Maria Anderson

New Website

2011-10-03T20:25:00.001-07:00

New website! Check it out at mariaanderson.net!

Two, actually. The other is battheory.com.

Agh. Apartment Hunting in Portland.

2011-07-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

on novels

2011-07-21T14:16:00.001-07:00

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

2011-06-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

William Wei

"But the thing about a dark truth is it is indistinguishable from doubt. And so—since I couldn’t just go home—I kept approaching the dark area. Not by anything I said, but by what I did, and by watching how she reacted. "

such simple prose

German Expressionism Influences

2011-06-01T04:04:00.001-07:00

-Thomas Theodor Heine

"Unfettered by bourgeois norms, Simplicissimus attacked the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of German society, thereby opening new possibilities for later artists."
-MoMA

Max Klinger, for example, played a crucial role by emphasizing the suitability of black-and-white printmaking for exploring the darker side of life and artistic imagination.

Amitav Ghosh - Guernica

2011-05-31T14:42:00.001-07:00

cocoon my friend Ashley Zelinksie made last year....I want to make some sort of swing in my yard when i get back from epic road trip and high school reunion to montana.

Guernica interview with AMITAV GHOSH

-anthropology is useful for writing

-he calls Updike "pathetic" and a racist (when talking about his novel Terrorist ...an affront to my sensibilities as a writer

on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude:

"When you’re living in this very tiny place, [with] a thousand people or something, your temptation is to think of it as being outside the flow of history. In reading Marquez you begin to think of all the ways in which the whole world is visible in the microcosm of this one small place, like Marquez’s Macondo."

on VS Naipal:
"His representations of India, his representations of Islam. I think very often they’re just mistaken. They’re just in fact a sort of perverse kind of autobiography rather than representations of what he sees. But the thing that I respect about Naipaul is that he was struggling with something. He was struggling with something that he was trying to do truthfully, pushing himself. He was never doing what’s comfortable, or what’s easy. He was always pushing himself."

Thinking of a summer reading list......

starting with Run, Rabbit, Run by Updike

take-away tactic for my writing:
listening to other people more, open up my experience of listening to hear other people in new ways

Guernica Updike Review

2011-05-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Great interview with Updike from Guernica on how art can influence writing and vice versa, and on borrowing moments or angles or perspectives from art in different mediums to create something new.

"John Updike: Yes, often. I think what Eliot said was bad poets, or maybe weak poets imitate, strong poets steal.
Lila Azam Zanganeh: Yes, good poets steal.

John Updike: Yeah, you’re always looking for something. You know, this image I mentioned. There’s an image in one of the first Nabokovs I read, was the pencil sharpener, which said “Ticonderoga, Ticonderoga.” Ticonderoga being the brand of a pencil. But to listen to what a pencil sharpener is saying was a kind of image you would love to have created yourself. I don’t think I would steal that, it’s so special. But I have stolen images, I think, in the course of my work, when I thought nobody would notice. Sure. At first, I think trying to form an approach to writing you look for a model. And I named four or five that meant a lot to me at a formative point in my life. But after you’re formed, then basically you kind of read for things so admirable that you wish you had done them and you’re not above maybe stealing them, if you can find a good place to hide them."

Guernica Magazine

I've been writing a lot lately by doing so very slowly.

"Lila Azam Zanganeh: Are you a slow writer?

John Updike: .." I’m always interested in how other writers do it, what their quota is, if they have a quota, what their hours are. John O’Hara, a writer I admire, worked at night—he worked from midnight till one... I try to do about a thousand words a day. It depends on what you’re writing, of course. In the beginning of a novel, where I am now, you go very slowly because you’re trying to feel your way into the heart of the thing, and also you’re naming characters and trying to create incidents that will resonate through the length of the book."

Paris Review - Five Poems, Chris Forhan

2011-05-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

Paris Review - Five Poems, Chris Forhan

Paris Review - You Leave Them, Mona Simpson

2011-05-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

Paris Review - You Leave Them, Mona Simpson

The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand; that each act be ordered, that good and evil be decided arbitrarily, thus clearly.
-Albert Camus

Updates: Graphic Novels Accompanying Stories

2011-05-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

New work coming out this month in:

-Anemone Sidecar, an international literary online journal of avant garde, progressive poetry and shorter prose.

My professor and department head here at Brown, the illustrious and kind Brian Evenson, is featured in Chapter 12. His piece, The Story, appears alongside The Graphic Interpretation by Caitlin Skaalruud.

Check it out here.

I like the idea of having someone reinterpret a story you wrote in another medium. If any artists want to collaborate, shoot me an email at maria_anderson@brown.edu ....

&

-the Prism Review, which publishes contemporary poetry and fiction from both national and international authors as well as interviews and reviews with emerging contemporary authors — in the last two issues, they've interviewed poets Josh Kryah and Craig Santos Perez and fiction writers Lucy Corin and Josh Emmons.

In the future I'll have reviews of short stories I read from a variety of publications, mainly fiction, as well as links to contemporary artists and authors.

2011-05-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Wrote on a whale today

2011-04-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

“Strawberry,” the girl said again, insistently.
“Milk,” he replied.
“Now Mommy.”
“Cow.”
“Hamburger,” Violet said. To Jake, “Hamburger comes from cows. People kill the cows and then they eat them. They made me eat cows but I didn’t know what it was,” she said sadly. “I didn’t know.”
“Please don’t start again, Violet,” her mother said. “No one meant to taint you. No one knew how you’d feel about it.” To Jake, “Her nanny doesn’t know how to talk to sensitive children.”
“I ate cows,” the little girl persisted gravely.

Paris Review - Virgin, April Ayers Lawson

The ending of this story is tight and beautiful and impeccably constructed.
April Ayers Lawson won the Paris Review's Plimpton prize, which Ann Beattie will present to her at the spring revel this Tuesday.

2010-12-26T13:20:00.001-08:00

2010-12-03T17:31:00.003-08:00

In this week:

deer shedding horns (an underrated phenomenon I think):

a drop in hormones causes the base of the antlers to soften, and then they drop off

Lorrie Peterson

Hands:

Jesse Ball:

Colombia- take three

2010-04-09T12:57:00.000-07:00

Hello World

2010-03-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

Life is silly sometimes.

blither blather, love, me

2009-11-29T20:09:00.001-08:00

Through the ozone layer of Kazakhstan I look at the dirt mobbed masses
crabbling together their faces. They’re searching, searching bleary-bad, and trying to care in unnatural ways. Big old fried chicken buckets rimmed in golden grease trick bungled old mothers into obesity. Every man carries his sad eyes around in his left hand.

Down on the block a week ago old Jim is standing on his soapbox and swinging his arms in howling arcs that trail hot white light and birds fly in and out of the doors behind his ears.

We held ourselves into pockets, and escaped from every breath, and when I turned to you to say something I forgot who you were and why you were next to me, and then I forgot what I was going to say in the first place. I let you put your arm around me for a little while but then walked out into the blue streetlit corridor between the boozing cars and drunk-lined stink alleys and cardboard houses. You had this hurt expression on your face and rolled your eyes around in your hand like two Chinese Baoding stress balls.

Old Jim screams, the earth is mine! Cure me, AIDS! We are fighting fire with fire now, crickets! And the boozing cars pass, hot blue light steaming from potholes and the streets are golden and electric and once in a while people forget who their loved ones are and walk out with no memories into the dirty mob without any conception of what they are losing. Sometimes their mothers or brothers or boyfriends try to remind them, that one lost soul that thinks he can make miracles in another’s mind, but this works about as often as the epic comebacks from longterm comas. Sorry, spud, but these days have mechanical failure at times so just sit back and rub yourself against the ride until the sore spots turn tricks for flowers and the dust just chatters against your teeth in the moonlight and roll your eyes back across the sidewalk because hey, you’re happy now and happy later and sometime if your forgetting time comes, which it may, just remember that the person whose life you’re leaving is worth it.

2009-11-01T20:17:00.000-08:00

I am writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month. (november)

I am telling as many people as I can so that it will be embarrassing if I do not finish.

Right now I can't decide between two, so I'm working on them both. Writing 5,000 words today did oddly make my paper for anthropology class go by quickly.

I am going to try to be a "blogger."

2009-10-24T17:54:00.000-07:00

My sister had an amazing revelation today. Everyone gets pets at pretty much the same age as a kid, AND THEY ARE ALL DYING RIGHT NOW while we're in college. So many people's childhood pets have died this year. All at once. My cat and dog died, and now my other dog is dying. AAhhh.

2009-06-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

robotmelon.com

new poem up on robotmelon.

Naropa SWP in two weeks.

In an effort to emulate louisa and emily's epic cross country road trip blog, I will perhaps blog more often.

Today I saw a large dead bullsnake while biking.

2008-10-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

clinic home visit in arequipa, peru.
edith and olga sang for us after serving tea on dirty saucers. their father used to be a famous musician and now they live in a shack of old things, a man injected one with a tranquilizer he said was medicine and when she woke up the next day half of their things were stolen, they are content and aging faster than rocks.

death of cactus

2008-08-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

my cactus is turning white and dying i think. it is actually a very difficult plant to care for.

in other news, :

flash fiction i wrote is up on dogzplot

monks

2008-08-24T20:18:00.001-07:00

today i watched a growth of sunflowers burn on the side of the freeway.

2008-08-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

I like this picture because it looks like the wings are not connected to the bird.

What I remember about the Galapagos is that there is a cliff where diseased seals go to wait for death.

one

2008-08-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

Nature will not have us fret and fuss...she says to us, "So hot? My little sir."

- Emerson, from Compensation