Creating Van Gogh

Up to 150

2012-01-23T07:00:00.001-06:00

Well, at least the first hundred were fast. This post counts as no. 150 for Creating Van Gogh, a project started back in 2009 and still continuing despite some rather obvious fallow periods. I can't say that when I started Creating Van Gogh, with the specific intention to write about issues I was encountering as I worked through my Van Gogh novel Days on Fire, that I expected it would last into 2012. But I didn't expect it wouldn't either. I was simply ready to get going and see what happened. As I mention above, that first 100--fueled by a fall sabbatical and by constantly encountering new concerns about, and new challenges in, my manuscript--were written in only nine months or so. It's taken me a year and a half to add another fifty posts and reach the "sesquicentennial" mark. Clearly I slowed in my postings after the summer of 2010, but I've also broadened the scope of the blog. Hopefully to good effect. After all, if the purpose of this blog is only to write about the composition of one novel, then after the novel is done there's no point in still going on with it. But that's not the only purpose, and I think there's a good deal to be gained by going on. If nothing else, I've made new friends and colleagues through this blog, one being writer Cathy Day, who is not only writing historical fiction but attempting to remake how creative writing is taught in the academy, a subject of great concern to me too, as you can probably tell by my constant references to the university where I teach. Another such colleague is Erika Dreifus, internet wunderkind, who has not only produced a terrific collection of short historical fiction, Quiet Americans, but who maintains several great web resources for writers, including her blog, Practicing Writing. Creating Van Gogh has also allowed me to raise and explore questions related to historical fiction generally, not just my Van Gogh novel; to discuss various issues going on in the academy and the culture; to recommend books I've enjoyed; to report on conferences like AWP; to tell you about my latest fictional projects; to let off steam (for instance about the debacle of defunding the National Writing Project and other important literacy programs); and even to think through conumdrums like literary agents, as I did in my last post. I've tried not to stray too far the subject of historical fiction, and I've strenuously kept this blog from being about "what I ate for lunch," but I do recognize that to give Creating Van Gogh new life and to keep it going, I can and should comment on several different writing and fictional concerns. Because historical fiction is fiction, first and foremost, and it has a lot more in common with creative writing generally than with history writing. At least that's what I think, and that's what I'm going to keep saying, as long as Creating Van Gogh is around.

Here's hoping for a 150 more posts in the coming years. And let's hope too that they are a fruitful 150. Thanks to everyone who reads.

The mysteries of agents

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-06:00

Writing and attempting to publish a novel is certainly an education. Sometimes you just don't know what's really up, even when you are sure you do. I've had mystifying reactions from agents over the years, but none so mystifying as the one I received from one New York agent in recent months. Last spring, I worked quite closely with this man and his agency as we moved through the usual writer-agent introductions and on to a regular, sustained back and forth about my Van Gogh novel. Some background: Based on my original query letter, the head of the agency called me at home one night early in 2011 and we had a great conversation. He's an older gentleman; a world traveler; quite dignified; and quite a pleasure to talk to. He asked me to send him the entire manuscript of Days On Fire (then called Yellow). Soon after our conversation, I mailed the agent my manuscript, and his office began a careful scrutiny of its contents. The agent eventually wrote me to say that they were impressed with the novel but would like to see a vigorous rewrite, and he sent along a list of specific suggestions. The suggestions seemed reasonable, and so I conducted a substantial revision, more or less staying faithful to their wishes. I mailed the agent the new version, which he and his staff scrutinized just as carefully as they had the first one. As a result, they pronounced it closer but not quite there yet. They asked for additional rewrites, again listing specific concerns. I threw myself into the next revision and tried to make it as exactingly perfect as possible. I have to say that over the course of months of working with this agency I felt the book getting tighter and better; I felt certain this last revision would be the one to put it "over the top." No other agency had expressed such sincere interest in the novel; and I had never engaged in such an ongoing, cooperative, mutually respectful relationship with an agent before. That alone was significant and satisfying, but more significant and satisfying is the benefit it had for my book, which is finally all that matters. Near the end of May, I mailed to them what I hope would be the "final" version of the book, at least the final version before they agreed to represent it to publishers. I felt good about the whole project and about the relationship. My writer friends agreed that the fact the agency kept wanting to see the book and wanting me to work on it suggested a strong interest on their part. After this third manuscript made its way to the agency's office, I received a warm email from the dignified older gentleman--the one whose name is on the agency--saying how glad he was to receive the latest version, and while it would take them "several weeks" to review it and respond, he was looking forward to doing so. So far so good.

The summer passed. I taught a class. I went to the pool some. I took a vacation. I began writing new short stories. Fall came. The semester started at the University of Central Arkansas, where I teach. Students began turning in assignments. I became involved with all the usual teacherly busyness. It took me until the beginning of October to realize that the "several weeks" had become a rather significant period of time. Four months to be exact. I decided to send a polite, brief email to the agent to see how the review of Days on Fire was going and to ask if perhaps I had missed some communication from them. I sent the email from my office at school. I got up, walked across the whole to my wife's office (yes, she's on the same floor) and said something like, "Well, now at least I'll find out what's going on." I had some business in another building, business that would take an hour or so. So I headed off, looking forward to my return, when I would open up my email and find out where matters stood for my novel. (Up to this point, when I had emailed the agent I always received a reply within an hour--sometimes faster. And their examinations of the novel typically took five weeks or so.) Well, when I next checked my email there was no reply from the agent. Hmmm. I gave it a couple weeks, emailed him again from a secondary email address I use, but again I received no reply.

At this point, I was completely befuddled. If they were still reviewing the book, why not just tell me? Or if they were ready to say "no," why not tell me "no"? If they had in fact already said no, and I just missed the message, why not tell me that? No uncomplicated answer to my questions presented itself, but one thing seemed obvious: No one ignores emails from a person they want to have an ongoing business (or personal) relationship with. Apparently, they had decided not to represent the book but also apparently had decided not to tell me. Some writers I've talked to reject this notion as cock-eyed. "They wouldn't reject your book and not tell you," the writers say to me. No, of course, you wouldn't expect any agent to do that, especially not an agent with a fine reputation and storied career as this one has had. (You'll just have to trust me on that characterization.) But, considering all the facts, and applying Ockham's Razor, that's the only answer I can come to. For the heck of it, in December I sent the agent a Happy Holidays message, along with a reminder that I had not heard from him yet about the book. I didn't expect any result from the message, and I got none. So things remain as muddled as ever.

A rather old-fashioned agency in many good ways, this agency is also old-fashioned in that it has no web presence to speak of, and does not even advertise a phone number. Email is their preferred method of communication. So in case you are wondering why I don't just pick up the phone and call, that's why. Clearly, the time has come to start fresh with new agents. This isn't really a problem. As a writer you have to do that any time you get a rejection from an agency. But what stings this time is that as of last May no rejection seemed to have been imminent--and then none was ever sent. Exactly nothing was ever sent. A colleague of mine, who will publish his book of short stories with a British press next year tells me I should just give up on American publishers and turn my attention to England. While I haven't "given up" on American publishers (no American publisher has even seen the book yet!) I probably will follow my friend's advice, not because of his success, but because I had been thinking the same thing myself for some weeks and even years now. My wife has just published her study of university creative writing programs with a British press, and she has nothing but good things to say about the experience. [Stephanie Vanderslice, Rethinking Creative Writing, Professional and Higher, 2011]. Yes, I'll move on--both to other American agents and to British ones--but as I do so I know I'll recall my relationship with this agent with wistfulness and regret. Not for his (implicit) rejection--rejection is to be expected in the writing life--but for the confounded mystery of it all.

Fast and loose?

2012-01-09T07:00:00.001-06:00

My latest creative project, which for last several weeks has seen me involved in drastic, medically necessary line editing, is a series of stories half in historical in nature and half not. I've mentioned this in a couple blogs since last summer. What binds the stories is the

setting--Nantucket Island, Massachusetts--but I've found some similar themes evolving across the stories, whether they are contemporary or historical. I guess this isn't surprising since all the stories arise out of the same imagination.

The earliest story, chronologically, takes place in 1795. (Interestingly, this was the last story to be drafted.) The catalyst for the story was reading about an actual, and rather significant, event from that year: the robbing of the new Nantucket Bank by a group of off-islanders during the Nantucket's June sheep-shearing festival. No robbery is good for those victimized, but this crime proved particularly divisive, as accusations began flying wildly (cunningly?), especially from the mouth of the bank's president, one Joseph Chase. Islanders very quickly took sides in laying blame. On one side were the Quakers, who tended to be Jeffersonian Democrats; on the other side were the Congregationalists, who tended to be Federalists. Each side thought they had an explanation for the crime and were sticking to their guns, despite evidence to the contrary. This is especially true in the case of the Quakers. (Chase was part of their ranks.) At one point, William Coffin, a Congregationalist and Federalist--and someone suspected of being involved with the robbery--had to carry out his own investigation on the mainland, because the mostly Quaker, Democratic bank directors refused to look into, or didn't want to believe, clues and rumors that pointed to culprits from there. After months of searching off-island, Chase actually brought back to Nantucket two men from New York who admitted to the crime. But the bank directors, too busy trying to pin the crime on Coffin and his Federalist allies, never took the suspects seriously, and the two men were later permitted to escape. It proved a disastrously acrimonious episde for the island, and in the years following Nantucketers tended to look back on the pre-1795 years as a period of prelapsarian grace.

The Nantucket Bank robbery is a fascinating story--with even more complications that I've suggested above--so I couldn't resist approaching the event fictionally. It's probably worthy of a novel, but for now I've merely written a long short story. While I've stayed true to several facts about the case, I've also changed many facts, left others out, and am ignorant of still more. My characters, while based on real participants, are given new names and identities, and revised personal backgrounds. Also, in trying to shape the robbery into a coherent story, I've conflated the timeline and eliminated certain events and people that were significant to the historical account. Whether it works as a story is my main concern, not whether it works as history. Right now I can't tell because I'm still very close to it. My main worry for now, actually, is that because it's based on a real case I encountered in a history book (Nathaniel Philbrick's wonderful Away Off-Shore), I'm trying for too much historical perspective. But I have a feeling that historians, and perhaps Philbrick himself, would say that I'm playing way too fast and far too loose with the facts.

However, I wonder aloud--and am wondering in this post--if by giving my characters invented names and (mostly) invented identities, I have opened up exactly that "fast and loose" space for myself. I guess that's why I did it. (I say "I guess" because it was an intuitive choice. I didn't labor over it; I just did it.) Unlike my Van Gogh novel, I am not using real names. (Altough I am using a real event and a real island.) In my novel, I can fairly be charged, if in just a few spots, of creating an "alternative history." In completely abandoning real names and identities does the fiction become more or less alternative? Can a writer be criticized for not sticking to the "known facts" about a character if that character is fictional? What if the fictional character is in some vital ways drawn from a real person? Does this create a meaningful distinction or a distinction without a difference? Oh, the entangled mental waters one wades into when one starts blending history and fiction. But, then again, that's the fun of it, right?

Dancing with historical fiction

2012-01-02T13:06:00.011-06:00

Happy new year, everyone, wherever you are in the world. It's been a while since I've posted, so I figure it's time to get cracking! And that's good, because a subject came up in one of my classes last semester that I've been wanting to write to you all about. As I've mentioned on this blog before, one of the courses I teach at the University of Central Arkansas is called Forms of Fiction. It's not a literature course, but we certainly do read plenty of short stories as we survey some of the genres contemporary fiction writers work in. One of those genres (of course) is historical fiction; and I was pleased to see that this past semester more of my students took up the challenge of turning the research I assigned into finished historical fictions. One of the more interesting of these fictions was based on the Dancing Plague of 1518, a truly bizarre episode that occurred in Strausborg, France and resulted in hundreds of people dancing involuntarily for days on end, perhaps as many as a hundred of whom finally succumbed to stroke, heart attack, or exhaustion. The Plague started with one inflicted woman, known as Frau Troffea, who began dancing a jig in a street in Strausborg. Others joined her and within a month's time up to four hundred people were dancing and, here's the rub, they seemed unable to stop despite their apparent desire to stop. Contemporary accounts refer to looks of "fear and desperation" on the faces of the dancers. Strangely (well, is anything not strange about medicine in the 16th century?) the best answer medical practitioners could come up with was to encourage the dancers to dance more! They cleared fields and opened dance halls; they hired musicians to play. Apparently the thought was that in this way the illness would work itself out. All that happened, however, was that more people danced and many people died.

In my student's story, Frau Troffea occupies a fittingly prominent position. She is set to dancing by St. Vitus, whom she has unwittingly offended. (According to an old Catholic superstition, crossing St. Vitus can lead to compulsive dancing.) It was a promising, if somewhat rushed story, but whatever the story's deficiencies I am grateful to its author for introducing me to this fascinating case. Turns out that British historian John Waller has written a recent book about it, called The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness (2009). Of course, the question anyone must ask is, Why did the people dance? There are various modern explanations, medical in nature, for the phenomenon, none of which completely satisfy. Waller's best guess is mass psychogenic illness resulting from several years of extreme psychological stress, malnutrition, and disease. I'm not sure that explanation completely satisfies either, but unless you want, like my student, to blame it on St. Vitus, that's what you're left with. In any case, it's a fascinating subject and well worth looking into. Thanks to Karen Cochrum for my introduction to this Weird But True tale.

Watching Lust, Part Two

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

In my last entry, I discussed some of my reactions to the 1956 movie Lust for Life, an adaptation of the 1934 Irving Stone novel of the same name. I ended on a note about the film's bloodless interpretation of Theo, Vincent's brother. How the film depicts Paul Gauguin is far more interesting and far more successful. Played with a fierce, commanding self-composure by Anthony Quinn, Quinn's Gauguin is arrogant, commanding, and clear-eyed, an obvious foil to Kirk Douglas's more emotional and, toward the end of film, even raging Vincent. The different depictions of the two men certainly do point to real differences in their personalities. Vincent indeed was a far more emotionally based individual than Paul Gauguin, who could fairly be called calculating, even scheming. Gauguin should also be called a liar and a weasel, an aspect of his personality that the movie doesn't quite explore. Arguably, in the standoff between the two Yellow House roommates, in the vortex of their deteriorating relationship, the film suggests that Gauguin is the sane and reliable, even if he is also rather cold personally. (The film also suggests that Van Gogh was the much heavier drinker of the two men. Nothing factual points to that conclusion. Nothing factual even points to a great fondness for absinthe on Vincent's part, despite his reputation to the contrary. And Gauguin was the more frequent visitor to brothels--an aspect of 19th century male life, and Van Gogh's life too, that the movie simply declines to explore.)

The real Gauguin certainly was sane and cold, but never reliable. There's every indication that his famous account of Vincent's 1888 breakdown--when Vincent cut his ear off--is a network of self-serving lies, none of them verified by any other source. Unfortunately, the movie seems to rely on Gauguin's account for its lurid depiction of the event. The myth of the Tragically Mad Vincent, something I've complained about in other posts, is fully on display. But it gets only worse when the movie moves on to Vincent's last months in the quiet northern village of Auvers-sur-Oise. Without question, these were not happy months in Vincent's life. He had come to the realization that he would never be truly cured. The power of his painting had self-evidently diminished. The predicted friendship with Paul Gachet--a physician in the village who was both an art lover and had an interest in mental illness--a friendship Theo was counting on to provide support and counsel for Vincent in Auvers, turned sour rather quickly. So it is no great surprise, really, that Vincent would have decided his life and energy was all but spent, that there was no reason for him to continue on. All that said, the movie tries to portray him as not depressed but deranged. In one striking scene, a band plays in the street outside of a bar where Vincent sits desperately clinging to a drink. The music literally drives Vincent crazy as he winces and wiggles and clutches his ears trying to keep out the sound. It is the kind of scene that was likely deeply affecting to audiences when the film was released but which seems pathetically overdone now.

There is more of this Tragically Mad mythmaking in the movie's final minutes. Vincent is painting in a field, at work on what is widely--and erroneously--called his "final painting": Wheat Field with Crows. While Wheat Field with Crows is one of his last paintings, by no means was it his absolute last. In fact, art historians date it as having been completed weeks before Van Gogh died. Viewers of the painting simply would like to believe it was his last because of the strong note of foreboding in it: the threatening blue-black sky and the low-hanging bodies of crows that look like harbingers of death. Of course, people think, just before he died he painted a painting about death. It's too poetically perfect not to believe; but it's also simply wrong. The movie goes one step further. In the movie, this isn't merely Vincent's last painting but Vincent kills himself while painting it. He tries to work, but is struck by another fit similar to what is shown in the bar scene. In the anxiety of the moment, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself. "Now where would he have gotten the gun?" my sister smartly commented. Well, in fact, plenty of frenchmen owned guns in the 19th century, but Vincent was not in the habit of carrying one when he went painting. If, as is commonly held, Vincent shot himself in a field on July 27, 1890--a new biography disputes this notion and claims he was accidentally shot by someone else--he surely took the gun out with him just for this purpose. And by no means was he in the middle of painting Wheat Field with Crows, a controlled and striking painting. This shooting scene is nothing more than melodramatic Hollywood blather.

But to be fair, it's no less blather than most films of the day would have shown you. Or that most films show you now. Is Lust for Life worth watching? Yes, it still is. But please don't think that it transmits an accurate, or even sensitive, interpretation of the life of the artist. The real Van Gogh was far more complicated than the writhing, raging, movie cut up. The real Van Gogh was both more lucid and, for those who knew him best, more maddening a man.

Watching Lust, Part One

2011-11-07T07:00:00.001-06:00

Recently, I spent a week at my mother's house in Cobb Island, Maryland helping her out as she recovers from a rather serious surgical procedure. One of my sisters, who also lives on Cobb Island, felt it was about time I watch Lust for Life--the 1956 movie based on Irving Stone's bestselling Van Gogh novel--so she ordered it off Netflix for us. As I've mentioned in a past entry, I purposefully avoided Lust for Life, in both its novel and film versions, when I composed my novel Days on Fire. I firmly believed that a 21st century rendition of Van Gogh's life needed to be imagined and crafted independent of an early 20th century one. (Stone's novel appeared in 1934.) But having more or less completed my project, there seemed no point in hesitating any longer, so I watched the film with my mother and sister, quite curious about what aspects of Van Gogh's life and character the moviemakers--including Kirk Douglas, who plays Van Gogh--would choose to emphasize.

It should come as no surprise that Lust for Life the movie is very much a piece of its time. (This is true of just about any work of art, and is surely true too of my own novel. It's just hard to see that when something is both so new and so close to you.) The movie engages in just the kind of bowdlerization and heroic mythmaking that we've come to expect from the 1950s. And of course it takes several shortcuts in order to tell its story in 122 minutes. It completely ignores Vincent's childhood years in Brabant (a rural region of south Holland) as well as the crucially important, formative years as an art dealer in The Hague and in London. (Arguably, everything that came from his life, both good and bad, was a reaction to the disappointments of that time. Certainly, this is when his sarcastic ideas about the art business were formed.) Instead the movie picks up when Vincent is about to go off to the Borinage, a mining region in southern Belgium, where he tried to make a go as a lay preacher. I suppose this is as good of a place to start as any if you want to introduce tension into a movie. And I certainly understand having to cut something out to get your movie down to size. But, still, I felt the inherent absences caused by the moviemaker's choice. Don't get me wrong. Some aspects of the movie I admired but others I chuckled at. Some I thought were ridiculous. There are undeniably lovely scenic shots of Arles and other locations in southern France. And some of the testy artistic debates with which Gauguin and Vincent (repeatedly) engaged is fairly suggested by the movie, which does an admirable job summarizing the contrasting principles upon which each man based his work.

However, a good deal of what is depicted is terribly contorted and finally plain wrong. Sien, the prostitute who Van Gogh met (probably on a street corner) in The Hague and lived with for over a year, enters the movie not in The Hague but in an Amsterdam bar, the very night after Vincent is rejected by his cousin K and her family. While this makes for an efficient segue from one romantic interest to the next, it's a serious distortion of the facts of Van Gogh's life. He met Sien not only in a different city but after several months had passed, months that gave him necessary time to get over his fierce--and blunted--passion for his cousin. Moreover, in the movie Sien is portrayed as a distraught, underemployed cleaning woman, rather than what she really and infamously was.

While such a tidying up of history is to be expected in a 50s movie--or any movie--I was more surprised by how diminished are the roles of Theo and of Vincent's father. Vincent's father, the Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh, appears in exactly one scene, a drastic diminishment of the man who, in both positive and negative ways, was perhaps the most important influence in Vincent's life, at least until he met Gauguin. Theo appears in many more of the movie's scenes, but it's a fairly bloodless, antiseptic interpretation, as Theo's function seems to be simply to tell Vincent what to do--i.e., where to live, whom to meet--without seeming all that engaged in his brother's existence. In the movie, Theo is always smooth and always right. Vincent does what Theo says and thereafter thanks Theo for his advice. In reality, the brothers disagreed often, especially as to where Vincent should move, and what he should do, next. One of the most fascinating aspects of reading the Collected Letters is to watch the push and pull of their relationship, to see not just the affection Vincent felt for Theo but also the bouts of anger and disillusionment. To see Vincent openly bullying Theo or attempting to manipulate him. At the same time, Theo was Vincent's most reliable and informed sounding board on all things artistic. And Theo was hardly the impeccably cool, uninvolved customer. The nearly two years they lived together in Paris severely tested the young brother's patience and almost exhausted him; yet at the same time he was as dependent on Vincent as Vincent was on him. It is no accident that he died shortly after Vincent did.

(Next post: More mythmaking--and Vincent dies!)

Is it really a new Van Gogh?

2011-10-17T13:38:00.006-05:00

If you read this blog you probably know that there's a new Van Gogh biography out just now, by authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh. Not surprisingly for a book with the blunt, comprehensive title Van Gogh: The Life (not "a" life, but "the" life), the volume spans some 900 pages. (And I thought the previous draft of my novel was long!) If nothing else, the publication of yet another Van Gogh biography demonstrates the continuing cultural fascination with this man who during his life was so ignored, suspected, pitied, or detested. While of course one fears an overload of Van Gogh material on the market, I have to think this demonstration of interest in Van Gogh is a promising sign for the eventual appearance and success of my novel Days On Fire.

Smith and Naifeh's book is grabbing headlines for their contention that Van Gogh did not actually commit suicide but was accidentally shot by two gun-toting, playacting kids. This certainly is a provocative argument, although of course one has to wonder why, if true, these facts were not widely known before. Also, as one BBC reporter notes, by insisting on this interpretation of events, the two authors "pay little heed to the one person who was definitely there - Vincent van Gogh - when he quite clearly said: 'Do not accuse anyone... it is I who wanted to kill myself.'" Truth be told, I did not carefully research Van Gogh's death when I consulted secondary sources for my novel, the reason being that I knew I did not want to take my novel all the way to Van Gogh's death. Instead I wanted to focus the ending of my book on Van Gogh's triumph over his own limitations and his subsequent artistic breakthrough in that crucial, singular summer in Arles. The only contrasting opinion I came across about Van Gogh's death was the opinion put forth by one author that while Van Gogh did shoot himself he did so not with suicide in mind but to punish himself for his failures as a man and a brother. Given Van Gogh's melancholic state of mind near the end, after he realized he would never truly be through with his illness, and given his acute awareness of how much he owed Theo, of how great the burden was he placed upon that man, I can almost accept that author's opinion. But, as I said, not one other source--until now--ever suggested his suicide was anything other than what it looked like.

Some of Smith and Naifeh's other claims interest me even more. For instance, that Vincent's family tried repeatedly to have him installed in an insane asylum before he went there voluntarily on his own in 1889. Also that some in his family suspected Vincent of killing his own father. While I am not familiar with the former claim, I suppose it could be credible, although by the time Vincent moved to Arles--really as soon as he moved to Antwerp from Nuenen (where his father, mother, and sister Wil were living at the time of his father's death)--he was well out of his family's hair, and clearly committed to a life as an artist. As I've repeated to many a soul, and a few times on this blog, Van Gogh's famous mental breakdown in Arles came several years after he had devoted himself to the life of the artist and only after he had created many if not most of his greatest pictures. Up until that point there was every reason for his family to continue their patient--or let's say resigned--acceptance of his eccentricities. I'm simply stunned, however, that anyone, much less a family member, could suspect that Vincent killed his father. Smith and Naifeh will truly have to prove this one to me. There is no doubt Vincent's relationship with his father was an emotinally fraught one, but it was also arguably the most important relationship of his life, even more significant than his relationship with Theo, at least until he formed an obsessive and dangerous friendship with Gauguin late in his life. Vincent's frustration with his father was the flip side of his love and respect for the man. After all, he had once wanted to follow his father's steps into the ministry. And in some crucial ways, albeit after severe doubts, his father--in his fashion--finally supported Vincent's call to painting. Of course, Smith and Naifeh don't say that Vincent actually did kill his father, only that some in the family suspected this. Who the "some" are is a key question. Even so, I have my doubts. Unlike the famous/infamous biopic Lust for Life (more on that movie in a later post)--in which Vincent's father appears in exactly one scene--Theodorus Van Gogh the father is one of the central and most interesting characters in my novel. How sad to think that a family member could not appreciate how intertwined Vincent's life was with his father's, even long after Vincent had rejected his father's profession and way of life. In my opinion, Vincent needed his father even more then--as a whipping boy, as a convex mirror, and as a measuring stick. If it's true that some members of his family could think him capable of ending Theodorus's life, or anyone's life besides his own, that only shows how badly they misunderstood their painterly relative.

And that's hardly news at all.

Babbits and more babbits

2011-09-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

Last spring in one of my creative writing classes, a student wrote a curious short story in which she made reference to "babbitry." When the story was workshopped, many of her classmates asked about the phrase, an allusion that none of them caught, and not surprisingly. Prior to this class, I don't think that Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel--or the book's title character--had come up in any discussion I've ever had in a ficiton writing class. The novel, as famous as it was in its day, simply isn't taught or read anymore. Even I, who caught the reference and explained it to the class, knew the book only by its reputation. I'd read and enjoyed Main Street (1920) a long long time ago; and for several years I've intended to read Arrowsmith (1925), which is actually on my book shelf. But I'd never gotten around to reading Babbitt. Well, as you know if you've followed this blog, I'm a fan of the audiobook. I "read" a lot of things that way, during my morning run. So recently I went to Audible.com to find and download Babbitt. Turns out I had several different audio versions of the novel to choose from. Even more interesting, many of the versions were released only recently. This surprised me--such new life from an old book--but then I realized it made perfect sense. What better statement about our current political doldrums, and what better dunderhead to represent them than George F. Babbit?

I'm about three-quarters of the way through right now, and the book still seems to be an elongated, satiric character sketch. Lewis is not completely without sympathy for his title character, and it's not as if nothing of interest ever happens to the man, but the clear point of the novel is to hold up the Babbitt type for critical scrutiny. And what exactly is the Babbitt type? In short, someone who assumes that any place or anything not American must necessarily be inferior, who sticks doggedly to a low/middlebrow notion of what art means and sees little use for art outside of generating ad copy and cowboy movies, who believes that only businessmen are doing America's business, that fundamentally no one else contributes, who believes that any idea of shared community needs and community interests is akin to socialism, who walks around determined to see himself as kind, civic, progressive in spirit, and even moral while all the while acting dishonestly in his real estate business, attending church purely for appearance's sake, looking to cheat on his wife, and despising every public-concerned political initiative. In short, someone with no self-awareness. An obvious hypocrite, and--as the book goes on to show--a very sad case.

And I wonder why the novel might be ready for a comeback? Indeed, as I listen to it, what strikes me over and over is how relevant the ninety year old story is. Sometimes scarily so. Nothing depresses and infuriates me more than those who see any and all government investment as simply a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the nondeserving. That idea is so trite, so mean spirited, and so factually wrong that I almost can't believe it survives. Oh, but how it does. In all this Tea Party zealotry about lowering taxes for the rich, and cutting government services to the bone, what gets utterly overlooked is how mutual so many of the concerns are that lie behind the threatened programs. We all benefit from an educated public; we all benefit from a good health care system; we all benefit from a sustainable environment; we all benefit from an active arts culture; we all benefit from a solid infrastructure and a well-supported military and the opportunity for our children to go to college and accurate scientific data on how our planet is changing. How is any of that a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the none deserving? So many Babbitts flourish today, trying to convince the public, as they've managed to convince themselves, by masking their motivations in civic and/or religious language, that cutting their taxes is all that should matter to anyone, despite the inevitable resulting fallout to our government, our economy, and our society. Despite all that we could lose. (If you doubt my word, just take a gander at the vital federal programs that have already been cut or are likely to be cut soon--and in several cases with only a microscopic effect to the budget deficit. Meanwhile, the one thing that would significantly lower the deficit--a serious tax hike--seems impossible to pass.)

I used to think that we as a people thought greed was a sin; I used to think that our houses of religion preached against it and our systems of government worked against it. I used to be sure of a lot of things, but with the Babbitts in control of the discourse, nothing--certainly not our economy--is certain anymore.

Factually Fanatic, a Followup

2011-08-30T07:00:00.002-05:00

I ran into technical difficulties yesterday. Blogger was refusing to let me respond to a comment posted on my own blog! Apparently, my account "did not have access" to that blog. Oh yeah?

Anyway, in the comment a reader named Shannon raised some hard questions about what amounts to "going over the line" when one departs from known fact. (Check yesterday's post for Shannon's comment.) As I would have told Shannon if Blogger let me, my own opinion is that one can and should depart from fact when it's necessary to do so to tell one's story. But finally what's "over the line" is in the eye of the beholder.

I'll always remember a story a teacher of mine in graduate school told. A friend of his had a fictional story accepted by a major national glossy, one wealthy enough to employ a horde of "fact checkers." In the short story, the writer made mention of a "kidney shaped pool" in a backyard in the town where the story was set. The magazine's fact checkers told the writer that they could not publish her story unless she could prove that a kidney shaped pool actually existed in the town in question in the year in which the story was set. Can you believe that? If the writer had submitted her story as nonfiction, then sure go ahead and do the fact checking; insist on the literal pool. But for a short story? I'm afraid some people need to be reminded as to why fiction is called fiction.

What's alternative?

2011-08-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

Recently I finished You Remind Me of Me (2004), Dan Chaon's terrific first novel. (In 2009 he published his second novel, Await Your Reply). When I read novels and story collections I like to browse the acknowledgements pages for curious pieces of information, e.g., where a certain quotation comes from or where a piece first appeared in print or to whom in the author feels particularly indebted. And of course also included in every book of fiction is a reminder to the reader that the book is made up, that the reader should not assume the characters are based on real people or the plot drawn from real world situations. Sometimes this claim is more accurate than others, but it's an unavoidable legal necessity. No author or publisher wants to get sued by a private individual who believes he or she was unjustly represented in the author's novel. And most of the time the statement follows a standard, canned, legalistc pattern. In fact, in many books the statement is exactly the same. But some fiction writers actually compose the statement themselves and take care with it. I was delighted and intrigued when I read the following statement on Chaon's acknowledgements page: "No characters in this novel are based on real people, and I have taken some poetic license with the facts of law, history, medicine, geography, and weather. While there is, in reality, a city named Chicago, the Chicago of this novel, as well as the towns of St. Bonaventure, Nebraksa, Little Bow, South Dakota, and others, exist wholly in an alternate universe of the author's imagination."

Fascinating! That's the first time I've ever seen an author apologize for his treatment of the weather. And of course I ask myself what Chaon means. The novel jumps in time rather energetically, with a total span of four decades. Is it possible that Chaon knows the weather conditions in a given month and year in Nebraska thirty years ago, say, or Chicago, and felt he had to admit that he broke from literal fact? If he actually does know, I admire how carefully he researched his novel. But I also wonder who in the world would criticize him if he took small liberties with recorded weather data. Similarly I wonder what exactly the liberties were that he took with medicine and law and geography. I must say that nothing seems unusual about the geography of the book; nor do the various legal entanglements his characters get themselves into strike me as implausible. Whatever liberties Chaon took, the book is a resoundingly believable work of realistic fiction. Whatever liberties he took, and despite his note on the acknowledgements page, no one would--or should--label You Remind Me of Me as an alternate history.

That label is usually applied to science fiction or historical fiction books in which history has been dramatically and obviously altered. But Chaon's note makes me wonder: Isn't all fiction, given its nature as fiction, an alternate history? Even if one is writing a novel set in the present day, even if the novel is set in one's own home town, when one is writing what one sees inside one's head is the hometown as it exists in one's imagination. That is what's transferred to the page. Of course this remains true--not truer, but equally true--if one's novel is set 30 years ago or 50 or 400. And if all novel writing is a form of alternate history, why then is historical fiction held under such a factually driven microscope? Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of historical fictionists carrying out as much research as possible and using the facts of history to dramatic advantage in their works. Or simply as useful, necessary imagery. I am bothered as much as anyone when a writer makes glaring errors, or employs anachronisms, especially if those errors or anachronisms aren't dramatically necessary but the result of writerly sloppiness. But finally we all need to be reminded that the historical novel is a subset not of history writing but of novel writing.

This seems obvious when you set it down--by the way, if you want to get a historian upset, tell him that historical fiction is the same thing as history--but in point of fact many readers and writers expect historical novels to function as history not as storytelling. These readers and writers do not reserve the lable alternate history only for those books that alter history dramatically. I've heard it opined in various conference sessions and blogs that if a historical novel knowingly departs, even a little, from the historical record, the writer can't call it a historical novel but must call it an alternate history. (And clearly this is understood to be the the lesser distinction.) As if the writer doesn't really understand history, or hasn't done her homework or is guilty of being selfish or less than rigorous. This attitude strikes me not only as a little dumb but also unfair. The writer may know her history perfectly well. She may be deeply indebted to that history for not only originating but sustaining and girding her book. She may stick to the "known facts" substantially if incompletely. Just because she departs from known history a bit does not automatically move her novel into some other category. It just means she's writing a novel. It just means she's doing what all fiction writers do: writing from the world of her imagination. Get real, folks. If it's understood that writers of realistic novels set in the present day often need to adjust details of the real world in order for their novels to work structurally and dramatically, there's no reason why we can't allow the same leeway for historical fiction writers.

Triangle of history

2011-08-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

In packing for my recent family excursion to the east coast I packed reading material, of course. (And before I go on, I must congratulate myself on not packing, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, ridiculously too much reading material.) One of the books I read was Katherine Weber's Triangle, a novel that explores--in sort of a mystery novel approach--the long term effects of the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in 1911. I've been curious about this novel for several years, ever since I heard book reviewer Maureen Corrigan raving about it on NPR's Fresh Air program. I had tried to "read" it via audio book earlier this summer after downloading the title from Audible.com to my iTunes library. Turns out I hadn't downloaded Weber's novel, but a nonfiction account of the fire and its effect on New York and national politics. I was quite disappointed by my mistake, but then I quckly found the book I downloaded--Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (2003) by David Von Drehle--to be engrossing and thoroughly informative.

When I turned to Weber's novel I wondered how different her fictional account of the fire would be fron Von Drehle's nonfiction study. I hoped that what I learned from Von Drehle would not color how I responded to Weber's imaginative recreations. Well, I need not have worried. As I quickly discovered, Weber's novel is almost entirely different from Von Drehle's straightforward narrative account. In fact, it took quite some time for the fire to play a central role in the novel, although increasingly it does, especially after one passes the halfway point. The novel is actually not at all what I expected it to be, but that's my fault more than Weber's. Triangle is fundamentally a contemporary novel rather than an historical one; yet it's a novel that tries to show how a single event in history can still affect individuals decades later, and in completely unexpected ways. The novel's main character is not the fire, nor is it even Esther Gottesfield, a fictional survivor of the Triangle factory tragedy who lives to be over a 100. The main characters are Rebecca Gottesfield, Esther's granddaughter, and George Botkin, Rebecca's significant other and a richly successful musical composer, best known for his musical portraits of famous individuals, compositions derived from studying those individuals' DNA. (A genuinely curious idea but one that Weber explores ad infinitum before she truly lets her novel start.) Over the course of the novel, Esther dies, Rebecca and George discover secrets about Esther's past, and finally they decide that for Esther's "protection" they will not reveal what they know.

I'm not terribly sympathetic with Rebecca and George's urge for, and rationalization of, this secrecy; nor is the "secret" all that difficult to figure out given the hints Weber provides. George, not Rebecca, realizes the truth--many many pages after the reader does. This was a bit disconcerting; also disconcerting was how much of the novel, a great big early chunk of it, Weber gives over to describing George's career as a composer before she finally gets down to the business of telling her story, and highlighting the fire. Weber does, however, show terrific familiarity with the facts of the fire--Weber's grandmother actually worked in the factory for a time--and appears to slip up only once, when she has Esther Gottesfield relate that a fireman helped her onto the roof of the Asch building (the building that housed the Triangle factory) when she made her escape from the fire. As I learned from Von Drehle, back in 1911 there was no way for firemen to get to the roof of a building as tall as the Asch building without climbing up through the inside. And to do that they had to put out the fire. This they did, but not before 146 people lost their lives, many as a result of jumping out of windows. The firemen arrived at the upper floors only minutes too late to help those trapped there, but those minutes meant everything. If they had been able to make it to the roof to help Esther Gottesfield, they also could and would have saved many more people. Now, Esther proves to be an unreliable historian when it comes to the fire, so perhaps this little error is meant by Weber to be a tip off. If true, then I say fair enough. Because I should credit Weber for how carefully she uses known facts about the fire, including real people from history, as well as facts about the trial that followed as a result, and how she uses these facts to help create a mystery that George and Rebecca (or at least George) finally crack. Once history becomes relevant to the novel, it becomes engaging and a very worthwhile read, with an interesting and admirable structure. But boy did it take a while for history to get there.

Where past is present

2011-08-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

This past Saturday evening I returned from an extended tour of the east coast visiting family from both sides of our marriage. The trip included a week spent on Nantucket Island, a place I've visited several times with my wife, but not for many years. This year I was struck again, as I always am, by how vivid the past feels as you walk around Nantucket. Or, said another way, you seem to walk at once in two different centuries: the 21st and the 19th. Historian Nathaniel Philbrick says this most eloquently in a film I recently saw about the island. Philbrick says--and I'm paraphrasing here--that on Nantucket ones feels that one is living an imaginary life that has somehow been given body. (The film, written and directed by Ric Burns, the brother of celebrated documentarian Ken Burns, is currently being shown at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.) There's an obvious reason why the past seems so present on the island--the place barely ever changes. In part this stasis is an accident of history, but in large measure it is due to design. I learned from Burns's film that Nantucket, for being such a small location, has a remarkable number of extant pre-civil war houses. These number in the hundreds. The reason being that after the civil war--when in so much of the country industries boomed, populations spread, and old buildings had to be scrapped to make room for new--Nantucket's economy went into a decades-long depression after the collapse of the whaling industry. There was little economic incentive to destroy the old houses; so they just sat there. And when Nantucket's economy revived via a new concentration on tourism, there was every incentive to repair and preserve these old houses.

But this is only part of the story. Just as important, if not more important, are the strict regulations that govern development on the island. A great deal of habitable space on Nantucket is owned by a public trust. This trust buys up land for the express purpose of making sure the land cannot be developed. With extremely few exceptions, no chain stores are allowed on the island. There are no traffic lights--anywhere. The cobblestone streets of Nantucket town center cannot and will not be replaced. Last but not least, any new constructions must be built to fit specific aesthetic standards, with the result being that at least 90% of homes on the island are of similar design and covered with wooden shingles that in the sea air quickly darken to the distinctive deep gray shade that one sees everywhere. In other words, any new building on Nantucket invariably looks old.

I realize that for some this must sound awfully claustrophobic, even socialistic, certainly in contrast with the wooly, no-holds-barred, slash-and-burn state of development in nearly every other part of the United States. But the beautiful result of these various regulations is immediately apparent, even before you step on the island. You can see it from the ferry as you approach. Except for the skyline of Manhattan, I can't think of a more distinctive and recognizable "city" view in America than that of Nantucket town center seen from a ferry in Nantucket Sound.

Finally too there is the fact that Nantucketers have never forgotten the famously vigorous and profitable years of the late 18th to mid 19th century, when the whaling industry reigned supreme on the island and Nantucketers ruled the whaling industry. Reminders of that maritime past are everywhere on Nantucket, not just in the Whaling Museum. It seems to ooze up through the fabric of the streets, through shingles of the houses, and even into the sand at your feet. (Perhaps it is no accident that Nantucket has been called, by various authors and ghost tour guides, "the most haunted place in America.") And given that one cannot escape the past on Nantucket; that at times one feels that one is literally walking through it--in an immediate, real way that places like colonial Williamsburg can only hope to mimic--it should come as no surprise that the island provides, at least for me, excellent stimlation for historical stories. I know of several histories of the island. And I know of one bestselling historical novel--Ahab's Wife--set there. But to date I am not aware of many historical short fictions set on Nantucket. (Suggestions anyone?) Years ago, on a weeklong visit, I started five or six separate short stories, eager to get my characters down and plots started before I left the island. Over the course of the following six or eight months, I finished, revised, and edited each of the stories, many of which subsequently found their way into publication. I loved, and still love, that little group of fictions, and tried to make them the second half of a collection of short stories that never found its way into print. On this last trip I decided that the failure of the collection was a good thing. Because the Nantucket stories--none of which were strictly historical but were certainly informed by history--never quite matched up with the stories in the first half of the collection. And I think now that a smarter choice would be to compose a group of historical stories set on Nantucket and then combine them with my earlier stories to create a full fictional treatment of the place--a mixture of past and present--fitting for an island where former centuries seem to breathe on you in every footstep and around every corner is another imagined life.

A Krauss House

2011-08-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

As I think I've reported on this blog before, I have a tendency to discover new writers long after most of the rest of the country does. This is certainly the case with Nicole Krauss, author of three novels--Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House--each more successful than the last. Great House, a National Book Award finalist, came recommended by my wife. In fact, she practically forced the book on me. One of those Oh-my-gosh-you-have-to-read-this moments. Well, I didn't right away. (I usually have too many other books I'm trying to get through.) But I have now, and I can't urge it strongly enough to anyone interested in literary historical fiction. The book is so carefully crafted, each sentence a model of clarity and incision, and yet too brimming with subtle--and sometimes not so subtle-- feeling. It's a book that is both small and vast at the same time. Similar to Erika Dreifus's superb short story collection Quiet Americans, Great House doesn't merely dramatize historical events but explores the very nature and force of history itself, revealing how seemingly insignifcant decisions and actions can affect the lives of those who live decades further on and in entirely different continents. It's the old "If a butterfly flaps its wings . . . " adage brilliantly rendered.

The novel is broken into two parts and each part into four sections. Each of the four sections is rendered in a different first person voice and details the lives of very different characters. We are shown New York, London, Oxford, and Israel, with quick stopovers in a host of various European cities. Meanwhile, we move back and forth in time, from the 1930s up until the present day. By design, for the longest time the different sections remain vastly separate from one another, so much so that a reader might ask himself what some of them are doing in the same novel. But, ah, you must trust the book. The connections gradually and unerringly and even tragically come into focus. If there's any theme the book demonstrates it is the Law of Unintended Consequences. One of the central characters, a Jewish novelist named Lotte Berg who was forced to flee her hometown of Nuremberg for England in the 30s, long ago accepted the gift of a desk from a gentleman lover (exactly who the lover was is one of the few matters left unclarified by Krauss). Lotte later gave the desk away to a fan of her books, an action that, with fatalistic inevitabilty, acts as the catalyst for much of the disappointment, rancor, and literal devastation dramatized later in the book. Great House comes to its realizations and its climaxes indirectly--that is, through its seemingly disparate four fold structure and its back and forth movement in time and space--but come to them it does. And the reader is not left unaffected. It is a masterfully, pristinely rendered work, a novel that has been carved rather than shot out, one that will dwell inside you long after you stop reading. Of all the many lessons I took from the book, one is this: In a world in which you can never completely control the consequences of your actions, a world in which finally you can't control anything but yourself, the very least you can do, maybe the only thing you can do, is Tell the Truth. Whatever comes after that, let come.

Personal Note: As you read this--if you're reading it on or near the day it's posted--my family travels along the east coast of the United States visiting our relatives. And it happens to be the birthday of my oldest son. Happy 15th, bud. I can't believe you're that old. You still seem like a kid to your mom and me. But I know that you know you certainly aren't.

Going Big

2011-08-01T06:44:00.002-05:00

My wife, who recently completed a historical novel of her own, has been looking at what agents and publishers have to say about the form. One opinion she has come across goes like this: If you want to convince potential readers to leave their own present century and take a journey with you into the past, you ought to choose for a subject someone who is already familiar to those readers, somebody about whom they might have built-in curiosity. Readers will be much more likely, these commentators say, to grab for a novel featuring George Washington, let's say, than a heretofore unheard of organ grinder working the Jersey shore. This makes a good deal of sense, as do most generalizations, but as with most generalizations it must also be accompanied by several caveats. On reading the above idea, my wife thought it meant good news for my Van Gogh novel. Nowadays who hasn't heard of Vincent Van Gogh? And who isn't at least a little bit curious about him? I certainly was curious enough to begin the whole process of researching his life, and then imagining it in fictional form. Why shouldn't readers be equally curious? In fact, I hope they are and expect they will be. And I think anyone who reads my novel will enjoy it on its own terms, whether they care much about Van Gogh or not.

But there is at least one potential drawback in Going Big. Your subject, because he/she is so well known, may have been explored in fiction before. (As Van Gogh has.) Does this mean your subject is out of bounds? In literature studies students are typically advised against researching familiar subjects. Because in carrying out your research survey you will inevitably, or at least possibly, find that someone has taken up your idea already. And at that point, you are morally and professionally obliged to stand down. This is the reason why literary scholars always seem to be discovering "lost greats" from the past. They need fertile territory for the books and articles required by their jobs and their professions. They need untrammeled ground. They need to find someone about whom they can be the first to say something. But this same law doesn't seem to--and shouldn't--apply to novels. How one novelist envisions a historical character might be entirely different from how another novelist does, thus making their two novels entirely different reading experiences. Besides, in a creative work it's not so much the idea behind it that moves the reader, but how the writer gives lungs and tissue to that idea. How engrossing is the flesh of the story. So while there surely isn't an inexhaustible market for novels about any particular historical person, there is certainly room for several.

That said, you certainly don't want to seem redundant. One way of avoiding that while at the same time "going big" is by narrowing your focus to a single, specific, perhaps lesser known, aspect of your subject's life. Hemingway's childhood. D. H. Lawrence's time in New Mexico. Lincoln's years as a young lawyer. By doing this, you avoid rehashing overly familiar aspects of your character's life. (I suppose this instinct was behind one agent's advice that I limit my novel to Van Gogh's later years in Saint-Remy.) Another way to reenvision a Big Subject is to present him or her from the point of view of someone else. This is the strategy Sena Jeter Naslund employed very successfully in Ahab's Wife. But, in the end, I think, you need to tell the story you are moved to tell. And in my case this meant, more or less, Van Gogh's life from his time in London as a art dealer to his release from St. Paul's hospital. (I never had a lot of interest in the few months he spent at Auvers-sur-Oise or the fact of his suicide. Perhaps because my book is more about triumph than about ruin.) While I have trimmed my book considerably over the past year or two, its span remains the same. I'm telling the story I want to tell.

But what if, I hear someone asking, the story you want to tell doesn't involve anyone famous, and yet it's still a good story? (This is the case with my wife's novel.) Does that mean there's no hope for my book? Can't my book in fact shine light on a little known story that needs to be heard? Clearly the answer here is yes. And, besides, I like to believe that any book written well enough will, once it's published, win an audience for itself. (Getting published is, admittedly, the tricky part in the equation.) Plenty of nonfiction books are first imagined, then written, then published just because they do take on under known or virtually unknown subject matter. That appears to be their whole raison d'etre. But, again, that is the realm of nonfiction, in which the originality of one's facts and ideas carry a greater importance than in fiction, the final effect of which is so dependent on structure and style. Even so, if a great story needs telling, it can't not make an audience for itself, as long as it is told superbly. How else to explain the success of Katharine Weber's Triangle, a novel about an event (an early 20th century factory fire) that had been almost entirely forgotten by the time she wrote her book, the major players in its story practically and in some cases literally lost from history?

I feel like I'm talking around my subject with this post. Perhaps a reader would like to share his or her opinion on Going Big. Does this explain your choice for the subject of your historical novel? Or, conversely, are you instead trying to bring a hidden story to light? And what has been the reaction so far to your attempt?

Is historical fiction intimidating?

2011-07-26T11:00:00.004-05:00

Part of the mix of classes I teach in the Writing Department at the University of Central Arkansas is one called Forms of Fiction. It sounds like a literature class, but it isn't. It's a writing workshop, albeit one that requires more reading than your typical workshop--and one in which I make the students draft stories in specific fictional forms, whether they want to or not. "Learning by doing," as I tell them. For each of the forms we cover, we spend a whole class beginning stories in our journals. Four of these journal entries the students later type up, polish, and turn in as one of their formal assignments. I taught two sections of Forms during the spring semester, and for the first time I included historical fiction in the mix of forms we covered. You might be wondering what took me so long to include it, especially if you know that I've been teaching the course since 2005. I can hear you thinking: "You're the historical fiction, guy. It's the subject of your blog. Why avoid it in your Forms class?" Why, indeed. Exactly what I said to myself while planning last spring's classes.

Interesting outcome. As with the other forms, we read and discussed example stories, and we talked about the challenges and excitements of the form. But then I gave them something else to do. I asked them to select a specific century or period in a specific country's history. Then I gave them a list of very practical questions to answer about that period. A few were broad questions, such as "What type of government was in place at the time?" But most were purposefully more specific and more quotidian, e.g., name a popular hair style, describe a popular hat, list three food items that would typically have been eaten for dinner during this period. I told them this wasn't supposed to be a major research project. They should just go on the internet and track down answers that they could express in a few sentences. The point of this quicky research was not to just arm them with some political and sociological facts about the period, but to generate pictures in their heads. Because from pictures come stories. And because I knew there was no way they could have ideas for stories set during the American Revolution, let's say, or the Ming Dynasty, or World War II Germany, without some grounding in the period first. The sheet of questions was homework. In class, we started stories in our journals, my hope being that once they decided on a protagonist and course of action some of the information they came up with through their research would be of creative use to them.

The results? They all, more or less, carried out the required fact-finding. And they all, more or less, dutifully started stories in their journals on our journal writing day. (Although there did seem to be more huffing and groaning and sighing than usual.) But when it came time to turn in their next formal assignment, almost none of them chose to do historical fiction. Out of two Forms sections--30 students in all--only two students finished their historical stories. This was quite disappointing. I had hoped they would find themselves newly engrossed in some fascinating historical period and driven to compose a story set in that period. What happened? You might think their disinclination stemmed from a lack of interest in history generally. But that isn't true. A number of students, whether due to work in other classes or simple personal interest, were very curious about the time periods they researched, which ranged from ancient Egypt to medieval Japan to 20th century Guatemala to footballer culture in 60s England. And on journal writing day, when I went around the room asking them what they had started, many of the stories sounded marvelous to me. When I expressed my disappointment that so few of them had gone on to finish their historical fiction pieces, the only response I got was that the form seemed "too hard." A bit more illumination came in their end of the semester statements in which a few of them admitted to being intimidated by the challenge of researching history and then accurately reflecting that history in an imagined story. It seemed like more than they cared to take on in the middle of a busy semester.

Okay, fair enough. I'm glad that's cleared up. (Perhaps the fear of hearing comments like these is why I dragged my feet on including historical fiction in this course.) But the results do make me wonder, How many people who might want to write historical fiction are simply scared off by it? A colleague of mine at UCA has a terrific idea for a historical novel set in early 20th century Italy. But he says he's not sure he has the wherewithal to see his way through the research and then the writing that would come out of that research. (Actually, I'm sure he does have the wherewithal.) At the risk of sounding naive, I find the idea of historical fiction being intimidating mildly surprising. For me, the challenge of bringing alive history in all its sights, sounds, smells, and attitudes is the fun of historical fiction. And, really, once one has found one's story, and is locked into it, the whole process isn't much different from writing any story. You just want to make it as engaging and concrete as you can. (Okay, so might find yourself doing a bit more fact checking everyday. But that's part of the fun.) I worry now that my students thought I was expecting them to become historical experts, and their stories to be flawlessly researched tomes exemplifying the periods in question. No. Not at all. If that's what they thought, I must do a better job of explaining myself in the fall. Because what any historical story is finally about is never the period of history but the person at the center of the story. And exploring people is exactly what should warm the hearts of storytellers all the world over. Even 19 year old ones.

I'm back! And with titular news

2011-07-23T10:09:00.007-05:00

I know. It's been so so long since I added a new entry to this blog. Readers probably suspected that Creating Van Gogh had gone belly up. Not to worry. CVG is alive and well. But certainly much has happened out there since last I posted five months ago. Where to begin: NWP is still up in the air; Republicans are still angling to blow up the federal government figuring that Obama will be blamed for it; the last space shuttle flight is over and done (are you really sure you want to do that NASA?); March Madness happened and the College World Series, the French Open and Wimbledon; and the annual Tour de France--I hope to see it live someday--is almost finished. But what about me you ask? Well, not surprisingly, I've been busy as well. I finished a novel I started last fall; I traveled with my colleague Garry Craig Powell and five UCA students to Lawrence, KS to participate in a faculty and student readings exchange with the University of Kansas; I successfully completed a French 1320 class that I sat in on during the spring semester (much thanks to instructor Veronique Odekirk); I started and finished a great summer 1 Forms of Fiction class at UCA; I wrote a proposal for a Forms of Fiction textbook; I drove my oldest son to Durham, NC so he can participate once again in the wonderful Duke-TIP program; I've taken up some duties as the new Associate Editor of the journal Toad Suck Review (formerly The Exquisite Corpse); I've listened to Await Your Reply (Dan Chaon) and Miss New India (Bharati Mukherjee) and Selected Shorts (NPR) and Coffee Break French Season 3 (members version) on my iPod during my daily sweatfests, and I've spent the last week trying to endure the mind-numbing Arkansas summer heat with my youngest son--i.e., fighting with him to get off my computer and take the dog out to pee--while my wife is away at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow finishing up the novel she has worked on for so long. (Congrats, sweetie.)

Of more interest to readers of this blog, however, will be some quiet but important developments in the life of my Van Gogh novel Yellow. No earth-shattering announcements yet. But there has been progress. I've been working closely with a kind and wise literary agent who has pushed me to sharpen and improve the book in important ways. What in its first typed form was 1250 ungainly manuscript pages is now a tight, focused 550 and includes some relevant and hopefully useful appendices, namely a chronology of the life of the real Van Gogh (my Van Gogh sure feels real to me, of course) and a detailed explanation of what sources I used and how I used them. The most obvious change is that my book now has a new title. I have to admit that this decision was a hard one for me. Since I first conceived of the book some ten years ago, I've only ever had one title in mind: Yellow. Not only is that the color most typically associated with Van Gogh's paintings, especially the paintings he created during what I consider his finest, most luminous period--when he worked in Arles, France--and not only did color and colors become a crucial stylistic element and organizing principle to the novel, but "yellow" seemed to speak to an important psychological tendency in Van Gogh: his eager pursuit of extremes. And I must say that I also like the title's directness. Easy to say; easy to remember. Long story short, it was actually quite hard to think of any other title being attached to my novel. Literally for months I remained stymied--and stumped. What else could I call this thing? Finally, at the end of May, after much sturm und drang, I came up with something: Days on Fire. The agent I'm working with likes it, and I must say that I do too. I like it a lot, actually. It keeps some of the same associations as Yellow, but with more linguistic and imagistic energy. What do you think, dear readers? How does the new title work for you? Does anyone out there have title-changing stories of their own?

From this date forward I will now refer to my novel as Days on Fire. Yellow is now officially kaput. And I promise not to be so long in updating the blog next time. I am going away on vacation at the end of next week, but I have a few entries in mind to put up before then or even while I travel!

An end to literacy?

2011-03-29T10:56:00.007-05:00

I know I've been away from this blog awhile, and I hope to rectify that soon with more updates about my Van Gogh novel and historical fiction generally. For today's post, I feel obliged to return to a subject I've written about before and that should strike the hearts of every reader and writer in America whether his or her taste runs to historical fiction or not. As many of you probably know, our Congress, in a fit of pique about the deficit--a pique that for some strange reason went unstated while former President Bush ran up monstrous deficits during his eight year tenure--has taken some rather drastic steps to reduce the federal debt. Apparently, raising additional revenue cannot even be considered, so the Congress is attempting to balance the federal budget by cutting spending alone--an effort that is not just misguided but impossible. And as a result, Congress is making devastatingly bad choices, one of which is to cut all funding for literacy programs, including Reading is Fundamental (RIF), Teach for America, and the National Writing Project (NWP). This despite the fact that these programs have been in existence for decades and are doing beautiful, demonstrably useful work. Apparently, maintaining tax cuts for already wealthy individuals is a sacred cow that cannot be touched, but literacy programs that help foster a passion for reading and writing up and down the economic scale can be cut with no problem at all. I don't know how else to define this state of affairs except as a pure, grotesque sickness. And such an example of horrifically skewed priorities that our country cannot help but to feel the longterm effects of it.

Of the many crazy aspects to this terrible decision is that these programs are not just a drop in the bucket of the federal budget but a microscopically small portion of one drop. For example, the entire budget for the National Writing Project, a nationwide organization with sites in every state, is only 25 million dollars. 25 million dollars amounts to part of a downpayment on one airplane flown by our military. And to save that pittance an entire organization that for decades has worked for better teaching of writing may be put out of business. I hope you agree that literacy is simply too important a matter to be disrespected and defunded like this. Let's put aside the hope of all authors everywhere that in the future an audience will still exist for our books; literacy cuts a lot closer to home than that. Literacy is all about providing people--all people--more opportunity. It's about making the American dream possible. It's about growing our nation in all ways, including economically. It's about creating incentives to try for more out of life and not falling into traps like a life of crime. If you scoff at that statement as inflated rhetoric you should know that one of the factors that experts look at to predict the need for future prisons is 3rd grade literacy. If you care about the basic fabric of our nation holding together, if you care about creating opportunity, if you care at all about education and specifically education in literacy, these cuts should disgust and frighten you. What kind of country are we, anyway?

That really sad thing is that in disparaging so many government programs as "earmarks," conservatives have attacked some truly wonderful, and successful, initiatives. My wife happens to be affiliated with the National Writing Project. She has been quite depressed lately about the cuts and has said repeatedly that the people involved in NWP are the best people she has ever met. The most committed, the most selfless people. People doing great work on behalf of teachers and students. And yet Congress decides to defund them. And our president, inexplicably, signs the bill into law. As I write this, my wife is headed to Washington, along with others associated with NWP, to lobby Congress on behalf of the organization. This is something the organization does every year, but never inside an atmosphere like it faces this year. The little piece of good news is that there's an outside chance that funding for NWP and other literacy programs could be restored for 2012. It's a very small chance, however, unless Congress and the president hear from all of us about how important funding literacy is. Please take a moment and hit this link. It will lead you to a page where you can very quickly and easily--honestly, it will only take a second--express to your congressman and senators your support for NWP. If you would rather send an independent email to your representatives expressing your concern about literacy funding generally or about funding for some other literacy organization, please do so with my blessings. Congress--and the President--needs to hear from as many of us as possible. I never in my life thought I would live to see a Democratic president and a congress that is half-Democratic cut all funding for literacy. It is deeply deeply disheartening. More than that, if finalized, it amounts to a national tragedy. Please do something. Let's shout while we still can.

Interview avec moi

2011-02-24T09:21:00.008-06:00

As readers of this blog know, on Monday I shared with you a great interview I conducted with historical fiction writer Erika Dreifus. I thought today I should pass along word that I've been interviewed on another writer's blog. Her name is Cathy Day and the blog is titled The Big Thing. It's a fantastic resource for anyone who teaches, or who is concerned about the teaching of, creative writing in the academy. I actually blogged about The Big Thing a couple weeks ago. Cathy has long been interested in the issue of how to make the creative writing workshop useful to students who want to work in longer forms (like the historical novel). After reading a couple of my December posts about a novel writing class I taught, Cathy contacted me and later decided to interview me for The Big Thing, asking me to explain how and why I structured the class as I did. She divided the interview into multiple parts, the first of which debued yesterday. Check it out!

Interview with Erika Dreifus

2011-02-21T07:00:00.002-06:00

Erika Dreifus—fiction writer, reviewer, blogger, and self-described “resource maven”—recently published a short story collection called Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio, paperback, $13.95) that is profoundly historical in nature. Borrowing in part from her own family’s history, the book demonstrates the long term effects of the holocaust, not only on those who lived through it but on those later generations who find themselves in the United States only because in the 1930s an ancestor escaped Nazi Germany. For a fuller description of Quiet Americans, see my review of it on this blog.

Given that Erika is an experienced writer of historical fiction, and someone who has even taught classes on the subject, I wanted to interview her and capture her thoughts on some sticky questions related to this popular—but sometimes contentious—genre.

First, a simple, or maybe not so simple, question. How do you define historical fiction?

It's not so simple!

The Historical Novel Society offers a definition that I have found useful in launching these discussions (in a past life, I taught writing workshops for historical fiction writers):

"To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research)."

The organization goes on to say:

"We also consider the following styles of novel to be historical fiction for our purposes: alternate histories (e.g. Robert Harris' Fatherland), pseudo-histories (e.g. Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before), time-slip novels (e.g. Barbara Erskine's Lady of Hay), historical fantasies (e.g. Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur trilogy) and multiple-time novels (e.g. Michael Cunningham's The Hours)."

Thank you. These are very useful distinctions, and, as the Society points out, all are legitimate, if varied, examples of historical fiction. How would you apply the definitions to your own book?

My work, as reflected in my new collection, Quiet Americans, is definitely more in keeping with the first, more "realist" part of the HNS definition. Three of the seven stories take place before my lifetime; a fourth is set during my very early lifetime (and was therefore depended entirely on research for the historical setting).

But while we’re on this topic, let me go a bit further on the issue of definition: I've long been intrigued by the way in which certain fictions written close to the time of the events they describe become "historical fiction" for the readers they reach many years later. For their authors, they may most accurately be considered "contemporary" or "political" fictions, but for the reader generations later, they exude historicity. For example, the first section of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française provides what was a contemporary account of Paris in 1940, but today's readers may perceive it as "historical" fiction. When does the contemporary become historical? Some of the later stories in my book incorporate events that were "contemporary" when I was writing about them in 2004 or 2006. Are those stories already "historical" for the reader? Will they be more "historical" for a reader fifty years from now? These are tantalizing questions.

Yes, I think this is important. It gets at the idea of a fiction’s historicity stemming from the uniquely interesting/important time period in which it is set, be that far from the writer’s own time or close to it. I agree completely with your example of Suite Française. It’s impossible not to feel that a big part of the book’s intrigue is in how it portrays that crucial period in French and world history. I think too of Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. No one would have called that book historical fiction when it first came out, but how can we not read it now with one eye on what it shows about the history of leftist politics in America?

Back to Quiet Americans. The book spans a wide stretch of time, from the early 20th century almost up to the present. Yet there is an obvious thematic connection between the stories. At what point did you know that you were composing a linked collection as opposed to separate stories? Did you ever consider turning the material into a novel?

Well, the stories certainly are linked thematically, and a few of them are linked further by characters and families who reappear from story to story, but some might argue against characterizing the book as a "linked collection," simply because not all of the stories involve the same characters/families. Which is all a prelude to saying that I'm not certain that I ever knew I was composing a linked collection, and I never seriously considered turning the material into a novel (perhaps because I had already written one unpublished, Holocaust/World War II-focused novel manuscript).

It seems important to note that the "oldest" of the stories in this book dates from a fall 2001 draft; three of the seven originated as submissions for MFA program deadlines. One of my program's strengths was its emphasis on generating new work: We were required to submit 8-25 pages of fiction twice during each semiannual residency and four times each semester. Revisions were acceptable, but even so, I wrote a lot of new stories in those years. Which means that I wrote a lot of stories that do not appear in this book. And shaping a collection was a process that took many years. At some point, I became certain that I had sufficient stories that cohered in some way to compose a collection—it just took me a long time to develop the particular content and sequence of Quiet Americans.

Wow, that’s a lot of composing over a very compressed time. The way in which it paid off for you is a good lesson for any writer. In several important ways, Quiet Americans draws directly from your own family's history of emigration to this country. Does exploring and utilizing one's own family's history affect the nature of writing historical fiction? Does it become harder or easier to insert oneself into past periods? Are there any extra burdens that you carry?

What great questions. I'm not sure that I can answer them right now. I'll want to think about them for quite awhile.

Overall, I've considered it an immense privilege to write these stories. The one pattern I'm noticing now that the book is out—I wouldn't call it a burden—is that I'm being asked by readers-who-are-family-members what, exactly, I've made up and what is "real" when it comes to the characters who most closely resemble my grandparents.

Yes, how often do we get asked that by our relatives, no matter what kind of fiction we’re writing? And the maddening thing is that they’ll never believe your explanations, because no one can who hasn’t immersed herself in the creative process. How much research did you carry out before starting the stories in Quiet Americans? How about other historical fictions you've written? How much of that research finds its way into the stories? And does your background as a historian give you an advantage?

In general, I've found that most of my historical fiction springs from some sort of osmosis, whether from having listened to and thought about various pieces of family history or having stumbled on a document or historical tidbit quite unintentionally. As I write, the research becomes increasingly important, but it's not usually the spark. And, like pretty much any other historical-fiction writer, I've uncovered plenty of material that ultimately doesn't make its way into the work.

I'd say that my background as a historian helps in several ways. For starters, I have a love for research and I'm not afraid to go looking for what I need. I'd also like to think that my training helps me approach and evaluate sources knowledgeably.

When you write a historical fiction are there any aspects of the past period that you feel are especially important to reproduce? For instance, settings or costume or diction? Are there any aspects you pay less attention to?

Another great set of questions. I do want everything to be plausible, but I probably pay less attention to settings, costume, and diction than others do. Some examples of historical details I've attended to quite carefully are the legal constraints that faced Jewish doctors in Nazi Germany (and then refugee doctors in the United States) in "For Services Rendered," the chronology of the Munich Olympics and the murder of Israeli athletes in 1972 for "Homecomings," and, in my unpublished novel, the medical protocols for managing the care of infants born prematurely around 1940.

I heard Ron Hansen say at one AWP session on historical fiction that when a writer is portraying an actual figure from history, he should not “knowingly depart from fact.” Do you accept this proscription?

I wish that I'd been there to hear Hansen say that, hear what prompted him to say that, and hear any responses. The use of "real people" in fiction is such a complicated issue. It always came up in my workshops on historical fiction, and some of the discussion always took place around an assigned reading of an edited transcript of a 1968 panel discussion that had taken place among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward.

And I always liked to quote Ellison, who argued that because "the work of fiction comes alive through a collaboration between the reader and writer," the dilemmas become more acute when fictionalizing individuals from more recent history. In contrast to an historical figure in a Shakespeare play, for instance, he suggested, "[I]f I were to write a fiction based upon a great hero, a military man, whose name is Robert E. Lee, I'd damn well be very careful about what I fed my reader, in order for him to recreate in his imagination and through his sense of history what that gentleman was. Because Lee is no longer simply an historical figure. He is a figure who lives within us. He is a figure which shapes ideal of conduct and of forebearance and of skill, military and so on. This is inside, and not something that writers can merely be arbitrary about. The freedom of the fiction writer, the novelist, is one of the great freedoms possible for the individual to exercise. But it is not absolute. Thus, one, without hedging his bets, has to be aware that he does operate within an area dense with prior assumptions."

And I also liked to quote Styron (who, it should be noted, was quite the center of attention at the time for his Confessions of Nat Turner), who presented this view: "[A] novelist dealing with history has to be able to say that such and such a fact is totally irrelevant, and to Hell with the person who insists that it has any real, utmost relevance. It's not to say that, in any bland or even dishonest way, a novelist is free to go about his task of rendering history with a complete shrugging off of the facts....It is simply that certain facts which history presents us with are, on the one hand, either unimportant, or else they can be dispensed with out of hand, because to yield to them would be to yield or to compromise the novelist's own aesthetic honesty. Certain things won't fit into a novel, won't go in simply because the story won't tell itself if such a fact is there....The primary thing is the free use and the bold use of the liberating imagination which, dispensing with useless fact, will clear the cobwebs away and will show how it really was."

It really is complicated. It really does depend. Did I depart knowingly from fact in "For Services Rendered"? I'm not sure. According to the facts, as I knew and researched them, "For Services Rendered" is entirely plausible. Is it factual? Most unlikely. On the other hand, the only words I put in Golda Meir's mouth in "Homecomings" are words that I am sure, from research, that she really said.

Thanks for the great quotes, and the insights. I can see how both Ellison and Styron, from their different perspectives, were responding to Nat Turner. I tend to lean toward Styron's view. Finally, of course, an adherence to fact is a very personal decision by the author, as your answer suggests. I don't like or want to just disregard facts, as Styron allows, but neither do I want to feel chained by them. Writing a novel is writing a novel, not writing a biography. There has to be a difference. As long as the author is open about what he's doing, and doesn't pretend to be strictly factual. Styron never did. Anyway, what you said about "For Services Rendered" gets to the heart of the matter for me. Even if a writer doesn't knowingly depart from fact, what she writes can still be extremely speculative and even implausible, fully a creation of her imagination. For the most part, that describes my Van Gogh novel, although I did depart from fact on occasion.

A different question. I know that some writers of historical fiction operate from the premise—or feel that have to—that while modes of external behavior (how people dress, how they talk, how they vote can change drastically over time) humanity remains essentially the same on the inside. Is that a premise you accept?

For the most part, yes, I have accepted that premise. Back in 2001, I read a wonderful essay by Geraldine Brooks on this topic, and I embraced what Brooks had to say wholeheartedly. But now, watching so many changes in the way we live and interact with each other—yes, technology has a lot to do with this—I have a few more doubts.

And before I sign off, please let me thank you, John, for inviting me to answer these questions, and for maintaining such a wonderful resource here at Creating Van Gogh for those of us who write historical fiction.

Thanks, Erika. Your comments were really useful. Good luck with your book!

The dream killers

2011-02-09T12:50:00.008-06:00

Spike Lee came to our campus this week, and I was very glad to see him here. The Writing Department, all by itself, tried to bring him in many years ago but just couldn't afford it. I'm excited that someone higher up the food chain at UCA had the same idea. Lee gave a good if not exactly scintillating talk, recounting his days as a college student, telling the story of how, with the support of some key people, he became a filmmaker. While it was mostly a standard fare talk for a visiting artist, Lee did say one thing that really struck me. He felt so strongly about this that he repeated the statement twice: "Parents kill more dreams than anyone." I'm not sure I'd ever heard the sentiment formed so succinctly before. As a former dreamy young person and a parent of two young people now, the statement resonated with me, probably more than most people in the audience. This is a subject of vital importance, one that my wife and I have discussed in detail recently in regards to our own children. It's also something that our creative writing students run up against constantly with their own "well-meaning" parents (or girlfriends or professors or bosses or . . .). And I'm betting that if you are a fiction writer, maybe a budding historical novelist, you've come up against a Dream Killer once or twice; and if you've not had your dreams killed, they have at least been smirked at. Perhaps by the very people who ought to be even more concerned than you that your dreams be allowed to breathe.

Let's be honest, this is almost always about money. More accurately, it's about what jobs parents think will make the most money for their children and therefore what jobs the parents insist their children pursue in order to get at that mythical pot of green. Sometimes, less often, it's about respectability, about what jobs the parents think will make their children--or themselves, really--look good in the eyes of friends and relatives. And that may be an even more pathetic equation. Talk about trying to live through your kids. Look Johnny, I know you want to be a composer, but I think Aunt Alice will be really impressed if you become a lawyer, so let's just toss that silly sheet music aside, shall we? As exaggerated a formation as that sentence sounds, I know someone who actually thinks this way. Who actually thinks like that exactly.

The fallacies surrounding all this dream murder are so numerous it's hard to know where to begin. First, it is very difficult to imagine someone succeeding, monetarily or otherwise, in a career in which he or she isn't interested. Because if the person isn't interested in it, it probably means they are no good at it. We tend to pursue what we like, and what we like tends to be what we're good at. It's not as if you can plop a would-be marine biologist into a surgical career and just say, "Okay, now succeed!" Second, if it's money parents are interested in, then what they should want is for their children to choose careers they're interested enough in to stick with and build a life around. No one gets rich (or happy) moving from job to job to job, or--worse--from career to career to career. Choose something you like and stick with it, throw yourself into it, watch the fruits of your choice with time. (Remember that book from a couple decades ago? Do What you Love and the Money Will Follow.)

But the great sin of killing a young person's dreams, telling him or her what they can't do, has nothing to do with money. It has to do with abusing someone's soul. After all, parents are the caretakers, not the autocrats, of the souls of their children. It is precisely not their job to tell the children what career choice to make, but to provide a way for their children to make their own choices, and then support those choices enthusiastically. After all, your children, like you, only live once; they have one opportunity to realize dreams. Who the hell are you to rob them of their one opportunity? I was lucky. Both of my parents were scientists, but when I realized in high school that my talents lay elsewhere, when I decided I would be headed to college not to study physics or chemisty but literature and creative writing, my parents supported me unhesistantly. They knew that to truly "make it" I had to fully approve of, and be passionate about, my own choice of a major. I really could not have asked for wiser parents. (Spike Lee, fortunately, had a similar experience.)

Like I said, some of our students are not so lucky, especially our students who are first generation college students. Their parents don't seem to understand college at all, much less pursuing a major one is fascinated by. (The most absurd example I've heard yet: A student in our department is only a semester away from graduating with a degree in creative writing, and her family is now pressuring her to quit college, return home, and start work in the local factory. In other words, to throw her college education out the window and aspire to be just like them. Huh? The pressure is getting so intense she may be robbed of the financial support necessary to finish.) The saddest aspect, finally, about this style of parenting--top down, unimaginative, proscriptive and prescriptive--is that it leads to hollowed out people, to adults who aren't really. 65 year olds who are mentally 16 and emotionally 7. (And don't we have enough of those already?) Adults who can't make decisions for themselves, or never trust the decisions they do make, because they've been allowed to make life's most crucial decisions, or because their own decisions have never been respected. People who have never known the satisfaction of putting themselves on a certain, self-directed course--come hell or high water--and seeing the benefits of that choice come to fruition as years and decades go by. My children are going to have every opportunity to see their dreams set in motion. And no one is going to play the role of Dream Killer. I simply cannot allow it. As a parent, I've got no bigger charge.

Check out "The Big Thing"

2011-02-07T12:28:00.006-06:00

I returned home yesterday from the AWP Conference with various thoughts stinging my head, particularly about the organization's approach to pedagogy generally and its decision specifically to eliminate pedagogy forum sessions from the conference in 2012 and beyond. I think, however, that I will save those thoughts for a future post. Today I'd like to alert readers to a great and passionate blog titled The Big Thing, created and maintained by Indiana writer Cathy Day. Cathy is and has been extremely concerned about the ways in which the traditional creative writing workshop--regardless of genre--discourages students from tackling larger forms like the novel, the novel-in-stories, the long poem, the linked essay collection, and the book-length memoir. She discusses this subject on her blog and offers ideas to teachers on how to afford space in their classes for the longer forms and ideas to students on how to pursue them. A superb and compelling introduction to Cathy's point of view is her essay "The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis," published recently in the online magazine The Millions. Believe me, the piece has generated a lot of buzz. If you are someone who aspires to tackle longer projects like the novel--as I assume you are if you read Creating Van Gogh--and especially if you are someone who either takes or teaches creative writing classes at one level or another, you need to examine Cathy's blog. It is riveting and thoughtful reading, full of useful anger and provocative strategizing. It will make you completely rethink the idea of the creative writing course, in ways both subtle and significant.

AWP is on! Day 2/3

2011-02-05T05:47:00.006-06:00

Couldn't blog at all yesterday as my wife needed our computer for some sessions, and, besides, the internet was down at the conference hotel. Bad news when you've got a bunch of computer-hungry writers around. On the whole it was a good day, though, despite opening up my portable hard drive at one point and not seeing the file of the novel I completed in my Novel Writing workshop last semester. (See former posts about this subject.) I had planned on doing some editing, and it was nowhere to be found. Later, however, I discovered the problem.

Went to an interesting, and fairly angry (maybe I should say urgent) session called The Future of Creative Writing at the Academy. The subtitle could have been, "Or how do we get these idiot administrators off our backs?" The most troubled speakers were two women from University of Central Florida, where drastic administrative intrusion is forcing them to make very hard decisions. Like teaching workshops with 35 students in them. Yes, that's right. And running enormous lecture courses with 150 students. To their credit, they are trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to still do right by their students (which is more than one can say for their administrators), but it sounds like quite a battle. As usual, the voice of serenity and careful planning was Philip Gerard from UNC-Wilmington, whose program is as thoughtfully put together--and functionally autonomous--as any in the country. Sounds like a little bit of creative writing heaven.

At lunch, I took my own advice and drafted a couple poems, playing around with some of the words in the songs piping through the radio at the sandwich place where I ate. The songs were "Don't you love me, baby?" and "Piano Man." I know. I can hear the cringing. Too bad. It was a poetic word game, and I enjoyed it. It also gave me something to tinker with later as I sat at the Toad Suck Review booth, waiting to snare stragglers with our sales pitch.

I went to one other session yesterday, this one on the Long Poem. I'm toying with the idea of proposing a Topics in Creative Writing class at my school on this subject, so I was curious to hear what the speakers had to say. There were a great many contemporary long poems referenced, and a number of practical aesthetic points discussed, but what sticks in my craw from this session has nothing to do with its subject matter. This was yet another one of those typical AWP sessions in which no time was afforded for audience questions, mainly because one of the panelists just couldn't bring herself to edit down her clearly too long paper. She must have spoken for at least a half hour. Not only did the audience not get a chance to speak, but one of the panelists never did either! What is wrong with these people? Why can AWP not insist on a ten or twelve minute time limit per panel speaker? Why can't these speakers simply time themselves in advance and--hey, amazing idea--edit their darn papers if they have to to fit the time frame? Talk about blithe arrogance, talk about self involvement to the point of myopia--which unfortunately is a characteristic of the whole AWP organization. Heck, talk about disrespecting your audience. The people who attend this conference are smart people; their questions, and the responses they evoke, are often the best aspect of a session. Yet maybe half the sessions at an AWP leave time for such questions, even though every single session claims it will.

As I mentioned, I also hung out a bit more in AWP's gigantic Book Fair, which in the end may be more valuable to writers than the sessions are. The most interesting figure in the room was writer Davis Schneiderman, who came dressed as a mime, white face and all. And then he acted like one, freaking out a number of dumbfounded writers. We are a blockheaded group, aren't we? (See previous comments about myopia.) Since Davis visited UCA last year, I'm familiar with his inventive gamesmanship. I loved it. And as a contributor to the new Toad Suck Review, he dropped by our table and did his mime routine, at least until I realized who he was and then we started chatting. I've discovered a few interesting new journals at the Book Fair (or at least new to me) and have heard about some intriguing format changes in other ones. Seattle Review, for instance, has completely remade itself into a journal committed to longer forms; that is, the long poem, the novella, and the long essay. How convenient to find this out just as I'm thinking of proposing a Long Poem course. And there's no doubt that the most underrepresented forms in the marketplace of literary journals are the longer forms. There's almost no place to send them, which is ridiculous and culturally stifling. Congrats to Seattle Review for being forward thinking.

Bit more of the conference today, and then I meet my mother and sister for a visit to the Phillips Collection--not far from our hotel--and a dinner in DC. It's great to be back in this city again, where I lived and worked several years ago. On one hand it hasn't changed a bit. It's still elegant and upbeat and remarkably multi-cultural. On the other hand, it's easy to see plenty of little changes. But nothing fundamental. Like all great cities, it abides.

AWP is on! Day 1

2011-02-03T16:29:00.006-06:00

I put up a quick note this morning about successfully arriving in Washington despite the terrible weather country-wide; so now, much later in the day, I thought I would share some news and reflections from day 1 of the AWP conference. This will prove to be my most session-heavy day, I'm sure, and by design. There's a diminishing returns quality to a massive conference like AWP. Too many sessions and your brain turns to jello. So while I'll still be at the conference, tomorrow and Saturday will likely be a bit lighter in terms of my session involvement.

Today's sessions, I'm happy to report, were all fine. Early on, I attended a session on encouraging and enabling the use of multi-media strategies for students' storytelling. As one speaker remarked, this subject is urgent. The literary landscape is changing under our feet, almost by the minute, as innovations like the iPad fundamentally alter what reading means. Anyone who wishes to write in the literary landscape of the future needs to be fluent in multi-media. Even if this idea is disheartening to a former curmudgeon like myself, I can't deny that it's also probably accurate. I also attended a really fascinating session on the use of monsters (liberally defined) in literary fiction. While the conference, because of massive travel problems caused by the Big Storm, has not been nearly as crowded as in the past, this session was jammed. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, the tremendous--and growing--popularity of supernatural fiction can't help but be felt, and reiterated, by AWP conference goers. And that's not a bad thing. The presenters named some titles that really sound intriguing and that I need to read, especially given that I taught a Special Topics course at UCA last fall called "Supernatural Realism."

I attended two other sessions today. One was a pedagogy forum session featuring short papers on the teaching of writing fiction and drama. The session went fine--I heard some wonderful approaches for teaching specific aspects of craft--but before the session got underway the moderator announced that starting next year AWP will no longer include pedagogy forum sessions in its program. The rationale behind this decision was supposedly a desire to increase AWP's commitment to pedagogy as a subject matter, a statement that I do not believe and that makes no sense. Whatever becomes of pedagogy at AWP, I will regret the loss of the pedagogy forum. It provided an important entryway for graduate students and y0ung instructors to come to AWP and present. It also is the only part of the AWP program in which the acceptance of one's proposal is based solely on its individual merits and not on whether it was included as part of a shiny-glamorous panel configuration.

The last session I attended was a very enlightening session on contemporary Jewish-American fiction, featuring several expert voices, including Margot Singer, Anna Solomon, and Erika Dreifus. A friend of my wife's spotted me there and we chatted afterwards. I'm afraid my attendance confused her. "Are you Jewish?" she asked. No, I assured her, smiling. Her confusion was perfectly understandable. After all, the audience was almost entirely Jewish. But in fact my roots are pure Irish Catholic (or at least as pure as someone's can be whose last name is Vanderslice).

Sitting through today's sessions, I realized that I've adopted a Code of AWP Behavior for myself, a code meant to make the conference more useful and less stressful. To end this post, I'll share some items of my Code. Rule 1: No forced networking. For networking to be profitable it also has to be genuine. Forcing yourself into conversation with someone for no other reason that to stick your name in their face makes you come across as bumbling, illiterate, and possibly mentally retarded. Just go to the sessions, learn what you can, ask questions when you feel like it, and don't feel compelled to talk to a soul if you don't want to. Don't worry about making any specific number of contacts. Just enjoy. With so many writers floating around, you're bound to fall into conversation with one of them anyway--a more natural conversation, that is. Rule 2: Leave the conference hotel for meals and as often as you can. Any conference as big as this one will drive you bonkers after a while and surely mess with your perspective. Get out. Cross the street. Realize that there is sub shop over there filled with people who don't all want to talk about their just completed sonnet sequence or the novel they are trying to find an agent for. Normal people still exist. Rule 3: Avoid the how-to-publish-your-book-sessions or any variation thereof. These sessions reek with desperation and oneupmanship. They will curdle your soul and make you doubt the benign nature of humanity. Besides, rarely does one ever learn anything new in them. How many times does one need to be told how to compose a letter to an agent or that the traditional market for fiction is dwindling to nonexistence? Rule 4: Write while you are here. Most people will tell you that it's impossible to write at AWP--but that's a flat out lie. If you call yourself a writer and you "can't write," then shame on you. Go to the bar and compose a few flash fictions over a pint or two. Skip a morning session and draft a story in your hotel room. Grab a lobby seat for twenty minutes and jot down a poem in your notebook. So what if the efforts aren't your best ever? That's not the point of this Rule. The point of this Rule: For a writer, writing tames your soul, lowers your blood pressure, puts you in equilibirum. It's what you do. It's who you are. It's why you are here. Good to remind yourself of that from day to day when faced with so many people urgent for that next job or book contract. Finally, it's the writing that matters. And it's the writing you have to love. Otherwise you're in the wrong business.

If I think of any other Rules in the Code, I'll let you all know.

Made it to AWP

2011-02-03T06:32:00.005-06:00

We certainly endured a weather scare this week, but traveling from Arkansas to Washington DC for the AWP conference proved surprisingly trouble free yesterday. Very cold temperatures and windy conditions were all we had to deal with, and when I landed in DC yesterday I was shocked to find that it was actually warm! At least by winter storm standards. Then the blustery front from the midwest arrived and temperatures plummeted over the course of just a few afternoon hours. When I left the hotel to go to Erika Dreifus's publication party for Quiet Americans (see my review in my previous post) it felt just like it had on Tuesday night in Arkansas. The party was wonderful, hosted very graciously by Erika's friend Natalie Wexler and her husband who own a terrific collection of art from Uruguay. Erika read from the book and signed copies. It was great to meet her in person.

Today AWP kicks off and I will try to provide a few updates on this space. I'm going to try to have a more sane AWP experience this year: fewer sessions but more carefully selected sessions. And I'll need to help out my colleague Mark Spitzer who is running a book fair table for the Toad Suck Review, the new identity for what used to be called The Exquisite Corpse Annual. And now . . . I'm off!

The quiet beauty of Quiet Americans

2011-01-27T07:00:00.003-06:00

Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading Erika Dreifus's new short story collection Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio, 2011) a book that is as difficult to type as it is easy to enjoy. At the same time one could call it historical fiction, third person family memoir, autobiographical fiction, contemporary literary fiction, "fact"ion, or holocaust fiction. Certainly the historical nature of Dreifus's book makes it a perfect subject for this blog. But its concerns are not merely fictive or exclusively historical. Like all good fiction what the book finally does is question, examine, and get at the nature of truth itself, which in Dreifus's collections proves to be far more complicated than her characters ever expect. Anyone with an interest in the holocaust and how it led immigrants to this country needs to read this book. Anyone who simply wants to enjoy engaging, relevant, and thoughtful fiction by a subtle practitioner of the craft needs to read it even more.

Dreifus's purpose in Quiet Americans is to show how both in small and large ways the holocaust shaped, and still does shape, generations of Americans, families whose history in this country began because of the terrifying social and political climate inside the Third Reich. As illustrative and disturbing are the well known chronicles of the "final solution"--Elie Wiesel's Night, Olga Lengyel's Five Chimneys, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning--Quiet Americans reveals how truly broad the legacy of the holocaust is, a breadth those other writers could not imagine because of their closeness its initial and most horrific events.

The book opens with three historical fictions, each asking questions that are both funadmental and irresolvable. In the first, "For Services Rendered," an immigrant doctor must struggle with the fact that he owes his life and the life of his family to the timely advice and practical assistance of Hermann Goering and his wife, the same Goering who at the time is being tried as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Should Dr. Weldmann, out of a sense of personal responsibility, write a letter of support for Goering or his wife, or would doing so be a violation against the millions of Jews who suffered under the regime Goering fought for? In the cunningly narrated "Matrilineal Descent," which opens even before the onset of the First World War, the frustrating, inexcusable coldness and lack of assistance shown by Emma Gross toward her more popular younger sister Karoline--and to the sister's young son after Karoline kills herself--is contrasted in one chilling sentence at story's end with the wider evil to come. How harshly do we feel like condemning Emma when we find out that come 1940 she was deported by the Nazis and never heard from again? Can we possibly say that the punishment fits her "crime"? And in "Lebensraum," we meet Karoline's son as he is in 1944. He has emigrated to America, joined the army, and now works stateside as a cook in a camp for German prisoners of war. The same Germans who drove him from his home country, and killed so many of his relatives, are put to work for Josef in his kitchen. The awkwardness is felt on all sides, brought to a point when Josef thinks he hears one of the Germans mutter "Jude" under his breath. Things become even more awkward when some of the Germans are permitted to observe Josef's son's bris. What, the story asks, ought to permitted, even expected, in this new, broad, unthreatening country, and what amounts to a violation? Outside of the Old World context, the answers are not simple, but, the story points out, the pain surrounding such decisions is what the holocaust has engendered, just one of its many terrible, unfortunate outcomes.

The last four stories in the book are set much further ahead in time. In them we find anti-Semitic actions and sentiments reborn at the 1972 Olympics and in post-9/11 America in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers. The original immigrants to the U.S. still struggle to put the holocaust behind them, while theirs son and daughters--and grandsons and granddaughters--try to come to terms with family history and encourage the older generation to do the same. But how much pushing is too much pushing? And do the younger generations really appreciate what they will find when they begin to look into the past? Two of these stories struck me with special sharpness. In "The Quiet American," a thirty-something year old Jewish American, visiting Stuttgart for a professional conference, is bemused and then increasingly aggravated by a tour guide who cannot stop pointing out all the buildings that were bombed during the war. The polite American, who understands--perhaps too well--the protocols of being a good traveler, cannot bring herself to confront this tour guide and make the woman face the obvious: that the buildings were bombed as a result of a war that Germany itself brought on. Until relief comes from an unexpected source, the quiet American can do nothing but suffer, both from the tour guide's hammer-heavy myopia and from self-loathing at her own inability to act. Finally, in "Mispocha," the son of an immigrant couple that has always refused to discuss their lives in Germany and their early years in the United States decides to take matters into his own hands. He becomes active in various organizations dedicated to Jewish family research. He submits a DNA sample to a laboratory in hopes of learning more about his paternal ancestry. What he finds, however, shocks and befuddles him. He can think of no logical explanation for the results. But, as Dreifus shows us, an explanation is found, one that no one could have guessed at yet which reveals another small, sad corner of the holocaust legacy.

While Dreifus certainly makes use of her own family's history, and some of her own experiences in Quiet Americans, she has composed something that is even more profound and affecting than memoir, a book that makes an imaginative leap not just into the life of a single grandparent but several--even into the generation prior to her grandparents--and then forward into the generations that followed. Not quite a novel-in-stories--because the cast of characters, and the number of families involved, is wide indeed--Quiet Americans nonetheless has the historical perspective, the intuitive grasp over cause and effect, of a grand historical novel. But at the same time--and what I love most about the book--these gently narrated stories are incredibly intimate, sharply focused little gems. They reveal piece by piece, person by person, what a whole people and a whole country have yet to fully understand or overcome.

A bit of Yellow in NDR

2011-01-24T13:25:00.005-06:00

Those who read this blog regularly know that a piece of my Van Gogh novel Yellow was accepted a couple months ago by the The New Delta Review, a print magazine that is launching itself anew as an online enterprise. Well, the day has arrived. NDR, in its new online identity, is up and running. Issue One! And in that issue you can find "The Evangelist," the title I've given to my novel excerpt. I hope you all like it. Hard to say whether it's representative of the book as a whole since the point-of-view character appears only in this one chapter. But the chapter certainly is representative of how some people saw Van Gogh, especially in his earlier years, before he decided to become a painter. Follow this link to the excerpt. And enjoy!

New Year Notes and News

2011-01-01T07:20:00.006-06:00

I thought it would be a good idea to begin a new year, and another year of Creating Van Gogh, with some short items I've been saving up and which might be of interest to readers of this blog.

* Just the other day, our local paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, featured a guest column by Chuck Klosterman about the continuing--and growing--popular fascination with zombies. Klosterman referenced the current AMC network series The Walking Dead, and (of course) George Romero's iconic film Night of the Living Dead, but I wish he had mentioned the new novel Brains by my friend and UCA colleague Robin Becker. Narrated by a sentient zombie, a former college English professor, Brains is a decidedly postmodern take on the zombie phenomenon, both sending up and paying homage to its mythology. The book is also a real hoot: chockful of snarky pop culture asides and literary zingers and starring a loveable cast of zombie misfits, each of whom is endowed with a surprising, un-zombie like ability. It's a quick read, one that will actually have you rooting for the zombies rather than the humans. If that sounds entertaining to you--and by no means do you need to be a follower of zombie literature to enjoy the book--give it a shot. Brains has been on the market for only 8 or 9 months and has already earned a devoted following. One might even call it a new "cult classic"!

* Fiction writer/book reviewer/blogging and web site whiz Erika Dreifus has a new collection of short stories coming out this month. The collection, partly historical in nature, is titled Quiet Americans and is published by Last Light Studio Books. In the coming weeks look for my review of Quiet Americans on this blog. Then, after the review appears, I will interview Erika about the writing of historical fiction. That interview, too, will appear on Creating Van Gogh.

* Also this month, I will be interviewed by author and teacher Cathy Day on her blog about issues related to teaching creative writing to undergraduates. When the interview appears, I will let you know about it on this space.

I wish everyone--no matter where on the globe they are accessing this blog--a good and peaceful start to 2011. And I hope many exciting developments come your way in the next year.

Publishing success for Yellow

2010-12-23T16:54:00.004-06:00

It's only a step, but a very gratifying one: A chapter from Yellow was just accepted for publication by The New Delta Review, a fine journal published out of LSU. The excerpt will appear in the spring, just as the magazine is switching to an online format. That's good news for anyone in the blogosphere who would like to get a little taste of my Van Gogh novel. I will certainly post about it when the issue is up and running. The chapter will run under the title "The Evangelist."

I'm quite happy at the news of this acceptance. Publishing novel chapters is always a tricky business. Some journals simply won't take them; others, understandably, only want to see novel chapters that work as stand alone stories. Culling one's novel for chapters that function that way is intriguing and delicate work, often requiring significant cutting and recombining. Fortunately, in Yellow, a somewhat episodic novel, I found several such chapters. ("The Evangelist" is the first to be accepted for publication.) Interestingly, more than a couple of these were chapters that featured a different point-of-view character than Vincent. I'm guessing the reason that these stood out is that they are literally stand alone in the novel itself, the only chapters which feature those particular point-of-view characters.

The chapter accepted by The New Delta Review, like all the novel's chapters, is told from the 3rd person limited point of view with the point of view character being one P. C. Gorlitz, a man who rooms with Van Gogh in Dordrecht. Gorlitz is an actual historical figure, one of those minor names who come up when you start to research Van Gogh's biography and read his letters. Very little is known about him now, except that he was a young schoolmaster when he shared a room in a boardinghouse with Vincent. In 1914 an article about Van Gogh, written by one M.J. Brusse, appeared in a Rotterdam newspaper. The article quotes from a letter Brusse received from Gorlitz in which Gorlitz recalls his months rooming with Van Gogh. I used a few of the details from Gorlitz's recollection to build my chapter, but the personality of the man himself and the core facts of his life, such as his attitude toward the teaching life, were utterly imagined. This, of course, is one of the great joys of historical fiction: taking an actual person and giving him a new life through the exercise of one's creative faculties. After writing the chapter I felt, of course, that the real Gorlitz must have been exactly like my Gorlitz. Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn't; but in any case, my Gorlitz feels as real to me as anyone--living, dead, or imaginary. Is there a difference?

Once more to the novel class

2010-12-20T15:10:00.004-06:00

I know I already bragged up my novel writing students in my last post, but after looking over their Final Folders I just have to go one more time to this subject. Their Final Folders contained a few different items, one of which was a reflective paper about the whole semester and the act of composing a novel in such a short period of time. In reading the folders, I'm amazed by, and proud of, them all over again, especially at the extent to which they get it. What the semester was about, what I was hoping to accomplish, and how by necessity that accomplishment happened. No kidding, I was almost moved to tears a couple of times. (Or maybe that was just relief that I hadn't caused them to lose their minds.)

Perhaps my favorite reflective statement came from a student who is not even a Writing major, but who understood the class and its utility as well as any one. This is a student who on top of taking classes in his major and on top of taking my novel writing class, spent the semester working on an iPhone application called "Video Game Trivia," for which he had to compose 1000 questions, an endeavor that forced him to write another 78,000 words on top of the 55,000 he wrote for his novel (and however many he wrote for his other classes). He didn't tell me this until our very last meeting, after all the novels had been turned in. My jaw literally dropped. Talk about a semester to remember. I quote from his reflective paper: "Going into this class, I had certainly never written anything of this magnitude or scale before. Designing and crafting a story that would span 55,000+ words just didn't seem like something I was cabable of. Maybe in ten years but certainly not as a junior in college. It's removing that roadblock that I believe was the most important accomplishment forward in writing and for my life in general. I know I'm capable of creating another novel if I need or choose to. If my boss tells me he needs a fifty page report on howGoogle uses their public relations (my major), then I'll nod and begin thinking how it pales in comparison to the task that I accomplished when I was 20 years old."

That really choked me up. This student was in my peer review group (I broke the class into groups of twos and threes for semi-regular peer review sessions; that way, they knew at least someone was going to read and keep tabs on their progress), and I know how hard he worked on his book. I think I was even more relieved and grateful by what he said next: "I believe I may have learned more from this class than in nearly any other class in my college tenure. In a weird way, I think it may be partially because we, being the students, kind of act as the teachers in this class." Yes. They certainly were. I took a huge step back this semester and essentially turned the class over to them. Either they were going to leap into the challenge, take it up, and assist each other in the taking up, or they were going to flounder, divide, and turn sour. Remarkably, almost no one reacted in the latter fashion. Unable to workshop in the traditional sense, the learning had to come essentially from the doing and from regular meetings with their peer groups. They had to be almost completely responsible for their own education. All I did was check word counts each week and collect response papers to the chapters we read in our textbook, No Plot No Problem by Chris Baty. (And of course compose a novel of my own right along with them.)

The success of the whole enterprise really did depend on them. Not only did this group rise to the occasion, but I think they found the process of doing so--of just pushing and pushing and pushing ahead on their books--incredibly liberating. As my student wrote: "We create the material we will be discussing by writing our novels, and we don't have to worry about memorizing every ligament in the kneecaps. All we have to worry about is when our cabin is going to be overtaken by zombies and who is going to survive. The work can still be a burden, don't get me wrong, but never once did I feel like it was a waste of time." I guess that what happens when you're engaged in a project you feel passionate about. And so many of them were. How many times can I say it? They were amazing.

Novel Class Survives!

2010-12-14T06:22:00.006-06:00

A few months ago, I blogged about one of the classes I'm teaching this semester: Novel Writing Workshop. As I explained at the time, I had taught the class twice before, somewhat successfully, but decided to do it differently this semester. Rather than have my students simply plan and begin novels, workshopping the chapters as they went, I decided that this time they would all start and finish their novels. In one semester. They would be producing a draft of a novel, of course, not one immediately ready for publication, and the word count I asked for--55,000--would put their novels on the short side. But, even so, let's not kid ourselves. 55,000 words is an awful lot to ask of students in one semester. A friend of mine taught a Novella class last year. His minimum word count was 15K and apparently a few of his students struggled to produce that much. So I didn't quite know what to expect when I presented my semester plan to them. But I know what I feared: A goggled eyed response, a few choice epithets relating to my sanity, and an empty classroom the next week when the whole group sensibly dropped my course. That first week of the semester, whispers, recollections floated through my head: a presentation I'd heard years ago about a Novel Workshop taught in England for graduate students--a two semester affair in which, the presenter explained, we of course don't expect the students to actually have finished their novels at course end; a teacher of mine in graduate school gossiping about a class taught by John Gardner, a graduate level class in which he demanded that the students finish novels in one semester and at the end of which most had dropped out and more than one suffered a nervous breakdown or divorce or both; an AWP session I attended two years ago about teaching novel writing workshops and at which the general notion of the panelists seemed to be "Of course, you could never do this kind of course with undergraduates."

Did I really know what I was doing? No, but I did know that I really didn't like hearing that students in my previous novel workshops had barely taken any steps toward completing their novels once the semester was over. Most had done no further writing past chapter 4. So how much--I thought and thought and thought--did they actually learn about writing novels?

I'm happy to report, now that we've reached exam week at UCA, that of the original 15 students, 11 endured to the end of the semester. And of that 11, 10 have already given me their completed 55,000 word novels, with the 11th to be delivered to me at any moment. 11 of the 15 finished their projects. That's a hell of a good percentage. (I wrote one too, meeting the same word counts they did. I actually like my little book a lot, but that's material for some other post.) What's more, several of them went over the 55,000 goal. One enterprising guy--who never came close to having a nervous breakdown--actually produced over 75,000 words. Another student quietly reached the 55,000 goal a week before she had to and then refrained from saying so because she was afraid the class would resent her for it. (She didn't need to worry; it wasn't that kind of class.) Another student not only finished a 55,000 word novel for me but at the same time composed an Honors College research thesis about an entirely different subject altogether. (I have no idea how she survived.) I am just so proud of this group. Not a one of them blinked when I explained the set up of the class; many of them were actually excited. And they are even more excited now at having finished their books and their word count. One student announced last week with a huge smile, "I can take that Novella course and it will seem like nothing!"

Most important is they learned from doing about the process of composing a book length fiction. They struggled with juggling characters, plots, story arcs, rising action and climaxes. What to leave in, what to leave out. All the messy, and even onerous, decisions of book writing. (A couple students realized they were actually composing the first of what must be a series. One of these students asked if I was teaching the course next semester, so she could write Book 2!) Most of all they now know what a commitment it takes to stick with and finish a novel. And they've each discovered what writing habits/schedules work for them. One student, a talented but extremely intuitive writer, struggled much of the semester to keep up with the words counts but in the last few weeks hit on a schedule that worked for him: 1000 words a day. That was not too much to overburden him and it was plenty enough to keep him connected to his book. He found it not so very trying after all and told me that he wished he had been writing that way since the beginning. He hadn't, but the important point is that the class allowed him to discover that way of writing.

Yes, I am now faced with a pile of novels to read. But here's the most satisfying part: They're good novels! Some of them are actually really good. Now I haven't gotten all the way through them yet, and I won't for a while, and maybe I'll be singing a different tune come January, but let me just say that I don't think I've ever been more impressed with and proud of my students as I read these semester-long labors of love. There's no way, as an undergraduate, I would have felt ready to take on a novel--not in one semester. 11 of my undergraduate students just did. And they didn't just survive; they thrived. Kudos to you all. It was a great four months.

Blackwell's bite

2010-11-29T04:39:00.002-06:00

Several months ago, I blogged about the novelist Elise Blackwell and her thoughts on how and when to use research in the writing of historical fiction. Recently, I’ve been reading her fine novel Grub, a contemporary reworking of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), that renowned satire of English literary and publishing circles of the late nineteenth century. Grub is a wonderful read: skewering without being mean-spirited, clever without being trivial, clear-eyed and tender at the same time. Blackwell loves her characters but is completely honest about their faults. Anyone who is a writer or is married to one or who works inside a writing community will recognize some of Blackwell’s creations, if not all of them. Writers may also find themselves nodding in agreement at a few of Blackwell’s zingers at the big New York houses. Coming on the heels of the criticism I leveled in my last post, the following passage certainly caught my eye. In it, Blackwell is writing from the perspective of Andrew Yarborough, a novelist and editor who, thoroughly disenchanted with the practices of the big publishing houses, has decided to leave them for good.

There was little good will there toward talent that didn’t sell well, small tolerance for the sophomore slump, no willingness to risk a quiet novel that might prove a sleeper. What bothered him most was the shift to decision by committee. No doubt it prevented some truly horrible books from being published, but it was clear that it overemphasized market concerns and selected for lowest common denominators. He’d had to write rejection letters for several brilliant but peculiar novels he’d badly wanted to publish. . . . He couldn’t say whether he’d quit or been fired, but he remembered the shaking anger with which he’d argued with one publisher over a nine-hundred-page labor novel that was as dazzling and important as it was desperate for substantive editing. “It’s the writer’s job to have the book ready for the copyeditor,” was the line that had infuriated him and started the fight that ended in unemployment.

I’ve got nothing against expecting writers to edit their own work as carefully as possible, but I sure do understand the complaint that publishers choose books according to lowest common denominators. I see that phenomenon all the time in books I peruse. And a prejudice against 900-pagers? Well, I’m afraid that goes without saying.

The Specter of Stone

2010-11-13T15:25:00.006-06:00

It wasn't as if I'd never heard of the man . . .

As difficult as it is for some people to believe, I conceived of, researched, and began writing my Van Gogh novel Yellow before I knew of Irving Stone's earlier Van Gogh novel Lust for Life. Sure, I knew Stone's name. I'd heard of The Agony and The Ecstasy, his fictional take on Michelangelo, if only because of the celebrated 1965 film starring Charlton Heston, a staple of local "4:00 Movie" programs during the pre-cable 70s of my childhood. But I think it was my wife who casually asked one day, "You do know he wrote a novel about Van Gogh too, don't you?" Uhh . . . Truly, my blood ran a little cold. But with some quick internet leg work I found the dates on Lust for Life the novel (1934) and the movie (1956). I breathed a little easier. After all, the book was published more than seventy years in the past. Should a book from that long ago permanently mark as "Off Limits" a famous man's life? It's one thing if the book was 10 or 20 years old, but 70? If anything, I figured it was time for an updated examination of the painter. Isn't that what writers and scholars are supposed to do? After all, in my research for the novel it became clear that the number of Van Gogh biographies ran into the dozens. Dozens of biographies, but only one novel allowed? Surely not. And, besides, how many other people--and here I mean readers, not just the public in general--were probably as ignorant of Stone's book as I was?

So I happily solidered on, spending years drafting, revising, editing, and shaping Yellow. The result is an admittedly long novel--though I cut out a great deal--but long for a good reason: I'm showing Van Gogh over virtually his whole life span, from his childhood in rural Brabant to his release from St. Paul's mental hospital in Saint-Remy, France, three months before he died. I realized, of course, that some agents and editors might balk at a novel close to 800 pages long. What I didn't expect, but what I've heard recently, is concern over the legacy of Stone. Lust for Life, I hear from some quarters, is simply too embedded in our culture--it's still in print and still selling well--squeezing out the possibility that any other novel can try to tell the story of Vincent's whole life. If one writes about Van Gogh these days, it must be from a drastically restricted vantage point. It's disheartening to hear such opinions, not only because it means the speaker won't be representing my novel, but also because I suspect the speaker is misguided. After all, another way to think about the same set of facts is this: The continued success of Lust for Life, more than seventy years after its first publication, shows just how deeply ingrained is western society's fascination with Van Gogh, how we revel in his many evident quirks and gape awestruck at his determination, how we see him as the truest archetype for the iconoclastic, starving artist--a "real" artist if you will. And how willing we are to lay down money for him. If we're that interested in Van Gogh, doesn't this suggest other Van Gogh books could succeed as well as Lust for Life? Or simply succeed? After all, our media--books, television, movies--is, if anything, famous for its willingness to recycle ideas and characters. How many Da Vinci Code knockoffs appeared in the wake of Dan Brown's book?How many new vampire series have appeared in the last five years? Yet there's only room for one Van Gogh novel?

Ironically, Yellow isn't a knockoff of anything. I still haven't read Stone's book, though I'm certainly more aware of it these days. While I was writing, I avoided it on purpose. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to achieve in Yellow, and I didn't want to feel like I had to pull back or change course because of something Stone did; whether that meant trying to avoid being like Stone or trying to actually mimic something about Lust for Life that I admired. I wanted and needed to stay true to my own vision of Van Gogh and of my novel. That seemed easiest to do without Irving Stone's 70+ year old Van Gogh vision running through my head. And it seemed the only way to make a Van Gogh biographical that could stand on its own and draw new generations of readers. Even now, as I'm more or less done with the book, I still don't seek out Lust for Life. In part it's lethargy, in part it's because I have so much else, for a variety of reasons, that I simply have to read. But of course, having not read Lust for Life, I am arguably not the best person to say whether Yellow charts new territory or not. So what do you all think? Does it sound like I have case, or does it seem true to you that Lust for Life has permanently coopted Vincent Van Gogh from fiction?

I began this project after being so purely blown away by the Van Gogh paintings I saw in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. My feelings were so stirred they simply demanded a fictional response. I didn't know what else to do with them. I simply couldn't turn this subject down. I still believe I made the right decision in pursuing it. But Irving Stone is trying his best to shake that belief.

A Cure for Dismal Reading

2010-10-01T14:20:00.009-05:00

I’ve finished a novel that I just have to recommend. As a historical novel, it certainly is a proper subject for Creating Van Gogh and should be of special interest to readers of this blog. But to call Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic, released last month by Workman, a successful historical novel is to suggest only the beginnings of its breadth and its charm. You could also call it a supernatural novel or a religious novel or a comic novel or a World War Two novel or a novel about modern Jewish identity (the prevailing theme of every one of Skibell’s books). But the best thing to call it is simply a wonder. A Curable Romantic takes you from Szibotya, a small Galician town on the rim of Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the seventh heaven--literally. Along the way one encounters dybbuks and angels, reincarnations and possessions, exorcisms and excursions into the afterlife. Too there’s Sigmund Freud—who in Skibell's humourous characterization is at turns brilliant and ridiculous, cowardly and insightful, dead set against all religious “fantasy” and at the same time ready to believe almost anything . (Perhaps my favorite moment in the novel is when Freud shows a map he has drawn for the narrator, Jakob Sammelsohn. The map details the history of Sammelsohn’s soul as explained to Freud by the dybbuk Freud has been psychoanalyzing for weeks.) Skibell's rendering of Freud is emblematic of the book as a whole: a quirky but seamless blend of history, personality, tragedy, and impossibility. The novel introduces us to other historical figures as well, most importantly L. L. Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto. As Zamenhof replaces Freud as the most important father figure in Sammelsohn's life, we are led through a (somewhat fantastical) history of that language’s bid for world acceptance. The latter part of the novel, meanwhile, chronicles the creation of the Warsaw ghetto. And as if that wasn’t enough, we are finally taken through several layers of heaven by our narrator and a semi-psychic, semi-magical rabbi with whom he has become associated.

Readers of Skibell’s first novel A Blessing on the Moon are already familiar with his idiosyncratic blending of magic realism, world history, black comedy, and Jewish folklore. But that unlikely bouillabaisse is all the more delicious, and ingenious, in his latest book. The novel is simply startling: bitingly funny, sexually urgent, and gently nostalgic all at once. It is also in many ways a perfect book for America and for these times. So much of the history of immigration in this country, after all, is tied to the events in Europe from 1890 to 1945, events that culminated in the war that opens when A Curable Romantic ends. And so much of our bestselling fiction these days is tied to the magical that it seems perfectly natural for a novel to describe a standoff between Sigmund Freud and a sexually frustrated dybbuk. Yet because the magic in Skibell’s book is so smartly done, and so not presented merely to dazzle or gross out, the book becomes relevant--even important--in ways that a Twilight or a Shining or a Harry Potter can never be. While as entertaining and as fantastcial as any novel you will ever read, A Curable Romantic asks seriously universal and profoundly eternal questions while leading a reader through some very real byways of late 19^th and 20^th century European history. If this seems too much to ask of a single volume of fiction, I am happy to report that A Curable Romantic delivers on all fronts.

I have long thought that Skibell deserves as much acclaim as other more heralded novelists of his generation (including one that recently landed on the cover of Time). I can only expect that A Curable Romantic will finally win him what he so richly deserves.

A novel experiment

2010-09-19T07:00:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned several times on this blog that I teach creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. My students are great, talented and up for anything. They have to be this semester, as I'm trying out a brand new experiment in my Novel Writing workshop, a 4000 level class that I've taught before but am teaching quite differently this fall. When I've run the class in the past, all I've asked is that my students start novels, the first 3-4 chapters, which we workshopped over the course of the semester. And too they read books about novel writing and gave reports on those books. It worked, sort of. They all planned out and did start novels, and they did learn a few things about the artistry of novel writing. But they never really confronted the other and perhaps more important fact of novel writing--that it's an endurance test. It's that fact and not a lack of artistry that keeps most would-be novelists from being actual ones.

So this semester, having seen too many promising novels simply stop at semester's end, and inspired by a provocative session I attended at the AWP conference a couple years ago, I'm asking a lot more. Both from them and myself. This semester my students aren't just starting novels but completing them. That's right, they'll each be writing a full novel (albeit a short one) over the course of one semester. And I'll be right there in the trenches with them. This semester I'm going to write a novel of my own, start to finish (or a draft, at least). To do so I'm going to have abandon my usual longhand first style of composing and go straight to the keyboard. (In fact, I already have, because we've already started.) I'm also going to have to shove a few other favored activities aside. And I know I'm going to have to be fiercely efficient when it comes to knocking off my other teaching and university responsibilities. But I've got to do this. Because I can't ask my students, who are plenty busy with their other classes and their own projects, to take on the challege of writing a whole novel in a semester if I'm not willing to join them at it. Plus, what an opportunity for me. Having recently completed my Van Gogh novel Yellow, a six+ year project, I get to start and finish another one in a relative blink of an eye. What a refreshing concept!

Will it be a great novel? Will theirs? I don't know, but that's not really the point. The point of the class is to learn about novel writing, and there's no better way to learn than to actually write one. So that is what I have to ask of them and what I am asking of them. To feel it and fight through it every step of the way, start to finish. When the semester is all over, not only will they have finished a draft of a novel, but they'll really know and appreciate all that someone must rise to, deal with, and overcome to complete a major creative project like a novel. Of course, plenty of revision will be ahead for them once the semester is over--for me too--if they want to truly complete their novels, but at least they will have the experience and satisfaction of getting through a whole draft. That's a significant accomplishment, especially considering that completing the first draft seems to be the biggest obstacle against novel writing for most of my students. Many of them start and stop one. Then start and stop another. Then a third. And so on. (They've told me this themselves.) But this semester they'll have no choice but to finish. And I think the prospect really excites them.

I've adopted the National Novel Writing Month plan, with some alterations. NaNoWriMo partcipants must write a 50,000 word novel in a month; my students will write a 55,000 word novel in a semester. Why 55K? Well, last spring the Writing Department ran a novella writing course. Because 50K is considered the upper limit for a novella I felt I had to ask my novel writing students to go beyond that. Thus I tagged on another 5K. I've broken down the whole semester for them, with 4600 words due every week (except the last week when I merely ask for 4400). We will also be reading a couple of short novels and will talk about how the authors of those books make their novels do such good work in 50-60K words. And while workshopping has to be less of a concern--production has to be the emphasis--my students will form small peer groups this semester and will periodically share their developing novels with members of their groups. So far so good. I've had remarkably few complaints and seen a lot of energized, committed faces. They're ready for the adventure, and a couple weeks into it I'm already seeing sizeable (and growing) word counts. I'm proud of them. And I'm sure it's going to be quite a ride before we're done.

The debate continues . . .

2010-09-14T07:00:00.004-05:00

I hardly knew that when I mentioned my decision to portray Van Gogh as a lefthander in my novel Yellow that the subject might cause such commotion in the blogosphere. My new internet friend Svend Hendriksen--I mentioned him in my last post--continues to send me various proofs of Vincent's lefthandedness. A couple of them certainly bear repeating in this space. First, Svend recommends that I look at Van Gogh's famous Vincent's Bedroom in Arles, a picture the painter cared so much for that he made multiple copies. Svend, with his engineer's eye for detail, points out a few telling features of this painting: 1) the water pitcher on the rear table sits with its handle pointed to the left, a position only favorable to a lefthander; and 2) Vincent chose to put his pillows at the far end at the bed, a position more advantageous to a lefthander. According to Svend, a righthander would naturally put the pillows at the lower end, as getting in and out of that end would be easier for a righthanded person. Svend has sent his analysis to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and presently awaits a response. Svend also references Van Gogh's pictures of potato and peet diggers. About 90% of these drawings portray the diggers as digging in a lefthanded fashion, an unusual abundance given that most of humanity is righthanded.

Meanwhile, a lengthy and informative comment from "Stuart," coming in response to my last post, points out that Gauguin's famous picture of Vincent working in front of an easel shows Vincent holding the brush in his right hand. Now, one must be careful to take at face value anything that Gauguin said, wrote, or painted. Notice his apparently invented account, published in his memoir Avant et Apres, of Vincent publicly charging him with a razor blade. Notice too his taking credit for advising and influencing Vincent during the creation of the Sunflower series, when that series was completed before Gauguin even arrived in Arles! That said, we can't simply discount the fact that in Gaugin's painting he portrays Vincent as a righty. From this and other evidence, Stuart wonders if Van Gogh was ambidextrous, sometimes using his right hand and other times his left. (See Stuart's comment to get his full explanation.) A new and fascinating possibility! If anyone has an addtional insight to add to this unexpectedly hot topic, please let me know. You can comment on this post or email me at johnv@uca.edu.

Van Gogh the lefty--verified!

2010-09-07T06:46:00.008-05:00

I posted several weeks ago about my reasons for portraying Van Gogh as a lefthander in my novel. My choice was based solely on Van Gogh's personality profile, backed up by my amateur's knowledge of the theories of handedness. (And, admittedly, some personal projection, as I myself am lefthanded.) What a pleasant surprise then to receive an email from Svend Hendriksen, a Danish gentleman currently living in Greenland, who has looked into the question of Van Gogh's handedness with considerable attention. Svend tells me I'm right: Van Gogh was undoubtedly a lefthander! And the evidence can be found in the paintings themselves. Svend calls my attention most particularly to an 1888 self-portrait by Van Gogh. (That's it over there). Notice that Van Gogh holds his palette in his right hand, indicating that he paints with his left. Now many would (and do) look at the portrait and say that since Van Gogh must have employed a mirror while painting the picture, what we see is a mirror (that is, reversed) image of the man. Thus, they conclude, he painted with his right hand. And Svend reports that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam does describe Van Gogh as being righthanded. However, Svend points out that the button on Van Gogh's coat is on the same side as the palette he holds, and on men's coats of the period this button would have always been situated on the right side. In other words, this evidence suggests that Van Gogh in real life, not just in the portrait, held the palette with his right hand. It's perfectly possible that for the sake of his painting he corrected the reversed image to show the world how he really worked: with his left. From what I know of Van Gogh generally, it is not hard to imagine him being stubborn on this point.

Svend has passed along a number of other interesting tidbits about Van Gogh, for instance that photographs of the man's paint box reveal that he kept it quite full. As Svend says, it's "a huge volume for a poor man's palette." Well, certainly paint was dear, an expense that Van Gogh avoided for years by concentrating solely on his drawing. But when he began painting he sacrificed almost everything else--food included--to keep himself supplied. And looking at his effusive, glorious pictures, especially from the Paris and Arles periods, it certainly looks as if he operated with a full box. Svend's comments make intuitive sense.

Svend, by the way, was not trained as an art historian but as an explosives engineer. He served for years in the Danish army. Yet he now brings his mechnical know-how to the study of paintings. His story reminds me of a phenomenon that I find profound: There is something about Van Gogh--his story, his paintings, his personality--that draws people to him like a magnet. Not only professional art historians but informed amateur sleuths and everyday idlers alike. For instance, the man who owns the house at which I stay when I visit Arles, a science teacher and devoted amateur astronomer, has done considerable work studying Van Gogh's use of constellations in his night paintings. He has even advised academics from America on the matter. Amazing how this Dutch painter, who struggled so and was so little known in his lifetime, has attacted and keeps attracting such a broad, enthusiastic audience. Perhaps this simply proves that Van Gogh knew exactly what he was doing all along: painting not for his time but the future. Indeed.

Van Gogh in the Middle

2010-09-02T08:39:00.000-05:00

As we all know, schools are starting these days--at least here in the U.S.--and that means too the beginning of football season. In fact, tonight I will be taking my youngest son and his friend to Estes stadium at UCA to see the Bears' season opener. With football so much in the air and on the news and in people's hearts--at least here in the U.S.--I think, strangely enough, of Van Gogh. And I think of the position of middle linebacker, the man at the exact center of the defense: midway between the sidelines, midway between the defensive line and the defensive backfield; the man with the most leeway of anyone on defense to circuit freely and make whatever plays need to be made. That could mean rushing up to help the line stop a running play, or dropping back to help cover a receiver, or blitzing to try to sack (tackle) the other team's quarterback. A successful middle linebacker sees and understands the field as a whole, and the developing play as a whole, and he uses his roaming freedom to enhance the whole defense.

It may be a stretch of a metaphor, but I feel safe in calling Van Gogh the middle linebacker of the Neoimpressionists working in Paris in the 1880s. That is, he moved freely between factions, between cliques, between individuals, and between styles, with only one end in mind--and it was a good one: learning and absorbing as much as he could. Having just spent several years working alone in the Dutch provinces, and then a few disappointing months in Antwerp, he was not just willing but eager to listen, to watch, to discuss, to experiment, and to change. And he refused to let interpersonal squabbles--replete with their petty resentments, paranoid suspicions, and blatant attempts at empire building--distract him from his purpose. He set up walls against no one, was willing and able to see value in the working practices and painterly results of many different kinds of artists. Whereas almost every other leading neoimpressionist eventually chose a particular camp to belong to, and thus allies to swear by, Van Gogh stubbornly resisted making such choices. He felt that he could and did learn from all of them. Certainly in his paintings from his Paris years we see him trying on and trying out many different artistic gestures. He did not carry all of these gestures with him to Arles--by his own admission, he "abandoned" much of what he learned in Paris (something of an overstatement, actually)--yet it was by carrying on these experiments at all that he grew as a painter; it's why his Paris period counts as the one in which he learned and grew the most. It was in Paris that Van Gogh became a modern painter. And he grew the most because he circulated the most. Whereas Van Gogh's associate Emile Bernard became a disciple of Gauguin and thus turned his back on the Divisionist group of Seurat and Signac and Pissarro, and whereas Seurat despised and scorned Gauguin and thus avoided company with all members of the so-called "Symbolistes," Van Gogh had friends in both camps. He literally worshipped Gauguin and for a long time was terribly close to Bernard, yet he ate and drank with Signac, and he admired Seurat's breakthroughs deeply. He did not fully buy into the optic theories behind Divisionism, but he did see the divisionist method as an excellent way to vary the texture of a painting. A quick scan of his Paris paintings reveals the number of works in which he played with and tried to learn from this method.

Finally, sadly, Van Gogh's attempt to stay above the fray wore him out and depressed him. His resentment over the exaggerated factionalism and trivial backbiting among painters in Paris drove him out of the city. At the very least, it played a significant part in his decision to leave. Probably playing into that decision too was the realization that he had learned as much from these people as he could, and the fear--which he wrote about in his letters--that if he stayed in Paris much longer his health would be ruined and himself turned into an alcoholic. (Much drinking among the painters in Paris of the day, not shockingly.) Shortly after moving to Arles he wrote Theo about how much better felt in his body and how much more at home. (Van Gogh was always fundamentally a rural person.) Ironically, however, only eight months later he suffered his first epileptic attack--if that's what it was--an infamous breakdown greater and more devastating than he ever could have imagined in Paris. At that point, the linebacker had taken more than enough shots, and it was all he could do to get up and off the field with dignity.

As the classroom beckons . . .

2010-08-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

A new semester starts tomorrow at my university. As usual, I greet this fact with equal measures of regret, excitement, and trepidation. While I'm wistful for the summer that is passing, and while full-time teaching (professors, even tenured ones, carry a 4/4 load at my university) certainly does stress one's time in many ways, forcing one into the familiar and maddening jitterbug between writing, teaching, and family (and dog) obligations, there are undeniable satisfactions to be found in the job. There are also real benefits to be had for our students, at least in the Writing Department at my university. Our students, like most of our faculty, get the connection between writing, research, and teaching. They do not argue for and would not accept the false mythology of a dichotomy between good teaching and good publishing. It's never made sense to me how someone who remains active in writing and publishing won't finally have some critical expertise to bring to the classroom, moreso than someone who writes little and doesn't care if he or she gets published at all. It's difficult to accept that the latter individual has as much to offer budding, hopeful, sometimes very talented, young authors as the former. The former has proven his or her commitment to the craft. The latter? While in the middle of a busy semseter it's easy to forget this, I hope I remember that my writing activies and teaching activities are--or at least should be--twins.

Another myth that I and others in our department find maddening, and I'm happy to say that we don't promulgate, is the idea that writing is a special act that should be undertaken by only a select, talented few while the rest would be better off not even trying. You, dear reader, may not share that absurd belief, but I promise you I've heard it expressed, sometimes from people who intend to go into teaching. Can you imagine a more ridiculous premise for a would-be educator to promulgate? What would happen to all those precious test scores in our country if math teachers decided that math was just for a select few, and the rest of the students shouldn't even try. Or how about history? Can you imagine walking into a history class and hearing the instructor tell you that understanding history is a special skill, so only a minority of students should just give up? How bad then would be the state of mathematical and historical knowledge in this country? You get what I'm saying. Should only those who plan on being full-time professional musicians try to learn an instrument? If that were true, how much joy would be lost by amateur and semi-professional players? How much good music would be lost by those who listen to them? Should only those fated for the NBA or the NFL take up basketballs and footballs? Of course not. Writing, believe it or not, is no different. There's not a single person in the world who won't find important skills honed, as well as their lives enriched, by exploring and developing their creative natures. Will all creative writing students become famous novelists? Of course not! But that's not the point of the creative writing course. What most of them will become is more stylish, more articulate, and more demanding communicators, and I've never heard anyone say that communication skills, both written and verbal, are less than priceless in the 21st century world.

I'm also proud to say that neither I nor my colleagues feel it's our duty to decide who will or won't "make it." For the uninitiated, let me stress that there certainly are teachers out there who think it is their duty to decide this. And not only decide it but declare it openly. I can't imagine a greater offense against a student. Anyone who's taught even for a few years has seen those brilliant, prodigious, seemingly unstoppable talents who, strangely, don't in the long run amount to much, while sometimes it's that quiet figure in the corner--that solid talent who you perhaps respect more for her work habits than her product--who surprises you ten (or twenty, or forty) years down the road by making it, maybe even making it big. The fact is, that we the teachers don't know who will "make it." How can we? We're not gods; we're not wizards. All we can do--all we should do--is work our damnedest for every student in our classrooms, and then let them show us who will make it and who won't. Some of them are sure to surprise as, and nearly all of them will have something to teach us, just as certainly all of them will have something important to teach themselves--while hopefully all of us have a blast along the way.

(Picture note: It may or may not fit my entry, but I thought the image was a hoot.)

Dog days

2010-08-18T14:02:00.010-05:00

I grew up in Southern Maryland, not even a half hour from Washington DC. The entire area is famously muggy and not at all cool in the summertime. DC was built on swamp land and for generations, at least until the dawn of air conditioniung, residents were forced to flee the city during summer, when it turned insufferable. In 1993, I moved to south Louisiana, possibly the only place in the country more muggy--and considerably hotter to boot--than the DC metro area. With temperatures never dipping below 90 and with nearly unimaginable humidity, stepping outside your front door in the summer literally felt like entering a sauna. Yet, I was never really all that bothered by weather; I even went running everyday: 5+ miles. I read the newspaper on the front stoop each morning, armed with a big hot mug of joe. All that is to say that I'm a warm climate person, better able to ignore it, withstand it, work in it, move in it, thrive in it, than most. And yet this summer in Arkansas, I must say, has been wicked. It's been at, near, or above 100 for what feels like two months now. According to the weather people, we're well on our way to setting an all-time record for average daily temperature. (Still don't believe in global warming, people?) And by all-time, I mean all-time. Higher than has ever been recorded since they started keeping records in the 19th century. We've been absolutely baking here. Maybe it's a matter of being 13 years older or maybe it's the difference between 95 degrees and 105 (when the high merely reached 97 the other day, it felt like a relief), but I don't remember the summers in Louisiana being as blindly searing as this one in Arkansas has been. Down there, we stewed in June, July, and August; up here we've been frying.

All this makes me think again of Provence, our three summertime visits, and of course Vincent Van Gogh. The region is renowned for its soaring summer season temperatures; its bright and searing sun. I remember reading in one of Peter Mayle's books (I can't remember which) a good-humored account of Englishmen and other visiting Europeans wilting, red-faced and sweating, in the provencal summer. Van Gogh was not exactly immune to the heat. He certainly felt it, but he also felt that he thrived in it. In letters he recounted heading out each morning, planting his easel in a field, and working all day in the blazing climate, "contented as a cicada in a tree." (The cicada, by the way, is the unofficial symbol of the region.) It's no coincidence that the famous "high yellow" of his Arles paintings most accurately characterizes the paintings he painted during the summer of 1888, his only in Arles, and in my opinion when he worked at the height of his powers, reaching an artistic peak that he never found again.

Well, for all of Provence's celebrated heat, and whatever the part, however minor, that it played in bringing on Van Gogh's physio-psychological meltdown in late 1888, I can tell you from experience that Provence has nothing on Arkansas. Yes, the provencal sky is a gorgeous, bold, clear, blue. Yes, the sun is bright. And yes, it's warm. But the climate of Arles in July/August, I assure you, would be a vacation from the July/August of 2010 Arkansas, or for that matter just about every summer we've experienced since moving up here in 1997. (One of the many reasons I'd love to be there right now.) Our dog this morning even uprooted a cicada nesting deep within the grass of our front lawn. He wouldn't leave the poor thing alone, so up it flew, pulling its thick, round body with its buzzing wings, finally reaching a safe place in a nearby tree. There it settled very happily inside the hot hot heat.

The intriguing case of Caleb Carr

2010-08-09T15:44:00.011-05:00

This summer I plucked a book from my shelf that had been there a while, waiting to be read: Caleb Carr's The Alienist, a bestseller from the mid-90s. It came recommended by a friend several years ago, but as with so many books it sat idle while I read other things on my list. It was about time to get to it, I figured, given all the reading in historical fiction I've been up to. I'm glad I did. And not just because it makes an interesting cul-de-sac to the subject I blogged about in my last entry: How historical fiction is both a serious literary form and a pop genre at the same time. The Alienist--let's just start by saying it--is a gem of a book. It's large, both in scope and length, and yet a quick read all the same. As with most quick reads, it becomes an urgent, physical pleasure to get through. And perhaps most interesting of all is how it both is and isn't a pop suspense novel. A group of (mostly) independent investigators carry out a secret investigation into a murder against a backdrop of social unrest and intense, negative police pressure. The investigation turns into a manhunt, with our heroes very nearly losing their lives before they catch their man. Sounds like it could be the plot of a tv PI drama, right?

Well, yes, in fact it could be. Carr doesn't pretend to be writing what isn't a crime thriller. He's well versed in the genre and shows it, occasionally demonstrating the kind of logical snafus that bother me in fiction that is suspense driven, such as when a character fails to figure out what is perfectly obvious to the reader and should be even more obvious to the character, who seems to be perfectly intelligent and, after all, is "living" through the situation. While sometimes they turn out to be only minor annoyances in a novel, episodes like that cause me to lose heart and not a little faith in the author who I fear has given up the simple act of telling a story in favor of using his characters to effect a certain, preplanned and unjustified end: in this case, surprise. An example from the book: At one point in the novel the alienist (i.e. psychologist) Lazlo Kriezler discusses a love interest with the narrator John Moore. It would be obvious to a second grader that Kriezler is referring to the character named Mary, not the one named Sara, as Moore first thinks. And yet the realization, coming to Moore too many minutes late, like a big old failing steam engine, stuns and befuddles him. He subsequently demands an explanation from Kriezler. Clearly, Carr felt he needed the surprise moment in order to get Kriezler to say more, but it comes across as forced, phony, and unfair to Carr's own narrator, the talents and wiles of whom he has steadily revealed over the course of the novel. I tell my students all the time: Stop putting all this writing energy into the big Surprise moment (which rarely is) and instead put that energy into building a good story. In fiction that relies on the last minute twist, the next surprise around the corner--as genre fiction tends to--one is more likely to run into gaffes (at least what I consider gaffes) such as the one I just described, at the expanse of engaging story telling.

But here's the thing. Carr's novel is so much more than a genre book, even while at the same time it remains happily one. It is also a beautiful and eye-opening survey of late 19th century New York, when so much of the technology that we took for granted in the 20th century was just beginning to find purchase and yet so much badly needed social and political reform was still decades away. The novel--the first chapter of which is actually narrated from the vantage point of 1919--looks ahead to much of the history of the next century, including the late 20th century's (and early 21st's) fascination with the serial killer, while at the same time offering an exquisitely detailed picture of Old New York. There is also the fascinating personage of Theodore Roosevelt--not quite as fascinating in the novel as he was in real life but not far off--and that man's semi-tragic political and purely tragic personal history that lingers grayly over the book like a prophet's voice. Finally there is the intriguing figure of the alienist himself, committed to the new science of psychology, including criminal psychology, that nearly the whole world, and certainly the New York police force, regards as hocum and voodoo. And yet, not surprisingly, so much of the gains in the investigation come about just because of that new science.

I guess my point is that the book cannot be tossed away as a mere genre effort, as some have tried to, even while it embraces aspects of the genre itself. It's a fascinating and elucidating study of a period of history; better yet, it's a study occupied by characters that (mostly) manage to avoid the creaky stereotypes that drive me and most other readers mad, and that literary fiction is supposed to offer an escape from. (Supposed to. It doesn't always.) The Alienist is a historical study and a genre book in which you can easily find yourself caring about the people inside it, investing in them and relying on them and in some cases growing wary of them, in the way that one would actual people in one's life. In other words, it's a great book written in the form of a literary historical novel and yet one that grips you as tightly as the biggest potboiler you could wish for. It takes a rare sort of talent, and maybe a rarer background, to write such a novel. Carr clearly has it. I'm thankful that The Alienist found its outlet in him.

Historical fiction's double identity

2010-07-30T07:30:00.000-05:00

As my Van Gogh novel developed over the past four years, so did my attention to historical fiction. And what strikes me as one of the great curiosities about form is that it both can and can't be assigned the "genre" label. With the possible exception of science fiction, I'm not sure there's a fictional genre out there that leads such a double creative life, that has such a schizophrenic reception among readers and writers. On one hand, for decades historical fiction has been the locus for writers--many of them, let me say, perfectly hard working people--who aren't really intent on or concerned about creating books that can be lauded as "literary" so much as books they contribute to already existing and familiar genres. Many historical novels, for instance, were and still are little more than gussied up mass market romances or adventure books. There is too an abiding and popular genre of historical mysteries. And, of course, plenty of authors have written historical novels for children and young adults (some of them fine, and occasionally classic, books). While authors who write such books often do carry out quite extensive and valuable period research--research that does find its way into their novels--the end products are the type that cause historical fiction to get tossed into that long list of typically sneered at genre fictions. You know the list. You've seen it in every discussion of the literary marketplace, and in every journal's description of what it does or (more likely) doesn't want: romance, western, horror, suspense, children's, fantasy, sci-fi, sports, mystery, crime, etc. Now it goes beyond the purposes of this post to debate whether we ought to sneer at such genres at all--I know a lot of awfully smart people who say we shouldn't--but it's safe to say that the genres do earn sneers, even in this era of the ubiquitous, bestselling vampire novel that delights and consumes (no pun intended) so many people, even when so many stylish young writers (I see them in my classes) are absorbed by and committed to writing fantasy.

But here's the thing about historical fiction. Even while it lives out a full, happy, abiding life among the genres, at the same time it is embraced--increasingly so--by many "literary" writers. (I don't like the term, but for convenience sake I have to use it.) Don't get me wrong. There have always been acclaimed historical novels. But I feel an especially keen interest in the form now, even among younger authors, which certainly would not have been true in the past. Every year at conferences like AWP sections, sometimes multiple sections, on historical fiction are featured and are well attended--and not by anyone wishing to write a romance book. Some literary writers--Ron Hansen comes to mind--have more or less made their careers writing historical novels; others--e.g., Madison Smartt Bell--have completely re-made their careers, earning considerably more prestige for their historical novels than any others. Hansen and Bell have no interest in hack work and don't for a second think of themselves as doing such work. Because they aren't. (Read their books if you doubt my word.)

When you think about it, there's no reason why character-driven, realistic fiction need only be situated in contemporary times. You place the exact same character-driven, realistic story a hundred or five hundred years in the past and suddenly it's given the label of historical fiction, even though for the author he's not fundamentally doing anything different from his last novel, set in L.A. in 2007. Oh, for sure, there are some additional concerns. A great deal more research becomes necessary. (But nearly every piece of fiction requires some research.) And if the author is working with an actual figure out of history the author must struggle with the parameters of what "really happened" to this person versus what the author wants to have happen in the novel. These are not unimportant matters, but still at the end of the day the writing process for a literary historical novel is not that much different from writing any literary novel.

Historical fiction is quite the two (or three or six) headed monster, and it appears to be at an interesting crossroads. Tell one reader you're writing a historical novel and you earn a tolerant, even condescending, smile; tell another reader the same thing and you earn awe. Meanwhile, more and more authors give the form a try, discovering its pleasures and considerable challenges. "Form," I just said. Should I have written "genre"? I'm trying not to.

In a coming post: The intriguing case of Caleb Carr. Can an author explore both form and genre in the same novel?

Van Gogh the Lefty?

2010-07-21T06:06:00.007-05:00

For several decades now, the fact that the different hemispheres of the brain control different functions and influence different abilities has been popularized in western media. Especially commented upon is the fact that human "handedness" is influenced by which brain hemisphere is dominant in an individual, and with an inverse relationship, i.e., left-handed people are right brain dominant and right-handed people are left-brain dominant. The left brain, we are told, controls functions such as language--both spoken and written--computational ability, and reasoning. The 4 Rs, if you will. (Schools, it is often noted, are designed to teach and promote left brain activities.) The right side of the brain controls one's intuitions and emotions, one's musical ability, one's visual and spatial abilities, and one's creative and inventive potential. Ever since these ideas were popularized, there has been book after book celebrating the unique qualities of the presumably right brain dominant left-handers among us. And since I'm one of them, I've been given several such books over the years: from my parents, from my friends, and from my wife. The latest, called A Left-Handed History of the World, might be the most ambitious in its argument. After a short introductory chapter in which it lays out general tendencies of left-handed people, Left-Handed History goes on to profile 25 different and very prominent individuals, all left-handed, implicitly and explicitly arguing that it's left handers who have repeatedly made and remade the world. (Some of those profiled: Ramses the Great, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Napolean, Isaac Newton, Queen Victoria, Ghandi, Marie Curie, and Paul McCartney.) Given that only 7-10 percent of the population is left-handed, the profound influence of left-handers on history, the book asserts, is all the more startling. (Btw, if one counts Ronald Reagan, who naturally wrote with his left-hand but was made to switch to his right at any early age--typical of that time--4 of the last 5 presidents have been lefties.)

Brain scientists will tell you that it's not merely a matter of Lefty=This and Righty=That. We all use both brain hemispheres. It's a matter of when and how much. We can get into those sticky issues on another post or another blog. On this blog, and for this post, I want to talk about Van Gogh. Early in my composing of Yellow, I decided to show him as a left-hander. Partly the choice was intuitive, partly projection, and partly because I had in some remote corner of my brain a faux-memory of seeing him listed among history's famous left-handers. Don't get me wrong. It's not like this is a major theme in the novel or anything that I'm pushing in every scene. But I do point out in a few scenes that Van Gogh is drawing or painting or writing with his left-hand. In one scene I even reference the "left-handed scratch" that is his handwriting. The latter reference is admittedly a matter of me identifying with my protagonist--or vice-versa--because unless I am terribly careful my handwriting instantly descends into "left-handed scratch." (This is especially true, and especially problematic, during the white-hot rush of a first draft, which I still insist on doing by pen in a notebook.)

But my choice of making Van Gogh a left-hander wasn't and isn't simply a matter of trying to insert myself into my novel. It also made real sense to me, based on what I knew about him, and about the theories of handedness. It also wasn't a choice that I deliberated about ahead of time. The idea just occurred to me one day as I was composing a scene and so I went with it. It seemed to work. And if it allowed me to better identify and empathize with my protagonist, to see him from the inside, that's all to the good. Besides, whether Van Gogh was or wasn't left-handed, he certainly showed--and shows in my novel--a number of the characteristic traits. Visual acuity, first of all, demonstrated not only in his numerous paintings and drawings but his copious letters, filled with exacting descriptions of pictures and landscapes. His stubborness and his well-chronicled tendency to emotional spasms, whether that meant anger or romantic infatuation, also fits. Also related is the fact that Van Gogh never put his best foot forward verbally as he did through other means. By most accounts, he was a clumsy and naturally awkward speaker. He had a great deal of fire as a human being and as an artist--he made and kept (and lost) some close friends, along with his brilliant paintings--but smooth and orderly did not by any means characterize his speaking style. Left-Handed History goes out of its way to point out that left-handers are fundamentally distrustful of the world's organization and its institutions--perhaps because it was not designed by them or for them--and they can react in two different ways: They become agitators, openly working to overthrow the status quo, or they retreat deep inside themselves, intellectually and philosophically removing themselves from what they regard as a deeply flawed structure. It's safe to say that Van Gogh did both. Perhaps more than any other neo-impressionist, he was determined to evolve modern art, not just sell paintings. He worked doggedly to that end. But he also was a strikingly interior person, tending to withdraw for long stretches from the society around him, in order to go his own way, to follow his own drummer. I'll repeat: He made friends, even close friends, everywhere he lived. Like everyone, he needed human contact, human conversation. But funadmentally the man was a loner.

Last but not least is what Left-Handed History calls Lateral Thinking, the "ability to make unorthodox connections." Apparently, this explains why some left-handers become ingenious and original military strategists (e.g. Alexander), and why others became brilliant, quirky political maneuverers (e.g., Bill Clinton). A talent for strategy-making certainly defined Van Gogh's life. This, more than anything, struck me as I read about him and wrote about him. He almost always had a plan, sometimes quickly evolving and radically changing plans, for how to accomplish his desired ends. This was true when he wanted to become a lay preacher, and it was certainly true when he decided to become an artist. He knew where he wanted to go and was always confident that he knew exactly how to get there. Demonstrating the daring to act on a strategy was never a problem for him. Convincing others that he was right, however, always was.

What sells?

2010-07-08T06:05:00.007-05:00

I have a friend who's written a brilliant book that, through the lense of fiction, examines the strange, complex, and disturbing social compound that is the current Middle East. The book began as a collection of short stories, one that featured a variety of protagonists, some that are native to the region, many that are not. The point was to show, in some cases expose, the various and confounding strata of human lives and human interactions in this unique and terribly important part of the world. At the advice of an agent, my friend--who for several years lived and worked in Abu Dhabi--turned his collection of stories into a novel. But, staying true to the diverse nature of the stories, the novel very much features an ensemble cast. It is difficult to claim one of its protagonists as the Central Character. Don't get me wrong. My friend put in years of work metamorphosing his story collection into a unified fiction, making sure that the plot lines and characters interweaved and overlapped sufficiently, making sure the structure was tight enough and the final effect singular enough to deserve the designation of novel. It just happens to be a novel with several important characters and several substantial viewpoints.

My friend's book has received serious looks from a number of leading publishing houses. But it has not yet been picked up, despite glowing reviews. Apparently, one reservation is this lack of a single main protagonist. That's just not how most novels go. Well, maybe not most novels, but I'm sure you, reader, can think of a very good novel, one you enjoyed and maybe even treasure, one that might even be regarded as a classic, that involves an ensemble cast. I know other authors whose novels have been written off by editors because they start too slow. As if there aren't dozens of classic novels that refuse to jump out at you with a murder or bomb explosion or car crash on page one, that begin far more humbly than that. As my friend said to me the other day over coffee, "Look at War and Peace. Nothing happens for the first hundred pages!" And what bothers these authors most of all is when the It starts too slowly comment is delivered by someone who has not read the entire book--who, in fact, read only the first ten or twenty pages--and thus has no clue as to whether or not the novel's opening makes sense for the book as a whole. Indeed, maybe that opening is integral to how the book plays out; but the reader never read far enough to judge. I think most novelists, at least the ones I respect, see themselves as writing whole books not writing openings with some extra stuff added on to reach a page goal. Ironically, I have also read articles in which editors complain about manuscripts in which the first 50 or so pages are jam-packed, as if the author felt that he or she had to introduce every major character, each essential plot point, and some sub-plots too, right off the bat. Non-stop action, the editors complain, no room to breathe, everything a jumble; they give me a headache. Well, I think, can you blame the writers for this, when they are constantly preached at that their books must begin fast? I'm sure those authors thought that they were giving you exactly what you wanted.

My point is that there are clearly an understood set of musts in publishing, musts that get stricter every passing year as budgets become more and more tight and publishers become more and more afraid. And, even understanding (I really do) that the bottom line is the bottom line, I can only regard these musts as regrettable. Because every year books that no one could have predicted to do well capture the imagination--and the dollars--of the reading public. Other books that seem to fit all the required musts fall flat on their faces. Every year I read at least a few contemporary novels that simply blow me away, that astound me, that leave me in awe and with terrific hope for the state of literature. (In fact, I've written about a few of these on this blog.) And every year I read novels that leave me cold, leave me bored, leave me dry, books that make me wonder how in the world they got published because they are significantly inferior to some unpublished books I've read. And then I realize: Oh, it's because they fit all the musts.

What sells? Can anyone offer a definitive answer to that question? I doubt it. I can't, except to say that it seems to me that books that finally sell very well do so because they are striking in some unique, idiosyncratic way. Because they are not like everything else out there. And I have to think that the best way to get to such books is to encourage authors to tell their stories in the manner that their stories demand. Even if that means an ensemble cast.

Missing the mistral

2010-06-25T06:02:00.006-05:00

Before I'd traveled to Provence I'd heard of course of the mistral, the wickedly strong wind that comes up suddenly and then blows and blows and blows for days on end. I was a little skeptical. How was this possible? And this happens routinely, like getting a heavy rain shower in Arkansas in May? In fact, yes. It's such an ordinary part of life in Provence that no one thinks to say much about it. Van Gogh's only reference to the mistral is when he noted in one of his letters that he was so determined to finish a painting that once he drove the legs of his easel into the ground, strapped the canvas in place, and kept on painting in spite of the wind. I recreate this scene in my novel. I couldn't not do so, after having traveled to the same territory and experienced the same wind. But after living through a mistral or three, it's awfully hard to imagine Van Gogh could have completed that painting, at least to his satisfaction. (He doesn't in my novel.) The mistral blows so hard that once, riding on a bike, I had to get off and push the thing, because simple pedalling became too hard and too slow. I was almost literally going nowhere. On my trip last May I set off on a morning run in the face of a (unusually brief, as it turned out) mistral and could barely move forward against the force of the wind. (It lessened a bit when I turned onto a side road.) My wife has recounted stories of visiting the Arles craft market during a mistral and see all sorts of boxes and items cartwheeling away from vendors' tables.

Having done our French tours always in late spring or summer, we haven't faced the numbing bitterness of a winter mistral. I can only imagine how dispiriting it must be for residents to wait those out. Summer mistrals are a mixed blessing. One hand it knocks the top off the southern heat. (Although compared to summers in Arkansas or Louisiana, I've always found the supposedly scorching temperatures of the south of France way overstated.) It's also fascinating to watch the landscape of this rural, agricultural region sway in the wind for days. And for my wife there is no more special pleasure to be had in France than to lie in the comfort and security of our bed and listen to the mistral howl outside.

On our first trip to Provence, in 2005, we stayed for two weeks and faced one mistral in the middle of the trip. It lasted three or four days at full strength and then quickly leaked away. We woke up one morning, and it was over. On our second trip--a quick stopover not quite one week long near the end of my wife's research trip to England in 2006--the mistral met us the second we stepped off the plane in Nimes. In London, we had been watching the weather reports from Provence and realized a mistral had begun. Given that it was drizzly and terribly cool in London, this at the end of May, a mistral seemed a small price to pay for some Provencal sunshine. Once we'd arrived, however, I began to become impatient for the mistral to pass. We would only be there for a week, after all. It lingered, however, for at least four days, holding back the summery heat that I was actually looking forward to. But when it cleared we had a blessedly warm couple days before returning to England. On my last trip, a year ago, there was only the single, brief mistral (i.e., it lasted a couple days) though I spent five full weeks, and my family two, in the country. That's either a lucky or unlucky development, depending on how you look at it. Most would count it as lucky, I think. But I know that by the time we left, my wife was missing the mistral.

metahistorical classics

2010-06-09T07:00:00.001-05:00

I blogged a couple months ago about the great joy and utility I take in audible.com. In the last month or so the value of the downloadable audio book has only made itself more evident to me as I've listened to two Wallace Stegner titles: Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). Not only are these long-recognized modern classics, but they also can be read as historical novels--valuable ones for any writer of historical fiction to study. One could even call them metahistorical novels in that embedded in the structure of both is the very act of looking backward, an act carried out not simply by the author but by characters in the storylines themselves. Thus each book becomes not just an exploration of the past but a meditation on what that effort means. In the former novel--which earned Stegner a Pulitzer prize--Lyman Ward, a middle-aged and disabled historian, reviews letters written by his modestly famous grandmother, a Victorian era easterner who followed her engineer husband to the west. There she settled and lived a rather difficult life as a mother, wife, painter, and writer. Ward intends to write a history of his grandmother but the intense personal nature of the letters quickly leads him to write something quite different than conventional history. Instead, he writes a "history of a marriage," and in a style that is indistinguishable from that of a novel. What first annoyed me, but finally interested me is Ward's habit of pulling away from the story of his grandmother's life to discuss his own far more mundane and modern one. While at first I was impatient with these sections, eager to get back to the grandmother, I realized what Stegner--through his narrator Ward--was up to: drawing a comparison between the sexually liberated, socially chaotic early 1970s, and the seemingly more staid Victorian era. What the reader is delighted to discover is that while differences abound, fundamental similarities abide, similarities that speak to human nature, family personality, and the unavoidable chains of history.

The Spectator Bird is a less ambitious but just as engaging book. After all, it won Stegner a National Book Award. Like Angle of Repose, the book cannot help but be a study of aging--its narrator is 69 and feels it--but is even more significantly an examination of history itself. The narrator, Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, is writing an account of his life. The project is his wife's idea and not one he's too excited about. In looking over his files in preparation for starting the project Allston finds something that interests and even scares him: a journal he wrote during a trip to Denmark in 1954, shortly after his only son died. When his wife realizes that he kept a journal during that trip she is amazed and even bothered; she immediately insists he read it aloud to her. The book, similar to Angle, moves back and forth between Allston's journal-bound account of the Denmark trip and the present day life of Allston and his wife in California. Not surprisingly, Allston's account of the trip sounds more like a brilliantly composed fictionalization by someone who very much knows what he is doing than the everyday journalizing of a non-writer on vacation. But that's a mannerism I'm willing to allow Stegner because I am so drawn into Allston's story. I won't give away what happens on the trip, but I can tell you that, like Angle, Stegner expertly begins drawing his two narrative lines--the past and present--together. Once again, history, for Stegner's characters and for his readers, becomes less something to be studied objectively than a force we cannot deny or escape. In Stegner's hands, history is something that must be confronted and wrestled to a compromise.

If you like historical fiction, or simply well written realistic fiction, I emphatically recommend both titles. Read them, listen to them, whatever is easier for you. Just do it soon. I must admit that it took a while for both to capture me. But capture me they did--and how. I may have found one of my new favorite (historical) writers.

The Next Big Step

2010-05-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

My Van Gogh novel has entered a vital new stage in its progress. Yesterday I sent off my first query letter to an agent, a person with whom I've had various email conversations over the years in regards to different writing projects of mine. His agency is the natural one for me to approach first. And if his agency requests to see the entire manuscript, it will be the only agency looking at Yellow for a while. (Actually, that agency is quite conscientious about not holding manuscripts too long.) Most agents, if they have asked to see your entire book, want an exclusive look, which I understand. But if you're sending out anything short of that--a query letter or email, a synopsis, the first ten pages, a few chapters--authors should, and do, feel free to contact as many agents as they like.

In any case, this new development means something significant for my novel and for this blog. Instead of working at the privacy of my desk every morning trying to make the book just a little bit better, I've officially--at least for now--declared myself done and am essentially releasing Yellow to the world. The work is no longer about editing and revising but about mailing, emailing, hoping, waiting, photocopying, developing requested synopses, mailing again, waiting, mailing more, waiting, getting depressed, getting hopeful, mailing, waiting, emailing, photocopying, waiting, developing a longer (or shorter) synopsis, mailing, emailing, waiting, photocopying, mailing, waiting. You get the idea. Makes me think of that Tom Petty line: "The waiting is the hardest part." Well, maybe. But it's also the most hopeful part. Finding an agent--hopefully the right agent--for your book can be a short process or a long one. Sometimes, it can be an interminable process. At this point, as I start out on my efforts on behalf of Yellow, I really have no idea how long it will take.

But I do know that moving into the agent hunt phase means there will be fewer day to day thoughts and insights that I'll be driven to share on this blog. (Funny how this should happen so soon after celebrating my 100th post.) After all, how many times can I say to the world "I sent out a query letter today!" without sounding uselessly boring? Certainly if any issue regarding historical fiction or how I put together my own book is on my mind, or if I care to comment about a historical novel I've read, or I have some great news about Yellow, I will be back in this space sharing my thoughts. But I figure my posts will drop to maybe one a week, and some weeks not even that. I'm in a different phase now. Let's hope it's a good one. Thanks to anyone and everyone who has kept up so far. I'll let you know how things turn out.

Burnt Norway at BEA

2010-05-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

While throughout the world--and in our household--writers busily bang away at their books, in New York an annual Big Event in the pubishing world occurs this week. Formerly known as the ABA (American Booksellers Association) convention, Book Expo America begins tomorrow at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. The Expo runs through Thursday. While the basic point of the Expo is to allow publishers to show off their current and forthcoming titles, the Expo also includes some fascinating and entertaining speakers. Barbra Streisand delivers the keynote on Tuesday evening--will the singer deliver a high "note"? (yuck yuck)--while Wednesday's Children's Book & Authors Breakfast features Cory Doctorow and Richard Peck and will be mc'd by none other than Sarah Ferguson. That's right, that Sarah Ferguson--the Dutchess of York, who has penned numerous children's books of her own (and who, as I write this, is getting some rather embarrassing personal publicity). Thursday's Adult Book & Author Breakfast will be mc'd by Jon Stewart (yes, that Jon Stewart) and will feature Condoleeza Rice and John Grisham, among others. Finally, Thursday's Adult Book & Author Luncheon will be mc'd by comedian/actor/forthcoming zombie novelist Patton Oswalt and will feature sci-fi legend William Gibson.

All I can say is that I wish I were there. Because my book is! Not Yellow, but my earlier novel Burnt Norway. That's right. Burnt Norway will be present at the Expo in the flesh and featured, along with hundreds of other titles, in the Expo catalogue. I'm excited for it and curious to see what difference, if any, this makes for the book. But having paid to enter the Expo, I'd really like to hear Jon Stewart! Oh well. In any case, if you live in the New York area and are interested in book publishing (or Barbra Streisand) I suggest you drop by the Expo. Say hi to my book. It will be having all the fun while back in Arkansas I keep hard at work on its big brother Yellow.

A simple fact?!--uncovered!

2010-05-21T07:00:00.006-05:00

As you can tell if you've been following this blog, writing a historical novel is at least half an effort in fact finding, even if one is not being completely religious to the facts. I certainly want my novel to be as true to the facts as possible, unless those facts start to impinge on something [that I think is] necessary about plot or character. I've done a heck of a lot of fact finding since this project began and I'm still at it. One little piece of information that for the longest time I was unable to uncover was the precise location of the 8th--and last--Impressionist exhibit, held in Paris in 1886. One scene in my novel shows Vincent attending this exhibit and being moved by it. But in trying to write the scene one of the very first things I had to nail down was the where to place it. Where is Vincent when he is observing these pictures? Hard to draw the scene without knowing this, or at least deciding on it. After scanning a number of books and web sites and not finding the location precisely identified, I just decided to make a choice. The exhibit--as portrayed in my book--would be held at a private home rented for the occasion. Why a private home rather than a gallery or museum? Because the Impressionists were historically the "out" group in the Paris art world. They organized exhibits in the first place because the Salon turned down their works. All right, they responded, so we'll set up our own exhibit. That independent spirit would carry them, I figured, right up to the end. I really had no idea if my decision was at all accurate, but I needed to write the scene.

It's only now, as I put the finishing touches on what will be the first publically available draft of Yellow that I've came across my decision again and confronted it. What if a private home was a ludicrous idea, way off base? What if some very informed art historian found the idea laughable and called me out on it? But what to do if I can't find this seemingly simple piece of information? It then occurred to me that I ought to at least find the locations of the earlier and more celebrated Impressionist exhibits, when the group was still holding pretty well together. Where those exhibits were located could and should guide my decision as to where the 8th exhibit might have been held. Don't know why I didn't think of this before. In any case, I seemed to hit pay dirt almost immediately. One very informative article gave me the precise location of every single Impressionist exhibit--except for the last one! Errr. (Why was this so apparently unimporant?) But, it was heartening to learn that except for the 2nd Impressionist exhibit in 1876 (held at the gallery of the famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel) the exhibits were held in apartments or studios, not galleries--and never museums. So my instinct was correct. Should I just go ahead with the setting as I'd already determined it? Not so fast, I decided. Better check one more time. And what do you know, there it was. An article on all-art.org gave me (just a half hour ago) exactly what I'd been needing all along. The 8th exhibit was held on the second floor of the Maison Doree restaurant at the corner of Rue Lafitte and Boulevard des Italiens. Where was this article when I first started researching? Where was it yesterday? I can't tell you. And why a restaurant? I don't know. Did the restaurant simply not serve on its second floor during the month long exhibit? Apparently. (Although the hours of the exhibit were from 10-6. Did they try to do dinner up there, amongst all the artwork?) I suppose it's a sign that the group was dissolving that they couldn't find a more conventional space. After all, this last exhibit is most famous today for two reasons: 1) It's where Seurat unveiled his mammoth and controversial Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; and 2) almost every leading, well-known Impressionist decided not to exhibit. So those who did get into the exhibit were relative no-names and up-and-comers. They would have to take what space they could get. Conveniently, these were exactly the people Vincent needed to get to know and learn from. (Update: After doing more research I may have to contradict one of my last suppositions. The Maison Doree was quite a well-regarded restaurant at the time, serving an upper crust crowd. Perhaps the exhibit organizers regarded it as a superb location!)

As I head back to my manuscript, with precise and accurate information finally in hand, I am reminded of a lesson I so often drawn from Van Gogh's life and experiences, something writers of historical novels needed to tell themselves again and again and again: Don't quit. For the sake of my scene, I'm glad I didn't.

Playing with Paris

2010-05-19T13:42:00.012-05:00

For many, Arles and Saint-Rémy France are the towns associated with Van Gogh. It is there where you find "Van Gogh walks," with signs posted showing you exactly where he painted which picture, and abundant Van Gogh paraphernalia (maps, t-shirts, cards, posters, ties, etc.). But really, there would have been no triumphs in Arles and Saint-Rémy without the two years he spent in Paris, meeting and learning from so many Impressionist and Neoimpressionist painters. The odd thing about the Paris years for a biographer or novelist is that our best source for information about Van Gogh--his own letters--shrank to a mere fraction of their customary number during the Paris years. (Because he lived with his brother Theo and did not need to write to him.) As a result, many questions arise that have no firm answer. One questionable area is his relationship with Agostina Segatori, an Italian woman who owned the Café du Tambourin, where Van Gogh and his friends frequently went to drink and take meals. It is assumed in many circles--and sometimes repeated as fact--that Van Gogh had an ongoing relationship with Segatori. But because there are so few evident letters from the Paris period, his comments about her aren't conclusive. Some letters suggest a relationship closer than friends; others letters do not. He reports to Theo in one letter (when Theo was away in Holland) that Segatori has either had an abortion or a miscarriage--either way she looks ill; in another letter he reports, rather angrily, that even though her business has dissolved she refuses to give him back some paintings of his that he allowed her to use as decoration for the cafe. There is nothing in the letter to indicate a relationship. So I wasn't sure, as I wrote my Paris chapters, what to do with the woman.

In the end, I played with her a bit. First, since I didn't want to or feel I could just completely ignore the common idea that she and Vincent were lovers, I suggested in a few scenes that they were friendly, people who knew and enjoyed each other's presence, and that one night, after Segatori had drunk a few, they had a fling in her apartment above the cafe. What's also useful to know about Segatori is that she let Vincent use the cafe as the venue for an exhibition of Japonaiserie that he admired so and had collected for several years. She also allowed him to show work made by he and his friends, the painters of the "Petite Boulevard," as he liked to call them, in contrast to the original Impressionists, who were associated with Paris's "Grand Boulevards" a bit further south. I've played with dates and facts a bit to have the "Petite Boulevard" exhibition occur shortly before Segatori decides to sell the place. This creates an interesting tension of guilt and blame in which Vincent thinks Segatori is blaming the failure of the Petite Boulevard exhibit for the failure of her business, although logically that cannot be true. In rendering this scene I also make it clear that the night Segatori and Vincent shared happened just two months earlier. The reader can tell from my descriptions that Segatori is quietly pregnant, but Vincent does not--not yet--realize it. The timing of these various events opens the possibility that the pregnancy suggested by Vincent in his real life letter was the result of his own loins! Let me make it clear that no biographer of Van Gogh, even the ones who regard Segatori as his Paris lover, make this claim or apparently feel they can. In my book it's only a tantalizing suggestion. And the way I paint her, Segatori would not want Van Gogh to know the baby is his, even if it was. She's not cold-hearted, just very very independent. And besides, Vincent, this man she rather babies when he visits her café, is not in her mind someone cut out for fatherhood.

I don't know what a Van Gogh biographer would have to say about how I handle the Segatori relationship, but the fact is that it is a sufficiently mysterious one to allow a novelist freeplay. I think I'm actually being conservative! As it turned out, Van Gogh had no children in real life--at least none he knew of--and though he does not say so explicitly in the letters, this, I think, was one of his most cutting disappointments.

(Picture note: The above painting from 1887 is titled "The Italian Woman." Most commentators feel sure that the model is Segatori.)

Creating Van Gogh reaches 100

2010-05-16T07:00:00.004-05:00

As of last Friday's post (5/14/10), Creating Van Gogh reached the 100 count. In almost exactly eight months, I've come to you with 100 thoughts about historical fiction generally and/or my historical novel Yellow in particular. Yes, I've taken a few detours on occasion--e.g., to express excitement over a new publication, or to thank someone who helped me with the blog, or to report on AWP, or to gripe about political/financing problems encountered by the National Writing Project--but for the most part I've tried to keep the discussion focused on the essential themes of the blog, the themes that followers and visitors are interested in reading and commenting about. I can't say exactly when I expected to reach 100 posts--or if I necessarily did expect to reach 100--but I'm relieved and gratified that I've made it. I know that a few--okay, several--of my posts are longer than average, but thanks for sticking with me through them. I hope that means you find my questions and/or commentary and/or anedotes relevant and interesting, especially if you're in the middle of developing or writing your own historical novel. I haven't been shy about detailing my research trip to France last summer--in fact, post 99 and post 100 did just that--and while some of those posts probably read like travelogues I hope I've made the point that I was there to see, hear, smell, read about, walk through, run through, drive through, draw and photograph specific places that Van Gogh either lived in or visited. No matter where I was, the man himself was never far from my thoughts. And these days the France trip is very much in mind, since it was this time last year that I was slogging, stomping, and wine drinking my way through that remarkable, beautiful country.

I must admit that it was the example of my wife's blog Wordamour and her simple love of blogging that encouraged me to start Creating Van Gogh in the first place. Let's give credit where credit is due. And when I did start, I began with the idea that I needed to post something--anything--everyday. Well, within a week or two I knew that would prove impossible. After all, I was working on my novel! But I've tried to maintain due diligence, and I'm proud to say that even as I came off my fall sabbatical and was thrust into the grind of 4 classes per semester teaching I've actually logged more posts from January to the present then I did from September through December. Who knew? I worried over Christmas break that I might not be able to keep posting at all! (How Erika Dreifus updates her terrific Practicing Writing blog every Monday to Friday is beyond me. I salute you, Erika.) And since I've started the blog I can report some gratifying progress on different fronts. My novel, which back in September had just started a significant and drastic new round of cutting, editing, revising, and reshaping, is almost done. (Really this time.) It's so much tighter now, so much surer, so much more of what it was trying to be all along, largely because I've had to confront and resolve so many of the issues that I've written about on this blog. Since September I've also made some great literary friends through this blog, including Anne Whitehouse, who after a series of communications about a Van Gogh poem she published, kindly asked me to review her book of poems, Blessings and Curses. (Click on the link to read about the book.) Thanks for the confidence, Anne. It's meeting people like her that is the true benefit of any blog, or any online life. I hope more posts, and more such people, are in my future. Thanks everybody.

Meandering in Montmartre, Part Two

2010-05-14T07:00:00.003-05:00

When I ended my last post I was recalling my first visit to Montmartre, back in 2005. My family and I followed Rue des Abbesses to Rue Lepic (the street where Vincent and Theo moved to a few months after Vincent arrived in Paris). We followed Rue Lepic--an upward slanting and curving street that is virtually all residential--until it ended, and then we took a series of turns. At that point we were about as high as one can be on the Butte Montmartre. In fact, we were level with the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, only behind it now, a block or two away, in an area thriving with restaurants and shops and overrun with crowds of summer tourists. Hot and thirsty, we grabbed a seat at an outside table of one of the cafes. I can't remember what my wife or kids ordered, but I ordered a large Stella Artois draft. And though I'm not a big fan of Stella, I can attest that I savored that one. As we sat and enjoyed our drinks we spied a sign on the wall of the cafe that indicated that the building dated to the nineteenth century and had been then a favorite hangout of the Neoimpressionist community located in Montmartre. I believe the sign even mentioned Van Gogh by name. So, what do you know, we had stumbled onto one of his old watering holes.

When we were finished at the cafe, we wandered the area for a bit longer, checking out some stores, and then found our way back to the Rue Lepic and down the hill again. It was my wife who discovered it: an unassuming, creamy white-toned building with white shutters and dark blue doors, a building that melded almost invisibly into the others lining the east side of Rue Lepic. We'd walked by it the first time without evening noticing. But a rectangular sign with gold letters affixed to the wall near the front door told you: it was the building where Vincent and Theo lived all those years ago. Immediately, of course, we started snapping pictures. My wife made me pose beneath the sign. People walking by studied us curiously, unable to figure why this rather ordinary building should attract such interest.

Well, that was 2005. As it turned out, our camera was having difficulties and we lost most of our pictures from the trip, including half that we took in Paris and almost all we had taken in the south. So part of my reason (albeit a small part) for wanting to return this past summer was to snap some pictures that would last. Indeed, on that cloudy Saturday morning last summer when I arrived in Paris the first place I went after I unloaded my baggage at the hotel was Montmartre. It was far cooler in May 2009 than it had been in August 2005, but not so cool that as to be uncomfortable, especially when the sun peeked out. From the 2005 trip I knew precisely where Vincent and Theo's building was located. I skipped the Basilica and headed toward Rue Lepic, stopping along the way to observe the curve of the streets, the color and architecture of the buildings, the characteristics of the inhabitants. I wanted to burn Monmartre into my memory as well as take dozens of documentary photos. (Such as the ones above.) I examined Vincent and Theo's building again; then, I headed up the street toward the Moulin de la Galette, the umbrella name for two famous windmills--located almost at the heighest point on the street--that Van Gogh depicted in various paintings. An historically significant edifice--it had to be defended during the seige of Paris in 1814--during Van Gogh's lifetime it was regarded as a colorful bit of scenery; a convenient end destination for center town Parisians out for a long walk; and the site of a popular observation deck (at the "Blute-Fin" mill) and a "guinguette" (bar/dancing venue) at the "Radet" mill. Since I'd decided to make the creation of one of Van Gogh's windmill paintings a significant scene in the novel, I lingered for a long time outside the (unfortunately locked) gate to the Blute-Fin mill and then further on to the Radet mill, which tops a still functioning restaurant.

When I'd stood and gawked and photographed as much as I could, I continued on the Rue Lepic until I found the same cafe I'd visited with my family in 2005. This time, instead of sitting outside, I headed in without hesitation. I wanted to sit down, yes, and after the long stretch of Arkansas to Montmartre traveling a tall beer sounded awfully nice, but mostly I just wanted to see the interior, which was narrower and longer, more tightly packed, than I expected. I took my table--the place was almost empty inside--ordered my beer, brought my journal out from my backback, and began recording: what I'd seen and was now seeing, how the day had gone and was going. Without quite realizing it, I was sitting inside what would become the model for Café du Tambourin, the cafe appears in several of my Paris scenes. (Du Tambourin was an actual cafe, but I have no idea of its real life address as it does not operate anymore, at least under that name.) I think at the moment what I felt was pure fatigue, but accompanied by the delicious knowledge that I'd arrived--in Vincent's old neighborhood--and that I was gratefully off my feet; that I had a home here for as long as I wanted it, or at least until my beer ran out.

Meandering in Montmartre, Part One

2010-05-12T07:00:00.002-05:00

It was about this time last year that I arrived in Paris, on a cool, partly cloudy morning in early May, a Saturday as I recall. And one of the biggest national holiday weekends on the French calendar: the anniversary of the end of WW II. I felt grateful to find a cafe open for breakfast, to say nothing of the fact that my hotel hadn't lost my reservation, even if I couldn't yet occupy the room. When I finally did get into the room I dumped all my baggage: a large suitcase, a bag for my rather oversized laptop, and a backtop jammed to the hilt with books and guidebooks and maps and railway tickets and drawing pads and half a dozen other necessities. Then I reorganized, emptying my backpack of everything and then putting in only exactly what I needed for that day. I was sicking of lumbering around like a pack mule. You'd think I'd want to rest for a while, muzzy-brained as I was from a "night" spent on a transatlantic flight, which of course equals only a few hours of sleep. But I had only two days in Paris before I must leave for the south, and I knew my research itinerary was a full one. Besides, I was too wired to rest. I also knew the first place I needed and wanted to see: Montmartre, that famously bohemian district in the 18th arrondissement of Paris where Van Gogh lived for two years with his brother Theo, and where he first met a number of men who became crucially important to him, some personally and some professionally (and some both): Emile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Pére Tanguy, Georges Seurat. (Just to name a few.) Arguably, the story of painting in the second half of the nineteenth century is the story of Montmartre, as it welcomed first the Impressionists and then the Neoimpressionists before either group found acceptance in larger society. It also where many of these painters lived, if not permanently then at least for a time.

To clarify: This would not be my first tour of Montmartre. The first time I even heard of the place was in 2001 when my family and I took a trip to Paris with a group of UCA students who were going on a "field trip" while studying in Maastricht in the Netherlands. We were joined on this Paris leg by my mother-in-law and a couple friends of hers. While my family and I toured many of the familiar spots of central Paris, my mother-in-law was "dragged" by her friends up the slope of Montmartre. To her, the area was nothing but a "big hill" with a bunch of people trying to hawk tacky wares. It didn't sound like I was missing anything at that time, so I hardly gave it a second thought. We were too busy hanging out at the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens; at the small, temporary amusement park established at the Tuileries; and at the Jardin d' Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. When I returned to Paris in 2005, however, with the idea for Yellow firmly in mind, and armed with considerable knowledge about Van Gogh, I knew I had to go to Montmartre. It was a bright, gorgeous mid-summer day when we exited the Metro and made out way, among crowds of other tourists, to the area. To say the least, what I found hardly matched my mother-in-law's description. Yes, of course, Montmartre is essentially one high, large hill, around which a variety of streets wend. But oh what a great hill.

What one can't not notice upon arriving in Montmartre is the stunning white church that sits at the top: the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. The marble on the church, which has become the symbol of the district, literally shines. Although the construction of the church was not completed until long after Van Gogh's death--and thus it has no connection to either him or the artistic community he played a role in--one cannot visit Montmarte for the first time without stopping in. Or at least I thought so. While my wife waited with our two sons on the broad courtyard outside, and bought a great and possibly illegal purse from one of those nasty "hawkers," I walked up the towering church stairs, enjoyed the incredible view of Paris afforded from there, and then went inside. The transition from the bright sunshine outside was rather drastic but I felt rewarded by the lavish interior.

Done with the church we headed down the hill a bit and then westward along the Rue des Abbesses, picking up sandwiches at one of the many streetside eateries. Our rather overactive, overgrabby young boys earned a disapproving look from one restaurant employee who murmured to the woman next to him something unkind about the English. I chose not to disabuse him of his false identification, but smiled upon receiving our sandwiches and wished him a good day.

Next post's: Discovering Van Gogh hideouts

Mail slot minutia

2010-05-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

You can consider this blog as another in my series of "Little Things I Learned On the Way To Writing a Historical Novel." In looking over a scene in Arles, one in which the point of view character is not Van Gogh but Gauguin, I was reminded of one of those little bits of historical detail that I want to make right before I declare my novel done. In the scene, Gauguin reclines on his bed in the Yellow House, enjoying a cigarette and an hour free from Vincent's company. The postman delivers the mail. From upstairs Gauguin hears it drop through the slot and on to the floor. Gauguin, enjoying his leisure, is slow to check on the delivery, but finally he does. The mail contains both positive and annoying news for Gauguin, and how he reacts to that news throws light both on his character and his relationship with Van Gogh. It also contributes to his initial decision to leave Arles and the Yellow House behind.

But my immediate concern as I looked over the scene yesterday wasn't the thematic but the mechanical. To wit: Would the mail have entered the Yellow House through a slot? I wrote the scene and revised it several times without worrying too much about this point, although it did cross my mind a time or two. Old homes have mail slots, I figured. So I guess that's how this mail comes in. But would it have? Really? It's become a question I can't ignore, as the clock ticks down on this last flurry of revisions on the book. I wasn't sure if I could find an answer that would satisfy me, and I'm not sure I have, but think I've got an answer that my book and I can live with. After a little internet research, I've learned that mail slots did not become common in Europe until the mid-1800s. In some parts of Europe, they did not become common until the late 1800s. Well, what about Arles? (And is 1888 "late" enough to be the late 1800s?) I don't know, but I do know that in Paris mail slots began to appear in the late 1700s. Whatever happens in a country's captial will eventually find its way to the provinces, and since Paris was one of the first world capitals to employ mail slots, it seems logical that the provinces of France would begin using them before other parts of Europe. Since I don't want Gauguin to show any hurry in getting the mail, I'd rather not have him get up to answer a knock from the postman. So the only reason I'd ditch the mail slot is if the evidence is obviously against it. That not being the case, I'm keeping it.

By the way, do you know why mail slots were invented in the first place? No, not to look all gold and glittery on a wooden door front. The reason is that prior to their use the postman would indeed have to knock and wait for someone to answer the door to receive his or her mail. The amount of time wasted standing at the door convinced someone to introduce the mail slot. (And later, in the United States--in 1915--the all too familiar tunnel-shaped mailbox, invented by one Roy J. Joroleman, a U.S. Post Office employee.) I'll count this knowledge as a one more peripheral benefit to starting down the long Van Gogh road five years ago.

Addition by subtraction?

2010-05-07T08:58:00.006-05:00

At various times in this blog, I've noted where I think it's appropriate, or at least acceptable, for writers of historical fiction to break from the known facts. I've done this in different parts of my novel, although the vast majority of scenes in it are directly inspired by documented incidents in Van Gogh's life and/or by recollections of him written (sometimes many years later) by people who knew him. Recently, I have been editing and tightening the Nuenen section of the novel. Nuenen was the town in which Vincent's father Theodorus held his last position as Dutch Reformed pastor before he passed away in 1885. Just as significantly, it was the town where Vincent lived and worked for almost two years, producing most of the better known paintings of what is now known as his "Dutch period." It was also the last time he lived inside his home country.

The Nuenen years were crucial in Van Gogh's artistic development. In fact, it is not so much the surface affairs of his life that matter most in this period, but the discoveries he made in his painting and the simple devotion he showed toward his craft. (And the fact that for the first time in years he wasn't starving.) One personal situation does stand out, however. He met a woman named Margot Begemann, the daughter of neighbors. Margot, still living with her parents though she was past forty, was not entirely in her right mind, something Vincent recognized and pitied her for, but for which he blamed her parents and their autocratic way of handling her. He felt that they had tried to keep her cloistered her entire life and that this had emotionally crippled Margot. After a period of taking walks and getting to know each other, Margot decided she was in love with Vincent. The two actually agreed to marry. The Begemanns were astounded and outraged. They refused to let Margot see Vincent anymore. Theodorus himself was deeply embarrassed by and deeply uncomfortable with the situation; the relationship between the two households became strained to the breaking point. Margot, distraught over being denied her "love," escaped from her confinement one day to meet with Vincent and walk with him. When she collapsed on the ground, she declared that she had poisoned herself. Vincent made sure she vomited, took her home, and then got her a doctor. Later, she was hospitalized, and he never saw her again.

It was a strangely short-lived if intense affair, one that made him very bitter--at his own family and the Begemanns--but which in the long run affected him astonishingly little. Much less so than his failure in London to woo Ursula Loyer, or his later infatuation with his cousin Kee, or his two year relationship with the woman he called Sien (in The Hague). I think this is because when he met Margot he was older, more jaded, just about convinced that a conventional marriage and family life was not in the cards for him. (This turned out to be true.) In imagining and crafting this section the novel, I've made the seemingly strange decision to remove Margot Begemann completely. Why, you might ask, when the affair causted so much turbulence? As I said above, for me the primary fact of Van Gogh's Nuenen years was his artistic not personal development; also, despite the Margot Begemann situation, Nuenen was a period in which Van Gogh did experience a small if crucial rapprochement with his family. His assistance in nursing his mother after she broke her hip showed the family he was quite human--and skilled--after all; and a grudging respect for his ability as a painter began to develop as well. Though he and his father never became close, they also didn't fight much, if only because Vincent had moved his studio to the house of the Catholic sexton and was seen less and less often at the Van Gogh homestead.

In earlier parts of the novel I detail Vincent's difficulties with women and with his own family. By the time the Nuenen period comes around, I think it's important for the arc of my plot to show Vincent's arrival as a painter. It is this subject that dominates the second half of my book. So as not to distract from that subject, and not to muddy the waters further with his family, I chose to remove Margot Begemann. It's an admittedly surprising, and even risky, move. But I hope it's a matter of addition by subtraction. Soon enough I'll be able to gauge whether or not I made the right call.

A gin discovery

2010-05-05T14:33:00.005-05:00

My posting to this blog has slowed in recent weeks as I struggle through the inundation of end of-semester grading that typically inflicts one who works at a teaching-intensive university. (Four classes per semester.) However, my daily work of shaping and sharpening Yellow continues bit-by-bit, slowly but surely, as I near the date when I am ready to finally send it out. This morning, at my writing desk, I discovered a neat solution to a tiny little problem I encountered in one scene. In the scene, which occurs in the Drenthe section of the novel, Van Gogh confronts the owner of an inn at which he is staying and asks for assistance getting to Zweeloo. The innkeeper, as I portray him, is drunk at the time. In all my drafts so far, I have him drunk on vodka. I guess this seemed like an appropriately working class liquor, and one that certainly could have been found in 19th century Europe. One sentence refers to the man "reeking of vodka."

Along with a million other concerns about other parts of the book, a nagging thought remained in my head over the past couple years about this scene. First, exactly how popular would vodka have been in Holland then, and secondly, does one really "reek of vodka"? Vodka isn't odorless but it does not have nearly as strong an odor as other spirits. And culturally it does seem more strongly associated with Eastern Europe, Russia in particularly. In fact, after reviewing an online article I've learned the term vodka belt--those northern, central, and eastern european countries where vodka has historically reigned and where even today consumption is highest in the world. Holland, as it turns out, is not part of the vodka belt.

Seeking out another likely liquor choice for a hard-drinking 19th century Dutch innkeeper, I immediately thought of gin. I don't know. It just seemed right. Well, of course, I didn't rest there. I wanted to make sure it was right. A little internet reseach later and what do I learn?: Gin was invented in Holland! Eureka. In fact, the English first discovered gin when their soldiers went to Holland to fight against the Spanish in the 1580s. They proceeded to bring gin back to England, where it quickly became popular among the working classes. And of course it still remains popular in England--and America--today. But what matters is that it certainly makes sense as the drink of choice for my red-faced, semi-fictional innkeeper. Would it cause one to reek? Well, a couple things come to mind in answer to that question. First, gin is a berry-flavored grain spirit. It certainly does have a distinct, if not overpowering, smell. But more to the point--and pardon me for being so personal--my dear departed father demonstrated a strong fondness for gin late in his life. I think it's safe to say, one could smell it on him.

Further thought on letters

2010-04-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

Just an extra little thought for today, one that occurred to me after I finished my last post, about using real life letters in a historical fiction. First, I should clarify that while Van Gogh was a voluminous letter writer, at least from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, and while his letters provide crucial insight into what he did, thought, and believed over a span of decades (and, I think, is a big reason why he is and has been such a fascinating figure to literary people), letters occupy only a small fraction of my novel. If someone is a nearly unstoppable letter writer, it's just not possible to cancel out that aspect of his character when you fictionalize him. Or I didn't think so. Even so, dramatizing Van Gogh's life is my point and my method in the novel; I never really wanted to do else.

But the dilemma that I discusssed in my last post, whether or not to present the Antwerp period of Van Gogh's life as simply a series of letters between he and Theo, made me wonder if one couldn't simply create a different sort of Van Gogh novel, one that is purely epistolary. After all, the epistolary novel is hardly a new or rare phenomenon. Couldn't someone simply do something like that with Van Gogh? And then, simultaneous with this idea, I had two countering thoughts: 1) What do we need an Van Gogh epistolary novel for when his Collected Letters already exists and is such a profound resource? and 2) There already is a Van Gogh episotlary "novel." Sort of. Irving Stone--one of the first literary figures to discover Van Gogh as a subject--published a book called Dear Theo way back in the 1930s. (And it's still in print.) Dear Theo is a volume of selected letters--a very carefully culled and arranged volume. What Stone tries to do in Dear Theo is select pieces from, and edit, Van Gogh's letters so that they make a consistent narrative with a palpable dramatic arc. Therefore the book, while purely Van Gogh's writing, reads less like a straightforward selection of letters than like a novel. (By the way, there are a variety of other Van Gogh Selected Letters available, each chosen by different editorial eyes with different aims in mind.) So, in short, if an epistolary Van Gogh novel sounds like your cup of tea, I suggest you go out and buy Dear Theo!

The power in letters

2010-04-28T14:01:00.007-05:00

I've noted that one of my key sources in researching my novel has been The Collected Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, a fairly massive, three volume collection that features his lifelong correspondence to mostly one person: his brother Theo. When I was in the early stages of drafting my novel, and it seemed necessary to have Vincent write a letter to his brother, I would just invent the letter completely. I felt I knew enough about Van Gogh's biography, his concerns, and his passions to do so, and I knew too what specific plot points I was trying to develop in any given scene. But as I continued with both my writing and researching, and I read or re-read more deeply into the letters, I found that Van Gogh made certain points so well and so eloquently that it only made sense to borrow the man's real words. So the letters in my novel started to become combinations of my phrasings and his. Often what I ended up doing is taking bits from a variety of letters written during a given time frame or situation and combining those bits into a consistent fabric. Doing so required a bit of tweaking on my part, of course: slight changes to his phrasings, transitional phrases and sentences invented by me, the trimming away or ignoring of a lot of subjects that I didn't think were important to bring up. If I was going to use the actual letters, I couldn't see any other way to do so. After all, it wasn't appropriate to simply pull five or ten full--even lengthy--letters and stick them unchanged into the body of my novel, especially when all sorts of topics come up in those letters that might have nothing to do with the plot point I was trying to develop. So I condensed; I focused; I distilled. And hopefully the result is that the letters, as presented in my novel, go hand in hand with the dramatized scenes. Hopefully, the reader can't tell which words are originally Van Gogh's and which are imitations written by me.

I started thinking hard about this subject again recently, as I looked over the Antwerp section of my novel. This isn't a terribly long section--Van Gogh only lived there a few months--but I feature a scene with him in a bar shortly after he arrives in the city (a scene suggested by an actual letter of his), also a scene with him observing Rubens' paintings in a city museum (something also drawn from his actual letters), and a few scenes with Van Gogh in Antwerp's Art Academy, an institution in which he did indeed enroll but finally left after too many frustrating disagreements with his instructors, one instructor in particular. While all these scenes are useful in emphasizing an aspect of Van Gogh's life or character, the real drama of the Antwerp period involves the question of when he would move to Paris. Reading The Collected Letters, one sees that he had a rather fast falling out with Antwerp and very quickly began pressuring Theo for permission to move to Paris and live in Theo's apartment. Theo politely tried to dissuade Vincent, tried to convince him to wait at least until summer. Over an extended series of letters, a reader can watch while Vincent tries to answer Theo's objections. (One doesn't have Theo's letters but can take a fair guess at their content based on what Vincent says.) Finally Vincent just arrives in Paris, without forewarning--both in real life and in my novel.

An earlier version of my Antwerp section included my own approximation of this epistolary battle: My condensed and patched together versions of Vincent's letters along with completely invented letters written by "Theo" (really by me.) However, in an effort to trim away the fat from my novel, several months ago I got rid of almost the whole bulk of this correspondence. Looking over the section now, I wonder if the epistolary argument between Vincent and Theo isn't actually more dramatically interesting that the dramatized scenes I wrote. I'm toying now with the idea of reinstalling all the letters I cut and trimming down, or getting rid of altogether, the other parts of the Antwerp section. As with many crucial revision decisions, there's going to be pain involved with this one. Something will be lost no matter what I decide. But one hopes--one always hopes--that the loss will be an overall gain for the novel. I'll let you all know what I finally do with this section.

Indicting the Green Fairy?

2010-04-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

If you're a regular reader of this blog you know that I recently attended the 2010 AWP conference in Denver, and at the amazing AWP book fair I purchased a book called Absinthe, Sip of Seduction: A Contemporary Guide. It's really turned out to be a wonderful resource as I try to find out more about this infamously favorite drink (nicknamed "The Green Fairy") of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters living in 19th century Paris. If nothing else, the book has shown me how silly I was to just drink absinthe straight up, as I did the first time. (See my earlier post about that experiment.) Not only is that not the traditional or typical way to imbibe absinthe, but it's strongly cautioned against by the authors of this book. To quote: "drinking absinthe neat can result in gratuitous tears and choking due to the intense and bitter taste." (Yes, indeed.)

The book has also provided much useful information about the supposed connection between absinthe and madness, a connection made all the more popular given the particular form of "madness" that infected Van Gogh starting in December, 1888. Some commentators have tried to claim that it was absinthe that undid Van Gogh, but--as Sip of Seduction points out--this is a difficult case to make, because we can't be sure whether or not Van Gogh drank much absinthe at all. It certainly was the favorite drink among many artists and writers living in Paris in the late 1800s, and it was certainly a favorite of Paul Gauguin, who eventually became one of the most important people in Van Gogh's life. But no one knows how much of the stuff Van Gogh actually drank. It comes up hardly at all in his letters, but then again Van Gogh wrote comparatively few letters during his time in Paris (because the man he wrote most of his letters to was now his housemate). When he left Paris, he did claim that his health was poor and that if he had stayed he might have become an alcoholic. But he did not attest to any special attraction to absinthe. Most people who have looked into Van Gogh's condition (apparently a rare form of epilepsy) claim multiple contributing factors: poor eating habits, years of working himself to the point of exhaustion, a series of emotional crises, a diet consisting mainly of coffee and pipe tobacco, the unavoidable inhalation of fumes from paints and thinners, and--most particularly--a family history of mental illness.

That said, some very interesting facts appear in Sip of Seduction. Apparently, the psychoactive power of wormwood (absinthe's key ingredient) has been greatly exaggerated to the point of mythology, but during the heyday of absinthe's popularity, some manufacturers of inferior quality product added poisonous colorants to artificially bring about the famous glowing green shade of the real thing. According to the book: "commonly used harmful adulterants included copper salts, aniline dye, and turmeric . . . These cheap, toxic absinthes were common fare among those of lower socioeconomic status in urban areas." I think it's safe to say that struggling painters can be counted among the lower socioeconomic classes. Also intriguing is that, even before Van Gogh had a reputation of any kind at all, it was noticed that certain drinkers of absinthe demonstrated odd behaviors: "erratic mood shifts, disconcerting tic disorders, and in some cases blindness." As public opinion turned against the spirit, it began to be blamed for a whole range of symptoms: "convulsions . . . sleeplessness, tremors, and hallucinations." Even epilepsy! Whether absinthe abuse (as opposed to alcohol addiction generally) was uniquely responsible for such behaviors and conditions, it's certainly is true that hallucinations, erratic mood shifts, tremors, and convulsions were demonstrated by Van Gogh during his attacks.

So am I saying absinthe really was the culprit in Van Gogh's case? No, not at all. He had so much stacked against him to begin with--something I try to emphasize in my novel--that he did not need an alcoholic spirit to push him over the edge. He went there, I'm pretty well sure, all on his own.

Throwing the F bomb in historical fiction

2010-04-22T07:00:00.001-05:00

I blogged last weekend about an issue that arose during a historical fiction section at the recent AWP conference in Denver. In that entry, I took novelist Ron Hansen to task for his rule that a writer of historical fiction should never "knowingly part from fact." Hansen said many things during that session that I do agree with, one of which is that a writer of historical fiction should not use slang or terminology that postdates the era he or she is writing about. That seems a straightforward rule, one that I think most people would find reasonable and even useful. Part of the joy of writing historical fiction, after all, is finding out about previous decades and centuries, including the kinds of phrases used back then. When one is writing a novel set in North America or another English-speaking part of the world, Hansen's rule is easy enough to process and to follow. If Americans didn't say "by the skin of our teeth" in 1791, then you probably don't want to have the characters in your 1790s Boston novel use that phrase.

Things become more complicated, however, when your novel is set in a non-English speaking country or, as in the case of my Van Gogh novel, countries. If you are writing in English for an English speaking audience, then part of the long process of creating your novel is finding the right tone in English for conversations that would have actually occurred in French or German or Dutch or Swahili or whatever. (Assuming, of course, that your made up conversation ever actually happened at all.) So when a word came into parlance in English is less of a pressing matter than whether or not that word effectively renders the flavor of the character's thought. To be specific: At various points in my novel, different characters have reason to express disgust or anger or severe frustration. In a contemporary novel (in English), a character might simply say "F*** it." But can I have the characters in my nineteenth century novel--set in a non-English speaking countries--say this? My answer, so far, has been yes. In fact, the F word might be one of the easier linguisitic issues to put to rest. First, when I use that phrase, or a version of it, (and I don't use it very often) I do it because I think the word fits the emotional tone of the thoughts or conversation depicted. Would Van Gogh have actually used the word "f***"? Probably not. (Although he was fluent in English.) Would Gauguin? Not at all. But that's because they were not native English speakers. In fact, none of what I have them say in the novel they could ever have said--not the precise way I write it--because my characters weren't speaking in English back in Nuenen or Antwerp or Paris or Arles in the 1880s. I realize this may sound like an obvious point, but I make it to emphasize that a writer who is, essentially, trying to translate nineteenth century continental speech into English that a contemporary audience can read and emotionally appreciate, automatically earns a little leeway in terms of the application of Hansen's rule. Besides which, those who have looked into the etymology of the F word--and, by the way, I understand there is a fascinating documentary about this very subject, available through Netflix, titled The F-Bomb: A Documentary--have discovered that in English the word has been used for hundreds of years, well before the dawn of the 1880s. Not only that, but it seems likely this English language slang word is NOT derived from some silly acronym, but from simillar sounding words in Dutch (Van Gogh's native language!), German, Swedish, and Norwegian that mean "to strike" and/or "to copulate." (In fact, the Swedish word for "penis" is fock.) So given that the word existed in English at the same time as the real Van Gogh and the real Gauguin lived in continental Europe I feel all the more justified in using the word for my English-speaking audience--if I feel it accurately expresses the tenor of the characters' thoughts.

Language in a historical fiction is an extremely tricky issue, we can all agree, no matter what we think of Hansen's rule. Some would say, "Isn't the point of any novel to reach and touch the contemporary reading audience?" And "Can any of us really know how people talked and thought day-to-day in a world from 300 or 500 or 1000 years ago?" The answers are Yes and No. Given that, can we just go ahead and use contemporary English, no matter what the era is we're depicting? My answer: Not so fast. The simple fact is that in order to be affecting to the reader the language has to be credible, and in order to be credible it has to feel as if it could belong to the era depicted, even if it finally doesn't. And that's where applying Hansen's rule can be very useful for establishing and maintaining just that credibility.

Arne Duncan's Folly

2010-04-20T06:03:00.005-05:00

Taking a short break from my usual topic of historical fiction to blog about something I touched on a couple months ago: the Obama administration's approach to education reform, a topic that should concern any American writer. I decided to write about this after listening to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on NPR's Talk of the Nation radio show yesterday. Let's just say that it's depressing that this administration--which nearly let crucial health care reform legislation go down to defeat, and finally had to water down the reform legislation that did pass, because for months it stood passively by and let a Republican minority dominate and control (and distort) the public discussion--talk about education as if they are Republicans. Republicans are famous for assuming the worst about educators and our education system, for starting from the standpoint that it's all bad, and for questioning, underfunding, and attempting to undermine every federal education initiative no matter how promising or successful. That essentially was the tenor of Duncan's remarks yesterday on NPR. Duncan, by the way, is not an educator, having never actually stood in a classroom and taught students. This is another aspect of the American education debate that bothers me. How is it that non-professionals in the field feel they have the right to criticize and dictate to people who have worked in the field for years? In what other industry would this be permitted? Can you imagine an oil company being run by executives who have never worked in the oil industry before? Can you imagine auto manufacturers or computer software designers or giant retail companies being ordered around by people who have no inside knowledge of making cares, creating software, or selling clothes? Of course not. Such a situation would not be tolerated. Yet in education everybody assumes that they have all the answers, that they know what the real problems are--even if their last experience in a classroom was 25 years ago when they were seniors in high school. And unfortunately, as so often in life, those who are most convinced they know it all usually know the least.

And this gets me back to Arne Duncan. The man doesn't even realize the details of the very proposals he is pushing. Compete, compete, compete, Duncan says. Instead of funding existing programs that deserve it, we're simply going to create a big pile of money and individual states will compete for that money to fund the programs that they want to support. Putting aside the fact that this is utterly and completely a Republican approach to education coming from a Democratic administration (I never expected to get a repeat and exaggeration of George Bush's educational approach from the Obama administration), Duncan's argument that all the programs that currently work will be rewarded under his system is factually incorrect. A number of federal financed programs with a national infrastructure--the National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, Teach for America--cannot exist if it is left up to individual states to try to get money. How will a national infrastrcuture survive if some states are rewarded with money and others not, and when even the states who receive the money may not care to support local writing projects? But here's the thing. Such a scenario is not only impractical; it's illegal. I know something about the National Writing Project, because my wife has played a role in it for over ten years. And it's a simple fact that it is illegal for a national organization to compete for funding that is intended to go to states. Under federal law, they are forbidden from doing so. How come the Secretary of Education does not know this? How come he didn't find out before putting together and arguing vociferously for a proposal that would pit the National Writing Project and other federal education programs against state programs? A very valuable program that has for thirty years encouraged and shown K-12 teachers how to better use writing in their classrooms--no matter what subject they teach--is about to go under, and the Education Sectretary doesn't seem to realize that this outcome is due to his own misguided proposals.

I'm a writing teacher and I hear all the time about "How kids can't write these days." Well, some can and some can't. But if we're concerned about getting our students to write better, it doesn't make sense to allow a program to die that has been working hard and effectively for 30 + years to realize that desired end. And if anyone cares to find out exactly how successful the National Writing Project has been--and what a loss the death of this program would be--you should head to their web site (click on the above link) to find out.

No matter what we do, let's not let misinformed and arrogantly powerful Republicans-in-the-guise-of-Democrats undercut valuable educational initiatives. When Mr. Obama was elected, the very last thing I thought I would have to do is write that his administration does not know what it's doing in regards to education. Because Mr. Obama is a man who has drawn so much benefit from his own education, and he is man who clearly cares about the subject dearly. But appointing Arne Duncan was a mistake, one that becomes more aggravating and more apparent every day.

Parting ways with Hansen

2010-04-18T15:03:00.006-05:00

It's been a week since I returned from the AWP conference in Denver, but my head is still buzzing with questions stemming from the very last session I attended, one on historical fiction (the only one on historical fiction), featuring Ron Hansen, Cynthia Mahamdi, and Philip Gerard. It was a good session, one of the best I attended this year, just unfortunately placed in the very last time slot of a three day conference. Ron Hansen is a terrific novelist, someone who never writes a bad book. He's also someone who has a considerable track record in writing crisp, illuminating, perfectly delivered, historical novels. His book Hitler's Niece is one of the finest novels I've ever read in any genre. (I think I might have said that on this blog before.) In the session, Hansen elucidated twelve "rules" for writers of literary historical fiction, and I was gratified to realize that in composing my Van Gogh novel Yellow, I've followed almost every one of them. In fact, most of his rules seemed like good, plain common sense for any conscionable writer aspiring to write something that has value. I like to count myself in that camp. However, I instinctively parted ways with Hansen at one of his rules. Hansen said that the fiction writer should not knowingly part from fact. This is a disservice to the reader, he suggested, who is trusting the writer to render a realistic, even if imagined, picture of the subject. The reader is trusting the writer to get the details right even as the writer is developing his or her story. It is a disservice to both the reader and the subject, Hansen suggested, to put a character in Rio in 1932, for instance, when according to the historical record the character never went near Rio until 1940.

I understand Hansen's point, and I also understand that almost all of the fictive work of historical fiction is not in developing the basic story but in imagining what real historical events looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like for the real participants. To bring alive in scene what is a mere sentence in the historical record. This will mean making arbitrary decisions sometimes as to what someone is wearing, or what diction they use, or how tightly wound they seem, decisions that are virtually identical to the myriad decisions we make when writing a purely imagined, non-historical work of fiction. It's also true that some subjects are so barely sketched in the historical record that a writer has immense leeway in imagining what really did or didn't happen; the writer can wander off in all sorts of interesting directions without "knowingly departing from the facts." (William Styron noted, in his preface to The Confessions of Nat Turner, that it was exactly because so little was known about Nat Turner that he enjoyed taking him up as a subject.) All of this is to say that I understand how a writer can follow Hansen's maxim to the letter and still be free to write a richly felt, deeply imagined work.

But we can never depart from known fact? Never? And for the reason that we might give false ideas to the poor reader, who will mistake our books for biography? Wait a minute. I'm a writer of fiction. That Yellow is novel--not a biography--I have made, and will continue to make, perfectly clear. In fact, it's impossible not to read it without realizing that it sounds nothing like a biography of Van Gogh, just like Hitler's Niece sounds nothing like a biography of Geli Raubal. And if my book is ever published, it will have one of those big, fat, legalistic warnings labels inside proclaiming it to be a work of fiction. So I'm at fault if a reader mistakes it for straight history? No. Sorry. No way. If a reader is reading a novel, the reader should know what the definition of a novel is. If he or she doesn't, that's not the author's fault. Second, and more importantly, sometimes the writer of a historical fiction must depart from fact in order to make his novel work dramatically. There are a couple times I did this in Yellow, and I think of them as some of the most necessary scenes. Without them, I don't know how I could have held my book together as a novel. A novel certainly can't just be a dramatized version of every notable fact in a subject's biography. If you just starting writing ever inch of a person's life you end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of unusable pages. What you have to do is find a way to coordinate a person's life story into a compelling and credible fiction. And fiction--as we all know--counts on having a plot.

I don't want to sound glib here. I understand a commitment to the facts. It was because I was so interested in the specific facts of Van Gogh's life, because those facts so sparked my imagination to action, that I quickly abandoned my original plan, which was to write a novel about a Van Gogh-like painter. I found that so many of the scenes I wanted in the book were so drawn directly from, and depended upon, the man's real life that to use anything else than the his real name would have been ludicrous. And dishonest. And transparent. But by deciding to write a novel about Van Gogh, and not just pen yet another biography of him, I've made a decision that allows me, by definition, to "knowingly part from fact." I will fight to my last breath for my right, as a fiction writer, to do that; and not just my right, but my responsibility too.

AWP, Day Three

2010-04-10T16:36:00.008-05:00

Up and down day at the conference today. At breakfast this morning, at a cafe around the corner from our hotel, we spotted an old friend, a fellow who once taught at UCA with my wife and I but who has since moved to upstate New York. With him was his ten year old daughter, who I remember as a little babe, born as she was while our friend still lived in Arkansas. After breakfast, I stuck to my promise to myself and worked for a while on the novel. I was rewarded with some ideas on how to better arrange the Antwerp section, which has always felt weak to me. (More on that in another post.)

I hurried over to the conference at around 10:30 and attended two sessions, neither of which were completely satisfying, delivering less than they advertised. (A frequent problem at AWP.) The first session was about managing one's novel from start to finish, which sounds expansive, deliberate, usefully thorough. Unfortunately, none of the panelists presented papers; it was solely discussion. I have nothing against focused and informative discussion, but I've found in my career as a conference goer that discussions can too easily devolve into chit chat and laugh lines. That happened in this session, and as a result the scope wasn't nearly as thorough as it could have been. In a panel discussion it's imperative for the leader to keep the group on track, ask pointed questions, and keep in mind the original promise of the session. The leader of this session started out trying to do so but was almost immediately derailed by one of the panelists, a well known and charming fiction writer (who was once a professor of mine at George Mason), given to telling funny stories and/or making impassioned rants. Every time he spoke today it seemed that discussion ground to a halt. Questions did not pass from him to other panelists, but stopped, I guess because he seemed to talk so authoritatively and/or wittily. This was unfortunate because some of the questions--whether they came from the leader of the panel or from an audience member--were directed to all members of the panel, specifically asking for feedback from all of them. It was by no means a completely unprofitable session, but it was hardly the soup-to-nuts overview promised by the session description.

The second session I attended was even more disappointing. This session was centered around the "how and why of employing unusual points of view in fiction writing." I knew things were not going to go well when the very first speaker started off by saying "It's the afternoon of the last day of AWP, and I don't feel like talking very much." Excuse me? The room was jammed--worse than any other session I've attended--with people eager to hear about the advertised topic, and she just excused herself from doing so? In that case, step off the panel. This is another example of a phenomenon that burns up my wife (and about which she has written at length): writers who seem to feel that the world owes them a living just because they are writers. As teachers they shouldn't be expected to put the least energy into their teaching--despite the fact that they are getting paid for it--and as panelists they are allowed to blow off the assignment with a breezy, grinning "I just don't feel like it today." We're supposed to just chuckle and let them off the hook. Bullshit. That room was packed with people and that panelist abandoned them. As the discussion continued, the "how and why" was barely touched on; panelists more or less just described some stories they had written. How teachers should broach the question of point-of-view with their students was a subject completely ignored. Most strange was the fact that the panel was organized as a discussion (groan) rather than a presentation of papers, despite the fact that almost all the panelists had written papers for the session. Did the panel leader not know this or not care? It became frustrating hearing panelist after panelist say "Well, I said this a lot more thoroughly in my paper, but . . ." and then proceed to give a brief, watered down, and not terribly illuminating or original comment on point of view in fiction. Why, I thought, don't you just read your papers? I don't understand this attitude that written and delivered papers are inherently boring. Not if they're well written, they aren't. And we're writers, after all. We're always going to be more interesting, more thoughtful, more original, and more cogent in our written speech than our spoken words. So give us your written words! I quickly lost heart, sitting there on the floor, listening to drivel offered up as insight. (At one point one of the panelists seemed to be claiming third person omniscience as an unusual and original point of view.) With about a half hour remaining in the session, I left. Not just the panel but the building. I needed to see some more of Denver--something else I promised myself before I came. So I walked to the vicinity of the state capitol building and found myself at the Denver Art museum, where I passed (finally!) a useful hour looking around.

So I don't sound too much like a grouch, I should say that between sessions today I manned the Exquisite Corpse booth, and along with selling some copies of the journal I wrote some poems! Inspired by the incredibly energetic, linguistically swirling prose poems of Skip Fox--whose book Delta Blues I bought yesterday--I wrote a few of my own. I couldn't help myself. Skip put energy into my head that just had to get out.

In a little bit I'll head to my final session at the conference: a session on historical fiction. Given the pressing matter of getting my Van Gogh novel successfully revised and done, I'm hoping this proves to be an illuminating session. Later, my wife and I will have dinner with two old friends from our doctoral student days at University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Yesterday, we had drinks with Heather Cox, a UCA Writing Department graduate, who is really throwing herself into the MFA program at Roosevelt University, thoroughly enjoying Chicago, throughly shining, and really making our department and our major look good. She's a wonder. Way to go, Heather.

This is probably my last post from Denver. Despite today's grousing, I'm glad I came, and I hope you enjoyed following the conference with me. Next time I post I'll be back in Conway, (constructively) sweating over my novel again. See you then.