The Writer April 2014

Calling April the “cruelest month” has become a sound byte that creeps into nearly every National Poetry Month press release and blog post. Of course, in its entirety, it’s a hauntingly plaintive line: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Honestly, take a minute and read that one again. I wonder if T. S. Eliot would be horrified or delighted that this one phrase of his poem hit the big time. Which brings me to an even larger literary question: What would Shakespeare, who would be 450 this month, think about his place in both the canon and the quotidian? Throughout this issue of The Writer, you’ll encounter stories and micro features that recognize and…

Not long ago, I saw A.R. Gurney’s play The Cocktail Hour, which is a light-hearted, sentimental send-up of living room drama – the type of play that exposes the darker underbelly of family life. Fun as it was, it made me want to go back to the real thing, to Eugene O’Neill. Or Shakespeare. I would argue that no American did more than O’Neill to unleash the power of the living room drama, and that the playwright he learned the most from was Shakespeare. Although O’Neill never publicly named Shakespeare as an influence, Shakespeare was a constant presence in his life, beginning literally from the crib, since he was the son of an actor who worshipped and obsessively recited Shakespeare. O’Neill himself also read Shakespeare voraciously, and, after a bet…

William Shakespeare was a master of dramatic irony, a plot device in which the audience fully understands a situation or piece of information before the characters in the play. The device is often used in tragedy – for instance, when Othello trusts the devious Iago. It also works well for comedy – for instance, in nearly every Shakespeare comedy. With a third-person omniscient narrative, play a practical joke on your fictional character by withholding information. How will this lack of knowledge affect the character’s actions? Let your reader in on the secret. Does it change the reader’s opinion of the character? Build dramatic irony until the climactic moment when the truth comes out.…

It’s true; we often know a writer for his or her skills in one form. Still, plenty of writers have crossed the divide with elegance and mastery. Andre Dubus’ fiction is celebrated, but he also wrote essays. Grace Paley, known largely for her fiction, has also published several volumes of poetry. Anton Chekhov wrote both short stories and plays. Raymond Carver’s publications include short stories, essays and poetry. It is possible to do this and to do it well. Still, most writers pick a side (as the saying goes). Some are simply consumed by one form. Others find their skills don’t translate. If you’re considering branching out, by all means do so. There’s no harm in a fiction writer experimenting with poetry. In fact, the demands of poetry will no…

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. To celebrate his 450th birthday this month, we asked seven scholars and novelists what writers can learn from reading the Bard. “Shakespeare’s language models precision and efficiency. Consider the terse expressiveness of the Duke of York’s rebuke of a flattering nephew: ‘Uncle me no uncles!’ In addition to such snappy dialogue, Shakespeare teaches us that a kind of music occurs when long, Latinate words are set next to short, hard Anglo-Saxon ones, as when Hamlet speaks of his father’s ‘canonized bones.’ Long to short, abstract to earthy, spirit to bone. That’s Shakespeare’s rhythm.”—Grace Tiffany, novelist and professor of Shakespeare at Western Michigan University “The fulfillment of writing is not the page of words itself, but its performance…

Dani Shapiro is a novelist and memoirist. Her breakthrough book was the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, which details her early life growing up in an affluent, observant-Jewish household, dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College and then, at 20, living as one of several “keptwomen” of her best friend’s stepfather – a much older, wealthy, married man who enabled Shapiro to live an opulent and increasingly self-destructive life in Manhattan in the 1980s. He bought her expensive jewelry from Cartier and Bulgari, gave her a Ferrari to drive and a furnished triplex in Greenwich Village to live in. At 23, she was cocaine-addicted, bulimic and alcoholic. She turned her life around, however, when a car accident nearly killed her mother and fatally injured her father. Shapiro’s second memoir, Devotion, details a…