On Vauville

Chiara BIO PIC

I am a screen and fiction writer born in Rome and raised as a teenager in Los Angeles, where I became obsessed with canyons, quartz, and the Grateful Dead. When I moved to New York in my early twenties, I steered my fascinations towards the discovery that a huge slab of granite beneath the city of Manhattan is the reason why nobody there is able to walk or think slowly. And it was there, in New York that I turned back to look at Europe for the first time as a writer. Vauville takes place in a French summer home off the Atlantic Coast. The protagonist is a teenager who travels to Europe from the United States to discover a hidden piece of herself and her own family. It’s an important story for me because it was the first story that I wrote as an expat, reflecting back on the separation between these two continents that have formed my life.

The absence of a mineral subterranean life and psychedelia in the city of Rome made my return to this homeland a bit harsh, but opened me up to new interests including: abandoned castles and the nightlife of cattle. I lived in a remodeled barn inside the Castle of Torre in Pietra and worked on a variety of romantic comedies. The films needed to have linear plots and rigid narrative structures in order to make money. I entered a world of teenagers, pink hearts, chocolate, and teddy bears. It was great for a while, but I started missing the freedom of non-linear story-telling soon.

This longing evolved into my short story collection, Sister Stop Breathing, the furthest thing you can find from a conventional Hollywood-style romantic comedy. In its pages you will encounter creepy priests, incest, and murderous mothers. When asked if these scenarios are in some way a reaction to the narrative constraints of mainstream cinema, I say: absolutely yes! I am glad to have a smaller audience to celebrate my characters with. I was happy to receive positive feedback from Jonathan Ames, Gary Shteyngart, and the lovely Mary Caponegro whose experimental prose has inspired me since I was a teenager.

I am now working on my first linear/narrative book, a novel to be published by Fabbri Editori/Rizzoli in Italy. My protagonists are a bunch of cross-cultural teenagers living in the suburbs of Los Angeles and causing damage. My literary heroes are, of course, all those writers who have given me the courage to begin stories where they usually end: Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, and the original homeland inspirator, Italo Calvino, to name but a few.

Vauville first appeared in the Noon 2011 issue and it is the final, most narrative story in my collection Sister Stop Breathing. I submitted it to the Gertrude Stein contest because it’s one of the stories I’ve loved the most. It has followed me in different shapes and versions throughout all the important places of my heart. It seems to have a life of its own.

I was five months pregnant when I let Sister Stop Breathing into the world. Four months later I realized I had to take structure and form to a whole new level. Having a child is definitely not a romantic comedy nor does it grant one the luxuries of non-linearity. Babies want rigid schedules and undivided attention. But even this has had a good effect on my writing. Not a minute of my day goes to waste now, and I’ve become a more disciplined and focused writer, and possibly a better one because of this.

 

 


Chiara Barzini is an Italian screen and fiction writer. She has lived and studied in the United States where she worked as a correspondent for Italian Vanity Fair, GQ, Flair, Rolling Stone Italy, and Marie Claire. Her writing has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Coffin Factory, Noon, The NY Tyrant, The Milan Review, as well as the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s Magazine. She is the author of the short story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press.) To watch Chiara reading Vauville at the Noon 2011 launch at the Center for Fiction in NYC, please click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9v7ZYNC0Z4. She currently lives in Rome and is working on her first novel for Fabbri /Rizzoli.


 

 

Searching for the Solid

solid

I had always wanted to write a piece that was numbered — a short fiction piece or prose poem. I had read a number of them from many masters — Charles Simic or Tomas Transtromer — and even a handful of my contemporaries: Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Harryette Mullen. I was already experimenting with pushing the boundaries of reality and abstraction. What could I “get away” with? How far can I go?

The day I wrote the first draft of Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu was a Saturday – clear fall skies, a crispness in the air. I decided to go to one of the local chain coffee shops, Alterra (now Collectivo), but to a location I was less familiar with, more suburban than the edgier favorite of mine. I ordered my coffee (black) and found a vacant sofa. I had planned on free writes, dropping into whatever comes out of my pen. There was a young man seated close to me, and he was reading a manual of sorts. The book had graphic images. At first I thought it was a college textbook, but instead, it turned out to be a book about Jujitsu. And the name popped into my head, I wrote it down, and started the first draft. Somehow the title of that sport, exotic to me, combined with notes one might leave a former lover gave me the impetus for this idea. I didn’t stop until I had the bare bones of ten notes drafted, and then I decided in later edits to make it less about “notes TO the guy” and more just about the relationship between the narrator and his ex. For me, this is important during free writes, not to tinker much with it while I write it. Just let it come out exactly as it does in the first draft. Next, I read a draft in my writing roundtable and got encouraging feedback, and worked on it several more times. I also read it at the KGB reading in New York City, hosted by 52/250 in December, 2012, and felt like it went over well.

Here are some aspects that are less fiction and a little closer to me than others:

  1. I do have an ex-boyfriend who used to whistle “If I Only Had a Brain.”
  2. I also hooked up with a guy (different one) in his truck parked in the Haight. It didn’t really go down, so to speak, as described.
  3. When I was much younger, I cleaned up a lot of dog shit.
  4. Two of my sisters talk every Sunday, so I just pretended I was one of them.
  5. The last time I drank a six-pack in less than an hour, I was sixteen.
  6. The elevator fart scene was completely invented, was one of those “have you ever thought what this might be like?” conversations we’d have when I lived in NYC.

For the fictional content, I drew on many various modern references (Huxley’s Brave New World, Yoko Ono, Samsonite, or Sony.) I also relied on many relationship stories I’d heard throughout the years, tweaking them so they would fit the construction of the piece. I wanted to combine the sadder pathos with shards of humor. I like black comedies, and there is an element of comedy-tragedy that I tried to balance in the piece. The last stanza (number 10) was the one I re-wrote the most — I’m still not completely solid about it. The pathos seems to be present, but the ambiguity is a risk. As readers, we are used to endings that are more neat, or solve the problems that have been presented. Themes that cycle through my work are also at play here: disappearances, missing those who are no longer in our lives, and the echoes of our own eventual demise.

When I got the news about the finalist placement in the 2013 Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction, I was over the moon thrilled. I had entered the contest because I saw the head judge was Rick Moody and I’m a huge fan. Plus, one of the first imitative pieces I wrote in college was called “Ruth” and was in the style of Gertrude Stein. I revere her writing. What I remember most about “Ruth” was the style of experimentation, repetition, irreverence and energy of the piece. So much, in fact, that when I read a poem every day for National Poetry Month in April, I read Stein’s “Cezanne,” which has similar qualities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBivfsgOAk&feature=c4-overview&list=LL1Rvu_dH8w3eGL8ARupspdQ

And then, writer Dennis Cooper, another mentor of mine, gave my first chapbook, Microtones, two thumbs up, and he also re-posted the “Cezanne” video at his DC’s blog: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com.es/2013/07/3-books-i-read-recently-and-loved-darby.html?zx=6773f19341be394f.

And so, Rick Moody, Gertrude Stein, and Dennis Cooper = a cocktail of bliss!

 

 


Robert Vaughan leads writing roundtables at Redbird- Redoak Writing. His writing has appeared in numerous print and online journals. His short prose, “10,000 Dollar Pyramid” was a finalist in the Micro-Fiction Awards 2012. Also, “Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013. He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW, and Lost in Thought magazines. His poetry chapbook, Microtones, is from Cervena Barva Press. He has a chapbook forthcoming from Deadly Chaps this summer, and his first full- length collection, Addicts and Basements from Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, 2014.


 

 

How I Wrote “8 Tautologies”

The exhibition planMy series 8 Tautologies is the first piece of writing I produced as an amateur. At least, it was with this series that I consciously wrote like one. By amateur, I mean a writer who has given up the fantasy of professionalism—that is, making a living by the pen. It is true that I never really thought I would make a living as a writer, but it was not until I wrote 8 Tautologies that I began to compose as someone who had done away with ideas commonly associated with professional authorship. No longer would I feel the need to create a literary product that publishers believed thousands of people would pay money to consume.

Not long ago in the United States, writers had a justifiable position in wanting to become professionals. A professional writer — someone paid to produce a certain kind of literary work for a large audience (with regularity) — could expect not only that the work would sell, but also that the work would be read. But if your books did not find their way into publication, there was little chance that those books would be read. Therefore, a writer could defend the choice to become a professional simply by citing a desire to be read.

Many American notions of the professional writer date to the mid-20th Century, that short time when there was a large middlebrow readership that supported numerous careers for “serious” writers. This, of course, is no longer the case, and has rarely been the case. Outside of this anomalous golden age, relatively few Anglophone writers have ever made a direct living from literary production, and today, in most other languages, no writers do so, unless they enjoy private or state patronage.

But these days, in the so-called digital age, with its proliferation of reputable platforms for writers, visibility need not hinge on the market. Today you can reach readers — sometimes many — without having to think about money or the salability of your work. Instead, you can simply write what you please. When you are not doing that you can do something more lucrative to support yourself — something, needless to say, not too harmful to yourself or the world. Though there are few jobs that meet these criteria, they tend to pay better and more reliably than writing contests.

It is with this new understanding of myself — an amateur — that I set out to write “8 Tautologies.” It was a thrilling moment, being perfectly autonomous (so I felt): now I was free to write what I desired. So I cast aside bulky and lofty forms in favor of these inconsequential tales. After all, there had been precedents. Thomas Bernhard has shown that short-form prose could be serialized to great effect. In the same way, Eliot Weinberger has shown how explosive and interesting dissimilar paragraphs can be when arranged in stacks—he has done this so well in his avowedly non-art essays.

And yet I knew I was a complete disgrace and disreputable: I would arouse nothing but disgust at a posh dinner party of well-heeled guests. How to explain to a group of notable people, well into their careers, that I aimed to be nothing except an amateur ‘graphomaniac,’ rather than an esteemed author? Or: How to explain to such a crowd that good writing and financial success were not in the least compatible?

I decided it didn’t matter!

Because it felt so liberating to be autonomous, free from the worry of writing a book that everyone would talk about!

So I threw out my writing desk and took to the streets.

No longer would I force myself to write five hours a day, regardless of whether I had anything that had to be said!

No longer would I fashion literary commodities for a mass readership!

No longer would my writing be used in this way.

I ran around my city looking for air to breathe and people to follow and to observe!

I imagined that I was an explorer in an alien jungle.

I watched how bored everyone was and how lonely and desperate and un-stimulated.

I even watched people at museums pretending to observe art — most uncomfortably.

I started to see more clearly!

I finally realized that everyone at the MoMA hated art, and that woman who kept vomiting in front of the Rothko was actually not part of the work but a regular visitor who couldn’t take it anymore — all that supposed spirituality in a place with an expensive cafeteria and gift shop!

I wrote only about what I smelled and saw, yet I was not even aware that I was doing so.

Imagine! This amateur in the street scribbling in his notepad as he watches you toil in this late capitalist hyper-saturated desert of emotional alienation! Try to imagine the thrill of being simultaneously watched and refracted through an excited, young, and totally unambitious mind! No less, the mind of a writer with few credits to his name!

But in the end I wrote this series, and not only is it visible, I was asked how I did it.

 


Michael G. Donkin lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York and attends CUNY Hunter. His fiction recently appeared in Chicago Review.