Category Archives: All Writings

A collection of all of my creative writing.

Filaments

fil·a·ment noun \ˈfi-lə-mənt\ :
a single thread or thin flexible threadlike
object, attaching one thing to another.
~dictionary.com

I loved Jess Walter’s book Beautiful Ruins. Probably because of the perfect clarity of the writing and the wonderful characters. But, there was something else I loved equally well. I’ll call this something else a “filament,” for want of a better word.

Beautiful Ruins is a threaded narrative, a common narrative structure I’ve seen in other novels. For example, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a threaded narrative. A threaded narrative presents the story through a series of intertwined “threads.” These intertwined threads may have a different set of characters or they may occur in differing time frames or in differing locales (and any combination of these things may be the case). Each thread is presented one following the other, switching back and forth between them. Egan, for example, switches between five main characters and ranges widely across many years. She even switches literary points-of-view (some chapters are first person, some second person, some third person, and some power-point presentations).

Walter’s book exhibits a similar structure, alternating between the present day story of Michael Deane, Shane Wheeler and Claire Silver (the Deane Party) set in Southern California and the story of Pasquale Tursi, Dee Moray and Richard Burton, set in the Cinqua Terre of 1950s Italy.

Unlike Egan’s book, the threads in Walter’s book are easy to follow. Each chapter begins with an epigraph showing the time and place of the thread. Some chapters are excerpts of novels or plays. For example the first chapter of Alvis Bender’s book, The Smile of Heaven, appears as its own chapter. These chapters are easily understood because the reader has previously encountered them. This previous introduction is an example of what I mean by “filament.” The fact that we’ve previously learned about Alvis Bender’s book before it appears makes it familiar.

Walter uses these filaments, as I’ve called them, frequently. (I found more than 100 examples.) With these filaments he weaves his narrative together.

For example, Pasquale, when he first appears at Michael Deane’s office, is carrying an “ancient, wrinkled and stained” business card with Michael’s signature (36). Previously, we are told that a “signed Michael Deane business card is a form of currency” (29). When Pasquale hands Claire the business card, it makes perfect sense. The business card thrusts us into the opposing thread. As Dee Moray disembarks the boat in Porto Vergagna, she hands Pasquale a piece of paper with “Michael Deane, special production assistant,” written on it (11). The difference (and the similarity) between the piece of paper and the newer business card leads the reader to surmise, without being told, that Michael Deane and Pasquale have had further involvement. The detail knits the two time frames together and informs each of them.

This happens all the time in this book.

More examples: Pat Bender’s cleft chin, which, when we first encounter it, reminds us he is Richard Burton’s son, who had been previously described as having a cleft chin (203); the baby announcement that Pasquale carries with him helps us remember that Dee Moray was pregnant, and in fact, informs us, 50 years later, that Dee did not have the abortion, a fact we had not yet learned in the other thread (149); Edinburgh’s “entire history… [as] an attempt to get better vantage, a piece of high ground” (165) reflects the ruins of the gun-turret at the top of the cliff at Porto Vergogna; Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier’s discussions about the pure art of acting in the theatre vs. the corruption of acting in the movies reflects Claire’s pending decision about her job (172, 176); the fact that Alvis Bender owns a car dealership is horribly reflected when he dies in a car crash (271).

There are so many examples of interconnecting filaments that I lost track.

If the events in the narrative are the warp of the story, these interconnecting filaments are the weft. These filaments, these tiny, seemingly inconsequential details, appear in both threads. They inform the opposing thread as much as they inform the current thread.

For me, as a reader, these connections between the two threads serve not only as a source of information and a source of meaning as to what is going on, they also serve as a constant source of entertainment.

Before I finish my paper I want to more clearly define what I mean by filament. A filament, for me, in this paper, is any object or idea, introduced in one thread of a threaded narrative that appears later in another thread, and, in that other thread, helps the reader understand the story more deeply.

Other examples of these filaments are: the Deane Party / Donner Party equation (289); Lugo the Hero, who turns out to be a real life hero in the Battle of Porto Vergogna (281); Pasquale lowering his head to his chest in resignation, reflecting the way Pat does the same thing in the play (309); the sterility of the art museum vs. the messiness of real life and how it reflects on Claire’s decision to quit working for Michael (331). There are many more.

The funniest example, however, is Michael Deane’s Viagra® induced “rising flag of Iwo Jima.” While trying to be amorous with his wife, Michael is interrupted and called to his office to meet Claire, Shane and Pasquale (91). He throws his coat over his silk pajamas and rushes to the office. Fifty nine pages later Walter writes a single, perfect sentence: “Michael adjusts his heavy coat over his pajama pants. ‘Now, I’ve got to get home to Mrs. Deane’ ” (150). Walter reminds us, with a slim, tenuous filament, of Michael Deane’s state of affairs prior to being interrupted.

It is this attention to detail, this tidying up of every loose thread, that I find so satisfying about this book.

Works Cited

Dictionary.com Definition for Filament. http://www.dictionary.com (accessed 10 15, 2012).
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Walter, Jess. Beautiful Ruins. New York, NY: HaperCollins, 2012.

New Semester at Rosemont College

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Next week I start a new semester at Rosemont College. I’m taking three courses: Novel Craft (basically everything one needs to know to write a novel without the topic, characters, setting, plot or theme — it’s like a having a cookbook but no access to a grocery store); Literary Theory (a discussion of all the ways people can be involved in the pursuit of writing excellent and important literature without actually writing any literature); and my thesis which is going to be a book of poetry.

I started studying a dictionary of poetical terms and I’ve found 45 different terms related to the word “rhyme”: amphisbaenic rhyme, analyzed rhyme, apocopated rhyme, approximate rhyme, backward rhyme, beginning rhyme, broken rhyme, caudate rhyme, chain rhyme or chain verse, cross rhyme, crossed rhyme or interlaced rhyme, double rhyme, echo rhyme, embryonic rhyme, external rhyme, eye rhyme, feminine rhyme, full rhyme, head rhyme, historical rhyme, identical rhyme, imperfect rhyme, initial rhyme, interlaced rhyme, internal rhyme, ironic rhyme, leonine rhyme, light rhyme, linked rhyme, masculine rhyme, multiple rhyme, near rhyme, nursery rhyme, oblique rhyme, part rhyme, partial rhyme, perfect rhyme, polysyllabic rhyme, rich rhyme, sight rhyme, slant rhyme, suspended rhyme, synthetic rhyme, triple rhyme, vowel rhyme.

By the time I’m done with my thesis I will know what every one of these things are.

Here’s the thing though: rhyme has almost nothing to do with the type of poetry I write. My poetry almost never has rhymes, but maybe one of these 45 different types will give me a chance. Anyway, thought it was cool. Hope someone out there finds it useful.

Beware the Abyss

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Beware the Abyss
Written for my Creative Nonfiction Class – Fall 2011
by Thomas Jay Rush

I am standing on the brink of an abyss. I am looking out over a cliff into a beautiful and terrifying landscape. I’m concerned that if I take an initial step into that country I may not return. I have a family who needs me. So, in this essay, I may appear tentative – as if I’m dipping my toe in the water – and I am. But I think it’s the safest way to proceed.
I’ve struggled for two weeks to come up with a topic for this paper. This is my fifth draft. In my first draft, I equated David Foster Wallace’s work to the beef in a stew that has been simmering in my mind for months. A podcast on literary criticism (Fry 2009) played the role of the onions in that stew.

In another draft, I claimed I was of two minds about Wallace – one mind, a twelve year old boy, intimidated by his intellect and the depth of his writing, and the other mind, a fifty-two year old man who has been liberated by the free abandon Wallace exhibits in his work. That fifty-two year old man thought: if David Foster Wallace can do it, I can do it. In that draft of my essay, there was an apocryphal battle between those two voices. The twelve-year-old won.

In another draft, using way too many footnotes, I tried to mimic the “second voice” Wallace refers to in a famous taped interview with Charlie Rose (Wallace, CharlieRose 1997). I’ve been taught that a writer should avoid cliché. It turns out, using footnotes in an essay about David Foster Wallace is an extreme example of the cliché. Trying to be original, I changed that draft to use an extended forward, which I noticed Wallace had not used. I discovered the reason why he hadn’t – because it’s a bad idea. That draft didn’t work either.

All of those previous drafts of my essay have fallen by the wayside (cliché). They now reside deep inside a folder called “~/Documents/Wayside/Incomplete David Foster Wallace Essays” (cliché defeating humorous aside).

The abyss I referred to earlier is the abyss of David Foster Wallace criticism. I found a website on the Internet called Howling Fantods (Maniatis n.d.). It was built and is maintained by Nick Maniatis, a high-school English teacher in Australia. The site is recognized as “the pre-eminent David Foster Wallace website.” (Crawford n.d.) The community of scholars concerned with David Foster Wallace uses the site as a centralized resource for scholarship on Wallace.

If the worldwide web can be said to be a fabric then this website is definitely a thread. And pulling this thread unravels not just an adult XL sized sweater (a beautiful sweater of many colors, to be sure) but an entire clothing factory of David Foster Wallace criticism. Not just a clothing factory – an entire landscape zoned for heavy industrial.

One particular essay linked from this site is called “David Foster Wallace: the Death of an Author, the Birth of a Discipline” by Adam Kelly (Kelly 2010). This article summarizes the state of David Foster Wallace criticism as of 2010. There were two particular passages in that essay that stuck me as particularly relevant.

The first passage I will discuss in detail below. This passage perfectly describes, I think, what David Foster Wallace was trying to do in his work. The passage is very “dense”, by which I mean that it is written with the supposition that the reader is familiar with the ideas of literary criticism. I am going to attempt to “unpack” that dense passage.
In the second passage, Kelly lists a series of writers and philosophers he believes would be helpful in understanding Wallace’s work: George Berkeley, Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, William James, Fredric Jameson, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Gilbert Ryle, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Kelly 2010).

Twelve-year old boy: Whoa – I’ve never even heard of any of these writers.
Fifty-two-year old man: Whoa – I’ve never even heard of three-quarters of these writers.

I take Kelly’s suggestion seriously. I believe him when he says that to understand Wallace’s work one must first understand these writers. Also, I want to understand exactly what that dense passage means. For this reason, I am going to do two things with the remainder of this essay.
First, I will write a brief sketch on each of the writers mentioned in the above list. These are not intended to be authoritative sketches. I am only making this list as a sort of road map, for a time when I might revisit this place. Also, I think these sketches will serve as an exercise in summarizing the lives and work of these writers (as we did in class). As I enter into this landscape that so fascinates and frightens me I need a road map. These sketches will serve as the beginnings of that map.

In the second part of this essay, I will excerpt an extended passage from Kelly’s article and try to explain what I think the passage means. I will “unpack” the text, as Wallace might say (Wallace, CharlieRose 1997). I think the passage perfectly summarizes what Wallace was trying to do. The passage refers implicitly to work of many of the writers mentioned in the sketches. This is another justification for creating these sketches.

One of the ingredients in the stew from the first draft of my essay, I called it onions, was a podcast I’ve been listening to by Dr. Paul Fry (Fry 2009) from Yale University called “Introduction to Theory of Literature”. The podcast is a series of 26 one-hour long lectures on the history of literary criticism: from the study of hermeneutics or literary interpretation, to gender and identity studies. I started listening to these lectures before having read David Foster Wallace. Each lecture is devoted to an important development in the history of literary criticism – this translates to a discussion on the work of one writer. Many of who, coincidentally, are on the above list. In these lectures I first heard of Derrida, and Gadamer and Wittenberg. I listened to these lectures closely – I grocked very little. Putting these sketches together will help to reinforce what I learned in those podcasts.
Finally, I truly believe that it is impossible, at this stage in my understanding of Wallace’s work, for me to say anything interesting or original about him as a writer. I quite simply do not feel qualified (twelve-year-old boy speaking).

In fine David Foster Wallace style, then, and drawing heavily from Dr. Paul Fry’s lectures, (please be aware that at this point I am now officially “in over my head” and the abyss that I thought I was looking over has suddenly morphed into the edge of a deep swimming pool, and I’m diving in without swimmies), I now present:

SKETCHES OF WRITERS AND PHILOSOPHERS ONE MUST UNDERSTAND IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (DFW).

Note: Most of this information is from a combination of Wikipedia (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia n.d.), Stanford Online Dictionary of Philosophy (Stanford n.d.), and Dr. Fry’s lectures (Fry 2009).

George Berkeley
b. 1685 d. 1753
Also called Bishop Berkley, George Berkley, was an Irish philosopher who lived and worked between 1685 and 1753. He was a proponent of a theory called immaterialism. Which very broadly contends that reality consists of no physical objects. That everything is either “spirit” or “idea,” and that spirit perceives idea and idea is perceived by spirit. His theory may be seen as a reaction to materialism, which was prevalent at the time.

William James
b. 1842 d. 1910
The brother of novelist Henry James, William James studied at the Lawrence Science School at Harvard and the Harvard Medical School. He wrote many influential works of philosophy and influenced many later generations of thinkers including Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
b. 1889 d. 1951
A professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1947, Wittgenstein apparently published very few things while he was alive (a book review, a children’s dictionary, one article and a 75 page book). A book published two years after he died, Philosophical Investigations, was named in 1999 as the most important book in 20th century philosophy.

To poorly summarize my understanding (which is poorly understood to begin with) Wittgenstein believed that most philosophical questions could be made moot if one refused to allow the discussion to leave the “rough ground” of everyday language.

Quoting un-cited text from Wikipedia: He argues philosophical problems are bewitchments that arise from philosophers’ misguided attempts to consider the meaning of words independently of their context, usage, and grammar.

Martin Heidegger
b. 1889 d. 1976
Heidegger says: “In an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself [“the text” in the words of Dr. Fry], or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being [a challenge to the authority of the author as to interpretation].”

Gilbert Ryle
b. 1900 d. 1976
Born in Brighton, England, Ryle lived and worked his entire life in England. From 1935-1945 he taught and wrote at Cambridge. His theories were along the lines of Wittgenstein, in that he thought of philosophical ideas as something distinct from everyday experience.

A regular person knows experience in the same way a farmer might know the land, in the sense that he toils with it every day. A philosopher knows experience more in the way a mapmaker knows a landscape.

He is one of the “ordinary language philosophers” who believe that some of the difficulties of philosophical questions lie in the loss of being in touch with everyday language.

His most famous book, published in 1949, was called The Concept of Mind.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
b. 1900 d. 2002
Born in Germany in 1900, Hans Gadamer lived to the age of 102. He died in Heidelberg, Germany. He studied under and was influenced by Martin Heidegger. His most important book, published in 1960, was called Truth and Method, in which he argued that people approach the reading of a text with preconceived ideas. As soon as a reader reads one part of a text he forms conclusions on the remainder of the text. He carries this expectation forward as he encounters further parts of the text. Gadamer called this back and forth of expectation and encounter the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer argued that a reader is constantly trying to “merge” his understanding of what the writer is saying with his own prior knowledge. He claimed he was not trying to explain how people “aught to” read a text but how people actually do read a text.

From Gadamer: The reader projects before himself a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges…because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning.

Paul Ricoeur
b. 1913 d. 2005
As an indication of just how deep this swimming pool is I searched on Google for this writer and found a link to a website called the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford n.d.). There are 2,500 articles listed in their table of contents about every possible philosophical question. I retreated fairly quickly from this website.

Paul Ricoeur was a prominent 20th century philosopher. For more information please see the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Paul de Man
b. 1919 d. 1983
Professor Fry, in his lecture on the work of Paul de Man, with whom he was apparently a contemporary and colleague, says, “…what we…write in our papers, is grounded in theoretical premises which, if we don’t come to terms with them, we will simply naively reproduce…so it is as crucial…to understand theory” (Fry 2009).

This sentiment, that if we don’t understand the ideas upon which we are basing what we write we are simply naively reproducing other people’s work, is exactly the reason why I didn’t feel qualified to allow myself to enter into the land of serious David Foster Wallace criticism and chose instead to write these simple sketches.

Gilles Deleuze
b. 1925 d. 1995
An interesting website, by an artist called Mark Ngui, shows drawings made to try to elucidate the ideas contained in the first two chapters of Deleuze’s book: A Thousand Plateaus. I reproduce one small image from that website here (Ngui n.d.), as another indication (as if it’s needed) of the depth of the DFW swimming pool:

Jacques Derrida
b. 1930 d. 2004
This important writer published over 40 books on diverse topics. He taught at the University of California, Irvine but also held positions at Yale University and Johns Hopkins University.

Speaking of a famous lecture Jacques Derrida gave at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, Professor Fry says “this extraordinary event in the imaginations of people thinking about theory…[brought]…about a…revolution from the preoccupation we had in the mid-sixties with structuralism to the subsequent preoccupation…with deconstruction. (Fry 2009)”

Derrida subsequently published another important essay called “Différance,” which played an important role in the history of literary criticism as well. A very simple description of the ideas in this paper is that all things are defined only in terms of being different from other things, that without being able to specify what a thing is in relation to other things it is not possible to say anything about that thing.

William Wimsatt
b. 1907 d. 1975
Wimsatt was a professor of English at Yale University from 1939 until his death in 1975, 36 years later. He published many papers on literary criticism. One important paper was called “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt Jr 1946) which was published in The Sewanee Review in 1946.

In that paper, Wimsatt argued, “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art!” [My exclamation point]

He also said, later in that article, in what I call his famous twelfth footnote : “the history of words after [his italics] a poem is written may contribute meanings which if relevant…should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention.”

Professor Fry spent a long time on this writer in his lecture. I found the idea of the Intention Fallacy interesting. Wallace mentions the intentional fallacy in his essay “Big Red Son.”

Richard Rorty
b. 1931 d. 2007
A philosopher and writer who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia and Stanford University, Rorty developed ideas called neopragmatism. His work was based, in part, on the works of Derrida and Heidegger. William James was apparently a pragmatist, so Rorty’s ideas are an incorporation and expansion of some of the pragmatist ideas.

Wikipedia claims that the Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy calls Rorty’s work a “postmodern version of pragmatism.”

Fredric Jameson
b. 1934 d. present
Born in 1934, Jameson was an American literary critic. His most famous work was titled Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1991.

Martha Nussbaum
b. 1947 d. present
A teacher at Harvard and Brown Universities, Martha Nussbaum now teaches philosophy, law, and divinity at the University of Chicago. Nussbaum has “a concern for nut-and-bolts utility” (Boynton n.d.). Which means she wants her philosophies to have a practical effect on the world. She has studied women’s poverty in India. Through her teaching of law she hopes to have a lasting effect on society. She was born and raised in the privileged world of Bryn Mawr, PA and attended the Baldwin School.

Nussbaum was the winner of many awards including being named one of the world’s top 100 intellectuals (how can they possibly tell?) by Foreign Policy Magazine in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

In the remainder of this essay I will discuss a passage taken from “David Foster Wallace: the Death of an Author, the Birth of a Discipline” by Adam Kelly (Kelly 2010). Hopefully, some of the ideas in this passage may be better understood given the above sketches.
The article is a summary of David Foster Wallace scholarship. Studies in David Foster Wallace have experienced a huge upsurge since his death, in 2008, by suicide. The article discusses the fact that Wallace was one of the early “internet age” writers. It discusses how Wallace’s fan base actually played an important role in the furtherance of studies about his work. One amateur fan actually went to Amherst College Library and discovered an important early draft of a Wallace short story from the time he was a student. The article then goes on to say:

What became known as “literary theory,” and eventually simply “theory” (see Culler), initially arose as a method of reading “against the grain,” with the aim of exploring a text’s unconscious (whether political, psychological, gendered etc.).

In other words literary critics, at the beginning of the discipline, were trying to understand what the writer was saying by focusing on the actual text. Trying to determine what was hidden in the text’s unconscious. The theories of Sigmund Freud came into play here and some literary critics hung their work on the ideas of Freud’s id, ego, and superego (Fry 2009). One critic, Wimsatt, claimed, in a paper called “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt Jr 1946) that it was not only not possible but not desirable to try to understand the original intention of the author of the piece. He claimed that once a literary artifact is “born” it is no longer the province of the author to determine what it means. He contended that everything a critic needs to make an interpretation is in the text (Fry 2009).

Kelly goes on to say:

But as theory has moved from a position of peripheral challenge to one of conventional centrality in academic discourse, its relation to texts has become newly problematic…

In other words, as literary theory has gained relevancy and become more broadly disseminated, it has encountered new problems, those problems arising…
…both because the epistemological claims of high theory have come under fire from a variety of sources…

…that fire coming from not only other literary critics but increasingly from the authors whose authority is being challenged. He continues…
…and because literary texts have begun to engage critically with their own relation to theoretical formulations [italics mine].

This, I think, is the crux of what David Foster Wallace was doing. He was “engaging critically…[with]…theoretical formulations.” Kelly goes on to say:
Literary critics…have explored this problem in general…but Wallace critics have found it easier to negotiate because of the assumption of genius and encyclopedic knowledge attached to their object of study.

In other words, it is assumed that Wallace was both familiar with and was incorporating in his writing the theories of the literary critics. He understood the game the critics were playing, and he wrote his work not only for the regular reader but also in response to what the critics and literary theorists were saying. And this causes new difficulties for the theorist. The theorist’s object of study is squirming under the microscope.

Further in the piece Kelly says:

Whereas the rise of theory was initially viewed as the conclusive destruction of intention [Kelly is referring to Wimsatt here (Wimsatt Jr 1946)], …here intention is birthed again to co-exist with theory, resulting in fresh forms of critical engagement.

This is why Wallace is an important writer; some have called him the most important writer of his generation. I don’t think Wallace initiated this “rebirth” of intention (based on my limited understanding, the early practitioners of post-modernism may have initiated these “fresh forms of critical engagement,” but Wallace certainly added to it).

Further in the article, Kelly says:

When theory was at its zenith in the academy, what a writer thought he or she was doing in their fiction was not a decisive factor for critics; but when major writers become willing to engage the discourses of theory itself [my italics] – to speak the language of the critic, and challenge that language on its own turf – it is impossible not to take notice.

Wallace was “engaging in the discourse of theory itself.” He was “challenging” the critics on their own terms. The article quotes Wallace as saying:
The contemporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard the work of [literary critics]…as divorced from his own concerns.”

I think Wallace had read all of the theory. I think he had understood all of the theory. I think he incorporated it into his work.
In short, I think he grocked it (see fn 1).

During the last few months I’ve been reading the work of a man named John Barth. (He was the “celery” in the stew.) John Barth had a long career teaching writing at Penn State University, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins University. He wrote an important collection of post-modern short stories called “Lost in the Funhouse.” In one essay called “It’s a Short Story” (Barth 1992), Barth says that early in his career, while he was being taught writing at Johns Hopkins, he was having difficulty trying to meet the expectations of his teachers. He describes a time when he finally realized that he could just go off on his own. That he could go off in his own direction. That he could dive into the swimming pool without his swimmies (my words not his). I really loved this idea, this sense of freedom. The writing of David Foster Wallace gives me that same feeling.

This sense of freedom is what has allowed this fifty-two year old man to finally come to the end if this convoluted and probably confusing essay.

COPY OF EMAIL OFFICIALLY INCLUDED AS PART OF THIS PAPER:

From: Thomas Jay Rush
Subject: End of Year Paper
Date: December 12, 2011 9:50PM EST
To: Anne Kaier

This email is officially part of the paper I handed in earlier this evening. I believe one of the things that David Foster Wallace was trying to do with his many footnotes and asides was to make certain that he was fully communicating everything he needed to say. This is why he goes into such excruciating detail (Wallace, CharlieRose 1997). I totally understand this. I always feel that I’ve left a million things unsaid in my writing.
I started writing one version of my paper wherein I included tons of footnotes but I quickly realized that writing a paper on David Foster Wallace and using footnotes was pure cliché, so I abandoned that paper. I then tried to invent a new method to do the same thing, something that Wallace hadn’t already done. I struck upon the idea of using a “foreword” but after a short time I discovered why David Foster Wallace had not used a foreword in any of his essays – because it’s a stupid idea. So I abandoned that draft as well.

I’m sending this email because this is the method I’ve hit upon to speak with what Wallace called a “second voice.” But now that I’ve come to actually write the email I find I don’t have very much further to say.

So I’ll just say this: Thanks for the fine class. I really enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and I look forward to taking further classes with you in the future. Have a nice holiday.

Works Cited

Barth, John. “It’s a Short Story.” The Second International Conference on the Short Story – Proceedings (University of Iowa), June 1992.
Crawford, Ashley. “David Foster Wallace: Pale Kingdoms.” 21C Magazine. http://21cmagazine.com/#1379093 (accessed December 8, 2011).
Fry, Dr. Paul H. Introduction to Theory of Literature. Podcast. Yale University. New Haven, CT, Spring 2009.
Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Ace Trade, 1961.
Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.” Issue 2. Irish Journal of American Studies. Summer 2010. http://www.ijasonline.com/Adam-Kelly.html (accessed December 6, 2011).
Maniatis, Nick. Edited by Nick Maniatis. http://thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/ (accessed December 6, 2011).
Ngui, Mark. Drawings of Thousand Plateaus. http://bumblenut.com/drawing/art /plateaus/index.shtml (accessed December 12, 2012).
Wallace, David Foster, interview by Charlie Rose. An Interview with David Foster Wallace. New York, New York, (March 27, 1997).
—. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. New York, NY: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co., 2007.
—. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993).
Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum. http://www.robertboynton.com/ articleDisplay.php?article_id=55 (accessed December 10, 2011).
Wimsatt Jr, M. C. Beardsley and W. K. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review (Johns Hopkins University Press) 54, no. 3 (July 1946).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Zalta, Edward N., ed. The Metaphysics Research Lab , Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/ (accessed 12 5, 2011).
Wikipeida. http://www.wikipedia.org.

Rediscovering Nonfiction

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Rediscovering Nonfiction
Written for my Creative Nonfiction Class – Fall 2011
by Thomas Jay Rush

I was walking north on 22nd Street near the Philadelphia Art Museum a couple of weeks ago. As I strolled, angrily listening to a podcast, I noticed a homeless man sitting on a stoop. Unconsciously, I inched toward the outer edge of the sidewalk.

As I passed he said, “How ‘ya doin?”

I continued walking.

He said, “May I ask you a question?” Polite like that.

This made me angrier than I already was. I went back to my car and drove home.

Twenty minutes earlier, I walked away from the Occupy Wall Street protest at Dilworth Plaza where I had gone to interview people. Not because I was interested in their protest, but because I wanted to practice the art of interviewing. I left without speaking to a single person.

I had only to have asked that strange man, dressed like a Luftwaffe officer, wearing a blond wig and German army fatigues: “May I ask you a question?” What was so difficult about that?

In this paper, I propose to tell the story of what prompted me to go down to City Hall that day. Four weeks earlier, I would not have gone. Four weeks earlier, I would have known the outcome of my excursion before getting on the Expressway. I would have known I would leave without asking a single question. Most likely, I would have written a piece about Occupy Wall Street anyway, but it would have been fiction. My intention on this particular day was write a piece of nonfiction. But I walked away empty handed and upset with myself.

When I was eighteen years old, I read a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It was required reading for my freshmen class at college; we were to write an essay about the book for our final project.

Prior to reading that book, I had read only five books in my life, all fiction. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and a book, when I was twelve, called The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald (great book). I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with the passion only a first-year college student can sustain. Re-reading it, outlining it, highlighting it, I practically tore the book limb from limb. I could not put it down. I have been calling it my favorite book for thirty years. Before the start of this semester at Rosemont, it was one of the few nonfiction books I had read.
Around the same time I devoured Dillard’s book, I also started writing short narrative essays and poetry. I tried to emulate Ms. Dillard in my writing. I adored the way she related personal events, so seamlessly integrating them into the larger point she was making about being human. I marveled at how she incorporated things she had read into her work, how she wove essays that contained no unnecessary threads. My efforts to mimic her fell well short.

I was young and stupid back then. Instead of trying to figure out what she was doing, I walked away. I stagnated in my own insular brand of the personal essay and I turned to reading fiction. Until I read John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens a couple of weeks ago, my love for Tinker Creek had all but disappeared. Like Rick Parry [sic], the contender for the Republican nomination, my love for nonfiction briefly blossomed, exploding on the scene to dominate the attention, only to recede as quickly as it appeared.

I read John McPhee’s book, The Pine Barrens, before the start of the semester. The following week I read Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Following that, I read Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. After a steady thirty-year diet of fiction, I filled myself with three nonfiction books in two weeks; and relished every word.

From the first page of McPhee’s book, I noticed something hovering over the writing. Unlike fiction, I noticed a feeling that what I was reading was true. It is a simple thing to say—of course, it was true, it was nonfiction—but this was a new feeling to me.

On page four McPhee says, “In parts of New Jersey there are over forty thousand people per square mile…in the central area of the Pine Barrens there are only fifteen people per square mile.” (McPhee, 4). When I read that I thought, “Wow. An honest-to-goodness fact.”

Up until that time, I was under the misapprehension that dry, dusty facts took away from the enjoyment of a book. The fact is McPhee’s book was anything but boring. In the first three pages, he mentions the geography, history, and even linguistic history of the Pine Barrens. He introduces us to the town of Hog Wallow (what a great name) and one of its residents, Fredrick Chambers Brown, when he writes, “Some [people] describe it [Hog Wallow], without any apparent intention to be clever, as a suburb of Jenkins…One resident of Hog Wallow is Fredrick Chambers Brown. I met him one summer morning when I stopped at his house to ask for water.” (McPhee, 7).

I wrote in the margin beside this passage, “I’m in love with this writer.” The next hundred and fifty pages made me a fan of John McPhee. I appreciated the way, like Dillard, he was able to impart so many facts and yet keep me interested. The natural history, the social history, the flora and fauna, the people were all fascinating. I started thinking I could write a book like this.

The only trouble was, as I was conjuring a book about where I grew up, a place just as interesting as the Pine Barrens, there was a nagging worry, revealed in the quote above, haunting me.

John McPhee stopped at someone’s house and asked for a drink of water.

I tried to ignore this detail, but it kept returning and ruining my daydream. Going back over my notes in the margins, I see numerous references to him meeting new people. At one point I wrote, “He’s interviewing the entire population of New Jersey.”

I am afraid of interviewing people. There. I said it. Better to stay silent and allow people to think your stupid….

I was not ready to deal with my fear. As people do, I chose to ignore it. I finished the book and moved on the next book on my reading list: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I really enjoyed Skloot’s book. The prologue itself engaged me enough to carry me through to the end, if only to find out by whom she was pushed up against a wall. As she writes:

I couldn’t have imagined it then, but that phone call would mark the beginning of a decade-long adventure through scientific laboratories, hospitals, and mental institutions, with a cast of characters that would include Nobel laureates, grocery store clerks, convicted felons, and a professional con artist. While trying to make sense of [it]…. I’d be accused of conspiracy and slammed into a wall…and…eventually find myself on the receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism (Skloot, 6).

If I had ever thought that nonfiction writing was boring (and I did) this prologue removed that misconception from my mind. The use of the words “adventure” and “cast of characters” are perfect. It sounds like an old Hollywood movie trailer. “The adventure!” (Splashed across the screen in red letters from lower left to upper right.) “A cast of thousands! Don’t miss the latest blockbuster from Cecil B. DeSkloot.”

I loved it.

Like McPhee’s book, when I first started reading this book, I detected that same “pall” hanging over the narrative. I call it a “pall” because it felt like something dragging on the narrative, something holding back the prose. I think this “pall” was my own internal thoughts questioning how the writer could have possibly known what she was reporting. For example, on the first page of the first chapter, Skloot writes, recounting a conversation of Henrietta Lacks, “ ‘I got a knot on my womb,’ she told the receptionist. ‘The doctor need to have a look.’ ” (Skloot, 13). I wondered how Skloot could have possibly known what Lacks said to the receptionist.

I suppose she may have interviewed the receptionist and that this is a direct quote, but in any case my attention was distracted. Even if Skloot had interviewed the receptionist, how could the receptionist have remembered an anonymous visitor from thirty years earlier? There must have been hundreds of people passing by that reception desk every day.

I was in the process, for the first time in my life, really, of learning what nonfiction was. What were the rules of this game? What does it mean to say nonfiction is truth? How true is true?

While I was reading Skloot’s book, I was scouring the Internet for information on creative nonfiction. I bought five books about creative nonfiction (see Works Sited); I found a number of online literary journals devoted almost exclusively to creative nonfiction. (One of them called Creative Nonfiction, of all things.) I read numerous articles by Creative Nonfiction’s editor, Lee Gutkind. (Gutkind 2008). I also read many articles on an online journal called Shadowbox and another called Etude.

For some reason, the quarterly On Craft essay on the Etude website, written by the journal’s founder, Lauren Kessler, captivated me. Four times a year Ms. Kessler writes an essay on the craft of narrative or creative nonfiction. (I find it interesting that people practicing the field don’t agree on what to call this endeavor. Is it called creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction? They can’t seem to make up their mind.)

I’m a software developer. I wrote a very simple piece of software that downloaded all thirty-five issues of the On Craft essay and stuffed them into a Word document. I did this so I could read them all together in a bunch, but also because it would allow me to summarize them. I was hoping to create a list of the issues a creative nonfiction writer might encounter while doing his or her work.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last two years studying fiction, so I’m familiar with the ideas of characterization, setting, plot, suspense, pacing, etc. I was interested in making a list of things a creative nonfiction writer would have to know about.

Over the years certain recurring themes emerged from Ms. Kessler’s essays:

Truth is paramount, but craft is equally important. The “nonfiction” and the “creative” parts of the name of the genre carry equal weight.
Because one is writing truth, one will encounter ethical questions that do not exist in fiction. What parts of the story should the writer exclude to protect the privacy of the subject? What parts of the story must the writer include? Will certain facts revealed in the piece hurt someone? To whom does the writer owe his/her allegiance: the subject of the story, the truth, or the reader? These issues can get very murky.
Memory is faulty. Two people may remember the same event in different ways. Who is to say what really happened? How can the writer of the piece possibly choose? Should the writer make the choice or present both versions and allow the reader to choose?
Details are important, particularly when characterizing people. When writing fiction one may invent any detail one needs – for example the name “Snidely Whiplash” for an evil character. When writing nonfiction the writer may not invent. But he may choose details. Tom Wolfe called these “value-revealing” details. Kessler says, “If [a man] is bald because he shaves his head, then his baldness is a value-revealing detail…If he’s bald and he undergoes a $10,000 hair implant operation, this is also a value-revealing detail.” (Etude Magazine, Autumn 2002). Ethical questions appear here as well. Which details should be ignored? Which ones includes? What exactly is “truth” if the writer decides on the details?
Frequently in these essays (they span a period of about ten year) the issue of scandal arises. Every few years a supposed nonfiction book is exposed as fiction. The book by James Fry, called A Million Little Pieces, is a famous example. Marketed as a nonfiction book, when it was learned that large parts of it were untrue, there was a huge kerfuffle. Wikipedia now calls this book a “semi-fictional” memoir (whatever that is). Kessler is frequently concerned about how easy it is to slip back and forth over the line of fiction, and warns practitioners to be careful.
Sourcing—that is keeping track of every particular piece of information—is hugely important. On what date did the writer meet someone? Where did they meet? What page, in what book, does a particular quote come from? These sorts of technical issues are important. Without them the piece loses its authority, and the reader’s trust.
Finally, (and this is an issue I tried to ignore), interviewing skill is a prerequisite for writing nonfiction. Ms. Kessler constantly discusses the art of interviewing. She annoyingly insists on her opinion that the writer must learn to interview. The writer must learn to insinuate herself into the lives of her subjects. Metaphorically I stuck my fingers in my ears.

Near the end of Rebecca Skloot’s book is a page titled “Acknowledgments.” (Skloot, 337). They go on for ten pages. There are hundreds of people on that list. To be completely honest, this list of acknowledgments is the single thing that stands out for me from this book. Just as when I was reading McPhee’s book, my internal voice was saying, “I can write this…” and my internal non-voice (or whatever we call that part of ourselves that knows the truth but refuses to speak) was saying, “…but I’m afraid.”

I said earlier that I was shy. I said I was afraid of interviewing people, but I was choosing to ignore this small “value-revealing” detail. Here it was then—staring me in the face—I was going to have to get over my fear of interview people; I was going to have to involve other people in my projects.

So. What did I do?

I ignored it.

I went on daydreaming about writing the next great creative nonfiction book. Worrying much more, to be honest, about the possibility of making stuff up and being exposed, embarrassing my family and causing a scandal, than learning how to interview. Besides, I told myself, I am an artist, and if I want to invent a new sub-genre of creative nonfiction that excludes interviews then that is what I will do. Who will stop me? I moved on to the next book in the reading list, Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit.

I am running out of space, so, without going into detail I will just say I enjoyed Seabiscuit. As Dr. Kaier pointed out in class, Hillenbrand plays no part whatsoever in the story of Seabiscuit, and yet it was a very enjoyable and engaging story.

Similar to Skloot’s book, where the acknowledgments stood out as the most striking aspect, a certain passage stood out for me from this book. On an un-numbered page near the end of the book (Hillenbrand, Reader’s Guide), a writer named William Nack interviews (arrrhgg) Hillenbrand about her writing process. In the interview, Nack reveals that Hillenbrand completed large parts of this book while in bed. Apparently, she suffers from a disease called Chronic Fatigue. If she exerts herself too strenuously she gets dizzy. She worked, with her papers propped up on books, from her bed. She conducted interviews over the phone and used inter-library loans to have materials delivered to her house.

Just like that, all my bull$hit about not interviewing people disappeared. How could I possibly maintain the excuse “I’m too shy” in the face of Hillenbrand in her bed? Her experience expunged that excuse from my life as quickly as Howard Dean’s cackle, the night he won Iowa in 2004, expunged him from the Democratic primary race.

The next morning, I drove to downtown Philadelphia and parked my car near the Franklin Institute. God damn it. I was going to interview people. I strode confidently down Benjamin Franklin Parkway, past the Four Seasons Hotel, past Love Park with that beautiful towering masterpiece of a city hall staring me in the face. I had my iPhone with its voice memo app opened and ready. I would deliver a political bombshell: “Those protestors have no idea what they’re doing.” This would catapult my career as a political reporter. I would expose the dirty underbelly of Occupy Wall Street.

When I got to Dilworth Plaza, I milled around, walking on the outskirts of the encampment. Getting the lay of the land. I stood for a long time looking at a strange man dressed in a Nazi Luftwaffe uniform. He was wearing a cheap looking blond wig that stuck out awkwardly from his SS hat. He wore an olive-drab German army coat and grey flannel pants. He was actually spinning on his heel (of what I later came to understand were his jackboots). Two hated rival amateur reporters stuck iPhones in his face while I stood outside the circle and watched.

“Hey buddy, can I ask you a question?”

That is all I would have had to say. What was so hard about that? Instead, I walked away upset with myself. I walked down Chestnut Street until I reached 22nd, then north on 22nd where I encountered that homeless fellow. I should go back and thank him. He knew. Like McPhee, and Skloot, and Hillenbrand, and especially Dillard. He knew. All you have to do, if you want to get what you want, is ask.

References
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1979.
McPhee, John. The Pine Barrens. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York, NY: Broadway Paperbacks, 2010.
Hillenbrand, Laura. Seabiscuit. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Etude Magazine. On Craft Essays. Edited by Lauren Kessler. http://etude.uoregon.edu (accessed Oct. 2011).
Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Edited by Lee Gutkind. http://www.creativenonfiction.org/ (accessed Oct. 2011).
Shadowbox Magazine. Edited by Fletcher and Rivera. http://shadowboxmagazine.org/ (accessed Oct. 2011).

Gutkind, Lee, ed. The Best of Creative Nonfiction. Vol. 2. 2 vols. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Jones, Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier, ed. In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Moore, Dinty W. The Truth of the Matter. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2007.
Paola, Brenda Miller and Suzanne. Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2005.
Stewart, John L., ed. The Essay – A Critical Anthology. New York, NY: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1952.

Two Things That Are Going to or Should Happen

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1. Penn State University should start a research center devoted to the study of child abuse. They should study the techniques that men use to lure children and their parents into danger. They should study the way institutions like Penn State and the Catholic Church hide the perpetrators. Penn State should become the center of a new field of scientific research devoted to studying child abuse. But…and this is extremely important…they should audit themselves continually because a research center such as this would attract perpetrators who would wish to learn the techniques people use.

2. Twenty years from now (this is written in 2011) everyone is going to realize that all the time and energy they’ve spent organizing their photographs and videos on their Macintosh computers is in danger of disappearing into the ether when they die. Companies should start forming now to preserve people’s photos into perpetuity – much like a cemetery keeps the memory of people physical being there should be a place to keep a person’s digital being.

Creative Nonfiction

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I’m taking a course in Creative Nonfiction with Anne Kaier at Rosemont this semester. Anne is an excellent teacher. Creative Nonfiction is hard to define. I think of it as “Telling truth through story.” By this I mean that when one writes Creative Nonfiction one makes a promise to the reader that one will stick to the truth, in a “whole truth and nothing but the truth” sort of way. That’s the nonfiction part. The creative part comes in telling the story in as engaging a way as possible. “Whole truth and nothing but the truth, but let me put some lipstick on this pig.”

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at a a literary magazine called Etude. They bill themselves as “New voices in Literary Nonfiction” (Literary Nonfiction is another name for Creative Nonfiction). They produce an excellent quartly journal. Each quarter they include a column discussing the craft of Creative Nonfiction called on Craft.

I’ve linked into the magazine here. Links go to the home page for each particular issue and directly to the on Craft essay for that issue. Enjoy.

	Winter	Spring	Summer	Autumn
2002	n/a	Issue on Craft	n/a	Issue on Craft
2003	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2004	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	n/a	Issue on Craft
2005	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2006	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2007	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2008	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2009	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft
2010	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	n/a
2011	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft	Issue on Craft

My Celebrity Look Alikes

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Never heard of three of them, one is a drunk the other is a terrible actor.

Starting new semester at Rosemont

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Last night I started a new class at Rosemont College. It’s called Modern Creative Non-Fiction. We are going to read nine books in nine weeks: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Sklott, Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, Italian Days by Barbara Grizuitti Harrison, Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham, The Pine Barrens by John McPhee, Best American Essays, 2009, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia by Sharon White.

I’m very excited to get started. I ordered all the books from Amazon this morning. I want to write about the experience of reading and studying these books on this blog, and I intend to do that. I get great joy out of reading great pieces of writing. I’m especially excited about David Foster Wallace and John McPhee. Stay Tuned.

Rome and Amalfi

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Been writing a lot over here in Italy. Will post somethings once I get home and am able to re-write and edit. These days it seems all I do is re-write and edit. Still working on Collected Short Stories from May. About 85% completed with second drafts. The goal in May was 120 short works of fiction, essay or poetry all 120 with second draft status. Not quite done yet but I have until November when I start my next novel (which is already written in my head).

Hemingway’s Six

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There is an interesting discussion about Hemingway’s famous six word story here.

I started thinking about this and I wondered if Hemingway’s particular ordering of those six words were the best possible ordering. I wrote a simple (six line) C++ program to permute the six words and print out all 720 different combinations of the words “For,” “Sale,” “Baby,” “Shoes,” “Never” and “Worn.” I couldn’t even begin to be able to figure out what to do with the puncuation so I left that as it was. I then scanned through all 720 variations of the six words. Except for “Baby shoes: for sale, never worn” which was pretty good here is my conclusion: Hemingway is a great writer.

Story
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Not a story
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NaShoWriMay 2011 – II

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This is insane but I wrote a second 50,000 word book in May, 2011 called Blooming Glen, 1959-1986, R.I.P. In this book I figuratively walk up and down the two streets in my town and recount everything I can think of related to every place in my town. I thought of a lot. Each property in town is given its own three or four page flashy treament. I tried to write the entries as a mixture between memories and flash fiction pieces. There is so much potential here. I’m really glad I got this all down on paper. I will serve me as a source of material for a long time I think. Here is the table of contents.

As you can see I didn’t even start this work until the end of the month and then I rushed to finish it before May 31. I also completed a large collection of short stories, flash and non-fiction, the table of contents of which is here.

Contents of Blooming Glen, R.I.P.

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This is the table of contents for my book Blooming Glen, 1959-1986. R.I.P. which I wrote during the last ten days of May, 2011.

Table of Contents
North and East
The Swartleys	11
The Derstines	13
The Parisies	15
Doc Schaefer	17
Dunlap’s Butcher Shop	19
The Gulicks	21
The Carrolls	23
Derstine House	25
Dean and Laverne Detwiler	27
The Detwiler Farm	31
The Mennonite Church	35
Vacation Bible School	37
Tim Hockman and Boy’s Club	39
The Medwick Farm	41
The Effrig Farm	45
Further Afield	47
Conclusion	49

North and West
Fehls	53
Bobby Green’s Farm	55
Holy Roller Church	57
Next Property	59
Witton’s Store	61
North side of Route 113, west of crossroads	63
Gladys Loux	65
The Next Property	69
The Gas Station	71
Next Two Houses	73
Barney Rush	75
Old School House	77
Blooming Glen Meats	79
The Apartments	81
The Dam	83
Next Property	85
Justice Moyer’s Farm	87
Further Afield	89
Conclusion	91

South and West
Aunt Dolly’s	95
Uncle Jim’s Sister’s	99
Moyer’s Farm	101
Pants Factory	103
House Behind Pants Factory	105
Swope House	107
Other Houses	109
Kraft Factory	111
The Hotel	115
Barber Shop House	117
Roy Dale Hange	119
Double Houses	121
Jimmy Myers	123
Post Office	125
Miriam Drive	131
Big Pretty Houses	133
The Farm at the End of Town	135
John Dayton’s Farm	137
Sam Miller Tires	139
Poppy Yoder	141
Chuck Straus	143
Uncle Feryle	145
Pretty Girl in the New House	147
Further Afield	149
Conclusion	153

South and East
Trash Dump	157
OV the AV and Other Houses	159
Brooke and Lee’s First Apartment	161
Michael Myers	163
Other Big Houses	165
Old High School	167
Old Gym	169
Baseball Field	171
House with Swimming Pool	173
Factory Building	175
Triple House	177
Little Apartment Building	181
Rapp Family	183
Houses on Route 113	185
Ed Curry	187
Huntsburger	189
Crouthhammels	193
Baseball Field and Snack Shed	199
Scout Cabin	203
Horse Farm	205
Creek Play / Boat Racing	207
Further Afield	209
Conclusion	211

The Rush House
Introduction	215
Basement	217
Back Room	219
Main Room	221
Closet at Top of Stairs	225
First Floor	227
Dining Room	229
Living Room	235
Den	239
Back Porch	243
Kitchen	245
Second Floor	251
Mom and Dad’s Room	253
Becky’s Bedroom	261
Upstairs Bathroom	267
Front Bedroom	269
Back Bedroom	271
Third Floor	275
Attic Right	277
Attic Left	279
Attic Back	281
Outside	283
Barn	285
Garage	287
Burn Heap	289
Dog Pens	291
Conclusion	297

NaShoWriMay 2011

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I wrote 110 short stories, flash and essay peices in April and the first twenty days of May 2011 (here). I do this as part of something that I call NaShoWriMay, which means National Short Writing May.

I always keep my own MS Excel spreadsheet were I track my progress during the month and I present that data here. You can see that the activity flattens out near the end of May. That’s because I wrote another book (here) in the last ten days of May. It’s been a productive spring.

Contents of Short Fiction, Essays and Poetry, May 2011

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I had a hugely productive spring. I wrote two full 300 page books. The first is a collection of short fiction, flash fiction, micro fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry consisting of 110 peices. Most is flash (about 60). Most of the rest are creative non-fiction (essays). Here’s the table of contents and the chart of progress. I will detail the second book in another post.

Table of Contents
Short Stories
War Games	3
The Great Symphony	19
Liver and Onions	29
The Thief	31
Getting Into Pants	33

Flash Fiction
Robert Frost Helps Me Talk to My Father	37
The Anthropic Principle	39
Flushing Pheasants	41
Sigmund Freud on My Relationship	43
Inside Out	45
Queue	47
Johnny K	51
First Holy Communion	53
Lake Marie	55
e^iπ + 1 = 0 (An Identity)	57
Double Word Score	59
Diving	61
Chiaroscuro	63
Hardwood	65
Jason Makes a Call	67
For Her	69
Omnistrain	73
Picking up Girls at the Bar	75
Mr. Jones’ Accounts	77
The Parallel Postulate	79
Bumper Cars	81
Ham and Swiss on Rye	83
How I Learned to Like Guacamole	85
The Point Beyond Which There is No Return	87
The Mathematics of Titties	89
Charlie’s in Trouble	91
Drive Thru	93
Fireworks	95
Stuffed Chicken	97
Lying	99
The Normal Curve for Normal	101
My Prayer	103
Story Table	105
My Stuff in a Box	107
Bobby Daddy	109
Being in Love	111
Jumpy Juice	113
New Tom	115
Telling Her	117
The Peacock Room	119
So Much Promise	121
The Decision	123
The Robbery	125
The Insight	127
God Makes a Mistake	129
You’re Welcome Day	131
Dinner with James	133
Baba	135
Medieval Torture Room	137
Welcoming a Guest	139
Edgar, Richard and Miss M.	141
The Good King Goes Up	143
Speaking French to a Taxi Driver	145
Nothing Ever Happened	147
Doors	149
Mirror Image	151
My Net Diary	153

Micro Fiction
The Doppler Effect	157
Gimme a Yacto-second	159
Q & A	161
Writing	163
Prince Charming	165
The Sunday Smell of Frying Chicken	167
Cow Crap	169

Essays
30 Steps to Surviving the Death of Your Brother	173
Penis Butter and Jit Jelly	179
Rules for Pennies	181
Shaman	183
The Anniversary	185
The Backwoodsman	187
You	189
If [I \| You] Had Never Met [You \| Me]	191
Pi	193
Snow Hole	195
My Boss Washes His Hands	197
Torturing Katie	203
Second Chances	205
The Laws of Inheritance	207
The Trouble with Freedom	209
Under Protective Cover	211
Going Green	213
War 101	215
Yesterday and Tomorrow	217
Twenty Things	221
An Interview with the Poet	223
Numark Turntable	225

Poetry
The Present	229
You	231
Fibonacci Poem	233
My Reading Spot	235
Song To Myself	237
Poem for Daddy	239
Screw You, Reader	241
I Am God and Shit	243

Other Writing / Blog Posts
What Was Raymond Carver Talking About?	247
Nancy Clearwater Herman, Artist and Blogger	247
Bend the Light	249
Make Mercury Wobble	251
Tricks of the Trade	253

What Was Raymond Carver Talking About?

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What Was Raymond Carver Talking About?
A Critical Analysis of
Raymond Carver’s Collection
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

by Thomas Jay Rush

The first story of Raymond Carver’s book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love ends with the narrator saying “There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out,” referring to a young woman who had stopped at the home of a man whose furniture was on his lawn. The obvious reading of those words is that she was trying to understand what caused the man to put his furniture outside. However, I think there may be another, equally valid, reading. I think one could read those words as direct statement, not about the situation, but about the story itself.

As soon as I read those words, I started wondering what exactly the girl needed to “talk out.” I wondered what happened that was so dramatic that she was still talking about it weeks afterwards, and what exactly was the “more” the narrator has not told us about.

If one thinks about the words “there was more to it” for a moment, one realizes that the writer is saying that something has been left out of the story. One also realizes that the writer is aware that something has been left out (otherwise why would he say there was “more to it”). It seems to me that, because the writer is aware that something is missing, he has made a conscious choice to leave that part of the story out of it.

Using three example stories from the collection, Why Don’t You Dance, Tell The Women We’re Leaving, and Sacks, I will argue that this purposeful “leaving out” characterizes Raymond Carver’s entire collection. I will further argue that he drops hints, such as the words “there was more to it,” that point to directly to what’s been omitted. Further, I will argue what is left out is the most important part of each story, and that it is exactly these left out parts that help the reader understand what Raymond Carver is really talking about in each story.

I recognize that a paper like this, a personal interpretation of a writer’s work, is filled with difficulty. That the interpretations I make are mine alone, and that other readers may have wildly different interpretations, all of which are equally valid. Therefore, my final argument in this paper will be that the craft that the writer exhibits most forcefully is his ability to write stories that are open to broad interpretation. It is this aspect of the writing craft that I most wish to incorporate into my own work. It is a writer’s ability to communicate things that are not said that I take the most pleasure from when I read a great short story.

So, what did I find when I went back and re-read Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? looking explicitly for the “more”? I found a lot. Did I find anything “more” in any of the other stories in the collection? Yes, I did. Will I spend the rest of this paper trying to explain what I found? Yes, I will.

About half way through the story Why Don’t You Dance?, when the boy and the girl first get out of the car, the girl lays down on the bed. She tells the boy to lay down with her and says “Kiss me.” He says “Let’s get up,” feeling uncomfortable. A few sentences later she says “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and trails off without finishing the thought. The obvious implication unsaid thing is “Wouldn’t it be funny if we made love on this bed out here in the driveway.”

Further in the story, after the man returns from the store and puts his sacks of groceries on the table, he puts a record on the record player and tells the young couple to dance. The narrator describes this thus: “Arms about each other, their bodies pressed together, the boy and the girl moved up and down the driveway.” I found the words “up and down” an interesting word choice.

A few sentences later the girl says “Dance with me,” and the narrator goes on to say “…when the man stood up, she came to him with her arms wide open.”

Then there is a section break; two blank lines in the narrative.

Then the girls says “Those people over there, they’re watching,” as if a crowd has formed and is standing in the street looking at them. The man says “Let them watch,” and then “I hope you like your bed.” The story ends with the last paragraph where the girl is still, weeks later, trying to “talk it out.”

Because the writer told me that there was something “more”, that wasn’t told, I wondered exactly what happened during that section break. What happened in the time interval between those two blank lines. What did the writer not say? Why did a crowd form? Why, weeks later, was the girl still trying to “talk it out”?

I think what happened is that the man and the girl explored fully, and to its conclusion, the question “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” In my mind, what Carver was really talking about in this story was sex.

Of course, there is no way for me to know if my interpretation is correct. There is no way for me to know if the man and the girl made love on the bed in the driveway. It is very likely that I am completely wrong, but that’s not the point. The point is that the writer, clearly and on purpose, put the words “there is more to it,” into his story – and that those words opened up (at least for me) this interpretation.

I think this same sort of openness to interpretation is exhibited in Carver’s Tell the Women We’re Going.

In this story Jerry and Bill, two young men who’ve been life-long friends, ostensibly kill two girls that they meet by chance one Sunday afternoon. While returning from an afternoon of drinking and playing pool, the two men come upon a pair of girls riding bikes along the road . Jerry and Bill play a cat and mouse game with the girls, driving ahead of and behind them in the car as they peddle along the road. After a while Jerry pulls ahead and parks, waiting for the girls near a trail leading to Picture Rock, where he presumes the girls are going. When they arrive they get off their bikes and start to climb the trail. The boys follow them and the blunt, and surprising, end of the story is presented.

The obvious reading of this story is that Jerry killed the two girls with a rock while Bill stood watching. But, as in Why Don’t You Dance? I think there is another interpretation. Unlike the previous story, I did not find a direct instruction from the author telling me that there was “more to it,” but I think it’s there, nonetheless.

The main reason I think there must be more to this story is because the murder makes no sense. Other than two very violent words (“cunt” and “cockteasers”) Jerry uses to describe them, there is no hint of a murderous intent on his part anywhere in the story.

In fact, just the opposite. The writer says Jerry is “the happy father of two” and that he had “moved up to assistant manager.” He seems firmly ensconced in his life. He does seem a bit unhappy, when he and Bill are sitting on the deck, before they leave, but not murderously so.

When the boys meet the two girls on the road they turn the car around and start following them. The interaction between them is “playful” with the girls frequently laughing and giggling. There is a cat and mouse aspect to the interaction.

Just before Jerry pulls ahead and parks to wait for the girls the narrator says that one of the girls looked at Jerry “in the right kind of way.” However, in the first part of that sentence the narrator says “It seemed to Jerry”.

This is a perfect example of Carver’s penchant for leaving things out. If the narrator had said it seemed the girls looked at Jerry “in the right kind of way” and then said “but he was wrong,” that would be one thing. But Carver doesn’t say that. He chooses the word “seemed” which is a weak word. It seems to me that the sun comes up every morning. And that’s turn, it does. But it also seems to me that the sun moves through the sky, but it doesn’t, the earth spins under it. There is no indication of whether Jerry was right or wrong in his interpretation of the girls’ look. It seems to me that Carver did this on purpose.

A similar thing happens when Bill first finds the two girls “crouched behind an outcrop”. The writer says “Maybe they were smiling.” Without the word “maybe” this sentence is as clear as it could be. The sentence “They were not smiling,” would be equally clear. “Maybe they were smiling,” says nothing at all about whether they were smiling or not.

One wonders who didn’t understand if the girls were smiling or not. Technically it is the narrator who says the may have been smiling. The implication is that, like Jerry who may have misinterpreted the look the girls gave him, Bill thought the girls may have been smiling. But, technically, it is the narrator who says this. The narrator – that is Raymond Carver – is leaving open the possibility that the girls were smiling. As if they were inviting what came next. Which makes the murder even less understandable in the context of the story.

The last paragraph of this story says:

[Bill] never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s.

When I first read that paragraph I thought to myself “Jerry killed them,” but then I realized that this interpretation depends entirely on what the writer means by the word “rock.” If rock means “rock,” as in an object found on the ground, then the murder reading is the obvious interpretation. If, however, “rock” means something else (let’s just say something else that is frequently described as being hard) then the meaning of this last paragraph is totally different.

This second interpretation, that Jerry used something rock hard that he hadn’t found on the ground, (that is that he had sex with both girls while Bill stood by watching) makes much more sense (at least to me) given the rest of the story, and the purposeful ambiguity that Carver has used.

We know Bill stands by in the kitchen while Jerry and his wife are having sex in the bathroom. We know that Jerry has been “looking for something on the side” as Riley the Rec Center worker repeatedly says. We know the girls went up the hill and looked back down before disappearing, mirroring the cat and mouse play from earlier.

The author presents no “dread” in his telling of the interactions between the boys and the two girls on the bicycles. Jerry and Bill climbed the hill at a “walking pace” because they knew they “had it made.”

As in the previous story there is no way for me to know what the writer intended, but this wonderful ambiguity, this lovely openness to interpretation is the craft aspect of this story that I love.

As in the previous example, I think, what Carver is talking about in this story is sex.

As an aside, before moving on to the next example, I want to point out that as the two boys are driving down the road, after leaving the Rec Center, they encounter “an old pickup loaded with furniture.” When I read this I wondered if this was the same guy who had his furniture out in the driveway in Why Don’t You Dance?.

The final story I will look at is called Sacks. This amazing story takes place in a lounge in the Sacramento Airport where a son has flown in for a quick visit with his recently divorced father. The two have clearly not been in touch for a while (the son didn’t even know the father wore glasses).

Without much preamble the father launches in to the story of himself and the woman with whom he’s had an affair. An affair that resulted in his divorce. The father tells the entire story while he and his son share drinks. It is a pretty straightforward story. As in the previous example, I would note, this story in a story is fundamentally about sex. I looked hard but I did not find anything that I would say was clearly open to interpretation, except perhaps the title.

The title of the story seemed interesting. Why Sacks I wondered. There only two sacks mentioned in the story – first, a sack filled with small gifts for the son’s wife and children. The second sack is the sack the saleswomen holds when she first knocks on the man’s door. Neither of these two sacks seemed to play any real part on this story. Like the murder in Tell The Women We’re Going it made no sense to me why the writer would choose this as his title.

At one point the father says “You’re an educated man, Les. You’ll be the one to figure it out.” Like the words “There was more to it.” I read this as a direct instruction from the writer that there is something to figure out about this story. This is totally conjecture, of course, but I think this story is a puzzle. I think the goal of the puzzle is to figure out why the story is called Sacks.

Looking at the structure of the story one sees that this is a story within a story. Les, the younger man, flies into Sacramento where he meets his father. Quickly, the father tells the story of what happened in his marriage leading up to his divorce.

The framing story, the story about the son and the father meeting at the airport, contains the inner story, the story the father tells about his affair.

The father’s story in first person present tense. The framing story is in first person past tense. There is a large amount of dialog in both stories. The dialog attributions in the framing story use the word “said” while the dialog attributions in the father’s story use the word “says.” This has the effect of making father’s voice sound much less well educated than the son’s voice.

I think, instead of just two sacks in this story, there are three. I think the third sack is the framing story itself. The writer has placed the father’s story inside the “sack” of the framing story. Otherwise I can’t explain to myself why the story is titled as it is. It makes no sense. The sacks in the story have no importance.

I think, in this story, the writer is flexing his writing muscles. Pointing out his own prowess in the art of punctuation and story craft. Saying to a careful reader “Look what I can do,” and then pulling off this amazing act of punctuation (quotes inside of quotes inside of an inner story, and so on). In addition to the amazing punctuation (which as far as I could tell is perfect) the transitions into and out of the inner story are seamless.

In some paragraphs the father is deep inside the telling of his own story and the writer places a comma, a closing quote, and tells the reader that the old man “shook his head.” This shaking of the head happens in the framing story. Immediately following this the writer jumps right back into the inner story without missing a beat. The transition is totally seamless. The reader is not jarred or confused in the least. Carver is telling two stories simultaneously, both perfectly, without the slightest hitch.

There are many interesting hints and connections to other stories in this collection built into this story. The son in this story is constantly looking at his watch, reminiscent of Bill in Tell the Women We’re Leaving. The old man say “I’ll tell you what’s the most important thing…there are things,” which is reminiscent of the story I Could See the Smallest Things (the title of which, by the way, is also a direct instruction to the reader to pay careful and close attention to the smallest things).

When describing the scene where the saleswoman’s husband, Larry, returns home to find the father and her in bed the old man says he was afraid Larry would push him up “against this big fence in the yard” and that the woman stood in the kitchen in “her robe,” both of these things being reminiscent of I Could See the Smallest Things.

Finally, the narrator says “My father started to say something more. But instead he shook his head.” Again, there is something more in the story that has not been said. There always seems to be something “more” in Carver’s stories.

Conclusion

When I read a short story I don’t usually care much what happens in the story. If a story simply relates a series of events, no matter how interesting, I feel let down. I usually look for something special, something hidden, or hinted at. In most stories I read I don’t find anything. Sometimes, when I do find something, it is so blatantly obvious and so completely lacks subtly, that I find it unrewarding. But Raymond Carver’s stories are different.

Raymond Carver’s prose is so sparse and so clean that somehow it allows itself to be opened wider to interpretations. It’s as if all the underbrush has been cleared away allowing the reader to see more clearly.

I have no idea if anything I’ve said in this paper is accurate. It’s all my own interpretation, of course. I do know, however, that Raymond Carver revised these stories many times (in some cases 40 to 50 revisions for a single story). It is difficult for me to believe that, after 40 revisions, a single word remains in any of these stories by accident. I think he purposefully crafted these stories to be open to multiple interpretations. Why would the writer put the words “there was more to it,” at the very end of the very first story in this collection? I think those words were put there for a very specific reason – to admonish readers to pay close attention, and to instruct the reader that careful attention would be rewarded. This is why I think this is such a wonderful collection.

When I write I sometimes try to put these sorts of double and triple interpretation possibilities into my writing, however it always turns out very heavy handed. It is this aspect of the craft of writing that I love. This ability of some writers, such as Raymond Carver, to say things without saying them. And to say them in such a way as to not be heavy handed, but to be subtle and secretive.

One final word. I tried to convince myself as I went through this exercise that what Raymond Carver talked about when he talked about love was sex. In the first two examples, with the man in the driveway and Jerry and Bill, I think I’ve at least opened the possibility that there may have been sex involved. I tried, in the third example story, to find an unsaid hint that someone was having sex, perhaps it was the woman dancing in the bar with her arms wide (reminiscent of the girl in the driveway) as the bartender watched (reminiscent of Bill). But I couldn’t convince myself.

No matter. It was still very enjoyable looking.

Stony Lane Press

"Inspiration is like a dog that doesn’t come when called, it must be beaten.” ~Thomas Rush

Category Archives: All Writings

Filaments

New Semester at Rosemont College

Beware the Abyss

Rediscovering Nonfiction

Two Things That Are Going to or Should Happen

Creative Nonfiction

My Celebrity Look Alikes

Starting new semester at Rosemont

Rome and Amalfi

Hemingway’s Six

NaShoWriMay 2011 – II

Contents of Blooming Glen, R.I.P.

NaShoWriMay 2011

Contents of Short Fiction, Essays and Poetry, May 2011

What Was Raymond Carver Talking About?