This Modern Writer: Ten Things About Writing and a Preface by Erin Fitzgerald

I could talk about advice not taken, mistakes made, people slighted, opportunities missed, pity parties so elaborate they are weekly street festivals. Someday, I’ll write about those things. But I’ve been so surrounded by distraction lately that I’m thinking about what’s left when distraction falls away. Some of that is what follows here.

1. There are two writing ladders of which I am now aware. There is the craft ladder, on which you improve all of the abilities that get covered in writing manuals and workshops and writer interviews conducted by or for other writers. And there’s the authenticity ladder, on which you find truth. Your truth. At the bottom of that ladder, you have to do it with a low quality plastic spork. Somewhere in the middle, you do it with a jewel-encrusted titanium sword. I suspect that near the top, it’s all about your bare hands. In an ideal world, you’d ascend both ladders simultaneously…but there is no such thing as an ideal world, is there? The craft ladder is shiny and well-maintained and visible for miles, but the truth ladder has chipped paint and is broken in places and behind clouds in others. It’s a little like the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Plenty of opportunity for disparagement, plenty of shed needles, and everyone’s secretly a little disappointed when the gang covers it with tinsel and lights toward the end.

2. Using creativity is about setting rules. I like those kinds of rules because they’re not limitations, they’re guideposts. I like setting down guideposts and then going what feels like completely bonkers. I don’t think it’s actually completely bonkers, though. In recent months, looking at something I wrote and thinking “I’m going to be wearing a sandwich board and talking to pigeons soon” has been a fairly good indicator that I’m on the right track.

3. The other day Kyle Minor said this on Facebook about about stories under 1500 words:  If you go shorter, you can ride the lyric train and let the last sentence save you. It was like the floor opened up underneath me, that sentence. I love to read and I’m not much of a musician. But a lot of the time, what I actively try to emulate is a song, or a part of a song…something that is three or four minutes long. Probably related: I dream about trains all the time.

4. I dislike the overuse of the word “fear” in discussions of approaching the act of writing. I spent a lot of time as a student thinking that it spoke to other students, who had legitimately intense and terrifying secrets they wanted to share. I had secrets I wanted to share — what writer doesn’t? — but they were (and still are) smaller and in some ways, mundane. Fear isn’t a good word choice for what stands between me and the page much of the time. There’s no one word that covers all for everyone, but a phrase that is close comes from the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear. The second line:  Fear is the mind-killer. What the Litany neglects to mention, understandably, is that there are other mind-killers besides fear.  Most of the time, what gets in my way is mind-killing.

5. I’m always in pursuit of myself. If keyboard writing stops working, I switch to longhand. If lines seem limiting, I go to sketch paper. If sitting at my kitchen table makes me jumpy, I go back to my regular desk. No one tactic works for very long. I’ve been wondering if my reptilian brain — the one that really likes by-rote things like Bejeweled or solitaire — has grown to blimp-size, and that’s why I have to keep up the chase. It’s a more pleasant theory than the one in which a side of me continually mocks another side of me.

6. Most of the time, when I sit down to write I have to take out the garbage first. I spend somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes just writing about whatever’s going on in my head. Stuff going on in my life, things I’m obsessing over, grievances, whatever. I have a journal, and this is even separate from that. There is always muck to be skimmed off the surface.  If I have the luxury of substantial time, I’ll push the garbage phase to that full 30 minutes because I know that toward the end I will want to be writing about something else…anything else. If I do that step correctly, there’s a quiet afterwards that is empty and spooky and if I’m lucky, beautiful.

7. There’s an essay in Alice Walker’s book  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens called “Writing The Color Purple.” In it, she talks about how the characters visited her — almost like imaginary friends. I used to work like that. I’ve been thinking about trying to take it up again, because imaginary friends have the extra perk of comfort. In the meantime, though, I often start with artifacts and go at them with the archaeologist toothbrush. Three for the last three stories on  this page: Christmas trees, Keurig coffee makers, Jack Van Impe.

8. I love the highs I get from having a story that is humming along nicely. What I love more, though, is when it’s obvious that it has been heading in that direction all along. Some random object, idea, emotion I was rolling over mentally five days ago, seemingly unrelated, clicks into place like it always belonged there…because it did. I wonder what I would think of that phenomenon if I was an atheist.

9. I love Margaret Atwood’s novel  Cat’s Eye for many reasons, but a big one has to do with how it depicts artists’ relationships with their work. The main character, Elaine, paints subjects and themes that draw from her life, but aren’t distinguishable to her audience as such — there’s a significant gap between those two experiences, and it has an effect on how she responds to the art community. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, changes media and schools and attitudes with the times — it’s nearly parody, how it’s portrayed. I think most writers who keep with it for any length of time are probably some combination of the two.

10. My standard answer to “why do you write?” is that I write to make sense of things. I don’t think I succeed in that very often, though. Mostly what I do is show you something, and maybe you say “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that too,” and then we both move on. I don’t glance back right away — just like how when I leave a restaurant table, I don’t want to see who sits there next. But sometimes I circle back later, because I’m both obsessive and easily bored, and I see that you’re someplace totally different, and it gives me a little bit of hope.

This Modern Writer: A Day as An Extra An On Set Dispatch From Vallie Lynn Watson

Ed: Vallie Lynn Watson recently edited the fine, fine, Writing, Place and Film issue of Rick Magazine and she was kind enough to write a dispatch about her day as an extra on the set of MY FAVORITE TEENAGE SOAP OPERA SET IN NORTH CAROLINA IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD or as you may refer to it, the one true show to rule them all, One Tree Hill. If you are a fan of the best show in the whole wide world, you will love every juicy moment. If you are not a fan, I am sad for you.

Had to be at a parking garage at 6:30, and they drove me in one of their ever-present long white vans to Clothes Over Bros, a block away. Went in a side/back door and joined about a dozen other people of all ages/races in a small, sort of hot room. We’d end up being in this room off and on for half the day, toiling in folding chairs. Had to fill out tax forms””I hadn’t even thought about getting paid as I of course would’ve done it for free, but I’ll get about $100 for the day.

I was in four scenes (fingers crossed that they’re all used!). The first two were really taxing: I had to walk back and forth in front of Clothes Over Bros. The first of the two was about nine o’clock, and when I rounded the corner on my walk, I almost ran smack into Austin Nichols (Julian), who looks hot as shit with his hair all curly and unkempt. And then Lee Morris/Norris (?), Mouth—or as I like to call him, Minkus—was right behind him. The scene was the two of them exiting COB, and in most of the shots I was walking right past the front door as they exit. Right when we were finishing all this up, Sophia Bush (Brooke) walked up in the clothes she was filming in a couple days before (a tight, lovely gray and black number and weird heels—they have this bulb-like thing at the bottom of the actual heel).

(By the way, if you wanna try to spot me, this is all for the second episode of the season. I am as short as I always was, my long, blonde, curly [probably frizzy] hair was down, and I was wearing an empire-waist turquoise/green patterned dress that may be too boobalicious and probably makes me look pregnant, though I sucked tummy in with all my might. And was wearing too much makeup).

Back to the waiting room for a couple more hours in the folding chairs. Most everyone was nodding off. It was warm, and they didn’t supply us with coffee! They did provide us with weird (leftoverish) food throughout the day, and water.

About noon, more walking in front of COB. I could see inside that Daphne (Brooke’s mom) and Sophia were filming an argument. At the end of the scene, Daphne exits COB. She looks as mean as I expected. I kinda doubt I can be seen in this shot.

Back to the waiting room, and the nice older ladies I’d made friends with at 6:45 started to get on my two-hours-of-night-before-sleep nerves. They thought it was cute to stand in a line and show off their ballet plies (sp?). I kept going to the bathroom (people probably thought I had some drug problem!) because to get there, you had to go through the middle room that is attached to the actual COB store/set (for those who don’t know, this is an actual space, a former business, in downtown Wilmington). I could see all the cloth chairs with names on them (Brooke, Millicent, and Julian’s were in the back corner). I could see the monitors that the directors/producers were watching on. Once on the monitor, I could see Sophia goofing off, making faces right into the camera. Cute. There was always music blaring between takes, probably to keep the energy up.

About 1:30 we were all driven in the vans to lunch (oh, got to walk through the front of COB, the actual “store,” which was cool) two blocks away, in a Hilton conference room. Before we even walked in I could hear Sophia’s throaty voice. She was at a corner table, sitting next to Lisa Goldsomething (Millie). As I was getting my food at the buffet I heard Sophia say something about her and Austin (Julian, her on and off-screen boyfriend) having watched Ghostbusters the night before. I sat down and tried not to stare at their table (she was still wearing her black and gray) but it was hard not to. She’s very loud—her voice carries—and seemed to draw all the attention in the room.

About three, another dozen extras who’d be playing doctors and nurses in the next two scenes invaded our hot folding-chair room. About four, we were all white-vanned over to Cape Fear Community College to film two hospital scenes. This time our holding room was a large lecture classroom, much nicer except the old ladies sat down next to me and drove me batshitcrazy. As I texted my friend Vickie, I DID NOT NEED TO KNOW ALL DETAILS OF ALL THREE OF YOUR DIVORCES, ANNOYING LADY! At one point, oldlady2 said, “I wish I knew how to text so I wouldn’t have to speak.” Really, lady, really?

Different people were chosen for different scenes. About 4:30, I was chosen and went to the “hospital” cafeteria where I immediately heard Sophia, then spotted James (Nathan) who was not sitting in his cloth “Nathan” chair but instead, tucked into a back corner quietly reading. Tried hard to see what book it was, but couldn’t. Sophia, who he recently dated, approached him with her IPad thingy and said, “Can I show you something?” He was polite to her but standoffish.

Then Joy (Haley) came in and the three of them set up for their scene, sitting at a cafeteria table. The conversation was about Brooke’s mom calling the cops on her, and something about Haley being pregnant (I still have not seen the last six episodes of this past season, so I’m not up on what’s going on. Going to wait to get the season 7 DVDs next month and watch the season in its entirety, some weekend with a couple bottles of wine.)

In this scene, I had to walk across the cafeteria, pretty much right behind Nathan&Haley. Of all the scenes I filmed I’d guess this is the one I could most likely be seen in. I’m carrying a turquoise purse.

Back to holding and then about an hour later, me and a goth (is that still the right term?) dude were chosen to film a scene in the “hospital” waiting room. We were sat in some chairs, goth was told to play with his IPhone and I was given a coffee cup of water to be sipping on. As they were setting up, Jackson (Jamie, the darling little kid who’s no longer blond) sat down in the chair next to me and was playing and talking to everyone.

It was six chairs, three on each side, back-to-back. Sophia sat down on the other side; we were back-to-back catty cornered. They filmed a scene where Jackson ran up to her. If this airs, you should be able to see the back of my head and maybe a little bit of my profile; I kept turning my head that way some but didn’t want to be too obvious. At one point, Joe Davolla (director) came over and very quietly—as though trying to convey the mood—suggested Sophia act more longing (something about wanting a baby).

A little more time in the holding room and then at 7, the white vans took us back to the parking garage. I so wanna do this again!

Connected: The Web (2.0) of Literature & Strangers by Mensah Demary

It’s easy to forget the breadth and scale of the world’s literary landscape. Millions of books from all cultures, all perspectives and should one step out of his comfort zone, out of the few genres and authors that move and excite him, the vast literature universe can be disorienting, disconcerting. Even those who consider themselves “well read” must ask, “What else is out there?”

Behind me as I type, two bookshelves dominate the living room. Many of the books were procured by my fiancee during her undergrad and grad school studies. When we moved in together, I lugged three, maybe four boxes of her books up the stairs, impressed by her voracity for literature, albeit necessary for her BA in English and eventual MFA.

Before she moved in, I had my own small bookcase, enough to hold my own collection: a hodgepodge of poetry books, novels and biographies amassed during my years in Washington DC. I peeled the tape from the boxes, and stared at the various titles printed on spines, titles foreign to me. Her collection dwarfed mine three or four times over.

I suppose I had an opportunity to feel inadequate; instead, I took the high road, wanting to read more for reading’s sake, as opposed to some fictitious competition between lovers. I will say, for disclosure’s sake, I did feel competitive—to faceless writers, those who devoured books as part of their matriculation, who could quote the most obtuse Proust passage without spilling a drop of Guinness or Shiraz.

That said, I figured I could start reading my fiancee’s books, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to start with myself: my tastes, my desires, my favorite things. From there, I could not only learn more about myself as I took the first steps out of my comfort zone, but perhaps discover the limitations of my own perspective—then expand it while, at the same time, approach it from a more nuanced angle.

I use the internet, the interconnectivity of servers and ethernet cables, to fill a literary void in my “real” life. Not just the likes of Amazon, but keeping my virtual ear to the ground, remaining tuned to the cyber streets, to catch wind of a good book or, better yet, a masterwork collecting dust in a publisher’s warehouse near you.

My favorite podcast is the New Yorker’s monthly fiction program. A writer, once published in the magazine, reads his or her favorite New Yorker short story. Though the story was discussed by author Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz recorded a reading of “How To Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” from his collection  Drown. This was how I discovered Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the writer who changed my life for reasons beyond the scope of this little bit of prose.

Technology and social platforms are as useful as you make them. While it’s hip and contrarian to shit on Twitter as micro-banality, with ‘s oft-played-out quips about tweets on users’  breakfast menus and bathroom habits, its reach and ability to connect, to relay information, is so powerful, it made Facebook publicly and shamelessly bite Twitter’s style.

Follow along, if you don’t mind.

I used to follow a particular novelist’s blog. Through this ‘s list of links, I found another blogger, my current favorite. When I gave Twitter a second chance, I became a follower of my favorite blogger and, after the blogger followed me back, I ran into a short story writer who followed my favorite blogger (stay with me).

The short story writer raved about a book that just dropped, from an author whose name was vaguely familiar to me. Soon, others in my Twitter timeline echoed her sentiments and, me being human and on a mission for more books, I couldn’t resist. Through 140 character recommendations, I purchased two of the author’s books, his story collection and the novel that dominated my Twitterverse for about a week.

Twitter introduced me to Victor LaValle. I remembered his name because of his collection.  Slapboxing With Jesus was in my hands years ago, at the bookstore that once employed me. I picked it up because of its title, a quote from Ghostface ‘s “Daytona 500″ from the classic album  Ironman. While the collection was good, albeit in the vein of Diaz’s  Drown, LaValle’s  Big Machine, his second and latest novel, was one of the best books ‘ve read—ever. Octavia ‘s death left a hole in my heart; her novels lit a spark that  Big Machine doused with gasoline.

And without the internet in general, the following books would remain unknown to me: David ‘  Reality Hunger, Elif Batuman’s  The Possessed, Alexander ‘sEdinburgh (and through his blog, the dope  Astonishing X-Men series written by Joss Whedon), Roberto Bolano’s  The Savage Detectives,   James Hynes’  Next, Ralph Wiley’sWhy Black People Tend to Shout, Yann Martel’s  The Life of Pi, Denis Johnson’s  Jesus’ Son, Francis Flaherty’s  The Elements of Story, and on. And on. And on.

Someone once said, “writers read,”  so color me committed to the craft. After reading a good book, I go through my emulative phases, like other writers, deconstructing the elemental makeup of Nabokov’s  Speak, Memory (to no avail, I can assure you) in order to find a new way to arrive at the most daunting of solutions: writing a good story.

And yet, it’s impossible to distill the impact of wanting to read more—and finding online avenues to achieve this—on my personal, professional and creative lives. The best literature impales your perspective years after you closed the book, placed it on the shelf, lent it to a friend (to then never see it again). As much as they’re meant to be read, books are lived as well.

But if you held a gun to my head, and asked me to venture a guess, then I’ll say this much.

Angela Nissel was once the webmaster of Okayplayer.com, the official site of my favorite hip-hop group, The Roots. She soon became a screenwriter for the show  Scrubs and eventually wrote her memoir,  Mixed, on her life as a biracial woman. I read her book because she was funny as hell on Okayplayer and I wanted to support her efforts. I remember feeling some kind of way when I read her chapter detailing her stint in a psychiatric hospital, treated for Depression. Four months later, I was diagnosed with Depression.

The symptoms were upon me before I read her book, but I had no name with which to associate my deteriorating disposition. And it would be revisionism to suggest that Nissel’s memoir somehow, magically and mystically, helped me become aware of the illness. I was sick and no book could’ve accelerated or delayed my diagnosis. But there was a connection.

Years later, as my fiancee and I note the overflow from our bookshelves, contemplating the logistics of managing our still-growing library, I think about what I want to achieve as a writer. Even amid obscurity, should someone stumble upon my future book or stories, perhaps through a friend of a friend on Facebook, that connection could be enough. I read a poet’s early work online in 1999; our wedding is in 2011. Literature and the internet is a beautiful combination–

Mensah Demary (true identity: Thomas DeMary II) is a full-time worker bee, part-time fiction writer and occasional blogger at mensahdemary.com. From his home in southern New Jersey, dominated by farmlands and flea markets, he melds technology and the written word, sometimes with mixed results. You can read his story, “Saturn Return,“ at Up The Staircase.

The Machine’s Arrival by Mensah Demary

I was twenty-five. My father and I were in his living room: the floors were overcast like marble and, along the walls, various prints featured animated Jazz musicians in suspended animation, frozen in creative glee. We spoke of my future, a topic-on-loop since I left Georgia. Back in New Jersey for the first time, full-time, in seven years, without a college degree or a sense of what I’d like to do in the “professional” arena, I relied on what was—and remains—my primary desire: writing.

“Well Dad,” I said, “I’m thinking about an English degree. I mean, I don’t know. Not much money in an English degree.”

“That is true,” my father said.

“I could teach.”

“You could. But you mentioned an MBA a few years ago.” Prior to my first marriage, days before maybe, I talked about attaining a business degree. For what purpose, I had no idea. In what hopes, no clue. “Business” was analogous to “stable” and in the midst of an impending marriage, stability, in all its forms, seemed appealing.

“It’s not what I want to do,” I said. “I’m not interested in being a businessman. Just seems like means to an end.”

“Right,” my father said, “so get a degree to help pay the bills. Who said you can’t work and write at the same time?”

What I thought was, “It’s not about time, Dad.” What I said was, “I hear you.”

Before my family was obliterated by divorce, we lived in a three bedroom home, an “A-frame” house, with wood siding and a deck that wrapped around half the building like an incomplete skirt, and a small front yard where my brothers and I, neighborhood kids included, engaged in whiffle ball, tackle football and foot races.

I was seven. My father, in school for his Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing, brought home a word processor: a fifteen inch monitor atop of a horizontal base where the computer’s inner-workings were housed. The computer was utilitarian: though it had the shape of more flexible PCs, it processed words…and nothing else.

Before the machine’s arrival, I had no discernible desire to write. I was atypical, I suppose. I didn’t care for reading as entertainment, I never scribbled stories in a spiral notebook. But I played with action figures, pretended to be a ninja and spoke to myself often. My mother thought I had an imaginary friend. When I told her, “No Mom, I’m talking to myself,” she frowned and said, “Dennis, only crazy people do that.” So sure, I had the makeup of a writer, after all.

Writing surfaced as a means to emulate my father and, therefore, garner his approval. He spent many nights on the terminal, keyboard “click-clacking” in the name of academia, of medicine. Being seven, I thought of cartoons and ways to piss off my younger sister. One day, I asked my father if I could use his computer.

“It’s a word processor,” he said.

“I want to write a story.”

“Really? Tell me about it.”

“I have to write it first, Dad.” He sighed and fumbled in a desk drawer and pulled out a plastic case. Inside were square, black disks. Each one had a colorful label to them: he handed me a blue one.

I sat down and inserted the disc, like I saw him do many times before. After that, I looked up for guidance. The screen had a black background with white lettering. There was no mouse. There were no Windows. Again, utilitarian. Myopic in its purpose. The screen displayed so many file options: open, close, erase, and a hundred more ways to create and handle a document. My father walked me through the process and, within minutes, I was confronted with my first blank screen.

“Press this button here,” he said, pointing at the keyboard, “when you want to save.”

I spent what now seems like days on my first story. “The Man Who Died And Came Back Alive.” I will admit that while my titles have improved over the years, I still lack a general feeling, a seventh sense, so to speak, and my titles still trip over themselves. That said, the printout was 1.5 pages long.

I don’t remember how the man died and, more importantly, what force brought him back to life. The idea itself was as fantastical as I could get. Defeating death—this was the secretive preoccupation of my childhood. My father, upon reading the story, was neither worried about my state of mind nor impressed. To give him some credit, maybe he was impressed that I actually did what I set out to do; the product, on the other hand, achieved a pat on the head.

“Good, Dennis. Good.”

Three Reasons to Read Federman : A Review of Shhh: The Story of a Childhood by J. A. Tyler

Raymond Federman died in 2009. This is not the reason to read Federman. Rest in peace as they say, but Federman would not want it like that, to gain readers simply by his own mortality.

Raymond Federman didn’t die in 1942. This is also not the reason to read Federman — plenty of people should have or nearly did or almost could have died at earlier points in their lives. Federman would not want readers merely because of this fateful lengthening of his life either.

Then why read Federman’s very last book Shhh: The Story of a Childhood a novel (Starcherone Books, 2010)?

Three reasons:

[ 1 ]

The story of Federman is a tremendous and startling story. Barely a teen, Federman’s mother pushed him into a closet when the French Gestapo arrived to take his Jewish family to their end in Auschwitz. He stayed in that closet through what remained of the day and the entire night, only to emerge the next morning without a family, all of whom he would never see again. It is a magnificently rendered story of heart-wrenching quality, a boy in search of somewhere to stand as the world sinks away around his feet. As much memoir as it is novel, Federman-as-a-boy finds extended family members and walks them to the train as well but is not boarded with them, his name not on the list of Jews to collect. Indeed Federman is saved, alone but spared, and Shhh is the brilliant recounting of this unbelievable childhood. If for nothing else, the plot of Federman’s rebirth in 1942 is worth taking Shhh into a quiet room and letting it wash out. But there is more, there is so much more.

[ 2 ]

It would be nothing short of horrendous to force those memories out of a system, a life that has no doubt worked to cover and recover the staggering fact of a life lived as Federman lived it. But Federman is not satisfied with a mere retelling of this story, he must also deconstruct it as he goes, giving the book both its narration from Federman himself, as well as from an alter ego, the counter-narrator who speaks against Federman, who questions Federman’s facts and methods, who asks Federman to move ahead or share more details, who keeps Federman in check throughout the novel. And in part, this is what makes Shhh as much novel as memoir, this destructive and deconstructive anti-narration, the voice that allows this book to be so much more than a simple telling of a caustic and tragic event in European history and in Federman’s life. And yet, Federman is not satisfied with just that either, with just breaking the text as he writes. There is more. With Federman, there is always more.

[ 3 ]

The third and final reason proposed here as a justification to pick-up, to buy, to order Shhh for every library in every zip code in this nation, is the levity with which Federman eases into and out of the dark dark hole that is both the holocaust that Federman missed and the closet that made him miss it. Federman and anti-Federman both rail and rally against one another to the point of flippancy, downplaying the gravity of the situation, of Federman’s boyhood at the most pivotal and important moments. We are as readers then flung in and out of a death missed and in and out of a life lived, the Federman that could have been and the Federman that was. Federman keeps the story afloat, buoyant, by the clever manner in which he both lightens and darkens each and every turn of the pages. And perhaps it is this beyond all other things that makes us miss Federman already, not nearly a year yet since his death.

Raymond Federman died in 2009.

Raymond Federman could have died in 1942.

And Raymond Federman could have written a memoir, or a holocaust novel.

Instead, he wrote both.

There are no quotes from the text in this review. There are no quips or phrases or words from Federman himself here, in this, as you are reading. Shhh is owed more than my quoting of it. Shhh deserves to be read. Shhh warrants an opening of the book as a book, not as easy scraps to be quickly picked up and put down. For these three reasons, for a million others, for six million others, for Federman, for yourself, for the words that are and aren’t in this brilliant lovely horrible moving crushing resounding book, read Shhh.

Electric Parade by Mensah Demary

Drinking my Saturday morning coffee, browsing on my iPad, I make the usual online rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. As I swipe and tap the glass, cigarette smoke wafting through the living room, I’m energized by guilt and looming deadlines. My mind dips in and out of possible topics to write about, to say nothing of the music review—and the unopened zip file containing the album—sitting on my desktop. I shut off the iPad and lumber over to my glass, L-shaped desk.

A 22″   LCD monitor lords over the setup; speakers and two external hard drives flank the monitor’s left and right sides. Underneath a pewter lamp, my Macbook is closed and wired to the monitor, my external keyboard, the speakers and now, the iPad, syncing and charging in silence. Underneath the monitor, my Motorola Droid displays the time and weather. Further to the right, my printer whimpers for black ink. The cable modem and router radiates the Internet throughout the apartment. Underneath the desk, the PC tower hums next to the speakers’ subwoofer.

I’m at a stage in my writing life where I need to get organized. More than calendars and to-do lists, I require technological balance. There’s always a “gadget utilization”  period for me. I buy it, run it into the ground, learn its strengths and weaknesses for myself, expert reviews notwithstanding, and plug it into my writing ecosystem accordingly.

Since bringing the “magical”  iPad home, my ecosystem has come undone. Left is right, up is down and I realized I didn’t know which tool to use for which task. The iPad’s existence in my world brought to the surface a bit of overlap between my tools and, as the deadline for this article pressed its cold nozzle against my temple, my frustration grew.

Will it be slow-pecking on the smartphone’s keyboard or an on-screen, capacitive touchscreen? I could take the Macbook out of the house, bang out a first draft during my lunch break. Yet, the iPad can do the same, more or less. All the while, my phone would sit idle in my jeans pocket, probably pouring impotence-rendering radiation into my groin.

And what about a simple pen and journal?

It became comical, now that I think about it. So many gadgets to write with, yet it took over a week for me to get my act together, to settle down and—well—write. Color me proactive, because I know this will happen again. So while I find myself smiling, tapping away at the external keyboard, I’ve made some important decisions to repair my ecosystem.

First, my smartphone is my mobile office. Email me, send me a tweet, post a note on my Facebook wall, comment on my blog: it all sends literal shivers down my over-clocked phone’s spine. This is how I communicate with the world, to stay in touch. As an example, the opportunity to do this piece presented itself, by chance, on my phone as I sat in the dentist’s office. By the time I scheduled my (second) root canal, the invitation to pitch the column flashed across my screen.

My Macbook is the undisputed king of long prose production. My Droid’s keyboard is, by design, a disaster, a slab of flat keys that aggravates me to the point of wishing for my old Blackberry Curve—or any Blackberry. The touchscreen keyboard is good for quick notes and dry, sarcastic tweets, but not much else. And I understand my writing process, that I’ve never gotten into a rhythm while working in public. This is where I need to be to get the work done, at my desk, the television on mute behind me.

It actually conjures up a desire for another ecosystem reorganization, to sell my Macbook and replace it with an iMac. Remember, its as much about utilization as its about balance. If I no longer see a need for a laptop, then why bother? Besides, writing at a Starbucks is overrated. Trust me. I end up eavesdropping instead of typing.

I use my journals and pens for “easier”  writing, when speed isn’t a requisite, when I don’t have a deadline chasing me like a rabid dog. Similar to scratch paper to figure out a math problem, I use a journal to work out a plot issue in a story or, if nothing else, to rant about how much I suck at writing, how I’ll never succeed at it and all of that good stuff akin to wanting to be creative. In other words, the journal allows me to slowly unravel a kink in my work or to maniacally rant in the name of catharsis; the latter helps to spare my blog readers from my public mewling.

Which brings me to the iPad. After using it for a month, I conclude that, within my ecosystem, its best purpose resides in the world of synchronization. While some bemoan the iPad’s usefulness, the ye olde “solution in search of a problem” argument, I’m pragmatic enough to know a new breed of technology when I see it. I discovered its niche in my writing world when I first used it to remote access my Macbook, essentially viewing and controlling my laptop from the iPad’s screen, not to mention creating and editing my Macbook files as well.

The iPad is where I can begin to do “serious”  writing, to then move my files through iTunes when I sync. I could move them through the “cloud” via Google Docs, but I’m paranoid about cloud computing. I like to keep my files local, moving from system to system with one little white cord. So call it excellent or poor design, but the iPad, as a writing tool in my life, works best alongside a full-bodied desktop system.

Technology breeds choice, foregoing bulky, utilitarian monoliths for sleek, bezeled super-machines created, and marketed, with multitasking in mind. Of course, writing is a matter of sitting down, the “ass to chair”   theory, and doing the work. The act of writing and technology, naturally, go hand in hand, but I think new challenges are born when writers, once users of utilitarian devices, are introduced to the electric parade of gadgets pumped out of tech companies’ imaginations. It’s too easy to get distracted these days, but the devices themselves, like the apps they run, requires the knowledge to understand what to use, when to use it and why. Then again, we could all use Moleskines and call it a day. But Moleskines don’t have Wi-Fi antennas inside them, so–

Mensah Demary (true identity: Thomas DeMary II) is a full-time worker bee, part-time fiction writer and occasional blogger at mensahdemary.com. From his home in southern New Jersey, dominated by farmlands and flea markets, he melds technology and the written word, sometimes with mixed results. You can read his story, “Saturn Return,“ at Up The Staircase.

We Take Me Apart: A Review by Nicelle Davis

The remarkable thing about love is how it operates as an entity—something born miraculously with a fast unraveling life span. Love lives, dies then haunts. The human body seems merely a house within which love can sully the sheets and leave its fingerprints on everything. Molly Gaudry’s protagonist in We Take Me Apart houses a love that ravishes her interior until all that’s left is a frame—walls with gaping wounds for anyone to enter. The last lines of the book reads, “Listen / if nothing else / I am at least a woman who has known & loved / the company of a lamp in a dark & empty room.” Lines such as these expose humanity’s exquisite vulnerability. Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied.

The plot of We Take Me Apart is made from reconstructed fairytales that center around the lives of three women: a mother, daughter, and the daughter’s lesbian lover. The lover leaves, the mother dies and the daughter is abandoned with no desire to experience more loss. Gaudry’s prose does not offer the comfort of a “Happily Ever After.” The novella ends with the main character cutting out her own eyes to prevent anymore ghosts—or rather memories—from overwhelming her. She has had enough. She wishes to remain with what life has already given her— to make time for reconciliation with her past.

It is the novella’s twisted fairytale quality that gives the reader the feeling that he or she has just had their umbilical cord cut a second time. The ending is necessarily visceral and suggests that there are multiple realities—that loss births its own children in us that require nurturing. Gaudry’s novella is a reminder that love is intangible and it demands our undivided attention. By gouging out her eyes, Gaudry’s character becomes a kind of ghost. She can no longer see our world. She has resigned herself to the past entirely.

We Take Me Apart begins with an homage to Gertrude Stein and could be read as a reinterpretation of the three-line poem, A Carafe that is a Blind Glass.” This approach is an act of pure courage on Gaudry’s part. Only a brave and talented writer would dare mess with the perfection of Gertrude Stein. Add this offense to your favorite childhood fairytale being reimagined and We Take Me Apart reads like a novella about to implode. And yet, as if by magic, the story holds even as the narrative spins out of control.

Gaudry writes:

If there is a how to describe the what

I feel then a dead-red-roses-filled &

fingerprint-smudged carafe on the center of a

table in the center of a room in the center of a

house in a place called before the stitching years

where I have long collected dust

forgotten skin

fallen hair

sloughed cells that nowhere rise with the

entrance of a body

yours

perhaps

There is something brutally honest in Gaudry’s interpretation: she does mess with perfection and does so quite well. She continues by writing, “they stir me into steaming cups until I am gone.” Just as the three-line mastery of Gertrude Stein’s poem is gutted, the main character is consumed by her acts of self-sacrifice. Where Gertrude Stein was perfection, Molly Gaudry is human which is, in and of itself a different kind of perfection.

Not only does We Take Me Apart reimagine the works of others,   the novella revises itself as it is being read.

This can be seen in the lines:

WHAT I WANT IS TO TASTE WITH

DELIBERATION THE WAY A

QUIET MEADOW BECOMES DIMMER AFTER

A WETTING AROUND THE EDGES

I said this not long ago for no reason really

except that by taste with deliberation I meant

hope & by quiet meadow I meant baby & by

dimmer I meant calm & by a wetting I meant

pink lips & by around the edges I meant clamp

mother’s breast

a revision

then

of what I want

which is to hope the way a baby becomes calm

after pink lips clamp mother’s breast

Truth is flexible in We Take Me Apart and evolves as the main character recreates herself after each loss she survives. This flexibility of truth adds to the sense that multiple realities are co-existing in Gaudry’s book. What one means is not what one says. What one feels is not necessarily mutual. That doesn’t make the words and / or feeling any less real. Gaudry’s character seems to be collecting herself—to be housing multiples of herself from different stages of life. The book shows adulthood to be our multiple selves craving wholeness.

I wish I could say for certain I knew how Gaudry does it. She uses such simple language to create an epic and moving tale. We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift.


This Modern Writer: Stupid Video Games by Erin Fitzgerald

I started playing EverQuest in 2001. Most video game addiction stories start with a friend who coaxes you into playing, and mine is no different. Over the course of two weeks I went from “I dunno…” to a full time career as a bronze-plated, hammer-wielding, high elf cleric healer.

It was a weird time in my real life. I’d quit writing fiction a few years before, and I’d just left a reasonably lucrative career as a marketing writer because my employer had been irritated by the inconveniences of my high risk pregnancy. Now, I was working second shift at a call center with a baby at home. All of my priorities had changed dramatically in less than a year. Cracking the skulls of giant rats outside the gates of West Freeport was cathartic in its violence, and comforting in its predictability.

I went through an mild addiction phase with EverQuest, where I sometimes ate dinner at the computer screen. I still think of it as a happy time. My friends and I would go home from work and play for hours. We’d fight crocodiles in an oasis, or hole up in the goblin-filled dungeon of Highpass Hold and fill our bags with loot. But the best part was the joking around. Playing a game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft is like standing in the Hall of Presidents in Disney World without a tour guide. One is asked to take it seriously, but the degree to which that’s actually done is entirely up to the participants. That choice can make the difference between being bored out of one’s mind and going to bed early, or staying for hours before noticing that the sun is coming up. My friends and I had a lot of adventures that way. We once spent a night just jumping off of the Plane of Air to land in the Ocean of Tears below. Once we fought to the center of a witch’s lair, and the keyholder fell asleep at his monitor. During the day, we sent each other links describing new places we wanted to visit, quests we wanted to finish, treasure we wanted to loot. Everyone else thought we were completely intolerable.

Because the game occupied my intellectual energy (the baby, happily, took up the rest of my energy), I was thinking about other things besides how angry I was at the enormous change in my real life circumstances. I could make a stupid mistake in a dark dungeon, and then laugh about it by the fax machine the next afternoon. My friends had play styles that reflected their personalities, and asking each other to correct tactics could sometimes end up as personal criticisms. Part of what broke that first gaming addiction for me was realizing that despite appearances, I was ill-suited to play a healer. I still deal with the consequences of that discovery, on both sides of the monitor.

The big surprise came when I wanted to write fiction again. One afternoon at work, I was (sleepily) reading the forums at eqcleric.com and someone had posted this:

“Does anyone else think it’s strange how we heal? We wait until people are nearly dead before we do anything, in order to conserve mana. But in real life, could you really wait until your friend was almost dead before you did something about it?”

Many clerics replied that the total absence of mana in the real world was an important consideration, but it got me to thinking. Thanks to EverQuest, I had gained some new points of view. As a cleric, sure — I’d learned a way to turn a blind eye to suffering in the interest of the greater good. But I’d also learned what can happen when someone who claims to have the same allegiances has lied. I’d learned about wanting a reward for weeks, only to get it and realize it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped before — even though I’d known exactly what it was the whole time. I’d learned that the pleasure of arriving someplace new can be wholly contingent on one’s traveling companion. And I knew what could lead to stepping back from a world and a life that had been generally good, and nearly all consuming.

None of those events was reliant on blessed claymores, angry pixies, or dragons that respawn once a week. But they were part of the gaming life, because they’re part of any life. Realizing that is what brought me back to fiction. There have been times since when my gaming and writing balance has been off kilter, especially when one of them offers me something shiny and new. But is life ever completely balanced? In the end, the two reap rewards for each other, and I can’t complain.

Later, I spent some time in a role playing guild. From a more technical point of view, that was also very educational. Roleplaying gamer decisions — what armor to wear, what quests to choose, even whether to walk or run — must be justified by narrative and backstory. Even on an ordinary day, good roleplay gaming presents small but interesting writing challenges. Cheat on those, and guildmates will notice. Do well at them, and become an architect for larger stories.

Eight years and eight games* after EverQuest, I play Aion once or twice a week. It’s cookie cutter in design, but very pretty to look at. My character Ambiguous is musclebound with broad shoulders, purple armor, long flowing black hair, and just a hint of lip color. The female characters seem to like Ambiguous a lot. I also play Left 4 Dead. That game is only about stumbling through warehouses and sewers and forests with a rifle, zombies at every turn. Left 4 Dead gave me strange dreams for a while. (One of them led to There are always children.) All of that said, I’m waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which will come out next year. There’s going to be a smuggler class. Lately I’ve been thinking about how people can be unintentionally heroic while just trying to make a living. I can’t wait to try that out.

*Dark Ages of Camelot, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage 2, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, and, of course, EverQuest 2.

Erin Fitzgerald is editor of The Northville Review. Ambiguous’s character profile is here.

This Modern Writer: Stephen S. Mills

Sometimes Sex Is Just Sex

My conservative aunt once asked my mother, after reading one of my poems, “Why does he always have to write about sex?” My mother, trying to smooth things over, responded, “Sometimes the sex isn’t about sex. It can mean different things, like getting screwed by the government.” I appreciated my mother’s attempt, though I don’t think it made my aunt feel any better (at the time, under the Bush administration, my aunt trusted the government quite a bit and couldn’t imagine it screwing her). In many ways, both my aunt’s and my mother’s responses were typical. We often feel the need to question all sexual content or to justify sex by making it about something more. But what if the sex is just that, sex? Is that so wrong?

A few years ago, I would have bought into that need to make sex into some metaphor or symbol for something “grander,” but I’ve now come to terms with the fact that sex is a valid topic on its own and needs no other justification. For anyone who has read much of my work, they will know that I devote a lot of my poetry to examining sexuality. Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the time I’m writing about gay sex? This makes it even worse. Some can handle heterosexual sex, but gay sex just crosses the line. The questions start flying: Why do you have to rub your gayness in my face? Why are you being so graphic? Why are you helping push the stereotype that gay men are sex-obsessed?

I remember in a graduate poetry workshop someone questioned one of my poems by saying it was just trying to be shocking. This is a response many people take to sex in general. If you are showing or writing about sex, you are just trying to shock people. To me this comment says more about the person saying it than the poem in question. Shock is relative. Are you shocked because mass media and politicians have told you that you should be shocked by gay sex? Are you shocked because you are uncomfortable with your own sex life or sexuality? Perhaps this is the point of such a poem: to make you think.

Being gay you quickly learn that no matter what you do you will shock people. Once you accept this you suddenly stop caring and are truly free. You realize it doesn’t matter if you are cautious or not, you will still make people uncomfortable, so you might as well go full force. I write openly about gay sex because so few do. Even other gay poets often refrain from dealing head-on with the intimate details.

I’ve been with my partner for six years now and I love examining, in my work, the ever-changing elements of a relationship and of a sex life. This is something I haven’t seen that much of in gay poetry, or really even in straight poetry. In the gay world there are many “hook-up poems,” or “club poems,” or “let me compare you to a Greek god poems,” but very few, what I call, “ever-after poems.” What happens after you meet the man of your dreams? This is what I try to examine in all my work and part of that examination is sex based. Sure, sex is hot the first time, but how do you maintain that good sex? Yes, many are turned off by it. But I refuse to write any differently.

A few weeks ago I had two poems published in Velvet Mafia, which is an online queer magazine that seeks alternative gay work and erotica. I found the site months ago, but hesitated to submit. I kept thinking do I want my work associated with an erotica-type publication? As someone who has been academically trained, I had that feeling of not wanting to associate myself and my work with something “low-brow.” Of course, I eventually came to my senses and realized nothing on the site is any different in quality than the work I write. Many would try to classify some of my poems as erotica, though most are not written with the intent to get you off.

In this situation, I had to confront my own stereotypes and ask myself why do I deem erotica as something less? It’s just another form of writing and has just as much place in the world as any epic poem does. I’m not saying all erotica is well-written, but not all poetry is well-written either. I also made myself admit that the poems that are posted on Velvet Mafia will probably get more readers than my poem published in The Antioch Review, which is a well-established and respected literary magazine. That is not saying anything against The Antioch Review, but it is putting it all in perspective. People may be shocked by sex, but secretly they love to read about it.

I’m a firm believer in writing those poems that are hard to write. The poems some will never respect or understand. These are the poems that need to be written. I always tell my students if you are scared to write it, or scared of what others might think of you, then that’s the thing to write. As for my aunt, she might never appreciate a good gay sex poem, but I like to think just maybe I’ve made her think.

Stephen S. Mills earned his MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Hoboeye Online Arts Journal, The Broken Bridge Review, PANK, Velvet Mafia, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, Redheaded Stepchild, and the anthologies Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 and Ganymede Poets, One. Others are forthcoming in Knockout, Limp Wrist, and Word Riot. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. He currently lives in Orlando, FL with his partner and his dog. Website: http://joesjacket.blogspot.com/

Terese Svoboda is Weapons Grade

An Interview by Neil de la Flor

Neil de la Flor: How’s it going? In other words, what’s changed since our last interview ?

Terese Svoboda: I’m on a roll. I gave up trying to get big presses and voila! I have two more novels scheduled, one for 2010, and 2011.

ND: Delightful. What’s the gist, scoop, anti-plot? Any pilots involved?

TS: I wish somebody were on pilot. Pirate Talk or Mermalade is coming out from Dzanc Press just before Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s all in dialogue, no description. In other words, madness. Parts have been published in Conjunctions and Fairy Tale Review. The other one is my answer to Willa Cather, the bugaboo of Nebraska who is really a Virginian and don’t you forget it. Anyway, she appears in the book, saying O Pioneers! The star of the show is a spunky girl who’s building a mound for an Indian because her father lost her in a bet. It’s a book about honor.

ND: As you may know, your most recent collection of poetry, Weapons Grade, was just published by The University of Arkansas Press. Why the title Weapons Grade and not Dad In Suspenders?

TS: It was called Wooly Bully for six years. My fabulous editor, Enid Shomer—I’ve never had a poetry or fiction editor before!!!!!—said the title wasn’t good enough. I took it from a not-good-enough poem and tried to write another poem under it so there would be a title poem but that didn’t work. She was happy when I decided to make it a video game.

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