New Van Gogh collection!

When I was working on my Van Gogh novel, Days on Fire, the one source I found myself coming back to constantly was the mammoth, three volume, hardbound Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, published originally by Bulfinch back in the 1950s.  It's an incredible resource: a better, fairer, clearer view into the mind and world of Van Gogh than any biography or novel (shhhh) or recollection "by those who knew him" (which are often marred by how little they really knew him).  Exacting descriptions of place he has visited; despair about his artwork and exultation about the same; resentment toward his brother and exhortations to him; disputes with his father; chatty discussions about (now long forgotten) artists or art dealers or paint supply store owners; opinions about the (countless) books he read; revelations about the women he loves and about love itself; depictions of the depressingly, growingly hopeless life at St. Paul's asylum in Saint Rémy--it's all there, along with so much more.  A whole adult life documented with a fantaticism of detail that is just about one of a kind, really.  As I say so often, I think surely it must be these letters--and Van Gogh's roadside eloquence--that accounts for our continued fascination with the man, just as much as his beautiful paintings and a life that was marked with so much tragedy, idealism, and stubbornness.   The one drawback to such a thorough recored, of course, is its necessary length.  The Complete Letters runs to something like 1800 pages.   Not a weekend read!  And while it's useful to watch the arc of the man's life play out over these hundreds of missives, long and short, profound and mundane, energized and bored and despairing, it's also true that not every letter is crucial to understanding Van Gogh, his time, and his milieau.  Or not crucial in the same way.  

So it's welcome news that in December a new selected edition of Van Gogh's letters will be published by Yale University Press, one with the beguiling title Ever Yours: The Essential Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.  You might have read Dan Piepenbring's early glimpse into the volume, published recently in Paris Review.  It certainly does sound like a promising new book: almost 800 pages in length, with 265 out of the extant 820 letters included, along with family photographs and 87 pages worth of reproductions from the actual handwritten letters.  At $50 it doesn't come cheap, but for a Van Gogh lover--or anyone simply curious about learning more about this fascinating person--it looks to me like money well spent. Of course, which letters you finally deem "essential" will depend on who you are and what you are trying to learn about the painter, but without yet having had the chance to review the collection I can take a pretty fair guess at some of the letters regarded as "musts": the letters written to Theo in the period of abject despair and loss of identity after being removed from his position as lay minister to miners in the Borinage region of Belgium; the letters to Theo explaining why the "no" delivered to Vincent by his cousin K was not really a "no," and why even in the turbulent state of his emotions it was better by far to feel such a powerful love than none at all; the letters to Theo glorifying the peaceful home life he enjoyed with his new life partner Sien and why, despite her being a former prostitute, Vincent regarded her as his wife and insisted the family do as well; letters describing his almost manic level of energy and the resulting "high yellow note" that marked his painting in that fitful, historic, crucial summer in Arles in 1888; the heartbreaking letter from St. Paul's in which he describes the painting he has just made in honor of the birth of his nephew (named after him) and his desire to bring it to the boy in person.  Interesting man, yes?  And let's face it, 800 pages--while hardly an inconsequential entry into Van Gogh's life and writing--is a much quicker read than 1800 pages.  This sounds like the perfect introduction to the other Van Gogh: the riveting literary artist.

                                                          *  *  *

Not to blow my own horn, but I am amazed and humbled by the fine reception my story collection Island Fog is receiving from book bloggers and other reviewers.  Here are two I found out about just yesterday: one comes from the book blog Books Are Love; the other from the Australian book blog The Bookshelft Garogyle.  (Great title, huh?)  Then there's the really positive one I got from Kirkus.You just write the stories and try to make them the best you can; then they go out there and you can't ever really (really) know if they are as good as you hope, not until such kind words come back to you.  I can't say how grateful I am.   And a little amazed.

                                                       

The fictional fine line

For my historical fiction workshop class last Wednesday,  the group read T.C. Boyle's novella Wild Child (from the 2010 collection Wild Child and other Stories) based on the famous true life case of the "Wild Boy of Aveyron." To summarize the true life case in brief: In 1800, in France, a boy was found living feral in the woods, naked.  No one knew for certain when he went in or for how long he'd lived there, but based on earlier reported sightings authorities estimated that he had lived for seven years or more in that environment, alone.  The boy seemed to have no knowledge of any language and did not react to any sounds.  It was assumed at first that he was a deaf-mute.  When it was discovered that he could in fact hear, a determined young doctor named Icard tried to civilize him, the hardest work of which was to try to teach him to understand and even speak the French language.  Icard also chose the name Victor for the boy.  After years of fantastic effort, Icard had to give up his experiment.  Victor simply was not progressing in his language acquisition, and in some ways he seemed to be regressing.  He was henceforth allowed to live out his life in the home of Madame Guérin--Icard's housekeeper--serving as Guérin's houseboy.  Victor did not cause the woman any undue trouble, but neither did he seem terribly happy.  To say the least, the attempt to turn the "savage" into a civilized man was deemed by all to have been a terrible failure.

From what I knew about Victor of Aveyron, and from what my students could tell, Boyle seemed to be sticking very closely to the known facts of the case.  Many of them also described the tone of the narration to be distant, clinical, impassionate, observing rather than participating.  (Perhaps this is what led one of them to call Boyle's style "stodgy.")  What Boyle appeared to be doing with the story was taking the facts of the case and lining them up inside a fluid, readable narrative.  I use italics on appeared because neither I nor my students knew enough about Boyle's intentions or his method of working to speak conclusively.  I had tried to find an interview with Boyle or an article about him in which he discussed the novella and his research in detail, but I wasn't successful.  The way the discussion was going I wished I had tried a little harder.   One student wondered aloud what made the novella fiction since Boyle's apparent modus operandi could describe a great deal of narrative nonfiction, including some very celebrated examples of such.  I have to admit the question stumped me.  I was completely unprepared for it.  (I'm much more ready to respond to those who attack a work of historical fiction for playing too loosely with the facts.  Fiction writers are rarely if ever questioned for being too faithful to the historical record.)  I said that since it was published in a collection of fiction I just accepted it as such, which is true but not a terribly convincing argument.  And I offered my apology for not finding out what Boyle himself had to say.  A pretty meager response.

Later, after I'd had time to think about it, I realized there were aspects of the book I could and should have pointed to in order to nudge it, in my students' minds, clearly to the side of fiction.  First, despite the complaints about the distant and clinical narration, the novel isn't written in third person objective; Boyle doesn't narrate, not completely, from the stance of the neutral historian.  Instead,  he shows the perspectives of a variety of the book's characters, most importantly, Icard, Madame Guérin, and Victor himself, especially in one especially fraught scene when Victor flees from Icard's control to find himself lost and and at a loss on the streets of Paris.  Given how shut out from Victor's mind the people around him felt, this scene certainly represents a leap of the imagination for the author.  A leap based partly on the facts of the case, of course, but even more on Boyle's intuition.  And too,while the novella's narrator demonstrates more powerful control over what we know and find out and believe and interpret than is typically the case with contemporary fiction--in which scene is primary--it's not like Wild Child is without scenes or without dialogue.  As I frequently say to people who like to discuss research vs imagination as if they are strict writerly dichotomies,  just because you know Mr. Brown had a conversation with Mrs. Smith at French restaurant in New York in 1931, and you even know the subject of their conversation, there is little to no chance you know what the actual words were that they used in that conversation.  And even if somehow you know the actual words, you don't know what the sky looked like outside the window; or what oddities marked the appearnce of the passersby; you don't know the state of the tablecloth on their table or how dingy was the lighting; you don't know who was sitting at the tables nearby and whether their conversation might have made it hard for Mr. Brown and Mrs. Smith to concentrate; you don't know if Mr. Brown and Mrs. Smith's conversation became a distraction for them.  These are just a fraction of the possible details that could potentially make up a scene in story, and they are details that the historical fiction writer must often create with his or her imagination.  Yes, that's right.  Must.  Those details are certainly evident in Boyle's story, even as he also relates a tremendous amount of factual information about the Wild Boy's behavior, the other principals and their backgrounds, and the philosophical debates of the time that made Victor such a crucial test case.

Meanwhile, a strict writer of narrative nonfiction would forbid himself or herself from risking such a liberal assertion of the the imagination.  I remember once hearing a radio interview with Sebastian Junger in which he claimed that every single detail in The Perfect Storm, even conversations between the principals, was derived through research, whether that meant through reading or by talking with knowledgeable people, including the families and friends of the men who died in the storm.  Junger refused to allow himself to speculate about how a person involved might have felt or might have thought or might have perceived something.  If he could not derive a detail convincingly from research, even if that detail might have made his narrative more vivid,  he left it out.   Clearly, this is not the way of the fiction writer.  And I think it's safe to say it wasn't Boyle's way in writing Wild Child.  Perhaps he came as close to the fiction/creative nonfiction line as any writer of historical fiction dares, but I'm not willing to write him off as not being among us.  He is T.C. Boyle, after all.  Don't you want him in your corner?

(Pictured on right: Boyle, in our corner.)

A Van Gogh opportunity!

Several interesting items came to me in the past few days, via Facebook and email.  With this post I'd like to share them with you.

Van Gogh Talking Painting Movie Project: UCA Honors College student Taylor Lea Hicks sent me a curious link, one that I just have to share with Creating Van Gogh readers.  It's an opportunity from Kick Starter not only to find out about a fascinating Van Gogh-themed movie project but to get involved yourself as a minor investor.  The plan for the movie is to tell Van Gogh's life story by having his paintings and drawings "come alive" and talk to the viewer.  Cool!  If you click on this link and watch the short video, you'll see an example of what the producers mean. Sounds like an exciting and extremely innovative project.

The "Van Gogh" photograph.  Could it be real after all? Several months back I first started posting about a controversial photograph, one that the historian of photography Joseph Buberger is convinced depicts the adult Vincent Van Gogh.  In a previous post, I passed on some evidence that suggests pretty strongly that the photograph was taken in Quebec, Canada by a Canadian photographer, making it unlikely that the photograph's subject could be Van Gogh, who never traveled outside of Europe.  But Joseph is still convinced and still seeks evidence to support his claim.  Last week he sent me two emails containing curious links.  Click on this link to see a colorized version of the photograph.  Very compelling.  The second link takes you to an article about Van Gogh in which Joseph's photograph is used, without comment, to show the reader what Van Gogh looked like.  Joseph's photo, despite the questions that surround it, certainly manages to stay in circulation!

Shameless plug/free stuff opportunity: Redacted Story, a just released, pleasantly perverse anthology from publisher KY Story, can be downloaded to your Kindle for FREE if you do so soon.  Click on this link to get the free download.  The 5-day free download deal began last Friday, which means there are only two days left!  Act soon!  As you probably guessed, the anthology includes a story of mine: a comic--even silly--sci-fi story about dogs on Pluto.  Yeah, that's right.  

Less shameless plug: On my other blog, Payperazzi, I've been carrying out a discussion about the 5 star rating system that is so often used to rate books.  The discussion has generated some Facebook and Goodreads discussion.  Click on this link to see my first post from last week and this link to see my followup post, featuring comments from reader Doug Luman. 

2013: Historical year for historical fiction

I've been thinking for several years now that we are living through a golden age for historical fiction.  Of course I realize that almost since novels have been written writers have played with the idea of setting their stories in earlier historical periods.  But I can't think of an era in which the ambition to do so is as widely embraced by solid, literary writers--even young literary writers--as it is now.  Again, I'm talking about literary historical fiction, not historical romance novels or historical mysteries, which have been popular for decades and will continue to be so.  I'm referring to literary fiction written by mainstream contemporary authors, authors who aspire to write serious, realistic books regardless of the era their books are set in, but who happen more and more to be setting their novels in the past.  And there may be no more evident proof for this trend than the awards-giving season just passed.  Four of the six books shortlisted for the 2013 Man-Booker Prize are historical fictions (including the eventual winner).  At least two of the five finalists for our own 2013 National Book Award are historical fictions (including the eventual winner).  And if you are of the ilk (as many are) to argue that historical fiction isn't just a matter of an author writing about a period of time before he or she was born but writing about an era of special historical interest (even if the author lived through it) or a period far enough in the past that it must be approached as an historical period not merely "the way we live now," then we should also count Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (set in 70s New York) as historical fiction, bringing the total for National Book Award finalist up to 3 out of 5.  Furthermore, just last week I was listening to the radio show Here and Now on NPR while book reviewer Lynn Neary offered up her unranked recommendations for the best fictional reading of 2013.  Neary named seven books in all, six of which--that's right six out of seven--qualify as historical fictions.  And she didn't even include two of the more prominent historical novels from 2013: Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.   Both of those are quite accomplished books, with The Luminaries, in my opinion, ranking as completely spectacular, one of the most memorable reading experiences I've had in a long time.  (Soon to come on this blog will be my own proselytizing  review of the book.) 

So what's going on?  Accepting my premise that we're living through a golden age of literary historical fiction, naturally leads to the question of Why.  Why are so many literary writers, both the young and the established, turning to previous eras for inspiration?  One obvious reason is implicit encouragement from publishers.  Just as, in the years following the astonishing success of the Harry Potter series and then the Twilight series, many writers thought to try their hand at YA--and, by the way, in college writing programs these days it's not uncommon to meet student writers seeking to specialize exclusively in YA, an unknown trend when I was a student in  a college writing program--as publishers let go their prejudice against historical fiction as a merely a matter of pretty costumes and exotic houses, as more of these books get published and earn acclaim for their authors, up-and-coming authors become increasingly influenced by and enthusiastic about the genre.   This simply must be the core reason.   

But it's not the only reason.  One can be successful (or not) and earn acclaim (or not) with almost any kind of book.  I think just as important a compulsion is the sense that writing historical fiction marks one as a writer who likes to take on serious, ambitious, even lofty challenges.  Every good literary novel will be serious, of course, but there's something about a historical novel that strikes readers, rightly or wrongly, as especially serious, and writers can't help but be influenced by this realization.  Perhaps it's all the research that typically accompanies the writing of a historical novel; perhaps it's the challenge of using that research to credibly represent the past; perhaps it's the challenge of turning that research into story.  For whatever reason, writing a historical novel is a special pleasure for those who do so.  It touches on so many different parts of our imaginative and intellectual  and even academic selves.  Every fiction one writes is (or can be) a source of pleasure, but the satisfaction of composing a good, successful historical fiction is unique. 

And I think maybe this leads to a final reason for historical fiction's emergence, a reason that ties back to the first I mentioned.  In an era in which--as agents and publishers have been telling us for too many years--the reading of literary fiction is on the decline and the selling of literary fiction is as hard as it's ever been, having a historical premise for a story sets it apart, makes it seem unique, gives it a recognizable and extremely useful identity: to agents, to publishers, to marketers, to booksellers, and to readers.   Finally, it might just be that historical fiction not only is a unique satisfaction for the one who writes it but makes for a more unique,  sexy novel on the bookstore shelf.  As a lover of the genre, if this means an increase in the number of good, commercially viable literary historical novels, I'm all for it.  After all, it's lead us to this current Golden Age, and I couldn't be happier.  

Sidelight: In case anyone reading this blog is a fan of sonnets as well as of historical fiction, you should check out my other blog, Payperazzi, in which I am currently providing a report on last semester's Sonnet Writing Workshop class, including the e-anthology we put together.  

The Circuitous Tale of a (finally) Successful Book (Part 2)

[Readers: This is a continuation of a post I started last week in which I tell the tale of how a short story collection was finally accepted by a publisher, something like twelve or thirteen years after it was begun.]



The hardest part of the writing life is not the writing itself.  Not that the writing is easy.  It certainly isn't, but it's also uniquely entertaining and deeply nourishing.  Writing really is its own reward--which is why so many people are called to do it, even in our supposedly post-literate society--even if it's not done perfectly well, but especially when it is done perfectly well.  No, the hardest part of the writing life is not the writing but all the infernal roadblocks between what you've written and the audience it might move.  The hardest part is knowing that what you've produced is solid, very solid, as solid as you are capable of making writing be, and yet you still hear a seeming unending series of "no"s from publishers, editors, and agents.  To be honest, often times, those "no"s end up being terrifically helpful.  They force you back to a project and make you reexamine a project, and as a result you realize weaknesses you just didn't see the first time around.  Now having seen them, you can properly address them.  Reexamining your work and making it better is almost always a valuable expenditure of time.  But then there are the occasions when you've already spent so much time on a project, months or years or even decades, when you've already reexamined it a hundred or a thousand times over, when you finally say to yourself: No, this is how the manuscript must be; this is how it should be published.

I reached that point with the manuscript of Island Fog a year ago.  An earlier version of the book (see my last post) I had circulated among small presses and entered into contests, all to no avail.  But now I knew why.  That earlier book was never the real book. This one was.  It had a lot going for it: Its stride spanned four different centuries of Nantucket history, realistically (I think) evoking those different periods; it had engaging dramas; and it contained some of the best writing I've ever produced, including my favorite piece of fiction I've ever written, the novella that is the title story of the collection.  That story is set on 21st century Nantucket and is introduced as a realistic story with a realistic setting, but it quickly spins into something else, something I won't call magical--because it isn't--but is certainly mysterious and probably indebted to John Fowles's spectacularly disorienting novel The Magus.  Its smoke and mirrors effects, its purposeful air of mystery, its thoroughly confused young protagonist, its borderline inexplicable and never exactly explained developments might remind one of Fowles's 1966 masterwork.  An editor at a magazine I once submitted it to wondered if the story was science fiction, which at the time astounded me because at no point during the creative process did I have science fiction in mind.  I guess she took literally a comment the narrator makes that the protagonist Doug had entered a kind of alternative Nantucket entirely cut off from the other, more familiar Nantucket he once knew, even more cut off from the familiar world of his college life and his family.  No, it's not sci-fi; it's just weird.

While still trying (and succeeding) to publish individual pieces of the collection, and reading from the stories at two different international writing conferences, I also tried to find a home for the book as a whole.  I got very serious at the last AWP, circulating among the tables rented by various small presses, describing the book and inquiring about their submission policies.  I also consulted some extremely helpful databases, the most helpful being the Poets & Writers database of small and alternative presses.  In that way, I educated myself on the small presses that publish fiction in this country, and I began to sort out which ones might be good fits for my book.  I submitted to several included in the P and W database as well as to a few that I learned about at AWP.   It's a great feeling to place your manuscript directly into the hands of someone who can make a decision about it, independent of an agent.  One frustration for the literary fiction writer, however, when dealing with small presses is that they tend to emphasize poetry and academic nonfiction, because these genres are largely ignored by mainstream publishers.  "You fiction writers always get those huge deals from the New York presses," I've had said to me by small press editors on several different occasions.  Huge deals?  Who are you talking about?  Most fiction writers are lucky if a person at a NYC press actually reads a single page of his book much less offers him a "huge deal."  No, the truth is that for many literary fiction writers the small press is just as much the inevitable fit as for poets and critics.  Because as with poetry and criticism, that's where the best, most daring work gets done.

I received many positive comments about the collection from various presses.  I got very very close with one, but finally they wanted the stories to be linked even more they are, linked in the manner of a novel-in-stories, which my book isn't and can't be.  With palpable regret they declined taking on the manuscript, but they did encourage me to try again another time with another book.  (I probably will.)  The positive responses I was getting told me I was on to something, that this new version of Island Fog was holding its own, bearing weight, if you will.  I just needed to keep trying.  One of the presses I tried at was Dialogos/Lavender Ink, run by Bill Lavender, a man I'd met two or three times at readings and at AWP, but no one I could say I actually knew.  I followed the same protocol everyone else must who submits to his press and I hoped for the best.

And then it happened.  Bill sent me a tidy little email one morning in late September, about six months after I'd submitted, inquiring if the book was still available.  Because his press was considering publishing it.  I responded immediately: Yes, it is still available; thank you for your interest.  Another month or two went by as I busied myself with all the usual activities of my writing and teaching and family life and tried not to wonder too much what Dialogos/Lavender Ink was thinking.  Finally, in mid-November I shot an email to Bill asking him if the press was still interested in my book.  I didn't expect an immediate reply.  And I had several errands to run just then. As it turned out, I didn't check back on my email until the next day.  When I did check I saw that Bill had replied within an hour of my emailing him.  His reply: Yes, we want it.  And in a followup message he had sent me a contractual agreement.  Just like that, early on a Saturday morning, sitting on my living room couch, the wait was over.  Island Fog the book was no longer an idea but an actuality--not a potential project anymore but a real one with an established publisher.

Afterword: At the moment I am seriously editing each of the stories in the collection.  (Bill needs the final version by February.)  This is crucial and very satisfying work.  You have no idea how good it feels just to worry about the writing itself and not selling the writing.  Of course, all that other kind of work awaits me when I put my next book on the market. : )

The Circuitous Tale of a (Finally) Successful Book, Part 1

I've mentioned here and there on this blog that I've created a collection of stories--half historical in nature--all set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.  I received the wonderful news not long ago that the book has been accepted for publication by Dialogos/Lavender Ink, a press run by the legendary poet and novelist Bill Lavender, who worked for so long for the University of New Orleans press.  (Yes, that's him in the picture.) As a general rule I hesitate to say that everything happens when it's supposed to--because that's kind of like saying everything happens according to God's will (which is a lie)--but in the case of Island Fog being accepted for publication, I have to say that I am glad it's happening now rather than, say, five years ago.  And thus begins my tale of how this collection came to be.  I'm going to break it into two parts, because the tale will take some time.

I started several of the stories in Island Fog perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago--during a trip I made with my family to Nantucket.  As is my wont, I was up before everyone else each day, trying to get a little writing done along with downing some come-alive coffee.  I hadn't planned on writing about Nantucket before I went, but ideas for stories just started coming to me.  In fact, I had so many story ideas--and was so afraid I might lose them--that I did something I've never done before: I started a brand new story each day of that vacation, writing as far into a story as I could before the family awoke and then leaving that story behind to begin a new story the next day.  In this fashion I laid down the tracks for the stories that now make up the second half of my present book.  But I hardly thought of them as a book back then.  They were just stories I wanted to nail in place in order to get back to later.  And I did, struggling mightily to read my atrocious handwriting, which turns from ordinary small/bad to illegible during the fury of engaged composing.

Eventually, I finished every one of those stories and in the years that followed I edited them mercilessly, revised a few significantly, and kept sending them out to various magazines.  A few were accepted and were long ago published (but not the title story, one of my favorites, which is one of the many reasons I'm so happy the book will appear).  A story about a plumber who hears some painful facts about his wife's death during a breakfast at a diner was published in 2005 in the now defunct Dana Literary Society Online Journal; a story about a couple struggling through the emotional fallout of several failed pregnancies was published in the journal Oasis, also in 2005; a story about a ghost tour leader haunted by his former male lover was accepted by Seattle Review and, after a wait of numerous years, finally appeared in 2009. 

It wasn't too long after the Nantucket stories began to be accepted by journals that it occurred to me I had a neat little set that could form a solid portion of a story collection.  Not enough pages to make a whole collection, but perhaps a half.  So I gathered together some non-Nanucket stories I thought worked all right together and combined them with the Nantucket stories to make a book I called--tah-dah!--Island Fog.  To the non-Nantucket stories I added the section header "Off-Island"--using stories that I thought had an enhanced sense of place--and the Nantucket stories were given the section header "On-Island."  Very clever, I thought.  The headers, and the organizational strategy they highlighted, would make this disparate group of fictions seem to belong together.  Well, in truth they didn't.   At least not enough to convince me or any of the many contests and small presses I submitted the book to.  Not knowing what to do, deciding the collection was a misft, I finally put it aside.  I didn't do anything with it for a long time except to occasionally submit one of the Nantucket pieces to a seemingly appropriate journal.

Well, what should happen except that I returned to Nantucket in 2011--for the first time in several years--having more or less finished my Van Gogh novel, having started this blog, and suddenly having historical fiction on the brain.  Lots of new ideas for Nantucket stories came to me, except this time all of them were historical in nature.  Like the first time, I started as many of the stories as I could while I was on the island, but I think I only managed to get three underway.  Later I drafted a fourth and, still later, a fifth. Certain characters I just could not get out of my head.  I had to write them: a retired whale ship captain who long ago was stranded at sea and forced into cannibalism (inspired, I know, by the real life story of George Pollard, commander of the Essex); a whaling widow who feels the first inklings of lesbianism; an African-American schoolteacher walking through some mid-island streets on a foggy afternoon, early in the twentieth century; a self-satisfied twelve year old, the son of a sheep farmer, who has befriended a half-Indian boy early in the nineteenth century.  I fleshed out these characters' stories, having a ball with them, and at some point--I can't remember when-- it occurred to me: I've got a new Island Fog book now.  The real Island Fog.

Next post: The process of getting done, getting it out, and getting it accepted.

World News worthy!

Last week for this household featured one of those curious episodes when you stumble into the attention of the wider world and use up three seconds of your mythical fifteen minutes of fame.  Here's how it happened: On the day that it was announced that a painting uncovered in 1991 in someone's attic in Norway had been declared an authentic Van Gogh by the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, I received an email from a man who works at World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer.  I almost just breezed right by it--assuming it was another one of those mass emails I get from various (mostly left wing) organizations--until I realized the subject line said something about my blog.  So I opened the message only to find out that World News Tonight wanted to use a photo that I'd posted on my blog for their story on the Van Gogh painting.  What??

The painting in question, completed in the summer of 1888, was of the landscape surrounding Montmajour Abbey.  Montmajour was an abandoned monastery in Van Gogh's time but is now a museum and popular tourist site.   It sits atop a sizeable hill a few miles from Arles, in southern France.  It was one of Van Gogh's favorite places to go to look for views of the landscape around the city, especially in the summer of 1888, the events of which take up a sizeable portion of my novel Days on Fire.   When I first traveled to Arles it was one of the sites I made a special point of visiting, and I've gone back several times since just to enjoy the quiet and the majesty of the old stone and, most of all, the splendid views.  (The abbey nowadays also features regular art exhibits.)  My wife Stephanie came with me when I went last July and she took several photographs, both inside and outside the abbey.  I reported our visit on this blog while we were in France and uploaded a couple of the photos.  World News Tonight found the photos and wanted to use one in particular (that's it above).  They wanted to show viewers what the countryside that Van Gogh painted actually looks like.   (Of course, while still rural that countryside today can't and doesn't look exactly the same as in the 1880s.  And, besides, the stretch of landscape captured in my wife's photo isn't identical to what Van Gogh painted.  But was I going to point this out to World News Tonight?)  The really ironic thing is that of all the masterful photographs Stephanie took during our European trip, she was least thrilled about the photos she took outside at Montmajour and for a simple reason: The sun was so bright she couldn't even see the screen that tells you what you are photographing!  Essentially, she was shooting blind.

But blind must have been pretty good, because World News Tonight wanted to use her photograph.  It made for an excited stir at the office early in the afternoon.   Funny though, we forgot to watch the show later.  I got busy making dinner, and she was working on the computer, and we completely missed it.  (Perhaps factoring in a bit was my skepticism.  I know that news programs prepare a lot more news than they actually show.)  However, on my email that evening was another message from the World News Tonight employee.  He had sent it right before they went on the air and advised me that they were still planning on using the photograph; the story, he said, would run at the end of the first block of news.  We couldn't access that night's episode online until the following evening, but sure enough there it was: the picture my wife had taken at Montmajour Abbey two months earlier, fillng the whole screen, with her name superimposed at the left hand corner.  When I excitedly informed my 13 year old son about his mother's accomplishment, he was typically unimpressed.  "God, Dad," he said, "that is such a typical middle-class thing to get excited about."  "Hey," I shot back, "you think it's so fantastic that the guys who make those gamer videos you watch have 80 or 100 thousand fans.  World News Tonight is watched by millions of people."  That gave him pause, but he even so he declined to watch the clip.  (You know how it is, the toughest audience for the prophet is his home country.)

But if any Friends Of Stephanie care to check out the clip, follow this link to last Monday's full episode of World New Tonight with Diane Sawyer.  The story about the Van Gogh painting appears toward the end of the first batch of news.

Visiting writer reactions

Last year, a faculty member in my department had an intriguing idea: to invite to campus Damien Echols, a man who has recently published a memoir but who is better known for being one of the "West Memphis Three."  You may or may not have heard of the West Memphis Three, but know that for several years they were a serious cause célèbre, not only in my home state of Arkansas but in other parts of the country.  A documentary about the the three, West of Memphis, was released last winter, only one of several movies that have been made about them, with more to follow.  Here in a nutshell is their story:  Twenty years ago, three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas were brutually murdered, their bodies tied together and mutilated.  Three teenagers--who later became known as the West Memphis Three--were quickly arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime.   Damien Echols, supposedly the ringleader of the Three, was sentenced to death.  The other two teenagers--Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin--were given sentences of life imprisonment.  It's impossible in this space to go through all the various legal battles that were fought over the next two decades, the reservations that were raised about the evidence and how it was gathered; new forensic evidence revealed in 2007 that suggested the presence of other, yet-to-be-identified individuals at the crime scene on the night of the murder; the outcries the case raised inside and outside the state, both from supporters and critics of the Three; and the number of articles and books written as a result.  But it's safe to say that nearly twenty years after the initial guilty verdict significant questions remain about how the case was handled, with a burgeoning consensus opinion that the Three were wrongly convicted.

While the Three never received the retrial that they wanted, sentiment in favor of their innocence ran so strongly that two years ago they were allowed the option of entering an Alford plea, a complicated legal manuever that ultimately permitted them to leave jail as free men without being officially exonerated; that is, without the state of Arkansas having to admit they never should have been locked up in the first place.  (Instead it was determined that the time they had already served in prison satisifed their sentences.)

Fast forward to 2013, and Damien Echols is not only an ex-convict but the author of the recently released (and critically acclaimed) Life after Death, the story of his life before, during, and after his imprisonment.  Given the power of his story, and his obvious notoriety, it occurred to one UCA Writing faculty member last fall that Echols would be a natural to fill a visiting writer slot for 2013-14.  While this was not my idea, I did support it.  Every year at UCA we invite artists of all stripes and backgrounds to visit campus, to read from their work, and to share thoughts on their craft with students and members of the public.  To say the least, over the years we've entertained visiting artists of wildly divergent ages, socio-economic backgrounds, politics, religious beliefs, aesthetic tastes, and creative histories.   Allowing our students access to a range of voices wider than those of our regular, continuing faculty is a critical part of their writing education--and their university education, period.   And given that Echols, with the permission of the state of Arkansas, is now a free man, there certainly was no legal hindrance on our part from inviting him or on his part from accepting the invitation.

So now we are letting it be known that Echols is coming to UCA this semester, and the reaction we've gotten has surprised and disheartened me.  While many on campus and in the central Arkansas area are glad and excited for his visit, and are eagerly planning on attending his public event, we are also receiving livid emails from individuals who believe Echols should never be allowed to speak anywhere ever again.  It has been suggested in some of these emails that he will unduly influence the impressionable minds of our students, leading them astray.  Some of these emails have been so disturbing that the dean's office has had to make arrangements for security to be present at Echols' events.  (I should add here that to their credit UCA administrators have rejected out of hand any notion that Echols' visit should be canceled, which is what the email screamers are telling us to do.) Needless to say, arranging for enhanced security is not our normal protocol for entertaining visiting writers.  And it never should have to be.  The point of a college campus is to promote academic growth, intellectual curiosity, and artistic maturity. None of those outcomes can be attained if one reacts to new ideas and unusual speakers with fear, hatred, or simple noise.   That is classically the wrong approach to take.  Instead, all of us, myself included, need to trust that in a marketplace of competing words and ideas, the truth will win out.  Arguably, the truth sufficiently won out in the West Memphis Three case to convince the state of Arkansas that it made more sense to let the Three go then to keep them in prison.  Are there those who believe the state made a wrong decision in letting the Three out? Absolutely.  And they have stated their arguments with considerable passion.  I expect and hope they will continue to do so, while at the same time I hope they will respect the right--even the duty--of a university to bring speakers of diverse public interest and artistic accomplishment to campus.  Part of me is worried about the hornet's nest of anger we've stirred up by inviting Damien Echols to campus, but another part of me says that this means we've done exactly the right thing.  Education doesn't happen without some controversy and without lots of unpleasant truth telling.  I know that my colleagues in the Department of Writing--down to the last woman and man--are concerned more than anything with mentoring the young minds entrusted to our care.  I can only hope we are allowed to continue pursuing that mission, rather than be shouted down by a few who, so far at least, seem to lack faith in the marketplace of ideas.

HIstorical fiction from Franklin and Fennelly

Popular southern novelist Tom Franklin has entered the domain of historical fiction before, first with his bestselling Hell at the Breech (2003) and then again (sort of) with his lurid, black-comic, historical fantasy Smonk (2007). So it's not surprising to find myself using this space to review another historical novel with his signature attached to it, namely The Tilted World, scheduled for release in September.   What's different this time is that Franklin isn't the author but the co-author, the other co-author being none other than his energetic and ambidextrous wife Beth Ann Fennelly, she of well-deserved poetry and nonfiction fame (and current director of the esteemed MFA program at the University of Mississippi).  It's hard to know what made Fennelly want to jump into fictional waters or Franklin to move aside so gracefully to allow her a place in the pool, but readers will be glad for their mutual cooperation.  The historical setting for The Tilted World is the Great Flood of 1927—an event, the authors note in their engaging afterword, that not only displaced thousands of southerners and came with a political fallout similar to that which followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but which permanently altered the social and political landscape of America.  An event as titanic as that one certainly deserves a fictional retelling, but what proves more relevant to, and interesting in, the novel is another aspect of 1920s American history: prohibition.   After all, the America Franklin and Fennelly depict is an America very late into the peculiar experiment, an America in which revenuers can easily be bribed or otherwise made to disappear, where the revenuers themselves when off duty enjoy illegal whiskey as much as anyone, where things have gotten so bad Herbert Hoover has to create a special task force of select, honest revenuers, because so many in the service are uselessly corrupt.  In such an America move our two protagonists: Ted Ingersoll, a former army sharpshooter and one of those honest revenue agents, and Dixie Clay, a young wife of a Mississippi bootlegger who, only after she marries and realizes exactly how her husband makes his money, discovers she is quite the natural at making moonshine herself. 

What brings the two protagonists together is a child--orphaned due to a violent raid on a bootlegger--that Ingersoll needs to find a foster home for, and the fact that Dixie has recently suffered through a series of dispiriting miscarriages.   Indeed, Dixie is quite glad that Ingersoll found his way through the woods to her home, so glad she puts aside her natural suspicions.  And not surprisingly, Ingersoll takes a shining to the pretty, freckled, whip smart young woman.  There are a few roadblocks to romance though.  First of all, Dixie is married.  Second, she's a bootlegger.  Third, a historic flood is about to release itself upon the American South.  And fourth, her cad of a husband Clay is, unknown to Dixie, conspiring to commit a severe act of sabotage against their hometown and just at the worst possible moment.  Will love prevail?  Well, maybe so.  

Cagily focusing The Tilted World on two equally significant protagonists—one male, one female—the two different writers develop the novel on separate tracks for most of its length, permanently bringing together the protagonists only about three quarters of the way through.  (And fittingly with a powerhouse, nearly perfect scene that features a medical emergency with the child and some brilliantly calm parental nerves.)  It’s impossible not to imagine Franklin acting as the writer of Ingersoll or to imagine anyone but Fennelly as the originator of Dixie, who discovers her true role in life after Ingersoll gives her the orphan to raise as her own.  Throughout, Fennelly portrays Dixie’s struggles to align who she is with what she is allowed to do.  Not merely a pretty, innocent woman done wrong, Dixie is a proud craftsman, a woman given the unusual job of running the still because of her bootlegger husband’s frequent sales trips.  She proves not just capable at making tasty moonshine but superb at it, so good her husband insists she sacrifice quality for quantity so that he can better keep up with demand and turn an even better profit.  Dixie refuses to submit to this violation and comes up with a better plan: she increases the quality even more, so that her customers will be willing to pay many times what they would for ordinary liquor and in the process earn her husband the enhanced profit he seeks.  This sly strategy to both maintain her self-respect and pacify her husband fails in the end.  But then again everything is destined to fail in the light of the unprecedented natural disaster released upon Mississippi.  

Franklin’s Ingersoll, meanwhile, is a loveable, quietly heroic galoot.  While he’s a well-crafted and credible hero, what fascinates the reader in his chapters is less Ingersoll himself than the world of revenuers, those men trying to carry out a strange job against impossible odds, cultual lethargy, and their own growing distaste for the hypocrisy of it all.  In the Ingersoll chapters, Franklin’s taste for the lurid, the off-color, and the folkloric rise to the fore, engendering the fine entertainment we have come to expect from him. 

Eventually, of course, the two separate tracks of the novel merge, and half the delight of the book from that point on is guessing which scenes and what lines and which character impulses one of the authors suggested to the other.  It is a credit to them both that the latter chapters, when Dixie and Ingersoll are bound together, are as seamless and engaging as any in the book.

The Tilted World is a well-told, commercially viable literary novel set in the time of a notable historical event.  It’s no knock to the novel to say that one can easily imagine a movie coming from it.  It is that tight of a creation.  Of course, as with any book there are flaws.  One could wish for an even stronger emphasis on the flood itself and the resulting geo-political damage, or for a further exploration of the history of enforcement of the Volstead Act—but it’s a novel not an academic treatise.  One could wish that the inevitable pairing of Dixie and Ingersoll seem a bit less inevitable and the sex scene between them a little less ludicrous and a lot less telegraphed; one could wish for a few more characters who seemed less like types we’ve seen in southern fiction before.  On the other hand, when two writers of very different styles and sensibilities work together it is always a risk that they will cancel each other out, that what makes each most idiosyncratic, even masterful, will be sacrificed in the name of compromise, with the result being a muddled mess of competent but finally uninteresting writing.   It’s safe to say that that did not happen to Fennelly and Franklin in The Tilted World.  Rather than blunting each other’s strengths they seemed to have enhanced them.  In fact, it seems as if it’s the poet Fennelly who discovers and probes and solidifies the heart of the book, while it’s the fiction writer Franklin who keeps the story humming along at a steady pace.  That’s a delicate dance few writing couples, to say nothing of writing married couples, can pull off.  It’s a pleasure worth the price of admission to see Fennelly and Franklin make it work.

A new blog future

I started Creating Van Gogh with the idea of thinking through and expounding on various issues I was confronting in my attempt to write a compelling, credible historical novel: What were the "rules"?  How   do I handle this research thing?  What exactly is the proper function of the imagination in historical fiction, and is its function any different than for any other kind of fiction?  What do I do with contrasting historical "facts"?  What am I allowed to do when borrowing work that my character, in real life, created?  These are only a few of the many questions I've considered in my four years of doing this blog, and I've gotten some useful answers from my readers.  Of course, there are plenty of questions I probably should have considered but didn't.  And along the way, as various professional and personal events have unfolded in my life, I've written about other issues not strictly related to historical fiction: some crazy administrative developments at my university, for instance, and how the public conception of a writing professor rarely corresponds with the real nature of the job.  I've written about a Novel Writing Workshop I teach; what I've learned; how I might do it better.  I've written about four different AWP conferences and the UK's Great Writing conference; I've written about Toad Suck Review, the journal I help edit; I've written about the connections between running and writing.  I've recommended books; I've reported on some of my publications.  In short, Creating Van Gogh today is less about historical fiction, or about my Van Gogh novel, than it is about the state of imaginative writing generally and the art of teaching imaginative writing.  Yes, that's right, I'm guilty of making another writing and teaching blog.

That being the case, I've decided to create a new blog this fall that in its very conception is broader than the my original conception for Creating Van Gogh and thus fairly allows me to discuss any relevant issue or development or fantastic idea I've heard about in regards to the literary life and the unique nuturing of literary lives that takes place in university settings.  As I said, I've been kind of doing this already, and so it's probably time for the blog itself to match the identity of the content.  I haven't finalized a name yet.  I'm toying with a few possibilities, Letteratti being the one I like the most right now.  When a name is finalized, you'll be the first to know.  Meanwhile, after a few more entries, Creating Van Gogh will go into suspended animation.  It won't quite end; that is, I certainly can see myself putting up the occasional post, especially for any updates regarding my book.  But for the most part it will be in a state of rest.   I began the blog while I was in the throes of finalizing a draft of my novel.  Now that the novel has been published, it seems like a good time to let it nap.

                                                                *    *    *

Other publishing updates: It's been an unusually active summer for me in terms of placing my work, both long and short.  Traditionally, literary journals go into suspension during the summmer months, but as more and more journals go online, it's not unusual anymore to find journals that read and publish all year round; and sometimes this means a dizzyingly fast turnaround between acceptance and publication.  One online journal thankfully caught me by phone the day before I was to leave on an extended trip to Europe.  A trip in which I had NO phone service and limited internet access.  Whew!  They informed me of the acceptance and said they needed a recent photo of me, which I proceeded to pose for and my wife proceeded to take.  I emailed it to them that afternoon and within a week my story, and the picture, was up on their web site.  

In any case, here's a countdown of my publications/acceptances this summer, with links to the works provided where possible.  In May, an excerpt from Days on Fire appeared in Versal, the great English-language journal published in Amsterdam.  In July, I was the featured contributor on the journal's blog.  You can check out my answers to their rather creative questions here.  Also this summer, I published (in a somewhat trimmed down state) my quirky story "Homeroom" (written as a series of high school homeroom announcements) in theNewerYork Press's Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature (EEEL); I published the longish story "Home Visit" in Gemini; and I published the memoir essay "A Minute Inside the Ocean Cafe, July 1980" in Squalorly.   Meanwhile, my half-personal/half-journalistic essay on marathon running, "Thirteen More Miles," is soon to appear in the journal 1966, a magazine conceived with the fantastic idea of focusing on research-driven narrative nonfiction.  (The link takes you to the journal but not to my essay--I promise it will be there soon.)  Finally, as I reported in my post of last week, I placed my historical short (long) story "On Cherry Street" in Pembroke.  The story should appear this fall.

And, the best news of all is that Days on Fire is out and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com, capping a summer that has been quite the whirlwind for me--in more ways than one.

Days on Fire is PUBLISHED!!

In my last post, I wrote about meeting with the directors of Elan Sud and discussing a possible French-language edition of my Van Gogh novel.  Well, how fitting that with this post I can finally announce the publication of the original English language version of the book.  That's right, Days on Fire is finally out and available!  The book can be purchased through Amazon. com here; also through Barnes & Noble.com here; and through Lulu.com here.  It can also be special ordered by your favorite neighborhood bookstore through Ingram Distributors.  Finally, for readers in the UK, the book is available through Amazon.co.uk.  Click here for that link.

This sure has been a long time coming.  I started this blog, after all,  back in 2009.  Along the way, various readers have been asking me, "Why can't I buy a copy of your book?"  Well, the simple and most truthful reason is that all good things take time, and I think it took a fair amount of time for the book to finally take the shape it needed to be.  But here it is.  If you decide to get it, I hope it is the pleasure for you to read that it always was for me to write--even despite how long it took!

Enjoy the unexpected

Last week, I had one of the more unique experiences of my writing life: meeting with the directors of Elan Sud, a boutique French publisher, at their cozy headquarters on a quiet side street in Orange. The interview was arranged by the woman who owns the house we were renting in Rapheles-les-Arles, an avid book reader and the friend of an author who publishes with this press.  It was a wonderful experience talking with Madame Corinne Neidegger and her partner Monsieur Dominique Lin. Madame Neidegger understands spoken English but speaks little herself; Dominque speaks and understands English, yet it is, of course, very far from being a first language for him; I understand spoken French somewhat, but I don’t speak it well at all.  So for over an hour we engaged in a fascinating triangulated conversation.  Madame Neidegger asked me questions in French, and I answered them mostly in English, with interpretations and amplifications provided by Dominique, a working writer himself--I bought one of his novels (Toca Leon!) during my visit--with long experience in the publishing industry, as has Madame Neidegger.  In fact, Madame Neidegger once worked for Actes-Sud, one of the largest publishers in all of France and a company headquartered in Arles.

A passion for well-written, well-edited books is what encouraged them to start Elan Sud.  Like many niche presses, it is a labor of love and one that tries to address important needs left behind by mainstream publishers.  For Elan Sud, this means publishing, among other things, graphic novels, novels by young first time writers (through a labor intensive, multi-stage submissions and drafting process), and publishing fiction set in atypical settings, like Cuba.  We spent a good deal of time discussing my Van Gogh novel, but also many minutes reviewing the state of publishing in France.  What was striking was how similar their complaints were to complaints made about publishing in the United States; e.g., a few massive houses buying up many smaller presses, a lack of courage and originality in what they publish, too many examples of patently bad books—with little evidence of editorial oversight—being not only allowed into the market but turning into bestsellers.  The subject of Fifty Shades of Gray came up.  (Yes, the book has been published in France too.)  I told them what I tell everyone: I hear that it’s pretty badly written.  Dominique was beside himself.  “Of course, of course, it’s badly written. That’s what everyone says.  And I don’t understand.  When somebody  tells me this food smells terrible and tries to give it to me, I will not eat it.  But if someone says , this book is terrible, people want to read it!” 

They are both lovely, dedicated, and shrewd people, with wonderful senses of humor and an abiding interest in publishing provocative work.  Here I thought I was driving to Orange from Arles just to drop off a copy of my novel, and I found myself invited in, given a place to sit, offered coffee, and engaging in a chat that lasted seventy minutes long and covered everything from my own life history to the history of my book to the characteristic of my book to the characteristics of their press to the state of “the book” to the practical challenges of literary translation.  We even talked over their philosophy on book covers.  I’ve never had a more engaging if nerve-wracking hour, an hour I could never have imagined for myself years ago when I first started my book.  One I could have never imagined for myself when I first thought of visiting France.  Sometimes, it’s simply amazing where a project can take you.  In this case, I really mean where.