It used to be the conventional wisdom that a movie always dumbed-down the novel it was based on. When film was a new medium, film makers assumed audiences needed to be led by the hand. But even a few decades down the line, we had those awful versions of A Farewell to Arms (Rock Hudson!) and The Great Gatsby. Read the rest of this entry »
An article in the current New Republic, “The Country of the Damned” by Adam Kirsch (TNR June 25) awakened memories. Kirsch discusses the grip that the Southern Agrarian ideology held on Allen Tate, who for a time was thought of as one of our greatest poets. Along the way, Kirsch quotes some atrociously racist and anti-semitic remarks that Tate made in print in his younger days, one being a declaration in the early 1930s that certain blacks accused of a particular crime (I forget what it was) should be executed whether guilty or not. Read the rest of this entry »
Of the better-known poets who contributed to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, I hear most often from Gibbons Ruark. In promoting the collection at libraries and bookstores, I’ve more than once chosen to read his contribution to the book, a poem called “With Our Wives in Late October.” Recently I emailed him to say how much people have appreciated this lovely and delicate poem. He responded to tell me that it was a conflation of a number of days spent with Jim and Annie during an autumn when they were neighbors. Here’s how it begins:
“Wandering with weather down the long hillside,
We come to the slender reeds in the water,
All of us who lazed by our own rivers
Summer and autumn.
Looking for redwings or leaves that were falling.
Light that was flying, the red wing of summer,
Never dreaming to be by one sure river
Gathered together.”
Gibbons ends the poem by describing the first stars of evening and “the loveliest faces of women.” It’s a wonderful tribute not only to James, but to Annie Wright and Kay Ruark.
Gibbons will have a poem in the June 25th issue of The New Republic.
Last night Northern Lights Books and Gifts of Duluth, MN threw a launch party for Anthony Bukoski’s North of the Port, his fifth collection of short stories. With these books, lovingly depicting the joys and heartaches of the Polish community in Superior, Wisconsin, Tony has achieved a well-deserved national following. While his writing is rooted firmly in regional culture, his themes of love, loss, and endurance, evoked by way of the everyday, are universal. Read the rest of this entry »
The window of my study looks into the backyard, which slopes downhill to my wife’s pottery studio, hidden by various trees and shrubs that have been keening under rain and eternal clouds for way too many days now. I remember sitting on a screened porch forty-some years ago with a girl who said, “I think whenever it rains, you can remember every time it’s ever rained.” Of course we didn’t have as much rain to remember then. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a branch of literary criticism that studies the role that readers play in determining or completing the literary work. You can talk, for instance, about how Jane Austen’s awareness the audience’s expectations might have helped to shape Emma. On the other end of the writer-reader alliance, you can talk about how the way readers are wired determines their understanding of a story or poem. In a wonderful novel by Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler, a character representing the reader constantly tinkers with the plot.
The critic Wolfgang Iser argued that all literary works contain “gaps” that must be filled either consciously or otherwise by readers. This line of speculation is influenced by a large volume of psychological and philosophical writing about perception, and fancy words such as “phenomenology” are batted back and forth. Below is my contribution to this discussion.
Lovely Reader,
I will say a poem to your eyes
someday when we are by a lake
and raindrops whisper secrets in the trees.
You will move me somewhere with your eyes,
perhaps a shore where small ships nod
and oceans breathe contentedly.
The poem will be summer wind in grass,
or sounds the insects make at night,
and it will walk the pathways of your eyes
To find the sea and board a ship
that journeys where the oceans roll
in eyes that make the poem whole.
Henricksen’s first rule of writing a memoir is that you better have had interesting experiences, and the second is that you better have something interesting to say about them. You ought to be clear in your mind about why total strangers, not just Mom, should read your little book.
Too many people are writing memoirs. There’s memoir glut. If you haven’t invented the doomsday machine or a cure for death, write letters to your friends. Don’t write a memoir.
But there are exceptions. An old friend of mine from New Orleans, Judy Connor, wrote a wonderful memoir called Southern Fried Divorce. I knew Judy when she sported a different last name, and I picked up her book having heard only that people in Louisiana were enjoying it. Five pages in, I realized that I had known the eccentrics and zanies she was offering up. Read the rest of this entry »
Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into an excellent film with Morgan Freeman. I’ve just finished reading the novel, finding it charming and moving. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, Baxter coaxes together a wonderful ensemble of characters, each recounting his or her own amorous tale.
The unifying device is the notion that each character is speaking to the author, Baxter himself, as he seeks out people to tell him about their encounters with Cupid. Baxter is deft in creating the unique voice of each character, and perhaps he’s at the top of his game with the character of Chloe, a latter-day flower child who broke my heart and then put it together again.
Lost Hills Books became a reality last December, when the two titles featured on the website arrived from the printer. I promptly sent copies to a person living in my town who writes book news for a magazine. She and I are members of a large, regional writers’ group, and of course I thought I might receive a response. Nope. Recently, I emailed her to ask if the books had been received and if she might be able to mention them in print. She replied that she doesn’t read unsolicited books and that mine had been passed on to charity. Splat.
As a check on my perspective, I’ll tell a story I’ve told on myself before. I taught English at Loyola University New Orleans in the 1970’s, and somewhere around 1977 Walker Percy agreed to drive over the causeway from Covington a couple of times a week to teach a creative writing class in our department. His presence was a gift to the university and a definite feather in our cap. Department members promised to see that things went smoothly for him, which included insulating him from people who might show up seeking favors. Walker had been a bit of a recluse in Covington.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I drove to Crosby, a small city about 100 miles west of Duluth. This year is the 30th Anniversary for the Hallett Memorial Library, and Peggi, the lady who runs things with great energy, skill and good humor, had invited me as part of the celebration. On Thursday evening I spoke about James Wright, and on Friday I conducted a workshop on fiction for the Quill Masters.
The QMs are an enthusiastic group of local writers, and we had a lot of fun bouncing ideas around. I talked about how to tweak dialogue to suggest the things that characters won’t say outright, and how to shape plots so that what is unsaid at the outset rises to the surface as things heat up.
