Motel Life

Just finished Motel Life by Willy Vlautin. Vlautin is another writer in the Minimalist tradition. At the end of book is an interview with the author. He discusses his 'Road to Carver', citing influences such as Hemingway and Bukowski, which eventually led to his discovering the works of Raymond Carver.

"Raymond Carver changed my life," Vlautin proclaims. Carver's touch is felt in Motel Life, but by no means is this work a copy.

Motel Life is the tale of two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee, who live in Reno, NV. They are destitute alcoholics, and their lives are upended one night when Jerry Lee, driving drunk, kills a teenager on a bicycle. They flee Reno, but Jerry Lee is so consumed with guilt that he ditches Frank and returns to Reno, where he eventually shoots himself in his stump leg--the leg was severed years earlier when Frank and Jerry Lee tried to hop a moving train.

The only glimmer in their hopeless lives are the stories that Frank tells Jerry Lee as they lie in bed at night. The two are re-imagined as wealthy tycoons, WWII fighter pilots, daring spies, happy sons of a loving father ...

The tenderness between the two brothers echoed long after I finished the book.

Knockemstiff

Knockemstiff is a collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock. It's the best collection I've read since The Pugilist At Rest, by Thom Jones.

All of the stories take place in the impoverished mill town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. There is so much to love about the stories: The original voices, the stupid decisions of the doomed characters, the irreverance, the immediate and vivid language. I drove to six different stores in search of this book, and I would drive across state lines if I couldn't find a copy.

It's difficult to choose a favorite story, but forced, I'll go with Hair's Fate. Only thirteen pages, I can't get the images from my head: The boy jerking off in the shed with his sister's doll, jizzing in the doll's blonde hair as his father walks in. The redneck father who as punishment chops off the boy's hair with a butcher knife, leaving his bald head scabbed. The boy running away, hitching a ride with a fat trucker who loads him up on speed. The redneck trucker's dingy doublewide trailer. The trucker offering his dead mother's wig, to cover the scabs, then cutting the wig so it fits. The boy and the trucker staring in the mirror at the purty wig, the trucker's sweaty hand on his shoulder ...

Yeah, all the stories are intense.

Born in the USA.

Tom Spanbauer

Just returned from a week workshopping with Tom Spanbauer, the Pulitzer nominated author of The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, among other books.

Tom is an absolute genius, and I don't think I can articulate my gratitude for the experience. Simply, Tom teaches to descend into that place of great pain, hurt, humiliation and find each character's true voice. The workshop was exhausting, an emotional roller coaster.

I'm going to borrow a passage from Tom's website:

"What makes writing dangerous," Tom Spanbauer writes, "is something personal, very small, and quiet. In this class we will be asked to go to parts of ourselves where there is an old silence, where it is secret, where it is dark and sore. One of the goals of the class will be to go to where we've never gone before, writing down what scares the hell out of us. Eventually to the very foundation and structure of how we perceive, and in this investigation, we can challenge old notions of who we are.

"In our investigation to the bone, the first thing we will encounter is voice. How to create it. Saying it wrong, saying it spoken rather than written, saying it raw. By challenging old creative writing workshop language, we will investigate what my teacher called Burnt Tongue. The New York Times, in its review of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, called it Poisoned Lyricism. Character lies in the destruction of the sentence. How a character thinks is how she speaks. The class will be, as Annie Dillard has called it, 'alligator wrestling at the level of the sentence.' By studying sentences, by taking them apart and looking at all their elements, by tuning them to how our particular narrator thinks, and ultimately speaks, we can begin to create a music that is unique."

Tom is a gentle soul with intense passion for the craft. Studying with Tom, what really struck me was his unerring ability to pinpoint the needs of each writer. An incredible author and an incredible human.

Thanks Tom.

Jesus' Son

Every writer dreams of putting pen to paper as the stars align--when every word, every phrase, every idea, flows in perfect pitch, the prose singing effortlessly.  As a slave of the rewrite, I have never experienced this Nirvana, but when I envision such a writing session, I watch myself frantically scrawling out Jesus' Son.  

In this collection of short stories we follow Fuckhead through a dark valley of alcohol, drugs, domestic abuse, and senseless death, from which there is no escape--but the tragedy and despair serves to illuminate his brief glimpses of heaven.  These visions are breathtaking and unforgettable.

Karl Rove--Video "Free Don Siegelman"

My good friend Alan Breslauer at Hot Potato Mash political blog scored some great footage of Karl Rove holding a "Free Don Siegelman" banner at an L.A. shindig.  If you haven't followed the controvery, visit here.

Shouts to Alan.