Absolute Fiction

The story that appears first in this collection also was written first. Finished in October 1989, it was submitted continually until September 1994 and published in winter 1995. At that time, I already had published one scholarly book, a linguistic study of the vocalic phonology in the East Mercian Old English dialect, which, according to received scholarship, most directly preceded the Middle English Southeast Midlands dialect, which, in turn, most provided the basis for Modern Standard English. That book helped me earn tenure at a state university that, at the time, was positioned to become the only comprehensive metropolitan university in the state. The school’s mission, despite faithful, serious work by a crowd of very intelligent people, most of them highly underpaid, never was sealed. Beginning in 2014, quite the opposite occurred when the school began terminating staff and faculty by the dozen, closing programs and departments, and coercing senior, tenured professors to retire. I was already retired then, against my desires. In retrospect, I can see that I was a test case for the administration, that the thankless shove it gave me out the door provided it with information it could use two years later. Perhaps the administration learned more than I will ever know, because the terminations and associated cutbacks that began in 2014 (with an initial fête de guillotine that drew national attention), all weathered the predictable flurry of litigation and grievances. A year after that assault, some departments actually were forced to decide between supporting the administration’s attempts to rid the school of senior faculty and never again searching (for the foreseeable future) for a single new tenure-track faculty member.

In 1989, though, as I worked on “The Shrinking Middle Class,” I was cruising on a well-considered career trajectory. The propulsion for writing for publication was defined by (1) continuing Old and Middle English language study and (2) exploring the opportunity to write fiction in a genre that had appealed to me from the time of my earliest memory, horror and fantasy. During and before graduate school, I had invested much time and energy in writing what I hoped would be regarded as serious literature, work that would stand up against that of the best dead authors from western civilization. I doubted I would be the next Hawthorne or Austen or Flaubert, but I imagined high horizons. That was before writing scads of scholarly essays (of the studenty type) for my course work, a Ph.D. dissertation, new scads of papers for scholarly conferences, after landing a tenure-track position, and the published study of Standard English. After the cumulative effect of that intellectual work settled, the bright lights of writing good fiction dwindled to specks. But I knew that I could not stop writing fiction, so I devised a new plan. If I had accomplished a Ph.D., earned a job, and secured tenure, I reasoned, forging a reputation in genre fiction should fall well within my skill sets. I could research the horror and fantasy genre markets, read a thousand or so stories published there, and establish myself with dispatch as a category writer who counted, a writer courted by editors and agents, even screenwriters and producers.

To cut my teeth, I wrote a novel belonging to a market narrower than a niche, “Lovecraftiana,” fiction that continues and expands the “mythology” or “mythos” created in stories and short novels written by one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the sorriest, closetedest son of a bitch ever exploited by the vicious editorial practices of the very early pulp markets, principally the original avatar of Weird Tales. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft’s work is comparable to The X-Files in one key respect. Much of his fiction contributes nothing to his “Cthulhu” mythos; some stories contain tangential material related to the mythology; and still fewer works are entirely concerned with the overarching or meta narrative telling of how human life was created by extraterrestrial scientists visiting (for sinister purposes) planet Earth. Many of Lovecraft’s fellow contributors to Weird Tales—Robert Bloch (author of Psycho) and Robert E. Howard (creator of the iconic Conan the Barbarian), for example—eventually flourished beyond (or to the farthest limits of) their respective dark genres. Among Bloch’s earliest writings, in fact, lie the foundations of Lovecraftiana. But Lovecraft always already failed from his earliest days, dying prematurely as diseased and alone as a tubercular bohemian in a roach-infested garret. For many winter months, then, I toggled between rongorongo, a novel that concludes in the Antarctic city discovered by explorers in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, the home base for the creatures who created humankind, and a white-knuckled, Derridean, grammatological analysis of allegedly incorrect rhymes in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry. For Chaucer’s bad rhymes, I spent long hours at a library table covered with notes and lists written on graph paper and reference works in English, French, and German; for Lovecraft’s aliens, I hunched over a computer already primitive when my employer assigned it to me, alone in the dark in my cheap apartment, making something out of nothing—truly creating—while trying to be faithful to Lovecraft’s fiction legacy.

Unfortunately, my naïveté about legacies seduced me into imitating, very guardedly, Lovecraft’s idiom, his stylized language. Even a short sentence taken almost at random from his prose affords a good window on his “overwritten” style. This one comes from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” one of his most famous tales: “Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly.” Many people, especially regular readers of certain genres, will find nothing objectionable in this sentence. More power to them. By modern literary tastes, however, it sends up at least five or six flares: zero action verbs, two adverbs (of the “-ly” type), two infinitive verbs (“to mount” and “to elapse”), and a strong presence of Latin-derived words (“eternities,” “spectacularly,” “nauseous”). “Fishy” is the sole word delivering an Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic punch, but even that effect probably is weakened by the following “odour,” in the British form always favored by Lovecraft, rather than native English “smell,” “stench,” or “stink.” But I had learned a thing or two from my research into writing and selling horror fiction. I exercised restraint with adjectives, adverbs, polysyllabic words, yeasty nominalizations, repetitive evocations of mood, and other Lovecraftian weaknesses. Still, a friend who read rongorongo’s climax, in which Lovecraft’s giant cone-shaped aliens emerge from hidden passages, called it an “adjective explosion.” As I worked on rongorongo, though, I believed that my prose was cleaner and meaner by a wide enough margin to make it cognate with Lovecraft’s but to spare it the disfavor accorded Lovecraft by both his contemporaries and later critics. I never thought my contribution to Lovecraftiana might meet a worse fate than Lovecraft’s Mountains. After being rejected by literary agents and genre mags (which all despise serializations, unless the author already is famous), my novel disappeared somewhere along its electronic path through new computers and updated platforms. Lovecraft’s novel, after being rejected with no comments by Weird Tales, the fanzine that Lovecraft had helped bring to prominence, was published by Astounding Stories, a lesser mag but one that published serialized pieces. The printed version, to Lovecraft’s dismay, was so butchered by an editor that long sections make no sense. For a price laughable even by the standards of his day, his crowning work was an atrocity. (Having read the entire novel in its original published form at Brown University’s John Hay Library, I can support Lovecaft’s assessment with some authority.) This was not Lovecraft’s final publication during his lifetime, but, even though his biographers and friends’ memoirs don’t say this, the debacle broke him utterly.

Even before “Shrinking” was finished (and the article on Chaucer’s rhymes), my resolve to remain in a category was undergoing change. By good chance, I became friends with an established writer who taught creative writing courses as an instructor at my school. For a long time, she read and critiqued my writing with unflagging generosity. Not only was (and is) she a gifted writer herself, she also knew the business of writing more thoroughly, from a perspective tinged with Marxist philosophy, than anyone I knew then or now. Every lunch meeting we shared to discuss my work (and sometimes hers), left me smarter, less impoverished of momentum by my increasing wealth of rejections, and more conflicted about my aversion to attempting any fiction that fell completely outside my selected genre. My mentor’s excellent fiction can fairly be called minimalist, I believe, even though that label, today, often is not taken kindly. In my writing, she slashed her share of adjectives, adverbs, and other structural features usually viewed askance by minimalist writers. Beyond such mechanical editing, however, she also spoke of setting up oblique psychological tracks between characters, of expressing states of mind through diverting attention to inanimate surroundings. But I recall vividly that she once said, almost in passing, “I enjoy reading your stuff because it has plots.” That comment, delivered with such innocence, gave me an idea almost banal but with staying power. I began thinking more directly and clearly about creating plots without all the words that had become my average. Total word count per story, of course, is not what I mean. That seemed secondary. It was words per sentence, per independent clause, per dependent clause, per noun phrase.

Through this friend’s advice and her position, I reluctantly began participating in various writerly public functions, including my first public readings at local gatherings. One year, she asked me to run a workshop in a summer writers conference that had a long history, some prestige, and always a thin cash flow. She recently had taken command of the conference, upgrading it in all respects and ultimately saving it from economic failure. The year before she asked me for a workshop, the conference had been incorporated into a “restricted residence” (originally called “low-residency”) M.F.A. program. Today, this method for delivering instruction has proliferated beyond everyone’s expectations, even those of the most opportunistic administrators who galloped abreast with the horses dragging education into “distance learning” for everything from certificates in pressure washing to doctorates in genetic engineering. The democratizing appeal of distance education, however, was far from jaded when my former workplace approved my friend and colleague’s proposal for the restricted residence writing degree It would give students the opportunity to earn an advanced degree in writing (fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction) without being tied to a particular location for the length of a traditional semester. Instead, students would work with faculty remotely—at that time, primarily through hardcopy snail mail. The curriculum also required students and faculty to congregate, on-site, for one or two short periods each year, usually during the summer or the break between the university’s fall and spring semesters.

As the conference approached, my misgivings about talking to the students became more serious and varied. One misgiving amounted to performance anxiety. My workshop would constitute one three-hour meeting of a course taught by a major contemporary writer. I had never met the writer or the students. The second reason for self-doubt was that the conference, now operating with some serious money, featured highly prominent writers with national reputations; for the first time, editors of major publishing houses would give plenary addresses. Publishers of top-flight small literary magazines and desperately-sought literary agents would form the texture of cocktail parties, dinners, and late-night confabs. Third, my colleague had asked me to speak about making blind submissions to markets of different types—and about how to grow from prolific rejection. She knew I had applied to my non-career Mae West’s advice that a girl should keep a diary because someday it can keep her. My detailed record of rejections, studded with witticisms, profanities, and whining, accounted for the terminus of 97% or so of my submissions, so she rightly assumed that I had materials on which to draw. I doubt she knew, though, that I didn’t see my wealth of rejection as contributing to any kind of personal growth—unless sheer doggedness is growth. But I masked my disappointment with the topic. I prepared a lengthy visual aide that was both amusing and informative; I wrote remarks for the session’s opening, middle, and end; I even calculated such figures as average reading times at magazines of different types, percentage of submissions that died because magazines folded or changed formats, and how much time it took to rush each new piece into the mail.

The students were enthusiastic and appreciative. They asked intelligent questions and I responded with an alacrity not always achieved in my teacher persona. They actually seemed grateful for receiving a hardcopy pack of significant rejection letters and excerpts from my journal, as if they were being given free headstarts. Interactive learning at its best—except, perhaps, that the class’s genuine instructor, the well-published writer, seemed increasingly disengaged, almost lost, as the hours passed. I tried to draw her into the productive exchanges, unsuccessfully at first; but she livened up near the end, made insightful connections between her experiences and mine, and expressed sincere appreciation for the efforts I had put into the workshop, gratis. Nevertheless, her interval of self-exclusion cast a shadow over my sense of fulfillment until the day ended and I could concentrate. It was not a matter of condescension or elitism, I realized; not a matter of doubting the educational value of what she watched. Rather, the heavy machinery of submission and rejection itself was less known to her than that of suspension bridges was to me. It wasn’t that she lived in enviable oblivion concerning such genres as horror and fantasy and romance; it was that she had never come into such close contact with someone who wrote in those trenches. In retrospect, I felt the way H. P. Lovecraft might have felt if he had found himself at a roundtable with modernists like T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, people whose professional lives, writing styles, and critical approbation profoundly lacked common ground with his own desperate career. A few chance incidents that occurred at later conference events enhanced my H. P.-otherness. In one, a highly lauded editor of a top publishing house mentioned that his company, through someone’s poor decision, had “lost” the writer for whose class I spoke. The comment made me think, with skulking envy, of legendary associations between agents and writers and of how distant from that world I would always remain. At a miser on another day, I overheard someone say that all but one of the chapters in the writer’s most recent novel had first hit print as stories. When I bought a copy of the novel, I discovered not only that this was true, but that every mag that had published a chapter belonged to the highest echelon of the small press world. After the summer ended and I read the novel, which I found excellent (within well-defined parameters), I was struck by having seen at such close quarters what I unfairly branded “the painless method of writing a novel.”

From that point forward, my goals in writing changed every time I started a new story. Becoming an established genre writer now seemed even more impossible than becoming an artistic success had seemed back in the days of rongorongo and “The Shrinking Middle Class.” I continued to value plot but used fewer words to create one. I placed a couple stories at genuine literary mags but also a couple with genre zines. Without being aware of what I was doing, I zigzagged through genre fiction, modified minimalism, and even the type of narrative that recently has been called “hysterical” and “encyclopedic” realism. My fiction output, which had no impact on my status with my employer, sneered at the best advice ever given me for racking up sufficient scholarly publications to earn promotion to (“full”) professor: “Identify what you do best, then do it over and over again.” So I continued linguistic studies that drew on (and demanded) my graduate school background, but in fiction I freestyled, telling myself that writing endlessly in one mode is gutless. Slowly, though, my fiction work tapered off in quantity while my time spent on academic projects and innovative teaching increased. Entries in my fiction submission/rejection journal became infrequent until a day arrived when not a single story was under submission, not to High Plains Literary Review, not to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, not to junky fanzines with lurid names I don’t recall.

Not too long after that, the job problems began that the first paragraph of this essay mentions. Sensing a coming storm, I was compelled to put fiction aside altogether. During my years as a tenured associate professor, I had quipped a few times that I wondered how many lives, after graduate school and four, five, or six years as an assistant professor, had been ruined by not being refused tenure. The question might be Wildesque, but I learned quickly that having one’s research projects, professorial identity, intellectual stimulation—one’s entire life, in short—ripped away by coldblooded bureaucrats and a couple treacherous colleagues came close to being lethal. When I was capable again of mustering interest in anything, however, I found time on my hands and I conceived the idea that culminated in this fiction collection. Liberated from the urgency of learning Native American languages for a course on endangered languages, stripped of the need to bone up on Jewish Christianity for a course on the antique Roman Catholic church, peeled away from keeping current on deconstruction, cultural studies, and pedagogy, I could review all the fiction I had written, published and unpublished, to make decisions about what to keep and what to purge from my computer and files. Not long after that, I left my home state and city for the last time, into an uncertain future. As I drove away, I felt, in H. G. Wells’s words, “a vast implacable condemnation,” but I took with me a new starting point in fiction.

When I first got started, my method was simple: pick the best apples in the barrel, polish them up, and send them to market. As I proceeded, though, I realized that the stories presented an unusual opportunity. I could make public a body of work representing a writer’s passages through key fiction categories read by large audiences and different modes favored by serious critics. For several years, overlapping almost exactly with the period that began with my forced retirement and continuing to the present, vigorous debates have developed concerning (1) the respectability (or lack of it) accorded genre writing by higher education, the publishing industry, and the general reading public and (2) the decline in critical support experienced by minimalism, which derives from the styles developed by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Chuck Palahniuk, and the proportional ascent of fiction sometimes called “maximalism”: “big novels,” those with ties to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, novels that are lengthy, heavily plotted, unafraid of digressing on specialized fields of knowledge. In regard to (1), you need spend only a few hours on the internet to gain a good sense of how category writers are agitating against academia’s entrenched ways of teaching creative writing and the literary establishment’s attitudes toward genre works. Respected and expensive M. F. A. programs, which all owe their existence to the academy’s embrace, decades ago, of minimalist fiction and poetry, are being rejected by writers who want the programs to take genres and marketing seriously. These dissidents know well that, despite the rise of “maximalist” fiction and despite the published descriptions of writing programs that make them sound welcoming to writers of all types, that minimalism remains the coin of the realm. Participating in the protest from a different angle, a world-famous science fiction writer recently disparaged, quite bitterly, the exclusion of genre works from the lists of novels nominated for major awards. Protests of this type have occurred before, but they have exerted no cumulative effect. Regarding (2), the type of non-minimalist fiction represented by Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith currently draws more attention and controversy (and probably awards) than any other type, especially in the wake of Wallace’s suicide and the widely-acclaimed film based on reporter David Lipsky’s interviews with Wallace. The polarism between minimalist and maximalist fiction was strengthened in 2000 by literary critic James Wood, who expressed his exasperation with novels that become curio cabinets for knowledge of obscure subjects, that deploy a broad cast of characters on erratic and elliptical plot trajectories, that flaunt defiantly improbable circumstances and events, that even contain (like Wallace’s Infinite Jest) hundreds of footnotes. But Wallace’s name, of course, along with those of others currently writing encyclopedic fiction, is not nearly as widely known as those of mega-sellers like Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and Nicholas Sparks. (Pynchon may be known more widely for his animated guest appearances on The Simpsons, wearing a paper bag over his head, than for his most brilliant fiction.) This adds fuel to the genre writers’ campaigns for fair treatment, as does the long-known fact that major publishing houses amass their profits far more from genre work than from literature that wins literary awards.

Against this background, then, appears this fiction collection. When I first dedicated my energy and time to this enterprise, I knew that the final product would be something of an oddity. Seeing writers cross from genre to literary fiction or vice-versa may hardly be precedent-setting, just as seeing genre pieces with literary overlays and the reverse is not new. Among the genres, mysteries and thrillers like those of James M. Cain (Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity) have an affinity with minimalism, while novels and stories belonging to the mainstream frequently lay claim to genre markets. Works by Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Gore Vidal especially come to mind. This collection, however, provides a broader, yet more compact canvas for viewing modulations, changes, transgressions than any single collection I can recall. Moreover, Absolute Fiction, without any intention on my part, constitutes a teachable text, one from which emerging writers, those going it alone and those pursing academic degrees, can profit. All of the stories herein probably will appeal to very few readers. Those who find “Expect Delays,” “A Spike in the Head,” and “Della’s Motivation” agreeable to their genre palates may well find “The Stillness Caused By Trains,” “An Octopus Vase,” and “A Map for a Fictional World” too constrained or controlled or cloaked. But another way of looking at such a compilation is that a healthy majority of readers, beyond finding experiencing several pieces that interest or provoke them or that earn grudging respect, will find something that helps them grow as writers or readers.