Post originally appeared on Wellesley Underground on August 8, 2015.

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It is an honor to converse with E.B. Bartels whose work appears extensively in close to two dozen publications. Most recently, she graduated with an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, where she founded Catch & Release, the literary blog and online magazine of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. At Wellesley, she won the Jacqueline Award in English Composition for her essay “Russian Face,” which you can now read in the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35. In addition to being a prolific writer, E.B. is a teacher, a photographer, and was also an alumna editor for our very own Wellesley Underground.

Image credit: Janna Herman

WU: You were a Russian Language and Literature major and Studio Art minor at Wellesley, though you also wrote extensively for the college’s student life magazine, Counterpoint.  What were your biggest influences from Wellesley on your writing? Did you know you wanted a career as a writer back at Wellesley?  How did you find yourself in your major and minor?

EB: My falling-in-love-with-writing story is pretty boring––it’s the same old thing that so many writers tell: I loved books as a kid, I started reading at a super young age, I wrote extensively in journals throughout my adolescence, I did independent writing projects in high school, blah, blah, blah, you know how it goes. I was so smitten with writing that I actually enrolled in a class at Wellesley in summer 2005––the summer after my junior year of high school. It was Writing 225 with Marilyn Sides, and it took place in a very warm room in the back of Clapp Library with a mix of students ranging from current Wellesley students to adults from the town to other precocious high schoolers such as myself. I loved that class and Professor Sides, and when I got into Wellesley, there was no question in my mind that I was going to be an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, with maybe a Studio Art minor because I’d always loved photography too. I was even all set to ask Professor Sides to be my advisor. Done and done.

But then, at the end of my senior year of high school, I went to hear one of my favorite writers ever––the playwright Tony Kushner––speak at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. Afterwards there was a book-signing, and I went up to Tony Kushner and gushed all over him about how much I love his plays and how much I also love writing and I just wrote a play that my friend directed at our school and I was starting college in the fall and I was definitely going to study creative writing––and he interrupted me. Don’t major in creative writing, he said. I thought I heard him wrong. He went on to tell me to study anything else, to study everything besides writing, or I would be mechanically good at writing with nothing interesting to say. I took this advice very seriously, and when I arrived at Wellesley, I enrolled in Russian 101 to fulfill my language requirement. I immediately fell in love with the language––puzzling out Cyrillic, fantasizing that one day I would be able to read Anna Karenina in the original (LOL)––and I realized that majoring in Russian would give me the excuse to travel abroad and travel abroad far away, which was something I desperately wanted to do since I grew up in a town not even twenty minutes away from Wellesley. I thought that studying Russian would give me plenty of material to write about, which it did.

I started writing for Counterpoint while I was living in St. Petersburg my junior year. Some of my good friends from ‘09 were on the Counterpoint editorial staff and gave me a monthly column which basically was “E.B. Rambles On About Something Relating To Russian Culture For A Couple Hundred Words” and I loved it. I enjoyed feeling that I was still part of the Wellesley community while so far away, but I also loved the deadlines and trying to come up with a new, exciting topic each month, and I enjoyed getting to develop my own voice and sense of style. When I came back to Wellesley my senior year, I took the only creative writing class I ever took in college––Travel Writing with Professor Sides, in the same hot room at the back of Clapp as that summer class––and it blew my brain. Before that I had thought oh, I’ll do the Russian Literature PhD route which most Russian majors seem to pursue, or I thought I would go into translation, or maybe get an MFA in photography, but Professor Sides’s travel writing class made me remember how badly I had wanted to be a writer before I got to Wellesley. So as I panicked about what to do next, I applied to be an AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow at a school in Dorchester. I worked at Mother Caroline Academy for two years, teaching fifth and sixth grade girls English, Literature, Social Studies, and Art, and that sealed the deal. Seeing eleven-year-olds freak out with excitement about writing spoken word poems or coming up with their first-ever short story made me remember my own love of writing, and so that was that. I applied to get an MFA.

WU: Did you notice a difference in the community between Wellesley and Columbia?  What was it like being in a co-ed writing environment as opposed to a women’s college?

EB: Columbia is known for having one of the largest MFA writing programs, which is part of why I chose it. I knew that if I ended up at a place like Brown, where you have all your workshops with the same four other people for the two or three years of your MFA, I thought I would lose my mind. And, though I didn’t realize it going into getting my MFA––I thought I was getting the degree just to become a better writer––the whole point of going to graduate school for art is to develop an artistic community. An MFA degree is no guarantee of employment, and a lot of artists out there are very anti-MFA––feeling it’s a waste of money and time and that you can be a perfectly successful artist without one, which is true––but in getting my MFA I met a whole lot of amazingly wonderful fellow writer friends, and it was as if this big hole I had in my heart that I hadn’t realized existed was suddenly full. Suddenly having this gang of friends who just got it when I didn’t want to go out for drinks because I was finishing an essay, or who would want to sit at a bar all night and talk about their favorite memoirists or how they were having a moral dilemma writing about their family or ex-boyfriend or whatever, it was incredible. I say get an MFA just to find those people. They’ll let you bounce ideas off of them, they’ll listen to you cry about getting rejected from McSweeney’s again, and they’ll edit your writing forever.

At Columbia, the writing program is divided into three genres––Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction––and while some people complained that such a large MFA program gets very competitive, I found that seemed to apply to some genres more than others (cough, Fiction). Nonfiction was this big, emotional family––maybe because right away in workshop we were sharing some of our darkest secrets and feelings in our pieces and it was like Group Therapy Lite––and there were thirty-five of us, so there were enough people to mix up who was in your workshop and classes each semester, but few enough that we knew each other all pretty well by the end. Also Nonfiction felt a lot like Wellesley, because, more so than the other genres, Nonfiction was mostly women––I think it was something like thirty women and five guys in my year. My thesis workshop with Lis Harris was all women, and it was awesome.

Though something I did notice about being in a co-ed environment––and I’m talking about all the genres here, not just Nonfiction––was a divide in the confidence between the men and women writers. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of the men or all of the women, but I noticed that often the men were much more confident about their writing, with no doubt they were on their way to being the next Jack Kerouac or David Foster Wallace, while many more of the women seemed to suffer from Impostor Syndrome––feeling they didn’t deserve to be in the program, not sure how they got in, totally unsure if they would ever make a career of this whole writing thing. I definitely fell in the latter category. I have my MFA, and I still feel like a total fake. I feel like a fraud being featured in this series on Wellesley Underground––I have been forcing myself to say “I’m a writer” when people ask what I do, as opposed to defaulting to whatever my paying day job is at the time: “I’m a babysitter” or “I’m a teacher” or “I’m an intern at a literary agency.” But fake it ‘til you make it, right?

WU: Your focus at Columbia was creative nonfiction.  Can you explain a little what this is and what inspired you to pursue this track?

EB: I chose nonfiction because I realized I needed to stop lying to myself. In high school I would sometimes write “short stories” which were stories inspired by my own family’s lore, and then I wrote this play about a grandmother, mother, and daughter who have coffee together once a week and talk a lot and occasionally get into big blow out fights, weirdly just like me and my mother and grandmother, and I realized that fiction isn’t my thing. I think every writer starts off thinking that to be a Real Writer you have to write The Next Great American Novel, but then as you get older, you start to notice all these other amazing types of books out there, and you start to think, hey, maybe I can write The Next Great American Biography or The Next Great American Collection of Essays. All the writing I did at Wellesley for Counterpoint was all in the personal essay and travel writing camp, so when it came time to apply for my MFA, I only looked at programs that offered nonfiction, and Columbia has one of the oldest and established creative nonfiction programs, which is another reason why I chose to go to school there.

Now, to clarify creative nonfiction: no, I did not go to Columbia Journalism School. (The number of times I have to tell people this over and over blows my mind.) And, no, I am not working on a “novel.” But I understand why it’s confusing, because what I do falls somewhere in between––not that I make things up, no, none of that James Frey garbage, but that I take real information, real stories, real people, real things from the real world, and write about them in a way that reads much like a short story or a novel. You find a way to take the events of an ordinary life and order them and structure them in a way so they build on each other to make a plot that is exciting to read––just like in a novel. I like to think about it like this: fiction writers are composing music in a room that is silent––making up everything as they go, while nonfiction writers are composing music on a very noisy, crowded, loud street––filtering the din to hear only the sounds they want for their piece. A way I like to try to explain the difference between journalism and creative nonfiction is that journalism is like the video footage they show on the local news to get the information across, while creative nonfiction is like a Ken Burns documentary. Though I think a lot of journalists would have beef with that statement, and, to be truthful, there is a lot of overlap––I’ve read articles in The New York Times, which would probably be called journalism just because they’re in a newspaper, that are as gorgeous and artful as any memoir or personal essay.

WU: You write a column Non-Fiction by Non-Men for The Fiction Advocate.  Can you tell us a little about the writers you have interviewed and this experience?

EB: Why, yes! Thank you for asking about my Non-Fiction by Non-Men column. Ahem. (Yes, that’s a link. Click it. Thanks.) I began the column because a personal mission of mine is trying to read more books by underrepresented groups of writers––women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. I am continually horrified by the statistics that VIDA puts together each year––in so many major publications, male writers continue to outnumber women by vast proportions, not to mention how many more books by men get reviewed than books by women, let alone books by white people than books by people of color, let alone books by straight people than books by LGBTQ people. It’s depressing. And at one point in grad school someone asked me to name my favorite writers, and I realized that the group I had quickly rattled off (Nabokov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Chekhov) were all white men. So I thought to try to do my own little part by showcasing some really incredible women writers of nonfiction in this column. So far I’ve interviewed biographer Patricia O’Toole, historian Andie Tucher, former New Yorker staff writer Lis Harris, and Cris Beam, who has written about queer/trans issues and also the American foster care system. Upcoming I have an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson whose book Negroland: A Memoir comes out in September, and also one with Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose memoir She’s Not There was the first bestselling book by a transgender American. I’m constantly in awe by these women––by the work they’ve created, the junk they’ve had to put up with as women in a male-dominated field––and I love that this column gives me an excuse to ask them a million questions about their lives and careers. It’s very comforting for me, personally, to hear their stories and advice because it quells my own anxieties about trying to make it as a writer.

WU: You are currently working on two books, one based on your MFA. thesis.  Can you tell us a little about these projects?

EB: My MFA thesis was a memoir and historical narrative about my family’s small business––an insurance agency in Somerville, Massachusetts that has been in our family now for almost a hundred years. While the business has barely changed, our family––and the city of Somerville––has evolved significantly around it, and my thesis was about how a family can evolve from factory-working, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, into privileged, upper class, Ivy-League-attending artist types through this one, tiny, prosperous business. The book is about how hard people work to protect themselves from all kinds of loss––saving up money, obsessively going to doctors, buying expensive insurance policies, checking and double-checking and worrying about every possible worst case scenario and thinking you’ve got it all covered––but how, in the end, you can’t protect yourself from everything. Loss, and death, are inevitable.

My other project is actually about loss too. This book project is a collection of linked essays about all the pets I’ve had, and all of the unfortunate ways they’ve died. Three of these essays have already been published on The Toast under the series Dead Pet Chronicles. But in addition to my own personal stories, I’ve been researching all the varied and wild ways that people mourn their animals––pet cemeteries, taxidermy, mummification, artificial diamonds made from cremated ashes. It’s amazing what people do for their pets. Though, I think the thing I like the most about working on this project is that as soon as I tell anyone about it, it’s like being the priest at confession––people open up to me about hamsters trapped in walls and puppies they ran over with cars and fish they replaced without kids knowing.

WU: Is there a particular essay that you have written that has the most significance to you?

EB: “Freedom, My Dear” was published on The Butter. The fact that it was published on The Butter alone is hugely significant to me––The Butter is the sister site to The Toast, run by amazing essayist Roxane Gay. The fact that Roxane Gay, whom I worship, read my essay, and, not only that, liked it enough to publish it––I died a little with joy when that happened. But more so than that, writing “Freedom, My Dear” was a really important experience for me. The essay started out as a total mess––all these different ideas stemming from an experience at the Russian Baths in New York––and I was really lucky to have one of my best writer friends and editors-for-life, Ariel Garfinkel, go through at least half-a-dozen drafts as I tried to figure out what I was saying. I would like to point out that several other writer friends also read drafts of this essay, and for them, I am forever grateful as well, but Ariel not only helped me figure out structure––she also patiently pointed out flaws in my logic and thinking and gently helped me see when I was actually making some unintentional but extremely transphobic comments about women’s spaces. Writing that essay made me examine my way of thinking, and my own inner prejudices and biases, and try to understand how to fix them. And even so, the end result wasn’t perfect––one commenter on the essay pointed out that I had made some assumptions about trans women’s genitalia, which I hadn’t intended to do, but I had nonetheless. That essay, to me, is the perfect example of how writing can help you figure out not just how to say something, but how to think and what you think, and how we are all always growing and learning as people, no matter how old we are. Also, writing that essay made me really appreciate having honest and kind friends/editors like Ariel who are willing to provide a safe space for me to try out ideas and call me out on things.

(And now go read Ariel’s essay on Salon. It’s incredible.)

WU: Do you participate in visual art projects as well?

EB: Alas, since college, not so much. While teaching at Mother Caroline Academy, I did do a photography project of my students’ accessories, but besides that, I’ve really been focusing on writing exclusively for the past three years. I’m still a visual learner––I will forget something entirely unless I see it written down, and I draw these crazy charts to try to figure out the structure of my essays and writing projects––and even while I’m writing, I’m always thinking of visual components to complement the work. My thesis was full of photographs and scanned letters and doodles and artifacts, and it’s very hard for me to separate words from visual components. Similarly, most of my photography, painting, and printmaking projects in high school and college involved words. For example, I took a lot of photographs of graffiti around my high school and then did double-exposure prints of the words overlapping with other images I had taken. Words and images go together for me. My dream is to find an agent/editor one day who supports my visual art drive and will allow me some say in illustrations/photographs in my book. But that might be a pipe dream. Publishing houses have whole art departments for that stuff.

WU: What is the most important message you try to communicate through your writing?

EB: One of my professors at Columbia said that every writer has a theme or subject that they just can’t shake, and that every one of a writer’s works can be traced back to scratching at one idea. I guess, at least with my two book projects, I am trying to understand how people try to protect themselves from––and later cope with––loss and death. I also want to understand and show the role that humor plays in the darkest times. I love a good black comedy. As my grandfather says: what’s the difference between a Russian tragedy and a Russian comedy? In a Russian tragedy, everyone dies. In a Russian comedy, everyone dies happy.

WU: You are also an extensive reader.  Any recommendations for WU readers?

EB: Yes! I have so many recommendations! I set a goal for myself that in 2015 I am trying to read fifty books by women, with a majority of those books by women of color. You can check out my blog for updates on the challenge and to see the twenty-seven books that I have read so far in my 1st Quarter Check-In and 2nd Quarter Check-In posts. Also, follow me on GoodReads to see what I am reading in real time!

WU: What plans do you have for your writing future?

EB: Short-term––I will be teaching middle school again this fall, so I hope to learn how to balance the demands of working full-time in a school with making space for my own writing and reading because, to be honest, I think making time for my own writing and reading makes me a better teacher––what example are we setting for students if teachers are not continually in the process of learning themselves as well? I also am applying to writing residency programs for school vacations and next summer. Long-term––I want to finish one of my book projects so it feels strong enough to begin to query agents, so then I can obtain an agent, create a book proposal, find an editor, get a book deal, the whole glamorous thing. And, eventually, one day, I hope to be able to teach writing at the college or graduate school level, because I find, selfishly, that I am a better writer when I am also teaching. Students give me creative energy and drive, plus they hold me accountable––I can’t go around telling them to write if I am not writing anything myself.

WU: To continue to follow E.B.’s writing, check out her website, her blog, and her Twitter.

The post Wellesley Writes It Interview appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Read my farewell post here.

Thanks for a great year, everyone.

The post This is E.B. Bartels Signing Out as the Editor of Catch & Release appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Judith Thurman in conversation with Lis Harris at Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program’s Nonfiction Dialogue on Wednesday, April 16, 2014.

Judith Thurman spoke about writing nonfiction – specifically biography and literary criticism – at Columbia this past Wednesday, and apparently we were very lucky to hear her since, according to sources, she rarely leaves her house. Ms. Thurman said a lot of really brilliant things, of course she did, because she is brilliant, she’s a critic for The New Yorker, but there were three quotes of hers that stuck with me in particular.

“You have to be able to tolerate contradiction to write good nonfiction.”

A friend and I were talking later about how relieved we were that someone finally just came out and told us this. Contradiction is something that drives nonfiction writers insane. As I work on my own thesis, which involves interviewing my family, my grandmother will tell me something was one way while my grandfather will insist it was another way while my mom won’t even remember the thing at all. It makes me want to scream and write a novel instead. But, Ms. Thurman assured us, that not only do you need to learn to embrace contradiction, but writing about the contradictions of a situation is what makes your story interesting.

“Writing a bad review is a piece of cake. It’s really hard to write a good review.”

Ms. Thurman insisted that she thinks this because she has a particularly nasty streak, but I agree. It’s much easier to find hurtful, angry language that is fresh and unique in its cruelty; writing about something positively runs the risk of falling into the clichés of lovey-dovey talk. This doesn’t mean that Ms. Thurman has only written feel-good-happy-go-lucky reviews in her time, but she encouraged us to write balanced reviews, to think of it as an intellectual challenge to find the good in everything, even something you can’t stand. I think that this applies not just to writing but to life as well. As a friend reminds me, time is better spent putting positive energy out into the world than dwelling on the negative.

“There’s no objectivity, only vigilant subjectivity.”

This goes back to the idea of contradiction in nonfiction, because for as hard as you may try to get at “the truth” – whatever that means – you are still going to come across holes and problems. And, not only that, no matter what you write is subjective because it is filtering through you. Ms. Thurman said that when writing biographies – she has written two, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette – you, as the writer, are the third point of navigation in the triangle: the subject, everything and everyone around the subject, and you. Especially when writing biography, she said, you grow sick of writing about your subject, you start to resent them because you feel like their handmaid, just waiting on them, devoting your life to their life, and those feelings of bitterness can sneak into your writing. The best you can do is to be aware of and honest about your own biases and prejudices in your writing.

The post Three Quotes by Judith Thurman that I Never Want to Forget appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky engaging in some witty banter during the Columbia Graduate Writing Program Translation Lecture on Wednesday, March 12, 2014.

Before I was a nonfiction writer in Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program, I was a student of Russian Language and Literature at Wellesley College. I started taking Russian 101 the fall of my first-year – sick of the Latin I could have used to place out of the language requirement – thinking, “It would be nice to read Chekhov in the original.” I didn’t expect to spend all my undergrad years struggling to translate simple poetry and children’s literature, reading Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Gogol in translation, and living in St. Petersburg for fourteen months. The Wellesley Russian Department became my home: it was intimate, familial. There were only three Russian majors in my graduating class, and many of my closest friends from college also studied Russian, speaking together in a Russk-lish slang outside of class. My non-Russian-major friends even picked up a few words: devushki (ladies) and davai (come on) or poshli (let’s go). The professors in the department too – Thomas Hodge, Alla L’vovna Epsteyn, and Adam Weiner – felt like family. I remember crying to Professor Hodge in his office when I told him I needed to miss class to put down my family’s dog. I spent my days at Wellesley lounging on the Russian Department sofas, drinking tea and eating Russian candy, thinking that if I ever could get the genitive plural straight then maybe I could hack it as a translator. In fact, I decided to come to Columbia because of the Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) track that was possible to pursue jointly with an MFA.

But something happened. I fell off the wagon. I started to feel that maybe the LTAC requirements were too similar to the translation classes I had done in undergrad, that I was simply trying to replicate my cozy experience in Wellesley’s Russkaya Kafedra. I decided to use my MFA semesters to branch out and take classes I didn’t take in undergrad: a poetry lecture, a book arts seminar, a class on teaching writing. I was also scared because in the four years since I graduated, my Russian has become painfully rusty.

That didn’t prevent me from arriving with enthusiasm at Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program’s Translation Lecture last Wednesday night featuring Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. When I first read Anna Karenina – the translation by the Maude sisters – I fell in love, but when I reread Pevear and Volokhonsky’s version, it was like renewing my wedding vows. The language was fresh and alive and vividly modern. Tolstoy felt like Zadie Smith. I could not wait to hear their insights, and I was not disappointed.

Referring to themselves as “P and V,” Pevear and Volokhonsky have a shtick. One Russian-major-friend refers to them as the “infamous couple.” When they were asked to explain their process, Volokhonsky began with, “Well, you see, we are married…” (pause) “… to each other…” They somehow managed to end the lecture alternating lines of a song, “Don’t need a ticket! Get a stamp… and lick it!” Their translations are clearly born out of love – mutual affection for each other, but also a deep passion for language itself.

Pevear explained that they first began translating when they happened to both be reading Crime and Punishment at the same time – Pevear in English, Volokhonsky in Russian – and they compared sentences and saw how radically different they were. Since then, they have developed a system: Volokhonsky makes the first draft, trying to translate as literally as possible (“But only a phone book or a train schedule can be translated literally,” she said, “Though even Amtrak can be interpreted!” Pevear added), explaining any clichés or colloquialisms. Then Pevear looks at the “scribble” (as Volokhonsky calls it), and he “puts it into English” (Pevear said, sighing). Pevear asks Volokhonsky questions, and, in the creating of the third draft, she answers them. Finally, before sending anything off to their editor, Pevear reads the English version out loud while Volokhonsky follows along in the original Russian text.

Born from this system are translations of the major works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Turgenev, and Chekhov. Pevear encouraged students not to be intimidated by translating something that already exists in translation – chances are you will see something that the earlier translator missed. “Express not word for word,” Pevear added, “but meaning by meaning.” Volokhonsky talked about the challenges in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – how there are two different voices in the writing, one for the modern Moscow plotline and one for the ancient Pontius Pilate plotline – and she read the original Russian and several different translations, explaining the differences of each.

Part of why Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translations feel so contemporary is their faithfulness to the original author’s voice and style. “There is no such thing as a general voice,” said Pevear, and you have to work with “the foreignness given to you by the foreign language.” “Often it’s very important to use the same word,” Volokhonsky said, when you are trying to preserve a certain style or voice. In MFA workshops we are told repetition is bad; I myself have been guilty of circling words on classmates’ manuscripts and saying, “This is redundant!” She read a passage of Anna Karenina in which Anna is described as “enchanting” seven times. Tolstoy intended the building repetition, besides, she added, finding seven synonyms would be hard. Pevear also warned against the dangers of the autocorrect in your own brain – how when you are reading, you “correct” things as you go along and may make “incorrect corrections” – referencing Tim Parks’ essay, “Reading It Wrong.”

“God is in the details!” declared Volokhonsky. “Some say it’s the devil,” Pevear added.

Listening to Volokhonsky read the original Russian snippets of Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Tolstoy, my heart swelled and then broke. It brought me back to my Russian 101 class, when Professor Hodge recited a Pushkin poem and the beauty of the language overwhelmed me. But I was devastated: I could only understand maybe a third of the Russian. At one point Volokhonsky asked, “Does anyone here actually speak Russian?” My MFA friends stared at me, but I sunk lower in my chair. Later, when Pevear read a French translation, I thought I understood about the same amount as the Russian. I felt like a fraud. Not only had my Russian gone to hell, but what had I been reading all those years at Wellesley? I focused on Nabokov’s novels (as he founded the Wellesley Russian Department in the 1940s to a cult following) and lesser-known short stories. How had I never read War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? I was supposed to read Crime and Punishment, I knew that, but it came up in the Russian survey course syllabus back-to-back with Anna Karenina and it was a pick one or the other situation. I was a joke.

Still, sheepishly, I approached Pevear and Volokhonsky after the lecture. I thanked them for the talk and admitted, embarrassed, that I speak Russian – though very badly. When Volokhonsky asked me what I was translating right now, I looked at the floor and said I wasn’t working on anything at the moment. “Translating is good for all writers,” Volokhonsky said.  I had to agree. I spent so much time this year thinking about the plot structure and themes in my book-length project that I was forgetting what actually makes up writing: paragraphs, sentences, and words. Getting back into translating Russian might be a good idea after all. If anything, it would help me focus on the specifics.

Still, I thought, leaving the lecture that night, I think I’ll start by reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Crime and Punishment.

—

P.S. In case you’re planning to write one, you should know that Pevear reads Amazon reviews of their translations. He chuckled at one describing War and Peace as “a book with a novel in it.”

The post The P and V Show: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

However, after hearing Elif Batuman speak the other night at the Columbia Graduate Writing Program’s Creative Writing Lecture, The Possessed is next on my list of books to read in post-grad-school life.

Elif Batuman, dropping some knowledge bombs at the Creative Writing Lecture at Columbia on Wednesday, February 5, 2014.

Batuman presented her talk as a list of things she has learned about writing – even though she said she hates when writers spew unrequested advice. Here are the things I remember best and/or managed to quickly jot down (Batuman speaks pretty fast):

1. Don’t feel bad about writing stupid stuff. Everyone does it and if you try not to write anything dumb you will get stuck and just won’t write at all.
2. Enjoy throwing away whole chunks of your writing as you edit. Even the things you cut out are not lost – it is all part of your process and may show up in another piece, at a different time.
3. Print out your work to edit and reorder, because it makes it feel more real than just the mush of stuff going on in a Word document on your computer.
4. Don’t compare yourself to others. “Describing the human experience is a job too big for one person,” Batuman said. There can’t just be one writer, because writers think about and work with problems, and luckily no one person has had all of the world’s problems. “Think of everyone as your peer, not your competition,” Batuman said.
5. Don’t listen to readers and editors you don’t trust, but do listen to the readers and editors that you do trust. Fight your instinct to be defensive when someone criticizes you.
6. Take a lot of pictures with your phone. It will help you remember things better when you’re writing about them later.
7. When people say funny or insane things, write them down right away.
8. Careful of what you read right before you write – it can influence your style and voice.
9. Writing about how you think you’re going to die is boring. “You’re not going to die. Probably not. At least not now. Everyone thinks that at first. Get it out and move on,” Batuman said.
10. Don’t be embarrassed to tell people you’re a writer. It’s just another job, like being a banker or a plumber or a teacher.
11. It’s better to try to write for four, one-hour periods than one, four-hour block of insanity.
12. When you go on vacation, let yourself have an hour each day to write. You’ll be nicer to the people you’re on vacation with. Don’t force yourself to go outside and play Frisbee all the time, like Batuman did.
13. Your brain is an organ. Take care of your muscles, exercise, “and don’t do too many drugs,” Batuman added.
14. Especially when writing nonfiction, you need to be aware of how you perceive yourself versus how you perceive others. Batuman compared it to when she shops for clothes and always thinks about how the items look on the hanger, but doesn’t consider how they will look on her own body. She also mentioned a friend who had been buying his shoes a size big his whole life: “I thought that was just how shoes fit,” he said.
15. It’s impossible not to offend anyone. “Lots of things you learn from the bitter, biter experience of offending people,” Batuman said.
16. “Don’t be upset when a life experience doesn’t fit into a genre,” added Batuman. She pointed out that the affect of an experience isn’t necessarily the same as the affect of the writing about it: an awful experience can become funny, while a great experience can become sad or scary.
17. “If you have a problem in your writing, one way around it is to describe it as best and honestly as you can,” advised Batuman.
18.  Don’t talk too much when you’re interviewing people.
19. It’s impossible to write the same exact thing as someone else. Don’t be upset if you find that a book already exists out there with your idea. Everyone writes about things differently and comes from his or her own experiences.
20. “And have as much fun as you can!”

The post Advice I Got From Elif Batuman, My New Favorite Person appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Ted Conover in conversation with Lis Harris at Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program’s Nonfiction Dialogue on Wednesday, January 29, 2014.

Nonfiction Dialogues, for those not familiar, are a lecture series featuring conversation between Columbia professor and New Yorker veteran Lis Harris and an established nonfiction writer. On Wednesday night, Ted Conover talked about his experiences crossing the Mexican border with illegal immigrants, inspecting meat for the U.S.D.A., freight-train-hopping with hoboes, trailing the wealthy elite of Aspen, and working for a year in Sing-Sing maximum-security prison. Conover, a smaller, unassuming guy with a kind face, looks like someone you would see cheering on his kid at a soccer game and not driving trucks through the AIDS belt of Africa. Yet, he is one of the bravest writers I know. Recently, for his birthday, Conover’s Buddhist father – who seems like a pretty cool dad himself – sent him a magnet that said: “leap and the net will appear.” Conover stressed the importance of jumping into situations, but making sure you do, in fact, have a net before going in – a net such as an assignment from The New Yorker.

Conover spoke of the challenges of undercover journalism – getting things wrong, hurting feelings – and how to handle research holes. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to work with what you don’t have. Absence can be powerful.” Conover also emphasized, even after an immersion, to know your limitations: “When you’re a writer and you put yourself in a story, you have to be aware of the limits of what you can claim to know.” Though he got a good idea of what it felt like to be homeless while riding the rails, Conover has never actually been homeless and, therefore, cannot claim to know what it is really like.

Finally, Conover brought up something many aspiring writers think about: what happens when your family reads your work? It’s one thing to have your parents read about the time you were sexually harassed on the Russian metro; it’s another entirely when you are the parent and your child reads about you smoking weed with Mexican Coyotes. Recently Conover’s teenage son read Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes. Conover and his son had the following conversation after:

“So, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I finished your book.”

“Oh?”

(pause)

“I liked it.”

“Oh, good, good.”

(a few days later)

“So, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“If you did those things, does it mean I can do them too?”

Conover paused. He didn’t want to be a hypocrite, but he had been thinking of this answer for fifteen years:

“Sure. How about we ride the rails together?”

Most teenagers would cringe at the idea of hopping freight trains with their dad, but Conover is clearly not a regular dad, and so this past July, Conover and his son rode the rails together. The only disappointment was that his son got sick of it after three days.

Conover offered to take Lis Harris with him train-hopping this summer, and I could not be more jealous. Maybe he will let me come along too.

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Matt Bell’s new novel.

Don’t be intimidated by the long title. I still can’t remember it exactly unless I’m looking at the blue-and-green cover: The House In The Woods By The Lake? The Dirt Near The Lake On The House? It doesn’t matter though, because all you need to remember is the name Matt Bell. The man is brilliant.

As a nonfiction writer, I live in awe of people who can create whole worlds from their own brains. I can describe people I know, I can recreate a place that I’ve been, but when it comes to new people and new places, I am at a loss. I end up simply masking real things and having a lot of twenty-something female protagonists named “Phoebe.” In particular, when it comes to fiction, I worship magical realism, because I cannot comprehend the thought process behind its creation. The first time I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, my brain exploded: the devil shows up in Moscow and has a pet demon-cat, while, meanwhile, Pontius Pilate’s trial of Jesus is happening in a parallel timeline? How do you even come up with that? But it makes so much sense. What?

Perhaps because of this awe of fiction and magical realism, I became smitten with Matt Bell when I read In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods. American Book Review describes Bell as being in the company of “the great fabulists like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino,” and I could not agree more. Bell conjures up the same surreal sensitivities as my friend Bulgakov, but he takes it to a different, deeper level. In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods is not an absurdist political critique but a deep examination of the most primitive animalistic urges and raw human emotions.

The book opens with the introduction of a nameless male husband narrator, his wife, and a bear, and describes the husband and wife’s failed attempts to have a child and their new life together in this house on the dirt between the lake and the woods. It feels almost like Bell is telling his reader a classic fairy tale at bedtime as he begins his story. His style is mythological, using strong, simple language that causes the story to feel that it has been passed on for generations. At first I was skeptical that Bell could pull off this tone for a whole three hundred and twelve pages, and at times it does move a little slow, but over all I think the book is successful due to Bell’s characters. Even though they are never named, I found that I could still connect deeply with the protagonist and his wife despite their abstract and seemingly symbolic nature. It is all thanks to the remarkable way that Bell is able to portray complex feelings through a simplistic folk tale style. His language is so on-point that is strikes hard and fast. Sometimes Bell uses grotesque visceral language that wrenches at the gut – much in the beginning when describing the many miscarriages of the wife, reminiscent of Cider House Rules by John Irving – and I could feel waves of nausea and had to walk away from the text. In the same vein though, Bell’s beautiful descriptive words have a similarly powerful but calming affect. He finds the most lyrically unusual ways to describe some of the most ordinary things – woods and lakes and houses – while never straying from his clear, direct style. One of the lines that caught my breath was how Bell described time slipping away: “The days were thieves. And the happier ones the worst, their distractions allowing the hours to pass unnoticed, allowing the minutes to be snatched away without knowledge of their passing.” In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods reads like a fairy tale with the emotion and psychology of a contemporary novel.

Bell is a classic storyteller, and once he grabs his reader by the hand, he doesn’t let go. I happily and agreeably followed Bell through his pages where magic and reality blend seamlessly – of course the wife can create objects by singing, of course there are two moons, of course a mysterious creature lives at the bottom of the lake, of course childbirth is painful and traumatic, of course it must feel isolating to live alone in the woods… Bell’s story twists and weaves, and it feels at time like he is Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, adding and building as he goes, but smoothly and never losing his readers’ interest, keeping his readers awake night after night. But it’s ok, because when you’re wrapped up in a Matt Bell story, you don’t want to sleep anyway.

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