Lamar Herrin Discusses His Latest Novel, Fractures

Lamar Herrin, author 

In this interview Lamar Herrin discusses his book Fractures, a novel in which he explores the conflicts that develop between the members of the family of a landowner when a natural gas company plans to do some hydrofracking in their fields.

Lamar Herrin is a distinguished author and educator. He has published five novels, most recently, House of the Deaf, and one memoir, Romancing Spain.  Stories of his have appeared in Harper's, Epoch, The New Yorker, and in The Paris Review, which awarded him its Aga Kahn fiction prize.  From 1977 until 2006 he taught literature and creative writing at Cornell University, for ten of those years serving as director of the Creative Writing Program. Students of his have included Lorrie Moore, Stewart O'Nan, Susan Choi, Junot Diaz, Melissa Bank, Phil Gourevitch, and Philipp Meyer.

OE: Your last two books, House of the Deaf and Romancing Spain, were set in Spain. Fractures takes place in the northeastern United States. What was it that brought your literary interests back to America?

LH:  The story did.  Looking back, I think it's fair to say that Fractures came into being when I walked into the Susquehanna court house in Montrose, PA and saw desks lined up the length of the main hall.  The policeman on duty there told me they'd had to put out those desks to accommodate the many landowners coming in to check on the titles of their parcels of land once the gas drilling boom had hit there.  He also told me that family members were vying with other family members to see which parcel of land belonged to whom.  It's that line of desks I see and it's those family members I imagine seated there trying to decide whether to drill or not when I think of the beginning of Fractures.  And it's Pennsylvania and New York State.  But it's true—I almost never write about the place I happen to be writing in.  "Place" is important in my fiction (and very much in my life).  If I can be writing in Ithaca, New York and living through my fiction in Spain or the American Midwest or South, it's as though I'm keeping those distant parts of the world alive, preserving them, really living in two or three places at once since, as most writers of fiction know, you live just as intensely (or more) in the world of your imagination as the world you happen to be writing in.

OE: I have been to Montrose, Pa. several times. It is a nice little town, a bit out of the way, and not exactly on the route to anywhere. Did you go there specifically looking for a story about the natural gas drilling? If yes, what caused you to become interested in the topic?

LH:  No, I didn't go to Montrose (or to the Susquehanna County Court House) "looking for a story" about the gas drilling, but I did go because there was so much talk about the drilling (much of it wildly exaggerated, I suspected) and what harm it could do to our community if it came north that I wanted to see for myself.  Dimock, seven or eight miles from Montrose, was in the news then for its contaminated wells, so I thought I would drive through there and then nose around a bit in Montrose, the county seat.  Like any concerned citizen, I was worried about the environmental price we were willing to pay for "energy independence," but I was also fascinated, almost metaphorically, by the little that I knew about the process.  Drill down a mile, say, and then out, horizontally, for perhaps another mile.  Down and out.  Plumb your depths and then swing wide.  And anybody you swung wide under was "compulsorily integrated" into your scheme of things, or you into theirs.  And that very narrow bed of shale you had to drill along through.  All of this spoke to my poetic imagination before I began to be alarmed and to draw the potentially dangerous conclusions.  But it wasn't long before I began to see it all as the context for a family drama.  So maybe the best way to put it is that I was playing an as yet unformulated hunch by driving down to Montrose and Dimock, PA.

OE: The concept of "family" is quite strong in House of the Deaf. and in several of your other novels. What made you conceive of Fractures as a family novel, rather than say an "environmental conflict," novel?

LH:  From my point of view it's fairly simple.  Drama is all about conflict, and conflict at the closest of quarters and in its richest vein can most often be found in families.  The emotions get compacted: love-hate, attraction-repulsion, allegiance-revolt, and so on.  The to-drill-or-not-to-drill question is complicated in its own right, and when studied in the context of family loyalties and disloyalties it can become very intense.  Fractures  is not a muckraking book.  I have my personal feelings about the folly or wisdom of hydrofracking, but what I was trying to do in this novel was "use" the controversy to reveal character in the context of a family, where a powerful emotion can double back on its opposite very quickly.  It's hard for me to understand how you could write a novel that wasn't about family. When I'm reading a novel and a character is introduced, I immediately wonder, yes, but who is his mother, who is his father?  Are there brothers and sisters and so on?  For a character to stand family-free a huge drama must have taken place some time before, and I want to know all about that.

OE: Can you give the readers a brief summary, without giving too much away, of the plot of Fractures? Also when will it be available in book stores.

LH:  I've never known a novelist who can "briefly summarize" his novel for the simple reason that as soon as he enters that field of fiction again, again he wants to flesh it out.  I can say that Fractures will be published by St. Martin's Press on November 12 and that it is about 320 pages long.  It is told in the past tense in the third person from eight, but principally from five, points of view.  These points of view correspond to the members of the Joyner family, chief among them Frank Joyner, a sixty year old retired architect on whose shoulders (and conscience) rests the decision of whether to permit drilling (to "frack") the family field or not. This field is located in a region in an unnamed northeastern state, but which will quickly be identifiable as New York State and the region as the Finger Lakes. There are two other point of view characters, both of them outside the family but who in some ways aspire to be in. There's a bullying ex-brother-in-law of Frank Joyner, a criminal lawyer from New York City, and there's a Texas roughneck become gas company landman, who falls in love with Frank Joyner's daughter.  And I could go on—and on.  All of these characters have a voice, and not one of them is free of doubts as to what the final decision should be.  The only constant is the land.  The novel goes down and the novel goes out, following the trajectory of the drilling itself.  In many ways it illustrates the drilling refrain: Plumb deep and then swing wide.  Compulsory integration.

*  *  *

Fractures was published by St. Martin.s Press in November of 2013, and can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through Independent Book Stores.  ($19.35 hardcover; $11.04 Kindle.)  On Lamar’s website  www.lamarherrin.com. Under the heading "New Work" he makes some additional comments about the book and then includes boxes you can click on to order.  Under "Contact" you can find Lamar’s email address.  Please feel free to email him with any comments you might have about the book or the subject matter.  Lamar Herrin would like very much to hear from you. 

*  *  *

   

---

Scholarly Work Online

Proposal Seeks to Safeguard Publishing Prospects of Scholars Forced to Put Work Online

Academic historians are grappling with a very modern dilemma: how to balance the benefits of making research findings widely accessible online with the need to protect the career prospects of young scholars for whom that research represents years of hard work and sacrifice.
The American Historical Association is calling on universities to adopt new policies giving students the option of embargoing their dissertations for up to six years. In a recent statement, the AHA described the Catch-22 created by the current system.

“Because many universities no longer keep hard copies of dissertations deposited in their libraries, more and more institutions are requiring that all successfully defended dissertations be posted online, so that they are free and accessible to anyone who wants to read them.  At the same time, however, an increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources.”

And, the AHA points out, “the book is the measure of scholarly competence used by tenure committees.”
Open access advocates counter that the real problem isn’t the availability of information but university practices that penalize scholars who have their work shared online. A New York Times story quoted the head of a leading open access organization:

 “The idea of locking up ideas for six years is not right,” said Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which favors open research. “The thing that bothered us the most is that it was a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional issue, and a missed opportunity.”

The Times piece told the story of Yale graduate student Michael Hattem, who supports letting students embargo their dissertations. In a blog post, Hattem elaborated on what’s at stake for him and his other peers.

An embargo is not about keeping research, dissertations, or knowledge permanently unavailable; it is about giving students the ability to protect their own professional interests in a situation that did not exist for previous generations of academic historians. And that need only increases as the job market continues its downward spiral.

There’s no consensus on just how much putting information online devalues it in the eyes of publishers. In 2011, College & Research Libraries conducted a survey of academic journals and university presses to put hard numbers behind the anecdotal concerns expressed by students and their advisors.
Among university presses, while only 7.3% of respondents would not consider a manuscript derived from a dissertation openly available online, 26.8 % said they would only consider the manuscript if it had been substantially revised from what was posted and 43.9% said it operated on a case-by-case basis. The percentage who said such manuscripts are always welcome: 9.8%.
Scholars who’ve put their dissertations online have better odds submitting to academic journals; 65.7% of journal editors said such manuscripts are always welcome.
Highlighting another pitfall of putting dissertations out there for anyone to see, UC Berkley history professor Maureen Miller wrote in a letter to the Times about the threat of plagiarism locally and oversees.

“History dissertations include citations to archival discoveries. These finds are an original contribution to knowledge and are not only what academic publishers seek, but also the “commodity” that allows a young historian a career in the field…If their universities put their dissertations online, what’s to stop someone who lives closer to those archives from taking those hard-won citations, adding a few more and publishing the ideas under his or her name?

“What’s to stop a scholar in Asia or Europe, under pressure now to publish in English, from copying a chapter and publishing it under his own name?”

With the 2013-14 academic year set to begin in less than three weeks, the controversy over forcing scholars to post their work online is poised to heat up.

This article provided by The Authors Guild, 31 E. 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016

*  *  *

CHIAROSCURO




A Jeanne Mackin arrangement, photo by Stephen Poleskie

  an essay by

Jeanne Mackin

Wherever chiaroscuro enters, colour must lose some of its brilliancy. There is no shade in a rainbow, nor in an opal, nor in a piece of mother-of-pearl – John Ruskin

LIGHT CAN BE SLOWED DOWN, can be made to reconsider its own path, its own desire for velocity. When light passes through glass, moving from thin air to that other more substantial material, it slows and makes a slight detour we call refraction. Refraction is matter’s way of saying: “Let’s rethink this.” Shine light through a diamond and it slows its speed by almost half because of the density of the crystal. If you lived inside a diamond, you would be twenty-five when your peers were fifty; you would live twice as long, and twice as slowly.

That Thanksgiving Day it was warm, and humid, so after dinner we went outside, full of a strange energy. In the western sky over the new-growth forest, we saw a triple rainbow. A double happens once in a while, but there were three in the sky that day after the storm, one inside the other, and we looked at them, knowing we would never see such a thing again, no matter how long we lived. The rarity of it locked us into silence; we grappled with the event the way medieval star gazers must have contended with comets or halos around the moon, with wonder and fear as well. Wonder and fear refract our direction, bend it into new paths. The wonder takes hold of us and says “I have caught you. The fear says “I am going to change you whether you wish it or not. From now on, up will be down, and inside will be outside.” But wonder cannot last. Colors fade, especially in a rainbow.

After matter emerged from chaos, the first miracle was the creation of light, and with light came time. With time, came shadows. When the triple rainbow began to fade, we came to ourselves, the way sleepers awake, slowly and with confusion. We went back indoors carrying new desires with us and I wished I had seen the triple rainbow when I was a child, not a grown up. I think somehow things would have been different. I cleared the table of our dirtied dishes and glasses and the vase of yellow garden mums.

*   *  *

JEANNE MACKIN is the author of several novels and has published short fiction and creative nonfiction in journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview. She was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and is an award-winning journalist. She teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

“Chiaroscuro” is an excerpt from a text to accompany photographs by artist Steve Poleskie. The text and photo exhibit, titled “Light and Shadow” was shown at Bright Hill Literary Center in Treadwell, New York, in June 2011.

Links:
www.jeannemackin.com
www.stephenpoleskie.com

*  *  *

Apple Leads Price Conspiracy

Judge Rules Apple Led Price Conspiracy, “Seizing the Moment” As Publishers Looked to Defy Amazon


U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has ruled against Apple in the Justice Department’s ebook price-fixing case, saying the tech company coordinated a scheme involving five major publishers that were looking for a way to challenge Amazon’s ebook pricing strategy. In a decision issued July 10, Cote said:

“The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy. Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the spring of 2010.”

Apple released a statement saying it plans to appeal the decision.

“Apple did not conspire to fix e-book pricing,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said. “When we introduced the iBookstore in 2010, we gave customers more choice, injecting much needed innovation and competition into the market, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

Cote also called for a trial on damages, noting that the conspiracy caused ebook prices to rise, resulting in some consumers paying more, buying a title other than the one they wanted or forgoing a purchase altogether.

The publishers named as defendants settled with the Justice Department long before the case went to court.During trial testimony publishing executives denied that they colluded and Apple officials said they didn’t know whether publishers were communicating amongst themselves on pricing. In her decision, Cote rejects those claims.

“Apple and the Publisher Defendants shared one overarching interest — that there be no price competition at the retail level.”

Cote goes on to say that:

“Apple seized the moment and brilliantly played its hand. Taking advantage of the Publisher Defendants’ fear of and frustration over Amazon’s pricing, as well as the tight window of opportunity created by the impending launch of the iPad on January 27 (the “Lauch”), Apple garnered the signatures it needed to introduce the iBookstore at the Launch. It provided the Publisher Defendants with the vision, the format, the timetable, and the coordination they needed to raise e-book prices.”

Information for this story was supplied by The Authors Guild, 31 E. 32nd Street, 7th floor. NY NY 10016.

*  *  *

How I Spent My Sunday



Terry shoveling in front of the barn

 flash fiction by Terry Mooney

You talkin' to ME? You talkin' to ME? You want to know how I spent my Sunday? No? Phooey on you,

I'm going to tell you anyway!

My friend's barn is at the base of a slight hill. When it rains, there is a stream of gushing water that pours through the barn and run-in. So, I am digging a water trench to divert the water to go to the side.

I am shoveling horse manure in a very hard torrential downpour and high winds, which lasted about 45 minutes! In my boxer shorts and crocks (the area is very secluded) so that I would have dry clothes for the drive home. And Tigere, the curious friesian, is following close by to make sure I did it right.

Not a pretty picture, but funny! We were laughing the whole time!

So, how was your Sunday?

*  *  *

Terry Mooney is a former Senior Computer Control Specialist for NASA's Kennedy Space Center who lives in Aiken, SC

photo by Sasha Thurmond

*  *  *

THE TURTLE TANK

A Short Story
by Thaddeus Rutkowski



THE  TURTLE TANK CAME into our apartment while I was away. Along with the tank came a turtle—a mature red-eared slider. My wife and daughter bought the tank while I was on a short trip. Maybe they didn’t want me to stop them.

We all knew our daughter needed a pet, but I’d put my foot down about a cat. Our place was too small for a cat, I believed. But not for a turtle, at least in my wife’s and daughter’s opinion. When I came back from my trip, I was surprised by the sight of the aquarium, with its sun lamp shining and its air pump bubbling. In it was the turtle, treading water. It was a big animal, for its species. My wife and daughter had gotten the reptile free of charge because someone had abandoned it.

Of course, no one except for the turtle had any use for the tank. It—or I should say she—swam in it, ate in it and slept in it, until she had to lay eggs. When the time came, she would climb out of the tank and fall to the floor. It was a long way down, and I worried that she’d crack her shell. But I was never able to catch her—she fell so fast.

Somehow, if she landed on her back, she could wave her legs until she got traction and right herself. She would then look for a soft place, maybe among clothes on the floor, where she could dig a shallow pit for her eggs. She would scratch and knead with her hind feet. But the floor was hard, and no amount of scraping would dent it. Giving up, she would look for a window to escape through. She knew where the windows were, but she didn’t know how to climb to them. She was a turtle, after all.

The idea at this point was not to push her with my foot, that is, not to kick her. The temptation was there, however, because she was low to the ground. I didn’t want her in my clothes, or in my bedroom for that matter, so I wanted to nudge her out with my foot, then shut the door so she couldn’t get back in. But if I were caught by my wife and daughter while I was pushing with my foot, I would hear some screaming—some accusations of animal abuse. So I would bend down and pick up the turtle by her shell. If I were gentle, she would not panic and scratch me with her back claws, which were sharp, for digging.

It would usually take a week or two of her escaping the tank before she found an egg-laying place. Usually, it was not a good place. It was the hardwood floor, or the ceramic tiles in the bathroom. She would deposit eight to 10 eggs there. Some of the eggs would remain whole and perfect. Others she would step on and smash. Whether she meant to destroy them was not known, at least to us, her caregivers.

The tank stayed where it was, on top of a cabinet in the living room, until it was replaced by a bigger tank—one the turtle, named Mystic, might not be able to climb out of. But as it turned out, she could get out of the larger tank when she wanted to—or when she needed to. She quit the tank whenever it was time to lay eggs. Precisely when that time would come was the question, one that required mystical knowledge to answer. None of us could say.

*  *  *

Thadeus  Rutkowski is the author of the innovative novels Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. He teaches literature as an adjunct at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and fiction writing at the Writers Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan.

Thaddeus Rutkowski web site

I Say Stylist and Head for the Hills

An excerpt from the essay The Backlash Against the Novel

by Paul West

WHAT  IS THIS FICTION we are talking about? Surely nothing to do with best sellers and/or pulp “page-turners” or the old Dodd-Mead formula of one crisis every ten pages. No, it had to do with those deplored matters: formalism, interiority, the presumably ineffable unspoken, textural and plotly experiment, and structures flinched from the other arts. In my tousled head I carried a short list of practitioners, some of whom I knew: Barth, Coover, Davenport, Gass, Hawkes, Markson, Morrow, Sebald, Vernon, Hugh Nissenson, Poleskie, Joanna Scott, Jeanne Mackin, Janet Frame the New Zealander and Delia Falconer the Australian, plus James Hamilton Patterson, (Gerontion) and Michael Brodsky, a true heir of Beckett, and Claudio Magris, a picaresque heir of Svevo. There are others who will not now forgive me. I have trouble with the phrase “post-modern,” which always struck me as post-Renaissance, so I am aware of having flinched some post-modernists from that moldy ragbag. Asked to describe myself, I say “stylist” and head for the hills.

* * *

PAUL WEST is the author of 50 books. He has received awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Prize for Fiction and the Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. He was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. He has also been a runner-up for the National Book Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* * *