Craft Essays, Reviews, Interviews

Here are the beginnings of a few craft essays, reviews, and interviews, with links to full versions (when not behind paywalls) in the titles.

Mystery vs. Confusion (CRAFT)

In writing fiction, we’re always looking for ways to manage the release and restraint of information, introducing our characters and situations while avoiding the dreaded exposition junk pile at the beginning (many of us do have a great fondness for exposition junk piles when they’re intriguingly full of bright objects). When we’re writing the first draft of a story or novel, the process can feel like an unsettling dream: we’re attending a party in the dark. Is it a funeral? A wedding? The birthday party of an old friend or enemy? What are we doing and why? We fumble around trying to figure out who else is in the room as we trip over the furniture and bump into walls.

‘Consciousness, Splintered,’ Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California (Alta Journal online for the California Book Club):

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”

Self-Awareness & Self-Deception: Beyond the Unreliable Narrator (A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, anthology, Trinity University Press, also in The Writer’s Chronicle)

We refer to reality as if it were tangible--a geographical location or an absolute and identifiable state--but writers often arrive at the reality of the world of their story, if ever, as a kind of byproduct of the characters' everyday self-delusions.

The term "unreliable narrator" suggests that unreliability is a special category and that most narrators (and people) are clear-sighted, rational, and honest. Even a fairly casual consideration of an ordinary day, however, let alone a crisis, suggests otherwise; there's substantial narrative interest in the chaos of the "normal" human mind. It's a little scary, even for people who consider themselves to be recklessly truthful, to count the number of lies (social lies, kind lies, self-serving lies, small semi-truths to avoid long explanations, and outright lies) we tell. Often, we don't allow ourselves to know when we're lying. It's even scarier to look back over the decisions we've made and to try to remember what made those choices seem so smart or so necessary. So one aim in our ongoing project of writing and reading is the passionate desire to get an accurate view of reality.

‘Only Because It’s Forbidden’: Seduction and Loss in Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love (Alta Journal online for the California Book Club):

Jessica Hagedorn’s fiercely exuberant 1996 novel, The Gangster of Love, hurtles through a kaleidoscope of tones, mixing eruptions of imagination with elements from her lived experience as an immigrant child and then as a punk rock musician in 1980s New York. Hagedorn—novelist, playwright, musician, and multimedia performer—is, most of all, a collagist, including in her earlier novel, the American Book Award–winning Dogeaters, a marvelous cacophony of voices and modes set in Manila.

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Hilary Mantel’s works — brilliant, elusive, inventive, psychologically acute and gorgeously written — vary more exuberantly in style and subject matter than almost any other great author. Nonetheless, they consistently track certain obsessions in theme and subject matter: cruelty, the uses and misuses of power, the shocks of illness and mortality, and the invasions of the spirit world. As much as Mantel is celebrated for exploring the workings of long-vanished monarchies, she’s vilified for her temerity in considering contemporary power issues, whether she’s writing an opinion piece that mentions the symbolic role played by a photogenic princess or a short story about the imagined assassination of a former prime minister. None of this seems to slow her down.

Cristina Henríquez, Book of Unknown Americans (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Oral histories, real or fictional, exist both on and off the page: Readers are always trying to look behind the stories, to hear what isn't being said, to come to our own conclusions about the meanings and interpretation of a life. These histories can reinforce what we know about the world, delineating experiences like our own in ways that help us make sense of them, or can bring us into lives we saw from the outside but didn't understand.

Edan Lepucki, California (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Edan Lepucki's ambitious, powerful, frightening first novel, "California," takes place, like the 1980s TV show "Max Headroom," "20 minutes into the future." Cal and Frida - two escapees from the dystopian hellhole of Lepucki's Los Angeles - have lost everything but each other and a few precious, talismanic objects, like a ratty family sweater or Frida's secret, cherished glass turkey baster, still wearing its price tag. They live in the "afterlife," Frida's private name for the green place she imagined they would find when they left L.A. But their life in the woods is almost unimaginably hard - their survival only possible because of Cal's stint in a tiny, all-male, idealistic back-to the-land college called Plank. They're both haunted by the loss of Frida's charismatic brother, Cal's roommate at Plank, who became a revolutionary and the center of a violent tragedy.

A Classic Nightmare: On Emily Fridlund’s  History of Wolves (Review, The Millions)

In one classic nightmare, you seem to keep waking up only to experience a new version of the same terror. Or you’re running away from a monstrous being, and then, just when you think you’re safe, he comes from behind and looms over you. Emily Fridlund’s unnerving, beautifully crafted first novel, History of Wolves, recreates these implacable structures, moving back and forth in time, evading and then confronting trauma.

Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain (Review, The Believer)

Stacey D'Erasmo, Blood, Breath, Bone, String: A Seahorse Year (Review, The Believer)

Politics and the Imagination: How to Get Away with Just about Anything (in Ten Not-So-Easy Lessons) (Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope, anthology,  Rutgers University Press, also in The Writer’s Chronicle)

The Pleasures of Hell (The Writer’s Chronicle)

Teeming with Villains & Villainesses, or, Taking Sides (The Writer’s Chronicle) 

Sylvia Brownrigg (Interview, Necessary Fiction)

Joan Silber (Interview, The Believer)

Anita Felicelli (Interview, Full Stop)

Peg Alford Pursell (Interview, Full Stop)