Quote from poet Louise Glück:
The fundamental experience of the writer “is helplessness… Most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to write differently. It is a life dignified… by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.”
Marisa Silver on the short story:
“The short story, to me, carries the essence of what is magical about writing: that a full human being can be conjured in a sentence, that an emotional state can be suggested with two or three behavioral gestures, that something ineffable but essential about life can be conveyed in a mere twenty. Sometimes you stand in front of a painting at a museum and the image just hits you. It transports you. With one gaze, an entire narrative opens up and you are enlarged. That’s what a great short story can do.”
Read the full interview here.
“My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.”
That’s from Donald Ray Pollock’s “Real Life,” the opening story from his collection Knockemstiff.
I’ve been thinking about first lines a lot lately, mostly because my reading time is so limited these days, and because if a story/novel/essay doesn’t grab me with its first line, I may not make it any farther.
It’s sort of a sad commentary, I guess. Yes, my attention span is dwindling, my readerly patience has likewise diminished, my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to (three kids, lack of sleep, blah blah blah).
I haven’t read Pollock’s book yet (I just got it), but the first sentence drew me in, made me want to read more. I read the line and it immediately got me wondering: What kind of a father shows his seven year old how to hurt someone? What will happen from here? There’s also a kind of matter-of-factness to the tone that really works.
First lines are so important. You used to hear that the first page of a story was crucial. But that first line — it’s the initial communication between reader and writer, and it can be so powerful when done well.
I’m planning to periodically post other story first lines that grab me. We’ll see how it goes.
You can read another Pollock story (with another great opening line: “I was hiding out in Frankie Johnson’s car, a canary-yellow ’69 Super Bee that could shit and get.”) here.
That’s the question asked by Gregory Cowles in, appropriately, a Paper Cuts blog post.
The occasion is the publication of Jose Saramago’s The Notebook, a compilation of blog posts that the Nobel Prize winner wrote from September 2008 to August 2009.
Cowles’ answer to the above question?
“[Saramago’s blog posts are] fascinating and smart and provocative, and a lot of fun to dip into. But they strike me as too topical and too fleeting to count as literature, and they reinforce my impression… that blogs are by their nature part journalism, part journal.”
So that’s, uh, a no.
Mark Sarvas @ The Elegant Variation recently posted this poem by Edward Hirsch. I’d never read it before. Definitely will resonate for anyone who’s watched a parent go down this path…
Lay Back the Darkness
By Edward Hirsch
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.
Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,
though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,
But a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.
—
You can hear Hirsch read the poem here.
