Memoirous

The Great Believers Rebecca Makkai Viking, 2018 “We were the great believers. I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved—and who now walk the long stormy summer.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Generation” A striking epitaph for Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers about . . . . Imagine a mysterious virus suddenly besetting a population. The illness itself sets those people apart, publically identifies them. It hits with impunity, across all ethnicities and age groups. At first no one knows how it is spread . . . they have an idea formed from fear and panic, prejudices and assumptions. A mixing of fluids. And, because this population is somewhat small, though no one knows exactly because it can sometimes be hard to tell, and marginalized, the rest of the world carries on. Years later as the outcry grows for treatment, a vaccine, more is done to stop the spread, to ...

This story, Big Thompson, was something I had on my mind for awhile--in a couple different pieces. Listening to Rebecca Makkai at OCWW talk about how she composed a few of the stories in her collection Music for Wartime I went home and tried to do the same thing. She wrote down two of her strongest ideas and then tried to tie them together into one plot. For example, the collection ends with “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” a story that focuses on an apartment house that had a gas leak which killed almost all of its inhabitants, save one couple—who also survived the Holocaust. Relatives move into the apartments, and one of the new residents is an artist who is creating a project—a dollhouse structure using found and donated objects from each apartment. Record albums serve as a focal point for each miniature room: Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, Joe Cocker. Whew! This could all seem like such a jumble--but under a deft hand it can all come together. So I combines images of water ...

I recently had an excerpt of my chapbook Bright Invisible in Utterance Journal A short story will be out soon in THINK journal It is titled Big Thompson and I used a method laid out by Rebecca Makkai author of The Great Believer and a finalist for the Pultizer Prize. She was teaching a class a few years ago at OCWW where she said when trying to come up with ideas for a short story she sometimes let her ideas collide--for instance news of a recent gas leak/explosion and Holocaust survivors. She has a penchant for putting together incongruous scenarios and constructing a story. I thought: Why not?  I'd had in mind several loose threads that had to do with water: New Burlington, Ohio that was abandoned and flooded to make way for a reservoir ( Caesar Creek State Park ) and a flood that occurred in Colorado along the Big Thompson in 1976. Adding other tidbits, I wove together a 5,000 word story. Forthcoming--Big Thompson. Finally, Stoneboat a print journal contacted me ...

Florida Lauren Groff Riverhead Books, New York 2018 I am a capricious reader—of Lauren Groff. Her Fates & Furies infuriated me. I read it because it was mentioned in a group review of House Frau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, a good friend of mine. There was at the time a certain “wokeness” of reviewers about women and sex. I know, ridiculous. The idea was that these books should be grouped together because women in them were having sex. Which didn’t make sense because had not one of the reviewers read Madame Bovary ? Maybe they were put together because it was women writing novels about sex. Either way, even the categorization was infuriating. Fates & Furies went on to be highly lauded: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A FINALIST FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NPR MORNING EDITION BOOK CLUB PICK NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS, AND MANY MORE Yo...