A Quick Catch-Up: Publications and Return to the Grind.

I have returned to the great southern hill country of Indiana's Monroe county after a trip up to the rust belt centre of Windsor/Detroit for a late week get away. Good news is that both cities are physically intact and fire brimstone haven't actually welled up and out of the river, yet. We managed to catch our first game at WFCU Centre and eat a little Pho. All in all, a very successful trip. I just love the feel of rust in the air. What can I say.

There are a couple of publications of note that just came out. Only of note because I have some work appearing in them. The first is a big shout out to READ THIS, who have published their spring issue. You will note that I manage to grace the pages of the issue with a few fellow IU MFAers. It's good to see that they are still cranking out some solid issues, keeping the dream alive in Bozeman, MT. My piece is an excerpt of a longer short story I wrote while working at the Ambassador Bridge almost a decade ago. "Glimpses of Honolulu Blue" finally sees the light of day. You can read the whole issue at Read This Website.

The San Pedro River Review has released their inaugural issue. They are based out of Tucson, AZ and are affiliated with a local press there. I just received my contributor's copy and I really enjoy many of poems in it. My poem "The Lilies of Riverie Canard" appears in it. It's a publication of quality that I am ecstatic to have my name associated with. If anyone is looking for copies you will have to contact them directly. I believe they have a special for institutional copies.

I'm returning to work on a couple of poetry pieces and the longer bits of novella compilation. My first pantoum is in the middle drafting stages and "To Come Upon the River Narrows" (once Bastion of Industrial Decline) is about to get fired back up again. There is a potential mythology ala Duluoz I can see emerging. Be Bold. Writing is only for those with the wherewithall to withstand the punishment.

Rust Hills and the Lens of Fiction

I just recently finished reading Rust Hills' classic Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular and must say that I did find it quite useful in settling into the new semester of writing. While the book does focus in very large part on the short story, he does provide highly valuable tips to crafting novels. An act that I've been highly engrossed in for sometime now. The "Bastion" piece is by far larger than I had originally thought it would be, and it is with some fright that it might continue to grow. Regardless, Hills' call for a tightly controlled focus is helping me with this piece. It's actually allowed me to see the beginning in a new and more controlled fashion, one that I've been reworking over the past few days. I'm finding these craft books quite handy in breaking writer's block.

This tight focus on narrative perspective is something that I've become quite fascinated by. When asked to apply some of Hills' theories to some short stories in The Habit of Fiction collection, I became fascinated by the way in which Christie Hodgen uses vignettes in her piece "Three Parting Shots and a Forecast." The story, a wonderful piece of historical fiction, revolves around the assignation of Lincoln as seen through the "eyes" of Booth, Lincoln's chair, Lincoln's Doorman, and Boston Corbett. It's worth a read just for the details she employs in exploring this single most important act through differing viewpoints. The narrative lens is tightly focused on its respective subject matter.

I've often talked to my classes about narrative lens in fiction, but this semester it has spilled over into poetry. I try to compare the speaker of the given work to the camera lens of a director. I often use Wes Anderson, if only because I'm still hooked on his Darjeeling Limited. It seems to help the students to watch the way he uses and relies upon distinctive concrete images to paint his scenes. I noticed a very strong improvement in their narrative control after telling them to watch at least one of his films. Movies still seem to have something valuable to writers. They're not all evil.

Some Notes on the Preparation of a Novella

So I'm writing away on this whole novella enterprise (begun in earnest around September) and I'm stumbling through both the editing and completion portion. I've only re-wrote the beginning three times now, replaced narrators, and added whole scenes. I'm beginning to work about stretching this past the whole novella thing. That's the problem with writing, it's far more organic than we would often like it. This is not to say that writing comes down upon us in some magically driven type force. Rather that the whole process takes a lot of time, patience, and effort.

As it stands now I'm about three fifths done the physical writing portion with the totality of it at least sketched out. "The Bastion of Industrial Decline," may not even keep its name. While I like the ring of it and can personally see the tie between story and title, but worry it might be too vague for those outside my head. It's still fun to sitdown and write, just that private time and the space to get into that mode necessary to craft words into something meaningful seems limited at best over the previous few weeks. I've crawled to only about 700 or so new words in the past 2 weeks. I'm needing a few days worth of burst to get this novella moving in the right direction before it loses all sense of speed and momentum.

I know that my novel in clearly in the midst of a holding pattern. Hopefully it won't be a perminant one. But again, those type of things are rarely close to certain. Poetry also seems to be eating time in regards to the craft. This isn't a horrid thing, just slightly problematic in that I would like to finish this one project before branching too deeply into newer stories. Just one of those things. Focus is an important thing for any artist. Just trying to pull mine back online before fiction workshop rears its head.