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All Friday and Saturday I walked around and chatted with writers and editors, running home now and then to write a seminar paper and grabbing a few hours’ sleep each trip. I listened to stories about elephants hanged for homicides and stories of overpaid college presidents and stories about the Civil Rights movement. I gave away half a dozen copies of the book and found out exactly all of the creativity that goes on at UNCG.

Memories flooded back from Greensboro Review’s literary magazine and press festival a couple of years ago, the first one they ever hosted. Back then I was working for Yemassee and predicting that my thesis, which became this novel, would wind up in slush piles in some of New York’s finest literary agencies and publishing houses. (There’s a scene in Franzen’s The Corrections in which a NY literary agent’s daughter decorates the back of a slush pile mss. with crayons.) I’d just suffered a tremendous breakup. After sitting all afternoon at our booth at UNCG, my fellows and I went “tearing it up” in college town Greensboro. I remember almost starting a conversation with a cute girl and muttering to myself, “Oh, just forget it” as I returned to my table with a depressingly soggy slice of pizza.

In three years, both the festival and I have rebounded – doubling in size (the festival, not me). But sadly, I heard the Backward City Review had folded due to creative differences. A few of the journals I’d hoped to see–Sewanee Review and Chattahoochee Review, weren’t present this time around.

Boy. Sunday afternoon has now turned into Monday morning. After a marathon of work, I felt oddly compelled at 3 a.m. to watch all of Barton Fink online. I’d never seen it. Now I know exactly what not to do as a writer. In fact, after finishing the film, I’m so terrified that I’ll swear here and now: I will always listen to the common man. Always! Really! Or, wait, the next man who claims to be common and has “stories to tell,” I’ll run screaming into the hills. Yes, that’s the moral of this movie. John Goodman + mysterious package = run. I think. Z’ounds, I hope he’s got enough sense not to open that box on the beach.

Here we go

Greensboro Review’s lit festival kicked off with a reading by George Singleton and Claudia Emerson on Thursday. I expected a show. But I didn’t expect the story George read to be based on an old friend from my undergraduate and MFA days. At the cheese and wine thingamajig afterward, George explained that he gave a heads up to the stoner of honor–we’ll call him Joss Whatsan to protect his identity–and this might explain why he didn’t show up. “Now I really am going to kill him,” George said.

The story involves a poetic though scatter-brained dog sitter, sopping wet carpet, a runaway dog, and lots of grass.

Day one: good. Now let’s see about waking up at 6:30 a.m., which means I’m actually hoping that my upstairs neighbors’ dog-rooster mix wakes up at sunrise and starts howling.

Here’s something I found while reading up on Angela Carter for a course I plan to teach in the fall. Her revisions of fairy tales are well-known, but probably not her thoughts on Joan Didion, whom I’d thought to be a relatively unsentimental writer. I’m staying impartial here, but I find the clash interesting:

Angela Carter – “Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didion’s female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest. Like aversion, dare I say it, of the rape of the Sabine women. And bear them off to hard labour in the grease pits. Or else ten years compulsory re-education in the coffee plantations of Nicaragua might do the trick, make those girls feel there are worse things in life than running out of valium. Except what lousy fun it would be for the Angels. And the Nicaraguans might feel with justice it was a particularly foul C.I.A. plot.”

–Bomb Magazine, Issue 17 Fall 1986

After this performance of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” sunrises will probably look a good deal more threatening and conflicted than they should. What a show! Having never sat in gallery seats before, I was struck by the odd feeling you get looking down on these characters from abnormal angles – like a god almost, eye-level with the stage lights. It’s funny watching characters speak with their backs to you sometimes. It gave the performance a disturbing verisimilitude. The only thing that bothered me: cheesy thunder sound affects, cued any time the father’s malevolent presence is felt. (If they’d just turned the volume down a little…)

But even creepier: So “Ghosts” is about, among other things, a talented young artist who finds himself haunted by the ghost of his mentally deranged father and ultimately pays a heavy price for the discovery of some dark truths about his family.

Um, Through the Pale Door is about, among other things, a talented young artist who finds herself haunted by the ghost of her mentally deranged mother and ultimately pays a heavy price for the discovery of some dark truths about her family.

Proof from the jacket description: “Sarah finds her own artistic endeavors haunted by grim yet compelling memories of growing up under the rule of an inexplicably deranged artist on one side and an oddly aloof, workaholic entrepreneur on the other.” She “will face a great challenge: domesticating her own emerging inner demons…”

Cue the cheesy thunder.