AWP Presentation: Notes on Literary Style in Fiction

UPDATE: The full and corrected version of this essay is now up at LitHub, as "Elements of Literary Style." I'm keeping the introduction here, with one quote. Please check out the full version at LitHub, and many thanks again to Christian Kiefer, and to Jonny Diamond at LitHub, for agreeing to run the piece.

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Yesterday I mentioned that I would post my remarks for the AWP 2018 panel "Profundity as Purpose: Thoughts on Sentences, Vocabulary and Style," organized by writer and critic Christian Kiefer. Other panelists included Coffee House Press editor Caroline Casey; acclaimed writers Kim O'Neill and Christine Schutt. I should note that I slightly modified the introduction below when I read it aloud, and also read only a portion of the full set of notes, to which I added a few quotations, by panelists O'Neill and Schutt, based on their remarks and readings. Many thanks to Christian, Caroline, Kim, Christine, and everyone who attended the panel, which was held at 9 am on Saturday, and drew a full house. Many thanks to Christian and my fellow panelists, and to all who attended the event!

(I should also note that at the panel Caroline and I offered the name of some living authors whose styles exemplified what Christian, others on the panel, and I were talking about--ourselves included--but I decided not to list them here, because there are so many great fiction writers, and I do mention but a few of the many I admire and regularly read with enthusiasm in my notes. I encourage J's Theater readers to add names of distinctive living fiction stylists they admire in the comments, if you'd like, and I'll aim to post them at some point soon if there are more than a handful.)

Lastly, I also want to note another highlight of this year's AWP, which was attending the Jack Jones Literary Arts' welcome event at the Columbia Cafe in Tampa! Many thanks to Kima Jones and Allison Conner, and it was so much fun to meet everyone on Jack Jones' roster--which includes yours truly--and its fans!

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INTRODUCTION

I want to begin by thanking Christian for organizing this panel, and thank all of my fellow panelists for their thoughts on this topic, I initially thought I would write a short essay, but instead I decided to draft a series of provisional notes on the topic of literary style in fiction, interlaced with quotations on the topic by various writers of note. (You can find a number of these quotes online, as well as on the website "Some Literary Criticism Quotes," which is where I culled them.) Unless otherwise noted, however, the comments and thoughts are mine.

Two quotes:

Is there an ethics of style? How might we talk about it? What happens when we consider how one template for now-dominant literary styles, emphasizing craft and de-emphasizing politics, that are taught in many—most?—MFA and undergraduate programs, may have their possible origins in the US government-funded approaches instituted at Iowa and Stanford, as Eric Bennett argues us in his 2015 scholarly study Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa Press)? Even setting this particular history to the side, as usually occurs in most creative writing programs, doesn’t every artistic act require some level of ethical inquiry? Are there styles and stylistic approaches we might label more ethical or less, and if so, why? Or might another way to speak of the ethics of style be to raise questions not just of historicity and genealogy, but also of the truth(fulness) of representations in relation to a given narrative? What role or roles do the larger social, political, economic, and cultural contexts hold in this line of questioning?

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“In order to find his voice he must first have mastered style”

–A. Alvarez, The Writer’s Voice

*

Prose (fiction) should not be musical; this is the province of poetry. (“Poetry is music set to words” –Dennis O’Driscoll.) This is another dictum I have always worked under, and to some degree, because of my inner sensibility, against. Yet so much of the most memorable prose, not just poetry, appears to aspire to, as the old phrase goes, and often achieves the condition of music. What lines in prose fiction do you most readily recall? Even the ideas and statements that engrave themselves on your consciousness do so not just because of their aptness and timeliness, but because of how they were written, how they unfold, almost like lyrics or lyric, as prose.

AWP Reading: Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN/Radical WRITING + Poem: Evie Shockley

I'm back from a few days at this year's annual Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which was held over the last week in an unseasonably cool Tampa, Florida. AWP has grown considerably since I first attended it years ago, with several generations of new writers and students now attending, and though I find the sheer number of people and events overwhelming at times, I once again found it an enjoyable and invigorating event to attend since it provides an opportunity to see so many friends that I otherwise would not run into, and meet, hear and learn about the work of so many writers I was not already familiar with, or only knew in print and not in person. C joined me, and we had a great time over all.

R. Erica Doyle

I participated on two panels, one that I moderated, titled "Translating Blackness," sparked in part by my 2016 Poetry Foundation essay. It included translators and authors Aaron Coleman, Kristin Dykstra, Tiffany Higgins, and Lawrence Schimel; the second focused on style, and included Christian Kiefer (organizer and moderator), Caroline Casey, Kim O'Neill, and Christine Schutt. Both were full houses, I was happy to see, and I plan to post my notes for the second within the next few days. In lieu of the kinds of reports I've posted on this blog in the past, I thought I'd feature a few photos, and poem, from one of the events I attended, a reading and pre-launch of the forthcoming must-read anthology Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN/Radical WRITING, edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, and on bookshelves in June from Kore Press.

L-r: Ruth Ellen Kocher, Dawn Lundy
Martin, and Erica Hunt

According to its description on Kore Press's site, the collection

celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature. The anthology will collect late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean—work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making. Because one contextual framework for the collection is “art as a form of epistemology,” we envision the writing in the anthology will be the kind of work driven by the writer’s desire to radically present, uncovering what she knows and does not know, as well as critically addressing the future.

It continues:

This anthology will help re-write the misnomer that innovative writing is white writing and do it with a particularly interest in gender. Is it a coincidence that #blacklivesmatter was coined and put into action by black queer women in the same moment that there is a proliferation of black women writing experimental work? We don’t think so. This anthology is part of our means of investigation, or of simply looking at, what we are doing together to re-write the future world as unfamiliar. Indeed, it is the familiar, the well-worn racial and racist past that is killing us.

The audience

The reading, on International Women's Day, took place at the Floridan Palace hotel, in downtown Tampa, and featured a handful of writers whose work appears in the collection, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, R. Erica Doyle, Duriel Harris, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Tracie Morris, Evie Shockley, and giovanni singleton. Given this lineup, every poet's performance sparkled, and made a very strong case for getting a copy of the anthology, which will be perfect not just for reading from cover to cover, but in a wide array of courses.

Dawn Lundy Martin and Evie Shockley reading

Below is one of my Rutgers colleague Evie Shockley's poems, "What's Not to Liken," from the anthology, which I found especially moving, and a few photos from the event. The poem also appears in Evie's most recent collection, semiautomatic, Wesleyan University Press, 2017. This is one poetry collection you definitely want to add to your bookshelf; it is fantastic! You can pre-order the anthology at Kore Press's site, or via Small Press Distributors.

Copyright © Evie Shockley, from semiautomatic,
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017

Random Photos

A few random photos from the last month. I've been so busy with school-related work (multiple search committees, thesis projects, etc.) that I haven't been able to get out much. But here are a few images from recent weeks.

The façade of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary
Art, announcing Zachary Fabri's show
From the Wolf to the Fox,
which closed on January 15 

A detail from Fabri's Areola: Black
Presidents, digital print

Detail, Zachary Fabri, Eu
Mino Minas Gerais (I Mine
Minas Gerais, Brazil), 2010.

Rutgers-Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor
speaking at the opening of Express Newark
at the newly renovated Hahne's Building, Newark 

One of the glassed in reliquary spaces
at the new World Trade Center PATH station 

In Las Cruces, New Mexico 

Las Cruces, New Mexico 

The flyer for the conversation I had
with the utterly brilliant, lovely Christina Sharpe,
who also read from her must-read
book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Marble-polisher, WTC PATH statoin 

Worker relaxing, WTC PATH station

A display being erected or dismantled,
it was unclear which was the case,
WTC PATH station 

Workers polishing all that slippery, easily scuffed
marble, WTC PATH station (perhaps
someone will think of laying rubber pathways
to lessen the possibility of slips and tumbles
when it's rainy or snowy outside)

Union Station, Washington, DC 

What I found when I left my office on Monday;
someone had smashed into my left sideview mirror 

Dorothy Wang of Williams College delivering her talk
at Rutgers-Newark on Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn,
and the politics of literary history and valuation

My AWP 2015

Posing with the Mary Tyler
Moore statue (downtown
Minneapolis)
(Photo by John Domini)

I've just returned from the year's biggest annual American--and perhaps global?--creative writing gathering, the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which concluded yesterday after four days in Minneapolis. Over 10,000 (or was it 11,000?) writers, readers and publishers packed the rooms and auditoriums of the Minneapolis Convention Center, nearby hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, libraries, and a variety of offsite venues, to deliver papers, talks and presentations, and to read their work, buy books, talk about writing, and just hang out with other literary folks.

Inside the Convention Center

As an officially academic conference AWP primarily convenes people in academe or who want to be in it, focuses a sizable portion of its panels on educational issues, and represents one of the major networking opportunities for those seeking jobs within educational institutions. Yet despite this it is above all a writers' and writing conference. To me AWP's real emphasis, unlike that the Modern Language Association's annual conference or the Book Expo America, remains on conversations on and around writing and literary practices and production, and the presentation of literary works; the opportunities to participate in and attend the onsite and offsite readings and book-signings, and the immense book fair are chief among the reasons many writers scare up the funding to attend. Another key benefit is running into new and old friends and acquaintances, and meeting new ones, with the added possibility of hearing them read and talk about their work.

One of the skyways leading
to the Convention Center

A post-snowy morning
outside my hotel

Giving and attending readings and seeing people I otherwise would not get a chance to were mu reasons for attending this year, and my visit didn't disappoint. I should note that during the worst days of my knee troubles earlier this year, I was not sure at first that I would be able to attend, but hope springs eternal and physical therapy works, and since the trip to Missoula, I have grown increasingly more mobile, so I was able to make my daily way from my hotel, the Marriott City Center, to the convention center mostly on foot, and most outdoors, even during one of the sleet/snowfalls that occurred during the conference's run, and I even spent a good several hours every day I was there in the immense hall hosting the book fair, walking as much as 6 miles on Friday alone. I did feel all the walking while there and once I go back, but I was resolute in not wearing any knee braces and in not carrying around a backpack or bookbags full of books, so I avoided straining my knees and utilized UPS's services several times, and now my campus office has heavy, stuff troves waiting for me.

Inside the AWP Book Fair

At the Book Fair

The perambulations around the book fair afforded many serendipities, including running into countless writers I seldom get the opportunity to see and hang out with, as well as happening upon books I had been intending to buy, with the writers nearby to sign them, as well as ones I had no idea about but am incredibly I happened upon. I saw and chatted two of the publishers I have worked with (New Directions and Nightboat Books), and learned that at the former a steady stream people were asking for my book, which will be out on May 21, 2015 (a few weeks later than originally). I took that as a very positive sign. Other highlights were the lunches and dinners with friends and colleagues, including former students, and one amazing book party I attended where I had the opportunity to meet yet more writers. While I prefer the scale of smaller conferences like Thinking Its Presence, AWP definitely has its charms, and rather than feeling overwhelmed as I sometimes have at  the sheer size of the crowds, the surfeit of texts on display, and the undertow of competitiveness, this year felt more manageable and enjoyable. (Was it the 10,000 or 12,000 fewer people than a year or two ago?)

At New Directions table; Tynan Kogane
is seated at table; to the right is Archipelago
Books, where I learned a former student,
Eric Wilson, is now working

Lorenzo Herrera, poet and publisher
of Kórima Press, which shared a table
with Lisa Moore's RedBone Press

For the first time ever I was a featured reader, on a panel sponsored by the Cave Canem Writers Foundation that featured four poets who received the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation's annual writing awards: Thylias Moss, Tyehimba Jess, Atsuro Riley, and I. Before the conference I learned from a colleague that there was tremendous concern over the paucity of openly gay featured readers and LGBTQ-focused panels, and another friend told me that I was the only out featured reader, though I learned that another fellow member of my reading slate, the poet Atsuro, is openly gay, so that doubled the total, and also meant that two men of color were intersectionally representing for LGBTQ communities at AWP. Instead of poetry I read the lyrical opening to my story "Blues," in which Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia meet up in Depression-era New York. The story is a tribute to both poets, but especially Hughes, as well as Richard-Bruce Nugent, author of "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," whose style and themes provided the template for mine. Supposedly we were visible on a Jumbotron monitor, which I thankfully could not see or I'd never have been able to take the podium! Many thanks to CC, the Whiting Foundation, and to AWP for the event!

Lisa Moore and I

A panel on creative writing as a second career,
headed by Tayari Jones (at right), with Evie
Shockley seated at the table at center

The following evening I read at an offsite event to promote the new Volta Book of Poets, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson and published by Sidebrow Books, between whose covers I have a few poems. The 3-hour reading was at Harriet Brewery in St. Paul, and many of the poets in the anthology were present, including Eric Baus, Susan Briante, Julie Carr, Don Mee Choi, Arda Collins, C. S. Giscombe, Fred Moten, Yona Harvey, Dawn Lundy Martin, J. Michael Martinez, Andrea Rexilius, Evie Shockley (my cab and Uber mate), Matthias Svalina, TC Tolbert, and Lynn Xu. (I probably have left someone off, so my apologies.) The beer hall was loud and packed, and some patrons seemed more eager to hear poetry than others, but the readers in general were on their game and I aimed to have fun and read an Internet-app based poem that elicited a good deal of laughter, in keeping with the venue's tone. I had to head out to another event, so I missed the evening's final readers.

At the Harriet Brewery reading,
Fred Moten seated at center

The Obsidian panel, with (1-r) Kwame Dawes,
Duriel Harris (editor), and Sheila Smith McKoy

I also got to attend several panels, including one devoted to the literary journal Obsidian, which I have read for years and now serve as one of its fiction and hybrid forms editors, and the invigorating words and atmosphere of fellowship in that room underpinned for me, as so many other experiences did, of why I attend AWP.  Next year's conference will take place in Los Angeles, and I'm already looking forward to it. Below, a few more photos!

The Convention Center

Lynn Xu at the Volta reading

Fred Moten at the Volta reading

Don Mee Choi, translating, and Valerie
Mejer, reading in Spanish,
at the Volta reading

Susan Briante at the Volta reading

Yona Harvey at the Volta reading

Cecil Giscombe at the Volta reading

and:

An arrest Tyehimba Jess and I witnessed
one night walking back from dinner

AWP 2013 in Boston

As I was returning on a late-evening, slow train from Boston after attending the annual Associated Writing Programs (AWP), I tried, before briefly falling into a deep sleep--and nearly missing my stop at New York's Penn Station-- whose spell only my iPhone alarm and the conductor's loud yell broke, I tried to remember the first AWP I attended, and I couldn't. The conferences and years and cities blur, though some, like the gathering Baltimore several years back, or Denver's two years ago, marking my first visit ever to that city, or the prior one last decade in New York, or the several in Chicago, one of which I had to miss because of my father's death, remain as alive to me as if I were still there. So too do a few that I could not attend for various reasons, including the AWP conference that took place in Vancouver.  Yet whatever I may feel in the months and weeks leading up to each AWP conference I attend, I always return from them physically exhausted but intellectually and creatively energized, and this year was no exception. I overheard someone saying that by Friday afternoon 12,000 people had attended, a number that may or may not be astonishing and a high, though because of the layout of the Hynes Convention Center and the nearby hotels, this year felt far less frenzied than that maelstrom of last year's conference in Chicago. By the first full day I'd been there I was feeling overwhelmed by the circus-like atmosphere, and was glad that I could head home and revive myself before returning for another day of events.

Snowquestered Boston

The AWP conference also always feels a bit more upbeat than the Modern Language Association (MLA) conferences, perhaps because the literary world, far more so than the scholarly-academic one, still (thankfully!) includes large numbers of non-professionals, lovers and enthusiasts of literature and books,   amateurs and dilettantes and tyros, and this is not a bad thing. AWP, and the American (by which I also include Canada and increasingly the global Anglophone literary sphere), as Mark McGurl and others have persuasively argued, is part of a literary-industrial complex, with an increasingly institutionalized, rationalized, stratified, hyper-commodified hierarchical system of actors, laborers, commodities, but what AWP also makes clear is that anyone who can afford to get into (or can inventively sneak into, at least for the first few days) the panels or readings or Book Fair, for example, can interact with anyone else who's there, and there are always a range of offsite events (readings, performances, musical events, etc.) that attendees accord just as much, and sometimes more value, than anything occurring within the conference itself. In fact, these offsite events often enrich and add considerably more value to your experience of the conference, and both offer a counterbalance and a leveling effect to the increasing dominance of academe. They also demonstrate that although there are numerous gatekeepers in the Anglophone American literary world, powerful publishers, institutions, famous authors and teachers, a history and tradition that must be acknowledged and reckoned with, creative writing at its core, as is the case for all art and art forms, remains fully beyond the grasp of anyone or any institution that would want to reduce it to a mere cog in the wheel of global-American capital, though it is that.

Snowquestered Boston by night

Perhaps it is a question of perspective, but this year's conference also felt more diverse, in the sense of pluralism more so than multiculturalism, than prior ones, and even the briefest perusal of the major official readings shows that the organizers have really made an effort to feature an ever wider array of voices from within the institutions that make of AWP. (For writers outside institutions, it's another story.) Yet I still often feel that there are too many blind spots that persist, particularly in terms of the composition of panels. A friend who attended the Digital lit panel, for example, noted that not a single writer of color was on it or discussed. (This was the subject of a paper I gave at the MLA and so I was particularly interested to hear how the AWP panel turned out, especially since I could not attend it.) The same was true of other generalist panels at the conference. Yet in other cases, where panel organizers did the work of trying to look beyond a narrow ken, the panels were more racially and ethnically diverse. As VIDA has once again made clear, the problem of sexism also continues to plague the American literary landscape, and AWP, given its power, can become a force to change things. But the barriers in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class that are endemic to academe and academic institutions carry over into a conference like AWP. As I said, I felt this year's conference was better than prior ones, but that could be my limited perspective. It is up to AWP's members and participants, though, as much as to its organizers, to continue the improvements the organization has made.

US Poet Laureate and Dark Room longtime member
Natasha Trethewey opening the Dark Room Reunion Reading
at the AWP Conference

Dark Room cofounder Sharan Strange reading her work

Saxophonist James Brandon Lewis performing
with Thomas Sayers Ellis at the Dark Room Reunion reading

Tracy K. Smith concluding the Dark Room reading

My chief reason for attending this year was to participate in the Dark Room Writers' Collective reunion reading, which took place on Thursday afternoon at 3 pm at the Hynes Convention Center. It was an especially important reunion because Cambridge was where the Dark Room began, and on a personal level, it was where I went to college and worked for many years; Boston was the city where all of us cut our literary teeth as writers, and the Dark Room's final home before its dissolution in the late 1990s. Natasha Trethewey, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, could not participate because she is an AWP board member, but she did introduce the event, which included amany of us who had been members through the years: Tisa Bryant, Tracy K. Smith, Artress Bethany White, and Kevin Young; founders Thomas Sayers Ellis, Janice Lowe, and Sharan Strange; and I. As has become a tradition at reunion readings, a younger writer, poet Abiku Roger Reeves, joined us, as did the talented young saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, who performed expertly with Thomas. A number of other fellow members who couldn't attend were there in spirit. The room was full, and despite starting a little after 3, we didn't go over and were able to participate in a lively Q&A afterwards with the audience, which included a number of writers, elders and youngsters, all of us had met, learned from and worked with over the years. So goes the Dark Room motto: TOTAL LIFE IS WHAT WE WANT.

My other reason for attending was to join students to answer question at the Rutgers-Newark MFA table, at the Book Fair, something I'd done for Northwestern's MFA program at last year's AWP. I am always fascinated by the range of people who stop by the table to inquire about the program. During one lull, however, passing before the table wasn't just one of the many amazing authors peopling event, but, as I quickly noted, extracting my camera for posterity's sake, one of the greatest living authors in the Arabic or any language, Adonis (Adunis), who was supposed to pay a visit to Chicago (and the Poetry and Poetics Program at Northwestern) in the fall of 2011, but was too ill to do so. I stopped him and Khaled Mattawa, and translator and escort for the day, asked if I could take his picture, and he graciously allowed me to do so. Though I had had to miss his event the prior day, I also got to thank him in person for his work. After he'd moved on, several other people milling about nearby asked who he was, and I was glad to tell them.

The extraordinary Adonis (Adunis - أدونيس;)

At the Derek Walcott-Seamus Heaney
reading and conversation at AWP

The third reason I attended the conference was to attend a dinner at a great Ethiopian restaurant hosted by Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press, with the great Kwame Dawes serving as Chief-of-Ceremony and colleague Chris Abani (whom I'd never met in person) as reader, in honor of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, on whose panel I'd served in selecting the inaugural winner, the tremendous young Kenyan poet Clifton Gachagua. He wasn't there nor was one of the judges, Bernardine Evaristo, but in attendance were two others, Matthew Shenoda and Gabeba Baderoon.  I also had the opportunity to meet poet Nathalie Handal, who'll be visiting Rutgers-Newark in several months, and two British poets whom I've admired from afar for many years: Kadija Sesay George and Dorothea Smartt. (In fact they'd been on a panel the prior afternoon, but because my train was delayed by over two hours as a result of the snow and who knows what else, I had to spring to my event and so was unable to catch them.) Also present and offering spirited remarks was Laura Sillerman herself. One final treat of the evening was a video that convened two of the giants of contemporary African literature; in it Kofi Anyidohoo interviewed Kofi Awoonor, who later read from a new long poem.

Kwame Dawes, leading the proceedings
at the Sillerman Book Prize dinner

Chris Abani, reading poems by great
African poets, and his own beautiful poetry

After dinner (l-r): Tracy K. Smith, Matthew Shenoda, Kwame Dawes,
Nathalie Handal, Chris Abani, and another dinner guest

I ran into so many writers over the weekend I could fill multiple blog posts just listing them, and I will inevitably leave people out, so I'll say instead that it was wonderful as always running into so many old friends and making new ones, and I especially appreciated having the opportunities to chat and spend time with some of them at various points throughout the trip. I must mention that the first person I ever read with outside college, at the Dark Room, was Samuel R. Delany, one of my heroes, and I happened upon him Friday afternoon as I was leaving the Hynes with the Dark Room writers and other friends. I can hardly express how important he has been to me as a writer, as an intellectual, as someone who puts his ideas and art into practice, and I cherish ever opportunity I have to see him. As it happened as I was speaking with him, the head of Rutgers-Newark's MFA program, Jayne Anne Phillips, a writer I first began reading at the behest of my friend Kevin Keels shortly after I joined the Dark Room, was passing by, so they got to speak and I felt that in that moment, a circle was coming together, uncannily. There were many such moments, including running into my former NYU classmate Martha Witt on the train up to Boston; Martha was a dear friend when we were in graduate school and now teaches in New Jersey, and we were able to exchange information so that we will no longer have to play phone tag as we had for years.

One final highlight of the visit was participating in a Dark Room photo shoot conducted by the acclaimed photographer Elsa Dorfman, in her studio in Cambridge. Thomas, who'd serendipitously happened upon her during one of her visits to New York, arranged for several photos using a large frame color Polaroid camera, and in addition to the fun of hanging out, watching Dorfman work her photographic magic was priceless. Many aspects of prior AWP conferences have faded, but I don't think I'll soon forget this one or the enjoyable time I had. That it occurred in Boston makes it that much more special.

The third Dark Room Portrait, by Elsa Dorfman
(l-r: John Keene, Danielle Legros-Georges, Janice Lowe, Tisa Bryant,
Major Jackson, Sharan Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Artress
Bethany White, Patrick Sylvain, Tracy K. Smith)