Brock Clarke, a native of upstate New York, received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester. He is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Mississippi Review, American Fiction, The Journal, Brooklyn Review, South Carolina Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Twentieth Century Literature, and Southwestern American Literature. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers’ Institute. Clark is the author of the novel Ordinary White Boy, the short story collection What We Won’t Do, and his most recent collection of stories Carrying the Torch. The Q&A was conducted via email. Questions in Bold.

Have you always wanted to be a writer? What sparked your interest or desire to become a writer? What were/are your influences?

I don’t think I always wanted to be a writer; it’s just that there were so many other things I didn’t want to be. Or more accurately, so many things I was so profoundly terrible at that I wouldn’t be allowed to be them, or at least make a living at them. So, I wasn’t much good at anything else; that’s one reason I became a writer. The other is, like most writers, I loved some books, and hated others, and both equally fed my desire to become a writer–to write books like the books I loved and not write books like the books I hated.

My influences: Becket, Grace Paley, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, William Kennedy, Muriel Spark, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Walker Percy.

Do see yourself as primarily a teacher or a writer? How do you balance the two?

This is a lame answer, but: I see myself as both. I can’t imagine one without the other. Like most teacher/writers, I gripe occasionally that, when I teach, I don’t have much time to write. But when I’m away from teaching for too long, I miss it.

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The opening sentence of the title story in Brock Clarke’s latest collection of stories, Carrying the Torch, is sure to get your attention (particularly if you are of the male persuasion):

I decided last night that someday soon I am going to rip my husband’s penis off with my bare hands.

With this sentence Clarke has our attention. Intent to undergo what might be called “Bobbittry” wakes up the reader and grabs his focus. From there Clarke reveals what motivates such hostility and describes how his character carries out her intent (albeit symbolically).

This is one of the strengths of Clarke’s stories, their ability to pull you in and make you want to know more about these odd, dysfunctional, yet sympathetic characters. He takes an aspect of their life or family and exaggerates it in order to shed light on the nature of relationships, families, and communities.

This is taken up symbolically in the second story, For Those of Us Who Need Such Things, where a man buys the city of Savannah, Georgia in an effort to reconnect with his ex-wife. And at the heart of almost all of Clarke’s stories is the issue of “settling.” The narrator of the above story makes it clear:

[Y]ou can’t just buy a three-hundred-year-old city and expect it to be real, anymore than you can cheat on your wife and expect her to truly love you again. And if you can’t have real cities and true love, then you settle for the next best thing.

The characters are trying to rebound from poor decisions and life’s bad breaks by giving themselves a second chance, by taking on a new identity, by changing their surroundings - taking the “next best thing” after their original ideas fell short. In What We Won’t Do the focus was on facing the facts about life in the Rust Belt of Upstate New York; admitting that your dreams might not come true but you will have to muddle through as best you can. In Carrying the Torch the characters have escaped to the New South but don’t find it any easier to get excited about their lives.

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How to Write, by Herbert and Jill Meyer, has been helpful to many writers and English learners for years in paperback. Now it’s available in e-book format for $1.99. Take a look the book William Safire called “the most helpful book the beginning writer can buy.”

Help me out here. Does this work as a meme?

1. Find a blog you don’t read.
2. Go to the third post down.
3. Quote the second sentence from that post along with these instructions and with links to the blog and post.
4. End your post with “Thanks to Collected Miscellany” with the link.

Here’s an example.

“With science behind her, I’m not sure why it is even worth any further discussion.” from The Rail.

Thanks to Collected Miscellany

The New Republic Online has posted a spate of book reviews recently and I thought I might bring them to your attention. I believe some of them require subscription so if you can’t read them in their entirety I apologize.

- Howard’s End by Robert Alter looks at Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Alter finds much to praise in Smith but feels the novel doesn’t quite come together in the end:

Finally On Beauty is an odd mixture–alternately amusing, perceptive, even emotionally absorbing, with some of the narrative zest of White Teeth, and then too often schematic, insistent, or simply not quite credible. The American academic setting, which Smith knows but perhaps not well enough, and the emulation of Howard’s End, which is an interesting idea that does not altogether fit this fictional world, may have led her astray. As a novelist, she can marshal shrewd understanding, stylistic flair, vivid description, and a lively sense of comedy. All this may yet enable her to produce great fiction, but On Beauty is still far from that.

- Combined Efforts by Alexander M. Belenky tackles Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. Mr. Belenky is not too impressed:

The book’s title, Bait and Switch, refers to Ehrenreich’s argument that corporate management entices its workers to climb the corporate ladder, sacrificing their humanity for security and status, only to eventually lose their jobs. But the true bait and switch is the book itself, which promises insights into the work experience of corporate middle management but explores only the pathetic, exploited, compulsive, and self-deluded lives of job-seekers.

- Mrs. America by Alan Wolfe looks at Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade By Donald T. Critchlow. Wolfe is hopelessly biased. Conservatives are racist, anti-semitic, misogynist, and generally bad people:

Conservatism was in large part a revolt by whites against the aspirations of blacks, and whatever success it enjoyed was a by-product of the backlash that it generated.

Wolfe excoriates Critchlow for not sharing this view:

It was a stroke of considerable inventiveness for Critchlow to persuade Schlafly to cooperate with him. Too bad that the book he produced is dreadful. Critchlow is right to insist on Schlafly’s influence–but influence is a neutral category. It may be a force for good or a force for ill, depending upon the ideas that animate it. Let it be said of Phyllis Schlafly that every idea she had was scatter-brained, dangerous, and hateful. The more influential she became, the worse off America became. But Critchlow can barely bring himself to lift his eyes from the Schlafly papers long enough to examine her views with anything approaching a critical perspective. Critchlow is by no means a leftist academic historian implacably hostile to his right-wing subject. Quite the contrary. His book is fair and balanced, in the Fox News sense of those terms. Not even saints should be admired as much as Critchlow worships Schlafly, and Schlafly is not a saint.

I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on Wolfe’s more subject orientated critiques but his hatred of conservatism is so overwhelming that you can’t take his views seriously. Wolfe is calling not for scholarship but advocacy.

It’s Banned Books Week, so take this opportunity to rant against some book which isn’t worth the paper its printed on. Like the upcoming timewaster by Cindy Sheehan or the flash journalism on Michael Jackson.

As G.E.Veith notes, “Liberals today are doing most of the book banning, forbidding the very possession of books on Intelligent Design, conservative politics, and Christianity.”

Content has been a bit sparse around here lately. My eyes were bigger than my . . . well, my eyes I guess. I have a stack of books to review and the only way to catch up is dive in and read. This means less posting. But never fear. For those poor souls who rely on this humble blog for entertainment and enlightenment, there is content coming.

- I have a review in the works of Brock Clarke’s latest award winning collection of short stories Carrying the Torch. Plus, I hope to have a Q&A with Brock as well.

- I just finished bringing myself up to date with Olen Steinhauer’s Eastern European series so expect reviews of The Confession and 36 Yalta Boulevard. I am also hoping to line up a interview with Mr. Steinhauer.

- On the not to distant horizon I am going to focus on some young adult fiction including The Water Mirror and The Oracle Prophecies series.

So lots of chewy goodness is in the pipeline my friends. Your patience will be rewarded in good time.

Copying Ed from yesterday, I will offer this Meme instead of substanative content:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

ANSWER: “England’s pork sausages?”

Several authors are giving eBay users the opportunity to bid on having their names put in upcoming novels. It varies a bit with each author, but that’s the gist. The money will go to The First Amendment Project (FAP), a legal defense group which I hope defends all infringements on free speech, free press, free religious exercise and gathering, not just liberal ones. The most recent example I found on FAP’s site is a defense of a political artist whose printing company destroyed or rejected a couple offensive compositions regarding Bush and Abu Graib. But maybe FAP defends more than the reprehensible. If you don’t care to bid on placement in a book, you can donate $35 to receive an FAP “Generate Degenerate Art” thong.

But back to the authors. Bidding on several authors has already ended. One person won placement in Stephen King’s next zombie thriller, Cell, with a donation of $25,100.

Dave Eggers offers: “The winner will be featured in a strange illustrated story I’m working on called The Journey of the Fishes Overland. The winner, or someone of her/his choosing, will be encountered by the traveling fish in question, as they travel over land. It could also be a family, a house, an address, whatever. I get to decide why the fishes see this person/place, and what’s said by/to or done by/to the person/place. This story will be finished and published in the fall. The name/s have to be tasteful and be undisruptive to the narrative. I reserve the right to refuse using a name I find offensive.”

Do my fellow books addicts out there feel the need to catalog their book collections? Do they use software to do so? I find this idea intriguing but wonder about the work involved. The idea of my library being cataloged is very attractive, but the work involved in doing so is not. Perhaps, I could just plug away at it cataloging a few books each day until I am caught up.

I have come across two online tools that would allow you to accomplish this lofty goal.

- Library Thing was put together by Tim Spalding - a web developer, web publisher and search-engine optimizer based in Portland, Maine. It is in Beta right now and you can catalog up to 200 books for free or get a lifetime membership for $10.

- Reader2 was created by Dmitry Kuchin and seems to emphasize the sharing of book lists more than cataloging all of your books.

Anyone know of other useful tools (online or off) for book cataloging? Thoughts, opinions, and ideas about book cataloging welcome.