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Michael Merschel: Michael Merschel is The Dallas Morning News books editor. September 2009
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This year's Mayborn Literary Conference is off and running, as nonfiction writers, editors and agents are converging in Grapevine for celebration and conversation about the craft of nonfiction writing. Bob Shacochis was the evening's literary light. The National Book Award winner delivered a keynote speech that was described as insightful by the charitable, rambling by those less so. But it was packed with nuggets of writerly wisdom. It should be noted that he started out with praise for his hosts for boosting the city's literary stature: "I don't know what you've been putting in the water since my last book tour in the great state of Texas, which was in the year 2000. And it went to Austin, which is fabulous, fabulous. And I went to San Antonio -- great. And I went to Houston, which is -- you can suffer though, it's OK. "But your publicist was not going to send you to Dallas ... because it was sort of a literary wasteland. It was. Nobody would come -- unless you were John Grisham or Madonna, nobody is coming to your damn literary reading at Barnes & Nobles in Dallas. It's just not happening. That's not my opinion, it's most of the writers I know. "And I'm going to have to tell them they have to change their mind." He said he's been to writing conferences for 20 years, "And I've never been to one like this ... I didn't think you could have literary conference with this many people at it." He then spoke at length about ... silence. In short, he wishes there were more of it on the literary scene; he decried memoirists who tell all for the sake of shock value, and suggested that such writing needs to perform a greater good beyond drawing attention to the writer. In the course of this discussion, however, he discussed personal details ranging from his adopted niece's sex life to an article he once wrote about attempting to conceive a child to his father, whom he said was a pedophile. But in context, these revelations also helped expose some truths about writing, such as: "I would never write about my father and his destruction of our family in nonfiction, but one of the core reasons is aesthetic. Fiction understands that the perp -- that's cop talk for perpetrator -- fiction understands that the perp is often more intriguing, more compelling, more morally conflicted than the victim. Anybody who has watched an episode of "Law & Order" gets this. "In nonfiction, we gaze upon the victim and think, 'justice and redemption.' In fiction, our allegiance often falls upon the other side of the divide. We gaze upon the perp and think 'dramatic tension, character development, art and irresolution,' which is the opposite of redemption." Later on, the "tribe" of assembled writers gathered to discuss such thoughts at length at the hotel bar. It's not your usual hotel bar conversation. But it's the kind of thing that makes the Mayborn the Mayborn. More tomorrow. E-mail entry: |
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