one book, two classes, three essays
Dear friends, fellow writers, and former students,
It's been a while (almost six months, in fact). Here's a quick note with a few reading recommendations, and to let you know about a couple of classes I'm teaching at the Writers Grotto in the coming weeks.
One Book
Though I've studied and played and written about a lot of music, it wasn't until very recently that I read one of the classics of rock criticism, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music. First published in 1975 and much updated since, the book consists of six essays on seminal figures in the history of rock 'n' roll: Harmonica Frank Floyd, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley. But while Marcus is nothing but eloquent about music, this is really a book about the forces that have shaped not just rock but our country itself. In many ways, this is a book about race; in almost as many it is one about class. But it is first and foremost a book about America, and Marcus is a pungent commentator on the nation in ways that pertain both then and now. Here are three examples that landed for me:
"America is a trap: ... its promises and dreams, all mixed up as love and politics and landscape, are too much to live up to and too much to escape."
"What is unbearable is the impossibility of reconciling the facts of evil with the beauty of the world."
"In an age when politics succeeds by confusing and obscuring matters of life and death, the strongest artists must claim those things as their own and act them out."
Particularly now, when the fate and shape of the country are at play, this book makes not only enjoyable reading but a valuable and insightful history lesson from an unexpected angle. I highly recommend.
Two Classes
I'm teaching two classes at the Grotto in the coming weeks, one starting in mid-September and another toward the end of October. If you're in the Bay Area and want to read some great work and improve your own, think about signing up:
Reading and Writing the Personal Essay
7 Wednesdays, Sept. 18 - Oct. 30
This is a workshop in which we not only critique student work, we read great published essays as well, as a way to hone students' skills in close reading. How do you "read like a writer" in order to extract lessons you can use in your own work? We'll talk about how to get more out of your reading life, and bring those skills to bear in providing constructive feedback on each other's essays. The roster of published essays we read always changes, but for this session I'll almost certainly be teaching the ones mentioned below (the "three essays"), as well as a favorite from Dinah Lenney, Annie Dillard's Total Eclipse, and one or two others. Sign up here.
Take Us There: Writing About Place
4 Tuesdays, Oct. 29 - Nov. 19
One way or another, place figures centrally in almost any kind of writing—which is part of what makes this class so fun: we get to read everything from fiction to travelogues, personal essays, poetry, science fiction, and more, from writers like Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, William Least Heat-Moon, Lidia Yuknavitch, and others. We'll take on a series of place-focused writing exercises, and I'm working on arranging a Skype session with an editor from The Common, Amherst College's literary magazine devoted to "a modern sense of place." Sign up here.
Three Essays
If you happen to follow me on Twitter you might have seen me Tweeting about this fine little essay from the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug: "One Another: An Essay About Sex, Reading, and Mary Ruefle." It's a nicely turned piece touching on three topics every sensible writer should be interested in, and it references another, littler essay of Mary Ruefle's, "Snow" (which is perhaps more of a prose poem, but who's counting). I want to look at both of these essays in my class on reading and writing the personal essay that's coming up, as well as another Mary Ruefle essay I've been planning to teach, one of my favorites, "My Private Property," a kind of coming-of-age romance with a shrunken head. Even if you aren't interested in the class (or shrunken heads), you'd be well served to read these, as each of them, in different ways, shows off the flexibility of the "lyric" essay and the way a roving, poetic eye lends itself to certain effects that are out of reach of a more linear treatment of material.
That's it for now. Let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to send news. See you at the Grotto sometime soon.
best to all,
Wallace
--
Find me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkWallace
At the Writers Grotto: https://www.sfgrotto.org/
On Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/markwallace