THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Never Let a Novelist Guest-blog

            not by Laura Numeroff

I should have written it down. Which is strange for me, because I write everything down. I burn through notebooks, always copying down odd wordings on hand-written signs or trying to get right the way the girl at Taco Bell just asked what kind of drink I wanted. But this I've let slip. I remember the gist, though: Writers are never not working. Even if they spend just ten minutes a day at the keyboard, still, those other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of the day, they're writing. And, yeah, now I remember why I didn't write it down: because after this, the thing I'm probably not even paraphrasing -- Steven T. Seagle's It's a Bird graphic novel, about a comics writer maybe and maybe not writing some Superman stuff -- it kind of ramped down into something like "the unconscious is always cycling through the story." But then too I just read that somewhere else -- in a Richard Ford article or interview, maybe? And I didn't write it down then either, probably because I'm very resistant to romanticizing the act of writing, hesitant to ever attach psychoanalytic jargon to it it, all that. When, I mean, writing, plain and simple, it's just work, it's getting to the end of one row, dinging that carriage return, and leaning back into the next row, knowing full well there's acres and acres of rows left to go. Not saying there's not magic moments or that it's not worth the product, just that -- it could even be that, by handing responsibility over to this 'unconscious,' over which I guess I have no real control, it would mean getting all Calvanistic, saying I'm just the vessel through which this 'divine' story flows. Which in turn would make my name on that cover pretty damn moot. At which point, yeah, we're talking about the ego now, when I was trying so hard to stay off the couch. So let me begin again, if you will.

(this is how everything I ever write goes, too)

I should have written down what Seagle was saying. Because it's true. Case in point: right now -- or, since two days after Carolyn interviewed me for that podcast -- I'm writing a new novel. Tentative title, and this kind of just jinxes me in every way, but what fun are sueprstitions if you can't dare them, is Ledfeather. It's the novel I'd always planned would be third, after Fast Red Road and Bird is Gone. Except then sometime after Bird I got kind of, I don't know, disenchanted with writing that was consciously experimental, or trying to be innovative. And not at all saying that that's what an FC2 book is [Bird and Fast Red Road = FC2 books], just that Fast Red Road and Bird seemed to always get lumped 'experimental.' And, I mean, they're strange looking for sure, and that's not a bad pigeonhole to stuff them in, and, if 'experimental' is supposed to refer to FC2 books, then that's some excellent company to be keeping. What I AM trying to say, and burning all this space to say it, is that I began to question my own motives for writing such non-normal stuff: was I showing off? trying to hide behind all the diffraction and pyrotechnics? could I even write a 'straight' story, do, say, what Lynch did with The Straight Story, what Tony Earley did with Jim the Boy, or was I (consciously) spinning off into some literary sideshow, where we all appreciate each other's narrative eccentricities or something, but are pretty well insulated from the real world? All of which is itself lights and mirrors, I suspect: truth was, 'experimental' or 'innovative' had (has) become such a loaded term to me that I didn't trust myself to tease apart whether I was grafting it onto a piece or whether it was the only way that piece could express itself, or get expressed, however you understand it. Whether the shape my stories and novel took and take were some kind of valid reflection of whatever twisted, melodramatic pathways in my head or whether my own flawed act of writing was in fact the thing twisting them.

None of which has even started to get at what I meant to be saying here, about how writers are always working, I know. There's a reason I write fiction: without the mediation of characters and scenes, I just have no focus whatsoever. But to dig my way out of this hole I'm suddenly standing in: just like with pushing superstition or whatever, I finally decided to just do it and see what happened, to try my hand/pen at that third FC2 book (which they've yet to accept, even, or even see, so, really, it's a still an anyplace book, like all of them. but it's in keeping with Fast Red Road and Bird, anyway). Because you don't figure out what, say, a detective novel is just by reading them and talking about them. The only way to really grok them, to know them through and through, is to write one yourself. Same with engines: read all the manuals you want, but until you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and have to get your hands greasy if you want to keep on living, you don't know the first thing. Or -- and I think I say this in Bleed Into Me somewhere -- you don't learn not to kill things by not killing things. And, what I was, and am, trying to kill here was the so-called experimental novel. Or what that is and was for me, anyway. And no, this Ledfeather, it's not even remotely the novel I planned a few years ago. That one was supposed to take a minor character from Bird (Slugpusher), set him back in the comical Old West, and then mount some of kind of Robert Cooverish/Ghost Town assault on the whole of western myth, which is kind of the underpinning of America, I think. And I could still write that novel, I know; it's all in my head, swirling around that chrome drain that leads to my fingers. But it would just be exercise, I think (and, believe me, please, if I'm insulting anybody here, it's myself, not Coover: his Ghost Town is maybe the novel of the 20th c, for me). No, instead how this Ledfeather thing started happening was completely by accident. Like all good novels.

I was up on the reservation shooting elk and managed to find myself in the bookstore of the community college there, dropping twenty dollars I didn't have on this big thick government report thing --  a history of the Blackfeet Reservation type affair. Boring reading, of course, unless, say, that's your people. It'd be a few days before I could read it, though; there were a lot of elk to get through first, so that the next time I saw that report (it's hundreds of pages), the front was all coated in dried blood. Mine, not the elks', because the skinning knives were uselessly sharp at first, my hands just so fun to cut into (evidently). But the blood flaked off, and I just inhaled that report, every word, every boring little thing. And about halfway through, just stuck between two words that didn't even matter to each other, there was Ledfeather. The whole freaking novel. And it made perfect sense in my head. But then, a few days later, when I started thumbnailing it out onto the backs of napkins because it wouldn't stay in my head any longer, I realized that the only way to push the magic of this particular story was to do a thing to the narrative which I really don't think's been done before. Or not like this anyway.

So now, yeah, I'm in it neckdeep, trying hard just to keep it sane, to make it manageable -- to only use the straightestforward sentences I can, because that's maybe the best way to tell a story as torused as this one. It's like -- you've heard about that Russian dude who solved Poincare's big impossible math problem thing? It's way past me, though I'm sure it somehow includes or accounts for me, and all of us, but, just reading the dumbed-down explanations for it, trying to visualize the contours of space his numbers evidently describe. That's how Ledfeather is to me. If you think about it all at once, your head melts a little, so that you can kind of hear a bit of cerebellum calving off, splashing down to never be seen again. And I didn't think, after what Bird did to me, that I had any brain like that left.

Which is about where Seagle comes back into things. Or Ford. Whoever.

That first week after Carolyn interviewed me, I slammed through fifty pages, no problem, and -- I hope I'm not just saying this, either, but am probably the last person to trust on/with it, too -- really, I think it's the best stuff I've ever written. Certain pieces of Fast Red Road aside. And one particular chapter of Bird. And Demon Theory, yeah. Con looking up at what's coming for him. Nona going out to meet them. Jenny touching her brother on the arm. But I'm in love with them all, so, again, can't be trusted. Anyway, it was rolling, Ledfeather, it was happening, it was real and I was dreaming it, and by the end of the next week I was up to eighty pages, I think.

At which point a thing happened to me which, jacking around with as many novels as I've jacked around with, I've come to recognize: I hit a wall. Not of not knowing what was coming next, that's never the problem, and not of how to say it, that's always findable, if you flay enough of yourself away. No, midway through that next stretch of pages (I was promising myself not to let this particular part push past p.100, just in order to keep Ledfeather around 160/180 pages, if not less), I stopped right in the middle of a scene that was just singing, just humming along perfectly. And that was two weeks ago. Not a word on Ledfeather since then. And I'm not talking anything romantic like "writer's block" here -- writer's block's crap, plain and simple -- but a certainty that something was wrong, that I'd screwed up, and to go any farther would just compound the problem. So, for that first week of nothing, trying to figure out what was wrong, I reread those last ten pages countless times, just because, when I stop like I'd stopped, it's nearly always from a mistake I've just made, that's going to pretty seriously perturb things downstream. An oversight, an indulgence, a mis-spent not-at-all matter-less line, something like that. And then that second week, like Seagle was saying, I didn't even read Ledfeather at all. Actually, that was the week I read Seagle, and about twenty-five other graphic novels, about twenty of which I'd already read, and a few of which were pure stupid (some of those six were the twenty, too). And I also got back into the swing of teaching, of having a schedule again like the rest of the working world, and then blew my knee out on the court, and there were all kinds of other excuses not to be writing as well, but, like with writer's block, I don't accept excuses not to be writing, because that's a slippery slope you can't ever climb back up. You either write or you don't. It's not complicated. Too, I mean, I'll hardly ever take a two week break from a novel. Especially one like this, which I'm supposed to have done by March (though it may very well end up being in March). But I wasn't just going to fake my through it, either; it's too important to me, too real. It was either going to be authentic and as good as I could do if not better, or it wasn't going to be at all. And yeah, some writers will just fudge over a part they know's a little fried, because they can fix it next draft, but in my stuff, everything's always so interlocked that if you allow some wrong thing to remain, it kind of worms its way into the rest of the story until you (okay, "I") can no longer recognize it for the fake thing it is, and wind up throwing just the whole piece away, because it's thoroughly contaminated, and likely to infect the rest of your writing. And I was willing to throw Ledfeather away, even though I'd already told people I was writing it, all that useless fun.

But then I ran out of graphic novels I was interested in, so picked up a book wholly at random, just a blind stab into a jumbled thirty-two-degree sided pile I really need to be stacking -- Gene Wolf's The Devil in a Forest. And it's so so good, and not at all related to anything to do with Ledfeather, except that it too is a story, I guess. And, wholly on accident, I even sketched out this beautiful little OTHER novel, which I'm all hot and bothered to start writing NOW, please, and was about to this morning, screw everything else. Except, just out of loyalty, or maybe whatever nostalgia can accumulate over fourteen days, I thought I'd give those last ten pages of Ledfeather one last look-over, as goodbye, and there it was after I'd given up, that obvious thing I'd missed, the thing which informed and shaped not just the next chapter, but the whole rest of the book. The key which locked everything together. THAT's the thing some part of me had seen and been seeing. And now that it's there, I've got my winamp open again, my Ledfeather playlist cued up (see '*' below), and the book's cooking again, just clawing at the inside of my head, trying to bleed out my eyes, my fingertips shaking on the wallowed-out letters, all that. Which is what writing's about, I think. No, I mean, it is what writing's about. And, yeah, who knows, will I finish this thing, this Ledfeather? No clue. But then Demon Theory, and Bird, and Fast Red Road, and ATBS and (lo) the many unpublished ones, it was the same way with all of them too. I think if I knew I was going to finish any of them, knew I was going to be able to make them work, then I probably wouldn't even play anymore. Either that or I've just read way too much Conan, and have never gotten over the way he knows, each fight he goes into, that the odds are impossible this time, that there's no chance. But then he mumbles something about Crom and just wades the hell in anyway, to see what'll happen. And that's where I am right now, pretty much: this big hard-to-manage thing rearing up over me, blotting out the sun. And somehow I've got to get it down on the page. So yeah, I was lying earlier, when I said I don't like to romanticize writing. Truth is, instead of framing it in Freudian terms, I prefer to make it look more like a Frank Frazetta poster:

[ and yeah, that's a Molly Hatchet cover. Flirtin' with Disaster; Frazetta rules ]

________________________________________________________________

*

01. Cinderella - Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone) (5:55)
02. Warrant - Heaven (3:58)
03. Skid Row - I Remember You (5:16)
04. Poison - Every Rose Has Its Thorn (4:20)
05. Motley Crue - Home Sweet Home (4:01)
06. Guns N' Roses - Patience (5:56)
07. Kix - Don't Close Your Eyes (4:17)
08. L.A. Guns - The Ballad of Jayne (4:32)
09. Skid Row - 18 and Life (3:51)
10. Bon Jovi - Livin' On A Prayer (4:10)
11. Poison - Something To Beleive In (5:27)
12. Slaughter - Fly To The Angels (5:10)
13. Cinderella - Nobody's Fool (4:50)
14. Tesla - Love Song (5:24)
15. Def Leppard - Love Bites (5:46)
16. Jackyl - Down On Me (4:05)

Yeah, I still wish I could wear bandannas tight around my wrist, all over my jeans. But, too, that's in the minimized winamp right now, as I'm not writing Ledfeather, but this post. What's in the front winamp, I'm proud to say, is my playlist I call just 'second grade' :

01. Terri Gibbs - Somebody's Knocking (2:58)
02. Juice Newton - Queen of Hearts (3:26)
03. Barry Manilow - I Write The Songs (3:55)
04. Johnny Lee - Looking for Love (3:31)
05. Carly Simon - You're So Vain (4:18)
06. Blondie - Heart Of Glass (5:48)
07. Nick Lowe - Cruel To Be Kind1 (3:28)
08. Neil Diamond - Heartlight (4:28)
09. Waylon Jennings - Luckenbach Texas (3:18)
10. Bee Gees - How Deep Is Your Love (3:58)
11. Stevie Wonder - Ebony and Ivory (3:42)
12. John Lennon - Watching the Wheels (3:33)
13. Barry Manilow - Copacabana (At the Copa) (5:45)
14. Glen Campbell - Rhinestone Cowboy (3:18)
15. Neil Diamond - America2 (4:19)
16. Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers - All The Gold In California (2:37)
17. Juice Newton - Angel of the Morning (4:11)
18. The Moody Blues - The Voice (5:16)
19. The Romantics - Talking in Your Sleep (3:58)
20. The Who - You Better You Bet (5:38)

( I've got a sixth grade one as well, but I'm guessing I'm not to be trusted anymore, either )

Also, for Ledfeather, I'm doing a new thing: every time the winamp cycles down to Jackyl for the second time, I stop writing for the day. Or that session, anyway. Because, without these kind of external governors, I'll just go all day, not eat, not do anything of the moneymaking or 'life' variety. And, as for this post, it's only taken me down to Glen Campbell on that second grade list. So now I have a cool six songs to just coast around the net or whatever. Except of course I'm about to switch to other winamp, steal some Ledfeather time before the chicken pot pies of lunch start dinging that bell that pulls me into the kitchen . . .

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹I do however, always skip over this one. I mean, I have to have some self-respect, yeah? I leave it in that list mostly to remind myself that I've become more mature since second grade. And yeah, not liking that song, it's about the only way I can tell (used to, KISS's "Shock Me" was on that list -- growing up, all my money went to blood tablets -- but that just really and seriously makes all those other songs sound just a lot more 'adult contemporary' than I'm completely comfortable with).

² I always feel like such a traitor listening to this song. Like watching (and kind of liking) Outkast dressing up in green tribal gear for those music awards whenever. But maybe that's part of the attraction, too.

===================================================

( and no, I'm not all that interested in what framing writing fiction as a Conan-ish campaign might say about me. but I will admit that my biggest concern when I was twelve was where I was going to carry my sword when I grew up. because that I was going to have one, I mean -- foregone conclusion, man.  unavoidable, really.)

                                                             +++++++++++++++++++++++++

[ this Death Dealer series was so cool, really, that it inspired a series of novels, and comics -- much
as Nighthawks and Diner (81 & 82) were were not based on the 1942
Hopper painting. rather, together, they reverse-
portend, ie, 'echo,' Tom Waits' 1975
Nighthawks at the Diner ]


                                                     stephen graham jones

Contest Number Two - Win a Copy of Demon Theory

The second contest we've come up with, seeing as Demon Theory beyond the top story itself, is also a great way to learn about the history of the horror film genre, has to do with just that.

Please post in thecomments section of this post, what scene from a film generally regarded as a horror film, are you most embarrassed to admit scared the excrement out of you?  Have your comment posted by 9 P.M. PST Friday, February 2, 2007 and we'll notify the winner - that person that we LBC members feel most embarrassed for - early next week.

Myself, I can think of four scenes at least that I remember physically rising up off of the seat in recoil (though thankfully I do not recall shrieking).  Three of them cause little to no embarrassment - Alien - the alien leaping from the pod; Alien - the dinner scene; Jaws - the head popping out of the Orca; and then there's the movie that causes my head to hang in shame - It's Alive.  I can honestly say there was a week or two where I absolutely refused to drink milk as a child thanks to this one.

Contest - Win a Copy of Demon Theory

MacAdam/Cage has generously offered a couple of copies of Demon Theory if we could come up with a couple of contest ideas.  Here is the first one:

Per our reading of Demon Theory, and then following up with the interview with Stephen, it's pretty obvious he's a big fan of what are generally referred to as 1980's hair metal bands.  Please write, in the comments section of this post, your best/worst/strangest experience at a hair metal band concert.  The comment that creates the most interest among the LBC'ers will be rewarded with a copy of Demon Theory, to be shipped directly from the publisher early next week.  Comments must be entered by Friday, February 2, 2007 by 9 p.m. PST.  The winner will be notified next week.

Will the band be Motley Crue?  Ratt?  Poison?  Or some other band at least partially responsible for the hole in the ozone?  An admitted fan of all of the above myself, I look forward to the replies we get!

A Demon Theory Discussion - Round II

The discussion you started earlier continued.  There will be even more later in the week.  Be sure to come back tomorrow as well, as Stephen Graham Jones will be guest blogging.

The Roundtable Continued:

Megan Sullivan:

I didn’t think the footnotes were as successful as a storytelling device, When I think of digressions, I think of Herodotus---called the Father of History, the Father of Lies. His book The Histories contains all sorts of digressions. He spends a good portion of the book talking about Egyptian history. That’s the kind of storytelling I enjoy. Since the footnotes interrupted my flow of reading, I regarded them as unwanted intrusions. Even after getting into a flow of reading, looking up at the story and looking down at the footnotes, I didn’t like them that much.

I did like that it was a trilogy and I agree with Anne that the middle section was the weakest. I liked the deconstruction of the horror genre going on throughout the book. That was its strength to me. At first I was worried---it can be really annoying to watch a film with a film geek. Did anyone else like that aspect of the book?

Dan Wickett:

I don’t think I had as much of a problem with the second section as the rest of you seemed to.  To be honest, my larger problem was with the very beginning of the novel, which, in retrospect, should have been expected based on the idea of Jones writing this study of a trilogy of movies – there was the whole having to learn the characters and have all of the camera angles set up, etc.

Getting back to the footnotes for one more aspect of them – do you believe they are all accurate?  Do they need to be?  This was, after all, a novel.  Did you assume Jones did his research on everything?  Or that possibly he truly is an expert on both horror movies and 80’s hair metal bands?  Did the fact that Black Christmas really was a movie, or that Cinderella really pumped out three or four albums in the late 80’s lead to your assumption that everything in the footnotes was from our own reality, and not necessarily the reality of the fictional world Jones created?

Based on the premise of the book, and the fact that I recognized many of the movie titles and band names, I have to admit, I assumed they were accurate and believed Jones probably did research on the movies.  I thought he might have known the music – there wasn’t that much information in that area and that which he included is pretty common if you were a fan of the hair metal genre – though when he slides out of the hair metal bands, and the movie business, I’m not as sure.  Were I to find out that something was not exactly accurate, as I believe most of it to be so, I don’t think it would affect my reading of the book.

Scott McKenzie:

I’ll have to answer “all of the above” in regards to the validity of the footnotes. Jones really does possess an encyclopedic knowledge of many things. Horror films, music, literature, manufacturers of cowboy boots, old-fashioned western shirts with pearl snaps, and Conan are just a few areas of expertise for him. So I’m quite certain that many of the footnotes simply flew off the top of his head.

At the same time, the movie information was so extensive and exhaustive, with release dates, directors, and other specific facts, that I assumed he also did some serious research. I believe I’ve seen him allude to various reference books that bolstered the movie data. And, of course, he refers to sources such as Mark Whitehead’s SLASHER MOVIES in the acknowledgments section. And that is a real book, or at least it’s on Amazon, which hints at my next point…

While I tip my cap to Jones’s extensive knowledge of these subjects, and to his detailed research, I’m not necessarily ready to believe that every single footnote is one hundred percent true. As Dan says, “This was, after all, a novel.” So I’m also willing to accept the fact that he might have twisted some “facts” to support the needs of the story or even a particular page. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the footnotes are small whimsies, seeded throughout the text the way mischevious software developers sprinkle Easter eggs throughout their code.

And, finally, there is always the potential for error. With this many notes it would be an understandably human issue to just flat out get a fact wrong.

All of which is to say that I don’t believe the veracity or accuracy of the footnotes matters at all to the enjoyment of the book. I didn’t read these footnotes as scientific fact. Unlike some people, those folks who actually wanted to see if gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate make napalm, I didn’t feel the urge to fact check. There were a few footnotes that I questioned but they didn’t impact my thoughts on the novel. The footnotes enabled me to add a few movies to my Netflix queue so that was real enough for me.

Dan Wickett:

I agree with Scott’s assertion that if all of the footnotes are not accurate it would not change my enjoyment level.  In fact, to be truthful, I think if I don’t find out that he made up at least one or two things I’d probably be more disappointed than to find out he made an error with one he intended to be correct.

Did Jones’ afterward prompt to think about looking for any of the many other examples he gave of books, comics, movies, etc. that had intrusions such as his own use of footnotes?

Have to say, I also thought that some of the dialogue was just a little short, or maybe flat.  But I think that it worked due to the horror film aspect of the novel, where in a novel that I might have tried to read as something more realistic, that is, within our world, I think this would have bothered me. 

And, not to give it away, but was the ending a surprise to anybody?  Did the reference to the name on the notebook cause you at all to think of the short film that Jones acknowledges in his afterward?  It’s the first thing that I thought of when I read the name – and I must admit, it was one of the first film references I would have caught without him stating it.  Did anybody else think it was slightly odd that he noted this in the afterward and not in a footnote?

Interview with Stephen Graham Jones

The following is an interview with Stephen Graham Jones, author of All the Beautiful Sinners (Rugged Land, 2003), The Bird is Gone:  A Manifesto (FC2, 2003), The Fast Red Road – A Plainsong (FC2, 2000), Bleed Into Me:  A Book of Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and Demon Theory (MacAdam Cage, 2006).  He’s also published many short stories online, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Texas Tech University.

Dan Wickett:

Hello, Stephen.  Thank you very much for taking some time out of your writing and teaching schedule to answer some questions.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man, there’s also my Heroes and 24 and Lost schedule. But the day’s full of hours, near as I can tell.

Dan Wickett:

Out of curiosity, had your heard of the Litblog Co-op prior to your being nominated for this quarter?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, through Scott’s Slushpile.net, I’d guess. Cool place—I mean, well, both, Slushpile and the Co-op. Really, I think I have a lot of Co-op hats hanging on various deer around the house. Growing up, we’d always pull the Co-op patches off once the hat was trash and use it on our jeans. Cheaper than a Metallica patch, and they look sharp too.

Dan Wickett:

You have a blog of your own at www.stephengrahamjones.com.  Do you find this helps you as a writer at all?  Or is it just a convenient place for fans of your work to keep up one what you’re doing, what you’re reading, watching, etc.?

Stephen Graham Jones:

I wouldn’t say it helps me, and yeah, I can definitely see the dangers of blogging, but, too, I mean, I’ve never been afraid of running out of writing juice, either. I’ve always got some left for fiction. But no, wait, I’m lying. Sure, I can blog and keep up with just an avalanche of email and student work, all that, and still write novels. What I’ve found I can’t hardly do, though, is program and write fiction. Like, web-programming, writing code, a hole I nearly fell all the way into a few years back, when PHP was still young and stealing all the Perl die-hards. For me, writing code, it’s just so, so fun, because there’s always the chance of elegance, if you stick with a line long enough. Problem is, the brain muscles I use to program are the same muscles I use for fiction. And there’s not enough brainpower for both. So I try as hard as I can to stay away from the code anymore. Sometimes it involves lashing myself to the mast, but oh well.

Dan Wickett:

Speaking of what you’re reading – the list goes on and on at your blog.  Fantastic recommendations, wandering all over the literary map in terms of what sections one might find them in a Borders or Barnes and Noble.  How important do you believe reading is for young (and even not so young) writers?  What do you tell your students?

A Demon Theory Discussion

The discussion this week on the site will surround Stephen Graham Jones and his most recently published novel, Demon Theory.  There will be a roundtable discussion, an individual post or two, plus random posting by Stephen himself throughout the week.  There should also be a full length interview with Stephen posted on Thursday, and a podcast interview of him on Friday.  We hope you enjoy and become part of the conversation this week!

A few of the LBC members have been discussing Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones via email this past week or so.  We'll be posting the conversation over the next day or two.  Below is the first installment:

Dan Wickett:

I picked up DEMON THEORY with a bit of trepidation.  Ruined by an odd mix of horror and camp for the thriller movie genre at an early age, I’ve never been a huge fan – though will admit to being sucked in by the Scream trilogy.  But Stephen Graham Jones pulled me into his story quickly.  I’m not sure if it was the screenplay-like use of panning and fading and zooming, or the copious footnotes pulling my attention down to the bottom of the page where I was learning about the history of horror films, films in general, and too many other pop culture categories to list here without inclusion of footnotes of my own – but once I started reading DEMON THEORY, I rarely placed it anywhere out of my reach until I was done with it.

Anne Fernald:

I had some trepidation too--and the “ironic” appearance of a pretty girl in a skimpy bra throughout didn’t help much. I know she’s a staple of horror fiction, but this book seemed to want it both ways. (I’m not a Scream person, I guess.) But, I, too, raced through it: fascinated and curious about the book and amazed by both the gore and the enthusiasm of the writing.

Scott McKenzie:

I also found it oddly engrossing.  I stayed up all night (on a frigid, windy night, coincidentally appropriate) plowing through it. I think I literally read it one sitting. When my capacity for the horror aspect occasionally flagged, then the footnotes carried me through. When I bogged down with footnotes for footnotes for footnotes, I was intrigued by the camera angles and the way Jones wove in the screenplay conventions. It just seemed like there was always something to push me on…

Jeff Bryant:

I can count on one hand the number of horror films I’ve seen in my life.  Never been a fan.  So I guess you could say I was not exactly looking forward to reading this book.  Had it not been a LBC nominee, I don’t think it would have dented the TBR pile.  Oddly enough, though, once I started reading it, I found myself thoroughly engaged, at least at first.  It wasn’t so much the plot or the writing, but I loved the history of the genre as told through the footnotes and how the story or stories seemed to come alive through the use of the footnotes.  That said, I did find myself bogging down somewhere in the second part of the book.  The read became more monotonous from there. 

Megan Sullivan:

It took me a few chapters to get into it, I must admit. I’m not a horror film buff, but I have seen a lot of movies---I’ve been watching a lot of zombie movies recently. I don’t read horror either. The format took some getting used to, but got into it after a while.

Dan Wickett: 

Curious to hear how everybody else handled the footnotes – and they are piled on;  footnotes to footnotes, in some cases seemingly going on for five or six segues and wanderings.  Did you read them at the moment Jones pointed you to them? Or did you collect five or six from a page before you allowed your eyes to wander to the bottom and see what tidbits of film history (the most common usage of the footnotes) he was passing on to you?

LBC Podcast #1: Valerie Trueblood

Nominator: Anne Fernald

Nominee: Valerie Trueblood

Subjects Discussed: Weaknesses for beautiful books, life as "structured anarchy," the definition of plot, David Markson, narrative flow, cause and effect in narrative, unexpected events, Seven Loves' "eventless" perception, on being "anti-plot," the beginnings of May Nilsson, family characteristics, the relationship between unpredictable life and fiction, compartmentalized American novels vs. compartmentalized British novels, Edward P. Jones, MFA workshops, the short story form, the paucity of older protagonists in fiction and how older people are underestimated, Faulkner and race, Sidney Thompson, verboeten perspectives, underlying nuances beneath sentences, Trueblood's unintentional wisdom, two-inch items in newspapers, "quiet" vs. melodramtic reader perceptions, people who disappear, and being an apocalyptic person.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show)

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Trueblood: Narrative seems to me to be something that sort of flows in many currents through us and carries us through life, but is not -- I guess what I mean by plot and why I'm sort of anti-plot is the sort of contained arc: the beginning, the complication and the resolution.  Novels like that, I just don't believe.  It's hard for me to see that things could really ever be tied up with a resolution. 

Chronology and History, Memory and Time

Valerie's thoughts on chronology below lead easily toward the elements of the novel that so captured my own attention -- the extraordinary way in which history is interwoven into the book.  It's rare that a novel captures for me the feeling of what it is to be alive at particular moments in the past, because any writer who aspires to portray such a thing gets caught between various bad options: should the characters encounter the most famous people of their time (even though most of us never have much interaction with the names that will last in the history books) because that is a simple way to signal that this is History? should the characters point out major events? how much emphasis should be put on details different from our own lives now?  Et cetera.

These are the questions of a historical novel, which is generally seen as something different from a novel that just happens to be set in the past -- the emphasis is different.  A setting in the past is not necessarily about the past.  And yet, for me at least, Seven Loves is not quite either, or almost both, and better because of it.  The book accomplishes this feat by indirection, and the effect is a result of both the non-chronological form and the weight and power given to memory in the narrative.

First, we have the personal events of May's life, the stuff of everyday existence, the family stories, the individual experiences.  As early as the second chapter, the patterns created through May's remembering create a vivid portrayal of her life as imagined by the writer.  The novel accumulates these details as it progresses -- things hinted at or passed by earlier get filled out, explained, explored, and whatever details the reader has kept in her or his mind then gain new resonance.  This is a useful technique for building a sense of "roundness" for a character, but it is more than that -- it deepens the entire world of the narrative, creating perspective and richness.

What most impresses me about Seven Loves, though, is that it doesn't stop there.  Many a sensitive, well-written novel creates perspective and offers deeply imagined characters, but what sets Seven Loves apart for me is the way it subtly situates those deeply imagined characters within a clear, but never obtrusive, past.  From the Depression and World War II to Vietnam and all its aftermaths, nearly a century of American life gets glimpsed in the book.  Always, though, the glimpses are just that, and the relationships of friends and family, colleagues and students, supervisors and enforcers, loves and losses are more immediate, though not all-consuming.  The personal and political intersect, encountering each other, affecting each other, and yet they are different worlds, different effects.  The personal becomes the sharper instrument of memory, and the form of the novel reflects this, but the world beyond the home and family, beyond love and loss, remains a sharp shadow across it all.

A more linear narrative approach, perhaps one that didn't foreground the play of memory so much, would not have been able to achieve such a fine balance of experience and events, because it would have robbed us of the many glimpses that create -- through repetition, accumulation, and slow revelation -- the substance that is then given another layer of meaning through the mention of moments we think of as history.  The novel becomes much more than a simple portayal of one woman's life.  It becomes the portrayal of a life lived in time, a life with a past built from the material we all build our pasts from: what we remember.  It thus manages to be intimate without being hermetic, focused without being solipsistic, personal without forgetting how much lies beyond each one of us.

Chronology

Many ages live side by side in us, only one of them the one we're seen wearing. When May first appeared to me, she was a woman in her seventies, but she quickly showed her past. Nevertheless, when I tried to see her as somehow progressing from youth to age, the stages--or what absorbed me, the states of mind--refused to line up. They were like slides--not in order in the carrel but lying on a table, overlapping, being spread with the hand. By the time I was writing the last episode I was face to face with the girl who was mother to the woman.

While I enjoy novels with a clear path from some secret or trauma in youth to its resolution later, no life in my own fiction (or the work I most love) goes that way, and it isn't a pattern I see in reality. Existence seems to me more like a segmented balloon: here slack, there taut. Or one of those straw wrappers we used to tear into "legs" at the counter in Woolworth's, and twist and then drip water on. The creature would surge (the war is ruining that word), and weave in and out, and inch forward, and finally lie not quite exhausted, still reaching. That's life. That's May's life.

I like the idea of looking this week at un-chronological novels, although these days it may be more of a coup to bring off an utterly, uncompromisingly chronological one, the way Stewart O'Nan did in The Good Wife. That book made me look around for more. I mean more that are that good, that strangely undiscouraging.

We play with time so blithely now, partly I think because we feel aghast and ashamed--in the U.S. at least--in a scary and shameful present. Novels are running the clock backwards and sideways and inside out; people pop in and out of the centuries, the costume-element comes in, etc. We don't want time to run meanly forward and the dead to be dead.

I wish I could say that when I was writing Seven Loves I had a grand theory about time. But I can see that I too have lodged a complaint against the forward march of life. I did want the ages jumbled, as consciousness is mercifully jumbled so we don't see too clearly exactly where things are heading.

Readers and writers, I hope you'll post more of your thoughts about chronology and how fiction treats time. And any other subjects that might have come to mind as you read the book or the interesting and original entries in the Structure contest.

Valerie Trueblood Interview

Anne Fernald: First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to another interview! I hope this is fun and not too odious. And most of all, thanks for your novel, Seven Loves. You sent it to me out of the blue and, as you intuited, it was just my thing.

Valerie Trueblood: I did send it to you out of the blue! And you put your hand up and caught it. I had been reading your blog with such interest; I knew you loved Woolf and so were probably open to work that had to do with time and the slow (or in Amy Hempel's inspired word, "slown") onslaught of existence rather than with plot as such, and I suddenly thought, "I want this person to see my book." I thought "see." I didn't think "read." It was hard to imagine anyone actually sitting reading it; it still is. So thank you! And then to my surprise and delight you nominated it.

AF: I read in an online interview that it was a friend who told you that you had written about the same character, but at two different ages. Is true? How did you go from those two stories to the novel?

VT: Yes, a friend sort of seized me and said, "Write this out." It was Denise Levertov. In the last years of her life she moved to Seattle and through various twists of fate we became friends. Actually I bought her at a peace group auction! She offered a master class for a poet, and I bought it and gave it to a poet friend. Eventually I met her too and that turned into one of the great friendships of my life. Anyway she liked to order people around and she felt there was more where those two pieces came from. And there was. I just kept going.

AF: I love the structure. But it's a risky one. When you were refining the form of the book as a whole, what did you take into consideration? Did you see the seven-chapter format early or late in the process? How did you figure out their order?

VT: In Evan S. Connell's novel Mrs. Bridge, the son, Douglas, decides to build something in the back yard. He just starts building. I think his tower has golf clubs in it, and boxes, and parts of machines-- pretty much everything he can round up. But it's set in cement, it has posts, it's strong. The book's structure started like that thing. I don't mean it was just random objects. I knew the posts were there. In the beginning I saw the book--when it began to be a book--as separate stories from a life. But as I wrote, the parts ceased to be free-standing and came to lean on each other and require each other. Finally an agent saw a story of mine (all of this happened to me suddenly and late in life) and asked to see something longer, and she called me and said, "This is a novel!" I see I'm describing everything the way I saw May's life as I was writing it, as accumulating rather than going from A to B. But in fact my definition of the novel would be a loose one. And the forms are blurring now, all of them. The order: I couldn't get it to go any other way. I did know I wanted the last chapter to be last, that the life had to make that circle. It wasn't so much that I didn't want it to end in death, since I seem to have killed off nearly everybody, but it was definitely not over until the childhood chapter. I knew where everything had taken root and I had to show how it all began, for May. But the other chapters were like horses that keep coming to the fence in a certain order.

AF: For me, this is book has a lot to say about mothers and daughters, yet neither of May's daughters has a chapter. For the Publisher's Weekly reviewer, the most moving relationship was the one with May's husband, another character without a chapter to himself. Do these reactions surprise you? Did you ever imagine writing a chapter for these characters? And what, of reactions to your novel, has surprised you most?

VT: May's daughters' lives unfold in closer proximity to hers than her son's does. I'm not sure why they don't have their own chapters. They're in every one, I think, except maybe the last. They're mainstays--as I think daughters often are, after the fires of adolescence, taking a rather parental interest in you as they get older. (I don't have daughters but I have some borrowed ones.) The fact that both daughters are temporarily out of the country in the sixth chapter is one of the things that lets May act. Actually May's husband, Cole, does have a chapter, though you're right, it's not "to himself." It's the one called "Olga Sobol," where the two of them go away for the weekend and she makes a kind of rediscovery of him when she's drawn into the story of another couple who had stayed at that inn. The reaction that has surprised me most--what a good question. It was the plot summaries in some reviews, when plot is the last thing I would have thought anyone would find in it. Long ago I studied with John Hawkes, who said about his own writing something like, "Once I had dispensed with plot, characters, setting and theme I knew I had a novel." Words to that effect. He believed "totality" was what mattered: one's particular view, even if it was through a keyhole. Especially, for Hawkes, if it was through a keyhole.

AF: This is your first novel. Congratulations! How does it feel?

VT: It has been quite an experience, wonderful and unsettling. I would never have thought a book's fate would prey on my mind this way. But luck was with me at the outset: I had an agent who cared, a wonderful editor at Little, Brown--this sounds like the Oscars. I've been writing for so many years, and I had become--not resigned but accustomed to doing it in the absence of an audience. After sending work out and getting it back, I stopped sending things. Cowardice. I started to publish non-fiction, which, probably because I was much more cavalier about it, always seemed to have an easy landing. Not that I wasn't serious about essays and reviewing, but they weren't at the core; if somebody didn't like an essay I didn't have to consider jumping out the window.

AF: You've been a contributing editor at American Poetry Review for a while. Is there a synergy between the two jobs—novelist and editor--or are they in competition?

VT: Well, in this case contributing editor isn't really a working editor, more somebody who sends in an envelope every now and then--in my case at long intervals--and recommends other writers and so on. But APR is a great magazine to write for, very soothing, because they give you a free hand. Or they did, however many years ago I sent my last piece. So various eccentricities show up in that magazine, in the prose pieces. Writing non-fiction sharpens the brain. You come out of that fictional swoon, but secretly feed the fiction-devising part. Doing research is good for that part. I used to spend a lot of time in the big heavy books of the New York Times index and in the engineering library studying nuclear submarine accidents, for a peace organization, and going up and down in the stacks is the kind of fun you can't have on Google. The habit of making sure of the facts is a good one. And certainly reading for a review or an essay is a pleasure, sometimes even a thrill. Now I'm off the subject of your question.

AF: Do you write poetry? You must read it. Can you tell us what poets are important to you? How has your involvement with poetry affected your prose writing (fiction and nonfiction).

VT: I read poetry every day and my list of vital poets would be long. I love Louise Gluck, Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, David Antin. I love Louise Bogan, and two poets she did not love, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell. John Haines is a great favorite and a sort of prophet: for so many years he has had his ear to the ground of the U.S. of A. Alicia Ostriker's poems seem to me the largest in thought and experience right now. There are some interesting new poets I think I was led to by Tao Lin, Reader of Depressing Books: Jennifer L. Knox (A Gringo Like Me) and the Montana poet Michael Earl Craig (Can You Relax in My House--wonderful). Above all I love the Spanish poets, especially Hernandez and Machado. Poetry is always looking over my shoulder saying, "Shorten that. Cut that." I write some poems but am not a poet.

AF: I think I hear Woolfian echoes in your writing and I believe that Alice Munro and Flannery O'Connor are important to you but it wasn't until the last chapter that I thought of another Seattleite who wrote great, witty short fiction: Mary McCarthy. That's the constellation of influence that I came up with. But I'd like to hear from you about the prose writers who have meant most to you.

VT: Definitely three writers who are important to me! (I remember Flannery O'Connor's remark, "At interviews I always feel like a dry cow being milked." She didn't have the pleasure of questions like these. People were always asking her, "How come so-and-so has a tattoo?") Woolf's diaries and letters have their own shelf. I love the way the old and the young are all under the same umbrella, for her. I wouldn't have thought of McCarthy but her "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" must have gone deep; the flu of 1918 robbed her of her parents. Alice Munro is such a giant that to be unaware of her would be folly. Some of her stories leave the novel in the dust. The prose writers I reread most often are Eudora Welty and Clarice Lispector. Welty's book The Golden Apples seems to me one of the great works of the twentieth century. Lispector's The Apple in the Dark is a strange dream, as all of her work might be said to be. All these apples. Right now I'm reading the Javier Marias trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. A character says, "Life is not recountable," and I think Marias believes this, but look at this magnificent book.

AF: When May takes a ferry ride, you write "It was that moment of elementary happiness when the land is left behind and the expectation fills you that something will happen….She realized…that she had been waiting weeks to smell the deep fishy cold Pacific water." That seems quintessentially Seattle to me--a perfect description of how I feel whenever I go home to Seattle and smell Puget Sound. How long have you lived there? How important was the setting to you?

VT: I've lived in Seattle for thirty-three years. "I came here as a bride," as they say. The setting (peace to John Hawkes) was important because this is a city with an intense political history, seminal events in labor history that we don't live up to now, yet it is such a beautiful, rain-soaked, recreation-obsessed place that it's easy to simply dream here. The mountains, the water are very much present in a Seattle life and I hope present in the book. I know the water is, with its claims on more than one of the characters.

AF: May is in the middle of three generations of strong women: she had an activist mother, she herself had a committed career, and her daughters are both independent, powerful women. I would call this a feminist novel. Would you?

VT: I would. Women are worthy. Isn't that a sad flag for a cause? But we Americans are dull and slow: it had to be one of the flags of the cause of racial justice, it flies over the peace movement (people are worthy of staying alive), and it still needs to be said. Women are strong. Or if they are weak, that too has its interest, as it does with men. But men are less apt to be underrated. I remember Alice Munro saying people greeted her at first as a feminist and then turned on her when some stories went outside the bounds accepted by theory. I am not a theorist, but I love the word feminist, with its sly humor and proud seriousness.

AF: I have read that you have a story collection---and maybe another novel? in the works. Can you tell us about what we can hope for from you next?

VT: Right now I'm working on a story about a bear attack. It's very long (the story, not the attack) so may not come out anywhere except in a collection, should one get into print. I have a couple of story collections and I'm working on a novel, Into the Later. It's three novellas, really. Already they're leaning. But the posts are in.