Now that the dust has, at least marginally, settled over Amazon’s acquisition of the social-media platform Goodreads, it seems sensible to touch on how such a change might affect a small press like the Center for Literary Publishing, and the many talented writers whose work we’ve been pleased to publish.

If you’ll indulge a brief personal narrative: I joined Goodreads in 2007, the year after I graduated from my undergrad. The website was only a few months old. “It’s like Facebook for book nerds,” my brother had explained. And I’ll admit, it’s been good to me. Finding myself a little unmoored, it was a space in which I could talk about books—as well as hold myself accountable to thinking and writing critically about them—which I know seems reductive and, worse yet, not all that vital. But it was jarring to come from a world in which books and writing were the focus, and into one where most people didn’t even read, let alone the types of books I cared about. I needed a space where I could still feel connected. Goodreads ended up being that space. People “liked” and followed my reviews. People added books I’d glowingly reviewed to their “to-read” shelves. I felt like I was part of a larger conversation. Fast forward two years or so, when I find myself (through some miracle) a Fellow at a pretty prestigious writer’s conference. While introducing the absolutely credential-less me, my friend, surely fishing for something—anything—to say, said, “Derek reviews books!” It was, at least, empirically true. The person to whom I was being introduced ended up mailing me some books. She apparently didn’t know that any asshole with an internet connection could be called a “reviewer” by the Goodreads standard. But the author of one of those books ended up seeing my review and e-mailing me about it, and we’ve since become good friends, and she even graciously came here to CSU to read from her work. And none of that would have happened without Goodreads. I now review books for (a very nominal amount of) money, and again, those skills wouldn’t have been honed had I not been so immersed in the Goodreads world.

If you were to look at the site today, you’d have no idea that Goodreads is now in Bezos’s pocket. Click on any book. You’ll see that Barnes & Noble is, shockingly, still the primary means of purchasing a book through Goodreads, at least at the time of this blog post’s publication. (Though, to be fair, Amazon is the first on the drop-down titled “online stores.”) Though the company CEO and co-founder, Otis Chandler, posted the buyout news on the Goodreads blog, no mention was made in the monthly e-mail newsletter, and there’s nothing on the website (outside of the blog post) that makes the Amazon/Goodreads connection explicit. (I don’t know anything about Chandler, though I am a bit disturbed by his love for Ayn Rand’s nonsense.) It’s foolish to suggest that Goodreads is ashamed of the buyout, but given the amount of ire directed toward the company following the announcement, they’re likely treading this water very carefully.

Is it right to be worried? It depends on whom you ask. If you ask me, then I offer a cautious and caveat-filled, “Yes, be worried.”

Which isn’t to say that I’m about to delete my account for fear that the nefarious Amazon/Goodreads overlords might sync my two accounts. Indeed, many folks responding to the announcement were encouraging this linking, given that many folks re-post their reviews across both platforms. (For the record, I review only on Goodreads, not Amazon). Nor am I opposed to Amazon as a matter of course. While I always try to purchase locally (especially because Boulder Bookstore, just a short drive away, is the best bookstore I’ve ever been to), I do use Amazon occasionally, either to “remember” things I want to buy by putting them on my wish list, or for the occasional purchase of something I can’t find otherwise. I suppose, then, that I do the opposite of what Amazon does to so many other companies—treat the brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms for Amazon’s product.

But the buyout is worrisome insofar as Goodreads was one of the few places in which books could be discussed without the outright agenda of selling them. I’m not about to suggest that Goodreads, prior to the buyout, was some utopian, socialist, book-geek paradise. Indeed, there have been ads on the site for as long as I can remember, and there continue to be ads today (some of which, of course, are for buying books on Amazon’s Kindle). As far as I can remember, there were always links on Goodreads for the purchasing of books, though I’ve never used the site that way. But the buying of books was not Goodreads’ primary function, and it’s not difficult to see how the buyout might (might! might!) influence a move in the opposite direction.

And while Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads is certainly a smart one as far as both parties are concerned (Amazon gets data on over 16 million users, and a corrected Businessweek article posits that Goodreads pulled in something around $150 million, though their initial guess was much higher), it might not be such a good thing for those in the actual business of writing. The Authors Guild, in a beautifully worded and concise post on their website, claimed, “Amazon’s garden walls are about to grow much higher.” Bezos has been clear that the Kindle is key in Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads (though the exact shape that the integration is going to take is still unclear). Such a move might diminish the money that eventually makes it into an author’s pocket, though that, of course, is its own separate blog post.

If you’ve been following the news of this as closely as I have, you oughtn’t feel alone if you find the articles confused, and confusing. “Irate” is a term that might rightly be applied to a number of editorials. The above-linked Salon post said of Amazon: “It is hard not to view their mission as the eradication of all competition, where they are the sole producer, distributor, and even reviewer of what we once called ‘books.’” A later post on the same website was titled “Amazon tightens its chokehold,” and quotes author Alex Irvine as Tweeting, “Next, big publishers will be required to dig own graves.”

Still others seem hopelessly naive. An absolutely idiotic post concludes with the following infuriating banality. Try not to read it in the voice of your second-grade teacher:

“Rather than worrying about who owns our favorite book sites and online communities, we should do our best to maintain the positive experiences of the communities and continue to make the best use of the sites to keep the love of literature alive and thriving.”

And so it’s hard to figure if this is indeed a disastrous turn for publishers, as so many might have us to believe, or if, hey, it ain’t that big a deal. Part of the problem is that I’ve yet to see how the loss of Goodreads (if it might even be rightly described as a “loss”) is going to affect the sales of books. One could argue that Goodreads encouraged the purchase of books through booksellers that weren’t Amazon, but those booksellers were only just another option, the same that Amazon was. Goodreads wasn’t pushing you to go through IndieBound; it just made it an option. In other words, if you were disinclined to purchase from Amazon, your account on Goodreads was, at best, neutral to your decision. A buyout handicaps that neutrality, sure, but it’s only another click or two to get to the bookseller you want.

Nor am I especially worried that Amazon now has so much information on my reading habits. While any number of Big Brother arguments can rightly be made, nothing changes the fact that I made that information available on the internet. And so what if Amazon makes a really educated guess as to a book I’d like? I’ll remember the book and buy it elsewhere. It won’t change the fact that I still talk about books with real people, and value their recommendations over some algorithm’s. And I’m not an idiot. I’ll know that any recommendation coming from Amazon has, behind it, any number of monetary machinations that are trying to influence my tastes.

With all that devil’s advocacy aside, I’m still not elated to hear that Goodreads is now a part of the Amazon “family.” Type  “Is it bad to buy books from Amazon?” into Google and find that the first four results are, you guessed it, links to purchase shit on Amazon. The monopoly is nefarious for all the reasons that monopolies are always nefarious, and the purchase of a once-neutral space is another step in that direction. Not to mention that Amazon’s heartless treatment of the publishing industry is well-documented, and about as charming as George Hearst on Deadwood. I’m not downplaying that at all. I’ve just yet to find a well-articulated argument for how this specific instance of Amazon’s buying something marks the death of publishing, or bookselling, or reading, or print, as you’ll find it easy to find many folks arguing in the aftermath. I’m not happy either, but the fact that I find it difficult to put a name on that displeasure makes me worry that I’m over-reacting.

And so, cautiously, I’m leaving my Goodreads account up, and continuing to use it in all the ways that it’s been useful to me thus far.

Here at the CLP, we remain delighted that Goodreads offers a space for readers to review and talk about the books we publish, and we hope it continues to be that space in spite of the buyout. Our preference is that you order through our bookstore or your local indie, but if Amazon is where you’re going to purchase them, well, we’re happy you’re taking the time to read the work that we believe so strongly in. If nothing else, the buyout serves as a useful reminder of what a relatively small space we occupy in this world of letters.

by Brittany Goss, editorial assistant

On March 29, 2013, the Hatton Gallery at the CSU Visual Arts Center was packed with the friends, teachers, students, and proud family members of third-year MFA students Mickey Kenny, Derek Askey, and Joanna Doxey. Everyone came to hear the three writers’ final readings, a celebration of completing the MFA program and graduating with their master’s degrees. This event was especially important to the Center for Literary Publishing because Joanna and Derek serve as associate editors of Colorado Review.

Mickey Kenny set the tone, reading from his thesis “Harm Harness Harmony,” a book of poems in four parts. It became clear from the beginning that each writer was interested in thematic questions of place, as Mickey explained his subtitles referred to the four elements: water, air, earth, and fire. He read from the section “Watertecture Hexagonoir” (water via eye). This melding of nature and body creates a kind of internal worldscape, so that self and place overlap and bleed into one another. “I fear the rivers within us,” he read, then, “…a part of me has drifted, is drifting, and I don’t know where to ashore myself.” In “Watertecture,” Mickey took us on a journey through the bodyscape and Alaskan landscape, to the Iditarod, of which he read:

My feet are sore and there are roots within my mouth. Iditarod. The word tastes exile.       Hidedhod. I taste exile. Distant, Distant place, river. I fear the Hidedhod within me. I            stow emotion within movement. I can no longer offer structure. I crave space   untethered.

Indeed, space untethered is what Mickey gave us in the reading from his manuscript; a spacious, wandering poetry.

Derek Askey, who has interned at the Center for Literary Publishing since 2011, represented MFA fictioneers with a reading from his novel in progress, tentatively titled “Under the Allegheny.” The story, set in Derek’s hometown of Pittsburgh, follows the beer brewing Weiss family as they navigate the social and economic pressures of late 19^th-century America. The selection he read began with details of place, with sounds of the city, and, as he noted beforehand, corresponding bodily functions: “A hiccup, a burp. The clatter of West Penn Railway tracks not one block south. The peal of firecrackers lit in the distance. These sounds burned across the July humidity.”

On Independence Day, fourteen-year-old Gregor Weiss can be found drinking in his father’s taproom. Between the threat of violence from older, stronger men and the threat of disruption from some temperance women who crash the bar, Gregor has a flash of adolescent insight about the future he might have. He is aware “that a vast, broken world awaited him … it would overtake him, this world, Gregor was certain. It would break him to its will. And it would be his father who did the breaking.” That he has not yet glimpsed this vast world ahead of him is clear, as he is trapped inside his undeveloped body, inside his father’s brewery, and inside the boundaries of his industrial city. The end of the chapter takes us to the edge of the Allegheny River, which, in a moment of fear, Gregor hopes might sweep him away from his place, for, as he and Derek noted, “Men shaped their own destinies, or they were not men.” The audience received, from Derek’s reading, the promise of a spacious novel in which Gregor and his family might shape something like a destiny.

Finally, the audience was treated to the poetry of Joanna Doxey, who has interned for the Center since 2010. The work she read from her thesis, was, again, a poetry concerned with place, but this time with an emphasis on absence and memory. She began from the prologue, which started “this land is a memory of wind without wind”, and continued:

There is a memory of breath,

or a relearning of pronouns.

I think again of lungs or glaciers without words.

 Lungs and glaciers, breath and words, intertwined and lead into her book of absence, which asks urgently about disappearance, about abandonment. She read:

Consider a meadow, with an impossibly placed boulder resting in its center, abandoned thousands of years earlier by snow and ice  snow and the movement of melt—

 Glaciers in their absence shape a land that holds their memory.

 Some readers shy away from too much silence in performance, but the space Joanna gives us within and between her poems allowed her audience to travel the distance between time and place, body and breath. We ended the reading with a sense of release, and with a better understanding of endings, in their necessary wordlessness.

After three years of diligent work in the MFA program, including time volunteered to internships, jobs, and community literacy projects, our readers gave us an offering of keen and beautiful words to remember them by. It was a lovely final reading to celebrate their thesis year, but certainly not the last we’ll hear from these writers.

I first encountered Susanna Childress’s poems while working on a review of her second book, Entering the House of Awe (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), for Ruminate Magazine last year. I should note that I am astounded by her work and so a bit biased. Her first book, Jagged with Love, was selected by Billy Collins for the Brittingham Prize and published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2005. A Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow from 2008-10 (another reason why I am biased toward Childress—I am a current Lilly Graduate Fellow), she taught for two years at Valparaiso University in Indiana before moving to Holland, Michigan, where she now teaches in the English department at Hope College. I was eager for an excuse to speak further with her about House of Awe and, in particular, about “The Hyssop Tub,” a seven-part poem rich with artistic and biblical images, which appeared in issue 38.2 (Summer 2011) of Colorado Review. I wanted to meditate further on each of the seven parts and have asked Susanna questions correlating to each part. You can view the poem in its entirety here for reference.

I. Kristin George Bagdanov: In the first-page spread of this poem there are two similar but varied forms at play. Part I relies on large spaces between certain words, causing the poem to appear jagged, somewhat hesitant and uncertain. Each section also contains the shape of the sonnet but not all the formalities. Your poems as a whole in this book vary widely from tight couplets to lines that wind across the page and spill over to the next line. At what point in your writing process do you typically realize how the poem should be formed on the page—particularly in “The Hyssop Tub”?

Susanna Childress: Ah, jagged. A word I am enamored of, if my first book is any indication, and have feverish hope I might outlast, since, even if thematically, I hope also not to overuse. You’ve pegged me, is the point. I tend to feel like the spacing in this poem and others like it in Entering the House of Awe are representative of the halting relationship one has with language when investigating items of psychic heft, where the brain and tongue concurrently lag behind the work being done to or in or by the heart; poetry might be our general attempt to catch them up to each other. That is not to say, though, that I was hyper aware of how I laid out the line as I was doing it or in the revisions this poem (and others) received. I had a sense the spaces meant something, pressing as I was rather directly into matters of great psychic heft, but my concern in drafting and in revision was to be consistent with it, its look and its feel, whatever it was, and to produce a unity of effect (I borrow that phrase from Poe, among others, who believe it to be an aim of the short story). A few sections in “The Hyssop Tub” work slantwise towards their intensity, but this section straight away rams right up against it, and I see now that what is halting or, as you phrased it, hesitant, is a consequence of that: words are trying to keep up (and can’t, quite).

Let me say this, too: for a few years now I have been playing around with what I call “Cherry Pickin’ Sonnets,” as I do not follow all the rules of the sonnet but, perhaps haphazardly, just those which seem to fit the tone or subject of the poem—parameters that I do not decide while I am writing nor do I detect until after the poem is written. It is probably true that I have some idea about the poem’s character before I begin to impose certain (even if loose) strictures upon it. With “The Hyssop Tub,” though, I wrote the first section without foreknowledge that I would write six others. When I finished a draft of the first section, which happened—I swear—to be an unwitting fourteen lines and carry the rhyme that I later fettered out as the final couplet, I had this inkling that a) I had only begun discovering what I needed to in this poem and b) the poem was finished. So in time I thought I might try to resolve these paradoxical inclinations by writing several more sections which I knew would be sonnets. Only after they were all written did I go back for, once more, consistency and massage the lineation towards a final rhyming couplet in each one. Somehow I was able to uncover rhymes without changing much, which I suppose is possible with a certain level of musicality but makes me wonder if I did not have it in my cherry pickin’ subconscious to do a set of sort-of sonnets all along.

II. KGB: I noticed some significant changes from the version of “Hyssop” that appears in Entering the House of Awe and the version in CR (significant for us poets, at least—words and phrases cut, lines re-broken). In particular, part II of “The Hyssop Tub” loses rich words like “crepuscular,” “splotched,” “semi-submerged,” and “instep.” Your writing process looks like one of winnowing rather than augmentation. Could you say more about your writing process and the transformation of this poem in particular from its first form to the one we see before us in CR? Have you revised it in any significant way since its publication in CR?

SC: If only my revision process were so heady. The truth is, I had material constraints when I published with CR. The poem as it originally stood (and as published in my book) had longer lines than were possible to print in CR’s page template. My choices, then, were to cut it down to fit the page or allow the lines to overflow, indicated with indentation/tabulation, which created a strange tail-looking little flicker after each long line and lost the 14-line count for each section. I opted to slim the lines to fit the page. The process of, as you put it, winnowing, was rather painful. I hated losing the words I had to lose, I mean crepuscular, crepuscular! What I realized, though, is that I have a tendency towards adjectival pizzazz—word-bling, if you will. I remember being accused in a graduate school workshop of letting my subject GRE studying get the better of my poetry writing. For the most part, I could defend my word choice, but in this case, I learned an odd lesson, rollercoastered back and forth by emails to folks at CR and at New Issues, where my manuscript containing the poem was about to go to the printers. After I had winnowed and relined and again winnowed and relined, cursing CR the whole way, I ended up liking it better than the original. It seemed somehow cleaner and less stuffy. But by that point the book was past the stage of substantial edits (that point, I think, where some poor graphic designer has to manually insert changes), and, were it even possible, I did not have it in me to ask my publisher to underwrite that cost. I would like to pretend this lesson has played itself out since then and, ultimately, refined my aesthetic, but as yet it is still a reminder of how my being disgruntled with certain stages of each poem’s journey from drafting to publication is rarely justified—and often out of my control by mere millimeters or days. But even as a reminder it is good and helpful in its way.

III. KGB: This section inhabits two paintings by Mary Cassatt: one of a woman bathing her child and one of that same woman bathing herself. The poem initially focuses on the former image:

My father’s the woman in the striped dress, holding my waist
tender as an oblong bread. My mother, too, her right hand
rinsing my foot in the bowl. My beloved’s the woman leaning into
the child, her lap a honey possum’s marsupium…

Given the epigraph from the Sidney Psalter, it’s hard not to interpret these lines as a rendering of the Trinity. How have you found poetry helpful in illuminating or exploring difficult questions concerning your faith and beliefs? (concerns with which this book as a whole, I think, is largely concerned—see the Ruminate review for more on this).

SC: I suppose I should first admit that I had not thought of these figures in section three as the Trinity. I see it now, of course, and certainly this exemplifies one of poetry writing’s most gratifying elements—that readers help writers understand layers of or new possibilities within their own work. I can also say that especially for the kind of illumination or exploration you are referencing, I learned a lot from Richard Hugo’s first chapter in Triggering Town, which suggests that writing poetry is less an archive of resolved emotion and more an act of discovery. In a course I took with Scott Cairns I also found value in the (long history) of Midrash writing, where difficult questions are at the heart of—propelling any discovery(ies)—the purpose of writing that addresses or investigates issues of faith and belief.

IV. KGB: This section begins by speaking to Caravaggio’s influence on the Spanish and Italian Baroque painters Ribera and Gentileschi, their fantastic and “brutal themes” that depict the beheading of Holofernes and the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. The speaker eschews the extraordinary nature of these paintings for something simpler—the “genre scenes” of Diego Velasquez’s early work, in particular, The Water Carrier of Seville. This poem seems concerned with the dailyness of living—women bathing, jugs of water, a russet-colored world—scenes that are held up to be extraordinary. Could you speak more about your attentiveness to these “genre scenes”?

SC: For whatever reason, your question makes me think of Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World,” with his famous rendering of line-hung laundry as angels, connecting the human and transcendent and the complicated relationship(s) and transaction(s) therein with the final image of nuns floating in their “dark habits/ keeping their difficult balance.” Wilbur took a lot of criticism for these connections and, from feminist scholars, for romanticizing the hard work of laundering. It is unlikely Wilbur did his own wash, and I cannot suggest we should ignore this aspect. (I have never had to carry water long distances in heavy jars upon my shoulders.) Even through the classist or sexist (or both) perspective of Wilbur’s speaker, the quiet power and stunning beauty of the poem lies in an awareness of how stuck we are here, with our everyday conundrums, and how those moments are both bridges to and emblems of all that is beyond the everyday—“Yet, as the sun acknowledges/ With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,/ The soul descends once more in bitter love/ To accept the waking body….” So perhaps poets like Wilbur and painters like Velasquez have taught me how to attend to the quiet and stunning moments in our lives. Within “The Hyssop Tub” it is also a clarifying acknowledgement of the speaker’s own ordinariness, even if a bit begrudging, and her coming to a reckoning, as most of us must, that the dailyness of living, as you put it, may not be sensational but that it is or can be, indeed, extraordinary.

V. KGB: This section inhabits the often misconstrued scene of David and Bathsheba in the Bible. Your poem works against the connotations of Bathsheba as symbol, as moral cautionary tale:

          BATHSHEBA        we call to you

centuries of women who both     knew & didn’t know

better       Believe me your voice   had you one to speak

in holy text      is mine…

Much of this book seems concerned with giving voice to the silenced. Would you describe this witness as an explicit aim of your work as a poet?

SC: If it is possible for something not to be accidental but not an explicit aim, then that might be what this is.  As I studied Medieval and Early Modern Women’s Writing in graduate school and later when I taught Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting I was very intrigued by the idea(s) and act(s) of witness through and in poetry. I can’t say that I set out gritty with purpose to do that here or elsewhere in Entering the House of Awe, but I also was very aware of stepping away from a purely autobiographical narrative and allowing my reading and art imbibing of others’ experiences lead me. I had been holding for some time onto the historical-contextual detail that Bathsheba was most certainly on the roof because of purification rituals associated with menstruation. That David with his power and his desire should be the symbol, as you word it, representing a dynamic between men and women that in sundry variations continues to affect women all over the world to this day—and by affect I mean eclipse and exploit. It is part of the speaker’s own story, so there is a personal connection in the poem, but it relies on and draws from the voices that have not been able to speak their own story.

VI. KGB: This section draws on the Sidney Psalter, which is composed of reworkings of the English translations, rather than the Hebrew. This section examines two versions of the same line in Psalm 51:

it is not let the bones you have crushed    rejoice but    that bruised bones   may

dance away their sadness.

The difference between bruised and crushed, sadness and joy seems tremendous and filled with implications for how one understands translations of the Bible and of any ancient or foreign text. Has your research and writing for this book helped you understand or reconcile the gap inherent in translation (from language to language, experience to poem)?

SC: My gut says yes, though I am uncertain I can articulate how. Mary Sidney Herbert, who I discovered along with other Early Modern women writers like Christine de Pizan, picks up the unfinished work of her brother Sir Philip Sydney after his death serving the Queen of England (for whatever reason, Herbert has been gaining a bit of popular attention; last fall, Robert Pinsky wrote about her psalms on Slate). Though Herbert is better known for, among others, Psalm 52, I have always been intrigued by Psalm 51 and became especially fascinated with Herbert’s rendering of it—she is a woman working with Scripture, and she, too, is crafting a poem. Even across centuries and radically different socio-cultural contexts, her view of David’s famous psalm of contrition seems to me to swing wide whole windows on the power of forgiveness, specifically as the recipient, and in turn on our relationship with the divine. Herbert has, thank God, forever altered Psalm 51 for me.

VII. KGB: In the last section of this poem, the speaker asks her lover

how could the bird in the cove

be    anything but    our love

 

In the first section, however, the speaker

bargained

with a man the whole night long to call         what thing hung

between us love

 

Billy Collins describes your first book, Jagged with Love, as being “at the cutting edge of the long tradition of love poetry.” Has your understanding of this suspended thing called love changed or transformed throughout your two collections? Also, do you have any advice for the rest of us who can’t seem to get a grip on love?

SC: Oh, Lord: love. I am wretched at advice. It is true that my own experience has bent along a sweeter path since writing my first book. I should add healthier as a descriptor as well (though still challenging). In some ways, this poem traces that path, though I did not mean for it to be understood as an autobiographical journey alone (or at all, as those details are not provided). That kernel in the first section—What/ woman    believes she has the turrets   of God/ beneath her rattlebox of skin     The flag   I flew/ for so long read    I’ll erase myself if you want me to—speaks, I believe, to the experience of many women, whether it manifests itself in eating disorders or more generally in compliance and, when maltreated, passivity. For complex and myriad reasons, I did not believe myself worth being loved—or loved well, at any rate; I chose compliance and passivity towards maltreatment, yielding to those with whom I involved myself. Once I became more cognizant of the damage this was doing, I had to face it as something of an addiction, and therein I discovered the good, hard work of forgiveness. I also discovered its remarkable counterpart, being forgiven. Several years in, I met the man I would marry, who has never mistreated me, though both of us remain students of the stunning process of forgiving and being forgiven. So my advice, crass for something so complex, is this: you, me, Bathsheba—we are all—worth being loved well; it is, for some of us, terribly hard to believe, but true. If you can, find paths of forgiveness, both human and transcendent, that lead you away from indiscriminate submission and toward health.

Your token gift-giving link for literary friends. If you’re like me, you haven’t started shopping yet, so here’s a head start with some “elegant and pithy” posters illustrating famous quotes by writers.

Suspending reader disbelief for the moment is hard but suspending reader disbelief for an entire creative world is harder. Karen Russell of Tin House talks the rules of the governed, and how she got away with a character hatching from an alligator incubator but not with a character surviving a fall from a 40-foot tree.

Cut the b.s. If a story is boring, tell your workshop mate that it’s boring, not “slow” or “stunted” or “underdeveloped.” You’re all writers and can recognize a euphemism when you hear one. Do each other a favor and be honest.

Emily Dickinson’s birthday was Dec. 10th. Why does a December birthday for Dickinson seem appropriate? Celebrate by watching an animated short for her poem “I Started Early–Took My Dog.”

“Who gives a shit? Good books is good books, and nothing else matters” is the best conclusion regarding genre fiction I’ve read in a while. Even though Paper Darts blogger Courtney Algeo considers her foray into genre a failure, I’d say it was a success.

If you like Henry Miller and long-winded metaphors that liken writing to journeys, roads, paths, and the polarization of paradise and hell, you might enjoy The Wisdom of the Heart.

The elusive agent: ever so mysterious and unreachable. Six months passes after you’ve submitted a proposal and still no word. You don’t want to be a nag but the anticipation is corroding your health. Is it time to query? Agent advice from PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are all the rage in education if you don’t mind sharing an instructor with 36,000 other students. MOOCs are for when you have too much time on your hands and you’d like to learn something without the pressure of a grade. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford are all opening their doors to knowledge so you can take Ivy courses without the price tag or admissions competition. Elliot Holt of The Poetry Foundation reviews a modern American poetry MOOC.

There’s quite a bit of stigma that revolves around online literary magazines, but before you write them off or submit to all of them, educate yourself.

Local to the Front Range? Come hear, tonight, the works of three Colorado State University graduate students: Dan Moore, Tim Orme and Dennis Lee. The reading promises to induce romping laughter.

]]> http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/bookmarks-6-dec-2012/feed/ 0 http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/shaer-nelligan-interview/ http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/shaer-nelligan-interview/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:44:55 +0000 sgschwin http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/?p=3904 Colorado Review Associate Editor Derek Askey interviews Matthew Shaer about his story “Ghosts,” which appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Colorado Review as the winner of the 2012 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Jane Hamilton. Read the full text of the story here, or listen to Shaer read the story on our November podcast!

Derek Askey: What prompted your decision to choose David as the POV character? What about a seventeen-year-old made him appropriate to see this story through his eyes?

Matthew Shaer: Well, the obvious answer is there a lot of me in David. The story started with a kernel of something that had happened to me, too, and spun out on its own from there. In that sense, there was never a selection process—I never sat down at my desk and picked and chose from among potential protagonists.

I should also say that “Ghosts” is very much an homage to a much better story—“Pigeon Feathers,” by John Updike. In “Pigeon Feathers,” the narrator—also named David, also a teenager—grapples with the specter of death, albeit in a drastically different way. I must have read that story a hundred times, and each time I’ve been inspired anew by what Updike had accomplished. It’s a really beautiful piece of writing.

As a side note: You mentioned David’s age. In fact, some of the folks who read early drafts of the story told me that a 17-year-old could not possibly know so much, or be so deeply in touch with death. I disagree—I think when we’re young, we’re sometimes more in touch with certain realities that we eventually learn to avoid or shirk as adults.

DA: The feature of “Ghosts” that I found most striking was its dreamlike quality in describing a very real event. Many of the dreams in the story seem like memories (David with Opa, trying to catch the train), and many of the memories seem like dreams (David with Opa, again, walking to the burned-down house). Can you describe how dreams helped you to understand these characters, and how we use dreams and memories to process things that are difficult to cope with otherwise?

MS: “Ghosts” started as part of my thesis at NYU, where I got my MFA. Originally, there were more dreams in the piece, but my thesis advisor, the novelist Rick Moody, sat me down and told me a lot of it had to be jettisoned. Dreams in fiction are dicey things—they’re fun to write, because you have so much free rein, but for readers, the effect can be like sitting in the audience at a Phish concert, and listening to the guitarist noodle on for just a little too long. It comes off as incredibly self-indulgent. So I took Rick’s recommendation, and stripped some of that back in subsequent drafts. But yes, the dreams that do remain are subconscious attempts, on David’s part, to process some of what is happening around him.

As for the stories that seem like dreams, like the moment where David recalls the visit to the burnt-out house, I wanted the reader to understand that the incident had attained the status of myth in David’s mind, so I altered the tone accordingly.

DA: The book that David reads to Opa is interesting to me because it’s another example of what I referenced above—these small narratives that are woven throughout the story, which enhance our understanding of it. Is this a real book? If so, what is it? If not, how did you come to insert this into the story?

MS: No, it’s not a real book. It’s actually a fragment of a story I wrote about four years ago, and which I never really finished to my satisfaction—still, it’s been rattling around in my head ever since, and when I came to this scene in “Ghosts,” I found myself just kind of regurgitating it. Which is not so surprising: That story was about a father and a son, and the intersections of a dream world and the real one. Also, it’s worth noting that Opa is actually the German word for grandfather—it’s what I called my mom’s dad.

DA: The choice to have a story set with a character on his deathbed seems like a risky one; I’m reminded of so many Victorian novels with very emotional scenes between characters, dying in their loved ones’ arms. But there’s nothing cheaply sentimental about “Ghosts,” and it seems to resist this at every turn: the incontinence, the drug-addled confusion, the familial infighting. Is this something you were conscious of as you wrote the story, something that you were deliberately resisting?

MS: That’s kind of you to say. Was I conscious that there were a whole lot of clichés involved with writing deathbed scenes? Definitely. But I think I’d point to the answer I gave to the first question, about the decision to make David the narrator: In many ways, the story evolved on its own, and didn’t leave me with many choices. I’m aware of how horribly pretentious that sounds, of course. And no, it’s not like stories come out fully formed—we trim and cut and hack and slash and revise and revise and revise. That’s what workshops and critiques and the endless drafts are for. But with most stories, we all start with a concept, a theme, I guess, that’s pretty much inviolable. If was to subject myself a 30-second self-psychoanalysis, I’d say that in the case of “Ghosts,” that theme came about because I’m still working, years later, to understand my reaction to the death of my own grandparents, and of a childhood friend, who, like Matt Corey in the story, died very young.

DA: When describing your story, the judge for the Nelligan Prize, Jane Hamilton, cites Frank O’Connor’s assertion that good short stories have “an intense awareness of human loneliness.” Is this reflective of your understanding of David, Lucy, Opa, and Petra? Do you see Opa’s impending death as driving that loneliness, or do you believe it might diminish it?

MS: Oh, yes. They’re all terribly lonely, although I think it’s a different kind of loneliness in each case. David, for instance, might not categorize it as such—he’s naturally withdrawn, happy being alone. But Lucy’s loneliness is an active loneliness. She feels it acutely, and gives expression to it, both with tears and shouts, which may in the end make her, paradoxically, the most emotionally healthy of the bunch. As for your question about the old man’s death—it’s a very good one. The truth is, I don’t know the answer. It might drive the family further apart, or it might, as the last scene between David and his mom suggests, bring them all closer together.