Beatrice Debuts on Sirius XM’s Book Radio

I recently recorded what I hope will be the first of many special interview sessions with the hosts of Sirius XM’s Book Radio Channel, bringing three authors—Julie Buxbaum, Lucinda Rosenfeld, and Jennifer Weiner—into the studio to talk about their new novels, womens’ fiction, female friendships, and a slew of other topics.

That interview will be broadcast on Book Radio tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, and if you don’t have Sirius XM yet, you can try it for free online. I’m on air to introduce the authors, but the really great questions come from Book Radio’s Kim Alexander, Maggie Linton, and Pia Lindstrom; it was great to be in the studio with them and, as I say, I hope we can make it happen again soon! (And believe me, we’re trying!)

(I also hope you’ll take a look at everybody’s latest novels: Julie’s After You, Lucinda’s I’m So Happy for You, and Jennifer’s Best Friends Forever.)

19 October 2009 | events |

Barb Johnson & the “Magnificent Sadness” of Joyce Carol Oates

Three of the first four short stories in More of This World or Maybe Another feature Delia: first a teenage girl tentatively exploring her sexual identity, then a young woman who thinks she’s shut that experiment down completely, later still a mature woman whose longterm lesbian relationship has hit a major obstacle. Then there’s a passing reference in that last story that makes you realize that “T-Ya,” the small child in the story I haven’t mentioned yet, might be a three-year-old version of Delia—she isn’t, as you’ll discover, but from that point on the connections between her characters grow increasingly intricate. Somebody we’ve seen on the sidelines in one story becomes the “star” of the next, and a character we’ve come to identify with is suddenly re-presented to us from a new angle. In this essay, Johnson—who waited until she was 47 to enter a creative writing program but quickly made up for lost time—revisits a Joyce Carol Oates story about another teenager whose explorations have the potential to pull her life in a new direction.

So I admit it: I like short stories. Sad ones most of all. I like sublime depictions of alienation. And no one is more adept at portraying alienation than Joyce Carol Oates, the queen ruler darling of darkness. While almost all of her short stories offer an impressive portrait of magnificent sadness, one story in particular has really stuck with me over the years. I first read “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again” when I was maybe twenty, and I have never forgotten the feeling of hidden worlds and worry that it gave me.

In the story, Oates uses a fragmented narrative style to underscore the alienation of the narrator, who is trying to make order out of her own internal chaos. Like all good stories, the individual’s experience here is both influenced by and stands for a larger experience. Oates does a good job of capturing the turmoil and issues of the late sixties, but this is a story of any time and any place. And best of all, it answered a question for me. I had never understood why the daughters of privilege went looking for the very sort of trouble I was trying to make enough money to move away from.

The story takes its form ostensibly from a writing assignment given to the unnamed teenaged narrator. The setting is 1968 Detroit/Grosse Pointe. Despite the fact that there had been a very deadly race riot the year before in Detroit and ongoing rioting across the United States and throughout Europe in 1968, in the notes for her essay, the narrator lists “nothing” under the category of “World Events.” In the girl’s world, the world of Grosse Pointe, there are no events. Trouble is hushed, tucked out of sight. Fixed and forgotten. We learn that the girl has a history of shoplifting. Her older brother has been sent away to boarding school, following a series of—we surmise—increasingly severe crimes.

The “World Events” entry is followed by “Sioux Drive.” The girl gives elaborate descriptions of the houses in her neighborhood where her neighbors are judged by those houses and by their exalted professions. But as with events, nothing much sticks in Grosse Pointe, which has everything it needs and forgets everything it doesn’t want.

When spring comes, its winds blow nothing to Sioux Drive…nothing Sioux Drive doesn’t already possess, everything is planted and performing. The weather vanes…don’t have to turn with the wind, don’t have to contend with the weather. There is no weather.

(more…)

15 October 2009 | selling shorts |