Tag: fiction

Carousel #8

Joseph Dante2 Comments

(A somewhat late carousel. I found a lot of things last week, but I just forgot to keep track of some of them. Sorry!)

  1. No Pulitzer Prize was given out for the Fiction category this year. It was quite hilarious to see the deluge of sarcastic and infuriated comments by writers about the Pulitzer committee on Twitter. But here’s Ann Patchett’s much more reasonable reaction to it.
  2. I like this post about pseudonyms and writers’ identities, especially as someone with a half-pseudonym kind of thing going on.
  3. Speaking of pseudonyms, a writer who goes by the internet name of xTx has a really great story in The Collagist (which is probably my new favorite online lit journal, by the way).
  4. My sister has been pressuring me into reading The Hunger Games for a while and I caved. I’ve just finished the first book of the series and I’m beginning to read the second. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it would be something I would enjoy, but I have – more than I expected to, anyway. There’s also this great personal essay by Roxane Gay that helped to persuade me as well.
  5. This story by David Foster Wallace is very chilling. I think it will stay with me for a while.

Writing from Home

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

Home has always been more strange than familiar.

This is a video clip I found while going through old stuff on my computer today. It shows my sister throwing rocks into the lake by our house. You can hear Nana laughing. I’m also laughing to myself right now because the clip is actually labeled “WhatWeDoforFuninFlorida.mov” in my videos folder.

I make fun of Florida a lot. I was born here and I’ve lived here all my life. It’s quite a strange place to live, to be honest, if you don’t know anything about it outside of your occasional trip down to Disney World (or any of the other theme parks) or to Sanibel Island for the nice beaches. Although, if you watch the news enough, you might know something about how often people get murdered too. The perpetual heat makes people do crazy things, I think. I also live in one of the most popular counties (and attended one of the most overcrowded universities), so it is the very definition of hot and crowded.

Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, often uses Florida as fodder for her fiction, spinning it into her own mythology and an eccentric ensemble of characters. I write about it sometimes too. I write about neighbors and neighborhoods a lot, and hurricane parties. I remember writing a short story once about a gated community where the neighbors all gather outside after a hurricane has passed them over. That’s one unique experience that I’ve lived through quite a few times. It’s an interesting experience seeing all the people gather into the streets – sometimes people you hardly know at all – and sit down together to share some lunch, games, and conversation.

Other than that, I write about escape too. I think about leaving. Really, there isn’t much here to see besides all the housing communities, shopping plazas, and miles and miles of sprawl. I sometimes wonder how things would’ve been different if I grew up in a city in New York instead, which is where my parents are from. How different it is there. I wonder if I would’ve grown up into a writer at all. I say this because, as a child, boredom and an overactive imagination were a potent combination, and Florida – despite how much I pick it apart – has proven to be the perfect place to grow something like that. New York would’ve made the process almost too easy, maybe, for something like that to happen. Maybe all the color and culture would’ve been too much – there would’ve been less reason for me to write as a kid because the stories would be happening to me instead of me having to make them up for myself.

Edit: I received a comment about this post elsewhere discussing how I was implying that people who come from the city are more likely to have a weak imagination, which is obviously not true. Plenty of great writers come from such environments and I didn’t mean to insinuate that. This post is more speculation about my own personal trajectory.

Writing for Yourself

Joseph Dante4 Comments

After all this time, I’ve never really kept a private journal for myself. I mean, I wrote stories in black-and-white composition books when I was little and I had my own online journal when I was a teenager (still kind of do), but other people always read these things.  My family and teachers enjoyed reading my books and my friends commented on my journal. There was always this audience, even though I claimed to be writing for myself.

Well, I’ve finally decided to change that and start writing in a simple brown notebook that no one knows about. No one knows about it and no one reads it. It’s only for my unfiltered, unedited thoughts. There aren’t any stories, just these wide strokes of feelings vomited on to the page. I don’t plan on articulating myself properly with this – it’s mostly just for therapy. Looking back on everything else, I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t find a place for this before. No big deal I guess, except for how strange it suddenly makes me feel and how it’s made me realize that maybe I haven’t really been writing what I feel, and how, maybe, I’ve still been a bit too safe in how I go about it.

If someone finds it, I’m not going to act like a teenager. If they read it, they can be horrified or disgusted or amused. Probably a combination of all the above.

It’s also made me realize how awful I am in verbalizing my own feelings. I can’t seem to spit anything out. I usually end up laughing because it makes me so uncomfortable. Maybe it makes me scared. Either way, I seem to treat my emotions like they aren’t really my emotions. Writing about them in a fictional way has never been difficult, but writing about them without the fiction is something entirely different.

The Small Things and the Big Things

Joseph Dante2 Comments

This week, I spent some time with Melissa, dear friend and fellow writer, and we went to the same Barnes and Noble I was talking about a few weeks ago. Apparently, I’m not going crazy because there have been articles now where the stores are actually stocking less and less books. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I managed to pick up Other People We Married, a short story collection by Emma Straub that I was somewhat surprised to see (maybe I’ll tweet Emma and tell her how it was right in the front of the store, in the “new fiction” section), and Melissa got me The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz is one of her favorites). We  also had a very nice breakfast together and talked about our current writing projects. She has been mostly working on fairly large projects, while I’ve been working on small things. It got me thinking about my own bigger, more involved long-term projects I’ve had in my head for a while.

Here are some of those long-term projects:

  1. A coming of age novel. Probably the one I have thought about the most over the years, and the one most likely to happen eventually. I have names for the characters I want to write about and short backgrounds on who they are, as well as the title for the novel itself. I have scraps of conversations I want them to have and recurring symbols and images to flesh their world out. What I don’t have: what kind of point of view I want to use (first-person or third? alternating between characters?) and the central conflict or main plot thread that will tie everything and everyone together.
  2. A children’s book. My family thinks I have the capacity to write one of these (or a series of these) over everything else. I definitely have the gist of a story written down somewhere, but it’s nothing fleshed out yet. Hypothetically, it would read something like a cross between The Phantom Tollbooth and The Little Prince in that it will have an imaginative world with curious characters, and hopefully can be enjoyed by both children and adults alike due to it being a story with both simple language and underlying symbolism. The main issue with this one is the fact that I think it may be too morbid or mature for children. But I know there are plenty of strange books out there like that anyway (see: anything by Roald Dahl, mostly).
  3. A short story collection. It’s the form I’m used to. I’ve written an online collection before called Letters for Burning. Short fiction is something I’ve always been naturally drawn to and I love writing it.
  4. An epic, sprawling novel with a light touch of magical realism or mythology. I’m not sure I can handle the “epic” and “sprawling” parts, but I’d like to experiment with this. I’ve written short stories that read like this, so who knows. I don’t have any ideas for it yet though.
  5. A novel that is more like interconnected stories about a community of characters. I guess this one would be in the vein of something like Winesburg, Ohio or A Visit From the Goon Squad. I like this idea quite a lot because it’s like writing short stories, but with recurring characters, themes, and timelines. No idea for anything yet, but I think maybe it would involve a gated community based on the one in which I live and how the families and their surrounding eccentric neighbors come to relate to each other.

Read More Female Writers!

Joseph Dante8 Comments

When it comes to dealing with other people’s reading habits, something that has always bothered me is the way so many readers of fiction largely ignore women writers, whether consciously or unconsciously. I always think to myself: I must be dreaming! This is 2012, and this is still going on? Yet I’ve encountered (and continue to encounter) quite a few male readers who simply just don’t read any at all (maybe a short story by Flannery O’Connor or two, and maybe some Joyce Carol Oates, maybe). It just seems really extraordinary to me.

Obviously, there is something to be said here about patriarchy and how women have been stifled and silenced throughout history when it comes to writing, philosophy, the arts, the Western canon, etc. The other day, I came across these statistics that detail the gender breakdown of contributions to the biggest literary journals around. Shocked? Well, I suppose you could reasonably guess the results without even looking. I know I did. But the gender disparity is still fairly alarming regardless, and the divide is far more gaping than I imagined. There have been several responses to these statistics already, with both editors and readers alike trying to come up with possible solutions to address these problems. Other relevant questions might be: How many men actually submit to these magazines in comparison to women? If more men do (which I suspect is the case), why is that? Do women still feel powerless in their attempts to become great literary writers, or is their attention simply focused elsewhere? Or both?

I remember once coming across a particular male reader’s blog discussing how few women writers he has given the time of day. It went something like this: “I’ve noticed I don’t read female writers at all, but I think that’s simply a coincidence. It’s just the type of books I like.” Honestly, with all the women writers I can name (even those considered “literary”), I don’t think that’s a very convincing argument.

And what about the newer and upcoming online literary journals? Is this disparity the same for them, or is it becoming more equal? This is just based on my own observations (no official statistics here or anything), but I do suspect there may be a much more equal gender representation among these journals, than say, The New Yorker.

With that said, I think it would be great if people actively tried to search out more books by female authors this year. As of now, I’ve only read one novel so far, but at least I can safely say that that is, in fact, just a coincidence (back in 2011, I actually read more female writers than I did male writers). There are many on my to-read list already, and I look forward to getting to them. Particularly Carson McCullers, who I’ve grown to love very much recently.