LIVE! #70
4 May 2025
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Joyce Carol Oates
- Oates grew up on a small primitive farm in Niagara County in upstate NY, in a house with domestic violence and no books.
- Her grandmother gave her a copy of Alice in Wonderland and a library card, both of which changed her life.
- She was the first of her entire family to graduate high school.
- On scholarship at Vassar, Oates wrote a novel a semester.
- Oates has been an English professor since 1962, still occasionally teaching at Princeton. She co-founded Ontario Review Press.
- Today she is one of America’s most respected literary figures: a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and short story author.
- She has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
- Butcher is Oates's 73rd published novel: 62 under her name; 8 as Rosamond Smith; and 3 as Lauren Kelly.
- Oates write in longhand, rewriting later drafts in Microsoft Word.
- She spends months researching and outlining her novels—she says she knows the ending before beginning to write.
- A typical day begins with two hours of revising the previous day's work, followed by hours of new writing until 1pm, when she eats breakfast and takes a walk. She spends the rest of her day writing, claiming her cat won't let her move.
"The opposite of language is silence; silence for human beings is death.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
"There's a twin personality in the writer and the private person.
JCO is not a person but a process which has resulted in a number of texts.
I, on the other hand, have to be physical corpora. I am getting older hour after hour
while JCO, the other one, has no fixed age.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“In this room, which is my writing room, thus my sanctuary,
all times are present tense. The past is not vanished but now.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
"Art should not be comforting; for comfort we have mass entertainment
and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing Butcher
- Before writing, Oates walks and runs, thinking about the novel. She sees the movie in her mind: 1 hour=20 pages. 1st draft in longhand; 95% of her writing process is in revision. She always has the ending and begins writing with the climactic scene. “Most of my novels end with the younger generation kind of rising up.”
- Oates wanted to highlight the evolution of medical research, women's medicine, and indentured servitude (which includes some of her ancestors) and she incorporated episodes from the lives of three historic doctors:
- 1. J. Marion Sims, M.D. (1813–1883), ‘The Father of Modern Gynecology’
- - Famous for repairing vesicovaginal fistula, invented Sims speculum, Sims sigmoid catheter, and Sims position.
- - His original subjects were twelve enslaved black women and girls with fistulas, whom he treated at his own expense in his backyard hospital. He purchased one woman specifically to experiment surgically when her owner refused to allow Sims to treat her otherwise. No anesthesia.
- - In 1855 Sims founded the New York Woman's Hospital, primarily to repair fistulas in service to the poor. No "pay patients" were admitted.
- 2. Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. (1829–1934), ‘The Father of Medical Neurology’
- - Discovered causalgia (complex regional pain syndrome) and erythromelalgia, and pioneered the rest cure.
- - His rest cure was used on Virginia Woolf, who wrote a savage satire of it in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
- 3. Henry Cotton, M.D. (1876–1933), Director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum, 1907–1930
- - Cotton and his staff employed experimental surgery and Bacteriology techniques on patients, which included the routine removal of some or all of patients' teeth as well as tonsils, spleens, colons, ovaries, and other organs. These pseudoscientific practices persisted even after statistical reviews disproved Cotton's claims of high cure rates and revealed high mortality rates as a result of these procedures.
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Medical Fiction, Historical British & Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Women's Fiction
- Genre: Historical Realistic Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 352; Word count: 110,974
Reading Grade: 13th; Avg. wds/sent.: 21.24
Lexical Density: 48.37; Flesch Reading Ease: 54.75 - POV: Jonathan, Tabitha, Milton, Silas, Abraham, Mrs. Peele, Brigit, Inmates
- Person: 1st; Tense: Past
- Publish date: May 21, 2024
- Publisher: Knopf
- Audio book length: (13 hours, 11 mins)
- Narrators: Amy Shiels, Edoardo Ballerini, Cassandra Campbell, Robert Fass, Tavia Gilbert, Jeremy Carlisle Parker, Danny Campbell, Max Meyers
- Recognition: Vogue The Best Books of 2024, CrimeReads The Best Historical Fiction of 2024
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