Eng. 180: Interview with Dennis Lehane!

Last week, we finished up Dennis Lehane's Mystic River and my class and I formulated some questions that he agreed to answer via email.  I was not expecting to get answers so fast, but last night, I come home from a truly spectacular conference in Milwaukee (which, as many of you know, "spectacular" generally does not denote a low-energy affair, so I was exhausted, which may have been exacerbated by the 10-hour drive from Lincoln to Milwaukee and back)--and what should be waiting in my inbox, but our interview!  I can't wait for class (later) this morning to share this with my students!  And, yes!  That's a lot of exclamation points for this early in the morning!

Enjoy!

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How do you go about writing your novels?  What is your writing process like?  Do you write longhand?  Computer?  What was your specific inspiration for Mystic River?  How many drafts did you go through for this novel?

I write in the mornings or late at night. Always hit the chair every morning for at least 3 hours. I write longhand and/or on laptop. Completely depends on my mood. The inspiration for Mystic River was moving to Charlestown in the early 90's, a historically clannish, 100% Irish, mostly poor-to-working-class neighborhood of Boston that had just been discovered by the real estate frontiersmen and yuppies looking to live closer to downtown. When I first lived there it still had plenty of rough edges but I could read the tea leaves, and I wrote myself a note: "What happens when Pat's Pizza becomes a Starbucks?" That's Mystic River in a nutshell. It took my another six years to begin writing the book because I didn't have the necessary muscle when I first came up with the idea. The book took about four or five drafts if memory serves. 

When creating characters, do you ever favor one over another and do you find yourself becoming attached to a certain character?  How much control do your characters have over the plot?  Do you let them free and write wherever they take you or do you know from the beginning what will happen in the story?

I usually have prior knowledge of three or four things that have to happen in my novel--one beginning thing, one middle thing, one end thing. Everything else is discovery. Sometimes characters pop up who speak to you with a lot more clarity and volume then others. Sometimes they're minor characters who present their case to become major ones. When that happens, I listen, because so much time is spent chasing characters down and begging them to talk to me. When one does so, freely and unbidden, I treat that like a gift from the gods.

How do you create a character’s dialect in a way that adds to the flavor of the story without being distracting?  What sorts of local knowledge—like dialect—are you conscious of writing into your characters?

I always had an ear for dialogue, probably because I came from a place where people spoke in a very vivid manner. I'm not conscious of writing it, though. It's just innate and organic. 

How did your upbringing affect the ways you use setting and character attitudes in Mystic River?  How are you aware of the ways you use the natural and built environments in this novel to create suspense?  What ways do you see this story as rooted in this place, that it could not take place anywhere else?

The neighborhood is a character in the novel, quite possibly the most important. It couldn’t take place anywhere else because East Buckingham doesn’t exist; it’s my amalgam of all the urban Boston neighborhoods. It was my way to look at the tribalism that defined the city for decades, for good and ill. Since I grew up very much a part of that tribal culture I certainly felt comfortable writing about it.

How do you go about writing societal fears, such as violence against children and violence against women?  Are you conscious of having an overall agenda as you write a novel, an overarching principle you want the reader to come away with?

I never bring an agenda into the book. If it bubbles up organically—as I assume it will—I deal with it as seems appropriate but I’d prefer to come bearing questions not answers. I’m not a big fan of the novel-as-scold. As a reader I’m there to be entertained and learn something about the human condition, not to be hectored or lectured. 

The relationship between law and justice and punishment is extremely complicated in Mystic River, a relationship that is essential to crime literature (crime disrupts the social order and and something must happen to restore order by the end of the tale) and causes the reader to question what constitutes justice.  (We just finished reading Rebecca, where a murderer went unpunished (at least by legal standards) and we were rooting for that murderer to go free.)  Can you respond to the complications of law/justice/punishment in Mystic River and how you created them, as a writer?

It’s playing around with American myths regarding regeneration through violence and the outsider who rights the wrongs society is unable or unwilling to. Jimmy Marcus is the classic American gunslinger hero—he follows his gut; he avenges the sins no one cares to avenge; he is absolutely sure he is right. Punch line is—he’s wrong. The novel is something of an assault on the idea that might can equal right or that we should forego trust in our institutions and the better angels of our nature simply because our emotions are boiling hot enough.

Many are critical of genre literature and crime fiction (recently Jeffrey Eugenides in the By the Book interview in the New York Times).  What position do you believe genre literature occupies in the larger world of writing and literature?  What do you see as it offering that other modes of fiction do not?  What do you see as the value of crime fiction?  (And we are noting that you use several different modes in your own work—from the PI in the Kenzie and Gennaro novels to a complication of that mode in Mystic River, etc.) 

The issue isn’t genre. The issue is whether something is formulaic or not. If I pick up a genre book where the hero cop and his family are targeted by the serial killer because this time it’s personal, well, I’m tossing that book aside. But if I have to to choose between, on one side, THE BIG NOWHERE or CLOCKERS—both books in which the main characters are policemen who, on some base level solve crimes—and, on the other side, the latest dirge about “the vaguely dissatisfied in Connecticut” or some piece of clever meta-fiction wholly unconcerned with character or story, it’s no choice at all. The former is literature, the latter is “literary fiction.” I’ll take the literature, thanks very much.

What authors did you read when you were starting out, writing your books?  Which authors were influential—and in what ways?  What current practitioners of crime literature do you think are doing particularly good work these days?  Where do you see the genre going?  What are you reading right now?  What books would you recommend to us?

I was most influenced by urban novelists like Richard Price, Pete Dexter, Elmore Leonard, William Kennedy, and Hubert Selby. I also looked up to those who’d transformed the crime fiction genre in the late 70’s and through the `80s—James Crumley, James Ellroy, and James Lee Burke. Then, because I’d studied to be a short story writer for so long, I’d say Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Andre Dubus, and Hemingway’s short fiction left a mark. Graham Greene cast an enormous shadow. The people who are currently doing great work in crime fiction are legion but ones who spring immediately to mind are Daniel Woodrell, Ken Bruen, Gillian Flynn, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Laura Lippman, Michael Koryta, Stuart Neville, and Val McDermid.

On Issues of Genre Literature

It's one of those moments where various threads of the universe come together at an extremely inconvenient time, but these things usually happen for a reason.  I'm now in the midst of grading my Eng. 180's midterm essays; we started Dennis Lehane's Mystic River in class on Monday; Jeffrey Eugenides' interview in the NY Times, and the sentencing this morning of Jerry Sandusky.  The Lincoln Library Book Sale was this weekend; I'm on my second pot of Maritime Mist, and I have a locally-grown Cortland apple to remind me it's fall.  Happy October!

I'm dissertating today too.  Working on an essay about Charlie Byrne's bookshop in Galway and also finalizing my paper on Joseph O'Connor that I'll present next week at the Midwest meeting of the American Conference of Irish Studies.

This weekend, I brought home somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty-some books from the library book sale.  I think whenever I talk about this particular book sale, which feels like my birthday, Christmas, and the 4th of July all wrapped into one, I don't think people who haven't been there really understand.  I actually prefer used books to new books, because they always feel like they have a history before they get to me, a story layered in those pages.  And I like that my own library feels comfortable, like it's a place you wouldn't be afraid to take a book off the shelf, snuggle up on the couch with a cup of tea, and read there for the afternoon.  And the riot of colors of those book spines against the dark of my shelves livens up the space.

I stocked up on books I should have in my library (I made a killing in the John Janovy, Jr's), authors I'm specifically looking for (Jane Urquhardt), books that will help me with various classes that I'm teaching or want to teach.  I loaded up on classic crime literature (Walter Mosley, Ross MacDonald, Ed McBain, etc.), enough that I've reorganized my library so that I have shelves specifically dedicated to crime lit.  (I have more than fits on those shelves, so it'll be a work in progress.)  But as my goal to teach my students how to analyze crime literature within the space of a college literature classroom (albeit an introductory one), how crime literature fits into the larger idea of capital-L Literature, the divides of valuing this work seems particularly wide this morning.

A while back, when I was reading Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel, I noted that he really had nothing good to say about the rise of genre literature in Ireland, a kind of selling-out for some writers and a dumbing-down of the high-literary tradition of Irish writing.  It's one of the few things in his work I strongly disagree with.  But I'm also not blind when it comes to the perceptions of genre literature, especially from the perspective of those in academia, where literary fiction is king.  And I mean king deliberately.  While the debate over gendering issues in publishing is absolutely an argument worth having until it's no longer an issue anymore (hooray for the VIDA issue of Brevity!), I also see no benefit in getting my back up every time genre literature is maligned.  I think those people are idiots, but the link between genre fiction and gender issues is not as far as one might think--and this is the point I've been mulling this morning.

A friend directed me to Jeffrey Eugenides' interview in the 7 October 2012 By the Book in the New York Times and it is indeed illuminating.  In some places it is downright funny, especially the "You're organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive.  Who's coming?"  His answer is wonderful.  But then, there are moments that make me scratch my head:  "You grew up in Detroit.  What should someone who really wants to understand the city read?"  Eugenides answers, "I'm trying to think how to answer this in a way that doesn't sound self-important.  Give me a minute." I'm trying to hear wry humor in his voice and perhaps that I don't is a failing of the written medium, and maybe it annoys me just because writing of a city is important.  That's my own bias.  (And I know he's said some very dismissive things about gender and publishing that already predispose me to be irritated with him.  Some good responses to that via NPR and Francine Prose.)

But here's the exchange that annoyed me most:  "Any guilty reading pleasures--book, periodical, online?"  And the answer:  "The only thing I'm high-minded about is literature.  It's not an elitist stance; it's temperamental.  Whenever I try to read a thriller or a detective novel I get incredibly bored, both by the language and the narrative machinery.  Since I'm so naturally virtuous on the literary front, I don't see why I can't slum elsewhere, and I do, guiltlessly.  I'm the guy in the waiting room flipping through People.  Bellow said that fiction was 'the higher autobiography,' but really it's the higher gossip."

Like I said, I can't rage every time somebody says that genre lit is inferior, but in the world of writing, there does seem to be that hierarchy--and perhaps the larger question is not greater-than-less-than, but how literary fiction serves a different purpose than genre fiction.  It's true that there are some crime books I can't stand, whether it's the writing style or the treatment of various topics or whatever--and that's a valid reason for putting down a book and picking up another one.  But to dismiss an entire classification of books as boring sounds much too much like my students on the first day of class (we haven't made it to the last day of class, so I don't know how things will end up there)--and I want to tell Eugenides (and others like him), if you're bored, you're not reading the right things.  If you want language, I can pull down half a dozen crime books on my shelf that will set your socks on fire with sentences.  If you're bored by the "narrative machinery," go read Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea and talk to me about narrative machinery.  

But the larger issue is something we started discussing yesterday in my Eng. 180 class, as we started Lehane's Mystic River.  If, as we have been talking about all semester, crime literature is the literature of social order, that the purpose of crime literature is to address a specific societal fear and the disruption in the social fabric that crime represents, as well as the role of law/justice/punishment that restores the social order, then today's sentencing of Jerry Sandusky is incredibly interesting.  The beginning of Mystic River involves a three-way friendship between three boys in working-class Boston, the kidnapping and the presumed sexual assault of one of them (an eleven-year-old boy), who is rescued.  Taking place in the present time, with the three boys grown up and grown apart, the daughter of one of them is missing (as far as my students have read so far, we only presume that she has been murdered).  The role of contemporary crime literature--as we are still formulating our definition of "literature"--is to take the fears of a specific society (and with our book so far we have identified several, some with conflicting values) and somehow use the movement of the novel to restore order.  How the novel ends (which we will not get to until next week) questions the way that order is restored.  Those of you who have read the book know what I mean.

But the point I want to raise here is the fear of contemporary society towards violence against children and violence against women.  (Violence against women and violence against women for entertainment value is something we'll explore as we learn, for sure, that our missing character, Katie, has been confirmed murdered.)  Jerry Sandusky was sentenced today to 30-60 years for assaulting, molesting, and raping children.  It's a cliche to call a television show or book "ripped from the headlines," but such things is where crime literature thrives, because it would not exist without those rips in the social fabric.  Teaching my students to recognize the links between those headlines and the novels we are reading (or short stories, plays, or nonfiction, as the course progresses through various genres) is absolutely critical for them to apply these concepts outside of our classroom.  I don't know how our discussion tomorrow will go, thinking about whether Sandusky's sentencing was just punishment, the role of the law in justice, and what his sentencing says about our society's attitude towards violence--especially sexual violence--against children.  Violence against children in Mystic River--there are frequent references to physical abuse--seems to be a different issue, treated differently--and this is a conversation definitely worth exploring.  Provoking conversations we would not be having otherwise is the greatest benefit I see crime literature as offering, something that drives what I do as a teacher.

Eng. 180: Arthur Conan Doyle

What a whirlwind week of Sherlock Holmes it has been--and I'm actually really sad to see him go.  Since none of my students signed up for the Conan Doyle author presentation (not really surprised, since it came up really fast), I did it--and that meant I got to watch the British Sherlock series and call it "research."  The movies themselves I didn't watch again until this week.  I love my job.  Watching the Robert Downey, Jr./Jude Law Sherlock Holmes yesterday, I picked up on a lot of things I hadn't on previous watchings--like Holmes wanting to dissect Blackwood's brain (Victorians were big on phrenology), etc.

Monday started with the author presentation, which was lovely if I do say so myself.  Then we jumped right in and talked about "A Scandal in Bohemia."  Whether it was Monday, only the fourth time we'd seen each other, the first day of a new author (and era), or something else, my class was sleepy and difficult to engage in conversation.  But we did get to talk about gender and class, as well as narrative structure and other fun things.

On Wednesday, I changed my tactics for our discussion of "The Speckled Band."  I divided them up into groups (hopefully covering those who didn't read their assignment), then assigned each group a specific question.

• What role does the built environment play in this story?  How is it being used?  Where can you identify where it is playing an active role in the plot (making things happen or preventing them from happening)?
• What purpose does the natural environment play here?  Where is it being used, to what purpose?
• How is the environment itself literally a part of the narrative structure?  (After all, this is actually a locked-door mystery.)
• Where can you identify where what Conan Doyle/Holmes/Victorian society values?  And how is what they value being threatened by the crime?
• Where is class reflected by how Conan Doyle uses place in this story?

I let them go for a while and then we came back together--and while we're still stuck in the question-and-answer stage of awkward discussion (rather them talking with each other), they mostly got what I was hoping they would.  The built environment--mostly in the use of Stoke Moran--plays an active role in the plot, because without the renovations that Grimesby Roylott is making to the house, Helen Stoner would not have been moved into the room where her sister died (and she suspects was murdered).  I just love that.  Nature is regarded as threat here, not a pastoral paradise.  Even when Grimesby Roylott shows up at 221B Baker Street and he is described in terms of the natural world (bird of prey, etc.), he's also described in terms of how he fills the doorway.  Brilliant.

Today, we finish up our Holmes unit with "The Red-Headed League."  We talked motive today, as that was our specific theme for the day.  Why do we do what we do?  I told them the story of my college math professor who once told us that the root of all conflicts was either money, sex, or power.  Yup.  In our class, we questioned not only why the criminal-villain does what s/he does--but an even more interesting question we rarely consider is why does the detective do what s/he does?  Holmes, for the most part, does it because it saves him from being bored, it's a mental challenge.  He doesn't do it for the greater good, to clean up the streets, for justice, or any other more noble calling.  I can't wait to talk about motive further as we keep reading--should be interesting when we get to Raymond Chandler... 

In the classic detective stories we've been reading, and specifically Conan Doyle this week, the mores of Victorian society, the ideals of honor, class, and gender roles are incredibly important--and a lot of the villain's motives are related to those elements.  That John Clay is the bastard of a royal duke is important, because it puts Clay outside accepted society--even as he invokes his grandfather's blood to get better treatment (and the aristocracy would have received better treatment anyway).  It is also important to remember that Holmes only investigates crimes of the "higher order," not the lower class of crimes, which I term to be crimes of survival (like stealing because one is hungry).  Murder is fairly rare in Conan Doyle, so the idea that more is at stake than the body is incredibly important.  In only one of the three stories we read for this week is there a murder.  Murder is much more common in contemporary crime literature and in many cases, motive is moot, simply because the villain functions as simply "evil," a psychopath or sociopath whose mind does not operate on the same wavelength as "normal" people.  Also, the theme of revenge/justice is also more common as a motive for crime in contemporary crime literature.  Should be interesting to explore as we move into Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" next week.

"The Red-Headed League" is different in the narrative structure itself--generally, there is no interaction of Holmes with the crime.  In this story, the crime he is investigating has not happened yet and his goal is to foil the plot.  In the classic detective stories of this type (and in modern times, the tv show Monk is a good example), the story is divided in two:  the story of the crime is self-contained and the story of the investigation is self-contained and never the twain shall meet.  Mostly.  But writers break their rules all the time.  Almost never in this type of story does the detective have a personal relationship with the criminal he is tracking--but in this story, Holmes has been after the culprit for quite some time.We spent the first part of class talking about all the rules that Conan Doyle is breaking here, narratively, what makes "The Red-Headed League" different from the other stories we've read--and the first thing one of my students said was that the crime hasn't been committed yet, that the plot is about preventing the crime, not catching the villain after the fact.  The other major thing my students observed is that Holmes has a personal relationship with the villain, John Clay--and this is another breaking of general rules, where the crime and the detection are separate, that the detective has no personal stake in catching the villain.  

Note to self:  this group does not say much when we're in a large group.  In the future, lesson plans must include some sort of group work.

In other news, congratulations to William Kent Krueger on the release of his new Cork O'Connor book Trickster's Point, which debuted at #12 on the New York Times bestseller list!  Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy and a better writer--and I can't wait to introduce him to my students, both in the first book in the O'Connor series (Iron Lake) and via Skype when we get to talk to him face to face.

And the good news this morning is that Dennis Lehane has agreed to do an email interview with my class (hopefully next time I teach a class like this it will fit better with his schedule)--so we still get to ask him questions about Mystic River!

Life is good.  I picked up some Ken Bruen and Declan Hughes at the library a couple of days ago, so if I get some free time this Labor Day weekend, I get to spend to take a tour of Galway's seedy side with Ken Bruen and Dublin with Declan Hughes.  And we (hopefully) get the bad guys.  Interesting to see how the literature of social order functions in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland...

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 2

I'm just going to give a blanket statement about today's class: I love my classes, I love my students, and I'm more thrilled than I can say that they're loving Star of the Sea. I feel like I have very little to say other than these sorts of joy-reactions, but that's all I've got right now. When you get to the point in the semester and you know your students don't want to be there, the weather is really nice at 12:30 on a Friday, it's easy to get excited when your students actually come to class, so excited that they're tripping over themselves and each other to talk about what they noticed. To quote one of my students in his Think Piece, "This book was not quite what I was expecting, but when you think about it, all books that are worth reading are never quite what you are expecting."

But instead of reporting what we talked about in our discussions, I'm going to direct you to our class wiki, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea: Imagination and Knowledge, and I'm going to relate how our class started this afternoon.

First, I mentioned stress tics and how, when we discussed them some weeks ago, I told them how one of mine is tiny houses. Well, another is planning new classes. As a result, I'm currently in love with Dennis Lehane, so while we aren't reading him this semester, I wanted to play this interview clip:

And then I asked them to consider for the rest of the semester what they would put on their own 3x5 card. I'd mentioned earlier that I have my own, in the form of a Post-It Note stuck to my sightline on my desk. It contains two quotes: "Just write the fucking thing," courtesy of the inimitable Jonis Agee. And then right below it: "That story won't unfuck itself," from Chuck Wendig.

I did this on purpose, because I had a plan. I don't often drop four letter words in class, though they do appear occasionally. First, we're reading some of the most depressing material in human history and this would make them laugh. And it did. Second, I wanted to segue into O'Connor by playing a clip of O'Connor reading, on the subject of swearing (although as you can see, not much swearing in it):



And from there we had a second day of stupendous discussion.

So, what's on your 3x5 card of writerly wisdom?

Eng. 252: Star of the Sea, Day 1

We start the real part of our collaborative project today! I got to Skype with Dawn Duncan's class at Concordia College and I'm really excited about how it went, though I don't know if her students were able to take too much from it. Part of it is just the thrill of today, that we're starting Star of the Sea in my class and her class is starting the book as well and I'm really excited about the discussion that I'm anticipating will be awesome. Part is caffeine. Good morning, world!

So, I asked my class (Intro to Fiction) what they thought Dr. Duncan's class should know about what we're doing, how we're going to approach Star of the Sea. (Her class will do the same for us.) And the basic question is this, for both classes: What do we see when we look at a piece of writing? What's the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer?

The difference is important. As readers, at the most basic level, we want a story to take us to a place we've never been before, to meet new people, to learn of the world outside of our lives right now. As writers, we want to know what the writer has done to effect that reaction. For instance, I bet that Duncan's class will talk about fragmentation and identity in the postmodern novel (which Star of the Sea is) and how that plays into a postcolonial reading of the novel--but in my class, we'll talk about how O'Connor constructed that fragmentation. We'll talk about the shifts in POV, the shifts in form (from traditional narrative to ship's log to newspaper editorial and more). We'll talk about the way that O'Connor develops and constructs his characters to represent the questions of identity. The fact that it's a murder mystery is genius, of course, and something we'll talk about in my class as well. But a lot of our time as writers is spent at the sentence-level.

I asked my students about what I should tell Duncan's class and here are the top things:

• The form of what is on the page is deliberate (the function of it is what the reader brings to the page). Diction and dialogue, even punctuation, is so deliberately considered through countless revisions that you have to assume it's deliberate, because nothing in writing happens by accident. So, for readers, if O'Connor is using semicolons frequently (something that is common to British/Irish authors), why would he use them, rather than other forms of punctuation? My students find themselves heavily influenced by Noah Lukeman's book A Dash of Style, which looks at the way that punctuation affects the reading of a text.
• A reader will ask "what is happening?" and a writer will ask "how did the author create this?" A reader--and the scholars in Duncan's class--will talk about symbolism and other thematic issues; writers will ask how that symbolism and that theme is constructed. If Duncan's class is talking about identity as fluid in the text, my students will ask how O'Connor constructed the characters and the setting to affect that reading. For instance, how is the setting crafted through character in the preface, how the character of The Ghost moves through the landscape, a landscape that is also moving? How does how O'Connor craft both the character and the setting mirror the changing perspectives and the reader's understanding of those characters? And what does it mean that the movement is of a crippled character and a coffin ship?
• And the final thing my students would like to pass on is the importance of place in fiction, that it is more than the physical description of a setting. Reading Eudora Welty's classic "Place in Fiction" is a good place to start. Setting involves atmosphere, the air a character breathes. Place, when it is done right, is as much an active character on the page as anyone who breathes. It's the reason that I was so disappointed with Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, which I listened to on CD last week--and the reason I'm so in love with Dennis Lehane right now. Setting and place can never be neutral. (One of the reasons why last semester, the craft paper I got on William Kent Krueger's use of cold in Iron Lake turned out so brilliant.)

Her class asked some good questions too, about why they should read Eudora Welty, what was my best moment of studying in Ireland and how does that play out in my reading and writing and teaching, and other excellent questions. I talked about only being able to take history classes over there and how all classes feed the writing, no matter what they are. But history class, as well as others, just make the context of reading and writing richer. History and literature are so closely linked as to be nearly indistinguishable for me sometimes. Some of Duncan's students are studying abroad in Galway in the next few years--and I'm really excited for them.

Then, in my class, we started talking about the preface and the first three chapters. We set up the perspective shifts that the epigraphs provide, the realization that there is no one right way to tell this story--which is immediately followed by the "fake" title page, that this is a book within a book. We talked a bit about reliable narrators and how that is constructed, how we're not sure whose voice we're supposed to trust. We moved through the four chapters we read for today and some important questions we asked:

• How many ways does O'Connor manipulate the landscape of the text, the actual form that the pages take (fake title page, footnotes, etc)?
• What's the effect of switching POV so completely between chapters? Why does he choose to change form, rather than just change voice? How does the ship's log work a different perspective on place and setting? How does it continue to set up the ship as a character?
• In the 2nd chapter, we get the first real dialogue of the book--and what purpose does the dialogue serve? How is it what characters do to each other?
• In the 3rd chapter, another POV, another form: what purpose does this editorial serve that could not be delivered by any other form? On one hand it gives the reader the background information necessary to understand some of the characters, but it also serves a larger purpose of developing Dixon's character t00--how does that happen?

We almost ran out of time today and this brief synopsis isn't even close to mentioning all the things we talked about today. The class was pretty excited and engaged and thrilled and we were picking out nuances around every little corner, like the mention of the red sky in the morning during the Preface, the old sailor's ditty about danger coming--and we really came away at the end of class with a new appreciation for a writer's skill, how many ways a writer can take control of a text (we specifically talked about O'Connor's diction) and make it do exactly what the writer wants. I can't wait for Friday.

Here's the interview with O'Connor that we started with today--very interesting in a lot of ways, so feel free to comment and contribute to the conversation!

Stress Tics and Crime Fiction

We're to the point in the semester where I have more things to do than time to do them in--and my stress tics are no help. This semester, we used our stress tics to help us write awesome characters and right now, on this absolutely gorgeous Saturday that should be in June, rather than April, I got my page quota on my rhetoric paper, prepped my quota for Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, which we start on Monday in my 252, and my reward to myself was to work on my syllabi for fall, even though I don't know what I'll be teaching yet.

Yes. I know. I am not normal. Funny the things that help you relieve stress...

So, here's the current idea for a 101 (Rhetoric as Reading) or a 180-ish (Introduction to Literature): "Literature of Place: Crime Fiction." I've been wanting to put together a crime fiction class for a while now, but I've never sat down to do it. (I wonder why...) But as we're moving into Star of the Sea, which is, for all intents and purposes, a murder mystery, and I was listening to Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan on the way up to MN last weekend and to Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mile on the way back down, I've got mysteries on my brain. And I've got place-based mysteries on the brain.

The sad part was that I was actually pretty disappointed by The Silver Swan and I'm hoping when I break into some of his other works Dublin will play more of a role on the page. The series takes place in 1950s Dublin, but from the way the novel unfolded, it could have been anywhere in any time, which should not be the case. Dublin--and Ireland in general--is a very specific place and the 1950s is a very specific time in the history of Ireland. It's not just a matter of landscape, but atmosphere, and the way that the place affects and shapes the characters. By the time the story finished, I knew--just from my experience with Ireland and Dublin--that the story itself could not have been set elsewhere, that the plot couldn't have happened that way without this time and place, the characters and their actions dictated by the time and place, but rather than seeming timeless, it felt generic. And for Black--aka John Banville, who I adore--it seemed too easy. So we'll see if that changes when I read some of his other books.

Here's the current reading list, with a goal towards hitting the parents of the genre, and then spending the rest of our time in contemporary crime fiction that works really well with place. The goal is to examine place and the role that place plays not only on the page, but to the reader--what do we take away from this reading? How does the author create atmosphere? How does the author use the landscape (both natural and built) to advance the story? How are heroes and villains hampered or aided by the landscape? How are characters Othered? How are women portrayed? What is their role on the page, in the story?

Trying to narrow things down has been excruciating so far--and even narrowing to authors down has not been helpful. I just got off Skype with my mother, who's read most of the books I want to assign, and we couldn't decide between various books. Maybe when my stress gets really bad, I can have two or three crime fiction syllabi in rotation... And I'm not happy right now with the overload of men vs. women here.

Okay, here's the preliminary reading list:

• selections of Edgar Allan Poe;
• Arthur Conan Doyle, a Sherlock Holmes to be determined;
• Agatha Christie, short stories;
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon;
• Nevada Barr, to be determined (taking suggestions!);
• William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake;
• Dennis Lehane, Mystic River;
• Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

I don't know about this. Not sure how many books I can get away with requiring of my students, even if they could probably get them for a penny on Amazon. We'll see. And again, since we're largely reading contemporary authors, I'm going to see if I can get any of them to Skype with my students. Krueger is wonderful and he Skyped with my 252 class last semester, so maybe he'd be willing to do it again, but I'm curious what would happen if I emailed any of the other living writers. Got nothing to lose, right?

If it's a 101 class, then we'll be writing three papers; if it'a a 180 (or the like), then I might just do a midterm and final paper. Because of this, I might have to cut a book, but we'll see. Sigh. So many books, so little time.

So, what do you think? Thoughts about who I should add or subtract from my preliminary list?

Bookmarking: Place in the Pages

Now I'm really stretching the purpose of this blog, but classes start next week and I'll be able to post on actually teaching things. But I wanted to take stock of my New Year, so far, because it's Day 5, and the reading has actually gone quite well. I'm trying to read as much as possible for my comps before the semester starts, because I don't know how much I'll be able to do--though I hope I can keep at a pretty good clip. So, to keep myself honest, here we go:

1. Dinty W. Moore's Between Panic and Desire. Freaking stupendous. I'd read parts of this, but never all the way through. I love that my comps is getting me to read all kinds of stuff I've put off till Later. I'm fairly traditional when it comes to nonfiction and form, but considering different forms is something I'm working on. My overarching question when the form isn't traditional circles around why write something this way? Mostly, my first introductions to experimental forms has come with pieces that feel like the writer is pulling a gimmick, trying to do something just for the sake of being weird, not because the piece demands such a form. With Dinty's pieces (some more than others, but that's going to happen in any book) the form was absolutely the right way to write his way through those ideas and those events. I'm looking forward to talking with him about this book at AWP, as well as my friend SFM, my resident expert in all things form.

2. Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. Hated. But I pretty much knew that going in. I'm not a fan of the New Yorker style pieces, of which this book is mostly composed. There's nothing in those style of pieces (I can't bring myself to call them essays, because they're not even close) that transcends their subjects. They're lovely in their writing--and they absolutely know their audience. However, because they're so topical with no perspective, they rely on their reader for meaning, which means if you don't know the person she's talking about, don't know New York or the place, or don't have some other sort of connection, it's going to be a waste of time. I will say that I think the New Yorker style inhibits Orlean, because those pieces that were not published in the New Yorker were near to brilliant. Those pieces allowed Orlean to make meaning out of the person, the event, the place, or whatever she was seeing. She's a brilliant writer, that's not in doubt. This just solidifies that the New Yorker wouldn't know a good essay if it bit them in the ass--what they do is good, but they should stop calling them essays. And stop clogging up Best American Essays with them. Sorry, sorry. Soapbox alert. Sorry.

3. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Not for my comps, but for enjoyment as well as wondering if I could possibly teach it at some point. It's been a long time since I've closed the back cover of a book with a heartfelt and reverent "holy shit," but this book was one of them. This book was so complicated, so brilliant, that I think it's definitely going to be on a teaching list one of these days. First, most importantly, the man can write a sentence. Wow. And the role of the place in the story was so much more than setting, second. Boston was not just a setting, but a place, a character, and acted as much on the human characters as they did upon it. I'm definitely teaching this one.

4. I haven't read David Quammen's Monster of God yet, but that's what's on my list for today. Bring on the charismatic mega-fauna! Stay tuned to see what I think of it.

Happy Reading!