Writing Across the States to be held Friday

The University of Central Arkansas and Auburn University creative writers will host two public readings Friday, March 30. The first event will be a student reading from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Eagle's Nest South. Students from UCA and Auburn will share their work, including fiction, nonfiction, essay and poetry. The second event will be a faculty reading from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at The Gnu's Room. UCA faculty members Garry Craig Powell and John Vanderslice will share their work as will Auburn faculty member Ryder Collins. Students interested in sharing work should contact Jennifer Collins at jkc0010@auburn.edu.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri's fiction is known for focusing on Indian-American characters who are caught between two cultures, and she tells her stories both from the perspectives of the parents who moved from India to the U.S. and of the children who have grown up in the U.S.

Lahiri made a name for herself with the publication of her first story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. This is especially astounding because of how little recognition is given to the short story form in recent years. She also has a novel, The Namesake, which was turned into a movie; in 2008, she published another collection, a New York Times best seller, Unaccustomed Earth. "Once in a Lifetime" comes from Unaccustomed Earth and was originally published in The New Yorker in 2006. The story is part of a section of three stories about the same characters, grouped together under the name "Hema and Kaushik."

The book critic and poet Anis Shivani has named Lahiri one of the most recent "overrated" writers in an article in which he had this to say:

Utterly unwilling (though probably fully capable, since she's the only readable writer on this list) to write about anything other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge's Central and Inman Squares, and making easy adjustments to the top of the American meritocratic pyramid. Determined to shun any stylistic influences besides Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Has staked out a very marketable niche territory and is never going to venture beyond it. Never a good sign when the movie based on a writer's only novel (The Namesake) is better than the book (there's no character in The Namesake that generates as much sympathy as Irfan Khan or Kal Penn in the movie). The protagonist's whole circle of immigrant elders moves from MIT to Harvard, but he's traumatized by whether his nickname (or given name) brands him an outsider! Invariably maintains coy persona of a modest writer in whose lap everything just happened to drop because of luck--come to think of it, this may not be far from the truth. There is such a thing as New Yorker fiction, even today--just read one of her upcoming stories about Central Square PhD Bengali immigrants effortlessly shedding their native ways. Possesses the talent to be so much more adventurous in theme and style--but remorseless caution stops her.

Here, however, is praise for Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, including praise for the story we're reading. Lahiri discusses Unaccustomed Earth in this Bookforum interview. Here is a link to Charlie Rose's interview with Lahiri -- she discusses how she got started with writing, how she studied other writers as she was working on developing her own stories, her thoughts on the story as a form, and what she was trying to do in her collection.

International Blog About Rusty Spell Week

My husband tells me that this is what week it is, so here's a post on one of his short stories, "The Age I Was at Christmas and the Girl That I Was With."

The story is a great example for you of how you can use a central motif (in this case, Christmas + the girl) to tell a story that covers a lot of time and/or characters. Rusty is also able to structure the story easily . . . and it's an interesting way to build character (something you could steal for your own work). You'll also notice how he has to use a lot of summary rather than scene because the story covers so much time, but how each section has such a high level of particular and sometimes quirky detail that the story still maintains energy. Also notice how he balances humor and sadness and gives his character flaws but still makes him likeable.

Your Brain on Fiction

From The New York Times:

Your Brain on Fiction

An excerpt:

Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. . . .

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Raymond Carver

In my 12:30 class, Raymond Carver's story "A Small Good Thing" came up and luckily we can read it online--this is the version that was less heavily edited. I can't find it anywhere online, but the more minimalist version of the story is called "The Bath."

Here and here are really interesting (to me, anyway) articles about Carver's relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace is a short story writer, novelist, and essayist. In his shortened lifetime, he published a 1,000 page+ novel, Infinite Jest; a collection of essays called Consider the Lobster; and a number of story collections. He's known for his postmodern, experimental style.

"Incarnations of Burned Children" was originally published in Esquire, and you can also find it in his collection Oblivion.

The New York Review of Books published this interview with Wallace. And you can watch Wallace's Charlie Rose interview here.

In 2008, Wallace committed suicide after a long history with depression. Here is a nice write up of his career and history from Time Magazine. After Wallace's suicide, McSweeney's published a number of moving letters from people who had read Wallace's work, and in some cases, knew or met him. You can also read "All That", a story that the New Yorker published after Wallace's death.