Brian Kiteley

If all you have on the shelf is space for one, just one, volume to excercise your fiction, make it this one. Let me tell you why:

1. The excercises are, indeed, uncommon. Even the ones that look like I've heard them before when I first start reading them are, upon further examination, given a new spin. Though this may make them look a bit daunting at first, it also makes them exciting and challenging and worth your money.

2. There are so many of them; just over one hundred and fifty. Do one show more every few days for a year and you might just find you've laid the groundwork for about ten short story collections (the average collection holds about fifteen).

3. While the author is by no means hyper-critical, he knows how to jolt you into action by tingling your pride. A learned, patient but no-nonsense teacher, he will not shy away from calling you a coward should you chicken out of doing your excercises properly.

4. The commentaries to the excercises often provide little snippets of literary history and criticism that inspire as much as they inform. Knowing that James Joyce almost stopped writing "Ulysses" when he parted from his daily writing buddy made me go awww (because it's a cute story) and oh! (because it is always useful to remember that even the greatest wordsmiths are human beings).

... there are more reasons; though if these are not enough, this isn't the book for you. show less

Back in 2002, I was in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. We did all the usual touristy things, but I was especially fascinated with Jackson Square in the French Quarter. I spent an afternoon on a bench there, people watching and just absorbing the history of the place. So many events have taken place in that location that I felt like all the other tourists should be paying more attention. It seems like a part of history was still alive even if few people were noticing it. And it was the first show more place I thought of when Katrina slammed the region: history continuing on, in that uniquely relevant place.

That memory was triggered for me when I read Brian Kiteley’s novel, The River Gods. This book takes place in Northampton, Massachusetts, and creates a fictional history of events that occurred over several hundred years in that one location. The rambling river that divides the town also intersects the stories, then and now. The focus of the story is the characters: wildly diverse yet all living within that same region. They range from Puritan settlers to Native Americans, from famous celebrities to an ordinary family called the Kiteleys. The stories are short, and reveal just a snippet of a moment in time. It isn’t until later that the impact of the individual stories reveal the comprehensive whole of Northampton history.

In one instance, we are introduced to Abigail Slaughter, one of the Puritan settlers who left England to protect their religious freedoms. She describes the region in 1680: “The land was from the beginning a savage antagonist. We pursued an immediate knowledge of the land to make it ours, but the complexity of this environment often killed or maddened us.” That same area, slightly tamed over the passage of a few hundred years, is still mysterious, when, in 1826 Arius Fuller describes an unsolved murder in the same region. Even later, in 1965, a young Brian Kiteley is spying on his grandfather and brother along a verdant river, wondering how he can ever measure up against his agreeable brother.

The idea that one physical place can hold years of history is nothing new. This is why travelers visit the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. It isn’t just the location but the mystery of the unseen people that have lived and breathed at those sites. This is why Kiteley’s book is so intriguing. Imagining the heartache, the conflicts, and the joys of different people set against the same backdrop gives it depth, and makes each story, possibly insignificant on its own, have a keener meaning. Because each story is very short, the pace is very quick. Stopping to note the dates on each entry is essential to getting the big picture of how all these stories combine in Northampton. And since they aren’t told chronologically, but rather jump back and forth in time, there’s a dynamic sense of unity between each character and their place in Northhampton’s stream of time. show less

The premise of this novel was really original and attractive: to follow the life of an amateur entomologist through a bunch of his field notes in several isolated, and not particularly critical, moments of his life. But unfortunately the story didn’t grab me at all, and though it’s a very short novel I found it a bit tedious.

I'm slowly working my way through the exercises - and they are challenging. But some very nice material has emerged from them and I'm able to use them to give me new perspectives on work in progress.

I wouldn't recommend this for new writers (a collection of writing prompts is a much better bet and I recommend The Writer's Book of days by Judy Reeves) but for anyone who has material already and wants to improve their craft, or needs shaking out of a rut, this has to be one of the best books show more on the market.

I would say though, that the print in the book is way too small to be enjoyable. It was for this reason that I bought the Kindle version. show less