I'm reading Joy Williams' Honored Guest at Molfe's suggestion, and while the first four were transcendent, intense, unforgettable stories--particularly "Congress"--I'm finding the stories about Tucson are falling a little flat with me. Maybe I'm distracted by the details of my hometown, but these stories seem so much more in love with place than the first stories, which focussed more on her great, strange characters.
I've long been of the opinion that Arizona doesn't yet have its novel (recommend me one, if you disagree, probably Ed Abbey has one, though I'm thinking less along the lines of natural or social writing). Something about our non-regional dialect and a heat that's oppressive enough to keep us in climate control also keeps us from having much of a regional identity. I've read a couple good tries that attempt to crack open that non-identity identity, but nothing that sticks with me. I've certainly never tried to write Arizona--not lately, anyway.
What are the signs of a great regional story? How does it feel to read your own hometown? Is it easier to write your old home after you've left it? Many of you are already great at this stuff.
My story series work continues, working through a week-long bad-story snag I hit when I was presented with the idea that flash fiction operates on "punchline" endings--an idea I don't wholly disagree with, though that's for another post. Looks like the rain will keep us from pointing fire at the sky, cheers to that.
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11 comments:
Hell yeah. I can't wait to hear what people have to say about his.
Last night C and I had this short little discussion about being a native daughter. I was telling her that I am not actually a new orleans native because I wasn't born there and because my family wasn't from there. I guess that makes me a native texan, although I don't feel tuned in to the cultural cues the way I do with NOLA.
But maybe new orleans is an opposit to Arizona. Becuase it is has the same problem. Everyone writes about it. Everyone falls in love with it. And yet, like Arizona, most of the stories about it bring out my snotty pants (I turn into Dago when he gives us that lecture about Tennessee Williams writing about Mexico). But when someone gets New Orleans, or better yet a recognizable pocket of that place, right--well, damn. (Confederacy of Dunces, some odd moments in Chopin).
I do love this post. And though I'm not sure I'm being honest if I say I miss workshop, I--without a doubt--certainly miss the impromptu, less formal discussions we all had about writing and how to do it, things to read, others opinions in general, so I could steal what ideas I wanted and then pass them off later as my own. Shit, I miss you guys.
But about place specifically: I think I'm still waiting to hear the most illuminating, or profound, comment about it. It seems critics are always bringing up place and it's function without saying much. They say "nice backdrop," or "great descriptions," or even the ever elusive "setting as character," or "setting as theme." My take--Nobody truly knows what these things mean.
One time, I thought I knew what they meant. But I don't anymore.
I'm kind of going with one of your ideas here Amelia, sort of. When I finish a novel and am struck by the strength of the setting, it is rarely because I can recall a detailed description of the physical land. Instead it's a touch of description, enough to get my imagination there, but description that allows me enough room to fill in the blanks. That-- plus characters--, and this is the big gun for me, characters that act/react based on their surroundings, which often seems to be a combination of the people and the places that surround them.
And so I give you: yet another psuedo-comment about place.
Wait, here's what I'm really trying to say:
Critics often discuss place as this separate element, and I agree that when you're writing a book review, that that is the easiest approach. I do it too, when I have to write those things. But from both a writer and reader's perspective, I think it may be a false divide to separate place from character.
...(dialect, but more importantly colloquialisms, syntax unique to a region, manners of dressing, hell-- even hairstyles, mores of a place that have to do with more regionalized customs, I'm thinking wedding stuff here, sorry)
All of that is character, but those writer decisions, if done correctly, will reinforce setting. And not neccessarily setting with a captial "S," like Tucson, AZ. Setting on a smaller scale like the suburban group of people from one of your early stories, Amelia, where hostessing and it's duties seemed the do-all and be-all of life. Where the yard and how it looked could make or break you. Where Car. strings together a bunch of cliches in one paragraph.
Car. = me
I meant that last sentence to be a funny jab at myself. I didn't want that to be misinterpreted as an insult to that story, Amelia. Am I being too crazy? I think I have to stop writing now.
Carmen. I love you.
I need a minute to digest all these words, and I'll respond.
This goes along with what you say about characters that have to act/react with a place, C, and I'm not fully covering the breadth of it, but I think characters need to know the inside joke of a place for that action/reaction to fully happen.
So, and, this is a bad example, Tucson is the only place I know where you walk outside and feel like God's aiming a hairdryer at you at all times. Tony Earley has many better examples in his story "The Prophet from Jupiter" (three years of MFA land and I'm still talking about this story), when the old town is flooded up to make a new dam. Everything is literally under the surface, there are stories about what's down there, and at night, the realtors throw their competitors' signs into the lake.
I don't mean "inside joke" like it has to be funny, but it has to be something inside enough that other people from that place have felt what you're writing, but never thought about it. Saying that a Tucson character drove to Eegee's and it was hot as shit outside doesn't have the same effect. (Not that Williams did anything that clumsy. I'm starting to think I'm being unduly harsh on her.)
ms. rebecca once asked me if i thought i'd ever write about texas, and i said no (i think she did, too).
now i wonder. do y'all?
hey, i noticed that as well. i loved the first part of the book, and then put her down in the second. i can't forget about the deer leg lamp. i just can't.
i have it, though, thanks to molfe, and when i get home, i'll see if the reason had something to do with the setting.
i'm trying to finish a story set in seguin. i've never wanted to write about my hometown before, mostly because it's awful, and i tend to mythologize my settings. but i've noticed that i'm doing that thing, almost unconsciously, where "the setting is as much of a character as the characters are," and it feels untrue.
i'm having a hard time keeping seguin from becoming a caricature of itself, and i wonder if that's the key to writing good setting. do you have to think of place as character in order to get it right?
or is that another one of those meaningless "write from your white hot center of heat" kind of cliches?
I don't know that I've ever read my hometown, and I don't think I've yet written it and nailed it. I fell in love with McCorkle's Carolina Moon b/c I recognized the people and places and they felt like home, even though it's set in Carolina. In Faulkner's Barn Burning, I recognized people and place and they felt like home (b/c of cadence and rhythm of speech), and it's set in a fictional town in Mississippi, I think. What I'm wondering now is if some of my setting whore-ish-ness isn't just that? Selfish and a desire for the familiar?
Is this something any of you read for?
Hell yeah.
I was thinking about this post on my way to work this morning and what I was thinking was that there is no word that I am aware that means what you, Amelia and Carmen were talking about. Sort of the equivolent of zeitgeist only the spirit of a place rather than of a time. And of course that is enormously comforting--when someone captures that.
RE Wolf's question. I've written about the texas of my childhood, but not San Marcos/Austin, TX. I want to, but I want to be old and nostalgic first.
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