Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si. Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose home, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart. (p 32)

More from/about Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses at iluv2read.

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Andy and I are off to Disney World tomorrow morning. See ya next week!

I don’t feel like giving a full review, but let me just say that (a) I loved the movie Blood Diamond, and (b) I bawled my eyes out. Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly were all masterful. And the writing was excellent.

3 out of 5 ex-boyfriends polled say that I prefer to be in a constant state of crisis. Maybe I just give a shit.

My heart always told me that people are inherently good. My experiences suggest otherwise. But what about you, Mr. Archer? In your long career as a journalist, would you say that people are mostly good?

No. I’d say they’re just people.

Exactly. It is what they do that makes them good or bad. A moment of love, even in a bad man, can give meaning to a life.

Sometimes I wonder, will God ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other? Then I look around and I realize, God left this place a long time ago.

My mother and I had also made peace; she had accepted the fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well. Slowly, she accepted that I dated one American man, and then another, and then yet another, that I slept with them, and even that I lived with one though we were not married.

From “Hell-Heaven” by Jhumpa Lahiri, another of my (many) inspirations.

Apparently the requirement for good poetry nowadays is the same as the requirement for good contemporary art: that I can’t understand it.

(In fairness, that may say more about me than the poetry or the art…)

I recently read Issue 42 of the Potomac Review, and I managed to find one poem that I not only understood (I think) but also enjoyed, one poem that I definitely understood and enjoyed, and a couple that I enjoyed parts of but mostly didn’t understand. The rest… “Huh?”

I won’t tell you which category this came from, but here, enjoy the last stanza from “Signs” by Marjory Wentworth:

I have let the water pull me for miles,
for years. I’ve watched birds turn
their heads in my direction. I didn’t notice
all the signs surrounding me. But I have
felt the stars throbbing like hearts
in the darkness. It has something to do with love,
and the way it hides and waits
in places we never expect to find it.

Also in that issue was “Harvard Man” by Michelle Brafman, which was a FANTASTIC story, the kind I’d love to write myself — and think I maybe could, someday. I contacted her (via her husband’s email address, which was more or less the only thing that turned up on Google) to let her know how much I enjoyed it, and she very graciously replied with thanks and encouragement on my own writing. Another point for Nice Writers!

“Alice Dale” by Laura Albritton was the other story I quite liked.

Immediately after finishing the Potomac, I gobbled up THE KITE RUNNER (my thoughts on its AMAZING-NESS here) and now I’m onto The Cincinnati Review 4.1. It feels good to be reading this much, so hopefully I keep it up. Though writing more might not be so bad either…

Unfortunately, I have yet to read any of Zadie Smith’s books. However, given her renown at such a young age (according to her Wikipedia page, she was basically courted by publishers during college) I decided to read her Atlantic Monthly interview. When I did, the title of a certain Ani DiFranco song came to mind, hence this post’s title.

Zadie Smith believes that fiction is a “hypothetical area” in which to experiment with possible courses of action.

I have to admit, it’s been a while since I thought of it that way, and I was glad for the reminder. Lately I’ve been so stuck in “What would really happen? What would these characters actually do?” that I feel like some of the “let’s play make-believe” aspect has gone out of my writing. And isn’t that the most fun part?

Later Zadie says:

In a lot of American fiction, particularly young American fiction, the idea of writing third person is anathema. But I didn’t even know there were novels that weren’t in third person until I was quite advanced in years. So that kind of narrative voice seems natural to me.

I felt the same way — Books in first person? Isn’t first person bad? Isn’t literature about the characters, not about me? — which is another reason I had a hard time writing in the first person myself. (Except for personal essays, of course.)

I also found her methods VERY interesting:

I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash. Usually I work out the plot for the first half and then kind of feel my way through the other half. I wouldn’t say I make excessive plans, though.

I don’t think I could work that way — I love my journals, and I’m desperately trying to finish #23 so I can start #24, because there’s nothing so exciting as starting a brand new journal! — but it almost elevates Zadie to an unreal level of cool that she doesn’t need notebooks the way most writers do.

Also, WOW, can I just say how much I love her for saying this?!

All my books are made up of other books. They’re all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn’t have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people’s novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH NOT HAVING MUCH “ACTUAL LIVING” TO WRITE ABOUT YET. JUST LOOK AT ZADIE SMITH!

I think every writing student needs to hear that. And every parent of a writing student should probably hear that too. Or maybe just my mom…

When it came to writing the academic part of the novel, I was thinking about how I felt when I was a student—how lost I felt a lot of the time, and confused about what I wanted and what I was getting.

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH FEELING LOST AND CONFUSED.

I think I know a few people who could stand to hear that too.

And finally:

You’re constantly told in college and elsewhere that good taste and good fiction are about not pushing, about not expressing your opinion too forcefully. So we’re always hearing things like, “Oh, it’s a very good novel about a young black boy, but unfortunately the author presses too hard on the question of race.”

And the same with women’s fiction. It’s nonsense, and it’s time to stop. I felt like a hand was at my throat when I first started writing. That if I was going to be a proper writer, I’d better be as polite as possible and as calm as possible and as un-angry as possible—and recently I’ve been thinking, you know, fuck that, basically.

Like I said: fierce, flawless.

From PREP author Curtis Sittenfeld (a woman! who I hope to meet through a mutual connection!) in an NY Times essay I’m Y.A., and I’m O.K.:

“You write the book you want to write, and then publishing has its way with it.”

After learning some sad news last night, I’m feeling weird, so I thought I’d keep with the mood and post about something that’s been weighing on my mind. Writers Carolyn and Lisa See (mother and daughter respectively) are “Chinese American.” But you’d never know by looking at them.

(Seriously, when I first went to Lisa See’s Wikipedia page, I thought someone had put up the wrong picture.)

It shouldn’t bother me, and maybe “bother” isn’t even the right word, but it does make me feel… strange, to see these non-Chinese-looking women so clearly and easily labeled as Chinese American. Maybe it’s because I, who am half-Chinese, have struggled over the years with my own appearance and identity.

(Eyes too small. Face too flat. Pretty hair. Tall. (HAHA.) Too skinny. Not skinny enough. Can’t speak Mandarin. Don’t know traditions. Bad pronounciation. The only brown head in a sea of black at Chinese school. The only one of my friends learning pin yin instead of zhu yin fu hao. “La China” in Spain. Chinese among Americans, American among Chinese.)

Did these women struggle similarly? With one quarter and one eighth (I think) Asian-ness in their blood, can they really identify as Chinese? Can they understand what it’s like when no one would ever mistake them for being anything other than “white”? What in their body of experiences gives them the — sorry to use this word — right, to claim that heritage, the one that I am so tentative to take, because I worry that if someone were to challenge me on it, they might decide I don’t have enough evidence to support my stake?

I don’t know enough about them to come to any conclusions. All I have are questions. Questions that aren’t even really about Carolyn and Lisa See. It’s not personal. It’s just another reminder of all the issues I have yet to resolve within myself.

And none of it has anything to do with their writing either. From what I have heard, Lisa in particular is a fabulous writer, and I may go see her when she comes to Cincinnati to speak in a few months. (Would it be too weird of me to ask her some of these questions, in a non-offensive way? I’m really, really curious about her take on it.) Personal weirdness aside, I’m more than happy to learn what I can from them.

From a conversation between Carolyn & Lisa See:

Every writer has to be a little bit delusional about his or her work. We have to know it’s good. Even if we hate it, we have to know it’s good. Perseverance, stubbornness, has everything to do with keeping on. When I started writing, I was the wrong age, too young, the wrong gender–not all that many women were writing for a living then–and on the wrong coast, the west one. But you just have to put all that aside and go on working.

From an interview with Tobias Wolff, posted at The Bay Area Intellect:

Wolff talked a lot about his slow, arduous writing process. “Some writers seem, almost, to be a channel for an inspiring work that flows down from the sky…,” he motioned to the ceiling, “…and through them. Updike is that type.” He likened his own process to working with clay, sometimes shaping it and pounding it down to start all over. “But the stuff’s still there,” he said.

As for me? Yeah, not so much with inspiring work flowing from the sky. (I wish.) Nor with the clay, really. More like long, tortuous mornings and afternoons avoiding the sofa (naps) and the internet (amazingness) and the refrigerator (fatty fat fat), and instead forcing myself to hold a pen over paper, or poise my fingers over the keyboard, and make letters come out. Then make those letters form words, and the words sentences, and the sentences stories.

It’s not always pretty, but I guess it works?

God I hope it works.

Earlier this afternoon I met with Michael Griffith, a writer and professor of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. (Side note: The UC campus is beautiful!! So much interesting architecture and beautiful lawns/lounge space. Definitely made me miss campus life.) Anyway, I wanted to ask Michael about writing in general, writing in Cincinnati, going for an additional degree (MFA or Ph.D.), and being a professor. I figured he might know a thing or two about all that.

His novel SPIKES and collection BIBLIOPHILIA both seem to have been well-received, and I liked the excerpt I read of the latter. But more important than his credentials, he was extremely friendly and willing to help me. We only got to speak for about forty minutes since he was meeting with Ph.D. students about their dissertations all afternoon, but he offered a lot of great advice and even his assistance in the future. I left with a mixture of happiness, warmth, and motivation surging through me.

I mean, sitting at Starbucks and talking with someone who’s doing what I want to do — writing, reaching out and mentoring fellow writers, (maybe) teaching, and somehow still staying involved with family — gave me this feeling that I can do this. I WILL do this. Even a complete stranger thinks so!

It was also cool that he knew of Hilary and Terrance.

A few times during our discussion I felt a little silly/stalker-like because I had looked Michael up online. (”I actually only took one workshop in my undergraduate career–” “From Joyce Carol Oates!” “Yes… How did you know that?”) But I didn’t want to go in knowing nothing and seem rude! Thankfully he was cool about it.

(Because I’m NOT a stalker.)

Speaking of JCO, I’ve been saving up a few excerpts, including one from her. In an interview with The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
What are the advantages of being a woman writer?

JOYCE CAROL OATES
Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can’t be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven’t much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can’t even grasp what Hemmingway and the epigonic Mailer meant by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility. Like Ellison’s The Invisible Man. (My long journal, which much be several hundred pages by now, is titled Invisible Woman. Because a woman, being so mechanically judged by her appearance, has the advantage of hiding within it — of being absolutely whatever she knows herself to be, in contrast with what others imagine her to be. I feel no connection at all with my physical appearance and have often wondered whether this was a freedom any man — writer or not — might enjoy.)

The Paris Review also had a (more recent?) interview with Vladimir Nabokov, but now I am wishing I hadn’t read it (well, skimmed it) until after I finished reading LOLITA, because his arrogance and condescension was so off-putting that now I feel like not reading it just to spite him. But that would be silly.

I just won’t link to the interview instead. :P

Anyway, my meeting with Michael and my foray onto UC’s beautiful campus, combined with this magical weather (sunny, 80s, with a cool breeze), has made this a wonderful day. Tonight we have Riley’s last Advanced Training class, which means he will get the Canine Good Citizen test. Cross your fingers and hope he’s really, really tired, because otherwise he’ll be too darn hyper to pass!

A while back, Alex told me I had to read THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE. I looked at her like, What, you’re regressing back to our scifi days? Are we going to bust out with the Star Trek dolls — sorry, action figures – and play make-believe again?

Then she hit me over the head and said, No, you dope, I’m just trying to get you to read one of the most awesomest books ever.

Well, it went something like that anyway.

The book of course turned out to be fabulous — and not really scifi, although there is obviously time travel involved — and so when I stumbled across Writer Unboxed, I had to read their interview with the author, Audrey Niffenegger.

I figure writer’s block is a signal to stop working on something straight on and go at it sideways for a while.

I’m trying to put some order into my life, and not do everything for other people before I do my own work. It’s very hard to beat back the needs of other people, because taken singly, they seem so small and doable. Taken en mass they completely engulf me. So I am in the midst of attempting to make a new way for myself.

That reminds me SO much of myself, and the way I’m always dropping my own tasks to do what others ask of me. Work, parents, friends, Andy, Riley… (”Play! Let’s play! Take me outside! Wanna play?”) I always think, Oh sure, I can handle that, no big deal. And if it were just the one thing, or even the two, I probably could. But it’s never just one or two things.

It’s hard training myself to be more selfish — and more importantly, to not think of being “selfish” as bad. Really it’s more about focus, and priorities, and realistic expectations of self. I am not Superwoman, sadly. I am just me, trying to be an author.