Failure Was Possible: About George Saunders

There's been a lot of buzz about George Saunders lately. Glowing reviews of his latest collection, Tenth of December, which has cracked the best-seller lists; an amazing cover profile of the man in the New York Times Magazine featuring the title "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year"; and he was even on cable news shows... talking about books! Talking about short stories!

It's wonderful to see such acclaim and notoriety for Saunders -- not only because he's been one of my favorite writers for several years, but also because he seems like, well, just about the nicest guy on the planet.

I don't remember the first Saunders story I ever read. It might have been the raccoon disposal one ("The 400-Pound CEO"); it might have been the Civil War theme park one ("CivilWarLand in Bad Decline"; or it might have been "Offloading Mrs. Schwartz."

I do remember that I first heard of Saunders when David Foster Wallace name-checked him in an interview. That was good enough for me. And I've been a mighty fan of Saunders ever since.

In conjunction with an e-book release of his first book (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), he's written a new preface. He discusses how he came to write the stories collected in the book, and what was happening in his life at the time. As a Saunders enthusiast, it makes for great reading. But it also wonderfully distills the struggles of writing and finding one's voice, as well as balancing the joys and challenges of family life with trying to start a writing career.

Some choice quotes from the essay...

1.

"I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived."
 
2.

"We didn’t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we’d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility...

"At one point our second car broke and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I’d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I’d dash through the atrium, into the men’s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.

"But seriously: those were the days.

"Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy colonial houses orange with firelight, I’d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life."

3.

"We managed to buy a house. It was small but sweet, and the four of us lived there, happily. What a thing it was, to suddenly have a real life happening to us, to be in over our heads but glad about it. The gratitude I was feeling nudged me to the edge of a thought precipice: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen?... The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy."

4.

"Mostly I was using whatever story I happened to have going at the time to get me through the day and give me some minimal sense of control and mastery. They were a secret source of sustenance. If I got a few good lines in the morning, that made the whole rest of the day better."

5.

"I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant."

Better yet, you can read the entire preface here.

That Way of Looking

"It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time."

--Raymond Carver, On Writing

2012 Recap

'Tis the seasons for lists, I know. Just doing my part…

• The big "news" writing-wise was that I (finally, finally) finished my novel, Believers. To be honest, there were times when I wasn't sure that I'd make it. I've been working on the book for several years. Now it's wait-and-see time (yes, I'm being purposely vague). You can read excerpts here and here. Also got some related good news toward the end of the year: Another excerpt will appear in the anthology 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues, edited by the outstanding Andrew Scott. There will be a release party at AWP in Boston in March. (I'll be going to AWP, by the way. My first time.)

• Got a very nice acceptance (Kenyon Review!) for the final yet-to-be published story in my short story collection, What I'm About to Do Now. This is known as my "Cops" story (actual title: "The Riot and Rage That Love Brings"), and I've read it a few times in San Diego. So all the stories have found homes. Now, if only I can get the entire collection published…  

• I've been working on the novel, and hence haven't been writing any new stories. But I did have new work appear in Gigantic, Corium, and Pank.

• Read my story "Are You Somebody?" at a So Say We All event in San Diego. Rare video footage here. Also read at another So Say We All event at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park back in March. 

• My story "Job History" made the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2012.

• Put down some thoughts on revision.

• Finally joined Twitter. Late to the party, as usual. 

• Favorite reads? Cheryl Strayed's Wild; Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda (I'd read some of the stories previously; others were brand new to me) and Underworld (re-reading it); George Saunders' New Yorker story "The Semplica-Girl Diaries"; Roxane Gay's story "North Country" (in Hobart and Best American Short Stories 2012); Caitlin Horrocks' story "Zolaria."

Coming up in 2013: As I mentioned, I'll be heading to Boston for AWP. Looking forward to meeting many writers who I know via the Internets but have never met in real life. Besides the Kenyon Review story and Believers excerpt in 24 Bar Blues, look for other work appearing in Atticus Review and fwriction.

Happy New Year!

The Demands of a Novel

From a Paris Review interview with the great Amy Hempel:

INTERVIEWER

But why do you think the demands of a novel are greater than what you do? I think the short form is incredibly demanding.

HEMPEL

I do too. But I understand it. And I don’t understand the novel. The amount of stuff to hold in mind, the number of things you have to keep bringing forward over time I found entirely daunting. How do you keep everything a novel requires in your head? A friend of mine was about three-fourths done with her novel when she realized she had two characters named Bob in it. That’s the kind of thing that would happen to me.

Gigantic Everything

 
The new issue of Gigantic (dubbed Gigantic Everything) is now available for preorder.

The issue features Lydia Davis, Etgar Keret, Michael Kimball, Stephen Elliott, and many other fine, fine folks.

And oh yeah: I also have something in there -- a very short story called "This Is Illegal."

There's also a release party on Saturday, December 15. If I lived in New York, I'd, like, be there.

Something New

Her first time in Los Angeles was as a child, nine, maybe ten years old, a family vacation, Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard and the endless narcotic blue of the Pacific Ocean, only it was just her and her mother because her parents had been divorced for several years at that point, her father somewhere in Florida and going bankrupt again, and the thing she remembered most about the trip—that is, besides the crud smell in the shitty motel and the homeless guy with his pants down—was the air. The air was different. And she didn’t mean the smog. It was something deeper than that, something more profound that she could not name or fully understand at the time. Also: the light, the sky. The blazing red-orange-purple sunsets that on more than one occasion caused her mother to pull over the car and just stare. “Damn,” her mother said. “Look at that. Wow. I mean wow. I guess that’s why there are so many people here and more keep coming. People. Nothing but goddamned people.” This was the mid-1970s, and they drove around a lot and she looked out the passenger window, watching her breath appear then disappear on the glass, absorbing as much as her little girl brain could, her mother smoking and monologueing and navigating their beater yellow-and-brown station wagon through the freeways and side streets of the concrete metropolis. Above all else, it seemed like a place where things could actually happen.

It's Just Like Baseball

"Writing is frustration -- it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time."

-- Philip Roth