Month / May 2007
Influences
As as writer, I always find it interesting what other writers consider their own influences. Most times when you read interviews, the influences usually range among the author’s favorite authors. Sometimes they range out of genre, but rarely do they range out of books.
I have talked before about how I learned to write from comic books, along with Michael Crichton and James Bond novels. Comics taught me pacing and plots twists.
But the biggest non-book influence I’ve had recently actually came after I started writing. It’s the show that taught me about location, mostly because it’s filmed in my home state. THE SOPRANOS just gets New Jersey. As silly as it seems, NJ is like that, as integrated with stupid and smart people. With people who, despite having funny accents (which I contend I don’t have) have souls deep, dark and sad. And the shots, that grainy, gritty look is part of the state I love.
Yes, we’re the Garden State. And if you watch the show, they show that part of the state too. As gritty as it looks near the Turnpike, it’s just as beautiful in South Jersey.
Part of getting a location right, however, is attitude. People act that way and are influenced by their surroundings. My favorite moments of the show have to do with “going to Booton” or meeting “Sil in Paterson.” New Jersey is close knit like that, almost like a really big city.
The Sopranos gets it, and it has helped me get it as well.
“predators”
This might seem an incongruous thing for me to say, having written a book in which a predatory high school teacher plays a prominent role, but I feel quite bad for the guys who get trapped on To Catch a Predator (which I’ve been watching online for the last fifteen minutes, prompting this post). As Judith Levine wrote in Harmful to Minors, the notion that all sex between someone above the age of 16 (or 17, or 18, depending on state law) and someone below that age is criminal, abusive, exploitative, or traumatic is totally irrational. Some of the guys on the MSNBC show clearly are predators, but others are probably just sad, lonely people. They are lonely and online and someone pretending to be interested in them sends a message (it is legal for the decoys to approach the “predators” rather than wait for an approach, I believe; if I am wrong about this, someone correct me). Also, the notion that they are all pedophiles seems wrong to me. A pedophile is someone who is aroused by preadolescents. At 13, 14, 15, and up, most people are biologically mature. It is certainly socially and cultural innapropriate to feel sexual desire for them, but not biologically “unnatural.” Was Edgar Allan Poe a pedophile? I feel like there are many other examples–extraordinary people in history whose carnal lives I could have used in that sentence rather than Edgar Allan Poe. I think the show ruins lives unnecessarily, although I don’t deny that it may have prevented some future crimes as well.
Tom Whalen: The Most Underrated
The “oldest” writer, and by far the most underrated, from my 1979 “Young Writers I Admire” article was Tom Whalen, who was barely 30. I praised his poetry chapbook The Spare Key and the stories I’d seen in some of the same little mags I also got published in: Nantucket Review, Interstate, Panache, Laughing Bear, Iron – as well as his editorship of New Orleans’ Lowlands Review (the first publisher of soon-to-be-household-names like Madison Smartt Bell, then a Princeton undergrad).
Later Tom would become a close friend when he asked me to be a guest teacher at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where he founded and directed the most rigorous high school creative program in America from 1977 to 1999, giving teenagers the equivalent of a pre-undergrad MFA. Named New Orleans Public Schools Teacher of the Year in 1984, Tom has published literally hundreds of stories, poems, prose poems and reviews, as well as works of literary and film criticism and screenplays. It’s hard to think of a major literary publication of the last thirty years that hasn’t published Tom Whalen’s astonishing work, which The Review of Contemporary Fiction has called “thickly lyrical and meditative, interrogating the relation of language to things, of books to life.”
Now retired in Germany (but retired like I am — in other words, still working part-time, Tom as a visiting professor of film and North American Studies at the Universities of Stuttgart and Freiburg, respectively), Tom gets my vote for the undisputed world champion in the heavyweight division of Writer You Should Know About But Don’t.
So you never heard of the little mags I mentioned in the first paragraph? Since Tom’s first story appeared in INTRO, the AWP anthology of graduate student work, when he was studying at Hollins back in 1972, he’s endured, like Dilsey, while many of the publications he’s appeared in have gone by the wayside. What has he done lately? See his recent stories “History Lesson” in AGNI Review, “Prose Piece for Martha Stewart” at Pindeldyboz and “Surviving Death” at Barrelhouse, for one. (Okay, I guess that’s three.)
The author of Roithamer’s Universe and other novels, Elongated Figures and other story collections, Winter Coat and other poetry collections, co-author of A Visitor’s Guide to the Afterlife and distinguished translator of Robert Walser, Tom has two new books out:
In the story collection An Exchange of Letters, just released by Parsifal Editions, levels of reality are exchanged, shuffled, made to dance, fuse and vanish. In “After the Rain”’s post-apocalyptic landscape, “Children congregate around the puddles and point to the reflection of the planes crashing at the water’s edges.” The eponymous “Jorinda and Joringel” (from the tale by the Brothers Grimm) appear trapped forever in their past, but the generative nature of the form of their discourse resists despair. “Report from the Dump,” “Twenty-six Novels” and “Critical Tendencies of the Middle Ages” present Tom’s chiseled prose in all its remarkable diversity.
And just out in the last couple of weeks (I got my copy in the mail only a few days ago) is Dolls, Tom’s winning entry in the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, judged by one of my favorite poets, Denise Duhamel (we’re old friends, I’m old friends with Tom, but like too many of you, Denise had never heard of Tom before she discovered she’d selected his anonymous manuscript). This is what she has to say about Dolls:
“Baudelaire wrote that ‘the overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys.’ Rilke claimed that when children realize that their dolls are inanimate, that their toys have no souls at all, they grow disgusted with their dolls. Enter Tom Whalen….these beautifully crafted prose poems are as animated and frightening as voodoo dolls—think the American Girl collection in the hands of Cindy Sherman. Dolls delighted and scared me beyond belief.”
The penultimate word on Dolls comes from Sven Birkerts:
“Tom Whalen’s book is malign and unsettling and darkly outré – he re-Wittgensteins the world that used to be the case through the impassive, but vigilant, eyes of his dolls, and returns it to us strikingly changed.”
The last word on Tom Whalen comes from me: Don’t just sit there, read him. What have you been waiting 35 years for?
Gettin’ to Know You
Forgive me this, I posted twice below without a proper introduction. Obvs, my name is Patrick Stephenson. I grew up in Saudi Arabia and currently reside in Saint Paul, MN, former home of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m 24-years-old, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota’s English department. There, I learned under such amazing (and I do mean amazing, the sort that’d change your life) profs as Edward Griffin and John Watkins.
My last day as a security guard was this past Monday—hooray!—and I begin an internship with Graywolf Press (which has published Ander Monson, Sven Birkerts, Jane Kenyon, Percival Everett, David Treuer, Charles Baxter, John D’Agata and about a billion other awesome writers) on July 1.
My websites are PatrickStephenson.net, where I haven’t posted much lately because of, y’know, busy-ness, and Smith & Stephenson, another sufferer of my inattention. (I do my best, man, c’mon.) The latter I co-run with Gregory Smith, editor of the Red Dirt Review, who appears occasionally in the comments section of this website. I expect these blogs’ll get a lot more love considering all the free time I have now.
I also TWITTER, if you’re into that sort of thing, here: Patiomensch
By the way, I’ll have a book of my own—ENDOTHERMIC—out in June, and (hopefully) beginning May 24th you can hear me every Thursday on KFAI’s “Write On Radio” show. If you live in the Twin Cities, this’ll be accessible through your radio—90.3 in Minneapolis, 106.7 in Saint Paul. If you’re not fortunate enough to live in TC, you can stream the broadcast from KFAI. I will impress you with my strong, very masculine voice and literary insights.
My favorite writers are Philip Larkin, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Ames, Richard Ford, John Updike and David Foster Wallace. Here is a photo of me wearing a reflective vest. I enjoy biking. Also, I’m attracted to girls who wear glasses. Nevertheless, prose before hos.
