A Note About the Blog

One thing I’ve learned is that writing straightforward book reviews is getting boring for me, and it’s distracting from my work as a writer. This summer I went to the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez, AK. I presented a couple of my plays there, did some acting, and met a lot of incredible creative people. I thought a lot about the creative process. I discovered a couple of things about my own style and method. Improvisation seems to me an integral part of writing. A lot of my favorite books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers) bear clear traces of having been improvised; other favorites of mine (Shipping News, for instance, or Mating) come off as much more polished, beautifully planned and researched books where the form seems well under control.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.