H: "The voice is working, but the novel so far shies away from intimacy."
S: "So I need more...intimacy?"
H: "Exactly."
S: "Does that mean that I should write a scene where they have sex?"
H: "Not exactly."
S: "But sex would fix the intimacy problem, wouldn't it?"
H: "Well, that's one way to fix it."
S: "They're both from incredibly repressed backgrounds; if they have sex they'd probably die from guilt."
H: "Still. Intimacy."
S: "Right. I'll think about it."
~Later that day, while meeting with the other degree candidates~
A: "What are you doing tonight?"
S: "Drinking whisky and writing sex for Henry."
A: "...That sounds wrong on so many levels."
Big secret: Everyone's already had the Big Serious Earth-shattering conversations, and I'm probably not going to revolutionize the novel through my supervision discussions. But they certainly make me do things I wouldn't do otherwise.
In other news, my critical supervisor suddenly adores the three thesis chapters I've given her, and I submit for my upgrade in a few weeks. So, yay return of sanity, however fleetingly you may grace me with your divine presence!
Friday, 23 May 2014
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
A shed of one's own
About six months ago, David bought a house. And behind that house was a garden, and in that garden was a shed. And I said, "dibs!"
This past weekend the spiders were energetically evicted, a school desk was acquired from the British Heart Foundation, and Dave breathed a relieved sigh for his unvarnished teak dining room table, which I had previously colonized and may have scratched just a little bit.
My upgrade panel has been slated for the 26th of June, which means I need to hand in all of the material on the 5th of June if I want my examiners to not hate me, which means that I should have started panicking yesterday. The fiction is nearly finished, but my critical supervisor thinks that the two paragraphs at the end of the thesis sample, where I sketchily describe the research I haven't been able to finish, are the best part and that I need to develop them into the bulk of the submission. Which seems to be a standard supervisor response. So I'm under house arrest and wishing books had a Ctrl+F option until I turn out a draft she likes or I lose my mind and run away from home, whichever comes first.
 |
| Also pictured: the swing-set abandoned by the previous owner. And the pond. And a bottle of slug killer. And a million spiders. |
This past weekend the spiders were energetically evicted, a school desk was acquired from the British Heart Foundation, and Dave breathed a relieved sigh for his unvarnished teak dining room table, which I had previously colonized and may have scratched just a little bit. |
| The chocolate is vital to the process. Trust me. |
Friday, 2 May 2014
I'm sensing a trend...
Last night I was going to go to bed early, because allergies are evil. But after thirty minutes or so of cycling a paragraph I'd just read on the 1980s textbooks lawsuits through my head I got back up for juuuust one minute to try and find the books they were referencing one more time.
A lot of what I'm doing right now involves literature textbooks that were in use from 1973 to the mid 1990s. They're easier to find than I thought they would be, because people will try and make a buck off of anything on the internet and the 70s aren't that long ago, but they're also harder to find than I expected, because the publishers got really funky when they titled their books and the sellers don't follow a set way of listing them, and the 70s were about 40 years ago and who saves textbooks that long? (The books on my desk are from the Adventures in Reading series; it took a considerable amount of looking to figure out that Adventures in Reading is for ninth grade, while Adventures in Appreciation is for tenth, and that the Heritage edition is from 1980 and has different content from the Pegasus edition, which is from 1989. And that the Pegasus edition existed at all, because for some reason almost no one wanted to sell me that edition of the book.)
So I just-one-minuted myself to 1 AM, but I figured out the publisher's material structure and titling scheme, and found the books, and ordered the books, and am now waiting for the books to drop through my mail slot so I can find out if I really did figure out the titling scheme or if they were all mislisted.
Which is exactly what happened the last time I had a breakthrough and found Adventures in Reading.
All of my massive leaps of progress happen at 1 AM.
Why do I even try and get work done during the day?
Monday, 28 April 2014
A home for "Target Practice"
I'm a bit tardy with this, as the e-mail came the day I packed up to go to America last-minute, but the first chapter of The Shore, in which Chloe appears and which I have been trying to home appropriately for a while, has been published in issue 5 of The Fog Horn Magazine.
I'm particularly happy about this, as the editors did not ask me to change the ending to be 'a little bit nicer', which has made me turn down offers of magazine publication before; many thanks are due to Lucy Luck (agent extraordinaire) for brokering the arrangement. Also, The Fog Horn has a relatively low subscription cost - it works out to $1 per published story, and gets you free access to all of the back issues. 5% of their proceeds go to 826LA, a non-profit that supports young students in developing creative and critical writing skills. As a student that's never been able to justify the subscription cost of one of the big literary magazines and has in the past gotten quite creative about funding her education, this is too much happy for words.
(Props to the Randolph College Writing Lab, which left copies of The Sun, OneStory, and similar lying about for the consumption of the great unwashed. Also, I suppose, thanks to the rich students of that institution who indiscriminately abandoned designer goods and electronics on move-out day and funded my return to the UK for the Masters degree.)
Also, another happy thing that effects literally no one outside my program: I've been given funding for the rest of my degree, provided I finish the degree by the end of 2016. They don't publicize how many funded places are on offer, but the general consensus is that there are not many; I know exactly one person in the cohort that is funded, and we're a gossipy species. The Hub is pretty lax about sending out notices that all of the funding has been dispensed and that hopefuls can stop hyperventilating every time a new message pings in their inbox, so I may be casually avoiding department social events until the tension dies down. Just because no one talks about researchers being assassinated for their funding doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I'm particularly happy about this, as the editors did not ask me to change the ending to be 'a little bit nicer', which has made me turn down offers of magazine publication before; many thanks are due to Lucy Luck (agent extraordinaire) for brokering the arrangement. Also, The Fog Horn has a relatively low subscription cost - it works out to $1 per published story, and gets you free access to all of the back issues. 5% of their proceeds go to 826LA, a non-profit that supports young students in developing creative and critical writing skills. As a student that's never been able to justify the subscription cost of one of the big literary magazines and has in the past gotten quite creative about funding her education, this is too much happy for words.
(Props to the Randolph College Writing Lab, which left copies of The Sun, OneStory, and similar lying about for the consumption of the great unwashed. Also, I suppose, thanks to the rich students of that institution who indiscriminately abandoned designer goods and electronics on move-out day and funded my return to the UK for the Masters degree.)
Also, another happy thing that effects literally no one outside my program: I've been given funding for the rest of my degree, provided I finish the degree by the end of 2016. They don't publicize how many funded places are on offer, but the general consensus is that there are not many; I know exactly one person in the cohort that is funded, and we're a gossipy species. The Hub is pretty lax about sending out notices that all of the funding has been dispensed and that hopefuls can stop hyperventilating every time a new message pings in their inbox, so I may be casually avoiding department social events until the tension dies down. Just because no one talks about researchers being assassinated for their funding doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Friday, 11 April 2014
Walk to the moon
This spring the uni hosted, among other luminaries, Margaret Atwood and Eleanor Catton. And somehow I managed to hear both of them speak from quite close up. And though that was in itself a wonderful thing, my biggest takeaway was not from what they said, specifically, about writing, but who they are as writers.
Craft books go on at length about subverting expectations, but Margaret Atwood did so in the flesh. She led the conversation places that the interviewer obviously had no idea they would go. She brought a rag doll a fan had silkscreened her face onto, to answer the questions that she as a writer did not want to answer. She sang a hymn from Year of the Flood. We had, through the course of the Literary Festival, become accustomed to hearing Writers speak, each time with all the dignity and gravitas of the capital W, but she did not perform to our expectations. She was unapologetically who she had decided to be, with the fire-hardened edge of a person that has probably discovered through experience that this is simply the only way to be.
I want to be Margaret Atwood when I grow up because I adore the complexity and skill of her writing, and I feel a biographical familiarity with her wilderness upbringing and hope that I can also turn the feral aspects of my nature to good use.
Eleanor Catton I want to be for different reasons. She has gone down in record as being the youngest person to win the Booker, the first New Zealander to win the Booker, and the author of the longest book to win the Booker. Which, in light of the prize being opened to Americans the year that she won the Booker, sounds surprisingly like a gauntlet bouncing across a stone floor to me. Hopefully when I turn twenty-eight and some other American is the first American to win the Booker my dangerously competitive streak will bed itself down until needed.
It seems, when you look at it, an impossible thing, the position she is in now. But there is, as there is to everything, a logical progression of events.
In conversation during the Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton explained how she had gotten where she has gotten. She had no television as a child, so she spent her time reading long Victorian novels. Her parents encouraged this, and she got into University. She did well in University, so she did a Masters. The Masters required her to write a book, so she wrote a book. Having written a book, she had a book to sell, and, being in New Zealand's tiny literary market, she was able to sell it directly to a local publisher. Because she was published in New Zealand, an English agent who loves Kiwi fiction found her book, signed her on, and sold her in the rest of the world. Because she had a successful book, she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's workshop. Because she was in the Iowa Writer's workshop she had the space and the tools to begin writing the book that would win the Booker. Yes, massive amounts of discipline, skill, and hard work were also involved, but the point is that she didn't go from being a teenager reading three-volume novels to touring the world talking about The Luminaries in a single step. There were many steps, and when they occurred they were logical steps, not to the ultimate outcome but in a general direction. So what I learned from Eleanor Catton is that, with enough small, logical steps, you can walk to the moon.
Craft books go on at length about subverting expectations, but Margaret Atwood did so in the flesh. She led the conversation places that the interviewer obviously had no idea they would go. She brought a rag doll a fan had silkscreened her face onto, to answer the questions that she as a writer did not want to answer. She sang a hymn from Year of the Flood. We had, through the course of the Literary Festival, become accustomed to hearing Writers speak, each time with all the dignity and gravitas of the capital W, but she did not perform to our expectations. She was unapologetically who she had decided to be, with the fire-hardened edge of a person that has probably discovered through experience that this is simply the only way to be.
I want to be Margaret Atwood when I grow up because I adore the complexity and skill of her writing, and I feel a biographical familiarity with her wilderness upbringing and hope that I can also turn the feral aspects of my nature to good use.
Eleanor Catton I want to be for different reasons. She has gone down in record as being the youngest person to win the Booker, the first New Zealander to win the Booker, and the author of the longest book to win the Booker. Which, in light of the prize being opened to Americans the year that she won the Booker, sounds surprisingly like a gauntlet bouncing across a stone floor to me. Hopefully when I turn twenty-eight and some other American is the first American to win the Booker my dangerously competitive streak will bed itself down until needed.
It seems, when you look at it, an impossible thing, the position she is in now. But there is, as there is to everything, a logical progression of events.
In conversation during the Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton explained how she had gotten where she has gotten. She had no television as a child, so she spent her time reading long Victorian novels. Her parents encouraged this, and she got into University. She did well in University, so she did a Masters. The Masters required her to write a book, so she wrote a book. Having written a book, she had a book to sell, and, being in New Zealand's tiny literary market, she was able to sell it directly to a local publisher. Because she was published in New Zealand, an English agent who loves Kiwi fiction found her book, signed her on, and sold her in the rest of the world. Because she had a successful book, she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's workshop. Because she was in the Iowa Writer's workshop she had the space and the tools to begin writing the book that would win the Booker. Yes, massive amounts of discipline, skill, and hard work were also involved, but the point is that she didn't go from being a teenager reading three-volume novels to touring the world talking about The Luminaries in a single step. There were many steps, and when they occurred they were logical steps, not to the ultimate outcome but in a general direction. So what I learned from Eleanor Catton is that, with enough small, logical steps, you can walk to the moon.
It's raining dead white guys
The upgrade panels are mostly slated for June, so all of us that will be going through the grinder have hunkered down to write. Henry had mentioned that I would need to come up with ten thousand words of creative work and five thousand words of critical, so imagine my surprise when various cohort members passed along the official guidelines. Which call for documents. That satisfy requirements. And forms.
I wouldn't be surprised if, should I make it to the end, they handed me a diploma and it turned out to be a degree in filling out forms.
Everyone else's critical projects are more traditionally literature oriented, so whenever I hang out with them I hear them drop names like Foucalt and Bakhtin and Adorno and Derrida. And I stay in the corner and occasionally mutter to myself about free speech. Because interdisciplinary work looks good on funding applications, but really has no space of belonging in the bar on a Friday night when the topic is French philosophers.
 |
| Pictured: the Bakhtin of my childhood. That and The Philosophers Song is my entire relationship with Philosophy. |
And in between crises of confidence I've managed to rattle out about five thousand words on censorship in general and expurgation in particular, which has made me realize how odd it is to study something that is, by definition, an absence. With censorship you have a thick black line, a clear enemy of free speech, concrete behavior to point to and say, "this is bad." And most readers will reflexively agree with you, because over here we're all brought up to think freedom=good without really considering if we agree with the ramifications of speech that is truly free. With expurgation, you indicate an absence, and your reader may respond, "there's nothing there," to which you must retort, "Exactly!"with a twitch of the eyelid. So it is not completely unexpected when the reader then hands you a tin foil hat and tells you to stay away from high places and sharp objects.
At least when the panel is over and done with they'll let me alone to get on with things. And it's spring again. Nothing can be that bad when you no longer risk frostbite while hunting in the rolling stacks.
 |
| The view from my living room window - top floor of council housing means that the zombies have to eat the first three floors before they get to me. |
Thursday, 3 April 2014
The unbearable lightness of degree work.
Sometimes I forget that I'm actually doing a degree, that much extraneous paperwork crops up. Granted, it's all important, life-and-career related work, but I'm starting to really look forward to term breaking up, the Hub emptying out, and all the little undergrads wandering away so I can get in some quality time with my thesis work.
The upgrade panel is supposed to be in the first week or two of June - it's usual to give a body more time between starting the degree and upgrading, up to a year and a half, but there appears to be sudden pressure on the Uni to move along students in general and internationals in particular as quickly as possible.
I have enough fiction drafted for three upgrade panels, but the critical part has me nervous. Dr. Potter recommended that I start off with just reading around as much as possible to get a firm grasp on the subject, so now I have a lot of opinions and not much else. Well, tell a lie; I have opinions, subject matter coming in the post, lots of notes, and a deadline of 5k words for her in about a month.
To limber up for the critical writing draft, Dr. Potter decided that we should do a close reading together. So I found a piece of literature that I knew had been expurgated in one of the books I was looking at, read it over, and brought it to her office. At which point she read it over and asked for my analysis. And after doing an imitation of a beached trout for a few moments, I gave her a pretty solid analysis of the effect of expurgation on the meaning and impact of the extract. So apparently all I'm short on when it comes to the critical piece is chutzpa.
Some of the material I'm reading for background is really delicious though. Over the weekend I may have accidentally plowed through a history of expurgation written in 1969 instead of doing the work I actually was supposed to do, because it was so wonderfully tongue-in-cheek the whole way through. So between that and the heavily annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet that I also plowed through as background work, I now know more dirty lyrics and bad words than I thought possible when I started the degree.
The upgrade panel is supposed to be in the first week or two of June - it's usual to give a body more time between starting the degree and upgrading, up to a year and a half, but there appears to be sudden pressure on the Uni to move along students in general and internationals in particular as quickly as possible.
I have enough fiction drafted for three upgrade panels, but the critical part has me nervous. Dr. Potter recommended that I start off with just reading around as much as possible to get a firm grasp on the subject, so now I have a lot of opinions and not much else. Well, tell a lie; I have opinions, subject matter coming in the post, lots of notes, and a deadline of 5k words for her in about a month.
To limber up for the critical writing draft, Dr. Potter decided that we should do a close reading together. So I found a piece of literature that I knew had been expurgated in one of the books I was looking at, read it over, and brought it to her office. At which point she read it over and asked for my analysis. And after doing an imitation of a beached trout for a few moments, I gave her a pretty solid analysis of the effect of expurgation on the meaning and impact of the extract. So apparently all I'm short on when it comes to the critical piece is chutzpa.
Some of the material I'm reading for background is really delicious though. Over the weekend I may have accidentally plowed through a history of expurgation written in 1969 instead of doing the work I actually was supposed to do, because it was so wonderfully tongue-in-cheek the whole way through. So between that and the heavily annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet that I also plowed through as background work, I now know more dirty lyrics and bad words than I thought possible when I started the degree.
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