American Short Fiction blog

Much has been made of literature’s ability to transport readers to other worlds. As the famously reclusive Emily Dickinson wrote: There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away./Nor any coursers like a page/Of prancing poetry. Even those of us less housebound than Ms. Dickinson can appreciate the imaginative entrance that books allow into unfamiliar emotional and geographic realms.

Summer, especially, finds readers seeking escape, and right now the Internet is jam-packed with summer reading lists that promise a bit of respite from the workaday world. For those seeking the vicarious thrills of armchair travel, the New York Times offers this list of recently published travel writing. Billing historical fiction as “the ultimate summer getaway,” NPR recommends a list of novels sure to carry readers through both space and time.

Escaping into the pages of a book is lovely. But reading, I think, also has the wonderful ability to put us into closer contact with our immediate surroundings. Though (as Meredith Blake argues over at the New Yorker) summer doesn’t always mark a dramatic shift in what we read, rising temperatures do usually mean a change in where we read. With any luck, even the most harried and desk-bound among us will find time in the coming months to savor a story or two in true summer reading fashion: on the beach, under a shady tree, or (my personal favorite) poolside, a cool, refreshing drink in hand.

Indeed, the where of summer reading seems just as important as the what of it. Over at the L.A. Times’ Jacket Copy blog, book lovers recall favorite summer reads, and the places–a crowded public pool, a plane to Ireland–they first encountered them. And in last Sunday’s special summer reading issue of the New York Times Books section, authors offered up their memories of books discovered by chance on summer vacations (Dogwalker author Arthur Bradford recalls reading Charles Portis’s “Dog of the South” near Austin’s Barton Springs Pool!).

As I scan my own bookshelf, I realize that I’m reminded not only of the imaginary landscapes contained between the covers of the books, but also of the particular place where I read each one. Holding my worn copy of Lolita I’m transported to the unseasonably warm spring of my senior year of high school that I spent sunbathing on my parents’ lawn perplexed and awed (but mostly perplexed) by Nabokov’s dense language. A couple of summers ago, I carried Tropic of Cancer with me to cafés all over Paris, and I took silent, self-satisfied delight in Miller’s every mention of a restaurant or street name I recognized. And I will never forget reading Joan Didion’s Run, River in the apartment I rented in L.A. my first year out of college, the El Niño-year rain playing a loud and inexhaustible dirge for the myth of an always-sunny California on the metal carport outside my window.

I like to think of these memories as constituting a map of sorts, a smattering of coordinates that add up to something like a personal literary geography. Sure, some of the sites are mundane (my old green couch dominates the topography like Mt. Everest). But some strike me as quite remarkable for the irreproducible synergy that is created between the site of reading and the site of fiction, or (to appropriate Willa Cather’s phrase) the city of place and the city of feeling.

This summer, as I make my way through the ever-growing stack of books in my office, I’m eager to add new landmarks to this map. I’m excited to explore the fictional worlds of the stories I’ll read, but I’m also ready to find the yet-undiscovered places around town, where, with my head in a book, I can experience the strange kind of escape that is being simultaneously both here and there.

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This is the first in a series of posts exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Do you have a favorite place to read in Austin or beyond? Let us know.

Reading Lisa Locascio’s “What Is Disneyland?” is like taking part in a fevered, wondrous dream. Be sure to check the story out and then return here to read more about Locascio’s inspiration and editing techniques.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the story. Where did the idea for “What Is Disneyland?” come from and what kind of evolution did the story go through to get to us?

I have often found that my best work comes from refracting my experiences into my fiction. Certain elements of the story are “true”—I did go to Disneyland, I am engaged to a man from another country. The character “Stella” is a sort of self-proxy I’ve experimented with over the last few years. She has appeared in a few stories, including this one published by Candor Magazine. When I wrote “What Is Disneyland?” I had just moved to Los Angeles, which I immediately loved, and I had just met my fiancé, whom I immediately loved, but both the city and the man were a bit mysterious and unknown to me.

I’m fairly obsessed with the allure of mystery—the moment of not knowing before we discover whether someone or something is dangerous or benign. I wanted to write about all of this in some way, and I started thinking about Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9,  an art film I watched at midnight a few years ago in New York, where he and Björk meet on a whaling ship and get married. So I started out with Stella’s travel narrative, and then the way she can’t escape her thoughts, even in a distant place like Disneyland. The implications of migration and movement in a story about being in love with a foreigner really weren’t planned, and were only pointed out to me after the fact by my advisor, Aimee Bender.

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Does Grammar Girl even need an intro?

I’ve taken a liking to Mignon Fogarty’s warm, funny podcasts on grammar and usage, and now I’m happy to discover her books as well.

Get the podcasts (iTunes or podcastpickle). So many choices. What are your favorite episode?

The new issue of PEN America looks incredible. PEN America 12: Correspondences presents email exchanges, letters, telegrams, epistolary fiction, and more. Sam Lipsyte writes to Barry Hannah (more on this after the jump), Siri Hustvedt writes to Scheherazade, and Paul LaFarge writes to Marcel Proust. Anne Carson searches letters from a lost brother, and Robert Walser writes behind the walls of a sanitarium. Plus comics from Iran and Lebanon; fiction by Alain Mabanckou and Donald Ray Pollock; poetry by Billy Collins; and much, much more.

PEN is also hosting an online forum dedicated to the same kind of correspondence. Sam Lipsyte and others contribute. Contributors are invited to “write the first paragraph of a letter [they'd] like to send either to another writer, living or dead, or to a fictional character,” or to “describe [their] experience with the new technology of correspondence: Twitter, email, Facebook, etc.”

Check out Lipsyte’s letter to Barry Hannah below.

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While the land still smokes from the mighty fire that’s consumed brick-and-mortar bookstores—the B. Daltons and the Waldenbooks, the mom-and-pop shops, so many shut, so many still closing—lo! a cry of new life:

Barnhill’s of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A new brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Books, wines, art, gifts, coffee, chocolate, merch, hooray! The group of authors that put this baby together is looking raise it up as an independent thinker. It needs your help.

• Specifically, it needs books by independent publishers.
• More specifically, it wants quality titles to sell on consignment.

Interested? Contact mike [at] onlyatbarnhills.com.

Can we share some really terrific news?

Last night our parent nonprofit, Badgerdog Literary Publishing, won a $105,000 grant from Impact Austin.

Impact Austin is a local organization of philanthropic women who give annual grants for projects in five different categories. Badgerdog won the Culture grant for “It’s Elementary,” a project that will put professional writers in classrooms in eight elementary schools on Austin’s East Side. Over the course of a year, 600 students will engage in creative writing workshops where they will read, write, and share their original work; they’ll also become published authors—submitting their work, revising proofs, and participating in reading events for Badgerdog’s awesome anthology, Youth Voices In Ink.

This is an exciting step for Badgerdog and we’re thrilled to have Impact Austin’s generous support.

Check out the announcement.

I am hyperorganized when it comes to the techie aspects of editing and story-drafting. All potential ASF blog post topics get filed neatly in the hard drive in the folder labeled “ASF Blog” by date according to week. All my story drafts get filed in, you got it, “Stories” by date and further identified by version “a,” “b,” or “c,” depending on how the drafting goes.

There is one techie thing, however, I am terrible at. That I have to be reminded to do, and if I am not watched like a five year old who has been told to brush her teeth, I will skip the process, assuming I will never be caught. That thing: backing up my hard drive. Like the tooth-brushing, it doesn’t matter how good it is for me, I resist. I skip. I could go months and months without doing it. As long as there’s no pain, I’ll go without…

You know what’s coming next, don’t you?

About a week ago, yes, of course, my hard drive, she done died. Last backup: Christmas. Oh the pain.

All this to say what you already surmise:

(1) Back up your work regularly. And often.

(2) The slew of lovely notes and links and ideas slated to be this ASF post (and many, many others) are gone forever.

But I have a new hard drive, empty of all data. So.

Ironically, the post you won’t see was about technology tricks for writers. It, too, disappeared when I dropped my laptop on its head and gave the thing a total lobotomy. Bah.

Here’s something I stumbled upon that kinda makes up for the loss. It’s short and sweet and so helpful for writers. And it is a reminder that a disabled computer and freedom from technology are good.

The info came to me from Belle Boggs’ blog. She writes:

“I find the Internet really distracting, especially from the work of writing. It’s so tempting to check your email, read the news, or spy on people. Mac users can download a cool program called Freedom that allows you to disable the Internet for a set period of time, but I write on PC, so I generally just try to exert my willpower.”

Many of you may already know Belle Boggs’s beautifully quiet yet ferocious collection of short stories, Mattaponi Queen, which won the 2009 Bakeless Prize for Fiction (and is just out from Graywolf). I recommend this book. And I recommend freedom–the high-tech form you can click to achieve (looks like it’s available for Windows users, too) not the, ahem, low-tech kind you simply have to destroy your machine to get.

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Got any technology tips specifically for writers? Add your comments below. ASF blog readers, including me, will thank you.