Sherry Chandler

Do you remember when walls were built by the forces of repression?

Has that changed?

How can that change?

Anyway, thanks to Shamash and BagNews for pointing the way to Banksy, who has found one use for the wall on the West Bank.

If you build a big ugly concrete wall, the [graffiti] artists will come.

Banksy is up to new tricks that you should check out.

Banksy makes the NYTimes with an exhibit in LA. Perhaps not so much graffiti anymore?

…or, as Banksy puts it in a handout: “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”

Another nice interview on craft with Jim Tomlinson here at Jennifer Prado — Blog of an Unknown Writer (love that blog title).

In my prior incarnation, I was a manufacturing and design engineer. Taking things apart to see how they work is what I’ve always done. In industry it’s how competitors’ products are analyzed. The process even has a name – reverse engineering.

While I don’t view Andre Dubus II or Raymond Carver or Jill McCorkle or Tony Earley as competitors, I do try to deconstruct their stories. I want to understand how they create them. Of course, I read the stories first for pleasure, and to experience them as a reader. But then I reread with a writer’s eye. I study them, looking for the story’s bones, the structure, the craft.

Jim is very articulate about craft. Almost makes me want to take up writing short stories again.

Almost.

Very different media, poems and stories. And yet, in the end, as Jim says:

…my process always ends up the same way—seemingly endless revision, rewriting, and working on the language. Which is a long way of saying that almost nothing of the ultimate story exists when I first start typing. Nearly all of it comes from the work, the process.

And so it does, be it poetry or prose.

You have to pay your dues.