Category: literary life

Two interesting Portland events to mention this week, though they unfortunately are scheduled right against one another. The first is a rare appearance by Zlata Filipovic, the author of Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo. Here are details:

Zlata Filipovic
Looking Glass Bookstore
318 SW Taylor St.
Portland, OR
7 pm
Free

The other event is a LiveWire! Radio event with Michael Powell (yes, that Powell) along novelist Whitney Otto, and a whole bunch of musical acts. The show will take place at 6 pm at the Aladdin Theater.

LiveWire!
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukee
Portland, OR
6 pm
$9 adv., $10 dos.

I will go to one of these events, I’m just not yet sure which.

The indispensable Maud Newton has an excerpt from a Flannery O’Connor piece in which the writer explains how she came about creating the characters of the Bible salesman and the “lady Ph.D.” with a wooden leg in “Good Country People” (one of my favorite short stories.)

Now a little might be said about the way in which this happens. I wouldn’t want you to think that in that story I sat down and said, “I am now going to write a story about a Ph.D. with a wooden leg, using the wooden leg as a symbol for another kind of affliction.” I doubt myself if many writers know what they are going to do when they start out. When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women that I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. As the story progressed, I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason for this is that it produced a shock for the writer.

Now despite the fact that this story came about in this seemingly mindless fashion, it is a story that almost no rewriting was done on. It is a story that was under control throughout the writing of it, and it might be asked how this kind of control comes about, since it is not entirely conscious.

The excerpt is taken from O’Connor’s essay “Writers on Writing,” which was collected in Mystery and Manners.

And the Commonwealth Writers Prize goes to…Kate Grenville for The Secret River. The winner in the ‘first book’ category is Mark McWatt for Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement.

StorySouth has unveiled its list of “Notable Online Stories of 2005.” The award is judged by Sefi Atta, Randa Jarrar, Kyle Minor, Bob Thurber, and Dan Wickett, and the list of top ten finalists will be announced April 1st.

Canadian author Joy Kogawa, whose autobiographical novel Obasan told of the internment of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II, is trying to save her childhood home from imminent demolition. At the time, the Vancouver home was confiscated by the Canadian government and sold without permission of its owners. There is now a movement to save the Kogawa House, and you can visit the site and make donations if you wish.

Thanks to Alexander for the link.

“Gleason,” a new short story by Louise Erdrich, appears in this week’s New Yorker:

John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand. As the president of the New Otto Bank, of New Otto, North Dakota, Stregg had trained his employees to stay relaxed in situations like this. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and Stregg had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a methamphetamine addict. He did not flinch now.

“What can I do for you?” he said to Gleason. His voice was loud and calm. His wife, Carmen, was reading in the living room.

“You can come with me, Mr. Stregg,” Gleason said, leading slightly to the left with the barrel of the gun. Behind him, at the curb, a low-slung Oldsmobile idled. Stregg could see no one else in it. Gleason was just nineteen years old, and Stregg now wished that he’d joined the Army as Jade had said he was threatening to do. Except that, if he had, he might be carrying something better than an old, jammed-looking .22-calibre pistol. From the living room Carmen called, “Who is it?,” and Gleason whispered, “Say ‘Kids selling candy.’ “

Read more here.