Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper (a 2016 Michigan Notable Book) and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award), as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

[mttbll]

"Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness, one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill." —Wendell Barry, talking about bigger things than only writing, but also in terms reminding me of Maggie Nelson's "A Sort of Leaning Against" and Cormac McCarthy's "ugly fact" that "books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." A good feeling today then, to sit out to do my own work surrounded by the works of others. To feel like I'm working alongside the great books on my shelves, not against them or upon their shoulders or in despair of their achievements, which my own work in progress can so far only dream of approaching.

[mttbll]

“I suppose people—certainly imaginative writers—who consciously exploit their own obsessions do so in part because those obsessions lie like stepping-stones in front of them, and their feet are drawn towards them. At any given time, I’m aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn.” —J.G. Ballard, in The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/j-g-ballard-the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard #JGBallard #Writing

[mttbll]

A meditation for today's writing, from Alphonso Lingis: "It is important that Beethoven's Missa Solemnis be rehearsed to perfection"—with "importance" in these pages being used as a near synonym for "grand" or "noble," "magnificent" or "sublime."

[mttbll]

"I think that’s the goal of every poem—when you are dealing with a language where the point is actually to deaden the people around you, a poem wants to go “no” again and again and again. Can you feel what is being lost here? Can you feel it? That’s what I hope." —Solmaz Sharif, in an interview at Divedapper: https://www.divedapper.com/interview/solmaz-sharif/

[mttbll]

I was very doubtful about having a book published. In that sense I think I was always very clear-sighted. I watched myself develop and I didn’t force things. I knew that at a certain moment what I was writing was worth quite a bit more than what was being written by other people of my age in Argentina. But, because of the high idea I have of literature, I thought it was stupid to publish just anything as people in Argentina used to do in those days. So I held my fire.

Julio Cortázar

[mttbll]

I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it … If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.

James Baldwin

[mttbll]

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

[mttbll]

I think literature is the best technology we have for communicating the experience of consciousness, for capturing what thinking feels like. To do that, consciousness has to be embedded in a particular place, a particular time, a particular body; one sign of the success of a piece of writing, for me, is the extent to which I feel immersed in a physical environment.

Garth Greenwell

[mttbll]

Much of the planet’s human population, today, lives in conditions that many inhabitants of North America would regard as dystopian. Quite a few citizens of the United States live under conditions that many people would regard as dystopian. Dystopia is not very evenly distributed. Fantasy is fun, but naturalism is the necessary balance — realism, to be less precise. Naturalistic fiction written today is necessarily fairly pessimistic — otherwise, it wouldn’t be a realistic depiction of the present. If you were, say, a tiger, and you knew what’s about to happen to your species (extinction, almost certainly), wouldn’t it be realistic to have a pessimistic view of things? I think it’s realistic, as a human, to have a pessimistic view of a world minus tigers.

William Gibson

[mttbll]

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you but only if you look for it. You search. You break your heart, your back, your brain and then and only then it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye, you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way on two white wings. It flies directly at you. You can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you'd hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow-motion.

Annie Dillard

[mttbll]

Hold onto that part of you that first compelled you to start writing. Hold onto that self through the vicissitudes of 'career.' A writing life and a writing career are two separate things, and it’s crucial to keep the first. The single essential survival skill for anybody interested in creating art is to learn to defend this inner life from the world. Cherish yourself and wall off an interior room where you’re allowed to forget your published life as a writer. Breathe deeply. Inside this walled-off room, time is different—it is flexible, malleable. We’re allowed bend it, to speed it up, to slow it down, to jump forwards and backwards, as our minds do. We can circle back to our thoughts and memories picking and choosing the most meaningful to us. There’s a hushed, glowing sound, like the sound coming from the inside of a shell.

Lan Samantha Chang

[mttbll]

Every book offers its own dilemmas and you just have to solve them. That’s just the way it is... If you’re a person who tries new things all the time, sometimes you’re frustrated, but you’re never bored.

Jane Smiley

[mttbll]

The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is.

Sam Shepard

[mttbll]

The day I felt like I took a step over to the side of the room where I might start thinking of myself as a 'writer of poetry' was when I finally gave up trying to be the hero of the poem.

Adrian Matejka

[mttbll]

You don’t have any primary text, of course. You have to create that, and yet the struggle seems to be to uncover things by language, to find out what you mean and feel by the sheer effort of writing it down. By expression you discover what you wish to express or what can be expressed, by you. Things that are vague in the beginning have to be made concrete. Often, what you thought was the creative idea ahead of you vanishes or becomes something else.

Elizabeth Hardwick

[mttbll]

Imagine that there’s a giant pit that’s opened up before you. And on the other side of the pit is the rest of your life. And all you have to do is just dump words into the pit until they fill it up and you can walk across.

Lindy West

[mttbll]

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

Annie Dillard, Tinker at Pilgrim Creek