Good stuff’s happening lately. On Sunday, I got unstuck with The Beacon, and now have a pretty good idea about how all five layers (!) of the novel are going to be working. Now it’s just a matter of getting back to the scribbling, but I’m excited about it again. And after a week of being blocked and disinterested, that’s a good feeling.

Also, found out that an abstract I proposed to the MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing) conference was accepted, so, in addition to the Undergraduate Research Symposium on campus in late April, I’ll also be presenting “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction” in front of real-live professors and academics next week. Kinda freaky, actually, but I love that paper and the ideas in it. That’s coming up on April 3rd.

I love when writers come to campus; last year Sherman Alexie came and hit on me.  Signed my copy of Reservation Blues “To Ben – My Crush!”, and now this year we got Michael Perry.  I had never read any of Perry’s work, or even heard of him until a week ago at all, but I heard that he wrote creative nonfiction–that troublesome term–and more, creative nonfiction about small town, rural life.  I geek out enough about writers as it is, so it didn’t take much convincing for me to get onboard.  He came to class today before his reading, and we talked about the revision process, and all of that nuts and bolts kind of stuff, and without getting into it too in-depth, here are a few of my favorite quotes, reproduced as accurately as my notoriously poor memory would allow:

I have friends who have done these MFA programs, and many of them are tremendous writers, great craftsmen.  But I go down at the implement dealer, and listen to the old men rolling dice, listen to the way they talk, listen to how they mistalk, the rhythm of it, and there’s your graduate writing course.

You have all of these tangents, but if you can bring back all of those tangents back to where they started, then that’s called an essay.

I really like Dylan Thomas.  A friend of mine said, “I don’t understand Dylan Thomas,” and I said, “I don’t understand it either, but it sure tastes good.”

I’ve thought a lot about divisons that we set up, whether that be in academia (literary studies vs. comp vs. creative writing), or in politics (republican vs. democrat), or in lifestyle (intellectual vs. anti-intellectual), and one of the many things I admired about Perry was that he dismissed that idea that the diametrical opposite of the rural “good ol boy” and the “intellectual”–the kind of person who likes poetry and art.  Perry rejects the idea that these two positions are mutually exclusive.  Mr. Perry owns a gun rack, a thirty-ought-six, and an old pickup trunk.  He also listens to poetry in his car, can wax on the beauty of obscure, precise words, and enjoys watching his 95-year-old friend perform modern dance.

I like the idea that no two positions on any spectrum should be mutally exclusive.  Perry loves things at each end of that spectrum, but I got the feeling that he doesn’t see himself as a body drawing from two distinct reservoirs of culture–he’s just a guy who likes what he likes.  And that’s how I tend to like to look at things.  I don’t consider myself a republican or a democrat, I don’t like to position my main point of interest in any of the three fiefdoms of English study; I just like stuff and think.  I don’t want it to matter so much to me if I can insert that neatly into a taxonomy.

As he signed one of my books, he looked up at me and said that there was something he had forgotten to stress in class when he had been talking about how he broke into the profession.  He said, “You gotta love it.”  You’ve got to love what you’re doing.  He flipped through my newly-purchased copy of Population: 485 and underlined what he said was the best writing advice he could give me.  The underlined phrase reads: “just keep shoveling.”

Woke up this morning in a funk, like nothing was interesting, like I wanted to just sit and do nothing.  But there was that whole class thing, and a paper due tomorrow morning, which I thankfully just finished.  It’s about the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and in it I discuss how Christian supersessionist political conceptions are revealed through the rhetorical orientation of the….nevermind.

I put the novel in my top three novels of my college career, along with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and William Faulkner’s Light in August.  Absalom, Absalom! comes in at a close fourth.  But now my first paper for my senior seminar is done, and I can spend the weekend concentrating on rounding up more information for my Understanding Writing project–I’m trying to clarify the position of creative nonfiction as it relates to composition studies.

I read a great article last night in which Harriet Malinowitz characterizes the divisions within English–literary studies, composition/rhetoric, and creative writing–as three divided fiefdoms, each of them waving banners and whistling, yelling to prospective students, “Pick me!  Pick me!”  Alright, so I added that last part.  But creative nonfiction is hard to place, because it seems like each of the divisions wants it, which is cool for me because I get to posit a bridge between these divided groups–a division that I think is stupid anyway–and maybe, just maybe, make the world a little brighter.  We shall see.

So, that’s this weekend.  And hopefully I’ll finally get to play a little of Fable II this weekend.  The day after it came out, I basically lost my partner for a day, but she’s almost to the end of it now.  Then the madness starts over, because, of course, you can’t play a Fable game just once.  Or twice.  Or five times.

I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others, and good god, dude can flat out write.  He’s not a prolific writer, just a handful of stories, and I think he’s currently working as a technical writer, but his stories are like little pocketwatches made of bone, ticking away precisely, almost unfathomable in their intricacy and craftsmanship.  That’s why it makes me sad that he’s not readily carried in mainstream book stores.  It takes a lot to impress me when it comes to sci-fi, a genre which, with all of its brilliant beacons of awesome, still is stuck in a mire of genre conventions and slush.  Not Ted Chiang.  It’s fucking awesome.

Started typing out my fourth novel, the third Oddry novel, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, which I started writing in longhand in England over the summer and finished about a month ago.  It’s strange copy/typing a handwritten manuscript like that because, even though it’s been a long time since I wrote it, I find myself predicting my next word or phrase.  I’ll think as I’m typing that a particular word of phrase should be added and, low and behold, when I turn back to the manuscript, I already had it written down, four months before.

Right, bed now.