Book News: about Short Stories, and Mentioning J.G. Ballard, Raymond Carver, Orhan Pamuk and others

There is general agreement, in my book circles, that 2009 is the year of the short story. Of course, this is not to say that we are not prepared to accept 2010 as a short story year if it becomes one. I asked the question somewhere, perhaps in one of my classes, about why it would make sense for 2009 to be a short story year, and the answers were practical: "Global warming", "shortening reading spans", and "a rediscovery of the short story".

So perhaps the Melvillean big American novel may go out of fashion on the basis of green thinking. I like that reason. There is nothng wrong with being concise out of necessity. Then once in a while you hear that a 1200 page collection of J.G. Ballard's short stories has been published, then you say, "short stories!"

"That's not all," you are told, "they just came out with another collection: Raymond Carver's stories in one volume."

You start doubting whether the size of the book does or does not matter.

But whatever the reason, surely, 2009 is the year of the short story. In my circles (readers, bloggers, etc) that may simply mean that the people we know have been successful in their short story writing and we ended up just focusing on reading short stories, and maybe elsewhere, in the world of speculative fiction, sci-fi, horror, it might actually be the year of the novel, but that doesn't matter now because I have been seeing a lot of evidence that points to the success of the short story. For one, major novelists have made it a point to publish a volume of short stories. I have mentioned names like Kazuo Ishiguro, Chimamanda Adichie, etc in previous posts.

We have to consider publishing decisions too: at first, it's the decisions publishers are making that can, in the first place, lead to the popularity of a genre, and remember, no sound publishing decision is made without putting the reader in the mix. Someone saw the reader interest and said, "Bingo! Let's do short stories!" Or the short stories themselves are so good that no one can ignore them.

People are reading short stories this year, which explains why they have won awards and have gotten on national and international bestseller lists. I have heard it said that an award does not necessarily mean that a work is being read or will be read. Now, how does that work? We may not consider judges readers, in the sense of the readers who walk into a book store to purchase a copy, but when I see a book on BBC or CNN, the NYT, or San Francisco Chronicle because it's been shortlisted for something, believe me, I will be in Barnes & Noble asking for it. Then as I look for these books, I usually end up finding another work, perhaps by a small press, which grips me with its first sentence.

I have read more short stories this year than I read in my literature courses, and believe me, I have come to understand my own writing in a different way.

As the year ends though, I am slowly returning to the novel. The return has turned out not be that slow--there is something about reading Orhan Pamuk that speeds up things a bit; you know you are reading The Museum of Innocence, but you find yourself trying to read Snow and My Name is Red. It becomes very clear again that while there has been much activity in the short story, things seem not to have slowed down in the novel genre.

Still....

Petina Gappah Wins 2009 Guardian First Book Award

I would like to congratulate Petina Gappah for winning the 2009 Guardian First Book Award with her hard-working short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly. Yes, hard-working, because this book has been very active since its publication in May; it has sent its author to an international book tour, has been on the short-list of the Flannery O'Connor Short Story Award (2009)and has touched the hearts of many readers worldwide.

The £10,000 prize is well-deserved, and I get the feeling that this is just the beginning of many things to come.

Here are the words of The Guardian's Mark Brown breaking the news December 2:

"Geneva-based international trade lawyer whose poignant, humane and funny collection of stories about her home country, Zimbabwe, has impressed critics was tonight named winner of the Guardian First Book Award.

Petina Gappah became only the second short story writer to win the award in its 10-year history, the first being Yiyun Li in 2006. Gappah's collection of 13 stories, An Elegy for Easterly, tells of the lives of people, rich and poor, caught up in events over which they have little control." Read more at the The Guardian.

Memory Chirere Reviews "State of the Nation"

Title: "State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry"
Publisher: Conversation Press (UK)
Editors: Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingham
Reviewer: Memory Chirere

When I received this book, ‘State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean poetry’, its very pointed title hinted that it is a project on Zimbabwe now as seen by its various poets.

I know that the state of our beloved but beleaguered nation, Zimbabwe is now well known. Now a term ‘Zimbabwean crisis’ has even been spawned. Whatever way you look at it, the Zimbabwean crisis is characterized by serious food shortages, lack of jobs, rampant underpaying of civil servants, acute brain drain and the general collapse of public amenities.

Definition(s) and causes of this crisis, in Zimbabwe, fall desperately and untidily too, between an oppositional view and the establishment/government view.
A particular incident associated with the genesis of this crisis is the giving out of hefty gratuities to the liberation veterans from ZANLA and ZIPRA, resulting in the first substantive fall of the Zimbabwean dollar in 1997.
In 1998 Zimbabwe intervened in the Congo war on the side of the government of Laurent Kabila against some rebels and this too had very negative impact on the Zimbabwean economy.

In 1999 the Zimbabwean government embarked on what its opponents in the opposition and the West have called the ‘chaotic land reform.’ The ‘new farmers’, as the land reform have come to be known in Zimbabwe, have not been able, within the interim; to produce enough for the nation to consume.

The West hit Zimbabwe with what they have been calling ‘targeted’ sanctions, stopping government leadership of Zimbabwe from traveling abroad. However in due course and as categorically admitted in Article IV of the Zimbabwe Global Political Agreement document of September 2008, the sanctions are not necessarily targeted (as Zimbabwe cannot receive the balance of payment from the IMF and institutions related to Britain.)

But the Zimbabwean government has always projected their own side of the story. First, they argue that the international diatribe against President Mugabe is basically because he took land from the former white settlers and distributed it to the African people to fulfill the long standing cause of the 1970’s war of liberation. They argue, further, that the British colonial policy created the cases of social imbalances in Zimbabwe in the first place and that the problem in Zimbabwe is not about the rule of law because in some countries on the continent, worse methods of suppression have been used but the West has remained quiet. They also claim that the opposition is a puppet of the West meant to help further the disfranchisement of the black people of Zimbabwe and that through the invitation and persuasion of the opposition; the west has slammed Zimbabwe with sanctions.

Therefore, any book as this one, ‘State of The Nation’ that boldly positions itself to look at our woes in the eye, raises great expectations. Poets are seers and from them we want to know ‘where and when the rain began to beat us.’ The editors did well to ask the poets to start with each a testimony on what it means to be a poet, and sometimes a Zimbabwean poet. If you cannot read the poems, you go for the narratives and sometimes, as in the cases of Emmanuel Sigauke, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Ignatius Mabasa and Ruzvidzo Mupfudza, you go for both.

But then I must state that this cannot be an out and out book review because I know and am known to most of the poets in here. I know the fires that beget the red brick. Reading them is like meeting again in a new country under a new sky. To me, most of these are both poets and people.

Probably the most unique thing about this book is that it has poets from Zimbabwe who are still very active. For instance Christopher Mlalazi has just won an ‘honourable mention’ in the latest Noma awards with his book: Dancing With Life: Tales from The Township. Noma is a greatly prized literary award in all Africa. Mlalazi is also a recent winner of NAMA, a prestigious national award. When I wrote him to say congratulations for Noma and pointed that he has now won both Nama and Noma, he wrote back: “Ngiyabonga baba… Now I want MANA (money).” Even his poetry is like that, spontaneous and hard hitting. In ‘A soundless song’, a goat is described as ‘mercilessly tearing at the petticoats of a tree unable to flee’.

I see that Ruzvidzo Mupfudza’s personae have not, unlike us, left the bars. In the first two poems I see it and agree with Ruzvidzo that the thin board between wakefulness and sleep is a zone during which one sees further than the eye. At that moment, one’s sins (and of those people behind and ahead of us) coagulate into one event. And, ah Ruzvidzo still sees Nehanda too!

Ignatius Mabasa’s ‘problem’ about which language to use (or not to use) is not a problem. Good translations (as Mabasa has done with poems like ‘Cavities’ and ‘Concrete and plastic’) will serve us well. Having seen these poems before in the original Shona, I dare say they have even gained an extra amount of subtlety. Consider Mai Nyevero’s ‘tan thighs’ and how she ‘laughs like a hyena.’ I actually see her and suffer. Harare is teeming with such women. I wonder why Mabasa did not include a piece on ‘baba vaNyevero’. Of course, I cannot run away from the fact that Mabasa’s strong point is the Shona language, rendering him one of the more successful writers of our generation with his novels, 'Mapenzi' and 'Ndafa Here?'

Nhamo Mhiripiri and his wife Joyce Mutiti are Zimbabwe's writing couple. I do not know if we have another. We must have more. In college we saw them courting, writing and smoking together. We wondered why they didn't fall on each other and fight because discussions at the Students Union tended to end in fistfights. They didn't give us that opportunity. Nhamo's pen is conscious of ideology and theory. Joyce is private. Today you still see them together either at the Book fair or the book launches in Harare.

In his own testimony, John Eppel makes the crudest series of claims and accusations that I have ever heard from one of us. First, Eppel says the late Yvonne Vera, ‘like all Shona writers with ZANU PF sympathies (was) still in too much denial to tackle the shameful period” (of Gukurahundi) and therefore Vera’s The Stone Virgins ‘is abject cowardice.’ Really?

I have quietly noticed, over the years, that John Eppel is decidedly anti Shona. Most of his bad characters have to be Shona! Everywhere Eppel’s Shonas are senselessly clobbering and haranguing either a white man or a hapless Ndebele.
Eppel also says that nobody includes him in the bibliography of Zimbabwean writers. He even claims that no contemporary of his; Mungoshi, Zimunya, Hove, Chinodya, Dangarebga, Chirikure… ever notices him except Julius Chingono! But then Eppel admits, strategically: ‘generalisation is a tool of the satirist.’ Maybe.

The five poems by Charles Mungoshi crawl all over you like ants from the underworld. As you read his poems you have a feeling that you are working your difficult way around boulders, towards some treasure. In 'A Kind of Drought' the spirit is weak because one has been lied to, cheated and finally deserted by fellow humans (and maybe especially by the leaders) and what remains are roads, because they do not lie and trees too, because they remain the same old faithful parents and one can do many things with trees, including going round and round and finally dying safely under them. And as the spirit wonders, you wish you could come to a river.

Dambudzo Marechera’s poems, given to the editors by one Betina Schmidt, are dedicated to Betina and are about Betina. They remind one of Marechera’s earlier poems, the Amelia poems. Of them Marechera once said: ‘Amelia’s presence in the flat inspired me to write the sonnets. When she had been in the flat and then left, I would still feel her presence, and any item she had touched could give me the first line for a poem. Or just the emptiness… the flat felt so completely empty, and it is this emptiness which is all around me which I have to grab by the collar and put into a poem.’

Nearly all the poems about exile in this book seem to insist on the fact that exile is more dangerous than home. These poems seem to be in the majority with the outstanding being Chenjerai Hove’s ‘Identity’, NOViolet Bulawayo’s ‘Diaspora’, Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s “Tomorrow is long coming’, Kristina Rungano’s ‘Alien somebody’ and Amanda Hammar’s ‘Exiles’. If it is not the loneliness, it is the anxiety or the downright confusion that comes close to declaring that one has no country because things are currently unwell in one’s country.

Amanda Hammar’s reminisce is the most uplifting narrative in this book, if you do not get confused easily. What is a Zimbabwean poet, Kizito Muchemwa once asked Amanda Hammar in Uppsala in 2009. ‘Does location matter; does exile/proximity make one less or more Zimbabwean; what it is we can or should, or should not, write about, or should that even be a question at all?’ And Amanda Hammar’s answer, which comes after a long search is: ‘I am no longer solely defined by my Zimbabweanness. While for some, such a condition may seem unremarkable, for me it is both a new sensation and a big and painful admission.’

Then you realize that this book is also about identity. In Europe, Mushakavanhu’s persona feels like ‘a dark presence’ and his ‘coal black hand tightly clasping’ the long white fingers of a half desired white wench cause heads to turn on the streets of Europe.

In her narrative, Jennifer Armstrong says she writes as a poet and not as a white girl. She says 'the black white history of Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia)' has given us 'the remarkable and highly dubious gifts of race and gender.' And her shortest poem goes:

I don't think
my race
will win
this race
although it might
come second

It is refreshing to come across the new voices; Beavan Tapureta, Tinashe Muchuri, Batsirai Chigama, Josephine Muganiwa... voices associated with the spoken word at the Book Cafe and the Zimbabwe-Germany society.

Maybe Emmanuel Sigauke's poems stand out for not going necessarily for the 'state of the nation'. They are not about what I need from my country and government but are about what I did and may do. His poems as in his book 'Forever Let Me Go' are about personal journeys from the past to the present. Poems about what could I have been had I not been married to you and about the dramatic happenings in distant villages and the zinc roofed houses that we didn't and have forgotten to build.

My worry though with most Zimbabwean poetry since ‘And Now The Poets Speak’ of 1982, is the prevalence of melancholy. Our poets are yet to find an idiom that redeems, regardless of the well known woes. The poetry of Jorge Rebelo and Jose Craveirinha are an example of poets who, while chronicling the ills of their society, reflected also on what they should offer. They went beyond the realm of 'look what they have done to me' and began to show 'what we have to do about it'. I honestly believe that Zimbabwe is not the worst and last place God made. We shall overcome.

Nevertheless, Poets Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingham have done well to put together the first major anthology of Zimbabwean poets writing in English since And Now The Poets Speak. And in both cases, the poets are concerned about the sate of their nation. Mushakavanhu walks with a spring, head up, chest out and before he talks, he rubs his hands together like the soothsayer that he is. Somewhere in some uncomfortable weather we once talked about how, one day, he is to become Zimbabwe’s youngest publisher.

Memory Chirere is a Zimbabwean short story writer. He works and lives in Harare.

KwaChirere now open

Memory Chirere has opened a blog. Most know him as a short fiction writer from Zimbabwe, who sometimes travels to places like Oxford University to present papers on Dambudzo Marechera, or to Namibia to lecture on poetry. He is also a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Zimbabwe, and, in addition to what he calls his "occasional" short fiction writing, he is a poet, a critic (one of the best reviewers in Zimbabwean literature), and a voracious reader of world literature. He is, in short, a good friend of mine.

I am happy that he now has a blog, a site that might turn out to be a place for many to hang out.... Check it out at KwaChirere and read the flash fiction piece he posted.

Young Writers to Meet at Sacramento State University

California's Capitol City Young Writers, a group whose operations are similar to the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe, are meeting at Sacramento State University on December 5. The Discussion topic is on the art of non-fiction writing. The young writers will attend workshops by the following writers:

JENNIFER BASYE SANDER

Jennifer has been creating successful book products since 1983. She has worked in all aspects of the book publishing business, everything from book retailing to book publicity, from authoring New York Times bestselling books herself to acquiring them for a large trade publisher. She is also the author, co-author, or ghostwriter of more than a thirty books herself, including the recent gift book hits Wear More Cashmere and The Martini Diet. Along with the New York agent Sheree Bykofsky, Jennifer authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published, which is now in its 4th revised edition and has over 100,000 copies in print. A graduate of Mills College in Oakland, California, she has also attended professional publishing programs at Stanford University and the University of Chicago.

KOULA GIANULIAS

Koula is thrilled to be reporting in her hometown of Sacramento. Her first news internship was right here at KOVR when she was a senior in college. After graduating from UC Davis and working in public relations, Koula went back to school to pursue journalism. She interned at Fox 11 in Los Angeles and Sky News London as she worked towards her masters degree at USC. Koula also picked up some print experience writing for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Her first television news job took her to Northern California where she worked for KRCR-TV as a "one-man-band" reporter, shooting and editing her own stories. Then she was off to Nevada to report for the ABC affiliate in Reno. She covered everything from wildfires to politics - her favorite topic. Koula joined the CBS 13 team in October of 2006. Her gigantic Greek family welcomed her home with open arms and a lot of food.

JT LONG

JT Long is a freelance editor and reporter for business, political and financial publications. Her work has appeared in Fortune, Engineering News-Record and Comstock's magazines. She started in community newspapers and has launched six magazines in her career for audiences as diverse as school administrators, real estate agents and stay-at-home mothers. As Director of Content for a group of publications, she led the movement to digital content including adoption of social media and variable content creation.

WRITING WORKSHOP

JT LONG

"The Write Audience"

Did you know that you can pitch journalistic story ideas in a multitude of ways? In this workshop, JT will help you brainstorm magazine story topics and then create different leads for different publications based on an understanding of the audience. You'll understand the importance of The hook, The voice, and The spin.



LOCATION: Sacramento State University, Student Union, Hinde Auditorium.

PARKING: Parking in designated lot during the course of the event and you will incur no charge during the course of the event. Park in Structure II, adjacent to the Student Union and the University Bookstore.

Trusting Your Narrator

When you become serious with fiction writing, you begin to understand that there is a difference between you and your narrator, even in stories that you consider autobiographical. The writer just becomes the facilitator of what's told, but how its told may be completely dependent on the narrative POV you have selected. It is very important to let this narrator have an independent voice.

I am reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, whose narrator shocked me by "abandoning" the story and telling the reader that Orhan Pamuk himself will finish the story, and as you read along, you can see that the author agreed to do so. Here is a narrator so self-aware and independent that he knows his limits, knows where he can stop and authorize or trust the author to finish telling the story.

Lately, I have been writing stories told by female narrators and this has become an example of writing what I don't know, to open new possibilities, and I have found myself worrying about whether or not my POV was accurate. I am satisfied by what the characters have turned out to be, especially where I have allowed them to be themselves.

In instances like these, the role of the writer becomes that of recording what the narrator is saying. Trusting our narrators then is very important if our stories are going to be authentic.

A Time to Be Thankful

This Thanksgiving I am thankful that I received my contributor copy of State of the Nation. It is a collection of thirty poets' works, edited by Tinashe Mushakavanhu and David Nettleingam. I haven't read all the poems, but I like how each poet was allowed to submit a short essay on craft or the process of writing. Mine, for instance, focused on my poetic journey, which, as you can imagine, tried to cover details about the many writing activities I was involved in growing up. It is an opportunity to get the writers to talk about their writing, something that most of us try to do in the wrong places...[like a friend just warned me against trying to talk about writing at the Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, and I will comply].

I am not going to review this book, since I am in it, but check this blog next week for a review from Memory Chirere. Featuring his review here will be an honor.

I can tell you that there are many good things about this book, especially the essays by Ignatius Mabasa, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Joyce Mutiti, and others.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is doing great work. His dedication to Zimbabwean literature is evident in much of what he does. His next publication will center on Chenjerai Hove.