I would also add that sometimes people are not ready to read the story. And that’s also okay. As a high school teacher, I have often told students that if they don’t enjoy what we’re reading that they might pick up the books later and enjoy them. You never know.
True. On the other hand, there are stories I would have been able to read years ago - without being too much disturbed/shaken - but cannot read now. For example: since I have kids on my own, violence against children in stories touches me more deeply. There are books I needed to put away but something in me said: "I cannot handles this."
My first fiction-writing teacher told my class that we could write anything, no matter how shocking -- BUT she would never accept a story in which a dog was harmed.
Thank you for another thrilling post. This one took me way back to a couple of films I was very disturbed by, in that they brought me straight into virtually unbearable emotions. Both brought up some terrifying memories of my mother, one on a physical level, the other more on the emotional. The first one was Carrie. The other was Ordinary People. Mary Tyler Moore’s role was ultimately the more disturbing one. But the redeeming thing about both these films was that they forced me to grapple with memories and emotions I was determined to block out, and in this manner they both proved to be healing, at least in the long run.
I find it harder to make the decision to walk away from a movie than I do a book. Maybe be it's my ADD hyper-focus, but the multi-sensory experience and time allotted make it more difficult to peel myself away from what can often be a pretty traumatizing experience. I've managed to do it a few times, but, knowing myself now, it would've probably been better for me if I'd done it more often. I'm glad that George pointed out how personal these kind of decisions really are. It's important for me to remind myself of that—that it's not necessarily a moral thing. It's about what each of us can handle. It's OK to have limitations.
I'm in a short story reading group and in any given meeting there are at least a few people who just didn't like the story. No one ever says they didn't like it without saying why and it's always so interesting to hear how it was a miss for them. If I loved the story it makes me sad that they didn't 'get it' and try as I may, I can't quite help trying to enlighten them. Not sure it's appreciated but, like Popeye, I yam what I yam. What you've said in this post is helpful in terms of helping me not assume the role of having better vision than the next guy.
We've been alternating between stories in The Best American Short Stories of 2020 and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and your follow on story lesson. The 'get it' factor for these Russian Classics and to some extent for all of our stories is much improved through your tutelage.
For each session one of the members of the group gives a little introduction about the story's author. Next week we will be reading the last story in Swim in a Pond and I asked to do the introduction. I introduced the book and therefore you when we started it so that's taken care of. We talked about Tolstoy when we read Master and Man so that's done. My real motive for asking to do the introduction for this last story is to talk about Story Club and see if I can get some of our group to sign up. I had sent a link and small blurb about it a few weeks ago but I'm not sure they 'got it' - lol. But really - I think most of the people in the group would really enjoy Story Time as do I so thanks for all of it and thanks to all of the other commenters. Best Substack on the internet.
I appreciated the "permission" to bail on a story for any of a number of reasons, as that's something I started doing in the last year of so. I've been feeling a momentary tinge of guilt at times, but--really, why spend more time with something that isn't resonating, when there's so much out there that does resonate?
I also appreciate George's comment that a story is like a mirror. I definitely have that experience, and there are some thoughts, feelings, and experiences I simply don't want to entertain. This is a great post; I had several mini-revelations while reading it. The main outcome is that I feel more connected to my reading and writing.
Yes - more connected to my reading and writing - me too. I wrote a follow on comment to my post, about Maeve Brennan, who I gave a second chance to (actually because there was nothing else to hand when I needed a book to read) and had a completely different - and enjoyable - experience of her stories - later ones in the book, more about her Irish days than her American ones - maybe that's why I liked them better or maybe they were just later stories, I'm not sure. But it just goes to show - a snap judgment is not written in stone! so to speak! And still the bailing was a good lesson for me too. This time with an unexpected kicker!
I've recently started doing this as well and it's definitely freeing. However, I've also got great memories of books that were difficult to begin with, yet I pressed on with them and was rewarded with a payoff I never could have anticipated. It seems to me that developing the nose for what is worth bailing on and what is worth pressing on with, comes from an early period of exposure to potentially unsettling things. Then again that's just me. Perhaps more sensible people don't have to put their hand on the hot stove to learn that it burns.
Hanish, thank you for your thoughtful response. I've had that same experience with great books that were difficult and worth pressing on with. I totally agree with you about the importance of developing a nose for what is unsettling before making the choice to bail or not bail. There are unsettled things from the past that I've come to terms with in the most surprising ways that had nothing to do with being sensible or logical, and often what I read in a book causes a slight shift that leads me to reevaluate my memories. I like George's statement that "That’s the point, really: the writer is trying to cause something to happen in the mind of the reader, something unusual and exaggerated and rarefied." From an early age, when I started to read, books presented me with most of the possibilities in life that I couldn't even dream of otherwise. And...life, as well as books, seems to present us with many opportunities for resolution of the uncomfortable stuff. If we don't want to touch it at this moment, there will most likely be another opportunity.
That is so helpful. When I first heard that George Saunders is one of our greatest comic short story writers I eagerly plunged in - well, I didn't get the joke, and well, I have to admit it - felt it as failure to be hip enough to appreciate his sophisticated humor. Interesting that I have some of that left - being well over that hill we are all either climbing or sliding down. (As in James Taylor's lovely song, "The Secret of Life" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkW9A04SNs is a link to him singing it live as an old codger himself!). But I guess we don't change much, just learn to deal.
Yet - thanks to George's unstinting and wonderful presence here over the past year, and that of story clubbers - I actually do feel that, like a much revised story, I am actually getting better, a little better all the time (can't get much worse) as regards literature at least. Yesterday I opened a book of short stories by Maeve Brennan, which I'd been led to believe I'd love and admire. Well, those first couple stories were not my cup of tea and without judgment about her wonderfulness, I put it aside and read The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, all the way through in pretty much one sitting. Yum. Feeling really fortunate right now.
At this point I'll stop being coy or whatever it is - and add that I wrote the question that George answered in this Office Hours post, which I was gobsmacked to read again here and completely wonderstruck and satisfied by his kind answer to the original questioner's question, which had come came late in the Santa Cruz book tour event I attended. The question was also mine - and I totally got that the slight misfire was due to tour fatigue - and yet I really wanted to know what George would have said in response. Thank you George - for your full and so-satisfying response to the question here. It went to my heart. And I also hope that young man is reading it on Story Club!
Thanks also for the wonderful discussions arising and to Mary G for kickstarting me on my first short story attempt in a looooong long while - I'd given up years ago my unsatisfactory attempts.
In the middle of the night last night, I woke, as one does, and picked up Maeve Brennan's stories again, which I'd been disappointed in earlier in the day -- opened randomly to the middle and read four in a row - so stonking good!!! Achingly sharp stories of Irish life. Almost Mervyn Peake-ish descriptions of people - Then, this morning a memory arose of my uncle Neil's Irish wife's mother, who ran a boarding house for working men in an old part of Glasgow - I remembered creeping down dark mysterious steps as a wee girl, to discover this big dishevelled Irish woman cheerfully plucking a chicken in an overheated basement kitchen - and how she welcomed me. So I wrote from that fragment this morning to - maybe - the start of a short story?? Happiness all around!
Oh, this makes me so happy! I once went to a lecture given by the poet Marvin Bell. When someone asked him his advice on how to begin to write something, he said, "Read. Read and then write, using what you read." Seems that you did this on your own!
I did, Mary, I had that idea from the memory of myself going down to that unknown basement kitchen to see the big happy Irish woman plucking a chicken. I wrote a bit more - then came to a grinding halt. Yesterday I spent somewhat in the doldrums. Also a bit under the weather - literally - with a wonderful storm sweeping through bringing oodles of lovely rain - and just with the sniffles. I roused myself to go to Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz and attend a performance the Bach Christmas Oratorio, in which my flute teacher was playing. The singers were a regional group of semiprofessionals and trained amateurs. It was heart-ripping-openly wonderful - choral singing of great magnitude like standing in a gale lashed to the mast. My flute teacher's solos played on a baroque flute were sweet and wonderful. I met lovely people there. I went home elated and had vivid dreams. This morning I realized that right now anyway I can't jump into fictive lives of other people from a memory, or maybe at all. Except - maybe within constraints that require that creativity such as my children's historical fiction adventure spy story set on a ship in 1962.
Out of my window this morning I watched the storm and noticed a sticky monkey plant - too woody, too tall, needs cutting, I thought. Then I noticed at the very tip of it a pair of the small but vivid orange flowers, buffeted by the wind and glorious. I thought of me taking up flute playing again at age 70. Flowering is possible, the plant, somewhat stereotypically, said to me, even at your age. And then I thought of the short story again -- but my mind jumped to another children's story project that's been on my back burner a long time - or not just for children - about a mated pair of California deer mice (Peromyscus californicus), caught in a house and released, one one day, one the next... Their seeking each other through dangers - great horned owls, bobcats etc. -- then finding a woodrat nest. Now, woodrat nests are amazing things that can endure for a hundred years if unmolested, ruled by a series of dominant females. And that great big heap o sticks has compartments - and also apartments in which other creatures live. So - thus comes in the mythical/naturalist aspect and the mice have to become accepted by the queen first having satisfied or overcome various challenges
before the queen permits them to settle in her domain - and the female mouse being pregnant and the need being urgent to find a home. Now there is a story I can get excited about. And out of these structural and naturalist constraints and so on - come the personalities.
So maybe I write stories from the outside inside out. I feel buoyed up this morning and feel that I've been through some revelatory experiences, musical, and personal/creative.
This has all been kicked off by you, Mary, along with other discussions of course in Story Club. But the primary one was your challenge to me. You may be glad to know.
Forgive the length of this post - I'm writing from rapture (and later maybe will recall it in regret)! But I'll right away capture the rapture -- in a Scrivener project for the mouse story. And then go and practice my flute and send little orange flowers bursting in air!
I suddenly saw each Story Club episode as a dusky-footed wood rat nest built by George within which our posts are apartments where a few people might meet and chat and enjoy literary companionship, and others may drop by and join in.
But imy rambling is not so relevant to the aims of story club - and if I knew how to use substack better I'd direct this to you personally, Mary - and maybe if you register that you've read it - I'll delete it then as it seems to me now confessional clutter in terms of the shared space.
I feel all these throbbing, living connections you are making. Can you (and this is advice I need to give myself also) just take a few deep breaths and take the plunge? Write from rapture, write from sorrow and desperation. Write up and down the bones. No worrying, no judging! (Leave that stuff for the editing brain and the revision brain, hiding way over there so that Creative Brain won’t be inhibited.) Go for five minutes and stop, unless you can’t stop! (Bach is good for writers, I think.)
Jackie! What a gorgeous, life-affirming and generous post! I'm glad that words in these threads reached you just at the moment you were ready to hear them. Thank you for making this a beautiful start to a day when i woke up feeling ill-at-ease. Your words have helped me rise up from my blues!
Gosh - I just now saw this comment, Mary, and thank you hugely for it - I was afraid I'd gone kind of overboard.
As I did yesterday, "babysitting" my wonderful 11 year old Beatles-obsessed granddaughter. I put on the Rolling Stones for our "dance party" and was well into unrestrained and full on 1970s gyrating with Jagger - till I turned and saw a shocked look on her face - Granny! was all she could say. I tuned back into her expressive 11 year old dance mode - which is always great fun, and currently features lots of grand jetés!
Oh yes the Gormenghast books were huge for me too. Maybe my undergrad years. Yes, according to my copies - 1974. “Titus Alone” cost 50p! There was a great episode on them on the Backlisted podcast and I learned a lot about Mervyn Peake also. When Backlisted podcast people love a book they REALLY love it and put love into the program. And brains. Thank you for being happy for me having my question asked. It felt a bit special. Or exposed. And it wasn’t my question - so that handles the old ego problem!
Thank you for the link; I had never heard that song before now. “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time…” That might be one of the secrets of great writing and good reading also!
Here’s a link to something I recently discovered, thanks to an email from Narrative Magazine:
It’s about Hemingway, and other writers, and the art and craft of writing. I listened to one episode interviewing Tom Jenks about editing The Garden of Eden, and an early one about the relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald: and I’m hooked!
I did. Thanks. I woke up in the night and “the Rose Garden” collection was to hand and I dived into the middle of the book and read four stories that I loved! The first couple I didn’t warm to but we’ve made friends now !
Yes I think I recall that. Again I refer you to a Backlisted episode. Backlisted has become my unfailing treasure trove of wonderful literature and attention to same, curated by attentive and sensitive lovers.
What a lesson. I found Victory Lap uplifting, that we can do things - on the spur, when presented with a dilemma - that are good and helpful even if it costs us something. I will reread it to see if I missed "the sadness." Meanwhile, I have been rereading Flannery O'Connor, who delved in the same garden as Carolyn Gordon, Faulkner (to a degree), and the garden I can't seem to get out of - the intricacies of the Jim Crow South, from which I believe many of the country-wide problems today come from. I hadn't read O'Connor for many years. I saw the ugliness as unrelieved, and I learned that her deepest feelings about blacks and the poor around her were - admittedly negative. Despite her religious faith. I see in them the pain, but I don't see the struggle, the kindnesses that can open frozen hearts. What I love about George's stories is what an old man once said to me, about rainy days, "got to find yourself a little patch of blue." And while I can step my brain aside and admire O'Connor's writing, I do not love the stories. I'm reminded of what I learned in Swim in a Pond about Tolstoy's "Master and Man" - when Tolstoy didn't give the Man the epiphany he had given to the Master. So - I am setting O'Connor aside once more. It's like going home and finding that the brilliant nasties are the only ones left in town.
Ha! I was just eyeing my volume of O’Connor stories. She is tough to read, but hopefully worthwhile. Maybe interspersed with some other writers? Need some sunlight in between dark nights.
Sallie- I hope you can pick up O'Connor again. I have come to appreciate that she exposes her own fears and weaknesses through her writing and she often writes hateful characters but in a reflexive way that broadens our own view of sin and grace. My perfect pairing of stories is her "Revelation" (I think- gotta look it up) and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." Both characters gain so much by the end of the story that you can forgive the assholery that got them there.
You're right. Revelation is - a revelation. And the ramifications of the woman's horribleness and her recognition at the end that there might be some truth - she is an old warthog. But I got that as just an instance before the blindness of her half-digested religion covers it all up again.
And I think that O'Connor wants us to see that we are all half-blind warthogs and that all our religion is half-digested and it's only a grace that even allows the revelations. I'm sure O'Connor would be perturbed at my evangelism for her writing. I'm sure she'd find me irksome. 😂😂😂
Oh, I just picked a few books to keep with me on a two-month hiatus from home, and my book of O'Connor's short stories is among them. Thanks for the extra encouragement to delve into that book.
When I wrote my memoir In Her Wake : A child psychiatrist explores the mystery of her mother's suicide - people had many reactions to the pain, exploration of trying to understand why my mother had died by suicide when I was four years old. Because I used this story as a platform to appeal to people who may have lost someone to suicide or were suicidal themselves I got varied reactions . Some people worried if I was ok ( mind you it took me ten years to write the book and I am now thirty years older than the age I was when my mother died and an associate professor at harvard medical school . I assured those who were bold enough or kind enough to ask me. Sometimes people who had lost someone yo suicide felt reassurance that I could chart my course of pain and healing and I had survived . Those left behind in loss can sometimes get comfort not from a self help book but the groping that comes from being in the darkness and searching for the light.
I also chose to put in the memoir the talk I had with the doctor who cared for my mother after her overdose before she died . Why ? Because yes I knew it could be chilling to hear medical details of this and most of the memoir I focused on her life - but I didn't want to glamorize suicide.
So I guess I am resonating with the idea sometimes upsetting topics chose us.. I am currently working on a novel about a middle age woman ostensibly in a happy family where she has to confront abuse from her childhood . I carry with me chosen audiences- I imagine someone opening this , curious, brave to weather the ups and downs as my main character finds her way towards more intimacy . I wish I wrote romance novels . I also wish sometimes I was quiet . That is not how I am wired. And I have come to accept who I am as a writer - while also feeling blessed to invest in revision so I can arrive to a deeper place with my reader .
It always amazes me when people read someone's writing about tough topics and they wonder if the writer is "OK." Of course, they're okay if they can write about it. Or blessed to be able to write about it. I'm deeply sorry about your mother. I am also one of the children of suicide. I was fifteen when my father hanged himself. I wrote a memoir as well 20 years after my mother died. My father, who I rarely saw, was a specter in the book as he was in life. And you became a psychiatrist. Wow. Tremendous admiration to you. One of the most fascinating things I have discovered about those in our "club" are the ones who shy away from the connection. I, however feel deeply attached to all children of suicide. To me, it's a more involved connection than being a parent, a spouse, or friend of one because the child is abandoned and left with conflicting feelings of what they did (which is always wrong) to have caused the parent's action. 🌷
I felt so responsible for my parents at, let’s say, eleven. I wanted to escape from them, and I wanted to save them. Needless to say perhaps, both of those overwhelming drives deflected me for decades from being in my own path. Doing my darnedest now to impress upon my child that he is responsible for his life, and I am responsible for mine.
Much love to both of you. If it’s a burden to feel one’s parent’s pain while they live, it’s hard to imagine how much more of a confusing hell it would be in a more extreme situation.
Thank you, David. For the loving compassion. My father was such a stranger that he became omnipotent & not in need of saving. My mother I wanted to save all my life until I realized I couldn't. The grace of writing is I could save her, my memory of her, of us together on paper. And that's a gift a long time in coming. But it came & I'm grateful. Yes, to doing better with our reproductions. They deserve it. 💓
Perhaps the desire to save our parents creates an empathy or compassion that we carry with us all through our lives, though it may be invisible more often than not (to us). Not all is lost.
I would say you are brave with deep courage. The taking is with us every day and each time holes are blown in the golden fabric of life.There are times and human builds that cannot cope with the savage unfairness of some events and personal experiences. The mental hurt cannot be cleared or made peace with and final exits are deemed the only way. You know more about this then I. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom from your life and know that it takes deep courage to stay or leave life but those that live are on the battle line until they to must fall^^
The memoir you wrote and the novel on which you are now working both sound like books I want to read. It’s both strange and wondrous, the way intimacy forces us to confront the past, sooner or later. Like the beloved is also a mirror, reflecting the parts we’ve tried our damnedest to block out, or ignore.
This is the aspect of creative writing that I find the most fascinating--why do we react the way we do and what does that tell us about ourselves. I'd been wanting to make an observation about the brilliance of "Victory Lap" for a while and this is the perfect opportunity. Though we all know rationally and even emotionally how horrific are incidents of kidnap, rape, and all variations on that theme, I'd never read (or saw) anything that so clarified, that enabled me to feel so viscerally, the vulnerability and innocence of a potential victim. How did George do it? Some magical combination of the girl's thoughts, her view of the world, even her physicality throughout the story. So, though I was practically screaming with dread as the story's action accelerated, and was nearly a weeping heap of relief at the end (for both children), I still experienced the horror of "it doesn't always end this way." I guess that does reveal a lot about my take on the world. It's like when my partner watches episodes (a LOT of episodes) of SVU and other crime dramas and I say "How can you watch this?? It's so disturbing!" and his response is "It's just a show," and my response to that is, "But these things really DO happen!!!"
Interesting that you bring up crime shows because, unlike stories, we don't go to a crime show to feel. SVU wasn't created to make us feel, I don't think. I think we start liking the characters, but I'm not even sure the characters really feel much because if they did, it would be a dark, dark show that no one would want to watch because it would reveal too much with not much payoff. Maybe I'm wrong. All you SVU fans- don't come at me! 🤣🤣
Ya, I agree crime - police - detective stories are more about solving a puzzle - the classic who dun it. Agatha christie and on. It's branched out though - into ongoing emotional lives of characters, even serial killers. I like when the murder is over before the show begins! I don't know what SVU is and have stopped watching crime shows lately (or much tv at all). Could get hooked again though, by a good one!
Oh, I think they are supposed to make you *feel* (I'm thinking of SVU, in particular, though I am far from an expert on this). I'm not sure they're supposed to make you *think.* But I believe they are supposed to entertain, and that's when things get tricky. Do our short stories entertain? What IS entertainment? Is that one of the purposes of art? It all gets pretty thorny.
Ya the genre has indeed evolved to take in feel. British series - Shetland, Vera etc. Also American - Bosch, a favorite of my late husband's. But I think the best -- back a bit - oh gosh - was it 1973!!! -- was Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren as newly minted DCI Tennyson, struggling to be "boss" to unreconstructed policemen. Classic. I think you are ALSO supposed to think - in puzzle terms. There are classic structures in detective stories - some people write out matrices to eliminate suspects, I hear. I'm not that kind - I am lazy. Entertainment is such a broad brush term - it can mean different things, engagement at one end - e.g. quantum mechanics is entertaining, to a quantum mechanic! We entertain ideas. But - we know what we mean when we say "mere entertainment - a diversion for a time that leaves no trace other than maybe a lift in mood. Words are slippery critters! What goes beyond and engages us more viscerally, or changes us - then we are in the realms of art. Like The Ice Palace changed me, I think, and will next time again probably, in ways that build on the first reading. Also Sebald's strange works. George Saunders short stories - yes indeed. Before George I didn't read a lot of short stories but I'm seeking them out now. What literature or TV has had an effect on you beyond entertainment? Oh in TV, one that affected me was the Apple series "Dickinson" -- in wonderfully strange and beyond-entertainment ways.
Gosh I think I need to step away before I write a novel here. An interesting and thought provoking question you put!
One of my favorite shows during the "COVID" years is "Severance," a series directed by Ben Stiller. I know several people who work for a certain company in our city that are so triggered by the show that they stopped watching after just a few episodes. Normally, I will try talking people into liking what I like–– not in an argumentative way, just, you know, coaxing. Usually I'll say, "just give it a few more episodes!" But with these people, I just let it go, because I can imagine how unpleasant it would be to spend your free time experiencing a story that reminds you of something yucky. One said to me, "I can't watch it. It's too close to the bone."
I love having someone else influence my understanding of a story. I don't think that's unique to me. I like having a friend say, "just give it fifty pages" or whatever they say if it's a book, and sort of "pitch" me the story. If I'm feeling tormented after reading something, I also like hearing another point of view. This is why these posts and comments are so fabulous.
Sometimes, I read George's posts and then the comments here, and I feel in sync with everyone. Other times, i'm amazed that I am walking through the world with my brain ticking away with thoughts, only to find out that I am on another planet from everyone else. This sentence from George, for example, left me wondering about myself: "That’s the point, really: the writer is trying to cause something to happen in the mind of the reader, something unusual and exaggerated and rarefied." Okay, when I write certain things, I certainly am hoping that a joke lands properly, or that I have articulated an argument well enough that others can follow my line of reasoning (like in these posts), etc. But when I write a story, when I am creating a world--and perhaps this is why i'm not a bestselling writer!--I am not trying to cause anything in the mind of the reader! I am trying to figure out my own mind--i am looking and searching and dreaming my words/worlds, in an attempt to find out what i really think and feel. If a story is published, then yes, I am sharing my world view with others. (And if I connect with a reader on that level, that is a beautiful thing.) But that is never my original intent when I write. I don't write wondering what others will think, and I'm not hoping to cause anything to happen in another person's head. Or maybe i should say it is not top of mind--and therefore, not "the point" when I write. (What's wrong with me?)
This, from George, feeds directly into our discussions over the last week regarding The Lady and the Dog: "...a story will land on a thousand people in a thousand different ways."
Also, I wanted to mention that we talked about sadness in stories in another post here in Story Club. Many in these threads took issue that a certain reader was weary of reading so many sad stories. I so appreciate George's words this week, which completely validate that person's feelings. We learn from everything, and there is so much to be learned from a story you turn away from because you find it too sad.
I certainly find out about myself in my journal and always have since I was young.My project for years now is a novel for 11 year olds. I'm not sure if I'm trying to figure out my own mind there though it does come up tangentially as the setting for the story does come from my childhood. I've just started a non-fiction project - a family story about events that happened before I was born. Will I ever truly write a short story or any short fiction? It's a question that bothers me. Can I do that? Will I ever really try?? What will it be like? As you say here a deep exploration of oneself - and/or what George says, about imagining his reader as a sort of better version of himself - and gauging that person's responses.
Something George S. said a few weeks back sparked a flash of recognition in me. To paraphrase, he said a reviewer said his stories are best when he writes from love rather than anger. I think it's the same for me. When I hold an idea gently in my open palm, it has room to grow into the shape it needs to be. When I trap it in my fist, it stays stunted. So I'm trying to keep my mind and hands open, while giving myself permission to prune through revision.
Yes - I recall that and it hit home with me too. A good metaphor to keep in mind: "Are my fists tightening on this story?" And then to breathe and open. I have plenty tight fisted moments actually but I've been pleasantly working on that quite a bit. In general, not just in writing but there too.
Anything you write is about you. It's just that some projects make that more obvious than others. You ask if you'll ever write a short story? And "Can I do that?" Well, yes, of course you can. What's stopping you? Maybe you don't really want to. But if you DO want to, and fear is stopping you, then maybe just give yourself permission to write a terrible story and see what happens.
Thanks. I appreciate your independent voice btw. Yes, that is true - always about you. My children's novel is about me - but it 's also about writing for people who haven't been on this earth for long and they have different - requirements - ways of being in the world - it's a craft and a genre. It has structures and strictures - that somehow I've found helpful.... Just write a short story, you say - and I've tried. I don't feel that "yes of course I can." I don't know why. Thanks for poking me! Your questions and suggestions are helpful. OK - It can be terrible. It can be not even a story - what IS a story? - Just stop thinking! Do!
Sounds like you find writing within the constraints of a YA novel helpful. You could write a short story within some constraints, if you wanted to. Many prompts give you constraints to work within. But the main thing is to allow yourself to put words on the page, and to then not beat yourself up when the words on the page seem so ugly compared to the dream in your head of what you would write. As William Stafford wrote: "Lower your standards and keep writing." (You ask: what is a story? George has given us a lot of definitions, but may I put this one forth to you? You've got a character living their life, everything just going along as always. and then, one day, something happens and throws that life out of whack. The character spends the rest of the story trying to find their balance again. The thing that throws everything out of whack can be teeny tiny, but it has to really throw that particular character for a loop. It has to matter, deeply, to them.)
I like that quote. Lower you standards and keep writing! Yes. Constraints are useful I guess to me. Never thought of it that way before. Thanks so much for these encouragements and tips. I’ll read them again in the early morning when I have an awake brain. Time for sleep for me. Who knows I may get the ball rolling!
Try reading a bit of Alice Munroe re short story form....might trigger you. Think of your story for 11 year olds as a good mix of words and illustrations.My advice is to go ahead and write. You have the ideas now flush them out to the stories that are all in you and that journal.^^
Oh - yes - I *have* loved reading Alice Munroe - been reading her since story club started. I'm also listening to New Yorker stories in their two short story podcasts. I love the one where a writer picks a story and reads it - bookended by discussion of that story. Terrific. So far I haven't felt triggered, but I'm keeping that gun loose in its holster!
Thanks for your thoughts on my middle grade novel, Graeme - yes, I would like illustrations -- this book is partly a throwback or homage to the Enid Blyton Famous Five books (trashy and racist and classist - but fun even so) that I read as a girl in Scotland in the early sixties - All British people know them - they've inspired many parodies too! So - I'd like to have similar illustrations (like Hardy boys and Nancy drew illustrations). You are giving me heart to just go ahead and have a go at short story writing.
I think Joan Didion said that she "writes to understand" or something like that. I don't have the exact quote, but I remember relating to that. The more I write, the more I understand.
*edited to provide correct quote* She said "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976)
and this: James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview with The Paris Review: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
"The writer who seeks personal truth almost always seeks something along with it. He seeks something that might be called a writer's beauty. By that I mean he not only wants to unfold his vision––his truth––but to convey the feelings that are part of seeing the world as he does. He is not detached but immersed, not authoritative but questioning, not godly but human, as the sage says, all too human." --from "Why Write?" by Mark Edmundson
Absolutely, David. And i think many people probably write that way. But for me, I really don't think about the reader. Not proud of that--just admitting that I don't go there.
Tagging along here on this consideration of why we write at all.
Even when we write for our own purpose of discovering, or figuring out something for ourselves, we also do this for others, whether consciously or not. To leave the cave and find out what is causing all those ghastly, aw-inspiring shadows is to seek the boons for not only ourselves but for the tribe.
I guess the key question for you Mary is : How are you going to write your story? What is the central reason for writing it? Nothing is wrong with you....but if you do not know your story then how can a reader find it?^^
Graeme: The central reason for writing a story is for me to discover the story--and it's true meaning (to me). In this way, writing is a way of getting to know myself better. I think many fiction writers begin without knowing what the story is going to be or where it is leading. And then you begin and, as George says, you look at what you've put down and see what expectations you have raised. Then, you keep going. I hope i'm answering your question. Here's an example: my most recent story was about an elderly woman. I just started writing about her. She was alone, in a retirement home. And as I wrote, I saw that she felt trapped. And so I continued. What was she going to do about feeling so trapped? Who did she have in her life? How did she feel about the long life she had lived that had led her to this place--alone, in a retirement home. And so i kept going. Do you see what i mean? I wrote the story and saw that, in some way, i was writing about myself (as always). And i learned a thing or two about my feelings--about life, aging, love, agency, etc. So that is how I write a story.
Yes - it is a true exploratory journey you take, Mary - I think I approach poetry perhaps like this. But imagining others' stories? I quail at that enormity and my lack of imagination of Other Lives. I feel guilt that my subject is so often very directly me. I want/lack that outward looking gaze. Guilt is - perhaps - best allowed to dry out in the fresh air, releasing its dank moisture like a sheet spread over a sunny bush! Not something to be followed, moisture meter in hand, down the dark dark cave of a journal that twists through ever narrower, more claustrophobic spaces! Actually - I have guilt/fear that my actual metier is memoir. (I'm an alliteration junky!) Just now wondering: maybe it's the guilt that causes the claustrophobia? I've started reading Annie Ernaux, "A Girl's Story". Her work in memoir garnered her a Nobel prize. Maybe this is my way of - valorizing - the genre so I can let go these constraining ideas! And then there is Joan Didion too, her memoir work...
Story Club - these interactions - makes quite the composite lens - like the Webb telescope! Or at least - maybe a polishing cloth for our own cloudy lenses.
Oh and btw it's Keith Richards in his grizzled state who is my man! I can listen to him growling "it only tightens up" any day and feel richly endowed somehow!
This makes me so happy, and kind of well - something else - I can't pin down but that feels very good and honored.
Yesterday I was all fizz and foam, all day, couldn't settle, didn't sleep well - today I got up and began a modified short story/memoir - of my recent past, writing in detail the story of my husband's recent passing (as the modern euphemism has it), and his 10 years illness etc leading up to it - but distancing through the lens of switching all the genders of everybody involved - and it's going to a really potentially interesting place, and, as Mary g. says - it is very much writing to find out about myself - with the possibility of lifting into other spaces than the literal, by that sideways shift of genders. Thank you Alfred-P, Mary g. David Snider - and all and of course - George Saunders who generates the ambience that supports us all!
Voyage of discovery, Hollywood Sign: Feeling trapped by age and Lonely. Got it! You have your method. George is at Walden Pond trying to measure how deep it is.....Stop doubting yourself^^
The cause something to happen in the reader's mind...is through good story telling...which includes excellent writing...I think this is what George is saying...^^
I'm super fast to go to the nope setting on my brain and stopping reading or watching anything that upsets me to the point where I think, "Who the f needs this?" That particular story of George's didn't make me stop reading. I find it makes me feel a panging sort of pull to other people on this awful journey with me, you, us. I was watching a documentary about Laurie Lipton and about how she creates drawings that comment on how immune and inured we might get to tragedy and human trauma via screens. She writes that it's a form of protest. If the artful story of horror and tragedy feels like that I'm okay with it. I try to write the truth and the truth is sometimes acutely disturbing. I think about the yogic word, "satya" which means truth but also clear-sightedness. The best stories deliver a clear-sightedness that highlights the human condition, and for me only, allows me to feel a companionable warmth in being just a human with other humans doing the best we can. The upsetting content of some stories I have read exists for shock value and have no layers. That's my nope switch. Anyway, great post. Thank you.
Your comments remind me of a letter that Philip Larkin wrote to his friend, Virginia Peace, writer of a novel, A Bridge over Dark Water, based on the recent and sudden death of her son. She asked him to be candid, and he was:
"You have done amazingly well to describe what happened in so dispassionate and calm a way, but for you this is enough, the events speak for themselves. Unfortunately, for the reader it isn't: the reader wants that impure thing, literature--plot, suspense, characters, ups, downs, laughter, tears, all the rest of it. Your narrative isn't a story, it's a frieze of misery; your characters are numb with unhappiness; there is no relief, no contrast. Now I can quite see that to 'play about' with the kind of subject matter you have taken would seem heartless, frivolous, even untrue, an offence against decency or decent feeling, something you wouldn't do, and yet in literature it somehow has to be done--one might say that it's the mixture of truth and untruth that makes literature."
This is great! Thanks for posting. I remember receiving similar comments for my early stories! I have said elsewhere in these threads that I don't write with my reader in mind. However, I DO write with the idea of "story" in mind. I'm pretty much attached to the traditional elements of complication and resolution. I like having my main character revealed through a defining action. I love stories. But even though I have all of this in mind as i write, i'm still only conscious of myself as I put words on the page. Certainly, I write to eventually have others read what I've written. But in the creation--there's only me.
What a great anecdote and quote. The difference between describing it how it really was and writing a good story--I've understood and heard that before. What's new to me here is the insight that playing about with the intense, emotion-laden subject matter feels wrong to the writer/experiencer, yet that's just what is needed. Perhaps the ability to play about begins with distinguishing the writer from the experiencer. Interesting to think about.
Your response to the question of sad stories reminds me of something I read somewhere. If a story ends on a down turn, it's literary; if it ends on an up beat, it's commercial. That's an oversimplification, but it does resonate with me and makes me wonder why we want/need to write "down" stories, be they sad or violent or something else that takes us down emotionally. I'm sure there are many reasons, from the psychological to the sociological and beyond, but it's a question that's both easy and hard to answer. We want to reflect the world in all its existences or we need the catharsis of writing through experience, but that seems too easy an answer. The hard answer lies deeper, somewhere in compulsion, I think. But I also understand why many people prefer upbeat endings in stories, regardless of the form in which they manifest -- book, film, etc.
There are studies that show that in dark times, such as the great depression, more movies and books were upbeat (perhaps to compensate?) and in good times, there are more stories that take a down turn at the end. Perhaps it's all about balance, but the whole question is fraught with complexity.
I don’t know how or why I’ve always had latitude for “sad” — horror, less so, and gore, much less. I recoil most when I feel pressed into an experience for some kind of sensational effect — for its own sake— maybe this is what George means by “shock.”
And so, I LOVE this passage from today’s post: “The purpose – or my purpose, anyway, is never merely to shock, but, rather, to be in relation with. With the subject, and with the reader. “
”to be in relation with” I love it.
As to “Victory Lap” — I know we each carry what we do away from a story. For all the ways this story is disturbing, it is, for me, in the end, astonishing — the narrow escape these two kids make, from the abductor, from old habits of self, from perpetuating violence, and from living with a self that perpetuated violence.
This brings to mind my and others' response to The Lady with the Dog and the question 'is this love'. While some were seeing love affirmed, others (self included) were resistant. Love confuses the pants off me (literally): is it all projection or is it a meeting of souls? If the latter, is a relationship that ends never real? If the former, are all those meetings illusion?
But Chekhov's sophistry accommodates both of us. One need only listen to the conversation of those who read it for proof. And more. When I first read this story a dozen years ago I didn't catch the depth I'm seeing now.
How deep we go into a story, a writer's offering and our own fears is a choice. Finish a story or not, read deep or not, investigate our motives.
How cool would it be though, to be in your class and have the conversation you imagined?
Do you mean love can develop with care and affection? Well, arranged marriages work, and we love family members with only tradition to serve. But projection becoming real suggests the person changes, doesn't it?
I am fairly certain that most relationships begin as projection, illusion, hallucination. The ones that last require working through conflicts, and a willingness to step out of one’s preconceptions and try to see through a different pair of eyes, again and again.
I would also add that sometimes people are not ready to read the story. And that’s also okay. As a high school teacher, I have often told students that if they don’t enjoy what we’re reading that they might pick up the books later and enjoy them. You never know.
True. On the other hand, there are stories I would have been able to read years ago - without being too much disturbed/shaken - but cannot read now. For example: since I have kids on my own, violence against children in stories touches me more deeply. There are books I needed to put away but something in me said: "I cannot handles this."
Violence against animals is one for me
I’m so with you and Jeannie. Can’t do it.
My first fiction-writing teacher told my class that we could write anything, no matter how shocking -- BUT she would never accept a story in which a dog was harmed.
🔥🔥
So true. We have to be ready to receive what each work of art offers, and that readiness occurs at wildly different times for each person.
🙌🙌🔥
And I am constantly doing that!
True. Age and life experience change your perspective on books.
Yep! True 🔥
Thank you for another thrilling post. This one took me way back to a couple of films I was very disturbed by, in that they brought me straight into virtually unbearable emotions. Both brought up some terrifying memories of my mother, one on a physical level, the other more on the emotional. The first one was Carrie. The other was Ordinary People. Mary Tyler Moore’s role was ultimately the more disturbing one. But the redeeming thing about both these films was that they forced me to grapple with memories and emotions I was determined to block out, and in this manner they both proved to be healing, at least in the long run.
I find it harder to make the decision to walk away from a movie than I do a book. Maybe be it's my ADD hyper-focus, but the multi-sensory experience and time allotted make it more difficult to peel myself away from what can often be a pretty traumatizing experience. I've managed to do it a few times, but, knowing myself now, it would've probably been better for me if I'd done it more often. I'm glad that George pointed out how personal these kind of decisions really are. It's important for me to remind myself of that—that it's not necessarily a moral thing. It's about what each of us can handle. It's OK to have limitations.
Oh man. Ordinary People. Powerful.
I'm in a short story reading group and in any given meeting there are at least a few people who just didn't like the story. No one ever says they didn't like it without saying why and it's always so interesting to hear how it was a miss for them. If I loved the story it makes me sad that they didn't 'get it' and try as I may, I can't quite help trying to enlighten them. Not sure it's appreciated but, like Popeye, I yam what I yam. What you've said in this post is helpful in terms of helping me not assume the role of having better vision than the next guy.
We've been alternating between stories in The Best American Short Stories of 2020 and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and your follow on story lesson. The 'get it' factor for these Russian Classics and to some extent for all of our stories is much improved through your tutelage.
For each session one of the members of the group gives a little introduction about the story's author. Next week we will be reading the last story in Swim in a Pond and I asked to do the introduction. I introduced the book and therefore you when we started it so that's taken care of. We talked about Tolstoy when we read Master and Man so that's done. My real motive for asking to do the introduction for this last story is to talk about Story Club and see if I can get some of our group to sign up. I had sent a link and small blurb about it a few weeks ago but I'm not sure they 'got it' - lol. But really - I think most of the people in the group would really enjoy Story Time as do I so thanks for all of it and thanks to all of the other commenters. Best Substack on the internet.
Thanks, & good luck with the intro!
I promise to tell them it's called Story Club, not Story Time - lol
Either way!
I appreciated the "permission" to bail on a story for any of a number of reasons, as that's something I started doing in the last year of so. I've been feeling a momentary tinge of guilt at times, but--really, why spend more time with something that isn't resonating, when there's so much out there that does resonate?
I also appreciate George's comment that a story is like a mirror. I definitely have that experience, and there are some thoughts, feelings, and experiences I simply don't want to entertain. This is a great post; I had several mini-revelations while reading it. The main outcome is that I feel more connected to my reading and writing.
Yes - more connected to my reading and writing - me too. I wrote a follow on comment to my post, about Maeve Brennan, who I gave a second chance to (actually because there was nothing else to hand when I needed a book to read) and had a completely different - and enjoyable - experience of her stories - later ones in the book, more about her Irish days than her American ones - maybe that's why I liked them better or maybe they were just later stories, I'm not sure. But it just goes to show - a snap judgment is not written in stone! so to speak! And still the bailing was a good lesson for me too. This time with an unexpected kicker!
Yes: as we age and change books do too
I've recently started doing this as well and it's definitely freeing. However, I've also got great memories of books that were difficult to begin with, yet I pressed on with them and was rewarded with a payoff I never could have anticipated. It seems to me that developing the nose for what is worth bailing on and what is worth pressing on with, comes from an early period of exposure to potentially unsettling things. Then again that's just me. Perhaps more sensible people don't have to put their hand on the hot stove to learn that it burns.
Hanish, thank you for your thoughtful response. I've had that same experience with great books that were difficult and worth pressing on with. I totally agree with you about the importance of developing a nose for what is unsettling before making the choice to bail or not bail. There are unsettled things from the past that I've come to terms with in the most surprising ways that had nothing to do with being sensible or logical, and often what I read in a book causes a slight shift that leads me to reevaluate my memories. I like George's statement that "That’s the point, really: the writer is trying to cause something to happen in the mind of the reader, something unusual and exaggerated and rarefied." From an early age, when I started to read, books presented me with most of the possibilities in life that I couldn't even dream of otherwise. And...life, as well as books, seems to present us with many opportunities for resolution of the uncomfortable stuff. If we don't want to touch it at this moment, there will most likely be another opportunity.
You can always, always return to a story 🔥
yes
That is so helpful. When I first heard that George Saunders is one of our greatest comic short story writers I eagerly plunged in - well, I didn't get the joke, and well, I have to admit it - felt it as failure to be hip enough to appreciate his sophisticated humor. Interesting that I have some of that left - being well over that hill we are all either climbing or sliding down. (As in James Taylor's lovely song, "The Secret of Life" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkW9A04SNs is a link to him singing it live as an old codger himself!). But I guess we don't change much, just learn to deal.
Yet - thanks to George's unstinting and wonderful presence here over the past year, and that of story clubbers - I actually do feel that, like a much revised story, I am actually getting better, a little better all the time (can't get much worse) as regards literature at least. Yesterday I opened a book of short stories by Maeve Brennan, which I'd been led to believe I'd love and admire. Well, those first couple stories were not my cup of tea and without judgment about her wonderfulness, I put it aside and read The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, all the way through in pretty much one sitting. Yum. Feeling really fortunate right now.
At this point I'll stop being coy or whatever it is - and add that I wrote the question that George answered in this Office Hours post, which I was gobsmacked to read again here and completely wonderstruck and satisfied by his kind answer to the original questioner's question, which had come came late in the Santa Cruz book tour event I attended. The question was also mine - and I totally got that the slight misfire was due to tour fatigue - and yet I really wanted to know what George would have said in response. Thank you George - for your full and so-satisfying response to the question here. It went to my heart. And I also hope that young man is reading it on Story Club!
Thanks also for the wonderful discussions arising and to Mary G for kickstarting me on my first short story attempt in a looooong long while - I'd given up years ago my unsatisfactory attempts.
In the middle of the night last night, I woke, as one does, and picked up Maeve Brennan's stories again, which I'd been disappointed in earlier in the day -- opened randomly to the middle and read four in a row - so stonking good!!! Achingly sharp stories of Irish life. Almost Mervyn Peake-ish descriptions of people - Then, this morning a memory arose of my uncle Neil's Irish wife's mother, who ran a boarding house for working men in an old part of Glasgow - I remembered creeping down dark mysterious steps as a wee girl, to discover this big dishevelled Irish woman cheerfully plucking a chicken in an overheated basement kitchen - and how she welcomed me. So I wrote from that fragment this morning to - maybe - the start of a short story?? Happiness all around!
Oh, this makes me so happy! I once went to a lecture given by the poet Marvin Bell. When someone asked him his advice on how to begin to write something, he said, "Read. Read and then write, using what you read." Seems that you did this on your own!
I did, Mary, I had that idea from the memory of myself going down to that unknown basement kitchen to see the big happy Irish woman plucking a chicken. I wrote a bit more - then came to a grinding halt. Yesterday I spent somewhat in the doldrums. Also a bit under the weather - literally - with a wonderful storm sweeping through bringing oodles of lovely rain - and just with the sniffles. I roused myself to go to Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz and attend a performance the Bach Christmas Oratorio, in which my flute teacher was playing. The singers were a regional group of semiprofessionals and trained amateurs. It was heart-ripping-openly wonderful - choral singing of great magnitude like standing in a gale lashed to the mast. My flute teacher's solos played on a baroque flute were sweet and wonderful. I met lovely people there. I went home elated and had vivid dreams. This morning I realized that right now anyway I can't jump into fictive lives of other people from a memory, or maybe at all. Except - maybe within constraints that require that creativity such as my children's historical fiction adventure spy story set on a ship in 1962.
Out of my window this morning I watched the storm and noticed a sticky monkey plant - too woody, too tall, needs cutting, I thought. Then I noticed at the very tip of it a pair of the small but vivid orange flowers, buffeted by the wind and glorious. I thought of me taking up flute playing again at age 70. Flowering is possible, the plant, somewhat stereotypically, said to me, even at your age. And then I thought of the short story again -- but my mind jumped to another children's story project that's been on my back burner a long time - or not just for children - about a mated pair of California deer mice (Peromyscus californicus), caught in a house and released, one one day, one the next... Their seeking each other through dangers - great horned owls, bobcats etc. -- then finding a woodrat nest. Now, woodrat nests are amazing things that can endure for a hundred years if unmolested, ruled by a series of dominant females. And that great big heap o sticks has compartments - and also apartments in which other creatures live. So - thus comes in the mythical/naturalist aspect and the mice have to become accepted by the queen first having satisfied or overcome various challenges
before the queen permits them to settle in her domain - and the female mouse being pregnant and the need being urgent to find a home. Now there is a story I can get excited about. And out of these structural and naturalist constraints and so on - come the personalities.
So maybe I write stories from the outside inside out. I feel buoyed up this morning and feel that I've been through some revelatory experiences, musical, and personal/creative.
This has all been kicked off by you, Mary, along with other discussions of course in Story Club. But the primary one was your challenge to me. You may be glad to know.
Forgive the length of this post - I'm writing from rapture (and later maybe will recall it in regret)! But I'll right away capture the rapture -- in a Scrivener project for the mouse story. And then go and practice my flute and send little orange flowers bursting in air!
I suddenly saw each Story Club episode as a dusky-footed wood rat nest built by George within which our posts are apartments where a few people might meet and chat and enjoy literary companionship, and others may drop by and join in.
But imy rambling is not so relevant to the aims of story club - and if I knew how to use substack better I'd direct this to you personally, Mary - and maybe if you register that you've read it - I'll delete it then as it seems to me now confessional clutter in terms of the shared space.
I feel all these throbbing, living connections you are making. Can you (and this is advice I need to give myself also) just take a few deep breaths and take the plunge? Write from rapture, write from sorrow and desperation. Write up and down the bones. No worrying, no judging! (Leave that stuff for the editing brain and the revision brain, hiding way over there so that Creative Brain won’t be inhibited.) Go for five minutes and stop, unless you can’t stop! (Bach is good for writers, I think.)
No worries, no judgments, only this opening, go.
I think I love you! No, well, it’s just that you are right!
Hi Jackie. I commented a bit ago to show you I've seen this--but i don't think you saw my comment. it's in this thread....
Jackie! What a gorgeous, life-affirming and generous post! I'm glad that words in these threads reached you just at the moment you were ready to hear them. Thank you for making this a beautiful start to a day when i woke up feeling ill-at-ease. Your words have helped me rise up from my blues!
Gosh - I just now saw this comment, Mary, and thank you hugely for it - I was afraid I'd gone kind of overboard.
As I did yesterday, "babysitting" my wonderful 11 year old Beatles-obsessed granddaughter. I put on the Rolling Stones for our "dance party" and was well into unrestrained and full on 1970s gyrating with Jagger - till I turned and saw a shocked look on her face - Granny! was all she could say. I tuned back into her expressive 11 year old dance mode - which is always great fun, and currently features lots of grand jetés!
Thank you for being the one!!
You have read Mervyn Peake? I so loved reading Gormenghast over and over in my early teen years.
Oh yes the Gormenghast books were huge for me too. Maybe my undergrad years. Yes, according to my copies - 1974. “Titus Alone” cost 50p! There was a great episode on them on the Backlisted podcast and I learned a lot about Mervyn Peake also. When Backlisted podcast people love a book they REALLY love it and put love into the program. And brains. Thank you for being happy for me having my question asked. It felt a bit special. Or exposed. And it wasn’t my question - so that handles the old ego problem!
Thank you for the link; I had never heard that song before now. “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time…” That might be one of the secrets of great writing and good reading also!
Here’s a link to something I recently discovered, thanks to an email from Narrative Magazine:
www.onetruepod.com
It’s about Hemingway, and other writers, and the art and craft of writing. I listened to one episode interviewing Tom Jenks about editing The Garden of Eden, and an early one about the relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald: and I’m hooked!
That podcast does look interesting. Thanks for sharing,
You’re welcome! I am so grateful that it came to me seemingly out of nowhere.
Looks really interesting - will check that podcast out!!
Thanks, David, for the link. I always enjoy thoughtful conversations about writing.
Narrative Magazine!! I forgot about them!!
Yay to the James Taylor. And I adore Maeve Brennan, whose life was too short & tragic. Try her again. Her sentences glow; she touches heart.
I did. Thanks. I woke up in the night and “the Rose Garden” collection was to hand and I dived into the middle of the book and read four stories that I loved! The first couple I didn’t warm to but we’ve made friends now !
I had never heard of her but I want to read her! Seems she might have inspired Capote to create Holly Golightly?
Yes I think I recall that. Again I refer you to a Backlisted episode. Backlisted has become my unfailing treasure trove of wonderful literature and attention to same, curated by attentive and sensitive lovers.
https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/174?rq=maeve%20brennan
Thank you!!
Listening to it now, and I love it. When they read actual passages from Brennan’s work, what a thrill. My brain is on fire!!
What a lesson. I found Victory Lap uplifting, that we can do things - on the spur, when presented with a dilemma - that are good and helpful even if it costs us something. I will reread it to see if I missed "the sadness." Meanwhile, I have been rereading Flannery O'Connor, who delved in the same garden as Carolyn Gordon, Faulkner (to a degree), and the garden I can't seem to get out of - the intricacies of the Jim Crow South, from which I believe many of the country-wide problems today come from. I hadn't read O'Connor for many years. I saw the ugliness as unrelieved, and I learned that her deepest feelings about blacks and the poor around her were - admittedly negative. Despite her religious faith. I see in them the pain, but I don't see the struggle, the kindnesses that can open frozen hearts. What I love about George's stories is what an old man once said to me, about rainy days, "got to find yourself a little patch of blue." And while I can step my brain aside and admire O'Connor's writing, I do not love the stories. I'm reminded of what I learned in Swim in a Pond about Tolstoy's "Master and Man" - when Tolstoy didn't give the Man the epiphany he had given to the Master. So - I am setting O'Connor aside once more. It's like going home and finding that the brilliant nasties are the only ones left in town.
Ha! I was just eyeing my volume of O’Connor stories. She is tough to read, but hopefully worthwhile. Maybe interspersed with some other writers? Need some sunlight in between dark nights.
Sallie- I hope you can pick up O'Connor again. I have come to appreciate that she exposes her own fears and weaknesses through her writing and she often writes hateful characters but in a reflexive way that broadens our own view of sin and grace. My perfect pairing of stories is her "Revelation" (I think- gotta look it up) and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." Both characters gain so much by the end of the story that you can forgive the assholery that got them there.
You're right. Revelation is - a revelation. And the ramifications of the woman's horribleness and her recognition at the end that there might be some truth - she is an old warthog. But I got that as just an instance before the blindness of her half-digested religion covers it all up again.
And I think that O'Connor wants us to see that we are all half-blind warthogs and that all our religion is half-digested and it's only a grace that even allows the revelations. I'm sure O'Connor would be perturbed at my evangelism for her writing. I'm sure she'd find me irksome. 😂😂😂
She might want most of us to be stifled!
😂🔥🔥
Sounds fabulous! Thank you!
I LOVE O’Connor and can separate the art from le artiste 👩🎨
Oh, I just picked a few books to keep with me on a two-month hiatus from home, and my book of O'Connor's short stories is among them. Thanks for the extra encouragement to delve into that book.
When I wrote my memoir In Her Wake : A child psychiatrist explores the mystery of her mother's suicide - people had many reactions to the pain, exploration of trying to understand why my mother had died by suicide when I was four years old. Because I used this story as a platform to appeal to people who may have lost someone to suicide or were suicidal themselves I got varied reactions . Some people worried if I was ok ( mind you it took me ten years to write the book and I am now thirty years older than the age I was when my mother died and an associate professor at harvard medical school . I assured those who were bold enough or kind enough to ask me. Sometimes people who had lost someone yo suicide felt reassurance that I could chart my course of pain and healing and I had survived . Those left behind in loss can sometimes get comfort not from a self help book but the groping that comes from being in the darkness and searching for the light.
I also chose to put in the memoir the talk I had with the doctor who cared for my mother after her overdose before she died . Why ? Because yes I knew it could be chilling to hear medical details of this and most of the memoir I focused on her life - but I didn't want to glamorize suicide.
So I guess I am resonating with the idea sometimes upsetting topics chose us.. I am currently working on a novel about a middle age woman ostensibly in a happy family where she has to confront abuse from her childhood . I carry with me chosen audiences- I imagine someone opening this , curious, brave to weather the ups and downs as my main character finds her way towards more intimacy . I wish I wrote romance novels . I also wish sometimes I was quiet . That is not how I am wired. And I have come to accept who I am as a writer - while also feeling blessed to invest in revision so I can arrive to a deeper place with my reader .
Thank you for your musings Professor Saunders.
It always amazes me when people read someone's writing about tough topics and they wonder if the writer is "OK." Of course, they're okay if they can write about it. Or blessed to be able to write about it. I'm deeply sorry about your mother. I am also one of the children of suicide. I was fifteen when my father hanged himself. I wrote a memoir as well 20 years after my mother died. My father, who I rarely saw, was a specter in the book as he was in life. And you became a psychiatrist. Wow. Tremendous admiration to you. One of the most fascinating things I have discovered about those in our "club" are the ones who shy away from the connection. I, however feel deeply attached to all children of suicide. To me, it's a more involved connection than being a parent, a spouse, or friend of one because the child is abandoned and left with conflicting feelings of what they did (which is always wrong) to have caused the parent's action. 🌷
I felt so responsible for my parents at, let’s say, eleven. I wanted to escape from them, and I wanted to save them. Needless to say perhaps, both of those overwhelming drives deflected me for decades from being in my own path. Doing my darnedest now to impress upon my child that he is responsible for his life, and I am responsible for mine.
Much love to both of you. If it’s a burden to feel one’s parent’s pain while they live, it’s hard to imagine how much more of a confusing hell it would be in a more extreme situation.
Thank you, David. For the loving compassion. My father was such a stranger that he became omnipotent & not in need of saving. My mother I wanted to save all my life until I realized I couldn't. The grace of writing is I could save her, my memory of her, of us together on paper. And that's a gift a long time in coming. But it came & I'm grateful. Yes, to doing better with our reproductions. They deserve it. 💓
Yes they do.
Perhaps the desire to save our parents creates an empathy or compassion that we carry with us all through our lives, though it may be invisible more often than not (to us). Not all is lost.
I would say you are brave with deep courage. The taking is with us every day and each time holes are blown in the golden fabric of life.There are times and human builds that cannot cope with the savage unfairness of some events and personal experiences. The mental hurt cannot be cleared or made peace with and final exits are deemed the only way. You know more about this then I. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom from your life and know that it takes deep courage to stay or leave life but those that live are on the battle line until they to must fall^^
The memoir you wrote and the novel on which you are now working both sound like books I want to read. It’s both strange and wondrous, the way intimacy forces us to confront the past, sooner or later. Like the beloved is also a mirror, reflecting the parts we’ve tried our damnedest to block out, or ignore.
This is the aspect of creative writing that I find the most fascinating--why do we react the way we do and what does that tell us about ourselves. I'd been wanting to make an observation about the brilliance of "Victory Lap" for a while and this is the perfect opportunity. Though we all know rationally and even emotionally how horrific are incidents of kidnap, rape, and all variations on that theme, I'd never read (or saw) anything that so clarified, that enabled me to feel so viscerally, the vulnerability and innocence of a potential victim. How did George do it? Some magical combination of the girl's thoughts, her view of the world, even her physicality throughout the story. So, though I was practically screaming with dread as the story's action accelerated, and was nearly a weeping heap of relief at the end (for both children), I still experienced the horror of "it doesn't always end this way." I guess that does reveal a lot about my take on the world. It's like when my partner watches episodes (a LOT of episodes) of SVU and other crime dramas and I say "How can you watch this?? It's so disturbing!" and his response is "It's just a show," and my response to that is, "But these things really DO happen!!!"
Interesting that you bring up crime shows because, unlike stories, we don't go to a crime show to feel. SVU wasn't created to make us feel, I don't think. I think we start liking the characters, but I'm not even sure the characters really feel much because if they did, it would be a dark, dark show that no one would want to watch because it would reveal too much with not much payoff. Maybe I'm wrong. All you SVU fans- don't come at me! 🤣🤣
Ya, I agree crime - police - detective stories are more about solving a puzzle - the classic who dun it. Agatha christie and on. It's branched out though - into ongoing emotional lives of characters, even serial killers. I like when the murder is over before the show begins! I don't know what SVU is and have stopped watching crime shows lately (or much tv at all). Could get hooked again though, by a good one!
Oh, I think they are supposed to make you *feel* (I'm thinking of SVU, in particular, though I am far from an expert on this). I'm not sure they're supposed to make you *think.* But I believe they are supposed to entertain, and that's when things get tricky. Do our short stories entertain? What IS entertainment? Is that one of the purposes of art? It all gets pretty thorny.
Ya the genre has indeed evolved to take in feel. British series - Shetland, Vera etc. Also American - Bosch, a favorite of my late husband's. But I think the best -- back a bit - oh gosh - was it 1973!!! -- was Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren as newly minted DCI Tennyson, struggling to be "boss" to unreconstructed policemen. Classic. I think you are ALSO supposed to think - in puzzle terms. There are classic structures in detective stories - some people write out matrices to eliminate suspects, I hear. I'm not that kind - I am lazy. Entertainment is such a broad brush term - it can mean different things, engagement at one end - e.g. quantum mechanics is entertaining, to a quantum mechanic! We entertain ideas. But - we know what we mean when we say "mere entertainment - a diversion for a time that leaves no trace other than maybe a lift in mood. Words are slippery critters! What goes beyond and engages us more viscerally, or changes us - then we are in the realms of art. Like The Ice Palace changed me, I think, and will next time again probably, in ways that build on the first reading. Also Sebald's strange works. George Saunders short stories - yes indeed. Before George I didn't read a lot of short stories but I'm seeking them out now. What literature or TV has had an effect on you beyond entertainment? Oh in TV, one that affected me was the Apple series "Dickinson" -- in wonderfully strange and beyond-entertainment ways.
Gosh I think I need to step away before I write a novel here. An interesting and thought provoking question you put!
Our reactions and what that says about ourselves: YES 🔥🔥.
One of my favorite shows during the "COVID" years is "Severance," a series directed by Ben Stiller. I know several people who work for a certain company in our city that are so triggered by the show that they stopped watching after just a few episodes. Normally, I will try talking people into liking what I like–– not in an argumentative way, just, you know, coaxing. Usually I'll say, "just give it a few more episodes!" But with these people, I just let it go, because I can imagine how unpleasant it would be to spend your free time experiencing a story that reminds you of something yucky. One said to me, "I can't watch it. It's too close to the bone."
I love having someone else influence my understanding of a story. I don't think that's unique to me. I like having a friend say, "just give it fifty pages" or whatever they say if it's a book, and sort of "pitch" me the story. If I'm feeling tormented after reading something, I also like hearing another point of view. This is why these posts and comments are so fabulous.
I found myself evangelizing about Severance, too. Best show of 2022, in my opinion.
Yes!!!!! Can’t wait for the next season.
Sometimes, I read George's posts and then the comments here, and I feel in sync with everyone. Other times, i'm amazed that I am walking through the world with my brain ticking away with thoughts, only to find out that I am on another planet from everyone else. This sentence from George, for example, left me wondering about myself: "That’s the point, really: the writer is trying to cause something to happen in the mind of the reader, something unusual and exaggerated and rarefied." Okay, when I write certain things, I certainly am hoping that a joke lands properly, or that I have articulated an argument well enough that others can follow my line of reasoning (like in these posts), etc. But when I write a story, when I am creating a world--and perhaps this is why i'm not a bestselling writer!--I am not trying to cause anything in the mind of the reader! I am trying to figure out my own mind--i am looking and searching and dreaming my words/worlds, in an attempt to find out what i really think and feel. If a story is published, then yes, I am sharing my world view with others. (And if I connect with a reader on that level, that is a beautiful thing.) But that is never my original intent when I write. I don't write wondering what others will think, and I'm not hoping to cause anything to happen in another person's head. Or maybe i should say it is not top of mind--and therefore, not "the point" when I write. (What's wrong with me?)
This, from George, feeds directly into our discussions over the last week regarding The Lady and the Dog: "...a story will land on a thousand people in a thousand different ways."
Also, I wanted to mention that we talked about sadness in stories in another post here in Story Club. Many in these threads took issue that a certain reader was weary of reading so many sad stories. I so appreciate George's words this week, which completely validate that person's feelings. We learn from everything, and there is so much to be learned from a story you turn away from because you find it too sad.
I certainly find out about myself in my journal and always have since I was young.My project for years now is a novel for 11 year olds. I'm not sure if I'm trying to figure out my own mind there though it does come up tangentially as the setting for the story does come from my childhood. I've just started a non-fiction project - a family story about events that happened before I was born. Will I ever truly write a short story or any short fiction? It's a question that bothers me. Can I do that? Will I ever really try?? What will it be like? As you say here a deep exploration of oneself - and/or what George says, about imagining his reader as a sort of better version of himself - and gauging that person's responses.
Something George S. said a few weeks back sparked a flash of recognition in me. To paraphrase, he said a reviewer said his stories are best when he writes from love rather than anger. I think it's the same for me. When I hold an idea gently in my open palm, it has room to grow into the shape it needs to be. When I trap it in my fist, it stays stunted. So I'm trying to keep my mind and hands open, while giving myself permission to prune through revision.
Yes - I recall that and it hit home with me too. A good metaphor to keep in mind: "Are my fists tightening on this story?" And then to breathe and open. I have plenty tight fisted moments actually but I've been pleasantly working on that quite a bit. In general, not just in writing but there too.
Anything you write is about you. It's just that some projects make that more obvious than others. You ask if you'll ever write a short story? And "Can I do that?" Well, yes, of course you can. What's stopping you? Maybe you don't really want to. But if you DO want to, and fear is stopping you, then maybe just give yourself permission to write a terrible story and see what happens.
Thanks. I appreciate your independent voice btw. Yes, that is true - always about you. My children's novel is about me - but it 's also about writing for people who haven't been on this earth for long and they have different - requirements - ways of being in the world - it's a craft and a genre. It has structures and strictures - that somehow I've found helpful.... Just write a short story, you say - and I've tried. I don't feel that "yes of course I can." I don't know why. Thanks for poking me! Your questions and suggestions are helpful. OK - It can be terrible. It can be not even a story - what IS a story? - Just stop thinking! Do!
Sounds like you find writing within the constraints of a YA novel helpful. You could write a short story within some constraints, if you wanted to. Many prompts give you constraints to work within. But the main thing is to allow yourself to put words on the page, and to then not beat yourself up when the words on the page seem so ugly compared to the dream in your head of what you would write. As William Stafford wrote: "Lower your standards and keep writing." (You ask: what is a story? George has given us a lot of definitions, but may I put this one forth to you? You've got a character living their life, everything just going along as always. and then, one day, something happens and throws that life out of whack. The character spends the rest of the story trying to find their balance again. The thing that throws everything out of whack can be teeny tiny, but it has to really throw that particular character for a loop. It has to matter, deeply, to them.)
I like that quote. Lower you standards and keep writing! Yes. Constraints are useful I guess to me. Never thought of it that way before. Thanks so much for these encouragements and tips. I’ll read them again in the early morning when I have an awake brain. Time for sleep for me. Who knows I may get the ball rolling!
Try reading a bit of Alice Munroe re short story form....might trigger you. Think of your story for 11 year olds as a good mix of words and illustrations.My advice is to go ahead and write. You have the ideas now flush them out to the stories that are all in you and that journal.^^
Oh - yes - I *have* loved reading Alice Munroe - been reading her since story club started. I'm also listening to New Yorker stories in their two short story podcasts. I love the one where a writer picks a story and reads it - bookended by discussion of that story. Terrific. So far I haven't felt triggered, but I'm keeping that gun loose in its holster!
Thanks for your thoughts on my middle grade novel, Graeme - yes, I would like illustrations -- this book is partly a throwback or homage to the Enid Blyton Famous Five books (trashy and racist and classist - but fun even so) that I read as a girl in Scotland in the early sixties - All British people know them - they've inspired many parodies too! So - I'd like to have similar illustrations (like Hardy boys and Nancy drew illustrations). You are giving me heart to just go ahead and have a go at short story writing.
I think Joan Didion said that she "writes to understand" or something like that. I don't have the exact quote, but I remember relating to that. The more I write, the more I understand.
*edited to provide correct quote* She said "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976)
Ahhh.
and this: James Baldwin, from a 1984 interview with The Paris Review: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
It seems like one could write both as a means of discovery AND as a way to give readers a moving experience. Not mutually exclusive!
"The writer who seeks personal truth almost always seeks something along with it. He seeks something that might be called a writer's beauty. By that I mean he not only wants to unfold his vision––his truth––but to convey the feelings that are part of seeing the world as he does. He is not detached but immersed, not authoritative but questioning, not godly but human, as the sage says, all too human." --from "Why Write?" by Mark Edmundson
Absolutely, David. And i think many people probably write that way. But for me, I really don't think about the reader. Not proud of that--just admitting that I don't go there.
That is is exactly it, for me.
Tagging along here on this consideration of why we write at all.
Even when we write for our own purpose of discovering, or figuring out something for ourselves, we also do this for others, whether consciously or not. To leave the cave and find out what is causing all those ghastly, aw-inspiring shadows is to seek the boons for not only ourselves but for the tribe.
I'm always thinking^^
I guess the key question for you Mary is : How are you going to write your story? What is the central reason for writing it? Nothing is wrong with you....but if you do not know your story then how can a reader find it?^^
Graeme: The central reason for writing a story is for me to discover the story--and it's true meaning (to me). In this way, writing is a way of getting to know myself better. I think many fiction writers begin without knowing what the story is going to be or where it is leading. And then you begin and, as George says, you look at what you've put down and see what expectations you have raised. Then, you keep going. I hope i'm answering your question. Here's an example: my most recent story was about an elderly woman. I just started writing about her. She was alone, in a retirement home. And as I wrote, I saw that she felt trapped. And so I continued. What was she going to do about feeling so trapped? Who did she have in her life? How did she feel about the long life she had lived that had led her to this place--alone, in a retirement home. And so i kept going. Do you see what i mean? I wrote the story and saw that, in some way, i was writing about myself (as always). And i learned a thing or two about my feelings--about life, aging, love, agency, etc. So that is how I write a story.
Yes - it is a true exploratory journey you take, Mary - I think I approach poetry perhaps like this. But imagining others' stories? I quail at that enormity and my lack of imagination of Other Lives. I feel guilt that my subject is so often very directly me. I want/lack that outward looking gaze. Guilt is - perhaps - best allowed to dry out in the fresh air, releasing its dank moisture like a sheet spread over a sunny bush! Not something to be followed, moisture meter in hand, down the dark dark cave of a journal that twists through ever narrower, more claustrophobic spaces! Actually - I have guilt/fear that my actual metier is memoir. (I'm an alliteration junky!) Just now wondering: maybe it's the guilt that causes the claustrophobia? I've started reading Annie Ernaux, "A Girl's Story". Her work in memoir garnered her a Nobel prize. Maybe this is my way of - valorizing - the genre so I can let go these constraining ideas! And then there is Joan Didion too, her memoir work...
Story Club - these interactions - makes quite the composite lens - like the Webb telescope! Or at least - maybe a polishing cloth for our own cloudy lenses.
Oh and btw it's Keith Richards in his grizzled state who is my man! I can listen to him growling "it only tightens up" any day and feel richly endowed somehow!
This makes me so happy, and kind of well - something else - I can't pin down but that feels very good and honored.
Yesterday I was all fizz and foam, all day, couldn't settle, didn't sleep well - today I got up and began a modified short story/memoir - of my recent past, writing in detail the story of my husband's recent passing (as the modern euphemism has it), and his 10 years illness etc leading up to it - but distancing through the lens of switching all the genders of everybody involved - and it's going to a really potentially interesting place, and, as Mary g. says - it is very much writing to find out about myself - with the possibility of lifting into other spaces than the literal, by that sideways shift of genders. Thank you Alfred-P, Mary g. David Snider - and all and of course - George Saunders who generates the ambience that supports us all!
Voyage of discovery, Hollywood Sign: Feeling trapped by age and Lonely. Got it! You have your method. George is at Walden Pond trying to measure how deep it is.....Stop doubting yourself^^
And many thanks for your thoughtful reply^^
The cause something to happen in the reader's mind...is through good story telling...which includes excellent writing...I think this is what George is saying...^^
I'm super fast to go to the nope setting on my brain and stopping reading or watching anything that upsets me to the point where I think, "Who the f needs this?" That particular story of George's didn't make me stop reading. I find it makes me feel a panging sort of pull to other people on this awful journey with me, you, us. I was watching a documentary about Laurie Lipton and about how she creates drawings that comment on how immune and inured we might get to tragedy and human trauma via screens. She writes that it's a form of protest. If the artful story of horror and tragedy feels like that I'm okay with it. I try to write the truth and the truth is sometimes acutely disturbing. I think about the yogic word, "satya" which means truth but also clear-sightedness. The best stories deliver a clear-sightedness that highlights the human condition, and for me only, allows me to feel a companionable warmth in being just a human with other humans doing the best we can. The upsetting content of some stories I have read exists for shock value and have no layers. That's my nope switch. Anyway, great post. Thank you.
That's a good word. I learned something new!
Your comments remind me of a letter that Philip Larkin wrote to his friend, Virginia Peace, writer of a novel, A Bridge over Dark Water, based on the recent and sudden death of her son. She asked him to be candid, and he was:
"You have done amazingly well to describe what happened in so dispassionate and calm a way, but for you this is enough, the events speak for themselves. Unfortunately, for the reader it isn't: the reader wants that impure thing, literature--plot, suspense, characters, ups, downs, laughter, tears, all the rest of it. Your narrative isn't a story, it's a frieze of misery; your characters are numb with unhappiness; there is no relief, no contrast. Now I can quite see that to 'play about' with the kind of subject matter you have taken would seem heartless, frivolous, even untrue, an offence against decency or decent feeling, something you wouldn't do, and yet in literature it somehow has to be done--one might say that it's the mixture of truth and untruth that makes literature."
This is great! Thanks for posting. I remember receiving similar comments for my early stories! I have said elsewhere in these threads that I don't write with my reader in mind. However, I DO write with the idea of "story" in mind. I'm pretty much attached to the traditional elements of complication and resolution. I like having my main character revealed through a defining action. I love stories. But even though I have all of this in mind as i write, i'm still only conscious of myself as I put words on the page. Certainly, I write to eventually have others read what I've written. But in the creation--there's only me.
So good I copied and pasted it. Good to keep handy.
Thank you for this, Colin. Distinguishing between narrative & "frieze of misery" says much & says it so efficiently.
What a great anecdote and quote. The difference between describing it how it really was and writing a good story--I've understood and heard that before. What's new to me here is the insight that playing about with the intense, emotion-laden subject matter feels wrong to the writer/experiencer, yet that's just what is needed. Perhaps the ability to play about begins with distinguishing the writer from the experiencer. Interesting to think about.
Thank you for posting this!
Your response to the question of sad stories reminds me of something I read somewhere. If a story ends on a down turn, it's literary; if it ends on an up beat, it's commercial. That's an oversimplification, but it does resonate with me and makes me wonder why we want/need to write "down" stories, be they sad or violent or something else that takes us down emotionally. I'm sure there are many reasons, from the psychological to the sociological and beyond, but it's a question that's both easy and hard to answer. We want to reflect the world in all its existences or we need the catharsis of writing through experience, but that seems too easy an answer. The hard answer lies deeper, somewhere in compulsion, I think. But I also understand why many people prefer upbeat endings in stories, regardless of the form in which they manifest -- book, film, etc.
There are studies that show that in dark times, such as the great depression, more movies and books were upbeat (perhaps to compensate?) and in good times, there are more stories that take a down turn at the end. Perhaps it's all about balance, but the whole question is fraught with complexity.
Aye Aline fraught indeed. "In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes there will be singing, about the dark times." Berthold Brecht.
Yes indeed. And probably about the bright times too. We all need a bit of a lie now and then.
And don't forget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrdEMERq8MA
I don’t know how or why I’ve always had latitude for “sad” — horror, less so, and gore, much less. I recoil most when I feel pressed into an experience for some kind of sensational effect — for its own sake— maybe this is what George means by “shock.”
And so, I LOVE this passage from today’s post: “The purpose – or my purpose, anyway, is never merely to shock, but, rather, to be in relation with. With the subject, and with the reader. “
”to be in relation with” I love it.
As to “Victory Lap” — I know we each carry what we do away from a story. For all the ways this story is disturbing, it is, for me, in the end, astonishing — the narrow escape these two kids make, from the abductor, from old habits of self, from perpetuating violence, and from living with a self that perpetuated violence.
Either way!
This brings to mind my and others' response to The Lady with the Dog and the question 'is this love'. While some were seeing love affirmed, others (self included) were resistant. Love confuses the pants off me (literally): is it all projection or is it a meeting of souls? If the latter, is a relationship that ends never real? If the former, are all those meetings illusion?
But Chekhov's sophistry accommodates both of us. One need only listen to the conversation of those who read it for proof. And more. When I first read this story a dozen years ago I didn't catch the depth I'm seeing now.
How deep we go into a story, a writer's offering and our own fears is a choice. Finish a story or not, read deep or not, investigate our motives.
How cool would it be though, to be in your class and have the conversation you imagined?
Thanks.
Touché 🔥🔥
A projection that sometimes can become real?
Do you mean love can develop with care and affection? Well, arranged marriages work, and we love family members with only tradition to serve. But projection becoming real suggests the person changes, doesn't it?
I am fairly certain that most relationships begin as projection, illusion, hallucination. The ones that last require working through conflicts, and a willingness to step out of one’s preconceptions and try to see through a different pair of eyes, again and again.