Tag Archives: J. Greg Phelan

Close Reading: Paul Harding’s THIS OTHER EDEN

BookEnds Book Club,

In anticipation of the inaugural BookEnds Book Club on Wednesday, March 1, alum  J. Greg Phelan offers a close reading of a passage from program mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. For a link to this virtual event, and to order signed copies of books from our authors in conversation, visit the BookEnds website here!

One of the best parts of working with Paul Harding during my BookEnds fellowship was gaining insight into his writing process. During a recent interview, I had the privilege to once again prod him to reveal his secrets––to ask him how he renders the complex states of being that propel his stories with such clarity and concreteness, in so few words. “I’m fascinated,” he told me, “by how much meaning you can get into a given sentence without being exhausting, exhaustive, or ponderous. To make the book 220 pages long but feel 1200 pages deep.”

Paul provides a master’s class on how to do just that in his extraordinary new novel, This Other Eden, which evokes the breadth and depth of a much longer book. 

Take this passage of a sixteen-year-old maid removing sheets from clotheslines. Describing this everyday chore, Paul effortlessly weaves Bridget’s past, present, and future to precisely render the rich, complex interplay between what she does, perceives, thinks, and feels. Looking closely, we can consider the range of his mastery in a single, nearly page-long paragraph, which he starts boldly with a sentence fragment: 

Bridget in the lowering light, unclipping the sheets from the lines. 

The sole verb––unclipping––connotes an eternal present, as if we are observing Bridget unclipping the sheets both now and forever, if she’d been captured in a painting. It’s a dazzling effect Paul employs throughout the novel. The paragraph continues: 

The lines spring back when taut when she pulls the sheets from them, like the plucked strings on the homemade driftwood fiddles her father and uncles played at night. 

The present tense action pulls recalls the past tense activity played as we drift along with Bridget’s thoughts, mirroring how the mind works, gliding from the activity at hand to impressions of the past.  

She walked along the water with her father, looking for good pieces of wood. He traced the outline of a neighbor’s fiddle on a sheet of paper in charcoal, like Ethan drawing in the meadow.

Ethan is the boy she admires; as we start to intuit, her feelings about him confuse her. Indeed, she’s not yet ready to fully consider him, so we linger in the past:

Her father worked on the fiddle all one winter, when there wasn’t much to do and it was dark most of the time and the wind moaned and fog covered the island and the fairies moaned and wailed out in the dark and knew death, too. 

Did you catch how by grounding us in the concrete detail of the natural world (darkness, wind, and fog) Paul seamlessly carries us into a supernatural world of moaning and wailing fairies? His transition is so smooth, we don’t question but feel. All to prepare us, at last, to drift back to the boy circling her thoughts. 

There is something about that Ethan, with his charcoal and sunburned face and neck, something about him she can’t put a name to.

This sentence warmly and efficiently dramatizes the fact that Bridget’s confused feelings regarding the boy both compel and frighten her. This is the quiet conflict Paul so deftly dramatizes through these successive moments: Bridget is trying to keep a lid on her budding sexuality. In a vain attempt to do so, she returns to the task at hand: 

The sheets are so clean and stiff and crunch when she folds them and places them in the basket. 

A concrete, simple description in the here and now, gently invoking her innocence. These plain and powerful details juxtapose with her stream of thoughts and feelings to provide what it might otherwise take pages to convey. Then we return to her inner world, transported by the following wondrous, long and winding sentence without any commas, a marvel really how Paul moves so subtly from the present to her imagined future:

One sheet is her own and she will put it on her narrow bed in her small clean room tonight before lying down to sleep and it will feel crisp and clean and smell clean and good in the heat and she will open a window to let the fresh air in and it will feel so good and she will miss her mother and her dad and her sisters and her brothers so much that the comforts of the sheets and open window and lonesomeness of missing her family will make her cry herself to a dreamless sleep. 

This sentence accretes in a tumult of emotion she feels and knows she will feel. Staving off these increasingly strong, disconcerting feelings, Bridget once again retreats to the task at hand:

She reaches the sheet on the last line and discovers that the side facing the open meadow is covered with flecks of hay and dust from the mowing. Foolish girl, she thinks. You should’ve known such a thing would happen today. Scolding herself comforts her because she hears her mother’s voice when she does. She hears her mother’s voice and she tries to see if she can shake out the sheet by taking it in from the bottom and stepping back and drawing it out and snapping it so the hay will come off. She begins to sing. 

Swift, decisive action and thought has brought us here to the paragraph’s conclusion, in which Bridget being moved to express her feelings by singing.

Throughout the book, Paul painstakingly renders human complexity in countless moments just like these––living, breathing paintings in prose––to construct this powerhouse novel.

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He’s the co-founder and board chair of Project Write Now, a writing center providing classes and outreach for all ages. In 2020, he launched  book inc., a writing community for memoir and novel writers. 

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Pleasure and Faith in Writing with Alice McDermott

Drafting, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , ,

Fellow J. Greg Phelan on our November 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event 

I was having lunch with my mom’s three close friends from childhood. It was the first time we’d seen each other since my mom passed away, and her friends wanted to mark the occasion with a drink. I told them I couldn’t, that I had to keep my wits about me as that night I was going to interview my favorite author on Zoom. 

“Who?” they asked. When I told them, Aunt Kay, my mom’s buddy since junior high, smiled in joy and recognition. 

“Alice McDermott is my hero,” she said. “I feel like I know her, and she knows me.” 

Anybody who’s read Alice’s work knows what Aunt Kay means. (“Aunt Kay’s one of my people,” Alice said, when I told her the story.) 

I’ve been hooked on Alice McDermott’s work since Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel. I felt like I knew her and she knew me, and my family, too. I don’t know of any other living writer whose work has touched me more as a reader and inspired me more as a writer, to slow down and observe the extraordinary moments of ordinary people, to seek meaning, wisdom, and truth in their stories. 

Her most recent book is her first of nonfiction, What About The Baby?, a wonderful collection of insightful essays on writing and craft based on her lectures at Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as her 23 years teaching creative writing at Johns Hopkins.

What an honor and privilege it was for me to interview her for our BookEnds Alum’s Visiting Writing Series, to ask her variations on the same question: How do you do it? Evoke such richly observed lives with such compressed, beautiful, seemingly effortless prose. Here’s what I learned. 

Alice makes the time and space to write, doing her best to keep distractions and self-doubts out of the room, so she’s alone with the words on the page. She writes badly for as long as it takes—which, she reminds us, is sheer hell—as she works and reworks sentences, keeping the faith that she’ll get where she needs to go in due time. 

The reason she has faith to keep at it is because she’s experienced moments of transcendence herself, as a reader––when, as she put it, “we read something and felt like it changed our lives, hit us in the spine, gave us a new way to look at the world. We just fall in love with a character or a setting or a situation or a voice and we recognize the value of storytelling.” That’s what keeps her going: “This endless hope; it’s not based on nothing. It’s based on what I’ve experienced as a reader.”

She reads and rereads her works-in-progress constantly, looking for patterns, connection, and meaning, like a scholar would. That’s the way she finds the form of the story. “Constantly going back and seeing, ‘Well now, I know this, what do I make of that?’ is part of the pleasure, but also part of understanding the consequence and the logical movement of a story through time.”

Her emphasis on rereading led to my big epiphany, which seems obvious when you hear it out loud: We should bring the same high expectations we bring to reading books to reading our own works-in-progress.  

Indeed Alice advocates reading our own work with the same level of concentration, curiosity, and expectation as the books we love––all the while reminding ourselves, no matter how impatient we are to get it done, that unless we feel the same excitement and sense of discovery reading our own prose as we hope to feel as a reader, we still have work to do. 

“Language is the only tool the writer has,” she writes. 

So how does she do it?

Block out time to write, putting distractions and self-doubts out of the room. Have faith the work is worthwhile, knowing what you have experienced as a reader. 

Read widely and deeply, bringing the same curiosity and high expectations to your own work-in-progress as you do to any book. 

That’s it, really. Why make it any more complicated?

Alice McDermott shows and inspires us to understand that, simply, there’s pleasure to be had in the work, for us and our readers. That this pleasure is reason enough to keep going.

Greg Phelan was a BookEnds fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He co-founded a writing center, Project Write Now, where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently finishing a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Paul Harding On Generating Heat In Writing

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, ,

In workshops we tend to talk about point of view and character rather than the psychological resistance we must overcome to realize the potential of our work. We shy away from discussing the challenges of the writing process in favor of the relative concreteness of craft. 

My BookEnds mentor, Paul Harding, didn’t shy away. Through his close reading and annotations of my work-in-progress, he helped me identify forms of self-sabotage and practical ways to remedy them. A case in point: how do we generate energy on the page? Sure, we know it when we read it: “the heat,” some call it. But how do you generate this heat? And how do you stop yourself from tamping it down?

Paul gave me vocabulary to think about this challenge, borrowing concepts from Newtonian mechanics to dramatize the opposing forces at work. 

First up is centrifugal force, which pushes energy outward to spin off in all directions. Also called inertia. (You guessed it, this one is bad). In prose this happens when the writing lacks focus. There’s an overabundance of themes, actions, characters, or information as if the writer is, as Paul described, jumping the rails to see what’s over here and what’s over there unintentionally creating a crippling and dreadfully familiar-to-me narrative sprawl. 

This happens not because we don’t have the technical chops or aren’t good writers. It happens because we fear our story isn’t sophisticated or original or interesting enough and so we keep accreting more stuff to our story. We fear commitment to this story, so we keep adding more in an attempt to hedge our bets, when hedging doesn’t work. The reader bounces from one idea to the next before the necessary connections are made to make the reader curious and interested enough to want to keep reading. The energy dissipates, leaving no heat. 

The solution is to resist succumbing to our anxieties and seeking answers outside the book but rather to stay in it––in the moment, in the story, in the character––trusting the answer lies within. That’s how we cultivate centripetal force––from Latin centrum, “center” and petere, “to seek”––directing the energy inward. Does this sentence convey exactly what I want to convey in the most vivid way possible? Does that sentence do the same, not by adding something new, but rather expanding and deepening what I just conveyed in the last sentence? That’s the way, as Paul showed me, going one sentence at a time. Staying in it. Staying present. That’s what staves off resistance, builds heat, makes art. 

Write this on a Post-It and stick to your monitor (I did):

Resist centrifugal forces! 

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He co-founded a writing center on the Jersey shore called Project Write Now where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently working on a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.