rob mclennan : Queen Mob’s Review of 2015

I was asked to participate in “Queen Mob’s Review of 2015” over at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, in which I recommend books, chapbooks and other somesuch by Sarah Manguso, Jessica Smith, Marilyn Irwin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Phil Hall, Etgar Keret and plenty of others.

My list of 'best of' sits in a rather lengthy post alongside equivalent lists by Rauan Klassnik, Evan Tognotti, Greg Bem, S Cearley, Gideon Morrow, Eve Johnson, Reb Livingston, Nicholas Rombes, Natalia Panzer, Masha Tupitsyn, Jeremy Fernando, Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, Vladimir Savich, Legacy Russell, Scherezade Siobhan, Erik Kennedy, Menachem Feuer, Russell Bennetts and Amanda Earl.

I also have my fifth annual “‘best of’ list of Canadian poetry books” list up on the dusie blog on January 1st. Watch for it!

Etgar Keret, The Seven Good Years

When I was a kid, my parents took me to Europe. The high point of the trip wasn’t Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower but the flight from Israel to London—specifically, the meal. There on the tray were a tiny can of Coca-Cola and, next to it, a box of cornflakes not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.

            My surprise at the miniature packages didn’t turn into genuine excitement until I opened them and discovered that the Coke tasted like Coke in regular-size cans and the cornflakes were real, too. It’s hard to explain where that excitement actually came from. All we’re talking about is a soft drink and a breakfast cereal in much smaller packages, but when I was seven, I was sure I was witnessing a miracle.

            Today, thirty years later, sitting in my living room in Tel Aviv and looking at my two-week-old son, I have exactly the same feeling. Here’s a man who weighs no more than ten pounds—but inside he’s angry, bored, frightened, and serene, just like any other man on the planet. Put a three-piece suit and a Rolex on him, stick a tiny attaché case in his hand, and send him out into the world, and he’ll negotiate, do battle, and close deals without even blinking. He doesn’t talk, that’s true. And he soils himself as if there were no tomorrow. I’m the first to admit he has a thing or two to learn before he can be shot into space or allowed to fly an F-16. But in principle, he’s a complete person wrapped in a nineteen-inch package, and not just any person, but one who’s very extreme, an eccentric, a character. The kind you respect but may not completely understand. Because, like all complex people, regardless of their height or weight, he has many sides. (“Big Baby”)

Given that Etgar Keret is one of the most remarkable fiction writers I’ve read, I felt I had no choice but to pick up a copy of his new memoir, The Seven Good Years (2015). The Seven Good Years is a collection of short non-fiction pieces composed and collected over a seven year period, set in seven sections: “Year One,” “Year Two,” etcetera. The seven year stretch of the pieces run from the birth of his son to the death of his father, in which he observes and comments upon his immediate circle of self, family and identity. He moves through a series of observations on culture and cultural differences, the ongoing shelling around him in Tel Aviv, book tours and the nature of, and the complications, joys and confusions inherent to being father, husband and son. Words that describe his ongoing work often include “wry,” “poignant,” “witty,” “frank,” “enchanting” and “hilarious,” and there is such a buoyancy and optimism to even his darkest writing, one that discussing his parents’ survival of the Holocaust, or another attack in Tel Aviv on the day his son was born, or even the slow death of his father simply can’t diminish. This is (in my opinion), quite simply, an incredibly intimate and understated book by one of the finest of contemporary prose writers.

There is something tricky about attempting to excerpt from Keret’s prose, making me realize the extent to which his short pieces exist as entirely self-contained units. It is impossible to understand the depth and breadth of each essay without presenting entire three-page pieces (which I will not do here, for a variety of reasons). In thirty-six pieces, Keret presents self-contained portraits of an individual, a situation or an idea, sometimes wrapping the three simultaneously, from his sister’s conversion to ultra-orthodoxy, admiring his elder brother, or even the optimism of his parents, who might be forgiven had they slid into pessimism. “When I was a kid,” he writes, in “Long View,” “my parents used to tell me bedtime stories. During World War II, the stories their parents told them were never read from books because there were no books to be had, so they made up their own. As parents themselves, they continued that tradition, and from a very young age, I felt a special pride, because the bedtime stories I heard every night couldn’t be bought in any store; they were mine alone. My mother’s stories were always about dwarves and fairies, while my father’s stories were about the time he lived in southern Italy, from 1946 to 1948.” Further in the same piece, he writes:

            When I try to reconstruct those bedtime stories my father told me years ago, I realize that beyond their fascinating plots, they were meant to teach me something. Something about the almost desperate human need to find good in the least likely places. Something about the desire not to beautify reality but to persist in searching for an angle that would put ugliness in a better light and create affection and empathy for every wart and wrinkle on its scarred face.

Etgar Keret, Four Stories

 Etgar’s stories are a reminder of that rude intangible that often goes unspoken in creative writing workshops: a great work of art is often just residual evidence of a great human soul. There is sweetheartedness and wisdom and eloquence and transcendence in his stories because these virtues exist in Etgar himself.

Reading his stories, we are reminded that what we call “craft” is really just the means by which the writer manages to give clear passage to these positive virtues.

            George Saunders, “Introducing Etgar Keret”

In the absence of a new collection of short fiction by Israeli author Etgar Keret [see my previous piece on him here; see his “12 or 20 questions” interview here], I’ve been reading through his Four Stories (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010), published as part of “The B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies” at Syracuse University. Introduced by George Saunders, the short collection features an edited version of a lecture Keret gave at the university in October, 2009, as well as the four stories he read from. The lecture, titled “Second Generation,” is an absolutely stunning essay on growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors, and how that fed directly into the way he sees the world, and his writing:

            When you read second-generation authors, and there are some wonderful authors—children of Holocaust survivors, like Savyon Liebrecht, Lizzie Doron, Nava Semel, and now, recently, Amir Gutfreund—the thing that they always talk about is the silence. The fact that there was always a silence in their houses. Basically, Holocaust survivors did not talk about the Holocaust experience, either out of some wish to suppress the pain or even sometimes from a feeling of strong, unjustified, shame. They didn’t want to tell those stories. I must say that in my house it was different, different in very strange ways that, as a kid, I was uncritical of—and I guess that also as an adult, I was uncritical. Maybe now after passing forty, I look at it differently, but my parents always had these things. You know, they never denied the horrifying experience they had to go through, but there was something in the way that they told it.

            For example, my father spent almost six hundred days of the war in a hole in the ground, and I asked him, “Father, how did you get through that?” And he said, “You know, son, I have this belief that every person is the world champion in something. But the sad thing about it is, most of us will never discover what we are really good at. There are people who could be amazing tennis players, and they just play piano all their life, and they are mediocre at that, and they don’t know they could be great tennis players. One thing I can say about the war is that it showed me my greatest talent, the thing that nobody in the world can do better than me. And that’s sleep! Throughout this long period, every day, I would close my eyes, fall asleep, wake up six or seven hours later, and I would say to my father, ‘Dad, is the war over?’ And he would say, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Maybe I should sleep some more.’ This was my way of surviving the war. And all the people who were in hiding with me were jealous of me because they had to be there in a place in which time stood still, afraid for their lives, while I was sleeping.”

Part of what attracts me to Keret’s writing includes the sheer humanity of it, focusing on the important connections and disconnections between people, and the absolute brevity of his writing style, including only what is essential to the purposes of each story. Even through repeating the story of his father’s war experiences living and sleeping in a hole in the ground, a lesser writer might describe the hole, the population of the hole, the circumstances of the hole, or even describe other tangents that would take away from the story’s purpose and power. Thanks to his parents, Keret is able to speak fearlessly about what others can only whisper, openly exploring various dark histories and situations, both large and small. In his lecture, he speaks about the optimism his parents gave their three children, and that is what is most attractive in Keret’s fiction: his clarity, his fearless and his boundless optimism.

There aren’t many things I think everyone should read. This is something I think everyone should read.

[Etgar Keret reads again in Ottawa through the ottawa international writers festival on April 20, 2013, with an on-stage interview conducted by Jonathan Goldstein]

‘The Next Big Thing’ meme-interview with rob mclennan: the blog tour that ran itself

December 5-8, 2012

[photo taken in Paris, France in October 2012 by Christine McNair]

Pearl Pirie tagged me in this series of interviews [see her interview here], originally pointing out an interview by Christine Fischer Guy, who writes:

The blog tour that ran itself: this is ‘the next big thing’ interview that writers in the blogosphere are passing, hand to hand, like a baton. What’s the next big thing we’re working on?

There are a few others I’ve read as well, including Darryl Joel Berger, Ariel Gordon, Tanis Rideout, Laurie D. Graham, Alex Leslie, Jennifer LoveGrove, Gillian Wallace, Sandra Nicholls, Gary Barwin and Lauren B. Davis.

Here are my answers to these questions:

1. What is the working title of your book?

The working title for my current work-in-progress collection of short stories is “On Beauty.” I admit, it’s a title I’m not married to. It was long ago previously called “The Wedding Present,” after a short story that might still be dropped from the whole. For the time being, I’m worrying less about the title of the collection than the stories themselves.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

A singular story dates from February 2010 (a story that, depending on my mood, I regularly consider cutting from the collection entirely), but otherwise, the collection had its initial impulse during a trip we made to Toronto for Christmas/Boxing Week, 2011. We were spending a couple of days with my now-wife’s mother, and ended up spending part of December 27^th [see my post on such here] on Bloor Street West, attempting a few hours of writing. We had wandered through a since-closed location of Book City and picked up a number of things, including a collection of essays by Milan Kundera, an issue of Believer, an issue of Geist, some back issues of Granta and McSweeney’s. I read the most amazing short story by Miranda July, “Majesty,” which immediately generated the beginning sketches of a short story, “Fourteen things you don’t know about Arturus Booth.”

I eventually had to find her collection of short stories, No one belongs here more than you (Scribner, 2007).

But the ideas themselves: sometimes I start with an idea for a story, sometimes a short scene, sometimes only a title. From the anthology Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (2008), I adapted the idea of the semi-fictional “A Short Film About John Bolton” (2003) to a semi-fictional story set in 1968, “A short film about my father.” Another story in the collection continues one particular thread from my second novel, Missing Persons (2009), because Amanda Earl, quite literally, asked to know more. I have been attempting another piece to further another thread from the same novel, but the story hasn’t quite figured itself out yet.

There is this story as well, that came out of a conversation, and various thoughts I’ve had on the subject of The Matrix Trilogy.

For this collection, I am very much interested in the collage aspect of accumulating short, nearly stand-alone scene-fragments into a coherent, cohesive narrative of some three pages in length. To articulate the essence of a short story, one does not necessarily need to spell out all the facts.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Short stories. Tightly-packed.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Johnny Depp. Or the kid who was in that terrible John Carter flick.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Short, sharp and intensely personal; a large book packed into a small space. And yet, this is entirely incomplete. The work should speak for itself.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m not really interested in self-publishing this collection, and am represented by no agencies of any sort. So far, my fiction has had but a single trade home, which appears to be no longer an option.

I look with envy at works of fiction published by Anansi and Scribner and McSweeney’s and Douglas & McIntyre (even with their recent financial upheavals).

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still in the midst of the first draft, and rework many of the stories daily, slowly carving, carving, carving. Over the twelve months I’ve been actively working on this as my main writing project, I’ve got nearly ten finished stories I like, another half-dozen in progress that I think have good potential, and another half-dozen I haven’t decided on yet.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m not sure. I would attempt to ascribe my fiction alongside works by Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Jean McKay, Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis and Sarah Manguso, but that might all be vanity. It might be wishful thinking on my part.

I’ve composed a couple of short essays over the past year or so on writing short fiction that discuss some of my goals and concerns, including this blog post, and this short essay over at The Puritan.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Living, and writing. Part of what I’ve been enjoying about working in the realm of short fiction is in watching how various unrelated strands – fragments of real life, memory, information gleaned from television, newspapers, overheard tales, works of non-fiction, etcetera – all manage to wrap themselves into a comprehensive narrative weave. I don’t know where it all comes from, but it somehow make sense in the three-page stretch of prose.

I seek inspiration, at times, from other great works. Lately I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and re-reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’m hoping the combination of the collection’s sharp brevity and articulation of deeply personal moments are enough to interest anyone.

As per the rules of this series, here are the five writers I’ve tagged for self-interviews of their own:

Stephen Cain ; Natalie Zina Walschots ; Thomas Wharton ; Michael Bryson ; Spencer Gordon

Watch for their interviews. Hopefully they’ll be posting over the next little bit.
(and for the sake of gender-balance: over a period of two weeks, I asked a total of ten female writers and five male writers. This is the list of writers who, for whatever reason, said yes.)

Message for tagged authors:

Rules of the Next Big Thing

***Use this format for your post

***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)

***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Be sure to line up your five people in advance.

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.