Writing a "Palpable Sensation"

"Some folks want to believe that the writing must have been a wonderful cathartic; "playing all those horror tapes," as one guy put it. But I have not found it so. Writing as therapy, God help us; the world doesn't work that way. Let's just say that both of my war novels were written out of deep bitterness; put another way, the impulse to tell the story of the war rose out of an undeniable authenticity of exhausted, smothered rage, perhaps more bitter than tongue can tell. Someone once asked me why I wrote war novels, and I told him that writing novels was more elegant than a simple "Fuck you."

"My war-year was like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house, and I wanted it out, but for the longest time now, I have had the unshakable, melancholy understanding that the war will always be vividly present in me, a literal physical, palpable sensation."

From Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam
a memoir by Larry Heinemann

What's it all about, anyway?

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about. "This whole war," she said, " why was everybody so mad at everybody else?"

I shook my head. "They weren't mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing." 

"What did you want?" 

"Nothing," I said. "To stay alive."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

From "Field Trip" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

Truth

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. 

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. 

Here is the story-truth. He was a slip, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was sut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him." 

From "Good Form" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

On Writing as the Antithesis of Therapy

"I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. . . it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate if from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (158)" 

From "Notes" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

Literary Journals

During a craft talk at my past residency in Forest Grove, Marvin Bell advised students to subscribe to at least five literary journals a year. He suggested students chose a couple new journals for subscription each year, but advised keeping the list at five in order to actually read what you're paying for. I've heard this described before as "good karma." If you want to get published in literary journals it's naive (or snobby) to think that will happen without actually subscribing yourself.

So here's what I'm into. And here's what I'm getting into.

The past year I've discovered and purchased/subscribed to these (click on cover for link to website):

Now, I subscribe to and anxiously await issues of these:

And it probably doesn't fall into the realm of journals, but I've been a New Yorker subscriber for over a year now. I like the stories, but I really enjoy the essays each week.

A cost to defining expression?

I stumbled upon this Stanley Kubrick quote today; I really like it.

"I have steadfastly avoided talks, lectures, etcetera, because they tend to formalize my own thinking, which I think would not be a good thing."

Is there a risk of over analyzing art? When we verbalize and quantify what we're doing, or what we're thinking someone else is doing, do we ruin the original expression of it? 

Reading Lists

Well, my first semester is a few days from being officially over.  So, here's what I read this semester.  Here's what I'm looking forward to reading "for fun" over my winter break.  And, here's what I'm tentatively reading next semester.

*sorry, this list isn't in MLA format, I didn't feel like italicizing the titles...

"I fucking love reading." -the Mushing Mortician

1st Semester

Palm-of-the-Hand stories by Yasunari Kawabata

Enormous Changes At The Last Minute by Grace Paley

The Things They Carried by Tim O’ Brian

The Toughest Indian In The World by Sherman Alexie

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison

Once There Was A War by John Steinbeck

Dispatches by Michael Herr

And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat

Thin Red Line by James Jones

Back in the World: Stories by Tobias Wolff

Drown by Junot Diaz

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (8^th Edition) by Janet Burroway

The Loneliest Road in America by Roy Parvin

Reading like a writer by Francine Prose

Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer by L. Rust Hills

A Rumor of War by Neil Caputo

Someone To Watch Over Me:Stories by Richard Bausch

Winter Break

Storm Riders by Craig Lesley

Goat Mountain by David Vann

Leaving Las Vegas by John O' Brien

Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy

The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin

Red Moon by Ben Percy

2nd Semester

      1.     The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
2.     11 Days by Lea Carpenter
3.     Sparta by Roxanna Robinson
4.     A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories by Robert Olen Butler
5.     Paco’s Story by Larry Heineman
6.     Northern Lights by Tim O’Brien
7.     Going After Cacciato by Tim O’ Brien
8.     In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff
9.     Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
10.  Rock Springs by Richard Ford
11.  Welding With Children: Stories by Tim Gautreux
12.  All Other Nights by Dara Horn
13.  Caribou Island by David Vann
14.  The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
15.  Collected Stories by John Cheever
16.  Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
17.  Jesus Son by Denis Johnson
18.  Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
19.  Going To Meet the Man by James Baldwin
20.  The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell