But Call Me Betsy

I hope in the next season of The Bachelor , the man cries as much as Kaitlyn is crying, those heaving, sobs of regret for being attracted to more than one person at a time. Shawn, with the slicked back blond hair and beer bottle in the giant paw of his hand, says that he's not sure he can do this. He asks Kaitlyn if she's in love with him and she says, "I'm falling in love with you?" They make out. She cries. He goes and sits out on the steps in his denim jeans, his forehead super wrinkly, because that's how worried he is. Worried like a Shar Pei. Next, Kaitlyn goes on a double date with JJ, the investment banker and Joe, who she thinks is hilarious and I think looks like he shoots guns at beer cans. He wears a denim shirt with a down vest over it. They go on a boat and Kaitlyn is hoping that Joe will speak from the heart and that JJ will not talk too much about his three year old daughter. One of these guys must go home. JJ says that he's really fal...

I get that you want viewers. I get that you are pandering to the lowest common denominator, to people who want to zone out in front of the TV or are watching it while doing something else, so only half paying attention. I get that you still believe we're a society who can't handle a series where we see anything but the most hetero-normative representations of people: white goes with white, female goes with male. Perhaps you feel it is still too early in American history to have a bisexual male bachelor or a black female bachelorette or perhaps you're leaving that to the more progressive cable channels. You want to the show to be palatable to the prime time viewing audience, which may consist largely of Christian white women or Catholic white women or Southern-born conservative white women. I trust you know your demographics and so are pandering to your viewing audience. Okay, I take that back. I don't trust that you know what you're doing or that you have any rese...

Not yet a week back from this intense, ten day writing conference where we're talking about ideas and how to write the truth and here I am back, ready to blog about the least realistic show on TV. I missed two weeks in a row, including last week when Amy Schumer was a guest, which bums me out. Here's a question: Why is Nick on the show now and does he even not wear a bow tie? The remaining black guy left on his own volition because he felt that (wait for it...) Kaitlyn was not there for the right reasons, and also, because he went to Princeton and she went to Montreal Community Modeling School. Also, he believes that all she wants to do is make out with everyone she can and be on TV. He said that he's sick of talking about farts and high-fiving. She admits that she is "a make-out bandit right now" explaining that if this physical side of the relationship isn't there for her, she can't marry the guy. She is covered in sparkles. She tells the other guy...

You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton ...

Inspired by the writing conference and because the Rider library had two of these books, I am going to try to read a short story a day from one of the two "best of 2014" collections and see how that goes.  The story I read last night was Mark Haddon's "The Gun." You know who Haddon is--he wrote that charming and sad book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . This story is about a moment from childhood, as remembered by Daniel, a significant moment from his life the summer he was 10 years old.  FYI, If a short story is called the gun, you have to apply the Chekov mandate, something like, a loaded gun in a story must go off. The gun goes off several times, but what the story is really about is not what happens in the story, but what doesn't happen. Paradoxically, one of the things I often forget when I'm writing a story is that I should also be telling a good story. Like, something you could relate to someone else, something that you m...

I shared an Uber car with Miranda this morning after my last Yale Dining Hall breakfast of bacon, Frosted Flakes, yogurt, and a blueberry pancake. For my trip, I stashed away a box of Raisin Bran, a nectarine, an apple, and a cinnamon muffin that immediately came apart in the napkin. It's likely that I'm just transporting this muffin from one state to the next to throw away when I get to Princeton. While waiting for our trains, Miranda and I brain-stormed a list of the necessities that we must remember to bring next time. This is the exhaustive list, the list that allows you to ship a trunk of things like someone in Downton Abbey. I put asterisks next to the objects that are worth the extra effort. Please note that almost all of these items can be purchased at the Yale bookstore after your arrival for 100% more than you would pay at Walgreens. Extra hangers Fan* Bathrobe* Your own twin-sized sheets* Mattress pad ...

I wasn't of those kids who went to summer camp every year. The only formal camp I went to was with my youth group in seventh grade to Warren Wilson (hi, Maja! Don't forget to send me your dad's phone number for my next organ donation story) and my recollections of it are vague. As we're doing here, we stayed in the college dorms which I thought was very grown-up, but the only distinct memories I have of that time are discovering a stash of Penthouse Forum magazines one of the college students had left behind (thereafter, I never quite got looked at any root vegetables in the same way), and a lot of crying after Kitty Wiseman told Katie Battoe to watch out for Scott Reese, after what he had done to Kitty in the swimming pool the summer before. I wrote an essay about it in grad school for Vivian Gornick's nonfiction class. About my heartfelt essay, she said something like, "Why should we care about these girls? Who gives a shit about your summer bible study and...

Humor class with Teddy Wayne . He did a reading from his book last week about a child rock star having a made-up, publicity date with a cute girl. V. funny, dry, and sad. He reads like Amy Bloom says you should, sort of like you are reading a newspaper. If the story is good, the pathos will come through and you don't have to perform and do the British accents. First, we read a short piece by BJ Novak called "Missed Connection: Grocery Spill at 21st and 6th p.m. on Wednesday." The woman who reads it out loud is the same one who read a funny nonfiction piece about having too much hair everywhere. I suspect she has taken some theater classes (said the former theater major). 1. Short humor pieces often have a tight conceptual premise, and can start by asking "what if?" In the case of the above example, what if you wrote a missed connection piece that was absurdly specific, so that it could only be one particular person, versus the expected form which is ...

I am starting to get a little bit fatigued. Not a lot, not enough to want to be at home just yet, but my commitment to updating the blog as I go has waned. This is particularly true during the lectures, in part because I feel self-conscious typing away like a little elf instead of just sitting and listening like everyone else. Today, we had another workshop, and we did a couple of quick exercises around stereotypes in writing. First, each person got a piece of paper with a derogatory term that can be applied to a group of people, like "white trash." We then did a free write around whatever our term was, to explain why that character with the label applied is much more than just white trash--she has a history, desires, thoughts, fears, a job, maybe children, etc. Then we did an exercise where we were giving two adjectives generally applied to describing women only. Mine were "perky" and "ditzy." We wrote about what our job might be and why people might l...

Have you read Wild ? I did, and I am not someone who typically reads any nonfiction, particularly nonfiction about nature-y things, such as fly fishing or hunting bears or camping in the woods or hiking the Pacific Coast Trail (all actions I can't imagine voluntarily doing). But I read Wild about a year ago, because I had seen some of Strayed's short essays and loved them, and I got hooked on the narrative immediately. Don't rely on Reese Witherspoon to tell you the story. Go get the book yourself. The author is here today to give us a craft talk. She wears a bright blue shirt and a black arm bracelet or possibly a fit bit. Too far away to tell. She does not look unlike Reese. Here's what she has to say: Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to a young writer who sent him a story: "You have all of the elements of a short story here, but have unfortunately, you have missed the elements of the human heart." Bring all of yourself to the page. ...

Had a master class with one of my all time favorite short story and novel writers, Amy Bloom. I took lots of notes, because she had a lot to say. She lived up to all of my expectations.  She was straight-forward, smart and sardonic, but one of those funny people who doesn't smile at her own jokes. Here are some of the things we talked about, in order of appearance: "Turn off your phone unless you are an emergency worker or a surgeon. Second, even if you are brilliant writer, I will not be delivering your manuscripts to The New Yorker after the workshop." She warned against bad similes: "The rain came down like a prostitute's tears." She recommends a book by Ursula LeGuin called Steering the Craft where LeGuin talks about what she calls expository lumps, this challenge all writers face in trying to weave narrative info into the story so that it makes sense. She advises making even this information as good as possible, and if it's not, if that...

We workshopped my story today. Molly Gaudry, our workshop leader has a different approach to the model I'm accustomed to. In traditional workshops, the readers talk the whole time about the story and the writer sits mute. They talk about what they love about the story (the title, the ending, the character named Heloise). Then, they talk about what they didn't like so much, sometimes without explaining why. So, you'll get a comment like, "I didn't get the ending. Why did the guy shoot the old lady just because she said she recognized him as her son? I didn't get that." And suggestions about how to revise. "What if they just hugged in the end?" But mostly, it works okay. You hear from lots of voices, and you sit there and nod and maintain eye contact while trying to write the comments  down in your notebook, often fragments because your heart is beating so fast and you can't concentrate and later, when you go back to your notes, you'll find...

So many good quotes and pieces of advice at the conference which I will not share with you because you are not here and did not pay for it. I keep asking all of these successful writers the basic question of how they do it. How do they have lives and get the writing done? The editor from Ploughshares, this lovely woman with square black glasses, a gentle, teacherly voice and a sensible bob, said that she gives herself an hour a day. Every day, whenever that might be. And sometimes, longer on the weekends. Why don't I use do this? Here is my goal. I have to write a book by next year's conference. That's 50,000 words or about 220 pages. If I could do math, I would figure out right at this moment how many words that is per day, plus revision. This guy is here to talk about how he broke out of his drug addiction and construction job by writing about being shipwrecked for Amazon's Kindle. He wears a black Dead Volts t-shirt with a skull surrounded by angels wings, has two ...

If you want to feel bad about yourself, you should attend some talks where the featured speakers graduated from Yale just five years ago and are now working as editors for Slate.com and The New Yorker. Makes you wonder whether it's actually true that money does create a difference in your life trajectory, so, like, if you happen to have gone to an all-girls college for ten years and then attended Yale, then interned at The Rolling Stone and hung out with someone who knows the editor of Talk of the Town and Shouts and Murmurs who then later calls to offer you a job if you want it, you might have somewhat more of an edge than if you attended a state school in Tallahassee, FL while working at Triple A as a dispatcher and TGI-Fridays as a waitress. Of course, some of that is jealousy talking, but not all of it. I realize that to get these jobs, you also have to have talent, and I'm sure these speakers do, and they are very engaging speakers, but I don't like them. At all. Act...

Here's the thing about going to a writing conference (or any other conference, I suppose): you have to talk to people.  Lots of people. You have to socialize and you have to say where you're from all the time, a question I stumble on, because if I say I'm from Nebraska, people are always like, "Where? I didn't know anyone ever really lived there." Plus, I feel like it's an untruth; I only lived there for the first four years of my life. But I'm not from New Jersey either.  I live there now, but it's not my place of origin and I'm still trying to accept the fact that I live in a state that's best known by the rest of the world through the reality show, Jersey Shore. But here I am, at Yale University, a beautiful place in New Haven, established in 1701 (as we learned yesterday during the first town hall meeting) and I am assigned to sleep in Davenport College, in a dorm room on a twin bed under thin bedding that feel like butcher paper....

I missed last week, so I am not sure why we have started with a rose ceremony and the men holding their heads in their hands and why does Ashton Kutcher now have a black eye? And why did she send that other guy home, I think it was because he was shouting? Or was it because of how much he was sweating? It's all a mystery to me, but Mom is here and she doesn't like this Kaitlyn because she looks slutty in that low cut silver sparkly dress of hers. My mom has only seen like three episodes in fifteen years. First rose: Terry/Ashton Second rose: Ben Z. not to be confused with Ben P. and Ben T. Third rose: Shawn B. Fourth: Missed his name. Fifth: Tanner, will of course, accept this rose Sixth:  Chris, who look like he hasn't slept in weeks. He's a dentist, I think. Bi Seventh: Brian: wears fake non-prescription Superman/Clark Kent glasses Eighth:Justin Ninth: Ian,  other black guy 10th:Josh or Choc 11th:Joe 12th: Some other guy who is not the yoga guy with t...