Just when it seemed we might get some work done today…

We discovered the animation engine at the New York Public Library.

Make your own here: http://stereo.nypl.org/

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Best American Opinion Page Essays?

We respect David Brooks as a writer and thinker, but really, can’t the Best American Essays people every once in a while choose someone — an editor or writer — who represents the literary magazine end of nonfiction:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announces its 2012 ‘Best American’ series editors

 

• The Best American Short Stories: Tom Perrotta (novelist, most recently of The Leftovers)
• The Best American Essays: David Brooks (New York Times op-ed columnist)
• The Best American Nonrequired Reading: Dave Eggers (editor of McSweeney’s); guest introducer: Ray Bradbury
• The Best American Travel Writing: William T. Vollmann (author of 17 books, includingEurope Central)
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing: Dan Ariely (author of The Upside of Irrationality)
• The Best American Mystery Stories: Robert Crais (best-selling mystery novelist)
• The Best American Sports Writing: Michael Wilbon (co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption)

Rebutting Shivani

There seem to be two states of mind regarding Anis Shivani, the constant critic of contemporary creative writing who has somehow found a regular spot on the Huffington Post books page.  One side says “Ignore him, he only wants the attention and is encouraged by our outrage.” We were about to be swayed in that direction until we read Karen Babine’s crisp rebuttal.  Here is a bit of her opening:

…it was my instinct to employ silence as a rhetorical device and not even engage him, because it really seems like his purpose is to incite, not provoke legitimate dialogue—but then once I realized that not saying anything was part of his goal in silencing, that put my back up, and here we are.

And then she moves on to her major arguments:

…the main issue that Shivani overlooks—whether intentional or not, in his purpose to incite as much reaction as possible in his readers—is the difference between creative writing and literature: literature is artifact. As my fiction students identified last week, artifact brings to mind archaeology, digging, brushing away, interpreting this long-dead item for what it can tell us. Creative writing, on the other hand, considers a text as a living, breathing thing, something that puts my students in a chair next to Raymond Carver, because “Cathedral” did not spring, fully-formed, from the mind of Carver. He was once a beginning writer too. He wasn’t always Raymond Carver.

 And:

What is clear, however, that Shivani has equated creative writing with the feminine, and “real” writing with the masculine, for the purpose of silencing voices other than his own. Calling creative writing “Oprahfied” certainly genders the creative writing in terms that call to mind powerful women, mass appeal, and to him, little substance.From this argument, only women go to therapy; men do not. But what is particularly interesting about this phrasing is that it is a female mindset that phallically penetrates the workshop. He genders the workshop itself in other ways, using “she” to represent the creative workshop teacher—though it is interesting that as Shivani also argues that students are guided to imitate the models that the female teacher brings to class (Carver, Hemingway, Barthelme, Plat, Glück, and Levine are the ones he mentions), two women, four men, but the method of imitation that he rails against comes strictly out of this classical, masculine, rhetorical tradition.

… Until recent decades, women writing about their bodies and their experiences has been confined to “confessional” writing—and demeaned in the doing—but even as I write those phrases, women writing illness narratives, addiction narratives, and other deeply personal things is still largely dismissed in the writing world, often shelved in “self-help.” Even Susan Sontag, writing Illness as Metaphor at the beginning of this phase, could only write about her experiences will illness in a form that did not recognize her personal experience as a valuable source of knowledge and understanding.

Many folks are taking Shivani’s arguments apart these past few days, but Babine’s counter-punch is one of the best. Her extensive and thorough argument can be read in full on her blog State of Mind.

Would someone give Anis Shivani a nice warm cup of milk?

Would someone give Anis Shivani a nice warm cup of milk and put him to bed?

Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities — except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of psychotherapy. More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop. Life lessons and living a more authentic life are always just beneath the surface of any workshop discussion.

The full RIDICULOUS SCREED can be read here.

Robert Vivian’s Thoughts On The Meditative Essay

An excellent essay on the essay published at Numéro Cinq:

The meditative essay hinges on stillness, on a moment delicately teased out of the cogs of time to live in the timeless present: it is not interested much in opinions or even ideas, preferring instead to live in the realm of pondering and contemplation (though the aforementioned may be used as initiating sparks). Its primary focus is not the self, though it uses the self and all that it has to give as a kind of booster rocket that, once the prose reaches certain insights, is jettisoned or spent, much like shuttles that are launched into outer space as we see those burning hoops fall back into the pearly clouds after they have done their proper work of achieving escape velocity. The meditative essay is comfortable and downright friendly with paradox and has no real axe to grind: it’s too intent on paying attention to what bids it keenest focus and delight, be it a button, a homeless woman, the changing of the seasons, or the prevalence of roadkill in a certain area. It is not concerned with hierarchy or competition or anything that goes by the name of ambition or force and draws attention to itself only for the music of its cadences and what these cadences reveal, which are very often surprising to its practitioners, so much so that this same quality of surprise is the meditative essay’s own intrinsic and unshatterable reward.

Read the Rest of Robert Vivian’s thoughts on the meditative essay here.

Writing is Hard

Even for Dorothy Parker:

That Song in Your Head

William Bradley blogs on songs as nonfiction prompts over at Lit Bits, a Bedford/St. Martins teaching blog.  Bradley is a Brevity author and uses a Brevity example, and the exercise is pretty nifty.  Here’s the lead-up, and a link to the full post below:

In the small town where I live, one of our nicer restaurants often has their satellite radio tuned to a station that plays exclusively soft rock from the 80s and early 90s.  Air Supply.  Foreigner.  A little Journey or, if we’re really lucky, solo Steve Perry.  But there’s one song that seems to come on every time we eat there, one song that causes my wife to reach across the table, grab my hand and whisper, “Don’t sing.  Don’t sing.  Don’t sing.  I mean it.”

The song I’m talking about is Chicago’s song “Look Away,” which a quick Internet search tells me was written by Diane “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” Warren.  …  This is not a particularly good song.  In fact, I don’t think it’s very good at all.  But I love it anyway, and feel the urge to sing along with not-Peter Cetera every time it comes on.  This desire has nothing to do with Diane Warren’s craft or not-Peter Cetera’s singing, and has everything to do with the memories this song evokes for me…

I’ve found that most people have such a song—a song whose opening bars can transport them back to a specific moment in their lives.  In fact, some of us have several.  So in my creative nonfiction classes, I begin the semester with something I call The Music and Memory Exercise.

Read the remainder and see The Exercise here

New Brevity Coming Soon

In Brevity’s Winter 2012 issue, John Warner, Melissa Delbridge, Nina Boutsikaris, Anne Panning, Philip Gerard, Heal McKnight, Amy Butcher, SJ Sindu, Samuel Autman, Margaret Whitford, Sheila Squillante, Kerrie Kemperman, Kara Garbe Balcerzak, Dylan Brown, Diane Seuss, and Brenda Peynado offer brief, vivid prose focused on inadvertant idiocy, stillness, gunfire, family funerals, how quickly gossip travels, almonds, community college teaching, and narrative. Stunning work across the board.

Watch for it late next week.

What is Brevity Looking for in the Brief Essay?

Here on the tippy-top floor of the Brevity corporate towers, we are just about fed up to our necklines with editor Dinty W. Moore, who does very little of the work yet seems happy at any moment to expound on “what we are looking for in a Brevity essay.”  His latest off-the-cuff approximation of wisdom can be found this week on the River Teeth blog.  Here is one gem from that conversation:

“You need to move in and out of scene quickly, you need to introduce language, diction, and rhythm immediately, and you need to establish place, character, and conflict right away – usually in the first sentence. “

Later he has the nerve to say this:

“I wish I knew how much work the magazine would become. I wish I’d been less of a control freak and brought in more people to help me sooner.”

Really?  The sound you hear now is twenty or so senior editorial staff members spitting out their coffee.

Somebody sit this guy down and tell him it is time to retire, will ya?

 

 

Is the Pushcart Unplugged?

Travis Kurowski offers up a compelling critique of The Pushcart Prize - Best of the Small Presses 2012 over at Luna Park.  Travis, as we do, values all of the work Bill Henderson has put into the series over the years, but worries about a bias against online work:

The problem was the severe limitation of the anthology’s scope, an anthology ostensibly offering up the “Best of the Small Presses.” This is a shortcoming most significantly represented by Henderson’s disparagement of any and all online and electronic publishing venues. (Only one online publication was chosen from for this 2012 anthology.)

..

When the Pushcart Prize began in 1976 it was the anti-establishment (for lack of a better word). Anais Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, and Ishmael Reed were all prominent supporters from its inception. Maybe today things have changed? Not only are electronic and online publications nearly missing, but so are most cutting edge literary magazines and presses—Conjunctions and n+1 are about as avant garde as it seems to get this year. The anthology begins with work by Steven Millhauser and John Jeremiah Sullivan, two stunning authors, but also ones we can easily find in the glossies. Most of the publications with work chosen from them are largely mainstream, lit mag industry staples: Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, New England Review, Poetry, Third Coast, Tin House, and so forth. Again, these are largely great magazines; what’s lacking in the anthology is greater diversity and real coverage of the best being published in the indie presses.

Of course I’ll buy next year’s anthology, and the following year, and the year after that. And if I run into Henderson I’ll try to remember to introduce myself and thank him for all the great work he’s done for literature over the decades. The Pushcart anthologies are overall great publications, probably the best out there for representing and promoting what’s going in indie literature. I’m just hoping for a bit more electricity in the future.

You can read his full post here.