Rewiring Your Notebook with Sentences That Contain Worlds
First, an email from McSweeney’s this morning indicates they’re in a funding crisis. I have been reading the magazine for 25 years. Man, the years are adding up.
I love that McSweeney’s makes weird choices (the newest issue comes in a cigar box and is loosely based on a Vietnamese menu) but mostly they publish excellent fiction. My favorite book of 2024 was this best-of issue that arrived in a lunchbox. (People love when they do boxes. Their first box got me hooked.)
They also do good works: creating a national network of writing centers for youth, building schools in Susan, and on and on. Consider buying a book, subscribing, or making a $10,000 donation.
And it just so happens the author who inspired today’s newsletter was published in McSweeney’s 62. -Adam
Notebook Ideas from a K-Ming Chang Interview
I was listening to Maris Kreizman interview K-Ming Chang earlier this week—barely doing the dishes—when I found myself scribbling down some of Chang’s thoughts on writing. They’re meant for fiction, but I think we could find ways to apply them to keeping a notebook. Way back in 2017, the idea behind this newsletter was to prompt new ideas and experiments for what we write down.
K-Ming Chang writes surreal short stories.
There are writers who make me think: maybe, with time and effort, I could write a story like this.
There are writers I love who make me immediately recognize that I could never do what they do. I can’t write a David Means story without developing an obsession with fauna, for example, learning the names of every type of grass, and tending that knowledge for decades.
Then there are writers like K-Ming Chang. I love the stories while being baffled by how she’s done it— and sometimes by what is even happening. (The last one I read may or may not have been narrated by a crab-woman.) So I went searching for an interview, hoping for insights into her process.
These ideas, paraphrased from my notes, are so far from where my head is when I write. I’m grateful they shared the conversation so I can reframe how I approach my notebook, every now and then:
Every sentence almost contains its own world and every sentence is pushed to its furthest point.
I was thinking about the sound and the language and all the sonic qualities of the sentences — and having a sensory relationship to language.
Interested in language first and then ideas
Thinking less about progressing through a narrative and thinking more about it as a landscape. What can we expand? What can we see in this horizon of language?
On her characters: What is their lineage? What is the oyster they were pulled from?
Maybe the next time we open our notebooks we should:
Write a single sentence that feels like a whole because it’s dense or vivid or self-contained.
Begin with a single word and build upon it.
Follow up on an observation by asking: Where did this come from? What does it remember? What’s the oyster this moment was pulled from?
May Story Log
I’ve been listing and sharing the short stories I read each month.
“Sourlands” by Michael Ferreter
“Come On, Ye Saints of Arts” by Gracey Paley
“Living” by Grace Paley
“The Dwarf Pine” by Varlam Shalamov
The Lockwood and the Shalamov stories feel most in line with some of the ideas above about writing in our notebooks differently. The Starnone is about Hemingway, in a way, but the Erdrich felt most like Hemingway to me.