To answer the call of the Spirit
For some time now, I’ve been writing tight little stories about characters who have tight little narrative arcs. Does that make me an uptight writer? Possibly. But I like these roman candles that go airborne with a bang, arc and fizzle out. Beginning, middle and end. Presenting problem. Impediment. Something that goes aha at the finish.
In contrast is writing that is loose, that wanders. Plot’s not really its thing. Not necessarily stream-of-consciousness, but close.
I dusted off No. 235 from my stack of unread copies of The Paris Review and found that most of the prose pieces in this issue were like the latter. I say pieces, since a lot of them are play excerpts that fragment and recombine like dreams, where, as one of the issue’s authors says, “people vanish and appear like magic.”
In “Help,” a black woman confronts othering and privilege in her encounters with white men. “The Stumble” is built around witty conversations that the composer Oscar Levant has in his head with George Gershwin. In “The First Line of Dante’s Inferno,” a woman searches for her sister in a forest that may very well be her own mind.
The fiction in the issue has an equally absurdist bent, although, it being fiction, one more grounded in specificity. The standout for me is, oddly enough, not the most conventional of the three pieces (“The Loss of Heaven”), but the speculative “River Crossings.” It’s an absurdist parable that mirrors our present predicament in a tribalized America: a people long separated who no longer recognize each other.
The Paris Review Interviews are the literary equivalent of a national treasure. In this issue, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks stands out for me—a writer who often doubts himself—as a role model because of her prodigious output and work ethic. Her admonition is one I need to hear: just get out of your own way, answer The Call of The Spirit and let your words roll.