Critique: "Conveniently Portrayed"

The first full paragraph of “Conveniently Portrayed” is vivid enough to be chewed. Reading “Sweet potato bisque” is a very sensuous experience. But further, what this story does is contrast a matter-of-fact narrative with an uncertain foot-noted voice, which seems distinct from the voice in the main text.

The story is of a character named Hodge, who is out on a date with a woman named Lucille (who might be Margaret, in hind sight), and the narrator explains Hodge’s difficulty with first impression. These narrative expositions, digressions, analyses, whatever you may call them, compose one of the two writing tools along with the footnotes that sort of pry the narrative open. Otherwise, it is just a story about a bad first impression. Where normally an abstract definition of a character trait would be a no-no. it functions as a clinical voice that moves the piece towards its ultimate conclusion, which seems somewhat hopeful.

To me, this piece is the start of something excellent, but certain details are being under-utilized, preventing the story to reach its full potential. The color imagery, footnotes, clothing, these all become important aspects that seem to be full of meaning, but the meanings are not yet fully decipherable.

More on the footnotes: as many will probably say, maybe push further. Your sparse footnotes are quite effective, so in this story you run the risk of going to far. To me, there significance is in the uncertainty of the first and the certainty of the last. Try to span that arch from uncertainty to certainty, without losing it, because that is where the story is. 

Linguistically and stylistically you have crafted something that is enjoyable to read and capable of hitting on several levels. Think about what people are praising about it, and then ask how that can be complicated. 

"Glossolalia" Critique

“Glossolalia” uses a fishing trip as the framing device for another story, that of Old Man Pellum, who is crazy and tells stories in exchange for shots of whiskey. The two main characters aside from Pellum are Charlie (Chuck) and Lewis. Charlie is an asthmatic and narcoleptic, or perhaps just slow and lazy. As they wait for fish to bite, Lewis recounts the story of seeing Old Man Pellum on the news. Interspliced at three different places is a short tale from Pellum, which combines with the final motions of the story.

Two words take on importance in this piece perhaps above most others. One is the title word, glossolalia, which means speaking in tongues, but does not show up in the text. But it is in reference to Pellum, who was reportedly speaking in tongues when the Bulls pulled them off of the train (I am fortunate to have a sister who does hop trains, so I’m familiar with the Bulls). The other important word is derecho, spanish for “right” and referring to a particular hard-line wind-storm that can be incredibly damaging. This storm is central to Pellum’s story.

What’s nice about the story is that it has an informal, southwestern feel to it, where the real story is told indirectly, as an aside. This is a nice contrast to the nature of the derecho, a much more, if you will, direct storm. I would like the story to be a little longer. Perhaps more imagery and less story telling, as if Chuck is imagining the events. This would make it slightly harder to decipher whose story it is up front, perhaps adding some intrigue. Additionally, it is unclear if the mother is injured or what. I think fleshing out that moment some more would be helpful. There is room for expansion.

On the Weekly Reading: On Stealing from Lydia Davis

For this week’s exercise, I took Lydia Davis’s story “Excerpts from a Life” and refashioned it to be about a girl who grew up the daughter of a gun store owner, instead of the daughter of a violin factory owner. At first, it seemed like a novelty to simply paste one idea over the other, but it wasn’t interesting to note how my idea morphed as I tried to fit it into her form, as well as where it departed from Lydia Davis’s structure.

“Excerpts from a Life” takes an elliptical approach to the story, full of interstices and seemingly disparate pieces of information, and they are held together by voice, and the holistic feel one gets by the end of the piece. As I tried to reincorporate the story for my own purposes section by section, I found that by the end I relied much less strictly on the source text then at the beginning. At the same time, there were particular moments where certain tones, and indeed certain thematic movements, seemed appropriate for my own work. This is due in part to the desire to maintain something of the feel of the original Lydia Davis piece, but also as a result of the constraints of the form. I think that writing in this particular style (elliptically), I was inclined to unconsciously follow a particular narrative. Each of the details I incorporated in the first very short sections defined my character in the longer pieces. 

If I were to continue working on these piece (as I would like to), I would find more ways to break away from Davis and find what is uniquely mine about it. But as it stands, it feels like I’ve made something original from a pre-crafted form. It wasn’t paint-by-numbers, it was learning from a master.

Targets in a Shooting Gallery

(Adapted from the short story "Excerpts from a Life" by Lydia Davis)

Childhood

I was reared in a gun shop, and when I had a fight with my brothers and sisters we would twiddle our fingers at our hips and my father would call Draw! Then we’d spring our fingers into action and determine who had fired first through either stubborn dispute or the honest feigned sounds of a sputtering death as one of our pairs of knees hit the floor.

Stick to your guns

At the very least, you will have a large pile of dead meat and a convincing argument to keep others away.

The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers

I went to an elementary school named after the man, and committed many of his sayings to memory.

  They want peace.

But they want it with a gun.

Grownups

I find that it is easy to make a child understand that a gun is a powerful thing, and dangerous, and they understand that it is no joke. It’s the grownups who talk about them as if there is some middle-ground to that reality-- “He carried that rifle on his back through the crowded Walmart as a symbol of freedom.”

Hunting with Hemingway

One day the gun shop was in the midst of another panic, and my father was running out of ammunition. He refused to put anything on hold. Hundreds of people poured through the door any time gun violence was in the news, or whenever a Democrat was elected.

It was 1992.

As I was taught, I walked back behind the counter and into the clerical office. 

“Don’t let these people tell you a thing about guns.”

I watched through the office door as each person walked in. They gripped fear in their inwardly twisted  fists. They were all puffed up at the chest with pride, which they often called patriotism.

“Say there, cutie, tell your pops to quit holding out.”

“Close the door, sweetheart,” my father said.

He had a collection of literature by strong American men. The stories had names like “Hills like White Elephants” and Ham on Rye, and in them life was a hard-fought existential struggle. I read these books at the height of the panics. It was inside A Farewell to Arms that I found a small warranty card for an antique shotgun from the company W.C. Scott & Son. It was signed by Earnest Hemingway. I carried that card in my wallet until my Junior year in college, when someone pointed their less than impressive nine millimeter at me and took my purse.

A little episode

I’m proud of this, and should be.

I had just read All Quiet on the Western Front, which wasn’t American, but that wasn’t a problem. 

I had a friend from college who decided he would come home with me for a week during our Freshman Summer. We rode bikes into the Foothills and chained them to a tree so we could hike further up the hill. The summit of a better-known hill had two trees perched on top. High school couples carved their names into the trees. Beer cans were laid out on distant stumps, the stumps and the cans were laden with BB-gun pock-marks. 

You could see for forever. 

You could hear coyotes.

He asked me why I didn’t carry a gun. I told him I didn’t like the weight. He showed me his. I held it in my hand, inspected it from every angle, and then I held the pistol with both hands and aimed it at a beer can two-hundred yards off. 

“Bang,” I said, then I handed the gun back to him. 

“I want to know what war is like,” he said.

“Let’s find out,” I said. 

We rode back into town and I took him to my father’s gun shop. My father was out for lunch but I had a copy of the key. 

I took him through the back door, to the enclosed shooting gallery, which was dimly lit. From the individual shooting booths it was nearly impossible to see the floor. We laid on the ground and we waited. 

We had nearly fallen asleep before the door opened and the room was filled with the sound of a group of men. They loaded their guns. We kept our eyes open as the bullets whistled over our heads.

“Oh, what a wonderful feeling,” I whispered to him.

As I listened to the rounds pop off, I swore that I’d never lay down here again.

I have learned the meaning of self-defense

To do what it takes to maintain the sovereignty of my body, and the sanity of my mind.

Annie Oakley taught me to shoot

I took a more earnest interest in the family craft during my second year at UNM. For spring break my friend, a native New Mexican, took me to stay with his relatives in Lemitar. We sat in the back of his pick-up truck in the dirt yard and he picked off quail as they came by. They’d flutter and then drop like pebbles. 

“Your turn, Annie.”

“I’m no Annie Oakley.”

“I’ve seen you shoot. You’re related.”

I checked the sight and steadied the gun against my shoulder. The birds rose sporadically like shooting stars and fell like meteorites.

At night we watched an internet video of Annie Oakley taken by Thomas Edison. 

I purchased every book about her.

The Star who shined brightest over the Wild West Show

When people came in droves to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, they were blown away by stage coaches, buffalo, roping and wrangling. But it was the little girl with the big gun from Oklahoma that brought down the house. 

I went through round after round at an Albuquerque range. I shot skeet, and set up camp outside Socorro with my friend’s family, learning to hunt to the sound of orange dust rustling through sage-brush.

“They’re called Marksmen, Mijo.”

As they announced the awards at the exhibition, all the competitors sat in the front rows and waited for their names to be called, or not. The figure perched on my trophy looked like Apollo holding a rifle. 

I sat in my seat with it balanced on my lap. The marble base felt cold through my dress. As people patted me on the back, one old woman, impressed, asked me what they called a female shooter. My friend from Lemitar, who was seated next to me, answered, “A marksman.”

He glanced at me and I wished that I had some way to tell him how immensely his words had moved me.

I looked down my sight with Annie Oakley’s eyes.

As each clay pigeon rose in the sky I followed its path with the barrel and imagined the charge exploding from the chamber and careening down the bore, drawn to the pigeon. The impact was like the precise, terse prose of Hemingway, but the repetitive shots were rhythmic and made me think of Annie standing tall on a horse, firing at targets in the corral. 

I could see what I was doing, but I was shooting with more precision than I knew how. My arms moved more delicately then they could. For a moment after the last pigeon flew the coop, my arms remained in the air. A small puff of smoke from the barrel. 

Nice shot, Sweetheart

My father hugged me like a loving father holds his most precious thing. We stood for a photograph, and though my cowboy hat looked ridiculous, it felt right and proper. 

“Nice shot, Sweetheart.”

Workshop 02/05: Yvonne Labbe "Evidence"

Yvonne Labbe’s “Evidence” experiments with various electronic communication formats in order to form a narrative about a love triangle. It is fitting that this triangle should be created and discovered via the three communication formats utilized: craigslist adds, e-mails and text messages. The story begins with a craigslist ad posted by William, re: the woman he met at the New Mexican restaurant that he would like to reconnect with. Then the e-mail correspondence between William and this eloper, Kat, is discovered by Darlene (William’s girlfriend’s sister) when her regular customer (Kat, the other girl) tells Darlene about her new boy, William. Darlene then sneaks a peak at Kat’s e-mails on the computer she has left open on the table and quickly forwards the correspondence to Margaret. The two sisters then have a text message argument about the implications, resulting in Margaret deciding to trust her boyfriend over her sister.

As you can see from my attempt to explain that, it is a bit convoluted. That’s not to say that the plot does not work, but I think that the sister is not necessary, and just complicates things (unless there is a fourth section, initiated by the girlfriend, trying to talk out what the girlfriend has discovered). If you stick with the characters involved in the love triangle, then there is less necessity for expositional dialogue. An e-mail sent to the wrong girl, a misplaced text message, set-up for lunch with the wrong girl (taking the conversation from digital to physical, as the boyfriend and girlfriend confront each other, the boyfriend acting like he had planned it, the girlfriend discovering the truth). 

There is a lot to plat with here. We know the least about the boyfriend, William. Does he post craigslist ads every time he meets a pretty girl, or is it really that he hit it off with just this one girl? Answering that question lets the reader know whether he is a dog, or someone that we might be able to sympathize with. This is going to sound corny, but explore the digital world that you have created. All of these technologies, as you have shown, co-mingle and create a virtual ecology. Think about what tensions arise through these forms, and notions of private vs. public lives, and the fact that, like it or not, most everything you do will probably have some sort of on-line residuum. 

Good luck.