Holiday Wishlist 2013

It’s been an intense semester for me, as I suspect it was for all our editors. Aside from my duties here at The Journal and my coursework as an MFA student, I was also teaching for the first time in my life. Teaching was exhausting and rewarding, but it also so thoroughly colonized my brain that I had little time to ponder anything else. My reading for fun dwindled to basically nothing, and I spent most of my evenings curled up watching TV and shoveling ice cream in my mouth to deal with lesson planning–related anxiety.

Now that the semester’s over, I’ve got way more brain space to give over to literature, and thanks to my teaching-induced reading hiatus, a significant backlog of books I’ve been meaning to read.

As the semester drew to a close, and deadlines loomed, I found myself immersed in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. It was a delightful form of procrastination (except for some of those middle chapters about Smallweed and Mr. George, when I couldn’t help but shout, “Where, oh where, is Lady Dedlock?”), and I’ll admit I neglected my final revisions in favor of spending more time immersed in the world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. (Can we talk about Richard Carstone? Namely, how he is the worst?) There’s no real point to this paragraph: I just want it on the public record that I’ve read Bleak House. All 897 pages, and the afterword by Elizabeth McCracken.

Speaking of McCracken, I was recently in Cambridge, MA, and I happened upon a copy of McCracken’s first book of short stories Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry in Harvard Bookstore. (Previous attempts to get it from OSU’s Thompson Library had been unsuccessful.) I barrelled through half of it before I boarded my plane back home to Columbus. McCracken’s stories are surprising and sad and never sentimental. I’m already excited for her new collection, due out in April 2014.

I’m still wading my way through Chris Adrian’s lush and lyrical The Children’s Hospital (which comes in at a not-quite-Bleak House length of 600+ pages) and am content to take it slow. Adrian’s tale of a flood of biblical proportions that leaves only the tricked-out children’s hospital of the title (it has a replicator that can produce anything they need, extra quarters for the staff that now lives there, an “angel” that talks to them) afloat is funny, fantastical, and exceptionally dark. It’s different from (and yet, also, somehow similar to) his 2011 novel The Great Night, which took Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and recast it in current-day San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Adrian, a pediatric oncologist with degrees from both Harvard Divinity School and The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, brings to the page a keen understanding of both the mechanics of our fragile human bodies and our strivings after something greater than ourselves.

I’m in the middle of  three (or rather in the middle of one, and through the first third of two other) essay collections: White Girls by Hilton Als, This Is Running For Your Life by Michelle Orange, and My 1980s and Other Essays by Wayne Koestenbaum.

Beyond that, I’ve heard Beyonce released a new album. Perhaps I should look into that.

It’s winter break, so I finally have more time for extracurricular reading. Naturally, instead of doing that, I’ve been watching a ton of terrible shows on Netflix. Don’t Trust the B— In Apt 23 anyone? No? Just me? Oh well.

I’ve also been doing a lot of revising, which is my least favorite part of writing by far, the moment of truth when I have to go from “eh, NBD, I can fix this” to actually fixing it. In addition to revising, some friends and I have a gentlemen’s agreement to write one single-spaced page of new creative work per day, which is proving more of a challenge than expected, but also feels pretty damn good. For as much as my life focuses on writing (taking workshops, writing SO MANY critique letters, teaching creative writing, etc.) it often feels like I do precious little writing of my own, particularly since I tend to write in intensive bursts rather than consistently.

Since I’ve been keeping pretty busy with my writing-revising-Netflix schedule, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories, rather than digging into any novels, since it’s a quick in-and-out with no risk that I’ll get too involved and then suddenly come to three days later. I’ve been reading through back issues of The Paris Review, recent Best American Short Stories anthologies, and the current issue of American Short Fiction. I find almost as much pleasure in the stories I really don’t like as the ones I do, not due to any kind of bitchy delight, but because it reassures me to think about how subjective taste is, and that really publishing relies very much of getting work into the hands of people whose taste aligns with one’s own. Also, as someone who is perhaps too quick to believe that something I don’t like is objectively bad, it’s good to be reminded this isn’t the case. Even I can admit that any story making it into any of the above publications is certainly not bad, even if I don’t care for it. In the past couple weeks I’ve come across two stories I particularly liked, even though they really aren’t similar at all.

The first is “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, which originally appeared in One Story Issue #142, but I read in the 2011 BASS collection. The narrator of “Housewifely Arts” is grieving for her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship. She is a single mother, and takes her young son on a road trip to the sleazy roadside zoo where her mother’s African gray parrot, Carnie, now resides. She never cared for Carnie, but the parrot is able to imitate her dead mother’s voice perfectly, and she is desperate to hear it. As in any good story about grief, there is more than a little guilt mixed in—her mother loved the bird, and begged her to take care of it when she was moved to a nursing home, but she refused. “Housewifely Arts” is one of those stories that makes me feel completely inadequate as a writer. Bergman moves fluidly back and forth between the past and present in a way that is so artful—a way I feel like I’ll never be able to accomplish myself. Unlike some stories I read that are unlike my own, but I don’t mind because it’s clear the author simply has different concerns than I do, this story is different from my own in a way that makes me deeply jealous. It’s a story I’m sure I’ll come back to time and again as I attempt to figure out the mechanics of moving through time more effectively.

The second is “The Horror We Made” by Kevin Wilson, from American Short Fiction Issue 56. I love every little thing about this story, from the premise (a group of adderall-addled teenage girls film a horror movie during a sleepover), to the sharp characterization of each girl, to the main character’s somewhat reluctant attraction to her friend’s CREEPY older brother. Anyone who knows my taste, both in reading and writing, will realize that this checks all my boxes. This story is opposite to “Housewifely Arts” in its handling of time. Rather than seeing the past in scene, the story sticks to the present, moves linearly, and covers a brief span of time, only one night. I found this deeply reassuring—proof that a story doesn’t have to conquer time like a magician in order to be amazing.

I strongly encourage you to check out these two stories. They aren’t available online, but you can purchase a copy of One Story #142 through One Story‘s website (or check out the 2011 BASS) to read “Housewifely Arts”, and American Short Fiction Issue 56 is available for purchase online or in a bookstore near you. Enjoy!

Books

1. By Herself, poems by Debora Greger

2. Metaphysical Dog, poems by Frank Bidart

3. Reread all of Gjertrud Schnakenberg’s books of poems (I read her earlier books as an undergraduate and feel I should read them again)

Movies

4. The Wolf of Wall Street

5. August: Osage County

6. The Invisible Woman

It seems my only wish, ever, is to get through the stack of books on my bedside table. You know, the stack that’s about twenty-three books high now and is ever-growing. The stack that’s a smorgasbord of new and old and prose and poetry. A sampler:

1. Don DeLillo’s White Noise

2. Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems

3. Ocean Vuong’s No

4. Indivisible (Banerjee, Kaipa, & Sundaralingam’s Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry)

5. Mark Strand’s Hopper

6. Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land

7. Jamaal May’s Hum

8. Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture

9. Matthew Zapruder’s The Pajamist

10. Emilia Phillips’ Signaletics

…but something tells me even that abbreviated list is a tad ambitious.

I’m also particularly excited to see Blue Is The Warmest Color, Kill Your Darlings, and Anchorman 2. (And no, I’m not ashamed. Stay classy, San Diego.)