, unfettered. I remember the color yellow, Teddianne painting herself yellow and painting Billy-Billy yellow, all the color, everywhere, and the light, and the hands of people, touching each other. I remember how Billy-Billy’s little brother Ned falls purple and dead out of the icebox that the two children get trapped in for too long and afterward Billy-Billy says (I think), “I was still alive; my lungs were bigger.” I remember how I called my little brother on the phone soon after I read that. I remember how I cried at the end of the book at the last line (I think), “Sometimes I lift my eyes to look out the window at the sea.”
I rarely read books more than once, but I’ve read The Red Truck so many times. Rudy Wilson’s writing is tangible. It’s big and bright, and fever-like. I don’t exactly put The Red Truck down; it’s more like I wake up from it.
What stays with you after you’ve finished a book? Which books have you read more than once, and what does it take for you to read a book again, and again?
Violence of the Lambs; Or Why I Didn’t Write About That
There was more. I was going to write about book reviewing, and my general sense of discomfort with book reviewing, which stems almost entirely from a lack of confidence to write reviews in a coherent and intelligible manner that would be useful or interesting to anyone. I was going to write about James Frey, and teaching undergraduates, and the difference between reading a single essay and a collection of essays, and probably some other subjects that would all tie together neatly for a pretty good Friday read for you, our blog reader.
Here’s the thing. I couldn’t finish it. Or, I could, I guess – did, in fact – but I wasn’t pleased with the result. It was a colossal mess of tangents and half-baked thoughts, and it seemed like a disservice to publish it the way it turned out.
It’s warm here – frighteningly warm for Missouri in February – and I have my windows open, again. All morning yesterday I read manuscripts. I haven’t done that in a while. Downstairs, on the third floor, TMR has a few couches and a coffee maker, and I put my feet up on a table, tucked a pen behind my ear, and read fiction submissions. Away from my desk, away from my computer, away from my phone (both office and mobile, which I wisely left upstairs). Felt fantastic. Felt really great to spend the morning just looking for stuff for the summer issue, reading other writers’ work, stories about Russian dancers or out of work truck drivers or the daughters of war veterans and such, and not really thinking about our audience, our budget, our expenses and income, advertising, none of the other stuff that is often pinballing through my mind in the course of the day.
I felt all right, reading like that.
Someone close to me recently remarked that I never say anything personal in my blog posts. Note, even, how carefully I phrased that previous sentence. Of course, that’s now what my site is for. But this person was right: I’m careful about this blog. It’s been one of the most successful things we’ve done since I started at The Missouri Review—our staff has written several thoughtful, smart, engaging essays on this site in the past two years, and our mantra has basically been to not be negative; remain about publishing, editing, writing; and be interesting. Writing about Sullivan’s work, I worried that I was getting increasingly negative and incoherent, upset about who knows what about his work, and that my post would be the kind of vitriol that our readers don’t want. Morever, the kind of vitriol I don’t like to write.
I bring this up because for almost a year and a half now, my personal life, especially this past month, has been a bit tumultuous (to put it mildly) and sitting in a chair reading this morning, I became aware of how much better I felt. Just in general. No grand epiphanies or realizations or anything like that; dark clouds will certainly move in later in the day (or tomorrow, soon, etc.). Writing about creative nonfiction and its ticks and whirls and wearing a cultural critic hat—it just didn’t feel right. No, it was more than that: it was a recognizable state of discord, both in head and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with. I just wanted to read.
When I was at River Styx, our rejection letters all started the same way: “Look. We’re all writers too, so we know how it feels.” That’s true, of course. But, what was making me a boiling cauldron of frustration yesterday afternoon was writing: not just the act of writing, but the criticism of writing and the Big Ideas behind criticism and interpretation and connectivity. What made me feel calm was reading, just reading, nothing more. And, really, why did any of us start writing in the first place? Because we read. And liked it. A lot.
It would be silly, of course, to have a rejection letter say “Look. We’re all readers too” because that seems pretty obvious, ironic in a hipster way or something, and perhaps even a little snide. Nonetheless, it might be more true to what unifies as, editors and submitters alike, than calling ourselves writers.
If I was clever, if I had my writing cap on, I’d be able to come up with a really snazzy close here. But I don’t. Moreover, I don’t want to attempt to tack this together neatly. The messiness of this post is what’s most interesting to me, and how, by taking a little time to not think, to read without thinking beyond the story in my hands. And, for today, I think that’s all I really want to focus on. I’ll leave it at that.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye