Redux: Pen with Which to Write It All Down

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

This week, we’re listening to the first episode of The Paris Review Podcast Season 2! Read on for the pieces featured in the episode: Toni Morrison’s Art of Fiction interview, Mary Terrier’s short story “Guests,” and Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Impermanence.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to also subscribe to The Paris Review Podcast—a new episode comes out every Wednesday!

Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134
Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993)

Sometimes something that I was having some trouble with falls into place, a word sequence, say, so I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles. If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.

Mihály Munkácsy, Anyai ösztön, 1884, oil on panel, 36″ x 55″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Guests
By Mary Terrier
Issue no. 229 (Summer 2019)

The month after our mother died, our father began bringing women home. It felt like a behind-her-back kind of operation. “I’m going to have a guest over tonight,” is what he would say.

Photo: Ildar Sagdejev (CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://ift.tt/2E6q6du).

Impermanence
By Alex Dimitrov
Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

The first ending. And knowing it would end
I wanted another. Lover, summer,
pen with which to write it all down.
The first disappointment. Which is not
remembered but lives in the body …

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...

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