Note from the writer

Several years ago, I wrote to a very famous writer, one whose student I had been, for advice in getting my first book published. She generously replied by providing the names both of her agent and her fiction editor. Usually, someone who has failed in publishing books, as I have, does not secure that kind of confidence -- from anyone, and that means anyone, even one's own mother -- but I was lucky enough to have had a teacher who signed her name two decades ago to her statement of my young achievements, and who stands by it: it was then and still is her recommendation that I publish my work and that I work as a teacher.

Being on the outside

The atmosphere of the story suggests they are all women, but you have to dissect it, study it, to prove it -- no man or "he" is mentioned in the story, which runs 500 words. Before I cut 330 words from it, the story seemed "surreal" or Old Norse -- Scandinavian (dark nights) or Old English: it read like boulders and weeds. Cutting 330 words made it deeper, active, and more resonant. The extra wordage was needed to show that the women were in boring yet complicated terms on the diet. Literature and writing are not boring as rebalancing diets for a group of women to enter on together.

I was in the second year of a rebalancing diet eight years ago -- in my unconscious, that is where the number "eight" is coming from. I went on the diet alone, using books and going to the health food store. I was in a group of “recovery” women who ate together once a month. It was not boring, but fun. The group kept certain recovery women out due to their "diagnoses" (this was not the fiction, but the real tale), and now those women suffer alone, eight years later, and had to move from their houses to different towns. I stayed with the main group for a while then left because they had kept the others out to suffer. In the fiction story about the diet, two women stay away, and the eight others wonder about them. The other way of being on the "outside" is to reject the group.

The eight members of the group

The tallest of the group, Edel, is 5'6". It is not a group for "short people": it is a group for "good people," but they call it a group for "our kind of people." They experience "goodness" in one way, and it brings them happiness to "eat, meet, and greet." There is no hugging, except Von forgets herself and tries to jump Dash’s shoulders. Von has been to the barber, but the group doesn't know that. They think she has taken up wearing scarves and hats and caps against a war -- which she is, against a war -- as she hopes the group is with her. But the group is not "for" or "against" any war. They are "for" eating correctly in a balanced way, going by principles. It is hard for most of them to do, and when they aren't finishing off a once-a-month pie together, they are talking about it: the diet. They are not trying to lose weight, as with all previous diets, but are trying to achieve balance through nutrition. Vinegar is out, an easy one. The hard one is sugar, so once a month they eat it together, to get it over with, to be in agreement, to see to it, to acknowledge liberties they still enjoy. They agree they are experiencing more balance than ever before, that their diets are performing a miracle for them; they are free and clear of imbalance. Their nutrients solve their complaints, make them feel whole and clear, of one good conscience, and they are right to feel that way. Each is a fish in a big pond; each is a fish plant in an underwater marsh of seaweed; each says so in their own words. The language slips and hisses: what about knowing the story, really hearing it ala snorts from the lamb's nostrils -- "horse's mouth" frightens Vella: a sense of smell tells of something peculiar or suspicious or that doesn't fit. Starro, who is not in the group, won’t tell even one story, so that doesn't fit her behavior, the way her jeans fit: perfectly. Tesich tells stories about irrelevant things. None tells stories about work. Their work is run over by computers with ears, eyes, mouth, yet the computers do not breathe or notice smells. Dalni smells things that aren't there and develops a sick joke that makes them laugh: "Is it me?" she leads, "Or do you smell socks?" "The President's cat," Krenna says, chuckling hilariously. Dalni has "olfactory hallucinations," Shel, Ph.D., says. Tet cannot smell at all, and Dalni smells what cannot be smelled. Because Dalni cannot resist telling her joke, and Krenna cannot resist hers, and no one tells good stories, both are expelled. The group secretly changes its meeting time to the third Wednesday of each month, butting Dalni and Krenna -- hoping they go have sex. “Together,” Par, the newcomer, says, in tune with the wishes of the eight members of the group -- stories they'd like to hear.

Rice Crackers

Two approaches to deciphering and remarking our condition in America today: quilts and rice crackers.

Not particularly maternal and slavishly sexual we make rice crackers. Believing in the power of plain talk to revitalize the obituated giant we make quilts.

Q (g) u i (l) t.

Rice cracker: slightly sweet and slightly salty Chinese appetizer. Tease and oddity. Symbol of food. Rice cracker: our body on the tongue of the synogogue.

A woman's body is not Art. A woman's dimensions are not compressible to the fact of a cracker or definite as the pattern of a quilt. A woman is what.

What form might a woman's writing take besides quilts and rice crackers? What leaves or vase or tools might deliver her language and literature without the delicate omissions and parti-colored busy-ness of quilts and rice crackers?

Unusable language is silencing screams, signs, and villages.

(Nov. 12, 1988)

Why I Write

I write fiction to be more modest than I am in real life. To think less about tiny inconveniences and insults. To harbor less antipathy toward others. My characters don't react effectively to situations, especially distressing situations. Almost everything is expressed ironically.

I no longer wish to impress anyone with anything I write. I no longer wish to impress or get attention. It's too costly. I say too little; I attract too much attention. I would rather say what is nearer to truth.

What if there is no audience (and God has no material existence), why write?

I write to express joy.

As a woman writing I am interested in a particular kind of spiritual and physical freedom that living in the world extinguishes. Writing is a way out of the world, to another world that can offer what the 9-to-5 plot cannot. I am not insensible to the demands of straight, narrative fiction, and I enjoy reading straight, narrative fiction when the language is interesting or when its withholding is. I am also wooed by poetry. My poetry is becoming algebraic, masculine, square with suppressed emotion.

What I remember of most narration is not plot but atmosphere.

I find the greatest power in creating concrete images.

(Oct. 14, 1990)

Fiction's Properties

from Zadie Smith in "Fail Better," The Guardian, Saturday, January 13, 2007 (an article about the writing of ideal novels):

[...]Writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. [...]Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can't help tell if you write well; it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.[...]

[...]Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry—we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it.[...]

from Mary Gordon in "Bad Behavior," a talk originally presented at a 20th-Century Masters Tribute to Flannery O'Connor, sponsored by the PEN American Center and Lincoln Center:

Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have seen the light of day because of its parent, journalism. [...]

[...]I dreamed that Flannery O’Connor and I were speaking together on a panel. Her hair was perfectly coifed; she was wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and a perfectly crisp white blouse, and perfectly shined penny loafers. My hair was filthy, my slip was showing, my stockings were ripped. In the dream she said to me, 'Your problem is that you don’t believe in perfection.' And I said to her, because it was my dream, 'I do believe in perfection, but you think perfection is flawlessness, and I think it’s completeness.'[...]

from the Christopher Isherwood Diaries (July, 1940):

Prayer for writers: 'Oh source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my life become my art and my art my life.'

from Alibris:

On William Mills Todd III's The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Princeton University Press, 1976):

In the field of Russian literary studies, there is surprisingly little comprehensive, high-quality discussion of independent genres and their effect on the creativity of an era. This important text on the quasi-public "friendly letter" of nineteenth-century Russia addresses this deficiency. In The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin, Todd examines the tradition of familiar letter writing that developed in the early 1800s among the Arzamasians -- a literary circle that included such luminaries as Pushkin, Karamzin, and Turgenev -- and argues that these letters constitute a distinct literary genre. Such letter writing is not original with the Russian Romantics, but the fact that Russia of the 1820s and 1830s developed this genre so powerfully among its finest writers, and integrated French and German prototypes with such skill, makes their practice exemplary. Todd gives a thorough prehistory of the convention of "correspondence," both salon and scientific, in the eighteenth century, with marvelous citations. He then concentrates on the themes, strategies, and autobiographical functions of the letter for several master writers in Pushkin's time. By considering the writers' peculiar working out of semiprivate personae fashioned in public view, one can better understand certain later first-person works like Dostoevsky's Poor Folk and Notes from the Underground, Tolstoy's Confession, and works of Chekhov. This book's scholarship demonstrates that the real literary life and the genuine advance of literary thought in Russia occurred not in journalistic criticism but rather in this correspondence.