One of the things writing residencies made clear to me was how much more work I get done when I’m at least semi-unplugged, so I’ve been aiming for more novel, less blog,  which means that I have a lot more novel chapters now, but also that I’m way behind on checking in with thoughts and news. I’ve just updated my events calendar, so it’s current through April of this year—check back in a few weeks for some summer and fall events.

Last November, I was honored to be selected by National Book Award Winner Robert Stone as one of this year’s National Book Foundation 5 under 35. You can check out some video from the ceremony here.  Part of the fun of getting to head to New York for National Book week is that the 5 under 35 authors got to go to the National Book Awards, which was pretty amazing. Fellow 5 under 35er Melinda Moustakis has a full report here. (She also has a really really beautiful short story collection called Bear Down, Bear North. Read it.) By far the highlight of the National Book Awards ceremony was getting to hear Nikky Finney’s acceptance speech live—I’m way late on this, but if by chance you haven’t heard it yet, go listen now.

Speaking of poetry, at the suggestion of  Elliott Holt and a crowd of other writers who’ve decided to join in this year, I’m doing a poetry project for 2012– choosing a poem every month, and reading that poem every day of that month. January’s poem was Evie Shockley’s Re Re-birth of a Nation, February’s was Revolutionary Letter #1, by Diane Di Prima, and this month’s is Variation on the Word Sleep, by Margaret Atwood. I haven’t planned out the whole year yet, but I believe April’s poem will be Nikky Finney’s  Left. 

Earlier this month, I was thrilled to be invited to celebrate Ralph Ellison’s birthday at the Library of Congress. Circe and Betty Davis helped me prepare my portion of the presentation.

Jabari Asim and I read and discussed selections of Ellison, talked about his influence on our writing, and read samples of our own work. Ellison is a tough act to follow, but it was a really lovely event, and it was amazing to get to see some of the documents in the library’s Ellison collection, including some of Ellison’s novel notes.

I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in my own long novel writing process, so between that and travel, it may be another long while before I get around to updating the blog, but thanks for sticking around, patient readers. Goodnight from Kenosha!

NPR has just kicked off its 7th round of the Three Minute Fiction contest, and I am guest judging. Details here.

I’ve been away at Art Camp for most of the summer, and while it was utterly blissful both to be at writing retreats and to be unplugged from the internet, I didn’t have the chance to announce some exciting things: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self co-won (along with Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville), The 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize. It was also named the winner of the 2011 Paterson Prize for fiction, and is in good company as a nominee for the 2011 Hurston-Wright Legacy award.

This week I got the chance to talk to the NEA’s ArtWorks blog, and to head up to New York for a panel discussion in honor of the winners of Glamour’s top ten college women contest. The panel featured Taraji P. Hensen, Jodi Kantor, Megan McCain, Danica Patrick, and yours truly. You can read panel highlights here, but more importantly, you should read the bios of the contest winners, a truly impressive group of young women.

I’ll be posting an updated fall events calendar soon.

On June 28th, I’ll be reading with Tayari Jones at the Free Library of Philadelphia. (I’ll have an afternoon to spend in Philly before the reading, and I’m still on a pretty intense writing schedule, so anyone who can direct me to a good coffee shop where I can hang out and write will be my new best friend.)

On July 1, I’ll be in New Orleans tracking down Boyz II Men at Essence Fest, so that they can finally give me that autograph they have owed me since 1997 appearing on a panel at Essence Fest 2011, with Terry McMillan, Tayari Jones, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.

After that I’ll be headed off to a few writing residencies. I used to think of writing residencies as punishment for something I didn’t do (You are going to send me somewhere secluded? With spotty phone and email access? You are going to make me hang out with other writers? Why?!), but a few brief writing retreats convinced me of the error of my ways, and I’m really looking forward to spending some time really focusing on my work, unapologetically declaring myself unavailable to everything else, and letting well organized people handle the day to day temporarily.

I will briefly return to my non-sequestered ways on August 12th, for a reading and conversation at Telluride Association’s Centennial celebration– any former TASPers headed to Ithaca that weekend?

I say all this to say that literary types have declared May to be short story month, and as a person who writes and reads and loves short stories, I intended to join the conversation much earlier, but I have been busy having a torrid love affair with my novel, and also taking a deep breath after a lovely but hectic year, and also trying not to beat myself up over taking a deep breath, and so here it is six days from the end of May and I have yet to say anything about short stories, or even properly thank the people who’ve said nice things about mine.

So: some lovely people have used Short Story Month as an occasion to consider some of my work. Over at the Emerging Writers Network blog, Dan Wickett wrote about my story The King of a Vast Empire, and at Andrew’s Book Club, Dylan Landis wrote about Virgins. Though not formally part of short story month, I’d be remiss here if I didn’t also thank Roxane Gay for her smart considerations of Harvest and Robert E. Lee is Dead over at Vouched Books a few months ago.

In the spirit of short story month, I’d like to recommend a few short stories that I’ve read recently, most of which I’ve been lucky enough to get to teach this year: Lauren Groff’s Lucky Chow Fun, which is smart and haunting and so sharp on the sentence level, Jennine Capo Crucet’s How to Leave Hialeah, well-deservedly reprinted in this year’s O Henry anthology, and such a smart and moving depiction of the ways we leave the places we’re from and the ways we never can, that I recently butted into some people’s conversation at a party to tell them they had to read it, Suzanne Rivecca’s None of the Above, which somehow eloquently captures on both the intimate and the grand scale that sense of helplessness a person feels when the right thing to do is never quite right enough, and an older favorite, Edward P. Jones’ The First Day, which unravels me every time I return to it.

I’ve just gotten my hands on Amy Bloom’s Where the God of Love Hangs Out, and can’t wait to curl up with it.

Happy Short Story Month!

But between the Stewart piece, and this Root article on the controversy, I’ve been thinking about some broader questions about narrative and the first person. The Root article quotes Adam Serwer as saying:

“Rappers are often conflated with the content of their material in a way other artists aren’t because the narratives almost always take place in first person as part of an emcees’ effort to create a literary persona.”

So,  why is it that while elements of Cash’s music certainly reflect some of Cash’s own history and personality, nobody believes that Johnny Cash actually shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but so many are willing to believe that every rapper is expressing a literal truth of the past or an immediate desire?  I suspect it’s why so much critical discourse surrounding hip-hop falls flat—it speaks of hip-hop, collectively, and takes all artists and lyrics at face value, failing to distinguish between deliberate humor and hyperbole and things said seriously, failing to distinguish between  an artist who has adopted for storytelling purposes on a single song or album, an artists who claims a persona, but has not actually lived that life (technical term for one sort of this performance: “studio gangster”), and an artist who is narrating his or her own life story, failing to distinguish between a clever lyricist who is saying terrible things, and terrible lyricist saying terrible things.  I suspect it’s a big part of why we end up having conversations about hip-hop as if it exists in isolation, as if it’s an “ethnic” culture or a youth culture, and not something that at this point in its life span is a fundamental part of American culture, both shaped by and shaping the overall landscape. I don’t say this to say that hip-hop, humor, metaphor, or hyperbole are beyond reproach, simply saying that in order to intelligently and fairly critique hip-hop, one has to know the music well enough to identify these elements as such, and should probably be willing to think about instances of, say gendered or violent metaphor, or sexist humor, in other parts of language and culture as well.  

I wonder how this conflation or artist lyrics carries over into the book world. Do we have different standards for suspension of disbelief? Are some writers interrogated about their pasts, or held responsible for the personal or sociological truth of their work in different ways than other writers? Do we credit some writers with inventiveness and performance and intelligent use of imagination and structure more quickly than we credit others? I sometimes have to push my Af-Am lit students away from reading the assigned books as sociological reflections on the way the world is/used to be, and get them to analyze the artistry of the book itself. We are of course all familiar with stories of writers of color being asked when they will move beyond their ethnic niche, as if a diversity of culture and experience and language can’t exist in a book where all of the characters have a similar ethnic identity, unless that identity is white. Anecdotally, I’ve heard a lot of female writers say that the public assumptions of conflation between the self and the work is worse for female writers, that they are more likely to get completely inappropriate questions, or be accused of writing memoir every time they write poetry or realist fiction.  Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but it would not surprise me if this were true, if part of what it means to be a marginalized person in this country/world is to be denied the sort of complexity that would give you layers—the complexity to have a public persona that is not one’s true self, the complexity to have multiple first-person voices and be able count on an audience to recognize that none of them are you and they are also not each other, the right to own your own work in such a way that it gets sincerely heard, and not just used to justify the listener’s conscious or subconscious assumptions. Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates follows up his coverage of the controversy with a consideration of Cornelius Eady’s poem, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study Creative Writing,”   and points out how often this credible fear of being misunderstood constricts artistry. Who has access to narrative as a space of escape, instead of an extension of the self, as a place for reinvention, rather than an arena of translation or explanation?

When the phrase “a lion as taxidermied by a taxidermist who had never seen a lion,” appeared in my twitter feed, I assumed (perhaps because I first saw it tweeted by Maud Newton) that it was a  wonderful metaphor for bad writing. In fact, it was a literal reference to this:

Since it wasn’t originally a writing lesson, I plan to make it one: write what you know shouldn’t mean you need to be the lion, or to have raised lions, or lived with lions, to write about lions (wherein lions can be either the material conditions or the emotional underpinnings of the world you’re writing about.) If a person says that, they may think that’s what they want, but they’re wrong. What they mean is don’t write anything that’s fundamentally untrue to the basic nature of the thing you’re writing about, that’s so far from what you meant to represent that it evokes none of the reaction that it should.  If you don’t know enough to tell the difference, then maybe you better ask some questions about lions before you get to writing about them.

I also have a self-interview and a short excerpt from one of the stories in the book up over at The Nervous Breakdown, where I was lucky enough to be one of their featured authors this week.

A few weeks ago, the aforementioned Goodreads panel took place, and many smart and interesting things were said about the short story, most of them not by me, so do check out the full conversation if you have time, but I thought I’d pull my thoughts on endings, and in particular, endings as they relate to the project of short fiction, and share them here:

I think when it comes to writing endings there are two questions: first, “How Should the Story End?” And second “How should I write the ending?”
As far as the first question, I like the old cliché about endings: they should feel surprising but inevitable. I think the ideal reaction to the end of a short story is a brief gasp of shock, followed by a more contemplative process in which the reader steps back from the story and understands how it ended up where it did. If the ending isn’t working, the problem is often not the ending itself, but that the story hasn’t gotten there organically, that by the time I get to the ending, I don’t trust it, or it’s resolving the wrong question, or the story hasn’t been going anywhere all along, so it just kind of stops.
As for the question of how to actually write the ending, that’s often trickier. As I said yesterday, I tend to think of a short story as a moment that shifts or changes something permanently, and in that sense it’s sometimes hard to say where the ending stops. Is the ending the second right before the event or epiphany, the moment when it becomes clear to the reader exactly what is going to happen, or is the ending ten years later, when it becomes precisely clear how this moment is going to play out in the rest of these characters’ lives? It’s hard to find the point of just enough sometimes. I tend to be partial to stopping at the moment when you can see things falling into place. I like to leave the reader a bit breathless, bracing for the thing they know as coming next, and I’m of the school of thought that as long as the reader can see it coming, there’s no need for a full denouement to play all the way out on the page. Sometimes this gets called ambiguity, but it’s not really, it’s a concession that the things we imagine are often richer and fuller and more immediately and emotionally moving than the things we get told. If someone tells you there’s a monster under the bed, nine times out of ten the monster you imagine will be both more vivid and more threatening to you than the monster you’ll see if that person lifts the curtain for you. I want the reader to confront the scarier monster; I want the reader to have to admit to him or herself that they actually know what’s about to happen—in the next moment, and in some stories, over the next years or decades.

I also have students, and a novel to write, and events and interviews to follow through on, and so my commitment to the blog has been minimal of late. When I was visiting the University of Michigan, a student said that in a writing course she’d been warned that blogging made a person a less serious writer. It seemed silly to me, and I said so– a sort of outmoded fear of technology that as a general rule makes about as much sense as saying that a writer can never use a telephone. Blogging is one form of communication in a world of many. But I also said there’s a temptation in blogging– just as with the telephone, or facebook, or twitter– that can lead one to expect writing to be a process of instant gratification, or to put one’s energy into the form that gathers instant and measurable audience and feedback. I need to get fully absorbed into the long term, slow gratification of pulling the novel into its final form (perhaps another blood-drawing analogy is in order here?), and so it will probably be summer, maybe even fall, before I have time to get back to longer, more thoughtful, less self-promotional blog posts. In the meantime, here are some things I’ve been doing of late:

Last month I dropped by the NPR offices for a lunch hour reading, and they’ve put the video online here.

Before my reading at the lovely Franklin Park Reading Series (totally worth taking the 3AM train home to DC), I got to fill out The L Questionnaire for Writer Types. I also talked to Christi Craig at Writing Under Pressure.

I did a reading at KGB bar for a great program called Behind the Book, and another here in DC, for the Writers in Schools Program. Before the Writers in Schools reading, I had the opportunity to visit Thurgood Marshall High School, and meet some really fantastic and impressive students.

Just this week, I got the exciting news that Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was given an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway award.

Sometime this month, I have an interview coming out in the Fiction Writers Review, which has been running some really great essays and reviews and essays on reviewing.

Next week, I am part of a weeklong Goodreads conversation with a panel of debut short story collection authors including the lovely and amazing Emma Straub. To participate in the Q and A, join the group.

Last but not least, later this month I am off to the SMU lit fest in Dallas, which I am very excited about.