sarah HANNAH gómez
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I bought myself two new books today. This was wholly unnecessary, as I own at least fifty books I have not yet read, and I have a reading list of well over 100. But I can’t control myself, and I love bookstores, and I figured that at least I was buying books of short stories, which I don’t read enough of, and I decided that this would help me further the education I am getting in my fiction writing classes at school, which all have focused on short stories.
One book is a large collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shorts. The other is an anthology about adolescence, which should prove to be entertaining. Plus, a lot of my writing focuses on that, so it’s good to see what’s out there. The short story anthologies for our classes always duplicate famous stories, and they get so dull. I know I should read the classics, and I do, but crotchety old men get rather boring, as do cliché assignments like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (itself wonderful writing, but it as an assigned reading kind of hackneyed and obvious) and the same story by the same writers. This is my problem with poetry anthologies as well. I understand that I should read a lot of one author to really understand them, but is it too much to ask that not every collection have the same poems in it? William Carlos Williams wrote more than one good poem. Shakespeare did more than comparing thee to a summer’s day. Blah, blah, blah.
But it hit me that I can’t further my education if I haven’t learned anything. I have a lot of snobbery going into my writing classes here, which stems out of a variety of things: 1. I was trained in high school to consider myself completely above U of A; 2. I naturally consider myself above most things; 3. U of A’s creative writing program is nothing special unless it’s the MFA, which obviously I am not getting right now; and 4. I really have not learned that much about writing, at least not in a direct way, in either last semester’s beginning class or this semester’s intermediate class. I definitely learned a bit about craft in the beginning class, because we actually had to read a book about writing, and we had lectures and exercises that specifically helped us develop certain aspects of writing, from dialogue to setting to whatever. And, of course, we all know that the best way to become a better writer is to actually write, and to read anything and everything. Duh. So practicing my writing by having to write stories for class is always a good thing.
But it’s like I can’t remember anything I learned last semester, and this semester we only practice and half heartedly critique, rather than hone skills. What does that leave for the advanced writing class? Never having been one to write short anything, I have a lot of trouble with short stories. And after a semester and a half of “college writing classes,” I don’t really know much more about the art of short fiction than I did when I was writing paragraph-long stories in second grade. I have no idea what I’m doing. Teach me, please.
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The first annual Tucson Festival of Books was this weekend. Saturday I went for pleasure, Sunday I went as a volunteer. It was a pretty great event–not perfect, but especially awesome for the first year. I, dork that I am, went on Saturday dressed in my Marcus Flutie shirt, and Megan McCafferty definitely noticed it when she signed my book. It was sweet. She also spoke for an hour about writing, and like any good author does ( Megan McCafferty and Rachel Cohn are hands down the best current YA writers, though technically Megan is an adult writer–another reason why she’s an awesome YA writer, if you can understand me), made me want to get back to my writing. Too bad it’s still lost on that broken harddrive in my bottom drawer :-(
Still, it was a wonderful event. I now have a New York Times t-shirt. Very useful, I know. I also have a tent of a volunteer shirt from yesterday, which I promptly took off because it was too hard to move my arms in a men’s large. AND I have various other goodies, like Bookman’s tote bags. Whatever.
The Billy Collins reading was fabulous. Too bad the audience wasn’t. I have a huge problem with annoying audiences, and I feel like often, baby boomers are incredibly annoying to sit near. My parents are baby boomers, and they’re not obnoxious, but I think it’s inappropriate to continually guffaw at every other line of a poem, even if it is funny. This isn’t a comedy club, and though it’s one thing to chuckle or laugh occasionally, cracking up at everything that was even slightly funny meant a) I wanted to smack lots and lots of people and b) I couldn’t hear the next line of the effing poem. Shut up, people. But who cares, because Collins still writes great stuff, and his voice is awesome. I was wondering why it sounded familiar and then it hit me: Kevin Spacey. I’m not sure if Collins’ life is interesting enough for a biopic, but if it is, Spacey must play him. They have the exact same voice. Same monotony, same dry, wry way of being funny. Awesome.
His interjections about his poems were kind of the best part. Writers are some of the most interesting people to speak, especially poets, because you’re so used to ascribing your own voice to their work. I was actually surprised to find him so funny, not because I missed seeing the humor in his poems, but just because I read them as wry, not direct humor. He had two that I think are as yet unpublished, one called “Migraine” or “Hangover,” he said, depending on what feeling you’re more familiar with, that was hilarious, and another about the phrase that has already been kicked out of slang standing for “OMG,” which was a clever poem, but I think it needs work because he had to explain quite a lot of it before he actually read the few lines. But it was funny. Like a joke. Then it was okay to laugh. But other times, I think chuckling would have been far less annoying.
So afterwards I stood in line, which was also annoying, because it made me think of the Jason Mraz concert and about how famous people tend to get snobby and forget how to be gracious. I understand that it’s more efficient to have your book open to the page that needs to be signed, but sticking a post-it with my name in it seemed a bit much, and even more was the “volunteers” who took my book from me and opened it. I have had a book signed before, thanks. I’ve also read a book before, and I know what a title page is, thanks.
But again, who cares, right? Billy Collins. But I think he hates me. He saw my name, and he informed me that it was the same backwards and forwards, and we both acknowledged that it was a palindrome. I really like it when people tell me that about my name, because I’ve never written it before, so I would never have noticed. He said, “I’m going to show you the best palindrome,” and I was pretty excited, because a poet was going to tell me something, and not only is he a former poet laureate (I think you get to always keep the title, kind of like president) but he also has a PhD. so he starts writing “I love m–” and I go, “I love me, volume one.” (Spelled “I love me, vol. I,” it is a pretty sweet palindrome that is also the title of a book of palindromes.)
So he looks up and goes, “Oh. You’ve heard it.”
Oops. So much for being gracious. Foot in mouth, poet laureate crossed off list of future friends.
Still, a pretty wonderful festival over all. Can’t wait till I’m a guest there.
Henry read two of my stories to help me find one to submit for my application, and he wrote an interesting comment on one of them:
People probably say this shit to you all the time and I know you must hate it, but I like the multi-ethnicity of these characters, and the fact that their race is not the point. It’s fresh, and makes them more endearing and not copied-from-tv-teen-dramas trite.
People don’t say that to me all the time, though I think about it a lot, and I both love and hate it. I don’t think it’s all that hard to do. All I did was give one character a Japanese name and then had her act like any silly, bitchy, ditzy drunk girl would act. Another kid I described as “Hispanic,” which should generally be avoided, but using it once is fine, I think. Another character had a thought where she was glad that she was black so that no one could see her blush. How simple!
I have a huge problem in literature with things like “African American fiction” being a genre, and an extreme inability to have a main character in a book be Jewish, Mexican, Hindu, black, or anything else without making the main conflict in the story about that person’s cultural or ethnic identity clashing with the mainstream. Want to know why we can’t all get along, world? Because our representations of culture refuse to let that happen.
the belzhar
february reading in review
what else i’m up to, and where
the walls around us
i accidentally secretly watched the entire twilight saga
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