Archive | May, 2010

Upcoming Events and Advanced Praise

30 May

On June 10th, I’ll be reading with Martha Southgate and Lauren Grodstein at Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House. The theme of the reading is “People Make Mistakes”: http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.com/2010/05/30/brw-presents-people-make-mistakes-fiction-curated-by-marthat-southgate/

On June 12th, I’ll be speaking in a panel on learning to edit your own work at American Independent Writers’ annual conference, on GW’s campus in DC: http://www.amerindywriters.org/2010/05/14/all-about-the-2010-aiw-annual-writers-conference-bookmark-this-post/

Also, I made a page for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and the nice things people have said about it: http://daniellevevans.wordpress.com/before-you-suffocate-your-own-fool-self/

If you’re in Brooklyn or DC, come see me!

 

A Note on the Collection’s Title

24 May

I just answered a series of publicity questions about the book, and since I really love the title, and people sometimes ask me about it, I thought it would be worth expanding on my discussion of the title here.  The title and epigraph of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self come from The Bridge Poem by Donna Kate Rushin, originally published in the anthology This Bridge Called My Back. Of all of the many terribly exciting things that have happened to me during the course of writing this book and having it published, one of the most exciting was Kate Rushin giving her blessing for me to use a portion of the poem containing the title line as an epigraph. I first encountered The Bridge Poem when I was in college. Courtesy of  the brilliant Alexis Pauline Gumbs (now Dr. Gumbs!), who counts t-shirt modification among her many talents, I for many years had a t-shirt with the poem ironed on to its back. The section on translation, in particular, was really meaningful  to me on both a personal level and as a synthesis of some of what I was struggling with as an emerging writer.

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends’ parents…
 
Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody
 
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

I could see some of the characters in the collection identifying with that need for endless translation, and also with the line I am sick of being the sole black friend to 34 individual white people.  But the particular line I chose as the title I like because it has layers of meaning. In the poem itself, it’s directed by the speaker to someone else, and the implication is that the someone else is one of the people who has been using the speaker to define him or herself, or expecting the speaker to explain herself all the time. So, there’s an element of the title that’s confrontational, that’s directed at the reader, saying something to the effect of try to understand my experience before you drown in your own, which seems fitting in a collection that is somewhat concerned with characters who don’t often get to tell their own stories in their own words. But of course,
removed from the poem itself, the title also reflects back on many of the characters in my book, who have often gotten themselves into their own messes, or are at a moment where they need to make a choice about who they’re going to be, and whether their best selves will hold their worst selves at bay, so the title also works as a link between the stories in the collection and a directive to the characters.

(And perhaps also as a directive to the author, who needs to get off the internet for a bit and devote this week to making the words in her novel fit for eyes other than her own. This will probably be the last post for a week or so.)

Smart Conversations About MFA Programs

22 May

 

 This post is a little late and very long, so most of it is below the jump.

Per my previous post, I do not believe that MFA programs are killing US literature, or that they do more harm than good. I do believe though that they do some things much better than others, and we should be able to have an open and critical conversation about that.

1)      We should be clear about what MFA programs can and can’t do

Some people react to the concept of an MFA program by saying you can’t be taught to write. This is substantially true. In fact, most MFA program faculty are aware of this, which is why every spring they spend hours a day reviewing application files in an attempt to only admit students who they think can write in the first place.

An MFA program also can’t teach you to have interesting things to say, though, as before, I am of the opinion that deciding to go to graduate school does not make you fundamentally less interesting, and does not negate the things that happen to you before, during, and after your decision to attend.

The purpose of an MFA program is not to teach you to write, or to teach you to be interesting, but to teach you to edit, which, if you are anything like most writers, is how you will spend most of your “writing” time. On my first day of graduate workshop, the instructor said that if 15% of the advice you got was useful, you were in a very good workshop. That number often seems about right to me, and while there have been days when I’ve been exceedingly grateful for that useful advice, what I really got from workshop was the ability to filter useless advice from useful advice—to be able to articulate to myself what I was trying to do, to dismiss the criticisms that were completely off base, to look at some criticisms that felt wrong and use them to identify what was going on with the work that the reader wasn’t getting it, and to listen to the criticism that seemed right, even if  it meant doing work that was difficult, even if it meant ignoring the people who loved the story the way it was, because I knew it could be better. Developing this kind of filter is critical, not just for writers in MFA programs, but for all writers. Whether or not you ever set foot in a workshop, if you are successful as a writer, the world will be full of people who have things to say about your writing, and what it should be doing differently: agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, critics, your mom. Ideally, the skill set one develops in an MFA program helps you to cut through all of that noise faster. I have to say, I’ve been lucky enough to have never witnessed outright cruelty in an MFA workshop, though I’ve heard enough stories to believe that it happens with some regularity. I am not a person who believes you learn from cruelty (which, even if it’s based in honest criticism, is distinct from honesty). But, if as a writer your faith in your work can’t withstand mean criticism from one instructor, or from some person across the table, what’s going to happen to it when you get a dismissive rejection from the New Yorker, or a mean review?  Your faith in your work, and your editorial instincts have to come from within, but sometimes nothing teaches you that faster than trying to listen to other people.

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Stupid Conversations About MFA Programs

20 May

I waited so long to have a blog that it turns out I actually have a lot to say about MFA programs, so I’ve divided this into two posts: one about the legitimate conversations we might be having about MFA programs and what they can and can’t do, and one about the stupid conversations that get in the way.  This post got longer than I intended, so part two, Smart Conversations about MFA programs, will probably go up tomorrow.

A lot of complaints about MFA programs start with the assertion that writers should be “living,” instead of going to school.  Understandably, writers with MFAs tend to get defensive when the conversation is opened this way. Most people, I would venture, tend to get defensive when the conversation opens with “how do you feel about the fact that you’re not a real human being?” If going to graduate school was supposed to provide me with some kind of injunction against “real life,” against emergency phone calls from friends and family, physical and financial threats and challenges faced by people I love, money worries, racism, heartbreak, and the uncertainty of living in a world that seems constantly on the brink of large scale disaster, then the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has some serious explaining to do, because I never got my exemption paperwork.  I know a number of people who got married, divorced, or had kids during their MFA programs, I guess they’ll be disappointed to find out that these weren’t “real,” life events from which they learned things or by which they were changed. A number of people in MFA programs have full time jobs while they attend; it’s too bad the fact of their being in graduate school negates whatever else they are doing in the world.  

Certainly, there are a handful of shallow, petty people in MFA programs, and people who can’t see outside of their own experience or empathize with people unlike them. That’s because there are handfuls of shallow, petty, narcissistic people in the world, 22 year olds and 40 year olds and 80 year olds, writers and doctors and homemakers. If you are 22 years old and it has never occurred to you that most of the world lives and thinks differently than you do, the problem is probably not your MFA program. In any case, it’s not like the alternative to an MFA is  going to be forced humanity training that will make you a different and better human being.

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The Book as Physical Object

18 May

A few weeks ago, I got the galleys of my short story collection in the mail. Although it still needed to be proofread, and printed in its official hardcover form, holding the book in my hand made me truly start to think of it as “real.” I thought about this in light of the ongoing conversation about ebooks and ereaders. I haven’t yet acquired an ereader, so I can’t say from experience how it might alter one’s relationship to texts and words. I can say that I have always thought of reading as not just a mental experience, but a tactile experience, and that I like browsing people’s bookshelves, or squinting at stranger’s bookcovers on the bus or train so that I can see what they are reading, or browsing the bookstore with no sense of what I came in for, looking for the book whose cover jumps out at me. I understand that convenience and portability have their value (I would have loved an ereader my senior year of college, when I was writing my anthro thesis and either had to spend breaks and long weekends on campus in order to work, or lug 15 library books wherever I was going, even if I was only using a chapter or so of some of the books.) But I don’t think convenience and portability are the only value, and I don’t think our relationship with books as readers is purely one of words, and I don’t know how screens will change the way we read, and also the way we communicate with eachother about books. I get nervous when ereaders are pitched as new and improved forms of reading, as opposed to one alternative. Arguing that convenience and portability are the end game of reading materials kind of feels like arguing that the vibrator makes sex uneccesary. (I know, I need a better metaphor. I said this at a cocktail party recently, and people looked at me like I lacked decorum. Which actually happens to me fairly often at cocktail parties, come to think of it.)

 There is an element of the shift to on screen reading that gives me pause. We are, on my campus at least, working to be more “green,” in all of our endeavors, and in the lit department, that means excess paper is one of the first things to go. But what makes paper excess? Is it wasteful for me to expect my workshop students to print out paper copies of eachother’s stories for critique? To require lit students to buy and carry physical texts instead of ebooks? I know that I read differently off screen than on screen, but is it fair for me to presume that all of my students do the same? Is it really “greener,” in terms of energy and resources, to switch to expensive electronic devices that will need charging, replacing, and dangerous to mine metals in order to function? The green issue is the best case for the ebook that I’ve seen so far, but I’d like to see somebody really break down the overall impact here. With a giant hole gushing oil into the planet right now, I find it hard to believe that it’s books that will kill us, but maybe we’ve gotten to this state because everyone believes that the resource consuming thing they love the best is harmless and need not be compromised in the interest of the future.

Musings on the Black Book Section

18 May

A while back, I wrote a short piece for PEN American, working through some of my ambivalence about the “black book” section in a lot of US bookstores. Here’s the opening:

I first understood what people meant when they spoke of intangible white privilege when I realized that I read differently than other people. Literature had often asked me to identify with characters who were not only unlike me in terms of their experience of race, but were often actively hostile to women, or to Black people or to Black women. The strangeness of this identification didn’t occur to me until I heard my white classmates complain about having to do the same when we read books by Black authors. Years later, I would read DuBois and wonder whether my ability to identify with authors and protagonists who would despise me was evidence of a fractured self. But at the time, the inability to read outside, or even against, the self seemed as much a limitation as a privilege.

You can read the full piece here: Looking for Black Literature

I’m curious as to how other people have thought about these issues, as either readers or writers?

Hald

18 May

I just got back from a week of being spoiled rotten at the Hald Writer’s Retreat in Denmark. Hald is a lovely manor in the Danish countryside, which offers longer residencies throughout the year, but I was invited for a week, along with five Danish writers and four other US writers, as part of a program sponsored by the Danish Arts Council. It was one of those weeks that reminded me how very lucky I’ve been as a writer, and gave me the kick I needed to get back to my novel.

Bio and Links

18 May

If you have gotten here by accident, I am not the Danielle Evans who won America’s Next Top Model, Danielle Evans the martial arts champion, Danielle Evans the photographer, or any of the other people who share my surprisingly popular name. I am a fiction writer and professor of creative writing and literature. My work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, Callaloo, and Phoebe, has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, and is forthcoming in New Stories from the South and the Best American Short Stories 2010. I am the author of the short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which will be published by Riverhead books in September 2010, and I am currently at work on a novel titled The Empire Has No Clothes. I received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, was a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and am now teaching fiction at American University in Washington DC.

Here are some links about my short story collection:

Indiebound Preorder Link

 Barnes and Noble Preorder Link

Amazon Preorder Link

Ayesha Pande Literary author page

The Riverhead Catalogue description

Here are some interviews I’ve done about the writing process in general, and my writing in particular:

Fogged Clarity

The Messenger

Here are links to some of the magazines and anthologies that have published my work:

The Paris Review

A Public Space

Callaloo

Phoebe

The L

The Owls

Pen American

Best American Short Stories

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