Tucker Lieberman's Blog, page 5
October 16, 2019
‘Double vision’ in ‘Make Your Home Among Strangers’
In her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, Jennine Capó Crucet presents a young woman protagonist who is developing a sense of self.
She perceives herself as relatively accomplished, as, while teen pregnancies seem to be the norm in her family and high school graduation is the bar to meet, she unexpectedly lands and accepts a spot at an elite private university. On the other hand, she feels that she has somehow betrayed her family by moving away (because they tell her so), and, because of her Cuban heritage, she is treated differently than the rest of the majority-white student body. Home and school are alternatingly appealing, but neither is perfectly safe, and neither is exactly what she wants.
Make Your Home Among Strangers: A Novel
It’s a choice between what feels most “authentic” despite knowing that all choices are engineered anyway, that outcomes are not predictable, and that everything has a price. It isn’t a resolvable problem, as those of us of a certain age have already found out.
The protagonist becomes increasingly self-conscious about how people perceive her. She can’t control what they see, in part because she hasn’t yet decided what image she wants to project or whether she should have to go to the effort of projecting an image at all. Near the book’s final pages, she introduces the term “double vision” for this: one part of her is living her life while another part is sitting aside, detached, evaluating and criticizing herself from a distance in anticipation of what others will say.
October 15, 2019
‘I Didn’t Break The Lamp’ is out!
My short story “Exit Interview” is included in the anthology I Didn’t Break The Lamp: Historical Accounts of Imaginary Acquaintances, published today by DefCon One. I hope you’ll buy a copy of the book, as it’s quite entertaining. I’m honored to be included among these 25 other talented authors.
[image error] I Didn’t Break The Lamp is available in print and eBook.
“Exit Interview” was a difficult story to write. It took years to develop in my imagination, and, although it never really happened, some of the details have roots in a nonfiction book I’ve been working on concurrently. It is deeply meaningful to me, and I’m glad to be able finally to share it.
I hope you will give this anthology a try. Who among us doesn’t need to call on an imaginary friend now and again? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book. It’s available from Kindle and other retailers.
September 17, 2019
What you write
What you need to write for yourself.
What you ought to write for others.
What you enjoy writing.
What you enjoy having written.
What they tell you they want you to write.
What they secretly want you to write.
What they don’t know they want you to write.
What they will actually take the time to read.
What they will be better for having read.
What will catch their attention.
What will earn you a living.
What represents who you are.
What you realize you could have written.
What it takes for you to start with a blank page.
September 5, 2019
Recommended podcast episode: How your personality type drives your creative process
[image error]Lauren Sapala never liked planning her writing projects. Then she learned about personality theory and began to understand why. Now she’s a writing coach. Now she’s on Episode 7 of the “Art Stuff” podcast, “Creativity For Introverts & Empaths INFJ & INFP Personality Types,” interviewed by Jessica Johannesen.
INFJs tend to make clear, firm decisions based on other people’s feelings and then are able to move on. They have single-minded focus on a project they want to pursue intensely.
By contrast, INFPs may take extra time to make decisions based on their own feelings and, after deciding, may need to “backpedal” based on how they feel about the decision “in their body.” They need to spread their creative attention between multiple simultaneous projects. Because of this, they may have more difficulty serving a linearly product-driven model in a corporate environment.
Both processes are valid. It’s also normal to need unstructured time to allow unexpected ideas to surface and to feel grief when a creative project ends.
Whether we are content with our own processes may depend on whether we have a deep-seated belief about the need to hide the way we really think and to change ourselves to fit a different model. Self-doubt will always come in waves, like all other emotions, but, if you’re familiar and comfortable with your personality type and creative style, you may be better able to predict and handle your moments of self-doubt.
Listen to this podcast; it’s an enlightening conversation!
Sapala is the author of The INFJ Writer, a guide for sensitive intuitive writers, and Firefly Magic: Heart Powered Marketing for Highly Sensitive Writers. www.laurensapala.com
August 24, 2019
Among my favorite poems read in 2019
After spending 2018 with poems of grief (as previously posted on this blog: Part 1: Immediacy, Part 2: Identity, Part 3: What Happens Next), I continued to read more poems. Here’s what I stumbled across during the first eight months of 2019. Because I felt differently in 2019, poems began to feel differently to me.
Frank O’Hara, “My Heart”
Mary Jo Bang, “Consider This Corruption”
Rainer Maria Rilke, [i’m not sure yet when]
Gerald Stern, “Song”
Lucille Clifton, [i am accused of tending to the past], “mother-tongue: to the child just born”
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Kindness”
Mary Oliver, “Spring”
Li-Young Lee, “One Heart”
Carl Phillips, “To Be Worn Openly at the Wrist, or at the Chest and Hidden,” “White Dog”
Dorianne Laux, “Dust”
Keegan Lester, [“to all of this which does not just seem, but is extraordinary…”]
Franz Wright, [“Kneeling…”]
Anna Akhmatova. “A land not mine…,” “[Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold]”
W. S. Merwin, “The Room,” “Elegy”
D.H. Lawrence, [“What is the knocking?”]
Chelsea Dingman, “It’s Possible a Mother’s Body is Elegy,” “Winter Solstice”
Kathy Fagan, “Perpendicular”
Vladimír Holan, “Snow”
Czeslaw Milosz, “In Common”
Noor Ibn Najam, “Revised Surah”
Tess Gallagher, “Trace, in Unison”
Wislawa Szymborska, “An Unexpected Meeting” [trans. Stanislaw Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh]
Catherine Barnett, “Uncertainty Principle at Dawn”
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, “How to Break a Curse”
Marie Howe, “Without Music”
Blythe Baird, “An invitation”
Laura Fargas, “Winter, Leper of the World”
Diane Wakoski, “3 of Swords,” in Inside the Blood Factory
Phillip B. Williams, “Bound,” in Thief in the Interior
Elizabeth Bishop, “Casabianca”
Nazim Hikmet, “Occupation”
Nicole Sealey, “Object Permanence”
Agha Shahid Ali, “After You”
Dean Young, “Cotton in a Pill Bottle”
Donika Kelly, “Love Poem: Mermaid”
Joanna Klink, “Pericardium,” “Winter Field”
Maxine Kumin, “After Love”
Amy Meng, “Recovery,” in Bridled
Ahmad Shamlu, “Nocturnal”
Galway Kinnell, “On Frozen Fields”
Chase Berggrun, R E D
Ruth Awad, “In the gloaming, in the roiling night”
Tomás Q. Morín, “Circus Pony”
Jericho Brown, “Correspondence,” The Tradition
Rick Barot, “The Wooden Overcoat”
A. R. Ammons, “Gravelly Run”
Gwendolyn Brooks “Paul Robeson” Family Pictures
Lucia Perillo, “Given Unlimited Space, the Dead Expand Limitlessly” in Luck is Luck
Kelli Russell Agodon, “What I Call Erosion”
Jenny George, “The Drowning”
Tomas Tranströmer, “Black Postcards” [trans. Joanna Bankier]
Jean Valentine, “my words to you”
Danez Smith, “a note on the body”
Sneha Subramanian Kanta, “Post-Elegy”
Geffrey Davis, “What Make a Man”
Victorian Chang, “Mostly Ocean”
Carmen Giménez Smith, “Origins” in Be Recorder
C. T. Salazar, “Poem About Changing My Name + An Elegy”
Shannon Sankey, “Grave”
Maire Ponsot, “Bliss and Grief”
César Vallejo, “There Are Days, There Comes to Me an Exhuberant, Political Hunger” [trans. Clayton Eshleman]
Keith S. Wilson, “I Find Myself Defending Pigeons”
Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”
Sasha Fletcher, “abide with me”
Mark Strand, “The Coming of Light”
Lora Rivera, “[What are the limits of empathy?]”
Richard Hugo, “The Hilltop”
Kathryn Nuernberger, “Rag and Bone Man”
George Kovalenko, “Spooky Action at a Distance”
Chen Chen, “I’m not a religious person but”
Alice Branco, “Water on Stone” [trans. Alexis Levitin]
Heather Christle, “Religious Practice,” “Suggested Donation”
Amorak Huey, “Portrait of My Brother as Indiana Jones” in Boom Box; “The River Beyond the Pasture”
Alison C. Rollins, “To Whoever Is Reading Me”
Justin Phillip Reed, “On Being a Grid One Might Go Off Of” in Indecency
Aracelis Girmay, “Ode to the Brain,” in Teeth
Stephen Dunn, “After Making Love”
Michele Bombardier, “What We Do”
Alberto Ríos, “Sudden Smells, Sad Songs”
Elizabeth Lyons, “Death Roll”
Ansel Elkins, “Coffin Bone”
Desirée Alvarez, “‘Un Tintero,’ Inkwell”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, “I’m Learning Nothing This Night”
Gretchen Marquette, “Macrocosm/Microcosm,” in May Day
Leila Chatti, “The Rules,” “Postcard from Gone”
Bob Hicok, “Amen,” “Confessions of a Nature Lover”
Daniel Simko, “Coda”
Richard Siken, “Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors”, “Landscape with Black Coats in Snow”
Linda Gregg, “Grinding the Lens”, “Christ Loved Being Housed,” “Heavy with Things and Flesh”
Louise Glück, “Matins,” “Sunset,” “October,” “The Night Migrations”
Adrienne Rich, “My heart is moved by all I cannot save—” “The Dream of a Common Language,” “IX”
Stanley Plumly, “Infidelity,” “Fifth and 94th,” “At Night”
Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider”
Ada Limón, “The Millionth Dream of Your Return,” “In a Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me”
Jessica Abughattas, “Dinner Party”
Larry Levis, “Though His Name Is Infinite, My Father Is Asleep”
Rosa Alice Branco, “No Complaint Book” (translated by Alexis Levitin)
Wanda Coleman, “In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever”
Shannon K. Winston, “Shame Is a Bull”
Joy Harjo, “Remember,” “Speaking Tree,” “For Keeps”
John Ashbery, “Loving Mad Tom,” “Feverfew”
Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us
Marianne Boruch, “He was touched or he touched or,” in The Book of Hours
Hala Alyan, “You’re not a girl in a movie”
T’ai Freedom Ford, “namesake”
Maggie Smith, “Good Bones,” “December 18, 2008”
Carolina Ebeid, “Dead Dead Darlings”
George Oppen, “The Gesture”
Carrie Fountain, “Will You?”
Kaylin Haught, “God Says Yes to Me”
Amy Gerstler, “Poof”
Galway Kinnell, “Crying”
Julia Beach, “sudden the homecoming”
Rosemary Tonks, “On the advantage of being ill-treated by the World”
Luisa Muradyan, “Clams”
Tess Gallagher, “Kiss Without a Body”
Jane Hirshfield, “A Person Protests to Fate”
Jane Hirshfield, “Falcon”
Tiana Clark, “Conversation with Phillis Wheatley #1,” from I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
Keetje Kuipers, “Native Species”
Denis Johnson, “Looking Out the Window Poem”
Rita Dove, “Pithos”
Claudia Emerson, “Metaphor”
Todd Smith, “In This Kingdom,” “The Past”
Mary Jean Chan, “The Window,” Flèche
Alicia Mountain, “A Deer Mistaken for a Statue of a Deer”
Lonely Christopher, “For Light”
Mary Ruefle, “Errand,” “Kiss of the Sun”
Shara McCallum, “A storm / is an opportunity for all to to be given / form.”
Lee Potts, “Traces”
Matthew Zapruder, “Scarecrow,” American Linden
Franz Wright, “Promise,” “Request”
Jason Shinder, “Morning”
Lauren Clark, “Carmina 101”
Rimbaud, “The Visionary”
Louise Glück, “Landscape”
Morgan Parker, “We Are the House That Holds the Table at Which Yes We Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat”
Lisel Mueller, “Joy”
May 23, 2019
Nifty non-fic about novels with eunuch villains…free for Kindle! (limited time)
For a few days only, Painting Dragons is a free download for Kindle! Now through Monday 27 May 2019 (through midnight Pacific). If you haven’t heard of this book, learn more, or just go ahead and download it — you’ve got nothing to lose!
[image error] “Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains” by Tucker Lieberman
May 2, 2019
A ‘retcon’ overwrites the past; a ‘procon’ overwrites the future
“Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short,” to use Wikipedia’s definition, “is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.” If the hero’s sidekick dies in Book 6, leaving fans disappointed with Book 7, and is resurrected in Book 8 (with or without explanation), that’s a retcon. Retcons can also be more subtle, as when the fictional world undergirds itself with a revised history.
Does it ever happen the other way around? Can the contradictory or problematic detail happen first, while the authoritative detail appears in a subsequently published work? Would that be a “proactive continuity,” let’s say a “procon” for short?
[image error]
It seems that this is impossible. At least in fiction, the detail that happens first has to be the authoritative detail until further notice; there can’t be any contradiction until the subject is dealt with twice. Right?
Election-rigging in Azerbaijan: A chronological failure in the narrative
Ah, but let’s consider Azerbaijan’s 2013 election! This is not fiction; this is a thing that really happened. When President Ilham Aliyev ran for re-election under a dark cloud of suspicion, the Azerbaijani election board released an iPhone app to display the vote tally so the public could feel confident that the election was legitimate. The app release did not go as planned. It displayed the election results one day before anyone had cast a ballot.
This incident is described on the first episode of Power Corrupts, a new podcast written and narrated by Brian Klaas that launches today, May 2, 2019, on iTunes, Spotify, RadioPublic, and Stitcher.
[image error]“I mean, for the guy who accidentally pressed that button—you had one job, right?” Klaas says. Though Aliyev retained his presidency, he lost what little pretense to integrity he still had. “Pro tip for all the dictators listening out there: if you’re going to just make up election results, try not to release them until at least some people have voted.”
Lesson for writers
When election results are released the day before the election, they contradict the world of which they are a part. They cannot be true. They attempt to influence an uncertain future whose possible outcomes someone already rejects. They attempt to control the future proactively. As I see it, this election-rigging incident is a real-life example of proactive continuity. (I made up that term. Let me know in the comments whether you think it works.)
People do try to change facts both before and after they happen. People want to control the future sometimes more than they want to erase the past.
I imagine it can be done in fiction, too. It may be part of what we mean when we identify an “unreliable narrator.” A novelist often deliberately embeds implausibilities and contradictions; they are part of the character development. Such unreliability can confuse or distract readers who are unforgiving or otherwise not along for the ride.
Leaving aside arts and entertainment and again considering real life, it’s important to remember that, when real people are deliberately unreliable—for example, by reporting results of an election that wasn’t held—they’re gaslighting, and that’s a tool of dictators.
March 30, 2019
EBook giveaway: ‘Painting Dragons’
[image error]Check out the first giveaway for Painting Dragons, my recently published book about the stereotype of eunuch villains. Copies will be delivered as Kindle eBooks.
Never read on Kindle? You don’t need to have a Kindle device! You can install the free Kindle app on any device, and you can even read without installing any app by using Amazon’s “cloud reader.”
100 free copies are available. Goodreads will randomly select the winners. You can enter through April 7, 2019.
(Psst — can’t wait, want to guarantee your copy, or prefer paperback? Buy your own copy today!)
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Painting Dragons
by Tucker Lieberman
Giveaway ends April 07, 2019.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
March 28, 2019
Poems about grief (Part 3 of 3): What happens next
Last year, I happened to read a number of poems that, to me, describe what grief feels like when one is going through it. They speak on other subjects, too, but I saved and organized them around the theme of grief. I’m not going to tell you which lines spoke to me. What matters is that these lines speak to you.
Mary Oliver “In Blackwater Woods”
Sandra Lim “The Vanishing World” The Wilderness
Aracelis Girmay “Elegy”
Diane Seuss “Self-Portrait with the Ashes of my Baby Blanket” Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Ocean Vuong “Notebook Fragments” Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Katie Ford “Psalm 40” If You Have to Go
Nomi Stone Waiting for Happiness”
Jenny George “Mnemonic”
Timothy Donnelly “Explanation of an Oriole” The Cloud Corporation
Muriel Rukeyser “Poem White Page White Page Poem”
Ingrid de Kok, “Transfer” Transfer, Reprinted in Poets & Writers Magazine, Sept/Oct 1998
Cortney Lamar Charleston, “Turn the River”
Euripides Orestes (translated by Anne Carson)
Lawrence Raab “Last Day on Earth”
Ross Gay “Ending the Estrangement”
Jericho Brown “Crossing”
Mary Jo Bang “You Were You Are Elegy” Elegy
Rainer Maria Rilke “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Camille Rankine “Still Life with House Finch” Incorrect Merciful Impulses
Andres Cerpa “Letter” Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy
Kathryn Starbuck “A Gift”
Jorie Graham “The Way Things Work”
Joy Harjo “I Give You Back”
Erin Adair-Hodges “Once I Was a Thimble But Now I Am a Bell” Let’s All Die Happy
Cameron Awkward-Rich “Cento Between the Ending and the End”
Jay Hopler “Like the Stare of Some Glass-Eyed God”
Seamus Heaney “Scaffolding”
Mary Karr “Wisdom: The Voice of God”
March 20, 2019
Poems about grief (Part 2 of 3): Identity
Last year, I happened to read a number of poems that, to me, describe what grief feels like when one is going through it. They speak on other subjects, too, but I saved and organized them around the theme of grief. I’m not going to tell you which lines spoke to me. What matters is that these lines speak to you.
Kurt Rasmussen, “Burning Girl”
Lucille Clifton, “why some people be mad at me sometimes”
Jenny Johnson, “Vigil” In Full Velvet
Katie Ford, “The Ready Heart,” If You Have to Go
Jane Hirshfield “Sheep” Come, Thief
Jean Valentine, “The Door”
Catherine Barnett “Epistemology” Human Hours
Linda Gregg “God’s Places”
Joel Moskowitz “Too Many Things” Amethyst Review
Marya Layth, [I will not be your warhorse]
Chelsea Dingman “The Last Place” Thaw
Chelsea Dingman “Winter in the Rockies”
Jane Kenyon, “After the Hurricane,” Let Evening Come
Vievee Francis “A Flight of Swiftlets Made Their Way In” Forest Primeval
Yona Harvey “Meditation on Your Escape”
“At the beach,” Yechuda Amichai, trans. by Chana Bloch
Ellen Bass “The World Has Need of You”
Adeeba Shahid Talukder “Disorder”
Larry Levis, “Linnets”
Donika Kelly “A dead thing that, in dying, feedings the living”
Mary Szybist “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly”
Lucia Perillo “Say This”
Brandon Melendez “As Respite from Insomnia, The Author Writes An Elegy For What the Night Took” The Shallow Ends
Ariel Francisco “I know you love Manhattan but you should look up more often” The Shallow Ends
Lindsay Bernal “Heartbroken in Your Memoir”
James Richardson “164” By The Numbers
Kaite O’Reilly, “22” Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors
Ibeyi, “Transmission/Michaelion”
Yehuda Amichai “Poem Without An End”
Stephen Dunn, “The Reverse Side”
Jennifer Chang “The Winter’s Wife”
Nick Flynn “harbor (the conversion)”
Michael Dumanis “Nebraska”
Hieu Minh Nguyen “Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota”
Hanif Abdurraqib “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This”
Helen McClory “An Apocalypse in Seven Stages”
Stanley Plumly “Say Summer/For My Mother”
Ilya Kaminsky “When Momma Galya First Protested” Deaf Republic
Jenn Givhan “In the Shower with Sunday After Watching Lost”
Catherine Barnett “Chorus”
Laurie Sheck “And Water Lies Plainly”
Larry Levis “The Two Trees” The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
Hieu Minh Nguyen, “Punish,” Not Here
Sean Thomas Dougherty “Why Bother?”
Chase Berggrun Chapter XIX
Rickey Laurentis “You Are Not Christ”
Jericho Brown “Prayer of the Backhanded”
Fernanda Melchor “On a Sentence”
Bud Smith “Wedding Day”
Gwendolyn Brooks “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” Annie Allen
Hanif Abdurraqib “For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut”
Czeslaw Milosz “At a Certain Age”
J. Jennifer Espinoza “One Day”
Ellen Hagan “What Do We Do–Now”
Donald Caswell “How It Works”
Nick Flynn “Killdeer”
Brenna Twohy, “I am not clinically crazy anymore,” Zig-Zag Girl
