Five best things Sally Weigel has read recently

By Josh Spilker » On sharing Lady Gaga's fascination with Rilke.

Sally Weigel's novella is called Too Young To Fall Asleep, about a high school poetry-loving girl that signs up for the Iraq war. It's a millenial's take on the war and about growing up in the shadow of 9/11.

Too Young To Fall Asleep is available as a "pay what you want" ebook from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography and is also available in Kindle format.

Sally is doing a blog tour to support the book and all the dates and places can be found here.

Below are the five best things that she has read recently:

1. First pages of Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Milka Rilke

I’ve just recently decided to indulge in my obsession for Lady Gaga (I was fighting it for awhile due to conflicting thoughts on the pop star). Because of this, I spent my last Sunday afternoon youtubing interviews with the singer and found out that her favorite book is “Letters to a Young Poet” by Ranier Milka Rilke. After skimming through the first pages myself, Rilke’s words truly touched on ideas that I dealt with when writing “Too Young to Fall Asleep”. At first when writing the novella, I steered away from dealing with a fictional world that reflects my own life. If only I had read Rilke words sooner because he advocates for the very opposite. Rilke says, “Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity.” My own novella attempted this very notion.

2. “Songs of Ourselves” by J.P. Gorman

This is an interesting article from the Chicago cultural magazine STOCKYARD. It chronicles a group of guys as they decide on the best albums of the 2000s. Many debates and beers later, the only album they can all agree that makes the list is Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. I was shaking my head in agreement throughout the whole article.

3.“Telling Tales” by Tim O’Brien

“Telling Tales” is an essay published in the Atlantic’s 2009 Fiction Issue where O’Brien describes how too many stories nowadays are lacking imagination. I saw Stuart Dybek read recently, and he commented on the same thing in the Q&A session. Tim O’Brien sums it up, saying, “The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer.” I do realize that I have posted two very conflicting passages, one from Rilke pushing writers to expose their everyday life and one from O’Brien who encourages, almost demands, fiction writers to utilize imagination. Hmmm, think we can do both?

4. “The Brothers Size” by Tarell McCraney

I read “The Brothers Size” for a gay and lesbian literature class of mine. I also got the chance to see the play preformed at the Steppenwolf and hear Tarell McCraney discuss his playwriting career in class. He is a young, playwright writing important and challenging plays, and he deals with homosexuality in a way I haven’t seen done before. Also, he is a DePaul graduate, which is where I attend school now. Any who are in Chicago, I strongly encourage you to see McCraney’s plays, as they are very much worth the money.

5. “Breasts” by Stuart Dybek

I was assigned to read this for a creative writing course I took in school recently, and my professor prefaced the assignment by calling this story an “epic of short stories”. When analyzing the piece, I found that the most interesting part of this story was how Dybek used unusual narrative strategies. He portrayed a character’s personality and personal conflict within the protagonist’s reflections about past lovers, specifically these lover’s breasts. Impressive.

Posted on March 31, 2010. More on: codex, books, sally weigel