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 Short Story Month Q&A: Mark Anthony JarmanThe poets received all the attention last month, so once again, The Afterword is taking the month of May to celebrate short fiction. In this series of Q&As, we've asked short fiction writers - both emerging and established - to opine on the form. Here, Mark Anthony Jarman:  Q: What are the biggest challenges of keeping a short story short?A: The great story writer Barry Hannah taught me at the Iowa Writers Workshop; he very recently died and his obit quoted him as saying he was calibrated to the short burst. I like that line and feel the same way. The challenge is making a story compelling or worthwhile rather than the length. I love postcard stories; they are very short and hard to do right, but I also tend to write rambling longer pieces that have more depth. The story is the perfect form as it accommodates a lot of variety. Q: Do your stories begin with a character, a setting, a plot, or something else entirely?A:
Each story is a different case. I often start with an image or scene. A new story, shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, uses street scenes I saw in Italy. My story in Darwin's Bastards is set on the moon, which I found very liberating; it was fun.Q: If you could take a writing
class with any short fiction writer, dead or alive, who would it be and
why? And further, what would you hope the first lecture would be called?A:
I'd be interested in a class with Flannery O'Connor; her talk would be How to Train a Chicken To Walk Backward. I'd also be happy to be in a class with Alice Munro or John Cheever or Denis Johnson or Isaac Babel. Another good talk would be How to Not be Jealous of Other Writers. Q: Is there a short story you would consider to be perfectly crafted?A:
Elizabeth Tallent's "No One's a Mystery" is very tight, but I also like Barry Hannah's "Testimony of Pilot," William Trevor's "Beyond the Pale," Cheever's "The Country Husband," Denis Johnson's "Emergency." There are so many good ones. Q: William Faulker prioritized writing forms
thusly: "Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he
can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form
after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel
writing." Do you agree or disagree, and why? A: I think all the forms pose different challenges. I tease the poets I know that you can whip off a poem before breakfast. I find novels cumbersome. I'm happiest when working away in the rather tight space of a story. It's the best form.o Mark Anthony Jarman has published three books of short stories. His fiction have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Western Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the O. Henry Prize. One of his short stories appears in the new anthology Darwin's Bastards (D+M).
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 Steven Heighton: Hooked on esthetic riskSteven Heighton is the author of twelve books, including two this spring - the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). Heighton will be guest editing The Afterword this week.  In 2005 I published a novel, Afterlands, and then, after a brief creative convalescence, caught a wave of writerly energy that lasted almost four years before breaking. It was the most productive period I've ever enjoyed and--though I remain hopeful--I know enough about the writing life to doubt that it will recur anytime soon. I know too that if I conform to statistical and actuarial averages, I may soon start losing energy, creative and otherwise, as well as contracting that well-known ailment of writers entering middle age, repetitive story syndrome--the disease of repeating oneself, book after book. My wish to avoid self-plagiarism is probably one of the things driving me to write more and more from the perspective of women, especially in the short stories I've been working on, concurrently with a novel and poetry, over the last four years. The creative d
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 Buy It or Skip It? Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the WorldBy Gary Indiana Basic Books175pp, $27.95Gary Indiana, an American polymath and conjurer of nifty aphorisms, has written a book about Andy Warhol and the 32 paintings -- each entitled Campbell's Soup Can -- that comprised his first solo exhibition in 1962. These, Indiana says, "were the first shots of a total revolution in American culture." Here was the sly joke of an art that treated cheap commercial products with the reverence usually assigned to portraiture; the elision of high and low art -- at a brush stroke. These soup cans were painstakingly executed in a traditional medium (oil) yet had no discernible character in the way traditional painting has, "no aura", no meaning. If you elevate surface over content, as Warhol did with his cans (and his Marilyns and his Lizs), then your work is only skin deep and boredom a natural response. Yes, life is boring, says Warhol: face it. During his impoverished childhood he had to eat Campbell's soup every day and he found it so dull he never touched it again. Indiana likes Warhol, and thinks he was a genius, but his book feels most exciting when he expounds on Warhol's dark side and how his importance was not necessarily a good thing. Importance connotes the baleful as well as the salubrious. Serena Davies, The Daily Telegraph Buy it
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 Short Story Month Q&A: Peter CareyThe poets received all the attention last month, so once again, The Afterword is taking the month of May to celebrate short fiction. In this series of Q&As, we've asked short fiction writers - both emerging and established - to opine on the form. Here, Peter Carey:
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 Steven Heighton: Juggling genresSteven Heighton is the author of twelve books, including two this spring - the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). Heighton is guest editing The Afterword this week.
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 Short Story Month Q&A: Jessica GrantThe poets received all the attention last month, so once again, The Afterword is taking the month of May to celebrate short fiction. In this series of Q&As, we've asked short fiction writers - both emerging and established - to opine on the form.  Here, Jessica Grant:Q: What are the biggest challenges of keeping a short story short?A: Letting blind spots be blind spots. Avoiding the temptation to fill them in. This applies to longer works too.Q: Do your stories begin with a character, a setting, a plot, or something else entirely?A: This can vary. Usually, though, it's a what-if idea. What if a ski jumper took off and never landed. What if you were a cow and you grazed your entire life on a very steep hill. What if we'd gone the way of pneumatic tubes instead of the internet. Q: If you could take a writing class with any short fiction writer, dead or alive, who would it be and why? And further, what would you hope the first lecture would be called?A: I notice you said writing, not creative writing, so does that mean I can take a class in grammar, because I could really use an intensive course in grammar. If I could take a course in grammar from any writer, that writer would be David Foster Wallace. The first lecture would be called The Imperfect, because what is this tense? Q: Is there a short story you would consider to be perfectly crafted?A: "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Tolstoy. Q: William Faulkner prioritized writing forms thusly: "Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing." Do you agree or disagree, and why?A: I disagree. I suspect Faulkner is having us on. No way could writing "A Rose for Emily" have been more demanding than writing Absalom, Absalom! Not even twenty Roses for Emilies could be that demanding. But anyway, we shouldn't be ranking genres. We shouldn't be taking sides. You don't have to be against novels if you love short stories or poems. Jessica Grant's first collection of short stories, Making Light of Tragedy, includes a story that won both the Western Magazine Award for Fiction and the Journey Prize. Her debut novel, Come, Thou Tortoise won the Amazon First Novel Prize and was voted by our readers as the winner of the 2010 Canada Also Reads competition.
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 Buy It or Skip It? Savage Lands Savage LandsBy Clare Clark Houghton Mifflin Harcourt416 pp.; $31.50The devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was sadly nothing new for Louisiana, as Clare Clark's third -- and Orange Prize longlisted -- novel amply shows. In the early 18th century, when the village of Mobile was part of a burgeoning French colony, its immigrant inhabitants had to endure not only flooding and hurricanes, but famine, corruption, the English, illness and, above all, the native "savages." Clark has an academic background in history, so the extremes of colonial life play to her strengths. As a novel, however, the book is less successful. You never really feel the central character's oft-cited passion for her devious husband, certainly not in the way Clark makes you feel the bite of the mosquito or the oppressive humidity. This points to the novel's principal flaw, which is that the most exquisitely realized character is Louisiana itself. In comparison, the protagonist, Elisabeth, is hard to warm to, despite her history of failed pregnancies. This is not a novel for tokophobics (women afraid of childbirth), since there are miscarriages aplenty. The good news is there is only one scalping. Lucy Beresford, The Sunday Telegraph Wait for the paperback
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 Short Story Month Q&A: Colum McCannThe poets received all the attention last month, so once again, The Afterword is taking the month of May to celebrate short fiction. In this series of Q&As, we've asked short fiction writers - both emerging and established - to opine on the form.  Here, Colum McCann:Q: What are the biggest challenges of keeping a short story short?A: Stories, for me, find their own natural length. If you try to stretch them too far they'll snap back in an elastic way, or they'll fling themselves across the classroom, like that old schoolboy trick of firing an elastic band across the room. I like to think of stories as contained universes. Short stories are fierce, tight, imploding universes where every word matters. Novels are exploding universes, sending off their shrapnel in several different directions. Neither one is more valid than the other. A great short story will last as long as a novel -- and sometimes longer, since they tend to get anthologised, and have a life outside a collection. Q: Do your stories begin with a character, a setting, a plot, or something else entirely? A: I tend to begin with an image. The image then suggests the voice and the landscape. In other words the image finds the language and then the language tends to take care of everything else. It's dangerous to wrap a short story around an idea. If you're too wedded to an idea, or a theme, it tends to put a straitjacket on the language. I love short stories. I love their discipline and intent. But a novel should work as well as a story, and vice versa. Q: If you could take a writing class with any short fiction writer, dead or alive, who would it be and why? And further, what would you hope the first lecture would be called?A: Well, I teach at Hunter College in New York with Peter Carey and Nathan Englander and Claire Messud. I'd take classes from any of them in a heartbeat. And I'd take a class from Aleksandar Hemon, one of my favourite short story writers. There's other living writers I'd like to meet and ask them about their stories, Tobias Wolff and Stuart Dybek.And Edna O'Brien, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the list is endless. But for the ultimate experience I'd love to be in the ghost room where Joyce wrote "The Dead." I'd like to watch that story being written and rewritten, crafted and perfected, since it is, in my estimation, one of the most perfect stories ever written.That lecture, I suppose, would be called "How to be Alive in The Dead." Q: Is there a short story you would consider to be perfectly crafted? Well, "The Dead," as I mentioned. And Nathan Englander's "The Tumblers" in his collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a pretty much perfect short story. It's morally-driven, complex, profound and beautiful. Q: William Faulker prioritized writing forms thusly: "Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing." Do you agree or disagree, and why?A: Well I agree in the sense that all writing should aspire to poetry. Think of it this way -- when we have weddings, funerals, births, we look for poems to express what we feel. In that sense, poetry captures the moment. But I don't think that makes playwriting or journalism or story-telling the little stepchildren of literature. All sentences should aspire to say the perfect thing, perfectly. Colum McCann is the author of several books, including a book of short stories, Fishing The Sloe-Black River and Everything In This Country Must, a novella and two short stories. His most recent book is Let The Great World Spin, for which he won the 2009 National Book Award. He joins The Afterword for an event in Toronto tonight, at The Dominion on Queen at 7pm.
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 Yann Martel goes symphonic in MontrealBy Arthur Kaptainis, Montreal Gazette The musicians of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra were in concert dress as usual Tuesday night. But their music director, Kent Nagano, walked on the stage of Salle Wilfrid Pelletier in a barrister's robe, as did the actor Michel Dumont, seated stage right at a courtroom desk. And so began The Parole Hearing of Prometheus, a divertissement combining disused ballet music by Beethoven with a spoken text by Yann Martel. Trial-by-jury is not an original motif, but it got the piece up and running. Prometheus stood accused not simply of stealing fire and giving it to mankind but of enabling the despoliation of a planet the gods had been treating rather well. "Even Lord Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, says he does not need so much heat and fire," thundered Dumont the prosecutor in one of Martel's more inspired flights. As a defence we heard only music: the zesty Overture and four other numbers from the Prometheus score, most of them light and picturesque. Despite its earnest Al Gore undercurrent, this outing was mostly good fun, quite different from The General, the melange of Beethoven and Rom
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 Steven Heighton: A devil's dictionary for writersSteven Heighton is the author of twelve books, including two this spring - the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). Heighton is guest editing The Afterword this week. If God is in the details, the Devil is in the definitions AMBITIOUS: writer more successful than oneselfBUZZ: ignorant consensus of readers who have not yet read the book in question and for the most part never willCOMPLAINT: not actually a form of criticism, though often mistaken as such by reviewers FAILURE: phenomenon that allows writers to retain their friendsFRIENDSHIPS, OF YOUNG WRITERS: akin to the urgent, insecure alliances of small countries in times of warGOSSIP: weapon in the ancient, unconscious war waged by the group against the individual HIGH INFANT MORTALITY: problem endemic to literary novels, a low percentage of which survive their first two years LITERATURE: an education in complexity NEGATIVE CRITICISM: art of creating, out of an instinctive hostility towards work that tests or spurns one's vision, a calm, orderly argument Thus, NEGATIVE CRITIC: writer in the business of disguising a club-wielding caveman in civilized tweedPROMISING YOUNG WRITER: middle-aged writer whose work is finally gaining noticePROMISING YOUNGER WRITER: late middle-aged writer whose work is finally etc. ROYALTY: foreign celebrities who earn more in daily investment income than most writers earn in a lifetimeWRITER: someone trying to extend childhood--its exuberant creativity, its capacity for timeless absorption--all the way to death, thus bypassing adulthood altogether WRITER'S WRITER: one who lives at or below the poverty line
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 Steven Heighton: Underwritten by rageSteven Heighton is the author of twelve books, including two this spring - the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). Heighton will be guest editing The Afterword this week.  [A modern statue of the roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus in Sirmione. Credit: Schorle]About twenty years ago, when for a brief period I was subjected to a series of revenge poems, I came up with a pious, self-justifying axiom about poetry of that kind. I don't remember the axiom and I'm sure it's best forgotten but the gist of it was this: anger and hatred could never give rise to authentic poetry. Such poems were instead a form of propaganda, of special pleading--a prosodically encrypted form of schoolyard invective. But you don't have to look deep into the poetry of any period, or language, to find brilliant and lasting work underwritten by rage. Catullus and Horace both wrote revenge poems that still crackle on the page and induce synaptic fireworks after two millenia (Catullus: "Your nights will be as cold as his!/ How will that suit you for a life?/ Who'll come to see you then? Who/ flatter you on your looks, give you / what he gave you all the time, and / take you around, kiss you, / be your fan?"). Sir Thomas Wyatt follows suit--"But since that I so kindely am served/ I would fain know what she hath deserved"--as do many recent poets, though the reasons for their rage are more varied (as with Weldon Kees and his brilliantly bitter "For my Daughter," or Denise Levertov in "Life at War" and "What Were They Like"). The lesson I take from all this is that good poems, or at least good ones of the emotionally ample kind I prefer, feed off intense, unfakable energy--and the poems are indiscriminate in the sort of energy they parasitize. Biologists now tell us that life forms--at least at a microbial level--needn't all source energy directly or indirectly from the sun. Some live off elements spewing out of boiling-hot seafloor vents, out of reach of all solar fuel, while at least one recently-discovered microbe seems to subsist on the radioactivity of nuclear decay, thousands of metres underground. A poem is a life form that can feed off any number of fuels.If by now you've assumed that I've been writing some angry poems, you're right. What has happened, I think, is this: instead of just trying to understand "why bad things happen to good people," I've also become obsessed with figuring out why good things happen to bad people. I've been trying to write my way toward understanding. For a while it seemed I could only write first drafts through tears of rage--about Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson (the man who finally stopped Lt. Calley at My Lai, and died of cancer a few years ago, while Calley survives) and John Gallienne (the pedophile choirmaster whose predations probably led to the suicides of two of his victims, who served a brief sentence in minimum security, and who was then re-assumed into the bosom of the Anglican community in Ottawa--but who has, in an interesting karmic boomerang probably arising from the Catholic church's current scandal, just been arrested again on a charge allegedly stemming from another incident twenty years ago).Robert Karen has written, "It is never too late to forgive. But you can forgive too soon. I am especially aware of what I call 'saintly forgiveness.' Premature forgiveness is common among people who avoid conflict. They're afraid of their own anger and the anger of others. But their forgiveness is false. Their anger goes underground."Some anger should not go underground but should, I think, be processed publicly. And poetry should remain a venue of such expression, in contradiction of the art's potential atrophy into a private, specialist exercise--a sort of secret handshake or gang-salute exchanged only among experts and initiates.
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 The Afterword Reading Society: Of the final spin RON: When I was reading Adelita's chapter, all I could think of, was how nice it was that Corrigan, long-suffering, saintly Corrigan, finally got some semblance of happiness. Yes it was brief, but it was nice for McCann to give him something. I also get a slight bit excited every time the tightrope walker gets mentioned in passing. It's an elegant little thread that I look for now that we're near the end of this book, like a hook in a really great song, or a visual motif in a painting. I also want to bring up Solomon's description of the walk, how Petit had made himself a statue, "but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past." Spot on.BRAD: This being the last panel for this book, I want to thank you all for contributing through the past months. The discussion was lively, informed and a pleasure to be a part of. That out of the way, let's wrap this up with your thoughts about the last book. Suddenly we've left 1974 and find ourselves in 2006. And here's another new voice. Tell me how this last chapter concludes the book for you as a reader. And, as you came up on the end of Let The Great World Spin, was there any character you thought didn't get enough play in the book? And which voice rang loudest as you closed the book for the last time?BENJAMIN: The last chapter did a nice job of tying up loose ends of the tightrope -- until the Katrina reference. As I said before, McCann is writing The Great American Novel about 9/11 and New York, which you'd think would be enough. Bringing in the hurricane here was as unnecessary was it was in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.JULIE: Thanks for having me, Brad. It was a pleasure to read this alongside our discussion. In the closing moments of Six Feet Under, I lost it when I realized that we'd be forced to watch the inevitable deaths of our beloved characters, but it's natural to want to know what happened, or what's to become, so this last chapter felt as if it had distilled generations of hardship, stumbles, and "spinning" into a hopeful, smart, young woman. That's just fine by me. In the penultimate chapter, I felt McCann was at his strongest with Gloria, the character who will stick with me most. "There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it." "Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present." And, "...everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected." In that, McCann succeeds in reminding the reader that we're none of us in this alone, yet we each have our own voice. In fact, we each have a responsibility to own our stories. "People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self." It's an awesome feat to undertake, to dare to step inside these stories. To that end, McCann made it across the wire and back. Cheeky bastard.RON: Not sure if I agree with you on this one Ben. I think McCann's Katrina reference is a tip of the hat to America outside of New York and it didn't take away from the novel. He tries to cram in a lot of themes: race, the immigrant experience, 9/11, New York, and Katrina fits here nicely.I do love the intersections and coincidences in this book, they don't feel forced and they're often quite delightful. I'm not sure if I can pick a character that I felt got short shrift. I'm still standing by the fact that the chapter with the hackers and the phone call was probably the most fun and exhilarating, but maybe it's just me spending too much time on the internet. KIMBERLY: Thanks for having me as part of the discussion of this great novel.One character I really wanted to see wrapped up a bit better was Ciaran. I had a soft spot for him from the beginning and didn't feel the ending did his part any justice. I didn't take issue with the Katrina reference. I think, as Ron says, it's a hat tip to the rest of America. One thing that irked me at the end is the fact that Jaslyn was able to randomly find Pino in a cafe without so much as a phone call. I thought that was pushing the "coincidences" for me.One of the great lines toward the end of the book was by Gloria who told her adopted daughter that it's "necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise." That's how I feel after closing the last page in the book. There was all this noise and chaos and loss. And just as the book started with the babel, it ended cohesively. In the end it all tied together in a book that I really loved. The Afterword Reading Society will reconvene in early summer. If you would like to be considered for the panel, please email us at theafterword@nationalpost.com.
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Buy It or Skip It? Insectopedia InsectopediaBy Hugh Raffles Knopf Doubleday480 pp., $37Raffles was taking a shower when a water bug dropped from the ceiling and landed at his feet. His first reaction was one that might be expected. "I admit it: I screamed," he writes in his new compendium of thoughts about the creepy-crawly. "Wouldn't you?" Then he did something more unusual. He took this anecdote, labelled it "The Unseen" and made it the "U" chapter in his fluky, perversely appealing encyclopedia-style volume. There is one entry for each letter of the alphabet, but why does this scream/shower/big-horrible-bug story become the "U" entry? As with all of Insectopedia, there's no particular reason for what goes where. Arbitrariness is part of this book's extremely peculiar charm. At "N" (for "Nepal"), Raffles describes taking a trip with his friend Dan and smoking drugs with him all day long, while the "G" chapter, "Generosity (The Happy Times)," delves deeply into the weird world of Shanghai's illicit cricket fights. The book's ideas are unified by the author's genuine fascination with his material and his eagerness to follow it wherever it leads, even when it goes half-mad. Janet Maslin, The New York Times Buy it
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 Canadian Jewish Book Award winners announcedFor the past 20 years, the Canadian Jewish Book Awards have marked the best writing in Canada that "reflects Jewish themes and subjects in history, fiction, Yiddish, and other fields". This year's winners include David Sax, the Toronto-area journalist also recently feted by the James Beard Awards for his book Save The Deli and Robin McGrath for her novel The Winterhouse.Here is the complete list of this year's winners:FICTIONRobin McGrath, The WinterhousePublished by Creative Book PublishingHISTORYAllan Levine, Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of ManitobaPublished by Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and Heartland AssociatesHOLOCAUST LITERATUREMichael R. Marrus, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990sPublished by University of Wisconsin PressYOUTH LITERATUREEva Wiseman, PuppetPublished by Tundra BooksBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRDavid Sax, Save the DeliPublished by McClelland & StewartJEWISH THOUGHT & CULTUREKenneth Sherman, What the Furies BringPublished by Porcupine's QuillSCHOLARSHIP ON A JEWISH SUBJECTJeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian EmpirePublished by Indiana University PressYIDDISHGoldie Sigal, Stingy Buzi and King SolomonPublished by Lomir Hofn PressSPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDHoward Engel
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 Of Nazi spoons and killer robots: finalists for the Diagram Prize announcedThe finalists for the 2010 Diagram Prize, which (dis)honours the strangest book title of the year, include tomes on Nazi silverware, killer robots, and inflamed bowels. o David Crompton's Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter o James A Yannes' Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich o Daina Taimina's Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes o Ronald C Arkin's Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots o Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinsky's The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease o Tara Jansen-Meyer's What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? Organizers said they received a record number of submissions for the prize: 90 books were submitted for consideration, up from 32 in 2008. "Selecting a shortlist proved a Herculean task, as many books carried titles that furrowed the brow -- not least How YOU(TM) Are Like Shampoo, and Map-based Comparative Genomics in Legumes," said judge Horace Bent. "However, the vast sum of submissions has, in my humble opinion, created one of the most competitive shortlists in the 32 years of the prize. And I look forward with incalculable anticipation to the result of the public vote." The winner will be announced on March 26. The 2008 prize was awarded to The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60mg Containers of Fromage Frais, by Prof. Philip M. Parker. Other winners in the award's illustrious history include The Joy of Chickens, Versailles: The View From Sweden, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Bombproof Your Horse.
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 First Superman comic sells for record $1-million at auction
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 Open Book: Philip Marchand on Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship, by Dwayne Ramond Open Book by Philip Marchand
Now it can be told. The late Norman Mailer, according to his research assistant and factotum Dwayne Raymond, was obsessed by the subject of his lunch. His favourite midday repast, prepared by Raymond, was a tuna sandwich, plus a Berry Trio, a mixture of raspberries, blueberries and chopped strawberries mixed into a sauce of clover honey and the juice from half a lemon. "I suspect it's good for the brain," Mailer said. Raymond, in his memoir Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship (HarperCollins) also reveals the author's occasional fit of borsht mania. Don't get Raymond started on his quest, under Mailer's supervision, for the perfect borsht.
Not all readers will be fascinated by these details. Mailer's heyday was the late 1960s, when his apocalyptic temperament matched the mood of the times, and he was a Grade A celebrity as well a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. One fateful day in the late '60s I bought a remaindered copy of Cannibals and Christians, a collection of Mailer's essays, interviews, short fiction and poetry, and fell under his spell -- in part because Mailer, as Raymond points out, was "unwavering in his hatred of technology." I liked that, in my youth. Mailer also concocted his own metaphysics -- a main course of existentialism mixed with primitive animism, heavily garnished with the sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Function of the Orgasm, a classic in the field of crank psychoanalysis, and flavoured throughout with Ernest Hemingway machismo marinated in the Brooklyn tough-guy ethic. (It was no wonder that feminists were not thrilled with Mailer. They had a point.)
There were less contentious elements in the collection, including a brilliant essay on the 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. Mailer may be remembered, in fact, as one of the great essayists in American literature. He was less successful as a novelist, though he never stopped trying.
Raymond, a waiter in a Provincetown, Mass., restaurant sometimes frequented by Mailer, was hired by the author to help with the research for his last published novel, a fictional study of the young Adolf Hitler, The Castle in the Forest. This was in April, 2003, when Mailer, a long-time resident of Provincetown, was 80, and Raymond, a failed writer from Oregon, at loose ends and fed up with working in a restaurant, was 40. Why Mailer chose Raymond for the job is not entirely clear. Raymond thinks it was because the two met at a Provincetown supermarket and Mailer, unexpected food lover, was impressed by the contents of Raymond's grocery cart. In Mailer's colourful career his intuitive decisions did not always pan out -- he once supported an ex-convict and would-be writer who turned out to be a cold-blooded killer -- but this time his radar was working. Raymond not only performed admirably as a researcher, cook, shopper, schedule arranger and tireless user, at Mailer's behest, of the photocopy machine, but he won the friendship of Mailer's wife, Norris, his long-time Brooklyn-based secretary, Judith, and his nine children -- any one of whom could easily have regarded Raymond as an interloper.
Mailer surely knew, as well, that a writer hired as his dogsbody would end up producing a memoir of the experience, and here again Raymond turned out to be a fortunate choice. Raymond is a good writer but not that good -- his metaphors, for example, tend to be a bit overdone. ("Consonants are hard-clicking slithering noises pampered by vowels, which tend to slip around them like jelly.") Raymond clearly knew he could not, as a writer, posthumously compete with Mailer and therefore sticks to a fairly straightforward and sympathetic narrative of a man he unabashedly admired. His reconstructed conversations -- Raymond obviously kept pretty good notes -- never strain the reader's credulity, and the amount of detail in the narrative does not tire the patience.
These details include Mailer's habit of beginning his work day with a "convoluted" version of solitaire, "one that he'd mastered decades before, which involved memory and skill over luck," and The Boston Globe crossword puzzle, which is less demanding than the one in The New York Times. These exercises, he said, "combed his brain."
When he did his actual writing, he read his sentences aloud and thumped the edge of his desk with his hand to establish rhythm. Ever the technophobe, he scribbled notes on three-by-five cards while researching his novel and resisted email and the Internet, though these devices clearly expedited his work. Raymond's solution, as research assistant, was to keep his online research half-secret from his employer, thus avoiding diatribes against the Internet.
Raymond's fondness for his employer is evident, but he does not disguise Mailer's temperamental quirks. Freud said that the beloved of the mother feels like a conqueror, and Mailer's mother clearly offered stiff competition, in that regard, to Alexander the Great's mom. Her Norman always had to have the last word, could not bear frustration and was referred to as His Highness both by his wife and by Raymond. At one point, Mailer was adamant that any amount of garlic ruined chicken completely, and furthermore it was imperative that the bird had to be basted every 10 minutes. Why? Mailer's mother, it turns out, cooked her chicken that way.
In the very last part of life, weakness and debilitation sometimes prompted infantile outbursts from Mailer. Raymond records, no doubt accurately, the signs of Mailer's oncoming death -- the gradual lack of interest in solitaire, in culinary matters, in writing. It is very sad to imagine this decline of such a vital human being. For the most part, as portrayed in this memoir, he remained kindly and affectionate, and still retained a hint of panache. In 2007, when the time came for Mailer to leave forever his beloved Provincetown -- home for 60 years -- to return to his native Brooklyn where hospitals and doctors awaited him, he remained a gallant figure. "In the brightness of the Provincetown sun he cut a striking image as the car moved out and away," Raymond writes. "That shock of white hair, the powerful profile, and those sunglasses! Norman, at that moment, appeared to me to be the coolest man on the planet."philip.marchand@utoronto.ca
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 Margaret Atwood's rules for writingMargaret Atwood has written some 30-plus books, so we figure she knows a thing or two about writing. The Guardian managed to get some tips from her and they range from the practical (pencils not pens) to the conceptual (have a grip on reality). Here's a teaser:1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do. One question though, Ms. Atwood, have you tried writing on your arm with pencil? Owww!Get more wisdom (and chuckles) on Margaret Atwood's twitter feed. And there are more rules for writers from the Guardian.
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