Last week MPW trekked through snow and ice for 2013 AWP Boston in Back Bay. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference can be a daunting experience with hundreds of panels on every conceivable topic and with over 10,000 attendees from across the country. Fortunately, the MPW contingent braved these wee temperatures and massive hoards with wide-eyed grace and good humor.

For one, Dinah Lenney (right) led a passionate panel on “Why Genre Matters” with panelists Sven Birkerts, Judith Kitchen, David Biespiel, and Scott Nadelson. Do labels like nonfiction and fiction help or inhibit the writer? The arguments for genre’s persuasions were equally as brilliant as those for its perils. While some in the audience clearly had a horse in the race (at one point an “Amen” was uttered), everyone agreed that it was the vital and intelligent discussion about why genre matters that truly mattered.

We asked MPW students to describe their experience at AWP Boston. Here’s what they wrote:

Caron Tate

All I have to say about the AWP experience is: Everybody in the program you HAVE TO go. Find a way. Whatever you want to do with your writing, there are lectures,workshops, and presentations on it, and the discussions, hanging out, and crazy fun with your classmates is the best EVER!\

Trisha Chambers (right)

Had an amazing time with MPW classmates @ AWP! Here are my favorite quotes.
Richard Russo: “Writing is an exercise in empathy. To write is to become more generous.” Benjamin Percy on writing about werewolves and non-werewolves: “All my characters are hairy on the inside.” Cheryl Strayed: “Your book has a birthday. You just don’t know what it is yet.”

 Sharon Sim-Krause

I received a delightful snow confetti welcome the moment I strolled out of the Logan airport. I was transported from familiar LA to refreshing Boston, eagerly taking in jolts of inspiration from writers and muses, and basking in the soothing company of fellow MPWers.   My most memorable quote and reminder on why we write came from Richard Russo: “Writing is an exercise in empathy. To write is to become more generous. To be my best self is to write.” Thank you MPW and AWP for this invaluable opportunity!

Lauren Nelson

AWP is the most useful, enjoyable, and grounding experience I’ve had this year. My favorite panel was “How to get your first university teaching job,” and it was great hearing Don DeLillo speak.

Kelsey Nolan (center)

Knowing that there were over six hundred booths at the AWP book fair was, quite honestly intimidating. How could I ever know what to go see, or who to talk to? Walking in was, all at once, overwhelming and compelling. The buzz made me feel welcome–like I was supposed to be there. I wanted to meet everyone there, submit to every literary journal, and buy every book. I could have spent an entire day in there and still not exhausted it. The whole conference felt that way, really, it was incredible.

Susannah Luthi

Highlights were meeting one of the writers we published in SCR (Erika Wurth). She presented on a panel on Native American writing and came by our booth. Thrilled she sent us her work. Dinner with the MPW crew. Hearing about Connu (my start up) second hand. Figuring out the framing/ending of my novel thanks to Don DeLillo’s panel. Watching Matt in action 87 percent of the time. Connecting with the friends from Skidmore and seeing progress they’ve made–one lit journal, Unstuck, in its second year, a novel done, a few stories published, and a new women’s lit journal started. They are incredible. Ron Carlson’s flash lit panel. Seeing Anne Carson.

Matt Ackels

AWP provided all the twist and turns of a good novel. I met quite a few characters, some wacky, some endearing, and most memorable. I learned things about my life in the broader context of our world, about my place in the greater literary community. Through the countless panels, I gleaned insights into writing and the craft. Of course, there were moments of daunting plot twists (running out of journals too soon), intimidating landscape (the thousand member book fair), and unwitting heroism (free cupcakes from Howard). Ultimately, this experience sharpened me as a writer, thinker, and, most directly, as a citizen of the wider literary community.

And here are those cupcakes!

Josh Kun asked Patti Smith what place Los Angeles occupied in her imagination.   She said that she first saw it through the eyes of her mother, who loved Hollywood. She also mentioned the influence of hard-boiled Los Angeles writers—from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler onward. She mentioned that she loves the nicotine-gum chewing detective from “The Killing” so much that Sarah Linden is the screensaver on her computer.  When I told my friend Dawn Prestich, who is an Executive Producer on “The Killing,” she was thrilled—she texted me that “Patti Smith is now our screen-saver!”

Los Angeles figures as a place in the imagination through a blend and a whirr of associations.  Geography, immigration, inheritance and new technologies were the perfect mulch-bed for Hollywood. There is also Noir—that distinctly Los Angeles sub-genre.   Rayner describes noir as “on the one hand, a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when a European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom.”  He goes on to say that it is also a “counter-tradition, the dark lens through which history came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times…”

Patti Smith went on to talk about her love of the materiality of books: “the feel, the tissue, the paper, the frontispice”—I am reminded of a short essay that she wrote for the New York about shop-lifting a book from a New Jersey supermarket.

She also talked about what Josh Kun called her references, but what I understood to mean her influences:  “I mix freely,” she said.  “I take what I like from different worlds and try to make my own world. I look to work that makes me want to work—work that agitates me.”

She said that as an artist she feels “sort of dogged…I can’t relax. I always want to photograph– I always want to translate–” I always travel with a small notebook, and as she spoke I was trying to keep up with her, trying to write down the sense and gist of her phrases. We weren’t allowed to record or photograph that night, so this is written from those notes and those impressions—of course I did see many people in the audience covertly taking photos or recording on their little easily hidden devices.

Patti Smith spoke about loss and love—and how emotions and experiences get transformed into art.  She spoke of losing her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, and her mother and her dog—“they’re all gone.  I’ve lost them all.  But as I lost people I thought I can still talk to them. Because they’re still here—a host of happy, scolding spirits.”

As she played “Because the Night” she invited the audience to join in.  She said that she’d always hated it when she was at a concert and the singer cajoled the audience. “Now I’m doing it,” she said.  She also said how she still felt the love and tenderness and lust she’d felt for her husband when she sang “Because the Night.”

After she sang, after she spoke, after the event ended I was walking my dog Violet across campus.  We crossed paths with Patti Smith.  When I introduced Violet to Patti Smith, she kissed Violet on the head and said “Beautiful name.”  Yes.  Then she asked me “Do you want a pick?”  YES, I did, and she handed me a guitar pick. Here it is, and here is Violet:

“I don’t like meeting my heroes,” MG Lord said to me when I told her this story. I didn’t really meet her, I said, Violet met her. I just happened to be there when it happened.

The Reenactments , Nick’s third memoir, adds a new layer of experience to his first, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.   Nick watches–in the opening lines of the book, he is staring into a camera monitor–as director Paul Weitz and his cast and crew film a movie, Being Flynn, based on his first memoir of reconnecting with his father, Jonathan, when he appears as a client of the homeless shelter where Nick works.   

Nick shared with MPW students some of his ideas about writing poetry and prose, working in multiple genres, and having more than one project underway at a time–”I always have something to feel guilty about,” he joked.

A podcast of Nick’s reading and conversation with Elvis Mitchell will soon be available on the ALOUD site.

Jack Gilbert

On the big bulletin board to the left of my desk:

Assorted postcards (most strikingly featured: a manatee, a hummingbird, a fishing spot on the Cape Cod Bay)
A list of 50 literary magazines that pay
Another of phone numbers for my office-mates
A luggage tag from American Airlines
A couple of yellowing cartoons from The New Yorker
An ancient photo of my niece and nephew
A Groupon for a month of unlimited classes from a local Yoga Studio
Several quotes, lifted from periodicals and programs, to comfort and inspire (Emerson, Thoreau, Helen Frankenthaler, Whitney Balliet, and Margo Jefferson)

And poems—
poems peeking out from behind poems—
poems I had to have in my sightlines because they got to the bottom of how I think and feel; because they expressed exactly-but-exactly what I hadn’t known I thought or felt, better than I’d ever be able to say it myself—

poems from Yeats, Ponsot, Ryan, Rector, Haas, Gerstler, and Laux, to name only a few—

poems about living, and poems about writing—

“Memoir” by Vijay Seshadri—
And “The New Song,” by W. S. Merwin—
and “The Problem of Sentences,” by Linda Gregg—

and here’s Czeslaw Milosz, the last stanza of “Ars Poetica”:

What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
Under unbearable duress and only with the hope
That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

And from Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy #9:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
Bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most, column tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing…

And today I’m adding a poem to the board (thanks to Dinty Moore, who posted it online this morning). I’m typing it out to feel the words in my fingers, pinning it smack in the middle of everything, to remind me how important it is to get it right, and how impossible, and how that’s the reason we keep trying, isn’t it?

Here, from Jack Gilbert, who died yesterday, who left us his poems, this one among them:

THE FORGOTTEN DIALECT OF THE HEART

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

...the view from the bed...

The bed. The California king. In the master bedroom (not grand, but cozy, in the far bottom corner of the house). There’s nothing unseemly about the location; it just happens to be where I work these days—having to do with various developments: like, last winter I slipped on the ice in Vermont and broke my coccyx; like, my desk chair, which I’ve replaced with one of those enormous exercise balls, was lousy to begin with: but who can actually sit on a ball for any length of time (without bouncing—and bouncing isn’t actually conducive to reading or writing or thinking, not for me anyway); like, my college graduate has come home to L.A., so I can’t hole up in her room anymore. Long and short: if I were to open a fortune cookie? If it were to read, “You will finish an essay tomorrow”? Without affect, all joking aside, I’d be able to add in bed. Moreover, it turns out, though my husband is skeptical, this is as fine a place as any to get the job done. (Why is he skeptical? He’s afraid the work will interfere with my sleep, infect my dreams—and if only that were true; that’d be as good a reason as any to work here, right?) On the bed, I can spread out my papers every which way; if my feet get cold, my sock drawer is closeby; it’s quiet down here, and not dark exactly—more like a tree-house than a cave, thanks to the Chinese Elm that grows just outside the sliding glass doors—and the atmosphere, remote and isolated, promotes writerly/readerly immersion. Plus my office—my actual office—is just on the other side of the wall, if I happen to need a file or a book or an extra pencil.

But does it matter where we work? I think it must. It matters to me anyway, especially (though you might suppose it’d be the other way around) once I’m in the throes of whatever it is. This is not to say that whole paragraphs haven’t rushed me in Trader Joe’s, in line at the ATM, even at stoplights (the car is very good place to work, just ask Susan Straight, who’s written nine beautiful books, parked and waiting to pick up her daughters from here and there); goes without saying, of course, we should always carry a notebook, or, if we’re as put together (as dapper!) as New Yorker reporter Gay Talese, we might consider cutting cardboard into pieces to fit the interior breast pockets of our blazers. See and this is the sort of inside information that delights and inspires, right? Why didn’t I think to ask Aimee Bender, who read and spoke about writing to MPW students in Doheny library last Monday night, where exactly she spends that allotted two hours a day: would she be able to write those perfect stories just anywhere, or does she—like Virginia Woolf and me—need a room of her own?

“Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish,” wrote Mark Helprin earlier this week in an essay in The New York Times, celebrating not just his own work space, but the value of serendipity in a writer’s life. And last August Dani Shapiro blogged about “creating a narrative out of puzzle pieces…I have a feeling,” she went on to say, “that those of us who spend our days alone in our rooms working out stories on the page and in our heads obsess about the question of pattern and randomness.” Perhaps it’s because our work is mysterious and confounding in that way, that so many of us need the illusion, at least, of a safe, familiar reality, however impermanent it might turn out to be. And we have to believe, don’t we, that if we show up there with some regularity, we’re more likely to benefit from some wonderful ‘accident.’ Gay Talese says his “bunker,” his “subterranean think tank,” is where he can work “without any distractions.” Give yourself a treat and let him take you on a tour. And for more on where writers live and work, visit A. N. Devers’ wonderful site: http://writershouses.com/.

Elvis Costello sings:

The sun struggles up another beautiful day
And I felt glad in my own suspicious way
Despite the contradiction and confusion
Felt tragic without reason
There’s malice and there’s magic in every season

Speaking of which, tell me it isn’t strange to be back to school, where oh where did the summer go? Still there are perks—and among them, it’s time for our bi-annual readers’ round-up, a list of recommendations from MPW faculty and staff—the best of what we read this summer—in the order in which they came in:

First up, The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, “published about ten years ago,” says Gina Nahai, “it’s a great study of Voice. Four characters, all women, tell the story. They range in age from five to 40-something and each one is distinct and authentic and fascinating.”

Michael Price writes: “It’s been an all Robert Caro all the time summer for me; I listened to The Power Broker on audio and have plunged in to The Path To Power, the first volume of Caro’s biography of LBJ.”

From Brighde Mullins: “I’ve been reading Mary Gaitskill. I recommend reading her novel Veronica in conjunction with Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others—they are both explorations of the potential of others’ suffering to serve (merely) as schadenfreude. These are different approaches to the same ethical dilemma. Gaitskill writes like an angel-who-has-seen-it-all, Sontag’s clarity and wit are sublime.”

Howard Ho says, “I seem to have had a Chinese-American themed summer. I read David Henry Hwang’s hilarious new play Chinglish, which is notable for its very theatrical use of supertitle translations of spoken Mandarin Chinese that gets lost in translation. And MPW faculty member M.G. Lord let me borrow her copy of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (by Yunte Huang). Nominated for a Pen USA Literary Award, the book traces the Charlie Chan legacy from its roots in the real-life Chang Apana, a Hawaiian cowboy turned police detective, to his later fictional incarnation by novelist Earl Derr Biggers to the string of movies that were popular from the 1920s to 1940s. It’s a very quick read and engagingly touches upon many of the interesting historical landmarks which make Charlie Chan an enduring figure in American culture.”

And from Syd Field: “I hadn’t read James Lee Burke for a while so when Creole Bell was released I decided to read it. Amazing! The soul of a poet with razor sharp characters amid the smell and taste of of New Orleans.”

Amy Gerstler writes to say that she read “a lovely, sad and lyrically political epistolary novel by John Berger called From A to X.”

Kenny Turan recommends “the new novel by Norway’s Karin Fossum, The Caller. For my money, she is the best stylist of all current Scandinavian mystery writers, and the most chilling.”

And Tim Kirkman offers up James Joyce’s Dubliners. Although he, too, casts a vote for Robert Caro: “I’m working on a screenplay about a few weeks during the Johnson administration, so The Passage of Power has been an invaluable resource. It’s also a highly entertaining, informative and mammoth book. I’m still reading it!”

From Johanna Blakley: “I’m just finishing up Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. It’s an oddly menacing story (not unlike Bolaño’s brilliant 2066) about a rag-tag bunch of Mexican and South American poets who are searching for God knows what: meaning? friendship? political truth? hot sex? I can safely say I still don’t get it. But I can’t stop reading it.”

Gabrielle Pina writes that “Red River by Lalita Tademy is a haunting and heartbreaking family saga about love, honor, and a devastating event that took place in Louisiana during the pre-reconstruction period of our painful history.”

And Cort Brinkerhoff says “the thing I read this summer that still haunts me is Conor McPherson’s The Weir, a deceptively simple play about ghost stories and the specters that linger in all our lives.”

From Sandra Tsing Loh: “This will NOT be a news flash, but nor do I turn away from work that is great and literarily definitive of its moment. What I loved about Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is that it is a big male adventure book that’s wonderfully Melvillian, with more than a nod to James Michener (his Hawaii being a secret pleasure of many of us). As at times the zeitgeist of female fiction tends toward an anorectic, plotless East Coast preciousness (and God bless The New Yorker), the book’s massive success is wonderful news for Girl Writers of the West (never mind that some of us are 50!).

M.G. Lord writes, “Last summer I became atypically excited about new fiction. Two remarkable galleys arrived in my mailbox: These Things Happen by Richard Kramer and May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes. Kramer (who is better known for writing “Thirtysomething” and adapting Maupin’s Tales of the City as a miniseries) has written an extraordinarily beautiful novel about a very 21st Century Manhattan family. Each character tells his or her own story, culminating in a tender, climactic exchange between a teenage boy and his father’s male lover. The book made me think of Salinger (except that Kramer’s vision is less dark) and, although it could not be more different in form, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. To ensure that my momentary optimism was tempered with despair, I next read A.M. Homes’ novel, expecting to pick it up for a few hours one Friday morning but being so riveted that I could not put it down until Saturday night. The book may be her bleakest…and her best. Both novels will be published in November.”

Dana Goodyear says, “I read Brenda Shaughnessy’s first book of poems, Interior with Sudden Joy, as a young editorial assistant, living in New York and wanting to write. It was a performance—arresting, stylish, witchy, and stone-cold frank—I couldn’t look away from. Twelve years later, she still has my attention. This summer I wrote to her publisher and asked for an advance copy of Our Andromeda, her third collection, which comes out in the fall. The poems are longer, more narrative, and tack closer to life, but the voice is the same: glinting, dark, tender, unafraid.”

And from Prince Gomolvilas: “Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a devastating portrait of a family forced to confront secrets and lies that most everyone—except for the memoir-writing daughter—wants to sweep under the rug. And David Henry Hwang’s refreshingly funny Chinglish addresses the very contemporary issues of business and transnationalism while wrapping them in classic themes like East vs. West, the perils of language, and the myriad ways in which we all (mis)communicate. What’s more, both plays will be having their Southern California premieres during the 2012-2013 theatre season—Other Desert Cities at the Mark Taper Forum and Chinglish at South Coast Repertory.”

(Hwang and Caro taking the lead…)

Judith Freeman writes: “I read, for the first time this summer, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West—simply one of the best adventure stories ever told. And who knew that Lewis & Clark even had a dog with them, the remarkable Seaman, a Newfoundland, who made the entire trip, and was to Lewis such an important companion.”

And Bernard Cooper says, “I was under the false impression that Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was as charming as the movie starring Maggie Smith. I didn’t realize it was bleak and devastating, too; Spark foretells the deaths of each of Miss Brodie’s students just as the novel begins, so that the shadow of mortality hangs over every classroom scene and innocent blunder, deepening the story in stunning and unpredictable ways.”

Janet Fitch notes that she reviews everything she likes on Good Reads. “The book that really made it for me over the summer was Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences. Gorky was an keen observer with prodigious recall,” she writes, and then quotes from her review: “Gorky remembers so much that it seems he has looked at the world with eight or more eyes, evenly spaced around his head,” said the critic Viktor Shklovsky. He was largely self-taught, a proletarian writer who read enormously and remembered everything he read. His great, subtle and complex understanding of human beings, is reflected in his essays in this book, especially the ones on Tolstoy and on Chekhov–the best ever written on those two men, as men–and illustrates how their writing was in perfect keeping with their natures. His description of Tolstoy is a thing of beauty, his understanding of the heroic conflicts within the man, the techtonic plates of his inner contradictions that resulted in such great literature… and his portrait of Chekhov makes us love him as Gorky loved him. A treasure.”

She also recommends Brendan Constantine’s new book of poetry. Again, from Good Reads: “Poetry is the art of grabbing a fleeting moment of human truth and pinning it to the page in a perfect phrase, alive, iridescence intact. To compress broad experience into a crystalline memento, to pull the curtain aside on reality taking a shower–just a moment’s glimpse of its beauty and sorrow and perfection. Poem after poem, Brendan Constantine does just that in Calamity Joe.”

From Mark Richard: “Across Atlantic Ice (Authors, Stanford and Bradley)—a fascinating book using archeological studies, DNA testing, and paleoclimatic research suggesting some hardy ancient Solutrean peoples (from what is now Spain-France) came to the Americas 20,000 years ago in large ocean-going canoes under leather sails, possibly the forefathers of Clovis man. And after reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s (yes! yes! a former student!) excellent essay in the New York Times Book Review in June, I re-read Absalom! Absalom! (Faulkner) a book that simultaneously affirms and explodes everything I tell my students in our fiction workshop.”

As for me: I read Penelope Lively’s Passing On, in which she reveals the extraordinary inner lives of apparently ordinary people—examines the choices we make, the ones we don’t, and the courage it takes to live with them either way. And I could not put down Alice Mattison’s When We Argued All Night, an account of a friendship that lasts some 70 years, vivid, and true, and deep, and joyful, and sad. Like life, huh.

And what about you? What did you read last summer, tell us, please do…

Joe Bonomo's Beatle Girl

A week or so ago I stumbled onto TriQuarterly Online, and into a trove of “video essays”—and I was intrigued: What could this mean, what might this be? I looked and listened to a few: Joe Bonomo’s beautiful  “Beatle Girl, Where Have You Gone?” ; Angela Mears’ astonishing  “You Are Here”; Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s  “The Lightning”—lyric and mysterious; and Dinty Moore’s compelling  History, which breaks the rules to mirror the writing process itself, the metaphor discovered and revealed in a kind of collage, whereas the others feature a writer reading aloud over a static, single image, the one that inspired their essays in the first place.

And who came up with the constraints? According to an interview on Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, editor John Bresland gets credit for the project, and it’s he who says: “We basically set out to scare the bejesus out of writers by altering the rules of literary engagement. No printed words, just voice. And no continuous video, just a static image animated by thought. The idea was to get writers to explore the range of possibilities that digital media affords. In retrospect, it’s not a huge surprise that writers can make sense of the image.”

Well, no, it wouldn’t be: Think Rilke and Barthes. Consider more recent work from Geoff Dyer, Judith Kitchen, Mark Doty, Guy Davenport, Patricia Hampl, and Charles Simic—to name only a few—some of whom who have included the ‘inciting’ images for their readers in their published work, many of whom who have not—who are willing, determined even, to let their readers recall or conjure from their own imaginations.

Not that there’s anything wrong with providing an image. Not that providing an image cannot deepen the experience of the work; nor would it be fair to say that an essay couldn’t be just as rich, just as nuanced—only differently—if its audience were left to her own devices.

I should admit straight out: I loved TriQuarterly’s video essays—loved hearing Bonomo, and Wilkinson, and Mears, and Moore, fine readers all, and both voice and image enhanced my experience, though in the end I’d actually have liked to have seen the words on the page. I even closed my eyes, imagined them there, and admired them—the words—for making music and pictures in sentences and paragraphs: for their allegiance to the image at hand, and also for the ways in which they departed from that image, whatever it was. That was worth seeing, yes—that was something I might not have taken into account had I instead, as is usual for the reader, been encouraged to come up with my own associations. Still, how not to wonder and hope—and, in the case of these four writers, conclude—that these essays were meant to hold up as essays; that they are written, albeit written to be heard.

And why would that scare the bejesus out of anybody? Isn’t all writing meant to be heard? Aren’t writing and reading aural in nature? Leonard Michaels wrote that “sense follows sound.” And Louis Menand, in his intro to Best American Essays 2004, said that writing is closer to singing than speaking. And it’s Donald Hall who insists, “You hear a poem in your mouth.” Which must be why we have all been advised again and again to read our work aloud. If a public reading is a treat for writers and readers both, it isn’t exactly a radical idea, is it? So who said it was? you ask.

Well, over at TriQuarterly you can find “On the form of the Video Essay” by Marilyn Freeman, in traditional font, in which she quotes Theodor Adorno, harks to him again and again—“The essay’s innermost formal law is heresy,” he wrote—as if to imply that the video essay is a ground-breaking form: That to write from an image is novel; that to read the work out loud is an act of dissidence! For goodness’ sake, as if none of us ever heard or aspired to read an essay on NPR. As if nobody ever gave or attended a lecture with power point, and before that slides.

Images as inspiration and/or illustration have been around as long as any of us, and reading aloud is truly nothing new.

Am I thrilled about publishing online? Yes! And delighted by the possibilities of mixed media. Also keen, thanks to TriQuarterly, to come up with a video essay of my own. But to pretend this is revolutionary—dangerous or cutting edge—I’m not buying it. Why do we insist on sensationalizing the genre, as if it isn’t already sensational? As if it isn’t already challenging and brave to write as well as we know how about what we see, feel, think, remember, experience?

And it’s for that, that I applaud these writers; kudos to them and TriQuarterly for using new media effectively—for finding another way to celebrate the essay, to deliver it in all its original integrity to an audience with more sophisticated outer if not inner resources.

Now—go on over to Youtube and check out “Girl,” written and recorded  by the Beatles in 1965, before the music video was a twinkle in your eye. Consider the sylph in the field of flowers: Does she detract from the song? Make it better? Up to the audience, I guess, though in the end I’m certain the words and the melody carry the day, how about you?

Now comes along Beasts of the Southern Wild—and another A. O. Scott review, in which he cites the movie’s “evident kinship” with The Tree of Life, and apparently he loved it just as much, which bolsters my faltering faith, since I loved it, too. What’s more he’s right, Scott is: those big themes, having to do with the meaning of life, and how to live in the face of insupportable loss, are at the heart of both movies, on top of which the filmmakers have come to similar conclusions about the nature of our puniness on the planet, and our capacity to love and persevere under the circumstances. So why do I celebrate one film and not the other?

Here’s what Scott said way back when: “Do all the parts of The Tree of Life cohere? Does it all make sense? I can’t say that it does. I suspect, though, that sometime between now and Judgment Day it will.”

Hmmpf. Not all of Beasts of the Southern Wild coheres and makes sense, either. The thing is, though, I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to. Its mystery and magic is true to the sensibility of its heroine, a six-year-old girl called Hushpuppy who is age-appropriately literal and aroused to the miracle of life all around her. And this specificity of intention on the part of writer Lucy Alibar and director Benh Zeitlin, goes to where and how the one movie succeeds, and, in my estimation, the other one doesn’t. The Tree of Life is the “oeuvre” of a middle-aged man, Malick, who spent many, many millions of dollars to treat us to many, many minutes of what feels like personal revelation, in which he waxes on, self-indulgently in my view, about what he thinks about the nature of the human condition. Moreover, he presents his epiphany as gospel: This is not only a story of one family (partially autobiographical so we’ve been told), but a history of the universe that cannot sustain the courage of its original convictions. Yes, it’s true, as Malick illustrates with a supporting cast of dinosaurs: we humans turn out to be almost insignificant in terms of the grand continuum. Even so, he would have us accept that there is a God and he/she/it has a plan: We can look forward not only to life after death, but to heaven! Where we will be reunited on an ocean beach with the ones we love. Bosh, I say, not because I don’t buy it (though I don’t), but because the filmmaker has imposed his beliefs on me—tied his two plus hours of philosophical meandering up in a bow, as if it were that easy. Beasts on the other hand (on a shoestring, by the way, with a cast of unknowns, and in 90 minutes time) shows us the world through the eyes of one little girl and let’s us come to our own conclusions. The story is so particular as to allow us to fall in love with the characters—so specific as to touch the universal nerve. Director Zeitlin isn’t asking me to sign on or sign up—only to believe in his heroine; only to believe she believes. No happy ending for Hushpuppy—no heaven; just her conviction—her insistence!—that her tale is important enough to tell and to remember.

So why compare the two. Aren’t they apples and oranges. Well, yes, they are, but here’s why comparison is a worthy enterprise—maybe even a cautionary tale, you tell me. Not so long ago, somebody asked if I write with a theme—or multiple themes—in mind. And the answer? When I do, I get myself in trouble. But when I don’t, when I try instead to get it right—the situation, the players, the relationships—themes tend to naturally emerge. And those themes, if they make themselves known, are for second and third and umpteenth drafts. Even then, I have to be careful—I have to give my readers credit for being as smart or smarter than I. See Terence Malick hit me with themes—bludgeoned me in the name of deep thinking and spirituality, and consequently distracted me from the story at hand, which, if he’d told it true, if he’d been willing to give me any credit for my own ability to think and feel, might have delivered those ideas all by itself. Instead, bewildered and impatient as I became in the course of over two hours, I lost interest in his characters. I didn’t care; I didn’t cry; I couldn’t wait to get out of the theatre. Benh Zeitlin, however, told me a story so singular as to make me weep for people with whom I have nothing—and everything it turns out—in common. For though I’m not six years old, though I don’t live in poverty, though my world isn’t falling apart, I identify with Hushpuppy: What choice do I have? What choice have any of us, whatever our experience, whatever our faith, but to believe in ourselves and each other, and to carry on accordingly?

So listen: Rent The Tree of Life or don’t. No skin off my nose or Malick’s either, right? Meanwhile, so much in the offing in the theaters this summer: There’s Bernie (terrific), and The Amazing Spiderman (not high on my list), and People Like Us (high on my list!), and Ted (a maybe), and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (I’ll skip it, I think). And there’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, wow. If you happen to see it—and I hope you do—I’d love to know what you think…

When I was new to Facebook, a colleague and I had an argument about what it’s for. She advocated for the personal: Tell me, she said, about last night’s date and the new curtains in the guest room. Don’t tell me, she said, that you have a new book deal or by-line. When I objected—when I said I’m not about to ask my friends (all 600 of them, which apparently isn’t very many) to read about my dog (neurotic), or my herbs (gone to seed, except for the chives which are flourishing nicely), or my tattoos (don’t have any); but how else to alert my 600 friends to my essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books? -she just sniffed. If I catch you self-promoting online, I’ll unfriend you, she said. But six months later she had a new book to sell, and like that (snap your fingers), she changed her tune: acquired a thousand more friends and started posting reviews. I haven’t asked her how she feels about FB now, though neither of us are on very much except to play Scrabble. And if it’s true that I got on in the first place because I wanted to play the game with my daughter, who had gone away to college—because I wanted to keep tabs on her without keeping tabs (she moves a letter, I know she’s okay)—would you believe me? Well, it’s true, so there. However, Eliza has long since stopped playing with me: And I long ago started posting on FB like everybody else: About my by-line here and there; about my friends’ by-lines here and there; even, four years later, about Eliza’s graduation from college. I succumbed, yes, to celebrating the personal online, and I can’t tell you how gratifying it was. Because, come to find out, if ‘friends’ will dutifully ‘like’ a post about my piece in LARB or HuffPo (thank you, friends!), three times as many of them will let me know it was worth my while to show off my beautiful graduate. Does this mean anything? Is there a lesson here? Undoubtedly.

And also a conundrum: Because, yes, I admit I’ve surrendered, I’m as bad as the rest, I’ve addressed you all as if you were one and the same, approached you on Facebook, answered you on Facebook—as if you were interested, as if you were my ideal reader, which, I’ll insist (as did Kurt Vonnegut), is the way to the best writing; if, that is, one were actually crafting prose for public consumption (a story, an essay); which is, you might argue, exactly what we’re doing on Facebook! So why doesn’t it feel quite right? How is it that I want you, in your essays and stories and books, to fool me into feeling they were written just for me? Why am I certain that’s good for your sentences? Whereas when you’re not trying to fool me at all? When you write just for me (and everyone else) on Facebook? I feel a fool for reading and writing and answering in kind. And, blushing for us both, I want to ask: Isn’t anything sacred, off-limits, or simply too dull to post? Maybe not. Maybe so. Depends on the reader, depends on the writer; I don’t know the answer, I really don’t.

Here’s what I do know: For all our whining and preaching about real communication, it’s we who are abusing the venue, not our children. We of a certain age who would appear to need to over-share; we, wishing each other condolences and happy anniversary online—pretending, with equal emphasis, as if we want or mean to confide in hundreds of people, and care what they think to boot—who might be accused of behaviors that are false, coy, and cloying, and having to do with what? Extreme loneliness and alienation? A desperate effort to keep up? Fear of obsolescence? All of the above?

But why oh why, you might be wondering about now (if you’re still with me, that is) am I going on and on about Facebook?

Because every so often, to my mind anyway, somebody gets it absolutely right, as did author Nicholas Montemarano a week or so ago, when he wrote:

You don’t want to write, you don’t want to, you just don’t want to, no way, not today, not happening, you’re afraid that nothing will come or that nothing good will come, it’s Sunday, the day before a holiday, as good an excuse as any, why not spend the day reading, tomorrow you’ll write, or the day after that, but tomorrow or the day after you’ll still have the same fear of not writing or not writing well, so you make a deal, you’ll get into bed with paper and pencil beside you, and you’ll close your eyes, and whatever happens happens, no promises, and after a half hour of dozing and daydreaming you open your eyes and a sentence comes to you: “The year I was thirteen—unlucky thirteen.” And this sentence leads to another: “The year I let a boy get lucky with unlucky me.” And this sentence leads to more sentences: “Three years older than me, but still a boy. Absolutely a boy. Closer to being a man than any boy I knew, but not even close. My mother’s boyfriends were men.” And these sentences lead to more, and 15 minutes later the page is filled with sentences, and you read them aloud, you pick at them, you like the way they sound, you decide that they have a chance at making the cut when your novel is done, probably years from now, and you quit while you’re ahead, while you’re excited. Hours and hours of doubt and fear, 15 minutes of writing. A day’s work.

O but this was personal, and professional, and authentic, and generous, and inspiring, and comforting, too. What a gift. I liked it. I liked it so much. And I hope you do, too.

Not that I took exception when I read the Guardian’s list, not at all. I was delighted, in fact; pleased to be provoked to think about first lines, and how good ones abound; why, you could make a hundred lists of the ten best lines and never run out of material, right? Which got me curious and looking around the room where I’ve been working lately—my daughter’s—my papers and books strewn among hers for the next few weeks, until she comes home for the summer; good fun, consequently, to take a random sampling. Herewith, ten openings for your consideration, fiction and non:

On the bed:

1. “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome, taken in 1852.” Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida.

From the bottom shelf to my left:

2. “Kath. Kath steps from the landing cupboard, where she should not be.” The Photograph, by Penelope Lively.

3. “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.” Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley.

4. “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” Chandler. Farewell, My Lovely (a brittle little Vintage paperback that must have belonged to my father-in-law).

From the bench on the opposite wall:

5. “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.” 1Q84. Haruki Murakami.

In the middle of the shelf over the desk, wedged between The Bell Jar and a French dictionary, #6: Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, which begins: “A Nurse held the door open for them.”

And further down that same shelf, #7. “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” Orwell. 1984.

From the shelf just above, # 8 (This one kills me): “Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.” Baldwin. The Fire Next Time.

Back to the bed:

9. “The man was stubborn.” Calvin Trillin—Messages from My Father.

10. “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” From Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, Jr.

And, in deference to Eliza (my daughter), let’s make it 11; because how to leave out J. K. Rowling, who, in this room, has almost a whole shelf all to herself. From her first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

Ta da. But what does this selection tell us? For one thing, apart from the Harry Potter parade, we need a better system around here: I’ve been looking for the Lively for weeks, and also Eudora; and the rest of our Baldwins, fiction and nonfiction, are downstairs, I believe, so what’s this one doing up here?

But about these opening sentences: Tell me they aren’t mysterious and enticing—and I’m thinking it’s because every one of these books appears to start in the middle, as if to assume that the reader is in the know, which, of course, she isn’t; but she’s flattered all the same, to be trusted and invited; to have the author’s confidence, as if he or she were telling the story for her and her alone.

And how is that achieved? How has each author managed to enlist us in this way? With the Barthes, it’s the phrase, “I happened on,” which implies, doesn’t it, that he was doing something else at the time. That “Kath steps from the landing cupboard,” without introduction—well, obviously we’ve got catching up to do. In How Green was My Valley, something has compelled the narrator to pack all his things; but he’s going ‘from’ not ‘to’ which ups the ante considerably. With the Murakami, we’re actually in transit, on the road, music blaring. And how about Chandler: “It was one of those blocks”: So cavalier, right? —“it” with no antecedent?—as if to imply that we should know why he’s going on about that particular block in the first place. Now, Welty’s nurse—wherever, whoever they are, when she opens the door to let them in, we can’t help but be worried for them, right? Whereas Baldwin is honestly and totally overwrought, and we have to know why. And if Trillin’s state of mind feels, in comparison, resigned (amused), it too was arrived at before the book begins. Same thing with poor India, so ill at ease in the world from the outset—which doesn’t bode well.

As for #11: What does “thank you very much” tell us about the Dursleys? Why, they’ve got something to prove—an axe to grind, a grievance to air—and we’ve only just met them, too.

And, as I say, this was a random sampling; if I started all over again, I’m betting the outcome would be much the same. So why do so many authors choose to start their stories mid-stream? What’s the reason and the effect?

To seduce, right? At the very least, to immediately engage the reader, who, as noted, is not just eager to get up to speed, but delighted to be on such intimate terms with the author from the start. Moreover, the strategy requires specificity from the get-go—the writer is obliged from the very first moment to come up with just the right details of place, person, and thing, to insure our investment, to give us our coordinates, so that we can find our way forward and back. And that specificity makes for good prose, establishes authorial voice and control right off the bat.

Easier said than done? Sometimes, and sometimes not. When we’re lucky, our first lines simply arrive: They’re delivered to us when we’re walking or driving or watering the plants or washing the dishes, or in the middle of the night, or on line at the ATM machine, or during somebody else’s book-signing even. Other times, often in fact, we have to write our way to them, which is why, even when we think we’ve nailed a good beginning, it’s best not to get too attached—we might wind up shuffling things around, even cutting whole first paragraphs which turn out to have been throat-clearing, at least in my case.

The point is, in order to actually get to the beginning, you have to begin. Somewhere, anywhere—anything that gets you started is good—but a prompt is one thing, and a strong first sentence is something else. Therefore it isn’t good enough to get started, no. You have to keep going…