Iowa Writers' Workshop

"How Iowa Flattened Literature" has been around the interwebs recently, about the CIA and the workshop, and in fine blogging fashion, I've only skimmed parts of it so far. Nevertheless here are more than ten things, mainly books and writers, I think of when free-associating about the Iowa Writers' Workshop:

1) The Stone Reader a documentary about a forgotten Iowa writer that the director determines to find

2) The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt

3) After the Workshop by John McNally

4) Fred Exley at Iowa in Pages from a Cold Island

5) drinking stories about Raymond Carver and John Cheever at Iowa

6) stories I've assigned by Bharati Mukherjee, Nam Le, and Sana Krasikov

7) John Gardner and T.C. Boyle, wildly successful, prolific novelists with PhDs from Iowa (if I'm not mistaken, Gardner was one of America's first PhDs in creative writing although this is perplexing as I've always been under the impression Iowa does not offer such a degree)

8) John Irving, one of my father's favorites

9) Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Richard Yates and other literary greats who passed through Iowa

10) my rejection in '93 or '94; in retrospect, I'm sure it was a weak application (no publications, undergrad workshops, or thorough references, and a hurried seven semesters of college; my creative writing sample was likely somewhat experimental and weird)

11) need to get to work but plan to add hyperlinks and Jesus' Son, Joy Williams, and others

12) shouldn't forget Alexander Chee

13) Henry Israeli, Philly poet and publisher of Saturnalia Press

14) Jayne Anne Phillips, kind enough to answer my questions about her "Home"

15) for posterity's sake, of course, it's worth noting that none of the writers listed above are at my level, so to speak, and particularly not in the categories of sloth, fatigue, generalized failure, and penchant for procrastination (and for all their sakes, I hope they are also weaker than me in neuroses, doubt, angst, and occasional chest pain). ps--and it goes without writing, until I do, that I'm also better at my patented process for blog of editing, publishing, and then editing again. and again. . .

*#12 once included Steve Almond, but in a local library on 6/26/14, while reading from one of his nonfiction titles, I chanced upon his insistence that he attended the MFA at UNC-Greensboro. . . no doubt, another reason Almond has felt awkward and out of place with all the other nuts.

Kentucky on my mind

Yeah, first they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, etc., but then, later, when the bars were closing down, they came for the KFC, and, well, frankly, I've lived most of my life like a fried, breaded drumstick stuck in the grease at the bottom of the bucket, wedged between an oppressive thigh and an angular wing with a pointy part in the small of my back, and what I'm trying to tell you is that even Chick-Fil-A cannot save us, no matter how well they crucify their Palin, from our complicity in the food riots that global future markets expect within a year.

Driving up here, I heard Michael Savage on the radio practically drooling as he described the murdered American embassy leader getting sodomized by the enemy, a story I have not seen acknowledged by mainstream media and hopefully this is not in the way that Savage would have you believe the mainstream media fails to acknowledge, and I guess all we can do is frequent KFCs the world over, with American pride and indigestion as we live our lives in defiance of everyone who hates us or just prefers we not hog so much of the dark meat and biscuits as we get caught reading and wondering about articles like this one.

(For all we know, Savage could be a secret Communist double agent because the weight loss advertisement in the middle of his website seems to clearly advocate against plucking from the bucket that extra piece of capitalist chicken!)

I guess it all returns to Kentucky, the last beautiful state I drove through before crossing into Ohio where in a second-hand bookshop on Friday evening, I found Kentucky writer Chris Offutt's short story "Second Hand" collected with others in a recent but remaindered Algonquin edition of best new stories from the South. (Is Kentucky in the South?)

May God Bless The Less United States of America.

And you, too.

egg man

I thought I'd recycle some old content in case my current students make the mistake of showing up at the Less United States of Kudera. We are, after all, on the eve of teaching Chris Offutt (but I haven't yet decided what to teach the retired "egg man"). I have a feeling if this is my sample, I'd never make it as a Spark Notes writer although I like to believe I'd improve given time and pay. These paragraphs were originally written in haste for an online version of my contemporary literature class during the summer of expectation (Yiyi was born near the end of the second semester). And, well, here they are:

Chris Offutt’s The Same River Twice, like Paul Auster’s “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” is a memoir with a compelling narrative structure. In this case, unlike Auster’s fragmented approach, where paragraphs and even sentences stand alone as their separate scenes or sections—at times, almost like epiphanies or aphorisms—Offutt has two main narrative strands—a past and a present—that intertwine and then merge toward the end of the book. It seems possible you can compare this narrative approach to a movie you have seen or perhaps another book. Thomas Pynchon’s V—yes, that is the full title—famously introduces us to the same narrative strategy, and if you look at a V as an intersection between two lines, you can see Pynchon’s title alludes to the dual narration. Unlike Pynchon’s novel, in Offutt’s memoir, the author is the main character in both strands of narration. In any memoir, thus, the writer is also the “protagonist” although Offutt uses honesty, self-effacing humor, and humility to create a likeable “I” more than a self-absorbed narcissist.

Offutt’s Title: On page 54, Chris Offutt elaborates on the origins of his title. “You can’t step into the same river twice” is an aphorism you have probably heard before. It comes from Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher who lived and thought before Plato and Aristotle. The saying literally implies that because the water is always moving, whenever we step into the river, we are stepping into a distinctly different part of the water; we are never in exactly the same water. As a metaphor applied to our lives, our current experience with anything from our past—parents, cities, towns, old algebra textbooks—cannot be completely the same as our previous experience with that person, place, or object. Maybe you have had this experience of returning to a favorite place or film and being surprised or disappointed by the changes? For a film, once you have seen the entire film, your second viewing cannot be the same as your first because you will remember more and more of the film as you are viewing it a second time.

Chris Offutt’s next paragraph on the top of page 55 offers an ironic twist to Heraclitus’s “deep” idea, pointing out that for Offutt’s practical neighbor, “the river is always the same, moving past his house, providing food.” I enjoy the way Offutt mixes low- and high-brow philosophy, humor, and anecdote; it is exactly when he approaches pretentiousness that he brings us back to earth (sometimes literally). For your further contemplation, consider this saying also attributed to Heraclitus: “Water flows through a rock.” Yeah. What is the “deep” thought under the surface of that one?

"sign on the line that is dotted"

We finished up Glengarry, Glen Ross today, and overall, it seemed the students did not find it quite as harrowing as three hundred pages of Humbert Humbert's manipulations and madness or the ten to twelve of Dorothy Allison's "River of Names." Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" was one they could see as having the feel-good ending they crave. Next up, Chris Offutt's The Same River Twice.