Season 05

On this Lit Show, Nicholson Baker sits down with co-host Ben Mauk to discuss his new novel, House of Holes. Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of non-fiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle award.

Baker’s novels explore the experience of consciousness against the background of life’s flotsam and jetsam: buying shoelaces in The Mezzanine, feeding a six-month-old daughter in Room Temperature, and lighting a morning fire in A Box of Matches. These slim volumes pay loving attention to the domestic and quotidian, with whirligig sentences that have led the New York Times to describe Baker as “one of the most beautiful, original, and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades.”

But he may be better known for the bawdy fantasias of his sex “trilogy,” which includes the novels Vox, The Fermata, and most recently House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, which Slate described as “the extravagant, bravura performance of a writer as truly manically interested in craft as he is obsessed with sex.”

Baker’s eye for unconventional subjects and his idiosyncratic, ever-growing set of interests (he’s written about poetry and rhyme in his novel The Anthologist, the endangered paper culture in Double Fold, and pacifism during World War II in Human Smoke) make him perhaps the most unpredictable writer at work today.

Baker lives with his family in Maine. He is the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and will give a free reading on Thursday, April 5th at 8:00 p.m. in the W151 auditorium of the Pappajohn Business Building.

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This Lit Show features recent Writers’ Workshop graduate Chinelo Okparanta, whose short story “America” is a centerpiece of Granta‘s new “Exit Strategies” issue. Granta‘s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey joins her in the studio by phone.

Okparanta discussed her childhood memories of Port Harcourt, Nigeria and her first impressions of the United States; the environmental crises faced by residents of the Niger Delta region; and the reasons why Nigeria continues to be the backdrop for her fiction—even after many years in the United States. After reading an excerpt from a new short story, “Fairness,” Okparanta and Ellah Allfrey addressed their writer-editor relationship, the role of folk tales within Okparanta’s short stories, and the subversive quietness of her prose.

Chinelo Okparanta was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University and her MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her short stories are forthcoming in GRANTA, Conjunctions, and Subtropics. Her collection of stories, Tumors and Butterflies, and her first novel, Under the Udara Trees, are also forthcoming. She has worked as a Sears sales associate, an English and French teacher at the middle and high school levels, an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, a reader for NPR’s Three Minute Fiction Contest, and an editorial assistant for The Iowa Review. She is currently working on her second novel.

Ellah Allfrey is Deputy Editor of Granta. Before joining Granta, she was Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House where she continued to published history titles as well as introducing a list of young African writers including Brian Chikwava, Dinaw Mengestu and Peter Akinti. She sits on the board of the Writers’ Centre Norwich, and this year is on the judging panel of both the David Cohen Prize and the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her introduction to Woman of the Aeroplanes by Kojo Laing (Pearson, African Writers Series) is published this February. A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Allfrey was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to the publishing industry.

On Thursday, February 9th at 7 PM, Okparanta will join Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet, for a reading at Prairie Lights.

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Season 05
Episode 04
Air date: Thursday, February 9th, at 3 PM CST

On this Lit Show, Ben Marcus discusses his new novel, The Flame Alphabet. Marcus is the author of two previous books, The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, and the co-author (with artist Matthew Ritchie) of The Father Costume.

Marcus’s work centers (or de-centers) around language, mythology, and a perverse rationality that leaves the reader equal parts befuddled and captivated. The Age of Wire and String matches the prose style of technical writing and travel books to surreal, dreamy anecdotes and definitions. Notable American Women is no less experimental, turning familiar postmodern tropes (such as the inclusion of the author as character) inside-out.

Marcus will chat with co-host Ben Mauk about The Flame Alphabet, a novel in which a mysterious epidemic has caused language to become toxic.

On Thursday, February 9th, Ben Marcus will read at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, 7 PM.

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Air date: 12/7/2011, 2 PM CST

Students and alumni of Iowa’s graduate writing programs share new work. Featuring Charlene Choi, Michael Fauver, Deborah Kennedy, B.J. Love, Anna Morrison, Rebecca Rukeyser, Montreux Rotholtz, and Ben Shattuck.

Authors and Works

Rebecca Rukeyser, from “The Chinese Barracks”

Montreux Rotholtz, five poems

Anna Morrison, five poems

Deborah Kennedy, from “This Is My Country”

B. J. Love, poems from Bastards

Ben Shattuck, from Ambition and a Massacre

Charlene Choi, from “Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been?”

Michael Fauver, “Marchers”

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Air date: 11/16/2011, 2 PM CST

This week, Peter Orner returns to The Lit Show to discuss Love and Shame and Love, his second novel.

We talked about the midwest, the book’s many short, impressionistic passages, memory and narrative, and the tawdry allure of Chicago politics.

Orner will read and sign copies at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on Wednesday, November 16th at 7 PM.

Peter Orner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice won a Pushcart Prize. Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship (2007-2008). A film version of one of Orner’s stories, “The Raft” with a screenplay by Orner and the film’s director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin/​ Mariner, 2001) was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Esther Stories was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book. Of the book, Margot Livesey wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.”

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006) is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990′s. The novel was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and German.

Orner is also the editor of two non-fiction books, Underground America (2008) and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (co-editor Annie Holmes, 2010), both published by McSweeney’s/​ Voice of Witness, an imprint devoted to using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Harper’s Magazine wrote, “Hope Deferred might be the most important publication out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years.”

Listen to Peter Orner in his first appearance on the program, in March 2011, when he discussed his previous book, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.

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Episode 12

Air date: 11/11/2011, 1 PM CST

On this episode of the Lit Show, co-host Ben Mauk talks with Michael Martone about teaching, writing, and the Midwest.

Martone’s large body of work confuses the boundaries of fiction and fact, memoir and essay. At the same time he has emerged as a defining chronicler of the Midwestern experience, and he has edited several collections of essays and photographs in an effort to define that amorphous region.

Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. He is the author of, most recently, Four for a Quarter, a work of fiction whose subject and structure are defined by the number four. He is also the author of Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, The Blue Guide to Indiana, and Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books.

Joining Martone for this episode is a roundtable of former students–fiction and nonfiction alumnae of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop–to discuss their experiences studying with him, and their own teaching and writing lives. Rachel Yoder, Dylan Nice, and Zachary Tyler Vickers join us at the half hour.

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Since 1967, over a thousand writers from more than 120 countries have attended the IWP at the University of Iowa. Every fall semester, several dozen established and emerging creative writers—poets, fiction writers, dramatists, and non-fiction writers— come to the University to make time for their writing, take part in Iowa City’s literary culture, and experience daily life in America. For many IWP writers, the residency provides their first direct experience of the United States. The minimum requirement for consideration is that each writer has published at least one book, and has sufficient English language proficiency.

This episode, part one of a two-part series, featured, in alphabetical order: Park Chan Soon (South Korea), Naseer Hassan (Iraq), Usha K. R. (India), Fabienne Kanor, (France), Alexandra Petrova (Russia), Ogochukwu Promise (Nigeria), and Milena Oda (Germany).

Author Selections

Usha K.R. (India): Excerpt from the novel The Chosen.

Milena Oda (Germany): Excerpt from the essay “Dog’s Freedom”

Naseer Hassan (Iraq): Poems from the collection Dayplaces.

Park Chansoon (S. Korea): Excerpt from the short story “Ladybugs Fly from the Top”

Ogochukwu Promise (Nigeria): Poems from the collections Madeba and Blazing Hope

Alexandra Petrova (Russian by birth, Italian national): Poems from the collections Residence Permit and Just the Trees.

Fabienne Kanor (France) (Read w/ Kecia Lynn): Excerpt from her novel Humus.

Author Bios

Usha K. R. (novelist, fiction writer, editor; India) is the author of four novels: Sojourn (1998), The Chosen (2003), A Girl and a River (2007), and Monkey-man (2010). Monkey-Man was long-listed for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize and was was shortlisted for the DSC South Asia Prize. Her essays and short stories have been featured in magazines, newspapers, collections and anthologies, including the Katha Prize Stories Volume 5. She occasionally reviews books for the Deccan Herald and is the managing editor of IIMB Management Review, in Bangalore. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Milena ODA (fiction writer, playwright, translator; Germany) was born in Czechoslovakia and now works in Berlin as an editor, translator and journalist for Radio WDR, Der Freitag, Prager Zeitung, Literární noviny, and others. Her play Mehr als Meer was staged at the Central European Theatre Festival and at the 2009 Forum of Independent Theatre Groups in Alexandria. Oda is the recipient of the 2007 Marguerite d’Or in Vienna, and was nominated for the 2007 Ingeborg-Bachmann award. Her work, in German, Czech, and English, has been featured in the Entdeckungen 2. Cd/DVD Anthology, Ostragehege, Labyrint Revue, Lauter Niemand, Volltext, and Contact. In 2010 she published her first novel, Nennen Sie mich Diener [Please Call Me Servant].

Naseer HASSAN (poet, translator; Iraq) is the manager of a cultural NGO poetry forum, a producer at Free Iraq Radio, and an award-winning journalist. He has published four poetry collections, [The Circle of Sundial] (1998), [Suggested Signs] (2007), [Being Here] (2008) and Dayplaces (2010). In addition to his [Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems and Critical Articles] (2009), [Days of the Shore: Selections From the New American Poetry For the Period 1980-2010] (2011), and [Luis George Borges: 60 poems] (2011), he has several book-length translations forthcoming, including House of the Star: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and the German philosopher Arthurs Schopenhauer’s philosophical work (The World as Will and Representation). His collected poems were published in 2010 by the Arabic House for Publishing in Beirut.

PARK Chan Soon (fiction writer, translator; South Korea) made her literary debut in 2006 after working as a film translator for dubbing and subtitling for thirty years, with over fifty documentaries and hundreds of feature films to her credit—including Robocop. She has also worked as a subtitler for film festivals, and translated a number of books for adults and children. She is the author of [Whisperings of a Translator – Movie Translation, Aesthetics of Communication] (2005); her first collection of short stories, [The Garden of Balhae] came out in 2009. She is a professor of English Literature at Seoul Women’s University.

Ogochukwu PROMISE (fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright; Nigeria) is the founder and coordinator of the Lumina Foundation which instituted the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa; she also initiated the Get Africa Reading Project and runs a mobile library. Ogochukwu edits and publishes the literary magazine The Lumina, and the magazine Children’s Classic. An author of 16 novels, six collections of poetry, two short story collections, four plays, two essay collections, thirty children’s books, and editor of four literary collections, she has received seven Association of Nigerian Authors awards for her poetry and fiction. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Alexandra PETROVA (poet, fiction writer; Russia/Italy) was born in Russia, lived in Jerusalem and currently resides in Rome. She is the author of three collections of poetry Линия Отрыва [Point of Detachment] (1994), Вид на жительство [Residence Permit] (2000), and Только деревья [Just the Trees] (2008). Her poems have appeared in Russian magazines: Znamia, Zvezda, and Zerkalo, in English in Literary Revue, Modern Poetry in Translation, Drunken Boat, Guernica, and many more. She has also written a play “Пастухи Долли” [Dolly's Shepherds, A Philosophical Play]. She was short listed for the Andrej Belyj award (2001, 2007) and she has received awards the “Migrante” European Poetry meeting (2006), Belgrade’s Festival of Poetry Trceg TRG (2008), and the Torino Festival’s Sixth Annual National Mother Language Literary Competition (2011). She is currently at work on her first novel. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Fabienne KANOR (novelist, filmmaker; France) is the author of four novels, including Les Chiens ne font pas des chats (2008) and Anticorps (2010), as well as the children’s novel Le Jour où la mer a disparu (2008). She received the Fetkann Award for her novel D’Eaux Douces (2004), and the RFO Literary Award for Humus (2006). Kanor has also made a number of short documentaries and films, including C’est qui l’homme?, winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the Angers Film Festival in 2008. She has worked as a reporter at France 3, , Radio Nova (Paris), and International French Radio RFI. She is completing her fifth novel and a screenplay for the feature-length film Derriére le morne. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

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On this Lit Show, Chuck Klosterman discusses his second novel, The Visible Man.

Victoria Vick is a therapist practicing in Austin, TX when she receives a call from a strange client, a man she refers to as “Y—.” He’s a peculiar case, brilliant and self-deprecating, cantankerous and contrite. Strangest of all, he only wants to conduct sessions by phone. Gradually, he lets on that he’s a former government scientist gone rogue, and he’s unlocked the secrets to human invisibility. He spends his days watching people, holed up in their homes, unseen, relishing the secret lives of his “targets.”

“I’ve consumed people’s lives without their consent,” Y— confesses to Vicki. She listens to him share the stories of the many human glimpses he has stolen, vacillating between horror and fascination; even as Y—’s stories become more sinister and menacing, she struggles to let go. “Would I ever have a patient this interesting again?” she asks herself. “This was like being Hitler’s therapist, or Springsteen’s, or Superman’s.”

The novel, presented as a draft manuscript of a forthcoming work, is an epistolary narrative updated for the 21st century: we learn about Vicki and Y—’s ongoing therapy through voicemails, blackberry texts, recorded transcripts, typed notes, and email. The account that unfolds is a chilling account of modern voyeurism, an exploration of the Promethean powers of technology, and an attempt to navigate the terrain between our physical and virtual selves.

Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Eating the Dinosaur. His debut book, Fargo Rock City, was the winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has written for GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, A.V. Club, and ESPN, and he now writes about sports and pop culture for Grantland.com.

Chuck Klosterman will read from and discuss The Visible Man at the Iowa City Public Library on Wednesday, November 9, beginning at 7 PM.

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On this Lit Show, co-host Ben Mauk speaks with Colson Whitehead about his new novel, Zone One, a darkly satiric portrait of the coming zombie apocalypse.

Whitehead is the author of the novels Sag Harbor, Apex Hides the Hurt, John Henry Days, and The Intuitionist, as well as a book of essays, The Colossus of New York. He lives in pre-apocalypse New York City.

Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Publishers Weekly says about Zone One: “Whitehead dumpster dives genre tropes, using what he wants and leaving the rest to rot, turning what could have been another zombie-pocalypse gore-fest into the kind of smart, funny, pop culture–filled tale that would make George Romero proud.”

Whitehead read at Prairie Lights on Friday, October 28th at 7 PM.

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On this Lit Show, Josh Rolnick discusses his short story collection Pulp and Paper, winner of the 2011 John Simmons Award (University of Iowa Press). Pulp and Paper was selected for the honor by Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants.

The eight stories in Pulp and Paper are divided into two geographic locales—four are set in New Jersey, four in New York state. The book’s's epigraph, taken from Ethan Canin’s America America, tells us early on that these stories will address life-altering trauma and transformation: “That’s another thing this story is about, I suppose: how there’s no going back.” For Rolnick’s narrators, life-as-it-was is no longer an option.

In “Funnyboy,” a grieving father confronts the teenage cheerleader who accidentally killed his son. In “Innkeeping,” a boy mourning the recent loss of his father rages against his mother’s relationship with a new man, a guest at their lakeside inn. And in “Big River,” we meet a young couple, expecting a baby, who have been sweethearts since fifth grade; an activist pamphlet changes their feelings about their unborn child, and each other.

Rolnick’s stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. His work has appeared in in the Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast. He’s also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Rolnick, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will return to Iowa City on October 27th, to read at Prairie Lights at 7 PM.

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Susan Orlean’s new biography is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary animal. The German shepherd who became Rin Tin Tin was a puppy plucked from the ravaged battlegrounds of rural France during World War One. Through a series of happy coincidences and the persistence of his discoverer, educator, and companion, Lee Duncan, Rinty became one of the world’s first A-list movie stars.

Orlean’s book is not only a canine coming-of-age story—it explores the complexities of modern mythmaking. At first, we follow the successes and setbacks of a dog-in-real-life, Rin Tin Tin, but gradually Rin’s physical presence dissolves into his media presence, diffusing like a drop of food coloring in water. The book is a powerful inquiry into the differences between life and life-on-film, as well as the poignant, problematic ways our cultural stories diverge from our biographical histories.

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She’s the author of many books on wide-ranging topics, including Saturday Night, a cultural history of Saturday night, and Red Sox and Bluefish, an exploration of what makes New England, “New England.” Her book The Orchid Thief was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman. In addition to discussing Rin Tin Tin’s unlikely path to superstardom, Orlean addressed the surprising origins and history of the German shepherd breed, the reasons why we love watching animals on screen, and the strange twists and turns in her own life as a public figure.

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This summer, students from the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio crowded into the KRUI studio to tell stories from memory. Without notes or written preparation, these high-schoolers gave oral histories—true-life tales they’ll hold inside their heads for a lifetime. The series was aired on four dates during a two-week period.

This program was inspired by The Moth Reading Series in New York City.

Listen to last year’s broadcast of this program (2010).

Note: Some students chose not to give their full names. Their names and hometowns are listed as they asked them to appear.

Part One: 6-21-2011

Ellie Kahn
Baltimore, MD
Stuck overnight at the Detroit Airport.

Emily Rekkia
Facing down bipolar disorder.

Harry
Pine Grove, PA
Rats attack.

Jake
Greenwich, CT
Reflections on a car accident.

Lauren
Philadelphia, PA
Backpacking for the first time.

Mike Ross
Minneapolis, MN
Mormonism through the eyes of an outsider.

Paris
Philadelphia,PA
Discovering Steinbeck, and mourning Lennie.

Sarah Gruner
Edgartown, MA
First love goes wrong.

Scott Broker
Colorado Springs, CO
When an underage friend gets dangerously drunk, disagreements about what to do.

Zoe
Scranton, PA
A nighttime Wal-Mart raid, fake moustaches included.

Part Two: 6-23-2011

Andy Chang
Corpus Christi, TX
The highs and lows of competitive swimming.

Anne-Sophie
Paris, France
Visiting Auschwitz.

Catherine
Brooklyn, NY
A mother’s fire of fire is passed down to her daughter.

Cole
Dallas, Texas
Losing best friends but becoming content with nerd status.

Danna
London, England
An encounter with anti-Muslim xenophobia in the United States.

Jenna
Kansas City, MO
Losing the spelling bee—on purpose.

Jonathan Hong
Seattle, WA
Learning to embrace a family dictum through a perplexing encounter with a panhandler.

Rosio
Des Plaines, IL
Coping with parental betrayal.

Sam
California
A brush with near-death on a mountain bike ride.

Sarah
Connecticut
Watching a friend grapple with severe anorexia.

Stephanie
Washington State
Worrying about a father’s alcoholism while away from home.

Part Three: 6-28-11

Due to technical difficulties, only a portion of this broadcast was recorded. 

Jess Clay
Trapping a possum by mistake. (Excerpt.)

Part Four: 6-30-2011

Abbey Schneider
New York, NY
Triumphs and trials on a solo camping trip.

Andrew Quintana
Miami, FL
In writing class, inappropriate attention from a much older man.

Catherine
California
The pain of losing touch.

Chloe
Reno, NV
Taking sheep for a ride.

Christine
San Jose, CA
Completely lost, with curfew hour approaching.

Dylan Combs
Greenville, SC
A favorite childhood place, blown up.

Ian
New Orleans, LA
Lost in the wilderness.

Mallika
Windham, NH
A boarding school community struggles with a student’s sudden death.

Nathan
Ohio
A Japanese hike, with leeches and waterfalls, doesn’t keep a friendship together.

Sarah
Lake Forest, IL
Building homes and helping kids in Memphis.

Stephanie Campbell,
Bettendorf, IA
Obscured vistas on a mountain hike.

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Air date: Wednesday, September 21st

This bold, brutal debut novel is a meditation on a pronoun: we. Three brothers move as one through a rundown town in Upstate New York, their six arms throwing rocks, hurling open-palm slaps, pulling close in a fighting, biting embrace. Manny’s the oldest. Joel is the middle. And the youngest, our narrator, haunts the fraught space between them like a sweet and snarling ghost. “We were brothers,” he tells us. “We were monsters …We were the three bears, taking revenge on Goldilocks for our missing porridge.”

Their parents, Mams and Pap, had them at fourteen and sixteen. Their tumultuous relationship bursts with laughter and sobbing and long, unexplained disappearances. They kiss each other with their fists, and with their kisses, they wound.

In the fierce vision of childhood that unfolds, a house is pervaded by hunger. The boys push towards the back of the refrigerator for old half-finished cans of jam, explore emptied-out soup bowls with their fingers and tongues for every last wetness of broth, make condiment meals with free, diner-grade saltines. But their hunger’s not just the stomach kind. With every slap of skin on skin and gnash of teeth they push towards the upper limits of joy and terror, hatred and tenderness, If it burns, stings, freezes, or thrills, it will feed them.

Finally, in the last third of the book, a narrator emerges, distinct from his other brothers. Slowly and painfully, he begins to amputates himself from the family circle, but he longs for the days when “they” were “we,” crying like a phantom limb for the old, good body. The book, by its thrilling, conclusion testifies to the terrible pain of outgrowing the shell of family, to lift a lone voice and say: I was. I am. I will be.

The post An Interview with Justin Torres appeared first on The Lit Show.

You Deserve Nothing: A Novel

Air date: Wednesday, September 7th at 2 PM CST

Alexander Maksik graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching/Writing Fellow, in 2011. Currently, he’s the Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Of his book, Alice Sebold has said, “This novel is a reader’s novel in the best sense. The prose is direct and undeniable, one might say deceptively simple, and the story is both ages old and one that never fails to make us ask unsettling questions whose answers say as much about ourselves as they do Maksik’s characters.”

Read this episode's introduction

Book Trailer

You Deserve Nothing – Trailer from Alexander Maksik on Vimeo.

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On April 15, 2011, acclaimed poet Dean Young received a heart transplant that saved his life. Still, for Young, the ordeal isn’t over. One ongoing challenge is the massive amount of medical bills not covered by his University of Texas insurance–amounting to more than $50,000 per year.

A growing national movement has begun to help Young pay for the life-saving transplant. On August 31st, two benefit events will take place in Iowa City—where Young taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for many years.

On August 31st, at Prairie Lights, a group of writer read Young’s poetry to help raise funds. Readers included James Galvin, Mark Levine, Cal Bedient, Robyn Schiff, Christopher Merrill, and Jan Weissmiller.

To prepare for the evening event, poets Dora Malech, Danny Khalastchi, Marc Rahe, and James Longley appeared on The Lit Show to read poems and speak about Dean Young as a writer and teacher.

Please donate to Dean Young’s cause via the National Foundation for Transplants.

Air date: Wednesday, August 31st, at 1PM CST [Live stream]

Listen now:

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Alphabet Soup: A Roundtable from the Writers’ Workshop

Featuring BJ Love, Margot Lurie, Ayana Mathis, Dan Poppick, and Kayla Soyer-Stein.

Excerpts

BJ Love:

Margot Lurie:

Ayana Mathis:

“I’m going to read a chapter from a novel in progress. The main characters are a nine-year-old girl named Sala and Cassie, her mother. Sala and Cassie live with Cassie’s parents, Hattie and Fred. Cassie is in the midst of a mental breakdown that has severely compromised her ability to function normally within the family unit. At this point in the novel Cassie’s illness has reached a crisis point and her parents have decided to take her to see a psychiatrist. This chapter is written as a kind of monologue from her perspective and takes place on the day of her scheduled appointment.”

Dan Poppick:

Kayla Soyer-Stein:

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On The Lit Show, Wells Tower discussed, among other things, the treatment of nature in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, anti-lyricism and the “succinct poetry” of crude phrases, the author’s editing process and the long evolution of the stories in the collection, and detail selection and the role of long-term memory in fiction writing.

Complete show:

Wells Tower reads from “The Brown Coast”:

Complete Interview Transcript

Joe Fassler: I thought we would start by talking about the treatment of nature in your stories. It seems like there’s a duality in a lot of them. Sometimes nature’s this physically oppressive or malignant kind of thing. There’s almost an anti-lyricism to some of the descriptions. And yet, sometimes nature is the only thing of value, it seems, in some of the stories. And I’m thinking about the sea cucumber and the brown coast and the yellow-finned fish. There’s the transcendent beauty of nature and the poisonous manifestations of nature there in that story, and I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

Wells Tower: Sure. People have asked me about this a fair amount, and I think I don’t have any sort of coherent, intelligent response. I think that nature in the story often behaves the same way we see people behaving in the stories. I’m using nature as this avenue for escape and redemption and beauty when there’s a lot of human ugliness going on, but again, I think just lapsing into pastoral loveliness would get gross and gooey and not good. So, I like to have things go wrong there too. But I think there’s a fair amount of animal stuff in the stories, and I think animals are handy, because you can have them be kind and be these receptacles for decency that it would be hard to get away with, with human beings, because it would seem too sentimental. So often, when I want to have a sweet or funny moment, I’ll have a pigeon walk into the frame and do something amusing. Yeah, I don’t know.

Fassler: It’s interesting that you say that the nature is often mirroring what the humans do, because very much it seems to mirror the inner climate of what’s going on. Again I’m thinking of “The Brown Coast”, when Bob is walking around feeling like his life is ruined, and his landscape is ruined in that way. And when I got to the last story, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” it seems like an interested insight of that story is that it comes with the girl with the missing arm, and they’re shocked by the ugliness of it. Why are you missing that arm? And the answer is that one of them chopped it off. They were responsible for the ugliness they were seeing, and I was wondering if there’s any sort of implicit if not critique, just awareness of human fallibility, human mucking around in the wilderness that’s sometimes responsible? I mean, sometimes those kind of anti-lyrical passages I was talking about hinge on a human blunder gone wrong, like an ugly garden, and I was wondering.

Tower: Well, I think throughout the stories, throughout the collection, there are stories about people wanting to do good and then ultimately doing ill, and I suppose some of that comes into the way the natural world functions in the book, but really, there wasn’t any conscious symbol-crafting that went into the choice of some of the pastoral stuff, or the animal stuff. With “The Brown Coast”, that was a story I stole from a friend of mine who was a bartender, and some guy came into his bar and told him this story about how he’d gone down to Florida or something and built this aquarium, and it had gone wrong. And to me, it was just a perfect anecdote, and the idea of the aquarium as this means for this guy’s redemption and recovery seemed really rich, and then also funny since it all fell apart in a kind of amusing, sad way.

The first draft of that story, I actually did a straight transliteration of the anecdote as it was told to me by this friend of mine. And the comic punch line of the story was supposedly the actual guy who had built this aquarium, they put the sea cucumber in there and it ruined everything, and then he took it down to the beach, and he was getting ready to throw it back in the water, and in the instant where he had his arm raised, the thin spat on him, or peed on him, in his face. And I put that in the first draft of it, and it just seemed way too pat, and too dumb. And because that was the first story I wrote — really, the first short story that I ever wrote to completion — that was an interesting lesson about how you can’t rely too much on the truth, or you can’t assume that because something was real, that will somehow make the story good. And when I wrote that, everybody was like, this is so dumb, and that would never happen in real life.

Fassler: So, the real version of the story isn’t always the best version, and that’s your job, to milk the best version out of life?

Tower: Absolutely, and it’s weird, with a lot of the stories in the collection, I would be deliberately stealing somebody’s perfect, pat anecdote, and in order to make it work for fiction, you have to roughen the surface to some extent and loosen the connections up, and make it less of a perfectly meshed set of narrative gears, which is interesting.

Fassler: My last question on this topic of the interaction with the natural world, there’s two stories that end with scenes of eating. There’s the possibly-tainted moose flesh in “Retreat,” and the other is the house-potted tomato at the end of “Dora in Your Eye.” And it seems like again, nature as being this possibly-tainted, possibly tainted by us, this hollow promise and retreat. And then, in “Dora in Your Eye,” this silly potted plant somehow is a manifestation of him taking a bite for the first time in so long into something good and refreshing and wholesome and right. I was wondering if there was any — and “Dora in Your Eye” is later in the book, and “Retreat” is very earlier on. I was wondering if that was a swing? I don’t know if there’s any relationship between those scenes in your mind?

Tower: No, there really wasn’t. The moose stuff in “Retreat” was another anecdote that I stole from this guy in Alaska who told this story about when his brother-in-law wanted to go moose hunting. His brother-in-law came up from the Lower 48 and wanted to go and bag a moose. And this guy, who’s a bush pilot, wasn’t all that keen on it. But, they went out one day and spent the day waiting for a moose to show up, and it was pouring rain, and it was a miserable day, and finally late in the afternoon, the bush pilot convinced his brother-in-law to pack it in. And just as they were getting ready to head back, a moose walked out of the bushes, and the guy shot it. And then, it’s this long, hideous ordeal of breaking it down and chopping it up. And just as they’d gotten the boat packed — and by Alaskan game law or whatever, you have to take, I think, 80 percent of the meat, or it’s a felony. You know, you can’t just shoot a moose and leave it there.

So, anyway, they had the boat totally packed, ready to leave, and then a second moose walked out of the bushes, and the brother-in-law shot that one too. And so then they had to go through the whole ordeal, but this one, the hide is difficult to remove, and as it turns out, that moose was rotten and spoiled the whole head. Anyway, so I tried to put that in a first draft, and again it was one of these stories that was a little too perfect. But, I liked the idea of the rotten moose, and I remember when I was going through the edits to the first version of this story, with Eli Horowitz at McSweeney’s, I was walking down a street in New Orleans and talking to him. We were doing the final tweaks on the story, and the ending still wasn’t there, and we knew there was something good about the idea that this character had shot a moose, and it was this moment of triumph for him, and it had to go wrong in some interesting way. And then, it just occurred to me, he should eat the moose.

But then, “Dora in Your Eye”, that was an interesting process of revision, too. That story initially appeared in A Public Space, and it was a story told from the point of view of a 20-something narrator, and it was a much more Gen-X story about this young guy who’s in a weird neighborhood, and he had this preoccupation with this.

Fassler: So, the father wasn’t in the story at that point?

Tower: No.

Fassler: Who becomes the narrator in the final.

Tower: Right. In the originally-published version, the antagonists were this narrator guy who’s some young white dude, and then his girlfriend. And it ran like that, and then as I was revising it, it seemed like, who cares? This is a story about a guy who’s just moved to New Orleans, and he’s been told that his neighbor across the street is a prostitute. And then he goes over and visits with her, and it turns out that she’s an elderly drug dealer. As I was looking at that story again, it seemed like there was very little at stake for this young white guy with this interaction with this woman he thought was a prostitute, and it seemed more interesting to me to make it a guy in his 80s, and thinking this might be the conclusion of his erotic life to go and have this moment with this woman.

I think the idea of the tomato, I love the way fresh tomatoes taste and smell, but I think I’d recently reread Grapes of Wrath, and there’s a moment in there where the grandfather in the family is talking about how, when he gets out to California, he’s going to eat all these peaches and let the juice run through his beard, and there’s something wonderful about it. Of course, with the tomato, he’s consummating the sexual act he’d been hoping for with this woman, and it’s this last carnal throe for this guy.

Fassler: It does get physical with the beard. You have that nice description of it.

Tower: Right. No, I like that moment, the ending of that story.

Fassler: Yeah. A lot of your endings are interesting, because they seem at least to me to resist specific epiphanies of any kind. The language gets heightened, and there’s a sense that something important is happening internally, but there’s no real message or anything. I’m thinking of the New Mexico license plate that the father reads at the end of “Executors of Important Energies,” or “Down Through the Valley,” where he’s about to be arrested and has this strange flashback back to his relationship with his life, looking for imaginary prowlers in the house. These seem to me to be almost randomly chosen, like the stuff of life comes up and there’s not a concrete place that you’re supposed to go with it, necessarily. I was wondering if you had a comment on these endings that are so ambiguous?

Tower: Well, what’s a short story? To me, a short story can be anything. The time frame of a short story can range from 20 years to 20 minutes. It can encompass big revelations or tiny observations, or little heightened moments. But one of my rules or hunches about short fiction is that whatever it is, it should at least be trafficking in moments that would work themselves into the long-term memory — sorry about this — that they should at least be moments that would register in the long-term memories of the characters.

What happens when we’re having a moment that we’ll recall 10 years down the line? We rarely hear strings and trumpets and feel as though our life has changed. Usually we feel a pricking up of the senses and a quickening of the heart and this feeling that something important is happening. We don’t know exactly what to do with that excess meaning but to sit there and try to let it resonate within us. And I think those are the moments that I go for to some extent in the endings of the stories, because we don’t have revelations. How often do you have a revelation that counts? If you have one, usually it’s false, or it leads you down some dead end and it winds up being unimportant.

Fassler: Yeah, I like that idea that your long-term memory sometime lights on something arbitrary or strange or perplexing to you later, and that’s much more the feeling these stories have.

Tower: I think in life, we get the sensation of illumination without exactly knowing the character of it. It’s like that T.S. Eliot line, “Sudden illumination, we had the experience but missed the moment. An approach to the moment restores the experience in a different form.”

I think that’s all we get, as people, that dilation of the heart or the senses, or whatever it may be.

Fassler: At your reading at Prairie Lights, you talked a bit about the pendulum of sympathetic characters, and how you often don’t feel you can be done with a story if one character has been on the good side of your sympathies the whole time, you like there to be a swing. And there’s some interesting examples in here, but I like that idea a lot, and was wondering if you could talk a little more about that.

Tower: Yeah, I suppose it stems from a simple edict I try to follow in short fiction, which is not to have good guys or bad guys. I don’t believe in that with people. I think we all want to behave decently, we want to treat each other well, and often we fall short of that. And in the stories, I don’t want to have somebody being the saint and somebody being the demon. I think it’s much more interesting if everybody’s a bit of a shape-shifter, and even the characters we want to sympathize, we see them behaving deceptively or manipulatively. But I think the job of the fiction writer, at least the thing I try to do in the stories, is to show people doing despicable things, but to treat it with enough complexity or compassion that we understand why people are behaving in awful ways.

Fassler: I found it interesting, you said that at least in the original conception of “Retreat,” Matthew had been the definitely unsympathetic character, and Steven had been the definitely sympathetic. And I think that in my own reading, they’re both equally awful at times, and cruel, and yet the saddest thing about the story is that the fantasy almost comes real. It almost happens on the occasion of the hunting of this moose that they are going to move in together and it’s all going to play out, and of course it doesn’t. There’s two pages left, and I remember thinking, how is this all going to fall apart in two pages, and it does so well. I thought that was interesting.

Tower: Yeah, with those guys, the first draft — or, the published version that originally showed up in McSweeney’s — it was told form the point of view of the younger brother, and it was a series of cheap shots at the unsympathetic blowhard older brother. And so in revision, I went back and told the story from the older guy’s perspective, and that wound up complicating the character of the younger brother too. I wanted to see what he would look like from the POV of his despised older brother.

Fassler: We had touched on this a little bit before, but there’s some really nice awful language in the book. I’m thinking of a moment in “Leopard” in which not the narrator of the story — it’s second person — but the main character has a fungal infection on his lip. He’s young, and he’s humiliated by it. And a boy he admires in the cafeteria has this perfectly brutal insult for him that cuts him down. And even in that moment of humiliation, it said, “He couldn’t help but admire the succinct poetry of the line.” And it seems to me in the boo, there’s a lot of great, succinct, crude poetry that just as it does in that moment in “Leopard” gets the audience standing up and jeering. And I’m thinking of when you described the sea cucumber as being, looked like a turd of somebody who’s been eating rubies, or when you say of Steven, he was like a bumblebee trying to fuck a marble. Such great, humorous lines, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the value of the succinct, crude, humorous phrase that nails it like that.

Tower: I think my instinct, or my guilty pleasure as a writer is to go baroque and to indulge every impulse toward low potty humor that I might have. And then in revision, I try hard to subtract the excess language and see if there’s a way to make the phrases as compact as possible. But the kind of lyricism you’re talking about, where it’s the turd of somebody who’s been eating rubies, I get that is typical of the way I write, that I want to do pretty stunts with language, but I think if you’re using pretty language to describe pretty things, then it somehow shorts itself out. For me, it’s a much more enjoyable challenge to try to figure out beautiful ways of describing ugly things, or maybe ugly ways of describing beautiful stuff. But yeah, I think there has to be some kind of clashing polarity there between the thing you’re describing and the way you describe it.

Fassler: Maybe you’ll read to us a little bit from your collection?

[Author reads from "The Brown Coast, audio posted above]

Fassler: I wanted to ask you about the opening of the story that you just read and of the collection. When I first read it, I thought this is so wonderfully bizarre. This guy is having this butt-crack Saltine issue, and I’ve never read anything like this.

Tower: Yeah, with that story, I think that we chose to put it first, my editor and I, just because of its simplicity. It’s a very plain little story where not very much happens, and I think it felt to us like a pretty open, unimpeded onramp for the collection. It seems to be one that a lot of people responded to, I think because it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort to figure out what’s going on. The language isn’t reaching all that much, the character’s predicament is pretty simple, without a tremendous amount of psychological complexity, and the arc of the story is fairly tidy.

I think in fact we chose it not because it was doing anything complicated, but because it seemed like a simple, nonreactive narrative that maybe the more difficult readers wouldn’t buck at.

Fassler: And the physical discomfort, even though a lot of people have not had an experience exactly like that one, you can relate to it. And you don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t know the situation, we just know how awfully uncomfortable he is.

Tower: Yeah, that wouldn’t be too much, to have a Saltine lodged in your butt.

Fassler: So, we’ve talked about how many versions these stories went through, and how you’ve changed them from their publications, the way they appeared the first time for the collection. You said at Prairie Lights that you went at the stories Kamikaze-style in your editing, and I wonder if you could talk a bit about the process of razing these stories to the ground and building them back up again, and also, how did you know when to stop?

Tower: Well, sometimes I didn’t, but I did do very strange revisions to these stories. I often didn’t look at the first draft at all, and in revision, I might change the point of view, or the setting, or the plot, or everything. I might just discard all of the recognizable furniture from the first draft and rebuild it. And at times, I got so crazy with it that I wasn’t really revising out of any kind of well-considered editorial motives, but a frenzied desire to be a better writer than I am.

And with a few of the stories, my editor ultimately had to say, stop, you’re doing the seventh gigantic revision when the second one was fine, and you’re making the story worse now. But, I still think it was a good lesson for me to figure out what happens when you stray down every possible rabbit hole in revision. With these stories, when I was going back, I might write 20 pages that would issue — I might do a 10 or 20 page digression out of some piece of innocuous dialogue in the first draft, because maybe there was some sort of conflict hinted at there, and I would go back and try to exploit that and tease it out and see if there was anything there.

It wasn’t a very efficient way to approach revision, but I think it was an important lesson to see what happens when you doing everything you’re capable of doing to a story. That said, if this collection hadn’t been wrested from my hands, I probably would’ve gone on revising it for at least another four or five years, so it’s a good thing they took it away.

Fassler: Obviously there’s a certain level of finality to it now that they’ve been published as a collection, but is there any temptation to keep going back and messing with it, or are you trying to force yourself to move on?

Tower: If I could, I would. Even reading these stories, I see all sorts of little things that I would change if I could have at them again. But, you can’t spend your whole life writing one book. I know some very gifted writers who finished books 10 years ago, and they keep going back and tightening every single bolt until the threads strip. At a certain point, you’ve got to move on, and actually, I was in the middle of a lot of crazy revision on this book. I was talking with a friend of mine who’s an older, established writer, and I was telling him what I was doing to the stories. And he said, that sounds great, but it also sounds as though you’re trying to write your second book first, and it can happen that you wind up trying to write your fourth and fifth and sixth books first. At some point, you’ve got to let it go and understand that your early work will have some limitations, or some impulses that maybe in your later career, you wouldn’t be so pleased with.

But actually for me, going back and looking at the very first stories, which I was loathe to do when the manuscript came back, I was surprised by the clarity and braveness and simplicity of them, even though they didn’t seem to me hugely polished, sophisticated stories, necessarily, but they seemed to know their own hearts in a way that with the later stories, I had to find my way into that kind of knowledge of the characters, whereas there’s something about the early stories where I seemed to know who they were right at the outset. I’m not sure how that happened.

Fassler: Are there any particular story collections that you especially admire, or that were touched on, or helpful to you in the process for this?

Tower: I think the people I was looking to with these stories were pretty much the canonical American short story writers: John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Yates’ short stories, I think, are about as beautiful as American short fiction gets, and Yates is somebody who was so bleak and had such horrific insights about what people do to one another that his novels I find a bit unbearable, because at greater length, he can inflict greater and greater violences on his characters. But in the short story, when he’s only got 20 or something pages, he’s restricted to the low-amplitude apocalypse, and the thing that’s so amazing about Yates’ stories is that he can in the span of 20 pages make you feel as though worlds are imploding when all that’s happened is some guys got up and left a bar. And he’s doing the same thing, it has the same effect that the death and abortion and impotence in the novel has, but he’s somehow able to set up a relationship that you care about, and put it in jeopardy in some sort of hideous way quickly and with a beautiful economy and elegance. So, he’s somebody I look to in terms of structure.

But, Chekhov and Somerset Maugham to some extent, I like his short stories. Carver and Tobias Wolff and Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis, all those people I read a lot of when I was writing.

Fassler: It’s funny you mention Chekhov. In Allan Gurganus’s seminar this week here at the workshop, he paired “Retreat” with “Gooseberries,” the Chekhov, and there were a lot of nice overtones between the two that we talked about.

Tower: Yeah, he told he was doing that. I should go back and read that story. I haven’t read it for years.

Fassler: So, maybe you could talk a little bit about your work as a journalist. From what I’ve read from you in a few interviews, it seems like you worked really intently on fiction during your MFA time at Columbia, and then maybe to make ends meet, or for whatever reason, you went onto journalism for a while. And I’m wondering if it’s hard for you to do both at the same time, and if those two different parts of your brain accomplish different things. How do you make room for serious work in both fiction and journalism?

Tower: I think it’s very difficult, and I think it’s hard to have the two really coexist peacefully. When I got out of Columbia, I took a contract with the Washington Post Sunday magazine. And I would do three cover stories a year for them. And these were pretty long, 8,000 to 10,000 word stories they would assign me. They would give me arbitrary topics, character-driven story opportunities that had no ostensible angle, and they would turn me loose. I did a lot of grotty, blue-collar stories for them. The first cover I did, I rode with truck drivers up and down I-95 on the east coast for a month or so, and then I did a piece on denizens of this run-down horse track in Maryland. I did a piece on people who work at Wal-Mart, people who work in a telemarketing call center, I did a piece on a homeless chess hustler who found his way into the collection.

They were interesting story and interesting journalistic training, because when you’re writing about somebody who’s not famous and who’s not newsworthy, it takes a huge amount of knowledge and reporting time to learn enough about that person to make their story compelling. If you’re doing a piece on Lady Gaga, or something, and you get 45 minutes with her, readers are interested in the fact that she had the seared tuna for lunch, whereas people have no real motive to care about a homeless guy who plays chess in DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., so it’s your job as the journalist to really get inside his head.

But, it was difficult in the years when I was doing those stories. I was writing a fair amount for Harpers too, and the approach to long-form nonfiction for me was so different from writing short stories that it began to garble my short fiction process. When you’re doing a nonfiction piece, you go out and report and put absolutely everything you can into your notebook and assemble huge seas of notes, and then you go back ,and maybe you’re looking at a couple hundred pages of notes, and trying to distill that into 30 pages of narrative for the story. So, it’s this process of reducing all of this vague information into something that’s coherent.

I started doing that with fiction, where I would generate these vast drafts for a short story that I’d have some idea of what seemed like it might be a fun story, and I’d do it not exactly stream-of-consciousness, but I would do these big, explosive drafts that might run upwards of 100 pages, and then think that I could reduce that for a short story, but it just never worked. With the short story, I think there has to be a real unity of intention, and a real coherence of emotion and tone. It’s very hard for me to fumble my way into that small, controlled space where you know exactly what the emotional resonances of every sentence are supposed to be.

So, a spent a couple of years doing those big drafts, and I never got a story out of it. It was maybe two or three years of fiction work that went nowhere.

Fassler: I guess the paradox of it is that it sounds like lost time to a certain extent, but it seems like so many of the stories here stemmed from experiences that you had while doing your journalistic work.

Tower: They did, and it was a great way — the magazine work has been a great way to meet a huge cross-section of people, a lot of whom wander into the short stories. The story we talked about earlier, “Dora in Your Eye,” I was saying the first draft, it was from the point of view of a young, 20-something white guy. And as I was revising, I was thinking about who that situation might matter more to, and there was a guy I met years ago when I was reporting the story on Wal-Mart, where the Post magazine just had me go and hang around in a Wal-Mart for about a month in southern Maryland. And I met this old guy who would come down to the McDonald’s-ish fast food restaurant in the Wal-Mart every day and play bingo. They had these organized bingo games in the Wal-Mart. And he was in the motorized cart. And I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “I’m down here trying to meet women. I know it’s crazy, I’m 88 years old, but I’m not dead yet, and I’m having a great time.”

And he was such a wonderful guy, and he wound up on the cutting-room floor with the story. But he seemed like the perfect person to make the protagonist of the revision. And that happened a lot. It was a great opportunity to meet all sorts of different people, and to be able to ask them to describe their lives for me was a great privilege.

Fassler: Something you were speaking about at Prairie Lights is the deluge of careless writing, or writing that is meant to be carelessly read, I guess would be more accurate, perhaps in magazines, but especially on the internet. And I love that you said it’s all about gist. You described the internet as being a kind of gist harvest. And then fiction you also said, and I think a lot of people would agree with this, is words that have to be read carefully by nature. And so, I’m wondering if you could talk a little about what you feel the role of the fiction writer is in society today, considering the media landscape.

Tower: I don’t know. I suppose it’s what it’s always been. Fiction and literature is this amazing technology by which we’re able to telegraph human experience, to really convey what it means to eke out your short run of years on this planet by means of the magic of little black marks on a page put a life between the covers of a book.

I don’t think the role of the fiction writer has changed. I don’t think the internet has altered our job. I think those of us who write fiction still want to use language in interesting ways, and we want to try to know something about people. Obviously, there’s a lot more competition now, with video games and YouTube and this kind of epidemic attention deficit that I think does have something to do with the internet, and it is upsetting to see maybe where language might be heading.

That said, I’m sure there are great blogs and people doing fantastic writing on the internet. But I do think, at least for somebody like me, I just don’t read on the internet with the same degree of scrutiny and attention that I do when I’m sitting in a chair with a book, and I think that’s lamentable. I think that if we read too much in that idiom, then we can start to feel like it’s okay to write crappy, sloppy sentences, and with fiction in particular I think maybe even more than nonfiction, I think we’ve really got to treasure language in the way poets do. I was talking to my students at Columbia last fall about it, and I was saying people ostensibly have no reason to read a story that you made up. It’s the easiest thing in the world not to read. And if it’s not clear in the fiber of the sentences that every single word has been chosen with a huge amount of deliberation and intention, then there’s no reason for people to continue reading the work. I can’t remember where I was going with that.

Fassler: You said last night you strive for a kind of high-thread count in your work, and I really liked that idea. Maybe one reason you’re able to do that so well is because you do generate it sounds like hundreds of pages of notes, or just lots of drafts exploring avenues that then get compacted into diamonds.

Tower: Yeah. It’s weird, the thing I was saying about the thread count in language, I think we all know that experience of sitting down and you read a sentence and you can see that there are a bunch of different interesting usages going on, and that the writer is absolutely in control of each word, and it’s been put in place for a reason. I think writers who care about sentences, they often get asked, how do you do this? It’s amazing the way you’re using language. I think that talent comes into it to some extent, but I think it’s much more about spending the time, and really looking at the sentences, and caring. Writing good sentences and using language in a deliberate way seems like the easiest method for making your writing good, and it’s not all that difficult. It’s just about going back and making sure you’re carrying the 1s and being sure that every word is being yoked to the descriptive content or emotional friction of the scene in a responsible and tidy manner, I guess.

Fassler: There’s that famous and kind of pretentious thing Joyce said about Ulysses, but it was something like, “It took me 17 years to write it. It should take you 17 years to read it.” And it sounds like there’s a kind of reciprocity. The value of fiction — I have students all the time say, why should you write fiction? We have film, all these things that are easier to ingest. It sounds like the value, you’re saying, is not quite to that Joycian degree, but this is something that was poured over, that was invested with sweat and time, and it should ideally urge someone, inspire someone to take deep care in reading it, when at least here in America, most of our culture is about disposability and ease of use, and that’s the value in it.

Tower: Sure, and the flip-side of the Joyce quote is, as a writer, you can’t ask the reader to do more empathic work than you yourself have done in the writer. You can’t ask your readers to care more about the characters than you did. It’s amazing to me how much writing there is out there, these books where the characters are so poorly-imagined and wooden, yet we as readers are supposed to respond to these characters and believe in them when you can tell that the writer himself didn’t care. Reading something like The Da Vinci Code, it’s like a popsicle stick puppet, yet we’re supposed to feel moved. It’s the worst kind of manipulation.

Fassler: There’s a very strong tradition of southern writers and writing in this country. You’re from Chapel Hill, but I sense from a few of the things you said last night that you don’t see yourself necessarily in that tradition, or you say that you felt exotic for a while in New York City, but you became disenchanted with that. I was wondering if you feel that you’re operating in any sort of southern tradition, even in terms of geographically.

Tower: Not so much. The southern thing is something you’ve got to be really careful about. It’s really easy to lapse into the very worst kind of easy stereotype when you’re writing about the south. For me, there are a lot of southern writers whose work I really admire. Of course Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, or more lately Barry Hannah, Charles Portis.

At the same time, there’s something I do like about the south. I think there’s, at least in my experience, an attention to language and a sense of play with language among just about everybody. I remember growing up and working terrible jobs, painting or doing landscaping, or I had a job as a garbage man for a day, and these guys would be working these awful jobs, and the job itself will deliver no pleasure, but talking to the guy who’s working next to you, and using language in ways that are fun seemed to relieve some of the hideousness of the day. But, I think it’s something that happens across classes in the south, and probably everywhere, but I guess because I grew up down there, I got particularly attuned to it. There seems to be a real kind of — people take pride in their storytelling abilities, and their wry turns of phrase, and that sort of thing.

Fassler: Yeah, the dialogue in the book here is so wonderful, and I wonder if being around that sort of graceful, amazing southern vernacular helped you tune your ear for language. And a sub-question I have of that is, it seems to me that though the language is labored over, and you probably did labor over the dialogue in the same way, it’s different in that it should have the effect of spontaneity, and that’s such a different thing than a physical description, and I’m wondering how you work with that.

Tower: It’s tough. You always hear in graduate writing workshops that dialogues should be the greatest hits, that if you have people talking the super-boring way that people generally talk, that won’t do for fiction. And I believe that, so I try to have characters using language in ways that are fun and funny and clever, but at the same time, if every character is emitting these perfectly architected quips, then it just doesn’t seem real. So, to some extent, I did have to go back and occasionally reduce the cleverness of the dialogue because it seemed to pull away from the characters.

Fassler: So, we both know that one of the rudest things you can ask a writer is what they’re working on currently, so I won’t ask you what you’re working on, but I do understand you mentioned that you’re working on a novel. Are you finding the experience of longer form a challenge after working on short stuff for so long?

Tower: Well, I’m sure it will be. I’m sure that there are plenty of days of wracking doubts and self-hatred and all of that, though now I’m just having a good time with it. It’s actually a great relief not to feel the pressure of the ending constantly looming in the next 20 pages, where I can just let the characters breathe and be themselves and find their own way without having to constantly knot all the different ligatures together. So now, I’m in the fun, expansive phase of the writing the novel, and then there will be restrictive, anxious revisions I’m sure for many, many months.

The post Wells Tower (2/16/2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Featuring Rawaan Alkhatib, Andrew Bates, Henry Finch, Jordan Glubka, Jeff Griffin, Carmen Machado, Sam McPhee, Amy Parker, and Margaret Ross.

Andrew Bates: from “Be Still Now, Brother”

 

Amy Parker: from “The Balcony”


 

Carmen Machado: from “Difficult at Parties”


 

Rawaan Alkhatib: four poems


 

Henry Finch: three PoemSongs, “A Continuous Form,” “Survey,” and “Cushioning”


 

Sam McPhee: from “The Cyclops has Pink Eye”


 

Jeff Griffin: two poems


 

Jordan Glubka: “Do Not Read This Until Your 18th Birthday”


 

The post Alphabet Soup: Iowa Writers Read (4-26-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Featuring Jeff Griffin, James Longley, Alexander Maksik, Lori Martin, Chinelo Okparanta, Colby Somerville, and Lesley Wheeler.

Jeff Griffin: from There’s Never Been a Day That Didn’t Require Knives Like These

Available at human500.com.
 

Chinelo Okparanta: from a novel-in-progress


 

Alexander Maksik: from a story-in-progress

Maksik’s debut novel, You Deserve Nothing, will be released September 1, 2011.

 

Lesley Wheeler: three poems


 

Lori Martin: from Bitter Water, a novel-in-progress


 

James Longley: three poems


 

Colby Someriville: two poems


 

The post Alphabet Soup: Iowa Writers Read (4-19-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

The book concerns Marylou Ahearn, a 77-year-old woman—who’d like to become a murderer. Years ago, while pregnant with her daughter, a hospital physician gave Marylou a radioactive cocktail that was presented to her as a “health cocktail.” She drank it and became, unwittingly, a participant in a dangerous research experiment. The substance ruined her health, as well the health of her daughter, who eventually died from complications.

Decades later, Marylou has located Dr. Wilson Spriggs, the man who poisoned her—and she’s plotting her revenge. As she works her way into the fractious and highly eccentric Spriggs family, however, her desire for revenge mutates into something else entirely.

In this interview, we discussed revenge as a narrative engine, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, black humor, and the challenges of raising children with Aspergers’ syndrome (a prominent theme of the book). Stuckey-French also addressed her challenging—but ultimately rewarding—experience as a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The author will read from Revenge of the Radioactive Lady at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on Monday, April 18th, at 7 PM.

The post Elizabeth Stuckey-French (4-12-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives is the latest installment in the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness Series, edited by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen. The series illuminates human rights crises across the world using an unconventional, but powerful tool—oral testimonies from ordinary civilians.

For this book, Peter Orner and his co-author, the Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Annie Holmes, traveled a long way to gather histories. They spoke with Zimbabweans all across that country’s expanse, in urban centers and remote farmlands; they met with exiles throughout the Zimbabwean Diaspora, from Johannesburg, to Vancouver, to Washington, DC.

There are twenty-five narrators in this book, an eclectic group of men and women, who tell unforgettable stories of cowardice and cruelty, courage and kindness—all set against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s tumultuous recent history. Individually, each story demonstrates the power of the human voice to heal and harrow; collectively, these histories provide an unprecedented written history of Zimbabwe’s ongoing struggle towards legitimately democratic self-government. In a recent review, Harper’s said “Hope Deferred might be the most important publication to have come out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years.”

Peter Orner is currently a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he’s a graduate of the program. He also teaches at San Francisco State University. He’s author of two award-winning books: one novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, and one collection, Esther Stories. His short story “The Raft” was featured in Best American Short Stories 2001. Orner is also editor of Underground America, and earlier installment in the Voice of Witness series which features told histories from undocumented workers living in the U.S.

Interview will air at noon on KRUI, or listen online. Orner will discuss the book at Prairie Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, March 30, at 7 PM.

The post Peter Orner (3-29-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Complete Interview:

Hale’s novel tells the story of a precocious chimpanzee. After displaying early cognitive promise as an inmate at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Bruno’s selected for intensive study by a team of primate scientists. He moves in full-time with his trainer, Lydia Littlemore—and, through constant work, the young chimp develops the ability to understand human language. As his linguistic faculties become more human, his emotional and psychological complexity deepen. He falls madly in love with Lydia. Later, he commits murder.

The novel opens with Bruno looking back at his failed attempt to integrate into human society. Fittingly, he speaks the whole book out loud, and his memories are taken down verbatim by his assistant, Gwen. The resulting book is a part Lolita-style confessional, part literacy narrative, and part Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s rife with the id-on-the-page madness we’d expect from a talking chimp, but the narrative also displays the subtlety, momentum, and technical brilliance we expect from our best human novelists. The book also makes a powerful philosophical contribution to our still-murky understanding of animal cognition—just as it asks profound questions about what it means to be homo sapiens.

Benjamin Hale is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He first had the idea for his book on a trip away from Iowa, while watching the antics of chimpanzees at the Chicago Zoo. By chance, the world’s foremost primate language lab—The Great Ape Trust—is located in Des Moines, and the Hale was able to visit and learn from the scientists who are teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, organutans to do eerily human things. Hale completed his novel with the help of a Provost’s Fellowship from the University of Iowa. He’s written a book that’s daring, innovative, and challenging, but the Christopher Beha of the New York Times Book Review said it best when he wrote, simply, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is “an absolute pleasure.”

The post Benjamin Hale (2-22-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Shabnam Nadiya: “Eating Bone”


 

Evan James: “Stars of the Pea-Green Screen”


 

Ted Kehoe: from “Take Us to the Ocean and Break Us Apart”


 

Rae Ann Winkelstein-Duveneck: three poems


 

Scott Smith: “March 25th”


 

Jessica Laser and Jessica Marsh: “The Universe,” by Richard Foreman and Jessica Marsh


 

Jerimee Bloemeke: from “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”


 

Dramatic readings from Vogue, by the authors:

The post Alphabet Soup: Iowa Writers Read (1-25-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

In addition to his novel, Percy is author of two collections of short stories: Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). “Refresh, Refresh” won a Pushcart Prize, and was selected for Best American Short Stories 2006.

His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men’s Journal, Paris Review, Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Wall Street Journal, among others. He teaches creative writing at Iowa State University in Ames.

Complete Interview:

The author will read and sign copies at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on February 21st, at 7 PM.

The post Benjamin Percy (2-15-2011) appeared first on The Lit Show.

ARMS is playing at The Blue Moose on Monday, 10/25. Doors open at 7 ($6).

ARMS on Daytrotter
ARMS on MySpace
Download the ARMS EP free, here

Heat & Hot Water

Emily Sue, Pt 2:

The post ARMS (10-26-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Featuring Catherine Blauvelt, Nate Brown, Scott Butterfield, Katy Chrisler, Michael Fauver, Henry Finch, Angela Flournoy, Kokoy Guevara.

Complete Show:

Excerpts:

Catherine Blauvelt: five poems

Nate Brown: excerpt from “The Have-Nots”

Scott Butterfield: excerpt from novel-in-progress

Katy Chrisler: four poems

Michael Fauver: “The Wild Beasts”

Henry Finch: two poems

Angela Flournoy: excerpt from novel-in-progress, Coveted Space

Kokoy Guevara: three poems

Sound collage, featuring the readers:

The post Alphabet Soup: Iowa Writers Read (10-12-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Mona Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. Subsequent books include The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road.

Her work has been awarded several prizes: a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, a Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Of Simpson’s most recent book, Michelle Huneven has said: “This big gorgeous book is at once an entertaining, socially astute upstairs-downstairs drama and a profound meditation on the shifting and often competing demands of love and work in a woman’s life. One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. Lola, the Filipina nanny at the heart of the book, is surely one of the great literary creations of our time.”

This special edition of The Lit Show will air on Wednesday, 10/20 at 3 PM.

Simpson will read and sign copies at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on Wednesday, 10/20, beginning and 7 PM.

The post Mona Simpson (10-20-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Li’s new stories concern lovers and loners. For many of her characters, solace is a form of strength. In a the opening novella “Kindness,” the narrator serially deserts opportunities for intimacy; in another story, an aged art teacher, pariahed forever after a platonic infatuation with a student, learns to accept his being alone.

Even the lovers in Li’s collection hear the siren song of isolation. In the story “Prison,” a woman whose child has died dreads joining her husband in bed at night, when the couple is forced to share their private weeping. In the title story, lovers are in fact trustees of each others’ seclusion, in Li’s words: “they were lonely and sad people, and they would not make each other less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.”

Complete Interview [Download Podcast]

Li has said “I believe a writer writes to talk to his or her literary heroes,” and her new stories are in dialogue with master practitioners of the form. Her characters have Tolstoyian depth and complexity, surprising us the minute we feel we know them, both affirming and dancing away from our understanding at the same time. She’s internalized Chekhov’s economy of language, and his dramatist’s ear for dialogue. And on every page, the author impresses with her generosity of heart: her stories suggest a Dickensian faith in the deep-down goodness of people, even when they are under duress, or doing ugly things. There are no villains in Li’s work: only failed heroes.

Li was raised and educated in Beijing. She came to the United States in to be an immunologist at the University of Iowa: “I dreamed,” she told The Lit Show, “becoming the Marie Curie of China.” But Iowa City’s robust literary scene swayed her from her medical work. She begin writing, eventually earning graduate degrees from both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the nonfiction program. Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, among others. Her first novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction. She teaches at the University of California Davis, and is fiction editor for the literary quarterly A Public Space. This year, Li was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. Last week, she was one of 23 individuals this year to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Junot Diaz has said: “Li is extraordinary … a storyteller of the first order … each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart … Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel. ”

Complete interview transcript

The post Yiyun Li (10-4-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost is Lan Samantha Chang’s third book. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s the recipient of many literary honors including the the Banta Award for Literature, and the PEN/Hemingway/Ucross Prize. Her award-winning first collection, Hunger and Other Stories, and debut novel, Inheritance, both won widespread acclaim and have been translated across the world. Her shorter work was selected for Best American Short Stories in 1994 and 1996. And she’s been director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop since 2006—an experience she’s plumbed for her new novel.

Complete Interview [Download Podcast]

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost begins at The School in Bonneville, Michigan, a fictional Graduate MFA program with similarities to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Roman, a young poetry student, is handsome and ambitious, obsessed with achieving artistic greatness and worldly recognition. His cerebral counterpart Bernard lives an ascetic life, corresponding by mail with other authors from his shoebox apartment and privately toiling on a single long poem. Both young men, with the other students at The School, vie for the affections of Miranda Sturgis, an eccentric faculty luminary who allures pupils with her talent and fame but terrorizes them with her mercurial disposition and brutal criticism.

At first, the novel extols, and often wryly critiques, the triumphs and pratfalls of Workshop life. But as the students mature, the novel grows in seriousness with them. In its 200 pages, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost charts a series of lives lived in the name of art, and maps their vastly different outcomes. The book poses serious questions about the value of artistic sacrifice, the dubious gift of early promise, the patronage and nepotism of the academy, and the definition of artistic greatness. Finally, it moves beyond poetry altogether as we watch our characters meet their human fates, address the slow onset of their mortality, the wax and wane and wax again of their close friendships over time, and the regrets and longings that unspool in the wake of death.

Complete Interview
Joe Fassler: I sometimes think of your other long works as backwards-looking, tracing family
history and asking questions about inheritance and racial identity, moving back through
generations. This book is different. There are no first-generation immigrants or their children.
There are few questions about ancestry or genealogy. Do you agree that this book is forward-
looking in a way that makes it different than Hunger and Inheritance, and if so can you describe
how settled on this shift in orientation?

Lan Samantha Chang: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think about it in terms of looking forward except that
it seems to have put me in a new space with my writing, and it’s very curious to know what I’m
going to write next. I don’t have any idea at the moment. After I finished my novel Inheritance,
which took about 10 years, I was unproductive for a few years. And I think I reached the end of a
creative period. I had very little desire to write anything new, and when I did write, it seemed to
me that the work was lacking, I wasn’t very enthusiastic.

I don’t know why that is the case, except that I think that I had written through a lot of the
material that I came into my writing life with. I was here as a student in 1991, and I left in ’93,
and during that time, I had always known that I wanted to learn to write decent short stories, and
that I would also like to write something about “China”, because my parents are from China, and
it was a big deal to us when we were growing up in Wisconsin that our parents knew so much
about a country where we’d never been.

So, after I’d written through all that, which took about 12 years of writing and thinking, I paused
and thought about what to do next. I came up with ideas that weren’t particularly interesting
to me, and some that were. There were a couple of pieces that I started and gave up on. And
then in the summer — well, no, in the spring of 2006, I started detaching at the workshop and
became director of the program. This was a huge change for me. I had never held a permanent
full-time job before in my life. I had always deliberately taken positions, even after I published a
book ,that would end, because I didn’t want anything to take over my life. I wanted to save it for
the work.

And many things, as I say, happened. I finished Inheritance, I got married I guess the year that
Inheritance was published, 2004, in 2006 I started at the workshop as director, and in 2007,
I had a baby. So, what happened was, in the summer of 2006, after finishing a somewhat
wild first semester as director of the workshop, I went out of the country to France, where my
husband was at a painting school in the middle of nowhere. It was so remote that it wasn’t even

on Google Earth. And I was just in this little tiny country apartment with jetlag, and the first
morning I was there, I sat down and opened my computer and started working on this. And I
had been interested in working about poets for some time.

I feel that the novel, now that I’ve finished with it, I feel like I began to learn the material for the
novel 15 years before I started writing it, which is when I came to the workshop and began to
see what the writing life was like. Before I came to Iowa, I’d never been able to sit down and
write for long stretches, I’d never been able to define myself as a writer. And I didn’t know it was
happening at the time, but I was apprenticing myself to a process that was connected inevitably
to the academy.

And this is something I also didn’t know. I thought I would finish my term at the workshop and
go do something else, I don’t know what. And many people do leave the workshop and go work,
maybe as writers, maybe as editors, teachers, but I ended up getting an academic fellowship,
a Stegner fellowship, that sent me on a path, I think, more than coming here, that pointed me
in the direction of institutions. And institutions and writing are a strange combination, because
writers are by nature somewhat rebellious, somewhat uninstitutional by nature, a little bit
solitary, and somewhat skeptical.

And I think that what I began to observe was the different ways that writers and institutions
interacted. I’m still thinking about it all the time, I still find it fascinating, which I suppose is one
of the reasons why I’m teaching here. The thing that happened was, I wanted to write about
poets because it seems to me that the poet’s life distills an artistic life in a way that a novelist’s
life doesn’t necessarily, for this reason: that most of the poets I know, know they’re not going
to make very much money off of their work at all. I think a lot of novelists can labor under a
delusion that at some point they will sell their books for money and someone will like the book
and buy it, and they will be able to if not make a living, at least partially make a living off of their
work.

I think most of the poets I know totally don’t go into it with the idea of money in mind. And
so, their choices are to a certain extent more distinct. There’s a more distilled quality to their
decisions, the lives they live. I know this only having watched poets, of course. I am not a poet
myself. I find poets fascinating, and I admire them enormously because of the choices that they
make. And I was always interested in writing about them, but I didn’t understand how much the
book was going to be about the passage of time and the foibles of teachers and students, until
after I started at the workshop.

So that summer, I sat down when I was in France and wrote 50 pages in two weeks, which I’ve
never done before in my life. And the pages had in them all the main — not all, but a lot of the
main scenes of part one, a big scene in part two, a conversation between Roman and his wife,
Lucy, a fight they have, and then the final scene between two of the characters at the very end
of the story.

So, I had all that, I had it all figured out. It just came out of me, but of course, I hadn’t been
writing seriously for almost three years at that point. And I think that the transitions that I’d been
going through had been putting all this material in my mind, but I didn’t know it. You know, the
material of marriage and friendship, and the way that life changes, and the transition from being
an obnoxious young person to a rueful older person, which is what the book is about, I think
is something I went through in my late 30s, early 40s, right as I was transitioning to this job as
director of the workshop.

So, now I think I’ve forgotten the nature of your question, if you could remind me?

Fassler: I was characterizing the book as forward-looking in a sense, but now that you
mention it, the book is written in three distinct sections, which we’ll talk about in greater detail
later in the program. And it seems like it coincides with your own transition from younger writer,
a literary start-up company, to a more established middle-career writer.

Chang: That’s very funny. I guess it does. I guess that in the middle section, Roman is a little
older than I am, and he’s been teaching for years and years at a small university, an unnamed
school — I don’t know where it is, exactly — in Lincoln, Nebraska. There are many schools in
Lincoln, Nebraska, so this could be any of them. And he doesn’t actually teach in an MFA
program, he’s just undergraduates. And he’s just got his regular job, and he’s questioning the
path his life has taken and wondering, why didn’t I do something more daring or sacrifice
something for my art the way so-and-so does? And I suppose that those thoughts have occurred
to me.

I think that the change that Roman goes through from being a student to being a teacher is
probably more along the lines of what I’ve experienced. As a student, I saw everything from
a student’s point of view. I walked into a classroom, and I actually thought the teacher was a
powerful person. And I actually kicked and squirmed against that power in a way in my mind
and saw them as having no idea that I was doing this. But now that I’m a teacher, I understand
that my teachers were watching me the whole time, and they knew exactly when I hadn’t done
the reading, and when I was like — example: Deborah Eisenberg came to visit our program
a couple of year ago, and she told me a story she remembered from being my teacher in the
classroom. We were reading a Thomas Mann story, and she knew exactly when I had not done
the reading and when I had finished. She could see me reading the story in the classroom as
she was teaching. It was a very funny story she told, and I thought, I totally get it, and she’s
telling me because she knows I get it too, she’s not trying to hurt my feelings.

You see the students, and they don’t know you can see them. They think you’re infallible, and
you feel totally vulnerable. It’s completely different once you become a teacher. And I think in
some ways, that’s what the story is about. When Roman is a young man, he has no idea what
Miranda’s like. Even after he gets to know her better, very well, he really doesn’t understand

her perspective at all. And not until he later becomes a teacher and has experienced ingratitude
does he get that teachers put an enormous amount of themselves into the students and that the
students usually have no clue.

I think that, I can say, comes from some personal experience, but I never meant it to be an
insult, because I remember the way I felt when I was a student as well.

Fassler: So, you’re one of the uniquely privileged people to write about this from both
perspectives you’re talking about here, from the perspective of the student and then from the
perspective of the teacher. And not only the teacher, but administrator, in your case. So, you’re
uniquely privileged to write about this, and uniquely privileged to write about the workshop in
particular, one of the few directors there’s ever been. Was that a challenge at all, to take on
subject matter that is so close to home, especially when you’re a well-known MFA administrator,
even though this doesn’t take place at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?

Chang: Here’s the deal. When I wrote the first 50 pages, I didn’t think this book would ever see
the light of day. I wrote them because I was frankly uninterested in writing, and this was the only
thing that interested me. And it interested me so much, I was so thrilled to be able to enter this
world and make up this story in this little apartment in rural France. And I was so grateful to the
story, but I never thought anyone would read it, and I certainly didn’t think it was a good idea. It
was not a politic thing to do.

And I think I felt the subject matter was both esoteric and unpopular. People feel a lot of
conflict about the idea of writers going to the universities that they go to. There are now I think
230 residence programs that give the MFA degree. And most writers actually do attend MFA
programs and yet nobody really wants to think about it, because they like to think that writing
comes from the sky, or that writing can’t be taught. I think in some ways, my book agrees with
this, and that was another reason that I worried that it would be an ungracious book to write,
because obviously I’d come through very generous programs — this one here at the University
of Iowa, then I went to the Stegner Program in California — where generous people — in my
case, the state of Iowa, the citizens were paying me to teach rhetoric, and believing in my
potential as a writer, and here I was saying, maybe writing can’t be taught, maybe we don’t get
better, maybe craft is not the answer. And I thought, this is not something that people are going
to want to read from me.

And it seems to be the case that that’s true. And yet at the same time, I’m so deeply fond of
the book. It’s my favorite book that I’ve written, and I felt when I was writing it that somebody
was actually giving me a push, that I was writing in this little vehicle that was flying. It was such
a pleasure. I very rarely experience so much actual engagement and pleasure in creating
something. I felt like I knew exactly what the story would be and who the characters were. It was
really fun to write.

And what basically happened was, after two weeks, I put it away for two years. When I took it
again, I had a Guggenheim Fellowship. What happened was, my daughter Tai was born, and
by the time she was two months old, I knew that I would need to come up with some way to
take a leave of absence if I was ever going to write again. And so, I applied for a Guggenheim
Fellowship and started it in 2008. And at that point, I had a couple of projects on deck that I
thought were much more appropriate for someone of my ilk. One of them is about a family in
Iowa. They’re from my first book, Hunger. I’d written a 100-page novella about the mother who
takes driving lessons from this Vietnam veteran and learns to love the United States. And I had
another project about this dysfunctional Chinese-American family.

And I started trying to work on these projects, and I had time. I felt super guilty, because I
knew that Jim McPherson and Connie Ruthers [phonetic] were working to keep the workshop
steady while I was off there writing. And I tried hard for about a month, and I was so bored by
my projects. I can’t describe it. I suppose most people who are writers have experienced this at
some point, where they just try to get into something they know they should be working on, and
they just have no interest whatsoever. They fall asleep constantly when they’re supposed to be
working.

Anyway, a month passed by, and finally my husband said, why don’t you just give yourself a
month to work on the poet project? So I did. And it raced ahead instantly. I was thrilled and
happy, and I wrote large parts of part two. I set up part two, and I guess after that, I would give
myself one more month. The worst time when this happened was when I was actually at a
colony with my family. This colony had given me the opportunity to go there with my daughter
and husband and live in a little house, and they weren’t asking anything from us, not even that
we show up at the dinners, and the whole idea was that I would be getting time to write my
project. So, I was trying to work on these projects that I wasn’t interested in for two out of the
three weeks, and then finally in the last week, I gave in and wrote almost all of the rest of the
book.

Yeah, it was really crazy. It was this example of trying really hard not to write something and
then ending up desperately wanting to write it. So, you know, it was my big, guilty secret, that
I was writing a book, and I was stupid enough to set part one of it in a MFA program. And it
seemed like a bad idea. And on some level, it does turn out to be a bad idea, and on another, it
was the most wonderful experience I’ve had as a writer so far.

Fassler: What do you mean by that, it turns out to be a good idea?

Chang:You know, it seems to me as the book comes out and people begin to read it that the
people who actually read the book like it, and the people who are in a position to comment on it
officially say this is a book about MFA programs and all the questions in the book are about MFA
programs, but they’re not. It’s like, they can’t quite get past the idea that the first part of it is set in
an MFA program, and that I’m the director here at Iowa.

But I was really writing about a world that I’d come to know intimately over a period of 15 years,
that I actually love. I think that’s’ the other problem, that people have mixed feeling about MFA
programs. I actually don’t have mixed feelings, and I think probably that’s why encountering
other people’s feelings about the book is a surprise to me.

Fassler: So, let’s talk just for a minute about Roman and Bernard, the two poets at the
center of the book. How do their attitudes toward their artistic lives differ? Do they represent
archetypes that you’ve come to recognize through your years of working with graduate students?

Chang: Oh my goodness. Well okay, I was giving a reading in New York a couple of weeks ago,
and the young poet who introduced me described Roman as a careerist. I never thought of
Roman as a careerist, because I think Roman is too sour and antisocial to be a careerist, but he
is very ambitious. And the other way in which he could fit this definition is that he looks outside
of himself for recognition and acknowledgement of his accomplishments. So, he’s looking to get
attention, and he gets it from everybody, but he has to do all kinds of things in his school in order
to get attention from his teacher, for example. But ultimately, he doesn’t really believe in himself
until somebody says, this is a good book. And then even when he does win a prize for his first
book, he’s just gnawed by self-doubts.

And I think in contrast to Roman, Bernard’s desire to write is a kind of inner quest that’s almost
spiritual in nature. And he doesn’t send his poems out, he doesn’t care about the world around
him. He leaves graduate schools, moves into another shoebox apartment in Manhattan and
works at a coffeehouse and has no career aspirations. He’s just interested in it because he
loves it.

I don’t know if those represent archetypes of students that I’ve met. Most of the students I know
are mixtures of impulses. Some of them are their own biggest enemies, for example. There is
a character like this in my novel Lucy. She’s extremely talented, but she’s too critical of herself,
and years pass before she gains the confidence to really work.

Fassler: Yeah. One of the things that was really moving for me personally reading the
book is that I am a second year student in the workshop, and I’m facing the life beyond. And one
thing that’s interesting about the book is we get so many histories, even characters who are on
the periphery, of the different things that end up happening to them, and the different fates they
meet.

And there was one passage I thought I would just draw your attention to quickly that resonated
with me. From Roman’s perspective, it says, “And so he began a life fully committed to poetry.
He gave up a secure salary, a finite list of duties in exchange for two years in Bonneville,
Michigan, and following this, no clear path.”

And I think the novel really nails the painful uncertainty of life after the MFA. This must be
something you’ve seen students struggle with over the years.

Chang: I have. What I’ve seen over the years and experienced myself is that the end of second
year for many students, although not all, does feel like a black pit of the unknown. And what I’ve
noticed as a director is that usually in the year or two after the MFA, students negotiate that leap
with admirable agility, and most of the students I know continue to keep writing after they leave.
What stops them can be any number of things. Lucy is an example of this. I actually don’t think
it has anything to do with talent. It has something to do with endurance and stubbornness and
the ability to handle rejection.

And here’s something that is just starting to make sense to me, the ability to say no when other
people need you or want your attention. And that is something that I think most writers have to
negotiate, and especially after they leave the MFA program. They’ve been given two years to
think primarily of themselves as writers, and sometimes they leave and enter a world in which
they have to take other identities.

Fassler: Yeah, and it can lead to morally ambiguous territory, I think, as the characters in
your books suggest.

Chang: Very much.

Fassler: So, I read one critic of the book called it a series of linked novellas. Would you
agree with that characterization?

Chang: I’d not read that. That’s interesting. I don’t think of it that way, but I like the idea. I think
that the first section tells a story, and then the other sections — I guess each of them does. I
haven’t thought about it as a series of linked novellas at all, but I did think of it always as
beginning, middle, and end. And at one point, I think the ending was going to be longer, and
then I realized that it wasn’t necessary, and I could cut out massive amounts of time and just hit
the key points as I was moving forward.

Fassler: One of the things that really fascinated me about the book is that it seems that
the narrator in an interesting way seems to evolve in awareness as the characters do. There are
many moments in the beginning where they’re students, you know, and they’ll do callow, naïve
things, and they’ll say things that are unknowing or superficial, ridiculously naïve. There’s one
moment that I think of, and the narrator will narrate these in a deadpan voice.

Chang: Absolutely.

Fassler: One moment that I especially loved that I thought illustrated this is when Bernard
and Roman are arguing about whether or not Miranda has read his work, and he proves to

Roman, shoving the manuscript in his face, that she must have read it, because there’s one
word written at the bottom margin. And the word isn’t even a word, it’s just, hmm. And so, there’s
something so silly about this, but the characters can’t see the humor, and the narrator doesn’t
remark on it. and yet you as an author must have known how funny this was, and poking fun at
their dramatic seriousness.

Chang: No, not poking fun. I certainly didn’t want the narrator to poke fun. That was the thing, I
wanted the narrator to take the characters seriously, but in order to experience the effect of the
book, I think the reader has to be immersed in their callowness in part one, because it comes
back as poignant. At least, that’s how I’ve experienced. I remember the things, the conversations
we used to have when I was a student here in the workshop, and when I think back, they’re so
poignant to me.

We used to sit around talking about, would you rather be the kind of writer who wrote six or
eight books that were okay, or would you rather write one perfect book? And we would literally
try and answer that question for ourselves. And I think it’s very important that young writers
go through a period of immersing themselves in this idealism in order to move forward. And I
certainly never meant to poke fun, but I did think it was funny, if that makes any sense. And I
think it’s only funny in retrospect.

Fassler: Yeah, well, it seems that things that are given point-blank or at face value in the
earlier stage of the book actually take on this amazing added resonance as the book goes on.
And one example of that is the slogan that Roman keeps taped above his desk. It says, all that
matters is the work. And when you first encounter this, it’s touching because it’s the bravado of a
young man trying to will himself into greatness. And then later when we see it, it’s still at his desk
when he’s an older man, the slogan’s still there, and at that point it means so much more,
because he’s deeply sacrificed for his artistic life in a lot of ways.

Chang: And also in many ways it’s untrue at that point, because he has a wife and a son, and he
probably doesn’t stop to think about it, but they do matter enormously, and he finds out how
much it matters. And then, you know what’s so interesting about that is that I actually had that
taped to my computer when I was young. I don’t remember when it stopped being on there, but
when I was in the workshop, I had it on my computer, and I think I had it there for my first few
years in California. And I also had another sign taped to my door that I looked at every day when
I walked out that said, be brave.

Fassler: Especially as younger writers, we have to have slogans motivate us.

Chang: I tell my class, nobody in class is going to get in trouble for being sentimental, and no
one’s going to be in trouble for being full of themselves, because you have to have a certain
amount of that in order to move forward.

Especially as younger writers, we have to have these slogans motivating.

Fassler: When Allan Gurganus was here last year, he spoke a lot about his favorite 19th
century novelists, and how important it is in his view to read Chekhov and George Elliot and
Henry James, and I think your work has the density of detail and precision of language that I
often associate with 19th century of novels, and also the courage to work with long-term
character growth in a way that some novels don’t. Would you say that your aesthetic is
influenced by 19th century writers?

Chang: That is a very generous comment and I appreciate it. I did have Henry James in mind
when I wrote this, in particular his story “The Beast in the Jungle”, which is just an amazing
piece. I remember the first time I read it actually being absorbed in the waves of language, the
amazing sentences. I could never write those sentences, but the knowledge, the wisdom and
awareness and attitude toward the main character is something that I did take and hold pretty
closely when I was writing this particular book.

Fassler: One thing I love about the book is the way you drop in surprises almost
incidentally. We first learn that Roman has been sleeping with Miranda, which is a hugely critical
detail that happens early on, so I hope I’m not spoiling it.

Chang: I don’t mind.

Fassler: Yeah, but we learn through one offhanded subordinate clause. And yet, it’s really
key. And it seems like there’s several important details in the book that are intentionally withheld
and then revealed later. As a reader, I found this really satisfying. Do you think that withholding
information is key to crafting a compelling plot, at least in this book?

Chang: I’m sure it is. In class, we talk about tension being fueled by questions that the reader is
asking him or herself. And so, a short line of tension might be answered by the end of a chapter,
whereas a long line of tension may take longer for the reader to understand, and both kinds are
necessary in order for the reader to feel both fulfilled and curious as he or she continues.

As far as my own book, this book, it’s strange, because I’ve been in a lot of workshops and sat
in a lot of craft classes and heard a lot of lectures and read a lot of books on craft, but this book
was entirely instinctive. I did not sit down and figure out what people would need to know when.
And the thing I did was put myself in Roman’s head. Roman doesn’t need to tell us a lot of this
stuff unless it matters to what he’s trying to say, and so he reveals it when he’s trying to explain
what he’s going through. He’s a very self-involved character.

The one thing I did wonder about in the book was the placement of the enormous flashback in
part two, that I did wonder whether I should move it out of part two, but I wondered for about two
days, and then I just put it in there because I knew there was really no other way to do it, and
I’m fine with it.

Fassler: Sam, let’s talk a little bit about Bernard. He may be my favorite character in the
book, and he spends his whole life working on a long poem called “All is Forgotten, Nothing is
Lost.” I was really struck by the topic of this poem, which is the 1673 exploration by French
explorers of modern-day Wisconsin. Was this subject at all influenced by your own childhood? I
mean, you grew up in Appleton.

Chang: It was one of the things every Wisconsin child from our part of the state learns in first or
second grade. And Marquette [phonetic] and Joliette [phonetic] paddled in birch-bark canoes,
blah-blah. And I never thought about it when I was a kid, I just sort of swallowed it, but when I
left Wisconsin — which I did as soon as I had the opportunity, I’m afraid — the whole exploration
of that part of the country began to take on a kind of weight in my mind.

And it’s interesting to me, I think that one of the reasons the exploration of Wisconsin was so
interesting to me had something to do with the fact that my family were explorers. My parents
were one of only three Chinese families in our town, and they came out there and made their
own Chinese food, and they tried to improvise tofu out of actual soybeans and failed, and they
were basically frontier persons, and that feeling of being alone in the wilderness — not that it
was a wilderness, but it felt very foreign, I think it’s one of the reasons that I’ve always been so
drawn to books like Little House in the Big Woods, and books that describe the settlers moving
across the continent, and the exploration of the continent. It feels very resonant to me, very
resonant for me, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons I gave that topic to Bernard.

But also because Bernard is Catholic and the explorers were Catholic, and Bernard’s
Catholicism is important to him for his entire life. And I don’t know how it turned out that Bernard
was Catholic, he was always Catholic though.

Fassler: The third section of the book begins with what I see as a fascinating authorial
intrusion, where for the first time, this narrator who’s been very attached to the thoughts mostly
of Romans, but the other characters, breaks free for a moment. And then, this great lyrical
passage tells us about the historical background of this exploration. He or she, meaning the
narrator, even has the ability to pass independent judgment for a brief section, at one point
exclaiming, “How extraordinary a sight it must have been, lush and wild and swollen on the brink
of summer.”

So, I’m wondering about how you approached the narrator in this book, and if you have any
thoughts about why there’s a heightened moment of narration there at the beginning of the third
section?

Chang: I have a lot of thoughts about it, but they’re so boring. They’re long, and they have
something to do with the reading I’ve been doing for the past 10 years or something as I’ve been

writing novels. To summarize, I feel that many novels seek to achieve a sense of verisimilitude,
giving the reader a feeling that what they’re encountering is like human experience in some way.
And yet, we all know that human experience doesn’t really have the shape that a narrative has.
Narratives impose false shapes on experience. It’s interesting to me. In order for the book to be
satisfying, it has to have an ending, et cetera.

Anyway, I was thinking about this, and let me try to say, in order for the book to be satisfying,
it has to have an ending, but the stream of life as we now know it does not shut itself off in that
way. So, that sense of the narrative ending is something that we human beings have created in
order to satisfy ourselves, and that’s interesting to me.

Anyway, the idea I had is that one of the ways in which novels can make a reader feel as if
they’re actually experiencing life is to give the novel some kind of a sense that it’s not entirely
controlled and enclosed in perfect, tight order. And so, at some point in the novel, something
has to break out of the pattern that’s been established and create a sense of leaping, a jump so
that the reader feels that there’s something like reality in it. Reality’s inexplicable to us. There
are many parts of what we’re experiencing that we cannot even begin to understand or grasp,
and it felt to me at one point when I was learning to write novels that it was important. And I
think I internalized that idea and just did it in this book without thinking about it.

As I said, I really did not make very many conscious craft choices in writing the book, and I think
that’s probably another reason I’m so fond of it.

Fassler: So, I love your descriptions of natural world in this book, especially in the
passage we were just talking about. And your husband Robert, to whom you’ve dedicated the
book, is a landscape painter. And I wonder if his artistic eye has influenced you at all, or if that’s
something you talk about with him, physical description, because it’s something I thought was
very painterly in the book.

Chang: You know, I think that it probably has influenced me to talk to Rob so much, but I think
what influenced me more in this case is that Rob forced me to learn to go backpacking and
camping. And so, I’ve become much more intimately acquainted with the north woods in
particular, but with the outdoors in general. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I was
interested in Marquette and Joliette and describing their exploration of Wisconsin. But again, this
didn’t occur to me at all, so it’s very perceptive of you to pick it up.

Fassler: Another art you practice that I’m sure takes a second seat to your writing life, but
you’re a pretty serious knitters, and there’s a cult of knitters in the workshop currently. Is there
any relationship between the writerly temperament and the desire to knit, or is there any aspect
in which weaving things together are interesting to you as a writer, or is it just a habit?

Chang: Let me think. At this point, it’s a way of releasing stress. I started knitting, I suppose, a

year or two after I became director of the workshop and it’s been great. It’s really great. And one
time, I was in the Hambergen, and somebody there who was a practicing Buddhist told me that
it’s also mindful, so I feel like I’m getting more mindful, even though I don’t really know anything
about Buddhism, by knitting.

I don’t know. I had a daughter, she needed clothes, sweaters are ugly and expensive in the
store.

Fassler: So she can wear them? That’s great.

Chang: My grandmother knew how to knit, so I knew how to knit, I just picked it up more
seriously is what happened. And I think that having something to occupy your hands can set
your mind free.

Fassler: Do you have any suggestions for current MFA students looking forward to the
next steps? And maybe your don’t. Your characters in this book make a lot of different types of
choices, but what would you say should be the focus, or the approach?

Chang: Gosh, I think it’s different for everybody. I think at some point, every person has a
reckoning with themselves about what’s most important to them. And also, every person
recognizes that those priorities change with time. And so, I think the only thing you can do is
plan a couple years in advance. You can’t really say from now on, I’m only going to do X, Y, and
Z, because things are going to change on you. And when you’re leaving an MFA program, do
what you think is most important and what you most need at that moment, and trust that the
writing is going to continue.

Fassler: We talked earlier about whether or not art can be taught, or craft can be taught,
or MFA programs can make writers, and it’s certainly a divisive topic. But, some people have
told me, teachers that I’ve had, at least outside of the MFA programs, there’s some angers
towards MFA programs by people who have never attended them.

Chang: Yeah, who are those people?

Fassler: I don’t know, but they’re very active on comment boards on the internet.

Chang: Are they writers?

Fassler:
I don’t know, but don’t you feel that mean-spirited articles about MFA programs
come out from time to time?

Chang: I do.

Fassler: So, I guess in light of that, one thing that professors have told me is that some of
the most valuable things that happen to students in MFA programs is that they meet other
writers, and that’s certainly the advantage of a program like Iowa that’s so large, where you meet
so many people. I was really struck by Bernard’s project in the book to reach out to as many
writers as he could. It’s kind of like Letters From a Young Poet in the book by snail mail, writing
back in correspondence. What do you think is the value of long-term artistic friendships, and is
that an important aspect of the MFA?

Chang: Well, as I get older and continue to try to work, the friendships that I formed with my
classmates here at the workshop and later have become unbelievably sustaining to me,
because most of the world does not have very much interest in the preoccupations of fiction
writing. And so, it’s been really, really comforting and nourishing to have these friends help me
and talk to me and to talk to them, and to watch them live their lives and to live mine.

Long-term, I think it’s been the most emotionally healthy part of my life, aside from my family,
and I’m always very glad that I was able to meet them here. Yeah, I don’t know about — I think
okay, maybe an MFA program isn’t for everybody. I think that’s true, but okay, fine. I don’t see
why people should get upset about it. They should just do what’s best for them.

For me, I think because my parents were not at all supportive of my writing, coming here to Iowa
and finding an entire state that believed in the value of sheltering young writers was a huge
relief and also a source of confidence.

Fassler: We’ve just got a minute or two left, but I thought I’d close by asking you, if you
know, what’s next? Are you picking up any of those projects? The one with the Vietnam vet
sounded interesting.

Chang: I’m still bored by the one with the Vietnam vet. I know that it’s viable, because I know that
the last 25 pages work. So, I just have to sit around until I get what’s wrong with the first 75
pages. I started working on a story this summer about France, and I really enjoyed it, but right
now, because of the book coming out, it’s been too busy to get work done, and when the book is
in the world, I guess I’ll have solitude again.

The post Lan Samantha Chang (9-28-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

In Slow Death By Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things, Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith argue that consumer safety laws have not caught up with our chemical-laden culture. Industrial pollutants are everywhere, lurking in cosmetics, everyday plastic products, childrens’ toys, innocuous-seeming tin cans of tuna and beer. The book argues that our definition of “pollution” must be broader than belching smokestacks and overflowing garbage dumpsters. “Pollution” must include the countless invisible, toxic substances we come into contact with every day.

The authors decided to study their own bodies as sites of pollution, measuring blood levels of chemicals before and after engaging in commonplace activities—shaving, drinking cola, wearing pajamas. Their studies reveal a terrifying truth: our bodies have become repositories for countless industrial chemicals. Some have not been sufficiently studied for adverse human health effects, but many of these ubiquitous substances have been linked to cancer and reproductive problems.

On this Lit Show, Rick Smith discusses some of the most common household intruders—why they’re insidious, and how to avoid them.

Complete Show:

Rick Smith reads from the introduction to Slow Death By Rubber Duck:

The post Slow Death By Rubber Duck (9-21-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Though she does not have the condition herself, Bonnie J. Rough carries the gene for hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or HED, in her genetic code. The condition affects bone structure, hair, sweat glands, and can cause immunodeficiency, leading to a life of discomfort and related illness. Her memoir, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, works through the family history, four generations long, of individuals affected by HED. Assuming the voices of her grandfather, Earl, and mother, Paula, as well as writing in her own voice, Rough provides an intimate portrait of a biological legacy.

Complete Show

Excerpt: Bonnie J. Rough reads Carrier‘s prologue, “Letter to an Unborn Son”

The post Bonnie J. Rough (9-16-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

This summer, students from the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio crowded into the KRUI studio to tell stories from memory. Without notes or written preparation, these high-schoolers gave oral histories—true-life tales they’ll hold inside their heads for a lifetime. The series was aired on four dates during a two-week period.

This program was inspired by The Moth Reading Series in New York City.

Note: Some students chose not to give their full names. Their names and hometowns are listed as they asked them to appear.

Part 1: 6-22-2010
Featuring Myles Buchanan, Rachel, Elizabeth, Mark, Zach Hollenbeck, Rashmika Nedungadi, and Susanna Lustbader.

Part 2: 6-24-2010
Featuring Jesse Krebs, Alison Macke, Anna Hagen, George Liu, Nicholas Tonckens, Katherine Baus, Sara, Owen Kaye-Kauderer

Part 3: 6-29-2010
Featuring Maggie, Alex, Sophie, Eric, Andrew, Cameron, Shaj Mathew, Cypress

Part 4: 7-1-2010
Featuring Maddy Taylor, Rebecca Deranian, Elena Hudacek, Z Kuester, Zach Wendeln, Bryan Erickson, Sam, Scarlett, Parthiv Mohan

The post Iowa Young Writers’ Studio: Oral Histories appeared first on The Lit Show.

Complete Show [Download Podcast]

The post Yuly Restrepo & Chinelo Okparanta appeared first on The Lit Show.

In LePan’s dystopia, the intellectually and physically disadvantaged are set apart from society as “mongrels,” a sub-stratum of individual who are denied human status, raised for slaughter in factory farms. The novel is narrated by Sam, an abandoned mongrel boy who has been taken in by a human family, and Broderick, a mongrel-rights activist.

Prominent bioethicist Peter Singer has praised the book for asking “deep and challenging questions,” and Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee has called the book “a powerful piece of writing, and a disturbing call to conscience.”

The post Don LePan (6-22-10) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Justin Cronin’s The Passage begins in world we recognize, an eerie cousin of our of our own. But this time, when the switch is flicked, civilization erupts into chaos. The book accomplishes something I’ve never seen before in a work of fiction: it creates a full, vivid, and believable world, then destroys it, and reckons fully with the consequences. For many, many pages, we live alongside Cronin’s characters, discover their habits and secrets, learn to love them. And then, the unimaginable happens. When we step, blinking, into the wreckage, all bets are off. There are no familiar people, no known settings, sights or sounds. Our task, like the task of Cronin’s future colonists, is to make a home in a forbidding new landscape where truly anything can happen.

Complete Interview:

Like the Old Testament, Cronin’s trilogy tells the generational history of a civilization—we are promised in the opening paragraph that the story will span a thousand years. And so, the work lacks the sheltering hallmarks of traditional fiction. Gone is the easy reliance on a single, trusted protagonist; gone is the tacit assurance that central characters won’t die—they can and must. The novel’s epigraph is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, which personifies time as a merciless, ravaging force, destruction incarnate; as history-maker, Cronin is merciless too, stripping from us familiar places and faces in humanity’s march towards the future. Time, we are deeply made to feel, will always break our hearts. But this novel is also a lasting testament to the human power to endure, our ability to recover from our brutal, even our irrevocable mistakes, and our endless quest to triumph, someday, over plain old death.

Cronin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of two other novels. His first book, Mary & O’ Neil, a novel in stories, won the Pen/Hemingway award, the Stephen Crane prize, and other honors. The Passage, which has already been one of the biggest publishing events of the year has been praised by the New York Times, Salon.com, and other publications, and is destined for bestseller lists this week. Stephen King has said the book is “an enthralling, entertaining story wedded to simple, supple prose, both informed by tremendous imagination… It has the vividness that only epic works of fantasy and imagination can achieve.”

The post Justin Cronin (6-15-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Reding stumbled onto the subject for his book almost accidentally, while on other journalistic assignments. As he made inroads into communities from Idaho to Missouri, he found that each setting, despite regional differences, had something in common: meth. In each of half a dozen distinct cities, the drug had woven its way into the fabric of daily life. Reding felt increasingly sure that he’d uncovered a major story—a national epidemic that was ravaging communities, families, and individual lives. Still, the author found he simply couldn’t convince editors on either coast that the problems he described were real. Their responses were maddeningly uniform: no one is talking about meth. It’s a fringe, rural problem. Sorry, but no one’s looking to read about this. Our nation, as could be judged by its silence on the issue, apparently agreed.

With Methland, Reding seeks to demonstrate that greater forces–national, even global trends–not just individual choices, are driving meth addiction countrywide; that individuals caught within the drug’s destructive circle of influence are normal, everyday, and usually very hard-working people; that meth, as an epidemic, is a side effect of the confluence of challenges facing small-town America. In these goals, the book is a resounding success. Americans, rural and urban, are lucky that someone took a chance on this book. Reding’s canny, humane analysis demonstrates that methamphetamine, far from being a fringe issue, is actually at the heart of who we are and how we live as Americans. It is the rare book that convinces us its topic is the salient lens through which to view our cultural moment.

Complete Interview:

Methland was one of the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2009, and it won the 2009 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. The book was picked as a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times.

Excerpt from the New York Times Book Review:

“[Methland], wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type that’s disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main Street, isn’t chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us, we learn, and once again, as happens in America whenever our collective attention wanders from the gray struggles of the little guy to the purple capers of the big wheels, attention must be paid. Right now. Or else.”

Excerpt—Nick Reding reads from Methland‘s new afterword:

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Davis is known for incorporating aspects of other genres in her stories, and her work succeeds because she has the skill to do so. She has the poet’s knack for evocation through description; the memoirist’s capacity for unflinching self-analysis; and the fiction writer’s ability to create a world, populate it, and then make it tick and tock with life.

Many of the works do not have a standard narrative chronology, but use other strategies to provide meaning. Some stories read like sprawling lists of objects or people, others like SAT algebraic word problems, others as koan-like meditations on isolation and loneliness. Davis perpetually surprises with formal innovations, too. In one story, the speaking narrator is saddled with a bad case of the hiccups; another is a faux-scholarly analysis of a series of get well cards. Despite her inventiveness, though, Davis never embraces iconoclasm for its own sake. Her stories read as the work of an author deeply engaged with how to best use words to represent life—in all its strangeness, pathos, and comedy.

Lydia Davis has received numerous awards for her fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her translations of Blanchot and Proust. Her 2007 story collection Varieties of Disturbance was a finalist for the National Book Award. Rick Moody has called her “the best prose stylist in America.”

Complete Interview:

Readings

“20 Sculptures in One Hour”

“Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms”

“Cockroaches in Autumn”

“The Actors”

The post An Interview with Lydia Davis appeared first on The Lit Show.

Hamilton’s work tells the real-life stories of three modern farmers: a dairyman in Texas who wages a one-man war against agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico attempting to revivify farming’s centrality in his community; and a North Dakota family pioneering new varieties of plants that work against climate change and the dominance of patented GMOs.

In a time when agribusiness and the global economy are making the rules, and when most people of the land are striving to be obedient, these people have had the courage to use their own intelligence in their own places. They have been appropriately rewarded for their independence, and readers of this book will be rewarded also. As for me, when I read of the Podoll family’s thinking about local adaptation and their effort ‘to get the maximum from the minimum,’ I wanted to stand up and shout.

— from a letter to the author by Wendell Berry

The post Lisa M. Hamilton (5/11/10) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Patel’s latest book confronts the issues that are hot-button in America’s homes today: health care, bailouts, climate change, Goldman Sachs. In its large-scale criticism of market-based thinking, the book traces the genesis of grave financial, humanitarian, and ecological crises, shows how we arrived where we are, and offers insight on how we might move towards better future. Naomi Klein has called The Value of Nothing a “deeply thought provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness—argued with such humor and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable.”

Complete Interview and Reading:

The post Raj Patel (5-4-2010) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Min, born in Shanghai, China, is the author of The Last Empress and the memoir Red Azalea.

Complete show:

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