Summer Reading Again: A little Joyce

I seem to recall that most every recent summer (minus perhaps this one) CBC radio has run a little challenge to its readers to pick up and get through all of Joyce's Ulysses. Sadly, no, I haven't read or even opened his masterpiece. But I thought it rather appropriate to read something by Joyce to make my summer reading list at least respectable. So I picked up Dubliners.

For that small percentage of readers out there who haven't heard about this brief collection of short stories, Joyce paints through his pieces in this book the day-to-day lives of the working class of Dublin in the first decade or so of the last century. It is important because Dubliners tells stories that everyday working class people experienced (or could have experienced). This is a nice change give the more modern day obsession with the cult of personality/praise of the rich that seems to float through the works of regularly praised writers such as Rushdie and yes, Dan Brown. What Joyce shines through with is his ability to illustrate the everyday in a manner that engages the reader and propells oft ignored voices and experiences.

Moreover though, Dubliners shows writers the way to write economically and successfully at the same time. I know that many MFA programs push for higher page counts (mainly for the reason of forcing the budding fiction writer to get the mechanics of composition through physical memory). As an off-shoot of this, writers sometimes forget that you can accomplish a lot with a little. Joyce shows us in this collection that shorter fiction can work and do so wonderfully.

The Thunderstorms of Spring

Yes, it is true. We've been having a good number of them in recent days. Most of the town has gone to flowers and the long hard days of February seem to be nicely behind us. I've been rather behind updating this page. This has as much to do the effects of teaching, grad school, and general outside reading load that might be a tad bit too heavy for my own sanity. The best way to learn to write better is to read those you admire most. I might be taking my advice too liberally.

I forgot to report that Zaum 13 is out. It really is a nicely designed journal (I'm quite taken by the cover)and has some pretty cool things going on inside. My poem "Misplaced Nashville Skyline" appears in it. There are lot of solid poems in the journal, along with art work, that make it worth picking up for a read.

Work continues in earnest on a new poetry series looking into the lexicographical connection between Canadians and their landscape. Being from Ontario might make this just a biased as most of the critics out there would assume it to be. There is a long list of unique Canadianisms that could make for some interesting explorations of the power of the performative and words in our relationships to the world around us. I've been looking pretty hardcore in the history of OED this semester and this series will undoubtedly bear much of its success (or failure) to that study. My most recent short story is actually my longest to date. "The Landscapes of Hubert Pineau" is in its early draft stages and details the son of an artist and his search for a fatherly legacy on Pelee Island. There will be more to report later.

Lest We Forget Hugo: Triggering Town, the must have.

I still recall my early days here at IU. Those clumsy first weeks in a graduate creative writing program, when you introduce yourself from you (in my case adoptive) home state (Montana) and try to push the virtues of that place on the others. Being education in Montana and being a writer, it pretty much went without saying that I had to push the whole Richard Hugo thing. I was surprised by the number of my fellow students who had no idea who the man was, let alone anything about his book The Triggering Town. Really, this is a cornerstone type book in any writer's collection.

Hugo's book is quiet short (just over a hundred pages). But it packs that sort of terse depth that one often associates with his poetic works. For those who don't know, Hugo was a professor at University of Montana back in the day. He shares that magical space of awe of Montana poetics with Patricia Goedicke also of the same school's fame. Be a poet from the Northwest (Seattle) you can really feel the landscape pour through in his work. In this collection of his essays, you can see the origins of it. One whole chapter/essay is pretty much just a collection of his triggers for good poems.

But this collection is worth it, just for the final two chapters. This chapters most brilliantly illustrate the way in which Hugo pieced together his work from the experiences around him. The first of the two is centered around his return to Italy in 1963 (Hugo fought in the war) and a few of the poems that came out of that experience. His last chapter focuses on his time working for Boeing and explores this great story that leads to a great poem. I'm trying to give much away, here. To hear Hugo on this level is to apprecite him beyond his verse and into his mind as a teacher.

I'm terribly fascinated by the places where poetics and prose merge. Those that pull these type of sections off best, tend to be the writer's I hold dearest. I say this only because a book such as Hugo's illustrates the ways in which life experience can translate into poetics and possibly great fiction. For those that don't know Hugo and fancy themselves writers I say it's about time you made friendly.

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.