Isak

"I'll bet John motherfucking Updike doesn't even know who I am."

I've used this space to vent my feelings on the romanticized alcoholism of many a "literary giant." From Norman Mailer to Hunter S. Thompson, plastering oneself into bully-stupors too often comes packaged in bemused anecdotes.

Here, though, is another take: "How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever's?"

You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I'm completely blotto by 10 a.m. because of a deep, withering fear that my family will eventually discover my bisexuality. And, to top it all off, we were both born in Wollaston, Massachusetts, if you can believe it! But just because he's one of history's finest short story writers, Cheever's epic benders are considered delightful, whereas I've just got a "serious problem with alcohol."

What a bunch of horseshit.

Via Bookninja.

When I Was a Kid, There Was This Thing Called A "Book Review" ...

Now that the LA Times its about to print it's last book section--and beginning the sad era of shoveling any lit coverage to the calendar section, a move its book editors are protesting--Scott McLemee offers a stalwart essay on the "debt of honor" of writing about books in our periodicals. And on the way, he has insight into its pleasures.

Not all of it comes down to economics, though. We’re also talking about the effects of a long-term change in ethos.

People at newspapers ... once held respect, verging on reverence, for the printed word as such. A sort of continuum existed between the world of newspapers and that of books. The examples of H.L. Mencken, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Lippmann seemed to prove it. Each had been a journalist and gone on to write things of a more durable nature; and knowledge of this possibility left its mark on others. ...

Over the years, book-review sections have existed because somebody in charge had a commitment to them – an old editor, perhaps, with an unfinished novel in the drawer, stored beneath the shot glasses. The oft-repeated claim that shrinking or abandoning book coverage is economically justified because publishers have stopped buying enough ads is nonsense. They never did; and anyway, no sports page depends on business from the teams it covers. The willingness to keep book sections alive was never rational in the narrowest sense. It manifested a sense of participation in print culture ...

... The Los Angeles Times Book Review was one of the last freestanding literary supplements in an American newspaper. Preserving it would have been a matter of pride to anyone capable of grasping that a newspaper is one part, potentially an honorable part, of print culture itself. Instead, the publisher is grasping dollars, and honor has nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: I just caught this other reason why it's curtains for those quaint things called "books" at the LA Times. Think it's just a west coast disease? Nope. Enter Exhibit M.

A Prize Of One's Own

It's a good day for bylines: a second article of mine is out today. It's headlined, "Women's Book Prizes Fire Up Literary Canon," it's over at Women's eNews, and here's an excerpt:

... The question of whether single-gender awards are still needed to transform a literary culture comes amid a boom of fiction written by women, including what's characterized as "chick lit." Women also form the majority of U.S. book-buyers and are becoming the majority in publishing house staffs.

(Orange Prize co-founder Kate Mosse) said the issue is not the number of books authored by women but the shortage of those books by women that are honored and promoted by literary culture. That is how books get in the hands of readers, and how the canon of literature is built.

The Russians Steal My Heart

Their names ring bells inside me: Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Vladmir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Turgenev. With strange slippery stories and poems, visionary novels and novellas, they'll have me coming back to them my whole life long.

One Russian I haven't read yet is Maxim Gorky. I know nearly nothing about the guy, actually. Happily, a feature in The New Republic on Gorky, and particularly his "reminiscences" of Tolstoy," gives me a starting place. The occasion? A new translation of Gorky's memoir of Tolstoy by Donald Fanger that TNR calls "fascinating."

When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. ...

The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.

(Gorky's) memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. ...

The Fortunate Fiction Writer

Like most writers, I've had a lot of lame workshops in the past. And I'm not even talking about the classroom kind.

In a poetry class in college, we had assigned small groups. We were supposed to spend our Thursday session out in the world, sharing our poems with each other, talking passionately about craft and writing we love in a very "non-workshoppy" way. It was a great concept by the class teacher, Ken Mikolowski, one meant to make the community piece of a vibrant poetic life as meaningful for us young folks as it is for him.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of hanging around with my group. One fellow rarely showed up. Two others had the passion, but had trouble delivering anything but compliments, or, if on the rare occasion they didn't like something, they offered the vaguest of vague lines: "I just didn't find it satisfying." I didn't like the poems I read from that group very much, which made it hard to feel engaged in supporting the writer to make them better. I don't think that mattered much, because I'm not sure the writers cared much beyond the first draft. And I didn't feel like being the asshole who dared be specifically negative.

Not that I had it all together. It was hard for me to muster the energy to try very hard on any poems or revisions for the group. I distinctly remember taking a few lyrical passages of my stories, inserting line breaks in them, calling them poems, and passing them to the group for feedback I didn't care about.

I had another workshop with a couple pals in Boston. A fiction one, which instantly engaged me more. Well, two of us wrote fiction. The other wrote poems.

Ah, a classic set-up: bright lights, big city, Tuesday evenings in coffee shops to talk writing and make lists of book recommendations in my Moleskine. I had more fun, because I liked these cats, but this workshop fizzled out too. Something felt forced--we all liked to write, we were friends, therefore we should be naturals to critique each other's work, right? That assumption was wrong; we just weren't as invested in what each other was trying to do in order to be much help. The hyper-politeness of my past poetry group was blessedly not there, but neither was the passion that makes this sort of thing take off.

I tried a couple rounds using Craig's List to connect with other fiction writers. That turned out exactly how you think it turned out.

But now. Now.

I have one that works. I have one that's as exciting as those I jealously heard others tell of.

It's with six gals I know from my MFA progam. Most of us got going last February; there was one who had to step out, two others who stepped in. We send out our stories to each other on the 1st of the month, returning stories with line-editing and letters on the 21st; it's a pattern familiar to us from our program and, happily, that means we have a common basis for the thoroughness and care expected in our editing. There are times when one of us steps out for a month; there are times when we send something longer than the (very general) guideline of 20 pages.

While standard workshop etiquette is to avoid being prescriptive, we have come to embrace it; we are all strong enough as writers to take the feedback for what it is. I for one have loved hearing alternative visions or ideas for my work. My response to it helps me gauge where to take the story at hand.

The magic of this group is that I have enormous admiration for the stories I'm reading; I am downright excited to help imagine how they can move forward. This sets up a basis of trust for the responses I get back on my stories. And over time, it's been interesting to get long-view feedback. What are my patterns, for better and worse?

We're also considering using Skype or another tool to continue conversations that have come up in our letters--about race in fiction, for example, or about managing narrative disorientation.

Today, I got back responses on a story of mine called "On Being the Daughter of a Man in Prison." I've been knocking around with this story for ages. One of it's trademarks is its manipulation of point-of-view; it moves between first- and second-person. But I've struggled in making the transitions have the impact I want them to have--to be noticed, but not be bewildering; to resonate, but not diminish all the other stuff going on in the story.

I sent a draft of this story to the group earlier on, and by god if I didn't take a big step forward with a story that's stagnated in my own bewilderment of how to work out its problems. This month I sent the revision--to a smaller section of our workshop, as the gals who are still students at Warren Wilson College were down in North Carolina for the MFA residency.

They pointed out the places where my POV switches aren't quite in line with my intentions. They pointed out opportunities for expansion. And they celebrated what works, which I needed to hear.

So inspired was I, I immediately went to work on the story this afternoon. And after several exhilarating hours, I think this story is finally ready to be sent out in the world.

I'm left feeling immense gratitude for the sharp-sighted, generous, and exceptionally honest readers in this workshop. I'm left feeling glad that all those lame workshop attempts in the past didn't get me to a point where I swore them off altogether. I'm left excited to see what new work I'll get to read from them in August--and what work of theirs that you too will soon read, because these talented writers have a place out in literary land.

On a Play, a Priest, Napalm, a Trial, and a Spiritual Base

Awhile back, I found and read a strange little play called The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It was by Father Daniel Berrigan, the creative nonviolence activist, Jesuit priest, and poet. Among his many direct actions of civil disobedience, he's remembered for one that dubbed him a member of the title's Catonsville Nine: forty years ago, he, his brother, and six others walked into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, took a set of draft files outside, and burned them with homemade napalm.

Here they are:

The play told the story of their trial for destruction of property, a trial that refused to allow the "why" for the action to enter the court testimony. As Berrigan tells it, in the one-act play that draws from the trial's transcript, the nine of them pointedly returned again and again to the why, and the powerful spiritual tradition that informed them. Their words of the nine come to reverberate like an ancient chant. He writes their language in verse, like a scripture, which contrasts with the unnamed court officials' prosaic speech.

The Nation profiles Fr. Berrigan, now 87, "forty years after Catonsville." And journalist Chris Hedges places Berrigan's story in its context of radical spirituality:

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

"Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians," he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. "She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking."

Berrigan's relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton's "great contribution to the religious left," he says, "was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, 'Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.'"

Hardly packaged up in history, Berrigan resonates in our modern moment: election year 2008, an era incessantly referred to as "post-9/11," a time when we wrangle over mediocre responses to global warming and get ourselves all in a fuss over a New Yorker cover.

The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would be illegal." He is critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church" ... He despairs of universities, especially Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. ...  And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now "disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline."

"The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life," he says. "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base."

What then is to be done? Is there nothing but mourning left for us ... or, in spiritual terms, are we experiencing our lamentation?

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go." ...

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

"The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living--the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet--was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place," he says. "We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation."

This seems a good moment to raise a glass to Tom Lewis, another one of the Catonsville Nine, who continued his life committed to creative nonviolence. He passed away last April.

Jonah House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker that has been a home to the Berrigans, Lewis and countless other good souls, celebrates Catonsville's 40th anniversary with an interesting online library (for which all images in this little essay of mine are credited) that is still there for us who couldn't attend the films, conversations, potlucks, teach-ins, vigils and witnesses that Jonah House facilitated in May.

For your exploration, consider also "Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File."

But once you're done exploring, for now, what are we going to do? There's so much that's possible ...

Interlocuting on Intercourse

Jane Smiley's review of Robert Olen Butler's Intercourse: Stories borrows the form that verges on Platonic dialogue. No, really. With more than a touch of humor added in. Seems to be a right strategy to describe Butler's book, which features the dual monologues of couples who are having sex ... from Adam and Eve, to JFK and Hitler, to newlyweds who are interrupted by the sinking of the Titanic.

Jack: Read me a line.

Jane: "The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette." He gives that to Milton Berle.

Jack: (laughs) That was good.

Jane: He's having sex with Aimee Semple McPherson.

Jack: How does she like it?

The Choice of the Subscriber

I don't have much money to subscribe to my favorite lit journals. Hell, I'm in a fury to pay off loans from my undergraduate and graduate days, which means I'm mowing lawns and writing articles at a frenetic pace alongisde my full-time gig. But there's so much good work out there, and I believe so deeply in doing my part in sustaining a vibrant literary culture, that I make room in my budget to subscribe to at least one or two of the best out there.

Of course, this means I have tough choices to make. I've been musing over the last week or so about what lit journal I was going to subscribe to, having room right now for only one. I've already got some Crazyhorse coming to me, which is a joy, but what else?

The shortlist included:

• Hayden's Ferry Review
• One Story
• Brick
• Glimmer Train
• Tin House
• Black Warrior Review

I'd love them all, of course. But here's what emerged as my top choice.

This also seems to be the right time to offer a sorrowful good-bye to a real great lit journal: Other Voices. They're transitioning to a book-only company and losing the magazine, which is a loss to us all. The Ontario Review, which I never knew well, is also closing up shop after the death of Raymond Smith, its founder and editor (and the man who moonlighted as Mr. Joyce Carol Oates).

Bat Segundo Buried

Oh, dear! Sorry news, indeed.

If it's not going to be Bat, what new literary alt media project will fill the void? Who's going to step up?

And The Nominees Are ...

... well, actually, that depends on you.

Here's the word: The New Media Women Entrepreneurs project is launching an awards program next year to honor the contributions of creative entrepreneurial women to news, information and ideas.

Who would you like to nominate an award candidate? What do you think? Andi Zeisler and/or Lisa Jervis of Bitch Magazine? Jill Filopovic of Feministe? brownfemipower, the ever-awesome? Carman Van Kerkhove of New Demographic, Racialicious and the great podcast, Addicted to Race? Nancy Gruver of New Moon Magazine, the pub I wish I had in my hands as a young girl? The brilliant Heather Corinna, the gal behind Scarleteen (and also a past Isak interviewee). Corinna, if I may quote myself, "was one of the first to carve out space for creative, compassionate, and informed sexuality on the Internet."

It'd be great to get some lit bloggers on the slate, be it Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, Maud Newton, or Sarah Weinman.

UPDATE: The New Media call-out comes with the announcement of this year's winners of the $10,000 awards. They are:

• Echo, a system of public storytelling installations in Atlanta. Led by Lila King and Karyn Lu, movers behind CNN's user-generated site, iReport.com.Watch their first video blog post.
• Latina Voices, a news site for and by Latinas. Led by Teresa Puente, a journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago and member of the Chicago Sun-Times. Read her first blog post.
• Northwest Navy News, a networking site for Puget Sound's military community. Led by Elaine Helm Norton, new media editor at The Daily Herald in Everett, Wash., and former military beat reporter. Read her first blog post.