Old Things Passed Away

And all things became new and terrible.

From the SF earthquake of 1906 to Katrina to the tsunami to little ol' Iowa City -- it makes you think going into yet another hurricane season, every scientist telling you that even if we significantly curbed our greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the global temprature will still rise 4 to 5 degrees anyways -- that we live in a state of constant disaster. My aunt Charlene will read my stories and sometimes say, you write an awful lot about diasters (or floods, apparently, to be specfic, but I'm an equal opportunity employer of catastrophe). Maybe I do. We live in disastrous times. Hell, the modern age is the age of the disaster, dating back to the Titanic, the Hindenberg, even the Triangle Shirt Factory; you tire of it. You grow immune to it and the only way it can affect you is by humbling the disasters that preceeded it in size and scope. Writing about it, removed from it as I am here in Waterloo (though, increasingly less so) helps navigate the way through, and helps keep the insult and onslaught of it all alive, and real, and appreciated.

Lots of IC tornado pics and accounts from Babies Are Fireproof.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mirror, Mirror

Image
Recently I bought a copy of a pretty well reviewed and promoted speculative fiction novel.  About two chapters in, the main character looks in a mirror and describes themself.  I literally closed the book and stopped reading.  The novel had other issues, but this put me right out of the story.  This technique - being generous here - occurs a lot in first person narratives, about as often as a story beginning with the main character waking up from a dream.  The mirror device is best avoided, but not necessarily because it's so overused - it's best avoided because simply put, it's so easy.  A character, especially a protagonist, should never be described; they should be imagined.
Read more

Conversations With: Dr. Daniel Dahlquist

Here's what I hope is the start of a new weekly (or so) feature on the blog: a mini-interview with writers about the craft. My good friend and teacher Dr. Daniel Dahlquist inaugurates the series. Dr. Dahlquist is a wonderful poet; his poetry has appeared in respected literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Virginia Review, River Styx, Kentucky Poetry Review, and the Louisville Review. He graduated from the University of Iowa's storied Writer's Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University. His first book, SPEECH TO THE DEAD PEOPLE, was published in 1997 by Cedar Creek Press. You can read an excerpt from the book (and my favorite of his poems) here . Without further adieu: Q: What poets or other writers do you consider influences? A: The apocalyptic poets appealed to me when I was very young. I started writing poems at age sixteen, on my grandfather's 1928 L.C. Smith typewriter, largely to impress my English teacher.
Read more

My Advice For Writers

More and more I get asked for advice from aspiring writers. Mostly this is because I have a book, not because I really know anything. I'm not good at giving advice. Actually, I'm pretty good at it, just not very good at following it myself. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Actually, you should probably just click away to some other website right now. If you're still here, or have just reached the end of the internet, seriously: I've given a lot of thought to what I say to a serious writer who is asking me for serious perspective, and in so much as I can give it, I usually speak to these things: Find your faults . You have them. We all do. One thing my day job has taught me is to actively seek out process improvement. Usually we wait for problems to come to us - it's how we know they're problems - but most often in business, this can get you in trouble. The same applies to your art. It is a process; you should actively seek to impro
Read more