Words on a Page

As a matter of record, here is a list of my goals for 2010:  writing an average of 7000 words per month, complete 1st draft of novel; attend University of Chichester’s Research in Progress conference, 15 May, and present paper ‘Voices of the American West: Striving for Authenticity’; attend University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Studies in Literature Annual Postgraduate Symposium, 21 May, and present paper ‘Identity in Western American Literature’; make a research presentation at the Postgraduate Forum at Uni of Chichester; gather critical sources; complete outline of dissertation; review Sherman Alexie’s next book, Fire with Fire , due out in autumn; submit paper to Western American Literature journal; apply for research travel grant from British Association for American Studies in autumn.

It's been a full year since I started down the PhD road and at times it doesn't feel like I've gotten very far at all. To be honest, I've only been officially on the MPhil/PhD programme since mid-October. The preceding ten months were spent on University of Chichester's Probationer's Scheme, a sort of feeder road leading to the PhD highway, filling out applications, applying for funding, applying for more funding, building my 'writing profile', attending conferences and doing preliminary research into my subject. Lordy, I've filled out a lot of forms this year... Here's a list of what I've actually done this past year: completed a 7,000-word Literature Review of fiction, historical texts and theoretical works pertaining to my research; finalised my research proposal; applied for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (a three-month long process which was highly stressful yet ultimately unsuccessful); attended three confe...

Have just received an email from the good folks at Moonlight Mesa to say that 'The Difference Between Cowboys and Clowns' was named as one of four runners-up in their 1st annual Cowboy Up Short Story Contest, just missing out on a piece of the prize money... The story came out of the 1st round of the 2009 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge in which competitors are assigned a genre and subject and given one week to come up with a 2500-word story. I was horrified to receive the genre of 'Romantic Comedy' and the story remains the one and only example of this genre in my portfolio. Shockingly, it's proved quite successful, as it was also a finalist in the NYC Challenge. Perhaps I should give up my pretensions of writing 'literary fiction'? NYC Midnight run a number of competitions throughout the year, and their SS Challenge is a good way for writers to step out of their comfort zone and attempt something entirely different. Here's a link for more inform...

My romantic rodeo romp 'The Difference Between Cowboys and Clowns' has just been named as a Semi-Finalist in Moonlight Mesa's short story contest: http://www.moonlightmesaassociates.com/ .

For the purposes of this review I have divided my research into four main categories: historical data surrounding the Lewis and Clark expedition and the life of William Clark’s Nez Perce son, Tzi-Kal-Tza; personal identity in the writing of Native American authors; the use of landscape in literature of the American West; and the acquisition of authority. Historical Data Since its completion in September 1806, numerous books have been written about the explorations of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery , almost all of them based on the diaries of the two Captains and four of their enlisted men. Sergeants Charles Floyd, Patrick Gass and John Ordway, along with Private Joseph Whitehouse all kept journals during the expedition’s two-and-a-half years. The first complete record of the expedition to reach the public was the journal of Sergeant Patrick Gass, published in 1807. As Gass was relatively uneducated and his literary skills limited, his work was heavily edited for publication ...

Real and Perceived Risks I think there is always going to be an element of ‘riskiness’ in historical fiction simply because we are taking material considered to be ‘factual’ and reshaping it to fit our purposes. Readers knowledgeable about the historical details I include in my novel are bound to be critical if those details are not presented accurately, and readers more engaged with the fiction will be critical if the plot reads like an academic treatise. But historical fiction is fiction at the end of the day, albeit a form which demands authenticity. The key, then, is to be meticulous in my research. Perhaps the greatest challenge I face, however, is one which is self-imposed. At the centre of my novel is an historical personage about whom very little is known – Halahtookit, the Nez Perce son of the explorer William Clark – and my original aim was to present one strand of the narrative from his point of view. Many fiction writers would rejoice at such a find – an intriguing ‘charact...

A big 'thank you' to Ian Kampel at the Synergise.com for publishind my article on cycling across the United States. You can access the artlcle here .

Continuing on with my earlier discussion on The Toughest Indian in the World... As in the title story, the darkly comic ‘South by Southwest’ explores the idea of homosexuality between two outwardly heterosexual men. In a subversion of the outlaw narrative, the protagonist, Seymour, steals a gun and holds up the International House of Pancakes in Spokane, Washington. The narrator tells us that Seymour is a white man – adding in an aside that he is ‘therefore...allowed to be romantic’ (p. 57). He wants to be known as a ‘Gentleman Bandit’ and because these are ‘depressed times’ takes just one dollar from each of the customers in the restaurant (p. 58). Seymour is play-acting at being a tough criminal, going through the motions of intimidating his victims, while at the same time encouraging the cooks to continue cooking because ‘everybody is still going to be hungry’ when he’s finished with the robbery (p. 57).

I was not a happy reader as a child, and though my mother tried to instil in me her love of literature, it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I first read a book from cover to cover. That book was John Steinbeck’s autobiographical account of exploring the United States, Travels with Charley . From that moment, I was hooked: hooked on Steinbeck, hooked on exploring other worlds through books, and hooked on the written word. Having grown up in the United States, I was drawn to American writers like Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner, writers who interpreted the world I saw around me. Like Steinbeck, they expressed a keen awareness of landscape and an understanding of what it is to be human. Through their books I came to realise that I was not alone in the world. Through them, I discovered that there were people out there who thought as I did and felt as I did. That is the magic of books: they have the ability to reach inside us and connect with the very essence of who we are. In 1982, the year ...

‘Indianness’ is a central theme in Alexie’s work and race is a concern shared by all of his characters (with the exception, perhaps, of Robert Johnson in Reservation Blues ). The reader is never allowed to forget the race of the characters nor encouraged to identify with them simply as people. Skin, hair and eye-colour are frequently used as defining features. References to race are so frequent in Alexie’s stories that I carried out a brief survey, selecting forty pages at random, from four of his books – two novels, Reservation Blues (1995) and Flight (2007), and two collections of short stories - Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and The Toughest Indian in the World (2001). I counted all direct references to race (ie Indian, White, Black) including tribal affiliation (Lakota, Spokane, Flathead), blood quantum (half-blood, quarter-blood), and slang (breed, skins, redskins). I did not, though, include other Indian identifiers (braids, tipis, warriors, blue eyes)....

As a punctuation pedant, it always takes me a while to get into the swing of Cormac McCarthy novels, but I'm always glad when I can remove my teacherly hat and get sucked into the story. I found this one very moving, probably in part due to its stark simplicity. The relationship between the man and his son is beautifully portrayed and utterly tender. McCarthy is not a one-trick-pony; all of his books are different - always dark, but still always different. Which is possibly why the punctuation thing nags at me. I'm not sure why he's chosen to write this way. Yes, it represents a kind of bleakness, which he's famous for, but still it seems unnecessary. He does not need a gimmick like this to set himself apart from other writers. His stories do that for him. And it makes it really difficult to insist that my students use correct punctuation...

Published in 1968, Outer Dark , is McCarthy's second novel. The black and pessimistic view of human nature, McCarthy's trademark, is there, and themes which emerge in later books are touched upon. There are, however, some fairly rudimentary issues which kept me from being fully engaged with this book. For some reason McCarthy likes his characters to be as anonymous as possible, seldom referring to them by name. This, and the fact that he does not give us much in the way of physical description, made it very hard for me to picture Rinthy and Culla Holme and to care about them as people. Sure, we know that they live in the bleakest of circumstances (that’s pretty much a given for McCarthy’s characters) and that they are impoverished on all levels, but it is not until nearly half-way through the book that we learn the age of Rinthy. This matters. I do not necessarily need to know that Rinthy is nineteen years old, but it would have helped tremendously when trying to form an image ...

As can be said of all Cormac McCarthy novels, Blood Meridian is not for the faint-hearted. At its centre is 'the kid', a fourteen-year-old boy, sucked into a mercenary band of scalp hunters who rove the south-west frontier of 1849. As they drift from one bloody massacre to another, a hellish world unfolds. There is little plot in this novel - the action is, for the most part episodic - and the omniscient narrator remains detached to the point that we never get inside the heads of the characters. This makes them feel two-dimensional and cliché in their bloodlust and I know that I've seen them all before – the psychotic murderers, the crooked lawmen, the Indian accomplices dressed in ill-fitting morning coats – and because of the narrative distance, I learn nothing new about any of them. The narrator also has an amoral and objective tone: we are never asked to make judgments about or join in the depravity, but merely to be a witness. We do, however, get the sense early on th...

This is a link the Synergise website which has just published an article I wrote about a visit to Malindi, Kenya. If you would like to have a look, please click here .

On 23rd May, I attended the Playful Paradox conference at the University of Bedfordshire and presented a paper discussing my research into the journals kept during the Lewis and Clark expedition. There are many gaps in these diaries, some of which I suspect are deliberate, and I find myself becoming increasingly skeptical about historical 'facts'. Here is a link to my paper, The Paradox of Historical Fiction: Finding Truth in the Absence of Fact . All of this year's conference papers can be found here .

Thank you, Sam, at hackwriters for including this piece on your website. http://www.hackwriters.com/Westron3.htm

Thanks to Sam North, editor of Hackwriters, for publishing this article. http://www.hackwriters.com/lions2.htm