This past week I spoke with my friend Ed Skoog on our occasional podcast, Lunch Box, about nostalgia, and whether it is a force for good or ill in art. The latter, is of course the party line; the artist, at least in our latter-day western conception of the vocation, is supposed to shun the past and innovate, not look back fondly on what has come before. We associate nostalgia with sentimentality, naivety, weakness—a defensive longing for the past in the face of the the bleakness of the present. In our conversation, Ed points out that the concept of nostalgia—literally, homesicknes—began life as a medical condition, originally coined to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.

The New York Times’s recent list of the century’s best books would be kryptonite to me even if I was on it. I love the democratic spirit of a box of oddments; my mind loves to generate methods of ordering it, then ordering it, then disordering it again. (If the Times had published a randomly selected list of 100 books published in the past 25 years, I would have been absolutely thrilled to read it. Imagine the triviality!) I spend as much time rearranging my home office as I do writing fiction in it, and I don’t think I could competently do the latter if I didn’t have the former to clear my mind.

Back in the late nineties I went on tour for my second novel, The Funnies. At a bookstore in Los Angeles, a bookseller introduced me as one of five siblings, the child of a famous newspaper cartoonist—that is, not by my own biography, but by the biography of the novel’s protagonist. I had to explain that the novel had nothing to do with my actual life, something that seemed to confuse the bookseller. If a bookseller didn’t understand what fiction was, how can anyone?

Thus began a seven-year period of terror at the hands of the mustache-dominated political machine. Mayor DeBevoise, now nicknamed “Mindless Flesh Host” by the mustache that controlled him, demanded that every man, woman, and child in Long Island City wear a long, luxuriant beard. Initially unpopular, the “Beard Act” of 1877 eventually led to a cultural renaissance in the region, as women of means competed to sport the most extravagant horsehair prosthetics, children fashioned false beards, called “rustlers,” out of old newspapers, and taverns overflowed with men exchanging tips for growing, styling, and pacifying their facial hair. Stage plays of the era dramatized the class conflicts among various beards and mustaches (affectionately nicknamed “Scratchums” or “Furry Playfellows”), and racy illustrations of clean-shaven men and women licking each other’s faces exchanged hands in backrooms and dark alleys.

In traditional rock recording, a “demo” refers to a casual take of a song, either tracked in the band’s practice space or in an inexpensive studio, without much concern for virtuosity or audio fidelity. A collection of demos usually serves as a rough sketch for an album, which would be recorded “for real” with a reputable producer and engineer. But in an era when musicians can record their own music on the cheap, and make it sound pretty good, a demo can be something else. For me, it’s kind of a sonic Ship of Theseus—I just open the multitrack sketch I made and start replacing things, this time trying really hard to get each right.

A big part of my job as a professor is getting my students to make their prose more efficient—to help them eliminate unintentional ambiguities, untangle nests of dependent clauses, cut unneeded or distracting detail, pull back on arbitrary similes and metaphors, and leave more open to the reader’s imagination. My own writing, like my house, tends to be fairly tidy (though not always—in the writing and house both). I sometimes give students an exercise called Subject Verb, that asks them to write a story using only two-word sentences, a subject and a verb. The goal is to show them how much of their distinctive style comes not from their syntactic elaboration, but the kind of ideas they get, and the order they put them in.

A sentimental old saying has it that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. I think that, if I had to choose a single notion that best characterizes my life’s work, it’s that a friend is just a stranger you think you actually know. The impenetrability of even the people you love the best is a source of fascination and, of course, horror for me; perhaps the reason I like books so much, more than any other artistic medium, is that they come closest (maybe?) to channeling the nature of consciousness.

The “Institute” was this little storefront by the creek on rte. 96, same building Gimme Coffee is in now. It was run by this lady who seemed old to us at the time but I guess she was in her late thirties. We thought of her as kind of a burnout (she sold us the pot) but she had an inheritance and owned the building. Her name was, I swear, Jules Rainbo. The place was kind of a new age information center, with pamphlets and short-run books, plus some poetry and nudist magazines…my boyfriend and his friends would go in there and try to steal those until she started stashing them under the counter.

Hey,

This shit is wild, thanks for posting. Do you have the one where there’s a restaurant that’s an aquarium or something and this pervert kidnaps a kid? I swear my uncle had it, he would let us get stoned with him and listen to it. This was in Rochester in the eighties. There was this one kid, he borrowed the record from my uncle and never brought it back and then later they found him at the bottom of the reservoir and his parents burned their house down for the insurance money (not sure if related)?? It had a blue cover with a shrimp on it.

Thanks, this really brought back memories

Vince B.

I was talking to a graduate student the other day about her novel-in-progress. She’d taken a lot of notes on her protagonist’s psychology, motivations, personal history, and so on, and wanted to know if I found this kind of exercise useful. The answer was yes, sure—character sketches and outlines are a boon to a novel, especially if you haven’t tried writing one before. But I also warned her against the pitfalls of hewing too closely to your notes. Reading over mine for Subdivision, I’m struck by how wrong I was about it; if I’d remained committed to including everything I thought I should, the book would have ended up stiff and uninspired. What you think you want to do might turn out to be a jumping-off point for what you really want to do.

The new collection, Let Me Think, came together much more slowly and uncertainly, first at random and in little bursts of energy, and then grindingly, with excruciating deliberation. It contains 71 stories, culled from more than a hundred, many written contemporaneously with the other two collections. (The oldest in the original draft were written 20 years ago; the oldest in the final version is from, I think, 2004.) Many of them were drawn from a folder on my hard drive labeled “Miscellany,” which, in 2016, I printed out, spread all over the floor, and rearranged with my own two hands. (I have long romanticized this task, which I think of as something poets get to do and, these days, document on social media. I did it! I photographed myself doing it and put it the photo on social media.)

Last week, my mother-in-law sent me a photo to touch up. In it, she and my father-in-law are posing outdoors with their new grandson (aka my new nephew, thank you very much). They are mostly in shadow, except for my mother-in-law’s forehead and part of her hair, which are anointed with bright sunlight, distracting from the main subject, the baby. Could I get rid of this anomaly? I did a local adjustment in Lightroom, dialing down the exposure and color temperature of the affected area, so that it now looks like they’re standing fully in the shade. Of course I can’t resist contemplating the rift in reality I’ve created—from now on, we will all misremember my in-laws as standing six inches to the left of where they really stood! I feel this weird sense of disconnection every time I touch up a photo, like I am creating an alternate timeline, diverting the river of reality.

There was something impure about actually playing, and failing at, the games I ostensibly knew the secrets to, and something sacred about the ones I’d never see. These chapters might as well have been metafiction, and I read them in the same spirit I’d later read the Oulipian pastiches, exercises, and borrowed forms that have inspired my creative midlife.

It’s perhaps a given that all artists repeat themselves. For some writers, variations on the same material are a career imperative—take, for example, any author of series mysteries. This isn’t a slight; I love to watch a writer I like go back to that well. Sometimes the minor changes that time imposes on the artist can result in exciting new directions for old material.

Dreams can offer non-writers the opportunity to ask a question writers ponder every day: what is interesting to other people? Nothing is more fascinating to you than a dream you just had, and nothing is more boring to others. The reason is context: when something strikes you as noteworthy in a dream, it’s because of the ways it departs from the ordinary. But only you know what counts as ordinary to you—and departures from it say more about you than they do about the dream’s subjects.

Part of the appeal of these distortions is, of course, nostalgia for the sounds of our youth; my generation taped songs off the radio with a low-fidelity cassette boombox, and the hopelessly corrupted results remain our head-canonical versions of the era’s hits. But the main appeal is the distance—subtle or extreme—that distortion puts between the music and its listener. Distortion is enigma; it transports us not back to the moment of a sound’s creation, but to the mysterious interstitial zone it has journeyed through.

The line is the thing that separates poetry from prose, and the thing I envy poets for most. Prose writers can break up text in all kinds of ways: the aforementioned punctuation marks, the paragraph break, the white space, the chapter break. Poets get to have all that, and lines, too. In poetry, enjambment is the term for breaking a line in the middle of a sentence or phrase. Poets use it to create a sense of drama, or to trick you, which are things poets love to do.

An investigation followed, during which it was revealed the the subjects knew they might be drugged and had signed release forms saying so; and the ones who were hospitalized already had histories of mental illness and drug addiction that could explain their reaction. As a result, no criminal charges were brought against Jumand—but the University cancelled his research and kicked him off campus. He eventually went on to form a quasi-utopian collective that lived in makeshift geodesic domes on some farmland outside of town, and died at 43 when he—accidentally, it’s believed—drove his bicycle off a cliff and into a waterfall.

In writing—both mine and my students’—there’s no predictable path to a final product. Sometimes the basic shape of a thing comes to you immediately, and the process that brings it to completion consists primarily of refinement. When this happens, editorial assistance is most valuable writ small: rhythm and pacing, sentence-level tweaks. But at other times, you don’t know what you have, or what, if anything, about it is the good part. You’re more open to people’s broad suggestions, which might send you in a new direction, and to the process of creation itself, which may bring you exciting surprises.

In my work as a teacher, I assign a lot of experimental writing prompts, with an eye towards nudging students out of their comfort zones and onto, I hope, unexpected vectors of self-discovery. My intro to creative writing course, in recent years, has consisted entirely of these prompts, one every week, two pages maximum. My thinking with these students, mostly sophomores, is that they don’t actually yet know what they’re capable of; the prompts force them to try different things. I’ve had lots of students whose best work in intermediate and advanced fiction classes grew out of these intro experiments.