This week, we present Kim Revay, reading live at the Fuel & Fuddle Pitt MFA Reading Series, February 23, 2009, hosted by Billy Coakley.
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Robert Yune interviews Michael Byers for Hot Metal Bridge.
The Size of the World by Joan Silber
(Norton, June 2008)
Emily Stone
Catapulted between
Of course, tales of international exploration are also tales of international conflict. Silber’s stories in The Size of the World are war stories, but, like the people who tell them, they are inherently off-kilter and framed by peculiar circumstances. Toby begins his story in
On occasion, Silber belabors the connections between her protagonists, assigning them awkward statements about a high-school science teacher or a first husband’s grandfather only in the service of connecting disparate narrative lines. Her writerly voice, too, can break through the scrim of the monologues, though her intellectual omniscience is less jarring than it is utterly captivating. She prompts Mike, the most contemporary and also the most sedentary of the narrators, to say that “if you longed for another place, you longed for another time,” signaling that the “elusive connection” between travel and emotion is the product of contradiction layered over romance.
Breaking Dawn Dominates (and I want to gush about it)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
(Little, Brown and Company/August 2008)
Alexandra Rae Valint
Vampires are cool again. Of course, to we steadfast lovers of the bloodsucking mythical creatures, vampires have always been cool: stealthy, seductive, and inexhaustible metaphors for sex, empire, death, and desire. However, vampires have not always been as sexy as they are now, and as they undeniably are in Stephenie Meyer’s cultishly popular Twilight Saga, the finale of which came out on August 2.
Edward Cullen, our vampire hero and star-crossed love of our human heroine, Bella Swan, is perfection: a chiseled, cold, god-like body paired with an enviable IQ. He’s a guy’s guy who plays baseball and loves fast cars, but he’s also the type of guy you bring home to your parents, who opens doors for you and lovingly records you a CD of songs he’s composed for you on his piano (which, by the way, he’s kind of a prodigy at). Oh, and he’s totally okay with just kissing. He’s inspired a legion of loyal fans who endlessly extoll his flawlessness. He’s nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who for all his manipulative magnetism always aroused equal amounts desire and repulsion. Neither was Dracula quite the same brooding, tortured type that the vampire has become in today’s fang-friendly pop culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s resident vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, brooded with a stern, apprehensive face and morose eyes for three seasons before broodingly departing (at night, in shadow, without a word) to spin-off show Angel, where he brooded successfully for many more seasons. The recently aired (and cancelled) CBS series Moonlight starred another brooding vampire with a conscience who was, again, in love with a feisty blonde mortal. Such TV series have continued the trend towards the humanization and sexification of the vampire, along with the concomitant lessening of the danger and violence associated with the vampire’s demonic desires. Those sickly anemic looks, pointy fangs, and unwilling neck-scarred human victims have become stunning paleness, a set of perfect teeth, and a jug of extra blood from the hospital or leftover from the butcher’s shop. The vampire has increasingly become the repository for our hopes and anxieties about the human status as hero/victim: trapped within an everlasting yet bloodless and therefore blood-lusting body, the vampire struggles above his demon—his own self—to be “good,” “selfless,” and as “normal” as possible. The vampire has come to represent the human situation. Edward Cullen embodies this paradigm to the hilt, desperately trying to be good and moral in every way still open to him.
Clearly, there is nothing new about vampire lit. After Stoker and Polidori, Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (the basis for HBO’s fall series True Blood) followed. But no other vampire lit, to my knowledge, has caused this kind of frenzied, impassioned ferment. Witness: bookstores sponsor nationwide midnight release parties a la Harry Potter; a high school girl band, The Bella Cullen Project, gets their Twilight-inspired compositions distributed on iTunes (I recommend “Switzerland”); I’m up reading wide-eyed until 4 a.m., only to finally go to sleep and dream about the characters, only to wake up and write an acoustic-folk song with my sister (also a fan), only to then brag about said song to all my friends, who one-by-one I have converted to the series (my book conversion rate has never been higher).
To the still un-converted, the premise of the series is fairly simple: Bella Swan, our narrator, moves to Forks, a sleepy, rainy city in Washington State. Her first day at school, as she gazes across the abyss of the cafeteria, she locks eyes with a handsome pale boy sitting with other beautiful pale people (his adopted vampire family). Indescribable attraction and inevitable love ensue, even when she discovers he’s a vampire and even after he confesses that he must restrain himself from biting her because her blood is pretty much the best smelling liquid in the beverage store. Various threats to their love/life occur in the first three books, and through it all Bella desperately yearns to be turned into a vampire so she can live with Edward for ever and ever. The arrival of the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, had the Twilight universe atwitter. Would Bella go through with the wedding? Would she become a vampire? Would Jacob (Bella’s best friend and a werewolf) imprint? Would Bella and Edward have sex? When August 2 arrived, and I cracked open the hefty hardback, I nearly read the 754 pages in one sitting.
Twists and surprises and answers to the aforementioned pressing questions make it almost impossible to talk about the book beyond page 25. However, from my investigation into the massive online response, Breaking Dawn has been met with more resistance and less unconditional glee than the previous three books received. Of course, a beloved series’ final book will never be met with hugs and kisses from everyone, and the book does take a distinct turn in subject matter, narrative structure, tone, and mood. The book feels more adult and less young adult, and perhaps that’s why some of the young fan base feels a bit alienated and betrayed. The book is no longer concerned with proving Edward and Bella’s love, but rather with handling the crises that come after love is assured. Such a maturation was to be expected; Bella leaves high school and parents behind, and she ventures into the unknown terrains of marriage and vampire existence (comically, the first causes her much more dread than the second). Even Meyer’s oftentimes inflated, indulgent prose feels more controlled, descriptively tighter here; she spends less time, though still a lot of time, expressing mushy love and describing steamy kisses and instead takes both the mushiness and steaminess of Edward and Bella’s relationship for granted (although the cold planes of Edward’s chest still receive an undue amount of attention).
Meyer is writing a different kind of book in Breaking Dawn: not girl gets boy, or girl gets boy back, or girl gets stuck in a classic love triangle. Breaking Dawn’s winding plot is harder to stereotype as frothy teen fantasy romance when it’s mostly preoccupied with the reasons we form the families we do and the ways we keep them from disintegrating. Thematically, the books have always emphasized choice and sacrifice (ironically within a framework of destiny), but yet again, such topics have matured and broadened in this final book. Breaking Dawn’s climactic showdown, a more psychological and nuanced battle than the one in Eclipse, features relevant questions about power, war, corruption, and the necessity of resisting the politics of fear.
I have spent a lot of time wondering why these books are so gosh-darn popular. Certainly, there is the refreshing, yet endearingly sexy, abstinence of Bella and Edward and the drug and alcohol free high school scene, both which makes the world of Gossip Girl a drunken and stoned red-light district by comparison. Of course, there is the grand, love-at-first-sight, fated passion between Bella and Edward, a soul mate scenario which invokes Juliet and Romeo and Cathy and Heathcliff (Bella and Edward actually quote from Wuthering Heights to express their mutual infatuation). But, I think, at the heart of readers’ intense investment in the series is that Bella, a seemingly ordinary girl who doesn’t fit in in “this world,” whose life in “this world” is defined by mind-numbing mediocrity, has another viable option; she has an escape.
And here is the core fantasy behind the series: not that an average looking girl instantaneously mesmerizes a beautiful and brilliant supernatural being (although that is another fantasy), but that she possesses something special and inherent that makes her belong more to that other world, the glamorous supernatural realm, than to this mundane world of cafeteria lunches and graduation thank you cards. Of course, when Bella bemoans her life of mediocrity she also reveals her own, distinctly not-average strengths: her incredible bravery, loyalty, and ability to notice that an important letter is written, crucially, on a page torn from her copy of The Merchant of Venice. Despite her clumsiness and her human need for food and sleep, she’s always possessed a “superpower.” Although Edward’s superpower is the ability to read everyone’s mind, Bella’s mind has consistently been a closed book to him (it aggravates him; delights her). Bella’s mind is a fortress of sorts, defended by steely resolve and a wry individualism. Breaking Dawn satisfyingly follows this potential in ways that, again, I can do no more than hint at. Bella’s mind becomes her ultimate strength and her ultimate gift—a capitulation proving that an intelligent girl is always already a superhero.
Hello, hello! Today is the final day to submit a piece of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, or poetry for consideration in our fourth issue. We accept submissions electronically (see the Call for Entries for further details), so all it takes is the magical click of a button. We look forward to seeing your lovely language, your tall tales, your astute cultural observations!
Many thanks, and happy submitting.
Yours,
The Editors
Dear friends,
We are now accepting submissions for our fourth issue! Please send us your damned finest writing in nonfiction, poetry, criticism, or fiction. Submissions close on September 30, a date that hastens upon us like sleep, the desire for cheese, and the spectre of Ichabod Crane.
See our call for entries. Drink Ovaltine. Submit today!
Yours,
The Editors
PS: Hot Metal Bridge now has a Facebook group. That’s right. Join it.
Hot Metal Bridge’s third issue, “American Light,” is set to debut at any moment. Please expect it by/on April 1.
We apologize for the slight delay and promise to repay you in gold coin — or rather, in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, criticism, and art, all of which we’d take over gold any day.
Yours, with anticipation,
The Editors
Our spring submission deadline is so soon, you can smell it: like that strange perfume your grandmother used to wear, like the shepherd’s pie you forgot you were reheating, like the rugby player who chose to sit next to you on the bus on the rainest day of the year.
Luckily for you, Hot Metal Bridge is both more fortunate and more attractive than a slack-jawed neanderthal. Also, as an online magazine, it has no odor to speak of.
Submit! Submit quickly! And make it good.
Yours,
Kelly and Ashleigh
This is old news but has escaped my attention until now: The Atlantic Monthly is accepting entries for its annual student writing contests. (Student status being of the undergrad or grad varieties.) Entries accepted in fiction, poetry, and something called “personal or journalistic essays” that sounds a lot like creative non-fiction.
Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.
The best part? No entry fee.
Full details here. Good luck.
It seems that several times over the last year, I’ve looked in the front matter of a book of short stories I’ve been enjoying, and in the place where the author thanks those publications that originally printed his or her stories, I’ve seen the journal Salt Hill listed as one of them. (Although I can only think of the example of Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To at the moment.) Google “Salt Hill,” though, and you turn up a bunch of results pertaining to pubs called Salt Hill or, yes, salt hills.
It’s not just me. Fellow fiction ed. Ashleigh heroically compiled a long list of literary magazines over the summer, and her listing for Salt Hill was something like “Not sure this still exists.” We just figured it had gone the way of the dodo, so to speak.
Au contraire! Today, via Pitt’s super-useful “dist list,” comes word that Salt Hill not only exists, but is welcoming submissions for its 21st issue. It turns out too that it’s affiliated with Syracuse University.
Here is relevant info from the aforementioned e-mail, followed by an explanation of why I’m not just putting up a link:
“The editors welcome submissions of poetry, prose, translations, reviews, essays, interviews and artwork submitted by April 1. We do not accept electronic submissions.
“. . .
“To submit address your work to the appropriate editor
(poetry, fiction or nonfiction) at:
“Salt Hill
Syracuse University
English Department
Syracuse, NY 13244″
And now here is the web address they provided: SaltHillJournal.com. Click on it. Type it in yourself and see where it goes.
This is the most utterly mysterious literary magazine I have ever heard of.
-Adam
Issue #1 of Hot Metal Bridge launched over two months ago, but it continues to impress me. The astonishment comes in waves: first the insider’s swell of pride at the quality of (fiction) submissions; next the excitement of venturing into the other genres, seeing the excellent poetry and non-fiction my colleagues have collected. Now that the issue has faded from memory a little, the next stage is rediscovering stuff that, by the time the issue launched, I was honestly a little burned out on.
The best example? Johnathan Wilber’s “(de)jamais vu,” which gave me fits as I proofed it for the site–it’s a textual minefield full of particular accents, footnotes, punctuational flourishes, and selections from esoteric vocabularies. (My annoyance was nothing, however, as compared to that of Carolyn, who had to format the story for publication.) It was kind of a tough sell at HMB’s editorial meeting, and it’s not surprising: it’s a weird story, and with its fragmentation and the aforementioned excess of style, it can be tough to dive into.
But it remains one of my favorite things in the issue, largely because the weirdness and style feel necessary and embedded in the world of the story, and the fragmentation pays off in the end. But, looking through the site again, I came upon almost a distillation of all the things I like in the story: the separate page that contains “(de)jamais vu”’s footnotes. I could type a while longer trying to recommend the story, but I couldn’t make it seem as interesting as do these twelve short footnotes.
-Adam
Sorry about that title, but note that I’m refraining from any kind of “it was the best of contests, it was the worst of contests” opening. Each of these contests has something to recommend it, and each is run by a noteworthy and worthwhile lit mag.
Zoetrope: All-Story is holding its 2007 short fiction contest. The prize is $1,000, the judge is Joyce Carol Oates, and the entry fee is $15.
Black Warrior Review is also holding a contest, this one for both fiction and poetry. Prizes are $1,000 for first place in each category, plus publication in BWR. Judges: Josh Russell (fiction), Dean Young (poetry). Entry fee is $15, but note well that the entry fee entitles the contestant to a year’s subscription of BWR.
Read the rest of this entry »
The leisurely hysteria that is general across the country on the afternoon before a holiday was observed in Pittsburgh today. The clotting of major byways as people escape work, the throngs trapped in supermarket lines, and the seemingly spontaneous weekend feeling–unplaceable but real–are all in evidence this evening. Because of that and because the holiday in question is Independence Day (and because I’m moderately bookish, of course, and because a new blog post was sorely needed), my thoughts turn toward the novel Independence Day, by Richard Ford. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner and I can remember when I was 16 or so seeing its lovely paperback cover in prominent bookstore displays, the title and the photograph of a screen door with rain drops lodged in its tiny cells combining to make me think the novel would distill that listless-holiday feeling.
Let me throw this out there: I have tried to read this novel, and I have never come close to finishing it. I finished and enjoyed (moderately) The Sportswriter, the prelude to Independence Day featuring the same main character, Frank Bascombe. Certain of Ford’s stories (”Communist,” of course, and the one where the guy hooks a dead deer with his fishing rod) utterly floor me. And yet the book that’s thought to be his masterwork is so utterly tedious and unfulfilling to me that I have ended up not just bored but in that weird place of getting angry at the thing that is boring you so thoroughly; throwing-the-book-across-the-room territory.
Am I a complete philistine? Does my failure to finish Independence Day betray a fatal lack of character? Of literary taste? I am interested in being persuaded to suck it up and stick with Frank Bascombe, but I’m also wondering how alone I am in this opinion.
~Adam
On a day to day basis, I am a very laugh-y person. I giggle at incredibly innappropriate times, like when my large, short-tempered 3rd grade science teacher used to scream at our class to be quiet. While my fellow eight-year-olds cowered, my reaction was to muffle my laughter–surely bred out of fear–in the sleeve of my shirt. Sometimes I laugh so hard that my eyes get puffy and red, and the muscles of my face feel frozen in a perpetual, doughy smile. It’s actually a little painful.
But all that said, I also cry. A lot. Not because a road rager flipped me off or because I realize my bank account is devastatingly sparse or because I just ate about two week’s worth of calories in one sitting, and can already see it accruing on my thighs. I cry when something moves me, and I find it fulfilling to realize that I am moved by a quite a lot. Two of my favorite ways to get my cartharsis-on are by listening to heartbreakingly beautiful songs, and by reading a good novel. The list below details the who and what of both songs and books that have seriously moved me. I hope they’ll do the same for you.
Tunes:
“One More Dollar” by Gillian Welch.
Oh, Gillian. How I love you. You and your cowboy hat!!
I loved the lyrics to this song so much I wrote a story based on them. And while I wrote, I listened to this song on repeat. For literally days on end. If this particular tune doesn’t suit your fancy, try “Orphan Girl” or “No One Knows My Name.” If she doesn’t have you crying, she’ll have you tapping your bare toes and pensively sipping some moonshine.
“This is the Dream of Win and Regine” by Final Fantasy.
If you are already an Arcade Fire fan, this song may be that much lovelier (Win and Regine are married and play in their band, The Arcade Fire, as one gloriously artistic and adorable pair of musical lovebirds), but it stands its ground entirely on its own. Perhaps I am shamelessly sentimental, but this song embodies the kind of love and loneliness and sweetness and angst that I wish I could pour into my own writing.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
Say what you will about best sellers, but this book is a damn good one. Beautiful. I laughed, I cried so hard I had to put the book down until I got a grip, I laughed some more, I cried a lot more.
“Remember the Mountain Bed” by Billy Bragg and Wilco, lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
Um…I can’t talk about this one right now. I’m about to start crying.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
I’ve read this book several times and can’t decide if it’s a really twisted love story, or a story about a couple of miserable existentialists gone a little cuckoo from all those windy moors. What I do know is it is delightfully grim, and I can’t help but be moved when, psychotic or not, a guy loves his lady so much he’d dig up her dead body just to see her again.
(*giggle*/*sniff*)
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (all six of them).
I have cried at the end of every single one of these babies. I don’t know if it has something to do with Harry’s whole Burdened Hero persona, his poor murdered parents, or the fact that by the end of each book I’ve spent a straight forty-eight hours prying my eyes open with toothpicks and abstaining from food and drink in favor of finding out what’s going down at Hogwarts. These books are well-written, funny, smart, sweet, and sad. Everything a good book should be, in my opinion.
I’m a sweet-and-salty kind of person, and I like my reading and listening materials to hold that same dual quality. It’s like Joni Mitchell (whose music often makes me cry) said: Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.
–Ashleigh
***Spoiler Alert***
So I had a very Valentine day by going to see Music and Lyrics, a story of love between an insecure writer and a has been musician. While the movie was your typical chick flix, there was a bit of a “that sounds familiar” vibe from grad school. Recently, we read a Francine Prose book Blue Angel for one of my classes. Well, Sophia Fisher (Drew Barrymore’s character) had a past affair with her writing teacher who then wrote a book about her seducing him and destroying his career. He then went on to win the National Book Award. Very familiar.
This morning, in town for a speaking engagement at the Carnegie Library, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman sat down with Pitt’s fiction students. As all Pitt writing students know, Chabon did his undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. Chuck Kinder, the author who runs the Pitt creative writing program, said of Chabon, “I gave him special permission to sit in on graduate classes because he was clearly one of the most brilliant young writers I’ve ever been around.” That’s Michael Chabon on the left, Chuck Kinder on the right.
Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of Ayelet Waldman, who shared the stage — er, table — with her husband as they answered questions and shared stories about writing. Some of what they told us, hastily transcribed:
Chabon: What a good writing program does is give you time to do your writing. A writing program ought to be a way to change your life so you have more time for writing.
Q: Some undergrads are worried that if they’re not published by 23, they won’t really be writers…
Waldman: I think Michael’s one of the only people in the world who isn’t embarrassed by the book he published at 23.
Chabon: Oh, I’m embarrassed.
Chabon: If you write every day, you’re a writer.
Waldman: Michael’s model has been sufficient guilt to keep me at my desk.
Q: What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Chabon: Dennis Bartel, a teacher I had here: If you want to write a novel, you have to sit on your ass. At the time, I was like, Yeah, whatever, dude.
Waldman: story about the Golem as novel, a creature that you create but that you can’t necessarily control, ending with: It’s not anything good unless there’s a certain element of danger to it.
Q: What’s it like working in film, like Spiderman 2?
Chabon: It’s a totally different thing. so much goes unmade; he’s written 2 original screenplays, 2 pilots, years, 15 drafts of Kavalier and Clay. It’s not very fulfilling…. Usually the first draft is fun … but you don’t become a writer because you like sharing.
Q: What kind of research/prep did you do for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay?
Chabon: Part of the reason I wanted to do that book was because of the research; I knew there was a lot I didn’t know (so he read a lot of old comic books, 50-year-old copies of Life magazine and interviewed Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Gil Kane.) My dad grew up in Brooklyn in the ’40s and ’50s and infected me with the sense of wonder of the time.
Q: How do you create the internal logic of Kavalier & Clay, in which superhuman feats appear naturalistic?
Chabon: Try to find books that give you permission to do the kind of work you want to do: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.
Q: Literary fiction vs. genre fiction?
Waldman: I started with murder mysteries. Who did I think I was? I was just a lawyer on maternity leave. My goal was to write something no worse than anything I’d ever read. I didn’t call myself a writer until I had 4 or 5 books published.
Chabon: When I was here, writing, the work that I did, the stories I wrote and the stuff that I wanted to do when I grew up was strongly influenced by what I read — science fiction, hardboiled detective novels. There had to be a way to write within genre and transcend genre — to write literary fiction true to its genre roots. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was an anomole, naturalistic. All of my primordial great reading experiences were genre, in one way or another, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle when I was 10.
Michael Chabon’s upcoming novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is due out May 1. Ayelet Waldman’s latest, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, is now out in paperback. Big thanks to them for spending time with us Pittsburgh fictioneers!
The New York Times has posted the first chapter of Michael Chabon’s new book Gentlemen of the Road. As a fan of Chabon’s first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh I made sure to check the link ASAP. While I’m not going to ruin the read for you, I will say Chabon has a skill in going into new worlds each time he puts out a book. This time you can check out a fight between The African and The Frank in the Caucasus Mountains, 950 A.D.
It is hard, while in grad school, to keep up with all the writing and reading, even though that is what we’re here to do. Each time a New York Review of Books arrives, I get a few pages into it, sigh, then return to reading about the culture wars of the academy in the 1990s or whatnot. And so it goes with all the periodcals: they crash through the mail slot, demanding attention, but more often than not end up shoved into the magazine rack. At which point I think, geez, I need a bigger magazine rack.
All of which is to say that in the latest New Yorker there is a new short story by David Foster Wallace*. Available online now, and on a magazine rack in my living room for the forseeable future.
*Which, amazingly, actually works in the line “What would even Jesus do,” without irony.**
** I think it’s without irony, that is.