AWP--Final

Saturday:
I woke up Saturday morning to Elizabeth's alarm. Which is something I am used to. When we were kids and I'd fall asleep watching tv I would inevitably wake up to Elizabeth clobbering the kitchen cabinets open and closed. The girl might be able to dance, but around the house she is as graceful as Baryshnikov's toejam. White nights indeed. I showered and took an absolutely amazing dump. Which really encapsulates the side plot of this entire weekend for me: my boorish physical behavior and my sisters (new-found) willingness to put up with it.
Elizabeth and I went to breakfast with her friend. A nice guy whose name I do not know. We went dutch (Which means Elizabeth paid for me. Thanks) and the dude paid for himself. the breakfast was disappointing, it tasted OK, but the menu was unduly limited.
Normally I wouldn't come back to a topic a week later, but there are three good reasons from my Saturday to revisit it.
The first is the panel that Elizabeth went to with Robert Olean Butler and Ron Carlson (and three other young writers whose names I don't remember and were pretty inconsequential.) R.O.B. was pretty interesting, arguing for the centrality of the short short in fiction workshops (and his finding that as a practitioner of the short short they crept into his longer works). I think he is right, as self contained vehicles they can be useful in pointing out ingrained aspects of writing.
If I created any writing philosophy in my 5 years teaching freshman comp, it was that the small relates to the large and viceversa. That the same concerns you bring into a sentence you bring to a paragraph, a chapter, a section, to a whole book. That is an oversimplification of a generalization (which I think equals a complete vagary) but it grows out of the idea that specific details lead to good reasons which allow for new insights. You can't write a good sentence that lacks one of those three things, nor an interesting paragraph, nor a worthwhile chapter...and on it goes. You could probably even cut it down further and simply say: specfic detail. But my guess is that if you centered your search around detail only, you'd be a successful as a dog chasing its tail. You need the other two quests to straighten you out. So I liked (and Elizabeth liked) Butler's idea teaching fiction, but the pieces he read were only fine. They were consciously noirish and although artistic, maybe not "new."
The real reason I went, the reason I skipped the celebration of Nelson Algren at 100, was to see/hear Ron Carlson. Elizabeth had seen him earlier in the conference and had come away charmed. My brother in law Jim Fullin gave me Carlson's Hotel Eden in like 1998 and since then I've read everything I could get my hands on. I would recommend all of them except his last novel, Five Skies, which the entire time I read felt like the work of someone else.
It is time to take my daughter to bed. She told me so.
Carlson was older than I thought he'd be, warmer and more self critical. What impressed me was that he was trying to get it right, that he thought there were important things to say about the art of writing and he wanted to express them correctly. It was charming to see him kind of frustrated when he felt that his words came up short.

Elizabeth and I spent the lunch hour walking down to Millennium Park, one of her favorite spots downtown. I had never been, and it is neat, in an urban way. It is not natural, but impressionistic, and it seemed that its great purpose was to open up the city before you and to allow the city to envelop you without devouring you. We spent some time watching the ice skaters at the outdoor rink you'd think would be bigger. And I thought about how much fun it would be to visit the city with Katy and Nyssa and Leila (or even just with Katy).

The final session I went to was devoted to poetry. Looking at the predominance of poetry on AWP's calendar I had pledged to hear no poem over the weekend (a pledge cast assunder by my own fiction-hero Ron Carlson!). So it was without regret that I attended a reading of 4 poets who were now writing memoir. Not really my favorite topic, but I looked forward to seeing the poet Donald Hall.
Hall had been a teacher at Michigan of my college professor, Tony Bing. And Tony had brought Hall to Earlham one semester and into one of the classes I was taking. I am dumb, and did not really appreciate Hall at the time, but I am persistant, and have sense come to really enjoy his poetry (and to a lesser extent) his prose. Ox-cart man, Names of Horses, Kicking the Leaves, his extended poem the book, Without are all nice pieces of work.
At 80 now, Hall had the sloppy appearence of someone whom no longer had time to groom, or was perhaps afraid of what even a safety razor would do in his hand. he did not care if his voice boomed through the micro-phone, but simply held his book up where his eyes could see it and read. To the charmed, he was charming, and his poem was nice. to my friend Kim he was awful. And maybe the image that will stick with me is watching him walk alone off the stage, as Kim said, "Donald Hall should stop writing. He was terrible."
My writing, if I follow my perscription above, to often leaves out the specific detail, and rushes over the good reason, in an effort to spew out the new insight. Or, lacking good reason, it clings to specific detail and dangles unfinished hoping that a new perception will hop on along.