Indefinite hiatus

As much as it makes me sad to do so, I’m afraid I must go on an indefinite hiatus from The Narrative in the Blog. I am starting my MFA in creative writing in a few months, and will be working part time in addition. Unfortunately I only have the time for one blog, and I’d like to focus on my personal one at this point in time. I may pop in here every now and then, and Ruby and the Moon will continue on my personal blog. I will still respond to comments.

Don’t worry, I’ll still talk about metafiction… it just won’t be the ONLY thing I talk about.

Join me at http://kellylynnthomas.com!

Next week…

…I will start posting regularly again.

Consider June my summer vacation, even though I’ve been doing anything but relaxing.

That’s okay. I’ll get to do lots of that this weekend.

Happy Independence Day! Go read the most awesome web comic ever, The Dreamer, by Lora Innes, to celebrate!!!!

Goings on

A photograph of a photograph I took at MoMA. How meta! It's Maya Deren's Portrait of Carol Janeway (1943) from the collection of photographs by woman photographers.

First, I apologize for not posting last week.  I have a (at least I think) pretty good reason, and I plan on posting twice this week to make up for it.

This past weekend my husband and I took a trip into New York City and did lots of artsy fartsy things (the MoMA, Phantom of the Opera, a cute little show near Chinatown called Coyote, and Start Again that was quite hilarious), so I’ve got lots to talk about.

We really needed this vacation, because throughout March I was busily preparing for my first semester as an MFA candidate at Chatham University! I’m very excited, but I had to fill out the FAFSA, register for classes, apply for fellowships and graduate assistanceships, apply for scholarships and get other things taken care of.  Most (but certainly not all) of those things are taken care of now so I’m hoping my life will be a bit calmer until classes start at the end of August.

In the meantime, check out this author interview I did with Sherry Shahan, author of the awesomely awesome Purple Daze on Figment!  I of course had to cut a few questions from the final draft, but they were really interesting so I will post the “extra” answers here for your reading pleasure either later this week or next week.  (I really should come up with some sort of editorial calendar, shouldn’t I? I have tried a few times and I never seem to stick to it…)

While you’re at it, you can check out all of my book reviews for The Figment Review. Not to toot my own horn, but I think they’re enjoyable.

The lovely and talented Anita Nordlunde has also now posted both German and French translations of excerpts from Ruby and the Moon on her website Welsh Corgi News, which is AWESOME! How many authors can say they’ve been translated into foreign languages before they even publish a book?! Not many, but I’m one of them! =D  You can find each version of the translation by clicking on the appropriate country’s flag.  (And she has like, the cutest little corgi graphics on there ever).

And, finally, here’s a list of things you can expect to see here in the coming weeks/months:

• “Extra” questions from my Sherry Shahan interview, as well as a discussion of storytelling techniques in Purple Daze
• An exploration of some of the art we saw at MoMA in New York City
• An article on Phantom of the Opera
• An article on Coyote, and Start Again
• An article on the omniscient narrator and authorial intervention (and Stardust)
• A series of pieces looking at the way The Killers tell stories in their songs/albums
• A series of articles about Bones

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Winter Read-a-Thon

I love my library.  I love reading.  This is going to be the best fundraiser, ever.

It works like this: Between January 8 and February 19, I read as much as I can (I’m shooting for 50 hours).  You sponsor me by pledging to donate a certain amount of money for each hour I read.  The more I read, the more money the library gets.  More information at the official website here.

To make it even better, I’m going to read metafiction.  Metafiction that I get out of the library.  And once I read it, I’m going to blog about it, right here!

Here’s my reading list, although the order may change, depending on availability of individual titles.  I also can’t guarantee I’ll get through all of these during the Read-a-Thon as some of them are pretty lengthy, but I am sure going to try!

• Don Quixote* by Cervantes (in English this time!)
• House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
• The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane
• Timequake* by Kurt Vonnegut (abridged audio book)**
• Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (comic book)

If you like my blog, if you like me, if you like metafiction, if you like books and/or if you like libraries, please consider sponsoring me, or supporting this effort by reading my Read-a-Thon related entries (they will be tagged with clpreadathon11) and commenting on them.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is one of the oldest public library system in the United States, but its facing some major financial issues.  We have to make sure our state government knows how much the library means to us and how it important it is to our community — and that is only one of the reasons I’m participating in the Read-a-Thon and blogging about the books I read.  CLP is working on a major initiative to find a sustainable source of funding, and public support is one branch of that.

I, for one, am proud to support and use my library! (And so are the 2.6 million other people who visited the library in 2008.)

If you’d like to donate, please leave a comment or send an email to narrativeintheblog@gmail.com.  I can’t take electronic submissions, so at the end of February I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check (made out to the library, of course!).

I’ve done the math for you already:

• $.10 x 50 hrs. = $5
• $.25 x 50 hrs. = $12.50
• $.50 x 50 hrs. = $25
• $1.00 x 50 hrs. = $50
• $2.00 x 50 hrs. = $100

Between a few friends and my family, I’ve already got three pledges for a total of $80 (assuming I meet my 50 hour goal).  Not a bad start!  If you’d rather make a one-time donation, you can do that, too.  You can also set a donation limit if you’re making an hourly pledge (so if you would like to pledge $1/hour but can only donate up to $50, you can set your limit at $50).

*I own these two, so I won’t be getting them out of the library. The other three will be library books.

**I hate abridged books, I really do.  I’m making an exception on this one because it was FREE and it’s getting pretty hard to find audio books on TAPE.  And listening to audio books on tape in my old school (read: lame) car is the only way I stay sane while delivering newspapers as part of my duty as assistant editor of The Northside Chronicle.

An end, a beginning

Happy New Year, everyone!

 

Kelly chillin' with Don Quixote in Alcala de Henares, Spain. (Photo by Kelly Thomas, 2007)

The Narrative in the Blog has now been around for a year.  I’ve had a lot of fun writing about metafiction (and other things) and reading all your comments.  Our daily views have increased, and I started a Facebook discussion group.  We’d love to hear your opinion, so head on over and talk about your favorite fiction, meta or otherwise!

 

I’ve spent the past year finding my voice and figuring out exactly what I want this blog to be and the niche I think it fills: in essence, a blog about stories, the way we tell them and why they are so important to us.  I, of course, believe self-aware fiction is a huge part of that “story dialogue,” and that’s why NitB started out as a metafiction only blog.  Soon after I began, though, I found myself wanting to write about other, non-meta books that told stories in innovative, important ways.  At first I think I struggled to try to make those stories/books/structures metafictional in my head to justify writing about them, and some of my early posts reflect that.

Now, I’ve expanded the scope of this blog to allow me the freedom to talk about books like The Woman Warrior that aren’t metafictional but that tell us something about the art of storytelling.  I am not going to come out and say I was wrong about certain things I said in previous posts.  Allow me a moment of hubris in thinking that the arguments I made were valid, if a bit of stretch.

I hope 2011 proves to be the year this blog truly reaches maturity and becomes a destination for not only original experimental fiction (if you’ve got something, send it to narrativeintheblog[at]gmail[dot]com) but the best articles on storytelling, structure, and of course, metafiction.  Most of all though, I hope I continue to make you think.  To those ends, I have a few resolutions for Narrative in the Blog’s second year:

1. Post every Monday as part of WordPress’s Post A Day 2011 challenge (I’ll be posting once a week, and tagging my posts with “postaweek2011″).
2. Post fiction once per month.
3. Interview at least five authors.
4. Bring you the absolute best commentary on metafiction and the art of storytelling.

I know I’ve got a lot of work to do to make this little corner of the internet a great place for meta-lovers, but I’m sure I can get there with your help!  As always, feel free to leave comments with your suggestions, and here’s to a great 2011!

P.S. You’ll also see that I’ve slightly adjusted post categories to better reflect the wider scope of the “new” NitB and adjusted the sidebar a little bit to make it easier for you all to find what you’re looking for.

Sadly…

…I won’t be posting any new commentary this week.  I’ve been busy working on my metafictional travel memoir, so this week I didn’t have time to devote to blogging.  In the meantime, check out the Facebook group!

See you next week!

Ch-ch-changes

(This was supposed to have been posted 20 days ago, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t, but…here it is now.)

Now that I’ve been posting on The Narrative in the Blog fairly regularly for about 4 months, it’s time for a few adjustments.  I realize that I COULD continue posting every week during these adjustments, but I’d prefer to focus on bringing you a better blog design, a better “Narrative in the Blog” feel and more varied content while I’m away.

This is what you can expect when I come back in June (or July–I really want to come back in June, but I am getting married that month, so we’ll see how stressed I am over the wedding):

• More content! (Meta-everything, plus musings on structure, genre-bending/genre-blending and writing–more on this when I come back.)
• A new banner that’s actually relevant to the blog (and perhaps an upgrade in style/design/cool buttons so that you can share my posts on your favorite social media devices).
• A cool logo related to said new banner!
• Uninterrupted service!  (I will be furiously writing blog posts so that I have enough for three months of posting!)
• Real, actual goals for this blog.

Eventually, I would like to take submissions of flash fiction or short stories that can be broken into 500 to 1000 word chunks.  Of course I can’t offer payment, but I hope people will come to think of this blog as a place where they can experiment with genre, meta and structure and get feedback (or critique) from other meta/genre/structure enthusiasts.

Hang in there, fellow meta-lovers, your weekly dose of meta goodness will be back soon.  See you on the other side!

A status update, and more on the truth/reality debate

Yesterday, for Memorial Day, Publishing Perspectives ran an article by novelist/psychologist Shira Nayman on remembering and how it differs for those who fight war and for those for whom war is fought.  PP usually runs a discussion post along with features, and this one addresses whether or not a novel can be truer than a memoir because of the peculiar way in which memory works–something I’ve talking about here before, especially in my post on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (a book that touches on some of the same themes Nayman does in her post).  So, I recommend you check it out and comment, or discuss it on Twitter with hashtag #ppdiscuss!  Read the article here, and view the discussion here.

We are still technically on hiatus here, and unfortunately probably will be until July because I have to plan a wedding, and then have a wedding.  I am making fairly good progress on new articles, though I’m waiting on the new banner/logo.  Ruby and the Moon Episode 4 should also be up sometime this week, Goddess willing!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day, and Happy June!

The road to hell…

Although I had every intention of posting Friday and today, life intervened (in a good way–I had an interview for a fellowship at Chatham University for its MFA program, and a good friend is home on military leave).  I hope to have some new commentary next Monday, and hopefully the new episode of Ruby and the Moon tomorrow.  I’ve been having trouble figuring out my writing schedule and what time is the best to write and post, so I apologize for the somewhat haphazard nature of my posting the past few months.

The argument for fiction that knows it’s fiction

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes fiction is truer than truth.  And sometimes, in order to tell a story the right way, you need to let the story know it’s a story.

Metafiction allows the reader to pull back the curtain on the author and see the nuts and bolts of the story laid bare.  And there are times that seeing how the fiction works makes it all the more true, such as in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

O’Brien inserts himself into the story as a character, and proceeds to continually remind the reader that none of this happened, but all of it is true.  He creates tension between Author-O’Brien, who wrote a book as a Vietnam War Vet, and Character-O’Brien, who is trying to write a book about being a Vietnam War Vet.

Seeing Character-O’Brien struggle to tell a coherent story—seeing how the story is put together and taken apart—makes the book all the more powerful.  It forces us to see events from several different perspectives, and it forces us to think about the difference between truth, reality and fiction.  And then it asks us to decide what is more important: truth or reality?

In Margaret Atwood’s short story “Happy Endings,” she tells several versions of a story about Mary and John.  The structure draws attention to the way writers write short stories and the way readers read them.  She starts off with scenario A, then moves on to scenario B, then C, etc.  We know next to nothing about this couple, only that Atwood can’t seem to find the right ending to fit their story.  At the end, she simply states:

“So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.

“That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

“Now try How and Why.”

This story forces us to look at structure, plot and motivation.  Here we have a plot in front of us, but we find it’s actually not very interesting.  So we learn—we literally see in front of us—that without the “how” and “why” the story is meaningless.  Not only that, but it asks us why we read.

So why do we read?

We read to be entertained, to learn more about the world around us, to relax.  But more than that, we read to learn more about ourselves—even if we don’t realize that is what we are doing.  And when we read fiction that knows it’s fiction, we not only are forced to think more deeply about the text itself, but about ourselves as readers.