But Call Me Betsy

First continuing ed class at Princeton High  School last night. They offer a bunch over the course of the fall and spring--eight weeks focused on topics ranging from learning a new language to cooking with onions to samba dancing and mystery writing. I started another class like this last year, but only went twice--not because the class wasn't interesting, but because it met on Thursday nights which was one of the few times a week that both Luke and Dan were out of the house. The class costs $125, so it is highly affordable.  And classes are held in the high school, so as I was looking for the classroom, I kept passing posters for the Homecoming dance and a project for National Hispanic Heritage month, and thinking, Luke sees these same things every day. It's a beautiful school, and my class was held in the French room. I surmised this by the map of France next to the blackboard and the language exercises on the wall. As I imagined, the class was mostly adults in their ear...

In trying to work on "Real Estate," I'm working on figuring out what home means for this particular character One suggestion I had from Molly Gaudry is to free-write about homes. Here's what I came up with. This is a picture of my grandma in front of one of her homes. Homes I have known and loved and remember: grandma's house with the cement steps where you could swing off the end and the dark wood staircase going up and the kitchen where the activity was and outside was a wide driveway with chained up dogs and John Deer tractors and grease spots in the gravel, There were boys everywhere, as my mom had seven brothers. Omaha and an attic bedroom and a babysitter who had a scary basement. The apartment in Illinois. The first time where I slept on a cot outside of the bedroom by myself, separated from my mom. The house in Schaumburg with the pink and white bedroom and scratchy carpet and the huge flowered wallpaper in the kitchen and the back patio where Don g...

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 ...

I read Lauren Burkett's The Shining Girls in about a week.Well, a year and a week, because first, I checked it out from the library and didn't finish it, and then I recently found a paperback version for sale at the same library for $2 and so bought it, Do you know about this book? Writer Tana French has endorsed the novel, but I don't necessarily trust her judgment anymore, not after reading The Secret Place , which was a really long literary version of Dawson's Creek without the intrigue or multidimensional characters. The Shining Girls does this odd thing where it straddles two to three genres at one time. It's an historical book about a serial killer who time travels to find and murder his victims, women he sees as" shining;" meaning that they are particularly vibrant and strong, not your typical victim. He doesn't just kill them, he dissembles them, pulling out their intestines and doing the killing slowly, because it turns him on.The her...

I really must put in fifteen minutes or so trying to come up with something for my Sat. morning writing exercise. The parameters are pretty clear--the action is being observed by a group, the scene should start in the middle of the action, and there has to be a moment when the character is described by someone else. I wonder how many people will have her looking at herself in the mirror-maybe none, because she is supposed to be being watched by others. I already blew all of my suggestions by throwing them out to the class during our online meeting, so I can't use any of them. Retirement party, wedding, bachelorette party...Where else do people gather to do things? An AA meeting, that would be like the beginning of Fight Club . An AA meeting where she's not actually an alcoholic. A yoga class. The fat girl in the yoga class. A meditation group. An operating room and she's the  patient. One valuable piece of advice from the class is how when you're writing, you should j...

I've been more social than usual lately (which means I interact with new-ish people like once a month instead of once every three months) and so have been recently answering the question about what I do in my job and in my life. I can answer the job question easily, but then I sometimes expand on that to make my life sound more interesting by adding that I also write fiction. And then the person asks me what I write about and I have no ready answer. I usually say, "Dysfunctional women who can't connect with others and always say the wrong things and reveal too much information to casual questions." Maybe what I need to do is come up with a different answer every time, like "I write about pig farming during the turn of the century in Afghanistan." Or "My stories revolve around transsexuals who are hiding their identities." Or  "I'm into tales about registered sex offenders who are really very nice people at heart." But overall, I f...

Just finished another round of fiction story selections for Philadelphia Stories , and was reminded again how quickly a story can get rejected for seemingly minor reasons. Don't get me wrong--I read the whole story every time, but if I'm not intrigued or hooked by the beginning, it's going to take a while to reel me back in. If the first sentence is weak or if the first paragraph limps along and the subject matter seems cliched or even if the title feels off, I am already rejecting it in my head. This is because there are 15 other stories to get through, and if yours isn't standing out in some way, I'm ready to move on to the next one--the one that doesn't immediately remind me that I'm reading a made up story by a struggling writer. In the body of the story, there are a few things that will make me race to the finish and not in a good way. I'm not a prude, but if there is a scene that appears out of nowhere that includes graphic sex or violence, I f...

Can you write a novel in tweets? I hope not. Can you write a novel in fifteen minutes a day while also being distracted and Googling things like "novel in 15 minutes" and checking Facebook every three minutes? I should always decide I'm going to write when I have several other unpleasant things to do, such as paying bills, because when I have another task in front of me that I don't feel like facing (writing), I will allow myself to attack those third tier annoying things I've been putting off. Why is that? Note: I am currently resisting the  Googling of:  "Reasons for Procrastination" or "Writer's block" or "Death of David Foster Wallace." Which might lead one to believe that I don't want to write fiction anymore, and so what is my problem? Is it an identity thing--like, that I have thought of myself as a writer for so long that I wouldn't be able to figure out who I am if I'm not writing? No, it's not that, b...

Catching up on the fiction in The New Yorker , and so just read Jonathan Lethem's story from April 7, "Pending Vegan." Have I read any of his novels before? I have a vision in my head that he has a book with fat stars on the cover or am worried that he might be the guy who wrote Incredibly Loud and Too Close, or whatever that title is for the book about people trapped in elevators (I am joking, of course! I know that it's about 911. I have zero interest in reading it, even though it might change my life. I feel weirdly resistant to reading books from a kid's point of view, as I think it's really hard to do well without sounding saccharine. There are exceptions, like Mark Haddon and Ian McEwan in Atonement and Dorothy Allison, but get off my back, will you?). Okay, I just Googled him and he's written nothing else that I've ever read, though he is a prolific and successful writer. This story is about an anxious taking his twin girls to Sea World. T...

I just discovered the coolest, nerdiest thing--I wanted to write this blog post about "Under the Sign of the Moon," which is the latest Tessa Hadley short story in the March 17 issue of The New Yorker.  I was basically going to write something about how I didn't understand the story--and then lo and behold, the online version has a section called, "This Week in Fiction" where they interview writers about the stories that have just appeared. I haven't read the author's explanation yet, so I'll say that the story starts with this older woman, Greta, who is on the train, going to visit her daughter in Liverpool. While she's traveling, she meets an odd young man dressed in this old-fashioned way, who seems to take an interest in her that's beyond the normal polite conversation. There's something about him that's unsettling, and he seems like he's spent lots of time in the company of older people. She tries to avoid him so she can just...

Oh, by the way, it's April Fool's Day, so beware of bad jokes. I am still not done with No Country-- maybe 35 pages to go, but it occurred to me yesterday, as I was reading the italicized first person chapters that (I think) are the thoughts of the sheriff, that I could write more of my fiction in other voices. I almost never try on characters who are not like me, which means, essentially, that my stories all center around some quirky white girl of varying ages who is searching for a home or connection.  I never write a story where the main focus is an older black man from Africa. And I probably never will, because to do that well, you have to be a genius. I actually don't even like it when authors write in other genders; more specifically, when a male author tells the story from the first person perspective of like, an aging female prostitute. I don't mind it so much if the story is told via the third person perspective--Stephen King does this in a couple of his ...

This is what we talked about in our fiction writing class last night. I asked the participants to do a free write on two things--something that they were scared of and something that grossed them out. We were going to be discussing two pretty distressing stories ("The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick and "First, Body," by Melanie Rae Thon) and I thought it would be good to have them start thinking about how to exorcise some of those fears/anxieties/grossness in their fiction. These are some of the things they mentioned on the gross scale: bodily fluids, snot (see "bodily fluids"),  milk (because she grew up in Poland and mile their came in these strange cartons, and was never refrigerated) and hair on plates (this from someone who waits tables and so really does have to face this ick on a regular basis). In the scared of part, people talked about:  rats (one guy has a rat problem in his kitchen. This brought on a whole slew of stories about rats. We suggested he r...

In the writing class I’m taking, we’ve work-shopped a couple of stories that revolve around a character suddenly remember something of significance that happened to her in the past. Here's generally how it unfolds: the story is told from the present day/now, with the character doing something languid--like sitting in bed wrapped up in quilt, remembering. As the story continues, we move back and forth between the present day action and the traumatic event being recalled. In the present tense of the story, the writer describes the character doing mundane things, like spreading butter on a piece of toast or pouring over her reflection in an antique mirror. These activities trigger additional memories that reveal for the reader more of the traumatic event.   By the finish, the event is explained---the baby burned in a fire left by the mother's drunkenly dropped cigarette; the car skidded off the road and into an oncoming semi, the aliens sucked up all of the townspeople, except ...

We're going over Alice Munro's short story, "Free Radicals," in class tonight. To prepare, I've been reading other people's comments about the story; what they think it's about, what it means, if the main character is who she says she is...One of the more iffy comments suggested that maybe the whole story was all a dream...She just feel asleep and dreamed of a man coming to her house, threatening to hurt her, admitting he'd murdered his family, and then stealing the car. All a dream. It is my hope that Alice Munro would never write such a story, and I don't think she did in this case either. It's one of the more frustrating things about listening to other people's critiques sometimes; they can't understand the writer's choices and so invent their own possibilities. Someone else said that she had clearly just pieced together and older story and a newer one and forgotten to edit out the inconsistencies. As if: (a). She would consider...

I have the opportunity to write a noir story for this anthology set in Philadelphia and am having trouble knowing exactly what's expected. Seems like it must have murder, intrigue, and a sort of fatalism; also, the occasional leggy blond and criminals getting away with murder. There's also this hard, dark edge and somewhat of a lack of humor. I guess? But I'm a little confused, I think, about the differences between this genre and the hard-boiled detective piece. I've read a few of the other anthologies published by the same press, and they range from first-person narratives told from the guilty party's perspective to third person tales of revenge. I had an idea that I could write a story where the first line is something like, "It all started with the cats..." And then it would be something about a girl who is trying to fend off the growing number of feral cats that keep appearing on the cement wall behind her house in the dead of winter. Somehow, she dis...