, from the green notebook

, reading Jen Tynes, Brenda Hillman, Rob Taylor + Joy Williams,




Michigan poet Jen Tynes posted this excerpt of Brenda Hillman’s “Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” to social media earlier today, originally published online via Too Little / Too Hard, a site for “Writers on the intersections of work, time and value”:

When you feel paralysed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull and predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree. Never look at your phone while walking downstairs. Do not destroy your body by self-medicating under poetic stress. Just write new poems & read them to your community. Keep the ego in balance because the ego project is doomed to fail. If you don’t receive the rewards you deserve from “the outside world”—and you very likely will not—try to celebrate the good work of others; hold love in your heart; work for justice for humans & non-humans & keep writing.

Keep writing, most writerly advice offers. Keep going. Easier said than done, we all know. I work like a maniac for a couple of years on a manuscript, six to eight months further pushing the book once it’s published, and a royalty cheque a year or two later that won’t even cover a single outing of weekly groceries. It isn’t that difficult to feel discouraged, certainly. Keep going, keep moving, keep pushing. What are we doing, exactly? What is this for?

Tynes herself, from her chapbook Mushrooms Yearly Planner (2021): “We have every right / to be here muscle memorized.”

*

Awash in the beach-head of Bank Street traffic, another coffeeshop morning, Ottawa South. I’m reading through Vancouver poet and editor Rob Taylor’s pandemic-era poetry collection Weather (2024), his afterword to which includes this curious caveat:

Then, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had all of us searching for answers, I stumbled upon mine. Quarantined at home with my wife and two pre-school-aged children in our two-bedroom apartment, I had no choice but to venture outside to work in peace.

I understand that sentiment, especially from the viewpoint of living in an apartment, which would have provided an entirely different array of human interactions than where we’re at: three bedroom house, basement, fenced-in yard. The benefits of a particular kind of suburban lot, and the three months’ worth of notes across the onset of pandemic lockdown that evolved into my non-fiction hybrid, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022). We managed, if you can call it thus, fully aware we were in a better position than some. My home office, for example. In the early 1990s, when I lived with partner and preschooler in a one-bedroom Centretown apartment, the only way I could think was to leave for the coffeeshop, come evening. The stress was real.

Seeking a pandemic-era calm, where I delved into chaos. Peace is a relative term, after all. And the possibilities of space.

“the span it takes,” Taylor writes, “to read a poem / we can’t yet see.”

*

An interesting new interview with Joy Williams, conducted by Adrienne Westenfeld, lands online at Esquire, speaking to “the decades she spent contributing to Esquire, from the editors who shaped her career to the boxes of outraged letters about her most infamous story.” I love the detail that Westenfeld shares of sending Williams the questions, writing in her introduction that “Nowadays the eighty-year-old author lives in the Arizona desert, where she communicates by typewritten correspondence. When we sent over a questionnaire to Williams, what we received in return surprised even us. On vintage Esquire letterhead emblazoned with Hills’s name [the late Rust Hills, Esquire’s longtime fiction editor, who was married to Williams from 1974 until his death in 2008], Williams sent back typewritten answers to our questions, all written in the blunt, lucid voice we know and love.”

Interviews such as these remind of how early editors in such highly visible positions can be so essential for a writer’s career, from a young Joy Williams publishing stories in Paris Review and Esquire, to my own knowledge of infamous Canadian editor and broadcaster Robert Weaver (1921-2008), from his time as fiction editor of Saturday Night magazine, or his years broadcasting the work of a slew of younger Canadian writers on CBC Radio. Back when radio held a larger cultural attention, he created a variety of shows in the years spanning 1948 to 1985, including Anthology, that featured early works and appearances by Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Many of whom we consider Canadian canon owe their careers to the work of Robert Weaver. Will the same be said in the future of certain editors at This magazine, Maisonneuve or The Walrus?

In her Esquire interview, Williams responds to her time and experiences through the magazine, and of being edited by Gordon Lish, his pen striking through whole sentences, paragraphs. She answers: “I learned a lot. I had been getting a little wordy.” The sent questions and her single responses don’t allow for a back-and-forth, and there are more than a couple of her responses that scream for the inclination of follow-up. Still, her responses show a thoughtful combination of quickness, intuitive self-awareness and sharp terseness, offering only what is absolutely required. Her response to question six, the single, pointed: “No.”

 

reading in the margins: Joy Williams

Thanks to a tweet by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, I discovered a craft essay online by American writer Joy Williams, “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.” What emerged, very quickly, was Williams’ quick wit and dark humour, and a particular kind of wisdom, hard-won and practical. I’d not heard of Williams prior to this, but I became curious. In a 2014 interview I found with Williams for the Paris Review, conducted by Paul Winner, she displays that same wit and humour, as well as a kind of evasiveness, although that might be too strong a word. It is the way she responds indirectly to his questions, using Winners’ prompts as jumping off points into further thinking. Her mind, it would seem, simply moves too fast.

INTERVIEWER

I think of the Internet, the sheer volume. Cynthia Ozick wrote recently about the influence of this environment, all those Amazon customer reviews.

WILLIAMS

Who writes those?

INTERVIEWER

Anyone. People who may, in an earlier age, have written letters to the editor.

WILLIAMS

It’s one thing when it’s a restaurant. I mean, they can destroy a restaurant overnight. To do that with books?

Williams is wonderfully present, deeply engaged and comfortably outside the mythical inner-circles or goings-on of big name authors, of which she might even be one. She presents an aura of practicality and confidence; doing her work in her own way, conducting her own silences and spaces, and building up her own solitudes, from where she is able to contemplate and create her best work.

I like the way she references Alice Munro as part of the interview, so wonderfully evocative and charming in her descriptions: “That nice Canadian writer who recently won the Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a ‘hellish good time’ writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it could take some time.”

Responding to my follow-up, Elisa recommends I begin with Williams’ novel, The Quick and The Dead. I hesitate to attempt to read a novel during pandemic lockdown, predominantly for the fact of our two wee children are underfoot, in the midst of their online schooling. But the summer will soon be upon us, my wife reminds. You can sit outside, then. Elisa also points me to a November 2020 profile on Williams in the New York Times by A.O. Scott. Scott writes of comparisons made between Williams’ work with that of John Hawkes and John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, and to Raymond Carver, who studied writing at the University of Iowa at the same time as Williams. He writes:

Not that she needs their company. Her protean aspect — her manner of showing both a realist and an experimental face, sometimes in the space of a single page — exposes the limitations of such sorting. The bird evades capture, even in a notebook. Capture and evasion, not incidentally, are what she writes about most.

Given my own leanings toward Davis, perhaps this article does provide me with an answer of where to begin: her collection of micro-fictions, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. My searches also uncover options for a new novel, published in September 2021. That might be a later step. On my part, I quote the first two sentences of her essay as part of a short story I’m working on, slipping her lines just underneath the railings. They fit just fine.

Two short story collections: J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams,

Further to our time away in Picton, I went through recent short story collections by American writers J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams. All the adults were two weeks-plus beyond double vaccination (and seeing anyone else, obviously), and everyone was super careful. The children spent the week in the pool.

I’ve previously only read one book by New York State fiction writer J. Robert Lennon: his short story collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Press, 2005), and recently read through his Let Me Think (Graywolf Press, 2021). Whereas Pieces for the Left Hand was made up of one hundred very short stories organized into thematic section-groupings, the stories in Let Me Think are assembled via multiple shapes and sizes, from the short burst to the longer narrative. Lennon’s stories explore odd, small moments that can’t easily be explained, like droplets of magic sprinkled in to shift the narrative. His stories explore how certain experiences or interactions shift perception, from the repetition of a single day into infinity, the experience of a painful divorce or the seemingly-simple matter of sweeping up dust. As he writes to end the flash story “Unnamed”: “The road has no name. This is the commonest name in the world for a road.”

The stories in Pieces for the Left Hand were structural echoes of each other, offering twists and unexpected turns of perception, something that collection shares with this one, albeit through an equal exploration of form: a story might be propelled almost entirely by dialogue, for example, while another is composed closer to a flash, or even a prose poem. Listen to the story “Monsters,” that reads:

The blind man, who everyone agreed was exceedingly handsome and who had married a woman widely regarded, among their acquaintances, as extraordinarily beautiful, was chosen to participate in the trial of a new medical procedure that doctors  believed might fully restore sight to certain patients. The surgery was a complete success, but when the handsome man saw, for the first time, his own face and the face of his wife, he was horrified, and could not be dissuaded of the notion that they, and everyone around them, were hideous monsters; and when, six months later, the procedure’s efficacy unexpectedly faded, and the handsome man was plunged again into darkness, he said that he was not, as his friends might have predicted, relieved, but rather more horrified still, because now, and forevermore, he could not know with any certainty where the monsters were.

American fiction writer Joy Williams is someone I only discovered recently, thanks to catching a tweet (and subsequent recommendation) by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert. After moving through Williams’ extensive catalogue, I decided to pick up a copy of her short story collection, 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016). An assemblage of ninety-nine short, self-contained stories, each story is numbered, with their titles only set at the end. There are echoes of Milan Kundera through Williams’ prose, moving easily from big ideas to specific actions and ideas. The twenty-ninth story, “IGNORANCE,” writes of a man on the beach, rescued from the water by a pig: “Would the pig have rescued the man if she had known that he and his companion had just enjoyed a picnic of ham sandwiches?” With the response: “The pig’s owner replied that pigs are intelligent, more intelligent than dogs, but they are not omniscient.”

What is fascinating through this collection is how it is the framing that allows for these seemingly untethered and unconnected pieces their book-length shape and anchor. Hers are short bursts that suggest more than they say, and hold far more than they might easily let on; indirectly, and even directly, these are stories about and around God, even utilizing God as a character, moving around the earth, interacting with others in curious and even mundane ways. Should he adopt a tortoise? At another point, he answers questions for the wolves. These are stories that refuse to provide easy answers, instead offering openings of thought; offering, instead, a way through which to contemplate ideas. Offered as story number thirty-nine, titled “BURIED IN COLORADO ALL ALONE,” she writes:

The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a gold fish necklace.
            “What does that mean?” asked Dick.
            She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”
            “In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”
            Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is—his own prior thought formations—and this generates the flash. He now knows where he is.