Skip to content

You could be anyone

Monday, June 20, 2011

Oh you guys, the Indiana University Writers Conference was so awesome.

I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it was. Everyone was awesome. Awesome. It’s an overused word, but I mean it in the truest sense: I am full of awe.

Every day, I took a tiny little cranky elevator down to the Writer Camp headquarters and then sat in a classroom where we talked about the process and wrote some words and then wrote some more words and then Lynda Barry would make us laugh and then we’d all evacuate when the screenwriting lady came in, and I’d go sit in the cafeteria and try to find something edible (true fact: nothing served at the Indiana Memorial Union is actually edible unless it’s a naked scotcheroo pile (You know how delicious scotcheroos are? How normal people make the scotcheroo filling and then press it into a pan and cover it up with melted chocolate chips? Yeah, well, the geniuses at the University of Indiana skipped that there step and just dumped the filling into a pile to be served as an “no bake cookie” or whatever they called it but I’m here to tell you: it was a pile of scotcheroo guts and it was delicious and totally worth catching the diabetes) or a gingerbread man with red hot eyes (apparently these are famous or something because everyone was talking about them. I don’t know why the scotcheroo piles aren’t famous but the gingerbread men WERE pretty good) and read tons of short stories and write cogent and thoughtful critiques (at least I tried) and then eventually wandered across the campus, through oh my god unbelievable heat and humidity (look, I spent most of May in Las Vegas and I’m telling you, this was some egregious heat) into a scarcely cool classroom building to discuss character intent with a bunch of other word nerds. And it was bliss.

Bliss with scotcheroo pile cookie things.

This conference totally made up for the last two conferences I went to, the one where Amy Hempel couldn’t be arsed to show up and the other one where everyone seemed like they spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I’ll admit: I’m in danger of falling into that camp and I recognize that those people are INSUFFERABLE to be around. You know who is awesome to be around? Lynda Barry. No lie. I have a crush. I’m not even joking that I’m placing her up on a pedestal next to Mr. Rogers.

I may have cried on her a little bit on the second to last day, but then she made up for it for being a dirty rotten cheat at drinking games that night. Oh yeah, I may have gone out drinking with Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry. Just a little bit.

I also made new writing friends. They are awesome and made me happy and also, gave me hope for writing conferences of the future (also, weirdly a lot of my new writing friends are blonde! And beautiful. Writers are pretty sometimes. It’s true!) Fantastic stories in my fiction workshop! Ones that didn’t start with alarm clocks going off. Brilliant discussions and also, writer dinners at weird ethnic places, filled with laughing and gossip and then readings EVERY blessed night. This is pretty much my idea of heaven, right there. Plus, free wine (although I rarely had any because it was so fucking hot that I drove the 11 blocks to the reading every night. Also, the readings happened right in the middle of the two block Bermuda Triangle where Lauren Spierer disappeared and everyone was kind of freaked out about walking alone at night.)

I have but one regret and it is that I was not able to get my phone out fast enough to record Dan Chaon saying “Wendy Wimmer is beautiful.”* And then when I DID have it out, he refused to say it again. He’s wily, that Dan Chaon. Brilliant and more than a little wily.

There were so many fantastic moments, like when Lynda* mooned me or when I recognized a fellow bloggers work being cited in the blogging session being referred to as a Mommy blogger (and is, in fact, a dude and would likely be very upset or conversely turned on by the confusion) or skipping the Mexican Mennonite movie to go watch XMen at the local cinema like a fucking bad ass (and finding out later that it was probably the smartest decision I made all week) or trying a voodoo spell to help the ancient hotel room’s thermostat dip below 73 degrees or when Dan* walked into workshop, sat down and said “Wendy… darlin… Mommy’s not feeling so good right now”.  There are too many choice moments to pick from and I couldn’t possibly do any of them justice to describe them, especially when the only words that float into my brain are “Again! Again! Again!”

But perhaps it is this one that was the truest to the reason I went.

One night before dinner, I was waiting for my writing posse to check out a Turkish restaurant for dinner and Dan Chaon was reading the newspaper, probably waiting for HIS posse, so he called me over to chat while we waited.

At one point, after telling him about how I defended his honor during my master’s thesis committee, I said “Ok, so I’m here to learn how to write a novel… so, how do you do that?” and I googled my eyes at him, because even though my last blog post promised that I wouldn’t get too tongue-tied around Mr. Chaon, I still acted like a class one dork half of the time (Note to famous writers: I’m actually quite reserved and normal, despite appearances(I’m probably lying right now)) and he shrugged and said “You just do it.”

And then I whined about outlines and snowflake methods and might have said “I don’t know how to DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIITTTTTTTTTT” like I was eight and someone just asked me to do something I resented like picking up dog vomit or running a marathon or climbing the wall on an obstacle course — or all of those things combined.

He waved me off and said “Nah, forget all of that stuff. Just write it. Just dive in from chapter one page one. You can fix it later.”

It’s some powerful faith, for those of us who are so worried about mucking things up with our clumsiness that we are frozen. Those ideas inside our head are so perfect right now, just as they are, and we’re absolutely certain that we’re just going to fuck everything up. But apparently the trick is in just closing your eyes and diving in.

So here we go.

*SO much better than France!

Filed in Conferences | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on You could be anyone

Righter Conference

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Happily, my run of fifteen flights in three weeks is over and I’m home for the next nine days, when I leave for a writer conference.  As you know, I have been making an effort to go to at least one writer’s thingy a year, as I miss the snobby no-pointedness of graduate school. This year, the two I was most interested in were either studying with Robert Olen Butler in Brittany, France or with Dan Chaon in Indiana. My husband suggested that if I couldn’t decide, I should do both (because hey, we’re crazy that way) but also just assumed I’d be going to France and needed to be convinced to take the Indiana one, because holy crap, it’s FRANCE. And Robert Olen Butler wrote one of what I consider the only two perfect short stories in the universe, and since the author of the other one died tragically at a very young age, he’s really my only shot at glimpsing perfection. And also, hello, FRANCE.

So obviously, I chose to go to Indiana.

Here’s the thing (and also, the Greek Chorus is clearing its throat right about now): I do love Robert Olen Butler very much, but the man LIVES in the United States. It’s not like he’s Nicolas Sarkozy. There’s no reason to work with him in France, other than the fact that he happens to be leading a workshop in France this summer. Similarly, I adore Dan Chaon’s work. “Adore” might be too casual a word, actually. I called him out specifically during my master’s thesis defense as being a critical author in whatever it is that we’re publishing today (Post-post-post-modernism?) and as a writer, he’s a genius. I don’t think I’d be reduced to stammering nonsense talk in the presence of Chaon that I know I would with Irving, Boyle or Atwood, but, you know, it just might happen.

While I love Butler’s parrot story more than just about anything ever written, that story is more than a decade old. I love what Chaon is doing RIGHT NOW, which means… he’s brilliant right this minute. Not to say that Butler’s not brilliant right now (he is) but using that workshop as a touch point, would working with Robert Olen Butler be worth paying several thousands of dollars (not to mention, spending many many hours seething at my fellow passengers in coach or blow some bazillion number of my hoarded frequent flier miles to upgrade to first class) more than Dan Chaon’s thing? No. Not even with the France thing. France will always be there. Robert Olen Butler will (shhh) teach other workshops on US soil and I will participate in one of them. Can the France talk, I’m going to Indiana.

So in nine days, I’m driving to southern Indiana in the much maligned Murano. Originally the plan was to fly to Indiana and then jump to San Francisco for a week to meet my friends’ new baby and also celebrate someone’s upcoming birthday, but the in-laws are now taking some kind of extended road trip and won’t be available for pet-sitting duties, and while we could board both of the animals, it would probably be cheaper to buy San Francisco and have it shipped FedEx overnight to Wisconsin. So now we’re postponing the baby-meeting and birthday trip and, hopefully, the birthday too, and thus, it becomes a little more silly to fly. I need some mental distance before I am trapped breathing a stranger’s male pattern baldness for several hours and last week my husband offered to come along and keep me company in Indiana.

I’ve decided to workshop the body image story, which was the story I sent to get accepted into the conference, which leaves me feeling all weird and fuzzy, because a) when writing the story several years ago, I pictured it happening in my grandmother’s house, so I’m afraid I’ll get emotional when it’s being workshopped; b) the narrator is fat and the author is fat and everyone will picture me as the narrator, which I hate so much; c) writing workshops make me crazy–I hate the stupid pack games that are being played, I hate the sizing up that happens and I hate the mental bullshit, and I worry that I’m revealing too much of my own vulnerability in this particular story, which was inspired by the decline of my great-grandmother into Alzheimer’s Disease when I’m still upset about my grandmother’s death; and d) what if Dan Chaon thinks I’m annoying and stupid?

Also, I cut off all of my hair and worry that my hair was my secret writing strength and now some kid with cancer is going to have a magic writing wig (which is a shitty consolation prize to getting cancer, let’s be real).  And then I tell myself to stop being stupid because that lunatic thought assumes that there was any magic writing ability in the first place.

As if you needed more of a glimpse into crazy stupid writers’ heads, I saw a list of all the names in my workshop and I quickly scoured it, to see if I recognized anyone. And then realized that I think I was worried that I’d recognize someone. You know, it’s one thing to be in a workshop with Dan Chaon, but if your fellow combatants participants are, oh, I don’t know, a Blake Butler and a Matt Bell?

Kill me now, please, and save me from spending the fossil fuels to drive to Bloomington.

 

 

 

Filed in Conferences | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Righter Conference

Fragile. A major award.

Friday, November 19, 2010

My short story “Passeridae“? It was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2012.

You should know that I got the e-mail notification from Blackbird while sitting in a Whole Foods in SoMa and immediately started crying. Mostly what I hope were little pretty tears, but I am almost certain there was at least one hiccup in there.

Now, let’s be honest: a lot of people are nominated for the Pushcart. So many in fact that my boyfriends at Barrelhouse actually made a t-shirt about it. But let’s be honest, I constantly think my writing sucks and basically went through the hell of applying to (and getting multiple rejections from) graduate school so that I could feel like I had earned the right to call myself a writer, so it really means a lot to me, even though I seriously doubt that my story will end up in that pretty pretty volume. Just the same. It’s still kind of awesome.

Although, it did occur to me that weeping into my vintage/thrifted embroidered handkerchief in the food court of a Whole Foods in the middle of my raw vegan breakfast makes me some kind of weird person that I’m not really sure I want to know.

Filed in Awards and Stuff Like That, Short Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Words about words

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Last week, the issue #12 of the wonderful Drunken Boat dropped. It includes a story of mine. You should go read it! It’s free!

Another thing that happened last week: I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a PhD level writing workshop with George Makana Clark in Milwaukee. Toying, as in, I was all ready to pull the trigger, but with the short week last week, it didn’t occur to me until 2 pm that Monday was really Tuesday, which was also the first day of classes and if I had any hope of making that first meeting, I had to basically shit or get off the pot in thirty minutes.

After much hemming and hawing (with a side of more hemming), I decided that I was being silly. After all, as amazing as it is to sit in a workshop with graduate students and put forth credits toward that still-niggling PhD, it is a not inconsiderable time commitment. I mean, sure, one night a week, but it’s like 250 miles round trip, once a week, plus three hours in a class, and not one minute of that would be spent producing fiction (arguably, I would write two new short stories for the class, but that would be outside of those hours). That’s like 5-6 hours a week that I could be putting toward That Thing I’m Doing. So screw it, I decided to keep Tuesdays sacrosanct and use them as writing nights, where my husband would simply pretend that I’m in Milwaukee, sitting around a table talking about graduate student first draft stories. All of this, I can do right now and put no wear and tear on my car and instead, spend many cozy fall nights sitting in my office reading chair with a computer and a pug in my lap. No brainer? Probably, but I’m a slow learner.

As all this was happening last week, I got an email congratulating me on another story acceptance. I had had high hopes for that story, as it received some good early reaction in my master’s committee and actually won the Faculty Fiction Award and was chosen as my program’s nomination to the Best New American Voices series (alas, it did not place) and had been puzzled that no one seemed to RECOGNIZE THE BRILLIANCE. Supposedly. In my stupid little writer’s brain, I took this as proof that see? See? I am just a lousy writer and everyone likes me too much to point out that I suck.

Writers are stupid people. You know that right? The worst wallflowers that ever walled. Or flowered.

So, acceptance! Cool! Sure, it wasn’t the New Yorker or Glimmer Train, which are weirdly my two markets that I will have a braingasm should I ever be accepted, but at least it was finally going to be read by a few people. I didn’t remember submitting to Blackbird and it didn’t really click to me immediately, for some reason I was thinking it was a teeny tiny little journal somewhere so I went to look it up on their submission thingy and whoa, I submitted it back in November 2009. And then I did a Google search to find out how long they normally take and…

…braingasm.

I don’t know why the name of the journal didn’t click with me. Probably because there was drama with my grandmother’s chemo appointments and things were going south personally, and really, fuck the chemo excuse, let’s face it, I assumed that because the piece was finally getting accepted, it was a lesser market and not a “top-end literary fiction market” as mentioned by one reviewer.

Please see above re: stupid writers.

Filed in Graduate School, Short Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Words about words

The Thrill of Having Written and the agony of Writing

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

My biggest problem with writing seems to be the fear that the act of writing itself will somehow not be as good as whatever supposed brilliance is floating around my noggin. That is, of course, stupid, because how would I know? And yet, half the problem with This Thing I’m Writing is just the simple issue of my not putting words on the cyber page.I’m so in love with the idea of my story, the sheer world that has been created, that I’m terrified I’m going to ruin it somehow with my clumsy attempts to share it.

This is the part where I whine: I use Scrivener, which makes things a little weird, because while it tracks your word count like an obsessed auditor, it’s all in weird little snapshots and I’m finding the idea of writing on boundless notecards to be strangely offputting. Writing is hard. And also? Writing is hard.

In effort to commit myself to write (by the way, that’s part of my excuse for the absence of blog updates: I am loathe to write words that aren’t going toward This Thing I’m Writing*), I made an agreement with Aych while I was in SF this June: I would write 500 words a day, or 3500 words a week. That, in theory, should give me something reasonably Thing I’m Writing* sized after six months. Our agreement is that we would check in with each other on Wednesdays and report in. Aych sometimes scares me, because I know for a fact that she knows how to beat people up, so I hoped that it would help me stay on track. Plus, I don’t want her to mock me, which she has indeed threatened to do.

In truth, it worked for about a week.

I’m such a lazy bastard. Now, in my defense, I haven’t given up, I’m just eking along, writing closer to half of my goal, which is dumb because I used to write 1500 words a day for Conde Nast, if not more, and I still wrote fiction for grad school. Mostly because I had to, though, which is the crux of the issue. I need to “have to”.

It’s a weird myth that only the good writers get published. There are some lousy-assed writers out there getting published, who have agents and book deals and call themselves an author even though all they did was repackage some shit their dad said or old badly-written blog posts (please note: this does not refer to people whose books I own, for instance if your initials are MS, WM, GZ or JA). If you have any doubt of that, just look at the petri dish of the blogosphere: there are some JACKED writers out there with hit counts that MAKE NO SENSE. But what sets them apart (and those great, unlauded writers) from, oh, ME is that they are typing a lot more text into their empty DOC files. I know this. Of course I do. Blah. I should probably eat more green leafy vegetables too, but look! Candy!

It comes down to the lesson I learned in the pottery studio, at a profound level. You’ve got to persist, insist and exist as an artist (or a writer), which means that you “just keep making”, even though you are pretty sure it’s going to suck. Sometimes it’s just easier to do that on a potter’s wheel than when faced with a blinking cursor.

In semi-related news, one of my short stories (mentioned a few times in this blog as “the sleep story”) will be appearing in the upcoming issue of Drunken Boat, which you can read here. I’m banking on the fact that the thrill of Having Written and the feedback therein will give me some momentum to move forward. Here’s hoping.

*I have nothing against the word “novel” ok? And I’m sure that I’ll start using the word “novel” when I have a “novel” but until then, it’s not a “novel”. It’s a collection of larger snippets that is trying to be something more, and also, I hate how pretentious it sounds to say “I’m working on a novel”. It sounds quite a bit like saying “I’m not really a waitress”. It might also have something to do with the fact that “novel” is a scary word and I’m a super big chicken.

Filed in Creativity, Novel Writing, Short Fiction | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Thrill of Having Written and the agony of Writing

Everlong Everwood

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Mo and Ian graciously allowed me to crash in their living room on the California leg of CA/UT trip. I thought I wasn’t planning anything, other than meeting Magnus (who is absolutely gorgeous and I can’t stop looking at his cuteness) and also, a last minute plan to race up to Napa for brunch at Ad Hoc (overrated, I’m sorry to say), but despite that, it still felt like every minute was full of stuff going on. We went out for tapas with the 3 Fast 3 Furious posse (Jen Larsen was even in town from Everwood, another bit of serendipity) and watched Drunk History at Nonk’s house (I can’t watch the Tesla episode without snorting) and also had the BEST SUNDAY NIGHT EVER playing Rock Band. I was Kim Deal! And Aych was Frank Black! And it was MAGIC!

And then I flew to Everwood, to hang out with my bff at his parents’ house. We went to a giant copper mine, and it was all mine-y and then for something completely different, we went to afternoon tea where a chamber quartet made pop hits seemed austere and refined.  We also went to an amazing sculpture garden that made me question my commitment to artistic expression. I don’t know that I have it in me to write shit in stone. I barely have a blog.

That’s really the crux of it. I’m having some kind of identity crisis, I think. It’s this thing I’m doing which I’m not really doing. I call it “this thing I’m doing” (TM Wendy McClure) but in reality, I’m not actually doing it. Although when I’m not writing, I’m still spending a whole lot of mental headspace inside the universe of “this thing I’m doing”. Perhaps if I had a garden to fill with pages dedicated to my faith, this faith of words and language, perhaps then I would see a purpose to it all, or maybe even feel worthy to do  it.

Utah makes me think the wacky, I think. I’ll probably shake it off.

Nothing

Filed in Creativity, Novel Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Everlong Everwood

Pottery-ing

Monday, February 2, 2009

I’m kind of in love with my pottery class. I did the wheel this week! The WHEEL! Like in Ghost! It was not as successful as that movie, sadly, in that I got really dirty but never actually got it to go. I went in again on Saturday, during open studio time. Mr. Pottery Dude was making his own wares and there was one other student there so I wedged my clay and nabbed a wheel, which happened to be on the other side of his wheel. And then I basically stayed there for four hours, hunched over the damned wheel, getting pruny fingers and knowing that I wasn’t centering the clay properly and knowing that I was missing some step somewhere, but not really able to figure it out. Finally, another potter came in to use the studio and told me that I was building my walls backwards and should be leading with the right hand, not the left, unless I’m using a wheel that spins the other way. Oh. That worked a little better, in that I actually made a small cup thingy, but then I couldn’t actually get anything else to go. Make it go! I felt like a four-year-old. Finally, when Pottery Dude took a break from making his DOZENS of pieces of art, I asked him to just watch me and tell me what I was doing wrong. Everything, it seems. He grabbed my misbehaving wad of clay, plunked it down and had it centered in less than five seconds. Then he told me to feel it, so that I could feel what it was supposed to be, and then he knocked it off center and told me to fix it. I didn’t, so then he put his hands around mine and showed me how to do it. It was… disturbing and weird and would have been disturbingly sexy if it had been, say, Ghost-era Patrick Swayze and not Pottery Dude, who is a cross between James Cromwell and Ned Flanders, which made me blush for thinking those thoughts when I should have been thinking about art and ceramics and certainly not about naughty bits.

It was a very fulfilling Saturday, however, even with the mental distraction. At the end of the day, I felt achy and good, the way I used to feel after playing volleyball, and what is even better is that I had spent a good six hours not thinking about losing my job or what I was going to do next. It really reinforces my need to have some kind of artistic outlet, or anyone’s need, really. It’s going to sound really egotistical, but it’s been a really long time that I’ve had to work to be good at something. Normally, I can pick things up in a snap, especially if it’s something that I want to be good at (I’m a horrible bowler, but I have no desire to be good at bowling), and while pottery is certainly creative, there’s a definite skill involved as well. The moment of discovering that skill, of learning to turn it on and off, that’s a beautiful thing.

At one point, I asked Pottery Dude how many times I needed to cone the clay before making the well and he went off on an elongated tangent, as is sometimes his way, that turned into his view on art and artists. He feels that the keys are in existing, persisting, and insisting. You need to figure out a way to keep your life going while you pursue your art, you have to keep at it even if you’re having little commercial success and you also have to have the backbone to stick with your vision, even if your patrons and critics are telling you to change something. Of course, he meant it from a potter’s perspective (and a successful one, as he’s made a very good life for himself as a full-time potter) but it really hit home for me about writing. I have persisting in the bag, and I’ve found a way to exist, more or less, but the insisting is something that I have a hard time doing. Even now, this very month, I essentially was looking for a literary hero’s stamp of approval before moving onward. I don’t trust myself enough, I think. And even if I don’t make another thing on that pottery wheel, that’s more value than anything I learned in graduate school.

Filed in Creativity | | Comments Off on Pottery-ing

The final chapter of the quest for the Master’s Degree

Thursday, May 15, 2008

I was already late for my thesis defense when I got to the building, out of breath from the run across campus from the overfull parking garage. I caught the elevator but it went down to the basement and then, after I said “You’ve got to be fucking KIDDING ME!” under my breath but totally out loud, it stopped to pick up more people on the ground floor, at which point I was ready to punch someone if they hit floors 2 or 3, but luckily, everyone was going to Floor 5 or higher. I walked out of the elevator at about 10:36, which was, considering all things, not unforgivably late.

My three committee members were already there: Dr. George Makana Clark, Dr. Gwynne Kennedy and Prof. Liam Callanan, shuffling through my manuscripts. I apologized for being late and explained the parking situation but they quickly assured me that they had only been in the room for maybe three minutes. I went to sit down and then realized I was still wearing my ridiculous sage green Privo flats (that matched NOTHING) I’d thrown on for running and my witchy heels were still in my bag. I had nervous sweat dripping off of my forehead, but luckily, it was very cool inside the room, and, after all, these were my three favorite professors of all time. Thankfully, George, as the chair of the committee, suggested that they start by talking about the manuscript. I gulped, because while I felt comfortable talking about the stories (after all, I practically had all 70+ pages memorized, so it’s not like I didn’t know what was there) but I get extremely nervous when dealing with my writing in general, hence the autonomic fight or flight response before I workshop or read in front of crowds. Luckily, I had broken into my pre-airplane prescription of Xanax before I left the house, so the cold hands and nervous stomach was minimal.

What follows is a lot of boring stuff about my fiction manuscript.

Dr. Clark talked about the body of work as a whole, and then kind of ranked the stories, picking out the three he felt were the strongest (The baby story, “Passeridae” and the body image story, which breaks my heart as I love “Intersomnolence” so very much). Liam Callanan and Dr. Kennedy piped up several times, either asking me questions about what I meant by a certain line (one of which I’ve decided I hated and have since changed) or talking about specific lines that they enjoyed.

Professor Callanan said that now that he’s read more of my stuff, he has a hard time knowing where to place the stories or genre. He hesitated to use the term “magical realism” as it seems to be overused in grad programs these days (agreed) but said that while the stories can be read on a purely relationship level, there’s often a dark undercurrent or force at work in all of the stories, which I found interesting, because while I hint at something supernatural in three of the six stories, the others are very normal people in what might be considered realistic situations.

Dr. Kennedy picked up on the fact that every one of my narrators or protagonists are observers rather than actors in their plots, which is a pretty good analysis of the stories I’ve written that weren’t in the project too. Liam talked a little about what he considers the “Wendy Wimmer slant”, which means that the story he thinks he’s going to read when he gets to the bottom of the first page is not at all the story he’s read when he finishes the last page. He also said that he gets the impression that I’m kind of winking at the reader a lot of times, but not in an annoying way (he name checked Chuck Pahliniuk here, who was an author on my reading list). Dr. Clark suggested that part of my remarkable talent (his word choice) was in balancing a sense of playfulness with word choice and then, without the reader realizing it, there’s a very real play in human emotion by the end of each story, that you get to the final page and you want it to keep going, which was just kind of amazing to hear. I’m actually having a really hard time writing this all down, because it was all SO flattering and wonderful that every time someone said something, you could almost hear my ego start to purr.

The exam then kind of turned into a really super-charged workshop, with the three smartest people on the planet telling me how they would pinch a story here or change around the beginning there. At one point, Liam Callanan started a suggestion with the preface “I know that your biographer is going to absolutely crucify me for suggesting this, but I’d cut this paragraph completely.” Excuse me, but I think I’d slit my own wrist if you put the suggestion in such flattering terms.

They also loved three of the titles and didn’t so much like the other three, with Dr. Clark stating that if he saw the three lesser titles, he wouldn’t have thought anything of them, but since he knew that I could pull such perfect titles out of my head, he now wants all of them to be so perfectly chosen. And then he said that really, they were just being picky because the stories were all so strong that they were better than a lot of the dissertation stuff they saw coming through from graduating PhD candidates but they had to say something, so they were going for little details like titles and paragraph order.

We also talked about where I have been submitting my work and Liam chastised me for aiming too low. He recommended that I go big and aim high, and made a few suggestions, and then also recommended that I try to network and make contacts at a big fancy writer’s conference like Breadloaf, adding “You certainly don’t have to worry about running with the big kids, because baby, you definitely have game.”

As for the oral exam, I guess that was the reading list questions. Dr. Clark asked why I had included mostly authors who are “living and breathing and writing today” and not many masters. I responded that I could have easily provided a list dominated by books plucked off of Random House’s 100 Modern Classics, and felt comfortable speaking to them (ever since I wrote this, I’ve been making my way through the list… and hating about half of them), but since the very nature of the Creative Writing program was to support the manuscript, I selected authors and works that I felt really inspired elements of my manuscript. For instance, I am blown away by Nabokov’s use of language in Lolita and I took the courage to play with sounds and twist words from that. The Great Gatsby taught me a lot about voice and point of view: Nick Carraway is a fascinating example of observer turned active participant who thinks he’s only still an outsider. Also, Fitzgerald’s final paragraphs of the novel never cease to blow me away and I mentioned that I would recite the ending right there from memory, but it would be showing off.

However, as the committee mentioned during their critiques, my story endings are as ninja, tying everything up in a very tight package and you don’t even realize that it’s done until you’ve run out of words. Fitzgerald’s novel, obviously, is very linear, following a typical plot progression, but the ending… whoa. As for the rest, I tried to achieve a decent balance between what Liam called Eggers-esque writers (Ann Cummins, Amanda Davis, Eggers, Dan Chaon, Judy Budnitz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Audrey Niffenegger, Jincy Willett, etc) and the established, highly respected literary masters (Margaret Atwood, Amy Hempel, T.C. Boyle, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Robert Olen Butler, John Irving, Louise Erdrich, etc) and tossing lightly with a few quirky pop culty choices (J.K. Rowling, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland).

I defended my choices of the Eggers by stating that if I was an up and coming writer, it was more important for me to understand what a Dan Chaon is doing to get published than to spend a lot of time studying a giant like John Irving, who could probably publish his grocery list and pull a spot on the Amazon’s Top 100.

Professor Callanan asked me to explain the apparent fascination that graduate students seem to have with Pahliniuk, and I offered that he demanded a lot from the reader, kind of verbally assualted them, and the style is something we haven’t seen in a really approachable way. While his writing is, I have to say, not incredible, I had included Survivor because I was fascinated by the list making and occupational details, and was thinking of that when I wrote “Intersomnolence”. If I had known that it was a grad student cliche’, you’d better believe I’d kick Mr. Pahliniuk to the curb without even thinking twice.

I felt like we had just really gotten going when Dr. Clark asked me to leave so that they could do their deliberating. Eeeek! Although really, I was feeling pretty good about things, because they were loving on the stories so much. I started to gather up my stuff, but he said that I could leave it all there, as they would be calling me back in. Ok! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! I’ve never done this before!

I grabbed my phone, intending to send something to Twitter about awaiting the court marshall, but before I could even open the browser, Dr. Clark was calling me back in. I walked into my room, where the three of them were already standing, and he extended his hand to shake mine. I knew I had succeeded at that point, but I never expected what came out of his mouth next.

“Congratulations! I know that you didn’t ask for more than the Master’s degree, but we’ve unanimously decided to also accept you into the Doctoral program.”

I think I looked like someone had just dropped an ice cube down my back, because Professor Callanan interjected “You don’t have to decide right away. You can defer enrollment for up to a year if you want!”

I don’t know what I said at that point. I think it was something like “Wow, I didn’t even know you could DO that!” but apparently they are the committee and they can do anything they want. I thanked them all, told them that I was honored, and then gathered up my stuff with a semi-dazed expression. Dr. Clark went to file the paperwork with the English department office and Dr. Kennedy walked out with me. She actually thanked me for asking her to be on my committee and then said “Wow, you’re going to be famous and I’m going to get to say that I had Wendy Wimmer in my class.” She encouraged me to go out and celebrate, perhaps go out for a drink somewhere, which was, you know, just silly, because it was about 11:30 am in the morning.

Besides, who needed alcohol when you just had the biggest ego boost in the world?

The rest of the day was pretty much just gravy. I couldn’t believe the weight that had been lifted off my psyche with the verdict. I wasn’t even upset about the fact that I had forgotten the power cord to my laptop and was essentially toting around a very useless technological boulder, and as thus, couldn’t post the stuff for Elastic Waist that day. Luckily, the editors are a forgiving lot.

Then, as though the week couldn’t get any better, on Friday, Professor Callanan e-mailed me to tell me that I, along Christy Clancy, had been chosen as the program’s entries for the Best New American Voices anthology, with Dr. Clark adding that he felt like the program had a good chance this year.

And then, when I was leaving work that afternoon, my cell phone rang and it was my classmate Molly Maegestro, who had just left the English Department awards ceremony. She started with “I know if it were me, I’d want to hear this right away…” and I assumed that it was the Best New American Voices thing. Except she finished with “…guess who won the Faculty Fiction Award? YOU!”

I was kind of stunned because I hadn’t entered a Faculty Fiction contest, but apparently like the Best New American Voices thing, you don’t enter it, it’s just something that a bunch of faculty get together and decide. Molly won a different award, so she explained that in her case, she gets a certificate and a “teeny tiny check” but she and I have no idea what is involved with the Faculty Fiction award. And a week later, I still don’t know, because no one has told me anything and there’s frighteningly little discussion of it on UWM’s website. Ah well.

What really struck me was something that Dr. Clark said, right after he told me that they were accepting me to the PhD program despite the fact that I hadn’t requested it nor had I provided the extra pre-work. I thought about the struggles I had just getting accepted into any writing program at all and also, how UWM had rejected my application several times. I thought back several years, to what the Chair of the UW-Milwaukee Creative Writing department at the time wrote to me after I had questioned what I was doing wrong.

“There was a strong sense that your creative work was not a good match at all with our program. I’m sorry I don’t have the resources to give detailed feedback on particular mss. Since you have failed to convince current fiction faculty here for two years in a row, my recommendation is that you seriously consider applying and studying elsewhere. Of course, we are sorry to disappoint you, but I think it’s important that I be frank.”

That guy is no longer an administrator, and of course, my acceptance into the program was all thanks to Dr. Clark making things happen. He refuses to take credit for it, and is still amazed that I had a problem getting in.

When we were getting ready to leave the committee room, he exclaimed, “Just think, they didn’t even WANT you in the program initially!” he said, and Dr. Kennedy and Professor Callanan both shook their heads. “You sure showed them!”

And I nodded and I had a brief fantasy about finding Dr. Frank and shouting “IN YOUR FACE, BEEYATCH!” but yeah, I guess I showed them. I showed them a dozen times over. And it feels pretty damn good.

Filed in Graduate School, Reading List, Short Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The final chapter of the quest for the Master’s Degree

show me how you do that thing

Monday, April 28, 2008

On Tuesday, I will be spending the entire day in Milwaukee. In the morning, I will be facing my master’s oral examination, whereby Dr. Clark, Professor Liam Callanan and my current professor Dr. Gwynne Kennedy will be asking me questions and I will in theory be answering them with some kind of intelligent combination of words and phrases and perhaps even punctuation.

I’ve heard that someone was asked to define a novel in one of these things, and thinking about how I would answer that question pretty much makes my head explode. The only way I can do it is to make my hands into two right angles and then focus in on a pencil and say “This is a short story” and then spread them wide enough to pull back the shot until it fills the table and say “and this is a novella” and then spread my arms again until my hand frames encompass the entire room and say “And this is a novel”. It’s a piss poor answer, quite frankly, but it’s a better one than “A very long story that has more than, ooooohhhh, 45000 words.”

I’m a little bit nervous, because, well, Dr. Clark is my advisor and thus, running the show, and I would have to say probably my biggest concern out of the three. He scares me, a little bit, and I totally know that it’s all because he won the O’Henry recently. And Professor Callanan is an AMAZING writer, but for reasons I’m not entirely understanding, seems to dig my stuff.

And the cool thing with Dr. Kennedy is that she is outside of the creative writing program, meaning that she’s a lit person. The lit program people all seem to look at the creative writers with a little tilt to their head, like you would if looking at a trained monkey. And she volunteered to me, one night after class, that she was so surprised to hear that I was actually a writer, not a lit and comp person, because I was totally holding my ground in the class with the lit PhD folks. Which, I have to say, almost made me burst out into tears, because after the disaster of that stupid scifi paper, I was honestly starting to doubt whether I could hack critical analysis at all and maybe I was just an idiot savant when it came to words, able to string them together in a way that sounds pleasing, but not really able to think about the fundamentals behind all the lovely phrases. And, quite honestly, between the lack of funding in the program and the fact that the PhD requires an additional 12 credits in lit classes, it’s driving a lot of my decision not to continue on for the PhD. Which is another thing that I know I’ll be asked to explain during my oral exam, and it’s quite honestly, something I’m not looking forward to doing, because I know that my decision is a disappointment to at least Dr. Kennedy.

Thus, this Tuesday is also a big deal because not only is it the last day of class for the semester and also, it will be my last time that I attend a class that I’m taking as a requirement for a degree. At least in the near future, anyway. Which makes everything a little bittersweet.

A few weeks ago, on one of the first truly warm days, I was sitting on a bench next to the big water fountain, weeding through the fiction slush pile for the Cream City Review, and listening to my iPod. My favorite song in the universe, “Just Like Heaven” came on and the moment perfectly encapsulated my experience in this program. Sitting in the middle of everything, hiding behind a pair of sunglasses and some white earbuds, half there in person and halfway an observer untouched by anything. The sun was warm and under the sparkly synthesized rhythm, I could hear the spatter of the water against the flat cement and watch the students and faculty rush by, oblivious. Robert Smith’s voice was full of nostalgia for a time that has passed and even at that moment, I could feel it slipping away, as though I had never been there. Because I practically never was.

And then just when I thought that everything would go fuzzy, dissolve into a faded montage, a shadow broke the page and it was Trent Hergenrader, who was running late for his class but just wanted to say hi.

And for the first time since being in the program, I honestly felt like maybe I was really there.

Filed in Graduate School | | Comments Off on show me how you do that thing

the camel’s back

Friday, April 4, 2008

Over the weekend, I worked on my master’s project and am happy to report that I have now finished 55 pages out of 70 minimum required for the project. The problem is, despite evidence to the contrary on this here rambling diary, my fiction is actually pretty economical with the language. Usually, that’s preferred, but in this situation, most people could probably get away with 5 stories, but I’m having to pull out at least 7 to make the page limit. Which is sad, because I was hoping to have more choices in the matter. I haven’t written a lot of stories that I actually like. I like the iPod Guy story (“Billets Doux” is the actual title) but I think a lot of my liking it has to do with the fact that it’s the only thing that’s gotten published since getting into the Master’s program. On the other hand, it’s the only thing that I’ve actually SUBMITTED, too, and I only submitted it to the one place, so there’s that.

Flip flopper, party of one.

I also really like a body image story and the sleep story (“Intersomnolence”), but no one seems to like those as much as I do. And then there’s the boat story (“Passeridae”), which people seem to like a lot but I don’t like nearly as much as, say, the sleep story. I’m probably just saying that because I had to do so much more research for that one. One doesn’t just bust out with anecdotes about K-complex brain waves without a little backwork. There’s also the baby story (which, for long timers, is actually hanging out in the password protected area last time I checked), that I don’t really like very much at all, and I get worried that it has too many themes from both the boat story AND the sleep story.

And then I worry that I’m a two-trick pony, because the remaining two respectable stories in my dwindling pile of work are the bingo story and the car salesman story written oh so long ago, and they have practically the same plot! Why did I not see this before?

The bingo story is more recent, and needs some major work (the verb tense is all over the place) while the car salesman story is currently in a state of dismemberment that would make Frankenstein blush. It’s sad, really, because I love the final page of that car salesman story so damned much. It’s one of maybe two endings that I actually really and truly feel proud having written them (the boat story “Passeridae” having the other good ending) but the idea of slogging through all that ancient stuff just gets very wearying.

Now, the bingo story has some problems, but I think I can work through them, and I had a flash of brilliance on the mechanics and story framing last night while I was falling asleep, so that’s a super bonus. Right now, the bingo story is 19 pages long, which would put me over the page count, but given my need to tighten when I edit (as is clearly not evidenced by just this lonesome diary entry right here, hello, are you still reading?) it might truck on down close to the 15 page mark. Which then begs the question about whether or not I want to walk into my oral exam and project defense having done just the bare minimum, in front of these three brilliant professors whose work and opinion I truly value? Probably not. Probably need to resurrect the stupid car salesman story.

Stupid stories.

Filed in Graduate School, Short Fiction | Tagged , , | Comments Off on the camel’s back