Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A Saintly Weekend
Just got back from a weekend festival of Queer Lit in New Orleans called Saints and Sinners. It's my third time there, and each time I come back with some new lens on literature, my own work, and myself.
A few impressions that stand out:
1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?
2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.
3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.
4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."
Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!
posted by aaron hamburger at 10:40 AM
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Thursday, May 01, 2008
PEN World Voices
This weekend, I'll be blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival, featuring panels of writers from around the world. You can check out my comments and others by other writers on the PEN website, www.pen.org.
Here's my first post:
One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."
Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"
As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.
While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.
When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.
Go figure.
Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."
The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."
The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.
The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.
The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.
"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."
posted by aaron hamburger at 12:02 PM
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