daniel prazer

Lately, I’ve been editing a ton, focusing mostly on an amazing book by the principal of Crown Point High School, Dr. Eric Ban, that is forthcoming from Elephant Rock Books. It’s amazingly complex, the network that Dr. Ban has begun to create. He’s been a college professor, worked in private industry, and put all that knowledge into creating a network of schools and potential employers based on the concept that feeds data into the network just like research hospitals feed information into networks of healthcare providers.

How do you hire people? How do you help folks identify problems? How do you know which problems to work on and how to apply your resources? I asked so many questions when I spoke with the research hospital administrators. But I came to realize that my work is not much different. We have a ton of similarities on personnel, budgeting, and how to get our arms around all the data we collect. The talented research hospital administrators helped me to understand that we are working in a new type of leadership space. My dad used to say that if you are not consistently changing and improving, you are getting passed up. Leading in a culture of continuous improvement is actually what my best teachers do with their kids. They inspire, invent, and produce.

It’s heartening to have had the opportunity to read this, especially when states (including my home state of Ohio—and my mom works in a high school) seem to be turning against the teacher politically. To be clear, Dr. Ban doesn’t just talk a good game. He plays it hard. The sheer amount of data he’s collected in just a few years is driving innovation at CPHS. With the research hospital as a model, it’s almost impossible not to.

And it’s even better to see it in action. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting CPHS twice now—once for an Elephant Rock DVD shoot, and students seem engaged and tuned into their own goals. When you see the results firsthand, you know he’s on the right track.

Ric Hess, one of the owners of Sheffield’s, passed away Monday. I’d only met Ric a few times, mostly during literary events he hosted at his bar like Reading Under the Influence or Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department grad student readings during Story Week or other times, but this one’s shaken me a bit. Ric was only 48 when he died, and an alumnus of the Fiction Writing Department. It’s just way, way too young; his Facebook page is covered with gorgeous and touching memories friends have written. At times, it’s hard to turn away from it.

The Chicago Tribune wrote up a featured obit, which played second only to that of Sarget Shriver. But to Chicago’s literary community, losing Ric is a serious blow. Let’s all keep his family in our thoughts.

As far as I can tell, I’ve seen nothing but father-son relationships for the past year and a half.

They appear in books, movies — even television shows, and I’m not much of a TV watcher.

And I know why. My relationship with my own father, from the time I turned twelve, went downhill. That’s the age he was when he watched his own dad keel over from a heart attack at the breakfast table while he got ready for his day. My grandfather, as my dad told it, was dead before he hit the floor.

He only told me this because, around that time, he was yelling at my brother for not picking up a candy wrapper, and I stepped in between them. He told me to mind my own business. I grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him into the wall and said, “Why should I listen to you? You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.” He had a few inches on me, the body of an All American football player and wrestler softened by middle age, but in that moment, I stood eye-to-eye with him; I had him back on his heels for once. He called me a loser, though he apologized the next day.

The next day he tearfully apologized to me and admitted he was a drunk. He never uttered the word alcoholic, as far as I know.

I’ll skip a few years, a divorce, a few arrests for drunken driving, a distancing in our relationship to the point where we didn’t talk for a few years. But the truth of the matter is that he was a raging alcoholic, and nobody knew extent of it — he started seriously drinking when he took a job sweeping up at a bar when he was fifteen.

Of course, I didn’t know about this until after he shot himself in the side of the head on June 2, 2009.

That’s when I started noticing fathers in nearly everything, and in hindsight, everything I’d ever read. The image of Quoyle’s fatherhood in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News breaks my heart now, where it once inspired me. The distance between Frank Wheeler and his sons in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road seems eerily prescient now. I ache for Ballinger, the father who learns his pregnant daughter will marry one of her college professors in Richard Bausch’s amazing short story “Aren’t You Happy For Me?” I could go through my bookshelves and list you example after example, and do the same with my DVD collection.

In that one moment of despair that followed infinite others, when Dad squeezed the trigger of that .32, my view of life began to change. I truly believe fiction is a mirror of life, but I know — not just understand on an intellectual level, but know it in my core now — that that compact between reader and writer, director and viewer, is a two-way street, though not one that the writer or director has any control over.

I’ll be the last person to urge restraint upon writers; self-censorship makes for crap fiction on the page or on the screen, and stories of happy families don’t make good stories. Neither, though, do laziness or easy exits from plots. Every single example I mentioned does the hard thing and puts the audience through the wringer.

And as someone who’s been through the wringer of life lately, I’m damn glad they did.

Or even a text from last night (language not safe for work). Turns out, according to the Guardian UK, that drunken book-buying is so much easier with an e-reader.

The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.

Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I “purchase” per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone’s library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality.

It’s an absolutely brilliant piece, if not for the content, for the writing. Turns out if I ever end up with an e-reader (or an iPad), I may be drunkenly downloading some Elif Bautman.

I’ve seen a three people on the train in the last two weeks reading Kindles. Which is fine, if you’re just into consuming words instead of truly diving into them, turning pages with a pencil in your hand, marking passages that move you. You know, trying to make yourself a better reader or writer.

Well, now you can put your e-reader inside a case that makes your e-reader look like a book.

Based on my experience, the Pad and Quill cases are the toughest of all the gadget cases which imitate Moleskine notebooks. And now there are finally Kindle 3 and Nook versions.

Really? Really?

Ignoring the fact that Snooki has a book deal for a novel, I saw this awful news on the Poets & Writer’s daily news roundup:

A new study from Scholastic has found that 25 percent of the more than one thousand six-to-seventeen-year-olds surveyed count texting with friends as reading, 28 percent count catching up on Facebook as reading, and 39 percent said that information they found online “is always correct.”

Effing seriously? Reading your texts counts as reading nowadays? I guess this just makes me feel awfully old, because I have problems coming out of bookstores empty-handed, while the undergraduates of late seem to be wrapped in a bubble of technology at all times. I can’t tell you how many elevator rides I’ve taken at Columbia College Chicago with undergrads who are texting and listening to blaring music through their over-ear headphones. I just wish young people would pay more attention to the world around them, especially people who are at an art school. Consuming media does not prepare you to create media. The world around you does.

Okay, there was this silver lining:

In brighter news, 66 percent of the group said they will always want to read print books despite the increasing prevalence of e-books.

Now I fully understand the hypocrisy of being heartened by this factoid one post away from finally getting the e-reader for periodicals. But there’s a huge difference between periodicals and books. Magazines—and I’m a huge fan of magazine journalism—still have the advertising revenue coming in when they release digital versions, and that’s a good thing; their job is to make money for the publisher. As do books, but books, especially fiction, require an artist to create them.

Of course, they aren’t all necessarily good artists. Some books, like Snooki’s magnum opus, just piggyback on a fad. Somehow, I don’t expect A Death in the Family or The Sound and the Fury from her.

You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.

So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.

Here is what scientists found:  The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”

So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.

As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”

Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.

Oh, this is awesome.

I just rewatched the film adaptation last night, which is absolutely one of the most successful translations from page to screen out there, and was reminded of the first time I read E. Annie Proulx’s novel. I was a sophomore at Miami University taking a contemporary literature class, though The Shipping News wasn’t on the reading list. (Jesus’s Son was, and that’s still one of my all-time favorites.) No, my professor mentioned Annie Proulx’s novel to us as something amazing, and I picked it up in one of uptown’s bookstores on the way home that afternoon.

It absolutely blew me away.

Leading each chapter with an entry from the Ashley Book of Knots. The way it starts with clipped phrases. Taking everything from Quoyle. The way the prose becomes more fluid and nuanced as Quoyle learns who he is and recovers his life. The stunningly human twists, and Newfoundland becoming a character of its own. The mysticism of the sensitive Newfies.

It started a young journalism student out slowly, with those clipped phrases. I remember thinking, “I can do this. I’ve read Hemingway,” but the more I read, the more I got sucked in, I said to myself, “I want to do this.”

It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer and a journalist.

By Daniel Prazer

A year ago last weekend, I walked across the stage and got my master’s degree in writing from Columbia College. Cranking away at a book-length manuscript tends to burn you out, a condition I referred to as the post-post-graduate writing hangover.

Less than a month later, my father took his own life. For the next few months, I sank deeper into the couch cushions.

Momentum—or the lack of it—took over my writing life. When I finally emerged from my suicide-survivor’s exile, the only words I put down on the page were cover letters to go with a redesigned resume. Nothing creative.

Until this summer, when a former professor and friend, Sam Weller, threw down this gauntlet on his Facebook wall: “I am going to write 500 words a day, every day, until the end of August. This will give me a 53,000-word draft of a novel by the end of summer. Anyone care to join me in this challenge? It’s just two pages a day.”

Read the rest at New City’s Summer Guide.