Recently, from the comfort of my writing studio, I had the opportunity to read from my new book Q&A for a community of my peers during the alumni reunion of the Pan European MFA Program. One advantage of the virtual format for such a reading is the ease of incorporating visuals (including video!). It was a pleasure to trot this new novel out and to feel it getting a bit of wind in its mane after long days in the barn. Here's video evidence of the fact that I, for one, enjoyed the experience:
Enthralled by the screen, we came to question the necessity of privacy. We learned to let go of old values, and to require speed, convenience, portability, connectivity. We learned to desire our stats and the stats of others. We learned to accept the special way the screen reduced to equivalencies all things seen within its frame: NASCAR, cop shows, TV journalism, late night comedians, cat GIFS, and the office of the presidency. Gone was the idea of everything in its proper place.
More screen, less “meatspace” and IRL. More optimization, less serendipity. More jump-cuts, less syntax. More data, data, data. More info, info, info.
We embraced the self-promoting capacities and tools the screen promised us. We learned to expect an audience. We honed the skill of performing our lives in lieu of merely living them.
The screen created the “sharing economy,” the “attention economy,” the “gig economy,” and a special iteration of the “creative class” — a brave new world in which it seemed that everybody’s individual passion had, at long last, converged with their livelihood, while in fact hardly anybody was making a living anymore.
The screen provided us 2,000 songs in the palm of the hand but dealt a fatal blow to the solvency of musicians. The screen provided the texts of 3,500 books at a weight of 9.5 ounces but contributed to the dissolution of publishers and booksellers and weakened the infrastructure that supported and sustained authors. The screen empowered and accelerated the mobilization of righteous movements: the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and the Million Women March and Black Lives Matter, but it exposed us as never before to the rapacity of advertisers, to the invasive scrutiny of our own government agencies under the PATRIOT Act, to a massive blurring of private and professional life, to the political meddling of extra-national bots, to the daily specter of harassment by anonymous trolls, and to amplified terrorist threats both international and domestic.
Our fixation on the screen forged new neural networks and sharpened into biochemical habit our reluctance toward the printed page, our acceptance of incoherent audio-visual stimuli, and our need to fictionalize our lives not only for others but publicly for ourselves.
The screen led us away from the book toward the illumined mirage, away from ideas toward memes.
The screen gave us new meanings: desktop, window, home, field, friend.
It redefined everything.
Now, here in the madding wake of the 45th American presidency, let us remember that once upon a time we impeached the screen. TV itself was made to stand trial before the U.S. Congress. The memories are hazy, the details obscured as if behind a veil of snowy static, but this happened.
America, a land of electronic images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising, seemed to be teetering on the cusp of an awful new reality. False impressions were the stock in trade, big onscreen metrics mattered most, and in the midst of this a white man played a version of himself on primetime. He was a celebrity and a winner, and he ruled the ratings.
The object of this man’s game was to claim knowledge he didn’t possess, and to provide an image viewers would anxiously fixate upon and maybe even idolize.
He was a man more closely watched than any person of any time before him. He became TV and TV became him.
M. Allen Cunningham's new book Q&A is out now from Regal House Publishing. A virtual event with Cunningham, fellow author Steven Mayfield (Treasure of the Blue Whale), and Regal House editor Pam Van Dyk helped to mark the book's launch.
Matters discussed included: building fiction inspired by real events; novels as pleasure; televisual media and its long-term impact on culture; truth versus entertainment; where characters come from; the novel as yarn or tall-tale; outlines and endings; crafting voice in fiction; typewriters (!).
Kenyon Saint Claire is the son of a distinguished literary family, a keeper and teacher of the written word, but his America is a land of electronic images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising. False impressions are the stock in trade, and big metrics matter, especially onscreeen. That’s where Kenyon finds himself, isolated behind glass, portraying a televised version of himself on a scripted game show, avoiding the devouring eye of the camera that feeds his image to fifteen million viewers. The year is 1956.
Inspired by true events, groundbreaking in its evocation of an agitated, media-soaked half century, M. Allen Cunningham’s Q&A urgently reimagines the misunderstood 1950s quiz show scandals in light of our own time, as a moment of cultural reckoning whose reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception.
Praise for M. Allen Cunningham
“A fully formed, timeless American writer.”
—Square Books, Oxford MS
“One of the bravest and most talented novelists writing today.”
—Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child, Pulitzer Prize Finalist
“A master storyteller.”
—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
“Cunningham’s prose is perfect—he writes dialogue and sentences that beg to be read aloud.”
In this whimsical, often funny, Depression-era tale, young Connor O’Halloran decides to share a treasure he’s discovered on an isolated stretch of Northern California beach. Almost overnight, his sleepy seaside village is comically transformed into a bastion of consumerism, home to a commode with a jeweled seat cover, a pair of genuinely fake rare documents, a mail-order bride, and an organ-grinder’s monkey named Mr. Sprinkles. But when it turns out that the treasure is not real, Connor must conspire with Miss Lizzie Fryberg and a handful of town leaders he’s dubbed The Ambergrisians to save their friends and neighbors from financial ruin. Along the way, he discovers other treasures in the sometimes languid, sometimes exciting days of that long-ago season. He is rich and then he isn’t. He learns to sail a boat and about sex. He meets a real actor. He sneaks into villainous Cyrus Dinkle’s house and steals his letter opener. He almost goes to jail. He loves Fiona Littleleaf. He finds a father. And best of all, he and little brother, Alex, reclaim their mother from the darkness of mental illness.
Praise for Treasure of the Blue Whale
Steven Mayfield crafts this well-conceived plot into a coming-of-age fable that is full of mystery, heroism, familial love, and humanity. It’s a genuine, imaginative, and endearing meditation on how a few good people working together can accomplish so much in a weary world.
“Readers looking for a slightly stylized yarn of small-town drama will find much to enjoy in this charming book. A whale of a tale concerning a boy who tries to lift everyone’s spirits”
Revisit some prophetic words from the great Edward R Murrow, which are featured in M. Allen Cunningham's Q&A, arriving in paperback and ebook in January 2021.
(For best viewing results, enlarge the video to full-screen.)
During this event at the fabled Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham discusses his fourth novel PERPETUA'S KIN. A sweeping story of five generations in one American family, PERPETUA'S KIN spans much of North America, from the 1820s in Iowa to the American south during the Civil War to World War II San Francisco. In a structured presentation, Cunningham describes the story's origins, his research, the themes and characters, the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and why this novel was 11 years in the making. He also reads short selections from the book. The event includes an audience Q&A. It was recorded on a rainy night in November 2018.
WHAT WOULD LEONARD COHEN DO? If you’re a hardworking creative soul striving to continue doing the work of the expressive imagination, striving to honor an authentic vision that resists the forces of market optimization, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Leonard Cohen’s corpus and give that question your consideration.
Mentioned in this episode: Leonard Cohen; Cohen's "Hallelujah"; Songs of Leonard Cohen; Cohen's 1963 debut novel The Favorite Game; CBC Television; Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers; Cohen's performance style; Bob Dylan; Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat"; Zen; Mount Baldy; Leonard Cohen world tour; skipping at age 78; Cohen's album You Want It Darker; Cohen's album Thanks for the Dance; Feist; Beck; Damien Rice.
In this video excerpt from a talk I recently gave to a class of brilliant young writers, I describe the interdisciplinary relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (a relationship depicted in Lost Son, my novel about Rilke).
What can creative writers learn from what Rilke learned from Rodin?
The talk includes my own translation of Rilke's great poem "The Panther" (also found below).
The Panther
Rainer Maria Rilke
(transl. M. Allen Cunningham)
His gaze, from the passing bars,
has grown so weary that it can hold nothing more.
To him there are a thousand bars
and beyond the thousand bars no world at all.
The soft drop of his dread sleek steps,
conscribed to a tight circle,
is like a dance of stamina around a center
in which a greater will stands stunned.
Yet sometimes the curtain of the pupil stirs,
opens itself soundlessly -- then an image gets inside,
Cunningham's autobiographical essay, with musical accompaniment and slightly abridged.
"Variations on a Beginning" was originally published in complete form in The Timberline Review, Issue No. 3 (summer/fall 2016). You can read the full essay HERE.
For Henry David Thoreau's 203rd birthday, 12 July 2020: some choice excerpts from Canby's brilliant 1939 biography -- reminders about the growth and plight of genius.
"Overflowing with thoughts, he yet looked around for more, because he was living so intensely that his own thoughts choked his utterance. This description will do for any young writer. Thoreau's advantage lay in his resolve to find out what he was living before he made a book about it--to be, as he said to Emerson, first the idea itself.
[...]
"When a deep excitement of the mind finds a favorable environment, as it did in this Concord which was, indeed, a power plant of idealistic energy stepping up the spiritual voltage of the nineteenth century, an authentic moment in the history of civilization often follows.
[...]
"The two conditioning factors for writing anywhere, any time, are the quality of the imagination and the nature of the market. Later comes the fork of the road -- one way toward the competent and salable, the other toward the excellent and possibly unsalable. The completely successful [person] of letters is not [they] who writes for nothing, but rather the writer who learns how to do what [they] want -- and how to make readers pay for it. The predestined commercial writer is seldom a frustrated [person] of letters. [Their] success in cash returns is due to a different set of qualities. Every author writes for money, for money represents an audience, and no creative mind writes for itself alone. The question is, how high a price will [they] pay for the money [they] get. That became Thoreau's problem; but at first his concern was with what he had to say, and to whom and how he could say it. When this was solved, the question of how he was to get paid enough to allow him to go on writing followed, and in solving that in his own original fashion he broke out of obscurity into fame.
[...]
"The great world had no need of him, and he in his turn found that, for him, the greater world was Concord. And so, having been an author without pay, and having learned how to place an occasional manuscript with insufficient pay, he came home [from a brief residence away at Staten Island] to take up from a new angle his problem of how to live and how to stay alive while living. He had learned that in order to do what he wanted in writing he would have to publish himself. And this inevitably led him to Walden Pond.
[...]
"The failure of [Thoreau's first book] 'The Week' when it was first published, must be charged to the failure of the audience to whom he finally addressed it, much as, I think far more than, to its own defects in composition.
[...]
"These ecstasies in prose, those hours of observation, this hard labor with the pen and hard study of science and travel, now, rather than Latin, Greek, and the Hindu classics, this daily filling up of reservoirs, and nightly refining of waters, all this was Thoreau's real business of living while he was by trade the surveyor of Concord. Surveyor indeed, but not only of lot lines and corners!
[...]
"Thoreau lectures in Boston [1852] on his life at Walden, but to a handful only of people; the clerks at the other end of the reading-room would not put down their newspapers to listen, even when urged by [Bronson] Alcott."
From Thoreau by Henry Seidel Canby, 1939.
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Have you heard my new podcast, Thoreau's Leaves?I started Thoreau's Leavespartly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, out of a wish to share with listeners, in a uniquely atmospheric and meditative form, the consolations and inspirations I find in my regular explorations of Thoreau's journal. Thoreau knew how to stay at home, and he was so adept at finding the universe in his own backyard. This is an exemplary practice that we all, staying at home as we are and ought to be, can benefit from right now, but it has an enduring relevance beyond these times as well. As a portrait of consciousness, of a mind awake and alert to the natural world, Thoreau's journal is unparalleled. Don your earphones, close your eyes, and see if you can muse again.
Virginia Woolf's magnificent Mrs. Dalloway was self-published 95 years ago today (May 14th) by Woolf's own Hogarth Press. Almost a century after its appearance this novel remains a profoundly strange and inspiring literary work -- still in many ways much bolder and more innovative than so many of our contemporary novels. In honor of the anniversary, I'm sharing my lecture on Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway given recently to my creative writing students at Portland State University. If you're a writer working against the grain of the times, you might find something here.
Episode 1: In the Absence of Yes Thoughts on a subject all too familiar to every writer: rejection. Believing in the worth of what you've produced is no easy thing. And deserving work is all too often passed over in sluice tides of manila envelopes. All that matters is what you're committed to. ---- In the Atelier, a new weekly podcast premiering January 2020, is a place for occasional thoughts on literature, writing, and the life of the imagination. Each artfully crafted episode brings you reflections and real talk about subjects like the nature of creativity, the highs and lows of making art, inspiring works of literature and cinema, and the value and valor of staying true to your own creative vision. Produced by the award-winning literary press Atelier26 Books and hosted by author, publisher, and teacher M. Allen Cunningham. Eager to hear more? Get exclusive early access to seven episodes with a tax-deductible donation to the Atelier26 Books 2020 Campaign. Mentioned in this episode: Wallace Stegner; New York Times; Henry James; Andre Dubus; Gustave Flaubert Music in this episode: "Door Knob" by Egon Stone; "Petrolchimica2" by Bottega Baltazar; "Rising Up" by OFRIN; "Seventh March" by C3NC (All music used by courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)
A reading from Woolf's inimitable work. "I need not speak, but I listen. I am marvelously on the alert." Includes musical accompaniment from Bach's Cello Suite No. 6.
