On Difficulty
Marcia Aldrich
10.2
In eleventh grade I discovered that difficulty can give pleasure and that the simple can be a cheat. All at once, my world flamed up.
Until that school year, Mrs. Troup, kindly, blue-eyed, and middle-aged, guided my English education at the Moravian Seminary for Girls. She favored Ogden Nash for creativity, and for backbone had us diagram sentences to reveal the skeleton of grammar. In her classes on the second floor of Main, with its sharply slanted ceilings, we damned the unsolvable and grappled only with the plotted. Mrs. Troup’s approach discontented me, though I couldn’t name my dissatisfaction or my yearning. I felt that the body flesh of writing had escaped me. Then Mark Hinderlie, a recent graduate of Yale, came to teach. He lit firecrackers in the classroom. For the first three weeks of class we had to write a new short story every school night. What? we yelped. Write? We’re not writers. We had written nothing but five-paragraph essays. Nonetheless, preposterous as the task was, my classmates and I each wrote fifteen stories in three weeks. Click here to continue reading. |
Paraphrase, or Writer With Child
Thomas Larson
10.2
By paraphrase, we are saying the same thing in other words. Helpful, you say, but also a bit indefinable. According to The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language edited by Tom McArthur (1996), under the entry for “paraphrase,” its definitions are not simple. Each of the paradigmatic terms—explanation, clarification, translation—come pre-loaded. Like leading-role understudies, they may fit or stand-in for the character in the play, but the main actor’s performance will, obviously, be superseded.
If the thing uttered or written in the first instance is unclear, a paraphrase may miss the muddied point and only compound the unclarity, that is, put something too different or too new in the original’s place, a form of Chinese whispers. Still, it’s a good-faith effort, to give the source another go, using words to clarify words. (With writing, as I’m doing now, I’m crafting the sentences inwardly and, on my typing fingertips, trying to say what I trust or hope the sentences want to say, a kind of paraphrase that assumes somewhere in my mind’s recesses resides the more efficacious expression I truly desire, which can be, wholly or slightly, better said, clearer, perhaps less paraphrasable.) Language’s commiseration over its own failings emphasizes an honest but fraught path, to avoid a wobbly or wild or an over-stipulative meaning. Which is why paraphrases can only be partially true. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Monica Drake
Scott F. Parker
10.2
Scott F. Parker: Can you talk about what it was like to grow up with two parents who were writers and how that has influenced your life as a writer?
Monica Drake: The unreliable narrator was one of our father’s favorite literary concerns, along with writing in general. In the years when one of my teenage girl cousins was in legal trouble, with a bad-boy boyfriend and a mess of drugs, our dad said, “Write it down! Write it all down.” Maybe he hoped she’d engage in self-improvement through literature. Life is full of mistakes, and it’s all potentially material. That’s a fantastic life lesson. It didn’t solve my cousin’s struggle, but I heard his advice and took it to heart. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Ana María Caballero
Julie Marie Wade
10.2
Julie Marie Wade: Today I was reading the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day, as I always do, and was struck by this statement from featured poet Snigdha Koirala in her author note: “So much of what we need to say we can only say by bending language.” Immediately, I thought of your debut lyric essay collection, A Petit Mal—which is also a memoir, which is also an illness narrative—and of the striking, even sui generis, ways you bend language in this volume.
There is a quality to your language in this book that is hard to describe—cryptic, compressed, pared down to essence—and when I read Koirala’s statement, I thought, That’s it! Ana is bending language, omitting something to amplify something else. I hear it everywhere, but here’s one example of what I mean: “Boy as filter, boy as other, boy as same, same as mother, as father. Boy as filter, at once, of all that is part, of all that is other.” So let’s delve right in: How did you arrive at the diction and syntax for this book, the idiosyncratic style of storytelling? How does the how of your sentence-making (fragment-making) fuel the what of this story? Ana María Caballero: Thank you, Julie, for your boundless generosity. I’m so delighted to be in conversation with you about A Petit Mal as you are, in many ways, its doula. My book tells the story of my son’s sudden onset of seizures. When his seizures broke out, I began living an intermittent life, interrupted by his convulsions. Thus, the book’s convulsed form is a faithful representation of my experience. At night, I’d stay up after a seizure passed and write about what I witnessed, when I could have been getting sleep my body desperately needed. This book demanded itself to be written; it was a catharsis. It flowed out of me in this fragmented form, seismic. My text eschews the question mark—you will not find a single one in its pages—because the entire book is a question. By omitting this punctuation mark, I draw attention to the importance of asking, even when we know that, ultimately, no satisfying answers to our most profound interrogations can be found. My book posits that to ask, to invoke, to probe, without the expectation of a response, is an act of faith and love, one that is sustaining in its own right. Click here to continue reading. |