Joyce Carol Oates

Anyone who was in any of the Fort Dix FCI writing groups with me knows I am a fan of Joyce Carol Oates. I only knew some of her essays in The New York Review of Books before my incarceration. After reading We Were the Mulvaneys, I started reading all I could get into my hands.

In We Were the Mulvaneys, I finally saw an alternative to William Faulkner - how to use one's home territory when there were no great historical events. What to do when the home territory was an Indiana factory town.

Now let me direct you Ms. Oates being interviewed:  15 Famous Authors Ask Joyce Carol Oates Anything. This maybe the most surprising:

STEPHEN KING: What’s the scariest short story you’ve ever read?

OATES: The most truly terrifying reading experience of my life came when I was very young, and it was without a doubt Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass—particularly the final chapter. How bizarre that this ontologically disruptive work of fiction is considered a children’s book. The grotesqueries and scarcely disguised horrors—madness, murderousness, dementia, cannibalism, physical distress—of Lewis’s great work have certainly entered my unconscious, residing in its most remote and impregnable underground cavern, established at a time when I was 8 years old, when the phenomenon of “memory” was new. As an adult, I’ve encountered many unnerving works of literature that linger in the memory and resurface in times of unease or weakness. Odysseus’s visit to the underworld, though obviously fantastic, seems to the reader utterly realistic, plausible, and terrifying in its matter-of-factness. We are led to think, “Yes, the afterlife would be exactly like this: a sort of endless bad dream on the verge of dementia.” Nothing is more terrifying than [Anton] Chekhov’s short story “Ward No. 6,” although Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” is a close second. A third, long story of Chekhov’s unnerved me so much that I stopped reading it and have even forgotten the title. (It’s a little-known story about an elderly man of some distinction in a loveless marriage and surrounded by people for whom he feels little more than contempt; if you ask what is terrifying about this story, it’s the loss of spirit, meaning, clarity, the will to live, and sanity that Chekhov tracks so pitilessly.) The most terrifying works of fiction are likely to be realistic, even domestic, not galvanized by the supernatural, fantastic, or “action.” When I first saw your question, for a moment I thought you were asking what story of mine is the scariest. That would be “Big Momma,” in The Doll-Master [2016], a story so horrific that, had I not written it, I could not have finished reading it.

I got to listen to part of this YouTube interview. Her voice surprised me. Her advice to revise and revise did not surprise.

This discusses her Twitter activity. I have not signed up for Twitter, so check out her feed or not, but it gives the sense she operates on her own frequency. Anyone reading her would not be surprised at that.

And I cannot get podcasts in this halfway house, so I have not been able to check out Podcast #44: Joyce Carol Oates on Inspiration and Obsession.

But this is pure text - Literary icon Joyce Carol Oates offers a glimpse into her inner world:

When asked "Why do you write fiction?" Flannery O'Connor answered, "Because I'm good at it." I wonder if you identify with this response or would you have a more nuanced answer?

"I think Flannery O'Connor would have been really good at Twitter. She has all these wonderful one-liners… and she's not afraid to be funny. I don't think most people who are writers or artists really feel that they're good at it. I feel that most of us are trying and we're sometimes failing and dissatisfied and exasperated…"

"In just one morning I can have a gamut of emotions, from despair and despondency to mild curiosity over where this is going. I think that we all tell stories — our species is a storytelling species. And we love to tell stories, and we love to hear stories. So a writer or artist is someone who takes that impulse a little farther. I think there are many reasons we write or create art. Some of them are conscious and I think many of them are unconscious…"

And she teaches a MasterClass. 

She should have gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you have not read her, you should be doing so ASAP.