THE LITBLOG CO-OP: Three Questions

May 10, 2007

Three Questions

Here are my answers to the questions from the comments of my last post...

Hey Alan,

What are your opinions on writers being pigeonholed into specific categories? By chance, have you seen the Best American Fantasy collection? If so, what do you think of it?

Dan

I think the pigeonholing can sometimes happen, to an extent, as part of an end product with a finished book. But for me, good writing always transcends demographics. During the writing process itself, I try not to worry about category--sometimes there are specific tropes that I like a story or novel to snake around and get inside of, but those are permeable. There's this quote from the poet C.D. Wright that I've always loved: "We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going. Often in different directions at once. And the behavior of language is such that parallel concerns and sympathies are available to serious practitioners on many levels, at any point in space and time--the formal, the inventive, the revelatory, the message plane itself." I think this is the best way to ensure that writing doesn't become a kind of lifestyle accoutrement.

I haven't read the Best American Fantasy yet, but am really psyched to pick it up, probably at Wiscon. The wide range of venues that the stories were taken from is simply astounding.

*

Hey Alan -- Since you're going to talk about poetry anyway, I'd like to hear about whether your poetry and your fiction intersect and how. Do you work on them at the same time? How is writing each a different process (or is it)? And that sort of bizness. --Gwenda

I almost never work on fiction and poetry at the same time, though over the years the two have been drawn together much more closely, so that (in my mind) there's less of a barrier between the two. For a long time it was my poetry (since that was what I received my MFA in, and what most of my "training"/reading was in) influencing my fiction, but in the last couple of years I've found myself in a place where my fiction has been influencing my poetry more. I'm not sure exactly how, necessarily. In the long poem that I've been working on called The Stations, I have these interspersed prose-poemy/New Sentence-like prose sections...those are definitely coming from the kind of syntactical leaps that are bread and butter in science fiction and other forms of fabulism. So I've been finding ways to let them influence each other and for the most part they play nice. For this new story I'm working on, I have been writing ghazals that are interspersed throughout the story, that provide kind of a (okay, cryptic) metacommentary on the narrative at large. I'm not entirely sure whether I'm going to keep them or not in the final draft but the ghazals have been definitely useful in figuring out what's important and what's not important in the story.

Alan, you've written for Rain Taxi and maybe other book reviews. How is the book review situation in the Twin Cities and are people worried that about it? (a la the Atlanta paper etc. losing pages and editors.) --Gavin

I don't know if I'm the best person to answer this; I don't really read either Sunday paper in town. I do like the book coverage in City Pages. I feel really lucky to be able to write for Rain Taxi, and to live in the same town where it's based; they do a fantastic job bringing writers of all stripes to the Twin Cities to read and interact with readers. I do agree with what a lot of people say: that the cuts in book coverage have more to do with newspapers in general than books in general.

Posted by Alan DeNiro in Spring 2007 - Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead | Permalink