Last Days

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The first persons to mention the work of Brian Evenson to me were students in the Writing Division of the Columbia MFA program. Despite the handicap of never having taken or previously taught a course in creative writing, once a week during the month of October 2004, I conducted what Columbia called a "Master Class." In our first class session, not long after I learned that the campus bookstore had not yet received the students' copies of our text, I asked the fifteen people arrayed before me to name the writers they most admired, and boom, there it was, a whole new world. George Saunders, Jim Shepherd, Ken Kalfus, Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson, two or three others. . Of the writers they mentioned, I knew the work of only Mary Caponegro, Lydia Davis, and Ben Marcus, the director of Columbia's writing program. Over the next few days, I ordered a good number of books by these writers, among them Evenson's Altmann's Tongue. Soon the books arrived and I read them, or at least started reading them, at least sampled them. Some of the stories in the books Amazon faithful delivered to my doorstep really worked, I thought, really made the case for their author's vision by maneuvering language and the old tools of character, situation, rhythm, and presentation into brilliant combinations and patterns. Some others seemed less successful, and a very few clearly had been written for an audience that did not include me. (Their resolute bad temper as prose narratives closed the door, but these same stories struck me as extremely interesting, even beautiful, if read as poetry. Apparently, a radical reinterpretation of basic genre markers had been put into play utterly without my noticing it.

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