From Tesora
I look at her hands
on my hands
on her stomach.
A baby.
I hope to see
into the future,
but all I see is
the basket of shadows
the lamplight makes
of our fingers.
May 9, 2017
Excerpt from Tesora, a novel
January 10, 2013
From Treasure Island, by Robert Lewis Stephenson
Painting by N. C. Wyeth
The fire lit in me when I first read the novel as a boy, was
extinguished when I finished my own novel, Tesora.
Reading it now, however, allows me to sail again,
back to my own boyhood days—to find the treasures
of adventure and good writing.
From Treasure Island, by Robert Lewis Stephenson:
“Livesey,” said the squire, “you will give up this wretched practice at once. Tomorrow I start for Bristol. In three weeks’ time—three weeks!—two weeks—ten days—we’ll have the best ship, sir, and the choicest crew in England. Hawkins shall come as cabin-boy. You’ll make a famous cabin-boy, Hawkins. You, Livesey, are ship’s doctor; I am admiral. We’ll take Redruth, Joyce, and Hunter. We’ll have favourable winds, a quick passage, and not the least difficulty in finding the spot, and money to eat, to roll in, to play duck and drake with ever after.”
November 25, 2012
Anaïs Nin on the Unfamiliar in Books
Anaïs Nin on Embracing the Unfamiliar
It’s the personal insecurities of leadership which lead to paranoia, the need to control the freedom of individual and social personalities, and finally to mass violence. It’s been true throughout history from Atilla The Hun to Obama. It’s the responsibility of each artist to sieze his or her own piece of space, whether it’s geographic or psychic, and to produce art within his or her own chaos of freedom. “A room of one’s own,” yes?
Nin says:
The men who built America were the genuine physical adventurers in a physical world. This world once built, we need adventurers in the realm of art and science. If we suppress the adventure of the spirit, we will have the anarchist and the rebel, who will burst out from too narrow confines in the form of violence and crime.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/08/anais-nin-unfamiliar/
August 6, 2012
Tiny whoop. Faulkner Award semi-finalist.
My novel, Tardy Son, is a semi-finalist for the Faulkner Novel-in-Progress Award. Tiny whoop.
April 11, 2012
Vanessa Veselka on the Adventure of First-Person Narrative
I’ve switched the points of view of my two latest novels to first person, because it works to bring out the personalities of the main characters. Vanessa Veselka has some good ideas about this and she also points out some good examples to learn from. Here is an excerpt from her interview with Rob Hart. She is the author of Zazen.
Rob Hart: What attracts you to the first-person narrative?
Vanessa Veselka: I love the speed and the edge. It reminds me of what lit did to me when I first started reading. From Dostoyevsky to Melville, Celine—to all the modern classics of identity and manhood like Happy Baby, Fight Club or things like that. It drives. You hear the voice of the narrator and inside that, you hear your own. It’s a drug. What it lacks in sweeping majesty it makes up for in intensity. I like intensity.
RH: Which authors, contemporary or classic, do you believe are exceedingly adept at writing compelling first-person narratives?
VV: I mentioned some of my favorites above, but also The Lover by Marguerite.
February 26, 2012
Waiting for Godot, but Not Barney Rosset
From Notebook, a magazine of film culture, is an obituary for Barney Rosset, ground-breaking leader in American publishing. He fed us Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and I Am Curious (Yellow) when we were hungry for it.
Rosset’s publishing house, Grove Press, was a tiny company operating out of the ground floor of Rosset’s brownstone when it published an obscure play called Waiting for Godot in 1954. By the time Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Grove had become a force that challenged and changed literature and American culture in deep and lasting ways. [Thanks to Richard Nash from Twitter.]
January 22, 2012
Writing Novels Is Simple, If You Like Simple Novels
A new writer recently protested while writing his first novel that he frequently felt disgusted and incompetent. He felt that perhaps he should give up—that he didn’t feel “normal” enough to be a novelist. My response was this:
Who told you writing novels was easy? Writing is like life, but more intense—like a life that if all you do is ride a ferris wheel crossed with a roller coaster that breaks down a lot and the only mechanic you know can only be accessed by psychic smoke signals and the only ink available consists of your own blood mixed with stomach bile and the sweat off your back.
It is like that, but it’s also harder than that for a true artist who writes. Also, it’s more fun than real life sometimes because you get to make it all up from your own imagination, although if you don’t have one of those, give up right away. It’s all those hard, sad times that make the good ones so great. Also, it makes for a unique book, and that’s the main point. If it feels like nothing else you’ve ever felt or read, pat yourself on the back—you have arrived. Enjoy the ride.
January 15, 2012
The Work of Writing and Friends
The Work of Writing and Friends
WORK IS MEMORY: I was reminded by a writer friend of mine today about the struggle to work at writing when it is going poorly or not at all. It is an easy reminder for me because mine has not been going well recently. You can tell by my increased attention to my website here. I was also reminded by an opinion piece in The Times. Susan Cain writes: “One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone—and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” What did help me today was offering my time to help her by remembering my own experience earlier in my own career.
WORK IS PRACTICE: The best thing you can do is show up for it every day, because like any art, much of it takes place between sessions at the page and much of it takes place in the subconscious. I just wrote a paragraph about my main character in my Cuban novel where he imagines that his skin has turned dark overnight. It’s actually the first night he spends together with Tesora, and the vision signifies to him how shallow his prejudice against Africans had been: his mind is blown and his skin is now brown.
WORK IS CRITICISM: Yes, it’s hard to take criticism, but writing is a form of conversation, so feedback is important. Someone once said that whenever someone tells you a piece of your writing doesn’t work, the critic is probably right—at the same time that person, when they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong. You must stick to that inner self who knows the truth, whatever that is. Take time to sit quietly every day to listen to your inner voice (don’t worry if it sounds exactly like silence). No one can read the vision behind the piece you write.
WORK IS LISTENING: And to show up every day, is also to be a part of that audience yourself. You change and your point of view changes a bit every day, so you can be a better critic for yourself. One of my critics, a young Japanese woman, who writes urban fantasy, is someone I picked who would be far from my own point of view, certainly. She expects a whole different thing from writing—more present-tense action. Me, I think action is best emphasized by pauses, like music uses it to produce rhythm and cadence. I still enjoy reading books who were born in the 1800s. Plus, I have a propensity to enjoy and accomplish a certain lyricism. I enjoy reading it, and I enjoy creating it, too. So way to hang in there, writers: who told you writing was easy? It’s simple enough; you just stare at the page until blood forms on your forehead: no problem.
WORK IS COLLABORATING: Writing with a partner right there at your side can be helpful too. For a whole year, once a week, I trekked down to the Reading Room of the Boston Public Library and met a friend and we both wrote for a few hours and then had tea to congratulate each other. It was a wonderful way to learn how to show up for the work. Writing regularly helps you to feel good about yourself, even when that time is not a big number. Other things always get in the way: keep writing and feel good about that. I wrote much of one novel commuting on a bus, surrounded by black high school kids yelling and blasting music. At first I thought it would be impossible to write like that, but then it just became part of my routine like the Boston Public Library. Years later it gave me the idea for my last novel with the plot involving a Scottish boy marooned in an all-African Cuban town. Did you ever hear the phrase, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems”? That also applies to writing as well.
December 28, 2011
How Bravery Failed in Hemingway and Fitzgerald
I just finished re-reading A Moveable Feast, by Hemingway. The edition is one that was restored from its earliest version but it does not restore Hemingway himself to “Great Writer” status. The novel or memoir (or both) tells tales of writers in Paris in the 1920s without the humor or drama that Woody Allen does in “Midnight in Paris.” To me, his short work such as The Nick Adams Stories show an early brilliance that his novels and later work could never match. In Moveable Feast you can watch him wobble between that brilliance and his clumsy attempt to bully his way through the story.
Two topics: one each about Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein are the best of the bunch. In these two he does not appear to be in direct competition with his subjects. To Hemingway, it would seem, Stein is a woman so she offers no macho competition though she is easily his intellectual equal and mentor. And Pound is merely a poet who cannot match Hemingway in a boxing ring, so he requires no bullying either. In the section on F. Scott Fitzgerald, however, you can see how hard he competes. Most of the section is wasted with Hemingway spending too much time arguing how much worse a drinker is Scott than himself. Who wins that one? And who cares? Where are the great chats about writing we hope for? There one delightful small chapter on his use of first-person narrative, but it only highlights the lack of writerly tales.
Hemingway finally admits how “fine” a novel The Great Gatsby is, but he tags that with the prediction that because of Zelda, Fitzgerald could never match it after that. While it’s true that Fitzgerald never equaled that novel, it was not because of Zelda. According to Hemingway’s own statements that period of his own life also saw the dissolving of his marriage to Hadley, but you won’t find any of that in the text. The worst of it is a tedious discussion between the two men about the size of Scott’s manhood, the sub-text implication behind the story is the opposing size of Hemingway’s pen. Apparently, Hem had never heard the expression, T.M.I. and neither had his publisher. Finally, however, what felled Fitzgerald was also what felled Hemingway—a lack of writerly courage—which they covered up with their use of alcohol. Neither won that battle, and as their readers, neither do we.
I wish I could hold in my mind the foggy memory that I had after the first reading of the book (it was the sixties, you know) rather than have it sullied by this rereading. Something every reader knows is that fiction creates the best memories, so I will choose to “remember” Paris in the 1920s as Woody Allen has dramatized it in “Midnight in Paris.” Memory has always been my own best editor to me in life, but I pray never to be above any good editor of my own writing.
davidkrancher.com 