Amy hempel It’s all about the sentences

1. Amy hempelIt’s all about the sentences November 1, 2013

2. Writing WARM UP • Describe what Hempel’s story, “In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried,” is about in one word. Explain why you chose that word.

3. Rick Moody’s Introduction • “It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about rhythm. It’s about ambiguity. It’s the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captured in language. It’s about love trouble. It’s about death. It’s about suicide. It’s about the body. It’s about skepticism. It’s against sentimentality. It’s against cheap sentiment. It’s about regret. It’s about survival. It’s about the sentences used to enact and defend survival.”

4. A bit of biography on hempel • Considered one of the contemporary masters of the short story and part of the short story renaissance of the 80s and 90s. • She studied with the legendary short fiction editor, Gordon Lish. • She’s from Chicago, but wrote many of her early short fiction based on her experiences in San Francisco. • She teaches at Harvard; in fact, I attended one of her readings a few months ago. • Hempel has experienced a great deal of grief and tragedy in her life and we see this reflected in the types of stories she writes. • “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is based on her own experience of loosing her best friend to Leukemia, and her “failure” as a friend.

5. Writing about grief • Sentiment: an opinion; a feeling or emotion VS • Sentimentality: excessive tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. • Consider how Hempel conveys emotion through subtext, or what is unsaid.

6. What you don’t say • “What you don’t say can be as important as what you do say.”

7. Journalistic style • “Journalism was great training, as it turned out, because you have to grab readers instantly and keep them. I knew how to do that, and it happened to work very well in fiction. I hadn’t been a good reporter because I didn’t care about getting the story before the general public had it. I didn’t care about being the first one on the scene, the first one at the accident. I also started to feel the limitations. Obviously, in journalism, you’re confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it’s in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person’s going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don’t give them one. Frontload and cut out everything extraneous. That’s why I like short stories. You’re always trying to keep the person interested.”-Amy Hempel

8. Telling a different kind of story • [On her favorite writers at the time] “For me, they redefined what a story could be—the thing happening off to the side of the story other writers were telling; they would start where someone else would leave off, or stop where someone else would start. As Hannah said later in Boomerang, a lot of people have their overview, whereas he has his “underview,” scouting “under the bleachers, for what life has dropped.”