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One of my kids took this in Wyoming. We did not see any other elk that day.
I'm a writer living in the Washington, DC, area. My work has appeared recently in the anthology, Writes of Passage: Coming of Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review, and on NPR's "All Things Considered."
For more about me, see the Bio page.
We like the shoes.
"Mom takes a long time putting on her powders."
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September 3, 2010
Tags:
creative process, storytelling
I have the greatest admiration for storytellers; they not only have to come up with an interesting concept, write a piece, and brutally edit it, they have to know how to put themselves “out there” and present it for an audience. There’s a unique talent involved, part writing, part acting and interpreting, part showmanship. And now rising-star storyteller SM Shrake and accomplished memoirist Cathy Alter have joined forces to create a new DC group for serious storytellers, Story League.
For those who are unfamiliar, as I was, with the storytelling world and its conventions, I talked with Shrake to get an idea of how things work, and how he got involved in storytelling in the first place.
Me: What's the most important element in a story that's told, rather than written?
Shrake: Live storytelling is show business. First you need to punch the audience out… the way a good lede in a newspaper story hooks you. Then, there has to be a payoff. When your stories pay off, people start to trust you. There HAS to be a reward for listening. Our motto is “Stories Worth Telling.”
Me: Why a new organization? What’s different about Story League?
Shrake: First of all, we won’t have open mikes, only “curated” shows—selective shows. We’re going to keep the group small, and our approach is collaborative. We learn from each other. It’s like a guild.
Me: Why no open mikes or “slams”? Aren’t those really popular?
Shrake: There are two kinds of people who tell stories at open mike events: People who take it seriously as an art form, who prepare -- and people who had that unfortunate fourth cocktail… We’re looking for people who are going to take it seriously.
Me: What drew you to storytelling in the first place?
Shrake: I’ve always liked trapping people and making them listen to my stories. When I did Mortified DC, I realized that first dose of applause is intoxicating, like a drug; your first show is your best show, and you spend the rest of your career trying to recapture that. But of course you never do.
Me: I wonder if that’s why so many famous writers have been alcoholics. No applause? It seems to me that, being a writer, people can choose whether to read your stuff. Of course, they can choose not to listen to you when you tell stories, but it’s harder if you’re right there in front of them.
Shrake: Yeah, it’s great how when you’re onstage no one interrupts you.
Me: So what are your goals as a storyteller?
Shrake: I’m trying to assemble, story by story, a public persona. I want my stories to start acting as a mask I can wear.
Me: That’s really interesting. Because I would think of it as revealing yourself, but you’re calling it a mask, as if you’re constructing the fictional character, you.
Shrake: I write a lot of unpopular things. People who know me will make excuses for me, but those disturbing things are how I really feel. But I also have a soft, kind inner core. So what I mean is, I want to take all of my bad stuff, make it into entertainment, and keep it in the public realm so that I can be nice privately—offstage/offpage.
Me: What makes a good story?
Shrake: Some stories are so good, or fresh, you can’t screw them up. They tell themselves. The story of how I collected Barbra Streisand memorabilia as a 12yo is like that. I just say the plain facts, and people laugh. But the other kind of storyteller can take the most banal facts and turn them into something indelible. That’s my goal. I want to get to the level where I can make the story of how I bought a bike lock into an unforgettable ur-narrative that reveals the secrets of the universe.
SM Shrake has been a published writer for 12 years, and began telling his stories in public in February 2010. In the 6 months since then he has appeared on 6 stages in 3 cities. All things Shrake can be found at YouWannaKnowWhat.com. Story League has its first meeting in late September. If you would like to get in on the ground floor of this new organization, please send an email to smshrake@storyleague.org.
Cathy Alter's feature articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in local and national newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, Self, McSweeney's, and SMITH Magazine . Her book, Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood was released in 2004 and her memoir, Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over was released in July 2008. She holds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, where she is currently a faculty member and nonfiction advisor.
August 30, 2010
Tags:
random curiosities
Just in time for the back-to-school rush, this authentic outgoing answering machine message from a school in Australia. Telling it like it is.
Hard to imagine this is real, I know. But...fun to think it might be.
August 26, 2010
Tags:
authors, books, fiction
Take a listen to this fabulous interview with author A.S. Byatt by Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian. Byatt is one of my favorite writers (you're beginning to think I have too many "favorites," but when one considers the vast number of published authors, really, my list still seems insignificant). In this interview, she touches on everything from how difficult it must be to grow up the child of a children's book author ("children's writers want to prolong their own childhood") to the difficulty with defining one's identity in the absence of a religious framework.
It's her discussion of the latter that I find most intriguing. She refers primarily to Western society when she says that the map of the world provided by religion is gone--that religion itself has "gone away," leaving only an interest in "ourselves." She talks about the various frames for trying to understand ourselves--how to work out identity--and finally identifies the "blogosphere" as the place where people are attempting self-definition. She says that everyone needs a mirror to "tell you who you are"--and that we are finding that mirror on Facebook. According to Byatt, Facebook has, in that sense, replaced God.
If we do look to Byatt's "blogosphere" for self-definition, that presents an interesting problem. Because the identity people construct, their online "persona," is just that: a construct. A fiction. Is that the primary mirror through which you see yourself, this fiction you've created?
For the sake of argument, how is this different from any other locus of self-definition? Isn't any self you put forward a fiction, exclusive and exclusionary, by definition? Shaped by you, both consciously and unconsciously?
I would think that, more than any other medium, the web's sheer pervasiveness, and the possibility of spending so much of one's time and "relationship" energy there, could make it the overwhelming source of one's self-definition.
I'm obviously not a scholar of philosophy, and I'm not a psychologist, I only play one on TV. But if Facebook (etc.) really is where we locate our primary sense of self, that seems dangerously reductive and illusory.
Byatt thinks someone should write a book about it. I think she's right.
August 24, 2010
Tags:
authors, books, fiction
In this enlightening interview with novelist David Mitchell at The Rumpus, Mitchell is asked about the sheer variety of his work. He tells interviewer Alec Michod that writers are like duck-billed platypuses "and critics are taxonomists, and to us duck-billed platypuses the question of whether we should be considered as an egg-laying mammal or what is a pointless exercise... A novelist’s job is to write a novel, not worry about how it fits into one’s oeuvre..."
I've always wondered what to call myself: fiction writer? humor writer? food/travel/grocery list writer? At some point, I settled on..."writer." But now I'm thinking duck-billed platypus might be a more descriptive label.
Mitchell comments on maturing over time as a writer: "...the older you get the more familiar you become with your own ignorance. Your writing, hopefully, has more spontaneity and verve as you age. Now it can take painstaking weeks...to excrete a single sentence. It can be like having a hemorrhage, but one hopes the quality is superior the greater the excretion."
Mitchell's hemorrhages are a good deal better quality than most. His latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His earlier acclaimed novel, Cloud Atlas, was shortlisted in 2004.
August 20, 2010
Tags:
random curiosities, food
Introducing the Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger
The Machine Shed, a Wisconsin restaurant, expected to sell about 3,500 Krispy Kreme cheeseburgers in three days during the Wisconsin state fair. About a quarter of the customers have been paying an extra buck to add chocolate-covered bacon to this sandwich, which consists of exactly what it sounds like: A cheeseburger served on a Krispy Kreme donut instead of a bun. There are other things it sounds like, but we are too polite to say.
August 16, 2010
Tags:
random curiosities, music
Lazy blogging today, as I'm freshly back from vacation and not-so-freshly overwhelmed with minutiae, as well as, let's see, what's the word for lots of stuff that's actually not minutiae? Plus there is a pile of school forms sitting on my desk already...and two lists of school supplies and, how did this happen?? no camp this week or next? (What was I thinking?)
Anyway...seeing as how I'm blogging about the suburbs (at Semi-Charmed Life) and mocking it...gently...(at Bethesda World News), I thought I'd provide a few songs from my own personal suburban playlist for your listening pleasure.
Here, to start, Ben Folds says it all:
Ben Folds, Rocking the Suburbs
Next, since my draft novel is set in 1980, I'm going to prescribe some Foreigner to help you capture the suburban "white-boy" faux-angst that Folds is talking about, but 1980-style. I suggest Double Vision and Hot-Blooded.
When you've worked yourself into a self-righteous froth, you're going to need to spend some of that energy, and what better way than with a little Eddie Van Halen air guitar: Try Running With the Devil and Jamie's Crying.
And now that you've perfected your Eddie guitar-face, you'll need a Van Halen antidote to bring you back down. I recommend Van Halen, by Nerf Herder.
That should do it for now.
Next time: Fleetwood Mac with a Violent Femmes chaser...
August 9, 2010
Tags:
humor, random curiosities, suburbs
Beginning today, I'm writing a weekly humor blog for Bethesda Magazine's all-new destination website. My column, The Semi-Charmed Life: Surviving at the Center of the Universe will focus on the absurdities of life in the suburbs, especially in Bethesda and the DC area. Which basically means, a blog about anything.
The first installment is called, "In Which I Carry an Illegal Substance onto School Grounds."
If you click on the "about" link on that blog page, in addition to a picture of me sitting on a lawn mower that doesn't belong to me (thank you, Tim and Diana), you'll find a link to Bethesda World News. Bethesda World News is the new online parody newspaper I created, which I'm editing along with a band of rebel writers whose names have been changed to put all the blame on me. More on that another time.
So, stop in, take your shoes off, set a spell. But first make sure you've had a recent pedicure.
August 5, 2010
Tags:
books, authors, creative process, letters
I'm a latecomer to James Salter's work, having just recently read and been bowled over by his novel, A Sport and a Pastime. It was published in 1967, and I expected it to seem quaint and dated. In short, it's not. Its exploration of a love affair between an American man and a French girl is probably the best narrative of "good" sex that I've read. Because face it, most of the sex one finds in novels these days is "bad" sex. You know the difference; I don't need to explain that. And when there is good sex (particularly if it's at all explicit), it's often badly written to the point of being cringe-inducing--even by the best writers. So...I humbly suggest Salter's book as a primer for those who are preparing to attempt a scene of that kind in their own fiction.
A volume of Salter's correspondence with longtime friend Robert Phelps, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, edited by John McIntyre, will be out this month from Counterpoint Press. Although I don't read literary correspondence all that often, what I've seen so far of these letters has led me to believe I'm missing out. In addition to which this kind of exchange may soon become a relic.
Robert Phelps, a fiction writer, literary biographer, and writing professor, sent an adoring letter to Salter after reading A Sport and a Pastime, and so began an affair of friendship that lasted until Phelps' death. Excerpts from the letters have appeared in The American Scholar.
In their letters, the two men commiserate about everything from travel to bad reviews. (On reviewers, Salter reminds Phelps that "they are not the only readers, they are the paid readers." Something to keep in mind.)
What interests me most are their references to the creative process. Richard Ford is quoted in The American Scholar as saying that Salter "writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." In which case, it's gratifying to know that writers like Salter can have days like the rest of us:
"I'm still at work, disheartened, on the final chapter of my book...It still eludes me...Somewhere in all that boring clay is the shape I'm looking for." Later, he describes a play he's working on: "I don't know anything about it yet except there are parts I don't detest."
I think I can get on board for that, writing a passage that I don't detest.
Phelps says that if every writer has his given form..."I sometimes think mine is the footnote....I think I am an annotator. The story exists for the scribbled notes in the margin."
Salter, on the other hand, loves "the infinities, the endlessness..." He will clearly always find something new to say, or a new way of saying it. "We must consume whole worlds to write a single sentence and yet we never use up a part of what is available."
I can't help being struck by the likelihood that this type of relationship may never again be immortalized and made public this way. Unless of course you're a person who saves emails (intentionally--not just to avoid cleaning out the inbox), and (even less likely) you're corresponding with a person who writes emails that are worth saving.
For further insight and reflections on Robert Phelps, see this essay, written by Derek Alger, a long-time student of his and editor of Pif, the online literary magazine.
August 2, 2010
Tags:
random curiosities, creative process
It's not often that one has a chance to witness the moment where a neurosis is likely to be born. I wish I hadn't overheard this, but I did, in the ladies' room at the good Greek breakfast joint.
In the stall, mother talking to 3-year-old son. (I know he's 3, I don't even have to see him.)--
Mother: Want to go to Target next? And get a new backpack for school?
Boy: I don't want Thomas.
Mother: Thomas the Tank Engine? You don't have to get Thomas. We can find another character...
Boy: I want Dora.
Mother: Dora the Explorer?
Boy: Yes. I want Dora.
Mother: Dora's a girl. That's for girls. We'll find something good for you.
Boy: I want Dora.
Mother: Silly, Dora's for girls.
Boy: I'm a girl.
Mother: No [laughs], your sister's a girl. You're a boy. You can have Diego. Dora's for girls.
Boy: I want Dora the Explorer.
Mother: [exasperated sigh] Well, let's tell everyone in the bathroom about it...
Me: [writing it all down...]
Note to the mother: I hope you're setting aside money for the therapy fund along with the college fund.
July 25, 2010
Tags:
random curiosities, creative process
From Graham Greene's novel, The End of the Affair:
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
Greene's narrator complains that he's having trouble with his book, in spite of writing 500 words per day (just as the author reportedly did), because he's preoccupied with thoughts that go "deeper than the book"--his unconscious is at work on a different obsession.
Certainly many of us have experienced this--that the day can be filled with mundane tasks having little to do with writing, which would seem to take one away from a focus on the work, and yet because those ordinary activities require little creative energy, they can serve as indifferent fuel to the unconscious. So your mind continues to work independently, crafting solutions to your creative problems at the same time you take out the trash. That is, I suppose, as long as you don't become obsessed with the deeper meanings to be found in the things you throw away.
Now that a fast and furious storm has left me with two trees sitting on the power lines in my front yard, as well as a broken driveway, I'm counting on my subconscious to continue working on my novel, while my conscious mind is taking estimates from the tree people... I must admit that I would welcome Greene's list of superficial distractions over sitting on hold with the insurance company any day.
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