Green Frog by Gina Chung

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book is from my NPR recommendation list. I nominated it for our book club, but it didn’t win the vote, so I ended up reading it on my own.

 

As regular readers know, I love short stories, and try to have a collection on my nightstand most of the time. Being able to browse a bit at a time often fits the smaller time slots I have for reading. 

 

Green Frog is one of the more unusual collections, in that it contains multiple genres, from riffs on Korean folk tales, to science fiction, to fantasy, to realistic family dramas. It really is all over the place, which makes it a grab bag of fascinating treasures.

 

Chung is the child of Korean immigrants, devout Christians who, if the stories are any indication, didn’t really understand their free spirited and queer child. There is a lot of family trauma in the book, and parts feel autobiographical, with the tension between love and frustration with her mother. 

 

As someone who also grew up in a high-control family where religion was supremely important to identity, who has since deconstructed (although not as much as Chung), and for whom LGBTQ identities have lead to the breakdown of relationships, I found a lot in this book that felt familiar. 

 

Overall, the writing is really excellent, and the stories of all kinds will draw you in. 

 

As I often do with short stories, I will talk about them individually.

 

“How to Eat Your Own Heart”

 

The collection starts with a bank, a pseudo-recipe for cutting out and eating your own heart, and a description of how it grows back, but different. It is unlike anything else in the book, but it definitely grabs your attention in its short five pages.

 

“Green Frog”

 

Ah yes, the title story. This one features a Korean folk tale that Chung’s mother used to tell her, about a naughty green frog who always did the opposite of what her mother wanted, driving the mother to an early grave. The story itself is about a daughter who can never seem to do what her mother wishes, unlike the other daughter, the golden child. And yes, the narrator is a bit of a fuck-up, and the other daughter is a hard worker. But after the parents die, things take a bit of an ironic turn. This one very much felt like it had autobiographical elements.

 

“After the Party”

 

This story is about a Korean-American woman who has married a white college professor, and essentially given up her dreams to manage his life for him. It’s a bit of a bitter story, and I wonder if she knew someone like the protagonist. 

 

“Rabbit Heart”

 

A bittersweet account of a relationship between a little girl and her Korean grandmother and a magical summer spent in Seoul. It is heartwarming, but bittersweet because eventually age and death comes for us all. The level of detail in this story is what makes it great. Chung captures the sights, sounds, emotions, and personalities so well. 

 

“Presence”

 

One of the science fiction stories, this one really haunts me. The premise is that a company has come up with a way to erase “adverse life experiences” from memory. It starts off with good intentions: why not cure PTSD in veterans, or relieve the victims of child rape from their nightmares? 

 

But after the protagonist and her now ex-husband’s company soars to success, the side effects start pouring in. Erase the bad memories, and a lot goes with them. When a new, far cheaper version is developed, the protagonist rushes it into production, ignoring the troubling results.

 

Eventually, everything goes to hell. The protagonist is thrown under the bus and divorced by her husband, and finds herself haunted by an apparition. It is a powerful story that has some parallels to one of my favorite Charles Dickens books, The Haunted Man. This is also one of the longest stories in the book.

 

“Human Hearts”

 

Another story based on Korean legends. In this case, the Kumiho, shapeshifting fox-like creatures that eat human hearts. 

 

The narrator in this case is only half Kumiho, the product of her mother’s affair with a human. This story also returns to the idea of a favorite daughter, who the narrator can never hope to match. 

 

In this story, however, a lot of the drama revolves around the narrator’s simultaneous disgust with the violent life she is born to and her innate dislike of humans. The ending is deliciously ambiguous. 

 

“Mantis”

 

The author imagines the love life of a female preying mantis from her point of view. After all, mantids often, but not always, eat their mates after mating. Great line from a male on a date, “It’s too bad that all of this will end with you eating me.” It’s a short one, but with a definitely unexpected perspective. It also feels relevant to the dating scene we humans have created. 

 

“The Sound of Water”

 

A rare story from the male perspective. This is a realistic story, and one I thought was quite good. Justin reconnects with Ellie, who dated Justin’s older brother James. In the meantime, his father is dying, and he is faced with the question of what to do with the family store, which he has no interest in running. Not that it is even making money anymore. 

 

At its core, the story is about regret and time and the problem of balancing duty to family with one’s own dreams. I appreciate that it isn’t a story about romantic love, but about friendship and connection. 

 

“Attachment Processes”

 

More science fiction. It takes a bit to figure out at first, but a couple has just gotten their daughter back. Well, not exactly. The real daughter is dead, from an accident. 

 

But new technology can sort-of bring them back in the form of an android with a sort of artificial intelligence that supposedly can learn and eventually duplicate the deceased child. It cannot grow, however, so the replacement will be forever at the age you choose, up until age 16 or so. 

 

Which happens to be the age that the real Elly died. But instead, the parents get her back at age five.

 

As we come to understand, this was an unraveling relationship when death cut it short. The real Elly became more and more difficult as she got older, partying and skipping school. The mother (the narrator) is filled with the “what-ifs” and thus wanted to go back to before Elly became difficult. 

 

And now the replacement Elly will never grow beyond age five. 

 

I will admit this story affected me a bit. I have wondered myself if my parents wish they could have kept me at a younger age, before I got to be difficult, questioning things, insisting on doing things my own way, and generally resisting their attempts to create a clone of themselves. 

 

And on the other hand, if I could go back to age twelve, and somehow redirect my parents from getting involved with Bill Gothard, if I could have gotten my mom to get treatment for her mental illness, if I could have somehow managed to get them to embrace mainstream ideas of child development so they could have enjoyed my teen years, rather than freaking out that I was giving my soul to Satan when I did the normal teen things. 

 

What if?

 

There is a good line in this one, that seems appropriate to my situation as well:

 

There is no possibility of life continuing after death. But that didn’t mean the end of love, even if it was the kind of love that was easy. The kind of love that didn’t demand anything of me, or require me to change, to become better, or to dive into the dark waters of my own faults and weaknesses and emerge with treasure. Elly would always be small and sweet and easy to love, never asking anything of me that I couldn’t give.

 

Dang. 

 

“The Arrow”

 

Man, there are a lot of stories about parental expectations in this book. A woman finds herself pregnant after a brief encounter with a married co-worker. This leads to her considering how she always felt her parents had a path laid out for her - the arrow to follow, which she gets tattooed on her arm.

 

The pregnancy, strangely, seems to affect her mother in an unexpected way, and the two of them end up bonding as the result. The pregnancy ends in miscarriage, but somehow both mother and daughter end up seeing each other in new lights. 

 

“Names for Fireflies”

 

A very brief story, more like a vignette, about a brief friendship between tween girls. It is also more than that, as the narrator has a crush on her friend. It ends all too soon, as the other girl’s parents divorce and she moves away, but the narrator is left with the memories and the desire. There may also be a bit of autobiography here, including the author’s rejection of the kind of religion she was raised with. 

 

“Honey and Sun”

 

This one is a bit bizarre, with twin girls, dolls that are (maybe) sentient, an eccentric uncle who takes the girls in when their mother has a midlife crisis, and a giant butterfly collection. 

 

It’s definitely more toward the magical realism side of the spectrum, or perhaps even straight-up fantasy. 

 

“You’ll Never Know How Much I Loved You”

 

This is the longest story in the collection, and one that goes all over the place. It is a story of a woman from birth to middle age, from her dreams of being a singer to her discovery that her husband has another wife already. The ending is ambiguous as well. Will she stay or leave? 

 

It also has a grandmother, who in this case tells the narrator:

 

“Listen to me. In this life, you must be your own prize, and then no one can take that away from you.”

 

“The Fruits of Sin”

 

A short tale of a teenage pregnancy with more than a little resemblance to The Scarlet Letter. It also explores the way a conservative church congregation slowly changes from judgmentalism to acceptance. It also leans into magical realism territory. 

 

There are a couple of lines in this one that are worth quoting.

 

“Who might the father be?” the rest of us wondered, telegraphing our curiosity to one another with our carefully plucked eyebrows. We were none of us young anymore, and our eyesight was going, but very little escaped the attention of our eyebrows, which quirked upward at the first sign of gossip, like antennae.

 

And this one, as part of a passage on how so many of the children of the church had disappointed. 

 

Other than Mrs. Park’s Philip, most of our children were unremarkable in the ways they disappointed us. 

 

Ah yes, the children who disappoint - it is such a theme in the book. 

 

“The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat”

 

This is about a daughter who is left to take care of the final arrangements for her father, from whom she has been estranged for years. Her mother moved back to Seoul, and her sister is extremely pregnant and can’t travel. 

 

The story is told in a kind of irritating present tense second person way, with the protagonist addressed as “you.” This isn’t my favorite style of writing, and I think it really only works well in things like Neil Gaiman’s poem, “Instructions.” 

 

Aside from the style, though, it is a good story. The protagonist’s memories of her father are tied up with his fruit bat research, and she has a lot of good memories. But alongside that are memories of his violence and anger. And a particular memory where her father abandoned her sister on the side of the road after an argument. 

 

For so many of us, our childhood memories are complicated this way. There were plenty of good times. But also some real trauma that our parents don’t want to talk about. 

 

Again I wonder how much if any of this story has its basis in the author’s life. 

 

Overall, this is a good collection, and worth checking out. Apparently Chung wrote a novel before this book, and it will be interesting to see if she publishes any additional books in the future. 

I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet by Andrew Rincon (Empty Space 2026)

I actually saw this back in August, but remain buried in unwritten blog posts and real life. I’m working on it…slowly.

 

One of the fun things about The Empty Space is that they devote a part of each season to newer, less well known plays, often ones written by younger playwrights. 

 

In this case, the play is by Andrew Rincon, who lists “he/she/they” as pronouns, but seems to go mostly by “they” in the interviews and articles I was able to find. I will therefore use that for this most. 

 

They identify as queer, which has transformed from the slur it was often used as when I was a kid, to a broader descriptor that tends to encompass a degree of gender and sexual fluidity and ambiguity. It works well for that. 

 

The play itself could also be described as queer - fluid, ambiguous, refusing neat categories. It is about love, but far broader than the “boy and girl meet cute” kind of story. 

 

The play is also saturated with poetry - references, quotations, and poetic dialogue. It opens with the voice of God, so to speak, who describes herself as a poet. Creation itself is poetry - something that many of us see in the holy writings of most religious traditions. 

 

The Poet (as the program describes the deity) goes on to introduce the plot, starting with the fact that Cupid is having an existential crisis. Too many centuries of seeing love go wrong has left her jaded, hating humanity, and ready to give the whole thing up and go away…somewhere. 

 

So, she removes her wings, and prepares to go through a doorway to…wherever. She is interrupted by Valentine - yep, the saint - who takes her down to earth, and challenges her to one last contest before she goes. 

 

These two have a history, it appears, although it isn’t entirely clear whether they were lovers or just frenemies - and does it even matter? They fight the same either way. 

 Cupid and Valentine

I adore the anatomically correct heart on her shirt

The challenge is to take a pair of lovers on journeys, at the end of which they will (hopefully) be ready to embrace each other. First deity back wins!

 

The lovers are not promising. Benny and Alejandro have just broken up, although neither can entirely understand why. Clearly, they both have baggage that they aren’t admitting they have, even to themselves. 

 Benny and Alejandro

Into this mess comes a fifth character, Betti, a dental hygienist who befriends Benny, and then falls badly in love with Cupid. Oh boy, this could get interesting.

 Cupid and Betti

That kiss from Cupid will mess you up... 

That’s the setup, but I won’t spoil the plot beyond that. Ordinarily, I would say to go see the show, but in this case, the run has ended locally, so I guess you will have to wait for the next time. 

 

I will give the hint that this is a comedy, not a tragedy, so, by convention, it should contain misunderstandings, revelations, and a final unveiling that leads to marriage. Or at least reconciled relationships. It is a fundamentally lighthearted play that happens to touch on some really serious and often dark topics - child sexual abuse, homophobia, mental illness. 

 

It also has a lot of sexual content and language, so not really for kids. (A couple of my adult kids went, though, and liked it.) 

 

The staging of this play reminded me a lot of when The Empty Space was at its former location, with a tiny stage, no real backstage, and a shoestring budget. Well, they still have the budget, but a good bit more space. For this play, everything was minimalist, cartoon-like and whimsical. 

 

A play like this, therefore, cannot rely on dazzling effects, but instead depends on the skills and chemistry of the cast. Fortunately, this one worked quite well. 

 

Central to the story is the relationship of Alejandro and Benny. Played by Salvador Vidaurri and Michael Hendrix respectively, this pairing really worked. They were believable as a pair of fundamentally tender young men, wounded in childhood, and struggling to find words for their feelings. Seriously, you just want to give them each a hug. 

 

Since these characters are the “straight” ones (in theater terms, not sexuality, obviously), the humor involving them has to be played deadpan and straight-faced, which is not easy. So, kudos to both of them for excellent performances. 

 

The broader humor takes place between Cupid (Victoria Olmos) and Valentine (Cameron Kovac), and again, this was a good pairing - they played well off each other and really did feel like they had thousands of years of history. 

 

And then there was Betti, played by Nikki Flowers. What a live-wire, over-the-top, too-big-for-a-small-stage performance it was. I’m not sure I had seen Flowers in a larger role before, but she was hilarious. 

 

Finally, Azra Joy played The Poet, visible only for the final bows. I liked the pacing of the storytelling, which tied together the various episodes. 

 

I wasn’t particularly familiar with the play before this, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I should mention that a lot of the play is in Spanglish - Rincon is Columbian-American - but it isn’t hard to follow. I am not fluent in Spanish, but I did grow up in a neighborhood where it was often spoken. I found I could understand enough of what was said to get the jokes, and for many of the longer phrases, the character repeated it (more or less) in English. Which is also a very Spanglish way to do it. 

 

As I said, this is one of those plays by younger, queerer, and browner voices, unapologetic for expecting audiences to get with the times. It was a fun experience, even for an old cishet white guy like me. 

 

While this play has run its course, The Empty Space has three more plays this year, starting with Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, a classic that I am looking forward to seeing. Check them out. 

 

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner

Source of book: I own this. 

 

Wallace Stegner is one of those authors that I was aware of and wanted to read for years. I finally got a copy of this book, his last collection of essays. 

 

The title should be familiar to anyone who knows old time music. Back in the 1920s, Harry McClintock popularized a song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountains.” Around the interwebs, you often see claims that he wrote the song. This is false. While McClintock got a copyright for the song, it actually existed for decades before that, with various forms of lyrics - it was the typical folk song whose origins remain obscure. Also, the original McClintock version, before the recording, had far racier lyrics, as many folk songs do. 

 

Stegner remembers his father singing the song to him, and it made enough of an impression that he used the song title as the title for one of his novels. To him, as he describes in the opening essay in this collection, it represents the mythos of the American West, the misguided idea that it is an endless source of wealth and riches, open to all. In reality, the West is fragile, resource-limited, and has generally enriched only a handful of those who came seeking those riches. 

 

I have known for a long time that my father-in-law was a fan, and having read this book, I realize just how much of our conversations nearly 30 years ago, before I even started dating his daughter, contained ideas from Stegner. Like Stegner, he grew up in the west, particularly Utah, and shares a lot of what Stegner describes as the Western way of looking at life. 

 

What was more surprising, though, was that my father-in-law could absorb so much of Stegner’s environmentalism and realism about the fragility of nature - and indeed share so many of Stegner’s views - and fail to see that the Republican Party is the party of exploitation, destruction, and science denialism. He really should be a liberal. It is one of the great mysteries of our time. 

 

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs contains essays grouped by type and topic. The first is all personal stuff, about his childhood, about his life, about friends. The second is entitled “Habitat,” and is all about the living world. In this collection, there is a lot about water, which seems ever more relevant as climate change dries the west. But even before that, water has been overallocated by a lot. We are going to be forced by reality to change how we live in the west, as Stegner points out.

 

The final section contains essays about writers, from Steinbeck to Wendell Berry, and it's pretty fascinating as literary criticism. 

 

I won’t talk about every essay in the collection, but I do have some highlights. 

 

I very much loved his description of his childhood, his difficult father, his long-suffering mother. He writes with love and nuance yet realism about his parents’ limitations. The essay also illuminates a lot about how he came to be the person he was. 

 

The next essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” is a love letter to his mother, who died too early, at age 50. Stegner wrote it when he was 80. It is impossible to miss the ache that he feels not merely at the loss, but also at all that his mother lost over the years, much of it because she chose to devote herself to her husband, who himself was careless of her needs. It is a story all too common, although not as common as it was in that generation. (Stegner was born in 1909.) 

 

I didn’t write down any quotes from any of the personal essays. I think they need to be read as complete works, and as a set. 

 

I did, however, take a lot of notes about the conservation essays. First is this one, that is so incredibly true yet seems to be ignored by most of the right wing. 

 

Stegner talks at length about the “myth of western individualism.” And it is a myth. The west has always been highly dependent on the federal government for its existence. It is federal infrastructure that has supported it, federal lands that have been exploited, federal funding that has sustained it. From dams and other irrigation infrastructure to the railroads to the interstate highway system to the extensive national parks, the west as we know it wouldn’t exist without trillions in federal funding. 

 

Beyond that, however, western humans have never survived as individuals, but in cooperative groups. The Mormons are a great example of that kind of society, but everywhere across the west cooperation is necessary for existence. I was born in Los Angeles, which isn’t (as Stegner points out) part of the true west - it is the Left Coast or Del Norte depending on where you draw the line - but I currently live in the west, where water is scarce, and a lot of the white westerners still cling to the lone cowboy myth, even as they depend on government for the basis of their survival. 

 

In a later essay, Stegner talks about this paradox.

 

Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one. The distinctive western plans and animals, the hard clarity (before power plants and metropolitan traffic altered it) of the western air, the look and location of western towns, the empty spaces that separate them, the way farms and ranches are either densely concentrated where water is plentiful or widely scattered where it is scarce, the pervasive presence of the federal government as landowner and land manager, the even more noticeable federal presence as dam builder and water broker, the snarling states’ rights and antifederal feelings whose burden Bernard DeVoto once characterized in a sentence - “Get out and give us more money” - those are all consequences, and by no means all the consequences, of aridity. 

 

Yep. Get out and give us money. That is the western right winger in a nutshell. 

 

Stegner also talks about people like the Bundys, who took a federal building hostage because they didn’t like paying a paltry sum for grazing on federal land. This idea that everything would be better if the government went away is blind to all the ways they are dependent on the government. 

 

Never mind that grazing fees and coal and oil lease fees and timber sale prices are so low that they amount to a fat subsidy to those who enjoy them. Never mind that half of the money that does come in from fees and leases is given back to the states in lieu of taxes. Never mind that the feds spend the other half, and more, rescuing and rehabilitating the lands whose proper management would bankrupt the states in which they lie. NEver mind the federal aid highways, and the federally financed dams, and the write-offs against flood control, and the irrigation water delivered at a few dollars an acre-foot. Take for granted federal assistance, but damn federal control. Your presence as absentee landlord offends us, Uncle. Get out, and give us more money. 

 

And more later:

 

One of the things Westerners should ponder, but generally do not, is their relation to and attitude toward the federal presence. The bureaus administering all the empty space that gives Westerners much of their outdoor pleasure and many of their special privileges and a lot of their pride and self-image are frequently resented, resisted, or manipulated by those who benefit economically from them but would like to benefit more, and are generally taken for granted by the general public.

The federal presence should be recognized as what it at least partly is: a reaction against our former profligacy and wastefulness, an effort at adaptation and stewardship in the interest of the environment and the future. 

 

And more about the grazers like the Bundys who use BLM land:

 

Do they exist to provide bargain-basement grass to favored stockmen whose grazing privileges have become all but hereditary, assumed and bought and sold along with the title to the home spread? 

 

There are some other good observations about other things in these chapters as well. 

 

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone. 

 

I too feel this way, shaped as I am by the places I have lived and the places I have loved. I also think that last line is amazing. 

 

Culture isn’t some monolith, frozen in time and place. It is, rather, a pyramid that we all are continuously building. This is yet another thing that the right wing gets badly wrong. They speak of “western civilization” as if it were a museum. And of course, it is a euphemism for whiteness. But more than that, it is the worship of an imaginary culture that never really existed. Culture has been built and continues to be built by all of us, whether they like it or not. Hence why Albert Murray insists that there is no such thing as “white American culture,” because American culture contains white and black and Hispanic and every other kind of culture that Americans of every ethnicity have brought to it over time. 

 

In another place, Stegner quotes C. S. Lewis. I admit I had not heard this quote before - I suspect it is not one of the ones white evangelicals like to use, for obvious reasons. 

 

“What we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.” 

 

Another interesting essay takes on the issues of violence and lawlessness in the west, and how they continue to haunt us through our national mythology. A few lines stood out. 

 

Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be the West. In a folklore predominantly masculine and macho, even women take on the look. 

 

And this gem:

 

All this may seem remote from the life of the average Westerner, who lives in a city and is more immediately concerned with taxes, his job, drugs, the World Series, or even disarmament, than with archetypal figures out of folklore. But it is not so remote as it seems. Habits persist. The hoodlums who come to San Francisco to beat up gays are vigilantes, enforcing their prejudices with violence, just as surely as were the miners who used to hunt down Indians and hang Chinese in the Mother Lode, or the ranchers who rode out to exterminate the nesters in Wyoming’s Johnson County War.

 

These days, add in the ICE thugs, and the various MAGA rioters. The vigilante has always been about “enforcing prejudices with violence” and that hasn’t changed. 

 

Lawlessness isn’t exactly being against the law either. It is the idea that whatever the law enforcers do is right. As Stegner puts it when describing Western Novels:

 

Law is whatever he and his companions (and employers) believe (which means law is his and their self-interest.) 

 

This too remains all too common in our society today. 

 

Another essay in this section is a brief history of the conservation/environmentalist movement. He notes that there has been a gradual shift over time - in a positive direction. 

 

Yes, there was an environmental movement before Earth Day, a long, slow revolution in values of which contemporary environmentalism is a consequence and a continuation. We are still in transition from the notion of man as master of the earth to the notion of man as a part of it. 

 

This really is a necessary shift, and, in my view, a return to a healthier way of being in the world. We went wrong when we misinterpreted the blessing in Genesis to mean mastering nature rather than caring for it, and this misinterpretation hasn’t just meant the destruction of nature, but, as Lewis noted above, the exploitation of fellow humans as the means. 

 

The chapters on writers were also quite fascinating. Stegner definitely takes on the Cowboy Myth, calling for a more honest way of writing. While I haven’t read Stegner’s fiction yet, it is clear that his goal in his writing was to find that honesty. 

 

Real cowboys have more brutality and less chivalry in them than the literary kind. Some of them have been subverted by literary propaganda and believe their own myth. Others, I am sure, are trying to do what any writer is trying to do: render the texture and tensions of their own lives, their own occupation, their own place. Their trouble is that if they write with honesty about exploitation, insecurity, hard work, injuries, and cows, none of which make even a walk-on appearance in The Virginian and most of the horse opera it has spawned, they will find a smaller and less enthusiastic audience than if they had written about crooked sheriffs and six-guns.

 

He also talks about the difficulties of getting respect from the eastern establishment, which has tended to look down on western writers. 

 

But indignation and local puffery are not the ways to achieve stature. You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur. 

 

I loved that he specifically called out a number of Native American writers as being important western voices. You can find my list of Native authors here. I will note with approval that he names Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and N. Scott Momaday, whose writings I have enjoyed. 

 

There is a line in the discussion of Steinbeck that I thought was interesting. 

 

A critic, by contrast, is not a synthesizer but an analyzer. He picks apart, he lifts a few cells onto a slide and puts a coverglass over them, he runs tests of the chemical components of spittle and sperm and heartsblood. His is a useful function and, done well, may greatly clarify the reading of a story - may even give a reader the illusion of understanding both the product and the process. But it is more reliable on the product than the process. 

 

I’m not a true critic - my blog is more of a reading diary than a critique of individual books. Although a few have been so bad that I have felt compelled to write a scathing review. This idea is interesting, though. Stegner is more of a writer than a critic, but it is interesting in what is essentially a work of literary criticism that he would be harsh on critics.

 

One author he discusses that I was not familiar with is Walter Clark. I am probably not the only one, as a quick online search brings up a law firm as the first hit for that name. I did vaguely remember that The Ox-Bow Incident was made into a film back in the day, but that is about it.

 

After reading this essay, though, his books do sound fascinating. 

 

One line about that book struck me as profound. 

 

That novel is a long way from being a simple reversal of the vigilante stereotype or an ironic questioning of vigilante justice. It is a testing of the whole blind ethic of an essentially false, imperfectly formed, excessively masculine society, and of the way in which individuals, out of personal inadequacy, out of mistaken loyalties and priorities, out of a fear of seeming womanish, or out of plain cowardice, let themselves be pushed into murder. 

 

Something to think about when it comes to the MAGA bloodlust against immigrants and LGBTQ people. Particularly the expression of personal inadequacy in violence, and the ever-present fear of not being “manly” enough. 

 

I read this book before Wendell Berry’s recent passing, so that chapter seems even more timely now. One point Stegner makes is that Berry wasn’t the typical - or better yet, stereotypical writer. He wasn’t self-destructive, didn’t die young, didn’t seem to have endless personal demons he was fighting. Rather, he was thoroughly functional, and lived a measured, intentional, and quiet life. 

 

We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don’t disparage these Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to do so. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance - one doesn’t have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism. 

 

The final chapter in the book is a humorous one, about a lecture Stegner saw, purporting to teach a formula for how to write a short story. 

 

Like all such formulae, in every facet of life, it was hogwash. Very few things can be reduced to a rigid failsafe formula - and neither childrearing nor literature is one of those few. 

 

My distaste for that lecturer stemmed partly from the fact that he was commercial, and I was above that, and partly from his carpenter’s-rule method, but most of all, I finally concluded, from the fact that he had nothing but method. He wrote from an unvarying blueprint. He pulled prepackaged frivolous surprises out of his sleeve to elicit a gee-whiz response. There was no fire in his belly, no passion or vision or doubt in his mind, no penetration or challenge in what he wrote. He illuminated nothing, opened no windows, left no worm of wonder working in his readers’ heads. He had nothing to say, and nothing to ask beyond the questions to which he had just precooked the answers.

 

That is the perfect analysis. Why even write if you have nothing to say? Writing is, after all, about communication. This also is the problem with AI, which also has nothing to say, just a method for saying it. 

 

This is not to say that technique, practice, and diligence have no place in writing. They are as important in the case of words as in music, and nobody wants to read an incompetent writer any more than they want to hear a violinist who has never learned to play. But in neither case is technique the end of the matter: one must still make art. 

 

I’ll end with a bit about John Cheever, which Stegner relates. 

 

Once at a literary meeting I heard someone ask John Cheever why he wrote. He replied without hesitation, “To try to make sense of my life.” That is the best answer I can conceive of.

 

I would agree. And also confirm that I write to try to make sense of my life. Books are a means to that for me, but I also write a lot about myself and the things I care about. 

 

Stegner never lacks something to say, or fails to show the fire in his belly. This book is a great example of that. The author shines through in the words, and communicates his passion and vision. That is what makes this book great, and well worth reading.