Belle Yang: My Life, My Family, My Graphic Memoir in Snapshots

I will be at Kepler's at 7:30 P.M. July 8th talking about the process of making a graphic novel. Please join me.

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A drawing from 1967, the first year of my family's arrival in America. I like to show school children I wasn't drawing any better than most of them. The scene is of San Francisco Chinatown New Year's parade. Bing, Bang, Bong! Loving comic book sound effects at an early age.

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My parents and I moved to Carmel in 1971. I was lonely the first summer and Nancy Johnson, a professional watercolorist, who lived across the street, took me in her green VW Beetle to join her elderly students sketching and painting at Point Lobos and Cannery Row. The latter was no tourist destination. It was still the real Cannery Row of John Steinbeck.

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Self-portrait in my studio with my cat, Chairman Mao. Mao is a homonym for Mao--Cat (different tone. In Mandarin, there are 4 tones). You'll find him in my graphic memoir, "Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale." He appears in the present and in the past, because I wanted to connect my father to my great grandfather who were spiritually atuned.

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During my three-year sojourn in China, I studied traditional Chinese painting from contemporary masters. There he is, Chairman Mao sitting on his bistro chair.

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My studio at night.

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I use pigment markers for shading and hatching. Pigments do not turn blue or purple with age. This ensures my art work remains unchanged. I continue to do everything by hand. Some artist draw with Photoshop, but this leaves them with no original art. Perhaps they retain merely the sketches, which were scanned into the computer to begin the art work. Maybe not even sketches. I feel rich when I have stacks of art work under my bed, in the closet.

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A tube of gouache (pronounced goo-wash). It's an opaque watercolor and gives me the richest black. I prefer lamp black to permanent black.

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An Ames guide allows me to draw parallel lines. They corral my uneven lettering. But my lettering is hardly as good as it was in grade school. WW Norton decided to digitalize my handwriting, so I have a Belle Yang alphabet. It looks good. I had to do a double-take when I saw my pages with the new alphabet inserted in the captions and word balloons.

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A graphic novel page in the works.


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Taping off an edge of a panel so . . .

I can paint a straight edge. But I rarely use this trick, because my hands have gradually grown steady and I can make a straight edge free hand.


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Having a little show on the carpet of the living room with my dad watching on. It's so satisfying to spread out a bunch of the work and see how far I've come.

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Asked to try my hand on the jacket art, I drew these two pieces. As you can see from the published book, we went in an altogether different direction.

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The last page--"Finis!'

And Matt my loyal Fedex man comes to take it all away. It still amazes me my precious art, the results of 14-years, can reach New York City in less than 24-hours.


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My great granddad, Yang Junchen. He is the tragic hero in "Forget Sorrow."

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The Yang Family resettled in Tianjin during the mid-1930s after the Japanese attacked Manchuria.

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My father Zu-Wu, or Joseph Yang, and me. This was taken in 1994 when my first self-illustrated, adult nonfiction book, "Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father's Shoulders," was published.

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Laning and Zu-Wu. My parents on their engagement.

A life-long partnership.


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My next project will be on my mother's Hakka tribe on the Island of Taiwan. Hakkas were pushed out of the north in the 3rd Century by horse-riding peoples of the steppes. Hakkas in turn became nomads and are often called the Jews of China. My grandfather was adopted by a Japanese family when Taiwan was a colony of Japan (1985--1945), thus the kimono.

THE END

The Tao of the Graphic Novel

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

Before we begin today's Q and A, please click here to watch this 4 minute film in which I am drawing a graphic novel page.

Q: Ms. Belle, are graphic novels all fiction?

A: Well, Belle, this area of art/literature is still being defined as it develops, but I asked my friend the librarian Ruthie Pennington Paget who is my go-to gal pal. This is what she says:

Comics are non-continuous, short stories that you find in a newspaper.

Graphic novels are book length, but they are their own format, which uses the methods of movies for presentation. They are the fiction format.

Graphic memoirs are a non-fiction genre of the graphic format.

The graphic style is a new format with fictional and non-fiction content.

Graphic style = cup. Non-fiction and fictional work are different kinds of ice cubes.

So, you got it? I am actually more rattled. I’ve read “Graphic Novels for Dummies” and it says graphic novels encompass fiction and non-fictional works as in memoirs. And some creators would be outraged to be called graphic novelists when they prefer the aesthetic simplicity of being creators of comics. Some just want to be called cartoonists. Manifestos have been written about what comics should mean. Manifestos? I thought they were only for Communists. Is Communism the root of all comics?

Q: Ms. Belle, what are a few of your favorite graphic novelists

Okay, the obvious ones are Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. Then there is Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”—oh, she is just so literary and laugh-engendering even in as quirky a setting as a funeral home. How can you get literary in a comic book, you ask? You can. She does and I do or at least I try to be.

There are historical comics like the Canadian Chester Brown’s “Louis Riel.” Now that’s an area I want to see grow—biography and history. Comics grow up.

“Stitches” by the Caldecot bemedaled David Small. Josh Neufeld—and I am raring to get my hand on his “A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge.”

There is Joe Sacco’s journalistic approach in “Palestine” and “Gorazde.” He’s great, even if his characters were drawn by an overzealous dentist.

Seth’s “It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken,” about the main character’s obsession to discover the past of a dead New Yorker cartoonist. Seth's drawings are loose-limbed and stylish. Yes, some people get to go by one name because they are special.

Oh, not to forget David B.’s “Epileptic.” He’s French, so he gets to be just David B. (That’s Daveeeed to us uncouth Americans.) His drawings are stunning, marvelous. They make me wish I had made them. His story is painfully personal, about life with a brother who suffers grand mal seizures. Their parents’ attention is focused on the child with the problem. You get the picture. David has to live with the horrid N word: Neglect.

And I could tell you about the graphic novels I don’t love, but I always stop myself from being negative about another maker’s opus. This is my pet peeve: if it’s a bad book of any genre, it will die a natural death. Don’t throw dung at it. We need to review the good ones. Leave room for the idea that all your taste may be all in your buds?

Q: How did you choose the comics format?

A: It jumped out at me in a dark alley at a dead-end. It truly did.

I lived in Japan as a child and was devouring the telephone book-sized manga for girls and came to the US in 1967 wearing my favorite manga character shoes. Now in middle age, the manga phenomenon has washed over this continent like a tsunami.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s Well-Read Donkey post, I had a tough time selling my prose book with full color illustrations. In the eleventh year of my struggle, I reconnected with Alane Salierno Mason, my former editor at Harcourt Brace. She had moved to WW Norton and Company, and she suggested I take a look at Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.” I did, and KAPOW! I was knocked over madly in like with the comics format all over again. I said, hey, I can do this, and do it well. So I turned my prose work into captions and dialogues, drew the pages in panels of art then showed them to Alane. Norton offered me a contract in the fall of 2007.

Q: Why do you work in black and white. Are you giving up color?

A: Ms. Belle, you know very well this question sends me into a tizzy.

As far as I can remember, I've loved black and white art. It began with black crayons on white sheets of paper on the backs of mom's students’ exams. When someone mentions comics, my mind flies to black and white inky panels, not color. Black and white has it's own set of parameters and design issues. Black on white is ecstatic. The two "colors"--one being the total absorption of light and the other, the throwing off of all light--are polar opposites. It's thrilling, its ecstatic, it's exhilarating. It's drama and conflict. Durm und strung.

Think about the first mark you make on a pristine sheet of paper. The abrasion of the black crayon or pencil is like an explosion in the cosmos, the moment when matter comes into existence.

Q: Ms. Belle, how should someone new to the graphic novel approach the reading of the first one?

A: I am always surprised by this question, because I learned to read manga when young, so it’s as natural to me as eating rice. You can do it any way you like: read it fast and come back to study the details. Or linger over each panel until satisfied and go on to the next. I can’t begin to break down my eye-brain functions, but I imagine I scan the panels and the entire page.

A graphic novelists like Chris Ware in his “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” asks us to scan the whole page, because he wants us not to read in the usual way of moving our eyes left to right and top to bottom. He requires us to take in the whole and then home in on the details within the panels. You eyes will get a lot of exhausting and exhaustive exercise when you read graphic novels. It’s not kid’s stuff. Oftentimes, you have go back to find the trail of white pebbles, like Hansel and Gretel, in order to find your way.

And no, you are not stoopid if you missed it the first time round. Reread, reread and reread.

Q: Why did you use a brush and gouache instead of markers or pen and India ink?

I’m Chinese. Chinese love the brush. Therefore, I love the brush. Chinese culture is inseparable from the brush, since Chinese calligraphy is defined as the Mother of all arts. (I’ve heard Westerners refer to calligraphy as the art of the dunce. Hey, don't frown at me: I didn’t say it.) The brush can be supple or energized. It is able to express the artist’s every emotion, whether it be peace, rage or elated trembling.

With gouache, an opaque watercolor, I can get the darkest velvety black. India ink can crack. It’s not as supple after it dries on the Bristol board and causes the paper to warp. Nothing uglier than warped art.

Q: Why do you say the Chinese horizontal scroll is like a pre-modern motion picture. How does it relate to the graphic novel?

When you go into Asian museums, you might see a horizontal scroll unrolled in its entirety under glass. This is the wrong way to look. Horizontal scrolls were hand-held devices. Intimate. You unroll a section to the left and roll up what you’ve seen on the right. It’s as if you are riding on the back of a donkey and you get to travel the landscape, entering the mountain, descending into a village, crossing a bridge, getting into a boat to float downstream . . . the boat goes over a waterfall (Uh, just checkin’ to see if you are still with me.)

This is exactly what I try to show the reader of a graphic novel. I take my reader into the landscape of my story. And I might add that scrolls have lines of poetry written directly into the silk or paper, just like captions in a graphic novel.

Q: Why are you nuts about this format?

A: Because it’s perfect for me. In my prose books, the two-dozen pieces of art got lost. In my children’s book, the art was dominant partner. In graphic novels, words and images come together in a perfect balance and neither overwhelms the other. And how cool is that to be make ice cubes to fill a largely unfilled cup. My cup runneth empty is a good place to be.

Q: What are you going to blog about tomorrow, Ms. Belle?

A: I’m taking you on a photographic visit of my workspace and the tools of my trade, which includes empty, white tofu containers. And the latter has zero to do with being Chinese. I also want to show you family pictures of ancestors. But I have 24-hours to change my mind.

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

I’ve had many an interview on this book tour for my graphic memoir, “Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale,” published by WW Norton and Company. I’ve had fun replying to the questions, but sometimes, I leave the sessions feeling unfulfilled—mostly on radio when the platform is really for the scintillating host fast-talk.

One of my favorite telephone interviews became material for the Asian Pop column by John Yang in sfgate.com. John and I were so culturally in tune with one another, I could skip over the explanations and jump into the real deal of Chinese history and aesthetics. Tomorrow, I’ll do a self-interview about the art and process of the graphic novel (comic format). Today, some getting-getting-to-know what's under Ms. Belle's mad hat.

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

Q: Belle, what question do you hate most?

A: “Are you writer first or do you primarily think of yourself as a painter?”

I say: "When I write, I am a writer; when I paint, I am a painter.” I add: “When I make graphic novels, I can be both.”

Q: You’re a writer/artist of adult nonfiction books and children’s books, and now you are a graphic memoirist. Why do you jump categories, formats and generally make a librarian's job harder?

A: Belle, I came a cross a saying by a writer in India. She said: “ To be categorized is near death.” My soul was smiling when I read her words. I know it’s a trope, an exaggeration, but since I’ve long outgrown my childhood need to be like everyone else, I now have the opposite fear: of being plugged into a single category, let’s say “Asian American literature” or “Immigrant Literature.” I am a communicator. I can speak to young and old and anyone in between.

Q: Belle, if Forget Sorrow is your Chinese King Lear, can you identify the parallel characters in your book and in Lear?

A: My father’s grandfather was King Lear, who was blind to the truth nature of his children. His father was an imperfect Cordelia. My father’s second uncle was the fool and so was Yuan the Taoist idiot who came to claim his winter clothing from Great Grandfather when geese flew south and frost was on the eggplant. You know that Shakespeare had multiple fools in “As You Like.”

Q: Then who is your Edmund?

A: The Communist. They blinded China. The old order was turned upside down. Children were turned against parents to eradicate the Confucian legacy.

Q: Come now, did you reeeeally work 14 years on Forget Sorrow?

A: Yes, I had two adult nonfiction books under my belt. Then I met with rejection after rejection from my agent and editors, so I reworked my prose manuscript each time after I recovered from the blow. (I’d sleep for 2 days then get up, ready to fight on). Even when I was ill a decade ago, I returned from the hospital and dreamed of my great grandfather. He did not say a word, but I interpreted the dream as a reminder I had no time to be ill: I had not sent his story out into the world.

Q: Why were you so darn persistent?

A: There are many parts to the answer. One, I wanted to take away the pain my father bore for decades after the dissolution of his family and country.

Two, I wanted to take revenge against time, war and forgetting for my great grandfather who was thrown off his estate and wandered a beggar, dying ultimately of starvation and heartbreak.

Three, I was born in 1960 when great grandfather was “going home,’ so I often envision myself as his reincarnation.

Four, I always try finish what I begin. I’ve been a sprinter in the athletic sense, never a marathon runner. In my creative life, I want to be the latter.

Q: Under your hat, I see you have a bit of gray. What are the most important lessons you have learned in your half-century?

A: I lived with an abusive man who turned stalker after I fled him. He had gradually silenced me through manipulation. Manipulation is the evil art of alternating praise with pain. Sweetness followed by bitterness, on and on in this iambic pattern.

After I left him, I found a haven in China, but ran smack into the Tiananmen Massacre in my third year. I saw an entire people silenced by manipulation.

I learned that voice is power and stories make us individuals. When an emperor comes to the throne, he burns books—quashes stories—to enslave the people. I returned from China, vowing I would never waste this gift known as freedom of expression.

I’ve lent my voice to my parents who are bards in Mandarin Chinese, but lost their voice in this new country. I helped to make them individuals in the eyes of this society.

Q: What are your goals as a writer?

A: I want to have my books published and do well enough so that I can keep on doing the same thing. The reward of writing is to continue writing. No more; no less.

Q: How do you pronounce your last name?

A: Yang is pronounced like “young” as in young and old. We don’t have nasal “a’s” in Chinese. The “g” is almost silent. A few years ago, I made it my mission to teach non-Chinese speaker how to wag and curl their tongues properly. Yang means poplar, birch, willow or aspen. It's a beautiful family of trees and deserves to be pronounced with an open "a".

Q: I am writing a comic book script myself. It’s about my mother who was a member of the Hakka tribes. They fled the Huns when they rode in from the north. It's going to be really good. You want to read it?

A: Uh, oh gosh, I forgot I have an appointment for a pap smear followed by a root canal. Maybe later, okay?

How to Find an Author

Translation: like my publisher, I’m in it for the benjamins. But purely mercenary reasons aside, I should say one of the greatest rewards is stumbling across “new” authors. There’s an innocence, yet also a covetousness, to such occasions: you’re in love, you’re making a discovery that only a minority of English-speakers can share, and in staking out ground with your flag, you’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg—probably the larger part of an entire oeuvre still lies submerged in another language. It’s possessive in the best sense, like when, as a kid, you couldn’t wait to race to the library and check out all a given author’s books because you’d just devoured the last one. But of course, if you love an author, you also want to share him or her with the world.

How do I find the authors likely to interest me? Well, how do you decide what book to read next? The time-honored ways apply: critical histories, serendipitous bookstore finds, tips from trusted friends. I look up interviews with authors I like, then look up the authors they mention as friends, influences, heroes, contemporaries. Really, one read leads to another: epigraphs, quotations, allusions, blurbs, these all whet hungry curiosity with the breadcrumbs of further names or titles to investigate. One of the best things about reading foreign fiction is encountering the strange. Read a lot. Be willing to be surprised.

Because of the relatively small amount of work translated into English (as opposed to the amount translated from it), any authors you find are likely to be “new” only to English speakers, though sometimes they can be young or budding talents even in their home country. (This, like sales figures or an established reputation, can in fact be a selling point to US publishers.) We may feel we live in an international age, but c’mon: roaming charges, DVD regions, voltage variations, and a thousand other details of daily life make the experience of being in any one country quite different from being in another. The truth is, unless you can afford to spend your days following another country’s literary news, the best you can get from abroad is a very filtered view. What’s it filtered by? Professors, pundits, experts, scholars, reporters, reviewers, various government-funded initiatives for international cultural dissemination, authors, translators—think about all the usual people telling you who to read; think about how much you do or don’t ignore them; imagine that number doubled—the US plus another country’s literary establishment—then imagine the intermittent signal from one to the other further staticked by rumor, speculation, misperception, mistranslation, partiality, and gossip. How do we ever manage to get the skinny on another country?

This may sound exceedingly cynical, but what I’m saying is: make up your own mind. Find something you love and champion it. Only you can make it the next big thing. Often there’s a lot of competition among translators for a few big names that not only make it over, but make a splash. Toussaint. Houellebecq. Bernard Henri-Lévy. Don’t be satisfied with what people tell you is big abroad. The people over there think something if not totally different, then definitely more varied. As Americans, we have a certain conception of France, and naturally, we often look to confirm that conception. Publishers who like French stuff are looking the next book that’s somehow quintessentially French. But humans are great rationalizers, and everything that makes it big as French somehow gets added to the general conception of “Frenchness,” even if only as “something not formerly thought of as French.” So much of taste is decided around a dinner table, anyway: an editor goes to Paris, dines with his or her friends, comes back with recommendations. Why shouldn’t your dinner table be a source of informed opinion, provided that you’ve done your research and can eloquently advocate your tastes? Translation is your chance to revamp national reputations—to renovate a cliché. Up till recently, there was no such subgenre as “Scandinavian crime.”

I for one would love to expand the notion of Frenchness to include fabulism, not generally something we’ve looked to France for since, oh, maybe Jules Verne. As a genre, the Francophone fantastic is something of a lost continent for American readers today; the last communiqués from its shores to reach our own date back to the Decadents, or the Surrealists at best. Internationally, its centrality to French letters has been overshadowed by more prominent movements. Existentialism, Oulipo, the nouveau roman, structuralism: thanks in part to their successful exportation, these are the must-sees on any tour of postwar French literature, yet in the 20^th century, a tradition born of the transition from Romantic to Modern also thrived, and evolved to address contemporary concerns. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in our own American “weird tale,” homegrown name for a somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. But it’s clear the contemporary fantastic, which remains virtually unknown outside France, has much to offer similar Anglophone developments, from the metafictionalists of the 1960s, who playfully appropriated fantastical content, to the contemporary New Weird and New Wave Fabulists. Publications like Fairy Tale Review, or such recent volumes as the Library of America’s two-volume American Fantastic Tales bear witness not only to resurgent interest in the genre but its legitimization as literature.

A bit of advice for budding translators: international rights are a tricky business, and more than one translator has gotten burned by issues of permission. There have even been stories of fickle or unscrupulous authors retracting rights or pitting two translators against each other. Before you dive into the work, do your homework. Who owns the rights: the publisher, the author, or the author’s estate? The older a work is, the harder it may be to track down the rights. Contact the rights department for the publisher in question, and wait patiently for your email to be dug out of spam by an intern. Chances are, answering your query will not be a priority, unless you are coming with a publication contract or some other offer of money (sadly, publications in literary magazines may not always cut it). Then, stand by your author. The translator is writer, critic, and representative. In a way, I was Châteaureynaud’s US agent for a while, when I was trying to build a presence for him with publications in literary magazines. It may not pay much, but it’s gratifying, and a good way, down the line, to make a case for your author to a publisher. So what if your author isn’t even well-known in his or her homeland? The ironies and vagaries of international publishing are such that making it into English could, conversely, make your author big back home.

It’s been a pleasure and a privilege blogging this week at Well-Read Donkey. I am grateful and honored Aggie asked me to drop by, and I hope it’s been as fun for you as it has for me. To paraphrase Beyoncé: if you like it, then you should put a comment on it.

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P.S. If you’re reading A Life on Paper, why not drop by the terrific blog Largehearted Boy for a peek at the soundtrack the author and I have devised for the book? Then stick around for other awesome soundtracks writers have concocted for their creations.

Also, if you’re into supporting excellent writing, I’m in the Clarion Write-a-Thon this summer.You may have heard of the Clarion writing workshop, which has been running for 42 years and has turned out many bestselling and award-winning writers, often in the speculative vein. Funding has been cut for the program this year, and so Clarion has responded by running a "Write-a-Thon" to ensure that the workshop can continue. Sponsor me, and all proceeds go to keeping Clarion alive. What this entails is making a small PayPal donation via my profile page, which can be found here. Even a $5 donation helps Clarion tremendously. Sponsors also have the option of joining the Write-a-Thon forums, tracking my progress, and cheering me on during this six-week event.

Ways of Reading Châteaureynaud and the Fantastic

(Photo of G.-O. C. and me courtesy Christine Bini)

Translators often say that one of the things they like best about their job is research (though writers could claim the same). A proper rendering in the target language involves looking into the subject matter of the source text, with attendant crash courses in history and vocabulary. You can never quite predict the strange side alleys where translating will lead you. While working on the uncollected story “Talking Ape Clobbered by Clowns” (which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Epiphany) I stumbled across Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit, or “thrownness”: “the accidental nature of human existence in a world that has not yet been made our own by conscious choice.” It seemed to describe perfectly this headlong tale of circus life with a climax in which the hapless heroine’s last words as she is hurled from a speeding motorcycle are “Oh Lord, what is this world where I've been flung?” (When I asked Châteaureynaud about Geworfenheit, he smiled, intrigued, and said he’d never heard of it.) In researching the story “Delaunay the Broker,” I scoured the sites of antique dealers to get visuals of silver sauceboats on pedestal bases and collectible decorated snuffboxes, the better to wrap my head around the objects described in French. I even paid visits to auction houses. On the whole, I’m very thankful to be a translator in the age of Google.

Châteaureynaud wrote “Delaunay” in 1988, and Words Without Borders published my translation in November 2005: the author’s English language debut. The discussion that follows may perhaps be most rewarding for those who've had a chance to read the story. Its plot ****SPOILERS**** is simple: the narrator, antiques dealer Edmond Thyll, obtains the services of the titular Delaunay, a broker noted in the business for being able to procure almost any item, down to the last detail, that a client might demand. Delaunay, is, in essence, that magical figure able to make dreams come true (in this case, within the admittedly narrow bounds of antiquarian collectibles, but chalk that up to Châteaureynaud’s sense of humor). No wonder, then, he excites the curiosity and cupidity of the narrator, who takes it upon himself to violate Delaunay’s sole stipulation: that he never ask where Delaunay gets his goods. Sneaking into Delaunay’s apartment, he finds Delaunay’s unsettling, even horrifying diary of the ordeals he suffers in the other world from which he procures his objects. Naturally, Delaunay leaves Thyll’s service, and in the end Thyll is left alone with a copy he made of the diary, “the only diary of the fantastic in the history of literature,” which it seems he will contemplate for the rest of his days.

There are several ways to read this story. One that immediately leaps to mind is as a variation on an age-old cautionary tale: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If curiosity does not, in this case, kill Thyll, it leaves him haunted and bereft. As in fables, action and moral are somewhat predictable, speaking to the perennial, if lamentable human desire to ruin a good thing. But is that all we can get from the story?

Châteaureynaud’s skill at sketching character with economy, sympathy, and precision is such that we might also deepen our appreciation of the tale by subjecting it to a realist reading. The realist short story is generally said to “reveal character,” and the psychological exploration of character and motivation is often cited as a goal of “literary” rather than “genre” fiction (scare quotes denote the "common wisdom" aspect of these definitions, rightly contested). Through this lens, the denouement of “Delaunay” has the inevitability of the well-told tale. Instead of speaking to a universal human failing—-ceding to temptation—-the story plots, step by step, the specific ways in which Thyll’s weaknesses prove his undoing. Right from the outset we get hints of the narrator's character from his behavior: vain, snobbish, easily flattered, grasping, envious, and mistrustful. The latter qualities are expanded on when he reveals how he first became acquainted with the private eye that he hires to follow Delaunay: he’d once hired the same man to follow a former lover. There's also direct reference to the narrator's homosexuality, his attraction to Delaunay, and his inability to have lasting relationships. Seen this way, the story becomes an investigation of the drive to covetousness and curiosity in which the fantastic element is merely a device, comparable to a more realist conceit, to shine a light on the operations of these emotions.

Ah, but what about the mysterious Delaunay, who’s never developed? What about the harrowing world he visits, so coyly referred to as “crossing the bar” (no reference to Tennyson intended)? For realists, this is the elephant in the room, and must at least be boiled down to metaphor, if not psychology. But in the literature of the fantastic, the fantastic is the raison d’être. The abiding richness of a fantastical element may in fact lie in its resistance to explanation and its refusal to be reduced to metaphor. It simply is. As Brian Evenson puts it in his preface to A Life on Paper, “Like Kafka, Châteaureynaud has little interest in explaining away the fantastic or in dulling its claws: the dreamy strangenesses to be found in his stories simply exist and must be taken at face value.”

“Delaunay,” then, presents us with a perfect example of story of the fantastic in its classical form, in which an impossible and inexplicable phenomenon, usually the crux of the tale, is briefly visited upon the protagonist. As critic and Surrealist Roger Caillois would say, the fantastic “manifests itself as scandal, rift, or tear, an uncanny, almost unbearable irruption into the real.” Sometimes the light that shines through this crack lays us bare, leaves us shriven. Other times, darkness comes through instead, making us unsure of the world we think to know when suddenly we find it shrouded in shadow.

Finally—and I owe this reading to my friend Ken Schneyer—“Delaunay the Broker” may be taken as a religious allegory. Any broker is a go-between, but one endowed with the power to fulfill desires becomes, in such a scheme, the intermediary between some unknowable Other, like God, and the world of flawed mortals like the narrator. His diary describes experiences tortured and ecstatic as those of mystics, and that other world where “all things are the same” but “the same as what I cannot say” resembles a Platonic world of forms. But in return, Delaunay asks trust: a leap of faith the narrator can't make. When the narrator betrays this trust, he is left with the writings of the prophet Delaunay: holy writ and scripture, a host and reliquary from which the incomparable, uncapturable spirit has moved on.

If you’ve had a chance to look at this story or any others by Châteaureynaud, what are some of your interpretations? Do you read realist and fantastical work with different mindsets or expectations? Share your personal narratives of reading in the comments section!

A Translator's Journey

A doctor tells a man he’s dead, so he goes home to inform his family and arrange his own funeral. A taxi driver has the best night of his life on a street off all the city maps, but what awaits when, years later, he finally finds his way back? A father tries to ease his obsessive grief over his wife’s death by taking several photos of his daughter every hour of her life. A poet in a mid-life crisis stumbles into a museum devoted to his past, present, and… future? Returned from abroad and weary of war, a king tries to reconstruct a pavilion remembered from his distant childhood. An antiques dealer meets a scout who can furnish any item a client might desire. A fortunetelling parrot frightens a glove merchant contemplating suicide in one of the automated firing-squad booths conveniently installed around his city. To please his new girlfriend, a translator must give up the humming mummy he keeps in a double bass case. A musician returns to his hometown to discover his childhood sweetheart has committed suicide… but then again, the river Tartarus doesn’t just run through everyone’s hometown.

Earlier this month, Small Beer Press debuted French fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud in English with A Life on Paper, a collection of short stories spanning the author’s career from his beginnings in the mid-‘70s to his most recent collection in 2005. Handpicked from among the hundred-odd he’s written, these stories—-eerie, wondrous, monstrous, mocking, and genteel—-showcase the variety of subjects, influences, and structures unified by the author’s subtle, graceful style and his principal concerns: nostalgia, the intersections of dream and reality, the ironies of fate, and the painful knowledge of mortality.

How do you tell someone about something you’ve lived with for years in near silence? Where do you start? For so long, it feels like I’ve been the only reader for these stories—-and in a way, I have: there were people I could speak to about them in French, but whom could I talk to about them in English? Whom could I talk about their English versions to? Not editors who’d rejected them, often not even the overworked editors who’d accepted them for publication in literary magazines. After a day of translation at my desk, I’d emerge from work both exhausted and elated, as from immersion in a sea of stories. Now that these stories are finally out, able to be shared with an Anglophone audience, holding this handsome hardcover up to my ear is like standing in a landlocked state and hearing an echo of that distant ocean’s roar. But it's you readers out there--swimmers all--I want to hear from. I want to hear whether the water's warm or cold, clear or murky, calm or roiling. Send me postcards with a few lines about waves lapping at your feet, or radio warnings of riptides, photos of brightly-hued fish in quick schools. What do you want to know about Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud? What can I pass on about him, or from you?

I first came across Châteaureynaud’s work in 2005, in the Zulma reprint of his 1989 collection Le Jardin dans l’île. There are books you pick up that it turns out have been waiting for you, or you for them. Some are there as Virgil was for Dante, to take you by the hand and guide you through a dark wood. There are certain prose styles, of an instantly suggestive music, that sound to me like half a duet. They are waiting for their partner in another tongue to complement them with harmony and complete the performance. No doubt this is a translator’s fancy: coming after German, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Hungarian, and Croatian, English has certainly kept Châteaureynaud waiting.

What first drew me to Châteaureynaud was his use of the fantastic as an investigation of regret, a theme dear to my backward-glancing heart. But really, the Castelreynaldian fantastic does through indirection, unsettling symbol, or calm account of the impossible the very thing literature is meant to: lend voice to solitary experience or singular witness. How many of us, back from a foreign land, then face the difficulty of describing our time there? How often, over the breakfast table or even a lover’s pillow, have we found it hard to articulate a particularly compelling dream? How do we negotiate our return from the unrepeatable and unprovable; how do we import, intact, what only we have seen back into a social world—-a world of consensual meanings—-and make it matter to others? These concerns are central to the fantastic as a genre, which, as Tzvetan Todorov put it, forces the reader’s hesitation between natural (psychological) and supernatural (marvelous) explanations for the events described.

Here I am, then: back from a foreign land. Someone told me marvelous stories there. Impossible things happen in them, things that cannot be explained except by telling you each tale in its entirety. So I will do just that. I will pass these stories on intact, just as I learned them, but in the language you and I speak to one another.

*********************
Widely known in his native France, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud has been honored over a career of more than 30 years with the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, and the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire at Utopiales. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Words Without Borders, AGNI Online, Epiphany, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Postscripts, Eleven Eleven, Sentence, Joyland, and The Café Irreal. His work has been compared to that of Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Cortazar, Isak Dinesen, and Steven Millhauser.

A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the Centre National du Livre, Ledig House, the Banff Centre, and the American Literary Translators Association. His work has also appeared in World Literature Today, Subtropics, Absinthe, Two Lines, and Tin House. The winner of the 2010 John Dryden Translation Prize, in the coming year he will be a Fulbright scholar in Brussels, studying Belgian fantastical fiction.

Guest Post by Joan Frank: When It Is Good

Joan with her granddaughters Brittany and Bella (right to left)


A wise friend suggested I list some of the ways in which the calling of writing makes one happy—to ward off evidence that the work brings an apparently limitless supply of frustration, loneliness, difficulty so cunningly intricate it approaches a kind of Escherian sublimity, and in result, anguish.

An answering image comes to mind, from a silly Tom Hanks movie called "Splash." In it, Darryl Hannah plays a modern mermaid, whose fate is to own a pair of (drop-dead) female legs on land but, as soon as she’s in water, to manifest a glorious, scaly, powerfully-tailfinned bottom half. One scene I remember shows her filling a tub, with the bathroom door locked. The next moment we see her blissfully reclined in that tub: a brief retreat from the bewildering demands of humans, her fabulous tail flicking once or twice in peace and contentment. The bath has clearly restored an ineffable, deeply right state of things, down to the DNA.

It feels like that to be sitting at the keyboard.

I’m pretty sure I was imprinted to respond this way by my late father—a teacher who spent endless hours in the simple den he’d built behind our Arizona home. There he’d installed air conditioning, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a first-rate sound system, and a big desk made from a wooden door placed on two low filing cabinets. He burned incense in a little brass Buddha, played jazz, classics, Broadway, and opera on the stereo, and typed his head off—a rich, staccato music of its own, filled with the intensity of his thinking—at a Royal Portable typewriter which later became my high school graduation gift.

The objects, the tableau, the sounds and smells (sandalwood, sweat, books)—shaped me early, at what I’d have to call soul level. Anyone who’d known my father, and then lived to see my studio out behind our house today—its big old wooden desk, shelves of books, Glen Gould on the CD player—would be entitled to laugh, because it would appear I’d done my best to copy my father’s retreat in every detail (except the incense). Most tellingly, to "assume the position"—sitting at the desk, staring at pages or screen—still gives the instant, deep comfort of the fetal curl.

Here are similar moments, gathered in a free-association search:

• Intervals at the desk when it occurs to you that you don’t know what’s going to happen, and that you’re writing to find out. Your heart pounds.
• Finding a way through heinously painful passages that must nonetheless be told: being “accurately alive” to the framed experience, to borrow a fellow writer's words. Getting it right gives something and eases something, but I won't call it psychotherapy, because it's not.
• Rereading work after a long time away from it and feeling extreme relief to see that it still reads as it should.
• Feeling not ashamed but loyal, even grateful toward prior work. It was necessary, and you can stand by it.
• Driving alone in the car, and suddenly understanding what the title must be. (Titles are such a strange and delicate business—you seek them as if setting out to bag Tinkerbell in a butterfly net.)
• Swimming or walking or washing dishes or sweeping or staring at nothing, and understanding, of a sudden, what needs to happen next.
• Going into a piece of work to clean it up, and in some blessed flash seeing where certain material can naturally fall away. The unnecessary words almost turn a lighter shade before your eyes.
• Getting up from the desk as if from a long sleep, with only the dimmest sense of how much time has passed.
• Being unwilling to stop, even to eat. It happens. (And I really, really love food.)
• Bothering to turn on the light at night to jot the needed words, even if they wind up getting dumped. (You may insist you can remember without jotting. Good luck with that.)
• When life appears to be rocketing to hell and the known world exploding into gumball-sized shards, you can begin to write about it. The act is private, costs no money, keeps you company, gives validation, context, and some degree of control: a precious, slim tether to the sanity you feared for.
• Images and words surface like golden carp: from memory, from an odd photograph, from dreams. A kid’s face. Camellias in half-decay. A dead robin. A painting. An argument on a beach, long ago. A phrase—fitting the need to hand like a little key.
• Weirdly, there’s even satisfaction in getting stuck. It's a signal you’re underway. Somehow you'll dig out, or wander accidentally through a side passage—often unaware you did, until later. There’s excitement in the trust you learn to place in that process, in making yourself receptive to it.
• Stumbling into reading that helps, in some way, what you’re working on.
• A note arrives like a “message in a bottle,” telling you someone was reached and moved by your work.
• You send a note to someone whose work has reached and moved you, and (as frosting) receive a warm response.

Many of the above sound like the habits and consolations of a junkie: while the comparison’s a bit violent, it may not be completely inaccurate. But the tradition—of needing a writing life to survive—emerges from a long, distinguished, and not-so-distinguished past. Flaubert called it “a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.” Somerset Maugham said that after a good day’s writing, regular life struck him as “a bit flat and pale” by comparison.

I recall a "Saturday Night Live" sketch years ago, showing a couple strolling happily through a city park. As they did, a voiceover declared quietly, “These two people have not used any commercial product to make themselves more attractive to each other.”

In the same spirit: none of the above-described pleasures has much to do with publishing.

Joan Frank

Guest Post by Joan Frank: If You Really Want to Hear About It

In my alternate life as a book reviewer, I come across a practice that’s more and more pervasive, and it happens like this:

A first novel by a very bright, up-and-coming young author arrives for review. At the back of the novel the publisher has attached a section called (I'll invent a title to camouflage it) “Additional Info and More About Me.”

This section features the writer's photo—way handsome—followed by a little snack-tray of personal chat: a self-deprecating, witty narrative about his life, background, the writing of the book, and a quick tour of the books he's presently reading. For a farewell flourish he lists all the titles he'd first wanted to give the novel in my hands, and his funny reasons for rejecting each.

The purpose of these sparkling riffs is of course to draw readers. The “More About Me” section—promised in a shiny, medal-like sticker on the book’s cover—offers a literary amuse-bouche.

Of course I skip straight to this section, the same way I leaf through gossip magazines at the supermarket checkout. And in an instant, I want to tell the writer (and his publicist) with a groan: No, no, no. Please don’t do this.

It isn’t that the author's small talk isn't fun or tasteful: it's downright demure, compared with the antics of many websites and trailers. But a website or a video trailer—so far, anyhow—exists in a separate physical (or virtual) space. If you make a sandwich of the actual novel slapped up against the author’s jolly scrapbook-noodling, it strikes me that you not only devalue the novel—you make it almost irrelevant. Why should a reader bother with a flimsy, made-up story when she can zero in, between the same covers, on the tasty dirt of the writer’s life?

My guess is that most readers will skim the novel after having sucked up the more salacious stuff at the back—and only then if there happens to be nothing else to do.

And there’s always, always something else to do.

To survive, literary fiction—last time I checked—must create urgency, even inside the quietest tale. A reader’s got to need to push through, compelled by the story’s voice, or because she's curious about what happens next, or both. She’s got to care. One of the lines that still reverberates across decades, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, is Holden Caulfield’s tense refrain: If you really want to hear about it . . . Those words served as Holden’s sword and shield—and bait. Very few, he understood, really give a toss. It's a story's job to lure them.

I’m not arguing for piousness, exactly. I like the junk food of gossip as much as anybody, and to be fair, reading about artists' personal struggles (in their letters, for example) can inspire as powerfully as their works. Just, please—invoking that famous old New Yorker division between its advertising and editorial departments—can't we keep the elevator doors separate?

A writer offers a piece of fiction by way of saying Here is a dream I made. The reader takes it into her hands, answering I accept your dream for the duration of its reading—if it can hold me. The dream is a world. Unlike a website, film, or television show, a book doesn't commend itself to dreams when bound together with a series of outtakes, commercial tie-ins, funny bloopers, action figures, key chains, and the author tweeting what he ate for breakfast. Those latter forms of outfall may show up—but please, don't leash them to the art.

Introductions and acknowledgment pages aside—when personality profiling is packed cheek to cheek with fiction, it strikes me that the primacy of the “real” voice nearly always trumps. Some delicate membrane dissolves, a little sickeningly. Readers' sympathies naturally flow toward the "actual"—melting fiction's dream, rendering it gossamer, sometimes even silly. What's more, a reader can sneak back anytime and check out those dishy pages whenever she gets bored with the story (the poor story!)—like porn stashed in the back of a textbook.

So when that delicious suspension—okay: for this moment, this dream and no other—is punctured, what's left? The novel becomes an infomercial or larky exercise, winking the neon message Ha, Just Fooling Around.

A new genre? Possibly. And for some, that might be ideal—but I can't really say I want to hear about it. There's little time, and so much wonderful work out there yet to read.

~Joan

Feature article on Joan's life and work by Press Democrat writer Diane Peterson.

Guest Post by Joan Frank: The Fate of Palomino Boy

Joan Frank with her granddaughters Bella, 9 , Brittany 11, and her husband, playwright Bob Duxbury.

Born in Los Angeles in 1918, Don Emblen was one of those tough old believers, a poet, publisher and bibliophile who lived hard. Lifelong friends included Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and the late William Stafford. He worked for what was then the Los Angeles City News Service, chased submarines in the Navy, married three times, had kids and grandkids, taught English Lit thirtysome years at the same Northern California college, and acted as a second father to my husband, whom he hired many years ago to teach there as well.

Don’s passions were myriad. He ran a hand-press; printed chapbooks and broadsides. He drove for Meals on Wheels; grew fruit and vegetables. He hiked and traveled, Nova Scotia to Prague, and wrote about all of it. He held soirées: people read from new work; chamber ensembles serenaded. He published a monthly newsletter called The Reader’s Rejoinder, a literary almanac produced on his outsized manual typewriter. In 1999, he was crowned the first Poet Laureate of Sonoma County.

All this is to describe a polymath, whose driving passion was language. He wrote perhaps 4000 poems, and several books—including an early biography of Peter Mark Roget, creator of the thesaurus. Though frail and wizened toward the end, Don’s verve never flagged. His gravelly voice often popped up on our answering machine with questions about a name or title or phrase. He critiqued our work; left sacks of fruit on our front porch. Don died a year ago. We miss him fiercely.

After his memorial service, I wandered to a table bearing some of his effects. I saw the famous Emblen typewriter, on which he’d scotch-taped the local library’s schedule. Then something else caught my eye: an early book co-written with his first wife, called Palomino Boy, a young people’s novel about a Mexican-American child, hardcover: Viking Press, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1948.

The clear plastic cover had clouded; the pages yellowed around their edges. I looked at the book’s first sentence: Juan was as brown as the side of a mountain.

I flipped to the back jacket flap. There was a stunning young Don, almost unrecognizably handsome, walking the beach with a dazzling first wife, arm tightly around her waist, their hair wind-whipped. They looked like movie stars: an ad for joy. It streamed from their bodies, their faces.

I felt a little seasick.

It wasn’t that I don’t know this is the way of things. Other remarkable friends have died, never attaining anything close to Don’s fabulous earthly score of ninety years. It wasn’t that I didn’t rejoice to see this evidence of a brilliant youth.

It was the book.

Who would remember it? To whom, besides family and intimates, could it now possibly matter? I held it in my hands like Yorick’s skull.

Days later, I looked it up online. A smattering of libraries held copies; bookfinders offered it as an antiquarian title, often for outrageous prices. I found a hand-typed 1948 University of Illinois Library list of new titles coming out that year, dismissing Palomino Boy with a sniff: “not a must.” (It pleases me to think that the sniffer must be long dead.) And I found an old New York Times review—a two-paragraph blurb from 1949. It used dated terms (“Negro”) but its verdict was kind, signed by Cornelia Ernst Zagat, someone I now wish I could have known: “ . . . Simplicity and a poetic quality in the writing and convincing characterization. Eight to ten-year-olds will appreciate this wise and beautiful story.”

The story broaches, with extreme gentleness, the problem of racism, or Other-ness. The orphaned Juan, who lives with an American foster family, worries that he is the wrong color. Animal and human friends, of different colors, teach him otherwise. The illustrations (called “decoration” in the Times review) are dreamily beautiful, like woodcuts.

Don had never mentioned the book. I’d never known it existed. Coming upon it felt like finding a mummy in my basement. The dismay was complicated by my own writing life: kin to the hauntedness I always feel seeping from used-book stacks—the eyeball-stinging smell of aging paper, the curled, flaking pages—but in this instance, more sickeningly personal. Yes, Don wrote other books. But Palomino Boy had been a novel by the young, for the young; an act of life, real and, apparently, au courant.

Now it was a relic.

An adult novelist understands certain things rationally: call it mortal realism. We suppose we grasp the fact of our own eventual deaths. Secular writers can recite all the usual brave existential bromides: meaning is bound up in the process of making, in the richness of the life. But just beneath that sane veneer a wildly stubborn part of us, a magical thinking part, wants things to add up in our favor. And in bald point of fact, things rarely add up—rather, they add up too predictably. That afternoon, I felt with new sharpness (in stomach, lungs and heart) the limits of the artmaker’s quest—which, if we’re honest, is to leave something that will last, something that will continue to pulse with meaning.

What do we think of, these days, as lasting? Fifty years? Five hundred? With novels, we’re speaking of an art form that only found its footing in the 19th century. All I can attest is that sixty years struck me, while I held Don’s book in my hands, as both a very long tunnel, and a handful of sand.

Of course at some level (mostly unspoken) we understand that nearly everyone’s books will go the way of Palomino Boy—all but those of a very well-known few. Beyond them, “the grave’s a fine and private place.” (It was one of Don’s favorite lines.)

Can one stop writing, after the physical reality of this truth enters one’s body?

No.

Is there a way, in face of this, to make sense of the writer’s art, of the calling to make art, that avoids platitudes and specious sentiment?

Maybe. Probably not.

I don’t know.

-Joan

www.joanfrank.org

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: Writers on Tape

Helen Simonson hails from Sussex, land of rolling chalk downs and many, many sheep.

I recently drove seven hours from my home in the Washington DC area to the Hamptons. Driving alone, with just my dog for company, I listened to a wonderful set of CDs my mother had given me called The Spoken Word: British Writers, one in a series produced by the British Library Sound Archives. On three CDs, famous writers, including Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, spoke, lectured or were interviewed about writing. It was haunting to find myself barreling up I95, listening to writers, some of whose voices were only just able to be caught and recorded. The recordings are soft, the words often mumbled and the scratchiness of early technology (shellac discs) is evident. None of the writers had been given ‘media training’ and it was fun to hear the long pauses, coughs, striking of pipe matches and clinking of tea cups or train announcements in the background of various interviews. The voices too, spoke an English long disappeared; even from the royal family. They used ‘e’ instead of a short ‘a’ - so that Pall Mall became Pell Mell, and happy became heppy.

In a 1958 TV interview, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was asked if the coming of recording technology spelled the end of the written word and if all novels would become spoken. He mused on the economic difficulties of publishing and suggested that the cheaper spoken word might be a way out, though it would require novels to give way to shorter pieces. It was strange to realize that the current debate over the rise of the e-book is really as old as the gramophone. I am comforted that if the eight-track tape recorder did not spell the end of books, that even in the internet age, they will survive. It is one of the joys of my email inbox, by the way, to hear from people who have read me on Kindle, or some other e-reader, and write to tell me they have then rushed out to buy a copy. It seems the books we truly love demand a physical presence in our homes.

In scraps of a 1937 radio piece, the only surviving recording of her voice, Virginia Woolf spoke of English as an ancient language where every word comes freighted with echoes of the ways it has been used before; such that the writer’s task of combining words in new ways is made almost impossible. I thought of the word (and place), ‘Agincourt’ and how difficult it would be to use it without conjuring Shakespeare’s Henry V. I thought of putting a posy under a ‘bell jar’ and how Sylvia Plath had taken those words out of circulation; much as a famous baseball jersey might be retired. Most of all, I decelerated to an unacceptably slow pace for highway driving, as if this might somehow extend the joy of hearing the real Virginia Woolf talking to me.

Meanwhile, Rebecca West, journalist, critic, author and early suffragette, spoke to her interviewer, in 1958, of what a shame it was that so many people were now being taught to read and how this post-war expansion rendered it much less feasible for any one person to distinguish themselves in the art. She seemed to genuinely deplore the mediocre masses being granted access to the treasure of books and education. This was a sad reminder that even the most progressive of people may hold bigoted ideas in some areas. And isn’t it funny how the advancement of others is fought so hard by those who already hold all the advantages? If Rebecca West had been in charge of post-war education, I might have been trained to run a sewing machine instead of being introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer!

As I walked my dog in a highway rest area or tried to eat a hard-boiled egg while negotiating a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, I thought about all the writers we will never hear on CD – those who lived before the advent of sound recording. I will never hear Jane Austen talk about Emma, or poor Boswell defend his obsession with Samuel Johnson. I gained a new appreciation of the importance of capturing, in sound and video, writers talking about their work.

Accepting that writers belong in a multi-media world is not a easy position for me. I’m not that comfortable on video (no close-ups please!) and I’m suspicious of recording devices – too many politicians have been caught making off-color remarks into open microphones. I want people to judge my work independent of what they might think of me and I’m afraid of being captured and preserved in some awful dress and unfortunate hairstyle (is that Helen Simonson with the mullet and caftan?). However, it was just too wonderful to listen to Somerset Maugham sum up his life’s work and muse, in 1949, whether a few of his stories might survive the ages. I wanted to talk back and let him know he was still read and had a new biography out! I realized that I want to hear and see all my favorite writers and I think this means I need to stop being afraid of the video camera myself. So I’ll be looking for more of these British Library sound recordings and I’ll be seeing you on YouTube, folks!