the Prairie Schooner blog

P(rivate)S(paces) w/Terese Svoboda

in which Prairie Schooner contributors give us a glimpse into their writing spaces and sensibilities.

 

(Called "disturbing, edgy and provocative" by Book Magazine, Terese Svoboda’s work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subject. A "fabulous fabulist" according to Publisher’s Weekly; Vogue lauded her first novel, Cannibal, as a female “Heart of Darkness.” Of Bohemian Girl –excerpted in PS’s Summer 2010 issue -- Kurt Andersen wrote, “She will, of course, compared to Willa Cather -- and deservedly so.”)

 

(3 things on your writing desk at the moment)

Something more interesting than a file folder? A scarlet feather signed by Jonathan Keats, writer and conceptual artist, a full-sized harp that I haven't played since my teacher died, and a "Friends for Peace" sign I put in my window every election period. 

(A classic you've long been wanting to read)

The Gift by Nabokov 

 

(Why haven't you read it?)

I am, I am, but The Girls of Riyadh and The Quiet American are getting in the way. Both research, mind you. Nabokov is just for pleasure.

 

(Music that puts you in the mood to write)

Music puts me in the mood to listen to music. I can't write even thinking about music. All those great lyrics! 

 

(A favorite book in your possession: a favorite not just for content but for its actual physical qualities)

I've sublet my NYC apartment so I'm not surrounded by my possessions. At hand I am currently very happy to have Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Noya translated by Katherine Silver. A New Directions book, it features lovely French flaps and a driven narrator who is by turns amusing and terrifying with regard to his work editing a book about atrocities.

 

Of the wild mind

Interview with Michael Hettich, by Marianne Kunkel

[Note: Back issues of Prairie Schooner—from the current issue back to 2003—can be accessed via Project Muse and its subscribing institutions.]

Michael Hettich's most recent book of poems, Like Happiness, was published by Anhinga Press. A new book of poems, The Animals Beyond Us, which contains the work appearing in the winter issue of PS, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. He lives in Miami and teaches at Miami Dade College.

MK: Part of the charm of your four poems “Widow,” “The Ghost,” “The Mother,” and “Doubles” (PS, Winter 2010) is their reliance on understatement. In “The Ghost,” for example, you segue from one subject to the next using the casual word “Anyway” and you conclude “The Mother” with the sentence, “And that was all.” These add a light, playful quality to intensely serious and sometimes dark poems. How do you go about crafting this balance?

MH: The poems that were published in Prairie Schooner are all part of a manuscript entitled The Animals Beyond Us, which will be published by New Rivers Press [in October, 2011]. All the poems in that book were written as quickly as possible; in fact I set myself the goal of writing 150 poems before I turned back to any one of them to revise. I did this to try to break into a new voice (of sorts) and to try to discover new material. I had just had my most recent book, Like Happiness, accepted for publication and I felt that I'd ended a period in my writing and life and needed to try to find new ways of discovering what I needed to say. So, as I said, I wrote fast and didn't look back. This was liberating and fun—easy—and when I reached 150 poems I found that almost half of them were interesting enough (to me) to warrant revision. But I tried not to revise too much, since I had come to feel that my revision process had become stale, resulting in poems that felt overly familiar in their strategies and content. They weren't wild enough to hold what I was after (without knowing it yet).

Also, in composing those poems (in their first drafts) I set myself a few rules: move quickly, think by association, avoid stanza breaks, and use a loose four-beat line.

I like your sense that the poems rely on understatement, though I wouldn't have used that word. I think of them as avoiding the kinds of transitions we often (or I often) rely on to build the rhetoric of meaning (so called) a poem articulates. Without the connections such transitions impose, the poems seemed able to find their own music, and whatever meanings that music implied, in ways that felt satisfying and true to me. Perhaps this lighter rhetorical scaffolding allows the poems to achieve that sense of understatement.

I also think I allowed these poems to retain a kind of awkwardness (for lack of a better word) I would probably have worked into more conventional music in my earlier work.

Dogs, cats, and birds play central roles in your poem “Widow” and cats reappear in “The Ghost.” What unique quality do animals lend to poetry? What poems about animals do you love and inspire you to include animals in your poems?

This is a hard one to answer. It's an interesting observation, but I can't say I've actually thought about it. Birds have always inhabited my poems, but come to think of it, not that many animals—until now—have done so. And as I said, this new book is called The Animals Beyond Us. The obvious answer would be that animals other than humans seem to be (and are) so much less afflicted with the kind of self-consciousness that keeps us from being truly present in the world. But then again, as Edwin Muir pointed out, without that kind of consciousness we would hardly be in the world at all, or at least not the world as we know it, as humans. So maybe it's just the mystery of their being in the world with us, sharing that world with us and being so strange to us and full of their own wild life (even when they're domesticated). And what is "the wild mind," anyway? Can we find a way to bring it into our poetry? Might poetry itself be a kind of "wild mind" on the page? And I love the way we glimpse a wild creature sometimes—with a fleeting sense of its presence that immediately vanishes into its own world. The effect is like poetry itself, sometimes.

I see from your website that in addition to writing poetry, you write prose and sing. Of musical performance, spoken poetry or prose, or written poetry or prose, do you consider one more powerful than the others or are they powerful in different ways?

I think they are all powerful in their own unique ways—and I think that their power is unique and specific to their form(s). Having said that, my goal as a writer would be to create poems that are able to fully realize their power as artifacts on the page and as spoken (or read) aloud. That is, I want my poems to be scored on the page in such a way that the reader will hear them much the way he/she would if I were to read them aloud. My problem with a good deal of spoken-word poetry is that it feels dead and slack on the page and requires performance. Since I like to ponder, reread, and revel in nuance, this kind of poetry holds less interest for me. It doesn't feel fully realized to me.

I also love collaboration and have worked a lot with musicians (my son in particular) and visual artists. I do believe, though, that the "products" of these cross-genre collaborations are often more interesting for the artists than for the viewer/listener!

You have lived in New York, Colorado, northern Florida, Vermont, and Miami. Must a writer be well-traveled to touch a wide range of readers through his or her creative writing, or can imagination make up for a lack of traveling experience?

I don't at all believe that a writer must be well-travelled to speak to readers. I think it much more important that a writer bring a unique and specific focus of attention to his/her place and situation. In fact, perhaps we all travel too much; perhaps there's not enough deep knowledge of place in our writings—a result of too much travel, too little careful observation/knowledge. As Gary Snyder says, "know the trees." And who does know them, these days? I mean with a depth of understanding. Something that may be a bit interesting in response to that question, though, at least as it relates to my work: I "locate" myself very much as a person from the north—New York and Colorado and New England. That's the landscape I most identify with. But the images and hauntings that enter my poems more often come from the landscapes of northern and southern Florida—perhaps because, even after many years, these landscapes seem unfamiliar and surprising to me.

In your lifetime you  have published 12 books and chapbooks of poetry; congratulations! What projects are you currently working on? 

Thanks for your congratulations. The fact is, I work on writing for a few hours almost every day, so it's sort of a natural accomplishment. As far as projects, as I said my most recent book, Like Happiness, was published last fall, and I've just finished editing my new book with the New Rivers editors. Last summer I started a new manuscript, tentatively entitled Listening to Owls, since I love to do that—since they always seem to be saying something urgent but just beyond our understanding. I started the book just as the oil spill disaster unfolded last spring/summer, so I think the poems are deeply influenced by that grief, though that may not be apparent in their subject matter. My goal at the outset was to write long poems—20 pages in some cases. And some of them are still long, but at least one of them broke apart a month or so ago, into about 15 smaller poems, an odd experience, and I suspect some of the others might do that, too. So that's the poetry book I'm working on right now. I'm also gathering my energy to finally write the book of essays that have been in the back of my mind for years—about poetry, hearing, wilderness, walking, music—a huge jumble of things I want to try to get at. So I'm taking notes, filling a big box with articles and ideas—for something that may well never happen! And, as a smaller project a visual artist and I are getting ready to start a collaboration. Mainly, though, I'm working on the Owls.

Between panic and revision

On the occasion of the release of Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, co-edited by Dinty W. Moore and Kevin Haworth, we include here an interview with Moore, conducted by Devin Murphy (creative writing PhD student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner) during Moore’s visit to UNL last fall.

 Dinty W. Moore’s memoir, Between Panic and Desire (University of Nebraska Press), was winner of the 2009 Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. His other books include The Accidental Buddhist, Toothpick Men, The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes, and the writing guide, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. In addition to editing the internet journal, Brevity, he is on the editorial board of Creative Nonfiction and is coordinating editor for the anthology Best Creative Nonfiction. He currently heads Ohio University’s Creative Writing BA, MA, and PhD programs, and is the president of Associated Writing Programs. 

 

Devin Murphy: How do you prioritize your writing life?

Dinty Moore:  It gets squeezed, but even before graduate school I made it a job. I set aside so many hours a week for writing and that’s what I do, and I have to be there. I’m a university guy so it works out that I do that first thing in the morning. I get up, make my coffee, and sit in front of the computer. I do that before I do any other stuff so there is always some space for it. 

Are you working on anything right now?

I’m working on a very short book which is essentially a lot of quotes from other writers for a publisher that specializes in Buddhist books. The quotes themselves aren’t Buddhist, but the book is going to be called The Mindful Writer, so it looks at how those quotes resonate with some of the thoughts about mindfulness.

Then I’m working on another book of nonfiction that is really, really at the very beginning stages.  So when I say I’m working on it I mean I have seven to eight pages written and thirty pages of notes, but that’s where books start. This one is sort of a riff on The Divine Comedy and Dante, and sort of an attempt to do a 21st-century, quirky, funny, weird nonfiction look at heaven and hell, and how our views of that have changed and where they fit into our society now. Since, you know, we are a very different people then we were five hundred years ago. 

Once you finish a book project, does something of that project remain with you and inform your writing, or do you have to clear the slate and start from scratch? Here you are dealing with Buddhism again a decade after you wrote The Accidental Buddhist.

When I finished The Accidental Buddhist—and I was lucky because it did well, it still sells, ten years later, which is a nice thing—I got a lot of offers to do Buddhist books, and a couple of Buddhist publishers approached me to do Buddhist books. And I probably could have carved out a career, and been more successful, at least in terms of numbers of books sold, if I just kept turning out Buddhist books because of branding and audience. But I just didn’t have it in me. One of the things I like about nonfiction writing is that you can have a short attention span. If something fascinates you for three weeks you think about it for three weeks and write a very short essay. If something fascinates you for six months then you just immerse yourself in it for six months and write a longer essay. And if you have two or three or four years of fascination in something and if you have the patience and energy to explore it, then you say, I’m going to write a book about this. But then you turn the page, and say, now I’m interested in something else. So I felt like I said what I wanted to say about Buddhism in The Accidental Buddhist, said more than I wanted to say because I’m not an expert. So I turned down those offers to develop other projects until recently, when this one came up and I thought, “I can do that.”

It was your lack of expertise in The Accidental Buddhist that was the real charm of that book.

Well, I remember thinking about Walter Mitty at the time, and Plimpton did it too. There is a certain energy to not being an expert and throwing yourself into whatever it is and saying, I’m going to try to understand this. The reader can identify with that. If you are trying to reach your reader on a certain level, and you are a wide-eyed, nascent stumblebum, who is just trying to make sense of things, that is a pretty good voice on the page too. 

When you find yourself working on these long projects, when do you know it’s going to be a book, and how do you find your binding element or narrative arc so it’s cohesive and not just a series of loosely connected events?

The moment where you realize it’s a book comes and goes. I’m convinced at the beginning of the book, and then three or six months into it I’m like, “What was I thinking?” Then I rediscover it again. Then I lose it and rediscover that narrative arc. I usually think I have one, then near the end of the project when I finally have fifteen or twenty chapters, and they are still all rough, I realize the one I had won’t work and I’ll have to come up with a new one.

It’s an iterative process. I’m not the first writer to say that. I started as a journalist, then when I got interested in writing literary work and work that would end up in literary magazines, I started writing fiction, and did my MFA in fiction, and it was magical to me to realize that you could start a short story and have no idea how it was going to end and that the characters would dictate to you eventually, if you could find the way into the characters.

It’s not quite the same in nonfiction, but I still have that leap of faith. I don’t quite know what my voice is going to be in this book, I don’t really understand the structure, I don’t really understand what the payout will be that will make a reader or publisher care, but if I work on it long enough, I’ll discover it. Whether it is an essay or a book, that’s the way it works. So instead of the characters dictating to you where the book is going to go, and where it will end, it is the material that dictates where the book will go and where it will end.  But I can’t know that upfront. I think other writers do, but I don’t.

So once you’ve been immersed in it for a long time you can start feeling your way through it?

Both immersed in the material and also immersed in trying to put the material on the page. I love revision. If you give me two hundred pages of rough draft and send me off into a room for a year, I’m the happiest boy on the planet. I’ll revise for the rest of my life if you let me. I don’t like generating new material.

I’m curious to hear you say you don’t like generating new material.

Yeah, it’s hard, it’s scary, and it’s painful. It’s like yanking hairs out of your beard one at a time, one word at a time until you finally have a chapter. Then playing with that chapter is fun, it’s like sitting on the floor and playing with Play-Doh.

In your essay “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay,” you mention that at this point in your career, you’ve done several immersion books similar to what Plimpton did. And you just mentioned how scary it is to generate new material, but it sounds like that might be one of the most fun parts of your job.

Well, it’s fun to go out and meet people, and it’s fun to have people tell you their stories, and they will tell you their stories. And it was fun to hang out at Buddhist monasteries for The Accidental Buddhist, but then you have to write it up, and that’s what’s hard. You have to make that work on the page.

Now I’m curious what you think the role of courage is, in this kind of writing.

I think in any literary writing the role of courage is important, whether it is poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. In any art form there is a leap of faith that the individual can make a statue, a painting, or write a poem that’s actually going to stand by itself and be worth looking at. The idea that I’m going to start this project without knowing how it will work out, but if I just show up every day and work on it that it will work out…I mean, those are two big leaps of faith. I guess a third leap of faith is somewhere, somehow an audience will see your painting, read your poem, buy your book, which drives so many of us crazy. But I guess that is what is so exciting about it. There are no guarantees. If you loaded trucks for a living, you show up in the morning and load the truck and you know the job is done. But with writing, you load the truck and have to hope someone says that it’s a well-loaded truck before you get the emotional pay off. 

You mentioned other forms of art, and I’ve looked on your Flickr account, and know that you are serious about your photography as well.

I love photography. I think I love it because it’s storytelling, it’s artistic expression, but it’s not my career. It’s fun. I have a good lens and a good camera and I spend a lot of time looking for things to take pictures of that aren’t obvious. I try not to take the average tourist pictures. But beyond that it is just fun. I’m not selling the work, I’m not submitting it to my tenure committee, so there is much less pressure involved. I love taking pictures.

Does that ever feed into your writing or is it just a release?

It’s just a release. I mean, I loved, as a fiction writer, finding a character and imagining what his or her story was. And you do the same thing in nonfiction, you just can’t imagine it, you have to discover it in other ways by talking to or watching people. And I photograph people more than anything else because I like taking pictures of people and imagining what their story is, so I guess there is a link there in my writing.

As entrenched as you are in nonfiction writing, you’ve mentioned starting as a fiction writer several times now. In my research on you, I came across many references you make to your appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut. So how has someone like Vonnegut fit into your writing career?

You know, like everybody in my generation I discovered Vonnegut as an undergrad, and he blew my mind. I thought, Oh my goodness, how can he be so irreverent and so funny and say these things. And I never grew out of it. I now work in a department of English literature and I’m not sure he was taken seriously by a lot of my colleagues, but I still take him seriously. I think he was a genius. I don’t think anyone else can write like him.

Vonnegut has that real dark humor, but I think your writing is really light yet touches on heavy subject matter. Is that something that plays in naturally when you write? Are you trying to bring a dose of humor, or is that your personality coming to the page?  I guess I’m asking about how humor plays out in your work.

I’m going to step back and say that I think that finding your voice as a writer—and I think this is true of all genres, it is certainly true of nonfiction—finding your voice as a writer is really 80 percent letting your natural personality come out on the page, and maybe 20 percent is: I’m writing this, and do I want to dial this up a little bit, and dial that down a little bit. But I really feel like that is the way to find your authentic voice—to find your authentic personality and let it bubble up out of the work.

So I tend to crack jokes. I tend to especially crack jokes when I’m around uncomfortable material, and I tend to have a black Irish humor, which is me in real life. So the extent it shows up in my work—that is just my personality bubbling up through. I feel like I was lucky when I finally figured out how to do that. When I look at my earlier work I see that here I was trying to be Carver, here I was trying to be Thurber, and here I was trying to be Woody Allen, and none of those were me.

Is it interesting to look back on being a student of craft now that your own books on craft are used in MFA programs?

Discovering that there was a craft was kind of exciting to me. I went to graduate school to be a fiction writer, and I was already thirty years old, but I was still very naive. I still had these goofy notions that you were born with genius and being a writer was just having a great idea. And maybe, maybe, maybe somehow I would stumble into a great idea. Then I realized how much of writing I could break down. You can mechanically look at how a scene works, and mechanically look at how a chapter works, and mechanically look at how suspense is built, and to a certain extent how humor works on the page. I was like, oh great, I can actually get better. I can learn this stuff. Though it’s not to say that writing is like being a mechanic, as there is still a lot of mystery in any art form, but what I’m saying is that they are both existent. There is still that mystery of where these ideas come from, but there are also these deliberate steps you make when you are revising a story and you say, Wait a minute, I know how to do this.

So when you are working as an editor and working through the slush pile, what really excites you, and when do you know you have something you want to publish?

For Brevity, it is a slightly different equation because the pieces have to be so concise that they rest a lot on the moment: where do they begin and how quickly does the trouble get complex. For Brevity the pieces rely a lot on language. Every single word choice has to be very sharp. Every single pause and hem has to be edited out because you have only seven hundred and fifty words, often less.

In the longer essay it comes down to subject matter and voice. So I’m reading the first couple pages of an essay and I’m understanding it’s about growing up in a poor rural family in Ohio, or growing up with a sister who had a fatal disease, or I’m reading a piece and realize it is about a broken marriage; I have to ask, Where is the promise in the first page that the writer is going to make me think about this differently? I know having a sick sister is sad, but if all this is going to tell me is that having a sick sister who dies young is sad, where is some other facet—how is the writer going to make me think of this differently?

Then there is finding something appealing in the way the writer is telling the story:  the voice, the sentence structure, the lyricism, the Carver-esque brusqueness, whatever. There is no subject you can’t write about because it’s been written about before, but the minute you pick a subject that has been written about before, which is almost all of them, then you have to think, what is my fresh take on this?  Maybe not at the beginning, as you may discover that fresh take on draft fifteen, but in the end there has to be something fresh. 

I have one final and random question for you.  I’ve read that among all the many things you’ve done prior to getting into writing and teaching, you were a zookeeper.  How did that come into your life?

It was a summer job as a high school kid. It was painting fences at the zoo, and I was pretty responsible. While everyone else was off in the woods smoking dope, I actually painted fences, and the boss figured that out, so he brought me back the next year for the summer. And as each of the zookeepers would rotate off for three weeks for vacation, he’d say: you’re going to go help Leo up at the elephant barn this week, or you’ll be down at the monkey shed this week, or I need you over at the kiddy zoo helping with the goats this week. That went over two summers when I got to be the fill-in zookeeper. Then I got to be the night watchman, who got to take care of the animals when the zoo was closed. So I’d wander around until midnight checking on the animals, giving them their water and their food. It was wonderful!  Especially at night. The zoo at night is when the animals come alive because the sun is gone and the crowd is gone. 

About the interviewer: Devin Murphy's work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, The MacGuffin, PANK, and Many Mountains Moving, among other journals and anthologies. The Linkage of Bone, which appeared in last summer’s Missouri Review, is the title story of his recently completed collection of linked stories.

Jim Thompson & "The Killer Inside Me"

By Timothy Schaffert

If still looking for a Halloween costume, consider this monster: Lou Ford, the “me” of Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp tickler, The Killer Inside Me. The smugly homicidal Ford is infatuated with his own boyish fashion sense, and takes a moment from his moral decline to describe his dandy getup: “I was still wearing my Stetson, shoved a little to the back of my head. I had on a kind of pinkish shirt and a black bow tie, and the pants of my blue serge suit were hitched up so as to catch on the tops of my Justin boots. Lean and wiry; a mouth that looked all set to drawl.”

The recent film adaptation, newly out on DVD, has been criticized for its scenes of Ford (played by Casey Affleck) brutally tenderizing the girlish mug of Jessica Alba, who plays a hooker with a hankering for spankings. But the novel is even uglier. The movie allows for some humanization of the killer’s victims via the actress’s performances (Kate Hudson plays another of Affleck’s lady-friends); the novel, meanwhile, is trapped within the point of view of a man who not only waxes giddy about his mangling and mutilating, but who seeks a kind of commiseration from the reader. Ford, a dirty deputy warped by a childhood of abuse, implicates the reader by virtue of assuming empathy. He suspects he’s unburdening himself on the sentimental but sensible reader of dime-store paperback confessions.

In lots of books I read, Ford tells us late in the novel, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.

In other words, Ford wants to convince us, in a preening, swaggering fashion, that he doesn’t go in for the frills; however, it’s his vanity, and that of the other men in the novel, that provokes all the collapse and suffocation in the small Texas town of Central City. Ford gets wrapped up with a rich contractor who hopes to buy off the prostitute (literally a two-bit hooker, or even cheaper—she’ll bed a guy on an IOU) with whom his bird-brained son has taken up. Little does the moneybags know that Ford has taken up with her too. But double-crossing isn’t enough for Ford; in order to feel sufficiently manly he’s got to succeed at some triple- and quadruple-crossing too; and the actions of the local authorities aren’t far-removed from this grisly one-upmanship. So as not to appear impotent in their detective work, they revise the crimes for swifter resolution. 

Affleck communicates the lazy arrogance of the novel’s narrator by slurring half his lines and keeping his eyes half-lidded. Ford’s the type of guy who traffics in platitudes and cliché to render himself ineffectual among the town’s citizens—though these may not seem the actions of a vain man, they’re motivated by his sense of superiority. “Polite, intelligent: guys like that are my meat,” he tells us. Later, he dismisses those he passes on the street as both “tragical” and so amusing that “I’ve laughed—inside, that is—until my guts ached.” But he wants us, his readers, to think him intelligent, and if not polite, at least sensible, in a way most people aren’t. At the same time, he wants us to be impressed by his cruelty and indifference; and he even seems intent on convincing us of his normality. He often describes himself as typical, friendly, average, despite his unfriendly impulses. Ford takes comfort in his father’s psychology texts, and how openly they dissect human frailty and madness: “And no one was terrified or horrified.”

Ford is at his most convincing, his most clear-eyed, when he evaluates the landscape and its role in the growing soullessness of its population. “We’re a pretty stiff-necked lot,” he says, brought on by vast nothingness and the destruction of that nothingness by oil wells—“everything nearby became a mess of oil and sulphur water and red sun-baked drilling mud…and then the oil is gone and the houses stand black and abandoned, lost and lonely-looking…” Ford fancies himself as much a victim of his surroundings as of his own battered psychology. “It was like there was a plot against me almost,” he writes, letting his vanity slip just long enough to invite our pity.

And the novel is at its most vicious when it’s at its most amusing—Thompson’s ear for dialogue is uncanny, and all the ineffectual lawmen of this tiny Texas town stop just short of batting their eyes at each other, flirtatious in their bickering. This strutting among the men is more romantic than Ford’s proposal to a local girl named Amy. Here’s the moment that he first brings up marriage:

She picked up her panties and began putting them on, still standing behind the chair. “There’s no use arguing about it, Lou,” she said, wearily. “I suppose I can thank my lucky stars that I haven’t caught some terrible disease.”

“But dammit…!” I moved around the chair, suddenly, and got her in my arms. “Dammit, stop talking that way about the girl I’m going to marry! I don’t mind for myself, but you can’t say it about her, get me? You can’t say that the girl I’m going to marry would sleep with a guy who plays around with whores!”

There’s reason to believe that Jim Thompson’s portraits of decay—his body of work includes other tales of crime and psychological decrepitude, such as The Grifters, The Getaway and After Dark, My Sweet—were come by honestly. In his youth, working as a bellboy at a Texas hotel, he dealt with bootleggers, hookers, and drug peddlers, until he was run out of town. He worked on dangerous oil rigs. He was a night guard at a funeral home and a dime-a-dancer in a dancehall and a newspaper reporter. But he was never a terribly successful writer in his lifetime, despite some film collaborations and adaptations that included working with Stanley Kubrick (who called The Killer Inside Me “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”). At the time of Thompson’s death in 1977, none of his books were in print.

Prairie Schooner played a role in Thompson’s development as a writer; after high-tailing it from Texas, he took some courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he fell in with a group of students and professors who edited the journal. Schooner published some of Thompson’s first stories.

If dressing your kid up as the killer of The Killer Inside Me won’t prove suitable for a Halloween costume, consider instead making a costume of the flammable nightgown in Thompson’s “Sympathy,” a short story that Schooner rejected in the 1930s as too gruesome (BOMB published it eleven years after Thompson’s death). A man buys the nightgown on credit, it catches on fire, kills his family. The man then kills himself after receiving a letter from the credit agency; the agency expresses condolences, but reminds him of money due. The bill is paid with money the man earns from willing his body to science.  

(For more on Thompson: Straight: Constructions of masculinity in the cinema, by Wheeler W. Dixon.)

Top 10 Best Literary Fantasy Worlds for Children (OK, and Adults)

Wizards, wonder, wisdom...These words appear over and over in children's fantasy stories. As promised, below is a follow-up list to our top 10 best literary fantasy worlds for grown-ups posted last week. Joy and fear play central roles in all of these worlds (who can forget Pinocchio's terrifying transformation into a donkey in Play Town?), as do speaking animals: the Chesire Cat in Wonderland, snakes in Hogwarts and lions in both Narnia and Oz. Perhaps it's time to blow the dust off of the cover of your favorite children's book, or discover a new one! What classic or contemporary fantasy worlds did we leave off this list?

 

1. Terabithia (Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia) 
2. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series)

3. Wonderland (Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland)

4. Oz (L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

5. Kingdom of Wisdom (Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth)

6. Narnia (C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia)

7. Whoville (Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!)

8. Never Never Land (J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up)

9. Hundred Acre Wood (A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh)

10. Play Town (Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio)

Top 10 Best Literary Fantasy Worlds: the Grown-up Edition

As a fun diversion from the reality of the Prairie Schooner office, we’ve compiled a list of our top 10 favorite literary fantasy worlds—in no particular order. Is Homer’s Cyclops Island truly more thrilling than Circe’s Island? Will Gotham City ever be as legendary as Camelot? What literary fantasy world do you find enchanting that we’ve left off the list? Let us know! And stay tuned—we’re in the midst of assembling a list of the greatest literary fantasy worlds featured in children’s stories.

 

1. Luggnagg (Jonathan Swift's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World)

2. Cyclops Island (Homer's The Odyssey)

3. Middle Earth (J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings)

4. Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word of Unbinding)

5. Shangri-La (James Hilton's Lost Horizon)

6. Utopia (Sir Thomas More's Of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia)

7. Castle Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series)

8. Gotham City (DC Comics' Batman)

9. Camelot (Chreiten de Troyes' Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart)

10. Yoknapatawpha County (William Faulkner's novels and short stories)

New Work from Our Contributors

All of this great news is permanently linked to (and from) over on the sidebar to your right, but I wanted to do a little soft-shoe out here on the main stage to celebrate our writers. Congratulations to them all!

Cynthia Atkins, Psyche’s Weathers, WordTech Communications, 2009

Beth Bachmann, Temper, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009

Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E, Graywolf P, 2009

Walter Bargen, Days Like This Are Necessary: New and Selected Poems, BkMk P/UMKC, 2009

Tony Barnstone, Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, U of Missouri BkMk P, 2009

Nicky Beer, The Diminishing House, Carnegie Mellon U P, 2010

Elinor Benedict, Late News from the Wilderness, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2009

Bruce Bennett, Subway Figure, Orchises P, 2009

George Bilgere, The White Museum, Autumn House P, 2010

Chana Bloch, Blood Honey, Autumn House Press, 2009. Winner of the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress

James Brasfield, Ledger of Crossroads, LSU P, 2009

Jericho Brown, Please, New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008

JV Brummels, City at War, Backwaters P, 2009

Robin Chapman and Jeri McCormick, Love Over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems, Mayapple Press, 2010

Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Norton, 2009

Margaret Chula, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, Katsura P, 2009

Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, translators, Selected Poems of Friedrich Holderlin, won the PEN USA Translation Award

Bruce Cohen, Swerve, Black Lawrence P, 2010

Cathy Colman, Beauty’s Tattoo, Tebot Bach Publications, 2009

Susan Donnelly, Capture the Flag, Iris P, 2009

Paul Eggers, The Departure Lounge: Stories and a Novella, The Ohio State U P, 2009

Lynn Emanuel, Noose and Hook, U of Pittsburgh P, 2010

Patricia Fargnoli, Then, Something, Tupelo P, 2009

Sherrie Flick, Reconsidering Happiness, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Matthew Gavin Frank, Sagittarius Agitprop, Black Lawrence P,2009

Allison Funk, The Tumbling Box, C&R P, 2009

Christine Gelineau, Appetite for the Divine, Ashland Poetry P, 2010

Pamela Gemin, Another Creature, U of Arkansas P, 2010

Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Pantheon, 2010

Ray Gonzalez, Cool Auditor, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009

Marilyn Hacker, translator, He and I, by Emmanuel Moses, Oberlin College P, 2009

Meredith Hall, Without a Map, Beacon, 2009

Megan Harlan, Mapmaking, U of Missouri BkMk P, 2010

Kevin Hart, Young Rain, U of Notre Dame P, 2009

Ava Leavell Haymon, Why the House if Made of Gingerbread, LSU P, 2010

Bob Hicok, Empty and Words for Full, U of Pittsburgh P, 2010

Richard Jackson, Resonance, Ashland Poetry P, 2010

Hédi Kaddour, Treason, Yale UP, 2010

Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Passion Maps, Red Hen Press, 2009

Julie Kane, Jazz Funeral, Story Line Press, 2009

Marilyn Krysl, Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems, Ghost Road Publishing Group Inc., 2009

Keetje Kuipers, Beautiful in the Mouth, BOA Editions Ltd., 2010

Maxine Kumin, Where I Live, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, BlazeVOX, 2009

Nick Lantz, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, Graywolf P, 2010

Nick Lantz, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbor’s House, U of Wisconsin P, 2010

Bill Lavender, transfixion, Garret County and Trembling Pillow P, 2010

Frannie Lindsay, Mayweed, The Word Works, 2010

Kathryn Ma, All That Work and Still No Boys, U of Iowa P, 2009

Jackie Mackowski, View From a Temporary Window, U of Pittsburgh P, 2010

Peter Makuck, Long Lens, BOA Editions Ltd., 2010

Patti M. Marxsen, First Prize winner, All Nations Press Non-Fiction Chapbook Contest. Beyond the Village: Essays Out of Switzerland, All Nations Press, 2010

Hillary Masters, In Rooms of Memory: Essays, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Constance Merritt, Two Rooms, LSU P, 2009

Jennifer Militello, Flinch of Song, Tupelo P, 2009

Miheala Moscaliuc, Father Dirt, Alice James Books, 2010

Debra Nystrom, Bad River Road, Sarabande Books, 2009

Lisa Olstein, Lost Alphabet, Copper Canyon P, 2009

Elizabeth Oness, Fallibility, New Rivers P, 2009

Lori Ostlund, 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Book of Seventy, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009

Mark Perlberg, Waiting for the Alchemist, LSU P, 2009

Donald Platt, Dirt Angels, New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2009

Doug Powell, Chronic, Graywolf Press, 2009

Dian Duchin Reed, Medusa Discovers Styling Gel, Finishing Line P, 2010

William Reichard, Sin Eater, Mid-List Press, 2010

Jack Ridl, Losing Season, University P of New England, 2009

Lee Ann Roripaugh, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, S Illinois UP, 2009

Colette Sartor, short story “Lamb” published by Prairie Schooner, named to “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008” in Best American Short Stories 2009

Marc J. Sheehan, Vengeful Hymns, Ashland Poetry P, 2009

Anis Shivani, Anatolia and Other Stories, Black Lawrence P, 2009

Peggy Shumaker, Gnawed Bones, Red Hen P, 2010

Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Satyr’s Wife, Serving House Books, 2009

Maurya Simon, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St.Jerome and St. Paula: A Novel in Verse, Elixir P, 2010

Judith Skillman, Prisoner of the Swifts, Ahadada Books, 2009

Mary Sklarew, Harmless, Mayapple P, 2010

Dabney Stuart, Tables, Pinyon Publishing, 2009

David Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America, Wiley, 2009

Kristen Tracy, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus, Delacorte P, 2009

Charles Harper Webb, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009

Carol Westberg, Slipstream, David Robert Books, 2010

James L. White, The Salt Ecstasies, Graywolf P, 2010

Jeff Worley, What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, UP of Kentucky, 2009

Jeff Worley, Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur P, 2009.

Debutantes

I see that my intentions roar out in front of my practices. But I still want to draw your attention to two our our contributors: Robin Ekiss and Kristin Naca. They've been selected by Poets & Writers as part of their annual debut poets roundup. Their debut? Books, of course. You can find a connection to Ekiss's book here, and Naca's here.

And Poets & Writers has a debut meta-roundup here. See if you can find your own faves at the start of their careers.

Thanks for Contributors

Beth Bachmann, winner of 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
Walter Bargen, Days Like This Are Necessary: New and Selected Poems, BkMk P /UMKC, 2009. And the William Rockwell Nelson Award for poetry.Theban Traffic: Poems, WorldTech Communications, 2008.
Chana Bloch, Blood Honey, Autumn House Press, 2009. Winner of the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress.
Jericho Brown, Whiting Award. Please, New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008.
Margaret Chaula, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, Katsura P, 2009.
Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, translators, Selected Poems of Freidrich Holderlin, won the PEN USA Translation Award.
Matthew Gavin Frank, Sagittarius Agitprop, Black Lawrence P,2009.
Ray Gonzalez, Cool Auditor, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009.
Marilyn Hacker, translator, He and I, by Emmanuel Moses, Oberlin College P, 2009.
Bill Lavender, transfixion, Garret County and Trembling Pillow P, 2010.
Patti M. Marxsen, First Prize winner, All Nations Press Non-Fiction Chapbook Contest. Beyond the Village: Essays Out of Switzerland, All Nations Press, 2010.
Constance Merritt, Two Rooms, LSU P, 2009.
Lori Ostlund, 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Book of Seventy, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Donald Platt, Dirt Angels, New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2009.
William Reichard, Sin Eater, Mid-List Press, 2010.
Jack Ridl, Losing Season, University P of New England, 2009.
Colette Sartor, short story “Lamb” published by Prairie Schooner, named to “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008” in Best American Short Stories 2009.
Maurya Simon, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St.Jerome and St. Paula: A Novel in Verse, Elixir P, 2010.
Charles Harper Webb, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Jeff Worley, Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur P, 2009.

The Continued Work of our Previous Contributors

Cynthia Atkins, Psyche’s Weathers, WordTech Communications, 2007

Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E, Graywolf P, 2009

Bruce Bennett, Subway Figure, Orchises P, 2009

Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Norton, 2009

Paul Eggers, The Departure Lounge, Ohio State UP, 2009

Patricia Fargnoli, Then, Something, Tupelo P, 2009

Sherrie Flick, Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Meredith Hall, Without a Map, Beacon P, 2008

Kevin Hart, Young Rain, U of Notre Dame P, 2009

Julie Kane, Jazz Funeral, Story Line P, 2009

Marilyn Krysl, Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems, Ghost Road Publishing, 2009

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, BlazeVOX, 2009

Kathryn Ma, All That Work and Still No Boys, U of Iowa P, 2009

Hilary Masters, In Rooms of Memory: Essays, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Jennifer Militello, Flinch of Song, Tupelo P, 2009

Debra Nystrom, Bad River Road, Sarabande Books, 2009

Lisa Olstein, Lost Alphabet, Copper Canyon P, 2009

Mark Perlberg, Waiting for the Alchemist, LSU P, 2009

Marc J. Sheehan, Vengeful Hymns, Ashland Poetry P, 2009

Abbott Small, Into the Turquoise, 2009

Michael Spence, Crush Depth, Truman State UP, 2009

Dabney Stuart, Tables, Pinyon Publishing, 2009

Kristen Tracy, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus..., Delacorte P, 2009