VIOLENCE IS WIDESPREAD IN THIS CULTURE, also in our drama. This is irrefutable, and it would be a waste of space going into the Roadrunner-Coyote type of example here. It’s pervasive, people complain. Serious or comic, ironic or melodramatic, too many writers–critics imply–turn to random bloodletting as an easy way out, a give-me-the-gun or exploding-head denouement. It’s desensitizing, they say, boring, and worse (and here they’re judging not only the writer but possibly his or her entire genre), it’s cheap. Why, they say, can’t we have more uplifting stories about relationships? Why aren’t our films and novels more like our real lives, which are rather average?
Category Archives: Essays
The End of the World
Published in Outside, November 1998 as “Scratch the Island from the Map”
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THE PLANE COMES EVERY TWO WEEKS–weather permitting. The flight out is five hours from the Coast Guard base at Kodiak Island in an old C-130 Hercules, around 1500 miles. If fog socks in the airstrip or the rain stalls over the tip of the chain or the williwaws are blowing, you’ve got a five hour trip back. Tom Gauntt, our pilot, thinks we’ve got a fifty-fifty shot this morning.
A Dream Within a Dream
a speech for the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France
The subject I was asked to think about was the relationship between my writing and my country, the United States. At first I thought the question was too large to answer. After thinking hard about it, I came up with an even more impossible question: What do I feel about the United States? Do I love my country, like it, despise it, what?
The Connecticut State Library
ONE SUMMER NIGHT long ago at a writer’s conference, the novelist David Bradley and a few of his students were sitting around talking when he announced that he’d been researching a screenplay on the life of Otis Redding. This was before the CD reissues and boxed sets, so he was surprised, when he started singing the ballad “Dreams to Remember,” to find me harmonizing along with him.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 