Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop, Part 7: What to Do Afterwards

OK, your workshop is over, and you want to revise the piece that you brought to the group. Where do you begin? I think every writer handles this differently, but I can tell you the process I go through after a workshop, in the hope that it might be helpful to you.

First of all, I write down every single comment I get in a workshop that might possibly be of use, and mark it with the name or initials of the person who made the suggestion. That helps me sort through which comments are applicable to the particular work I’m revising. As I mentioned in a previous blog, you have to know the taste, preferences, and biases of your workshop members to absorb their comments most usefully.

Second, I wait one to three months before I look at the comments I’ve written down. Sometimes after a workshop I’m reeling from all the information I’ve assimilated in just a few minutes. I work on a piece for months, maybe years and when I finally show it to my writing group, and I hear all sorts of suggestions in the space of only a few minutes. Many of the ideas I didn’t anticipate at all, and one or two might take this piece of writing in a very different direction.

Even though I usually wait a couple of months to sort out all the information, if there’s something that was pointed out that I know is flat-out wrong, such as a misspelling or a dangling modifier, I usually fix that immediately.

To begin the revisions, I wait for a moment when I have no distractions and a stretch of time with nothing to do in front of me. Revision is a process that requires a lot of concentration. If it involves a poem, I try to allow an hour for the first round of edits after the workshop.

I start by carefully reading every single comment, sometimes recalling the tone of the person making the suggestion, and sometimes I remember my own reaction at the time I received the comment. I include those recollections in gauging how much weight to give to a suggestion. There are also certain comments I may have starred with an asterisk or underlined during the workshop, because the comments felt particularly useful. Those are usually the ones I begin with when I make my edits.

There are sometimes comments that would take my work in a completely different direction. Those are the ones I weigh most deliberately. Often those comments seem to me to be about a different work from the one I brought to the workshop—that wasn’t what I was trying to do, I’m not sure why that person interjected an idea that has nothing to do with the impulse behind this work of mine. Maybe it was a random idea. I discard that suggestion.

But every once in a while, a comment that takes a work of mine in a significantly different direction seems like the best one to me. A member of my workshop has given me a huge gift, a way to rework a problematic piece that otherwise might never gel into a work I’d like to an audience or try to publish. After weighing the alternatives, I rework the whole piece to incorporate that comment.

Just the process of sorting through the comments almost always stimulates other ideas that help me revise the piece in ways that the comments didn’t even suggest. Those fresh thoughts can be really useful in revisions.

One important thing to keep in mind is that a work of literature is a living organism. If you change one thing, you almost always have to change something else to restore the balance. For instance, you might add a line or a sentence that includes a word that you repeat just below the new edit, in which case you might have to find a replacement for that word when you use it for the second time. But this principle can also exist on a larger scale, in the plot of a novel, for instance. You might add a scene at the beginning that then requires adjustments several chapters later, to make the action consistent. Until you get to the very last round of edits, it’s almost impossible to make one change without making another tweak somewhere else. But that's a good thing. It means that your piece of writing is alive, that it is reacting to the work you are doing in revising it.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

How to Get Published
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

On Being the Child of a Writer

I have met a few writers who are children of writers. I believe that all of us with writer parents live with our progenitors’ careers and work as constant companions. It’s both a huge advantage and a somewhat of a burden to have a writer in one’s ancestry. On the one hand, it legitimates one’s claim to being a writer—this isn’t the first time that a literary career has emerged in this family. In a way, it’s as if your dad is a tailor and you want to become a tailor. If he could learn the trade, why can’t I? But of course, there are fewer good writers than good tailors. Or are there? The disadvantage: you are constantly comparing yourself and being compared to your parent.

My dad, Lee Rogow, was a successful writer. 

Lee Rogow, serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II

                    

My dad wrote short stories for magazines in the U.S.A. that published fiction in the early 1950s. His stories, many of them based on our family life, appeared regularly in Esquire, Harper’s, Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines. Rarely in the New Yorker, though he did publish in the Talk of the Town section. His short stories weren't quite edgy enough for that magazine, or maybe he never tried to publish his most artistic stories, since they were on topics that he might not have wanted to write about publicly. My dad wrote an interesting story about adultery, for example, which he told from the viewpoint of the other woman. He never published it.

My dad also wrote many reviews of plays, books, and movies. For years he was the drama critic of the Hollywood Reporter, and during that period he and my mom attended every opening night on Broadway. After the final curtain, they hurried to the Western Union office in Times Square and my dad telegraphed his hastily drafted review to the West Coast—where it was three hours earlier—in time for his article to appear in the morning paper in Los Angeles.

After my dad’s theater review was done, he and my mom would have a late supper and sip martinis at Sardi’s on West 44^th Street, where all the reviewers and producers would congregate till the newsboys burst in with the early edition of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, The Sun, and the Mirror with their reviews, which usually determined if a show would be a hit or a flop.  

Lee Rogow writing

Based on my dad’s experiences reviewing opening nights, he also wrote the draft of a screenplay. The story was inspired by Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, and her relationship with her mother. Maria Riva appeared in a Broadway play that my dad reviewed. To avoid comparisons with her mom, Riva never used the name Dietrich or mentioned her mother in her bios. Her mother was equally circumspect, trying not to overshadow her daughter. Of course, their connection was well known. At the daughter’s opening night on Broadway, Dietrich couldn’t resist making a grand entrance in a beautiful dress when the audience was already seated, eclipsing her daughter. My dad based the screenplay on that incident.

Tragically, my dad, Lee Rogow, died in a plane crash in 1955 at the age of 36. His career went unfinished, as did his screenplay. My dad had sold his screenplay to a Hollywood studio, but he never had a chance to complete it.  He also had a draft of a book of short stories he was planning to send to publishers.

Part of my motivation for being a writer has to do with a need to complete my dad’s career. I think that desire also motivates to some degree my first cousin, Steven V. Roberts, who has written many books, including My Father’s Houses, where he writes a lot about my dad; and From This Day Forward, which he coauthored with Cokie Roberts.

My dad and I in a photobooth, circa 1954

One thing about having a parent as a writer is that, even though I lost my dad when I was three years old, I feel I know him well. Reading his writing, I see his sparkly wit, at moments a bit forced. I sense his intellect, and his deep and complex feelings for his role as a father. That’s one distinct advantage to having a parent or ancestor who is a writer: you get to know that person through the writing in a way that is extremely close, closer than any other occupation could bring you. Here’s a passage from that story I mentioned earlier, the one about adultery that my dad never published. This occurs near the end of the story, where the other woman finally has it out with her married boyfriend, whose name is Spence:

“You just want to be charming, irresistibly charming, so that everyone loves you. Your talent for this is high octane, my boy. You can charm the birds from the trees. But you cannot be all things to all men—or to all women. You can’t have it all your way, flitting between two worlds, and finding them waiting for you, unchanged, every time you arrive. Sometimes, Spence, it’s kinder to have a scene. Have it with me, or have it with her, but have it.” What a strong female character! And this was in the early 1950s, when almost every TV show showed women in aprons baking chocolate-chip cookies around the clock. My dad was a man who appreciated a strong woman, and in that, I take after him.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 7: Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros zoomed onto the literary scene in 1984 with the novel The House on Mango Street. Since then, her work has become part of the canon, assigned to schoolchildren, displayed in multiple anthologies.

Somehow that enshrining of Cisneros’s work in a smooth marble niche has blurred some of the most important qualities in her writing. She is a daring author who constantly presents her readers with new vistas, writing books that deserve to be considered classics because they speak to core human experiences in language that shoots electric currents right to the reader’s imagination. Cisneros’s writing is wise, funny, sexy, and thought-provoking, often on the same page.

Nowhere is that truer than in her epic novel, Caramelo, or Puro Cuento, first released in 2002. The reviews were primarily chatty and upbeat, but most of them seemed to miss that this is a great American novel, a book that speaks eloquently to fundamental experiences, both in North America and in human life. Caramelo is the saga of one family on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, stretching over two huge countries and three generations. The depth of the passions, aspirations, disappointments, frustrations, and exhaltations in the book is breathtaking. Each chapter is almost self-contained, a polished turquoise set in silver, but each gem adds to the long necklace of the story.

Cisneros’s use of metaphor in the book is sensational. There are precious few writers who come up with such stellar figurative language on a consistent basis. Here’s a passage from Caramelo where Soledad, the grandmother of the main character, falls in love as a young woman, and the narration follows her thoughts:

In that kiss, they swallowed one another, swallowed the room, the sky, darkness, fear, and it was beautiful to feel so much a part of everything and bigger than everything. Soledad was no longer Soledad Reyes, Soledad on this earth with her two dresses, her one pair of shoes, her unfinished caramelo rebozo, she was not a girl anymore with sad eyes, not herself, just herself, only herself. But all things little and large, great and small, important and unassuming. A puddle of rain and the feather that fell shattering the sky inside it, the lit votive candles flickering through blue cobalt glass at the cathedral, the opening notes of a waltz without a name, a clay bowl of rice in bean broth, a steaming clod of horse dung. Everything, oh, my God, everything. A great flood, an overwhelming joy, and it was good and joyous and blessed.

So much for the doctrine of Original Sin!

To understand Cisneros’s gifts as a writer it’s worth remembering that she started out as a poet when she enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poetry is undervalued to this day—her book Loose Woman has some terrific poems. That poetic sensibility is the foundation of her prose—she’s a storyteller, but the telling is as important as the outcome.

There are so many achievement in Caramelo it’s difficult to parse them all. Cisneros threads real and surprising historical characters into this chronicle that I imagine includes a lot of her own family history, historical characters such as the ventriloquist Señor Wences; and the siren of Mexican film, Tongolele. Cisneros presents a complex portrayal of Mexico itself, a country with a glorious and tragic history. I enjoyed her command of the look and feel of different decades and their clothing, so all the layers of time seem authentic. Some characters in the book, living and dead, engagingly talk back to the author, asking her to exclude certain episodes or change her account of some events. In the end, the author tells all, more or less.

Yes, Caramelo has some mushy passages, particularly at the very end, but what great book doesn’t have warts? Ulysses has many more. Caramelo is not a page-turner. Neither is Ulysses.

Caramelo contains a lot of Spanish, and it’s impressive that Cisneros draws on the linguistic traditions of English and Spanish fluently. She places the Spanish in contexts that makes it understandable. Well, for the most part.

It’s time to take Sandra Cisneros out of the marble niche she’s been confined to and recognize her as one of the great living authors of the U.S.A.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Who Is the Audience for Your Writing?

I sometimes imagine that the reader of my work is a young woman living one hundred years from now in a remote village at the opposite end of the Earth. Having that reader in my thoughts when I write reminds me that I have to make sure my work is not just comprehensible to my friends, who are the usual audience for my writing. Thinking about that young woman in a distant mountain village makes me pay attention to whether the references in my work are obscure or generally understandable.

This check of my work for whether it can connect with the reader can be about relatively minor things, or it can be about much deeper issues.

For instance, I live in a country (the U.S.A.) where we still use the English measurement system, not the metric system. In conversation, I tend to speak in terms of miles and feet. But when I write, I try to find a more universal way to describe height, length, and distance: “a child no taller than a desk,” “as far as he could run in ten minutes,” for instance.

I also try to use more universal terms for money—“as much as I earn in a month,” “only enough to buy a one-scoop ice cream cone,” etc. You can use actual currency if the context makes it clear whether that amount is considered a lot or a little by the character(s) in a story, play, or poem. In fact, it adds ambience to mention a currency, provided it’s clear to the reader what the quantity signifies.

The idea that you’re writing for readers who may not share the same culture, religion, history, etc. should not prevent you from writing about what you know best. Sometimes the most interesting settings are the ones that feel most remote to the reader. As long as that setting is conveyed in a compelling and vivid way, it can be all the more interesting if it’s not familiar.

Writing for those who live in the future also reminds us to be forward-looking in our viewpoints. Walt Whitman, for instance, was so far ahead of his time and such a free thinker in terms of issues of democracy, equality, race relations, and sexuality.

                                                             Walt Whitman

That’s part of what makes his work so relevant 150 years later. Whitman wrote in his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

“It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;

I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried...”

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

A Tribute to Barbara Oliver (1927–2013)

This week the San Francisco Bay Area received the very sad news that the wonderful actor, director, and arts administrator Barbara Oliver passed away on May 20, 2013. Barbara cofounded the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. This blog is dedicated to Barbara. 

                                                              Barbara Oliver

Here is a tribute to Barbara from one of her close collaborators, the writer Dorothy Bryant, author of the play Dear Master (which Barbara appeared in) and numerous novels, including the amazing The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Confessions of Madame Psyche.

“The idea for Aurora Theatre Company began in the late 1980s with a luncheon conversation with Barbara (just turned 60) about the paucity of plays featuring older leading ladies. In my ignorance I offered to write a two person ‘reading’ based on the friendship between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. (I had no idea of the work and the cost of what seemed like a modest effort to fill some time before Barbara got another role with a ‘real theater.’)

“A year of research later, plus another year of mostly unpaid public readings (followed by my rewriting) by Barbara and Ken Grantham (and other actors) transformed this ‘dialogue’ into a play, performed successfully at the Berkeley City Club, (where she [Barbara] was a trusted member), and the beginning of Aurora Theatre Company. Her achievement was monumental—a fact I learned (knowing nothing about how a play went from page to stage) as we moved along. I would never have attempted such a thing without Barbara’s staunch belief that it could work, and her willingness to do these readings, her incredible savvy about climbing all the hurdles to production, her use of contacts built by solid respect for her work at Berkeley Rep and other theaters. She was totally creative and totally practical. Whenever we hit a snag that might have made others give up, she would nod thoughtfully and then work her way toward a solution.

"Thanks to her I wrote five more plays that were performed here and in other cities. Barbara had taken what had seemed like a setback and transformed it into an opportunity to display and use all of her talents, which, with her quiet, unassuming manner, few people knew she possessed. I learned a lot from her.”

My own connection with Barbara also began through the play Dear Master. I was teaching a summer literature class for high school students at UC Berkeley in 1995, and we were reading a translation I’d done of the novel Horace by George Sand, and a novella by Flaubert. To make that period come to life for the students, I persuaded the university to host a reading of Dear Master, with Barbara recreating her role as George Sand. Barbara was so moving and wise and memorable in that part. She embodied George Sand.

After that Barbara supported my efforts at playwriting, which were very rough at the beginning. I was working on a play that consisted mostly of dramatic monologues, and Barbara gently informed me at one point, “It sometimes helps if the characters talk to one another when they’re onstage.” She was infinitely patient and read draft after draft of my plays, but she never failed to let me know when I could do better—had to do better. Barbara was a fantastic and enormously generous mentor, and she had a great respect for writers.

After retiring from the Aurora Theatre, Barbara couldn’t stop developing new plays, and she founded a reading series called Four New Ones, where each year she planned to direct staged readings of plays in progress. She only got through the first year because of commitments to act and direct for other companies.

She directed several staged readings of another play of mine, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved. I admired the way that Barbara worked with the actors, choosing people she respected highly, and letting them find their way into their roles.

I had a chance this week to speak with Barbara’s daughter, Anna Oliver, who is a costume designer. Anna shared a few of her memories of her mom.

“My mom’s dad was a missionary, a Northern Baptist preacher. When she was three years old, my mom went with my grandpa and grandma to India. She came back to the U.S. when she was seven, speaking Hindi.

“When my mom was very young she used to listen the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons. She wanted to be an opera singer. It was outside the norm for the world she grew up in to go on stage.

“There were several roles she performed that she talked a lot about. Studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she played Cordelia in King Lear. One of the roles she was most challenged by but most glad she did was in The Chairs by Ionesco, at the Aurora Theatre. She also enjoyed doing The Gin Game there opposite my dad, Bill Oliver, though it was somewhat harrowing because my dad was ill.

“In her directing, she did a lot of George Bernard Shaw, and adored it. She also directed Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Aurora—that was Babs at her best. She was very happy with the production of Wilder Times [short plays by Thornton Wilder] that she directed at the Aurora in 2012. The short Wilder play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—a lot of that was informed by Barbara. She knew those folks.

“My mom always said that theater is a three-legged stool—the play, the production, and the audience. It can’t stand without all three of those. What struck me about her perspective was how much the audience mattered. My mom cared so much about writers and language, but theatre for her was communication to a purpose—to connect with an audience.

“She was generous and gracious, but it wasn’t all selfless. She did it because she loved the theater. She genuinely believed in the transformative power of theater.”

Interview with Liliana Heker

This blog is an exclusive interview with the wonderful Argentine fiction writer Liliana Heker. Thanks to Andrea G. Labinger for translating the interview.

                                                         Liliana Heker

ZR: I've read that you studied physics when you were younger. How did that influence your writing?

LH: I think that although my study of physics has left some traces in my literature, the real significant influence must be traced back to the fact that in my adolescence, a time when writing began to be my essential activity, I chose to specialize in physics. As it happens, ever since I’ve had use of reason, both predilections, mathematics and literature, have been very strongly apparent in me. Beginning at the age of four I can recall making up stories, feeding voraciously on the stories people told me or read to me, as well as those I listened to in secret, and later, when I learned to read, devouring fiction. And at the same time, by age four I see myself trying to provide a rational explanation for everything that surrounds me and turns out to be inexplicable. At school I was good at writing compositions and nearly infallible in math. In adolescence, it seemed natural for me to express everything that was excess and madness through writing, but (perhaps for that very reason) it never occurred to me to choose literature as a formal course of study.

ZR: What changed, then, to make writing your career?

LH: For me writing was a place of freedom, where I could discover and reveal myself exactly as I was. I didn’t hesitate to choose physics as a major because scientific thought was a passion of mine and because, somehow, I felt that this type of thought could contain me and help me get organized. At sixteen I entered the College of Exact Sciences and, at the same time, began to work for a literary magazine, El grillo de papel (The Paper Cricket) and write my first short stories. At twenty-one, with one book of short stories nearly complete, I left the College of Exact Sciences because I realized that I was still passionate about science, but I had nothing to contribute (to create) in that field. Where I really did have something personal to contribute was in writing, in which I could express even my scientific self. And that’s what I think has happened. In several of my short stories, and also in my novel Zona de clivaje (Cleavage Zone), the character who tries to organize reality logically appears at the forefront and is challenged.

ZR: What other ways did your study of the sciences affect your writing?

LH: As I’ve already intimated, my study of physics made concrete contributions to my writing. Above all, it has refined my ability to structure and organize both fiction and essays. But it has also made very concrete contributions in terms of acquired knowledge. In my works of fiction the reader will detect that Entropy, the Uncertainty Principle, or the planes of cleavage form a natural part of my experience. And in the novel The End of the Story, the College of Exact Sciences appears as an unavoidable locale. In short, I think that one very chaotic, nonsensical area and another, very rational and systematic one, coexist within me, and as far as I can tell, it’s a fairly peaceful coexistence.

ZR: Do you have a theory about why Argentina has given birth to so many short story writers over the last century? I think about Japan, how it has given us so many great short poems—haiku, tanka. It seems as though a country can specialize in a particular literary genre, but why?

LH: As you very correctly point out, Zack, Argentina is a country of notable short story writers. Even a tremendous novelist like Roberto Arlt has written exceptional short stories, and Borges, the canonical Argentine writer, didn’t need to write a novel in order to attain that status. I think, rather, that there are a number of factors, sometimes interconnected, favoring the abundance and excellence of short story writers in Argentina. I’ll mention a few. 1) Unlike what happened in other Latin American countries, in Argentina, in the beginning, there was very little influence from Spanish literature (which is very lush and has little to do with the austerity of the short story), and on the other hand, a great deal of influence from English and French, and later, North American literature, three literatures in which the short story has been very important.  2) In the River Plate region we have had, in my opinion, the first great short story writer in Latin American literature: Horacio Quiroga. Quiroga was born in Uruguay (another country with notable short story writers) and lived nearly all his life in Argentina. He was a bad novelist, and in every sense, a master of the short story, since he didn’t just write remarkable stories; he also wrote masterfully about the secrets of the genre. In his Decálogo del perfecto cuentista (Ten Commandments for the Perfect Short Story Writer), he points out those whom he considers to be the masters of the genre: Poe, de Maupassant, Chekhov, Kipling (a selection that illustrates what I said earlier). 3) In Argentina there is, by and large, a starker, less exuberant countryside than in other regions of Latin America, a phenomenon that, in a complex way, influences the choice of worlds and narrative styles. 4) There is a type of speech and syntax (connected, in turn, with a unique way of seeing reality and a predisposition to irony and doubles entendres) that perhaps draws us Argentines to the unique effect the short story presents. No doubt these are approximations or points of departure to try to understand this phenomenon. The fact is, in Argentina there are great masters of the genre and several generations of noteworthy writers of short stories, which makes it more likely that new writers will write short stories. For various and complex reasons that exceed the limits of this response, a short story tradition has become ingrained in Argentina and that trait, literarily speaking, makes us who we are.

ZR: Could you say something about how your family came to Argentina?

LH: My maternal grandparents arrived as children in 1889 on the Weser, a mythical ship that brought the first [Eastern European] Jewish immigrants to Argentina that same year, those who established the first colonies in Entre Ríos and Santa Fe. My great-aunts and uncles were “Entrerrianos” (from the province of Entre Ríos); the first to be born in Buenos Aires was my mother. My paternal grandparents arrived in 1905 at La Pampa, with my father, who was a newborn baby, and two other small children. All of them came from Russia, from the Ukraine area. I don’t know much more than that.

For more on Liliana Heker, please see this blog.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Liliana Heker: A Writer We Should All Know

Scanning the shelves of the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library one day, hungry for good fiction, I ran across Liliana Heker’s The Stolen Party. The book is a collection of short stories translated from Spanish by Alberto Manguel. Rarely does it happen that I make a selection almost at random in a library and end up dazzled. But dazzled I was.

                                                           Liliana Heker

Several of the stories in that book were among the most memorable I’ve ever read. Heker is a master of magical realism, but she has her own take on it. The first story in the book, “Georgina Requini: or the Chosen One,” telescopes the entire life of a wannabe actress into 30 pages. It’s breathtaking, zooming from one phase of the main character’s life to the next, in and out of her fantasies, so we rarely know where and when the action takes place until we get our bearings a couple of sentences into each episode. That puzzle is one of the most fun aspects of the story. But this disorientation also mirrors the main character’s bewilderment about how her fate plays out. The story is a technical tour de force, warping the space/time continuum, but it’s also deeply moving and knowing, a combination that magical realism doesn’t always deliver.

The title story of The Stolen Party is also amazing. More in the vein of naturalist fiction, it tells the tale of a nine-year-old girl who is the daughter of a maid, but gets invited to the birthday party of the girl whose family employs her mother. I won’t give away the shocking ending.

Julio Cortázar, like Heker, an Argentine master of fiction, said about her writing, “Liliana Heker is a magician. She turns little daily objects and trivial events into pieces of gold. She is wise, she is frightening. She must be read, she must be read.”

Also available in English is Heker’s novel about the period of the dictatorship and the Dirty War in Argentina, The End of the Story, translated by Andrea Labinger. The novel caused a stir both on the left and the right, because one of the revolutionary characters is subjected to torture, turns informant, and then becomes the lover of her torturer.

Heker was born in Buenos Aires in 1943 to a family that emigrated from Europe. In response to a question about her roots, Heker responded: “My maternal grandparents arrived as children in 1889 on the Weser, a mythical ship that brought the first Jewish immigrants to Argentina” from Eastern Europe. Her ancestors settled in Entre Ríos province, home of the Jewish gauchos.

Interestingly, Heker began her academic career as a student of physics. That might explain her comfort in playing with the rules of time and space in her fiction. She was also a literary prodigy, publishing her first stories at the age of 17. She’s well known in Argentina for cofounding two important literary journals: El Escarabajo de Oro (The Golden Beetle), and El Ornitorrinco (The Platypus). Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and fortunately for us, English is one of them.

My next blog will be an exclusive interview with Liliana Heker, featuring information not available elsewhere in English.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 4, Part 5
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka