VERMONT STUDIO CENTER

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Jessie Seigel

Red Mill, on Gihon River at VSC in Johnson, Vt.

Observed on April 8, 2014: A few days ago, although a low rapid gushed on the far side of the bridge, the Gihon river was mostly covered with ice. You knew water must be flowing under it, but except for a thin stream along the shorelines, the surface was white, cold, and still. Yesterday, the ice began breaking up a bit and, today, the river is suddenly flowing fast in a snake-like curve around the remaining broken ice beneath the bridge, a swirl of tiny ice-shards roiling down the middle, as the water comes. The sudden power, after the days of seeming stillness, invigorates, instilling a sense of anticipation, excitement, even danger—power now exposed, not hidden.

A green-headed wild duck darts from the sky straight at the water, but somehow ends its dive on its belly, treading water in the middle of the river, paddling against the current, moving a little upstream, and then paddling towards the shore. A piece of ice about the duck’s own size crosses its path, but just misses hitting it. My studio window gives me a good view of the flowing river.

I spent the first two weeks of April at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC), in Johnson, Vermont. VSC offers residencies for visual artists and writers and, when you get the right combination of people at a residency, the quiet little town of Johnson provides, daily, an inner excitement and sense of anticipation. It is a wonderful, renewing experience that stays with you after you go home, and leaves you wanting to find ways to keep the spirit you found there alive.

In my short time at VSC, the resident writers (no more than sixteen of us) and artists (the balance of approximately 50 people) had a wonderful spirit of playfulness and curiosity as well as an appreciation for and encouragement of each other’s work. This was true not only within disciplines, but between them. When the writers got together for their informal readings, artists were welcome to come and listen, but also to participate if they had something written they wanted to try out. Some were fascinated to see the writer’s process–how we develop our work and analyze what we have done. Writers (at least this writer) were welcomed into studios where the visual artists were happy to take time out to talk about what they were working on and their process. I was fascinated by the visual artists’ experimentation with the tools of their various media. Just as I might play with writing devices, many of them experiment to see how one medium will affect another (eg. the effect created by spilling cleaning fluid on a color magazine photo).

Meals are communal there, and conversation at lunch or dinner, when not happily silly, often was a time when you might be asked what you were working on or how the work was going and thus given an entrée to talk out a problem you had with your work, or bounce an idea off of someone, or become inspired by an idea or problem they were working out.

In addition, during each two-week period (most artists stay for one month), there is at least one writer or poet who comes for some days as a visiting writer, gives a reading, a craft talk, and meets with those who want critique of their work. (In my two-week period, the writer was Rikki Ducornet.) Likewise, there are painters and sculptors who come to give a talk and slide show of their work and visit with visual artists who want a critique. (in my time, these were Kyle Staver and Kim Jones). The resident writers (who wish to) have an opportunity to give formal readings once per week, and the resident artists (who wish to) likewise have the opportunity to give slide shows of their work. Other than these events, we made our own fun: bonfires, roasting marshmallows, Karaoke at the local Italian bar/restaurant on a Saturday night, a Friday night dance party in the Red Mill dining hall’s downstairs lounge (organized informally), even a makeshift séance. One poet was working on a series inspired by Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and so, with her, one night, a small group of us watched a dvd of Rear Window together. And through it all, the beer, and wine, and chocolate flowed. (And coffee and tea and marshmallows and chips, too.)

The creative impulse and comradeship we found together in this month of April was far more free-spirited than I have experienced at any previous residency. I think I can speak for many of us when I say that our greatest desire is to find ways to sustain that spirit and those supportive friendships now that we have come home and back to our everyday lives.

Mystery Writers of America–Mid-Atlantic Chapter

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Jessie Seigel

The Mid-Atlantic chapter of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) meets once per month in or near Washington, D.C. for dinner and a speaker. The speakers range from well-known authors to experts in various fields related to the subjects mystery and suspense novelists explore.

In November, the speaker was Dr. Max M. Houck, Director of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences. Dr. Houck’s initial training was in physical anthropology. He spent time as a medical examiner in Forth Worth, Texas, and seven years at the FBI. He also was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. His cases have included the Branch Davidian investigation, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, and U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa. He is a founding co-editor of the journal, Forensic Science Policy and Management, and co-authored the textbook, Fundamentals of Forensic Science. Truly, if one is writing mysteries that require knowledge of forensics, this is a man to hear from.

Amongst the interesting points Dr. Houck made:

1. Forensics is the science of relationships; that is, it demonstrates the relationships between people, places and things: who knows who and when? What is it? –a hair? a human hair? Where did it come from? Is there more than one possible source? Is it a bullet? Or could it just be metal from a ricochet? If a bullet, is it a usable fragment from which one can make a comparison? (Dr. Houck noted that, for comparison, a water tank is used. The gun’s trigger is pulled in water; it goes into the water and drops to the bottom of the tank. The bullet is then removed and examined for markings transferred to it from the gun’s barrel, which is harder than the bullet.)

2. The more you plan, the more evidence you leave behind; the more trails. Last minute crime, on the other hand, is harder to unravel.

3. The core of forensic science is the hunt. That is, it is not the deer one looks for, it is the traces left by the deer–the tracks.

4. One collects everything; the difficulty is determining what is relevant to a death.

5. Context trumps evidence.

6. A coroner can be a funeral director; a medical examiner generally will have a medical degree.

Dr. Houck noted that the National Academy of Sciences has expressed the view that forensic labs should be independent of law enforcement agencies. He also made two final points: (1) no matter how dirty his own house is, it is spotless compared to crime scenes; and, (2) anyone is capable of anything.

You may find more information about the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, events or membership, at www.mwa-ma.org.

Passing Thoughts

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Jessie Seigel

For me, September was a tough month filled with medical research, hours on the phone dealing various other personal and financial concerns, not to mention a troubling reaction to a vaccination I got on the first day of October, and frustrated preoccupation with the obstruction causing the federal government’s shut-down. So I did not do as much writing, or as much focused thinking on literary matters, as I would have liked, but I did do a bit of reading, and have some passing thoughts on what I read:

*****I have been reading, contemporaneously, Showing My Colors, by Clarence Page; Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin; and a Dover Thrift Edition of selections from the writings of Frederick Douglass, with an introduction about his life by Philip S. Foner. My impressions:

Granted, Clarence Page, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune and often a guest pundit on MS-NBC news shows, is the product of a different time and different circumstances from that of either Baldwin or Douglass, and his essays are, perhaps, attempting something different from their works. (Page might justifiably protest that he is a journalist while they were, essentially, advocates.) Nevertheless, since all three address some of the same subjects, I can’t help making the comparison and feeling that his book pales next to their works. Page’s essays suffer from what ails many modern pundits: too great an effort to sound erudite–to lean on conventional sociology, and to quote other experts, while pretending to say something original–and too little inclination to take a position on what they address. It makes such works, in the end, rather wishy-washy endeavors that use many words to tell us not much.

Baldwin, and Douglass, on the other hand–while also themselves products of very different times and circumstances–write directly and powerfully. They take my breath away (particularly, Frederick Douglass), and once I pick them up, I cannot put them down. They were true original thinkers.

*****I read a bit of Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors, and though I was not expecting great depth, I was hoping for an enjoyable escape. I was not impressed. It’s the first Christie book I’ve ever picked up, so perhaps I needed to try an earlier work. Maybe her writing got more pro forma after the upteenth book she wrote. It happens. Perhaps the National Public Television rendition of They Do It with Mirrors prepared me to expect better, but I found the writing and the characters quite thin, even for a cozy.

*****I also read a number of stories in The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, and I’ve got to say, I think her work has been highly underrated. Her stories combine the cynicism of a Saki with the whimsical turns of a Hitchcock. And, in this very thick book, the stories run the gamut from mystery to domestic to science fiction to ghost stories of a sort. I particularly liked the short-short “The Female Novelist,” which takes a poke at fiction writers who are essentially self-absorbed persons writing masked autobiography. On the second page, the female novelist complains about her novel’s rejection, saying “I know my story is important!” Her husband refers to mice he has seen in the bathroom and responds: “So is the life of the mouse here, to him.” What has that to do with anything, the wife asks, and he responds: “…mice are concerned with a more important subject–food. Not whether your ex-husband was unfaithful to you, or whether you suffered from it, even in a setting as beautiful as Capri or Rapallo…” As I am sometimes fond of saying, a story about a love affair ending shouldn’t be about “my boyfriend left me,” but about the nature of love. There needs to be a connection of the particular to the universal.

******Finally, I read Pat Barker’s novel, Blow the House Down, and for gritty toughness, I’ll only say: “Take that, V.S. Naipaul, when you say women’s writing is unequal to you because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world.” I’ll match her toughness against yours any day. Nyah. (You must picture me sticking my tongue out. And if you don’t know why I’m bringing Mr. Naipaul into this, see my post from July 2013.)

Interrogation-Girl

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Jessie Seigel

One semester, when I was working towards a master of arts in writing at Johns Hopkins, I turned in three very different stories that each happened to contain an interrogation scene. One was the first chapter of a novel about an Irish Traveler who had stabbed a barman; one was in a spy novel, and one was in a surrealistic short story. After the third one, I remember my instructor saying to me, humorously: “What are you? Turning into interrogation-girl?” I laughed then. But now, some years later, I find myself writing another couple of stories in which interrogations figure prominently. And though they are central to the stories I’m writing, not gratuitously injected, I do find myself wondering why interrogations are turning up again in what I write.

Perhaps the subject matters I choose as my themes have made such scenes inevitable: a suspected criminal interrogated by a policeman; a suspected spy interrogated by his or her captors. But these are not the only circumstances in which an interrogation could take place. One could have a husband interrogate a wife (or vice versa), or a boss interrogate an employee, etc.

Interrogation scenes, when evolving organically from the story, are useful vehicles for bringing arguments out in the open, advancing conflict, and leading the story toward its climax. I think that’s one reason why I gravitate towards them–they’re a good way to allow characters to argue. A form of action.

But I suspect that I am also drawn to them because they bring to the fore a contest of wills and the issue of power: who actually has it? (Between spouses, who has power will vary according to the relationship established between the characters. Is the husband a bully and the wife afraid of him? Is the wife the stronger character and the husband’s interrogation an act of desperation? Are they equally matched, like George and Martha, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

Where power is unequal–where the interrogator appears to control the environment, hold all the cards–how will the person at a disadvantage deal with it? Does he cave and crumble? Does he betray? Does she stand up to it? Does she find a creative way out of the situation? Does he or she have the strength or the bitterness or the stubbornness to stand on principle and refuse to give in? And if they do, what are the consequences? Does the power shift? Who ultimately will win a battle of wills? By putting a character under stress, an interrogation tests the character’s mettle and, in so doing, can quickly and effectively reveal his or her essential nature.

The Narrow World of V.S. Naipaul

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Jessie Seigel

Recently, someone brought to my attention a 2011 Guardian article reporting on a Royal Geographic Society interview with Nobel Prize Winner Mr. V.S. Naipaul. While the interview is a few years old now, Mr. Naipaul’s statements in it struck me as freshly as if the interview had been conducted yesterday. According to the article, Mr. Naipaul stated the following views:

1. that no woman writer is his literary match;

2. of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world;”

3. that women writers are “quite different,” that “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me;” and that this is because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world;”

4. that “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes across in her writing, too;” and

5. that “my publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.”

And of course, like any good bigot, in a preemptive non-apology apology, Mr. Naipaul apparently added: “I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

For a Nobel Prize winner for literature, Mr. Naipaul seems to have an extremely narrow knowledge of literature, as well as an extremely narrow view of life. When he accuses all women writers of being sentimental or dismisses all women writers as writing sentimental tosh, one must first ask what he means by the terms “sentimentality” and “sentimental tosh.” He does not define them, so I take the liberty of assuming he means either that women write tear-jerkers (or, in American parlance, stories fit for the Lifetime channel’s made-for-T.V. movies), or that their themes are limited to women’s concerns. Taking this as my premise, I must then ask, has Mr. Naipaul ever read anything by Pat Barker? Muriel Spark? Margaret Atwood? Doris Lessing? Nadine Gordimer? Has he ever heard of them? (And as for “sentimental” tosh, has he ever read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? And if by “tosh” he means anything to do with what he considers women’s concerns or lot in society, is he familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, or just about anything by D.H. Lawrence–all male writers? Frankly, for toughness, theme, and absence of “sentimentality,” I would set Barbara Kingsolver’s short story, “Why I Am a Danger to the Public” in her book Homeland above any of the stories in Naipaul’s Miguel Street.)

When Naipaul says of Jane Austen, that he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world,” he is baring an incapacity to make an empathetic leap into anyone’s world but his own. That is not the mark of a great writer, and certainly not of a great mind. (It is no wonder that, in Naipaul’s Miguel Street, a book of short stories about people living in poverty on Miguel Street in Port of Spain, Trinidad, not only are the subject characters of all of the stories male, but to the extent women are mentioned in the stories, they are entirely stereotypical, one-dimensional asides. The stories are quite entertaining, and Naipaul shows some sympathy for the men, but even the men are not given any depth to speak of. This was an early work, and perhaps one should examine Naipaul’s later novels to see whether he developed greater insight over time, but his public statements suggest otherwise.)

When Naipaul says he can tell within a paragraph or two that something is written by a woman, and that “…inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing,” he sounds a bit like the pot calling the kettle metal. In saying that a woman is not a complete master of a house, is Naipaul referring to women’s traditionally subservient position to the man of the house and to men in society? If one is not master, is one then a servant or a slave or–dare one say–subject to some form of colonial rule? On those terms, anyone–man or woman–who comes from an oppressed or colonized group or place and chooses that subject as a theme, and those people as characters–must have a narrow world view. This, then, must apply to Mr. Naipaul’s choice of themes and characters as well.

Finally, to bolster his universal dismissal of female writers, Naipaul pulls out his anecdotal view that his female editor is a good editor but, when she wrote, sure enough–she wrote “all this feminine tosh.” To that, I would say, first, that given his prejudices, Mr. Naipaul is hardly a reliable source for such an assessment. But even if he is correct, editing and writing are two very different tasks. Many people, male and female, can do one well and not the other. Many people, male and female, want to write but find they do not really have something of consequence to write about.

This gentleman won the Nobel Prize for literature. It is reported that some have dubbed him “the greatest living writer of English prose.” I have not yet discovered who so-dubbed him, so I cannot vouch for whether those proclaiming that greatness are giving a sincere assessment or are part of the usual publicity campaign found in the publication industry. But, considering that there are some other great writers, male and female, currently living, to dub any one of them the “greatest” seems a bit of puff. Still, I wouldn’t begrudge him as much claim as anyone else to the title, but for his using his position, standing on these laurels, real and/or manufactured, to dismiss as inferior all literature written by a gender other than his own.

By Hook or Nook

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Jessie Seigel

Okay. So I broke down and bought a Nook. And trying to get it to work properly has just about broken me.

I like to read paper books. But, since the nature of book marketing is changing rapidly, I figured that it was time I tried to join the twenty-first century. Given the number of people now reading books this way, as a writer, it behooves me to learn about how humanity now browses and shops for books.

Except for the screen’s visual blip that makes me blink when I tap the Nook to change pages (I’m not sure that’s good for the eyes, long-term), I rather like the actual reading on the Nook. However, the technology involved in setting it up has been and still is DRIVING ME INSANE. I’m sufficiently frustrated and angry that, if I weren’t so stubborn, I would have returned the device or stuffed it down someone’s throat. Perhaps I’ll write more when I figure out to what degree the problem is the device and to what degree it is my problem with technology. Suffice it to say that, between purchase and exchange, I’ve had to go back to Barnes and Noble four times in one week, and in that time charged the batteries of three difference devices. The batteries in those devices do not work at all the way it is claimed. (Three or four hours to charge? Try ten–or overnight. And then, the batteries of at least two of them drained ten percent the next day, without use. Ten percent per day will not result in the ability to read for the claimed two months without recharging.) Furthermore, I couldn’t buy and/or download books by connecting it to my computer (I assume that’s because you’ve got to have wifi–and if you are me and don’t happen to have wifi at home, you are stuck.–that of course, is assuming the lack of wifi is the problem, and it’s not the device itself. One thing’s for sure, the instructions are not sufficient and the thing is NOT user-friendly, except for the reading itself).

The little I could tell about how one must shop or browse books on these devices, I actually rather hate. You can download samples, but you can’t flip through them the way you can with paper. You can’t look at a little of the beginning a little of the middle, a little of the end to see if it really interests you, only the first x-number of pages and, even if that’s a good number of pages, it is a marketing hook, not a browse.

I don’t like the intrusion of marketers doing my thinking for me; imposing their recommendations of “best sellers,” as if that’s what everyone wants to read. I don’t like having books I have no interest in pushed on me by an automated medium that’s decided because I like one book, surely I want these others; that decides for me what books should be grouped together as my potential choices. In addition to the annoying mediocrity of those choices (at least on my device thus far) there’s the limitation of it. One is deprived of the chance to discover that unexpected book you can happen across when browsing along a shelf.

I need to master the Nook. Or the Kindle. Or some other reader–in order to understand how people are starting to find their books. But I don’t have to like it.

Some Additional Thoughts on Oscar Wilde

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Jessie Seigel

Back in my December 2012 post, I noted that in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde wrote that Basil Hallward (the honorable artist who begins by worshipping Dorian and ends horribly murdered by Dorian when he takes him to task for his infamies) “is what I think I am;” that Lord Henry (who espouses an amoral aesthetic and ostensibly leads Dorian astray) is “what the world thinks me;” and that “Dorian [is] what I would like to be–in other ages, perhaps.” I said I could easily believe Wilde’s statements about Basil and Lord Henry and, given the double life Wilde, as a homosexual, was forced to live, I could understand an affinity for a character living a double life. But, given the novel’s presentation of Dorian as a shallow, rationalizing, and ultimately cowardly, self-deceiving hypocrite, I asked, what did Wilde mean when he said Dorian is what he would like to be?

I still don’t have an answer to that. But, the Dorian Grey statement led me to read Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde. The biography seems to support what I have often felt about the man: that his philosophy of art was rather shallow. (For example, Wilde goes on and on about Lilly Langtree’s profile being Hellenic. But what is that to be proud of? That is not a talent. It’s nothing she accomplished. Could she act? Possibly, but that was not the basis for his compliments.)

On page 169 of the biography, Ellman writes of a meeting between Wilde and Walt Whitman: “Wilde declared, ‘I can’t listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style, or by beauty of theme.’ At this the older poet remonstrated, ‘Why, Oscar, it always seemed to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.'” I am of Whitman’s view.

Furthermore, Wilde’s compliments to the work of fellow artists, particularly those with whom he became enamored seem so overly effusive that one cannot help wondering whether he fell in love with people because he liked their work or liked their work because he fell in love with them.

On the other hand, as a human being, he is no phony. Wilde appears to have been extremely kind and to have had a great sensitivity to other people’s pain. (Something that Dorian certainly would not have had. Also, although I believe Dorian was written first, the character seems very like Lord Alfred Douglas in his callousness and self-absorption. Indeed, in the relationship between Wilde and Douglas as presented by Ellman, Wilde reminds me of the battered spouse who keeps coming back for more.)

One example of Wilde’s character, from Ellman’s book, (at page 412), touched me immensely. Ellman refers to Nelly Sickert’s retelling of how, when her father, Oswald Sickert died, Wilde came to call on her mother. The mother, beyond despair, refused to to see him, but he would not leave. Then, still saying she refused receive him, she nevertheless came into the room. As Ellman retells it, “Nelly saw Wilde take both her hands and draw her to a chair…’He stayed a long time, and before he went I heard my mother laughing….She was transformed. He had made her talk, had asked questions about my father’s last illness, and allowed her to unburden…those torturing memories. Gradually, he had talked of my father, of his music, of the possibilities of a memorial exhibition of his pictures. Then, she didn’t know how, he had begun to tell her of all sorts of things, which he contrived to make interesting and amusing. ‘And then I laughed,’ she said. ‘I thought I should never laugh again.'” What Wilde did here shows not only a great sensitivity and empathy, but also a very mature understanding of what this woman, in deep despair, needed. It makes me like him more than all his many witty works put together.

A last passing thought: I feel so very sad for Wilde. I know the world has a long way to go, but one cannot help but think what his life, and his art too, might have been if he were living today rather than in the time in which he was born.

JESSIE SEIGEL

WRITER * EDITOR * JOURNALIST * CARTOONIST

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