Saturday Working Through Stuff

Another day without much to talk about. I went to the convenience store twice. Nowhere else, though. I took one short nap. Why am I still so easily tired? Why is the still the same amount of discomfort? Small worries creep in.

Rejections:

8/7 

Thank you for submitting to Exposition Review Vol. XI: “PARA/SOCIAL.”  This year we received a record-breaking number of submissions, and we appreciate your patience while we gave each piece the time and attention it deserved.  We truly value your submission and consider it an honor to read your work. Unfortunately, “Agnes” is not a fit for this issue.  Since you indicated that you would like feedback on your submission, we will send comments from our editorial board along shortly.

We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors and hope you will submit again!

Take care,

Exposition Review

Submissions 

8/8

Cream City Review, Gordon Square Review, Southern Humanities Review: After Making Landfall 

Thriller Magazine Press - One Dead Blonde.

Readings

Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Indiana Authors Awards), a review (and one that has piqued my interest).

 While never rising to the comic heights of Vonnegut, and without his more overtly obvious moral lessons, these stories nonetheless have elements that will be recognizable to his fans, and the straight faced delivery of preposterous circumstances Moody presents will certainly be appreciated by those who enjoy Charlie Kaufman or even Terry Gilliam. Like Kaufman, Moody can verge on the allegorical and the surreal, and like Gilliam, the visuals are often of our reality but with the volume turned up on some of their more unsettling attributes.    

 Across all five pieces included in the collection, Moody’s writing is serviceable. He never quite swings for the fences when it comes to the prose, but that’s probably a good thing in that he is already stretching the imagination with the content he presents and doesn’t distract from the heart of his stories with cumbersome or showy sentences. Readers who need mimetic recreations of real life in order to find themselves drawn into a story might struggle here, but those who can set aside their nagging questions about how such things could be (or readers who prefer to!) will enjoy playing in the melancholy, symbol laden worlds of Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.  

The Lie the Character Believes: A Deeper Look at Consciousness and Character Arc (Helping Writers Become Authors ).

Being perverse, some of my characters do not transform positively.

But as I’ve come to recognize over the years, the Lie is not just a Lie. I’ve come to emphasize it specifically as a comparatively limited belief that exists in a continuum with a comparatively expansive Truth. Because here’s the thing: at the beginning of a story, the Lie starts out as the character’s Truth. To some degree, it was a Truth that worked for them up until the story begins. 

***

And so, I would posit that the Lie a character overcomes really isn’t so much a wrong belief they must correct (or at least not always and not at its deeper levels). Rather, it is a fissure in consciousness—a place where the conscious self is inhabiting an ego identity that has created separation between its surface-level understanding and the deeper Truth of our being. 

I have been more interested in people making choices based on incomplete or incorrect information and then having to live with those choices. Well, that has been the subject of some of my short stories.

 This may be why my stories keep getting rejected, and I should shift from wrong assumptions to lies.

First, we have the Lie as simply a mistaken belief or even an outright deception that must be seen through.

Second, we have the Lie as a point within a continuum from a comparatively limited perspective to a comparatively expanded perspective. Both “Lie” and “Truth” are qualified here; they are not black and white, good or bad. They are just reference points for where characters may find themselves along the continuum at any point.

And third, we have this deeper understanding of the Lie as an ego identity or a comparatively limited consciousness. It is ultimately a separation between the conscious self and the unconscious self. When we zoom back from the minutiae of any specific character arc to look at the movement of human growth, what we are really tracking is the larger expansion that becomes possible as we release the limitations of our ego identities, allowing us to embrace our capacity for deep alignment with the truths of life.

Or stick to my guns and live with characters who do not transform into better selves but live and die by their choices. After all, Ahab does not transform into anything apart from fish food.

Other lies addressed in the article: The Lie the Character Believes as Separation and The Lie the Character Believes as Social Reality. Some additional notes for me, if not for you.

Although I dearly love the idea of character arc as being about transformation, I think this expanded model reveals it might be more accurate to instead think of character arc as being about coming into alignment. It’s less about a change to the character’s fundamental self and more about the removal of the false self. It’s not the addition of a new perspective, but the stripping away of what isn’t true so the character may see more clearly.  

 ***

Ego identities are not simply personal. They are reinforced through collective social consensus. Society itself can be seen as an ego identity. In their seminal book, sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited that reality, as we think of it, is a social construction. Customs and traditions are dictated by varying societies. That America or Columbia or Italy are countries at all is a social convention. Indeed, the conventions of language are a social construction, with (mostly) agreed-upon rules.

Although we each, in our own small way, influence society, society bears a tremendous influence upon our own ego identities—not just in how we operate socially but also in how we understand ourselves internally. Arguably, the vast majority of our ego identities are inherited. We all entertain outer Lies (aka, limiting beliefs) about what we believe reality to be and inner Lies about what we believe our identities within that reality to be.

 I wonder what my father would have made of A Dying Art by John Semley. He was an embalmer, he held himself to a high standard, and I expect he would be appalled.

I spent somewhere around 2 hours writing a query letter and synopsis for One Dead Blonde. I do not have much hope for it.

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Muncie to Bloomington to Indianapolis: Arts, Books, Music

 Some items I want to share.

Events for Adults — Minnetrista

The Bloomington Book Festival

Muncie Three Trails - Free Concert Music Series

Books, Booze & Brains: Timefulness - Indiana Humanities

 Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - Indiana Humanities

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Another story published!

I have been remiss thanks to the surgery and recuperation to mention the Academy of the Heart And Mind publishing Ahab In The Moonlight!

Another piece from my long-gestating “Chasing Ashes”.

It is free. I would love to hear any comments.

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Indiana Writing Resources 2026 - Proof 2026!

 I have noted some of these before, I think. Like Bookmark Indy – Where Pen Meets Place and Indiana Humanities. Not that they are not worth repeating!

But some new stuff is here, too:

Indiana Authors Awards - the nominees are here.

Line Break: The Power of Practicing Craft - which new, but also for poets.

Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - I went last year, intend to go this year; I think it is a grand festival.

There's Only One Sin in Hollywood - Indiana Authors Awards - reviews a new book from an Indiana writer.

In conjuring the magic of a great movie capable of making one believe anything is possible for our heroes, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood will similarly imbue readers with hope on every page that the main characters can best the forces working against them. Readers will watch Aaron torn between institution and authenticity, and as the stakes mount and the consequences compound, Aaron must answer a question that I invite readers to consider themselves: If there is only one sin in Hollywood, but that sin promises freedom, is it worth the risk of damnation?   

Not Indiana related but still might be of interest: What Editors Want: The Ultimate Guide for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines 

sch 7/26 

Indiana Poetry Magazine - The Indianapolis Review

 I am too thick-headed and too thick-tongued for poetry. However, this is an Indiana magazine, so I want to point them out.

The Indianapolis Review, established in 2017, is an online quarterly publication featuring poetry, art, and visual poetry. We work to promote artists and writers from our region, but we also showcase work from around the country and the world. We don’t limit ourselves to one particular school or style of poetry or art; we simply want art and poetry that surprises, sings, and makes us think.

We believe that poetry and art often (not always) save us from desolation, misunderstanding, and thinking we are alone in our suffering . We believe that creating and sharing creativity is a gift and service to one’s community and can shift the way we experience our realities. 

And everyone on their masthead is a Hoosier!

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Orhan Pamuk Speaks - What I Found on YouTube

 I read Pamuk after I turned 50. What has attracted me to his novels is his writing about places and times. 

He sees the Turk as European and Middle Eastern. He sees Turkey as both modern and historical; a place trying to find its place as a former empire, a former Great Power, and a modern state of importance. 

 So what? It has to do with me being in the Midwest. The East Coast has its economic, cultural, and political power. The South lies across the Ohio River with its scars of slavery and the Civil War. The West's romance is hours to the west.

Let me put that another way. 

Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, Gore Vidal, Joseph Heller, Dennis Lehane, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Stephen King are to the east of me.

William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, Jessamyn West, Walker Percy, John Kennedy O'Toole, Jonathan Franzen (being from Missouri) and William Styron are to the south. 

Turning west I find John Steinbeck, Larry McMurty, Craig Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, A.B. Guthrie, Mark Twain (who also suddenly seems the most cosmopolitan of American writers - he could be southern, he spent time fitting into the east, and, if I could fit a slave state into the Midwest, and Midwestern), Raymond Chandler, Annie Proulx, Dashiel Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.

Those belonging to my Midwest: Kurth Vonnegut, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, and Michael Martone.

Put another way: the Midwest supplied the men who destroyed the Slave Power, then built the factories that supplied the country and the world, and then lost the peace to the South and saw their factories shuttered. It is an empire that lost its power and holds onto former eminence while wandering in the desert searching for its future.

Yes, I think Pamuk might have something to teach us. 

He is also an engaging human being with a lively intelligence.

Orhan Pamuk in Conversation with Merve Emre 

A Dialogue on Facts Fiction History: Umberto Eco - Orhan Pamuk (Full Version)

Orhan Pamuk - VO (4) - William Marx (2022-2023)

Big Think Interview With Orhan Pamuk | Big Think

Why he made a nveol into a museum

 

Finally, what I had collected into a YouTube Playlist

My other Orhan Pamuk posts are here. 

 

sch 5/18 

Another of My Stories Published!

 I got the word this morning that Freedom House Magazine published Going For The Kid. It is free to read, so please give it a read.

A bit of an adventure/crime story set in an alternate America circa 1972. 

The publisher says it can also be found at: https://www.instagram.com/freedomfictionjournal/ and https://www.facebook.com/freedomfiction/

Thanks.

 

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Indiana Writers For Today!

 Mirror Indy has a YouTube site including Indiana authors reading their work.

Mossy Feet Books – Author Paul R. Wonning:

Indiana native Author Paul R. Wonning considers himself an “Indiana Hound,” because he “sniffs” out interesting places & history of Indiana and then reveal them to his readers. He also enjoys gardening; US history & dabbles in fiction.

sch 2/18 

 

 

 

Remembering Midwestern Writers. Charting A Course to the Future?

 I heard of Lingering Inland at I heard about "Lingering Indiana" at Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - the program put on by Indiana Humanities. I bought the book, and in the past few days ran across a review from The Chicago Sun-Times, A new book makes the case for the Midwest’s literary might

Reflecting on these large-scale demographic changes, Olivarez says in his forward for Lingering Inland, “Because no one is looking to the Midwest for innovation, it has become an excellent place to experiment. The worst has already happened. Our former industries have collapsed or are on life support. What is there to do but dream a new way of living?”

“Lingering Inland” editor Andy Oler says that conception of the future happens when humans connect stories with people and places.

“What this collection is trying to achieve is to take those individual, idiosyncratic stories and start to sort of create a whole mosaic, a much bigger picture of what the region is, of what Chicago is, of like, how we think about the Midwest,” Oler said.

He hopes readers engage with the works slowly, letting the words sit with them. Each essay is around 1,000 words.

“I hope that they don’t read it all at once. I guess maybe, which is maybe a weird thing to say, but the brevity of the essays leads people to, you know, pick up one, read one or two, and put it down and then pick it up again,” Oler said. “I think that it’s something that you can sort of pop in and out of while you’re reading your coffee, while you’re, you know, waiting to leave, like, whatever it is, I think that it’s, it’s a nice little hit, and it, it lets people access it at their own pace.”

The collection is available at University of Illinois Press.

Well, that is what I am doing with the book - nibbling on it. I started with the Indiana writers - Booth Tarkington, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Martone - and was pleasantly surprised by a non-academic approach. It is very much more oriented to what the Midwestern writer meant to the essayist, not a formal discussion of their literary output.

The choices are varied - Louis L'Amour is here as well as Toni Morrison. Oddly, no Hemingway or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser. I don't think of Kentucky (Hunter S. Thompson) as Midwest. 

 

I do suggest buying the book for anyone interested in Midwestern writers, or just writers in general.

 

I make this suggestion not only because it endorses my idea that we out here in the Midwest have a license to experiment.

 

sch 1/24 

 

 

 

Sorry About The Hiatus

 It seems the past week has been an up and down one. 

Insomnia and then oversleeping. It has hit me again.

Christmas in the church under the Julian calendar.

Going nowhere but church, grocery, and the group session because I have been working on “Chasing Ashes”.

However, I did draft a post for my daily report; only I would find myself too tired to work on it. This is what I have collected this past week.

Another writer that prison gave me time to read was Iain M. Banks. Not heard of him? He was Scottish, didn't write YA dystopias, and none of his books were adapted into film, and so has probably escaped your attention. If you want to write science fiction, then he needs to be read - he creates a future civilization that does not feel like a retread of our current models.

For a second opinion: Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks is still a master (New Scientist).

But there is also so much to think about, from the nature of life in a utopia where there are no challenges left, to what it means to be a human in a universe where vast Minds take charge of everything. And that’s not to mention the joys of the plot – I was almost shouting at the page when Gurgeh was tempted into cheating at the game of Stricken by Mawhrin-Skel, and I was utterly swept up in the Azad games. This was a real win for me, and I’m going to go back and reread lots of other Iain M. Banks as a post-Christmas treat.

An inside look at college in Indiana Women’s Prison  

 I never saw many of Bardot's films when young, and when I came of age she had retired. I never understood the mystique. For me, the French actress that meant something to me is Catherine Deneuve. Even after reading, Brigitte Bardot was a zeitgeist-force and France’s most sensational export (The Guardian), I still do not understand what was the fuss.

 

Wednesday's rejection for “Coming Home”:

Thank you for entering the 46th "On The Premises" short story contest. We received 507 qualified entries. Of those entries, 10 made it to the final round of judging. We're sorry to have to inform you that "Coming Home" was not among them.

If you are interested in getting a critique of your entry, please go to https://onthepremises.com/getting-critiqued/ for instructions. Critiques cost $15 in US dollars.

Issue #46 will be published in February 2026 Our next contest, a mini-contest, will begin at the same time and will be announced in the February newsletter. Look for it, and keep reading and writing!

Sincerely,

The "On The Premises" editorial staff

www.OnThePremises.com

 Essay | 41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction by Caleb Klaces - The London Magazine

Literary Hub » What Happens When Gen Z Encounters Catullus’s Filthiest Poem? Rachel DeWoskin

The pious John Milton, noting that virtue cannot be known without knowledge of its opposite, argued against censorship: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”

Cloistered virtue, indeed! How can we know what’s virtuous, gentle and good, without reading, acknowledging, and parsing its opposite? And how can we stand up to corrosive and inhumane forces without naming them? It is an ignorant and unreasoned stance to argue that reading the adversary of virtue will set an example, trigger, or otherwise amplify bad behavior. To admit what hurts, agitates, and offends us in fact illuminates what is complicated and good in us. Catullus openly mocked not only his rivals, but also leaders, generals, and their allies. He hated Caesar’s friend Mamurra, a wealthy, corrupt engineer whose bourgeois degeneracy made him a tempting mark.

***

 Catullus’s vast capacity for love and sweetness is made all the more visible by his unflinching view of humankind; we get to measure the distance between what he hates and what he loves. Sometimes, as in 85, “Odi et Amo,” “I hate and love,” they are one and the same. And this is true of all of us. Poem 5 contains thousands upon thousands of kisses for his Lesbia; 51 has her laughter bringing him near death, his first sight of her rendering him voiceless with love.

Book banning is a movement against being or feeling alive, seeing with clarity what is already good and what can be made better. It is truth banning, and while it particularly silences vulnerable people, it also closes possibilities and voices for all of us, narrowing the narrative of our society and obstructing our views of what is essential to see.

 Literary Hub » The Publishing Industry is Capricious… Gamble on Yourself

Not that the publishing industry can’t or shouldn’t address the more general problem Kuznetsova highlights, which applies to this dictum, too. And I do think there is a fairly simple formula more conducive to giving the best literary art the best chance at commercial success: hire a diverse array of editors, pay them a living wage, and let them buy the books they like best. It would be great if someone tried this! But regardless, the only recourse for serious novelists is to stand by their work irrespective of market response, rejoicing in any commercial success for the sheer good luck that it is.

***

 If the contemporary institutions we might expect to reliably support high-quality work only do so haphazardly, I think there is another to which we might turn. A hypothetical institution, admittedly, but one that unfailingly supports the mindset I find most conducive to artistic productivity: your own house, turned into a museum after you die.

I am not being glib. Fixing your sights on a post-mortem house museum simultaneously incentivizes you to embrace the models, work ethic, timeframe, and material surroundings most conducive to creating the highest caliber art of which you are capable.

#50: Five for Them, One for Me, with Lori Rader-Day

5. WRECK YOUR HEART feels like a love letter to Chicago. You’re an Indiana native, but you’ve lived in Chicago for some years now, and Dahlia’s (and your own) love for the city feels palpable throughout. There’s an unexpected but very real sense of community in the book. Talk about how you wanted to portray the city in WRECK YOUR HEART, and what you wanted to spotlight.

Back to the story of how this book was written. I started it in 2020 as a writing challenge, I put it away never expecting to see it again, published my book Death at Greenway. Meanwhile, I got started on something else and sold that book on 50 pages. But almost immediately I realized I didn’t know if I could finish that book, at least right that moment. There was a tone to it I didn’t know if I could sustain—a fun, buoyant tone. I had I had just started treatment for aggressive breast cancer. So I poured my feelings about that into a different book, written quickly, and sold that instead. That was The Death of Us, a book I am very proud of but also realize is the darkest of all my books. Well, yeah. To recap: the pandemic, hardest book of my life (Greenway), then cancer.

All this to say, when I was facing cancer, writing and my writing community were the largest part of what kept me sane. Writing reminded me who I was, even when my brain was literally losing some cells and I couldn’t think straight. The mystery community was so generous and loving. 

Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules! | Creative writing | The Guardian 

Literary Hub » Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing

My Adventures as "Rosamond Smith"

Sara Paretsky - Bestselling Author and Creator of Private Eye V.I. Warshawski

Literary YardAndrey Platonov, The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution, Tora Lane

Literary criticism can suggest other avenues of inquiry, and Lane concludes on an intriguing perspective of Platonov’s place in today’s world as an author of relevance. Read together, her introduction and afterword endeavors to explain that relevance by posing the question—“Is it possible to reach an understanding of Communism in literature that is not communist literature?” Given the endless resurrection of socialism and its abject failure time and again as a viable form of social organization, it is hard to make a case for Platonov’s idealistic notions of a literary revolution ever evolving out of a decidedly aliterate culture.

In the end, Lane answers her own the question—”To the extent that the modern world in general and the realization of Communism in particular prefer the illuminated world of outer appearance, the nocturnal experience of shared existence in the Inner is also diminished or even extinguished. . . The problem with the myth of the Communist utopia, as Platonov tells it, is not the myth itself, but what happens when the myth purports to be real.”

Subjectivity Is A Thing In Publishing (Babbles from Scott Eagan )

Yes, we are very much trying our best to be rational and looking that things objectively and whether or not a book is marketable, but let's be honest, we are all still human. We all have our own likes and dislikes. There are simply times when we read a proposal and something just doesn't click with us. It is that simple. Does it mean the book is not marketable? No. Does it mean the book is poorly written? No. It just means, it isn't right for us. 

This is part of the reason why I am always pushing for you as authors to take the time to truly research those editors and agents. Find out their likes and dislikes. Don't just see if they acquire your genre, check to see what it is about that genre that they like and hate. 

***

You can even see this by looking at sites such as Publishers Marketplace and seeing who editors and agents are signing. You will see a pattern really fast and figure it out. 

My verdict – and votes – on the seven finalists for Europe’s Car of the Year (Irish Times)

An Askēsis of Epiphany Revisiting “Worship in a Secular Age”: Part One (Public Orthodoxy)

As prescient as Schmemann’s remarks may appear to us today, they were (and remain) inconvenient to those who would attempt to construct from them a programmatic response to secularism. Indeed, contemporary “anti-secularists” often fail to grasp the spirit and subtlety of Schmemann’s critique and miss that it is, in fact, a penetrating self-critique of Christianity: defended solely as an institution of moral order; confined to the formal rites of the Church; wielded as a world-denying (yet deceivingly worldly) ideology. Above all, Schmemann urged Christians to treat secularism as a self-imposed and self-perpetuated tragedy: a scandalous, intergenerational failure to transmit the life-giving and life-affirming message that “the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Only this paradox and the Person it points to can provide the basis of an Orthodox Christian response to secularism—one that renounces every easy lapse into antagonistic ways of thinking and being and embraces instead the evangelical and incarnational work of witness. 

 Trump’s anti-globalism looks like old-school Yankee imperialism (Washington Post)

We are so screwed - at the mercy of an idiot with power and no morals:

In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said he didn’t see himself bound by international law. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he told the paper. He also explained that ownership of Greenland was “very important” from his perspective, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” He said he could be willing to sacrifice the NATO alliance for the sake of his expansionist desires

 Why Scotland lost its tongue (Englesberg Ideas)

There were two rejections that I have not yet put in here.

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Grab Bag For Writers

 Processing: How Brandon Taylor Wrote Minor Black Figures (Counter Craft) - two quotes out of a quotable interview:

I’m getting sidetracked again. I don’t know that I have a strategy for writing embodiment because I am a writer for whom embodiment is a subject, theme, and natural interest. I think partly because I don’t experience my body in the mediated way that many writers seem to. I am acutely aware of my body at all times. Soreness. A sniffle. The tension in my arches. The pain in my lower back. The grit in my eyes. My body is very present to me, and so it never occurs to me that there are people for whom their body is…invisible? Nonexistent? That is a totally alien human experience to me. But I do think that maybe that’s an area of experience worth exploring. But to the degree that it has been explored in American literature??? It feels like a pathology.

But if we’re talking tips. I don’t know. Think about your character’s physical existence. And after every three beautiful thoughts or observations, describe how they feel in response to something that’s happened in the moment. That’s what I always do when things start to get heady. I come back to the physical world.

***

But in 2021, I started to read literary criticism and political theory, and I gained a more robust understanding of the world and my own experience of that world. I had a language I could use to understand things better, more clearly, and importantly, with that language, I could begin to express that understanding. All of this allowed me to articulate political and ideological questions, moral questions, in my work. The challenge was how to marry that with my Jamesian dramatic conception of fiction. Because for me, fiction is drama. It is action and rhythm and scene and dialogue to express the interior state. I am a Chekhovian and a Jamesian by nature. I am not, like, a super heady guy. That is not my disposition.

So it was a hard road, frankly. I am still on it, I think. But Minor Black Figures comes out of an intense period of self-study and self-reflection down in the criticism mines. It is particularly influenced by the critic Georg Lukacs, for whom “ideology” is the highest form of characterization. And for him, a novel’s function is to demonstrate the social process, in large part through the conflict of ideology among the characters in that novel. I wanted to a write a book that followed his principles—as much as I could. And I think the book is more vivid and more alive for it. The characters really argue the way that I argue with my friends about the things that matter to us.

And I think if we are going to write a robust, rich, living literature, we have to be able to capture that aspect of life—people arguing, debating, fighting, protesting, striving to bring about a world that reflects their values. It blows my mind that 2020 saw one of the greatest uprisings in modern history, and our novelists and short story writers are acting as though…we were all just inside talking about fruit ninja. Solely because they are afraid of being called didactic. Preachy, etc. At this point, the reality proffered by mainstream literary fiction is so much less politicized and so much less alive than the reality one encounters just walking to a bodega and listening to the guys argue about tariffs.

 The A24 Writing Formula: How You Can Use It to Write Unique Stories gives me one problem:

A24 films don't explain themselves. Take Civil War. Audiences are dropped into the action, and we don't get a full picture of how we got here. We're just along for the action and figure out the details as we go. Same for Under the Skin.

Where conventional studios provide exposition and hand-holding, A24 expects you to keep up.

"Hollywood thinks audiences are stupid. A24 thinks audiences are detectives," he says.

Learn more about showing, not telling.

I think this works better with films, but I am having trouble getting it across with short stories. There is a problem with pacing that keeps recurring in them.  

 Okay, some of this was repetitive, doesn't mean it does not need to be repeated:

 Q&A with the author of LINGERING INLAND is more literary than about writing; I bought the book after seeing some of the contributors and the editor at a conference that was part of Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest. See my Finally, My Post on Proof: A Midwest Literary Festival; A Call To Action.

Q: What myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your book will help readers unlearn?

Lingering Inland isn’t alone in this work, but it is a great example of how the Midwest is a dynamic, diverse place. There’s a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences among the contributors as well as their author subjects, and the variety of places they visited and wrote about certainly puts the lie to common, simplistic labels like “flyover country” or “the breadbasket of America.” It’s important that Midwestern writers and scholars acknowledge and articulate the region’s multiplicity, because the allegation of homogeneity—whether delivered in dismissive or laudatory tones—is a pretty unproductive way to look at an entire region, not to mention awfully boring.

 sch 12/22

Religion & Politics - Calvinism, Empathy, & Persecutions

 Calvinism may hold the key to understanding America’s white evangelical movement (Kansas Reflector).

Such measures enjoyed support and even celebration from the American Christian right, leaving many to wonder: What kind of religion endorses such cruelty, the withholding of health care, winking at racism and embracing xenophobia?

There’s little Christian about this, it seems, unless viewed through a theologically Calvinist lens.

The Rev. Robert Johnson, who leads Church of the Resurrection’s new Lee’s Summit location, said the seeming detachment from suffering, tolerance of destructive ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and more likely have Calvinist roots.

“In their minds, God has already chosen,” said Johnson, who earlier led a United Methodist Church in Wichita. “Social justice is viewed as impudence to God’s executed will, and it’s also anti-empathy. In fact, empathy is meaningless.”

I grew up in the American Baptist denomination; a watered down Calvinism is how I viewed it and still view it. That may have more to do with a familial fatalism on my mother's die than a statement of the denomination's actual theology. 

“For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left,” the article explained. “It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.”

Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” was quoted as saying: “Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validates lies or supports destructive policies.”

Christian right beliefs have buttressed political conservatism for decades, from the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” to Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” to today’s MAGA movement. Falwell’s Liberty University didn’t originally admit Black students. To be fair, not all evangelicals hold such beliefs, but we should try to understand where the beliefs of so many might come from.

A review of Anthea Butler’s “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” by Bianca Mabute-Louie, identifies evangelicalism as a nationalist political movement to support white, Christian hegemony. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of the movement.

***

Calvin believed that “even before creation,” God had chosen some people for salvation, a belief associated with predestination, according to Christianity.com. Calvin fumed at how Catholicism reduced religion to “salvation by works.”

His refrain? People shouldn’t try to manipulate God nor place Him in their debt. Saved people are saved only Him, not by good works.

“This is the perfect theology for what we see in the evangelical movement,” Johnson said. “This is why they may not consider themselves bigoted or racist. They have found a denominational justification for our racial caste system. It’s why they don’t like social activism. To them, there is no social Gospel, only individual salvation.”

I left the Baptist Church for several reasons, but I left the Church for this kind of thinking - that there was predestination - and for the church's history of violence towards those who disagreed with its interpretations of the religion. 

When I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, it was because it stood for free will and had no institutions like the Inquisition. Empathy is not alien to Orthodox thinking because Christ was empathetic.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, has no influence on American politics.

 Grace Byron writes in her Doubting Thomas (Granta) (Going to Castleton makes her an Indiana writer):

At twelve I harbored two obsessions: my acoustic guitar and God. I took lessons weekly at a Christian Music Store in Castleton, Indiana, a lovely little suburb that has since crusted over with chain stores. There was a mall that had a Spencer’s, the kind of novelty emo store popular in the early 2000s that sold My Chemical Romance T-shirts and sex toys. All the things a good Christian was not supposed to want.  

As kids raised in the church, we were supposed to be content to live in a world of answers, all neatly laid out in hymnals and Vacation Bible School. I wrote ‘To God be the glory, not me’ on all my silly little guitar compositions. It was obsessive, a talisman to ward off uncertainty. It started after hearing that Beethoven had done something similar – he wrote ‘es muss sein!’ on his symphonies. Was there a way out of the frenzied paranoia? Could holiness be discovered in a world less hellbent on shortcuts? Could the question mark be a gateway?  

***

In the Evangelical church we were supposed to accept the answers we were given as final. Questions and doubts were met hesitantly, like youthful rebellion. Early Christian writing developed as a form of self-surveillance. The diary was a technology of admitting fault and sin and finding answers to why one falls into temptation. The Christians I knew were less interested in contemplative dialogue – unless it was confirming their already deep-held beliefs about the world and their place in it. This wasn’t a synagogue or a sangha. It was a church. Besides, the mystics and seekers – even among the Christian faith – had never gotten very far. God’s will was supposed to be clear and easily definable. Even when we got confused, we could find counseling and clarity in a fifty-minute sermon. Don’t you want the promise of easy answers? I do. It’s alluring to know the way.  

 There is a very fine writer by the name of Marilynne Robinson who writes about the good side of Calvinism; I can see her point without agreeing with it. I have never agreed with predestination, and I cannot see how I will. There is a firm point in Orthodox thinking that God could not make something evil, that he is not angry with us, while the West sees God as doing the opposite. Empathy is not anti-God in the East. It is much easier to burn heretics when you think you are serving an Angry God - which seems also easy to translate into the French Reign of Terror and genocide, etc. In the East, we are to persuade heretics of their errors, not harm them. Bottom line, since I am holding myself together with chewing gum and baling wire, it goes back to the difference between Greek and Roman. The Romans were great ones for the law, were very good at destroying their enemies, and the Greek church never had the temptation for worldly power that Rome had. Oh, yeah, I read Hawthorne's The Marble Faun while in prison, and it was not bad - New England Puritan in the dying days of The Papal States - and never before got the real sense of the Pope as temporal prince (Yea, I've seen Rex Harrison in the Michelangelo move, but that was Harrison hamming up it up.) Good lord, I am in a gloomy and loquacious mood this morning. Shoulders throbbing and neck stiff, you'd think I'd just shut up.

All this might be moot except here we are with White Christian Nationalism rising, the Evangelical heirs of Falwell and Robinson letting Israel commit genocide so long as it brings about the end times. There is something seriously wrong with this kind of thinking that might just get a lot of us killed. Oh, yeah, been listening to some videos about Heinlein - was he a fascist or not. None have mentioned the dictatorship he predicted in his Future History was a religious one. So, I never bought the fascist argument, but do have to wonder if anyone gave proper attention to the dictatorship predicted. (They all want to jump on Starship Troopers - which actually asks a very old question, who should be citizens. There was a time I could not have voted because I had too little property; Americans, not knowing their history, assume everyone can vote and always have.) 

And I should say that not all Western Churches agree with the Evangelicals (who seem to be really Pentecostals), but they're not in the middle of politics now, are they? I am also not sure that they condemn Christian nationalism in the way that the Eastern Church does.

About Marilynne Robinson, there is Marilynne Robinson: Distinctive Calvinist from Reformed Journal.

At first glance, Robinson is a surprisingly traditional Calvinist. She defends the hallmarks of traditional Calvinism: the majesty of God (though not in those terms), original sin, the providence of God, and predestination. She also has a high view of scripture. Moreover, in addition to defending Calvin against all comers, she also defends the Puritans and occasionally cites Jonathan Edwards with approval. In each case, however, she gives a special Robinsonian spin to their doctrines.

***

 In another essay Robinson alludes to the same “offensive” doctrine and puts it in a historical context, thereby absolving Calvin from responsibility for it. “Terms and concepts associated with Calvinism also shock and horrify, for example the idea of an elect, of sin and fallenness, of judgment and condemnation, as if these were the products of one Frenchman’s fevered brain rather than basic issues in Christianity from its beginnings.”2 Her main line of defense that predestination is not determinism; that it is both scriptural and has a long doctrinal history preceding Calvin. “The elect” and “election,” she points out, “are terms used twenty-three times in the New Testament, seven times by Jesus, and are therefore significant in all classical theology, though folklore attributes the notion to Calvin and blames him for it.”3 She repeats the latter point in various contexts, and is quick to point out that “Predestination was accepted by every significant theologian (Chrysostom seems to have been the exception) before Calvin or contemporary with him, including Augustine and Aquinas.” After making this claim (which I believe is too sweeping), she adds this interesting observation, “Whether predestination is ‘double’ or ‘single’ is a quibble with which Calvin was too honest to have patience.”4 Only a “quibble”? I doubt it.

And Chrysostom belongs to the Orthodox Church.

sch 12/4 

Indiana Writers With A Book Published Read This!

 I do not qualify, I have now nothing more than what I quote below, but Indiana Writers should give a look at the following from The Friends of American Writers:

Each year FAW recognizes new emerging Midwestern authors or those whose novels or non-fiction writing are set in the Midwest. The Literature Awards Committee reads and reviews dozens of books submitted for the FAW Literature Award. The review and selection process starts in September with the selection of winners occurring in April, and celebrated at our May Luncheon. Books are eligible for review based on the following criteria. Send in your book and become a FAW Literary Award Winner!

• The author must be a resident (or previously have been a resident for approximately five years) of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota or Wisconsin; or the locale of the book must be in a region identified above.
• The books can be fiction or creative non-fiction.
• Self-published (vanity press), e-Books, and manuscripts are not eligible.
• The book must be published in the calendar year prior to the awards year. Currently we are evaluating books published during the 2025 year.
• The author must not have published more than three books under his/her own pen name, with up to and including the third book being eligible for consideration. If an author has more than one book published during the award year, we will consider all of them.
• Books nominated for the award must be submitted to the FAW Awards Committees by December 13, 2025.

No applications are necessary. Forward your submission to one of the designated Literary chairs as early as possible (Aug - Dec). Send two copies of each book along with a short biographical material regarding the author. Email FAW with further submission questions. We also give awards to YA books. The eligibility requirements are the same.

sch 12/2 

Indiana Writer: Michael Martone

 Before I say anything else: I am in awe of Michael Martone.

He writes these great short stories of Indiana. I think he might be the best writer of Indiana since Ross Lockridge, Jr. 

Kurt Vonnegut referenced Indiana in most of his novel (all, I think), but only God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is set in Indiana. He wrote more about Indiana in Palm Sunday; a collection of essays. As much as I like Vonnegut, he is not a great short story writer.

Theodore Dreiser may be the most important novelist to be from Indiana. He never put a novel in Indiana. He does write of Indiana in his non-fiction. No one has ever thought of Dreiser as either a great stylist or as a short story writer.

Booth Tarkington did write of Indiana, and he could write a short story. Tarkington has lost his audience, except for dedicated Hoosiers and some academics. I find his style a little fusty and sentimental; certainly he belongs to the mainstream of his day. Indianapolis is his muse, not Indiana. Martone is innovative. 

Boring becomes strange when we start taking notice. 

Michael Martone's webpage.

YouTube resources for Martone follow. 

 Bookmark with Don Noble: Michael Martone (2023)

 8/7/25, Michael Martone/Virtual Thursdays Dire Literary Series, plus Q and A with Timothy Gager

Michael Martone: Tuesdays with BOA

Michael Martone Wins National Author Award in 2013 Indiana Authors Awards

Michael Martone on Re-retirement: “This Will Be Weird, Too” (Department of English)

sch 11/15

Finally, My Post on Proof: A Midwest Literary Festival; A Call To Action

Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest was about 16 days ago. Procrastination and other distractions have gotten in the way of this post.

I am also including some thought I had on the way home that were divorced from the festival.

Let me sum up my thoughts: the whole was well executed; the conflicts in the scheduling were self-imposed; the staff (volunteers) were polite, helpful, casting an enthusiasm for what they were doing; the crowd was not huge, but I think we were all dedicated to the festival's purpose; I am looking forward to next year's edition.

The mixer was the usual horror for me. I never learned how to just make a cold introduction. The people I saw were all younger than me. I had no idea of their interests. Other than one fellow coming up to speak to me, no spoke with me, and I spoke with no one. (I would alter see that same person, gave him my email, and have not heard from him.) I won a book of poetry, but I cannot find it now. I gave it to CC to read when she was here last; I did not think she left with it.

 The book sale was small. I noticed Sarabande Books had a booth. My debit card failed me - it works well only if tapped - and I had promised to buy any more books. That was the highest cost of moving - toting, then organizing, all my books.

I did stop and look at Tipton Poetry Journal. They had a book of Indiana poets, but could not take plastic. They are on Facebook. Check them out.

I saw Larry Sweazy. He was on a panel of crime writers. I am pretty sure that he saw me. We both did a good job of ignoring the other. I left before it was over; this was one of those times when there was another program competing for my attention. 

Probably should have taken that program first instead of last. It was on Midwest literary history. Which is a pretty lame description. This was more along the lines where I want to work. However, I did get a line on the book which was the subject of the program: Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest (University of Illinois Press). (And which I purchased today.)

I got into a conversation with one of the panelists, a professor from Wisconsin, about the ambitions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Midwestern writers. He reappeared during the following session on Booth Tarkington. Poor fellow probably felt trapped by me chewing on his ear. However, I did get a sense that I was not wrong that Fitzgerald felt himself competing with Tarkington.

The Tarkington session gave me the idea I need to read another of his novels before I start on “Chasing Ashes”. In the conversation with the professor, I suggested that Tarkington is suffering from the same problem as someone like Gore Vidal, their popularity has done them in.

The last session attended was part disappointment and part surprise. It was about building communities. The disappointment was it had nothing to do with building literary communities and all to do with slam poetry. What I got from it was the members of the panel had much to promote poetry slams in Indianapolis, and that they were healthy. That made me feel good for Indy.

Being about 4 pm, I decided to go home. Age has its privileges and its costs. I skipped a discussion on getting one's works on stage.

Indiana Humanities should be proud of itself for what they are brining to Indianapolis.

Now, let me add some thoughts that came to me after I left the festival; not that they bear on the festival itself.

I made a stop at Meijers in Anderson. It has changed in 16 years. That was not the surprise. After all, I have made a trip to Muncie's Meijer's in the past month and found myself unimpressed. It used to be that I would do most of our grocery shopping at Meijers. They had better seafood offerings - including mussels - and things like leg of lamb (halal) and beef kidneys. Now, the seafood selection may be worse than Payless or Walmart. No leg of lamb, either. The place felt like a worn-out Walmart.

And that is what brought a long-boiling annoyance: too much seems more tawdry, more inefficient, cheaper than what I recall from before my incarceration.

It is as if upon getting market share, pushing out smaller competitors with better (or just as good) offering, what get is less variety and more shabbiness.

Ted Gioia has written about this in regard to Google and the culture generally, but Meijer's was evidence of our shabby culture on a different level.

If anything, the Proof festival made the contrast unavoidable - there was something brought off with style and concern for its attendees. Not the take-it-or-leave-it attitude I get from the huge commercial operations sitting astride this country.

Today, when I was preparing this post, the following came though in my email. They seem relevant to my thoughts, so I add them here for you to follow up on.

Dear Tech Evangelists: Have You Tried “Move Slow and Make Things”? (Literary Hub)

None of this is new. None of the panic, none of the prophetism. Okay, so our cigarettes tell the time and more and more people in a porno are computer-generated. The kids can’t spell and the world leaders are senile. It’s always been falling apart, even when it looked like it wasn’t. Take a long enough view of things and see how little has changed, even as everything has changed. What does Generative AI threaten that wasn’t already under siege?

The lie I hear spoken by every image-generation or video-generation or text-generating Gen AI app is the lie of instantaneity. That the most important thing is having produced. Not the living that precedes the act of art-making, not the living that occurs during the art-making itself. The app will tell you that the most important thing is how fast you made this song that you can get Spotify to pay you for.

You, singular. Without a keyboardist or a drummer or a singer or a mixing engineer, nobody else on payroll, no bandmates. No friends. The most important thing is how fast you did it all, because the second most important thing is that now you can sell the thing you made. Self-published gibberish on the Amazon marketplace, a Surrealist cat video YouTube short, bland country twang for a music streaming service.

You in your bedroom—yes, you—leaning forward hungrily in your gaming chair, can get rich quick and fool yourself into thinking you’ve lived a meaningful life for the cost of a monthly subscription.

Scheming and lazy, you don’t create the Velvet Sundown to win a Grammy or the adulation of your peers or any sense of satisfaction at having done a difficult thing well. You do it to make a quick buck. You don’t do it because the music is compelling or even good. You do it because it’s easy. Because it took no time at all.

Yes, everything online sucks now—but it doesn’t have to (Ars Technica)

We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

***

It starts with the creation of a new two-sided online product of high quality, initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to pick an obvious example. Once the users are hooked on the product, the vendor moves to the second stage: degrading the product in some way for the benefit of their business customers. This might include selling advertisements, scraping and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content the vendor wishes users to see rather than what those users actually want. 

A theory why the internet is going down the toilet (Planet Money : NPR)

Writing, the arts generally, should be in defiance of making our lives shabby. I hope more of you show up for the next Proof, pens in hand and minds ready to create a better defense against the technocrats.

sch 

Writing Resources - Indiana and Beyond

 I am a little late putting up Literary Events Around Indiana – October 2025. However, it also includes November events.

(This led me to The Irving Theater. Interesting things, if not about writing. Back in the day, I spent time there watching foreign films.)

The Indiana Authors Awards: Nominations Open for 2026 Awards 

Okay, the National Centre for Writing is from Norwich, England, which is not even close to Indiana, but that is no reason we cannot use its Writing Hub

An online space to explore words, ideas and new writing commissioned and produced by National Centre for Writing. Whether you are looking for long or short reads on the craft of writing; interviews with emerging writers and published authors on The Writing Life Podcast; real and imagined explorations of Norwich City of Literature or dynamic new insights into literature, ideas, and creative writing; we have a vast digital library of content for you to read, listen to and watch below.  

Or listen to The Writing Life Podcast.

The Writing Life podcast is the podcast for anyone who writes. Every fortnight, we speak to writers and educators to help you improve your writing, from theme, structure and routine to language, character and writing specific genres.

 The podcast has featured Margaret Atwood, Jackie Kay, Sara Collins, Antti Tuomainen, Val McDermid, Sarah Perry, Elif Shafak and many more!

Subscribe by searching for ‘The Writing Life’ or ‘National Centre for Writing’ in your podcast app or choose an episode below and listen right here.

Unclear of The Creative Independent, but why not add it, too? Grace Bryon's On getting out of your bubble got my attention and my time. This turned out a good thing for me, and my projects:

From one Midwesterner to another, how does the Midwest stay with your writing? Has your creative approach changed since you’ve moved?

I’m haunted by the Midwest. I love the Midwest. That’s closest thing I have to an element of tribalism or loyalty. I always say, no one’s allowed to talk shit about the Midwest unless they’ve lived in the Midwest or really are from the Midwest. I hate it when people talk shit. When I first moved to New York, and told people I went to state school in Indiana, and I was meeting people who went to Bennington, the New School, NYU, etc., everyone’s eyes would just glaze over. And I found that to be so elitist and annoying. It’s still very real. It’s interesting to think about how many novels have characters from the Midwest who come to the city and try to remake themselves. That’s such an eternal genre for some reason. I don’t feel I’ve tried to remake myself or whatever. I’m interested in the dichotomy and tension of people who move back and forth, or from one place to another—who feel scarred and made, in both positive and negative ways, by growing up in a place like Indiana or Illinois or Ohio. And a lot of the people that I have met in New York, a lot of my close friends, are people who are from the Midwest. Sort of ironically, we’ve sort of come together as an enclave.

The shared trauma brings us together.

There’s that Vonnegut quote where he has something about, “You can go anywhere and find a Hoosier.” I feel that’s a little true of Midwesterners, as well as people from Indiana.

And I think Herculine is partly about that… It’s about leaving to find home and realizing that there’s a part of home that’s still left behind, or trying to find a new piece of it. Going back and forth, and being caught in the strangeness of it all.

I mean, you could say [the narrator] is possessed by the Midwest just as much as by demons.

The real demon is just the State of Indiana.

Makes sense.

 

 

sch 10/17 

 

The Line Between The Arts and Politics

 Crossing the line between the arts and politics: John Semley's Kneel Before Zod (The Baffler). An idea that has been growing with me is that there is an intertwining of politics and the arts. Not in the sense of electoral politics, but in the idea that politics is how people live together and flourish.

Given the broader withering of American authority and its leaders’ seemingly inexhaustible capacity for both violence and buffoonery, is it any wonder that Naked Gun strikes a chord? As political satires go, it’s probably not quite as “sophisticated” as Pizza Man. But it’s a self-poke in the eyes, a blow to the nation’s nutsack. Naked Gun is the rare modern film to pronounce—through wall-to-wall jokes about Pam Anderson’s buttcheeks and unchecked police brutality—that, yes, we are the Freedonians, the Boravians, the baddies. 

We are not perfect; art lets us see that. In a world where principles no longer matter, the lack of them can get you elected as President, art that points us to our better selves is necessary.

This is the real issue behind the Kimmel story (Senator Ted Cruz says US broadcast regulator acted like 'mafioso' on Jimmy Kimmel  - BBC) - suppressing the Frist Amendment so that art cannot comment except at the permission of the government.

About our common need to create, please consider Periklis Angelopoulos's essay, An Impossible Resurrection A Review of Panagiotis Thomas’s Commentary on Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Public Orthodoxy). It opened my mind, even if I have read of similar ideas from Orthodox Christian writers.

In Thomas’s aesthetic theology, beauty is not an abstract quality but a personal, ontological reality. God, as poetic and decorative cause, creates in harmony, friendship, and communication. The uncreated and the created meet in a relationship of care and love. Beauty is incarnated in the person of Christ; it is the mystical radiance that, as Dostoevsky prophesied, “will save the world.” Aesthetic theology is not confined to the categories of charm or taste; it includes the ugly, the painful, the decaying, and the finite. In the figure of the Suffering Servant, ugliness is received, healed, and transfigured into eternity.[4]

Thomas interprets the protagonist’s transformation in Kafka’s novella within the context of the family and social system. Illness reveals the dysfunction of relationships, the sacrifice of the unrecognized and unloved member. Resurrection arises as a possibility of existence. The protagonist’s conscious freedom is claimed through his transformation: “I am.”

The family does not embrace difference but tolerates it from a distance. Tolerance does not achieve the daring of relationship—it fails to bridge the gap to the Other. The father figure, in Kafka, violently rejects the weak child, who reflects his own frailty. Thomas connects this dynamic to the theological tradition: fall, guilt, exile, and ultimately return to God through the Resurrection of Christ. Repentance is not a psychological act but an ontological one—it enables the union of the infinite with the finite; grace inaugurates a new mode of existence. 

 I finally had a chance to read Jenny Erpenbeck thanks to The Yale Review. Her story Junk is short but ever so strong. Its conclusion bothers me; having left me uncertain of her point. Her prose makes me despair of my own prose and inspires me to write better. In a few words she packs in history, current life, and a look into the future. A different intersection of art and politics.  

There is wisdom - a neglected virtue in this country and time - in this video:

And this is how to teach history, tying it not to abstractions but to lives lived, to the lessons we need to remember about humanity:

 History is an art - not just a subject that bored you in high school because it was taught by teachers who had no love for the subject - so consider Scott W. Stern's review, Writing Their Prison’s History (NY Review of Books) with its subtitle of "A recent study by a group of incarcerated scholars at Indiana Women’s Prison reveals how progressive reforms turned into profitable abuse."

“Consider the plight of the incarcerated historian,” Michelle Daniel Jones writes at the start of Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, a remarkable collaborative history of the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis: no Internet access, a tiny library consisting mostly of romance novels, no ability to travel to view archival material, captors legally authorized to censor your writing and foreclose your education. For more than twenty years, Jones—a highly regarded scholar and artist who has been profiled in The New York Times and recently completed a doctorate in American studies at New York University—was confined in the Indiana Women’s Prison as prisoner no. 970554. During that time she began working in the law library, became a paralegal, earned a bachelor’s degree, audited graduate courses, and ultimately embarked on her own historical research. 

Most of the remainder is behind a paywall, but consider what I have quoted; it is the opening paragraph.  The censorship of information going in and going out. The limiting of intellectual life. How the government neuters the education of its person inmates.

Also, notice how a person finds their own motivation to rise above the efforts of the government to keep them down. Humanity has its creative needs. Frustrating those needs should not be the purpose of our government, or beyond the crude powers of government, of our culture. Yet, that is what we have had even before the stifling of algorithms and the bigotry of MAGA. Think about it. 

Then what will you do to change this strangulation of humanity?

sch 9/20

Once More: Online Resources For Indiana Writers

I think I did something like this a few years back, but if you will excuse my laziness in not looking for that earlier post, are some resources for the Indiana writer.

Central Indiana Writers' Association 

Central Indiana Writers’ Association, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1976, is a community of novelists, poets, and essayists writing in all genres. We come together once a month and provide our members with a host of different activities and support. Everyone is welcome!

This has a wide array of information for the writer. 

Indiana University Writers’ Conference: News & Events (Department of English: Indiana University, Bloomington)

Resources for writers in Indiana (WriteByNight) provides a fuller list.

I hope these help you would-be Indiana writers.

sch 8/21

Workers of The World Unite For A Basic Income!

I did not plan on posting this for Labor Day until this morning when I was closing out my drafts folder. This was one of the newest items, being from in the folder since 8/10.

The problem facing me about writing anything about Basic Income for the Arts: What happens next? (The Stinging Fly) was that there was no way any state government would consider the idea. Pay artists for making art? Such silliness. We don't need no stinking art. We will just take whatever washes up on the shore. As for the federal government, it hates the arts as not providing any profitable returns for MAGA. (But what if the artists were making gold replicas of Donald J. "Cankles" Trump?)

The government’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme reaches three years in operation this month. The scheme was originally set to finish after this period, however an extension until February 2026 was recently granted by government.

The stated aim of the scheme is to address financial instability of artists through a weekly payment. In 2022, out of a total of 8,206 eligible applicants, 2,000 artists were chosen—by lottery—to participate. Selected artists receive a guaranteed €325 per week income for the duration, and are required to take part in the scheme’s research programme, providing data on the impact of grant payments. A further 1,000 artists are part of a ‘control’ group, engaging in the research programme, but not receiving the weekly grant.

The BIA scheme represents an historic commitment to art and artists by the State, and has greatly impacted, mostly positively, the lives and work of participating artists.

Ireland has good reasons for supporting their writers. Haven't its writers created Ireland? Typing the names of Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, William Butler Yeats, Sally Rooney, and Samuel Beckett only scratches the surface. But how much did they add to the nation's GDP?

I meant to point out the stability and dignity Ireland gave to its writers.

Declan Toohey: Practically, it has allowed me to both live and write in Dublin for an extended period of time, which is something I don’t take for granted given how expensive this city has become. From a more professional standpoint, the scheme has facilitated a rake of writing: I finished a novel, and several stories, and have started work on another novel, and I can’t imagine having done so if it wasn’t for the BIA. Most importantly it’s given me time—that lovely euphemism for money—in which to write whatever I want. Of course, there’s no guarantee that something you write will ever be published, and no guarantee still that what you publish will actually sell, but one antidote to such anxiety is to throw yourself fully at your artistic obsessions for a time, which is something I couldn’t have done without the stability of the monthly grant.

Caelainn Hogan: It is hard to talk about the benefits of this scheme when other artists are still being excluded. While those in power lack the political will to make everyday needs affordable, the impact is basic but life-changing. Everyone deserves to be free from precarity. When I started on the BIA, I was burned out after my first book and nearly a decade of writing about trauma, from conflict to systemic abuse. As a freelance writer, I suddenly had the peace of mind knowing I could afford rent and there was less pressure to take on work outside of writing. Over the years I have worked in bars, hotels, shops and markets to afford to write. With less financial insecurity, I was able to more easily afford and access support for my mental health. I got pregnant unexpectedly about half a year in and the Basic Income meant I could choose to have a child without the same financial insecurity and without the fear that I would have to give up creative work. I was also able to keep the small desk space in the artist’s studio where I work. So the Basic Income is keeping me writing.

Clíodhna Bhreatnach: It’s given dignity to my life. To give an example: in autumn 2023, a few months after the scheme’s introduction, I was depressed. For eight years, I had had my anxieties but not this terrible, draining low. I cried on the DART looking out at the sea; I sat on my bed and felt those black waves repeat within my brain. A friend encouraged me to go to therapy, but I was reluctant. I hadn’t gone since 2015, when after two sessions of long-repressed realisations, I was unable to afford a third. Rents and debts then consumed more than half my wages. However, thanks to the BIA, this time I had savings in my bank account. I found a therapist online, a woman with a kind face and auburn hair, named Gen. I paid 65 euro for an hour-long session each Monday for two months or so. I talked and talked. I realised I could not tell the story of my life, or the world of my life, in just one hour. So surely, I could certainly not make every poem carry my burden of expressive truth. My writing suddenly felt released from its lifelong cathartic responsibility. Those two months of me talking, Gen listening, made more difference to my life than I can say. But, the Basic Income being a lotto and receiving this state benevolence from sheer luck, made me feel painfully sad for my past self who had been mired in student debt and could not afford therapy, whose daily panic attacks took years to subside. Now I could pay to recover in two months. It felt like I was able to buy back my own life. 

What does America care about stability and the dignity of its workers? We're kicking people off public assistance, not adding them. Our governments do not care what instability comes to its citizens' lives through losing medical or food assistance. Our government must take care of the much-abused, overly-sensitive billionaires. 

Workers don't need dignity, they need to pick a second or third job, so that they can keep feeding the billionaires.

Besides, give people a basic income, and they'll just loaf and play games on their smartphones. You'll find that out from the stories written about it (Universal Basic Income in Science Fiction, What Science Fiction Can Teach Us About Universal Basic Income by Will Truman (Arc Digital | Medium), The Expanse's Basic Support vs. Basic Income, and Science fiction novels for economists - Noahpinion)

CH: As a writer it has given me the chance to experiment and collaborate more, to follow stories with more freedom and importantly to let those stories breathe, to let ideas develop in their own time, to let them change and evolve. There is an expectation within the scheme, I think, that it will make artists more productive and profitable. Maybe that’s true for some. For me, it allowed me in some ways to be less productive but to make more meaningful work, giving me more freedom to write for independent publications, to reach new readers, to engage more with community. Some examples: I collaborated with photographers Clodagh O’Leary and Ala Buisir, wrote about the government excluding survivors from redress for The Ditch, brought artists and activists together for an event exploring what liberation means today, and am currently writing a piece for Airmid’s Journal about intersectional movements for change in Ireland. The Arts Council funding I received before the BIA paid me more and I haven’t applied for funding since being on the scheme, so in that sense it’s not even costing the state more. But suddenly I had years to dedicate to long-term creative projects without having to fit those ideas into a grant application, encouraging more complexity and depth in the stories I wanted to tell. Without it I also might have needed to go abroad for work again. With so many artists leaving this country because they can’t afford to stay, that’s a meaningful impact of the scheme. How many people has it kept living and creating here?

***

CB: Short answers: yes and yes. Published poems do not pay thousands, to put it mildly. Even if the BIA continues, I will continue to work part-time. But importantly, the BIA has not only given me time to write, but the time to write funding applications, to get in touch with others and seek out opportunities. This has helped me enormously. And as the scheme has resulted in my pamphlet, I have been commissioned to write by festivals and organisations and asked to give readings, however ill-paid in the beginning. Nowhere else in the literary world, outside of academia and perhaps Rupi Kaur’s career, will emerging poets be paid €17,000 a year. Writers are not paid fairly.

Yeah, such a lazy bunch of leeches. 

Let the Irish promote their culture to the world and make their own lives more congenial, such silliness.

DM: I was of course relieved to know that the scheme was being extended, but I also hope that this is not simply gestural. We have no idea how long a future proposal will take to legislate and enact, not to mention the nature of it and who will be in power by the time this happens. I would like to see investment in individual artists and artist collectives, not in more bureaucracies which do not reflect artists’ lived professional realities. We have yet again as a country a unique opportunity to innovate on the world stage. I would like to give my culture the best I have to give, which I was only able to give with this scheme. I would like to see bravery on the part of legislators, to extend a new scheme to all professional artists across all stages of their career and discipline(s) of choice. 

Well, we all know the bravery of American legislators. Why should America innovate on the world state with anything but tariffs and threats of tariffs.

It's not like Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, or Bob Dylan did anything to improve this country or its standing in the world.

As for Indiana, whoever heard of any author coming from Indiana (Indiana Authors | Monroe County Public Library, Indiana - mcpl.info, Category:Writers from Indiana - Wikipedia, Indiana Authors Books, 52 books named to 2024 Indiana Authors Awards shortlists - Indiana Humanities, Hoosier Hall of Fame: The Indiana Authors - Indianapolis Monthly) that we should nurture them with a basic income?

No, what I think after reading the Stinging Fly interview is this: everyone having to work for a living should get a basic income. Stop letting us be economically blackmailed by politicians and our bosses. It can't cost any more than helping billionaires maintain their style of life.

sch 8/19

 

You can find the Irish The Arts Council here,

sch 8/22 

 And does the United States government do for writers?

NEA cancels decades-long creative writing fellowship (NPR)

 Alice Walker. Charles Bukowski. Louise Erdrich. Juan Felipe Herrera. These are just some of the authors who received a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts over the years. The fellowship has now been canceled.

The annual program was set up in 1966 to help foster American fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The latest iteration of the fellowship offered fiction and creative non-fiction writers a $50,000 grant. Applications were due in March and notifications were set to go out in December. But last week, notices were sent to applicants stating: "The NEA has cancelled the FY 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program."

sch 8/26