Amy Hempel/Workshop

Amy Hempel/Workshop

AGENDA:

HMWK:  Read Margaret Atwood's "Death by Landscape" and Toni Cade Bambara's "Raymond's Run"

Workshop Exercise #1

Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried"

Scribner pg. 343

"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" was frequently cited by critics as one of Hempel's strongest stories in her first collection, Reasons to Live. In discussing her sparse, minimalist style, critics often pointed to details in the story like the metaphor of a Hollywood set as the forum for a discussion on death. Discussing the book as a whole, Sybil Steinberg, reviewing the collection for Publishers Weekly, described the stories as "debuting a familiar contemporary hard edge, but a surprisingly sentimental and moving interior." Just two years after Reasons to Live was published, "In the Cemetery" was included in the prestigious classroom textbook The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

 Amy hempel’s introduction to writing fiction was a workshop in her late 20s with Gordon Lish at Columbia University. Lish had recently left his post as the fiction editor of Esquire to become an editor at Knopf in 1977. There he continued to publish many of the writers whose careers he had launched at the magazine: Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, and others. For his students’ first assignment, he instructed them to write about their worst secret: the thing they had done that, as he put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” “Everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was,” Hempel recalled in an interview with The Paris Review almost 30 years later, after three spare collections of short stories—Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997)—had established her as a star among Lish’s protégés. She continued: “We found out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell.”

In “Al Jolson,” we learn that the friend has hours to live with the line, “There was a second bed in the room when I got back to it!” And in the next two sentences, the narrator articulates her own (and the reader’s) response: “For two beats I didn’t get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin.” Like an open coffin—the simile splays open the cliche “nail in the head of a coffin.” Often Hempel plays with cliché: “I left the room before she could say I didn’t have a leg to stand on, or the shoe was on the other foot;” “I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain.

Post a response to these questions:

What narrative function does the beach scene serve in the story? Does it seem out of place? Why?

Why does the narrator refuse to stay with her dying friend? What roles do motivation and plot play in the reader's understanding of the narrator's reluctance?

How does the detail about earthquakes and fear of earthquakes relate to the central concern of the story?

How does the vignette about the chimpanzee serve as a metaphor for the story as a  whole?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Hempel

http://fictionaut.com/stories/amy-hempel/in-the-cemetery-where-al-jolson-is-buried

http://paulmcveigh.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-cemetery-where-al-jolson-is-buried.html