The name combines all of my favorite things: local interest, puns, twins, and the subversive erotic. Another one I like is "Single and Looking to Mingle." I have no further comments about that one.

Getting to the point, I cheated this week and interviewed my friend Patrick: writer, athlete, and all-around fabulous fellow. And he's from Minnesota! And he's a twin! However, he has no connection to incest, as far as I know. In fact, if he did have an incest connection, I would never have titled this column "Minnesota Twincest." Okay? So, no incest. I promise. By the way, his sister's a nun.

Have you read anything good lately?
The best book I read lately is probably True Grit by Charles Portis. What's that about? It's a young girl narrator set in the old west, and on the first page she tells us she's setting out to avenge her father's death.

Why did you like it? You like avenging girls?
That's right. Blood and gore all over the place. No, there's very little blood and gore. There's actually a John Wayne movie based on it and the Coen brothers are making a new movie, not based on the old movie, but on the book, which is much better. (1)

So tell me, do you have any reading guilty pleasures?
I don't know if I have any guilty pleasures because I read lots and lots of genre shit, but I don't feel at all embarrassed about it. (2)

Good! So you're a pretty nonjudgmental guy about what people read, right?
Yeah.

But still, have you ever dated someone who read stuff you thought was nonsense?
This is going to make me sound terrible, but I have to say Tuesdays With Morrie (3). . . I know I sound like a bad person but I think it's a despicable book.

Why?
Because it makes the life lessons of this man almost more important than the life itself. It seems unfair to the guy. (4)

So you once dated a girl who really liked Tuesdays With Morrie?
I've actually dated many a girl who liked Tuesdays with Morrie. And I assume that's because they are actually better people than me. (5)

How did you know they all liked it?
Facebook.

Oh! (6)
Probably conversations, also, hopefully. I actually do converse with my former girlfriends.

Were these real relationships or only online relationships? (7)
I think the majority were real.

Good. So, have you talked about Tuesdays With Morrie with your lady friends?
I don't think I've ever 'fessed up that I don't like it.

Have you read it?
I have. In fact, I took a high school psychology class that was structured around the book Tuesdays With Morrie. We didn't read the book in class, but we watched the movie several times (8) and at the end of the semester the professor confessed he had never actually read the book because he thought the movie was so good. It was the made-for-TV Jack Lemon movie.

Was he a good teacher?
No. (9)

Notes:

(9) Hell no.

1. Name three people who have been interviewed for Liana Liu's column, Reading People.

2. According to Kevin Fenton's article, "Social Media and the Anti-Social Novelist," what modern phrase might an ancient cave dweller have chipped into a rock that signaled the beginning of the social media impulse?

3. What two island nations have been discussed in J. Lee Morsell's column, The Weekly Apocalypse?

4. Name one author who has been interviewed for an article on dislocate.org.

After some frantic packing/showering/eating, we get on the road an hour later than expected, but still early enough to take on the excursion in a single, long-ass day packed into a Honda Civic.

For those of you who haven't experienced this drive, it primarily consists of the long, straight interstates through Iowa and Nebraska. This is the oft-mentioned flatness: the miles upon miles of cornfields on either side, broken up by the occasional rest stop or obscure roadside attraction. There's not much in the way of scenery, most of the time the smell of cows or fertilizer fill the car, and the only think keeping anyone awake is the constant stream of Mountain Dew that tastes all right at first until it eventually sticks to your teeth and your gut like some kind of paste. Most of the ride was through semi-serious rain, and we usually weren't able to sustain the posted speed limits, let alone speed through and cut off a couple hours (not to mention the water cast off of semi-truck tires, the white-knuckle tension of hydroplaning whenever we attempted to pass the slower-moving vehicles).

Still, I'm a Midwesterner; it occasionally feels necessary to make the drive through what most Americans consider "flyover country."

My students have been turning in short stories for the past couple of weeks, and I keep hearing about how frustrating it is to know how they want their stories to end, but feeling unable to make it happen on the page. I find myself telling them that they shouldn't force a story to end a specific way when the unexpected results are often more interesting. I think of it like this: there are several ways that the writer can approach their work (they can start with an idea, a situation, a rhetorical question, a scene, etc). In each case, it's going to involve a different writing process to reach the end result. There's no correct way to approach their writing--some may be faster, some may be more visual/scenic, some may drive halfway across the country before turning around and reaching the ultimate goal. The key is finding the path that works best for them, which involves practice, experimentation, and a lot of time driving through the middle of nowhere until you can find your way out of it. This is one kind of drive that probably works best without a road map.

I've noticed that for the past month or so I've been unable to muster the will to clean my apartment. Bags of recycling have sat in my hallway for at least two weeks. Dirty dishes are piled up on my dining table. I don't have a single clean utensil or plate. This doesn't help my lack of motivation to cook. It's not that I don't want to eat--though certainly my interest in food has decreased--but just that I can't be bothered to prepare anything that takes more than five minutes. Finally I've resigned myself to this fact and been trying to mentally prepare myself for a trip to the grocery store for a freezerful of prepared dinners, but that trip hasn't happened yet either--it can wait another day. Oddly, my fantasies around food lately have revolved around going out to restaurants where unobtrusive strangers will make me food. There must be something in the pampering aspect of the restaurant experience that I find comforting, like having my mother bring me soup when I was sick.

Luckily my boyfriend lives only a couple blocks away, so I get to escape my little rat's nest and retreat to his comparatively immaculate apartment, where our combined minimal motivation to feed ourselves seems just barely sufficient to make proper meals happen. It used to be that I would get sick of hanging out at his place; I'd begin to miss the fruits of my superior decorating skills. But when all I have to come back to is every surface covered with student papers, crusted dinnerware, and the still-unfolded laundry I washed ten days ago, it's easier to take another nap in his bed while he stares at his computer screen in the next room.

I'm grateful for him and for my friends who by now know the drill--that I need safe places to huddle in good company, and that the worst will be over soon enough. In a previous version of my life, I would have been pretty screwed right now. I would have been single, with tenuous friendships and nowhere to escape the ugliest parts of my internal landscape into a healthier kind of solitude. And yes: I believe that for some people there is such a thing as healthy solitude, even during a depressive episode.

The first time I became depressed enough for the authorities to be alerted, I was told that social activity and exercise would make my illness go away. As an angsty sixteen-year-old, I was quite sure this was bullshit, and that, more importantly, it missed the point. Something was happening. I was tapping into something true and real about the world, and these "doctors" were essentially telling me I could--and should--run away from it.

Do I still feel that way, eleven years later? Maybe a little. But I've now been through this cycle probably a dozen times. I know that it ends; I know there's a way for me to recover. And I've grown out of my adolescent myopia enough to recognize how important it is to make myself focus on the things in my life that I do enjoy, and to give myself those things as frequently as possible and without judgment. If that means indulging more than usual in my emergency chocolate stash, or blowing off work to take a long walk on a sunny day, then so be it. No sense in wallowing--it never, ever helps. Certain kinds of introspection can be useful, but I find that, in these situations, most often it's a matter of remembering how to take care of myself. And as it turns out, exercising and connecting with good friends can be incredibly helpful for climbing out of these holes.

These thoughts may seem simplistic to anyone who is in the throes of depression. I'm not trying to trivialize this condition or suggest that it's easy to emerge from. If you're a reclusive type who's having a hard time discerning whether your current psychological state is just part of a streak of down days or a symptom of something more serious, there's a simple test I recommend that you take. Just answer this one question for yourself:

Am I staying home alone because I take pleasure in doing so, or because doing anything else seems unbearable?

If your answer veers toward the "unbearable" end of the spectrum, and has been that way for more than a week or two, it's time for you to find some help. Call a close friend or loved one; contact a trusted mental health professional or your local mental health hotline. Sometimes the only way we can find our way back to the quiet contentment of our inner lives is to reach out into the world for help.

And what do I mean by "no-strings doing it?" Well, read my interview with Grant, Graphic Designer, to find out.

Disclaimer: There was no "no-strings doing it" before, during, or after this interview was conducted. Or rather, if there was any "no-strings doing it," I was not involved. Always the bridesmaid, etc, etc. . . .

Read anything good lately?
I recently finished Breakfast of Champions.

How'd you like that?
It's my first Kurt Vonnegut book so it was interesting (1) to get into it, but once I was a hundred pages in it was great. Yeah, I loved it.

Would you ever not date anyone because of the books they liked?
Probably not. If they're reading some right-wing BS and believe in it, maybe, but it's not based on the books they're reading. I'm sure a lot of people have read Sarah Palin's books and don't believe in what she's saying.

Say you go on a date with someone and she's like, "Hey, come up here, wanna listen to some records?" (2) and you see a shelf full of super-conservative books. What would you do?
I don't know. Is she like the president of the Young GOP Club? (3)

She totally is! Then, you know, you would have to step up to the challenge! Come on, there's some wine there. You can drink it.
Yeah. (His Friend: It could be . . . an encounter. But I don't know if there would be any dating.")

Yes! An encounter!
I'm actually engaged so no, I wouldn't have an encounter. (4)

But this is hypothetical!
Ok, well hypothetically . . . I . . . umm . . . I don't really care. I mean, I don't really care. (5)

So what does your fiancée read?
Well, the last thing she read . . . I had her read The Stranger by Camus. (6)

Did she like it?
Yeah, she did.

If she hadn't liked it, would it have caused a problem in your relationship?
No. I don't know.

Do you think she really liked it or just told you she liked it?
No, she really liked it. She has no problem telling me when she doesn't like something. She would not have told me she liked it if she didn't like it. (7)

Sounds like an ideal relationship!
It's solid. On literature, we're definitely on par.

Congratulations! Love means loving the same books. (8)

Notes:
(1) "Interesting" is also my choice of word when I mean "SUCKS," fyi.

(2) Apparently I only have one pickup line and it's, "Wanna listen to some records?"

(3) Power is sexy!

(4) "Encounter" is my new favorite euphemism for no-strings doing it. Actually, "no-strings doing it" is my new favorite euphemism for no-strings doing it.

(5) In other words, hell yeah to no-strings doing it!

(6) Romantic.

(7) I guess she liked it.

(8) Upon further reflection, this is probably not true. I once dated a young man who only had survivalist-type books on his bookshelf. My favorite was How to Survive in the Woods. The book was waterproof. So handy! Although our relationship did not work out, it was not because of our disparate literary tastes. I think waterproof books are really cool. When I was a little girl, I always wanted to read while taking a shower. I can't remember why.

In addition to his writing, D'Agata is well known for his work as an editor; he's currently the Lyric Essay Editor for the Seneca Review and has assembled two nonfiction anthologies: The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He's helped to highlight the ways The Essay can be used, how nonfiction is more than personal reflection or memoir.

In other words, nine years after Halls of Fame was first published, there's a lot of expectation for D'Agata's second book, About A Mountain. Luckily for us, the book lives up to its hype. Using investigative reporting combined with lyric prose, D'Agata opens up a world for the reader that covers environmental literature, memoir, and the science of communication. He shows us what can be achieved with the book-length essay.

About a Mountain follows a number of overlapping stories: primarily, the book covers the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste in a mountain range near the city of Las Vegas, and the story of a teenager who commits suicide in the city. Through all of these bigger themes we have D'Agata taking tours of waste facilities, experiencing the city of Las Vegas, and answering telephones for a suicide hotline.

Reading through About a Mountain, I couldn't help but make comparisons between this book and his earlier collection. In About a Mountain, D'Agata manages to keep the tightly packed lyric prose from Halls of Fame, but uses it to frame a commentary on the state of the environment and the ways communication breaks down over time. For example, midway through the book, D'Agata goes into a section that lists human fascination with the end of the world.

God initiated this obsession of ours when he explained to us in Genesis that everyone would be killed by a single giant flood. Roman prophecy said it'd happen in 600 BCE, the year in which Romulus was told in a dream that his empire would be destroyed. It will happen before I die, said Confucius to his pupils. It will happen twenty-nine times, said the Sibyl throughout her life. Four hundred eighty-three times, St. Clement later revised.

Although this listing goes on for another two pages, I think this does a good job of showing how D'Agata manages to build momentum with the escalating apocalypses in these shorter paragraphs, and he repeats this technique throughout the book. The writing brings in a lot of outside research and mythology, all which make the subject matter feel more crucial, dire.

One of the most interesting things about this book is its structure. About a Mountain reads like a book-length essay: the book is organized into a number of chapters, under a set number of titles, each an investigative question: who, what, when, where, why, and how. These titles repeat throughout the book, which gives a certain weight/theme to each section while connecting them to the greater pursuits of the book. D'Agata's use of chapters allows him to keep the fast-moving pace of his earlier work, as well as the ability to jump between different subjects and themes, while still tackling bigger, more complicated subject matter than could be achieved in a fifteen- to twenty-page work.

Another interesting aspect of the book exists outside of the main narrative: the end of the book includes an extensive notes section. Here, D'Agata includes expected information like article citations and secondary research, but he also includes wonderful asides. Here's one of my favorites:

63- There's a wonderfully absurd discussion about the origin of our dragon fantasies in Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Origins of Human Intelligence... A report submitted to the British Royal Society in 1764 suggested that dragons died off in Europe in the ninth century.

In addition, these notes tackle the problems of truth and shaping narrative in nonfiction, which provides an interesting lesson for aspiring writers of the genre.

Admittedly, the book isn't without flaws. I'm trying to avoid spoiling any major plot points, but I will say that the ending is abrupt and fairly unsatisfying. In a book that's so satisfying, the final ten pages feel like a misstep (but not an unforgivable one).

With that said, there are so many good things happening here that About a Mountain is worth your attention. It doesn't even matter that the Yucca Mountain range was quietly removed as a theoretical storage site for nuclear waste in the past several months: the environmental narrative still works as an effective metaphor for the problems with population growth, communication over generations, and the personal events of D'Agata's time in Las Vegas.

It's kind of disgusting.

Training goes beyond physical pain, throwing serious kinks into most aspects of my life. I mostly run at night, after the sun sets, and I run into all sorts of city-related problems: I've run through at least one drug deal, have been nearly hit by a car or two. Once I get home I'm wired, and I can't remember the last time I caught a full night's rest that wasn't somehow interrupted by shooting pain or a heavy-beating heart.

Still, there are certain upsides to marathon training. For starters, you get to eat obscene amounts of food and still lose weight. Probably more importantly, there's an intense satisfaction in running 26.2 miles without stopping, a sense of accomplishment when coming over the intense pain of the process (there's a special satisfaction in the PR, the personal record, but I'm not in the shape I once was, making a new speed record in the immediate future highly unlikely).

Haruki Murakami has perhaps done more justice to this subject than I ever could, but I'm still going to take a crack at connecting the marathon to the process of writing.

Marathon training amounts to a significant time commitment, to taking an hour or four out of your daily life to devote to building up your body, to accumulating enough miles for your body to handle the race. My own schedule looks like this: an hour or two of writing in the morning, an hour or two of running before I go to bed at night. Each process involves heavy revision: the body reshaped in a tighter, fit form; the story edited to maximize significance and aesthetic. The long hours in each allow the writer/runner to spend a lot of time (arguably too much) in their head, better shaping arguments and figuring out a most efficient means of accomplishing the task. Both are painful, time consuming, and sometimes awful.

Both--in the end--are altogether perfect.

What a fool I must be to miss this gorgeous weather!

Luckily, it's still too early in the season for much guilt to have accumulated around this failure. For the brief period between the coming of sunshine and the oppression of guilt for not enjoying it enough, I find myself feeling more eager than usual to explore the world--at least in theory. I can imagine traveling to distant destinations (as long as they offer three-star hotels and running water), exploring echoing ruins in rainforests, even touring the overstimulating hell that I envision Tokyo to be, all without sudden queasiness. Usually this travel-fever doesn't last long enough for me to make actual flight reservations, and before I know it, winter is here again.

In response to the warm weather, I dreamed two nights ago that I was vacationing in Freiburg, Germany (that charming city in which I lived drunkenly for two months during college). In the dream, I'd chosen Freiburg as a suitably distant destination that was also not entirely new to me--an attempt to compromise between my desire for stimulation and my fear of the unknown. After arriving, I soon realized that almost all the people I'd met during my previous stay at the language institute were still there, or there once again, in the apparently endless process of learning German, hanging out in cafes, and fraternizing in the way footloose 20-year-olds are wont to do. This fact disappointed me a little--I hadn't wanted circumstances to be quite so similar to my last visit. Momentarily I berated my dream-self for not having been more adventurous in choosing a destination. But then I got caught up in grappling with all of the minutiae involved in planning a vacation in a foreign country: back in my white-walled lodgings, I ran myself through German language drills, memorized guidebooks, and researched local grocery stores. Thus was my dream spent planning for my vacation while I was in fact on my vacation, and generally feeling at least marginally competent at managing my anxiety about the whole situation.

Though my nighttime dreams have lately featured a lot of traveling (more in the vein of moving my life, rather than just visiting a place), this particular nocturnal journey was the first in which I experienced the excitement and discomfort of navigating a new place while being expected to Fully Enjoy it. No business to occupy me, aside from the necessities of eating and sleeping. Just entertainment, soul feeding, that kind of thing. And all I could do was read guidebooks.

In life, too, I'm an obsessive planner. Slowly I've begun disabusing myself of the delusion that my time spent planning actually makes it more likely for me to do anything other than plan some more. This year, though, I'm developing semi-serious intentions to travel somewhere new. I know that this is in part because my boyfriend is forever dreaming wild dreams of remote locales, so I can ride on his intrepidity. When we first began dating, I resisted the possibility that I might share any of these kinds of adventures with him, and I still have no interest in driving his 1992 Honda Civic to Mongolia, or, for that matter, ever sleeping overnight in a car. But I figure this is a place in my personality where I can allow my limits to be pushed without compromising my true reclusive nature. After all, most of us recluses are very good at dreaming dreams of foreign lands, having spent so much time in the worlds our favorite authors created for us to keep in perpetuity on our night tables. It's just a matter of confronting the reality of those worlds, all the ways in which they appear mundane and abrasive, uninspired and oppressive. Reality is not a volume that is easily bookmarked and shelved away for later leisurely perusal. In Germany I got to deal with the constant awkwardness of the language and culture barriers on top of my own social ineptitude, as well as the persistent sense that my Asian features were attracting unkind attention.

Sometimes I wonder whether a reclusive nature is not most often a result of an oversensitive temperament--one that is less effective at filtering out unpleasant stimuli in any given situation. In situations where everything is new, the novelty itself is quickly overwhelming, a fact that makes traveling that much more challenging. Maybe this is why it's so common for people to joke that they need a vacation right after having returned from a vacation.

In any case, I'm still figuring out for myself this particular aspect of good living. For those who share my proclivities and limitations, I might simply suggest, as usual, that we be gentle with ourselves and avoid giving in to that internalized demand that we take it all on at once. Retreat is how we keep ourselves sane. But I think my own sanity will benefit from exploring some new territory this year.

Thanks to the demands of this column, however, I have discovered that my friends were indeed telling the truth, and not jealous of my wit and charm. Or rather, not just jealous. In any case, now there is hard evidence in the form of this taped interview, conducted at Liquor Lyle's, late one Tuesday evening. How I loathe the sound of my voice! And the relentless enthusiasm! And my inadvertent sexualizing of the situation! It would be so much cooler if the sexualizing had been advertent. Obviously. Enough about me. Let's learn about Joe.

What do you do, Joe?
I'm a student. Studying business.

Business? Awesome! (1)
Yeah, keeping up with school.

Read anything good lately?
This one book, Crossing California. It's a novel about these Jewish people in Chicago in the 1970s, and it mostly focuses on the children of these families and how they're growing up in this neighborhood. It was really entertaining, I really liked it.

Now tell me your reading secrets.
Um . . . I've read all of the Harry Potter books. (His friend: What!? You're kidding!) (2)

Do you dress up in costume? (3)
No.

How about a wand? (4)
No . . .

Wait, sorry, I just made things weird. So Harry Potter?
When the last Harry Potter book came out I bought it at the airport in Santiago, Chile, and read almost the whole thing on the flight back to the US. I stayed up all night reading it.

Did you feel like you were living in that world because you were in this weird plane place?
Yeah, I was completely involved in the characters and I felt like I was there and they were my friends.

Were you sad when you finished the book?
Yeah, it was like a part of me was just gone. (5)

That's so sad! Who's your favorite character?
I don't know. Definitely not Harry, he's a whiny bitch. (6) I'd have to say . . . Professor Lupin.

Yeah, the genie in the bottle guy? (7)
No, the werewolf. (Friend: The werewolf! (8)) He was refined and subtle, really well done.

You liked him because you're so refined and subtle, right?
I hope so. (9)

Editor's notes:
(1) If I had been sober, this line would have gone like this: "Business? Awesome?" No offense, business people. I am just jealous of your wit and charm. Dad.

(9) Such modesty. I'm sold! Wait, unless that's some business trick. Sold? What? Oh no, what have I done?

The surge in popularity of online dating has become a boon to us as the stigma slowly drops away and "normal" people increasingly avail themselves of this new resource. If you're still in the "online dating is for weirdos" camp, get over it already. Everything happens on the Internet these days.

I started my thirteen-year online dating career before I got to high school. The first time I got drunk was in Golden Gate Park with a sixteen-year-old I'd met in a random chat room, who proceeded to trail me wasted down Haight Street proclaiming acts of love he would like to perform on me; my first kiss was at fourteen with a Miata-driving twenty-eight-year-old who'd claimed online that he was twenty, and then, in person, confessed to having a thing for Japanese chicks--and trust me, the scene has gotten WAY better since the dark ages of the mid-'90s. Luckily, so has my self-esteem, which is truly crucial in the world of online love, so get thee to a therapist if you need some help in that department.

What to Expect

The best thing about online dating is the ability to pre-screen your potential partners without ever having to choose an outfit or speak a sentence. No waiting awkwardly at a bar for someone interesting to come along (god knows that never works out anyway) or stalking bookstore aisles feeling like a pervert.

The hardest part at the beginning of this process is writing your profile, which admittedly takes a bit of brazenness and, just as importantly, a sense of humor. Your best training will come through reading other people's profiles. Try finding a friend who has some experience with this stuff so you can get a second opinion about your self-advertising copy. As a start, I'll impart a few words of wisdom from my own prowling days, useful for both screening prospective cuddle-buddies and for crafting your own online representation:

Guys who are "laid back" are always actually boring.

"I like to have fun." Really? How unusual!

Any smidgen of hostility should be interpreted as a thousandth part of what lies in wait.

Users, as a rule, post pictures of themselves that are between three and ten times more attractive than their real-life selves. (Choose your own photos accordingly.)

Creative, honest profiles glitter like gems among the muck. You'll recognize them immediately.

Cautionary Measures

After you've finished your profile, you'll probably spend several (dozen) hours looking through your prospects. Or if you're using OkCupid (see below), you'll spend several dozen hours answering Match Questions so you can optimize their your search results. You'll get to answer revealing questions like:

If you inadvertently found a phone number in a partner's pocket, which would you do?
• Call the number to see whose it is.
• Openly ask what/who the number is for.
• Nothing, I would trust my partner.
• Nothing, my partner's privacy should be respected.

You'll also tell OkCupid matching algorithm how you'd want your ideal match to answer.

Then you'll get up the courage to send a few messages to people. If you don't hear back, don't take offense--especially if you're a guy. WSMs tend to get about fifty times as many unsolicited messages as MSWs do.

Once you've hooked someone with your witty email repartee, you're going to have to prepare yourself to leave the house. If you didn't lie in your profile, you have nothing to worry about in this regard. Remember to take advantage of this blind exchange of information to get all of your most obvious weirdnesses on the table. Best to drive them away before you have to put your shoes on! At least that's always been my strategy.

But the more important thing is making sure not to agree to a date until you're sure the person you might meet isn't psychotic. This takes some skill to develop, and just a smidge of trial and error--but if I could do it as a teenager without getting knifed in an alley, then you can too, for christ's sake. Remember the basics: exchange a few emails before meeting; if you see or feel ANY red flags at any point, end contact politely but firmly; when meeting, always do so in a public place, do not divulge your home address or phone number or last name if possible, arrive and leave separately, and make sure your phone is available and fully charged in case anything freaky happens. And don't have more than one alcoholic drink on your first date, seriously! Of course, women tend to be more cautious about online dating than men are, and for excellent reason. Guys, take note of this and have a little sympathy; you will probably have to try harder to convince a woman to go out on a date with you than women will have to try to get a date. That's life.

Life After the Internet

Once you're actually in a relationship, your start on the internet will not really help things along, except that maybe your interests and proclivities line up a bit better than they otherwise would because you can screen for them more easily up front. This is nothing to be sniffed at. Fellow introverts can be, by definition, difficult to track down, and being with someone who respects and shares your desires for solitude and low-key socializing will make your life easier. I promise.

OkCupid FTW

Having tried a host of different websites for picking up dudes, I've determined that my favorite online dating site is (not surprisingly here) OkCupid.com: it has a great proportion of young, educated, liberal types with a sense of humor, if that's your thing, especially (again) in the major cities. And a basic membership, which allows you to do everything you need to do to find and meet someone you like, is free.

Full Disclosure

For the first time in several years, I'm currently in a relationship I did not begin on the Internet, and I'm very happy. In 2006 I met a guy on MySpace who I married and very quickly divorced. I DO NOT recommend MySpace as a place to meet anyone. People on the internet are actually crazy. But usually in an interesting way!--at least it's interesting for a little while.

In Closing

Remember that even if it feels a little weird to be meeting people from the internet, it's still way less awkward than going on the prowl at your local bar. You can be drunk on OkCupid, too, you know. So the next time you need some human contact with a complete stranger who might have something in common with you, try it out. Have fun!

However, once the Q & A portion got started, I became miserable. How desperately I wanted to know what these question-asking people looked like. What sort of person asks a question about the writer's utensil of choice? Or the writer's underwear preferences? (Note: these questions may or may not have been those actually asked; my memory is a bit holey--I mostly remember my sorrow over not being able to see anything).

Fortunately, post-event I was able to do some inappropriate interrogating of my own. My victim: Maryhope, lovely graduate student in the psychology department.

What's that you're reading?
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindovist.

How do you like it?
I love it. I saw the film so I wanted to read the book. So far it's very good.

Good! Now, let's get down to business. Would you ever not date someone based on the books they liked?
Yes.

What are some deal-breakers?
The Da Vinci Code, anything by O'Reilly. I should probably stop. This is not a good way to make friends.

Right, right. Let's just say it's good that anyone reads anything. (1)
Sure!


But really now, what would you do if you were on a date with a total studmuffin and he invited you back to his house to "listen to records," and when you got there you found a bookshelf full of Dan Brown and Bill O'Reilly books?
That kind of happened to me once! I went on this date with this really attractive millionaire.

Tell me! How did you meet him? (2)
He was a friend of a friend who wanted to take me out. Then I asked him what the last book he read was and he said he didn't read any books. So I asked him what the last movie he saw was and he said his favorite movies were "Jackass" and "The Thomas Crowne Affair" because Thomas Crowne reminded him of himself. (3) That's when I realized that even millions weren't worth it. (4)

That's beautiful, thank you.

Editor's notes:
(1) Wrong.

(4) Like, how many millions? I wish I had thought to ask . . .

These perennially popular events are actually great for reclusive types who nevertheless feel they should be out in public more often.

First, the game is played in teams, which means that it's completely acceptable for you to talk only to your small group of friends--indeed, anything else might seem like treason. No one else will be milling around either, except the drunkest of the attendees, who have probably forgotten they're playing. It's socially acceptable to ignore these people. All the Trivia Nights I've been to involve writing answers down on a sheet of paper, which also eliminates excessive human contact.

Second, small talk is fairly limited and low-pressure thanks to the stream of trivia questions that everyone must discuss in fierce whispers until an answer is chosen. So you get the enjoyment of talking without the anxiety of needing something interesting to say. Also, don't feel too bad if you don't know anything about most of the questions. A couple of helpful comments throughout the game will be enough to justify your presence there (and anyway, I hear that friends are people who like to be around you even if you don't know the answer to Trivia Night questions). If the idea of being asked questions you don't know the answers to distresses you too much, some weekly trivia events announce their themes in advance, so you can study up. Try to find one of these and convince your friends it's the best one. They'll agree if you start winning free drinks for them every week. (In any case it's a good idea to try out several different Trivia Nights, to find which one suits your temperament and knowledge base best.)

Third, because Trivia Nights are usually at bars, you can drink. In fact, this is encouraged. Your friends will be drinking too, which of course means they'll notice your awkwardness less, which will anyhow melt away the more Jager bombs you do. Just remember: the next day, your level of retrospective shame and social anxiety will be directly proportional to the amount of alcohol you imbibed. (The emphasis on drinking is also a good reason for finding a Trivia Night within walking distance of your residence.)

Finally, Trivia Nights are usually held on weeknights and last about two hours, give or take, after which everyone is usually happy to head home feeling accomplished and content. Two hours is generally manageable for me, and it can be comforting to know that something has a definite end point.

Congratulations--you just made it through an evening of socializing without (I hope) having been bombarded too heinously with feelings of paranoia, panic, and shame. And what's more: you are now, officially, a team player.

***

As you can see, this first entry is no such thing. Instead, it is an explanation, a rationalization, and an apology. It turns out I have overestimated myself; I am far more timid than I supposed.

I have a long history of overestimating my abilities. For example, when I went to New Zealand, I signed up for a mountain biking trip, even though I had never mountain biked before. I had regular biked, and wouldn't you think it was almost the same, just on a mountain instead of pavement? Obviously, I didn't think this through. So, yes, there we were in the van, winding our way up the mountain, when the driver-guide mentioned that we would be biking the same trail that the New Zealand Mountain Biking Team trains on. Then he pointed at the trail. I pressed my face against the window to look. I saw grass and rocks and trees. I saw nothing that looked like a trail. And yet, I was still confident that I could do this; after all, everyday I biked two miles to school on a nicely paved bike lane--how could this be that different?

It was different. I fell off the bike about three times in the first minute. Maybe you'd better take the paved way down, the driver-guide said. So as everyone else embarked on the trail made famous by the New Zealand Mountain Biking Team, I wobbled slowly down the road. Very slowly. There was no guardrail. This was a mountain. About two minutes in, I flew over the handlebars and into the road. Apparently, mountain bike braking is different from regular bike braking. I lay there for a few minutes, whimpering. I'm going to stop here, because the story only gets sadder.

Besides, you get the point: I overestimate my abilities. In this case, I overestimated my ability to approach strangers and interview them about what they are reading. I asked a few acquaintances and they politely demurred ("I can't! I have to finish combing my hair within the hour!"). I asked some friends and they laughed in my face ("No way. Why don't you write about your mountain biking accident instead?"). Then I did what any reasonable person might do: I got drunk. Liquid courage! Unfortunately, once I was drunk I stopped caring about "that stupid column" and instead participated in a gun show competition. Yes, I don't know what that means either.

So what I've learned is this: people are so ashamed about their reading choices that they dare not talk about them. Or people just don't want to talk to me. Too bad for them, I have some bold new strategies I'm putting in action this week that may or may not involve jumping jacks.

Dear readers, be patient. You are my favorite.

In Rilke's famous letters to a young poet, he mentions frequently the importance of solitude for an artist's soul:

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours--that is what you must be able to attain. . . . Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life.

Though he continues to serve as a patron saint of contemporary artists who need permission to withdraw from the chaos of everyday life, Rilke himself didn't seem like an especially enviable character. He was plagued by his sensitivity to the world, suffering any time he came into contact with the event-filled evening and all of its concomitant feelings. And he didn't even have billboards, cell phones, and Twitter to deal with.

Still, despite constant social pressures to "participate," "have some fun," and "get dressed once in a while," life can yet be enjoyable for the reclusive among us in the modern world. It just takes some work.

Personally, I often get stuck ruminating ("perseverating," one of my blissfully World-of-Warcraft-addicted ex-boyfriends used to call it) about how seriously to take these accusations that I need to leave the house more often, that I'm letting life pass me by, etc. But who's to say? I tend to take as authorities figures like Rilke, Jung, my therapist, and New Scientist magazine--and yet the line between healthy introversion and shut-in status still looks frustratingly blurred.

Thus the weekly column you are now reading: a project of cataloging Stuff I Like About the World--stuff that either validates my introversion, or else makes me feel less freakish by inspiring me to declare, "This is worth going outside for!" (Keep in mind that, for me, what counts as "going outside" includes crossing the parking lot to get into my car, ordering a burrito at Chipotle, and, on some days, descending to the apartment complex's basement to do laundry.) Positive thinking is a good skill for me to practice, anyway.

And so we begin with my current favorite introverted self-indulgence, and also one of my aforementioned authoritative sources on the degree to which my introversion is healthy: New Scientist magazine.

I first heard about New Scientist when I was in Germany (yes, I went abroad, for two whole months--but I survived only by being drunk the entire time). One of my newfound drinking buddies was a quiet chemistry PhD who had completed his degree at Berkeley. Prior to my two months in Europe spent pretending to master the language of Nietzsche (I got thirty-four pages into Also Sprach Zarathustra--but they were thirty-four excellent pages), I had taken to reading books like Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality. I was indeed searching for reality, using science to cope with a deep "I'm twenty years old, where the hell is my life going?"-style depression during the day while spending my evenings dozing to marathons of The Osbournes. This string of events is the only reason I can think of for having gotten into a discussion about a science magazine with a fellow alcoholic. Some years later, while recovering from a breakup that threw me into another depression, I treated myself to a year of scientifically supported optimism.

An annual subscription (52 issues) is $72 if you order online. If you're concerned about paper consumption or haven't yet gotten sick of staring at a monitor for 60 to 90 percent of your waking life, the New Scientist offers an outrageously reasonable online-only subscription option. But I prefer the paper version--it's nice to feel distantly connected to the world without the use of a keyboard. (Reading the newspaper doesn't quite fill this role for me--I find the experience too similar to shopping an Ikea sale.)

If you spend a lot of time alone at home, and you don't have pesky friends who invite you out (or even if you do), having a few issues of New Scientist lying around is multiply useful.

1. First of all, you're pretty much guaranteed to read most of each issue of the weekly periodical, so you won't feel ashamed that you're wasting your money, and you'll be accomplishing at least one concrete thing each week even if you spend the rest of your time contemplating the yellowjacket corpse that's been caught in your window screen since last summer.
2. Second, if someone actually happens to come over and sees your stack of smart-looking magazines, s/he will be impressed: "Wow, [your name] must be a genius! S/he must be doing really important things alone in this apartment all the time. Now I feel less miffed that s/he never returns my phone calls."
3. Finally, it's a great prop to take out with you on those occasions when you're forced to leave your apartment, so that people will think you're serious in that marginally acceptable academic kind of way, and your aloofness may be partially forgiven.

This morning I had the chance to find a new use for my subscription. My boyfriend, having had a rough (decidedly extraverted) night, woke up feeling too ill to do anything other than sprawl on the couch in his underwear and nibble toast, so I entertained us both by reading article snippets to him. Though I basically did nothing this morning except make tea, I at least learned a few things, e.g. that, due to global warming, coral reef bacteria may stop producing a certain gas that contributes to cloud cover for the region, which could lead to the imminent destruction of Australian rainforests. Also, mammals that live in trees tend to live longer than their "ground-bound cousins." Now it's pretty hard for you to tell me that I wasted my day, isn't it?

While topics in the magazine range from technology to health to space exploration, I don't have too much trouble relating some of the content to my own cloistered existence. Notable discoveries:

1. Sexual activity is better at relieving stress when you do it with another person. (This tidbit unfortunately led to my first marriage, but in rough times it still encourages me to seek human contact.)
2. People who read cognitive behavioral therapy-oriented self-help books tend to feel more depressed after finishing the book than they did before. (Those CBT folks are so silly. As if they could reason me out of my bad mood!)
3. A recent study has shown that feelings of happiness may make people behave more selfishly. (So many places to go with this...)

The clincher for my unwavering support of this publication: I've never had anyone from the New Scientist subscriptions office terrorize me with human contact, even in the form of a phone call.

Why? Because it's fun. And because the Apocalypse is a myth with pernicious manifestations.

What is apocalypse? Dictionary.com, definition 5: "Any universal or widespread destruction or disaster: the apocalypse of nuclear war." Definition 3: "A prophetic revelation, esp. concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil." In Christian tradition, the Apocalypse is the moment Jesus returns to earth to solve the problem of evil; as Milton put it, "to dissolve Satan with his perverted world; then raise from the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, new heav'ns, new earth." There are apocalyptic traditions in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism too, each with the common view that the earth is corrupt and that disaster can cleanse it. People seem to desire the cleansing disaster, and have predicted it for millennia. (To list just a few dates predicted to be The End of the World As We Know It: 1260, 1300, 1533, 1666, 1844, 1914, 1988, 1997, 2000, 2008, 2012.) The Apocalypse is expected almost every week; so far it has never actually arrived.

It might seem far-fetched to claim that people desire disaster. Certainly, most of us are not in suicide cults, and we want the world to continue. And yet I wonder how far we've really come since the Millerites, an apocalyptic cult that enjoyed widespread appeal in the nineteenth century. The Millerites predicted, via millions of copies of their newspapers, that The End would arrive October 22, 1844. When the sun rose on October 23, they dubbed it "The Great Disappointment."

I know more than one rural white man who seemed a little too eager stockpiling supplies prior to the expected social meltdown of Y2K; apocalyptic novels like the "Left Behind" series sell millions of copies; and at this moment there are seven different apocalyptic movies playing in Minneapolis theaters near me. (Might movies, like dreams, express wishes?)

At the risk of making a silly comparison, I had an apocalyptic dream last night: Dr. Spaceman from 30 Rock convinced me to take a suicide pill as part of some medical treatment. (30 Rock fans will know that Dr. Spaceman is a quack; he generally encourages characters to indulge their base desires in unhealthy ways, and, when faced with real medical emergencies, is useless.)

(Perhaps I should keep this to myself, but I do notice an uncanny resemblance between my dream and the Heaven's Gate cult: back in 1997, they thought the only way to "survive" the end of the world was to commit suicide so their souls could board a passing spaceship.)

Anyway, I took my pill, and spent all night waiting to die, calling my loved ones to say goodbye and only getting voicemail. But then I didn't die. The apocalypse had been deferred. As the Apocalypse is always deferred. (Except for Heaven's Gate.)

I am not the first to suggest that, in this era of nuclear and ecological threats, there is a dangerous potential for the Dream and reality to converge and for apocalypse to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if "widespread destruction" does occur, I expect that we will find the destruction to be real and the Apocalypse to be disappointingly imaginary. No Holy Champion will rescue us with "new heav'ns, new earth." We will have to live with the "conflagrant mass."

Join me each week for reviews of moments where the Dream and reality blur, such as the discos of Tuvalu, Wall Street oracles, zombie culture, extreme science, and drug cults. If, by next week, a seven-headed beast has not risen from the sea and eaten my alarm clock, I will deliver a column about Avatar and the Amazon.

dislocate: In a recent essay you wrote for the Rumpus, you discuss John Hawkes and the advice he gave you as a young writer. He would say, "You read Lolita--why'd you stop reading Nabokov? You read two Flannery O'Connor stories--well, Flannery O'Connor wrote a whole bunch of stories." Along those lines, are you, in the tradition of John Hawkes, a completist?

Jim Shepard: Oh, no.

dislocate: So that wasn't an important part of Hawkes's advice for you?

JS: Well, I took the advice to the extent that I was shamed into thinking, Why haven't I read more? Now, there are some people like Nabokov where I've read almost everything. But everybody I know has pockets of shame where you're like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I still haven't read that." And in fact, somebody--I forget who--put together a collection of essays where they just asked writers, "What's the most embarrassing gap in your knowledge?" People would say, "I've never read Milton," that kind of thing. But there's so much in the canon. I think what Hawkes is urging us to do is this: if you say you love Nabokov, why don't you read a lot more of him? And I certainly know writers who have taken three or four writers and read everything. It's not so hard to read all of Flannery O'Connor. It's very hard to read all of Dickens; it's very hard to read all of Nabokov, but you can do it. So, I haven't taken Hawkes's advice completely, but I certainly was shamed enough to go back to writers I most admired and re-indulge, essentially--re-submerge myself.

dislocate: Now, sticking with Hawkes, one of the things you write about him is how his work can be "astonishingly idiosyncratic." In your appreciation of Hawkes you write: "The boy's being scolded, and then for no apparent reason he puts his finger in the ashtray and then licks it?" You then write about your own transition from writing suburban domestic stories of your own experience to writing the "astonishingly idiosyncratic." How, in both your teaching and writing life, do you focus on and impart that concept?

JS: One of the things I stress with my students is that they should pay really close attention to the weird. The weird shows up even in the most ordinary stuff. Part of the reason you have a workshop, part of the reason you have readers, is that they can educate you as to how weird you really are. Of course, everybody thinks they're fairly mainstream--even the people who claim, "Oh my god, I'm just so odd." But then they say, "Don't you do this? No? You don't?" Because what that is, I think--and so did Hawkes, I imagine--are those moments where your work gets outside of your conscious control. And that's where you're actually getting into something that's a little more intuitive, something that's a little richer, something that you haven't already laid out in a neatly conceived plan. That unruliness is what's going to give your writing energy, because the stuff you've laid out is pretty reductive, even if you're a master of design.

I don't write outlines for stories, but if I have a lot of material, if it's a story that's using a lot of science or history, I will often try to organize the information I have. And then I'll try to put it together in a rough but likely design. That design is an illusion that I create for myself that allows me to keep going. Without it I'd be too terrified to continue. But I need to understand that the design is an illusion. I need to understand that in some rough way, there is going to be a pattern, but if that pattern remains unchanged, that's evidence that the thing is dead. There has to be a moment where I go, "Oh, no, this is going over here, and that's going out," where I'm starting to teach myself as I go along. If I'm not--if in the writing I haven't learned anything more about the skeletal, oafish thing that I started with--that's a fatal sign.

dislocate: Do you make a distinction between the "astonishingly idiosyncratic" and "quirk"? That is, quirk for the sake of quirkiness can often be very light, very--

JS: Yes, I suppose that can be true. If you imagine "quirky" and its associative meanings--things like whimsy, strangeness for the sake of strangeness--yes, that's quite annoying. For me, a good example of weirdness that immediately takes on weight is Miranda July's best stuff. You read it and you see that this is a narrator who quickly lets you know there are some very strange things about her and that those things cost her. She's not simply saying, "I'm the weirdest girl you've ever met, don't you want to date me?" She's saying, "I am so weird, and let me tell you, it's not that much fun. Because there are problems with being this weird." A lot of July's narrators try to keep a very light tone. They try to make it sound as though they aren't really bothered by things. The extent to which they are is the extent to which the fiction works. I just did a conference with Shantha [Susman], and she's got these short shorts and some of those narrators work exactly like that. They have this element of "I'm just taking stuff as it comes. I know I'm strange and that's not a big issue." In fact, where the weight of the work resides is in the reader's responding, "I think this bothers you more than you think." That's suddenly where the stuff blooms.

dislocate: Miranda July is an interesting example because she can be quirky yet poignant, whereas quirk without poignance--

JS: Exactly. Quirky without pain? Then you're just performing. All of first-person narration, all of literature, really, is a kind of performance. This person is trying to get you to love them. Humbert Humbert is performing for you. But Lolita works because you realize Humbert Humbert is in some serious pain. And that tension--I'm going to deny my pain and charm you, and at the same time, by the way, I am the most miserable fucking person you've ever come across--that's a hugely compelling tension. Now, in the stuff that doesn't work for me of Miranda July's, you never quite see enough of the pain. Or it stays too oblique and you can't figure out what's bothering the character. Whereas, in the stuff that works, you think, "Oh my god, girl, you have got to get some help."

dislocate: Now, you were involved in the very first issue of Electric Literature. They made an animated trailer for your story. How was seeing that?

JS: I think publishers are catching on, or have caught on only very slowly, to how important the object is to the writer. I mean, the writer has a very child-like relationship to his book. You really want this object to be something you would like to have in your hand. It means that a book design or cover art that you really don't like is much more painful than it should be, rationally. Charlie Baxter's first novel, First Light, the one that works backward in time, had a cover that was stupefyingly ugly and hard to read. He was really heartbroken about it. He even offered to pay them to remake the cover and they wouldn't do it. What I think a lot of writers are doing in terms of visual representation and packaging of their work is just trying to dodge a bullet. With the Electric Literature people, they said, "One of the things we'd like to do is a trailer." I thought, "How cool is that? I don't know if anybody's going to see it, but I've never had anything like that before." Then they told me they had a number of animators that they were thinking about. They said, "We'll send you their work and you tell us your response." Now, that was fun. But at some point, even the most powerful writers, except someone like Updike, turn over control. Updike had total control over his covers and I think they looked like it. They were the most bland things. They would say "John Updike" and the title and then have a picture of a coin. And the reader would be like, "Good job, John."

dislocate: Can you, and would you, read a short story on a screen?

JS: Could I? I guess I could. I never have. Electric Literature is a product mostly for iPhones and Kindles. I don't have a Kindle and I don't plan on putting short stories on my iPhone anytime soon. I very much like reading on the page. I understand the logic of the Kindle to the extent that if I were flying to New Zealand, and that's twenty-four hours each way, that's a lot of Russian novels to pack into my suitcase. So the Kindle, at that point, would make a huge amount of sense because I could take an infinite amount of novels and read whatever I wanted. It's very much like an iPod where you have your whole music collection. In the middle of a trip I can say, "Forget Ray Charles, I'm going to listen to Elmore James." I understand the Kindle in that way. I don't understand the Kindle when someone buys a two-hundred-page novel and sits down at their desk at home to read it. I don't get that at all. When Electric Literature first approached me, I wasn't that receptive. Andy Hunter drove up to Williamstown from Brooklyn and talked me into it. It wasn't the fact that I'd finally get to be on a Kindle that convinced me. Instead, I liked the desperation he mentioned of, "We have to figure out a way to get people interested in short fiction. There has to be a way of doing more than putting an ad in the back of Writer's Market."

dislocate: Not surprising that the most ruminative of writers, Nicholson Baker, can't stand the Kindle.

JS: That makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it? One of those moments writers love in a way that publishers have never wrapped their heads around is when your book actually arrives. You can take it on the bus; it's a thing in your hands.

***
For the rest of the interview, pick up a copy of dislocate #6, The Contaminated Issue!

In this sense, the article is fairly uplifting: any one of us can find the inspiration to write our own timeless novel as long as we continually practice our craft, writing every day for as long as we can stand. However, Dufresne falls flat when he outlines "Nine Ways to Begin Writing." Every listed prompt, though helpful for generating content, seem more likely to producing formulaic stories than anything innovative or challenging. This isn't a problem just with this article, but a wider issue across literary fiction today. I'll go through the list and try to better explain the problems with the traditional prompt:

1) A Line--Dufresne suggests that the right line can pull us from the real world into an imagined one. Although this is possible, the idea puts a lot of value on a single line, particularly for a novel, which could benefit more from meandering/experimentation. Furthermore, the suggested lines in the article come from other established writers: will piggybacking off another's work help the new novelists create a unique voice or emulation?

2) A List--Admittedly, I'm fairly open to lists as a generative tool, though Dufresne uses it primarily as a means of character sketch (what character would make the list, why, etc). Although characters could certainly use lists as a way of furthering a story, I think characters will flesh themselves out without creating an arbitrary backstory from the get-go.

3) A Title--He suggests that titles can be symbolic or suggest a theme. In either case, starting with a deeper meaning in mind is writer's poison.

4) A Character--A character can be a good way to get into a story, but it can also take away from the story. There are too many novels where nothing happens but the interior struggle of a character, and this prompt seems to encourage this type of non-action.

5) A Situation--A good idea, but it's more of a non-prompt: I don't think you can go into a story without a situation in mind, so suggesting that "a situation" will help you begin writing is equivalent to saying that you need to put some words onto paper if you plan on writing.

6) An Event, 7) An Image, 8) A Subject--These are all equivalent to starting with a character or a situation: these subjects will develop naturally, and will be far more interesting if they aren't planned from the start.

9) An Oddity--Essentially, an oddity is defined as a weird event or image. Nothing new here.

Over at Virginia Quarterly, we're hearing about "The Death of Fiction," which outlines why literary fiction, particularly the literary journal, is no longer culturally relevant. Really, the problem is that most of the writing coming from these journals (ironically, the Virginia Quarterly is a major offender here) is becoming as formulaic as the dreaded "genre fiction" we find ourselves writing away from: how often do we read about the interior troubles of the university professor (or, alternatively, the professor/student affair)? The silent struggles of domestic life? As an editor for dislocate, going through the slush pile, I see a many new writers trying to emulate what the "big-name" writers are doing, which leaves us with a lot of uninteresting, uninspired knockoffs of already boring prose.

I think mainstream literary fiction is becoming so dull because we're writing in circles: we're writing about the same subject matter with the exact same approach. We need something new, something experimental. I'm thinking of projects like Danielewski's House of Leaves (a journal that uses typography/design to overlay at least three voices into the same narrative in interesting ways) or Joe Wenderoth's Letter's to Wendy's (a collection of letters written on Wendy's comment cards which manage to develop character and narrative in surprising ways). These projects manage to take a different approach to the traditional story and to breathe some life back into a genre buckling under the weight of tradition. Dufresne's list of prompts indirectly outlines a lot of these problems.

What we need is a better way of envisioning writing, particularly the ways in which we approach our subjects. For example, instead of using lists as a means of character outline, push the form to its limits. Here are a few examples (in list form!):

1. Write an entire story in the form of the list. Don't worry about transitions or order.


2. Regardless of the subject, never make a list with less than 100 points (if you make a list of 100 locations, the last 15 will push you in the most unexpected ways, giving you access to ideas you wouldn't normally encounter).


3. Dufresne suggests writing about an oddity, but I'd prefer to make lists sprung from oddity: write a list of good reasons to burn alive; write a list of broken homes.

In any case, writing prompts should have some purpose outside of generating writing: they should give you direction, should get you thinking about the written word in unexpected ways.

For the next few months, dislocate will be publishing a number of writing prompts that will ideally fulfill this purpose. Be sure to regularly check dislocate's columns, articles, and Twitter posts for experimental prompts.

Michael Dennis Browne was born in England, but his fascination with American poetry brought him to the United States as a Fulbright scholar. Browne attended the University of Iowa, earning an M.A. with Distinction in English in 1967. He has taught at the University of Minnesota since 1971 and is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English. In addition to his numerous books of poetry, Browne is author of a children's book, Give Her the River, and several librettos.

The warm weather won't last, and Browne won't be at the University of Minnesota much longer. Celebrate them both this Wednesday--7pm, 150 Lind Hall.

Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, two collections of essays and one collection of translations. On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature. King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008) won the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award and the Maine Literary Award. Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction. Stone Sky Lifting (poems, Ohio State University Press, 2000) won the OSU Press/The Journal Award. The Brighter the Veil (poems, Orchises Press, 1996) won the Towson University Prize in Literature. Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) was published in 1998.

Her recent essays "Glaciology" and "The Lustres" were awarded Pushcart prizes in 2007 and 2009, and other essays were named "Notable Essays" in Best American Essays, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Lia Purpura is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (translation, Warsaw, Poland), and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Her poems and essays appear in Agni Magazine, DoubleTake, Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other magazines.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA Program. Recent visiting appointments include The Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's MFA Program in Nonfiction; Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama's MFA Program; Reader/Lecturer at the Bennington Writing Program, and Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son, Joseph.

In her 1934 classic, Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande prescribes an exercise in discipline: every day for a week, immediately upon waking up, write nonstop for fifteen minutes. After that first week, schedule two more fifteen-minute slots throughout the day; at those exact times, you must stop whatever you're doing and write. She ends her prescription with this warning: "If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing." Your resistance, she says, is greater than your desire to write; you may as well find something else to do with yourself.

What a disheartening admonition to an aspiring writer! Of course, willpower is crucial when undertaking any difficult project, but Brande's declaration seems to me extreme and, frankly, unkind. Personally, I advocate the method of persuading the psyche to want something, rather than trying to strong-arm it into performing unpleasant tasks. I liken my style to cajoling a stubborn infant instead of resorting to spankings and time-outs. (No, I'm not a parent; as you might have guessed from my self-management strategy, I have my hands full just keeping myself in line.)

And you know what babies really like? Games! Easy, fun games in which everyone wins. And as luck would have it for us writers with a more hedonistic (read: lazy) disposition, National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner. Starting November 1, literary enthusiasts around the nation will flock to coffeeshops to convene with fellow NaNoWriMo participants, sharing inspiration, commiseration, and electrical outlets while striving to reach the 50,000-word minimum by the end of the month.

The NaNoWriMo website provides a full explanation of the project, which is now in its eleventh year. In short, the idea is to set up a low-stakes, high-intensity month-long writing exercise in order to push past that nasty inner critic that stops us from ever setting word one on the page. The result, in theory, is a "novel." The guidelines are refreshingly sparse: it must be at least 50,000 words, it can't be the same word repeated 50,000 times, it must be all new material, and if you call it a novel we'll believe you. And who doesn't want to be able to say they've written an entire novel--even if they would be mortified to show it to anyone?

In past years, my inertia has gotten the best of me, but this November is a different matter: my self-persuasion skills are stronger, and I'm enjoying a certain elusive optimism about life that I hope will last through the autumn. Still, I find I need to convince myself that taking on the NaNoWriMo challenge will be worthwhile and fun. I thought I'd share my personal persuasive strategy, in case anyone else out there needs some motivation to hop on this bandwagon.

1. In order to meet the 50,000-word minimum, you need to write 1,667 words every day. That means if you type 45wpm, it takes only 37 minutes to meet your daily quota. That's not even two whole sitcoms you're giving up each night. Totally doable!

2. If you can't bear to go without your primetime lineup, schedule your frantic burst of writing during the forgettable 7pm reruns or the ten o'clock news. Better yet, leave the TV playing in the background and call the stream of bad jokes and sensational stories "inspiration."

3. When you're feeling self-conscious about the fact that your prose seems to make no sense because you've been writing stream-of-consciousness with the TV blaring, take a break and treat yourself to some Donald Barthelme or Lydia Davis. You'll feel better immediately: you're being experimental.

4. If you choose to make a habit of writing in coffeeshops, reward your arrival at your 1667th word with a pastry. November's the month everyone starts putting on their "winter weight," anyway, right?

5. If you're still having trouble getting going, you can always resort to the time-honored writing aids of espresso, whiskey, cigarettes, pseudoephedrine, cough syrup, etc. etc. etc.

6. Don't feel obligated to read over what you've written. In fact, you can even promise yourself that, for the entire month, you will not review your work unless you're in such an awesome mood that you're sure to think it's brilliant.

7. If you slip on this last suggestion and discover in mid-November that every word you've put down is a horrible, melodramatic cliché, fear not. Just get out your trusty bottle of bourbon and repeat to yourself: "Things could be worse. At least I'm writing."

Are you sold yet? Sign up at NaNoWriMo.org.

While we laud writing's power to engage us with the larger world, to connect us across time and space and cultures, both as producers and also as audience, while we stress the necessity for our own writing of cultivating curiosity about the world beyond ourselves, we write--physically, literally--alone.

Sometimes this aloneness, especially for those writers who don't have the luxury of teaching in or attending M.F.A. programs, or working in publishing, or whose work is as of yet unpublished, can transform into a poisonous loneliness. We rely on our imaginations to ply our trade, but those imaginations--exhausted by craft--can fall short of providing us with a sense of community and kinship. In the echo chamber of our head, our work--not just the writing itself, but the work of writing--starts to ping back and forth, sending out a resonance that sounds eerily like why bother or who is this for, anyway? We lose faith.

So going to A.W.P. felt a little bit like going to worship. There was something of the prayer service in the vast gilded halls full of people nodding in unison as Stuart Dybek articulated his theory of urban animism, or as Antonya Nelson talked about the power of omniscience. The Hilton, a stately old-time affair on Michigan Avenue is the Hilton--the first hotel in the family's empire. I found myself feeling that its crystal chandeliers, plush muffling carpets, elaborate murals, sweeping staircases and grand foyers served as a sort of tangible imprimatur of the worthiness of our enterprise--as if the lovely, and yes, old-fashioned, setting not so much elevated the conference or what it stood for, but provided a reflection of it that we so often are unable to see.

Manning the dislocate booth on the conference's last day and speaking to a steady stream of awesome, delightfully weird, surprisingly disparate, but all identifiable Writers (or at least People Who Care About Writing) in my capacity as Fiction Editor, I was reminded of the Rosh Hashannas and Yom Kippurs of my youth--the High Holidays were the only time my family attended synagogue. On those afternoons, sitting in a far row in the back of the chapel, I was amazed to be part of something so much bigger than myself. Instead of paying attention to the rabbi or the service, I would try to count how many people were in the room. Afterward, we mingled in the halls of the synagogue, families exchanging news and Mazel Tovs and the pleasure of being together. That was my sense of religion as a child, my sense of faith--the pleasure and possibility of community.

So yes, the A.W.P. conference is a good place to professionalize, to schmooze, to pad out the old curriculum vitae. More than that, though, it's a chance to be reminded that we don't work alone, that in the end, we do a share a set of values and beliefs in that thing that can feel so fleeting, so ephemeral, so isolating--the making of art. Whether it happened when I was stuffing my face with tacos (the likes of which I haven't had since leaving California) in a hotel room itself stuffed to capacity with raucous writers exchanging dirty jokes, or while watching Paul Muldoon and his ASL translator entwined in mutual fascination and a sort of doubled poetry, or during my mission proselytizing on behalf of our bad ass mag, dislocate, A.W.P. made a believer out of me.

Take a man like Balzac. Fueled by innumerable cups of coffee, he wrote novel after novel, often working fifteen hour days. In his essay, "the pleasures and pains of coffee" Balzac noted that the warm drink "gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects" and further, that under coffee's influence "ideas quick march into motion like battallions of a grand army." The father of realism was not the only one to depend on caffeine as a part of his writing routine.

Jean Paul Sartre was said to ingest all sorts of amphetamines during his writing days, but always needed a cup of coffee first. But who else? There is a novel, "Coffee With Poe", based on the historical fact of the great poet's love of the drink. And who can forget the Beatniks, Kerouc, Ginsberg and company, perhaps the literary movement most associated with coffee and responsible for the rise and atmosphere of a good many coffeehouses. Remember, the next time you take that sip of coffee before you sit down to write, you are slurping on the shoulders of giants.