I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day.

Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly sitting on this deck as a summer sun faded into the gloaming and finishing Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

As an apostate who spent the first twenty years of my life chasing after the mirage of Jesus, I thought that I had pretty much dwelt upon every aspect of the historical Christ, explored every angle. But Saramago moved me. He made me feel for the man Jesus and I thought he even made a plausible explanation for the unwitting divinity of Christ. Mostly, though, I thought Saramago knew how to tell a damn good story. Better than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John put together.

There is much to commend in Saramago. He seems to represent a type of literature whose time is gone.

I should add that I also take comfort in the fact that he did not become a full-time writer until well into his 50’s. A fact that is lost on the NewYorker’s “20 under 40″ debacle.

This past week I received yet another letter saying “no thanks.”  This one came from Cezanne’s Carrot, a journal whose speciality is fiction that explores the metaphysical and mystical.  I sent them my story “Puppet Storm,” a story that fits nicely within their editorial guidelines.  This story is one that I started many years ago but finished only recently, and it narrates a comic moment of cosmic import.

The story has, so far, garnered no fewer than four rejections from journals large and small.

In the words of a poet friend of mine, “I want the rejections that are rightly due me.”  Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a low, every time thsoe damned emails/letters arrive.

“We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but after careful consideration, we have decided not to publish it.”

Very succinct.

Whilst moping about this latest rejection, I read a great post on HTML Giant.  The author, Roxanne Gay, is an editor at Pank magazine, and in that role, she has the pleasure of sending more than her share of rejection notices.  Her post explores the stages of grief that every writer goes through when dealing with rejection:

1. It’s not me it’s those damned editors.
2. It’s all my fault.  I will never be published.
3. People just don’t understand the brilliance of my writing.

I have felt all these things.

Gay cautions folk like me not to fall victim to an entitlement mentality.  To put that energy back into the work.

She concludes:

Growing up, my father (like many fathers, I’m sure) was fond of reminding my brothers and I that life isn’t fair when we were pouting about one trivial thing or another. I often want to dispense that advice to writers who feel like publication is inevitable, that publication is  their right by the grace of their talent.  I’m afraid such is not the case.

‘Tis a good word.  Not very soothing to me at the moment.  Maybe it’s simply the reference to father figures, but Gay’s post strikes me as a bit trite right now, however, true I know her advice to be.

I have much work to do with my writing.  I want to write well.  I have yet to acheive what I want with writing.  I recently read an interview with Barry Hannah, in which he discussed a certain story of his (I forget which), it was a story that he wrote several years after publishing a book of stories.  Hannah was well on  his way to achieving some noteriety for his writing.  Yet he said of this particular story that it was the first time he felt like he got it right, like his words captured the essence of what he wanted.  I’m still waiitng for that moment, and I do not wait passively.  I write.  I read.

And I try to ignore the rejections.

Huneven’s novels are positive, weighty things that speak to my psyche. Writing uplifting stories without being cliche is not easy. For every Michelle Huneven there are one hundred Elizabeth Berg’s (Berg, I admit, is a guilty pleasure of mine). I marvel at the way Huneven can make me feel good.

To be sure, Huneven’s stories are not the stuff of fairytale. Her latest Blame traces the life of Patsy MacLemoore from the promise of her early twenties till the twilight of her life. The blame gets assigned early in the story, after MacLemoore kills two innocents (Jehovah’s Witnesses even) while driving drunk. Patsy spends the rest of her life grappling with the guilt and the blame from this accident. These, all too human, forces shape her choice of a mate, her sense of self, her entire sense of purpose.

There is, of course, a twist that comes toward the end of the novel, and this twist leaves the reader wondering, “on what do I base my life, and what if I found that basis was an untruth?”

Intriguing questions. Huneven’s answer is this narrative.

I found Michelle Huneven after reading a interview with her over at that The Millions. What impressed me about Huneven was the way in which she turned the interview into a writing workshop. She sounds more like a counselor than a writer:

“What’s wrong with you, is wrong with your writing,” Huneven told me. “It really behooves you to find out what that is, so that you can disguise that in your writing. Or compensate it, or cover it up. Or cure it, if you can.”

What’s wrong with you is wrong with your writing. This begs the question “what’s wrong with me?” I suffer from extreme bouts of self-doubt. I suffer equally from both stubbornness and malaise. The stubbornness is an absolute commitment to my own worldview. The malaise is a weariness with that very worldview. My irony is often self-destructive. My sense of others (the Other) too little developed. Combine all this together with a deep-seeded perfectionism, and the result is that I’d rather not create. “Why try when it’s only going to be fucked?”

Huneven spoke to me like my analyst. She spoke through her stories. Her other book Jamesland thundered into me like a Summer rain. Jamesland has a silk thread of religion running through it. Religion as examined by the great psychologist William James. Having long ago sloughed off religion, it was inspirational to follow this, extremely non-pedantic, thread back to the source. Notions of community and redemption that I can barely understand outside the strictures of the conservative religious bullshit of my youth came back to me, as if I was seeing them for the first time.

I owe Huneven a debt for this. She has inspired me to be a better writer and to be a better person.

If you can only read one of her books. I’d go for Jamesland

Here’s a snippet:

There are many paths through the art. Having enough money to sit in a log cabin all day watching foxes make out, with berries on one’s breath. Having an entire university beneath one’s command. Ability to drag friends in for a little merlot and sloppy sex with students.

This is perhaps my favorite part:

Jay Leno, not Conan O’Brien, is the future. Why? Because Leno is more devious, sinister, and craven. These are things to aspire to be. Jay Leno would reach through your skin and deep into your stomach to fetch an undigested Skittle if he were hungry for one.

Makes me shy about eating Skittles ever again. That’s for damned sure.

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankees brought their Baptist faith and their cornbread up North and started raising families. Exiles from the Bible belt, singing the songs of the lord in a foreign land.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s remarkable book of short stories American Salvage captures this experience of the Yankee South, however unintentionally. All the stories in the book take place in Michigan, a truth made more poignant by the fact that Salvage was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their “Made in Michigan Series.” It seems rare to find a writer of Campbell’s talent stake such a strong regional claim. The notion of a “regional” literature seemed, for a time, to be the purview of Southerners alone–and the ocassional “Westerner” (Cormac McCarthy; Annie Prolux?).

American Salvage, however, is distinctly Michigan. But in being so distinct, Campbell pays homage to Michigan’s cultural dependence on the South. These characters would be just as comfortable in a Faulkner tale or a Peter Taylor short story as they are here in this colder clime.

I read American Salvage over the Christmas holiday while on my way to Michigan to visit my family. The characters evoked memories of my people, my family, and perhaps for this reason alone I felt a deep connection to Campbell and her story collection.

But these stories are more than just evocative. Campbell is a master craftswoman. She has a seemingly innate sense of how to control language and employ it in story. The beginning of the story the Inventor:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.

Two terse sentences that set up a story of loss and love, a story with one small part sexual tension and one big part discovery. The El Camino driven by a man who would be good, but who has only ever been the Other. In telling the story, Campbell gives the reader just enough to move to the next sentence with growing anticipation.

The fourteen stories in the collection share a tone and often a subject, though it would be difficult to pin that subject down like a moth. It is the stuff of life, and particularly the stuff of life in rural Michigan.

Campbell’s book was the runner up for this year’s National Book Award, an honor she fully deserves. As part of the festivities for the award, Campbell gave this fine reading of one of the stories in the collection. Not the story I would have selected for her to read, but a great piece none the less.

finalistread f campbell from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Check out her website too www.bonniejocampbell.com .

On her blog she had some great snippets of the speech she intended to give had she won the National Book Award.  I’ll conclude with this, which, IMHO, makes Ms. Campbell a damn fine Southern Yankee.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

It’s that “profound connection to their own people and landscape” part that I’ll ruminate on.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry and politics.

This is one of those recurring themes in my thought life. I’m an idealist who masquerades as a realist, but I cannot shake the belief that good art can shake the system to the core.

On the other hand, I fancy myself an artist, or at least a fella who likes to play with language. And, as such, I have always harbored a deep respect for Oscar Wilde’s apology for the uselessness of art.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

I believe Oscar. Of course, loving beauty got him two years hard labor. Maybe he was more ethical than he thought. Maybe it was his ethics that ran him headlong into the authority of the day. And perhaps his art helped to (eventually? still going on?) bring down the ethics that put him in prison.

But poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden’s words about Yeats.

And here is Yeats, taking swipes at and then steps toward Irish Nationalism. He turns his Nobel acceptance into an opportunity to promote Ireland:

“I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Ahhh, but the Yeats I love is the Yeats with “a faerie hand in hand,” the romantic Yeats. Or that dark lyrical pessimism of Adam’s Curse: “we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon.” Gorgeous. The beauty that needs no moral.

Poetry makes nothing happen…

And maybe Auden’s point is that politics, the give and take, the back and forth, it goes on with our without our art. But it sure don’t hurt to try and make something happen. Maybe the attempt to make something beautiful, and in that way to make something happen, maybe this is a windmill worth chasing.

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I’ll write more on him later, but I can’t resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing.

An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with an occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk, and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world, where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work is not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a sigle word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow’s mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed.
~Andre Dubus “First Books”, Meditations from a Movable Chair

Twenty tippled years from today, sitting
On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing
With a mason jar in hand and sipping
Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered
By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses
Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me
By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious,
Twenty tippled years and I will think about you.

Twenty years of liquid truth will not wash
Away the remembrance of things past and thoughts
Marcel and Billy would both be proud to own.
Thoughts of hard laughter, hard drink, hard times.

~Andre Dubus, “A Hemmingway Story” from Meditations from a Movebale Chair.