My response to the Stephen Elliott interview at The Days of Yore

Cheryl Strayed posted a link on Facebook to an interview with Stephen Elliott of The Rumpus on a site that features interviews of artists "about the years before they have money, fame, or road maps to success" and "inspires you find your own." Your own money? Fame? I would guess your own road map to success? Anyway I thought it was an interesting interview.

He says this:

I realized there were two types of writers. There were writers that started at a young age because they had something in them that had to come out. These were the spoken word poets, people that…. were writing because they had this scream inside of them and they had to get it out in such a way that someone else would receive it. That doesn’t mean they loved to read. They might. They may or may not have even been interested in other people’s screams. But this is where it came from, their urge to write.

Then there’s this other group of people that, usually in high school, first year of college, they read something that impacts them so much that they want to be part of that tradition. More often, I think you see them in MFA programs. They love literature, so they want to be writers.

One is not better than the other. People come from different places. I was coming out of a need to communicate, because I was in an abusive home and lived in group homes for years, and I didn’t have anybody to tell. That’s always been why I’ve written, to communicate, not because I loved literature.

I’m trying to decide if I disagree with this, or if I’m just afraid that I’m the other kind of writer, not the kind that had something in them. But… maybe some of us are both, somehow. I think I do disagree. I don’t like pronouncements like “there are two types of writers.” I think there are as many types of writers as there are writers. Or almost as many. Also, the stuff I read that impacted me, I read younger than my final year of high school. I always think of Horatio Alger. Except that might not have impacted me in the “I want to be a writer” way. But somewhere along the way, reading Alger and Dylan Thomas and Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams, I decided (realized? understood?) that being a writer was the best thing. You got to make up stories, make up people and actions and places. I’m sure I also had things in me that had to come out, but I also wanted to be a part of the tradition of Dickens and Ntozake Shange. Traditions. Later stuff impacted me, but so did earlier stuff. And I was a writer before the end of high school.

I might have kept writing because of later stuff that happened. Writing might not have stayed as important to me if my dad hadn’t killed himself, if I hadn’t needed that outlet. Except I think it would have.

Elliot also says:

What we think of as talent is actually just the desire to sit alone and write every day. I had my reasons for writing. Other people have their reasons. People write and write for years, and the ones who do it continually every day achieve the ability to communicate their own aesthetic vision.

This makes sense to me. I have known many very "talented" people who quit writing, making art, playing music, doing what they were so good or promising at. I have known a few who kept on keeping on, and some of them are successful now. If you quit, it doesn't matter how much initial promise (talent) you had. If you keep doing it, that initial promise does matter, but you might just trump a lack of initial promise by dedication and perseverance. And luck.

Tender Morsels

I just finished Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, which I put on hold at the library when it was pulled from Bitch magazine's list of "One Hundred Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader." I talk more about the list here and here. But basically they posted a list of "100 young adult novels that every feminist should add to the stack of books on their bedside table" on their website, people complained about three of the books, so Bitch "reconsidered" those books and ended up removing them from the list. The books were Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce, and Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. I read the other two and blogged about them, but a friend had said she read Tender Morsels and it was good but hard to read. I started it, but got cold feet. Living Dead Girl was really hard to read--I didn't want to do that to myself again so soon. So I read all the Ender's Game books (well, five of them, anyhow) and a few other things (Hush, The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson for my bookclub, Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett... um and I forget what else [and I didn't blog about them because I've been finishing my novel]) and then I came back to Tender Morsels.

I thought this was one of the most interesting, thoughtful books I'd read in a long time. About family and the decisions we make because of them: what they want, what we want, what we think they want, what we think they should want. But not only because of family. About growing up, and loyalty, and reality, and the ways we deal with reality. This was wonderfully a book like none I'd ever read. A terrific fairy tale. And yeah, a feminist book, absolutely.

Hush

I just finished Hush, by Eishes Chayil (a pseudonym meaning "woman of valor" in Hebrew). I'd never read a novel set in the Chassidic community before, though I took the bus through the Chassidic community in Williamsburg twice a day for a year on my way to and from work, and I lived within walking distance. But you can be a goy walking through Williamsburg and that doesn't mean you know anything about what's going on around you. I knew that the Chassidic community goes to great lengths to maintain their isolation from the outside world.

That's as far as I got in my review. I started reading other reviews of it, and I thought this one by a California rabbi was interesting, and there are many things about the book that he "gets" more than I possibly could, though he acknowledges that he is not Chassidic and says he would love it if a Chassidic reader would read this book and comment on the accuracy of it.

However, the book is, as he notes, primarily narrated by a young girl--the narration goes back and forth between Gittel at nine and Gittel at seventeen then eighteen. He says,

"The worldview portrayed in the book is absolutely terrifying. Anyone that is not exactly like 'you' is an enemy or at best a heathen. The self absorption and ignorance about almost everything is shocking. Characters in Hush describe any custom they have as 'The Torah say', even when the Torah certainly does not say the thing they are quoting. Characters in Hush subscribe to every possible superstition Jewish culture has to offer. And perhaps worst of all, every kind of prejudice about 'outsiders' that I am sure outsiders can sense in their real life interactions with the community. Characters in Hush have no working knowledge of what most communities call common sense and the facts of life."

I would argue that this is largely colored by the narration. It isn't what the author would argue that the Chassidic worldview is--it's what Gittel sees as the worldview in her community. And we learn what Gittel knows about the world, and therefore what she assumes others know.

This interview with the author is also fascinating.

And this review, by a Jewish woman, is recommended as well.

I liked this book a lot. I think I didn't understand a lot of it, being so far outside the community in which it is set, but at the same time, Gittel is a strong character and I liked watching her grow. Horrible, what happens, one of the big events in her life that makes her grow, but so clearly, honestly illustrated.

This is one of those books that I obviously can't talk about coherently, but I want to talk about it because I want people to read it.

Orson Scott Card and Ender

I am reading my third book by Orson Scott Card in about a week--I started Ender's Game last weekend, after picking up a copy in a thrift store--a lot of my students had talked about it, and even kids who didn't like reading had said it was a good book. So I knew I wanted to add it to my classroom library, but figured I'd add it to my "to read" shelf first. My "to read" shelf has about a hundred books on it--okay, my "to read" bookcase--and a lot of them are library books and a lot of them are borrowed books. I try to read those first, which isn't really possible because it's not like I'll ever read them all--I read a couple, I pick up a couple more... but I do try to read library books and borrowed books before I read my own books. Except I wanted to get that copy of Ender's Game out of my house and into my classroom--plus I picked it up and glanced at it and it was, like, magnetized to my eyeballs or something. Completely fascinating, though not the kind of book I usually find completely fascinating. It's closer to "hard" sci fi than anything I usually read, and it's all about battle ships and aliens and brilliant little kids recruited to save Earth. But it's more the story of those little kids than anything else, and I wanted to know how things would resolve.

So then I found Ender's Shadow already in my classroom library, and I took that home to read. When I finished that, I put the other three in the original series on hold at the public library, then I realized I didn't have to wait, I could go down the hall and get them from my school library! So now I'm reading Speaker for the Dead, and after that I'll read Xenocide and Children of the Mind. Maybe then I'll be done for a while. Maybe. But it turns out that Orson Scott Card has been busy--the wikipedia entry for "Ender's Game (Series)" includes an impressive flow chart listing these titles and many others, including a bunch of short stories. And that's just the books and stories he's written about what has become known as "the Enderverse."

Of course, by the time I was nearing the end of Ender's Shadow, I'd gotten so curious about the writer. I was somewhat shocked and horrified to learn that he is Mormon! I would add, "Like, really Mormon!" but I don't think that Mormon is one of those labels that exists in degrees. You're either Mormon or you're not. You believe it and live your life according to it or you get the hell out. At least that's what it looks like from here.

But I'm now in the middle of Speaker for the Dead, and knowing about Card's Mormonism, I am even more impressed by his broad knowledge of political history, including a complex understanding of how religion plays into this. In his fabulous introduction to the edition of Speaker for the Dead that I'm reading (1991), Card says, "My real life is being with my wife, with my children; going to church and teaching my Sunday school class..." but he talks so much about his reasons for writing Speaker of the Dead, and what he was trying to do. Here's the essay on Google books. I think it's valuable reading for anyone who's a writer or curious about writers. He talks a lot about the process of writing this book, and how many times he started over. He notes that most fiction deals with adolescents and with "footloose heroes." He wanted to write another kind of story, and so far (I'm about halfway through), he seems to be succeeding. He's the kind of ambitious, creative, thoughtful writer that I'd take this trip with even if he doesn't succeed, though, because even if he screws it up, he'll screw it up well.

Sisters Red (and more about the Bitch list)

Okay, maybe I'm not done talking about the Bitch list--um, Bitch magazine's list of "100 Young Adult Books For the Feminist Reader".

I wrote about this some here, in my review of Living Dead Girl, one of the three books removed from the original list. But I just finished Sisters Red, another book removed from the original list, and I'm all annoyed again. I'm also grateful to Bitch, because I thought this was a wonderful and moving book, and it's probably not one I'd have picked up otherwise because it's about werewolves. I've done a pretty good job of avoiding the whole vampire, zombie, werewolf thing. But this is a great story.

This was the first book to be removed from the Bitch list, based largely, apparently, on a negative review at Book Smugglers blog. It turns out that the compiler of the Bitch list hadn't read Sisters Red, but instead put it on the list based on reviews of the book. She also refers to the book as Sister's Red which makes me very crabby and gives her even less credence.

Anyway, I liked the book a lot. I found the most moving part to be the relationship between the sisters, Scarlett, who is very dedicated to killing werewolves, and Rosie, who is less dedicated but feels hugely indebted to her sister, for understandable reasons: Scarlett saved her life when Rosie was attacked by a werewolf, and Scarlett is permanently scarred and disfigured as a result.

This is a story about growing up, and making up your own mind about who you want to be and what you're going to be, considering all the factors, including what others want or expect of you. It's about loving other people and loving yourself and trying to take care of everyone, which is sometimes--usually--close to impossible to do. Especially when there are werewolves around.

Living Dead Girl: Feminist Novels (also, the Bitch list)

I just finished Living Dead Girl, which was hard to read but I had to read it all in one sitting--it's short, and also I had to know what would happen. It's the Stranger Danger story--the life of the girl who's taken away; her story as she might tell it. Ick.

I put this book on hold at the library because Bitch Magazine made a list of "100 Young Adult Books For the Feminist Reader," which they describe as "100 young adult novels that every feminist should add to the stack of books on their bedside table." Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, and Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce were on the original list, but there were complaints about them being "triggering" for rape survivors, so staff members at Bitch reread (and/or read) those three titles then removed them from the list. Several writers, including Scott Westerfeld, asked to be removed from the list themselves, since they considered that it was now an embarrassing list to be a part of, and Bitch refused to take those authors off. I don't want to say more about this because I've spent too much of my life on it already (here's the original post and the zillions of responses if you're interested--and I do think it's interesting!), but suffice to say that Bitch's removal of these books from their list made them the first I put on hold at the library. It also made me less likely to ever buy another issue of Bitch--I'll spend my money elsewhere. Whoever was taking responsibility for the list should have read all the books on it and been prepared to stand behind their choices, but instead it seems that no one even read all the titles, and there isn't any clear statement, much less consensus, on what makes these titles feminist or must-reads. As one of the gazillion posters, Walter Underwood, notes, "Bitch is not clear about what sort of list this is. Is it favorites or authoritative?" He observes that "If it is authoritative, then there are some books on there that I don't think make the cut for 'every feminist' to read." Plus they're implying that you must be literate to be a feminist, then, which is--okay, back to my review of Living Dead Girl.

This was not a pleasant book to read. But it was well-written and it was a story I hadn't really thought about: the girl who is abducted by the scary man, and the years she spends living with him. She talks about how on TV talk shows, audience members always blame the victim: "Why didn't she speak up?" "Why didn't she do something?" but the book does a great job of showing why she doesn't speak up, why she doesn't do anything, how frightened and isolated she is.

Now I'm reading Sisters Red.

Other interesting posts about the Bitch fiasco:

Margo Langan's (author of Tender Morsels) blog post

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog

There are many more, and both these posts link to many of them.

Trash

I just finished Trash, by Andy Mulligan. Set in "an unnamed Third World country" (though we know the author divides his time between his native London and Manila), it's the story of three boys growing up in Behala, "rubbish-town," the city dump. Raphael, one of the three boys, describes himself in the first sentence of the novel as a "dumpsite boy."

Raphael makes an incredible, life-changing find in the dump, and this novel is the story of that find. It is described--repeatedly--as a "thriller" in the Guardian, but I don't know if that has a different connotation in England, because it wasn't what I think of as a thriller. However the Guardian article is interesting because apparently Trash was shortlisted for a major YA award then withdrawn from consideration. Man, children all over the world are living in conditions as bad as these, but we have to protect rich (relatively) kids from reading about it?

Anyway. I liked this book a lot. Stayed up late to read it and then finished it at school during silent reading time, when I am usually too busy patrolling my students to really get sucked into a book. But this one is so... suckable?

It's also an interesting commentary on the greed of so many of our politicians, almost always at the expense of the poor children like the heroes of this novel. One of them describes the vice-president's house this way: "Look at the towers, man--it thinks it's a castle. It thinks it's in a fairy tale."

This isn't a fairy tale.