UNDER THE VOLCANO

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry
by John Kramer, Donald Brittain (1976, approx. 99 minutes)

This feature-length Oscar-nominated documentary focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, "Under the Volcano." Shot on location in four countries, this fascinating film combines photographs, readings by Richard Burton from the novel, and interviews with the people who loved and hated the man who won the battle with the novel but lost the fight with demons and drink.

And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains - and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden - what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an anecdote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place in a particular town.

--from Under the Volcano

TIN HOUSE WRITERS CONFERENCE

Last summer, I attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop--a one week intensive of workshops, readings, panels, and lectures. It was a wonderful experience. Reed College was jammed with enthusiastic writers and a good spirit of creativity pervaded the workshops and readings--and just hanging out under the trees. Writers included Denis Johnson, Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Charles D'Ambrosio, Anthony Doerr, Nick Flynn, Walter Kirn, and Colson Whitehead.

They just finished this years' conference, and that's where this film comes from. If you write fiction, memoir, or poetry, by all means apply for next year. By the way, Tin House is also a highly regarded literary magazine that features the best writing out there. Pick it up at the newstand.

Check out Tin House.

WRITERS' WORKSHOP

Do you ever wonder why some stories capture you while others meander and lose steam, or lumber predictably toward a ho-hum ending? Here's an interesting lecture from John Truby, author of "The Anatomy of a Story," that may answer these questions. You may agree or disagree, and his model may seem somewhat formulaic or mechanistic, but he has some valuable insights into story structure. (This clip contains Part 1, "Premise," and Part 2, "Seven Steps." You can find the rest of the lecture at Google Video)

Here is an excerpt from Truby's book, The Anatomy of Story:

Everyone can tell a story. We do it every day. “You won’t believe what happened at work.” Or “Guess what I just did!” Or “A guy goes into a bar . . .” We see, hear, read, and tell thousands of stories in our lives.
The problem comes in telling a great story. If you want to become a master storyteller, and maybe even get paid to be one, you run up against tremendous obstacles. For one thing, showing the how and why of human life is a monumental job. You have to have a deep and precise understanding of the biggest, most complex subject there is. And then you have to be able to translate your understanding into a story. For most writers, that may be the biggest challenge of all.
I want to be specific about the obstacles of story technique because that’s the only way a writer can hope to overcome them. The first obstacle is the common terminology most writers use to think about story. Terms like “rising action,” “climax,” “progressive complication,” and “denouement,” terms that go as far back as Aristotle, are so broad and theoretical as to be almost meaningless. Let’s be honest: they have no practical value for storytellers. Say you are writing a scene where your hero is hanging by his fingertips, seconds from falling to his death. Is that a progressive complication, a rising action, a denouement, or the opening scene of the story? It may be none of them or all of them, but in any event, these terms don’t tell you how to write the scene or whether to write it at all.
The classic story terms suggest an even bigger obstacle to good technique: the very ideaof what story is and how it works. As a storyteller in training, the first thing you probably did was read Aristotle’s Poetics. I believe Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history. But his thinking about story, while powerful, is surprisingly narrow, focused on a limited number of plots and genres. It is also extremely theoretical and difficult to put into actual practice, which is why most storytellers trying to learn the practical techniques of their craft from Aristotle leave empty-handed.
If you are a screenwriter, you probably moved from Aristotle to a much simpler understanding of story called “three-act structure.” This is also problematic, because three-act structure, albeit a lot easier to understand than Aristotle, is hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong.
Three-act theory says that every story for the screen has three “acts”: the first act is the beginning, the second is the middle, and the third is the end. The first act is about thirty pages long. The third act is also about thirty pages long. And the second act runs to around sixty pages. And this three-act story supposedly has two or three “plot points” (whatever those are). Got that? Great. Now go and write a professional script.
I’m simplifying this theory of story, but not by much. It should be obvious that such an elementary approach has even less practical value than Aristotle. But what’s worse is that it promotes a view of story that is mechanical. The idea of an act break comes from the conventions of traditional theater, where we close the curtain to signal the end of an act. We don’t need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays.
In short, act breaks are external to the story. Three-act structure is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic—where the story should or should not go.
A mechanical view of story, like three-act theory, inevitably leads to episodic storytelling. An episodic story is a collection of pieces, like parts stored in a box. Events in the story stand out as discrete elements and don’t connect or build steadily from beginning to end. The result is a story that moves the audience sporadically, if at all.
Another obstacle to mastering storytelling has to do with the writing process. Just as many writers have a mechanical view of what a story is, they use a mechanical process for creating one. This is especially true of screenwriters whose mistaken notions of what makes a script salable lead them to write a script that is neither popular nor good. Screenwriters typically come up with a story idea that is a slight variation on a movie they saw six months previously. Then they apply a genre, like “detective,” “love,” or “action,” and fill in the characters and plot beats (story events) that go with that form. The result: a hopelessly generic, formulaic story devoid of originality.
In this book, I want to show you a better way. My goal is to explain how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one, so that you will have the best chance of writing a great story of your own. Some would argue that it’s impossible to teach someone how to tell a great story. I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story differently than in the past.
In simplest terms, I’m going to lay out a practical poetics for storytellers that works whether you’re writing a screenplay, a novel, a play, a teleplay, or a short story. I will
*Show that a great story is organic—not a machine but a living body that develops
*Treat storytelling as an exacting craft with precise techniques that will help you be successful, regardless of the medium or genre you choose
*Work through a writing process that is also organic, meaning that we will develop characters and plot that grow naturally out of your original story idea
The main challenge facing any storyteller is overcoming the contradiction between the first and second of these tasks. You construct a story from hundreds, even thousands, of elements using a vast array of techniques. Yet the story must feel organic to the audience; it must seem like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax. If you want to become a great storyteller, you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, as they must, even though you are the one making them act that way.
In this sense we storytellers are a lot like athletes. A great athlete makes everything look easy, as though his body just naturally moves that way. But in fact he has so mastered the techniques of his sport that his technique has simply disappeared from view, and the audience sees only beauty.
Excerpted from The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. Copyright © 2007 by John Truby. Published in October 2007 by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Buy Truby's book here.

WRITERS ON WRITING

Don Delillo

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. - Don Delillo

"Craft," says Norman Mailer, in The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, "is a grab bag of procedures, tricks, lore, formal gymnastics, symbolic superstructures—methodology, in short." Craft is not in the same league as "a vision of experience," which is what the great writers all have, and can't be borrowed, mimicked, or faked. Craft is more like "a Saint Bernard with that little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued."

Amy Hempel

"I have stood a story on its head and started at the end. Galliano is shown putting a leather biker jacket on a pale blond Ukrainian bride. I have dressed a delicate subject in hard, tough prose. And the reverse: described in lyrical language something ugly, something bad. Used a genteel voice to describe violence, an angry voice to take on the harmless. I mix leather and lace on the page." - Amy Hempel


Tim O'Brien in Vietnam, 1969

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. " - Tim O'Brien

"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."
-David Foster Wallace

"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we being to see images—a dog hunting through garbage cans, a plan circling above Alaskan mountains, an old lady furtively licking her napkin at a party. We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. If the dream is to be vivid the writer’s ‘language signals’—his words, rhythms, metaphors, and so on—must be sharp and sufficient: if they’re vague, careless, blurry, or if there aren’t enough of them to let us see clearly what is being presented, then the dream as we dream it will be cloudy, confusing, ultimately annoying and boring. And if the dream is to be continuous, we must not be roughly jerked from the dream back to the words on the page by language that’s distracting. Thus, for example, if the writer makes some grammatical mistake, the reader stops thinking about the old lady at the party and looks, instead, at the words on the page, seeing if the sentence really is, as it seems, ungrammatical. If it is, the reader thinks about the writer, or possibly about the editor—’How come they let him get away with a thing like that?’—not about the lady whose story has been interrupted.” - John Gardner

SHUT UP AND WRITE

Writing ain't easy. Even after satisfying the demands of a cruel and playful Muse (writing every day, rewriting, wrestling with plot, structure, voice, and reading...yes, reading) it's still a bitch. Join a writing group, attend a workshop, get an MFA, and you still struggle. It's the nature of the beagle. Oh, you can write pages of breezy crap but when you really attempt to challenge yourself and create something new you find the task tantamount to squeezing blood from a block of aged Tillamook cheddar.


That's why a phalanx of writing gurus have sprung up like the skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. They bark orders, or whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They set up literary boot camp and run you through the drills. They have books and programs and software to make things easy. Well, easier. Critics say they reduce literature to mere craft and ratchet down inspiration to formula. What's the dang deal?

Probably the most famous is Robert McKee. He's a cranky drill instructor who wrote the bible of craft, "Story." Here is an interview with Robert McKee:




Here's McKee in action:




Writing gurus aside, you can't do better than going back and rereading John Gardner's "On Becoming a Novelist," or "The Art of Fiction." Read that, and Burroway's "Imaginative Writing," or James Wood's "How Fiction Works," or John Defresne's "The Lie that Told the Truth," or maybe Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer." Read voraciously, and write every day, and then...it will still be hard.

NEW BOOK FROM DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The fellow cleared his throat. Donne, of course, called it lethargie, and for a time it seems conjoined somewhat with melancholy, saturninia, otiositas, tristitia; that is, to be confused with sloth and torpor and lassitude and eremia and vexation and distemper and attributed to spleen—for example, see Winchilsea’s “black jaundice,” or, of course, Burton.

A new novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for release next year.

"The Pale King," excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out today, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s. (link below)

The novel is long and unfinished, but DFW fans should snatch it up. According to Wallace's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, the novel runs "several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material."

Wallace, best known for the novel "Infinite Jest," was a longtime suffer from depression and committed suicide last fall. He was 46, and had been working on "The Pale King" for several years. According to a New Yorker piece, he was struggling to top "Infinite Jest" until his death.


Read "The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest," here.

Read an excerpt from "The Pale King" here.

A song, "Living with David Foster Wallace" by Blammo. Click button:

HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL IN A MILLION EASY STEPS

With the possible exception of the Yalta Conference, you'd have a hard time finding three people more different from one another engaged in the same highly specialized activity: Here, Jimmy Buffet, John Irving, and Martin Amis discuss the finer points of novel writing with Charlie Rose.

EVERYDAY I WRITE THE BOOK

Everyday I write the book. Some days are better than others. It's been said that Balzac could knock off a novel by noon. I assume that was only the first draft. Even so, it was quite an accomplishment. Some write novels in their sleep, with one hand tied behind their back, or on the head of a pin. It takes me much longer than those circus freaks. I sweat over every word, and then rewrite what I've written. Maybe I'm a perfectionist. I can dash off emails or blog posts as if they were Post-it Notes, which I can dash off like Balzac, but send me anywhere near "important" writing and I have to use an axe to break through the ice. Sometimes it's easier and the story carries me along, but I think people who brag that "the story wrote itself" are either bald-faced liars or aren't writing deep enough, and the last thing the world needs is more formulaic crap.


What's going on in my brain? One person who might know is neurologist Alice W. Flaherty, the author of Midnight Disease: the Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. What a wonderful, mind-boggling read. (She's on a panel discussion linked below.)

Another person who might have a clue about writing--and the creative process-- is author Francine Prose, who has written a number of novels and a book on writing, Reading Like a Writer.


Writer David Foster Wallace suffered from depression and eventually took his own life, but was extremely creative, prolific, and successful. Was his pathology somehow linked to his prodigious creative output, or was that purely circumstantial? In this interview with Le Conversazioni in 2006 he seems like a mollusk without a shell. Here he discusses failure:



The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination is devoted to exploring creativity and the imaginative process. Not long ago, they hosted Hypergraphia and Hypographia, a roundtable discussion featuring Jonathan Lethem, Alice W. Flaherty, Pedro Reyes, Francis Levy, Alan Jacobs, and Lois Oppenheim. The panel examined the neurological and psychodynamic basis for writer's block and the opposite affliction, hypergraphia, which compels the artist to write, write, write uncontrollably.

It's a fascinating discussion, and to watch it click HERE and select video.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, RIP

David Foster Wallace (1) was found dead (2) in Los Angeles, California (3) in an apparent suicide. (4). A shining light of his generation, often linked to Pynchon and DeLillo for his pyrotechnics and post-post-modern sensibility, he was best known for Infinite Jest (5) and a mock-academic style that often included numerous footnotes and endnotes.(6)

[Wallace] "used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad 'deep and meaningless' facets of contemporary life." (7)

"Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone." (8)

LA Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. "What was a party is now a wake," David Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away."(9)



1) American novelist, essayist, and short story writer (February 21, 1962-September 12, 2008)
2) He was discovered by his wife
3) Actually, he was found at his home Claremont, California, according to Jackie Morales of the Claremont Police. Morales is a records clerk and received the call from Wallace's wife at 9:30 PM, Friday evening
4) Wallace apparently hanged himself
5) published in 1996, Infinite Jest is a sprawling, non-linear, post-modern novel loosely based on Wallace's own youth as a talented tennis player
6) Infinite Jest includes over 400 endnotes, some a dozen pages long
7) Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, September 14th, 2008
8) Frank Bruni, n a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine
9) Los Angeles Times, September 14th, 2008

PUGILISTS AT REST

Some writers write about nothing, huge airy clouds of nothing, shopworn romances and thrillers and fake memoirs with character types instead of characters who slog through meaningless, overly familiar plots. People love the stuff! This is the literary equivalent of fast food. These doorstops with the glossy covers sell well at airports and may comprise most summer reading, but when the vacation ends they're usually left behind on the plane or by the pool.

While some write airy nothings, others try to grapple with the times in which they live. These writers are generally crankier than the pop writers. They rodeo-ride the zeitgeist and try to hold on till the bell rings. They takes risks. Unfortunately, they write books you can't read lying in a hammock after six pina coladas.

Here are two from the latter camp, Martin Amis and Norman Mailer, chatting in 1991.

THE HULA HOOP DANCE

Tin House ended last night with bleary-eyed writers smoking, drinking, dancing, nursing wounds, swapping email addresses, and planning cab rides to the airport. A DJ played soul music. One tired dancer swayed just fast enough to keep her hula hoop aloft, giving the impression of some sad Saturn gradually surrendering to entropy. After an intense week of readings, workshops, lectures, Q and A sessions, networking, interviews with agents, singalongs, meal tickets, and lack of sleep, the hula hoop dance was a metaphor. It mirrored our exhaustion and refusal to surrender. We would leave without a magic bullet, without an amulet, armed only with the knowledge that others like us were scattered across this weatherbeaten planet practicing the exacting art of storytelling. By midnight it was vague and blurry--something about truth and memory--but even when I said my goodbyes and staggered to my car fishing for my keys I could have told you one thing: there was work to do. Not right then, thank God. But soon, and forever. Fuckin' A!


Colson Whitehead guided our workshop of twelve writers. He is bright, clever, shy, direct, a good writer and teacher. Here he is, sans dreadlocks, on the second half of this Charlie Rose show. Read his opinion piece in the New York Times here.

GETTING DOWN WITH CHUCK D

Wrtiting camp continues. Saw Charles D'Ambrosio today. He had a five o'clock shadow and a Crazy Guggenheim hat mashed on his head. He throttled the microphone like a strangler. Then he held on for dear life as if he were on a slippery deck in a storm. He writes wonderful stories. Here is an interview with Charley. Read his stories everywhere, or buy them in a book. see if I care.

FEAR OF WRITING

I'm out of town, and today I start my first day of Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, an amazing weeklong intensive of workshops, readings, seminars and panel discussions. The writers attending are quite impressive.
Today, I meet some of my fellow students as well as writers, agents, editors, and the always present demons of doubt. I was admitted on the basis of my manuscript, and so were my fellow attendees, and I've read their stories in preparation, and they are good. My group leader is Colson Whitehead, the author of "The Intuitionist," "John Henry Days," and "Apex Hides the Hurt." I'll keep you posted on my progress this week.

In the meantime, Jacques Derrida, the famous French deconstructionist, will discuss the "Fear of Writing."

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF JUNOT DIAZ

You're mainlining mass culture, little junkie, with all that flashy cable TV infotainment entering your veins in a continuous and steady morphine drip. Even if you hate it, you can't help yourself, and your synapses are firing in time to the latest on Lindsay and Angelina and other daft celebutantes who are famous for being famous. You sense there is more to life...but what?

You know America's Most Idle, and it's various permutations, but do you know who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

This guy. A thirty-nine year old Dominican named Junot Diaz. He wrote a slangy Spanglish novel, giving us an outsider's perspective on life from the point of view of a fat uber-nerd named Oscar Wao who's into comic books. Don't worry, you won't have to read it. Reading makes your brain hurt. But you can watch these clips pretty easily. I suggest you do. The book is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

WRITERS CORNER: RAY BRADBURY

Ray Bradbury (b. August 27, 1920) sci-fi writer, wrote such imaginative books as THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, FAHRENHEIT 451 and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. At 87 Bradbury still writes every day, a lifelong habit he attributes to an incident in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electro touched him with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!"

Back when I was twelve years old I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time.

Simultaneously I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, what a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.

In many ways that is exactly what I did. - Ray Bradbury, 2001


Ray Bradbury speaking at the "Writers' Symposium by the Sea."

During the summers after fifth and sixth grade, my family moved to Corvallis where Dad worked on his master's degree at Oregon State. During those golden summers I rode my bike all over that drowsy college town, exploring a different stretch each day, with only a couple guaranteed stops: an old fashioned ice cream parlor and the public library on Monroe. After hours on my three-speed bike, I'd curl up in the library stacks with science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. Bradbury was a particular favorite, and I spent a good part of those summers trekking through his Martian vistas and dark magical carnivals, traveling in time machines, visiting space stations and distant planets and future worlds where the imagination was outlawed and firemen burned the books. What amazing stuff!

Something I didn't know about Ray Bradbury, that I found in Wikipedia:

"Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams and collaborated with him on the creation of the macabre "Family" enjoyed by New Yorker readers for many years and later popularized as The Addams Family." It figures. I'm also a big Addams fan.

WRITERS CORNER

I've been working on a novel, and preparing to attend a summer writers' conference in July. A few years ago, I spent a couple weeks in a workshop guided by writers Tim O'Brien and Amy Hempel. They were good teachers, a well as writers. During my stay, Tim line-edited seventy-five pages of my manuscript. He was very supportive, but ruthless about cutting extraneous "stuff" that didn't ring true, or failed to move the story forward. It was a bracing experience. He was the same way about his own work. Before his reading one evening, he showed me his copy of "The Things They Carried," which was already published, and the printed pages were filled with his own handwritten corrections and changes, some major.

Hempel and O'Brien were opposites on the surface, but formed quite a good teaching team. What do these writers have in common? A woman who went to Sarah Lawrence, and a man who went to Vietnam? An obsession with truth. Strange as it seems, these writers of fiction struggled to create truth in their work-- and the way truth plays with imagination, memory, and myth.


O'Brien says there is "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), and "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth."

If you haven't read any of Amy Hempel's short stories, do so immediately. Her "Collected Stories" came out in 2006, and can be purchased here. An especially good place to start is the frequently anthologized story, "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried."

If you haven't read Tim O'Brien's work, you should. "Going After Cacciato" (which won the National Book Award in 1979) and "The Things They Carried" are contemporary classics. "Things" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. For more O'Brien and his work, click this link (you will need to sign in to the New York Times) HERE.

Buy Tim O'Brien's books here.

STORY HOUR

Michael Chabon and Oakley Hall chat in the library of UC Berkeley. The video is pretty dark, so think of it as a good radio show.

Michael Chabon wrote "Wonder Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," which won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is the critically acclaimed "The Yiddish Policemen's Union."

Oakley Hall died last month, on May 12, 2008. Hall wrote "Warlock," a twisted literary western, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Thomas Pynchon once remarked that he and Richard Farina formed a "mini-cult" around this book.

For years, Hall was considered the dean of West Coast fiction. He taught an impressive array of talented writers at UC at Irvine, including Chabon and Richard Ford. Some of his teaching was distilled in "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing," a book Robert Stone says is "simply the best book in print to examine the strategies and necessities involved in the making of a novel."

Oakley Hall, American writer and teacher, 1920-2008