Author: Marcie

It’s clear, by scanning user reviews on the ‘net, that many people who read George Saunders’ book focused on only a couple of words in the subtitle: In which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Registering only a word or two in the subtitle would dramatically impact your experience of this book.

Those noting only Master Class, might arrive with the built-in desire to challenge whether or not George Saunders is a master of anything (but it’s the Russians who are identified as the teachers).

Those seeking a book about writing, might overlook that reading and living are given equal weight (as promised).

And those interpreting the ‘writing’ element as how-to and instructional, might overlook that the book is titled for something one reads (Chekov’s short story, “Gooseberries) rather than writes.

Saunders declares from the start that everything matters—writing and reading and living—and the distinction between water in a pool and water falling from the sky matters too, and whether it’s an accumulation of a millimetre or a metre, and whether you wade in or jump, whether you float, dive, or splash around.

Logistically, the book is presented as an invitation into the classroom of a New York State professor’s creative writing class, to participate in some of the reading and contemplation required, and to eavesdrop on the analysis that might emerge when a group convenes after completing the same homework assignment.

There are seven stories: In the Cart (Chekhov), The Singers (Turgenev), The Darling (Chekhov), Master and Man (Leo Tolsoy) and The Nose (Nikolai Gogol). They appear in full, with separate pagination within the book, in translations by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, David Magarshack, Mary Struve, Clarence Brown, as well as Louise Mude with Aylmer Maude. (The translations themselves have been as deliberately selected as the stories, so there are detailed conversations about that process throughout, and the emphasis appears to be rooted in both accuracy and accessibility.)

Each story is followed by thoughts on the story, which often include detailed examples of the various opinions and responses voiced by Saunders’ students. (These are the stories he has most often taught, he explains.) Sometimes these sections, which immediately follow each story, feel endless, because Saunders includes so many queries and possibilities. With a myriad of potential responses to each tale, usually only one or two of Saunders’ comments resonated with me personally. His expansive and exhaustive view, however, validates each individual reader’s response.

Here’s an example: “The story is now about to present her with someone new to love. And we wonder: How can she love him (when she loved Kukin so much)? And: How can she love him (he who is not Kukin)?”

And: “The story has, for all of its looseness in other areas, a high level of organization. It may be wordy and awkward in its stagecraft but its controlling sensibility is far from random.”

After the thoughts on the story, there are thoughts about the thoughts on the story: these often include commentary on language (e.g. word selection, translations) and craft (e.g. structure, endings). At this point, Saunders moves one step farther away from the individual’s reading of the story itself, to invite consideration of the writer’s motivations and achievements; further, how this might intersect with a contemporary writer’s approach to creative writing.

Here’s an example: “So: a chance for us, again, to think about how stories end. What allows them to end? When they bypass a place where they might have ended, what must they then go on to accomplish?”

And: “I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier—his view of the world is wiser. When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty.”

With the first story, Saunders introduces readers to the process of querying their reading while engaged in the process of reading. Each of us has a unique set of experiences and expectations, and these affect our relationship with the stories. “That’s really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another,” Saunders says. We read them against one another, and we read them against our own selves. So, the key element to being an attentive reader is knowing our own selves, our own reading (and writing and living) selves.

As a means of highlighting the kinds of assumptions and resentments that accumulate—often unnoticed and unchecked—when we read a story, Saunders suggests stopping at the end of each page as we read: we can reflect on what we’ve learned by reading and how that changes our engagement. To assist, this first story is presented one page at a time, with commentary on the opposing page (pages, sometimes). He allows this is annoying, but the check-ins help secure a foundation of attention and self-reflection: thereafter, readers are on the honour system.

The detail-oriented approach that Saunders values—which he believes is necessary for writers to learn how to write as attentively as they read (which quite possibly they are also learning to do here, unless they have cultivated a practice of close-reading)—is on full display. And, he exhibits the qualities that he reveres. The bulk of the responsibility lies, however, with the individual who is reading and writing, who is living with the books they’re reading and writing.

It’s easier to blame a writer when a story doesn’t work, much harder to query yourself as to why you think it doesn’t work and what you would have preferred. The cornerstone of the work is Saunders’ insistence on the subjective nature of what makes stories work for us as readers, and how those of us who are also writers might use that information to further our creative goals.

After reading the commentary on the second story, I listened to some interviews and discussions with Saunders online, and he frequently references other readers’ interpretations of stories and novels, some of which shifted his earlier understanding of these works. There is a consistent sense of Saunders himself as being a work-in-progress, and that sense of perpetual engagement is inspiring. He writes:

Every time I read ‘Alyosha the Pot’, it puts me in that state of wondering.
And it never gives me an answer but only says: ‘Keep wondering.’
And that, I think, is its real accomplishment.

Saunders is the sort of teacher who lands on showing you how to think rather than telling you what to think, how to wonder rather than what you should wonder. There’s more confidence than authority here, more demonstration than articulation, and more invitation than presentation.

It’s terrific stuff for writers.

George Saunders. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random House, 2021.

An article in Poets & Writers by Elissa Altman convinced me to read this. Other writers with subtitles like hers—The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create—have landed too deeply in the pool of self-help to suit me. And some have weighed heavier on the balance of personal reminiscence, allowing craft and creativity to drift.

Permission is the perfect temperature for me to wade in, and her love and respect for the memoir form splashes over the work as whole. Just as Stephen King’s On Writing includes a terrific list of recommended reading in the back, Altman does too. And, further, she quotes her favourites judiciously. About half the notes I made were quotations from other memoirists, which resulted in adding about a dozen books to my TBR.

Early on, for instance, she quotes Doris Grumbach when she describes how making “art from chaos creates an environment ripe for understanding, revelation, and, ultimately but not always, healing.” Grumbach notes: “We are what we were told we were.” Observes: “Rarely if ever did we think to look within for knowledge of ourselves.” And asks whether we averted our eyes because we were afraid.

Often, yes—that’s it, Altman says. And this is where Permission lives, in the quest to find a way to confront and cope with the fear of telling what you’ve been afraid to tell, with the ongoing need to tell the story you’ve been unable to forget.

Altman is self-aware and reflective, and she does not unilaterally and consistently ally with the storytellers.

She does value difficult stories, and she quotes Joy Williams in support of that view: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.”

Her belief in the inherent value of stories and storytellers is clear and uncomplicated:

“The process of storytelling is paramount to species survival—consider the cultural stories depicted on Greek pottery in 400 BCE, in which entire myths are played out pictographically—and to the metabolization of joy and sorrow. This is why stories and our compulsion for telling them exists in the first place: as a way of remembering who we are, where we come from, what we saw, and what we know to be the truth. And that is the right of every artist.”

But nuance prevails. The bulk of Permission resides in the responsibility of writers and artists to tell good stories, to query their intentions, to scrutinise their motivations:

“When George Saunders talks about having to get quiet and listen to what the work is trying to tell them he is leaving out the fact that we also have to listen to the work’s answer to why it is being made—why it wants to be made—and whether that answer is one that involves transcendence, or retribution.”

Her narrative is all-the-more powerful in the context of her experience of familial estrangement, in the wake of her having told a story that others wanted untold. The risk of judgement and unexpectedly high-stakes outcomes for writers who “say too much” is obvious. Undoubtedly, many writers will relate to the dilemma surrounding what to say and what not to say.

There are instances in which the language feels slightly over-blown: “Words allow the stories that haunt us to move through the scrim of imagination and into a place of breath and life.” But most writers have likely had some experience, however slight, of censure—whether based on something they have written or something they have considered writing. And that sensation of being silenced (or the related and more complex mechanism of having “chosen” to silence oneself) would have been felt so keenly, that sensation of feeling stifled or suffocated, that Altman’s offering—breath and life—will be gratefully received as a counter.

Besides, her talk of breath is connected to the broader question of inspire+ation. She views stories as being life-sustaining and essential. And she includes all relationships to story in that assessment: “The act of reading, of looking at art, of breathing in the stories that surround you: they are all vital parts of the writing process.”

Audience, however, is key. She outlines specific distinctions: “Notebooks are places for practice, for undoing the knots of distraction and shame that keep the work from breathing. Notebooks dilute overwhelm and stick a pin in jealousy and envy: they allow you to pour out whatever it is that needs pouring out, and move on to focus on the work itself.”

Writers who are content to journal have a certain requirement for permission (entirely their own), but writers who seek publication have an obligation—to their own story—to examine their goals. Both their nature and their timing matter: “Impact on others is a trip wire, a snare that has stopped more creatives in their tracks than perhaps anything else. These is no impact on others unless and until the art is made.”

And the timeline could vary dramatically: “Quiet is the peace that you find when, after a day or a decade, a week or a month, you allow yourself to crack open the story that you must tell in order to find its pulsing heat, and to devote yourself to it and the crafting of it as art.”

I suspect there will be many writers who purchase Altman’s book who do not even give themselves permission to read it for quite some time. But, when they’re ready, Permission will be waiting.

A powerful resource for a certain kind of writer.

Elissa Altman. Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. Boston: Godine, 2025.

Try Hard landed in my stack thanks to an article in The Globe & Mail that suggested it was not just for Arkells fans: the subtitle—Creative Work in Progress—heralds its reach towards a broader audience.

Well, yes and no. There are many reflections on creativity that extend to many artforms and activities. But there are  many specifics, about songwriting—but also concert lineups and career management and development, that it’s clear fans would enjoy this book more than a casual/occasional listener.

Nonetheless, the format (short essays, perfectly timed for a coffee break) and the style (informal, but tightly constructed) conspire to make for a satisfying read. And I do enjoy finding the advice embedded in series of reflections, rather than self-help-y bullet-points and text boxes: Kerman’s narrative is well-constructed and feels like a conversation rather than an instruction set.

About a third of the way into the volume, Kerman makes this observation: “If you want your own art to get better, the first step is observing how other artists do it.” He actually refers to Stephen King’s book On Writing at one point; King’s version of this advice is that writers must read (and King includes a fabulous list of recommended reading in the back of his book too).

Fans would enjoy reading Kerman’s reflections on concerts he’s attended by the artists whom he credits with teaching him how to create memorable live performances. Also his description of the balancing act of adhering to a thoughtfully constructed set-list with the need to spontaneously adjust in response to a reserved/disengaged group.

But more enjoyable for me, is the way he describes other people’s way of interacting with the arts—with the world around them. Like Jim [Creegan, of the Barenaked Ladies], described as “sixteen years older than I am, but he acts like a sixteen-year-old when he’s talking about music. I want to hold on to some version of that feeling forever.”

And not just famous folks, but also Kerman’s father. He’s so spoilerphobic about movies, that he opts to leave the room whenever a conversation erupts about a new one and, at the movie theatre, wears headphones during the trailers, to create a sort of buffer for the film. He “remembers the feeling of seeing a movie without knowing anything about it, and he’s determined to experience it again. His strategy allows him to interact with art in a way that excites him.”

Kerman metaphorically plugs his ears when there’s talk of ticket sales for the band’s performances too. “The only time I want to know about a show’s ticket sales is if it’s sold out so we can make a social media post about it and carry on. Otherwise, I’ll assume that every show needs a bit more work.” A writer’s version of this could be avoiding reviews as well as sales information. Only James Patterson and Stephen King regularly find their position on a bookselling behemoth’s bestseller list inspiring.

In a general way, I appreciate the simple and direct advice like this: “Today, I work at a pace that doesn’t allow much room for imposter syndrome.” And this: “There is a fine, but important, line between a routine and a superstition.”

In a personal sense, I appreciate his way of writing about how pursuing your passion can be all-encompassing: “Because so many of my interests and passions exist within my job, it’s often hard to turn off. Even though my life is centred on my passion, it’s important to have moments of space. Moments away from work to play can reinvigorate my process.” Sometimes I spend too much time with words, so much time that I forget to do other things—take walks, weed the garden, look at photographs, watch films—and it not only sucks the joy out of words, but eventually I find myself writing in circles.

One of the books that Max Kerman acknowledges as a positive influence is Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, which disappointed me because it did not credit other artists and their experience and wisdom, even when he included their ideas. But Kerman creates his own sources often and clearly, so neglecting to do so is not what inspired him about Rubin’s book.

Kerman gets full marks for me on the sense of wanting to collaborate rather than dictate. And for making it so simple, in the end: try hard.

Great stuff for Arkells’ fans; good stuff for writers.

Max Kerman. Try Hard: Creative Work in Progress. Toronto: PRH-Viking, 2025.

The inimitable Tillie Olsen contributes the foreword to Black Women Writers at Work, which she describes as “one of those rare, rich source books for writers, readers, teachers, students—all who care about literature and the creation of it.”

In her introduction, Claudia Tate outlines her intention of balancing the personal and literary content of the interviews. Not too personal—“disrobing exposés”—but not so literary that “the writers’ experiences and interests are divorced from their works.”  

The artist’s life and art are “inextricably interlinked” she observes: both important in “an environment of diverse, and often conflicting, social traditions.” In fact, nowhere more so than in America, she says. There, the “social terrain” is increasingly “complex, controversial, and contradictory” where “a racial minority and the ‘wearker’ gender intersect”.

It’s this quality, the precise blend that Tate curates, which makes these interviews so satisfying to read. We have the biographical details that Toni Cade Bambara shares: “My mama had been in Harlem during the renaissance. She used to hang out at the Dark Tower, at the Renny, go to hear Countee Bullen, see Langston Hughes over near Mt. Morris Park.”

Alongside her talk of process: “I begin on long, yellow paper with a juicy ballpoint if it’s one of those 6/8 bop pieces. For slow, steady, watch-the-voice-kid, don’t-let-the-mask-slip-type pieces, I prefer short, fat-lined white paper and an ink pen. I usually work it over and beat it up and sling it around the room a lot before I get to the typing stage.”

And reflections on underlying philosophy and motivation. Which is often powerfully intertwined with contextual details. “People have to have permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do. I’m still waiting for another Gayl Jones novel or two so I can gauge whether I’ve been reading the first two correctly.”

Claudia Tate conducts her interview with Gayl Jones after Jones had not only published that third novel Bambara was waiting for, but had published a collection of stories too. (Tate invested energy, focus and time into her interviewing.) She opens with questions about an interview another writer conducted with Jones a few years prior, to discuss whether she views her writing as orchestrated or spontaneous. Thus not only are these women writers who are engaged with one another’s works, but there’s a broader cultural discussion about the works’ value and resonance unfolding in the interviews also.

Tate’s specific questions about Jones’ 1975 debut, Corregidora, get granular: talk of perspectives and influences, for example. But there are big questions circling around identity and the role of storytelling too. After referencing Jones’ second novel, for instance, Tate asks how Jones’ ideas about storytelling impact “her listener, the evolving story, and especially your narrator”.

“I think of myself primarily as a storyteller,” Jones replies, “not only the author as storyteller but also the characters. There’s also a sense of the hearer as well as the teller in terms of my organizing and selecting events and situations.” She talks about interior monologues “where the storyteller becomes her own hearer” and how “consciousness or self-consciousness actually determines her stories’ events, illustrating her point with by returning to specifics in her work. These conversations strike a balance between natural and purposeful.

Some of these interviews are only a dozen pages long, but they feel dense with both information and personality. Some are more than twice that long and, yet, each exchange offers something new to the conversation.

I first read these interviews a few years after the collection was published, because I was obsessed with Audre Lorde. Of the other writers, I had read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, some of Nikki Giovanni’s poems, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Returning to it, I have read nearly all of these writers and multiple works; I come up short with two poets (Sonia Sanchez and Sherley Anne Williams) and novelist Kristin Hunter (with a copy of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee on my shelves, but unread).

It’s truly a delight to reread these exchanges in view of another sort of intersection: their having first been published in 1985 and, again, nearly forty years later.

A great resource for writers.

Claudia Tate, Ed. Black Women Writers at Work. 1985. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.

Rick Rubin being a music producer—he co-founded the hip-hop label Def Jam (think Run-DMC and LL Cool J) but was also behind albums from artists as varied as Lady Gaga, Metallica, Weezer and Johnny Cash—didn’t put me off.

I’ve written about Questlove’s Creative Quest (2018) and Rakim’s Sweat the Technique (2019) here: both worthwhile resources for writers, written by musicians (with Ben Greenman and Bakari Kitwana, respectively).

The Creative Act is written with Neil Strauss and the presentation is striking; it suits an artist whose trademark is a bare-bones sound.

That’s what caught my eye initially: the packaging (the production). But this passage on the first page secured my interest: “Creativity doesn’t exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.”

There are a lot of core ideas in this volume that resonate with me. The book is organised into “78 Areas of Thought”. It begins with “Everyone is a Creator” and ends with “What We Tell Ourselves” and, in between, are countless relevant topics—from Greatness to Adaptation.

I’ve already recommended The Creative Act to someone who loves a pick-up and put-down and pick-up-again sort of read. Because Rubin’s Areas of Thought are not linked. You could read for a few moments, perhaps with a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade, before resuming your work. The clarity and precision is striking (and seems to reflect Rubin’s philosophy…that bare-bones approach).

These days, I’m on a Mary Oliver Notice-Everything kick, so these three bits stood out for me.

  From “Practice”:

“Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again.
  Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.”

From “Nothing Is Static”:

“The world is constantly changing, so no matter how often we practice paying attention, there will always be something new to notice. It’s up to us to find it.

And, from “Inspiration”:

“Train yourself to see the awe behind the obvious. Look at the world form this vantage point as often as possible. Submerge yourself.”

The prose feels like it has emerged from an editing exercise: is it possible to make this sentence more concise? This paragraph? This segment? How much can we cut while leaving the Essence intact? (“Essence” appears between “Non-Competition” and “Apocrypha”.)

Between the Areas of Thought, there are some epigrams. Right before “Inspiration” we have this: “Talent is the ability to let ideas manifest themselves through you.” If reading a few pages is too much for your schedule, how about a few lines. How about two. I’m all for this: I regularly trick myself into stretching by telling myself that I only need to get on my mat for one minute. Sometimes we really do need just a few words of encouragement to refocus on work we are resisting.

Rubin also offers some slightly more interactive elements. There’s a bolded list of Thoughts and Habits Not Conducive to the Work which begins with “Believing you’re not good enough.” There’s a section at the back with 14 pages of lines seemingly intended for readers to fill with their own words. And there’s an Area of Thought titled “Breaking the Sameness” based on exercises he has artists do in the recording studio (like altering volume levels or isolating particular sounds or focusing on only a single line).

That’s what I wish Rick Rubin had focussed on more: Breaking the Sameness.

There are no new ideas in any of the books I’ve written about here, but all those other writers have contributed something of themselves to their work on creativity. Questlove writes about chefs. Rakim includes such diverse memories and anecdotes that he covers the ground between Mickey Mouse and MLK.

But my broader concern is that things feel same-y because Rubin relies on the work of other creatives and doesn’t credit them. Those fourteen pages at the end could have been citations, references or, at least, recommendations—but that’s not Rubin’s priority.

This struck home (the sports metaphor will make sense soon) with this, in the Habit section: “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.” In the context of creativity, he’s highlighting consistency in this chapter.

That first sentence is a familiar mantra in my everyday life, and I was surprised to learn years ago that its genesis is the sports world. (Vince Lombardi is a popular theory for its origination.)

Though I haven’t researched the statement’s origins myself, I know enough to recognise that Rubin is quoting someone else. Without acknowledging their contribution to his thought process, to his published work.

I don’t credit Lombardi every time I utter this phrase, but I make it clear it wasn’t my original thought. Some sports guy made it a Thing. If I was going to cite it in my own work, however, I would have an obligation to get to the bottom of this. After all, Rubin says that an “artist earns the title simply through self-expression” and not by repeating other people’s ideas.

Maybe this isn’t the only instance of a lack of attribution in The Creative Act. Maybe it’s the only one I…noticed.

A questionable source for creatives.

Rick Rubin with Neil Strauss. The Creative Act. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

This month I’m inspired to write about David Naimon’s Between the Covers interview with Vi Khi Nao. Usually I listen to these interviews without having read the books discussed but, recently, I’ve been relistening to a few, to see if aspects of the conversation resonate differently with more familiarity with the author’s work.

With Vi Khi Nao, neither of the works at the heart of this interview—Umbilical Hospital (poems) and A Brief Alphabet of Torture (short stories)—were available via the public library, but I was able to find Fish in Exile. Although I had previously enjoyed the interview (his series is one of my favourites), reading did add another layer of appreciation.

In the context of her work, she talks about how people should view her story collection as an older sister to Fish in Exile. But Fish was unique, too, in the sense that it was written while she was in an abusive relationship, with some aspects of the narrative omitted in early stage; her lover had been reading the manuscript in progress, so the sections that were not encoded were added after the relationship had ended.

How it’s written does matter, she says: “The concept is boring but the actual art of writing is not.” And she issues a kind of warning to readers, that something deep and introspective is afoot; you have to drop out of reality to engage with the book.

Some of the interview is very serious, as when Naimon comments on a sense of rumination and repetition—which can sometimes be incantatory, and which can deepen engagement. (This word, incantatory, I love it.) But there’s another layer to the interview, as with the talk of sheeps’ assholes and how they blend in with the landscape.

There’s discussion of how Lydia Davis was inspired by cows and how one of her books came out of that. (I wonder how many of Naimon’s interviews don’t include a reference to Davis.) But these sheep that Vi Khi Nao is writing about? They actually exist in film.

She was writing those poems, inspired by the sheep, in 10-minute chunks of time, without editing until the entire chapbook was drafted. She describes this kind of writing as feeling like she was breathing for the first time in her life, like it was sacred.

And, generally, she does not edit her own poems or stories. But Fish was edited, however; twice before landing with Coffee House Press and then a third time, with about 95% of the suggestions accepted by the author.

When she does edit her own work, she is dramatic and creates a wholly different work so that the first version is barely (if at all) recognizable. “It’s not for everyone,” she giggles, “the hammer method versus the tweezer.”

There’s talk about significant influences (C.D. Wright, a poet and teacher at Brown, and Forrest Gander) and she mentions how they affect/ed her energy, in the moment of contact and in a lingering kind of way (for instance, she still feels C.D. Wright’s consciousness with her, even now, although she died in 2016).

When asked why she doesn’t write like Nam Le (The Boat) or Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), she says that writing in English gives her the opportunity for distance. Vietnamese is a beautiful and poetic language, she observes: tender and, she believes, evident in her writing but invisible.

There are some sentences, she notes, which one might feel are ‘strange’ and she thinks these are revealing a slant that exists first in Vietnamese, an expression of her somatic Vietnamese self. It’s playing out like a phantom, she says, like a sonic volume. So even if you don’t see diacritical marks in her language, they take place in the works’ experimental form.

She calls herself an eco-writer because she recycles things that she’s written previously, includes them in a later assignment. And she has different writing rituals, some of which developed out of individual assignments or calls.

She’d started out writing what she imagined to be a more accessible story, the kind she imagined her family would be able to read and appreciate, but the first page that emerged was Fish in Exile. She read Harlequins to try to grasp a more mainstream style, but it just didn’t work—after only one page, she realized it wasn’t going to be a mainstream story.

This interview series: a tremendous resource for literary writers and poets.

Based on the 2011 book by Robin R. Means Coleman, the documentary Horror Noire (Dir. Xavier Burgin, 2021) is an excellent introduction to identifying socio-political realities in film and possibly a way to lengthen your TBW list. (I added Girl with All the Gifts to mine.)

Early on, there’s some discussion of classic films, like Birth of a Nation—and its reflection of the government’s approval of political persecution by groups like the KKK—and King Kong. Commentary by people like Tananarive Due (her books are great, if you’re into horror) outlines the kinds of opportunities available to Black actors in Hollywood: how, initially, they were simply played by white actors, then they were represented as aliens (e.g. Creature of the Black Lagoon), and then had limited roles as second-class citizens or mystical figures (e.g. Uncle Remus).

With films like 1973’s Ganja and Hess (directed by Bill Gunn) and Scream Blacula Scream (starring Pam Grier) horror movies begin to move past the limitations of Blaxploitation films. Gunn’s film, exploring links between addiction and vampirism, was too smart and too stylized for many viewers, Due explains; more commonly, Black actors in horror films suffered from Red Shirt Phenomenon (i.e. the disposable characters in a Star Trek landing party, the first to die).

Clive Barker’s Candyman, a story originally designed to provoke conversations about class differences on the page, introduced conversations about race in regards to casting: was it an opportunity for a Black actor to take the lead role, or was it perpetuating patterns of Black men as predators? In Attack the Block, Black actors have lead roles with agency and the lead in Girl With All the Gifts was cast—but not written—as a Black character. Jordan Peele figures prominently as well, with a juicy bit of information about his having rewritten the ending of Get Out, in order to offer something he perceived audiences needed at the time, with BLM protests prominent and ongoing.

A great resource for horror writers.

This Graywolf series is a mainstay in my writer’s stack: whatever the theme, whoever the author, I’m down for it.

Admittedly, however, there are topics that pull me into the reading more quickly: The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts immediately appealed, whereas The Art of Mystery was unexpectedly relevant.

My hunch is that my response is more to do with the author than with the topic (although obviously that author selected that topic as a meaningful aspect of craft for them, so there’s a relationship).

Davies defines revision succinctly: “Call it, for now, the sum of what changes, and what stays the same, and the alchemical reaction between them.”

Then he elaborates and hints where the complexity lies: “Revision, after all, is the journey of a story—the story of a story, if you like—and of its writer’s relationship with that story. As such—like any journey, like any story—it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of revision, appropriately enough, is vision. Yet seeing revision is easier said than done.”

To demonstrate the art of seeing revision, Davies considers the first and last published stories by American author Flannery O’Connor: “The Geranium” and “Judgement Day”. One opens Complete Stories and the other closes it (the collection was 1972’s posthumous winner of the National Book Award in the United States). The discussion is detailed and mechanical; it’s just the kind of gritty analysis that writers honing their craft will appreciate.

Davies also considers the impact on Raymond Carver’s short stories of his editor, who pared down Carver’s narrative into what readers view as Carver-esque, quintessentially polished and exacting, which is actually as much Lish’s style as Carver’s. This is fascinating because Carver wasn’t tossing early drafts to his editor: Carver revised the work many times himself.

All these different layers of seeing, of revisioning, provoke even more contemplation: “(It’s worth noting at this point that while Carver’s versions of these stories predate the Lish versions, they’re by no means early drafts. Carver is on record as saying, ‘I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts.’)”

I also really appreciated Davies’s ideas about adjacent craft questions. For instance, his discussion of endings, when he says that not all endings need to be breath-taking, because “the right ending can also make us exhale, sign with aesthetic satisfaction.” This isn’t a book about endings, but when revision is considered a journey, then the destination matters a great deal.

One of the most intriguing ideas, for me, is what Davies views as “the sheer ubiquity of revision” in the form of “[r]emakes, reboots, retcons, sequels, revisionary ratios.” This broadens the cultural conversation, so it’s not only about elements of craft but also raising questions about the audience and what the revisioner’s choices “amount to, what they serve…the elaboration, articulation, alteration, and enriching of meaning.”

A great resource for writers.

Peter Ho Davies. The Art of Revision. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2021.

There will still be posts dedicated to books about writing and storytelling, but I’m broadening the conversation to include other media.

So, in a couple of weeks, there’s talk of a newer volume in Graywolf’s writing series and, later, talk of a documentary film about storytelling in another medium and an interview via podcast.

Why? I’m already discussing the books I read on BuriedInPrint, but there are so many outstanding films and TV series, podcasts and broadcasts, that go unmentioned. Often they employ the very techniques that I most enjoy on-the-page and I’m itching to say so.

I suspect that many of the storytelling techniques that I consider favourites were introduced to me as a young viewer, like shifting perspectives. (My So-Called Life’s shifting povs, for instance: with the initial episodes revolving about the main character but, in time, episodes devoted to the perspectives of “secondary” characters, who are the main characters in their own specific arcs.)

Often my favourite writers draw readers’ attention and focus to what’s left unsaid, or to events that unfold out-of-sight. Something which the recent film The Zone of Interest explores brilliantly, for instance.

There’s always a book about craft in my stacks (right now, it’s Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words), but I hope there’s room for the conversation to expand beyond books too.