Intro
Wherein you will learn of David Leo Rice’s ten mental locks, Marcy Dermansky’s ability to see romance in the confluence of pierogis and roaches, how Stephen Dunn’s poetry makes Kenzie Allen feel at home anywhere in the world, Kevin Catalano’s thoughts on semicolons and Faulkner, Pam Jones’s envy for Jeanette Winterson (and, really, who doesn’t have a little of that), and, finally, Darin Strauss’s musings on the great V.S. Pritchett. Enjoy….
V.S. Pritchett
by Darin Strauss
Pritchett is a great writer—admired by masters as different as Eudora Welty and Martin Amis—but he’s not the best writer in history. He happens, though, to be the writer in whose “rainbow” I “oscillate,” to paraphrase Melville on Hawthorne.
Brad Leithauser talks about there being, out on the shelves of the world, a “book of your life.” That’s Pritchett’s Collected Stories for me, as it’s probably some other writer for you—the person whose work sends out a message you receive perfectly, as if it was aimed at you alone.
The cadence of Pritchett’s sentences, the empathy in his dialogue, the gentle humor activates in me some feeling of kinship—some frizzle of recognition—that let me know who I was, or wanted to be.
Darin Strauss is the author of the bestselling novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than It Hurts You and most recently the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been New York Times Notable Books, Newsweek,Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, NPR Best Books of the Year, among other honors. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and The National Book Critics Circle Award, Strauss has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries. He has a novel, a limited comic book series—Olivia Twist—and a graphic novel coming out in 2018-2019 and is the Clinical Professor of fiction in the NYU graduate writing program.
Deborah Eisenberg
by Marcy Dermansky
In my first fiction class as an undergraduate in college, my writing professor assigned short stories by Deborah Eisenberg from her first collection Transactions in a Foreign Country. They just blew my mind. I loved these stories, the smart and troubled young women she was writing about. There was a girl from New Jersey (just like me) who was going blind, who falls in love with an older guy she meets at a bar across the street from her eye doctor. And the unhappy college graduate, recently dumped, who moves to the East Village to an apartment unseen, living that sort of on the edge of bohemian New York City life I one day aspired to have. Even the roaches on the pierogi had a kind of romance to them. At that moment in time, Eisenberg’s short stories were exactly what I wanted to read. And maybe even more important, they were stories I hoped that one day I would be able to write.
Marcy Dermansky is the author of The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. Her new novel Very Nice will be released next year. Find her at www.marcydermansky.com
Jeanette Winterson
by Pam Jones
The best thing, I think, is when I come across a writer who brings about envy in me. I have read Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Written on the Body, at least once a year since I was seventeen. The narrator is stripped of name, gender, age, description of any kind, save for their effect on those they have seduced and those who have seduced them. There’s a tricky balance here, knowing how much or how little you need to make a work act as a mirror, a reflection of the reader that is both humorous and humiliating. I envy Winterson’s talent. And when I envy someone’s work, I know it’s good.
Pam Jones is the author of The Biggest Little Bird (Black Hill Press/1888Center, 2013) and Andermatt County: Two Parables (The April Gloaming, 2018). Her short fiction has appeared in Boned and The Cost of Paper. She lives in Austin, TX with her husband.
Felisberto Hernández
by David Leo Rice
I picture my mind having ten locks. Any author whose work I enjoy opens two or three, any whose work I love opens five or six, but only a few open all ten, thereby entering the chamber where my DNA is stored. One such author is Felisberto Hernández, who also played piano in the silent film theaters of Uruguay in the early 20thcentury. All of his stories, and in particular “The Daisy Dolls,” descend into a netherworld where waking and dreaming overlap, and objects (pianos, mansions, dolls) take on uncanny life. What I love most is how familiar this netherworld comes to feel, inducing an eerie sense of déjà vu.
David Leo Rice is a writer and animator from Northampton, MA. His stories, which often strive to merge the real and the surreal in small American towns, appear in Black Clock, The Collagist, The Rumpus, Hobart, Catapult,Birkensnake, and elsewhere. His first novel, A Room in Dodge City, is the first in a trilogy and was published in 2017. He is currently working on a standalone novel inspired by reclusive artists such as Joseph Cornell and Robert Walser. Its main thematic question is: where, if anywhere, is the line between the cool-weird and the weird-weird in art? His work is online at: www.raviddice.com.
Stephen Dunn
by Kenzie Allen
I can’t carry much with me, continuously crossing oceans, but Stephen Dunn’s Different Hours always makes the trip. There’s much to be said for the cadre of artists sometimes referred to as “wisdom poets,” whose quiet revelations rendered in bright narrative never fail to bring me to tears, to longing, to a sense that I’ve come home (even in a time when, for me, “home” is increasingly elusive). I believe in poetry’s power to build community, and I admire poets like Dunn for inviting a broad readership; his work is no less complex than the poems we sometimes puzzled over in English Literature classes, but ultimately it feels welcoming—and funny, and wrenching, and yes, wise—and, above all, generous.
Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is currently an Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow in the English & Creative Writing PhD at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, where she teaches in American Indian Studies. Kenzie received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and she is the Managing Editor of Anthropoid. She was born in West Texas, lives in Norway, and tumbleweeds wherever the wind takes her.
William Faulkner
by Kevin Catalano
Because you young college man raced to chase that tail of the interminable sentence that vines like kudzu tangled in the nooses of history hanging from too many willows that weep blood on Sutpen’s Hundred, you tried all the tricks, like the semicolons–that mixed race of punctuation, the Eulalia Bon of pauses–an Absalom here and an Absalom there, a ten-year mimicry that could pass like Charles Bon, but with one indomitable exception: you’re a Yankee appropriating a tangled-up South you’ll never understand; so finally, you wise up, but your blood’s been syntactically infected and you’ll spend a lifetime repudiating it.
Kevin Catalano is the author of the novel, Where the Sun Shines Out. His other writing has appeared in PANK,Fanzine, Gargoyle Magazine, and other places. Find more at www.kevincatalano.com.
Outro
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)
Pam Jones’s devotion to Winterson’s Written on the Body has me thinking about the nature of rereading, why it’s so essential and how intimately it’s tied to this whole Under the Influence project, which in turn sent me back to Nabokov’s famous quote.
As he was prone to, Nabokov makes his case in hyperbolic terms, the reality being that of course one can bloody well read a book, that there is indeed quite a bit to be gotten from that first pass. As writers, however, we read not just for pleasure but to learn and in this way, from this perspective, Nabokov is dead on.
We reread, obviously, to increase our conscious understanding of a text, but also to embed it in our psyches, to make our relationship with it subconscious. Yes, we achieve some of this effect even with a first read, but not much of it. By rereading, by committing more and more of the text to memory, we create a stronger relationship with it, one that passes into something like the metaphysical.
The text travels, in our heads, through our lives, emerging sometimes years or decades later, not just in the odd syntactic tic, but in the cadence of our prose, the rhythms of our dialogue, and often, in the themes and architecture of our own work. This deeper, subconscious knowledge is the gift of rereading, one so great maybe it really was deserving of Nabokov’s hyperbole.
Kurt Baumeister 