When children's speech becomes just too painful

Originally printed Feb. 9, 2012.

While my 5-year-old daughter and I were walking the other day, she seemed to be complaining less than usual.

She soon explained that she wasn't getting tired — even after nearly two miles — because she had learned the secret of how to keep going: just keep on talking.

"As long as I talk, Daddy," she said, "I make energy, and that let's me keep walking."

She was clear that this energy also depended on getting enough sleep and eating healthy food, but it was the talking, she stressed, that let her keep walking even when her legs hurt.

So I let her talk, and a flood of words came out. Some of them were questions I was expected to answer. Some of them were statements I merely was expected to acknowledge. Most of them were nonsensical chatter that I was supposed to walk through uncomprehendingly.

If I were a character in Ben Marcus's "The Flamee Alphabet," however, my daughter's gush of language not only would have left me unenergized, it also would have begun sapping my existing strength. Her carelessly uttered words, in fact, would have made me ill. And, if I would let her continue talking, it eventually would kill me — along with killing any other adult who was foolish/loyal enough to remain within earshot.

Marcus's novel joins a number of other recent literary "Twilight Zone"-like morality plays:

From Kevin Brochmeier's "The Illumination," in which everyone's personal pain gets displayed as light emanating from the body,

To Tom Perotta's "The Leftovers," in which the Christian Rapture occurs, but it takes a completely random sampling of people and leaves behind a world in stunned confusion.

But Marcus uses his plot device as an excuse to ruminate on the limits of language and on the sheer impossibility of true communication — especially between parent and child.

Add to that Marcus's delving into the mysteries of Reconstructionist Judaism, and "The Flame Alphabet" reads like an extended tale by Borges or a mystical, magical-realist, fabulist twist on George Orwell.

"A list of speech rules filled the inside cover," Marcus writes of a pamphlet describing how to protect yourself from the language toxin he describes. "... A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one's interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire."

The effects of the language toxin seeps into Marcus's finely crafted prose as well. His basic metaphor — that the language of children produces a wasting effect on their parents — is both so powerfully true and untrue that it becomes difficult (even painful) to linger too long in the world he's created.

"The Flame Alphabet" makes you long for your kids to stop talking long enough for you to hold them tight.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlon can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

A welcome workshop history

Originally printed Sept. 26, 2011.

If you google the phrases "Sandra Cisneros" and "Iowa Writers' Workshop," the top search result is a YouTube video titled, "Sandra Cisneros: I Hate the Iowa Writers' Workshop," in which the Chicago-born Latina poet and novelist explains in detail why she detested her time in Iowa City.

That's why I was so surprised to see Cisneros listed as one of the more than 30 workshop graduates and faculty members during the 1970s whose shared memories and insights make up the new book, "We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop," by fellow Workshop graduates Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer.

I had been expecting "We Wanted to Be Writers" to be some kind of self-congratulatory, uncritical celebration of the workshop -- or, even worse, some kind of hagiography of the workshop's more illustrious graduates. I knew Schaeffer only as the donor for whom the Dey House's Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives addition was named. And I knew little about Olsen other than that he and Schaeffer graduated with their MFAs in 1977.

But when I began leafing skeptically through the collection of transcribed interviews, I soon saw that not only was Cisneros allowed to say, "I believe in workshops. I teach in workshops. I just don't believe in the academic workshop." But several other interviewees -- from poet Joy Harjo to sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman -- also were allowed to express their own critiques of the Workshop experience. And many of those critiques were inextricably intertwined with the writers' positive -- often nostalgic -- memories of his or her time in Iowa City.

In addition to Cisneros, Haldeman, Harjo, Olsen and Schaeffer, the list of former workshop students interviewed include Jeffrey Abrahams, Doug Borsom, T.C. Boyle, Anthony Bukoski, Sandra Cisneros, Jennie Fields, Catherine Gammon, Robin Green, Allan Gurganus, Joe Michelle Huneven, Gary Iorio, Sherry Kramer, Geri Lipschultz, Bill Manhire, Dennis Mathis, Bill McCoy, Gordon Mennenga, Cheryl Olsen, Mindy Pennybacker, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jane Smiley, Douglas Unger and Don Wallace. Faculty members Marvin Bell, Rosalyn Drexler, John Irving and Jack Leggett were interviewed as well.

The list does include many big-name novelists and poets, but "We Wanted to Be Writers" is all the more interesting because it includes so many graduates who went on to excel in other, non-literature related fields. Schaeffer himself went on to make his fortune in the stock market and real estate/resort ventures. And while Olsen continues to write, he largely is focused on writing magazine articles and non-fiction books on health related topics.

"We Wanted to Be Writers" turns out to be not only an exploration of the literary creative process, but also a case study in what graduates can do with an MFA from the No. 1 creative writing program in the nation if they don't become a literary superstar or an creative writing professor.

And that's one of the main points Schaeffer wants to get across through this book.

"The MFA is the new MBA," Schaeffer told me this summer, while sitting in the library that bears his name. He said his next project will be a more detailed exploration of the links between literary imagination and entrepreneurship.

Of the two, Olsen seemed the more responsible for deciding how to present the insights by the interviewees. Rather than focus on one writer for pages at a time, Olsen chopped up the transcripts and shuffled them until they formed engaging, lengthy conversions around some general questions about the craft, the writing life, youthful ambitions and heartbreak.

As result, "We Wanted to Be Writers" reads like the transcript of a good documentary -- with voice-over narration from Olsen and Schaeffer thrown in along with the occasional lists of "Books by the Bed" for each of the interviewees.

Olsen and Schaeffer have presented a welcome, controversial addition to collection of books on the workshop that stretch from Stephen Wilbers's "The Iowa Writers' Workshop" (1980), to Mark McGurl's "The Program Era" (2009).

And if you want to hear any of the stories that -- for whatever reason -- didn't get included in "We Wanted to Be Writers," Olsen will be reading at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights.

Contact Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson at jcharisc@press-citizen.com..

Torres leaves you wanting more

Originally printed Sept. 21, 2011.

The only problem with Justin Torres's "We The Animals" is that I'm left wishing the 125-page book was longer.

Not that I usually would want to read more about such a troubled childhood -- the narrator and his brothers are left on their own so much that they almost go feral. Or more about a woman who becomes a mother at 14 and then slips in and out of a poverty-induced depression and basically leaves her children to fend for themselves. Or more about a father who literally leaves his wife and youngest son to sink or swim.

But Torres had me hooked.

His 125-page book sits nicely alongside Piri Thomas's "Down These Mean Streets" and Junot Díaz's "Drown" for its focus on Latino self-identity and the exploration of color lines within the color line.

And as a widely dysfunctional family tale, "We The Animals" is on the order of Jeannette Wahls's "The Glass Castle."

Throw in how "We The Animals" also is a coming of age sexuality tale, and it's hard to imagine any writer -- especially a first-time novelist -- living up to all those literary predecessors in a mere 125 pages.

So it's not surprising that Torres doesn't quite pull it off. He leaves it up to his readers to fill in all the context and content that he doesn't think necessary to provide.

Torres does provide some of that missing context through interviews. He explains that none of the specific events in his novel actually happened the way they were written. But he also stresses that what he wrote is so close to the feeling of what his childhood was like that his brothers claim to "remember" the events described as if they actually had happened.

I'm left wishing more information was included in the later parts of the storyline. Maybe then the ending -- in which the animal/feral metaphors overwhelm the otherwise straightforward, hard-hitting, descriptive vignettes -- wouldn't come across as some kind of dark, existential reworking of "Where the Wild Things Are."

If fleshed out a bit more, "We The Animals" still would be worthy of all the blurbish praise it's received from Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Harding, Michael Cunningham and Marilynne Robinson. But that praise would be for a story that fully develops rather than ends abruptly.

"We The Animals" does make me look forward to Torres's next book -- and I think there's still plenty of room for him to pick up right where this one left off.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Justice's poetry deserves to be read

Originally printed July 13, 2011, in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

"Donald Justice is dead," Donald Justice himself wrote toward the middle of his poem "Variations on a Text by Vallejo," which was included in his 1973 collection, "Departures."

That sentence took on new meaning in 2004, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and longtime Iowa City resident died just a few weeks before the publication of his "Collected Poems," which provided a 300-page distillation of a lifetime's worth of work from a man often hailed as a "poet's poet."

While still in mourning for the poet, devoted readers that year were given a single volume in which they could travel from Justice's early work in the 1960 collection "The Summer Anniversaries" ("Great Leo roared at my birth"), through his mid-life poems the 1967 collection "Night Life" (1967) ("Men at forty / Learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to"), through his experimental poems in "Departures" ("This poem is not addressed to you"), through his 1987 collection "The Sunset Maker" ("Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know") through the new poems included among his later selections ("O prolong / Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong").
Seven years later, Justice's devoted readers now have a companion volume to read alongside the "Collected Poems": Jerry Harp's new critical biography, "For Us, What Music? The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice." Harp, the author of three books of poems himself, studied with Justice at the University of Florida in the 1980s and visited with the retired poet often in his last decade. His 170-page book, recently published by the University of Iowa Press, is itself a distillation of years' worth of conversations with Justice and his wife, Jean.

As its subtitle suggests, "For Us, What Music?" provides a helpful blend of biography and literary analysis to tell the story of the man and the poems. Although Justice is hardly considered an overtly autobiographical or confessional poet, his everyday experience always informed -- if not directly inspired -- his poetry. And his half-century, on-again/off-again relationship with Iowa City is an important chapter in our local literary history.

"For Us, What Music?" also seems equally appropriate for readers who are less acquainted with Justice's full body of work. Readers who know Justice only through his many well anthologized poems -- "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy," "Bus Stop," "The Assassination," "Pantoum of the Great Depression," etc. -- not only will learn about the poet's life, but they'll have a much better understanding of what about that well-crafted, technically perfect poem caught their attention so powerfully in the first place.

"Donald Justice is dead," but Jerry Harp helps remind us why Justice's poetry continues to deserve to be read and reread.

Harp will be reading at 7 p.m. today in Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., as well as during this weekend's Iowa City Book Festival at 4 p.m. Saturday in the University of Iowa Main Library. He'll also be participating in a reading of Justice's poetry at 1:30 p.m. Sunday in Prairie Lights.

Shameless plug

I'll be participating in this weekend's Iowa City Book Festival as well. At 10:30 a.m. Saturday, come down to the UI Main Library for what's sure to be a lively discussion of book reviewing from me and fellow reviewers Rob Cline, John Kenyon and Robin Romm.

For a full festival schedule visit www.iowacitybookfestival.org.

Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at  jcharisc@press-citizen.com.