On Fire

On Fire

Dan Weese doesn't think much of his work. Shannon Ravenel apparently did. I'm finally getting around to reading this.

"I figured writing might be like learning how to build houses or lay brick, or even fight fires. I had one burning thought that I believed was true. If I wrote long enough and hard enough, I’d eventually learn how."

"My only obligation was feeding my family while I was trying to learn how to do this other thing, and that meant to keep working at the fire department plus the usual extra stuff like carrying bricks and mixing mortar and swinging a hammer and cutting pulpwood with a chain saw. But I was willing to do all that in order to have the scattered afternoons and weekends to write."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/books/larry-brown-on-fire-firefighting-memoir.html

Comments

  1. Dan WeeseJune 9, 2017 at 11:41 AM

    Erm... whut? It's J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy which annoys me. I can't remember saying anything about Larry Brown.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Drew McCarthyJune 9, 2017 at 11:45 AM

    plus.google.com - They say we need to learn to talk to each other. They say we need to bridge t...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dan WeeseJune 9, 2017 at 12:00 PM

    Drew McCarthy Oh, yeah. Him too. Poverty porn. Alcoholics and abusers in some godforsaken clearing in the piney woods, Erskine Caldwell kinda defined those people.

    Well, sure, we're picturesque folk, some sort of anthropological freak show. Come 'n visit, spend some of your hard earned money, get a gallon of moonshine, pay no attention to the Made in China label on the bottom of the jug, the interior contains home-distilled crazy from the Murkan Heartland. We drink it out of old plastic milk jugs ourselves, but we understand you guys want authenticity.

    “I love the way the lights are set up on the side of the road at a wreck and I love the way the Hurst Tool opens with its incredible strength and I love the way it crushes the roof posts of a car and I love the way you can nudge it into the hinges of a door and pop the pins off and let the door fall and reach in to see your patient’s legs and what position they are in.”

    Well isn't that a treat.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Drew McCarthyJune 9, 2017 at 12:55 PM

    Heh. Well, what about Tim O'Brien? Raymond Carver? Robert Olmstead?

    I sometimes like to read folks who write stories about the grotesquerie of hard living people, with some blend of poetry and verisimilitude. I also enjoy Police Procedurals, Westerns, and Space Opera from time to time, so my tastes may not be refined enough.

    ReplyDelete

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