Recently in good news Category

My beautiful, funny, and generous friend Lorraine López, about whom you've read on here before (multiple times), has just been catapulted into the national limelight!  Her latest book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, a collection of short fiction, has been named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.   The other finalists are Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, and Lorrie Moore.   (Thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.)

Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic.  It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced.  Wow!

Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ."  The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:

Q: Your collection has many Latino characters, and they all interact with characters from other backgrounds. Did you intend this bicultural or multicultural dimension of the book from the start, and do you think Latino writers face any special challenges in writing about Latino characters and culture for today’s varied literary audiences?

Lopez: This is a complicated question, and I thank you for asking it. For me, I did not set out to do more than explore characters beyond their cultural definition. As mentioned, I wanted to avoid that performance of identity that essentializes cultural experience. I am not interested in providing the usual themes, characters, and props that many associate with Latino literature. These do not characterize my experience as a Latina, so why should I artificially simulate such things to validate stereotypic notions? I can think of no reason to do this, except to gratify expectations of others....

I am not out to give anyone (including myself) what he or she might be expecting. In speaking to other Latino writers, I find that we similarly resist gratifying expectations that our characters perform in culturally expected ways, say, rolling tortillas, bopping around the barrio, or gathering wisdom from a sweet abuela. More and more, Latino literature is evolving away from such stereotypes, and becoming more interesting and challenging in the process.

Lorraine's also co-editing a new collection, The Other Latino, that addresses this very issue--the expected performance of Latina/o ethnicity--from multiple perspectives.  It's due out next year from University of Arizona Press. 

In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine! 

You probably remember Chris Anderson's breakthrough notion of the long tail, the idea that the future of retail lies in selling unique items in small quantities.  Well, one week ago today, when the snow was thick and the sky was gray (again), I received the loveliest surprise:  an email from a woman who'd been on the editorial staff at Quarterly West 15 years ago, when QW published my little flash piece, "In Theory."

Currently teaching college workshops in creative writing, she wrote:  "I have managed to always keep a copy of that issue close-by so as to teach it, but somewhere in one of my moves, I misplaced my copy."   She wondered if I had a spare I could send.

Who knew?  You see, you might think your work falls into a pool and just lies at the dark bottom of the pond like littering leaves, rotting away, but somebody somewhere might have been teaching it for 15 years!  You just gotta keep the faith.

Well, I made Sophia a pdf file of "In Theory" for her classes, and it's also now here on this website, available to all and sundry. 

Thank you, Sophia, and hurray for the long tail! 

First of all, many thanks to all y'all who've posted kind things about my leaving Pine Manor.  I will miss you, too.

Secondly, fans of Tayari Jones--friend of the blog and friend to my life--will be thrilled to know that her eagerly awaited third novel, THE SILVER GIRL, has found a home at Algonquin. 

Thirdly, Lorraine López's edited collection, An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, is now available in paperback from University of Michigan.  Congratulations, Lorraine!  Full disclosure:  the title essay is by yours truly, and the book grew out of a raucous panel at the AWP a couple of years ago called "Trashy Women," which some of y'all kindly attended, thank you much.   (When over 400 people showed up, Lorraine knew she had a racehorse of a topic on her hands.)  The book includes work by Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Bich Minh Nguyen, Karen McElmurray, Heather Sellers, and other wonderful writers, including Lorraine herself and my own UNL colleague and friend Amelia Montes.  If you've ever been struck by the weird dissonance of class friction--even if you're not a woman or a writer, and even if you didn't end up in academia or publishing--then this book will move you and make you laugh.

Lastly but not leastly--and this is strictly personal--my sweet husband James and I made an offer on a home here in Lincoln.  It's a small condominium downtown, near where we've been renting for the past 2 and a half years, and it's definitely a fixer-upper, which is why we could afford to spring for it.  We're very excited (or is that panic?); I'm not sure if the fluttery feeling is a product of my profound (post-Wabash) commitment-phobia, or due to the hideous old turquoise carpet and popcorn ceiling.  (Alas, the decor is neither retro chic nor dazzlingly of-the-moment, but more like a pathetic from-the-land-time-forgot melange.  But the location is killer.) 

We should be in it by Christmas--the closing is during exam week.   Help!  If you have advice about moving, renovating, contractors, or anything related, please post!

I was so touched and proud last night to receive the Above and Beyond Award from Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters.  In the Lincoln area, 1,009 women and men serve as mentors to local children and teenagers, and 5 of us were honored at a lovely dinner. 

It did feel a little weird.  As I stood there, having words read aloud about the mentoring relationship I've had with Amara for these past couple of years, I thought, Amara's the one who should be here.  She should be receiving this award, just for surviving her life.  Only the cash bar helped to ease this ontological angst. 

A lot of corporate donors were there, and I hadn't realized how expensive a program BBBS is:  it costs approximately $1,000 a year to support each mentoring match (in terms of paying office staff to run background checks, handle paperwork, and do monthly check-ins with each member of every pair).  But considering the payoff, it's not such a high price to pay.  It's a program that changes kids' lives, and it's a worthy cause.  If you have time (and patience, and you genuinely like kids), consider being a mentor.  If you're short on time but have some cash and want to change a child's life, consider making a donation; BBBS has been thoroughly vetted as a sound charity.

In totally unrelated news, writer Charles Baxter was here on Monday to give a lecture and a reading.  His lecture was on "lush style," and here are some quotable quotes (or rough paraphrases) for all you craft-talk gluttons out there:

In our own postmodern era, an era of irony, skepticism, and understatement, we live with an "aesthetics of suspicion."  Only established writers like Angela Carter or Toni Morrison can get away with a lush style; in workshops, lushness is "vetoed" or "sneered at."

"If you want to be cool, you can't be lush.  You can be one or the other, but not both."

Lushness is "undefended, naked, vulnerable, embarrassing."  It is a "hot style" that "works out of a fever" and is given to "unstable self-dramatization."

It often "refuses to give up the past," and instead "superimposes the past on the present through lyric expansion."

Whenever two time frames are superimposed, there's the possibility of lushness.  The lush style is nostalgic, backward-looking; Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, Garcia Márquez, and Nabokov, especially in Lolita, are all practitioners of the lush style.

"When the claim is being made that everyone should believe in an emotion and agree with it, lushness veers into the overripe, the coercive, the fraudulent, the manipulative.  It stops being poetry and becomes rhetoric."

"Lush styles are about fullness."  They are about being open and unprotected.  They believe in the possibility of transformational love.  Irony, by contrast, is a form of protection, and it is possible that we are all, now, over-protected.

"In a trashy, duplicitous culture" (like our own current culture, apparently), "irony, a cold style," is the default.  Since we are always being lied to, we are always skeptical.

Those were the highlights of his lecture on style, as predigested for you by Joy.  It was an unusual presentation; we were given a handout that began with 4 pages of sheet music by Rachmaninoff and instructed to follow along as the piece was played for us, which quickly separated the musical wheat from the chaff.  (I'm definitely chaff on that score.) 

I'm still thinking through the things Baxter said.

Congratulations to path-breaking French Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye!  She has just won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in France, for her novel Trois femmes puissantes ("Three Powerful Women," Gallimard, 2009), becoming the first black woman ever to do so in the 106-year history of the prize.  (Wondering why it took so long?  Go here to speculate.)

Though the monetary award is only a token 10 euros, the prize brings tremendous international attention and prestige to the book and the author. 

While I don't think you can yet get Trois femmes puissantes in English, the attention from the Goncourt should soon correct that.  In the meantime, you can get NDiaye's novel Rosie Carpe from the University of Nebraska Press--the amazing little press that calls 'em first (as with Müller & Le Clezio on the Nobel).

Thanks to Cheryl Strayed for the heads-up!

 

My lovely issue of Fourth Genre arrived in the mail this week.  (Is it me, or do those inscribed tablets look awfully phallic?)
 
If you're a Pine Manor-head, or you went to Marcia Aldrich's panel last year at AWP (where she read the piece aloud), or you picked up one of Fourth Genre's little brochures at the AWP book exhibit (which featured it), then you know I'm excited about the at-long-last publication of my little creative nonfiction piece, "Grip."  Here's the beginning of it:

Over the crib in the tiny apartment, there hung a bullet-holed paper target, the size and dark shape of a man--its heart zone, head zone, perforated where my aim had torn through:  36 little rips, no strays, centered on spots that would make a man die.
     Beginner's luck, said the guys at the shooting range, at first.  Little lady, they'd said, until the silhouette slid back and farther back.  They'd cleared their throats, fallen silent.
     A bad neighborhood.  An infant child.  A Ruger GP .357 with speed-loader.

It's not as morbid as it sounds, a target pinned above a crib:  the place was small, the walls already plastered full with paintings, sketches, pretty leaves, hand-illuminated psychedelic broadsides of poems by my friends.  I masking-taped my paper massacre to the only empty space, a door I'd closed to form a wall.

When my stepfather got out of prison, he tracked my mother down.  He found the city where she'd moved.  He broke a basement window and crawled in.  She never saw his car, halfway up the dark block, stuffed behind a bush.

And it goes on.  It actually turns out to be sort of a love letter to my son.  

After the journal had accepted it, they asked if I would write another essay about how it had been composed.  This turned out to be a very odd thing to do, but I did it, and it's in the issue, too:  "Getting 'Grip.'"  The idea, I think, is that these how-I-wrote-it essays are supposed to be useful to people interested in the craft or process or something.  I'm not sure how useful mine will be, though I tried to make sure it kept a snappy voice and wasn't just deadwood in tone.  (It also thanks UNL grad student and Prairie Schooner managing editor James Engelhardt, who gave me feedback on a revision, for saving me from my cetological excesses.  Don't ask.)

Anyway, the issue also includes pieces by Heather Sellers, who's appeared on this blog, and Lisa Buchanan, whose work I have loved forever, and woolly wild prolific man du jour Ander Monson, with whom I read once on a panel at Ball State and who persists in never recognizing me when we bump into each other, which is a feat, but maybe when you have bushy hair and an electric manner it's hard because everyone always remembers you even when they don't leave much of an impression themselves (you can see I've given this far too much thought), as well as a very nice interview with Brenda Miller, done by Marcia Aldrich and some of her students, who felled me with their brightness. 

It's a good issue.  Even if the inscribed tablets are like phalluses or ghosts.

Non sequitur:  It's interesting to be teaching Meridel Le Sueur this week--or this year, I should say:  her  reportage on Depression-era suffering is becoming all too widely relevant.  Even her tossed-off observations like this one: 

Statistics make unemployment abstract and not too uncomfortable.  The human being is different.  To be hungry is different than to count the hungry.

Indeed. 

Next week, we read Hurston's gorgeous, gorgeous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and that brings us up to 1937, and then we stop reading primary texts and the students start felling us, I hope, with their brightness as they read their research papers aloud as if we're all at a tiny scholarly conference. 

Professionalization is apparently the name of the game, and I'm doing my bit by all these game young people who wish to do this for a living.

Thanks to everyone who's sent kind words about my birthday!  I've got to say, the view from 42 looks just fine. 

And while the whole world may be thrilling or griping about Obama and the Peace Prize (GObama!), I'd just like to say how good it felt that Herta Müller, 56, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got asked "whether winning the prize while relatively young could hurt her work" (emphasis so mine). 

Oh, yes.  Break out the Champagne.  Bring on the medal for stamina.

I like her calm response to the hoopla of the award (which she seems to be thoroughly enjoying):  "I am now nothing better and I'm nothing worse. . .  My inner thing is writing.  That I can hold on to."  I love it when people aren't swayed by praise or failure. 

I'm lifting a glass, too, because the House voted yesterday to include crimes committed due to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability under federal hate crimes legislation, extending protection to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and the Senate will likely agree.  Hurray!  It's about time.

As Müller, who grew up under Ceausescu's brutal dictatorship in Romania, says, "I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that.  And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live."

Let's keep writing our way toward the worlds we dream.  

I just learned that my collection of personal essays & creative nonfiction, ISLAND OF BONES, has received its first greenlight at a lovely university press:  the editor loves it! 

(May we all just pause for a moment to dwell on how blissful the words "I love the collection" feel?  Aaah.  There, now.) 

The manuscript still has to be vetted by outside readers, and then voted on by the press's publication board, so it's not a sure thing.  But the editor is on its side, and that's a great start.  Hurray!

Now, I don't know if I've been infected by working on a literary thriller or what, but to me, ISLAND OF BONES would sound a little creepy if I didn't know the reference.  (You old-school conchs are already smiling.)  So let me just tell you that Cayo Hueso, literally "bone key" or island of bones, is what the Spanish-speaking folks called Key West before English speakers got there and thought Hueso sounded like West-o, and presto:  a name, mangled.  Lost in translation.  Key West is where my grandparents and great-grandparents lived, where my dad was born and raised, and where we traveled every year to stay with family, fish off the piers with the cousins, and inhale way too much of my grandmother's black beans, fried sweet plantains, and roast pork. 

Key West was the island, the rock, of my highly peripatetic childhood, the place we could always go home to.  Now only one person in my family--my aunt, a high school librarian--lives there; the rest have been squeezed out over the decades by skyrocketing housing costs as the island became not a home for ordinary working people but a resort for the wealthy.  Even my aunt is planning to leave as soon as she can afford to retire.

"Island of Bones" is the title of an essay I wrote that will appear in The Other Latino, an edited collection by a bunch of different writers that's forthcoming from University of Arizona Press sometime--2010, I think.  I thought it made a good title for my own collection, which is really personal and intimate and sort of picks up where The Truth Book left off.  Most of the pieces, though, aren't nearly as harrowing as the book.  It's about being a writer, a mother, a daughter, a sister, about being an academic, an intellectual with working-class roots--about how to configure an identity with complicated ethnic, class, religious, and gender elements, about dealing with the long-term psychological impact of violence.  Some of the pieces are forthcoming in journals and anthologies, but this collection will put them all together in one handy book (and I hope it comes out in straight-to-paperback form).

Anyway, I'm very excited about the fact that an editor likes it, and I hope it keeps moving forward through the editorial process.   Wish me luck, people!