On Submerged Populations.

We talked, when discussing O'Hara, about how a writer's "submerged population" (to use O'Hara's somewhat curious term) can merge into his or her basic setting -- to be reductive about it, their "world". I'll admit that when we read The Lonely Voice had a little bit of difficulty picking up on just what O'Hara meant by this, but as I've been pondering it I think I've found that it's actually a very useful way of looking at (at least some) writers.

I suppose it's not a coincidence that we've started with two writers whose worlds are very much made up of the people in them. Lorrie Moore writes again and again about young women struggling with the difficulty of a world that imposes upon them rules. Raymond Carver, about working class people who drink. (Well, and other stuff, but man, do they drink.)

I find this kind of interesting partly because I had this memory of Carver's stories taking place in a distinctly northwestern world, but I think that's ultimately an illusion of (A) his biography and (B) the place-names he uses (Portland, the Naches River, so forth). He actually doesn't spend a lot of time fleshing out the physical environments of his characters; we are left, for the most part, to infer them from their personalities and social class. He writes about chimbley sweeps and door-to-door salespeople, janitors and secretaries, and trusts that we can see their houses, cars, bars and even environments for ourselves. It's kind of remarkable the degree to which his people occupy the space occupied by setting in the works of a writer like, say, Annie Proulx or Ken Kesey.

Anyway, this has set me on a bit of the navel-gazeys, all in all. Since this is a writing class, after all, I thought maybe it would useful to consider: who are our submerged populations? Do some of us stand closer to or farther away from our subjects?

I'm afraid my own population isn't terribly submerged, in the end. I tend to write about the cerebral and removed, people for whom the world is far away. Just as the crisis moment in Carver's stories is so often the moment when one character manages to reach across the gulf between him- or herself and the other person in the room, the crisis moment in mine is often the one in which a character manages to touch the live wire of living, usually by being brought close to death.

If anything, my submerged population might, in fact, be the ghosts of the dead who haunt the living. Weird.

What do you guys think about yourselves?

Yes, and let's remember that the Baltimore Ravens were, after all, named after a literary artifact of Baltimore's favorite son, Mr. Poe.  Just sayin'.

I'd be interested to know whether any of you are new readers to Raymond Carver's work, and, if so, what you think of it (before we talk about it the week after next).

Cool story, Poe.

Just to commemorate our focus on the short story this year.

On our new blog.

I think I've managed to get this thing set up -- a group blog through which we may all meditate on books, writing, and the nature of our anarchist collective. Now let's see if I can figure out how to get this posted.