The French trailer for Virginia Wolf (courtesy of La Pastèque):
“I refuse to lie to children,” said Sendak. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.” Instead, he gave us books rife with trouble and hard things. He tackled child fury and fear and loneliness. He provoked and rankled and broke the rules of picturebooks while setting new standards of artistry.
Ever-irascible and equally charming, I can think of no better person to speak to Sendak’s legacy than Sendak himself: “[I]f I’ve done anything, I’ve had kids express themselves as they are, impolitely, lovingly… they don’t mean any harm. They just don’t know what the right way is. And as it turns out sometimes the so-called ‘right way’ is utterly the wrong way. What a monstrous confusion…I never set out to write books for children. I don’t have a feeling that I’m gonna save children or my life is devoted. I’m not Hans Christian Anderson. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?”
(From Kenny’s Window, 1956, the first title Sendak wrote and illustrated himself.)
The great lie of longform narrative is that people are consistent, when in truth many of us are happily inconsistent for no dramatic reason at all. Some of us have major continuity issues. Some of us live our lives with a complete disregard for novelistic conventions, stable character development, or even basic logic.
Be honest. Have you ever felt that you were changing so rapidly, or living so much in the moment, that what you did or who you were the week or even day before felt like a foggy memory? My friend Mike calls this being 16 or 17. (Remember the constant renewal of adolescence?) As Mike remembers it, “You could fall in love fourteen times in an afternoon, every conversation was the final word, every movie was a paradigm shifting apocalypse.”
As a writer who has tried to build characters that have some semblance of consistency, I am aware that there are times in our lives (even beyond youth!) when we are in flux mode; when identity shifting experiences seem to happen daily, even hourly.
All of this to say, I love this book, I Keep Changing, by Bob Gill and Alastair Reid. I love this book because it shows that sometimes a good life doesn’t follow the usual rules of reliable behavior. As Reid puts it: “Big or small? Weak or strong? Vanilla or chocolate? Actually, I keep changing, and I’m all these things at the same time…”
Until it’s not. The truth is I will undertake endless revisions and write countless drafts if I feel that it’s in service of my story. I am not too proud. (What doesn’t need revision in my life? My shoes? My toothbrush? My cat?)
I remember hearing once that Ruth Krauss cut The Carrot Seed from 10,000 words to just over 100. I try to keep that in mind whenever I’m feeling grumbly or tetchy.
(Image from How to Make an Earthquake by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, 1954.)
Ezra Keats and Gyo Fujikawa, who blazed a trail for diversity in picture books in the early 1960s, made it look so easy. Why is it still a struggle in publishing to acknowledge the full spectrum of children who read and adore books?
I found this dismaying: “[D]ata analyzed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center in 2010 found that only nine per cent of the three thousand four hundred children’s books published that year contained significant cultural or ethnic diversity…[T]he white default—in books, as in other forms of mass media—is learned and internalized early, including by children of color.”
Read the full article here.
There is always the hope that meditation will make your mind feel like this…
Rather than like this…
Stray Love is set in a clunky, messy pre-computer world. It’s a world of inky fingers and jammed keys. I’ve always had a thing for typewriters and typewriter ephemera so this collection of vintage typewriter ribbon tins (courtesy of Janine Vangool) makes me very happy.
I also love this photograph of Stan Bevington at Coach House Press. Give me dirt and grinding noises any day. I will always be wistful for old machines.
p.s. Stray Love has recently received a few nice reads: here and here and here and here and here. I really appreciate it when writers take time to review work by their peers.
Q: What is your best advice on how to write the ending of a novel?
A: It’s probably best to end on some dramatically cathartic and conclusive note: the villain taken away in handcuffs, the couple reunited, the wetlands saved, etc. But I don’t roll that way. And, anyway, I think it depends on the particular piece of fiction. A heavily plotted novel demands a heavily plotted ending. A less plotted narrative has more freedom—which includes the freedom to acknowledge that stories, like life, don’t really end. (It would be weird if a book by Dan Brown petered off with a Chekhovian finale: “The rain beat against the windows all night long.”)
I personally like an ending that combines a sense of awe and ordinariness and conveys a degree of messy “truthiness.” But I think the problem is that while writers may like ambiguity, most readers like a bit more closure. So, ultimately, for me, it’s about striking a balance between closure and non-closure.
Given that there are no generic solutions, here are a few fun ways to end a story:
End mid-sentence. (The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence.)
End on a question. (The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss.)
End on an exclamation. (Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. )
End the same way you started. (Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.)
That’s it. The end!
(My response to this month’s Fiction Craft question—nine novelists were asked to share their advice on writing the end of a novel.)
Thinking about hands that make things, thinking about Agnes Martin’s hands. Martin (1912-2004) was a Canadian-born American painter who spent the second half of her life living alone on a remote mesa in New Mexico, who consciously distanced herself from the social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye, who used her hands for the rough work of building houses in the desert and the refined work of minimalist drawing. Is it my knowledge of her life and art that renders her hands so mysterious and riveting?
Thinking about the shyness of her hands, if it isn’t the same understatement I detect in her spare and ethereal canvasses, the same lonesomeness I imagine in her hand-drawn pencil lines. Thinking about this and what happens to hands when they are suddenly placed in the camera’s frame after years of working unwatched; that this is how hands sit (stoic and apprehensive) when, after years of working vigorously and reclusively, happily and self-reliantly, they are suddenly asked to be idle and observed.
For four days in November of 2003 , the Massachusetts Mental Health Center was in bloom. Artist Anna Schuleit created a living memorial project to mark the closing of the historic building. Noting that psychiatric patients are rarely brought flowers, Schuleit used old hospital records to calculate how many people had passed through the facility since it opened in 1912 and decided to commemorate each one with a pot of flowers (“bringing together all the flowers they had never been given.”)
What was once a place of healing and confinement was transformed into a place of fantasy and delirium. When the four days were over, the plants were distributed to patients in care homes throughout the region.
I have fallen in love with Schuleit’s site specific work, which in the past has incorporated everything from ringing telephones to wild ducks. With Bloom, I love the way a space can be transfigured so simply, how pots of pert orange tulips can bring a new feeling tone to a dingy office, how a river of white mums or African violets can infuse a bleak institutional hallway with fragrant dreams. I love the way art can entirely disarrange a familiar setting, make it strange and incomprehensible.
