LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA

I arrived far too early this morning (as in 7:30 in the bloody a.m.) at the Festival of Books because I was setting up the USC booth. This involved far too much box-slinging, which marred my lovely blue shirt with grease stains. So I changed to one of the USC shirts we were selling. A woman pointed at me and said, “brave.” Implying that in the land of the Bruins, flaunting my Trojan-ness was courageous. But I wasn’t. I was just wearing the only thing that was clean.

The first seminar I went to was one of the best. Probably because they plied the newly-minted novelists with questions about how to become newly-minted novelists, a topic that personally interests me.

First Novels: New Visions
Joshua Ferris
Alice Greenway (who won the LA Times first fiction award last night for White Ghost Girls)
Marisha Pessl
Antoine Wilson

Alice Greenway was rather shy and demure – I wasn’t surprised when she said she hated the whole public side of writing. Marisha was simply young, and rather media-genic, and Antoine and Joshua Ferris spent most of the session joking between one another.

When asked how they got their start in writing, Alice Greenway revealed (with a hint of a Irish accent) her epistolary side – she wrote letters in longhand and sent them via post to friends. Joshua Ferris said he wrote a Alfred Hitchcock rip-off called “Crabs” when he was seven, and when he asked his mother whether it was okay to use the word “damn,” she said, “Only if it’s in the service of the story.” Marisha Pessl said that she used the old Smith Corona of her mothers and wrote all about horses, then read the stories out loud to her classmates. And Antoine Wilson’s first writing was a non-fiction piece about all the words you can make by number combinations with a calculator upside-down.

They were also asked how much of their life was in the first book, and while most of the panelists said they tried to avoid writing an autobiographical novel, Greenway said she strove for just the opposite. But for all her efforts, the story turned into fiction.

Fiction: Jumping off the Page
Chris Bohjalian
Peter Orner
Gary Shteyngart
Marianne Wiggins

I attended this panel mostly for Gary Shteyngart, who is incapable of uttering a sentence that isn’t hilarious. He cracked jokes about skinny and fat characters, and about his parents quoting letters from anonymous bloggers to cut him down to size. When asked whether it was frustrating to be taken not as seriously because he wrote humor, he called upon the legacy of American fiction that is so often satirical: from Mark Twain to Joseph Heller.

Chris Bohjalian, who kept mentioning that his recent book was his tenth novel, had attended too many author events: all of his jokes were canned, repetitions that he pulled out far too easily, and not always in the service of the moment.

Peter Orner, who wrote the The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, didn’t talk much, and when he did, it didn’t seem to be with a great deal of confidence, but on the flip side, Marianne Wiggins, author most recently of Evidence of Things Unseen, was rather brash – almost militant – as she bragged, “I am not edited.” I always feel a bit of pity for people who say that, even if they’re good writers. It’s as though their ego has grown too large to admit that the wisdom of someone else could actually improve their craft.

Fiction: Modern Myth
Aimee Bender
Ben Ehrenreich
Steve Erickson
Deborah Eisenberg
Moderated by David L. Ulin

I could understand why Bender, Ehrenreich, and Erickson were grouped together, because their fiction doesn’t resemble a mirror of the “natural” world, but didn’t know why Eisenberg had been corralled with them. But she actually explained why her work would be considered mythic: “I’ve tried to reach a consensus view of the world – what everyone would recognize as a surface reality. My aspiration is to penetrate the naturalistic screen by using naturalistic details but my interest is in the psychological life which kind of floats on the surface.” Eisenberg seemed rather self-critical – she denied any knowledge of how she structures her stories, denied any attempt to plot, denied that she had any ideas and that she knows anything and denied ever consciously writing to a theme. Afterwards, when I had her sign her latest book “Twilight of the Superheroes,” she said that I probably wouldn’t like it (but I had already read it, and loved it, which I tried to tell her).

Around the end of the panel session, they got around to defining myth, but that didn’t stop the panel from being interesting while they were all applying the structure of myth to their own work.

Shameless plug: If you’re in Los Angeles, come to The Mountain Bar on Tuesday, May 8th, for The Loudest Voice reading. I’ll be reading, along with a few other colleagues, and Aimee Bender will frontline.

Also, we’ve been handing out thousands of free sample copies of the Southern California Review. I’ll be in the booth tomorrow afternoon if you’d like to stop by, and visit the MPW website for instructions on how to submit.

Okay, that’s all for now. I have to get sleep because I’m going to four panels tomorrow. It’s inspiring, all these authors talking about their work. It makes me want to write much more than it makes me want to attend more panels. But because this gig only comes around once a year, I’m still looking forward to hearing more about fiction in few short hours.