Two Books That Speak to Jen Silverman

In the eighth in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Jen Silverman, author of The Island Dwellers (Random House), discusses a couple of poetry volumes that have influenced her writing.

There are two books that I’ve returned to again and again across the years, both by poets. The first is Changing Your Story by Patricia Clark Smith and the other is Crush by Richard Siken.

I first read Changing Your Story as a teenager and found my way back to it some years later, right after college. I’d just returned from Japan and was in limbo, living in Boston with my best friend while I considered the life (and the relationship) I’d left behind me, stacked against my hopes for my life back in the U.S. I read poems out loud to my friend while we cooked, while we did laundry, while she studied for her med school exams. The book spoke to me in a new way. I was raised in many countries, raised with the constant fact of our ability to transform. Change your language, change your geography, change your customs, and there it is: a new iteration of yourself, a new story. No matter what you take with you from country to country, there is also so much that must get left behind—no matter how you try to hold on. In the wake of my recent leaving, the poems reminded me that transformation is as human and inexorable as breathing. Patricia Clark Smith seemed to understand this better than anyone, although these poems are so deeply rooted in the texture and detail of her home state of New Mexico, in her identity as a Native woman. My transience and her rootedness, my uncertainty and her certainty, were two sides of the same coin.

Conversely, Richard Siken’s poems found me at a moment when I was coming to terms with my queer identity – and, with it, the wary questions I was receiving from people both straight and gay. Queer is a fluid construct, by necessity, and fluidity is so often distrusted. As someone whose entire identity is a confluence of fluidities (both national and sexual), I was compelled by Siken’s work in a way that, even now, is hard to articulate. His poems offered no comfort other than the feeling of being witnessed—which is, of course, sometimes the only comfort. It is raw painful work, each poem a hard-won confession, a grappling with confusion, bewilderment, grief, violence, and queerness into which all these things are folded—and with it, defiance as well. Over the years I return to this collection, still amazed by how it propels itself forward, how it generates an electricity born of urgency. I don’t carry the same rawness that I first did; I’ve become much more comfortable with the discomfort that queerness can generate even within my own community. But I still feel like something in those poems sees me clearly—like the poems and I are sharing a long look of recognition.

The poems in both books read like short stories, confessions, perhaps even monologues, with the same attention to rhythm and voice that you find in good theatre. I’ve worked in theatre for the past decade, and it was in and around writing plays that I wrote my first story collection, The Island Dwellers. I can’t help but think that both of these poets influenced my approach to writing prose and plays. There’s nothing more powerful than a piece of art that functions like a shared secret, like a letter delivered directly to the one person in the audience who needs to receive it. What is writing if not an overture to strangers moving through the world, who might need what you need and long for what you long for? What is writing if not a chance to surrender the small lies that get us through each day, and risk coming face to face with your unguarded self?

Michael Knight on a Literary Touchstone

In the 34th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Michael Knight, author of Eveningland (Atlantic Monthly Press), discusses his sentence-level admiration for The Great Gatsby.

Name Something by Another Author that You Wish You’d Written / Talk about a Literary Touchstone / What Influenced You to Become a Writer?
Given the nature of this prize and this blog, I should probably select a short story to answer this question, and if I’m not going to select a short story, I should probably take advantage of this opportunity to shine a light on some under-read masterpiece rather than on what is surely one of the most read novels of all time, and if I really do intend to select an already well-known novel, it would make perfect sense for me to pick the one referenced by the title of my new collection (Walker’s Percy’s The Moviegoer is now and ever shall be one of my favorite works of fiction), but the book that keeps insisting on itself in my mind is The Great Gatsby. I know, I know. I already feel like a heel and I’m barely a hundred words into this post.

But, still, there are those sentences:

An oldie but a goodie

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

And there is the point of view, Fitzgerald’s observer narrator, Nick Carraway, his first person voice inviting us in, courting our sympathy—he’s a charming storyteller, after all, and he’s just as amazed as we are by the near surreality of the wealth and decadence on display—allowing for bias in Gatsby’s favor while also keeping us at a slight but vital remove. This is a narrative stance I have employed (imitated? stolen?) on several occasions in my own fiction, including in the story “Water and Oil” in Eveningland. Even when I’m writing in third person, I often imagine my narrators this way, as actual humans with flaws and opinions and recognizable uncertainties bearing witness just on the fringes of the action and moved by what they see, as I hope the reader will be moved. There is a scene in my story “Jubilee” that makes direct reference to (rips off?) The Great Gatsby, a party scene featuring a guest list that bears an undeniable resemblance to Nick Carraway’s list, famously scribbled in the margins of railroad timetable.

And there’s the way Fitzgerald uses imagery to mirror Nick’s interior life, a craft lesson for any writer. 

Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and ran in thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires . . . But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness.

Those lines span two beautiful paragraphs and appear in the novel immediately after Nick has learned the truth about Gatsby’s history with Daisy. For me, as a reader and a writer, no sentences in literature better reflect the way the world might look to just that human and just that moment in his life. 

Like most everybody else, I first came across The Great Gatsby in a high school, Nancy Strachan’s American lit class my junior year. I was the perfect age and exactly the right sort of kid to romanticize vague notions about the glamorous 1920s and a boozy literary life, false notions, to be sure, but no doubt the beginning of my dream to become a writer. And I can still remember the way my pulse thumped as Fitzgerald lead me inexorably toward what I surely must have known was coming, that image of Gatsby floating dead on a raft in his own pool, the water littered with fallen leaves, and from there to those last lines, which I most likely didn’t understand completely but which I somehow felt completely and have kept on feeling across all these years and dozens of re-readings and which, even now, I can feel creeping up on me as I type these words. Honestly, writing this post has made me want to go read The Great Gatsby all over again.