Glen Hirshberg's Blog, page 5
November 22, 2014
Congratulations to Louise Gluck on her National Book Award
Not necessarily my favorite poem of hers (although it might be). But possibly my favorite poem--by anyone, ever--to teach. Posted here in honor of Louise Gluck's National Book Award today:
Widows
My mother's playing cards with my aunt,
Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game
my grandmother taught all her daughters.
Midsummer: too hot to go out.
Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.
My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.
She can't get used to her own bed this summer.
She had no trouble last summer,
getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there
Read the rest HERE-->
Widows
My mother's playing cards with my aunt,
Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game
my grandmother taught all her daughters.
Midsummer: too hot to go out.
Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.
My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.
She can't get used to her own bed this summer.
She had no trouble last summer,
getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there
Read the rest HERE-->
Natalie at the Waffle House (More Motherless Child Art)
One of the (many) life-buttressing aspects of teaching spectacularly creative people how to live with, love, explore and maximize what they've got is that every now and then--usually, as in this case, years and years later--one of them finds his or her way to my creative work, and finds that they like it. And then I get things like this. It's by my remarkable former student, Siena Aguayo, a drawing of Natalie (from Motherless Child) in her Waffle House uniform.
So good, Siena...
So good, Siena...
November 17, 2014
Interviews and "Like Lick Em Sticks"
In preparation for teaching Motherless Child at the University of Ottawa last week, the redoubtable Sean Moreland conducted a new interview with me for the excellent Postscripts to Darkness website and zine. That interview, plus a rare reprint of my story, "Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey"--the vampire tale I swore I'd never write, that triggered the trilogy I couldn't have imagined--can be found at the link above. Sean and James Greatrex also conducted the longest and best interview ever with Peter Atkins and me about the Rolling Darkness Revue a few years back, and you can find that archived on the site as well.
Special kudos to Sebyth for the stunning illustration,
which I so wish could be the cover of the forthcoming MOTHERLESS paperback...
Special kudos to Sebyth for the stunning illustration,
which I so wish could be the cover of the forthcoming MOTHERLESS paperback...
November 15, 2014
Working
Surreal, the writing life. So solitary, except when it isn't. I've had a couple stories I'm really proud of come out in the last couple weeks. Maybe someone is reading them, or will. I got up and got to hammering away, as always, on a book I will finish this month that people will get to read, if they want to, a year from now, when I'm immersed in something else. I have teaching to do, movies to see, students to help, that Hookworms disc I've been grooving to all week to groove to some more. And tonight, at the University of Ottawa, professor/poet/polymath Sean Moreland will be teaching Motherless Child to his horror lit students I will never meet, can barely even imagine. In my office in the not-yet-90-degree heat, getting ready to grade, I'm imagining them in snow.
Brian Lille's Blog Post
Dear fans and friends of Glen Hirshberg on Facebook. Embarrassingly, I wrote a post about Glen's writing on my blog, and then somehow messed it up when making a new post. So, the link originally sent out is bad. Here's the new one , in case you want to read some preaching to the choir...
November 4, 2014
Politics of Education
With a simple substitution of the word "education" for the word "politics" in this November 4th column by David Brooks (a less-than-typical partner in thought, for me) in the NYTIMES, one arrives at a pretty fair summation of what's wrong with BOTH the education reform movement and the status quo in American schools at this particular moment: "Data-driven [education] is built on a philosophy you might call Impersonalism. This is the belief that what matters in [education] is the reaction of populations and not the idiosyncratic judgment, moral character or creativity of individuals."
And one more, using the same technique, from the same article: "At heart, [education] is a personal enterprise. [Students] are looking for a quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification."
It's people that count, in other words. Not counting people.
And one more, using the same technique, from the same article: "At heart, [education] is a personal enterprise. [Students] are looking for a quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification."
It's people that count, in other words. Not counting people.
October 29, 2014
Caliburnus Online
The dynamic, exceptionally gifted collective of students that I manage in the creative writing program I started building almost 20 years ago at Campbell Hall has lit out in another new direction. This time, we've taken
Caliburnus
, our longstanding arts journal, and started transforming it into a constantly evolving websomething that will publish new literature and art and audio work in a nonstop stream throughout the school year, culminating in the publication of a hardback book collecting it all next May.
Our first official published piece--a pretty dazzling piece of poetry and an accompanying painting--won't be up until next week. But the page is there, along with a video serving as our calling card/call for submissions/announcement of theme and backstory for this year's journal (click play to see the little film). It's kinda cute. The kids who created it are seriously talented. So I thought some of you--especially those of you who spent some part of your high school life dreaming Caliburnuses with me--might enjoy seeing it:
Our first official published piece--a pretty dazzling piece of poetry and an accompanying painting--won't be up until next week. But the page is there, along with a video serving as our calling card/call for submissions/announcement of theme and backstory for this year's journal (click play to see the little film). It's kinda cute. The kids who created it are seriously talented. So I thought some of you--especially those of you who spent some part of your high school life dreaming Caliburnuses with me--might enjoy seeing it:
October 9, 2014
Gone Girl
Several of you have asked, so here you go...my thoughts on Gone Girl, for whatever they're worth (and I know some of you think I'm a knee-jerk contrarian; I'm not. I've just got standards and I'm stickin' to 'em):
I felt about the movie pretty much the way I felt about the novel, except I probably liked the movie slightly more: it's a Rube Goldberg machine. That is, the pleasure in it--and it's substantial pleasure, and I don't mean to diminish it--lies in watching the whole absurd contraption dive and dart and twinkle and spin and duck its way around its gleeful circle. The actors, to a person, are spectacular, Gillian Flynn can stage a scene, she can write dialogue, and she can construct a Rube Goldberg, and David Fincher is a wonderfully unpretentious old-school storyteller, a master-craftsman of the highest order, our Howard Hawks (except maybe, sometimes, in the compassion department). But nothing here is meant to make us think or feel--at the end of both book and film, the closest thing to a thought I had is that these two people always deserved each other--and so, in the end, for me, this is The Mousetrap but not Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, Deathtrap but not The Secret History or The Other or The Wasp Factory , because in those, the twists come out of the all-too-comprehensible yearnings or anguish or loneliness or even perverse delight of characters we are compelled, touched, and repelled by in equal measure.
In other words, for all the dazzling skill on display, it's a trap that springs shut on itself.
I felt about the movie pretty much the way I felt about the novel, except I probably liked the movie slightly more: it's a Rube Goldberg machine. That is, the pleasure in it--and it's substantial pleasure, and I don't mean to diminish it--lies in watching the whole absurd contraption dive and dart and twinkle and spin and duck its way around its gleeful circle. The actors, to a person, are spectacular, Gillian Flynn can stage a scene, she can write dialogue, and she can construct a Rube Goldberg, and David Fincher is a wonderfully unpretentious old-school storyteller, a master-craftsman of the highest order, our Howard Hawks (except maybe, sometimes, in the compassion department). But nothing here is meant to make us think or feel--at the end of both book and film, the closest thing to a thought I had is that these two people always deserved each other--and so, in the end, for me, this is The Mousetrap but not Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, Deathtrap but not The Secret History or The Other or The Wasp Factory , because in those, the twists come out of the all-too-comprehensible yearnings or anguish or loneliness or even perverse delight of characters we are compelled, touched, and repelled by in equal measure.
In other words, for all the dazzling skill on display, it's a trap that springs shut on itself.
Dark Discoveries #29
The cover, I have to admit, is making me feel a little like Stephen King and the boys might have felt taking PLAYBOY's no doubt excellent money for their work back in the halcyon days of getting paid well, but I'm pretty excited about the long, emotionally layered, eerie story "Hexenhaus" I've got in this one--lebkucken, lost souls, and the Lebensborn--and that's a stellar list of contributors.
Also included in this issue is the most exhaustive and, I hope, informative interview I think I've done to date. It's one of two new long ghost stories I have out this month. Hope you'll pick this up, and as always, let me know what you think.
September 20, 2014
Amelia B. Edwards
Often, when I read the better pre-M.R. James Victorian ghost spinners, what I wind up feeling is kinship of a kind; affection, almost. Remote as their worldviews can be, slow-moving as their voices sometimes are, they are magnificent and familiar and comforting to me. Grandparents, maybe.
But every time I read Amelia B. Edwards, what I feel is less affection than awe. Take her story, "Number Three," which I read for the first time last night. It's set in a sort of pottery factory, where a nightworker stokes and monitors the giant kilns alone, and where the mentor who has lifted him off the streets conducts a doomed love affair with the gentle daughter of the factory's owner. A charming and talented Frenchman arrives, threatens to steal away the daughter. And then, one night, the mentor appears by the kilns, walks into an adjoining room, and vanishes.
You'll think you know where this is going. You don't.
You'll think you'll understand what all the mystery means in the end. You won't.
And that final emotional chord this story strikes...it had to have been new, then. I'm not sure it's been repeated yet. And we have no name for it, still.
Read some of her stories here courtesy of the Gaslight Project.
But every time I read Amelia B. Edwards, what I feel is less affection than awe. Take her story, "Number Three," which I read for the first time last night. It's set in a sort of pottery factory, where a nightworker stokes and monitors the giant kilns alone, and where the mentor who has lifted him off the streets conducts a doomed love affair with the gentle daughter of the factory's owner. A charming and talented Frenchman arrives, threatens to steal away the daughter. And then, one night, the mentor appears by the kilns, walks into an adjoining room, and vanishes.
You'll think you know where this is going. You don't.
You'll think you'll understand what all the mystery means in the end. You won't.
And that final emotional chord this story strikes...it had to have been new, then. I'm not sure it's been repeated yet. And we have no name for it, still.
Read some of her stories here courtesy of the Gaslight Project.
