The Mumpsimus

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...

This piece first appeared in the Winter 2015 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books . J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-face with Time by David Attwell Viking ($27.95) The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz Viking ($27.95) In 1977, J.M. Coetzee struggled while beginning the novel Waiting for the Barbarians , because, he wrote in his notebook, he had failed in “the creation of a credible beloved you .” David Attwell explains this mysterious statement as a manifestation of Coetzee’s disaffection with illusionary realism, the kind of writing that pretends textual figures are real. A week later, Coetzee wrote: “I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me. This man MM, as a ‘he’ living in the world, bores me. ‘Creating’ an illusionistic reality in which he moves depresses me. Hence the exhausted quality of the writing.” Any fiction writer ...

Today is Shirley Jackson's 100th birthday, and as I think about her marvelous body of writing, I can't help also thinking of the changes in her reputation over the last few decades, or, rather, my perception of the changes in her reputation. For me, she was always a model and a master, but there was a time when that opinion felt lonely, indeed. I discovered her as so many people discover her: by reading "The Lottery" in school. (Middle school or early high school, I don't remember which.) I loved the story, of course, but it wasn't until I got David Hartwell's extraordinary anthology The Dark Descent  for Christmas one year that I really paid attention to Jackson's name, because the book includes the stories "The Summer People" and "The Beautiful Stranger", both of which I read again and again. Around the same time, I read Richard Lupoff's anthology What If?  and thus encountered what would become one of my favorite short s...

Since my book came out, lots of people have asked me to describe my writing. I'm not good at this. However, having now seen my writing described by reviewers and by common readers, I've got a few ideas about how other people describe it. "Not nice", "disturbing", "bewildering", etc. After a while, I found myself responding with the same two words when people asked what my writing is like. "Perverse and uncommercial," I heard myself say now and again. (I'm sure I have some rejection slips around somewhere that call my writing exactly that.) I don't know if those terms are exactly true , but they seem to set up the right expectations in readers. My friend Jeremy John Parker overheard my self-description. Being not only an excellent writer and discerning editor but also a talented designer, he decided there should be clothing, tote bags, mugs, etc. with "perverse and uncommercial" on them. And so there now are. ...

In the earliest days of this blog, I declared David R. Bunch to be "unjustly neglected". This was true back then, but not nearly as true as it is today, when all his books are out of print and usually sell for high prices on the secondary market (if you can find them). After I wrote that post in 2004, Jeff VanderMeer and I started talking about ways to get Bunch back into print. I sought out every stray Bunch story I could find. I tracked down the rightsholder. I typed up a section of Bunch's novel-in-linked-stories  Moderan  before tendonitis forced me to stop typing much of anything for a few months, and made the thought of returning to typing up Moderan  painful. Various obstacles presented themselves. (I started a master's degree. I became series editor for the  Best American Fantasy  anthologies. I moved to New Jersey. My father died . I moved back to New Hampshire. Etc.) In amidst it all, I couldn't follow up on the idea of reprinting Bunch, thou...

Hopefully, someday my contribution to peace Will help just a bit to turn the tide And perhaps I can tell my children six And later on their own children That at least in the future they need not be silent When they are asked, "Where was your mother, when?"  —Pete Seeger, "My Name Is Lisa Kalvelage" Faculty and grad students at my university are being targeted by right-wing groups who publicize their names and contact information because these faculty and students have criticized racist and sexist acts on campus. The Women's Studies department in particular has been attacked in the state newspaper for the crime of offering supplies to students who were participating in a protest against Donald Trump. The president of our university just sent out an email giving staff and students information about what to do if they are attacked. Numerous students have reported being harassed, spat upon, told they'd be deported, etc. The right wing detests many ...

My publisher, Black Lawrence Press, has announced that for every book they sell through their website from now through the end of the year, they will donate $1 to the American Civil Liberties Union. I will match this for my own book, Blood: Stories , meaning that every copy sold through the BLP website will also send $2 to the ACLU. I'm an ACLU member, and pleased with this choice of an organization to support because so many of BLP's authors are among the groups targeted by harassment, civil rights violations, and hate crimes — all of which are on the rise and likely to continue rising.

In the archives of the New York Times , materials about Germany and the rise of the Nazis to power are vast. It would take days to read through it all. Though it would be an informative experience, I don't have the time to do so at the moment, but I was curious to see the general progression of news and opinion as it all happened. Here are a few items that stuck out to me as I skimmed around: 1932 7 February

Electric Literature  has published an essay I wrote about Robert Aickman , one of the greatest of the 20th century's short story writers: Thirty-five years after his death, Robert Aickman is beginning to receive the attention he deserves as one of the great 20th century writers of short fiction. For the first time, new editions of his books are plentiful, making this a golden age for readers who appreciate the uniquely unsettling effect of his work. Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of p...

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...

And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine — "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)"  First, some axioms. Points. Nodes. Notes. (After which, a few fragments.) From Alfred Nobel's will: "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: ...one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction..." Even if every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature were universally acclaimed as worthy, there would still be more worthy people who had not won the Prize than who had. Thus, the Nobel Prize in Literature will always be disappointing. The history of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a history of constant, repeated disappointment. The Nobel Prize in Literature's purpose is not to recognize the unrecognized, nor to provide wealth to the unwealthy, nor to celebrate literary translation, nor to br...

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...

Whenever I write about a new Coetzee book, I am wary. I think back to what I wrote in 2005 about Slow Man  when it was new, and I cringe. On the one hand, I'm glad to have this record of a first encounter; on the other, the inadequacies of a first encounter with a new Coetzee novel are immense. (With Slow Man,  I learned this vividly a few months later after the book wouldn't stop haunting me, and I reread it, and it was a different book, one I had learned to read only after reading it.) The first sentence of my 2008 Diary of a Bad Year  post is: "This is a book that will need to be reread." For the next book, Summertime  (2009), I didn't write anything until I could spend time thinking and re-thinking it, particularly as it was the final part of a trilogy of fictionalish autobiographies; I first wrote about it in my Conversational Reading  essay on Coetzee and autobiography . For The Childhood of Jesus  (2013), I returned to recording...

via Wikimedia Commons I demonstrate hope. Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes. — Mary Biddinger, "Beatitudes" (I keep writing and rewriting this post.) I thought I knew what I felt about the academic controversy du jour  (a letter sent by a University of Chicago dean to incoming students, telling them not to expect trigger warnings, that academia is not a safe space, that open discussion requires them to listen to speakers they disagree with, etc.) — but I kept writing and rewriting, conversing and re-conversing with friends, and every time I didn't know more than I knew before. Overall, I don't think this controversy is about trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. Overall, I think it is about power and access to power. But then, overall I think most controversies are about power and access to power. Overall— The questions around trigger warnings, safe spaces, and campus speakers are complicated, and specific situations must ...

via Wikimedia Commons I demonstrate hope. Or the hope for hope. Or just more unanswerable holes. — Mary Biddinger, "Beatitudes" (I keep writing and rewriting this post.) I thought I knew what I felt about the academic controversy du jour  (a letter sent by a University of Chicago dean to incoming students, telling them not to expect trigger warnings, that academia is not a safe space, that open discussion requires them to listen to speakers they disagree with, etc.) — but I kept writing and rewriting, conversing and re-conversing with friends, and every time I didn't know more than I knew before. Overall, I don't think this controversy is about trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. Overall, I think it is about power and access to power. But then, overall I think most controversies are about power and access to power. Overall— The questions around trigger warnings, safe spaces, and campus speakers are complicated, and specific situations must ...

I have a brief new essay up at The Story Prize Blog, "Why I Am Not a Poet" . Here's a taste: I care about words, structures, rhythms, resonances, patterns, allusions, borrowings, sentences, images, emotions, voices, dreams, realities, fears, anxieties, failures, yearnings, and much more, but I don't really care about telling stories. The story is a kind of vehicle, or maybe an excuse, or maybe an alibi. The conventions of the story can be followed and forsaken in ways that get me to the other things, the things I care about. All of those things I care about are things common to poetry — some more common to poetry than to prose, I'd bet — and that is why I read poetry, but even though I read poetry, I write prose because I just don't know how to do those things unless I'm writing prose. (I think I would rather be a poet, but I am not.) Continue reading at The Story Prize Blog.

I returned to the WROTE Podcast recently for a 2-part discussion of reading and writing queerly with Dena Hankins, SA "Baz" Collins, and moderator Vance Bastian. (Previously, I did a solo conversation there.) The strength of the discussion is also what makes it sometimes awkward and even contentious: we all have utterly different tastes, touchstones, and experiences. I'm not a natural fit for such a conversation, as I don't think of myself as a "consumer of queer content", but rather as a reader/writer who sometimes reads/writes queer stuff. I hardly ever seek out a book only because it's about a queer topic or has queer characters, and I only ever set out to write such a thing if I'm writing for a specifically queer market, which rarely happens. As I say in the program, if a book's not trying to do something new and different, and if it's not aesthetically interesting to me, I'm unlikely to read it. Why bother? I've got m...

Bonnie Nadzam's recent essay at Literary Hub , "What Should Fiction Do?" , is well worth reading, despite the title. (The only accurate answer to the question in the title [which may not be Nadzam's] is: "Lots of stuff, including what it hasn't done yet...") What resonates for me in the essay is Nadzam's attention to the ways reality effects intersect with questions of identity — indeed, with the ways that fictional texts produce ideas about identity and reality. I especially loved Nadzam's discussion of how she teaches writing with such ideas in mind. Nadzam starts right off with a bang: An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice. I’m not talking about rejecting memoir or characters “based on me.” What I mean is I don’t have the stomach for art that purports to “hold up a mirror to nature,” or for what this implies, philosophically, about selfhood and the world in which we li...

Literary Hub has published one of the most personal essays I've ever written, an essay about growing up as a reader and person during the AIDS crisis. The original title, which doesn't make a good headline and so wasn't used, is "A Long Gay Book, A Life". (I'm always happy for a Gertrude Stein allusion. And quotation, as you'll see in the piece.) The piece is fragmentary, like memory. It roams across the page, probably an effect of my recently revisiting some of Carole Maso's writings. (Also, reading Keguro Macharia's elegant essays and blog posts .) Here's an excerpt: When I was in the eighth grade I wrote a story about a vampire. He was young, roughly my age, entering puberty, entering vampirism. He ached to touch, to kiss, to drink in the loveliness of what he hungered for, but to do so was to admit his monstrosity and to kill what he loved. He feared himself and hated himself. I don’t remember anything else about that story e...

One of my favorite sites on the internet is Largehearted Boy, which brings music and literature together. A core series at LB are the Book Notes: playlists of songs to accompany books. Huge thanks to the Largehearted Boy proprietor, David Gutowski, for inviting me to participate and create a Book Notes entry for Blood: Stories . The The, David Byrne, Cowboy Junkies, Washington Phillips, Arvo Pärt, and many more...

When Kelly J. Baker put out a call for essays about music albums and emotions, I knew immediately what I would propose: An essay about The The's Soul Mining  and what it meant to me as an adolescent. Now, that essay, "Perfect Day", is available on Kelly's site, Cold Takes . Here's the opening: That moment: album — book — car ride. How long ago now? Twenty-five years? Something like that. It was (roughly) sometime between 1988 and 1991, which means sometime between when I was (roughly) 12 years old and 16 years old. Most likely 1989 or 1990. Most likely 14 or 15 years old. Interstate 93 North between Boston, Massachusetts and Plymouth, New Hampshire. Blue Toyota Tercel wagon, my mother driving. Mass market paperback of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick ( Blade Runner tie-in edition). Black Sony Walkman cassette player. Soul Mining by The The. read more

I'm just back from Readercon 27, the annual convention that I've been to more than any other, and for which (a while back) I served on the program committee for a few years. At this point, Readercon feels like a family reunion for me, and it's a delight. Here, I simply want to riff on ideas from one of the panels I participated in. Friday, I was on my first panel of the convention, "Nonfiction for Fiction Writers", with Jonathan Crowe, Keffy Kehrli, Tom Purdom, Rick Wilber. It was good fun. I'd taken lots of notes beforehand, because I wasn't really sure what direction the panel would go in and I wanted to be prepared and to not forget any particular favorites. Ultimately, and expectedly, I only got to mention a few of the items I was prepared to talk about. However, since I still have my notes, I can expand on it all here...

original image by Joseph Maclise In the Weird Fiction Review conversation I had with Eric Schaller , Eric asked me to talk a bit about designing the cover of Blood: Stories , and in my recent WROTE Podcast conversation , I mentioned an alternate version of the cover that starred Ronald Reagan (this was, in fact, the cover that my publisher originally thought we should use, until she couldn't get the image we ended up using out of her mind). I thought it might be fun to share some of the mock-ups I did that we didn't use — the covers that might have been...

The marvelous Weird Fiction Review  website has now posted a conversation that Eric Schaller and I had about our books, our magazine The Revelator , the weirdness of New Hampshire, and other topics. Along with this, WFR  has posted Eric's story "Voices Carry"  (originally in Shadows & Tall Trees ) and my story "The Lake" (originally in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ). So if you're curious about us or our writings (or just utterly bored), Weird Fiction Review  is a great place to start.

I'm thrilled that my A Cappella Zoo  story "Killing Fairies" has just been reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2016  edited by Steve Berman for Lethe Press . The table of contents for Best Gay Stories  this year is quite strong, and it's an honor to be among this company. It's especially nice to have my story in a book with a story by Richard Bowes, since "Killing Fairies" is my attempt to write Bowesian tale: something that skirts the line between fiction and memoir. In this case, I wanted to preserve a few memories of my first year of college before those memories slip away (they grow dimmer and dimmer), and I thought a fun way to do that would be to give myself the challenge of trying to write like Rick. It's harder than it looks. The problem for me was that my memories didn't add up to a story. There were a couple of really great characters (two of the strongest personalities I ever met in my life), but no story, just encounters that ultimat...

The good folks at Electric Literature invited me to converse with Adrian Van Young, perhaps not knowing that Adrian and I had recently discovered we are in many ways lost brothers, and so we could go on and on and on... And we did. We talked about  Texas Chainsaw Massacre , The Sublime, writing advice, writers we like, Michael Haneke, neoliberalism,  The Witch , and all sorts of other things. It was a lot of fun and we could have gone on at twice the length, but eventually we had to return to our lives. Many thanks to Electric Lit  for being so welcoming.

I have been busy and have neglected this blog. I forgot to make a post here about some of the most exciting news of my year: I have a story in the current issue of my favorite literary magazine, Conjunctions . It's titled "Mass" and it is about, among other things, a mass shooting. Early this morning, at least 50 people were killed and 53 wounded in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times  is currently calling this the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. I'm not going to write about the gun politics of this. For that, please read the work of Patrick Blanchfield , particularly "So There's Just Been a Mass Shooting" , "God and Guns" , and "The Gun Control We Deserve" . (He's excellent on Twitter , as well, if you want his most recent thoughts.) I have sputtered on about the topic in the past , not always coherently. Patrick is better at it, and better informed, than I. Thinking through the complex, contradic...

Kenneth James is editing the journals of Samuel Delany for publication. Volume 1 is coming out from Wesleyan University Press in December. For the future volumes, Ken needs help with funding. If you already know how valuable this project is, don't read on. Just go donate. But if you need some convincing, please read on...

A new interview with me — the first to come out since Blood: Stories was released — is now up at One Story 's blog, part of the publicity leading up to the One Story Literary Debutante Ball . Many thanks to Melissa Bean for conducting the interview, and for her very kind words about the book. Here's a taste: MB: On that note, what inspires your stories? MC: Daydreams and nightmares created by anxieties, fears, and desires. I don’t write fiction for the sake of therapy, per se, but I am prone to anxiety and I have an active imagination, so it’s often the case that a story starts from one of my weird anxiety fantasies. Read more at One Story...

This afternoon, I will be flying to Los Angeles for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference . Here's my schedule of events, in case you're in the area and want to say hello... Thursday, 3/31: Black Lawrence Press reading and party at CB1 Gallery , 7pm Friday, 4/1: Signing at Black Lawrence Press booth (#1526), 1-2pm Saturday, 4/2: signing at the GLBTQ Caucus Hospitality Booth (#633), 12-12.30pm And of course I'll be wandering around the conference and spending lots of time at the book fair.

Once again, chaos and luck have conspired to release another issue of the venerable Revelator magazine into the world! In this issue, you can read new fiction by Sofia Samatar and John Chu; an excursion into musical history by Brian Francis Slattery; surreal prose poems by Peter Dubé; an essay by Minsoo Kang; revelatory, rare, and historical Wizard of Oz comics; art by Chad Woody; and, among other esoterica, shotgunned books! Go forth now, my friends, and revel in The Truth ... and All!

This review originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Z Magazine . I'd forgotten about it until somebody today mentioned that it's the anniversary of most of the striking workers' demands being met (12 March 1912), and so today seemed like a good one to post this: Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream   by Bruce Watson New York, Viking, 2005, 337 pp. Lawrence, Massachusetts was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, what might be called one of the greatest mill towns in the United States, but "greatest" is a difficult term, and underneath it hide all the conditions that erupted during the frigid winter of 1912 into a strike that affected both the labor movement and the textile industry for decades afterward.             Bruce Watson's compelling and deeply researched chronicle of the strike takes its name from a poem and song that have come to be associ...

John Eliot Gardiner, from Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Preface): A nagging suspicion grows that many writers, overawed and dazzled by Bach, still tacitly assume a direct correlation between his immense genius and his stature as a person. At best this can make them unusually tolerant of his faults, which are there for all to see: a certain tetchiness, contrariness and self importance, timidity in meeting intellectual challenges, and a fawning attitude toward royal personages and to authority in general that mixes suspicion with gain-seeking. But why should it be assumed that great music emanates from a great human being? Music may inspire and uplift us, but it does not have to be the manifestation of an inspiring (as opposed to an inspired) individual. In some cases there may be such correspondence, but we are not obliged to presume that it is so. It is very possible that "the teller may be so much slighter or less attractive than the tale." [ source ] The very...

Eric Bennett  has an MFA from Iowa , the MFA of MFAs. (He also has a Ph.D. in Lit from Harvard, so he is a man of fine and rare academic pedigree.) Bennett's recent book Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War is largely about the Writers' Workshop at Iowa from roughly 1945 to the early 1980s or so. It melds, often explicitly,  The Cultural Cold War  with  The Program Era , adding some archival research as well as Bennett's own feeling that the work of politically committed writers such as Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck was marginalized and forgotten by the writing workshop hegemony in favor of individualistic, apolitical writing. I don't share Bennett's apparent taste in fiction (he seems to consider Dreiser, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, etc. great writers; I don't), but I sympathize with his sense of some writing workshops' powerful, narrowing effect on American fiction and publishing for at...

a box of Blood Though delayed, my debut collection, Blood: Stories , now exists. I know because I received copies of it straight from the printer. That means it's also going to arrive at the distributor within the next day or so, and from there ... out into the world. I'll have plenty more to say later, I'm sure. For now, I'm just going to go marvel at the thing itself...