William A. Patterson

I write long-form fiction and nonfiction and short stories and poetry.

My poetry is a combination of petulantly alliterative free verse with self-burial in iambic pentameter, blank and rhymed; and, more of late, though not soley: iambic tetrameter cut by the troachic stress and tensions that borrows from a tighter, more solemn mode. . . with much sparser — if any — movement into free verse. (Only time will tell whether my tetrameter bears solemn moleskin skies, and whether it will continue to put a cornfield horizon on movement into free-verse — which could yeild events in the poetry, if I’m so fortunate!)

Novellas, novels, short stories and real, articulated short story cycles following the spirit and structural idioms of song cycles, the best of which for me has been Dichterliebe by Heinrich Heine (who, with Schiller, created the modern German language), how these were articulated, created, and performed; and essays.

I sometimes write journalistic fiction in the good not-so good ol’ school of the combattive and egging masters of the form, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Naipaul (V.S. and Shiva); Joan Didion (and the ‘fiction’ and journalism of the brave and gifted Renata Adler, whose Speedboat, like Beckett’s Malloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable Trilogy, represents a terminus); and others; as William Faulkner said when interviewed by [of all people] a psychiatrist [I don’t know why he submitted to this, but what came out of it was worth the birth and the delivery]:

Yes, sir. That would be through a—a—an unflagging curiosity about people, interest in what people are doing, how they do it, and what they say. Not with any desire to study people or to store up material to work from, but out of simple curiosity, I reckon. Though it—it may be that no man could be that—that disinterested in the material he works from. Maybe that any writer's something like a packrat. He gathers up every scrap he sees on the chance that someday he may need it, and sure enough, there it is.

Sometimes it all comes together as one.

I hope you will subscribe to my newsletter and that you will enjoy it. Enjoyment is important; meaty satisfaction that you can dig your teeth into, and not be bothered by what feels like strands of artificial flesh that comes in a lot of suave, just too persuasively inclined, masked have your cake and eat it too writing today.

Lastly, if you’re game to read on, I really feel a need to express myself on how I view form. Form, for me, I can address by how I have had one of my characters name it for himself, which I narrated like this.

He wrote that he didn’t want to speak about himself; of which hs wrote, “unless it is in the economy of needfulness, which relies largely on form. Which is dictated largely by the moral compass of what one has to say and on what one doesn’t need to say.”

I’ve myself stated it with some inverse proportionality to how my character imagines devising his description, his formulation:

Form, for me, is a matter of what I can say and what I don’t need to say, largely dictated by your moral bearings in the world, your compass; an apophatic course. Which, I think, produces a vehicle capable of capturing what your conscience is carrying, with a mollifying or balm-endowed grace, and the artistry to contain it.

This is what I believe. And I believe it’s everywhere, even if it’s not overtly marked or visible as the emphasis in a writer’s style; and even more so there. I’m certain Joyce couldn’t have written Ulysses without this. I also agree with the late great Jean Stapleton that humour “obliterates bigotry.” I also am biased toward her generation, my grandparents’. An ageing Xer no doubt and no shame.

I’ll need to make some citations, later.