On The Unsaid

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Two students of mine recently asked me how to go about writing the impossible. They each had a narrative that was at once their own and also not: one was trying to write through his experience of being present during a national tragedy and another was trying to write about her illness, which was advancing at an exponential rate. I told them each that there were two possibilities: either they were resistant to taking on the responsibilities inherent in the act of narrating and they needed to face and embrace them—even if that meant getting it wrong—or their stories were unlanguagable, in which case they would have to find a new framework for giving the narrative voice.

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When Characters Fall in Love

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Even our blueprint for a romantic comedy suggests this bias: two unlikely people start out as enemies and end up falling in love. Against all odds, the circumstance proves stronger than the individual will. Which is perhaps the reason why writing about romantic love is so difficult in fiction: we have to first figure out why we fall in love in real life. Is it a choice? An accident? Both? Neither?

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Charles Baxter and MQR

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I was stunned by the long first paragraph of “Harmony of the World.” I set down the story and took a deep breath, thinking that if the rest of the story were this well written and as secure in its rhetorical structure, this narrative would fulfill Milton’s prescription for greatness. It would be read appreciatively a hundred years hence, just as in 1980 we read short fiction by Henry James and Stephen Crane, and poems by Emily Dickinson.

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Between Reader and Writer: An Interview with Dubravka Ugrešić

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“The problem I have with contemporary culture is that today everything is treated as a product. Culture is a huge and shiny supermarket. As all products are announced as ‘brilliant,’ the risk inherent in buying those product falls entirely to me. In that respect, I often miss ‘my butcher’ and ‘my baker’ and ‘my vegetable lady,’ people I could rely on. These days, shopping and consuming—including consuming culture—have become more difficult. In such a context, I behave like any other cultural consumer: I buy books randomly, because I’ve heard of the author or the title, or I know the publisher’s taste, or a friend recommended something to me.”

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On M.J. Fièvre’s “A Sky the Color of Chaos”

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I do not believe there’s a certain age at which a writer is suddenly prepared to write a memoir, though I sometimes wish the criteria were this easy, this concrete. There are other metrics that could be used: the amount of major events, the degree of trauma or enlightenment, the critical distance the writer has established from the narrative. By that final item, I mean, how close can the writer approach the material before becoming overwhelmed by it or simply unable to draw out its significance. If only this were just a function of time. And if only we could quantify that perfect balance between sentimentality and ambivalence, when the first threatens to make the narrative so saccharine that it’s barely palatable and the second can just make even the most engaging prose flatline.

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MQR 54:4 | Fall 2015

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A special section pays tribute to the work of Charles Baxter: Laurence Goldstein tells of discovering Baxter’s first submission to MQR, Matt Burgess discusses “Forbearance,” Michael Byers lays out a Baxterian taxonomy, Matthew Pitt discovers Baxter’s affinity with Wile E. Coyote, Joan Silber analyzes his use of melodrama, Valerie Laken explores “Minnesota nice,” and Jeremiah Chamberlin interviews the man himself.

Fiction from Beth Thompson, Garret Keizer, Ronna Wineberg, Maria Adelmann, Laura Lampton Scott, Jane Ratcliffe.

Poetry from Timothy Liu, Alessandra Lynch, Raymond McDaniel, Deborah Pope, Durs Grünbein.

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Affable Beasts: An Interview with Michael Thomas Taren on Tomaž Šalamun

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“This is to say that Tomaž’s exuberance was always off the handle. He always thought his legacy would be found in America. America grafted onto his encyclopedia of references. He loved to write in Starbucks, especially that of Union Square. He bought Starbucks every day when he was in America and brooked no criticism of that company. Tomaž liked America quite a lot. At either periphery of the Atlantic he’s viewed as something childlike and mystical. In his home country it’s a split between reverence and annoyance. He became both a trophy case and Modernity’s whipping boy.”

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Explaining Myself

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How much should we explain to the reader? This is a question that comes up a lot. In fact, it comes up every single time we write. Writing is a series of decisions of what to explain to the reader, what not to, what leaps and associations we believe the reader can take, should take, or might not be able to take (but do they need to?). It happens, on some level, with every word. Each word in our work is a kind of bet—which readers will recognize what we are trying to do, and which will not? And when that word combines with the next, and spreads its reach into reference or metaphor or anything beyond the basic and denotative, we make an even bigger bet.

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