Andrew Roe

The latest issue of the super-fantastic SmokeLong Quarterly is now live, and it includes my story “Stalling.”

There’s also an interview.

Lots of great folks in this issue (as usual), including: James Tadd Adcox, Grant Bailie, Martin Cloutier, Emily Darrell, Peter DeMarco, Ryan Dilbert, S. H. Gall, Amie Hartman, Tara Laskowski, David Lindsay, Sean Lovelace, Dennis Mahagin, Andrew McIntosh, Gary Moshimer, Jefferson Navicky, Alec Niedenthal, Glen Pourciau, Curtis Smith, Scott Stealey, and Brandi Wells.

“…I’d hide out in the basement of Elliott Bay or in the top floor of the Athenian and in my sporadic blue notebooks track a reading list — Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et al. — that was really little more than a syllabus for a course on exile. You could probably dismiss this as one of those charming agonies of late adolescence, but let me suggest that it’s also a logical first step in developing an aesthetic, a reach toward historical beauty, the desire to join yourself to what’s already been appreciated and admired. You want to find yourself in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance. For reasons both sensible and suspect folks today are uneasy with the idea of a tradition, but the intellectual luxury of this stance wasn’t available to me, and I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I’d have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being myself.”

— Charles D’Ambrosio, “Seattle, 1974”

I remember reading this thing by Charles D’Ambrosio a few years ago. (Thanks to Katherine Taylor, who’s guest blogging at The Elegant Variation, for resurrecting it.)

There’s a lot that I like about D’Ambrosio — mostly his writing, which I’m a huge admirer of. I go back to his stories again and again, and I’m always amazed at the depth of the writing, the emotional power, the craftsmanship. In fact, he’s probably the writer who’s made the greatest impact on me in the past few years.

Additionally, D’Ambrosio seems like an old-school kind of guy, which I also like. Here’s a quote from the above-linked piece, describing his take on doing publicity for a book:

“I feel sort of indentured, obligated to serve, to go out and play the public role of the writer, even though I know, in my heart, that the real act of writing, the one that matters to me — putting words on paper — ended many months earlier when I finished the final revisions and signed off on the galleys. I’m a writer, and that’s my job, and I work hard at it. I really don’t think any of the rest of it should be my business. I don’t understand it. I’m not a salesman or a promoter or even a publisher, but if I liked that stuff, if I wanted to be a full-time huckster, then I imagine there would have to be faster and far more lucrative ways to break into the business than writing short stories and literary essays. In other words, writing a book is a really crappy way to launch a career in the schmatta trade. I don’t like sales of any sort. Something in the nature of the transaction itself makes me uncomfortable. I can’t hardly buy my own clothes without trauma.“

The essay also includes a moving fan letter that D’Ambrosio received. And, too, there’s this stop-and-make-you-think quote from Eugenio Montale:

“A fragment of music or poetry, a page, a picture begin to live in the act of their creation but they complete their existence when they circulate, and it does not matter whether the circulation is vast or restricted; strictly speaking, the public can consist of one person, so long as that person is not the author himself.”

The New Yorker‘s Deborah Treisman on editing David Foster Wallace:

“David was wonderful to edit because he was so involved with the minutiae of his work—he had a long explanation for every decision that he’d made, and yet, at the same time, he was willing to rethink anything that didn’t seem to be landing well for the reader. Editing him was sometimes a more painstaking process than editing most writers, but it was a genuine pleasure to engage with his intelligence and with his way of thinking about language, from how it supported narrative trajectory and character development all the way down to the punctuation. He was truly interested in the fine points of grammar, and every rule he broke he broke deliberately, with a specific artistic purpose in mind. Those long paragraphs—as off-putting as they can seem—were entirely purposeful.”

More here.

The New Yorker also recently published another DFW story (“All That”), which is an excerpt from The Pale King. Which reminds me: I’m way, way behind on my reading.