Today I am delighted to have David Plante on the show!

David grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parrish, much the same way as Jack Kerouac did in Lowell, Massachusetts, in an area which was known in the 17h century as La Nouvelle France. David has written several books rooted in La Nouvelle France, most notably in The Family, a contender for the National Book Award.

He then went on to live in London for fifty years where he wrote several memoirs including Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart. David is also the author of the nonfiction book Difficult Women which has recently been republished by The New York Review of Books Press, and has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker with short stories and profiles of people he knew.

David is calling in to the show today from his home in Lucca, Italy, to discuss his most recent novel American Stranger. Listen in as we chat about the elements that went into crafting this novel, and how writing can give you a voice and identity belonging to only you.

Also, just a quick heads up if you have not yet read American Stranger. We got so excited talking about the book that we may have disclosed a few spoilers… so SPOILER ALERT!

In this episode David and I discuss:

• How he unboxed Franco-American culture through the eyes of an outsider.
• Why not having identity can actually be liberating, and can also help you find your writing voice.
• Crafting a timeless novel by grounding the story with details.
• The best way to deal with a bad review… (all authors get them!).
• Drawing inspiration from a writer’s day in Italy.

Plus, David’s #1 tip for writers.

About David Plante

David Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parish that was palisaded by its language, a French that dated from the time of the first French colonists in the early 17th Century to what was then most of North America, la Nouvelle France. His background was very similar to that of Jack Kerouac, who was brought up in a French speaking parish in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Plante has been inspired to write novels rooted in La Nouvelle France, most notably in The Family, a contender for the National Book Award. As a young man, Plante moved to London, where he lived for some fifty years; years in part accounted for in his memoirs Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart and in The Pure Lover, an elegy to his forty-year relationship with Nikos Stangos.

He has published a number of novels, some referring back to his parish but also expanding into European and Russian settings. He has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker with short stories and profiles of people he knew, including the painter Francis Bacon, the aesthete Harold Acton, and the historian Steven Runciman. His renowned book, Difficult Women, a non-fiction work that profiled Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer is being reissued by The New York Review of Books Press in 2017. He has dual nationality, American and British, but lives in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece.

David’s latest novel American Stranger is out now.

American Stranger

Brought up in a secularized Jewish household on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Nancy Green knows little about her parents’ past. She knows they were World War II Jewish refugees who were able to escape Germany with precious family heirlooms that are constant reminders of a lost life and a world about which Nancy knows very little.

In David Plante’s novel, American Stranger the longing Nancy has for some kind of spiritual connection first leads her into an encounter with a Hasidic Jewish man who, unable to find meaning in his own religion, has taken vows to become a monk. She then becomes romantically involved with Yvon, a Catholic college student in Boston where she is studying for her master’s degree in English literature. Yvon, trying to escape the clutches of Catholicism and his overbearing mother, finds temporary refuge in Nancy and sees her as an escape from the insular enclave of Franco-Americans where he has spent most of his life. Their highly erotic, tempestuous relationship frightens both of them until a tragedy in Yvon’s life eventually pulls them apart.

Devastated by the breakup, Nancy ends up marrying a Jewish man from London, hoping to find herself with a man of her own religion. However, her new relationship pales in comparison to her deep emotional connection with Yvon and, sadly, ends, inspiring Nancy to go back to Boston to track down the man who, she realizes, is the great love of her life.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 192

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 192: On Writing and Identity — Interview with David Plante appeared first on DIY MFA.

Is that not how you take your eggs?

Maybe it’s not the eggs. For you it could be the dog or the rosebush, the children skipping into kindergarten, or the drone of the behemoth copy machine. We live in a world ready with image.

How Images are Made

Images are brought into the fabric of a piece of writing in several different ways.

• Simile uses “like” or “as” to link the thing to its representative other thing, building an image through explicit comparison.

• Metaphor shows an implicit connection between two things

Metaphor is often the trickier device of the two. Of metaphor, Mary Oliver writes, “the two things compared often seem very different, and the linkage often surprises and delights even as it enlightens.” Both metaphor and simile can provide linkages that enlighten the reader, as they build tension and point the reader toward an intangible thing—this is how we wring emotion and mood from our writing. Not by saying “I’m worried and amazed,” but by showing it.

Here is a great example from “First Anniversary, With Monkeys” of an image that shows a tension as it explores the complexities of relationships in the context of a hot, sweaty jungle:

There is no crumbly frozen cake to thaw.

Today, we are in the jungle. I mean mosquito. I mean

tigers and elephants sludging their way

to the lake for a drink and Don’t make sudden moves

or snakes startled from an afternoon nap

will greet you fang first. I think we are lost. Too hot

for any cold confection to survive. Even my tube

of sunblock is as warm as a baby’s bottle. . . .  [emphasis added]

The jungle animals, the snakes who “will greet you fang first” are in alarming juxtaposition to a warm baby’s bottle—how did such a thing appear suddenly in the poem? Through the jungle, the speaker carries something essential, sunblock, but in her mind’s eye and in the eye of the poem it is “as warm as” a baby’s bottle. The “as” indicates a simile is being used to draw a link between two things. The link is between the essential and the precious. Exaggerated by the information we already have about the speaker, this is her first wedding anniversary with her husband.

Beyond the Metaphor

Here are some other ways to build images in your writing.

1) Extended metaphor

Using an extended metaphor can prolong the world of the metaphor and create an alternate environment. In W.S. Merwin’s “Bread”, for example, the poem opens with the image “Each face in the street is a slice of bread” and continues to craft the world of bread, “hung with the hollow marks of their groping” and “the ragged tunnels they dreamed of following in out of the light”, to the “heart of bread” until the final lines where, still within the shroud of the metaphor, we emerge:

to find themselves alone   

before a wheat field

raising its radiance to the moon

2) Personification

Personification is the attribution of human characteristics to something nonhuman In “Golden Retrievals” by Mary Doty, you’ll notice something different about the speaker of the poem:

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing… [emphasis added]

First, we notice that the dog is the speaker of the poem. In this first half of the poem he retains his dog-like thoughts, he is concerned with the things that would concern a dog: squirrels, balls, sticks, getting dirty, etc. But in the second half of the poem, the dog contemplates his human, using the thoughts and language of a human:

…And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? 

On the surface this poem seems fairly innocuous, but the deeper you go the more you realize the image of a dog in the park with a contemplative master is digging us towards the core of this poem; it’s about grief. Something is gone, someone is missing from the scene, and there is a solace, only it’s not the human who realizes it:

…My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

3) Allusion

Allusion is a brief and intentional reference to a mythic, historical, or literary person, place, event, or movement. A great example of a literary allusion is Louise Glück’s “Parable of the Hostages,” can you guess what the allusion is to from these first lines?

The Greeks are sitting on the beach

wondering what to do when the war ends. No one

wants to go home…

The entire world of Glück’s poem is an allusion to The Odyssey, picking up after the fall of Troy. Without saying his name, Glück specifically calls upon the travels of Odysseus and contemplates the reluctance of the Greeks to return home, without knowing that their journey would take them ten years to complete:

that of their small number

some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,

some by sleep, some by music?

Writing Exercises

Now it’s your turn! Try your hand at image-building with one of these devices: simile, metaphor, extended metaphor, personification, or allusion. To make things interesting, imagine yourself stranded on a tropical island. You have only a toaster, three knives, a jumbo package of Pixy Stix and a worn-out copy of Paradise Lost. Here are a few ways you might get started:

Metaphor – You are an island

1) Simile – This island is as hot as…

2) Extended metaphor – You are an island, your mother is the sea, every one of your siblings is a boat that passes by

3) Personification – turn the toaster into your version of Winston and give him human attributes

4) Allusion – incorporate a brief moment from John Milton’s famous work

………….

Danielle Mitchell graduated cum laude from the University of Redlands with a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing, and now lives in Long Beach. In 2010, Danielle was selected as one of ten up-and-coming poets in Pop Art: Anthology of Southern California Poetry published by Moon Tide Press. Later that year, she released her first chapbook, Poem Food. Danielle has been a featured reader at Beyond Baroque, Loyola Marymount University, the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, the Small Press Book Festival in Santa Monica, and the Ugly Mug in Orange home of the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry.

In 2013, Danielle founded The Poetry Lab, a bi-monthly writing group for poets in all stages of their careers. She also hosts the Stranded Artist Series, a quarterly poetry event featuring a visiting writer’s workshop and reading. Danielle’s prose poems have appeared in Cease, Cows, East Jasmine Review, and Four Chambers Press, earlier work has appeared in Mixed Fruit  and dirtcakes among others. She hopes to complete work on her full length book of poems in 2014.

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