Etgar Keret encourages 'poor' writing

The focus of a good story should be in its content, not its form, said Etgar Keret, an Israeli short-fiction writer and filmmaker.

Keret answered questions from University of Richmond students on Monday afternoon. He said he was trying to promote

students to "write poorly written good stories."

"When Bob Dylan sings, he sings crappy, but you feel the song," Keret said. "When you write a story it's much more important to know that people will feel something ... that if it's a car it will have a strong engine, not necessarily just a perfect shape."

Keret also spoke at Richmond on Monday night as a part of the English department's Writers' Series.

Christine Schwartz, a Westhampton College sophomore, said Keret's stories were "dark and scary and thought provoking."

His short story collections such as "Missing Kissinger," and "The Girl on the Fridge," meld the fantastic, ordinary, violent and funny into stories often no longer than three pages.

David Stevens, a Richmond English professor, explained why he liked Keret's work.

"What makes his writing so effective in my mind isn't just that it's short, anybody can condense something, but that he manages to pack so much into each short piece," he said.

Keret has won the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature and the Camera d'Or Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his film "Jellyfish," which he directed with his wife, Shira Geffen.

Stevens said the Writers' Series was exemplar of what good creative writing could be. Writers give readings, Stevens said, and also engage in classroom discussions and questions and answer sessions with students to give them an idea of what the writing life was like.

John Whalen, a Richmond College sophomore, said when he read "The Girl on the Fridge," for Stevens' Introduction to Creative Writing class, he found Keret's stories to be either a hit or a miss.

On the other hand, Whalen said, when reading Keret he thought, "Wow, I would absolutely love to sit down with him." He said there was so much in the feeling as opposed to the more conscious aspects of Keret's stories.

Wearing a red-and-black striped zip-up hoodie at the workshop, Keret spoke candidly with the dozen or more Richmond students on everything from his time in the army, to advice on filmmaking, hard-ons and the surrealist nature of many of his stories.

"Something about reality kind of blocks you," Keret said, when he was asked about how he reconciled fantasy and reality.

"Reality is a bit overrated."

Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His family covers a far-left to far-right wing spectrum in Israel, with a brother who leads a group that demonstrates for the legalization of marijuana and sister who is an Orthodox Jew with 11 children.

"I'm both with God and the neighborhood dealer. I think that there's something about us that is the same," Keret said, speaking about his siblings. "I think that being religious or being a social activist or being an artist are three different ways of trying to transcend a sort of material existence. And they are three different ways of expressing some sort of yearning."

Although Keret's stories are based in Israel, Stevens said, "I do think in many of his stories you could take his characters, you could take the situations, set them almost anywhere in the Western world and it would still make sense."

Tuesday evening, Keret changed into a green button-down and read three of his pieces --"Fatso," "Pipes" and "Surprise Egg," to Richmond students and the general public. Senior Caitlyn Paley said it was interesting to see a prose writer after going to the Writers' Series' poetry readings this semester.

"He is such a great storyteller," she said.

Keret said he wrote "Fatso," after his wife told him that he never wrote a story about her. Its narrator's beautiful lover transforms into an overweight, beer-drinking, sports fanatic each night only to turn back into the narrator's girlfriend every morning. Both "girlfriends," end up becoming bizarrely agreeable to the narrator.

After Keret finished reading he said, "Things that really scare you [about a person] actually create bonding."

When Stevens introduced Keret at the reading, he expressed his professional jealousy.

"It's nice to think about the process that's involved in creating that perfect gem of a work of art, where there is no filler, there is no tangent, there's only essence," he said a couple of days earlier.

Contact reporter Laurie Guilmartin at laurie.guilmartin@richmond.edu