PEN Center USA

Photo credit: antoinewilson.com.*

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels Panorama City and The Interloper. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He's taught creative writing at Iowa, Wisconsin, CSU Long Beach, UC San Diego, and UCLA Extension. A contributing editor of A Public Space, he lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in The Mark program.

Many of our Emerging Voices and Mark program alumni pursue or consider pursuing an MFA degree. Can you tell us one of the most important elements of craft you took away as a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop?

You know, a lot of broad fiction craft stuff can be found in books. I've assigned Jerome Stern's Making Shapely Fiction to The Mark participants. Anything you're going to learn about craft in an MFA program can be found in there, probably, and in the old short story anthology Points of View. Those cover the basic toolbox.

What I really discovered at Iowa was a way to create a small amount of distance between myself and my work for the purposes of revision. Approaching the work of others with a conscientious critical eye, week after week, for the purposes of making that work better, helped me develop the ability to self-edit. As so many craft lessons have fallen by the wayside in favor of a more gut-level improvisational approach, that learned ability has helped me more than anything.

Can you talk about some of your early literary influences? Who are your current role models?

When I decided to bail on my plans to go to medical school and instead pursue novel writing, it was because of three books. I'd have been a doctor if it weren't for James Baldwin's Another Country, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and Thomas Pynchon's V. Later, when exploring shorter forms in graduate school, I fell in love with John Cheever and Alice Munro. And I went through a Nabokov period—in which I read all the novels—that now seems to me like some kind of opium dream. These days, I've been reading early 19th century English essayists on my iPhone. Carlyle, Hazlitt. David Foster Wallace's The Pale King recently destroyed me.

I'm currently in search of a healthy novelistic role model. My ship is on the rocks.

What is the most difficult scene you’ve had to write?

The next one. Sorry to sound glib. I enjoy nostalgia as much as the next guy, but I try not to remember anything about the writing process if I can help it.

You published two novels: The Interloper and most recently, Panorama City. You have a number of creative "side projects" on your website, like Shopping Carts of Panorama City. Can you talk about Shopping Carts and also your other means of self-promotion?

The shopping carts book was just something I did while shooting photographs of Panorama City for novel research. I came home one day and realized I had enough to put together a book. So I tweaked the pictures a bit in processing and uploaded the whole thing to Blurb.com under a pseudonym. More the outlet of a distracted novelist than any real side project.

A legit side project, Slow Paparazzo, has taken off a bit more, perhaps because it's more process-oriented. The concept is fairly simple: Whenever I see a celebrity, I take a picture of where they just were. I capture the afterglow of fame. These go up on a blog at http://theywerejusthere.tumblr.com. A local art publishing house called The Ice Plant just released a book of some of them. It came out really nice.

However, I wouldn't call these side projects means of self-promotion. In fact, they sort of demand their own promotion. For the Slow Paparazzo book I've had to write pieces for blogs and sign copies and all that kind of stuff that comes with promoting a novel.

I do feel a certain duty to promote my work, on behalf of the publisher, and on behalf of the part of me that wants people to read it, but I'm not interested in, say, branding myself. I use Twitter a whole bunch, I've got a website, I do side projects—but these things are a result of my needing different creative outlets, not any kind of marketing strategy.

What are you working on now?

A novel.

How does The Mark differ from a standard writing program?

To my mind the most significant difference is that it is more goal-oriented. In a traditional writing program, you're focused on process as opposed to product—or at least you're supposed to be. The point is to hone your skills in preparation for a lifetime of suffering, er, I mean writing. The Mark is specifically oriented toward writers who have manuscripts that are almost ready to go out into the literary marketplace. It's a different focus.

If you had one bit of advice to a beginning writer starting their first novel, what would it be?

This is only your first novel. You don't need to cram everything you've ever thought about the world into it; you don't need to deploy every writing technique you've ever learned; you don't need to show us everything you know; it's not about you.

Who would you recommend apply to The Mark program?

If you've got a complete book manuscript in hand, i.e., one that you'd be comfortable sending on to an agent or editor, The Mark is for you. Odds are it's not quite as ready as you hope it is, but that's why we're here. Also, be ready to work.

*An explanation for this author photo can be found here.

Writing with humor can be challenging, even for the best in the biz. In this New York Times short, Jerry Seinfeld describes his process of joke writing. Regardless of your genre, we think this video is worth a watch and a chuckle.

Photo credit: The Guardian

Way back at the defense––which feels like a year ago, although it's been little more than two months—Antoine recommended that I read The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick. His recommendation was spurred by the fact that I'm missing a short story in my collection. I have its title, a point of view, and I've even a written scene. However, I can’t bring myself to write it. The story is about a woman dealing with the loss of her seven-month-old infant decades earlier.

I’ve been busy with rewrites and the workshop agenda. There have been other recommended books to read. Blog posts to write. But next week is the last workshop before the Mid-Project Review, and I have a feeling the subject of the unwritten story will come up. So I’m gearing up to write it–finally–and reading The Shawl seemed like a good starting point. The first part is actually a short story of the same name, in which there's a major loss. The second part is a novella entitled “Rosa.” It concerns the main character in the aftermath of the loss.

I had read the short story “The Shawl,” but the novella somehow escaped me. Ozick’s usage of language is unbelievable–sad and beautiful and powerful at the same time. Her prose leaves me marveling at its succinctness. This sentence haunted me for a day: “Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.” And that’s just on page one. Ozick is a master. Another favorite sentence, this one from the novella: “She wrote on the brittle sheets of abandoned stationery that inexplicably turned up in the cubbyholes of a blistered old desk in the lobby.”

In the video shared here, Cynthia Ozick speaks beautifully about her life, the background for the story, and her process. It’s a little over eight minutes but worth a watch. Check it out:

MC Escher

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about you. Not literally you (though, depending on who you are, who knows), but the pronoun you, as employed in that rare gem of a POV, the second person. So far, only one story in my collection is told in the second person. This week, so that story didn’t feel so lonely, I tried switching a newer piece from first to second.

The piece in question was starting to feel like a memoir. Not that I have anything against memoirs, but there are parts of the story I like that are flat-out made up. I hoped using “you” could help create some distance. But I also wanted it to be in past tense. For some reason, the second person seems to naturally roll out in present. I wondered if this combo had been used much, so I did a Google search but came up pretty empty-handed.

Then I remembered that Junot Diaz had two second-person stories in his latest linked collection, This Is How You Lose Her (note how he even uses "you" in the title). First, I checked out “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” which I had first read in The New Yorker. Sure enough, it’s in present tense, and it covers a whole six-year time period. In another second-person story of his, "Miss Lora," he starts off in past tense, but a few paragraphs in, he switches to present. Of course I didn’t notice this on the first read. I think any stylistic choice can work as long as it doesn’t call too much attention to itself.

So it seems most writers who dare to narrate a story from a second-person perspective will do so in the present tense. This makes sense to me. A second-person narrator often sounds like they're telling a story to a close friend: “You know how it is when you’re drunk, horny, and there’s only one girl left in the bar… You’re less choosy.” Even though the grammatical tense is present, it’s clear that, as in Diaz’s stories, the experience refers to something that's happened in the narrator’s past. Told that way, the narrator creates a more inclusive mood and the story feels more immediate.

I also found a short interview wherein Diaz says, “[The second person] has the distinction of being both intimate and repellent at the same time.” He also talks of using the second person to create distance between himself and the narrator. "I wanted my narrator to be 'in' the story, but also to be able to comment on his younger self a little."

I wondered how critics reacted to this style, so went back to Google, and sure enough, found this link. The post contains a reference to a scathing critical tweet by one Emily Gould: “like, no, bro, I definitely didn’t treat a lot of women like shit or think it was ok in the end bc it turned out 2 be grist for the ol’ mill."

I won’t pick apart her critique here, but I will say that when I read a story that's told in second person, I never feel that the writer is talking about “me,” unless that’s the point (and generally, that’s a less effective use of “you”). This idea came up when we workshopped my second-person story. Antoine said he mentally changed "you" to “I,” whereas for Marissa “you” became “he.” Neither thought I should change it, however. But their different interpretations are telling, as they adhere more or less to their respective genders, and perhaps how closely or not closely each identifies with the (male) narrator. But then I thought of Lorrie Moore’s first collection Self Help, where the “you” is clearly a woman, and I related to her just fine.

In the end, for this particular story, I went back to using a first-person POV. Mostly, it’s an aural thing, which is also why the other story works better for me in second. If ever in doubt, I read it aloud, and choose the one that sounds best. Ultimately, it’s all language, words on a page strewn into sentences, creating meaning via their relationships to one another. The syntax can often guide the content, or vice versa, but I believe it’s best when the line is blurred, when they equally inform and embellish each other. In a similar way, truth and fiction blended together sometimes makes the most interesting stories. But I’ll save that topic for next week.

P.S. After starting this blog post, Junot Diaz made an appearance in one of my dreams, hitting me up for weed. Seemed appropriate.