Monday, July 18, 2011

Wow. That was dark.

So, after I dug myself out of the yard and hosed off, I started reading a collection of Eudora Welty stories I'd gotten months ago.

(I'm also reading an early collection of Kelly Link's, "Stranger Things Happen." I've been having very genteel, very disturbed dreams lately. I'll drone on about Ms. Link, one of my literary heroes, another time. But real quick: go to the Small Beer Press site (http://smallbeerpress.com/books/2001/07/01/stranger-things-happen/), download the collection for free (!) and read "Water Off a Black Dog's Back" first. I get thrills just thinking about it.)

The first Eudora Welty story I read was a few years ago, "A Worn Path." Old Phoenix Jackson trudges along a worn path from country into town on an errand. She encounters obstacles and annoyances and borderline unpleasantness on the way, but taking the journey with her lets us spend a little time getting to know this woman, both from her thoughts and reactions, and from her expectations of others. That kind of steadfast strength and devotion is inspiring, especially considering the effort it takes her. And she never wavers, even when her frailty would make someone less set on the path question her purpose, and even when we wonder toward the end if the purpose for her journey even exists anymore, in a practical sense.

I think a lot of people read the story in school, but I'd never come across it. I'd love to include a link to a video of an interview with Ms. Welty in 1994 about this story--she sounds just like I'd imagined she would--but this site won't display the links I've attached. Harrumph. Here's the address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2fh37fzsOg.

I just read another of hers, "The Key." A train station full of waiting passengers, everyone keeping to themselves in one way or another. A young man drops a key accidentally, the sounds of which startles everyone. When the key slides up in front of an older, worn man sitting next to his equally weary wife, the story takes on a poignancy difficult to watch.

The thing that jumps out at me about Ms. Welty and other southern writers (the ones whose stuff I've read a little of, anyway--Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Dorothy Allison, Cormac McCarthy) is the ugliness. Beautiful writing, clean and strongly visual. Ugly characters in an unbending world, even when the surface is civil enough and pleasantries are exchanged.

I know everyone probably knows this stuff already, has read the same stories and noticed the same thing. But I like thinking about this contradiction, about how viciousness can be bone deep and not break the skin.

A quick look at the Wikipedia site got me this list of contemporary southern writers:

Among today's prominent southern writers are Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, Padgett Powell, Pat Conroy, Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, Ernest Gaines, John Grisham, Mary Hood, Lee Smith, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, Ron Rash, Chris Offutt, Anne Rice, Edward P. Jones, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Maron,, R.B. Morris, Anne Tyler, Larry Brown, Allan Gurganus, Clyde Edgerton, Daniel Wallace, Kaye Gibbons, Winston Groom, Lewis Nordan, Richard Ford, Ferrol Sams, Natasha Trethewey, and Olympia Vernon.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_literature)

Do I already have way too many books waiting for me to read them? Yeah. I don't care. I'm piling on.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Poseur! ... Dilettante! ... HYPOCRITE.


Do you listen to the voice in your head? Maybe not everyone has one, or the one telling you you're a has-been, a loser, undeserving of the shiny new desk in your office and bereft of original thought or the discipline to mold a readable story from thin air and some twine.

We're so bent on figuring it all out, on setting in stone our definitions of who we are. I do the same thing. Then, sometimes I remind myself I'm not finished yet. The stories I'll tell won't be completely told until I'm hot-footing it in the crematorium and everyone's gathered at the party in my honor, chatting each other up, munching on canapes and talking about how fabulous I was, et cetera et cetera. So, why try so hard to judge now?

I think we like to understand the framework. Then we build our understanding around it, place the "it" in its proper classification and move on in an orderly fashion. Yeah, it's a monkey thing. Chaos is upsetting. Unpredictable means potential for being eaten by pterodactyls when you've left your club in the cave. Knowing the score is where it's at. I get it.

I gotta say, this whole mindset does balls* for writing.

I've spent the last year spiraling the drain, trying to force creative thinking, spanking myself when nothing comes, comparing my relative failure to those talented writers around me who've worked hard and made solid strides toward their goals. I've been sliding backward and succeeding at punishing myself for it. And before that, I presented myself as someone who could tell people creativity is all around us; just pluck it from the collective unconscious like cotton candy. Tra la la. Heh. My self-fulfilling cosmic flagellation has kicked into overdrive.

Maybe I should just float along into complacency, accept I'm one of the 99% of people who dabbled a bit for a while before they found Funyuns or Hose Monsters of Newark (or whatever new trash has made the fall TV lineup.) Complacency implies a certain surface satisfaction, though. I ain't got even that.

Am I a fake? Since I've stopped telling people "I'm working on (insert current project here)," not technically. I'd give anything to be able to call myself a poseur again, though. Dilettante. I don't care. I just want to be able to write again and not feel like burying myself in the yard afterward. I'll worry about shucking the wanna-be label later.



* I got "balls" from http://moralambiguity.wordpress.com. Great word. Not used enough. Great blog, also not used enough. (Glad you're back, missy. Get to posting.)