Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Q&A with Janelle Adsit

Janelle Adsit answered a few questions about her new book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing exposes hidden biases of the creative writing curriculum and suggests principles that can counter these biases within the classroom.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

Junot Díaz’s 2014 New Yorker article "MFA vs POC," and Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Cap Max King’s The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books)—among many other works—have identified a clear set of problems in creative writing. The creative writing classroom has centered certain experiences and has, as a result, served to marginalize, demean, or exclude many of the student-writers that come to it. In my view, this is the most urgent problem facing creative writing today. I’ve worked in my classroom to recognize my own blindspots and the limitations of the practices I’ve inherited as a writer and teacher. With this book, I wanted to put my pedagogy and my thinking up for examination in the hopes that it would continue the conversation: What does an antiracist pedagogy for creative writing look like? How do we undo the exclusionary tendencies that are at work in creative writing? These are the questions I came to the book with, and they are the questions I hope the book keeps present in teachers’ and students’ minds.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

In the introductory chapter of the book, I offer a bit of my own personal backstory as both a student and teacher of creative writing. I first became interested in creative writing pedagogy when I was an undergraduate student experiencing it. I knew then that creative writing was forwarding a specific set of literary values, though they weren’t discussed explicitly in those terms. It was then that I decided I wanted to develop a better language for identifying and naming these values. I wanted to make these values seem less natural, less of a given in creative writing. I wanted to expose these values as contingent and as tied to identity. So I’ve been working on this project, in one way or another, since I was in the course Introduction to Creative Writing in my first year of college. I see Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is a waypoint in this journey, and I plan to keep writing about this topic. In fact, Bloomsbury will soon be publishing a couple of books that I am working on now: One is titled Critical Creative Writing, and it is an anthology of essays, written by a wide range of authors, that represent some key debates about literary value and identity. Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is written primarily for other teachers, and Critical Creative Writing is written for writers of all levels, including students.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Thanks to writers in creative writing studies and those who participate in conferences like Thinking Its Presence, there is a growing conversation that exposes the problems of the workshop and the marginalizing tendencies of creative writing’s institutions. But there is much more work to be done—and part of that work focuses on transforming the creative writing curriculum. What can creative writing teachers do to help ensure a more inclusive learning space that ensures dignity and respect for all writers and that advocates for the full diversity of literary traditions? Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is focused on this question.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Literature provides us a way of looking at ourselves and of transforming ourselves. We can see ourselves in our full complexity in the stories we tell, in the artforms we create. We can also envision something different for ourselves—our societies, our planet—through literary and artistic modes. I hold to that potential of literary writing, and it’s what excites and motivates me as a teacher. I have the privilege of witnessing my students engaging in the transformative capacities of literature. I have the privilege of helping to create a space that fosters that experience.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Stephanie Vanderslice and Becca Manery have put together a wonderful 10^th anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (which I am honored to be part of). The first edition of this book was a landmark text in creative writing studies, and the tenth anniversary edition broadens the scope of the field’s work significantly. I also loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words for the attention to language the Lahiri offers in both content and form. Next on my reading list are English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan and Censorship and the Limits of the Literary, edited by Nicole Moore.

 

Janelle Adsit is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Humboldt State University. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as Cultural Society, Confrontation, and Requited. She is the author of Unremitting Entrance and a chapbook Press Yourself Against a Mirror. Her research focuses on creative writing pedagogy and labor issues in higher education. She serves as Reviews Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her new book Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum is now available from Bloomsbury.

Macbeth, Macbeth: Day 1

Bloomsbury are thrilled to announce the launch of an exciting new series—Beyond Criticism—exploring (and breaking) the boundaries between criticism and creativity in the 21^st century. To celebrate the series, we’ll be dedicating the whole week on the blog to the publication of the first title: Macbeth, Macbeth.

Written by two leading Shakespearean scholars—Ewan Fernie of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and Simon Palfrey, Brasenose College, University of Oxford—Macbeth, Macbeth is at once a sequel to, a repetition of and a profound commentary on Shakespeare’s most familiar tragedy.

The tragedy is done, the tyrant Macbeth dead. The time is free. But for how long? As Macduff pursues dreams of national revival, smaller lives are seeding. In the ruins of Dunsinane, the Porter tries to keep his three young boys safe from the nightmare of history. In a nunnery deep in Birnam Wood, a girl attempts to forget what she lost in war. Flitting between them, a tortured clairvoyant shakes with the knowledge of what’s to come.

And here is a trailer for the book to give you a preview of what you will find within its pages, performed by the actress Stephanie Greer, directed by Mark Jones with illustrations from the book by Tom de Freston:

 

Come back to the blog tomorrow for a reading from the book by Stephanie Greer.

On Wednesday, we’ll hear first responses from readers of the book, including Slavoj Žižek, RSC Director Lucy Bailey and poet Don Paterson.

Thursday, we’ll have a podcast interview with the authors who tell us about the inspiration for the book and the process of adapting Shakespeare’s play.

Finally on Friday, Beyond Criticism series editor John Schad introduces the series website, an exciting new platform for creative-critical work (see it here if you can’t wait until Friday): http://thebee.buzz/

March Conference Update

Last month, our Literary Studies team attended two exciting conferences to showcase our latest releases. The American Comparative Literature Association hosted their annual meeting at Harvard University from March 17^th through 20^th. Our books were a big hit, with our eye-catching Object Lessons collection making a great display.  Attendees were excited to hear about some of our recently launched series, including New Modernisms, Literatures as World Literature, and Literatures, Culture, Translation, all of which feature cutting-edge research focused on global developments in literature and literary scholarship.

 

 

From March 31^st to April 2^nd, over 12,000 scholars, students, and writers gathered at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Los Angeles to attend panels, listen to readings, and explore the bookfair. With over 800 exhibitors, the bookfair offered an incredible range of material from publishers, journals, and literary organizations. Creative writing professors, MFA students, and curious readers alike found great new books at the Bloomsbury booth – from the writing course favorite Bending Genre and the unique handbook Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide to our always popular Object Lessons, we truly had something for everyone. Our Writers’ and Artists’ Companions offered attendees new perspectives on writing in all kinds of genres, including Literary Non-Fiction, Crime and Thriller Writing, and Historical Fiction. We loved having the chance to see our some of our authors, including fellow exhibitors Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich at the New Orleans Review booth.

 

 

Both conferences were great opportunities for the Bloomsbury team to show off the fascinating books we publish and help readers find just what they’re looking for. It was wonderful to hear so much positive feedback about our projects – we couldn’t be more proud of our Literary Studies list, and we can’t wait to bring a full range of new books to next year’s conferences. We hope to see you there!

To dust, or not to dust?

Guest post by Michael Marder

To dust, or not to dust? That is not the question. We have no other choice but to do both things at the same time: dusting as in tidying up our dwellings—an arduous and infinite task—and as in spreading the dust of our bodies and clothes around. A key lesson of my book Dust (Object Lessons) is that this powdery substance envelops and levels crude oppositions that follow the model of “X or not X,” on which the logical principle of non-contradiction is based. It decides us into finite existence before we have a chance to decide what to do with it.

You realize, of course, that the question I have playfully posed in this blog entry is a variation on Hamlet’s ponderous “To be, or not to be?” Herein lies another hint as to what I am after in my text. Dust is not so much what remains of being, but the substitute for being in our age, which Nietzsche poetically and prophetically called “the twilight of the idols.” Being, impregnated by time, is dust. Space, filled with dust, is extended time. The unequal amount of time it takes to grind a book’s cover, your skin, tree pollen, a metal doorknob, and fibers of wool into dust are the unique signatures of all these finite beings.

So, when I selected dust as an “object” to draw lessons from, I chose nothing less than a figure of being, appropriate for the end of metaphysics, that is, for the end of grand, totalizing narratives about the most essential makeup of what is. We live and breathe in the dust, and increasingly so day by day. Why not learn to think in the dust as well, instead of forcing our thoughts into the oxygen- and reality-free realm of pure ideas, divine substances, or absolute spirit? That is what postmetaphysics feels, looks, and smells like.

We might read the “to” of “to dust” not only as the (rather obvious) marker of the verb’s infinitive form, but also as a preposition followed by a noun and indicating a certain destination. Together with other animate and inanimate entities, we are invariably on our way to it. To dust! is the unwitting slogan of everything that is. For this reason, too, the question of my entry title is not in earnest. Needless to say, this pen, this hand holding the pen, this body to which the hand with the pen is attached, and this inimitable world holding (otherwise, “existentially”) the body with the hand clasping the pen are destined to dust. Exactly when each reaches it—is only a matter of time.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust, recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part II)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

What is one to think of the following picture?

Is it a bit shocking? A bit adorable? Is it shockingly adorable? Whatever it is, it is the image I had initially envisioned for my book’s cover. As someone who’s been interested in design and art for a long time, I’d even made mock-up:

I’d found the image of the dead baby deer by chance on Flickr, and felt immediately that it captured a certain feeling that I have about poetry—that beauty is sometimes best displayed in the ostensibly sorrowful or awful. It’s an overly sentimental notion, perhaps, and one I associate with a famous line from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies): Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang... (For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of a terror…).

As my book’s title employs the words “survivor” and “guide,” the image also brought forth the idea of the book as being somehow helpful when entering dark woods. I liked that notion both literally—one might take the book on a hike or a camping trip—and figuratively, in the sense of reading and writing a poem as an adventure into an unknown territory.

Apparently, however, the art director or designer had other ideas, most of them involving the vanishing point of a road or highway with something askew:

In the end, I am pleased with the cover we finally settled on:

And as an object, the book itself is lovely. The Rilkean aspect of the cover, for me, does not reside in the red-orange emergency cones. Rather, it’s what those cones point to: the word “poetry” and the misty white space intimating oblivion—an unknown beyond both dark woods and dark words.

 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part I)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

I’d wanted to call my book Poetry: A Guide for the Perplexed—not only because Bloomsbury has a series called “Guides for the Perplexed,” riffing off Maimonides’ 12th-century The Guide for the Perplexed, but because so many poems leave so many readers nonplussed—myself included.

I am not someone who devoured books as a child. In fact, I disliked books, did not enjoy reading, and found poetry to be especially irrelevant to my life...all the way up until my late twenties. But that’s not exactly why I first began writing Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide—as a means of getting people interested in poems. I wrote it chiefly for my students.

To be frank, over fifteen years of teaching poetry I’d gotten tired of repeating myself. For example, whenever my students and I would investigate certain figurative language, a question would invariably arise: What’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile? Someone would provide this answer: “A metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things. And a simile is a comparison that uses like or as.” I’d been taught this same reply in formative schooling and had learned nothing from it besides that it was a definition to memorize for a quiz. That is, simply identifying a metaphor or a simile helped me not one bit in understanding a poem. So, as a teacher of poems now, I ask a follow-up question: So why use a simile instead of a metaphor? If there’s an answer from a student, more often than not, it is: “Hell if I know.”

Here is where I employ one of my bromides:

Set aside the definitions you were given long ago, and think of a metaphor as a substitution, as in an equation: Bill is a bear this morning. In mathematical terms, “is” is “equals.” So: Bill = bear. But a simile functions a little differently. Bill is like a bear this morning. Bill ≃ bear. The substitution, or the transference, isn’t a full one.

While it may take another example or two to get across the notion of metaphor as nothing more than substitution (metaphor doesn’t necessarily have to compare “two unlike things”), students will begin to engage poetry from an angle they are unaccustomed to.

And as soon as they think they have a handle on it, I might offer the following:

If one accepts that metaphor is substitution, then what is one to do with T. S. Eliot’s proposition that “Nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else”? Metaphor, that is, becomes only a pseudo-substitution. Even two identical eggs aren’t actually identical: one sits next to the other in the carton and they can be switched around, but the one is never materially the other. Metaphor is a kind of necessary deception that we accept mostly unthinkingly.

And that is precisely what reading and writing poems can help us avoid: going throughout our daily business without thinking. Because after I collected all these little strategies and personal bromides about reading and writing poems, I realized that the book I wrote wasn’t only about how to view poetry, but how to view day-to-day living. And last year while on sabbatical (away from teaching) I was able to explore and hone these thoughts into a book—a book I wish I’d had long ago when I had my first (dis)taste of poetry.

 

Visit our blog next Tuesday for Part II 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Silence by John Biguenet

From Surrounded by Souvenirs of Life: A Conversation with John Biguenet by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais (The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 3, 2015)

 

How long have you wanted to write about silence? What drew you to the subject?

When I was approached by the publisher and asked if I would write a volume in its Object Lessons series, silence was the first subject I proposed. A writer spends so much of his or her life in silence, composing and reading, that it seemed an object with which I was very familiar.

Silence, in about one hundred pages (not counting notes or bibliography), delves into a wide range of topics and references — from Twain, Poe, Foucault, Kafka, and Chekhov to solitary confinement, luxury goods and experiences, sensory deprivation, punctuation, Edward Snowden’s leaks, and the Afghan practice of raising a girl as a boy when a family has no son. You also balance the personal, political, and philosophical. Is that what you were trying to do?

I wanted to create something that would mirror the life of the mind — integrating information, the testimony of others, personal experience, and then doubt about the conclusions reached. Someone has written that Silence reads like a novel. If that’s true, I would be very pleased.

One of the fascinating things about this book and about the series Object Lessons as a whole is its open-ended yet confining nature. While its topics are enormous and wide-ranging (and about things most people casually assume they understand), the short form requires the author to make difficult decisions about how to approach these subjects. Silence could have taken endless shapes. What ideas or examples did you immediately know you wanted to include? What did the short form force you to exclude? What did you wish that you’d had more room to explore?

The first paragraph of the book is about silence, but it might as well be about silence as a subject for study:

We may conjecture that somewhere in the cosmos, beyond the border of all human trace, a zone of silence awaits (always receding, of course, before the advance of future explorers), a great sea of stillness unperturbed by the animate, an utterly quiet virgin territory. But our imagination misleads us if we conceive of silence as a destination at which we might arrive.

The boundary of the subject, too, always recedes before our efforts to reach its frontiers. The deeper I descended into silence, so to speak, the more the subject expanded until there were few aspects of life that didn’t seem to depend, in some sense, on silence. I knew, for example, that I would have to address the relationship of silence to power and to religion. I could not have guessed, though, that I would write a chapter on the silence of dolls. I expected to write about torture as the antidote of silence: “For what is the purpose of torture … is it not to force stubborn silence into speech?” But I was surprised by my argument that the camera is, fundamentally, a silencer. On the other hand, I anticipated writing about the erotics of silence — examining, for example, “Murke’s Collected Silences” by Heinrich Böll in which a man records the enforced silences of “a very pretty blonde” so that he can listen to the tape in the evenings when he is alone. But the contractual word limit of my book silenced me before I could speak of such things.

 

John Biguenet is Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans, USA. His publications include Oyster (2002), The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories (2001), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (co-editor with Rainer Schulte, 1992), and Foreign Fictions (1978). He served as the first guest columnist of The New York Times (2005-2006). His latest book, Silence, is part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Some Lessons from Object Lessons

Guest post by Christopher Schaberg

Earlier this past month when I emailed the Advisory Board of the Object Lessons series to announce the release of our six latest titles (Silence, Phone Booth, Hotel, Waste, Refrigerator, and Glass), I was delighted by one common theme in board members’ responses: several of them planned to teach classes using at least a couple of the Object Lessons books.

I had been thinking about the possibility Object Lessons books assigned in college courses since we launched the series, but I never quite knew how it would play out. One early idea I had was that Object Lessons books could be adopted for “common reading” curricula, especially for First-Year Experience type programs. (Driver’s License, anyone?) It was gratifying when one of our first books, Remote Control, was picked up for an introductory media studies course—that made complete sense.

More recently, during a Reddit AMA that my co-editor Ian Bogost and I did with the current six Object Lessons authors, we got a question about teaching Object Lessons—and I began to realize the scalability and groupings of the topics within the series. For instance, Waste, Dust, Silence, and Golf Ball could be used as the basis of an environmental humanities reading group. Remote Control, Phone Booth, Refrigerator, and Glass could form the backbone of a technology studies seminar. Hood, Driver’s License, and Cigarette Lighter could provide the foundation for an American Studies course focused on everyday objects. The combinations are myriad—and we’re only talking about fifteen books so far (including the five titles forthcoming in January).

I designed one my own courses this semester around the Object Lessons series, taking a quite pragmatic approach. In my class we started with Ian’s book Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I used these two books to provide students with a sense of the intellectual background that (in part) inspired the series. I also brought in several excerpts from literary texts, examples that evince the rich lives of ordinary things in fiction and poetry. These showed us how often writers use everyday objects even when they are not explicitly trying to be object-oriented ontologists.

Then we moved into the actual series. I shared our original series proposal with my students, and we talked about what it means to edit a series of books. We and read and discussed the first four titles, and then considered Russell Jacoby’s blistering critique of the series in the Chronicle Review last April—we talked about it not only in terms of Jacoby’s theoretical positions and arguments, but also to see how we might use his more concrete feedback to refine the series moving forward. The new six titles then offered real case studies to talk about how the series has since developed and widened in scope; and we lingered on Joanna Walsh’s Hotel by way of discussing the creative potential of Object Lessons books, even within our relatively tight constraints (one thing in 25-30k words!).

Currently in my class we’re talking about the practical ends of the series—design, marketing, publicity, and review venues—as we prepare our next five titles (Cigarette Lighter, Hood, Dust, Shipping Container, and Bookshelf) for publication in January 2016. Meanwhile, my excellent and interested students are working on their own projects through which to think about the series: for example, one student is working independently on an Instagram account for the series; another has launched her own small press for poetry chapbooks, and she’s applying lessons learned about the ins and outs of publishing, drawn from our series. Other students are trying their hands at writing object-oriented essays. (Here’s an amazing essay that was written by one of my students the first time I tried this assignment, a couple years ago in a Contemporary Nonfiction course.)

But finally, all these things are not just about Object Lessons: I’m constantly reminding my students that the series is only one teeny tiny part of a vast and dynamically shifting landscape of media and publishing. This is a terrain that is continuous with literary production and consumption—topics more commonly considered the proper domain of English departments. We’re not all that far from the rest of their curriculum; in fact, we’re deep inside it, seeing and shaping how books come to life.

The Object Lessons series has given me a way to invite my students into an active field, one where texts are lively things not only to be read, but to be crafted, worked on, and realized in context. Without being too heavy handed about it, the series has become a place of praxis, where rubbery abstract ideas meet the firm road of the real, and books find their way into the hands of readers. It has also been a surprising confluence of my teaching, my research activities, and my service to the profession. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see this example as transferable: if you are editing a series of books, organizing a conference on your campus, or guest-editing a journal issue—invite your students to get involved! These sorts of collaborative activities not only give students actual skills, but they also help break down the musty and specious divisions between college and the so-called “real world.”

And the series has had a real impact on my writing, too. Reading our terrific manuscripts has reinvigorated my own fervor for inquiry, and as I work on a new book project (a third book about air travel—I know, I know!), I find myself borrowing from the keen energy and stylistic moves of our Object Lessons authors. My next book may not be an Object Lessons book per se, but I hope it will reflect the same spirit of wonder, playfulness, and critical imagination.

Since its inception, Object Lessons has been an exhilarating collaboration between scholars, editors, designers, writers, readers, reviewers, and booksellers. Inviting students into this collaborative sphere has not only been incredibly rewarding; it has also been remarkably easy, perhaps because my students recognize that this is no mere simulation or exercise—it’s something real.

 

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. His latest book is The End of Airports, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He is series co-editor with Ian Bogost of Object Lessons. For more information on the series, visit the Bloomsbury website or www.objectobjectsobjects.com. 

Object Lessons photo courtesy of Alan Pham

6 Lessons We Learned from the Object Lessons “Ask Us Anything!”

In less than 30,000 words, each book in the Object Lessons series opens our eyes to the buried meanings, uses, and significance of ordinary things. Last week, the authors and editors of Object Lessons came together on a Reddit AMA to answer questions about the series and the six new titles published last month. Here are some interesting facts we learned from the chat:

1. We’ve been storing tomatoes wrong all this time.
“Never refrigerate tomatoes. They give off ethylene gas that makes other produce spoil faster.”
—Jonathan Rees, Refrigerator

 

via GIPHY

 

2. Everything is waste once we stop using it.
“The immensity of waste and its ability to complicate our presentist feelings about time and desire can also have a productive, even optimistic function. It might force us to extract more from our time and our desires while we can.”
—Brian Thill, Waste

3. Phone booths really are emotional places.
“There's the famous scene in Anchorman when Ron Burgundy screams that he's in ‘a glass case of emotion.’ That scene says it all, in my opinion.”
—Ariana Kelly, Phone Booth

via GIPHY

 

4. That little voice in the back of your head actually does something.
“Five years ago, a man was found who has no inner voice. Even more surprising, his adult children have no inner voice, either. And they are all extremely dyslexic--inner silence makes it nearly impossible for them to read.”
—John Biguenet, Silence

5. There’s actually a reason so many films have swanky hotel scenes.
“In the early 20th Century, it seemed tempting to tell stories in hotels, because it was possible to bring together different sorts of characters, and it's easy and effective to recreate the clean-lined Art Deco hotel rooms, fashionable at the time, for shooting in black-and-white.”
—Joanna Walsh, Hotel

 

via GIPHY

 

6. Glass used to be a verb.
“In Shakespeare's time, to ‘glass’ something meant to showcase it, perhaps placing it in glass or in front of a mirror or just more broadly to turn our attention to it.”
—John Garrison, Glass

Learn more about Object Lessons at the Bloomsbury website or at objectsobjectsobjects.com.

Hotel Confessions

Guest post by Joanna Walsh

I gave myself far too short a time to write Hotel.

I’d been working on an 85k-word manuscript over the preceding two years, and I’d promised myself I’d finish it by May, then June, then July. I’d signed the Hotel contract much earlier in the year, but I didn’t start work on Hotel ’til August had already begun. By September I knew that finishing the book for the end-of-the-month deadline was not a stunt I was going to pull, so I asked for an extension. I think I got a month, and it was enough.

Hotel is about to hit the shelves of bookshops, and where is the 85k-word manuscript? Still in the metaphorical (laptop) drawer.

A writer can be too careful with words, can handle them too cautiously. As at least a part-time Freudian, with a strong interest in Surrealism and it’s psychoanalytically-inspired games of automatic writing and exquisite corps, I’m attuned to the idea of welcoming what happens when you put words on the page, in any order you can: everything is DADA¹.

When I started writing Hotel I put everything I had on the table: not only all the material--my notes, my recollections of those Hotel years--but everything I thought I could do with structure, with voice, as well as every form I thought I’d like to write in, plus a few more I’d not considered before. The series editors didn’t blink when I put fictional characters beside real people, and mixed them up again with real people playing fictional characters (without saying which got priority). They didn’t bat an eye when I trod a line between essay, memoir, and storytelling, or when I used postcards, or screenplay. They let me quote, misquote, and use as much wordplay as I like. Which is a lot. All these devices allowed me to talk about the subjects of Hotel—marriage, desire, psychology, luxury, illness—as truthfully, and straightforwardly as I could.

Do I regret writing Hotel over a few intense months? Not at all. I couldn’t be happier with the book if I’d written it over years—and to tell the truth it did take years: years of thinking, of reading, of remembering, years of keeping silent like Freud's Dora, and finally years of learning how to write it down.

In the big, as-yet-unpublished book (which I’m revising right now) I taught myself how to write. When I came to Hotel, everything was waiting for me, and I wrote.

1 Tristan Tzara, 1918 Dada Manifesto. 

 

Joanna Walsh is a writer based in England. Her work has been published by Granta, Dalkey (Best European Fiction 2015), Salt (Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015), Tate, and others. Her books include Fractals (2013), and Vertigo (2015). Her latest book, Hotel, is now available in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.