Posts from the ‘craft’ Category

Seth Fried is an Original and Here is an Interview to Prove It

Seriously, of all the names I hear bandied about in the tiny literary world I inhabit, I don’t hear Seth’s nearly as often as I should. That needs to change. The minute I read Seth’s piece in One Story I was floored by the originality of his voice. I wish people would stop comparing him to George Saunders. (I wish people would stop comparing everyone to George Saunders.) Seth’s voice is all his own and I think his debut collection is going to knock people backwards when they read it.

So, read the interview here and see if you don’t agree. Even just with this excerpt:

If a story is all concept and no urgency, I think that’s when you run the risk of shallowness and/or gimmickry. Conversely, if a story is all urgency with no concept to make it compelling, you can start to run the risk of sentimentality and/or preachiness. What works for me is to decide first what urgent thing I’m hoping to express, and then to come up with a concept/scenario that suits that urgent thing. Of course, both the urgent thing and the concept can change radically throughout the writing of a given story. What’s important is that there be a strong relationship between the two.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

You mentioned a story of mine called “Life in the Harem,” which is about a man who is inexplicably placed in a King’s harem alongside a bunch of beautiful women. Summarizing it like that, it definitely sounds overtly concept-y. But the idea grew out of real anxieties I had about the way heterosexual men seem to perceive desire in our culture.

David Foster Wallace once wrote in a criticism of one of John Updike’s protagonists, “[...] he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair.” That’s an attitude that seems not only prevalent among heterosexual men in our culture, but encouraged among heterosexual men by our culture. Obviously, that’s just a gut feeling I have (probably a result of sitting through one too many Axe body spray commercials) and not something I can really substantiate here. All I’m saying is that, as a heterosexual, it was an anxiety I had about our culture. The concept of the harem provided the perfect opportunity for me to explore that anxiety. Without the idea of the harem that story would have just been me complaining about Axe body spray commercials. And, as you can tell from reading this paragraph, that would have been kind of awkward.