Yiyun Li

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My writing groups have been reading the work of the Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li since last fall — her two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and her short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy Emerald Girl.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li

Last Saturday, we got to spend a good part of the day with Li, listening to her talk about her work. Fred Shafer teaches these amazing classes, and this is the third writer I have studied with these groups — the others were Kate Walbert and Colm Toibin. I have learned so much from reading all of them, and it has been a real joy to hear them talk about writing.

Li recently won the Sunday Times of London EFG Short Story Award for “A Sheltered Woman,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. The prize is £30,000, the world’s richest for a single short story. Li was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. Here is a passage from her story “The Princess of Nebraska”:

 He looked up at her, and she saw a strange light in his eyes. They reminded her of a wounded sparrow she had once kept during a cold Mongolian winter. Sparrows were an obstinate species that would never eat and drink once they were caged, her mother told her. Sasha did not believe it. She locked up the bird for days, and it kept bumping into the cage until its head started to go bald. Still she refused to release it, mesmerized by its eyes, wild but helplessly tender, too. She nudged the little bowl of soaked millet closer to the sparrow, but the bird was blind to her hospitality. Cheap birds, a neighbor told her; only cheap birds would be so stubborn. Have a canary, the neighbor said, and she would be singing for you every morning by now.

Photo Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Wikimedia Commons

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Aunt Marian, a dame and a writer

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One thing I love about the Internet is the way new information sometimes bubbles up from sources that have lain quietly for decades and then are suddenly digitized. My mother’s sister’s name, Marian O’Hearn, popped up recently in a context I had never seen it in before.

Another Girl's BrandI never met Aunt Marian — she was a lot older than my mom, and I am the youngest in my family — but I knew she earned her living as a writer at a time when that was rare for a woman. She wrote for Rangeland Romances and other pulp magazines, and was a minor figure among the pioneering female noir writers.

But now it turns out Aunt Marian was also a “sporting editor” for the Denver Express newspaper, which was around from 1906 to 1926. Her “pithy comments on matters fistic, baseball, football and athletics in general appear under her writing name of Judy O’Hearn,” according to an item in a 1918 publication of Editor & Publisher. That seems amazing to me, given the times.

Everybody in my mom’s poor, immigrant family in north Denver, Colorado, wanted to be a writer, but Marian actually did it. Mom was a terrific writer, but she never published much. She was always sniffy about Aunt Marian’s work in western pulps, but I thought she might have been a little jealous, too. If she knew you could buy one of Aunt Marian’s stories on iTunes today, like “Another Girl’s Brand,” pictured here, I think Mom would be very jealous indeed.

Aunt Marian was born in western Massachusetts, probably Williamstown. I’m not sure when. The family moved to Denver before my mom, Eileen O’Hearn, the youngest of seven children, was born in 1911. One of Mom’s  brothers, Charles O’Hearn, was dangerously asthmatic, and doctors at the time often prescribed the dry Colorado climate for lung diseases.

I should say, we have long generations in my family. If you get a few forebears having children into their 40s, and you happen to be at the tail end of the family yourself, in no time you get a long telescope of living memory going back into some interesting history.

“Marian O’Hearn” is sometimes listed as a pseudonym for a writer named “Anita Allen.” I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe one of these days the Internet will kick up some more information that will clear up that mystery.

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Alice Munro’s stories ring the bell

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It’s pretty terrific that the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, because she is a wonderful writer. The Nobel committee called her “master of the contemporary short story,” and a number of well-regarded writers responded to the news with glee.

Alice MunroIn The New Yorker, James Wood called the choice “deliriously incredible.” Wood wrote, “…Many of Munro’s readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like…. We were wrong, and for once it was wonderful to be wrong.”

Margaret Atwood, who might reasonably have hoped she would be the Canadian woman who would win the world’s most prestigious literary award, wrote a true and generous appreciation of Munro’s work in The Guardian.

“The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro,” Atwood wrote:

“Munro found herself referred to as ‘some housewife,’ and was told that her subject matter, being too ‘domestic,’ was boring. A male writer told her she wrote good stories, but he wouldn’t want to sleep with her. ‘Nobody invited him,’ said Munro tartly.”

The 82-year-old writer recently announced that she will retire, that her recent collection, Dear Life, will be her last. Here is a link to “Amundsen,” a story from that collection from The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have run. If this is your first taste of Munro’s work, you are in for a treat.

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The Finkbeiner test

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Longtime science writer Ann Finkbeiner wrote a terrific piece this year swearing off writing patronizing articles about female scientists, and it has been boiled down into what is being called “the Finkbeiner test.”

Finkbeiner advanced her manifesto in January in an article titled “What I’m Not Going to Do” on the blog The Last Word on Nothing*.

In March, Christie Aschwanden distilled Finkbeiner’s piece into a seven-point checklist on DoubleXScience, an online science magazine for women:

“To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention

  • The fact that she’s a woman
  • Her husband’s job
  • Her child care arrangements
  • How she nurtures her underlings
  • How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
  • How she’s such a role model for other women
  • How she’s the ‘first woman to…’

“Here’s another trick,” Aschwanden writes. “Take the things that are said about a female subject and flip them around as if they were said about a male. If they sound ridiculous, then chances are good they have no business in the story.”

I think it’s all about context. If you’re writing a breezy lifestyle story (or maybe even an obituary), the personal stuff is OK. But if you are writing essentially about your subject’s work, the Finkbeiner test should be pressed into service.

*“Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing” – Victor Hugo

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