Lillian Ann Slugocki: The Mythic Arc of The Blue Hours

I met Lillian Ann Slugocki in 2001, shortly after she and Erin Cressida Wilson had published The Erotica Project, a series of monologues that they’d co-written for various theatrical and print formats. I’ve stayed in touch with Lillian over the years, so I was delighted recently to hear that she’d taken the plunge into digital publishing with The Blue Hours, a Newtown Press ebook for the Amazon Kindle that has its origins in a serial she wrote for Salon shortly after the success of the Project. In this essay, Lillian talks about the challenges of expanding the story well beyond its original size, and the dramatic solution she found to give the novella its final shape.

When Diary of a Divorce, a series of short erotic stories, debuted on Salon, it got quite a bit of attention from editors at major publishing houses. Which was great. I got to work expanding 10,000 words to 60,000. Except I really didn’t have a strategy.

This was my first foray into fiction writing; prior to this, I’d written plays. I was still flush from the success of The Erotica Project, co-authored with Erin Cressida Wilson. I kept the diary format, but really didn’t invent an arc for the story. It’s not surprising that when it was submitted to these editors, some of them said, “This reads like a memoir not a novel, make it more like a memoir.” And some said, “If this is a novel, it needs more narrative tension.” I tried to please all the editors, both camps, and I don’t think this ever ends well for any writer. When I walked away from it, I simply didn’t know if it was really memoir or fiction, or fictionalized memoir. So I put the “diary” away for a very long time.

Last fall, I was reading The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. It’s geared towards screenwriters, and the classic three act structure. But since he draws on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I knew, obviously, this is one of the classic narrative structures, practically a template, maybe the only template for telling a story.

I had fallen in love with narrative structure while getting an MA at The Gallatin School. In particular I loved V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale Like Vogler and Campbell, he distills story telling down to its purest, simplest forms. I was doing all this research because I was writing another book, Scheherazade. I became convinced that despite the fact that the hero is almost a universally male narrative, I could still subvert it, twist it, use for my own purposes—a female narrative.

When I had that book all mapped out, I suddenly realized that this strategy would be perfect for Diary of a Divorce. I hadn’t thought of the piece in a long time, but it always haunted me. I knew there was a great story in there somewhere, and here was the mechanism for teasing it out.

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27 August 2012 | guest authors |

Julie Choffel, “Cardinal Sketch”

Stevan Alcala

Rough and literate, your bits made a cheery piece:
to try windows / to grate one’s teeth.

Keep placidly along the lines
of droll translation. Not merely a hat of polite passage,
but a rimmed ottoman and a sitter
or glass of burgundy with friend.

Lukewarm, I knew it. Infused air is your body:

happy campers abound in these parts.
Your gray self is more of an other.
Please fill to the top. And until there is something to say.

The Hello Delay is the first book of poems by Julie Choffel, and the winner of Fordham University Press’s Poets Out Loud Prize. Other poems include “If Everyone Came to Me” (which originally appeared in Bird Dog). You can hear her read from that and two other poems, and discuss her work, in this appearance on Balcony TV.

Another poem in the collection, “Something Must Be Described,” was originally published in Caketrain.

22 August 2012 | poetry |