At first glance, Bram van Velde is interesting because of Samuel Beckett.  It was Beckett’s name, at any rate, that prompted me to search out the slim, paperback Evergreen Gallery Book.  The volume, printed by Grove Press in 1960, is the fifth in a series on contemporary artists (De Kooning, Stuart Davis, and Philip Guston, for example) in which, as the back jacket explains, “each work, perceptively presented by an outstanding authority, is richly illustrated.”  This rich illustration, in the case of Bram van Velde, includes nine black and white prints, much as you might expect, with an additional twelve color plates, tipped-in—that is, glued onto the pages along their top edge only.  It’s a process that hardly seems practical, production-wise.  Guide marks on the pages suggest that it might have been a human, and not a machine, who preformed this meticulous pasting.  Nevertheless, I’m glad someone took the trouble, because, as I flip through the book, it appears to me as if these plates have truly been hung on the pages—very much as the paintings they replicate once would have been in, you know, a gallery.

In this gallery, though, the primary attraction is not the art, but the text meant to “perceptively present” it.  The book contains three essays, briefer pieces by Beckett and a French art critic named Georges Duthuit, which were written previously and on separate occasions, and a far lengthier article by Jacques Putman, Parisian friend and mentor of van Velde.

Beckett’s contribution, which turns out to be shorter than this essay I’m now writing, reads like even more of a riddle than his fiction, mentions van Velde only once, half way through the piece, and pointedly neglects to characterize the work he’s ostensibly discussing.  Instead of reaching any conclusions, he writes about being unable to do so.  “What is this coloured plane, that was not here before,” he asks, and answers himself, “I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before.  It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct.”

If you’re unfamiliar with van Velde’s work, as I was, this statement might lead you to imagine something far more radical than what’s actually taking place on the canvas.  A few pages on, when Duthuit is, “in the dock,” as Beckett puts it, the art critic has a go at describing this non-art.  “An aborted geometry,” is his first suggestion.  Later he elaborates: “The canvases are breaking down but ordered; they disintegrate, are constructed; are stiff, expansive; somber and aglow.  One and the same surface is both taut and relaxed.”  Since his text is presented alongside the prints, he can perhaps be forgiven for not bothering to explain what they look like, in favor of these musings on their character.

For the sake of clarity, though, I’ll pause a moment to attempt what none of the authors of Bram van Velde ever get around to: a straightforward description of the “art” of Bram van Velde.  The paintings, yes, are abstract, but not so rootless that it becomes impossible to say, for instance, “there’s a face,” or, “there’s a flower.”  He resists pattern and symmetry, but elements such as shape, line and color are not absent.  Looking at one of his “compositions,” as nine of the color plates are titled, the work appears, in fact, composed.  I couldn’t tell you what logic or impulse might have compelled the Dutchman to place this green triangle up here and that white sphere in the corner, but the choices he’s made give my eye places to travel; his palette—sometimes tending toward pastel, at other times more gloomy, nearly always incorporating a network of red or red-brown, snaking lines—certainly creates a mood.  Like all works of art, his paintings are un-paraphrasable, but, like any work of art, they can be productively discussed.

And Beckett is, in his way, responding to the work, even if his response sounds far more like self-reflection.  “My case,” he submits, “is that Bram van Velde is…the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”  If you’ve come for a view of Beckett, it’s a pleasure to read this thesis, which so transparently phrases his own philosophy.

Beckett’s, though, is a small part of this book, and arguably not its best gift.  If he is the curmudgeon in the room, Duthuit is the romantic, regaling us with lines like, “During all our attempt to understand his work this is our only datum: the fact that between this painting and ourselves there was an immediate communication, different from, or rather below the level of, any comprehension.”

Putman, whose essay accounts for the bulk of the text, initially presents himself as our arbiter, tempting us with the possibility of, “an original synthesis,” of the preceding viewpoints.  It quickly becomes clear, though, that, like Beckett, his interest is in refraining from conclusions.  His language is not so dense as Beckett’s, his air more cheerful, but his pattern of evasion is very much in kind.  He follows up the blessedly direct question, “Is his painting representational or not?” with this reply: “I don’t understand the question.”  He further asserts, “There is nothing more impossible than to tell whether or not things mean the same thing.  Except to tell whether they mean anything at all.  It is better to say nothing.”  A sentiment, of course, that we recognize from Beckett.

If I had come to Bram van Velde wishing to learn about Bram van Velde, I’d be left merely vaguely satisfied.  The brief biography that postscripts the essays and a quick perusal of the Internet do a far better job than our three authors at elucidating his life and work (Bram grew up very poor in The Netherlands, eventually moved to Paris, and by 1960 had experienced little commercial success, although that trend later reversed).  What their writings do suggest, though, is a common psychology, an obsession with the Sisyphean nature of life—as these men saw it—which contextualizes Beckett (and van Velde, too, if you like) in a way that makes his lonely toiling toward the minima seem, in fact, less lonely.

In James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, he remarks that, as the writer’s health was failing in 1988, “On one occasion, he watched a program about Bram van Velde, noting with emotion that, as he was being interviewed in a garden, Bram was carrying a copy of Beckett’s book Compagnie.”  In English, of course, that’s Company.  Never mind that the novella leaves us in doubt about the real possibility of companionship; what’s important is that it acknowledges, “the craving for company,” even, “the need for company.”

In the end, it isn’t Beckett or even van Velde that makes this little Gallery Book worthwhile.  It is the book itself, its spirit of inquiry, its esteem of conversation, its willingness to look a long time at something, withholding judgement, and to at last—in a final effort at companionship—bid the reader to take part.  “It’s your turn,” Putman tells us.  I’m going to go ahead and say that, here it is: meaning: in the desire to communicate, in the unfolding of a dialogue.  For what better reason could we strive and could we search, than for company?

Kate Brittain holds an MFA from NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her dog, her bicycle, and never enough books.

Alexxander Dovelin is an illustrator, writer from the internet. Crafting between tea breaks, Alex draws on personal experience and metaphor to produce poems, short stories, and pseudo-philosophies. You’ll find him scribbling over in Portland, OR.

We hope you have enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you new to class, read a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar read  The Red Parts: A Memoir and completed the second writing assignment.  If you didn’t get a chance to read The Red Parts this week, these supplements will get you up to speed (and really make you want to carve out the time to sit down and read Nelson’s haunting memoir about the murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, in 1969:

Eve Conant, “A Death in the Family,” The New York Times Book Review

This week, the class has focused on The Latest Winter and Shiner. Read the reviews here:  Jordan Davis, The Latest Winter in The Constant Critic and David Gunton, Shiner in Jacket #19.

Exercise #3: Poem(s)

Pick two poems from Shiner, The Latest Winter, and/or Something Bright, Then Holes.  Identify an element in each poem that you’d like to play with in your own work.  The element can be macro (a particular approach to subject matter, a certain kind of voice, a pattern of repetition, a strategy of ligature, etc) or it can be at the level of the sentence (syntax, orthography, lineation, acoustics, diction, etc).  Drawing upon both of the elements you’ve selected, write 2-3 pages of poetry (a single poem, or two, or several—up to you).

May 1, 2013

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you from a small village outside of Vienna. I am here with the artist, Jason Dodge, and others, living the next few days in a castle not far from the Danube river. I’ll be traveling for a month and wanted to keep in touch. It’s been years since I have been lucky enough to fly this far from Portland and now, of course, I want to always being flying this far away…in part so I can come back to you!

On the flight over I was nervous, nervous about the plane crashing in the ice of Greenland or falling into the Atlantic. Instead there was almost no turbulence and I slept and drank water and read magazines and walked up and down the big machine, stretching every few hours. About an hour before landing in Amsterdam, I began thinking about how I would take time to write poems while I moved around from Austria to Italy to Germany to England to France and then England again before coming home. I was walking down the aisle toward my seat (17J) and glanced down at a man sleeping, stretched out over three seats: he had a red Delta/KLM blanket over him, a cloth over his eyes, and a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems held in his arms like a teddy-bear. Poetry at 37,000 feet! Poetry calming a traveler down as he slept, and the plane racing across the world with Bishop’s “Waiting Room” there among it all!

And now, after the long trip here, I find myself sitting at a picnic table in a courtyard with a coffee and time for poems! But! But I am facing a bright green hilly valley covered in trees and mist and farm houses and ruins of old churches, and it’s like sitting in front of an ocean, the ocean being so beautiful and complete that it seems foolish to sit in my head with the waves crashing in front of me! I have always wondered how nature poets could write what they do and if they do so while being faced with nature, or if, like I would have to do, they live with nature but write surrounded by four dull walls, or on a couch with the TV blasting. I’m looking at the early stages of a sunset, the green going on forever and ever, and writing a poem feels like it would be an abandonment of the moment. How weird is that? What’s wrong with me? I might not write anything until I can get into a cheap hotel in London where I know my inner-life will be more willing to crawl out of the strange and wonderfully ugly floorboards of my body.

Believe me,

Matthew Dickman

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Joanna Klink’s inaugural reading as the Tin House Writer-in-Residence. Before a packed congregation (the event was held in a church), Joanna delivered a perfect sermon, one that seemingly pulled the crowd closer to her with each line read. The poems she elected to share seemed to mirror the night’s unfolding weather. Airy and playful at first, then tinged with melancholy as the sun set. There was something holistic about the entire affair, one that I still can’t quite put my finger on.

 Adding to the evening’s enchantment was the introduction given by one of Joanna’s graduate students, Missy Ward. Rather than list biography and accomplishments, Missy spoke of sonic registers and infinite arrangements. Time and care had obviously been given to her thoughts, and I ended up thinking about her words as much as I did Joanna’s (no small feat).

As such, I am happy to share Missy’s introduction below.- Lance Cleland

Every Tuesday afternoon, Joanna arrives at PSU to lead a graduate writing workshop.

Each week she is as eager and curious and engaged as any devoted artist for whom sharing is an expression of living.

Her syllabus this spring features, among five or six equally remarkable quotations, one from the writer and translator Jane Hirschfield. It says: “Here, as elsewhere in life, attentiveness only deepens what it regards.”

But of course it does, doesn’t it?

And of course we need reminder of it.

We need to feel that attention is itself an art and one that, moment by moment, deepens both the writer and the reader via practice.

Art is, after all, a verb as Yoko Ono says and not a noun.

Before I had the chance to learn from Joanna in person I had her three books to pore over and those are most recently Raptus as well as Circadian and They Are Sleeping.

Each of them, you’ll find, features an undeniable attention to sound and an appreciation for what James Longenbach calls “the poet’s materials.”

Our English language is the very “stuff” of poems but is, terrifically, a patchwork of German and Latin and French influence come down through the ages.

The many sonic registers available for use thus allow for sentences like this one from Joanna’s “Winter Field.”

What better witness than this evening snow,


its steady blind quiet, its eventual


completeness, a talc smoothing every surface

through the lumen tricks of ice.

In it you can hear her love of music and arrangement because you hear the conjuring undulates of “better, evening, steady and smoothing” give way to the three little thumps at the end – the “tricks of ice.”

Here we have a trick more subtle than deceptive, one that’s “played” with happy surprise.

It makes me think that material is, for the sonically attentive among us, a play-thing encouraging its own infinite arrangement.

Joanna’s gift for gathering together sonic bouquets is as characteristic as her insistence upon new hyphenated compounds for the English language.

I read her work and think of the urgent “couple-color” in Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” I think of the grieving “spectre-thin” in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

I wonder, too, whether her fascination with the German-language poet Paul Celan has influenced her taste for union.

I know that German, which is notorious for its long words, allows for hyphenation as a means of clarification.

However, I discovered that German grammar also employs the hyphen during combinatorial invention or “coining of phrases.”

Our own English language contains existing neologisms like cyberspace, Astroturf, Xray Frisbee.

To these Joanna has added: gray-bodied, fog-locked, calendar-sprung and my very favorite far-nessess.

When I encounter art that requires, “as elsewhere in life,” great attention, I sense the original effort of feeling first required of its maker.

But please don’t let me reduce attention to mere seriousness or difficulty.

The attentive approach is, on the contrary, an agreement that allows the subject of one’s attention to expand and reorient the senses and make the attendant new.

It is a generous Whitmanesque multiself whose work is always ever an invitation for its recipient to do the same – to encounter and play and grow and draw vitality from the practice.

Thank you again for being here and please help me welcome Joanna Klink.

Missy Ward is a graduate writing student in the MFA at PSU.

Writers were particularly smitten by her; Colette deemed her “a most beautiful panther” (and given the fact that Baker was both chic and wild and often accompanied by her pet leopard Chiquita, the sobriquet suits her well). Langston Hughes collected her pictures, postcards and newspaper clippings. Playwright Anita Loos noted Baker’s “witty rear end.” Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, Jean Cocteau and F. Scott Fitzgerald were ardent admirers. For e.e. cummings, Baker was “a creature neither infrahuman nor superhuman but somehow both.” Hemingway said that she was “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw, or ever will,” and the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner wrote, in the 1930s, about Baker’s “magnificent dark body” in her stage debut and the resounding “scream of salutation [that] spread through the theater” after her danse sauvage with partner Joe Alex.

Baker also dipped into the literary world when her 1930s novel about interracial love, Mon sang dans tes veines, My Blood In Your Veins, was published (written with two collaborators). Opening a swanky nightclub in Paris called Chez Joséphine, she directed and published a house magazine that included poetry, fashion and art work.

She did not go unnoticed by the inimitable couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and makes a cameo appearance in the “Treasures” chapter of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The rich recipe for Custard Josephine Baker calls for sugar, a little flour and milk, kirsch, lemon zest, bananas and the mysterious liqueur Raspail, “for which it will probably be necessary to substitute another,” Toklas advises, letting the reader dream up what might best sweeten the dancer’s eponymous dessert. (I had the custard once at a late night Left Bank dinner party and whatever secret liqueur was added made for a smooth, delicate flavor.)

This brief column can only give a taste of Baker’s fabulous talent, wild popularity and clever sense of humor when she duly notes, “I like Frenchmen very much because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” She has left her beautiful, indelible mark on Paris: visit la place Josephine Baker near Montparnasse or swim in the vast piscine named in her honor on the Right Bank. And, next month on May 20^th, wherever you may be, you can celebrate “Josephine Baker Day” (created by the NAACP in 1951)—whether in high style or with low profile, with bubbly or bananas or both, raise a glass, a peeled fruit, or very high heel in her honor.

Heather Hartley is Paris editor at Tin House. She’s the author of Knock Knock, released by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in Post Road, Drunken Boat, Forklift Ohio, Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She’s a Co-Director of the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop literary festival and lives in Paris.

We know the title would imply that World Book Night is, well, one night, but temperance has never been our specialty.  On Monday we threw a party for Alexis Smith, whose debut novel Glaciers was chosen as a World Book Night title. It was a fun night for book lovers (many of which were WBN volunteers) with good music, wonderful readings from Leigh Newman and Alexis, and some tasty birthday cake.

And while the cake may have disappeared (nothing cures a hangover like dessert for breakfast), good literature remains. Please enjoy the opening chapter from Glaciers, a worthy selection for a great event.

Amsterdam

Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably never will go.

As a child in a small town on Cook Inlet in Alaska, she saw volcanoes erupting, whales migrating, and icebergs looming at sea before she ever saw a skyscraper or what could properly be called architecture. She was nine years old, on a trip to her aunt’s with her mother and sister, the first time she visited a real metropolis: Seattle. She took it all in—the towering buildings and industrial warehouses, the train tracks and bridges, the sidewalk cafés and neighborhood shops, and the skyline along Highway 99, the way the city seemed to rise right up out of Elliot Bay, mirroring the Olympic Mountains across the sound. The breadth and the details overwhelmed her, but soon she loved the city in the same way she loved the landscape of the north. Old churches were grand and solemn, just like glaciers, and dilapidated houses filled her with the same sense of sadness as a stand of leafless winter trees.

She began collecting postcards of other cities: Paris, London, Prague, Budapest, Cairo, Barcelona. She borrowed books from the library and watched old movies, just to get a glimpse of these other places. She imagined visiting them, walking the streets, sleeping in creaky beds in hostels, learning a few words of every language.

Isabel finds the postcard of Amsterdam on Thursday evening, at her favorite junk store, across from the food carts on Hawthorne. It is a photograph of tall houses on a canal, each painted a different color, pressed together and tilted slightly, like a line of people, arm in arm, peering tentatively into the water. The picture has a Technicolor glow, the colors hovering over the scene rather than inhabiting it.

She turns the postcard over, expecting nothing—an antique white space never utilized—like others on the rack, bought decades ago on long-forgotten vacations, and never mailed. But Amsterdam had been stamped; Amsterdam had been posted. The postmark is dated 14 Sept 1965 and there is a message, carefully inscribed:

 Dear L—

Fell asleep in a park. Started to rain. Woke up with my hat full of leaves. You are all I see when I open or close a book.

Yours,
M

Isabel stands before the rotating metal rack for a long time, holding the postcard, rereading the message, imagining the young man (it must have been a young man) whose small, precise handwriting stretches across allotted space perfectly. She imagines the young woman (Miss L. Bertram, 2580 N. Ivanhoe St., Portland, Ore) who received the postcard, and how much she must have read between those few lines, how much she must have longed for him to say more.

Isabel turns back to the image of Amsterdam, wondering if the houses on the canal still stand, or if they have succumbed to time and damp. Amsterdam is one of those low-lying cities, she thinks, remembering a New Yorker article about melting icecaps.

She searches the rack for more of Amsterdam and the correspondence between M and L, but finds none. She buys the postcard and leaves with it tucked deep in her coat pocket.

Walking home, she thinks Amsterdam must be a lot like Portland. A slick fog of a city in the winter, drenched in itself. In the spring and summer: leafy, undulating green, humming with bicycles, breeze-borne seeds whirling by like tiny white galaxies. And in the early glorious days of fall, she thinks, looking around her, chill mist in the mornings, bright sunshine and halos of gold and amber for every tree.

Back in her apartment she pins Amsterdam to the wall above her bed, beneath another old postcard: four brightly painted totem poles and a few muskeg spruce, leaning over a marshy inlet.

Alexis M. Smith grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. She received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She has written for Tarpaulin Sky and powells.com. She has a son and two cats, and they all live together in a little apartment in Portland, Oregon. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed the Tin House Seminar: Maggie Nelson thus far. For those of you just discovering this, please follow the link for a full description of the project.

Last week, the seminar delved into Bluets. There was an amazing amount of user generated supplementary material added to the forum, well worth a look for those of you who have read the book or are just catching up. This week, we get our first writing assignment!

Exercise #1: Ghost Book Narrative

Many of my books have a kind of “ghost book,” a book that secretly—or not so secretly, as the case may be—stands behind my book, not just as its muse, but often as its literal stylistic and/or structural model.  … In the case of Philosophical Investigations and Bluets, the leaning against not only entailed working from Wittgenstein’s ideas qua ideas but also involved lifting concrete sentence constructions, locutions, and so on.  But there are insurmountable differences between us, which made the lifting productive.  —Maggie Nelson, “A Sort of Leaning Against,” Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, p. 94

Using as your ghost book a text selected from The Public Domain Review—or, if you like, another text entirely—write a 2-3 page piece that “leans against” the ghost book in whatever way(s) you choose. Make sure to check out the Maggie Nelson Seminar Blog for updates and discussions regarding exercise #1 (and all things Maggie Nelson!).

Is that true? Are we all—all of us writers—fans? Fan-like, do we not passionately—sometimes even obsessively—engage with our subjects? Do we not write in order to gain access and understanding? To be able to become part of the greater whole? But what about the freighted and fraught side of fandom? When our desire for access and intimacy creates a debit or comes at some other cost?

I put the question, as it were, to a variety of authors whom I admire and consider myself a fan. I asked them to describe their best or most interesting or most transformative experiences as fans. As the answers came back, I discovered another distinct and weirdly interesting pleasure: that of being a fan listening to fans talking about being fans.

Jim Krusoe (Parsifal): Before I ever experienced the obsessive delights of Raymond Roussel, the microfictions of Robert Walser, the skull-lifting novels of Flann O’Brien, or the doll-worlds of Guy Davenport, there was Kenward Elmslie. Because it was his book, Orchid Stories, that first allowed me to imagine my own possibilities as a narrative writer. True, I’d read Djuna Barnes and Beckett, so I should have gotten the message, but somehow hadn’t, maybe because back in 1974, I was still writing poetry (I did that for a long time), and was mostly focused on an extended argument with myself over irony and earnestness.

But Elmslie’s stories ignored all such questions, and the paragraph that follows, from a story called “Streetcar” marks the exact spot where, on a day nearly forty years ago, I actually felt an internal switch flip on:

Whole days passed when I rarely left my room. Friday night, I could barely sleep so involved was I in my Saturday excursion to see Dog Roots. I rehearsed getting in the streetcar in my mind’s eye—the steps, reaching in my coat pocket for the three pennies, saying hi to the uniformed traffic watcher. In point of fact, a new traffic watcher was sitting in the green booth beside the curtained conductor. A bunch of loud women got on, wearing minks and orchids. A bony girl in her teens with steel-rimmed spectacles and braces on her teeth accompanied them. In one hand, she held a pink noisemaker, and on the lapel of her white velvet break-away coat, a blue-and-gray orchid was pinned. I stared at it so relentlessly, she tossed it to me, with studied nonchalance. Her party got off at the next stop, opposite the Health Museum.

Kenward Elmslie

What was it about this single passage that changed my world, even though I didn’t know it at the time? Could it have been the vision of a movie called Dog Roots? The mysterious encounter with the teen? All those orchids? The looming presence of the Health Museum? To this day, I have no idea, but I remember at that moment I felt giddy, maybe to see a story that was unfettered both from “natural” details and “artfulness”.  What was that particular story about? What were any of the stories in that collection about? Even looking at them now, I can’t say, although if pressed, I guess I would answer that their true subject was play.

And maybe that isn’t surprising, because Kenward, who I came to know later, turned out not to be a storywriter at all, but primarily a poet, librettist, and graphic-novel precursor, collaborating with, among others, Joe Brainard and Donna Dennis. And what made The Orchid Stories so freeing, I think, was that unlike Beckett or Barnes, what was missing from Elmslie’s fiction was a sense of intentionality, or supposed purpose. It just happened and was interesting in and of itself, without needing to dominate a reader. Of course, that modesty of presence may also explain why his book isn’t more widely read, but for me, opening those pages was like the morning when, still a kid, I arrived from the pinched and greasy Midwest to see the Pacific Ocean for the very first time, shimmering and boundless, then waded in and, without any place at all to go to, swam.

Dana Johnson (Elsewhere, California): If I did not love music as much as I do, I would not be a writer. Music, and the musicality of language, propelled me into the world of writing, from the time my parents gave me my own little plastic record player somewhere around five years old. I played the “Three Little Fishes” until I wore that record out, just so I could hear “Boop boop dittum datum wattum choo.” And then right around the same age, I suppose, traveling down south, I realized that my family in California said, “up there” when my family in Tennessee said what sounded like, to me, “up air.” Up air. Up air. It’s great to hear it and repeat it even now. When I first read Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” it knocked me out, because I totally understood Anders’ love of the phrase “they is.” And when I finally got to the end of Ulysses, which is not my favorite novel, not by a long sight, I still savored the language in it, savored the ending, that rhythmic “yes I said yes I will Yes.” I read Ulysses in grad school with a 240-page annotation. It was the first book I read that required another book to help you get through it, but by the time I got to the end, I was like, Okay, James Joyce. I hate you for making me carry around two books, but I love you because at the end of the day, with or without annotations, you agree that it all comes down to the music of the words.

Aspen Matis (“A Hiker’s Guide to Healing” and Knapsacked: A Life Redirected North): I hated school. I was instead going to be an actress and also a great, famous writer. Yet I’d read only six books in completion by the time I was 20 and first heard a story by Aimee Bender. I had probably written more words than I’d read. In my first college fiction-writing workshop, though, we had Story Hour, during which my professor read to us, and there was nothing to do but listen.

The story was “Dearth,” Aimee Bender’s tale of a woman – Our Woman, she’s named – who could never manage to abort her pot of gestating potato babies. She all at once was a mother. She took her baby potatoes to a movie; they could not eat the popcorn and so “clutched handfuls of it in their fat fingers until it dribbled in soft white shapes to the floor.” As my professor read, I scrawled, “Magic is necessary.” Metaphor is magic. They were potatoes because of course they were. You get what you get. My pulse beat in the pad of my thumb. And of course I had a story about dearth, too.

Listening in that class, I learned that metaphors don’t need to stay just words. If Our Girl is growing lonely, a hand-shaped-hole can form where she feels it in her gut and grow, threaten her health. I wrote, “Not possible, but true.” I wrote, “I bet she drinks too much.” I wrote, “I want to write.”

* * *

I signed up for a class in L.A., a hands-on type of thing about breaking into Hollywood, and moved into The Oakwood – better known in town as Hollywood Elementary. Eight days after faded child-star Corey Haim overdosed, I moved into his room. He’d died, maybe in my bed. The man who’d lived in my room died thinking he was Corey Haim, teen idol. Big star. Really he was a 38-years-old, and an addict. That lie he wished were true killed him. My class took fieldtrips to directors’ lot-offices and agents’ phallic granite lobbies, producers’ over air-conditioned mansions perched on hills; at a Venice Beach bookstore I bought a book, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a book of stories by Aimee Bender.

I read it. I said nothing to my classmate-suitemates and called a cab and rode in silence to the University of Southern California campus, where Aimee Bender was – I’d learned online – an MFA professor. I found Aimee Bender’s office and peeked in on her office hours and I announced to her that in the fall I’d be at Columbia, studying writing. This was a lie. I was a sophomore. Yet I said it.

And she didn’t seem to doubt me. And it was a hope I felt like an arm around my waist and therefore, I thought, not really a lie. Or: it was the first lie I told in LA that was true.

I wrote a pill and swallowed it. Woke in New York.

Friday, April 5, 2013:

I’m parked in the University of Houston’s chancellor’s office, on the red-and-gold carpeted floor, participating in a sit-in organized by the graduate students. I’ve been here less than two hours, and yet I have no sensation whatsoever below my navel. Occasionally there’s a tingling in the toes of one foot—I’m not sure which one. I will need a forklift to get out of here. The students have good reason to protest. They are creative writing graduate students in one of the best programs in the country, but those who teach are among the hardest worked (2 classes per semester, 27 students per class) and they are absolutely the poorest paid teaching fellows anywhere.

For being fully responsible for the teaching of four classes of composition per year, the MFA students take home roughly $7800 per year (salary minus $1600 in fees charged by the U and taken out of their paychecks). The creative writing PhD students make a couple thousand more than that, which still puts them in the cellar nationally. TF salaries have not been raised at the University of Houston in twenty years. They make less than I did in the early 80′s when I was getting my MFA at the University of Arizona.

If this sit-in is a fair example, then protests have become a lot more hygienic and polite than my days as an undergraduate protesting the Vietnam War. And the participants are a lot better dressed. I definitely remember the smell of sweaty bodies, along with many rude, crude, and unkind comments voiced loudly. Well-dressed was not an issue, though fully dressed might have been.

Here, students and faculty line the walls but leave plenty of room for people to walk by comfortably. They have freshman essays with them to grade, and they have their laptops open (as do I) writing their lit papers and maybe their stories (presumably about revolt and revolution) for workshop. The administration is none too happy about these campers, but they seem especially worried about the social media sites that are covering the sit-in, including the grad students’ Facebook page: UH English TFs Unite. The page hasn’t been up long and the number of “Likes” is multiplying daily.

The protests back in the day were long before Facebook or email or cellphones. Communication, in fact, was often the most difficult issue in organizing and maintaining the desired tone—poor communication led to nonviolent protests turning violent, for example, and for a focused protest becoming unfocused and chaotic.

Those days are over.

Everyone involved in the sit-in signs up online. Protesters are advised to wear dress attire appropriate for teaching, to leave in time to teach their classes, and to take work along to permit quiet, friendly cohabitation with the president’s staff—a wonderfully friendly group. “I worry about y’all sitting there all day,” one said during my first day of the sit-in. She was concerned for our physical comfort. “Do you need anything?”

Q: How successful is this mannerly sit-in?

A: The faculty has tried all semester to get a meeting with the provost over this matter without any success; the students parked themselves on the president’s carpet and got a meeting with the provost in 90 minutes. Now the provost wants to meet with the
faculty today.

Power to the cordial, brothers and sisters.

To support the sit-in, like the following Facebook page: UH English TFs Unite.

Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books, most recently The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards and The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction. His novels include Century’s Son, American Owned Love, and Mystery Ride. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson