Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 2

A Conversation in Writer's Bone

http://www.writersbone.com/…/followin...…

The New World

The beautiful, powerful vision of a marriage bond that lasts
beyond death (as seen through a cracked lens), in new novel
jointly written by Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz...
http://www.npr.org/…/05/06/404739…/bo...

The Love Object

Some of my happiest moments as a writer come when I can recommend a wonderful new book...in this case, a wonderful new book of old stories, by the Irish writer Edna O'Brien...Here is life in all its fire, of love, loss, failure, and triumph!

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/04/4031238...

Edna O'Brien

whose nearly fifty years worth of stories comes out next month, some while ago gave a wonderful interview in the Paris Review Art of Fiction series, a must for new writers, and old, I think....
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

The Language of Paradise

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/4017813...

The Language of Paradise

An interesting and well-composed new novel about love and ideas in early 19th Century New England...
The Language of Paradise by Barbara Klein Moss...

Pulitzer for Fiction 2015

The awards announced. I had the honor
to serve on the jury--for the second time!--this year with Elizabeth Taylor and David Haynes, fine colleagues in this business of making difficult decisions.

Endings

With a group of our MFA students last night in a craft talk over pizza and good red wine (from Amador County, California, where, as it happens, my sister-in-law lives)...
The subject was endings...the third beat in the dramatic unfolding of narrative rhythm that Aristotle analyzes in his Poetics, based on his reading of the Oedipus play.
You begin with a problem, some irritant that sets a struggle or a quest in motion, and you work through it to resolve the discord, as in music, with some revelatory resonance...
We looked at endings, of Joyce's Araby, of Elizabeth Tallent's No One's a Mystery, of Amy Hempel's San Francisco...Each story resolves into new insight born out of a difficult struggle...
Not like life iself, but offering a life-like vision of how we might that life at its best might sometimes offer new ways of seeing to us...
The pizza cooled while we spoke, and the wine got us talking and thinking. The best way to face up to problems in composition, food, drink, and talking through the difficulties, based on our past experience, failures and triumphs, in a small group of dedicated artists...

MFA versus ?

In a talk today at George Mason's spring "New Leaves" book festival the question came up about the value of an MFA for fiction and nonfiction writers as opposed to not doing an MFA. One year when I was a judge for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction I met Patrick Hemingway and we had a conversation about his father. He said his father attended the University of Paris, and I said, well, I don't remember any mention of that in any of the biographies. He said, Yes, he studied with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson.
Makes me suggest that the MFA is well worth it if you can find good enough instructors to work with for the intensive--and intense--few years it takes to gain that degree. The degree itself means less than what the apprentice writer takes away from the workshops and classes with writers whose work he or she finds admirable and worthwhile. Think of two or three years as time gained--at the minimum--of learning some short cuts to finishing work at hand. In a good MFA program I think that two or three years might possibly take the place of five or six or seven years, say, revising in the dark, trying in some instances to reinvent the wheel.

Revision (again)

Unlike life, revision presents the chance to make things over, correct errors, at the minimum, transform characters and erase events and create new ones, at the maximum. One might pray or beg or implore whatever forces exist in the universe for help, but in the end the writer himself, the writer herself, plays petty god and makes the changes and rearranges sequences, sections, chapters, beginnings, endings. For that responsibility the writer prepares, as Malamud once put it, as an actor prepares--studies the inward life and life outside the self, rehearses and rehearses, whispers, chants, sings, shouts, testing the voice, closes the eyes and opens them, hoping to see something new that may help this time around. As the poet Kenneth Fearing wrote, "Pause, and begin again..."
Revision--the essence of narrative art.
"--and begin again..."