Today’s Booking Through Thursday answer is posted as a comment on today’s (Jan. 29, 2009) post at that site. That post refers to this article in Time.
The article is an interesting read, and I hope to go back to it in a later post, particularly on novels and the current state of publishing.
Just found this news tidbit about John Updike dying.
Closing in on the last chapters of Lolita, the passionately obsessed Humbert, spurned by his lovely Lo, has sunk to the final depth, the true tragi-comic flaw, the spurned lover’s flaw (Humbert in his own perverse way loves Lolita), in his character — the inability to let go of the past.
Leaving Lolita behind, murder on his mind, he nears a town close to the motor inn the Enchanted Hunter, where he experiences the his first perverse bliss with his nymphet, and he finds himself “weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”
Isn’t this where we all go when spurned by someone we love? We obsessively replay the past. Where did it all go wrong? How could it have gone better?
Humbert, of ocurse, is experiencing in full the dark side of Eros, the god’s cruel side, the dual fears of rejection and abandonment, fears that seem ingrained in our longing, lurking below surface of the joys of love, waiting to torpedo it.
#
Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.
This week’s Booking Through Thursday question:
Q: Since “Inspiration” is (or should) the theme this week . . . what is your reading inspired by?
A: For more than two years now, a large part of my reading has been inspired by Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which inspired my own 100-novels reading project. Many of the novels I’ve been reading are ones that Smiley read for the book.
Other novels on that list have come from other reading lists. Still others, suggestions from readers, friends and colleagues (there are quite a few Texas writers on the list because of a friend and former colleague inspiring me to read the likes of Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Stephen Harrigan; of course, my favorite Texas writer is Larry McMurtry, and he’s on the list, too).
Some of the novels I’ve read — Karen Lee Boren‘s Girls in Peril, for instance — were finds while browsing the bookstore.
Favorite recent reads — Evacuation Plan and Janeology — were blog surfing finds.
As for nonfiction, one of my favorite relative recent reads was Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife. I read Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love a few years ago while researching a feature on Valentine’s Day, and was inspired to read more of her work because of her combination of excellent prose and great research.
But my readings in nonfiction tend to follow the same inspiration as fiction: I’ve read about it, heard about it, or it just looked interesting.
So there it is . . . my inspiration.
Writer Lisa Romeo has a nice post on beginnings and endings, and then a nice piece at Tiny Lights on the same subject.
For me, beginnings tend to come easier (by easier I mean pulling less hair out) than endings, especially personal pieces. When I write feature stories, I’m usually able to find something that either ties back to the beginning, or something to open up the story.
A lot of times, though, I seem to get stuck with a beginning and a lot of middle.
In Joe O’Connell‘s debut novel Evacuation Plan: A Novel From the Hospice (Dalton Publishing, 2007), a young screenwriter, Matt, goes to a hospice “in search of a good story.” He finds several poignant stories as he interviews the hospice residents, their families, and the hospice staff. In turn, Matt discovers he has to come to terms with his own father’s death.
Told in a novel-in-stories style, the novel draws on O’Connell’s experiences as a participant in a project by visual artists and writers to tell the stories of the terminally ill at Christopher House in Austin, Texas.
You mention in your Acknowledgments that some of the stories in Evacuation Plan date back to when you were a student in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University(now Texas State University-San Marcos). The other stories originated from your experience at Hospice Austin‘s Christopher House. How did the individual stories begin to merge into a novel?
When I did the Christopher House project—a group of writers and visual artists chosen to tell the stories of the terminally ill in a residential hospice—I wrote poetry about the experience. But I knew I wasn’t done with it. I was later chosen for a residency that allowed me the time to complete
Joe O'Connell
this work, and in many ways I adapted the poetry into the novel, as odd as that may sound! The larger narrative grew from one story, which is the main narrator Matt’s. I just kind of took it from there, figuring out which stories would work where. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle that I solved as I created.
You chose to present multiple narratives, a novel-in-stories form. What led you to chose this form?
I read Tim O’Brien’s novel July July, which is about a 30th college reunion, but digresses into the stories of what has happened to different classmates in the interim. I saw here a novel-in-stories structure that would allow me to tell the full story of the hospice. I wanted to make the place itself a character. O’Brien, by the way, teaches in the MFA program I graduated from, but came on board after my time, and I’ve never met him. I do consider him one of our best writers and a major influence.
I do know that the novel-in-stories format is tough for some readers, the same readers who have a hard time with story collections. We’re indoctrinated as novel readers to follow the same characters along the way, so it can be tough when we dip in and out of lives in this manner. But I urge readers to be open to something a little different.
The dough that holds the collection together is Matt’s narrative. How did Matt’s narrative come about? And why did he become the central figure that pulls the collection together?
Matt’s story is part of a novel I started and got stalled on, a coming-of-age story. The relationship he develops with an older man, Charlie Wright, who is dying in the hospice, gets at a lot of what I was trying dig into. This is really a book about family and how death often signals how we must forgive in order to move on. Matt looks to Charlie as a surrogate father in this area, and Charlie is looking to Matt as a scribe, a means of passing on his story.
Why did you choose to make Matt a screenwriter?
Matt also allows me to write a bit about the creative process and to take a broader look at the hospice. The notion is that he is in search of a story for his next script. I have what I call my Black Hole Theory of Writing. When I’m in the zone, anything that crosses my path can get sucked in. In this case, while working on the book I was also preparing to teach a course in screenwriting. Some of that got sucked in. But, again, I’m really into the notion of each of us having a unique story to tell. I wanted to write of those pivotal moments in our lives.
The subtitle for the book is “A Novel From the Hospice.” What do want readers to learn about hospice care?
The oddest review my book has received is that there’s not enough death in it. Exactly! Hospice workers will tell you that 10 percent of what they do is about death. The rest is about life. Hospice is about empowerment. The dying have the opportunity to be in charge of their own deaths and to say a proper goodbye. What else could we ask?
You work as a journalist and as a teacher. How do these professions affect your fiction writing?
As a newspaper reporter I had Saturday festival duty. The reporters would take turns working Saturdays and writing about the rodeo, the corn festival, the train festival—you name it. I learned some strong lessons in fiction writing from this. You can either tell the macro story—a good time was had by all—or the micro story, which uses individual people to tell the story of an event. Character is king, even in newspapers, and the stories of what makes people tick is where it all starts. I’m a free-lance film writer these days for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. I had a cover story in the Chronicle a few months back about the film industry’s problem in Texas, and the big compliment was when the former state film commissioner said I’d put a face on the film industry. I’d learned that “character” lesson!
As a creative writing teacher, I learn as my students learn. In a sense I get paid to be a student alongside the other students. It does very much help me to continue honing my own craft. I’m inspired by my students, and that’s a great feeling.
You’ve mentioned that Charles Baxter‘s A Feast of Love and Tim O’Brien’s July, July inspired Evacuation Plan, especially its form. How were those novels inspiring?
O’Brien was primarily about the structure, but he is a master writer. Baxter, whom I’ll go out on a limb and call the best short story writer alive today, is about going deep. Fiction writing is tough work, and we shouldn’t be easily satisfied as writers. I talk often about the search for the “little truths” of what it is to be a human being. O’Brien, Baxter and the late Andre Dubus, who was my long-distance mentor while I was in graduate school, do it better than anybody I can think of.
How important is reading to you as a writer?
It’s essential. You can’t expect to be a good writer without reading. My classes always include a lot of reading, which allows me to constantly uncover writers whom are new to me. See? I’m always also the student.
Who are some of your favorite writers? What are you reading now?
Along with the ones I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O’Connor. Some folks I’ve been reading of late are the essayist Tony Earley and the fiction writer Dan Chaon, who really blows me away. I’m coming late to George Saunders, but his style is a challenge to take chances. Great stuff.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m writing this after a very interesting day. I spent the last couple of days in Jefferson, Texas, talking about my book at the Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club annual convention, Girlfriend Weekend. Today, I traveled to a small town in Louisiana that is home to my mother’s family and their secrets-which supposedly include a couple of murders. She died recently and this morning two of my brothers scattered her ashes in the Pampa River in South India. A few years before her mind faded with Alzheimer’s, she’d asked me to interview her about her life, which was quite remarkable. She wanted me to write her story, and I’m mulling how to do that. The result may be an odd mix of fiction and nonfiction, but the project is very much intriguing me. I’ve also got a completed mystery novel I’m trying to place, and I’m working on a sequel to it that’s set in the “weird” Austin, Texas, that is quickly disappearing.
#
Joe O’Connell is an award-winning short story writer, who teaches
writing to graduate students at St. Edward’s University and undergrads at Austin Community College. Evacuation Plan is his first published novel, and is both a Violet Crown Book Award finalist and a Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club bonus selection.
Yes, Sunday Salon readers, I am reading Nabokov’s Lolita, the notorious story of Humbert Humbert and his obsession with the nymphet Lolita. Of course, the novel’s subject created scandal in its time — the Fifties.
Such a story would probably make Springer and the nightly news today, but its power to shock might not shake us long.
What I’ve paid attention to, so far, in this rereading of the n0velis not its power to shock, but its narrative voice, the voice of a “lunatic genius,” as Francine Prose calls Humbert in Reading Like a Writer — a first person narrator who sometimes refers to himself in the third person, when he’s diabolically pleased with himself as he proceeds through his crimes.
The voice also guides us through a parody of dark European sophistication meeting American cheeriness and optimism. A fun read, so far. Delightfully sinister.
#
Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.
My inner Luddite was delighted to find this funny video at Scobberlotch:
A few days ago I read a post at Straight From Hel about another discredited memoir by Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat. (The memoir won’t be published because of the fudging.) The story purports to be the tale of how Rosenblat met his wife, how she helped him survive the camps. Oprah touted the romance as “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.”
Brevity posted about the story today with a link to a piece by Meghan Daum of the LA Times in which Daum asks “why don’t these authors simply present their books as fiction? After all, many novels are truer than their authors often admit. So why not play it safe and replace the word ‘memoir’ with ‘novel’ on the title page?”
Daum addresses the question to Creative Nonfiction founder Lee Gutkind. Gutkind says:
“I don’t think [Rosenblat’s story] is a particularly terrific story compared to the fictional worlds created by most fiction writers today,” Gutkind added. “It’s a cute story … but it doesn’t have the scope and depth required of fiction. But once you say it’s true, it becomes the kind of thing a publisher can take to the bank.”
The issue of moneymaking certainly must have lit up the eyes of the publisher’s sales and marketing team, but Daum ends the piece suggesting another problem is readers, the audience, and what they are or are not demanding from what’s being published:
For all the guilt there is to go around in the “Angel at the Fence” debacle — including the willful myopia of Rosenblat’s champions and editors as well as the man himself — a deeper blame may lie with an audience that demands so much treacle and sensationalism that apparently even the Holocaust requires narrative embellishment.
With her debut novel Janeology (Kunati, 2008), Karen Harrington invites readers to explore the questions, Why would a mother take her child’s life? and How does the past influence a person’s present?
Combining a legal thriller with family history, Janeology takes up the story of Tom and Jane Nelson after Jane has murdered her toddler son, and has been committed to a mental hospital for her crime. Prosecutors then argue Tom Nelson failed to protect his son because he was aware of Jane’s emotional breakdown that led to the boy’s murder. In Tom’s defense is attorney Dave Frontella, who proposes Jane’s emotional breakdown and latent violence is linked to her family history. Using multiple narratives, Harrington gives voice to the past in order to answer the present’s “Why?”.
Central to Janeology is Jane Nelson’s crime, the murder of her infant son. The murder evokes similarities to recent cases such as Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Were such cases the germs seeding this novel or was it something else?
In many ways, the answer to that question is yes. Like most people, I heard these stories and couldn’t stop wondering how a mother could harm her children. That was the question that kept me up at night and made me want to explore the idea further. I think for most writers, they choose a novel
Karen Harrington
subject based on a question they would like the answer to. This was certainly my experience after reading about Yates and other mothers like her.
You were a speechwriter and worked in corporate communications. Were you working on Janeology then, or did the book come later?
As strange as it might sound, I didn’t start working on Janeology until I was a stay-at-home mom, having left my corporate career behind. Around the same time I became a mother for the first time, my own mother died. I think this circle-of-life connection pushed me to explore many of the genetic inheritance ideas in the novel. You can’t help but look at your kids and wonder how much of your own mother is within them.
Did speechwriting and corporate communications influence your fiction writing in any way?
It did in the sense that writing for a living and on deadline is a great discipline. Also, when you write speeches or straight news stories, as I did for an employee newsletter, your writing must be lean and to the point. I’d like to think I learned a lean style on the job.
Had you written fiction before Janeology?
Yes, I had written more than 20 screenplays, a novel and countless short stories. In other words, many a tree died in the name of learning this skill.
Had you always wanted to write a novel?
Yes. I always wanted to see if I could actually do it, even if no one read it. I think it was John Irving who said that the first novel is the test of whether or not you have the stamina to do it.
You chose multiple points of view to tell the story. What led you to decide to use multiple points of view?
When I first conceived of Janeology, I knew it would be a series of linked short stories that formed a picture of one family tree. I wanted the reader to imagine that each of the ancestors was unique and believable. So, each of the stories had to have a unique point of view. This was actually one of the most enjoyable parts of developing the novel.
Did you work from an outline?
Yes. First I created a time line to get a picture of the dates and places of all of Jane’s ancestors. This served as the outline.
How much research was involved?
A great deal, both on the subject of infanticide and how the Texas courts treat this crime. And of course, I did quite a bit of research into the different time periods in which my characters lived. Since I grew up in New England and Texas, getting to know more about these places for the novel was a pleasure.
What was the most difficult part of writing the novel?
I think it was imagining how to piece together all the stories and bring the whole of the piece together. Many of the original short stories were left behind. I had so many doubts if what I was attempting would even stand together as a whole. I wondered if I had taken on a project that was too ambitious for my ideas. Since then, I’ve discovered these are the growing pains of most writers.
What was your writing schedule like?
When I was writing Janeology, my girls were just babies so I wrote during their naptimes and every night from 9-10. Now that they are in school, I can write during the day or in other spare moments.
You’ve mentioned that once you completed the manuscript you worked with an editing service. What did you learn from working with an editing service?
Hiring a professional editor was the smartest career move I’ve ever done. The value of a good editor is having someone point out your strengths and weaknesses. In my experience, my editor pointed out all the areas where I had overwritten, underwritten, needed additional internal commentary from my protagonist and whole sections that needed to be simplified to keep the pace going. I think it takes an objective third party to identify these flaws in any project.
What writers have influenced you?
Hemingway was a big influence early on because all my writing professors loved him and wanted to be a minimalist writer like him. Today, I’ve realized I still like a minimalist style, but with a little bit more meat on the bones. Michael Ondaatje and Tim O’Brien are contemporary writers I think are masters of the kind of style I love to read. I won’t even say I want to write like them because it seems impossible. Elizabeth Berg is also a writer whose style I am growing to love. I love how her stories just begin and keep going as if you are actually living them with the characters. I don’t know how she does it. And Stephen King is a writer whose perseverance continues to inspire me. He’s a true example that even an artist needs a solid work ethic.
What are you reading?
Right now, I’m reading The Glass of Time by Michael Cox. It’s the follow-up book to The Meaning of Night, which is a great period mystery set in England. Next up is a non-fiction book called Blue Genes by Christopher Lukas. It’s a memoir about the ways in which depression ran throughout the genes of one family. I’ll say it for you: I’m weird. I can’t seem to stay away from family history stories.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m working on the edits for my next novel, Prodigal Son. I’m also putting together notes on changes to the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel I wrote in November, which is the follow-up to Janeology, featuring Jane’s daughter during the summer she turns twelve.
What insights about writing have you gained from writing the novel?
There’s a great deal of satisfaction in just completing a novel, much less publishing one. I think anyone who has once said they wanted to do it should go for it. I think the biggest insight I have now is that I’m capable of finishing a larger project. I’ve also learned that my favorite part of the process is the beginning. Editing a piece is meaningful, but it’s hard, analytic work and isn’t as much fun as creating the story world and discovering characters and ideas for the first time.
#
Karen Harrington was born and raised in Texas, where she still lives with her husband and children. She received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her first writing gigs were in corporate America as an editor and speechwriter. Her fiction writing has been recognized by the Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Texas Film Institute. She wrote and published There’s A Dog In The Doorway, a children’s book created expressly for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Foundation’s MyStuff Bags. My Stuff bags go to children in need who must leave their homes due to abuse, neglect or abandonment
Exile on Ninth Street 