This past Wednesday (October 26th), Shenandoah played host to Rebecca Makkai, W&L Class of 1999, as she read selections from her new novel, The Borrower. Video of her reading is available here and also here

During the Q&A immediately after the reading (which, sadly, didn’t make the video), Rebecca raised an interesting issue about writing. She highlighted the differences between writing a novel and writing a short story, and the difficulty that an author of one might have in writing the other. It’s a matter of space, really. A novel author is used to having a few hundred or so pages at his or her disposal in which to develop characters, plot, plot twists, etc. A short fiction author is used to having at most a couple dozen pages in which to develop the same things.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, okay, so what? Novels are novels and short fiction is short fiction. Never the twain shall meet. The problem arises in that writers are creative folk. They don’t like to be bound down to one genre- that’s boring. This creativity runs the danger of producing some bastardized version of the genres. A novel author is used to having oodles of space, as I’ve said before. When you normally think in terms of lengthily-produced plots, a space constraint like the one placed on short fiction is lethal. There simply is no room for the half-dozen plot twists that would’ve enticed a novel reader into continuing to read. To make a holiday-appropriate example, take Jane Eyre. Would you as a reader keep going with Jane if her story could only be 15 pages? Probably not, as all the details would be lost. Everything in the novel takes pages and pages- Jane’s childhood, the strange noises and occurrences, the wedding scenes, Jane’s wandering across the moors, etc. It would be nigh on impossible to condense or select that type of story into a short story; there’s just too much to deal with. Even if you were to take a single section of the novel as stand alone, would it work? With a lot of novels, no. To use Jane Eyre again, let’s take Jane and Rochester’s reunion. There’s not enough character depth or comprehensible back story in that section to carry the reader’s interest through. Read as a stand-alone “short story,” it’s too confusing, like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Instead of “ooh, hurray for happy endings!”, the impression left behind is more akin to “who the hell are these people and why were they separated?”

Conversely, the short story author has trouble filling the pages necessary for a novel. While you may want to follow a character through that one particular moment of life in short story, it probably isn’t enough to hold your interest through a couple hundred pages. Faulkner’s Barn Burning works because it’s short; having to read through ten times the amount of microphiliac detail and desperate action would be unappealing. It’s like that paper you’re trying to stretch at 2 a.m.; it needs to be seven pages, but you’ve only got five. The filler you add looks like just what it is: inane filler. Likewise, a short story author can create a novel that looks like a number of short stories smushed together. The sections will hopefully be interrelated, but they still could easily stand apart from the other chapters.

At her reading yesterday Rebecca Makkai spoke about the arc of story, distinguishing it from simple sequence or anecdote.  It’s easy to workshop a story with our primary focus on the style, character, setting, but arc or architecture is harder, since it involves tension and suspense, character development, relationship of scenes and (hardest of all) theme, yet requires an understanding of the story’s fundamental shape.  It may be the most complicated question to put to a story, but we need an answer simple enough for us to see pattern shining through all the verbiage, what Chris Gavaler calls “the stuff.”  How do we get at this with a story-in-progress, our own or a peer’s?  Is it advisable to begin with a tentative outline, and work that toward something more unique and recognizable.? We know, for instance, the general arc of Moby-Dick, but how clearly must we see the stresses and buttressing system before we can see and begin to feel its true architecture?  Someone wade in here with an example of a story whose arc is visible to one who knows the plot and tone.

      What’s in a name, a word?  Blur, blurt, lubbr, blubbr, blab.  “Blurb” is a 20^th century coinage originating with Gelett Burgess (or perhaps Brander Matthews), who intended it to mock excessive praise for a book.  Most people in the publishing-and-reading world immediately recognized it as a raspberry aimed at boosterism, payback, mendacity and all the worst of motives and methods involved in the promotional blurb.  Now there’s even an online vanity press called Blurb, and I wonder how much thought (and wit) went into that christening.  The practice of endorsement goes back a fur piece – medieval at least, the Monty Python era, and the Arabic word (according to Dr. Google) for the practice is taquiz.  Surprisingly, the negative connotations intended by Burgess have, in the current climate, almost disappeared, but it’s still possible to detect them, like the moon’s full wafer, evident even when only a sliver catches the light.

     At their best, blurbs are minute reviews written by authorities and peers who genuinely admire the book in question and who aim to be accurate, enthusiastic, fresh, concise.  A blurb can be a brief standing ovation in print.

      So it’s a minimalist critical genre, and where’s the harm in that?  I’ve written blurbs for books, and my books have been blurbed.  Sometimes publishers have handled the request, and on other occasions I’ve personally asked another writer, usually someone I believed (or hoped) to be an admirer of my work, to read a manuscript and provide a comment, but the older I get, the less excited I am about the prospect or the product, because in the tangled little subculture we call the literary world, the wine has been watered down (I hope that’s water.).  I’m not guiltless in all this, but I’m trying to follow Ish’s recommendation that we examine our thoughts and behavior, no room for turning a blind eye or obfuscating.

     The blurb can be payback or pay-forward.  It can be another “like” or “poke,” one of the many tendrils of that unkempt garden that nurtures literary cliques, schools, networks, posses, mutual grooming societies and allies.  In the poetry world, everyone from the presses that publish our books to the few stores that sell them ask us to promote ourselves with wild abandon, and it’s only natural to recruit confederates to share the load.

     But it’s unnatural, as well.  Because the literary profession is so tangled (writers also edit, teach, review, give readings, administer programs, direct presses, award prizes, blog), as well as write, and publishers can muster a lot of leverage themselves.  A request to blurb a book can come with substantial subtext, much of it built around the question, “What if I respectfully decline?”  The word “inveigle” comes to mind.  Perceived duress can cast almost as hard a shadow as real duress, and who wants to be a refusenik in a small and imperiled subculture threatened by everything from “Survivor” to “Toy Story,” Gears of War 3, Sudoku, scrapbooking, hopscotch, texting. “occupying,” Farmville?

     It would be unfair to quote any of the specific blurbs that give me pause.  The selection process would be extensive and exhausting, and I probably no longer own the books sporting the worst offenders, but here are some facts that really put the stink into the word “blurb.”  Many blurbs are formulaic, as anyone can see.  Equally evident, many are hyperbolic.  Many are muddy or glib or so exclusively descriptive that the writer’s desire not to take a stand could not be more obvious.  Some blurbers just can’t disguise their lukewarm response to the book, others can’t conceal their own stake in the book’s success.  It gets worse.  I’ve heard writers disparage another writer’s work, then blurb it.  I’ve heard writers dismiss books they’ve already blurbed.  Quelle fromage.

     If we must have blurbs – and perhaps we must – then is there some way to keep accounts, govern, just simply keep count?  Some writers already refuse the gambit themselves, asking for quotations from reviews of earlier work or passages from the book on the back cover.  Perhaps the editor who decided to publish the book – or the referee who advised it . . .  no, that gets too murky quickly – should just write a paragraph explaining what made the work seem worthy.

     Although I believe less might be more in the blurb world, I’m not exactly asking anyone to open a website that publishes all blurbs by year, arranged alphabetically by blurber’s name.  It would likely be a thankless enterprise, but it would be a public way at least to hold me to what I’ve promised myself to do – not agree to blurb any book I don’t believe is exceptional, one of the ten or twelve best I’ve read in the past two or three years, and never to blurb a book briskly or for reasons other than the quality of the writing inside,  absolutely . . . no exceptions allowed. . .  starting now.  A fool’s errand?  I’ll get right on it.  I wonder if anyone else will admit it’s time to take that pledge.  Or am I just flat wrong?

Exit, pursued by a bear.

       Yesterday I received the following e-mail, and since it touches on an urgent issue, I felt I should share it with you all, despite the fact that it’s written under a nom de plume.

     “Call me Ishmael, and I’m a blurboholic.  Blurbophile.  Occasionally afflicted with blurbarrhea.  Of course, I knew I was a blurber – creator and consumer of them, prone to look at the back cover of a book, especially a poetry book, longer than I lingered with the contents, and on a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year my publisher requested that I blurb the first book by a newly-minted poet whose verse I had not previously encountered.  For once, I was stymied.  For hours, fueled by two pots of Blue Mountain, I scanned my files of serviceable exaggerations, inappropriate comparisons, Jarrell quotations, clichés, taxonomies, evasions, witticisms and exclamations, but the harder I searched, the less likely it seemed that anything I had on hand (old, new, borrowed or blue) might apply.  Pacing.  Sweating.  Panting.  Panic.  A couple more hours fuelled by three carafes of pinot something-or-other, but I wasn’t any closer.  Despair.  Exhausted despair.  I’ve never felt so small and inadequate.  I had been asked to lend my talents to someone who might well be a future MacArthur Fellow or AWP keynoter, a someday wheeler-dealer and high muckety-muck in the creative writing racket, and I had come up empty.  I reeled or the room reeled or the planet Lit Biz reeled.  I blacked out. 

     “After the reel, I can’t remember a thing, but the next morning, as the room unblurred, I was in the La-Z-Boy with my trusty Dell cool on my lap, the screen in deep sleep mode.  Ever the professional, I revived the Latitude and lo and behold, the following blurb — courtesy of my jitters and stumbles and McZany’s Reel, caffeine, alcohol, plus all that Campbell’s alphabet soup I ingested in my childhood and all the programming of various classes and programs and networks — yes, the following blurb, displayed in Baskerville Old Face, stared right back at my face, the cursor pulsing like the Morse Code gone monomaniacal – I I I I I. 

      “‘The lyrical density of X Y’s first volume of poems achieves narrative velocity without sacrificing a calm, elliptical documentary tone.  Not since the early days of poststructuralism has a poet reclaimed so much territory from both the critics and the novelists.  Epic and incandescent, though accessible and riddled with sparkling wit, this book is for all time.  It will survive as long as English is spoken.’

 “Ay-yi-yi!  One quick read and I knew I needed to give it up, the burbling, the blurbing, the bleating, but I needed help, empathy, hugs, twelve steps, a higher power.  Luckily, the local phone book was close at hand.   Fortuitously, it contained the solution: Blurboholics Anonymous.  And even more fortunately, my vision had cleared up enough for me to read the address — 17 Revival Way.  As soon as the sun was down, I was shaking hands and spilling my guts with gusto in the basement of an old boxing gym.  In the atmosphere of mold, sweat and pain, I admitted my problem before my fellow creatures, acknowledged a Higher Power (they call him The Trainer), ran through a ruthless moral inventory, began to ask forgiveness from those I’d harmed, vexed, misled in the throes of my addiction, and I swiftly headed out to spread the word.  My testimony is this: the affliction is curable, but requires a genuine Inner Change and requires all 12 steps. . .  and I’ve sent you this urgent missive that you might share the message with both your readers.  Twelve simple steps, call it the Blurboholics Waltz.  I have danced it, and the burden of blurbing has been lifted from my soul.  I recommend it.  Ish.”

     You don’t receive messages like this every day, and it took me a while to digest it.  Tomorrow I’ll offer my measured defense of the blurb, which I admit is somewhat less vigorous than it might have been before I read the testimony of the blurb survivor Ishmael.

Throughout the term thus far, we each have presented to the other interns two literary journals, one a more traditional print journal and one an online journal.  For the most part, I found that the online journals did a great deal to mirror their print counterparts.  Though the way in which we view the material is different, both are essentially a collection of creative works and reviews, organized for the reader.  Some online journals took advantage of their new medium more than others, incorporating voice recordings, video, and color photographs into their journal.  However, I think the ways in which technology changes will continue to influence literature, and eventually we will see changes not just in format, but in content.

This past summer, I finally made the leap and purchased Barnes & Nobles’s color reading tablet, a device to which I had formally been vehemently opposed.  I have quickly come to love its convenience and portability, and saving on the printing charges for the articles and other reading I’m assigned.  However, after exploring the way novels and magazines appear on its screen, I’ve begun to wonder how the rise of such devices will change the content of what we read.  Not only are certain things easier to view on small screens, but technology also conditions us to expect instant gratification, and we may expect not only easily accessible literary content, but additional information and media along with it.

Finally, we are on the verge of generation that will be raised from birth with this sort of media, and their comfort level with such technology may continue to push advances in the ways in which we view literature.  All of this will surely have an impact on the types of literature produced, as writers become more mindful of both the new audience and the new format they are writing for.

It’s certainly an interesting time to be observing the literary world, and while I’m excited about the possibilities of online journals and content, I’m still hoping those beautiful hardcover books don’t disappear off our shelves too quickly!

With two of the most recent blog posts, “Bar Bones? A Story by Martone” and “What to do with a poem,” contributors and interns of Shenandoah emphasize the various forms of literature included in the magazine and the specific genres within fiction. In Professor Smith’s Advance Creative Writing Fiction class that I also take this semester, we read a large portion of the assigned stories from the “flash fiction” genre, or “short” short stories. In his latest blog post, Professor Smith begins with the inquiry: “What are the minimum requirements for a sequence of sentences to result in a story?” The question magnifies the ambiguity of the evolving genre. Literary scholars often debate on the loosely defined length of these stories. Is 300 words the minimum? 1,000 word the maximum? Regardless of the length, the motivation and stylistic structure of “flash fiction” is debatable. Fred Chappell argues the primary purpose of “short” short stories is to make the reader uneasy. Without the full length and duration to develop multiple motifs and characters, the story must appeal to the reader’s emotions in an effective and economical manner.

In Shenandoah issue, Alyson Hagy’s “Self Portrait as a Trailer Full of Mules” embodies both the brevity and style of flash fictions’ allusive definition. Although all stories do not exemplify Chappell’s theory, Hagy’s story does not necessarily make the reader uneasy, but apprehensive and speculative. “Self Portrait as a Trailer Full of Mules” packs a plethora of geographical and trade specific references into the short short, which creates a sense of the unfamiliar for the average reader. Although usually understanding every one of a story’s references is not essential, the brevity of the story calls for comprehension of these elements. Moreover, by beginning the story with a question (Where do they find these animals?), Hagy immediately addresses the reader and promotes some internal question and rendering of emotion. In particular, the second half of the story that focuses on the jenny conjures the most apprehension. She writes, “She looks hungry for something. Her pumpjack head primes the bony lever of her neck. I see how the tendons in her forelegs have been pin-fired, a piss-poor job of it too. Futile. She’ll never tread the straight path again.” Hagy emphasizes the plight of the jenny with such detail and length (relative to the overall length of the story). With the one word, “Futile,” the author encompasses the jenny’s problems, which the reader can infer to mirror the narrator’s own.

Although the story is only one paragraph in length, I read it multiple times and with each reading gained more insight on its potential motivations, but consequentially become more and more uneasy with the author’s intended meaning.

This poem by Billy Collins has been a long-time favorite of mine, but that doesn’t mean I understand it.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

When I first read this poem, I felt like it cleared away all the murkiness of poetry for me. Finally a poet explained what to do with a poem. Now, years later, I’m reading it again, and it seems to only complicate the issue. Poets do put meanings in their works, right? Readers are supposed to be digging somewhat for that meaning aren’t we? Collins seems to be saying that I’m wrong. Maybe we’re just supposed to look at a poem and admire it’s physical and verbal attributes. After reading this poem, I feel like I’m water-boarding a poem anytime I analyze it too much. How do I ski across the surface?

Shenandoah is very excited to announce that the judge of this year’s Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Award will be the Poet Laureate of Virginia, Kelly Cherry.  Shenandoah will be accepting entries until November 15th.  Poets born or residing in Virginia can submit up to three poems.  Click here for more information.