The Weekly Atticus (11/03/2018)

Prime the Imagination Pump | The Weekly Atticus

November 03, 2018

A recap of the week at Atticus Review, along with some extras.

Dear ,

I’m a nonfiction writer by training, but I’ve been writing a novel for the past two years. Writing fiction has changed my work in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I feel a little freer—it’s fun to make things up—but I’ve struggled with my need to stick with facts even though fiction doesn’t place that requirement on me.  I love the Paris Review, but I can’t afford a subscription, which means that when I read the author interviews or their feature “The Art of Fiction,” I often get to a point when the text fades and the paywall goes up. Lucky for me, when I read Toni Morrison’s interview from the fall 1993 issue, there was no paywall, so I could read the whole thing and glean some writing advice. Well, it actually wasn’t advice. Morrison is one of my favorite authors, so I took what she said as proverb. Morrison said that when she wrote Beloved, her postbellum book about slavery in the United States, she began by doing some research. She looked at photos and drawings of cruel devices and implements. She read personal narratives from freed slaves. And in this way, she began to build the world from which Beloved would emerge. So far, none of this is particularly earth shattering. It’s what you’d expect an author to do when writing a story set in history, but it’s what she said next that gave me pause: after a certain point, she stopped researching. Morrison looked at the documents and felt familiar with slavery and overwhelmed by it. “I wanted it to be truly felt,” she says. “I wanted to translate the historical into the personal.” Given the novel’s historical context, the detail in the narrative, and the specificity of the experience, this really surprised me. I thought Beloved must have been based on arduous and meticulous research, but as I thought about it, I realized it didn’t read that way at all. Even the best historical novels feel laden to me, and I avoid them. They are heavy and, though accurate, can sometimes be pedantic. Beloved, by contrast, is vivid and alive. And then I understood what Morrison had done. She “primed the pump” with her research, then set it aside and let her imagination do the rest. She breathed life into a time and place that’s hard for present-day readers to imagine, and she did so with such insight that Beloved utterly destroys any romanticism the reader might be tempted to feel about the setting and circumstances. But she does it with poetry, not measures and weights. When I began writing my own historical novel, I gave Morrison’s technique a try: I did some initial research, and then I allowed my imagination the freedom to tell the story as it wanted to be told. At first, I was reluctant to let go of my perceived duty to accuracy, but as the novel began to take shape, I let go of that reluctance and, subsequently, let go of my fear that I’d get something wrong. After all, isn’t it story that brings the reader to transformation more so than accuracy? This is something novelists have known for centuries, but to me, it feels like a discovery, and it’s given me a renewed sense of artistic freedom.Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here. Naomi KimbellAssistant Creative Nonfiction Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

Like mixing words, film, and sound? Enter our Videopoem Contest judged by Marie Craven.

First Prize: $300

Deadline to Submit: December 3rd, 2018

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

BOOK REVIEW: FRAGMENTS OF A HUMAN LIFEA Review of JUST LET ME HAVE THIS from Selcouth Station Press by Heather SweeneyReview by AnnaLee Barclay"...a stunning debut collection that will surely put her on the map..."READ ON

FICTION: AN EVICTIONby Craig Bernardini"All this, even though we know that a few hours later, in the dead of night, they’ll arrive, bobbing their heads like draft horses, their blankets left snarled on the stairs."READ ON

POETRY: THE IMMEASURABLE IS MEASURABLEby Alexander Scalfano."...In the body of a per-son:​ ​a color for grass which gets lost,a word for green that only I can see, a hornetflying in elliptical orbits."READ ON

CNF: HE TOLD ME ABOUT EVERYTHING BUT THE RIVERby M. Mullen"Back then I didn’t realize that from Able’s third floor apartment at the Red Brick, in the single room with cowboy wallpaper and dusty sheets, he could look out the window and see the Ohio."READ ON

FILM REVIEW: THE HATE U GIVE IS THE MOVIE BLACK TEENS DESERVEA review of THE HATE U GIVE by director George Tillman Jr Review by Olivia Funderburg @oliviakfun"...based on Angie Thomas’s 2017 best-selling debut novel...probably the most important movie you will see this year..."READ ON

FILM REVIEW: MID90S BRINGS BACK MORE THAN NOSTALGIAA Review of Mid90s from director Jonah HillReview by Emily Moeck "Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s writer-director debut about a kid growing up in Los Angeles skateboard culture, might not help him achieve the elevated household name he deserves, but it sure as hell should."READ ON

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