Book Recommendation: Volt by Alan Heathcock

Volt, Alan Heathcock's debut collection of stories is one of those books that makes you celebrate the continued existence of small presses.  Volt is a 2011 release from Graywolf Press, and sadly, as a debut collection, it is one of those books likely passed over by the large houses, and as a result, unnoticed by most readers despite outstanding reviews.  That Mr. Heathcock will not benefit from a larger marketing budget and greater distribution is a shame, for it is a collection that should be on every one's "best of" lists for 2011.  Graywolf has a long history of championing such fine writers, and they've got a winner here.  It is a stunning collection of stories linked by a common setting and frequently featuring common characters.  The collections are a study in realism done right.  All may not want to face that characters who so often demonstrate such profound loss and sadness such as these, but we would be missing a glimpse at our own towns and our own lives if we turned from such realism.

Heathcock is masterful at offering more plot than many contemporary literary writers without sacrificing anything in depth of character or lyricism of language.  We may turn away in our own lives from characters such as those who people Volt, but we will be wiser and more compassionate if we face them.  It is a fairly thin collection with only seven stories, and you will be tempted to read the book straight through in one sitting, but you will fight that urge only because you want to savor each story.  Indeed the stories are likely to haunt your dreams.  Heathcock writes beautifully.  He  develops realistic characters who offer complexity and depth.  He is the sort of writer who other writers will be copying sentences from in journals just to study craft, and yet you would hardly know it, for the pace of the stories keeps the reader bolting through them and the grip of the narrative carries such truth that most readers will have to stop once and again to remember how beautifully Heathcock writes.



Alan Heathcock

 Heathcock also reveals himself as one of the first and certainly the most dexterous writers to begin and face the homecoming realities for some veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.  Largely those lives have been ignored, not just in our newspapers but in our novels.  It is not exactly a pretty picture of these lives as painted here, but I suspect, at least for many, it is an accurate one.  Such lives are not the focus of the collection but they seem to inform it throughout and certainly they echo its themes of morality and mortality, of guilt and shame, of bravery and persistence.  Heathcock's deftness in managing such complicated themes with understatement and his ability to rescue lives that we might dismiss is reminiscent of another debut writer I have championed--Josh Weil (The New Valley) and both writers will rightfully earn comparisons to the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and to Andre Dubus (both II and III).

Support a debut writer while supporting a small press and buy Volt.  While you are at it, buy one or two more copies for friends.  They will thank you.  And you will thank yourself for helping make possible more books from this fine writer in the future.

Stone Masonry and Writing

From my good friend Wilmer Frey, writer (and occasional obsessive stone mason). When not writing, parenting, or farmining, he is building a 140' x 8' dry stack retaining wall on his wall in New Hampshire. Always wise, in an email Will reminds me : "Have I mentioned before that stone work is kinfolk to writing? One stone, one word, each of them one after another, over and time, one line/row at a time. Sometime they fit, more often they do not. But when they do...lordy. That celebrated stay against confusion."

On Writing

So we think we cannot write.  We don't have enough time.  Our lives are too stressful.  We are "blocked."  The words are coming too slowly.  We can't get the language right.  The images in our head have become a chaos.  The lines we compose in our head when we think we are not writing disappear and never reappear...

I don't know how many times I have said such things, aloud or within my mind.  How often have I complained about the "struggle" I am having with writing?  And then there's this little reminder:  Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated the entire text of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye.  Paralyzed by a massive stroke, he composed the book in his head at night from his hospital bed and then dictated the book using a process called "partner assisted scanning" where the person taking dictation recited the French alphabet slowly over and over and Bauby blinked when the right letter was reached.  The average word took nearly two minutes to spell out.  He died within days of the books publication.

I think we can find our way to words.

The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise

Few books have marked my literary life more deeply than The Great Gatsby. I learned several courses worth of instruction from reading and re-reading and scrutinizing Fitzgerald's promise. That I could read the novel as an indictment of the modern American ruling class (even if Fitzgerald could not), speaks to my proletarian core. The Gatsby house is no more apparently: The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise. I suspect a new McMansion, one of grander scale and equally empty rooms, will soon no doubt take its place.

Sontag on Writing

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove


or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about

paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with

others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

~ Susan Sontag, from a lecture about writing at Vassar College

A Matter of Perspective

Last night my wife and I watched the wonderful HBO biography film "Temple Grandin."  I've followed Grandin's work in the past and have heard several interviews with her and have long been fascinated by her.  An autistic, Grandin has revolutionized the cattle industry by designing cattle-friendly apparatus that help move the animals from feedlot through to slaughter in a humane manner that focuses on keeping the animals calm.  A repeated line from the film is "Nature is cruel but we don't have to be."  She developed radical new ways of managing cattle by close study from their perspective, literally by dropping to all fours and moving through pens and chutes and by watching the patterns of milling cattle.  An autistic who thinks entirely in images, she is capable, in essence, of seeing like a cow.  Put plainly, she thinks differently from most of us.  She offers an entirely different perspective.  Indeed early in the film Grandin is depicted (in a stunning performance throughout I might add, by Claire Danes) in her first year at boarding school when a sympathetic teacher watches and listens closely enough to begin to recognize some of the patterns of her thinking process and then challenges her with a science experiment to explain how an optical illusion that shifts perspective can make two identical objects look of different sizes.

There are valuable lessons in the film about accepting people who are different from ourselves, about challenging our own patterns of thinking, about how we define intelligence, about how we should support the efforts of our children and how we meet their needs, about how we see our food sources...the list could go on.  But what does this have to do with writing?  Everything.  So much of writing, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is about trying on other skins, as one of my poet friends likes to say.  To succeed in portraying with authenticity the desires, thoughts, goals, worries, and philosophies (to name but a few qualities) of other people, be they fictional or real, we must come as close as possible to understanding how they think, just as good teachers must recognize that in any given classroom they have any number of individuals who will access the material that one is attempting to teach in radically different ways.  We can't get all the way inside some one's skin no matter how hard we try, but try we must to enter an other's mind, to enter their very thinking processes if we wish to portray in them in a manner that feels authentic and believable and if we truly wish to access their interior lives.

And still there are other applications to be learned here as well.  Among them is this:  it is inevitable in a writing life that we will encounter problems within manuscripts that will seem insurmountable obstacles.  Very often the only real way across those obstacles is to think about them in entirely new patterns, literally to change our perspective.  Sometimes this means reconsidering the cause of the problem.  The problem that may seem linguistic in nature may have its real roots in character psychology.  The problem that may seem a matter of ill-defined character may actually be one of structure.  The thematic flaw may prove simply mishandled within the language used to express it.  The solution that is revealed when you think you're at the copy-editing stage may be one with its true roots all the way back to a needing a different narrative point of view.  The point is we must be open to re-imaging text at times.  We must see it from new perspectives.  A universal need in all revision for writers of every type of material is a kind of perspective-based optical illusion--the need to step outside the writer's vision and achieve success in reading the material as a reader will do.  Failure to do this will always result in a failed text.

(And a postscript--the film "Temple Grandin" can prove instructive to the writer as well, for its creators had to imagine ways to convey Grandin's perspective and did so with innovations that are clean, artistic, effective, and entirely transferable to the writer producing text.)

Editing--"Skipping the Door"

This is the opening paragraph to Sherman Alexie's short story "Breaking and Entering" as it appears in his book War Dances:

"Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film--how to construct a scene--my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, 'You don't have to show people using a door to walk into a room.  If people are already in the room, the audience will understand they didn't crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize.  The audience uderstands that a door has been used--the eyes and mind will make the connection--so you can just skip the door.'

...'Skip the door' is a good piece of advice--a maxim, if you will--that I've applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life.  To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, 'An editor must omit all unnecessary information.'"

I read this after a long day during which many of my hours were spent editing other people's work and encouraging still others to consider undertaking substantial editing on their own.  If only we all had this text in common and I could have typed "Skip the door," and they all would have known precisely what I meant, and thereby I could have edited a good deal of myself.  Of course such shorthand rarely exists, at least not outside the context of contained classroom, one where the good students will, after years have passed, find themselves writing extraneous material when suddenly they remember a teacher telling them to "Skip the door," perhaps even skipping as (s)he says the phrase like Alexie's character does, and they'll begin the necessary and satisfying task of striking through sentence after sentence, watching language curl and skrink like bacon in a frying pan.