THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is about writing, publishing and what makes writers tick. This blog is dedicated to the self loathing that afflicts most writers. A community of like-minded malcontents gather here. I post less frequently now, but hopefully with as much vitriol. Please join in! Gluttons for punishment can scroll through the archives.
If I’ve learned one thing about writers, it’s this: we really are all alone. Thanks for reading. Love, Betsy
It’s official. I’m a simile slut. I don’t know when to stop. If I can compare something to anything else, I will. Given the chance to use “like” or “as” I’m all over that shit. Look, I spent 40K on a poetry MFA, what the hell else am I gonna do. My editor (yes, ahem, working on ye olde first novel, lol) has pointed it out, exasperation all over the margin notes. An early reader also commented on the PLETHORA ( a word I hate that reminds me of lady parts) of similes: “If the simile is not precise, it fails to do the job it was meant to do and draws attention to the artifice that’s taking place.” Busted. So true. The simile must thread the needle, you know, the one in the haystack. I’m off my fucking rocker with this revision. Please stop me before I kill again.
Back when I was a mushroom getting my MFA, there was a woman in my workshop who dazzled. She wasn’t taller than everyone, she only seemed that way. I have had the great privilege of working with Jean Zimmerman as her editor first, now as her agent, and always her friend. Her dazzling historical novel, SAVAGE GIRL, has just been published by Viking to great early acclaim.
CONTEST: Who is your favorite bad guy (in literature) and why? I’ll ask Jean to judge the answers and top three answers will win a copy of Savage Girl.
Sooner or later, a historical crime novel is bound to drag you down some dark alley and into the nastiest, most lawless precincts of the period. Jean Zimmerman followed this tradition in her first novel, “The Orphanmaster,” a descent into the hellish criminal haunts of 17th-century New Amsterdam. In SAVAGE GIRL (Viking, $27.95), this canny author puts all that aside and turns to the Gilded Age for a sweeping narrative, set within the cloistered ranks of high society in 19th-century Manhattan, that raises touchy questions about what it means to be civilized.
Even in this exclusive world, the Delegate family is more privileged than most. The paterfamilias, Friedrich-August-Heinrich (also known as Freddy), has taken his family and a retinue of servants on his private, sumptuously appointed 12-car railroad train to Virginia City, Nev., to visit the silver mine that’s boosting his already considerable fortune. But when the Delegates depart from this brawling Wild West boom town, they have an additional passenger, a beautiful, feral young woman from a land that’s “savage, wild, forsaken by God and man” — who’s said to have been raised by wolves. Found at a sideshow, she’ll be the ideal experimental subject, Freddy thinks, for the nature-or-nurture debate roiling his intellectual set.
Photo
Credit Christoph Niemann
Using Freddy’s intelligent but decidedly peculiar son Hugo as narrator adds another layer of suspense to the story. A student of anatomy at Harvard, this young man has an unhealthy fondness for knives and a vivid imagination when it comes to Bronwyn, as the “Savij Girl” comes to be known. But who’s to say where imagination leaves off and obsession takes over, once the family is back in its Fifth Avenue mansion and the “Pygmalion”-like process of civilizing Bronwyn (who keeps her own set of razor-like steel claws and creeps out of the house to visit the wild animals at the zoo) begins in earnest.
The wondrous sights Zimmerman rolls out for us — a picnic on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, a stopover at the “fabulous, glorious” Palmer House hotel in Chicago and visits to mansions up and down the East Coast — are all the more piquant when Bronwyn’s admirers begin turning up, cut to ribbons, at almost every whistle stop. If this is civilization, bring on the wolves.
‘My Fair Lady’ Meets ‘Psycho’: PW Talks with Jean Zimmerman
A feral child unsettles Gilded Age New York City in Jean Zimmerman’s Savage Girl.
How did the book come to be?
I’d always wanted to write about a wolf girl—that is, one afflicted with the genetic condition known as hypertrichosis, which causes a person to resemble an animal, with fur growing all over his or her body. Many children with the condition were exhibited in American sideshows in an earlier period. Related in my mind was the phenomenon of so-called feral children, a girl or a boy purported to be raised by wolves (or by bears, or big cats, or goats, or, in one reported case, by rats). I ultimately crashed these two ideas together in Savage Girl.
What did the murder plot add?
A random killing here and there really focuses a narrative. We don’t know who is committing the murders in Savage Girl, but indications point to Bronwyn—and with good reason. The historical record shows that feral children were prone to violent outbursts.
You often write about the status of women. Was there something in particular about the women of the Gilded Age that intrigued you?
I found the debutante to be a fascinating creature and the coming out process one that was as constricting as it was lovely. Here were the grand dames of society, banding together when a girl reached the age of 18 or so, helping to usher her into a new social status. There was some power in the process for women. The learning curve was steep. There were new gowns and dance lessons, teas, ritualized social visits, and grand balls. The fashions were extraordinary. Yet debuting was filled with the strictest rules and obligations, and if you failed, there was the threat of punishment—remaining a spinster. I wanted to search beneath the opaque surface of the debuting process to find deeper meanings. That meant talking about both corsets and bloomers.
“Zimmerman’s dark comedy of manners is an obvious homage to Edith Wharton, a rip-roaring murder mystery more Robert Louis Stevenson than Conan Doyle and a wonderfully detailed portrait of the political, economic and philosophical issues driving post–Civil War America.” –KIRKUS
My third favorite magazine arrived today, Poets & Writers. When I was writing poetry, I lived for the Classified section where all the contests were listed. The new issue has the 2011 MFA ranking. Guess who’s still coming to dinner at number #1? I-O-WA. How do they do it? Year after year? And this is in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. It’s the grand slam of wordsmithing. And what of my alma, Columbia? Twenty-fucking-five. Oh, how the mighty fall. And the poetry is ranked #47. Mother of god.
#2 – University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
#3- University of Texas at Austin
#10- Cornell at Ithaca
#50 University of Nevada in Las Vegas
Do these rankings matter? Do they help you on the job market? Getting published? I think the best thing you can hope to accomplish is to a) not go broke b) find a bff/first reader c) find a mentor who doesn’t eventually turn on you. What I discovered when I got my MFA was that I was a better editor than writer; at least that’s what I surmised. I also learned a kind of snobbery in taste. I made a great friend. And I studied with some greats like Denis Johnson and Richard Howard and Bill Matthews.
It’s an old question, but I’d love to hear if you feel your MFA program was worth it and what # ranking would you give it? If you don’t have an MFA, what are your thoughts about going to school to write
In Miami over the weekend, I got together with Campbell McGrath. Campbell and I were in the same MFA program. The only difference is that when we attended, I was an amoeba and Campbell was a complex organism, at least where language was concerned. The guy was writing circles over everyone’s heads whether we wanted to admit it or not. Shortly after he graduated, his first book, Capitalism, was published. Over the years, he has produced eight volumes, a series of arresting and beautiful books.
I felt tremendous nostalgia visiting with him, Liz and their two awesome sons. Had it really been twenty five years ago since he casually sauntered around Dodge Hall, ripped bandanas tied around his wrist. Since we first witnessed the poems that would comprise his first book. Twenty five years since I took writing more seriously than anything else in the whole world. Twenty five years since I had no idea how things would turn out. For Campbell, there was clearly only one way. For me, well let’s just say my portfolio was more diversified.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m not in awe of that kind of resolve, intensity, passion, calling, instinct, single-mindedness, thrall, vision, what have you. People, when they find out I have an MFA in poetry, often ask why I stopped writing. The answer: because I did. I didn’t plan to, I didn’t expect to. If you told me then that I would have quit, I would have begged to differ. But I did. I stopped working at them, or I worked at it but didn’t get better or find satisfaction. And eventually I gave up. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
In this week’s Sunday NYT magazine (not a particularly obscure reference, I realize), I was taken by something the poet Frederick Seidel said when asked to what he attributed the seventeen year silence between his first and second book. “Cowardice,” he said.
When asked what he was afraid of, “The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” I take this to mean fear of looking bad. I guess that would be a fear when you write lines like, “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” LOL. As if a naked man his age with a crepe nutsack and tits is a picnic. But that’s not my point.
What first attracted me to poetry was not what it revealed, so much as what it concealed. I couldn’t understand half the poems I read, but I read them over and over. They held secrets, sometimes answers. I knew when something sounded true, even if I couldn’t articulate why. And I think I wrote poetry when I was young because I could hide there, in images and ellipses.
This all came to a grinding halt when a professor asked if I were intentionally trying to obfuscate meaning in my poems. Intentionally, well no. I then wrote some frank poems with titles like “Calories and Other Counts” and “Venus Envy.” And then, shortly after getting my MFA, I quit writing poems. Cowardice?
People sometimes ask me if I still write poems. No, no, no I quickly reply, as if I gave up sleeping with farm animals long ago. Nah, not me, haven’t touched a sheep in ages.
I would love to know what people think keeps them from writing (besides e-mail).
Two young people (did I actually say “young people”?) asked my opinion recently about whether or not to get an MFA. This is a tough one. It really depends on two things: where you are in your writing life and if you can afford it. You do have to ask yourself the tough questions: would I rather have an MFA from Columbia or a Jaguar XF?
There are great programs out there, and taking two years to devote to writing and reading can be a formative time. Unless you are a stone cold idiot, you will come out a better writer than when you went in. Or, like me, find out that you’re a good editor, or teacher. Really fun is the community of writers with their orgiastic jealousies. Be prepared, know yourself, try not to cave to the style of the day.
Then there’s the faculty. I would definitely check that out before you write a check. I had the great good fortune of studying with Richard Howard, Denis Johnson (fuck me dead) Bill Matthews, Pamela White Hadas (my brilliant mentor), with Dan Halpern, Tom Lux, and for visiting writers we had Margaret Atwood, Harold Brodkey, Coleslaw Milosz (as we fondley referred to him), and others. That was all worth it. That was fantastic. As was finding my bff and best reader, the poet Jean Monhan.
Whoa, sorry for that little side trip down memory lane. I think getting an MFA can be very valuable, but you want to be in the right place for you and you don’t want to go bankrupt. Being a writer will take care of that soon enough. If you go, focus on your craft, read your eyes out, listen most to your critics, and try not to have a crack-up.
Would love to hear what other MFA survivors have to say, as well as those who avoided it altogether.
My third favorite magazine arrived today, 
Betsy Lerner 