Merrill Feitell’s first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction.
Her recent fiction, nonfiction, and text-image essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and McSweeney’s Quarterly.
She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Taos Writers’ Conference, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and she has taught creative writing for over a decade in both graduate and undergraduate programs.
Born and raised in New York City, Merrill lives, writes, and teaches in Los Angeles. (A more complete bio lives here.)
I’ll be teaching at the amazing Todos Santos Writers’ Workshop—and it’s not too late to sign up! Workshops in fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Jan. 27–Feb. 4, 2018. Inspiring, invigorating, and—dare I say it?—magical, this has got to be the best spot on earth for a great week of writing. And it’s the only writers’ conference I know where you can walk down the beach to help release rescued turtle hatchlings after class. http://www.todossantoswritersworkshop.com/2018-program/
I’m super proud to be part of this awesome new book of essays! An astounding roster of writers offers killer insights and resonant anecdotes on the writing process and life. Thank you, Katrina Roberts, for including me!
Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art and Craft of the Writing Life
EDITED BY KATRINA ROBERTS
Borne out of over 15 years curating the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, Katrina Roberts’s Because You Asked is an anthology that brings together anecdotes, approaches, aspirations, confessions, warnings, challenges, passions, foibles, secrets, prompts, craft notes, manifestos-that is, perspectives from writers, their insights and revelations shared often during “Q and A sessions” with young (or simply young-at-heart) writers and readers. A peek inside the writing life, for readers of all sorts!
Come celebrate the opening of 347 S. Clarence this weekend, November 6, 7 & 8.
The space blows my mind; the art takes my breath away; and Saturday night’s readers are so astonishing and innovative, they’re sharing the bill with bands. (And did I mention they’re actually letting me hang art on the walls?)
Readings by Chad Sweeney • Felicia Sullivan • Michelle Bracken • Ruben Ty Rodriguez • Mandy Kahn • Allyson Jeffredo
Readings start 7pm, Saturday Nov. 7th.
This November 2015 show proves that it is possible to find an alternative space and transform it, to gather a community and foment it, to step out of the studio and show work within a white-walled space of holy square footage, and to excite artistic, interdisciplinary, and community cross-pollination.
Last week my friend Matt Hart tagged me for the Next Big Thing self-interview series, in which writers answer the same nine questions about their forthcoming books or works-in-progress. It’s great to have this chance to talk about my work-in-progress and to get to peek into the brains and pending projects of so many great writer friends. Please check back next week to follow the links at the bottom of this post to their Next Big Thing self-interviews!
*****
1. What is the working title of the book?
The book is called Any Minute Now, which seemed innocent enough when I began working on this project—ten years ago. Now, every time I refer to it, it’s yet another cruel joke on the self.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
Like most things I write, this project began as something completely different: a novel about two half sisters jockeying for the affection of their shared father. I wrote a whole draft and threw it out.
I then began writing about a rock band and how its success or failure is hinged on a brother and sister and their respective impulses toward self-sabotage. I got stuck writing the same scene over and over again, which takes place atop the semis pulled up to the loading dock of a cupcake factory. I couldn’t get the scene out of my head—but I couldn’t get it right either. I kept stabbing at it, writing through different character combinations and occupying various points of view. The only fixed elements were:
• The setting—the deserted loading dock of a cupcake factory, after midnight, in winter.
• An inherent sense of menace—danger is nigh!—which kept feeling right no matter what characters were at play.
• It’s winter and the air smells like ho-hos, ding-dongs and snow.
I could not seem to just pick a version and stick with it. I angsted about my project paralysis to the ingenius Matt Hart (poet and friend; see link above), and I believe he said: Why do you have to pick? Why not just write them all and have a whole book that’s one big series of retakes at the same cupcake factory?
I believe I said: Don’t you think it’d be kind of stalled to just have the same scene over and over again?
And he said: Fuck it! I think it’d be awesome.
(Sometimes I think I love the poet people so much because they’re already completely over the idea of being relevant.)
Thus, I began writing a book about a touring rock band by writing variations of the same scene over and over again. I believe this photo narrative best chronicles the process:
1. Befuddled over how to impose a satisfying sense of narrative momentum on a series of repetitive scenes, I started flipping through a 1950s grade school science textbook—and it opened directly to the page with the moon phase diagram. Note the uncanny similarity! I felt like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters with the shaving cream and mashed potatoes and everything.
2. Considering the NEW MOON (the absence of visible moon) as the height of narrative conflict—like a moment of utter anxiety, waiting for the proverbial Other Shoe to drop—I began ascribing emotional relevance to each moon phase. The blue sheet on the left features my Rosetta Stone translation of cycling anxiety.
3. I then began arranging my Cupcake Factory scenes and scraps around this moon phase schematic, trying to make my non-linear narrative into something that would read with a sense of progression and feel like a satisfying *story*.
4. By color-coding the moon phases, I could start dealing with the fact that one can’t actually print a book that you read in a circle. All lined up and color-coded, I could see the pacing problems with the repetition/circularity.
5. Mad thanks to VCCA for 2 stints in their amazing studios which afforded me the wall space to try and figure things out.
6. I filled in some gaps and printed the manuscript on plain white paper. Don’t I look terrified! It’s still not done, but it’s getting there. Any minute now; any minute now…
So in answer to the question, the idea for the book came from Matt Hart, an 8th grade science book, and an anxious obsession with anxiety. Also, my long harbored envy of anyone in a rock band.
3. What genre does your book fall under?
Fiction
4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
To answer this question is to reveal my total ignorance about the movie industry. Basically, I picture the book’s fucked-up sister as a cross between Mortitia Addams and Sandra Bernhard. The rock star brother is like a cross between Gomez Addams and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse.
5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The lead guy in a small town rock band sabotages his rock band’s rise to fame in a skewed act of loyalty to his fucked-up sister.
6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Ha!
I like to say that I’ve been working on the first draft for a decade, but that’s not actually true. I worked on and off for about three years to draft the aforementioned novel about the two half sisters. I threw that out entirely, and this new draft has an entirely different cast and crew, but I kept the title, not merely as an act of self-mockery but because the main issue is the same, characters asking themselves: Will I ever escape my own bad tendencies and be the person I wish to be—wope! I’ve done it again, but any minute now… any minute now.
I guess the answer is that I’ve been working on the rock band draft since about 2004, but life has gotten in the way of writing so, all told, I’ve probably worked on it for about three 6-8 month stretches within those 9 years. When will it be done? Any minute now…
7. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Even though I’m a story writer, I think I started writing a novel because I felt like I had to write a novel. (I might have believed this would somehow save me from financial ruin. Hilarious!)
But since I was going to do it, it became apparent that I had to come up with a way to build a narrative out of fragments. I love the cumulative effect of fragments (for example, in Susan Sontag’s story Project for a Trip to China & David Shield’s essay On Collage). I also spent a lot of time thinking about mechanical physics in terms of narrative. If story is a machine designed to do the work of carrying a reader from beginning to middle to end, then story can work sort of traditionally, like a car—but it can also work like a pogo stick (like the aforementioned Sontag or David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel) or like an aerofoil (like Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine). I was inspired to write a novel that had real momentum and a satisfying sense of dramatic arc and build—but I’ve thought a lot about alternative ways the machine of story can generate page-turning momentum and gain real velocity other than relying on plot.
My favorite story collections often read more like novels, wherein the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried; Junot Diaz’s Drown; Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. I was also wholly inspired by talking to poet friends (Matt Hart, as mentioned above, who gave me permission to completely deviate from any expectations of the novel form) and I had the chance to read an early arrangement of my friend Patrick Phillips’ second poetry collection, Boy, and to make some suggestions about how to arrange the material. That exercise really inspired me to think about the cumulative effects of narrative suggestion and imagery.
8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I have driven x-country 5 times in the past two years with my big dog, and so I have also been making video vignettes to accompany the band’s experiences on tour. I’d love to collaborate with a musician on some kind of song/riff cycle to mimic the cycling scenes and emotions in the book. I don’t know much about digital publishing–but I think this would be great in the e-book version!
9. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Whenever I actually finish it, I hope that someone else will publish my book! So far, excerpts of it have appeared in Sakura Review,Black Clock, and Copper Nickel. I’m grateful to these publications.
My tagged writers for The Next Big Thing are amazing!
Tom Bissell! (Will be linked to this website; link activated next week.)
out of the hijack, but still—so exciting!)
