My friend Casey introduced me to Robert Olen Butler when we met in Spain. Not literally, haha. She lent me his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, which is fabulous, and now one of my favorite books. That’s all I’ve read of his so far, but I really want to check out this new collection, HAD A GOOD TIME, and the guillotine-inspired collection, SEVERANCE.

What astounds me most is how he comes to these ideas. The original inspirations almost sound like the hokey writing prompts you get in class or from Web sites, and yet he transforms them into non-hokey, fascinating voices and stories.

The inspiration for Robert Olen Butler’s new book of short stories, Had a Good Time, came from a collection of picture postcards. For ten years, he frequented postcard collectors’ conventions and antique malls, and while other collectors concerned themselves with the postcard photographs, Butler dug for glimpses of story—or as he says, “little fragments of expressed life”—in the written messages on the back. He chose fifteen postcards, breathed lives into the correspondents, and the result is a wonderful collection of stories that depicts American life after the turn of the twentieth century from a wide variety of perspectives.

I also liked his take on interracial relationships:

It’s not just a guy going and finding an exotic woman. It’s a much deeper thing than that. It’s that basic human yearning for connection—for an identity—in a world in which people clash over things like culture and religion, race and ethnicity. That seems to me the central issue of humanity. It always has been, and it’s particularly heightened today.

And of course, some general good advice/insight on writing:

It has to be historically plausible, but ultimately in fiction it’s the deeper human truth that you’re after.

All works of fiction are built around a character who yearns, and if you’re in touch with what the character is yearning for, then every detail is filtered through that emotional center. That will guide you as to which details are appropriate and which aren’t.

Graham Greene once said that all good writers have bad memories. He was speaking about a larger issue. He said that what you remember comes out as journalism, and what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. That’s an important point about the artistic origin of the work, but for me it also applies to the editing process: a writer needs to forget what she has just written in order to reengage it, in order to fix it or to improve it.

(Ah good, another excuse reason for my bad memory!)

Especially in this day and age, when literary fiction is not in great favor, my advice is to hang in there. If after fifteen rejections, or even twenty, I’d said, “aw fuck it,” I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. The thing that helps with rejection is to just move on to the next book or the next story. Once you’ve written a thing, and it’s the way you feel it needs to be artistically, you put it out in the world and you let it go. If you let the ambition to be published—or to be famous or to get book prizes—supersede your ambition to look into the deepest part of your self and to articulate your vision as truly as you can, you will never succeed as a writer. Your art will be destroyed. And if you do succeed in getting published, it will be as a compromised writer whose works will never endure. So you just write the thing you know to be true, and you put it into the world. Then you let it go, and you turn to the next story or the next book.

Ryan was here this weekend, yaaaay! :D This means that I got picked on twice as much as usual. At first it kinda sucked. Then it kept on sucking.

I think that’s the only picture I got of the two meanies all weekend. We were leaving Union Terminal after seeing Bodies, which was really neat, and surprisingly different from the Bodies exhibit I saw in Houston years ago. I was saddened by the lack of Operation in the gift shop, but they did have the Giant Microbes. And really, what more do you need in life than an adorable stuffed chlamydia?

Other than being the butt of every joke, I really enjoyed having Ryan around. (MOVE TO CINCINNATI!) We got caught up on a lot of things, he provided me with interesting insights and perspective, and after Meanie #1 left for his business trip in Chicago, Meanie #2 made sure I still got my daily dose of ESPN. Not to worry, Andy. You left me in good hands.

Now it’s back to reality — cold, cruel reality. The next couple of days at work will be crazy, plus I got another rejection letter in the mail. I haven’t done nearly enough work or writing, but I’m finding it hard to drum up the energy for either. (Too much worrying, too much negativity…) Seeing as it’s 7 hours before I need to wake up, I should probably go to bed. Thank god I have a warm, adorable puppy to cuddle.

First I’d like to say that there’s nothing quite so scary as driving along an unfamiliar interstate (supposedly a tollway but with NO booths in sight) half past midnight when you’re low on gas and can’t stop thinking about how much your surroundings look like where they filmed the Blair Witch Project.

Until, of course, you get lost in the shady drug-trafficking district of a small town in Pennsylvania and all you really want to do is find your aunt’s house where there’s a bowl of candy, Simply Orange juice, and a plush freshly made bed waiting for you.

Yeah, I had a great Saturday night.

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My morning writing sessions have been going pretty well this week. It’s certainly much easier to focus when Riley crawls into my lap and sleeps. Before, I had to keep him in the corner of my eye at all times, since I was never really sure whether his whimpers meant that he needed water, wanted to play, or was five seconds away from peeing on the carpet.

But then again, his adorable snuggly-ness compels me to hug and kiss and pet him a lot, which somewhat reduces my productivity. I guess you win some, you lose some.

Speaking of which… A few months ago, I sent one of my stories to Junot Diaz, the fiction editor at the Boston Review whose first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been quite the success both with critics and the public. He responded personally, which is wonderful and rare, and one of his comments was that my story was “strong but young.” (See the win-some-lose-some connection there?)

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