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Thought Catalog Books presents: Author’s Night Wednesday, June 24 at 7pm / FREE Free drinks, generously provided by TC Books
The great folks at thoughtcatalog are joining us next week for their AUTHOR’S NIGHT! Ryan O’Connell, author of the newly released I’m Special, will host the evening that includes literary fiction to memoir to stand-up comedy. With Robert Yune, Mike Heppner, Lance Pauker, Melanie Berliet, and Shanon Cook. There will be FREE DRINKS!
Abandoning the rest of her family, a woman runs away with her daughter to join her brother on a man-made island/new nation and reflects on what brought her there.
Never mind the context, it’s the choppy, additive quality of the sentence that interests me. It doesn’t “scan” in any conventional sense; the rhythm is Varèse, not Johann Strauss. We’re jamming in 11/8. We’re late-Coltrane: the drummer’s just playing a pulse. Get it? It’s not pretty. It’s not that horrible, treacly shit that mediocre hacks compose with a metronome and a thesaurus. Instead it’s evocative, colloquial, earthy, and real. And that brings me back to that word again: courage. It takes courage to write a sentence like the one quoted above; to risk ugliness, arrhythmia, tonal irregularities: those moments of dissonance and rubato that cause us to doubt our own ears.
Mike Heppner - The Courage of Joseph McElroy
Two examples of McElroy’s courage: first, he’s unafraid of abstractions, which automatically puts him at odds with the conventional wisdom. From high school on, we’re taught to show and not tell. Describe the coffee cup—is it blue, red, striped? Is the handle chipped? Now describe the coffee inside the cup—is it black and oily or does it have a brown cream swirl?
Mike Heppner - The Courage of Joseph McElroy
A McElroy novel cannot be approached passively. Other writers understand this.We don’t hold it against him. It’s what we admire in McElroy to begin with. It’s what we try and fail to achieve in our own work.Why? Because McElroy is strong, and we are not. Because McElroy has courage, and we lack it. Even the best of us stop short while McElroy ventures ahead. Something compromises us, whether timidity or the need to ingratiate ourselves.We’re such products of our times.We write in fear of someone giving us a one-star review on Amazon.We tremble at the thought of an anonymous word-sniper leaving a nasty comment on our blog.We’re small, scared people, and it shows in the ephemera we produce.
Mike Heppner - The Courage of Joseph McElroy
A Joseph McElroy novel begins and ends with a serious purpose. One page into Plus or Lookout Cartridge and it’s obvious the author does not take his work lightly. Joseph McElroy doesn’t write breezy, freewheeling romps about Elvis sightings and runway models with ESP. Perhaps he reads these books, I wouldn’t know. But the McElroy novel supports the notion that the written word is important and that the undertaking of a novel must be important as well; not because the author thinks highly of himself but because he has accepted the lonely burden of constructing something sturdy and well engineered in a world of so much shoddy carpentry.
Mike Heppner - The Courage of Joseph McElroy
