Saturday, July 09, 2005
Prelude: Packing it all.
MFA's are the 21st century version of the modernists going to Paris. Disappearing to a small college town is the closest you can get to being an expatriate now. It's the in-thing, the MFA. I went to a poetry reading a few weeks ago, billed as "Poets recently finishing their MFA without a book published." It sounded like a DSM-IV diagnosis. Or a Fox News special. "What to do when your kids finish their MFA, coming up after sports."
I write fiction, but I pretentiously consider myself an artist.
Somehow I've managed to get myself into one of the best MFAs in the country. I get a scholarship and a job teaching English Comp. The program takes six students a year, out of over four hundred applicants. Ok, now I'm bragging.
It's 11 PM and I'm at my job--the job that I'm leaving behind in four weeks to travel to the other coast to become a writer. I'm the night production manager at a printing shop. That's a separate story, though.
I'm listening to the Digable Planets.
I'm liquidating everything I can--guitars, cds, old books. That's just the stuff. There are relationships to be liquidated as well: Parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, just plain friends. My apartment is filled with boxes, most of which are headed to my parent's attic. The rest go the Salvation Army to be recycled, because I've become obsessive about not wasting anything.
My plan: to go cross country over four weeks before I arrive in my new home. A childhood friend of mine, his father died six months ago, and he made a few cross country trips after he retired. So I'll be using my friend's dead father's maps, staying at the camp sites he did, going to all the little places he visited before the cancer got him.
My former teacher has told me that Henry James (he's been researching to write an essay on HJ), strived to eliminate exposition in his novels... he wanted the reader in the character's head, and it was your job to figure the rest out from there. He paved the way for the stream of consciousness modernists a few years after him. So, do I need an exposition for this blog? I'm not nearly as confident in my narrative as Henry, and besides, this isn't a novel. Nor a short story. It's a blog.
Before I disappear from my current life, my father, riding the floatsam of a congestive heart failure, has been pleading his case for me to meet my new half-brother. Let's call him Randy. My dad's 65. He's a loan shark. Not emotionally speaking. Literally. And he has a six year old. Dad's not the most responsible guy you can meet. I will meet the kid before I go, if for no other reason than to have some material.
So obviously, my first novel will be about my father.
He'll be flattered. He's an attention whore, like me. He's his own favorite topic.
That was one of my objectives this summer: one, to read as much as possible. I didn't do too well with that, though I did read and thoroughly absorb Virgina Woolf and Philip Roth. Then I wrote thirty pages and managed to combine both their tones. That was objective two: to get a bunch of pages done before I get out there.
Most of those thirty pages are throat clearing, and'll end up on the cutting room floor. I have my opening scene for my novel in my head: my father's hospital room, a picture of a five-year-old I've never met in a frame with gold glitter that spells #1 DAD in obnoxiously large letters. Dad's girlfriend huddled on top of him and an ex-wife in the car. I have to manage this new information along with his women that circle him. It's a good opening scene. They'll be flashbacks, because, all this has happened before.
The question is, how do I give out the information to the reader? All at once? Or do I leave it out, like Henry?
I write fiction, but I pretentiously consider myself an artist.
Somehow I've managed to get myself into one of the best MFAs in the country. I get a scholarship and a job teaching English Comp. The program takes six students a year, out of over four hundred applicants. Ok, now I'm bragging.
It's 11 PM and I'm at my job--the job that I'm leaving behind in four weeks to travel to the other coast to become a writer. I'm the night production manager at a printing shop. That's a separate story, though.
I'm listening to the Digable Planets.
I'm liquidating everything I can--guitars, cds, old books. That's just the stuff. There are relationships to be liquidated as well: Parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, just plain friends. My apartment is filled with boxes, most of which are headed to my parent's attic. The rest go the Salvation Army to be recycled, because I've become obsessive about not wasting anything.
My plan: to go cross country over four weeks before I arrive in my new home. A childhood friend of mine, his father died six months ago, and he made a few cross country trips after he retired. So I'll be using my friend's dead father's maps, staying at the camp sites he did, going to all the little places he visited before the cancer got him.
My former teacher has told me that Henry James (he's been researching to write an essay on HJ), strived to eliminate exposition in his novels... he wanted the reader in the character's head, and it was your job to figure the rest out from there. He paved the way for the stream of consciousness modernists a few years after him. So, do I need an exposition for this blog? I'm not nearly as confident in my narrative as Henry, and besides, this isn't a novel. Nor a short story. It's a blog.
Before I disappear from my current life, my father, riding the floatsam of a congestive heart failure, has been pleading his case for me to meet my new half-brother. Let's call him Randy. My dad's 65. He's a loan shark. Not emotionally speaking. Literally. And he has a six year old. Dad's not the most responsible guy you can meet. I will meet the kid before I go, if for no other reason than to have some material.
So obviously, my first novel will be about my father.
He'll be flattered. He's an attention whore, like me. He's his own favorite topic.
That was one of my objectives this summer: one, to read as much as possible. I didn't do too well with that, though I did read and thoroughly absorb Virgina Woolf and Philip Roth. Then I wrote thirty pages and managed to combine both their tones. That was objective two: to get a bunch of pages done before I get out there.
Most of those thirty pages are throat clearing, and'll end up on the cutting room floor. I have my opening scene for my novel in my head: my father's hospital room, a picture of a five-year-old I've never met in a frame with gold glitter that spells #1 DAD in obnoxiously large letters. Dad's girlfriend huddled on top of him and an ex-wife in the car. I have to manage this new information along with his women that circle him. It's a good opening scene. They'll be flashbacks, because, all this has happened before.
The question is, how do I give out the information to the reader? All at once? Or do I leave it out, like Henry?
