The Heracles House, from my novel the Birds of Prey, is up as part of the Collagist issue #14. Much thanks to Matt Bell for taking the piece on and for all the hard work, all the time.
I probably won't get a chance to check out the full issue until the weekend but I'm sure it's beautiful as ever.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
We can only do the best with the trauma we are dealt
I have two stories coming out this month. "Heracles House" will be at the Collagist on the 15th of September and "In the Shadow of the Darkness of Strange Animals" will appear in Unsaid 5 (pre-order today!)
I'm very proud of both stories--I believe they are two of the three or four best pieces I've done to date.
"Heracles House" is from my novel-in-stories Birds of Prey. The idea for the piece came from Anne Carson's Euripides translations Grief Lessons as well as some painful, personal experiences I won't go into. So, initially "Heracles House" was to be a novel in three parts--the murder of his wife and child, the life on the run from the murder, and then a sort of surreal/cathartic final section. I spent the majority of the 09 summer writing a first draft and only got as far as the end of the first section before I lost interest. To be honest, I didn't know how to write the book and I quickly became frustrated with the quality of my prose. I wanted something like the Old Testament and Sophocles and this ideal was the furthest from what I was mustering. I shelved "Heracles" for my long suffering story collection (it was my mfa thesis back in... 06. The first story was written in 03/04 when I was 24 and Brett Favre was a mere 34) which was slowly coming together as a mixture of revised stories about Jay Gatsby, Napoleon, Gandhi, Chaplin, and Don Quixote from the MFA thesis (3 years in the filing cabinet without a single sniff of a publication) and new stories about Orson Welles and Herman Melville and Young Goodman Brown.
Eventually I decided to rewrite the Heracles novel as a 20 page story and during this process I learned more about writing than I had in most of the previous 20 years or so that I had been serious about becoming a "writer". One of the things I learned from this story was that my idea of being a "writer" is different than the "pros" I read about growing up in "how to be a pro" and "how to write like a professional author" books.
In those days I was using a collage technique and the form seemed perfect for what I had in mind. I focused more on the prose than I had previously and I also forced myself into some difficult and awkward narrative positions. In short, I had to teach myself how to write the story in order to write the story. This may not be apparent when reading the story but I had to retrain myself entirely away from everything I knew about telling a story.
I think a few of the most difficult lessons for a young writer to learn, and the hardest lessons for me, were how hard to work, what is "good enough", and (most importantly) what is important to me in a story. I had to admit there is a good chance that each new story I write will earn me no $, no kudos, and probably no publication credit. There must be some other reason. Some less tangible purpose. This is a tough one to soak in, I think, for someone who grew up in America wanting to be a writer and especially someone who attended a MFA program where accomplishments tend to be weighted in gold. It is part of a long process of trying to separate personal vanity and ego from art and it is a difficult process, a very difficult process, in part because many of us started writing when we were praised as children for our abilities. We learned quickly that writing was a way to recieve approval or attention that otherwise went to other children. Or, at least, this is what I figure happened.
"In the Shadow of the Darkness of Strange Animals" is probably my favorite bit of writing. It is, essentially, based off my senior year of high school and how my parents fell apart. Most of my writing comes back to that last year and I suppose always will. Specifically the fires, the madness, and the perversions came from those months.
In some ways I am grateful for those months of my life and for those grotesque and awful things I saw, those loved ones I ultimately lost. For the dreams I still have. Those events soaked into me in weird wasy and I'm proud of the writing they have led to. So many stories i could not have written without seeing the people I loved and trusted became weird and twisted in the autumn of my 17th year.
I'm very proud of both stories--I believe they are two of the three or four best pieces I've done to date.
"Heracles House" is from my novel-in-stories Birds of Prey. The idea for the piece came from Anne Carson's Euripides translations Grief Lessons as well as some painful, personal experiences I won't go into. So, initially "Heracles House" was to be a novel in three parts--the murder of his wife and child, the life on the run from the murder, and then a sort of surreal/cathartic final section. I spent the majority of the 09 summer writing a first draft and only got as far as the end of the first section before I lost interest. To be honest, I didn't know how to write the book and I quickly became frustrated with the quality of my prose. I wanted something like the Old Testament and Sophocles and this ideal was the furthest from what I was mustering. I shelved "Heracles" for my long suffering story collection (it was my mfa thesis back in... 06. The first story was written in 03/04 when I was 24 and Brett Favre was a mere 34) which was slowly coming together as a mixture of revised stories about Jay Gatsby, Napoleon, Gandhi, Chaplin, and Don Quixote from the MFA thesis (3 years in the filing cabinet without a single sniff of a publication) and new stories about Orson Welles and Herman Melville and Young Goodman Brown.
Eventually I decided to rewrite the Heracles novel as a 20 page story and during this process I learned more about writing than I had in most of the previous 20 years or so that I had been serious about becoming a "writer". One of the things I learned from this story was that my idea of being a "writer" is different than the "pros" I read about growing up in "how to be a pro" and "how to write like a professional author" books.
In those days I was using a collage technique and the form seemed perfect for what I had in mind. I focused more on the prose than I had previously and I also forced myself into some difficult and awkward narrative positions. In short, I had to teach myself how to write the story in order to write the story. This may not be apparent when reading the story but I had to retrain myself entirely away from everything I knew about telling a story.
I think a few of the most difficult lessons for a young writer to learn, and the hardest lessons for me, were how hard to work, what is "good enough", and (most importantly) what is important to me in a story. I had to admit there is a good chance that each new story I write will earn me no $, no kudos, and probably no publication credit. There must be some other reason. Some less tangible purpose. This is a tough one to soak in, I think, for someone who grew up in America wanting to be a writer and especially someone who attended a MFA program where accomplishments tend to be weighted in gold. It is part of a long process of trying to separate personal vanity and ego from art and it is a difficult process, a very difficult process, in part because many of us started writing when we were praised as children for our abilities. We learned quickly that writing was a way to recieve approval or attention that otherwise went to other children. Or, at least, this is what I figure happened.
"In the Shadow of the Darkness of Strange Animals" is probably my favorite bit of writing. It is, essentially, based off my senior year of high school and how my parents fell apart. Most of my writing comes back to that last year and I suppose always will. Specifically the fires, the madness, and the perversions came from those months.
In some ways I am grateful for those months of my life and for those grotesque and awful things I saw, those loved ones I ultimately lost. For the dreams I still have. Those events soaked into me in weird wasy and I'm proud of the writing they have led to. So many stories i could not have written without seeing the people I loved and trusted became weird and twisted in the autumn of my 17th year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)