If literary fiction is frequently character-driven, the setting significantly contributes to how those characters are developed. Certainly, distinct characters can exist anywhere in time and space, but the setting offers context and insight as to how they act and make decisions. The spatial elements of the prose are neither throwaway details nor inconsequential to the action. Imagining narratives in these terms is useful in constructing a larger understanding of how characters operate in both mimetic and speculative fictional worlds.
There is a widely held belief, among English-language writers, that sex is impossible to write about well – or at least much harder to write about well than anything else. I once heard a wonderful writer, addressing students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, say that her ideal of a sex scene would be the sentence: “They sat down on the sofa …” followed by white space. This is a prejudice I can’t understand. One of the glories of being a writer in English is that two of our earliest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare, wrote of the sexual body so exuberantly, claiming it for literature and bringing its vocabulary – including all those wonderful four-letter words – into the texture of our literary language. This is a gift not all languages have received; a translator once complained to me that in her language there was only the diction of the doctor’s office or of pornography, neither of which felt native to poetry.
“Borders always make a here and there, a them and us, they are built as a means of separations,” Eberhard says. Borders “define an inner space in which one finds comfort and safety and for some, a sense of belonging.”
He cited the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who described borders as the making of a national self-portrait. They come at a price, however.
Eberhard’s photographs portray the mostly healed scars of aggression. Dividing lines are seams — stitches in the earth — that knit us together and outline the parts of the whole.
Natasha Moskovitz mourns her old existence of only eight weeks ago. “I have a different perspective of life because of this. I feel so out of shape,” says the Haddonfield, N.J. resident. “Maybe this is what retirement feels like.”
Natasha, it should be noted, is 16.
Two years before he killed himself in 1979 at age 26, writer Breece D’J Pancake started drafting a story about a snake-handler. The preacher in the story didn’t have a snake to use, but he did have strychnine, the other sacred element of the service. He promptly collapsed, poisoned. “I reckon we better get him a doctor,” the narrator says. The preacher’s wife is grossly offended, insisting that he needs Jesus instead of medical attention. “She looks at me like I’ve fallen from grace,” he writes.
Amy Jo Burns’ debut novel, “Shiner,” takes that setting and its tensions — faith versus reality, peril and those who self-righteously toy with it — and gives it a smart, stylish update. Burns’ story is informed by the idea that myth hasn’t served Appalachia well; it leads to notions like “clean coal” and hot-air arguments from J.D. Vance that what the region lacks isn’t resources but stick-to-it-iveness. Yet Burns comes not to chastise the region, just to scrub away such mythmaking, in which women almost always come out on the losing end.
She loved silver, she loved gold,
my mother. She spoke about the influence
of metals, the congruence of atoms,
the art classes where she learned