Lots of good stuff to dig into here. Whoever put this together, incidentally, is clearly a big DFW fan.
Entries categorized as ‘Writing’
Interesting Archive: Best Magazine Articles Ever
July 29, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Categories: Writing · journalism
I Want the World to Be My Sad Dream
July 13, 2010 · 7 Comments
Everything dies. But only humans feel so goddamn bad about it.
We feel bad about death, about decay, about endings. Despite religion. Despite philosophy. Despite our enlightened minds and all the scientific knowledge we possess. We fear death, for ourselves and the others we love. In the same vein, we fear the lesser forms of death: pain, loneliness, anxiety over being. After all, we invented existentialism.
We are depressing, sad creatures, us humans, so no wonder we want to bring everything else down, too. Well, maybe you don’t. But I do. I’m a writer and a neurotic–and an agnostic, too. I don’t have the faith of the religious in an afterlife–the world for me is only here and now and all my stakes are tied down here, and all my love and loss lives here. So maybe that’s why I want trees to long for the past, balloons to suffer crises of faith, the sun to feel sorry for itself because it always misses the moon.
I keep reading reviews lately–in journals, on Amazon, online, most recently, I think, in the Georgia Review–where some writer bashes some other writer for excessive use of the pathetic fallacy (the gifting of human attributes, actions, and emotions to animals, plants, and objects), but I think it’s all a matter of taste and desire. I want the universe to be as crazed and miserable as me, so of course I’m going to love Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Others may find it too cute by half, but I say why not find solace in the fanciful thought that even ions can wander and weep and want, just like us humans? If existence has made me a melting mass of nerves and depression, then why can’t I define that existence any way I want to? Why can’t I mold it, box it in, expand it, frame it, give it the ability to share my pain and maybe my joy, too?
Some of us want to feel less alone in the world; we want the world to live and be as we are. Some of us like to dream the world the way the world will never be. Some of us just want the world to be a dream.
xTx at Necessary Fiction
June 16, 2010 · 4 Comments
The excellence continues during Roxane Gay’s Writer-in-Residence tenure at Necessary Fiction with this story by xTx.terrific story by xTx.
Seriously, such a great, intense little piece. If you’ve ever had the slightest bit of OCD, this story will slay you.
Categories: Writing · favorites · literary mags
A Story About Things that You Will Love
June 14, 2010 · Comments Off
Art by the amazing Matthew Lyons, whose site you should most certainly visit.
“Against Specificity.” By Douglas Watson. Who is apparently a genius. In Fifty-Two Stories. Read a bit:
On your way to the Thing Exchange, Thing B tucked under your arm, you run into someone—an unemployed magistrate, say, or a circus clown who comes up to you and says, I have scurvy. Give me an orange!
You say, Orange!
The clown lurches away.
You revolve through the front door of the Thing Exchange and into the lobby. Ah, the lobby. How grand, its pillars or frescoes or whatever! How high, its well-crafted ceiling! How long abandoned, the style in which it was built!
But you have not come here for the architecture. Holding Thing B tight against your side, as though it might leap from your grasp, you hurry across the lobby to the elevator. A sign reads, Things A-Q, Floor 2. You operate the elevator in the usual manner.
When the doors open and you step out onto Floor 2, a flutter somewhere near the center of you reminds you how very badly you want Thing A.
I want it considerably more than I ever wanted Thing B! you think.
Read this whole wonderful story here.
Categories: Writing · art · cool stuff
Does the “20 Under 40″ List Miss the Point? Or, A Totally Depressing but Hopefully Off-the-Mark Thought for Those of Us Already in Our Thirties and Older
June 11, 2010 · 12 Comments
Carving by Anthony Santella
Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting essay in the Times Sunday Book Review, on the New Yorker’s 20 over 40 list. He points out that these lists are designed with “futurity” in mind–the promise that these young writers show–and yet, that many writers have already hit their peak by the time they’re 40.
At the time, this anxiety struck some as comical, but history bears Ishiguro out. Even great novelists who endure in the collective memory as Prosperos, long seasoned in their “secret studies,” often performed their greatest magic when they were young. Flaubert was 29 when he began writing “Madame Bovary” (and was 34 when it was completed). Thomas Mann was 24 when he completed his first masterpiece, “Buddenbrooks.” Tolstoy, after a period of dissolution followed by military service, began writing “War and Peace” at age 34. Joyce, who wrote “Ulysses” in his 30s, already had two major works behind him. The late-blooming Proust, his youth idled in Paris salons, was only 37 when he began writing “Remembrance of Things Past.” Even Kafka, the 20th century’s most haunting exemplar of anguished paralysis, was 29 when he wrote “The Metamorphosis” and 31 when he began “The Trial.”
Personally, since I’m 32 and the idea of writing my masterpiece in a year or two is beyond comprehension, I like to think that maybe 40-is-the-new-30 applies here, too. Back in the day, 30 wasn’t all that young. In addition, an awful lot of people had to peak in their twenties or thirties, because they died not long after. Kafka and Proust may have gone on to produce thrilling and even more masterful work, had they lived longer. Fitzgerald barely got to middle age. (And yes, I know, but you never know. He may have sobered up eventually.) Crane died at 28. Nathanael West at 37. And once you go back a little further, you get the Brontes, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud–dying before 40 was the thing back then.
The list of those, like Woolf, who accomplished more after they went over the hill, is just about as long as the list of those who didn’t. Or at least, it should be, if you factor in early death and its statistical significance to the promise of genius in a way that I would know how to do if I didn’t suck at math. Anyway, I like to think there’s hope for everyone at every age. And the older I get, the more I’ll continue to tell myself that.
While You’re Eating, Perhaps You Should Go Here and Here and Here
June 3, 2010 · Comments Off
It’s lunchtime! Ah, lunch. I am perpetually stymied by lunch. I love food like nobody’s business, but not lunch food. Or at least, not the kind of lunch food that comes cheap, like sandwiches and soup. I love Thai food and Chinese and sushi and tapas and Ethiopian and Mexican and Tex-Mex and Peruvian and Himalayan and Italian and I even like brats and state fair food like fried stuff on a stick and sweet corn, and breakfast food like omelets and hash browns and pancakes and real maple syrup…mmm. I mean, I really, really like to eat. It’s my favorite thing in the world next to reading, and it might even be on a par with that.
But lunch food just puts me off. It’s never good enough, and never quite what it should be. A really good sandwich is still just a really good sandwich, and you pay too much and the calories count is off the charts for so little payoff. I usually end up with some boring-ass soup and sandwich combo, but today I’m trying to save cash by eating oatmeal. It’s the most boring, sad thing imaginable, so as I eat it I’m thinking about what to eat for dinner, and distracting myself by surfing the intertubes. Here are some things you, too, can enjoy, while you eat your lunch (which is hopefully better than oatmeal):
Greg Gerke has a post on Big Other asking for YOUR submissions for the best 20 writers under 40. Of course you’ve all heard about the New Yorker’s list by now, which I didn’t find too upsetting or too surprising, either. Greg would like to see more indie writers and small press authors get some love, and he’s going to post the final list later. So send him your favorite writers under 40. Do it!
Roxane Gay’s gorgeous piece at Spork now has its own gorgeous origin story, at JMWW.
Gary Lutz’s great review of a book I very much want to read, in the June Believer.
Enjoy your food and the reading.
Wigleaf’s Top 50 is Live!
May 20, 2010 · Comments Off
I owe Scott Garson and the Wigleaf Top 50 a ton. Seriously, when I was learning how to write flash fiction, this was the list I kept turning to over and over again for the best of the very short fiction out there on the web. I also discovered so many of my now-favorite writers this way.
The latest Top 50 is just as excellent, and is guest-edited by Brian Evenson of all the awesome people you could get to do such a thing. Whee! So check out the link, read the stories, and be sure to also check out the stories on the longlist, all of which are equally as good from what I’ve read. There’s a lot I haven’t read, too–so now I gotta find time to do some more reading. Thanks a lot, Scott and Brian and Ravi. 
Categories: Writing · favorites · literary mags
Matt Bell (and Lily Hoang, and Michael Kimball, and YOU) Write a Story Live at Everyday Genius
May 17, 2010 · Comments Off
This is where the site deserves its name. Yes, this is genius. This is so cool. Check out this link for Matt’s explanation of WHY and HOW, and click here to read the story and get the schedule as it unfolds.
This is where the internets and writing collide in the best of ways.
Categories: Writing · cool stuff · craft · literary mags
You Should Enter Stymie and ESPN’s Sport Fiction Contest
May 13, 2010 · 2 Comments
If you know me at all, you know that I am not exactly the sporty type. Nor will I probably ever put pen to paper to talk about a sporting event, unless it has somehow become vitally necessary to a character’s entire fibre.
I do, for some odd reason, enjoy reading about sports. Don’t ask. One of my fondest reading memories is finishing Field of Dreams for the first time as a kid and just wanting to weep with happiness. And odd sports, like cricket (odd to us Americans, anyway) fascinate me. I also enjoy baseball games at really great stadiums. I’m heading home for a few weeks this summer and one of the things I’m most excited about is going to a Twins game with my brother and his wife at the new Twins stadium. (No more dome! This is huge for Minnesota.)
So I guess that’s why I enjoy reading Stymie Magazine, despite being not the slightest bit of a sportswriter. And I wanted to let you all know about a contest Stymie is co-sponsoring with ESPN The Magazine. It’s a sports-themed fiction contest. The deadline is June 1st and all the details are available at the Stymie Magazine website.
Go! Write! Show ESPN how killer really good sports fiction can be.
Categories: Writing · literary mags
