Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

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Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

(Guest post by Debra Spark)

This will be a celebration of a writer I love that begins with what I am weary of: narratives in which other people are the problem. This is because I am weary of people who cast others as the problem, when that very tendency is the problem. If we cannot see the harm we have done, as well as the harm that has been done to us, we cannot see. As a writer and as a person, I’m interested in what seems truer: shame, self-analysis, owning your own crap.

This mini-rant leads me to one of my favorite books, William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The author-narrator are one and the same in this book, and the only person Maxwell really blames is himself, and this even though the story concerns a murder.

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David Haynes on Right by My Side

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David Haynes on Right by My Side

(Guest post by David Haynes)

“I’m a very dangerous boy. I’ve been known to say almost anything.”

Marshall Fields Finney said that.  He’s the narrator in Right by My Side, which was my first novel. It’s fair, I think, to consider the first paragraph of my own book for the MPP—since I don’t remember much about writing the book, and it is, after all, now an official “Penguin Classic.” Which has been my occasion for revisiting Marshall and company, thirty years after publication and close to thirty-seven years after hearing that first line in my head. When a book is reissued, you are assigned by your editors to read it again in search of necessary updates, mostly copyediting errors that slid by the first time (a painful subject for a different essay). So, I did, and it very much felt like reading any book that’s new to you for the first time—until it wasn’t, until it was like, “Oh, I remember this guy.”  Both Marshall and the guy who dreamed him up, that is. And still that first paragraph blows me away, in that way that openings that stick with us tend to do. 

“I steal.”[1]

“I was not there, yet I was there.”[2]

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”[3]

“I am born.”[4]

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Marcy Dermansky on Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here

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Marcy Dermansky on Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here

(Guest post by Marcy Dermansky)

Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. I loved everything about it so much: the writing; Anne, the teenager protagonist; the complicated relationship with her mother. I loved the cover. I wanted to be able to create something like that. Basically, all of the short stories I wrote in my early twenties were about sad beautiful girls wanting more, and there it was, perfect in a book.

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[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain

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[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain

(Guest post by [Name of author])

Rarely do I marvel at the standard paragraph. (Forgive the strict literalism with which I’ve approached my “marvelous paragraph” essay.) It’s a bit much and not enough for me. I prefer it broken up into stray lines or drawn out into full pages (/whole novels). The paragraph is where poetry gives up the ghost, signaling the advent of “prose” (let’s pretend this is an unproblematic assertion), and as a failed poet turned “experimental” “novelist,” I have a contrarian (/juvenile) resistance to structural stability. An aversion to all things…congealed?

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Yang Huang on George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Owning up

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Yang Huang on George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Owning up

(Guest post by Yang Huang)

George Eliot’s Middlemarch changed the way I think about reckoning in fiction. A sprawling novel about provincial life in 19th century England, Middlemarch is endowed with an urgent plot and slow-burning character development. Eliot is not protective of her characters; she takes them to the cliff and makes them jump. Dorothea is a high-minded young woman who marries a shriveled old scholar. Mr. Casaubon suffers almost as much as Dorothea in their incompatible marriage; the spirited young wife, with all her good intentions, perhaps drives him to an early grave.

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Caroline Goodwin on Amber Flora Thomas, Red Channel in the Rupture

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Caroline Goodwin on Amber Flora Thomas, Red Channel in the Rupture

(Guest post by Caroline Goodwin)

In fall 2020, I took an online class through the Poetry School with bilingual Welsh poet Rhys Trimble: “Poetry and Eclogue: Ritual Ecopoetics.” The prompts and the other students opened my eyes to many possibilities, and the “associative leap” became central to my practice in a new way. I have long been interested in writing about trauma survival, having lost an infant daughter in 2002 and my beloved husband suddenly in 2016. Trimble’s class challenged me to think about how I might continue to integrate these experiences into my creative practice in ways that honor their intensity and complexity. In my reading life, I began to ask myself: what leap might the poet be asking readers to make when juxtaposing wildly different images or tones? And, why might they be asking us to make it? In addition, I wondered how a poem might act through accrual, perhaps like a collage.

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Caroline Kim on Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories

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Caroline Kim on Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories

(Guest post by Caroline Kim)

I came across Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories by mistake. During the time I volunteered at Hyphen Magazine, it got sent to me, the fiction editor, instead of to its rightful recipient, the book reviews editor. I had often watched in envy as she received a pile of books at our bimonthly meetings, so when I got my own slim, brown package, I did not hand it over to her right away. I took it home, opened it to the first story, read the beginning paragraphs, and immediately emailed her to ask if I could write a review of it.

Talk about the right book at the right time.

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R. Cathey Daniels on Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: Set Pieces

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R. Cathey Daniels on Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: Set Pieces

(Guest post by R. Cathey Daniels)

Chasing that revision villain, What’s-Going-Wrong, often comes at the expense of letting her more elusive sister, What-Must-Go-Right, escape. At least for me it does. Thankfully, in the fraught days just prior to my final revision deadline for my novel Live Caught, my mind—like a drowning river rat grasping at a bob of drift wood—somehow spotted a claw hold on a new way of examining What-Must-Go-Right, and scrambled aboard.

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Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime

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Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime

(Guest post by Vendela Vida)

I don’t always enjoy picking out what I’m going to wear for a particular occasion, but I absolutely love picking out clothes for my characters. Characters who are uncomfortable in their outfits make me feel at home.

There’s a clothing description at the start of Christopher Bollen’s recent literary thriller, A Beautiful Crime, that I deeply admire because it highlights the discrepancy between who the protagonist, Nick Brink, is and who he’s pretending to be. These paragraphs appear in the first chapter when Nick has just arrived in Venice to execute his plan to sell counterfeit antiques to a wealthy American living in a grand palazzo.

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James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

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James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

(Guest post by James Cagney)

I was sitting in the back of a mildly crowded bus lumbering through downtown Oakland. It was the 90s, I was on my way to class at college. I recall nothing else of the day except a moment of looking once and not being able to look away. In the years before cell phones forced riders’ heads down into their laps, people examined their world. My eyes swept upward and found a single interior car card displaying instead of an advert or Transit Driver yearbook pictures—a poem.

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

(Guest post by Joan Silber)

Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with.

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

(Guest post by Harriet Scott Chessman)

I am a minimalist at heart, and now more than ever I’m searching for inspiration – comfort – significance – in the smallest number of words possible. So, last March, almost a year ago, I felt enormously glad to discover “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney. A gorgeous, lyrical sixteen-line poem (two more lines than a sonnet), it isn’t a haiku, yet it has the feeling of a haiku blossoming into something more. I have held this poem close all year, like a touchstone; this winter, as we approach March again, it’s helping me come back to writing.

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

(Guest post by Lucy Jane Bledsoe)

In this year of global illness (not just the pandemic—but I won’t write out the depressing list, you already know it), we are at a possible crossroad. I won’t use the word opportunity, and I won’t use the word hope. They are too limp. Both allow avoidance and denial. I’m going to go with reset and refresh, both personally and as a species, because these words require planning, dialogue, boots on the ground, in other words, work. Two extraordinary novels that take readers from a harrowing place of seemingly no escape to a new vision, using gritty and detailed dialogue and action, are Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

(Guest post by Maw Shein Win)

In the fall of 2019, I met poet Jennifer Hasegawa at Moe’s Books in Berkeley for a reading hosted by Omnidawn (our shared publisher). Months later and at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I ordered La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, her marvelous full-length poetry collection. I was immediately attracted to her interest in “paranormal phenomena, including alien encounters” (as stated in her bio) as well as her background in performance art and poetry films.

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

(Guest post by Pamela Painter)

Yes, we have the musings and dreams of Hamlet, and Raskolnikov, and Scrooge, Katherine in Wuthering Heights, and Offred’s dreams and nightmares in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was the use of a dream in an Alice Munro story that provided the solution to an impasse in one of my own stories.

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

(Guest post by Judy Juanita)

Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily. I can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. It happened with Death of a Salesman after news broke of Dustin Hoffman’s sexist treatment of a coworker during the play’s filming; a student asked me if I would stop teaching it. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand.

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Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

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Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

(Guest post by Charles Baxter)

Before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, you could go into bookstores and browse. You could amble down the aisles and look for something that might snag your attention. For much of my adult life, I’ve suspected that books are not simple inanimate objects but are haunted.

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

(Guest post by Margot Livesey)

If I weren’t a writer, then I always thought I’d work for Oxfam and if I couldn’t work for Oxfam then I’d like to teach people to read. What could be more life-changing than the experience of letters becoming words, words becoming sentences, sentences becoming paragraphs that can fly off the page and into the world? As friends who work in theatre and music struggle to keep their art forms alive, I marvel at my banquet of words, and how I share that banquet with friends and strangers.

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

(Guest post by Ron Nyren)

My father had an uncanny ability to manage numbers. He could add long strings of them in his head, as well as multiply and divide sizable figures without writing them down, skills that served him well in keeping the books for the family business, Nyren Brothers Florists, then later as troubleshooter for a wholesale florist, and finally as a real estate agent before he retired. He also served as treasurer for the church, the town’s garden club, and just about every other organization he belonged to. In his last few years, in his late 80s, when his short-term memory began to fail him, he patiently taught my mother to take over balancing the checkbook.

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Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

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Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

(Guest post by Anne Raeff)

Two years ago, tired of being in a perpetual state of anger about the state of the world and the United States especially, my wife, Lori, and I decided that we needed a different approach to life. We needed to do something we had never done before, something that would give us purpose and from which we could learn in a new, not an intellectual, way. Over the years of our relationship—we have been together for 28 years—we sometimes talked about adopting a child or fostering, but we enjoyed the freedom and focus on our work and writing that childlessness provided, so the conversations never were very serious. But this time, when my wife, Lori, mentioned fostering, we kept on talking about it, imagining what it would be like.

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