Mark Trainer

 
 
I moved to D.C. when my daughter was three weeks old, so I'm discovering the arts culture of the city somewhat slower than I might have otherwise.  But a reading of the work of Eleanor Ross Taylor last night took me to the Arts Club of Washington.  Near GW, the club is in an historic Georgian building that dates to the beginning of the 19th century.  After Monroe was inaugurated, the building briefly served as the executive residence--a mini-White House in Foggy Bottom.

The Arts Club was founded in 1916 and hosts a bunch of great musical and literary events with a wide variety of new art on display.  Their Web site has all the info.  Worth your attention, fellow DCers.
 
 
I suppose Trollope has become the patron saint of writerly productivity.  His daily schedule annoyed his contemporary critics, who thought the muse did not visit those who waited for her on a schedule.  (This opinion remains popular among undergraduates--at least the ones who took my workshops.)

But what's on my mind this morning is something I read a few years ago.  As we all know, Trollope wrote his allotted three hours EVERY day.  Was it from 5 in the morning until 8 or 6 to 9?  But apparently when he finished a novel manuscript at, say, 8:45, he would turn the page and write "Chapter One," and be off on his new novel for his remaining fifteen minutes of writing.

Now that my story collection is finished (it is finished, right?), I'm trying to get something else underway--something novel-like.  And all these Trollope questions come rushing back to me.  Did he outline anything?  Did he ever just stare at the wall and wonder how this or that strand of the plot could be made to work?  Maybe he did that at the post office  when he was supposed to be working.
 
 
Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Blog links to Donald Ray Pollock's recent interview with Southeast Review.  He's similarly mystified by the novel's prominence in these days of the limited attention span, but publishing in the tiny journals worked for him.  Good to hear.
 
 
So here's one of those things I cheer myself up by rereading now and then. 

The literary interview is traditionally a minefield of agonizing pretensions for both the interviewer and interviewee--authors get to wax bombastic about the mystic well from which they draw their inspiration, and their interlocutors allow themselves gassy questions about the author's place, as they see it, in the literary firmament.

In 2005, Bookslut published this interview with poet Richard Hell (of Voidoids fame) by Adam Travis.  While the interview itself is worthwhile reading, Hell's annotations of Travis' introduction are the real draw.  Hell comes out swinging at--what seems to me, at least--a fairly representative example of the interview intro.

My wife and I can still get a laugh from each other paraphrasing Hell's salvo in response to Travis' opening line:

     If Richard Hell had died fifteen years ago he would only be remembered for his essential contribution to the beginnings of punk rock in New York in the 1970s. No small feat, I’d say.  You would? You'd say? You would say? You'd say both those things? You? Mr. Adam Travis?

And infinite credit must be given to Adam Travis for having the stones to publish the interview with Hell's comments intact.
 
 
The pages on this site bring together examples of the two kinds of writing I've been doing over the last couple of years.  On the one hand, there are the stories.  I've been writing fiction for a long time, but the idea for this collection came from the what seemed to me a dearth of stories about fathers in the here and now, modern fathers warts and all.

On the other hand, thanks to a friendly editor at The Washington Post, I've become sort of a go-to guy for modern-dad essays (see the nonfiction page).

In one way, this seems like a logical combination.  But part of me worries that if the Post folks read these stories they'll wish they'd never asked me to write in a semi-authoratative voice about parenting. 

Encapsulations of a few Bad Daddies stories:
  • The college-age son of an arrogant blowhard catches him at his secret cross-dressing habit.
  • Fathers at a children's birthday party try to outdo each other in tearing down each others' wives and children.
  • A man feeling pressure to start a family finds the father of three who lives down the block masturbating in his garage.

Not exactly Family Circle material.  And in spite of the collection's name, I don't consider most of these guys to be bad people--bad fathers, maybe. (I'm reminded of the wizard saying to Dorothy and her friends, "I'm not a bad man, just a bad wizard.")  The idea was to find outward--and yeah, maybe extreme--manifestations of conflicts that are hiding in ordinary parent/child relationships.

So expect to see posts here on both the real-world parents of nonfiction and the maybe-even-more-real parents of fiction.
 
 
Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer for A Summons to Memphis, but he was at his best in his short stories.  The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor is out in a new edition on August 18, and you could do worse for a desert-island selection.

I worked for PT for a few years before his death in 1994.  Most of what I learned from him was indirect: how he thought about stories, what revision meant to him, etc.  But he did have a few tricks up his sleeve.  I just wrote about one of them in my friend Christina Baker Kline's blog.
 
 

Last week, I received these words from a thoughtful, well-respected agent:

... I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don't like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can't in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it...

Not very encouraging, to be sure.  Is this agent right?  Is the short-story collection going the way of the dodo bird?  It's been a long time since I've been in grad school.  Are short stories still the working unit of MFA workshops?  If so, where are all those stories going now?

 
 

For the last couple of years, I've been writing a collection of stories called Bad Daddies.  I'm now at the point where I'm trying to find a way to get it out into the world.  This, of course, is a long process.  And so while I'm waiting to hear from agents, I thought I'd use this blog to post thoughts about the writing process, give a sort of real-time account of the publishing process as I encounter it, and address some of the themes of the book itself and the nonfiction articles on parenting that I've published in the last couple of years.  And so off we go!...