Literary Mothers : rob mclennan on Elizabeth Smart

The website Literary Mothers was kind enough to re-post my piece on the late Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart on their fantastic site recently. Thanks so much! Originally posted at Open Book: Ontario, I actually composed the piece with them in mind, a magnificent website that has posted a whole slew of worthy material of writers on their "literary mothers," including Rachel Zucker on Alice Notley (and other mothers), Kip Wilson on Banana Yoshimoto, Dorothea Lasky on Many Literary Mothers, A Violin Case, And A Woman on the Subway, Elliott Holt on Alice Munro, Amy Lawless on Elizabeth Bishop, Deb Olin Unferth on Gertrude Stein, Carrie Murphy on Rachel Zucker, Jessica Smith on Susan Howe and Lily Hoang on Many Mothers, But Especially Anne Carson among many, many others. If you haven't had a chance to read any of their posts, you should very much do so. And they even take submissions!

Although I did find it curious that one of the comments under the piece at Open Book suggested that Smart wasn't an obvious influence on my literary work. Hasn't anyone read either of my novels...?

A brief note on (reading, writing) short fiction,

Thirty-two years old, she managed the impossible: an unbroken length of apple peel, fit for the shoulder toss. She remembered the chorus her grandmother sang, trilling peel, peel, please reveal. She tossed, and once it touched tile she turned, less a letter than line, with ambient twirl. Years earlier, she remembered high school-era gifts from her favourite aunt including a Michael Ondaatje signature, an autographed copy of The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems and his novel, The English Patient. The film had resonated, deep in her bones. And now, this red delicious signature apple-inked on her floor. The cinnamon-spice blush on her blue jeans.

I've been working on a collection of short stories for nearly three years, carving little narratives down as sharp as I can. I cut my fingers. Blood mixes in with my lines.

During my high school years, I attempted similarly-short stories, continuing for a couple more years after I arrived in the city. There was even an entertainment bi-weekly that published a few of them, until it folded in 1994. The last four months of Ottawa's Metro magazine included one of my stories in every second issue. By the end, I was composing new short fiction just to see if they'd appear.

There are a few ways I have come to these conclusions. In my early twenties, reading short stories and the accumulations of Richard Brautigan novels. Canadian writers such as Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Michael Ondaatje. That pointed brevity. I'm more attracted to stories that stop just before they end. Is it fair or reductive to suggest this comes from years of writing poems? I want no wasted words. Is this from years of composing reviews? When exactly to do you get to the point?

Just how much does a story require to contain a story? I continue to send mine out, only to have them rejected. I never exactly know why, although I have a number of theories that are only theories. I don't know where to send them.

The current project of short stories triggered when I read the short, sharp stories of Sarah Manguso [see my piece on her here], her Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (San Francisco CA: McSweeney's Books, 2007). Part of the appeal of her stories was in the construction of the collection of untitled short pieces; was this a straight collection of short stories, or a loose and abstract narrative built as an accumulation into a novel? Through Manguso, I became fascinated by the blur, and the distinction.

From Manguso, furthering to some lovely prose experiments in sentence: a journal of prose poetics to New York City writer Deb Olin Unferth, and finally tracking some of Unferth and Manguso's influences back over the past few weeks to another American writer, Lydia Davis, through her seven hundred plus page The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Picador, 2009), which includes this little gem:

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:

that Scotland has so few trees.

What did I tell you? Do stories require long, complicated narratives? Do we even need to know such extraneous bits as hair colour, clothes, cities, gender, the colour of their skin? Only when essential, only if the story requires. What do we know of Samuel Johnson? Is that important? Where the hell is she sending her stories? What exactly am I here to tell you?

Apart from discovering Davis, more recently I've been introduced to the work of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, through his collection of short stories, The Girl on the Fridge (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). How enviable, to be this damned sharp. To say so much in so little.

In my fiction, I am working on writing big stories in small spaces. Small novels, even smaller stories, and all written in dense, packed prose. Patience, breathing. Carve, slowly. Carve further, even slower. Pause. Listen.

Asthma Attack

When you have an asthma attack, you can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn't much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones--those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says, "I love you," and when an asthmatic says, "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

As any artist knows, your art should move only and exactly where your interest does, which can, theoretically, lead anywhere and everywhere. Some things can't be forced, and false roads quickly identify themselves. But one is constantly forced to ask, to reassess, is it even working?

He refers to it as his collected wisdom, all the shards of information he’s picked up, collated, held in trust to punctuate conversation so as to appear more interesting than he really is. Catherine the Great’s love of horses, conjoined twins from the 1890s concurrently pregnant from their physician, the air speed ratio of an unladen swallow.

Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

You ask my mother and father what it was like for them when I ran away to join the revolution that they’ll say they were traumatized. But to hear them tell it they were already traumatized. They have a whole list: there was my Christian conversation and, before that, my high school boyfriend, there was my brother from the time he was born, my father’s not being able to play baseball, the teasing my mother took as a kid. Still, it’s kind of a wonder that they didn’t hire a bounty hunter to come find me and drag me home. In fact they didn’t do much to get me back. They settled on one plan and stuck to it, and it did finally work: if they sent no money, we’d run out and eventually have to come home. A convenient plan for them, thinking about it now. A nonplan, really, a plan of inaction, of least resistance.

Later, from Nicaragua, I called and invited them to come “visit the revolution,” and they said no. Maybe in those days that’s simply how parenting worked.

There was just something about the excerpt of New York writer Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (New York NY: Henry Holt, 2011) in a journal I read recently that compelled me to find a copy of the book, something I found utterly charming about her coming-of-age memoir while travelling with the man she planned to marry, following him to Nicaragua so they could join the Sandinistas, and join the “revolution.” I haven’t yet read her novel Vacation (McSweeney’s, 2008) but her collection of short fiction, Minor Robberies (McSweeney’s, 2007) is quite magnificent, and one I highly recommend, originally sold as a McSweeney’s three-pack with similar collections of short, strange stories by Dave Eggers and Sarah Manguso. There seem a similar tone and construction to these two works, as Unferth writes her series of short vignettes, small self-contained accumulated pieces that eventually make their way into a longer work of her year of confused travel, volunteer work, unwashed love, foreign meetings and various illnesses. Obviously, unlike the short stories, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War works from a loose narrative thread of her time as a young adult travelling parts of foreign countries searching for meaning and self, from six sections made of smaller pieces that take her immediately from the bedroom in her parent’s house to a series of realizations and discoveries both small and large. What makes this book so appealing is just how sweet and naïve the author depicts herself, wandering around El Salvador and Nicaragua, fighting the fight she realizes far too late only foreigners are and, by the time they had even arrived, was pretty much over. She had missed her revolution, and barely even understood enough about it had she been there to catch it. Deb Olin Unferth’s memoir is sweet, honest and damned funny, an utterly charming and unusual memoir of growing up a stranger in a strange land. At eighteen years old, travelling with a man she barely knew, and idealistically trying so hard to live in a way that matters, but only realizing too late what exactly she might have signed up for. Through all of this, following as her perceptions that young love have over everything, rose-coloured and sweet, eventually fall. So many people, during that period of self-discovery, head out into the world to do their important works, but so few of them do in such a foreign place, missing the mark so completely on the revolution she set to fight for, learning her important lessons along the way; so few journeys are written with such compassion, such sweet and brutal humour and hard-won wisdom. So few journeys are ever written so well.

12 or 20 questions: with Deb Olin Unferth

Deb Olin Unferth [photo credit: Margaret Olin] is the author of the memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, the story collection Minor Robberies, and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been published in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature, and was a Harper's Bazaar Editors' Choice: Name to Know in 2011. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My latest book, Revolution, is a memoir, and my first book, Minor Robberies, is a book of short shorts. They feel similar in that I approached them with the same urgency and desire, and I revealed myself equally in both. But in Revolution I am better able to handle longer narrative, tell more of a story, I think. The short shorts are more obviously philosophical, perhaps. I think the answer to the question "why are you writing?" would be the same when I wrote each of them.  

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I never wrote poems, not even when I  was in high school and in love, though my leap toward fiction was more rooted in philosophical and emotional interests, like many poets. I suppose it took me a long time to work my way around to nonfiction because I didn't see a lot of examples of nonfiction that used language and sound in ways that excited me. I'm not saying it didn't exist, I just didn't encounter it. Once I began finding it, I grew interested.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?


It depends on the project. Short shorts come quickly, though I may revise them for years and they still may wind up looking very similar to how they started. My novel, Vacation, took tremendous reworking and changing, many, many drafts, notes, notecards, bargaining letters to God, and so on, but I began and ended the entire thing in a little over two years. With my memoir, Revolution, I had written bits and pieces of it over a period of many years without quite knowing what I would do with it. For a while I thought I'd write a spy novel -- ha! And then, after I wrote Vacation, I decided on a memoir and I spent a year and half gathering and rewriting and shaping. 

4 - Where does prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?


I do generally think of whatever I'm working on as either part of "the book" (whatever book I'm working on) or as some extraneous thing -- extra story, essay, exercise for no reason, outpouring of frustration, etc. There is always a "book" I'm working on -- or not working on, as the case may be.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings are generally a positive experience, it's nice to get out and meet people. I've had plenty of the usual horror story readings though, the ones where two people show up, or where everyone is so bored that they are falling out of their chairs, etc. I've had enough of those to put the fear of God in my heart whenever I'm on my way to an event. But I've had lots of fun readings too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?


I think if the questions were easy enough to formulate that I could just write them down right here, I probably would have just done that instead of writing the books. But narrative communicates in a mysterious way. Through things like collage, repetition, the way tension is built, the note a piece ends on, the narrative is expressing something about the world, about morality, perception, time, the self, etc. 

I would say my work has philosophical, political, and emotional concerns.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?


The role of the writer in the world is the same as it is for any individual. I happen to think every individual has a moral responsibility to, at the very least, not cause pain in the individuals (people and animals) around her. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have been very lucky with editors. I've had three fantastic editors work extensively on my books: Diane Williams, Eli Horowitz, and now with this most recent book, Gillian Blake. Also Dave Eggers edited my first book, but he did only a light edit -- and it too was just an outstanding edit. It is rare to have such luck, from what I understand. I loved working will all of them, and my books are much better for it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Approach the form with daring and disregard for the norm.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write every morning.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I do a lot of free-writing, a lot of exercises. I pull out things I never finished. I look at a part of the book that I haven't looked at in a while. I read.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What a question! Home? Several places have felt deeply like home. I felt deeply at home in Kansas, and the smell of skunk, of all things, reminds me of that (I had an entire family of skunks living under my house at one point and the smell lingered for a year). I felt at home in Chicago, of course, which is where I grew up, and each neighborhood I lived in had different smells. I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a child and certain fresh flower smells and the smell of exhaust reminds me of that. I now feel very at home in New York. I guess this is a question about sentimentality -- I suppose I can feel sensorally sentimental about any number of locations. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?


I think visual art, especially the various kinds of modernists, had a big influence on me as I was developing my voice. Now I mostly listen to music for advice on how to think about structure.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Here are a few just off the top of my head of a few writers I currently love:

Dead writers: Kafka, Yates, Stein, Waugh, Kobo Abe, Henry Green 

Living writers: George Saunders, Ben Marcus, Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Heidi Julavits

Also I'm a vegan and that's very important to me. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?


Save the world. Like Superman, you know? 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I might like being a full-time animal rights activist. I might have liked to be a lawyer. Or do something with design. Definitely not a politician, firewoman, or anything having to do with cooking. Those are out.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I took to it very quickly once I started. I started late (at twenty-five) and it never occurred to me to stop. Everything else I'd done up to that point, I stopped.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind is fascinating.

Hal Hartley's The Book of Life -- I can't believe how much I love this film.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A graphic novel.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;