On to AWP

Two days from now, I'll board a plane to Boston for this year's installment of the annual craziness called AWP.  According to the organization, it will be the biggest conference yet, which is a little scary, considering how big past conferences have been.  The conference has thoroughly outgrown even the space provided by mega-hotels; so for the 2013 edition AWP will be held in the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston.  One request, dear reader: please pray for no snow.   Winter weather has caused enough traveling snafus in that part of the country already; the last thing thousands of AWP conference goers need is to have their air and train schedules slaughtered by delays and cancellations.  I'm already worried about the "Sequester" and how cuts in the air traffic system might affect scheduled flights.  Thanks, U.S. government, for being so comedically dysfunctional!   (I realize any problems that the sequester causes for my travel plans is nothing compared to the trouble that will be caused to those people who will endure furloughs and severe cuts in pay.)

I am looking forward to the conference for several reasons.  First, I'm excited about the panel I'm on, which will discuss the phenomenon of single semester novel writing workshops.  As I reported in a previous post, this relatively new but fast growing type of course has seen a variety of iterations among its instructors.  Unlike the typical Fiction Workshop, there isn't a standard pedagogy yet, and that makes the class--and my panel--very exciting.  I expect to learn about the drastically different ways different instructors skin this particular cat.   And I'm eager to report on what my students are doing in their Novel Writing Workshop this semester.  Too, I will be at the conference to represent Toad Suck Review magazine.  We will introduce to a national audience our groundbreaking Toad Suck Review 3-D issue.  It really is a great issue, and I know our head editor, Mark Spitzer, and I are looking forward to showing it to folks.  We may even find ourselves soliciting for new material for issue #4!  We will also have along some of our grad students, who did editorial work on issue TSR 3-D.  It will be their first time at AWP--an important milestone for any young writer.

I will be blogging most days from the conference.  So if you're interested in how the conference "feels," at least to one conference goer, check this space, starting Thursday.

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Publication notice: An odd little short story I wrote called "Homeroom," which adopts the form of a high school homeroom announcements sheet, will be published soon in theNewerYork Press's Electronic Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature (EEEL).  I'm excited for it to land there.  Experimental, it is.


News Item:  Jennifer Egan, novelist extraordinaire and author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me, and several other titles, came to the UCA campus this week.  She gave a great reading, followed by an extensive question and answer session.  She then followed this up the next day with a small group meeting with Department of Writing students in which she covered a wide range of subjects, from drafting and revising strategies to the phenomenon of audio books to her side job as a journalist.  She was not only encouraging to the students but offered several morsels of really sharp, shrewd advice.  She earned her money, put it that way.  And the students spoke glowingly of her for days after.  Sometimes visiting writers don't live up to their billing; Egan exceeded hers.

Followup note: I wrote a couple weeks ago about Bobbie Ann Mason's historical novel The Girl in the Blue Beret.   If the novel, or Mason, sounds interesting to you, you should check out an interview with the author published in The Pinch magazine last fall.  In the interview, Mason discusses the kinds of research she carried out for the sake of the novel.  (No link to the interview, I'm afraid.  You'll have to get ahold of the journal itself.)

Followup #2:  The novel I'm writing this semester while my Novel Workshop students write theirs is at 54,000 words.  That's only 1000 words from the mandated total word count I gave them at the beginning of the semester.  Problem is, I'm about 5/6 of the way through my plot.  So it will just need to go longer!

Mason goes historical--again

As so many others did, I first became familiar with the work of Bobbie Ann Mason through her books Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country.  Back then she was counted, fairly or unfairly, as part of a new wave of North American writers, the so-called "Dirty Realist" school that included authors like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Jayne Ann Phillips, and Larry Brown.  Both books were bestsellers and received critical praise.  I know they were also eagerly lapped up by budding young fiction writers of the time.  In Country was later made into a movie starring Bruce Willis, and the title story of Shiloh has become something of a contemporary American classic, anthologized repeatedly in a stream of fiction volumes.  But I lost track of Bobbie Ann Mason after that.  She seemed to fall out of favor--as did the minimalistic idiosyncracies of the Dirty Realist school.  (The death of Raymond Carver probably hastened along this inevitable development.)  Mason kept writing, however.  Among other things, she has pubished several more story collections, the memoir Clear Springs (nominated for a Pulitzer in 1999) and, in 2003, a biography of Elvis Presley for the Penguin Lives biography series.   She has also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine.

In 2011, she published The Girl in the Blue Beret,  her second historical novel and one of her rare fictional forays outside of the state of  Kentucky.  Well, actually, Girl is one of those books that makes you question the definition historical fiction.  Technically, it's a contemporary novel, one that follows the actions of its protagonist--a retired airline pilot--as he travels through Belgium and France to retrace his experiences there during World War II.  (The "present" of the novel is 1980.)  While what happens in the present certainly matters to the protagonist, what makes up the meat of the novel is the terrible weight of World War II history, specifically the history of the French resistance and the risks the résistants took to save and hide--and later return to England--American aviators who had been shot down over Belgium and France.   It is this history--told through memory, dialogue, and the occasional flashback--that most engrosses the reader and, in the end, impacts the retired pilot in ways he could not have imagined before he began his journeys.  The book is so informed by history--so completely a creature of it--that I can't think of any other label to apply but that of historical.

It's a joy to rediscover Mason's fiction after many years, and an even bigger joy to see her engaged with material that would have been outside the range of her earlier self.  She hasn't just kept writing, but she has grown as an artist.  Her research is impeccable.  Inspired by the true life story of her father-in-law and his own crash landing in Belgium, Mason read widely--through both published and unpublished memoirs--into the experiences of Allied flyers who were shot down during the war and into the experiences of the members of the French resistance who quietly helped them.  She also interviewed a woman who had been held in the same Koenigsberg prison camp that comes to play such an important, if disturbing, part in the novel.  I did not know--as Mason's protagonist Marshall doesn't--that résistants, after being arrested, were sometimes tortured and sent to concentration camps.  Finding this out makes for a crucial, moving turn in Marshall's present life.  



By all means, anyone who has enjoyed Mason's work in the past should "catch up" with this novel.  Or anyone interested in historical fiction generally--or World War II fiction in particular.  It will not disappoint you.  My only real criticism is that in the second half of the book a great deal of crucial history is transmitted by means of conversation between Marshall and Annette, the now older "Girl in the Blue Beret."  Literally page after page and chapter after chapter is mostly conversation about the past.  If a student in my novel writing class had tried that I would have felt compelled to correct him or her.  It would be more dramatically satisfying, I would tell them, to show at least some of this history via scene, after first establishing that the frame of the conversation between Marshall and Annette.  I think this is a fair complaint, but on the other hand I hate to complain about a book that so effectively brings to light this under-realized aspect of World War II history; and I hate to complain too when I'm so glad to see Mason return to the art of the novel.