“I suppose the truth is I became a little self-conscious about people telling me how much they loved my sentences,” says James Salter in his interview with Jonathan Lee. “It’s flattering, but it seemed to me that this love of sentences was in some sense getting in the way of the book itself.”
“This is not George Saunders or Lorrie Moore making fun of the ineffectualness of romantic impulses; this is for real.”
James Salter’s All That Is: From Dream to Reality by Sonya Chung
“There’s wide agreement that writing is difficult even for very good writers. Sometimes it’s more difficult, sometimes less. In climbing the difficulty defines the achievement. In writing it doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
James Salter, interviewed by our own Sonya Chung.
Source: themillions.com
there is little warm-up period when you enter each of these stories. You are there, on the underside of a character’s skin, in her mind, behind his sightline, swimming pacifically in the underwaterness of their emotions, somehow muted and color-sharp at once. If there is something that ties these stories together, it is not so heady as a theme, like “the existential state of aloneness.” It is more that loneliness envelops the world of each story like a living, moving thing, and in the opening sentences, a kind of emotional atmosphere opens up, like a tiny mouth, where the reader enters, slips in quietly, whereupon the mouth closes, seals the reader in. If this description strikes you as sexual, then it’s not far off; these stories want all of you, mind and body and soul, like a consummation.
—Sonya Chung reviews The China Factory by Mary Costello
Source: themillions.com
Is Little Century a “woman’s book?” I asked myself this as I read, mostly lamenting that it probably is, from a marketing perspective. It’s a book about a girl, after all, and far fewer men read books about girls than women read books about boys; the math on that is pretty clear.
But it’s also a book about insiders and outsiders, friendship, forgiveness, love of the land, male mid-life ambition, corporatism, journalistic integrity, racial prejudice. (It is not, thankfully, a book about a girl who finds her boy: the ending, which I won’t give away completely, is quite satisfying in the way it allows us to choose-our-own-adventure). It’s a book with both a big heart and a big mind, not to mention a generous soul.
Sonya Chung on the latest entry to her Post-40 Bloomers series: Anna Keesey’s Little Century.
Source: themillions.com
“There are days when it seems to me that what it is to be a fucking human being is to be lonely; to be in this state of deep sadness and estrangement, and to know that there is something terribly wrong about this loneliness on the one hand, and on the other (in knowing the wrongness utterly), something also potentially beautiful.”
- On Loneliness: Art, Life, and Fucking Human Beings by Sonya Chung
“The question makes me think about how much of life is about loneliness and efforts to cure or soothe loneliness, and how much of art is about loneliness and efforts to cure or soothe loneliness; and how loneliness is a word — easily enough spoken or written, like death or love – but really it’s a deep sadness, which is also a force, driving so many of our desires and actions, and at the same time shameful and hidden and nearly impossible to live with, out in the open, in any authentic way.”
- On Loneliness: Art, Life, and Fucking Human Beings by Sonya Chung
We needed such a story. The romance, the sense of “close call.” We need these stories to counter the inevitability of obscurity; we need stories that kindle our sense of hope, and possibility. In truth, I wouldn’t blame fans or journalists for altering or exaggerating the story. I understand why we need it to be as dramatic as possible.
Post-40 Bloomer: Spencer Reece, The Poet’s Tale by Sonya Chung
![“At age 65, [Harriet Doerr] re-enrolled at Stanford to finish the degree she’d abandoned 47 years earlier. Her writing teacher, John L’Heureux, was impressed by her writing and personally invited her into the Stegner Fellows program upon her graduation. Doerr published the award-winning Ibarra when she was 74 years old.”
— Post-40 Bloomers: Harriet Doerr’s Impossible Perfection and Happiness by Sonya Chung
[Image via Anacleto Rapping]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1n9hxNxxL1r6xvfko1_1280.jpg)
“At age 65, [Harriet Doerr] re-enrolled at Stanford to finish the degree she’d abandoned 47 years earlier. Her writing teacher, John L’Heureux, was impressed by her writing and personally invited her into the Stegner Fellows program upon her graduation. Doerr published the award-winning Ibarra when she was 74 years old.”
— Post-40 Bloomers: Harriet Doerr’s Impossible Perfection and Happiness by Sonya Chung
Anxiety plagued me. Restlessness prevailed. I didn’t sleep well. I had tumultuous dreams where family members and people from my youth humiliated me over and over again. My chronic back pain became even more acute. My brain was foggy, my mood dark. I smoked and drank more than usual. My skin broke out (acne, really? At 38?), my teeth were yellowing. Generally speaking I wasn’t well. My mind, my spirit, my body, were all conspiring to thwart the productivity I had so coveted and envisioned. I generated words, filled a spiral notebook (I write drafts by hand), but I knew I’d likely trash most of it. Then the tailspin started. The voice in my head said, You can’t do this, you have neither the talent nor the mental strength (you have to have both, after all, and if you don’t, you should at least be able to fake one or the other). Look how you’ve shitted away all this precious time. Look at what a fraud you are. I started to wonder about a lot of things – life-purpose and self-worth sorts of things – that I’d rather not wonder about.
I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone, especially writers. I was embarrassed. Every so often I’d read lit blogs or log on to Facebook. Everyone seemed so happy and healthy and productive. Photos of newborns and kids on bikes, foodie meals, exotic travel; links to politically progressive articles (or regressive ones meant to incite our outrage), status updates thanking friends and spouses for their various kinds of wonderfulness, announcements about awards and publications with ensuing congratulatory comments.
The tailspin continued; a feeling of isolation deepened.
Where were all of the brooding, wretched, mentally unstable artists?
Excerpted from Sonya Chung’s “Scared Straight: Writers and The New Happiness,” which has been nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily Literary Award.
Source: themillions.com
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