Tony Abbott's Blog, page 3

FBR 103: Deepening the Dish . . .

Since I began teaching at Lesley University's MFA in Creative Writing, I've found a place to put a number of my more serious interests in literature to good use. Constructing seminars, guiding, commenting, teaching, are fulfilling a host of yearnings I have had for years, and I am so grateful for the opportunity this grandly late in my career to share some of what I've learned in three decades of writing.

One of the more inspired bits of email I received recently was a note to the faculty to, if they wanted to, write up a brief statement on the order of "Why I Write," a deep-dish request if there ever was one. These statements would be read aloud during graduation in lieu of a more formal speech. Many members of the faculty have jumped on the idea, one noting (how true) that while it's easy to say yes to the request, it's not so easy to come up with a personal mission statement.

I've been trying to tackle this over the last week and have come up with 76 words describing Why I Write. But you know these 76 words could so easily have been a different set of 76 words, and as soon as you say, "This says it all," you realize it doesn't explain a fraction of something so huge as why you write. That would take, well, the last three decades. And knowing I could massage and tinker for twice that long and still not get it right, I carved this out of the air, polished it up, sent it off, and that's that.

WHY I WRITE

Tony Abbott, Writing For Young People

Writing is like primitive worship. It's my attempt to understand the world by naming what I see and feel around me. But there's a contradiction in articulating reality this way. If words are the fundamental human act, the breath that begins a conversation with the world, they are also artificial. I enjoy working inside this tension and finally believe that fashioning a person out of words can be both insupportably hubristic and an act of reverence.

I was thinking of saying something like:



And because it is silent, written language seems capable of the lightest touch; it can approach the mystery closely without destroying it.

None of which says anything specific about writing for young people, which, I suppose, is also a big part of my mission, and about which I might be tempted to say:

Youth is a powerful and fragile mystery. Seldom in our later years, if we are graced to live them happily, are experiences as defining or memorable as in our youths. I find myself looking back to those years because I want to explore the fragility and power and mystery of the young self.

A couple of other thoughts I had were:

Everyone shares language in a practical way that we do not share art or music; we all use it, and we all own it.

and:

I suppose I believe that written language is purer than spoken language and clearer than thought. The spectrum of written language is huge; it can be as precise as nanosurgery or as vague as fog.

But while I might have I didn't go any further with these because they didn't take me anywhere immediately and I don't have sixty years or thirty years but simply must get back to work. Which is also one of the reasons I write.

FBR 102: T. C. Boyle and the Beauty of the Text . . .

With apologies to my students who will see this in another form . . .

Since the beginning of my fascination with writing I've felt a deep attraction to the sound of the text, whether prose or poetry. Certainly, the play of the words on the mind is achieved in many ways. The look of the text on the page is critical: the volleying of dialogue and description, the position and frequency of italicized words, the various ways dialogue may be expressed (in quotes, with leading dashes, as in Joyce, with no marks at all, as in Cormac McCarthy) — all these visual elements are part of the music the mind makes of the text as it's read. This is to say nothing of the physical design and font used.

But the very basic idea of the sound of the text — as it is read aloud, alone by the author or before groups of people — is, to my mind, a huge part, not only of the compositional process (getting the words on the page), but also of the resultant quality.

So I was happy to find an interview with T. C. Boyle from a couple of years ago, in which he talks fairly extensively and well about the music of the text.

"The language, of course, is the most important part of my literary work. At least to my mind. I always work with music playing. The rhythm is very important to me. You know that I love to go out and perform my work to the public. I read each day to my poor, long suffering wife, just to hear how it sounds aloud, because the rhythm and the beauty of the language is the essential part of the artistry of making something beautiful.

"I don't really care for genre writing, for the most part, because it sacrifices that sort of thing to just the plot itself. I think, for my money, I like art — literary art, that is — fully integrated, so that you have beautiful language and startling metaphors that seem natural, as well as a powerful story and a thematic level that makes you think and provokes you."

Boyle holds, in other words, the standard for literary work pretty high. Which is where it should always be. Being an occasional genre writer, I rather like that he takes it to task this way, as being inferior to literary fiction. A work can, of course, overcome genre restrictions to become literary, but there are few models. In any case, I believe a writer is fully aware of when he is writing to plot and when he is writing literature.

"The writers I most admire seem to have a natural rhythm. Everybody's is somewhat different, but I don't know if everybody, even editors, are aware of how it has to sound."

This is critical, and well said. There is only one person who can form the music, though many can hear it once it is formed. And that person is the writer, the composer, the artist. But the artist is not shielded from the world at large. He continues:

"You know, you can't remove a given syllable from a sentence without it sounding flatfooted, and so you have to substitute another one. Again, it just seems natural to me. I don't know how to explain it, except that it's very musical and rhythmic and it has to be. And, again, that's why I have never written anything without music playing in the background."

Everyone's different. I can't abide noise when I'm writing, the more for me to hear the music of the language coming off the page. But the resulting music is probably the deepest if not most essential element in the text produced. I've been pondering these things quite a lot lately and with some excitement as my novel approaches publication, and I prepare for public readings of it.

FBR 101: The Conversation . . .

Two booky events draw near. At the annual meeting of the New England chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (NE-SCBWI), to be held at the Courtyard Marriott in Fitchburg, Mass., May 13 - 15 is a panel my colleagues Nora Raleigh Baskin and Elise Broach and I are giving on surviving in book publishing over the long haul.

The panel is titled "Turning Millstones Into Milestones" and runs Sunday, May 15, from 2:05-3:00 PM. It's advertised as "a discussion . . . about how to maintain and nourish your writing career beyond the first, second, tenth, or fiftieth book. . . . Specific topics include: choosing the right editor/agent, capitalizing on your specific writing talents in an increasingly trend-oriented industry, 'brand identity' and adaptability from book to book and publisher to publisher, the tension between writing books you love vs. books that sell, publisher promotion and/or self promotion, recognizing and nurturing the unexpected turn in your career, and how to build a career that is true to yourself yet also economically sustainable."

That's a lot of meat to chew and digest in less than an hour, but we'll each be taking a part of the discussion and moderator duties, with open questions at the end. These issues, if not always conscious, at least run through our sleeps, I think, the deeper you get into a career.

At 10 AM, that morning I'm presenting a workshop on "The Changing Shape of Series Fiction," which, after some 85 series books, I've had some trench experience in, and, so they tell me, survived to tell the tale.

Later in the month I'm serving on a panel at the Connecticut Book Festival, held May 21 - 22 on the Greater Hartford Campus of the University of Connecticut. My session — "Marked & Purged: Writing the Truth for Teens through Realistic Fiction and Fantasy" — will be on Sunday at 3:30 PM. Nikki Mutch is moderating. The other writers include Sarah Darer Littman, author of Confessions of a Closet Catholic, Life, After, and Purge, and Caragh M. O' Brien, author of the Birthmarked Trilogy, a dystopian saga whose second volume, Prized, appears this fall. I'll be talking both about my fantasy work and my novels.

Public convocations are a welcome part of the writer's business, nearly always conducted in solitude. Reading, of course, is the deepest form of conversation one writer has with another, but a gathering of workers — of all levels — and the spirit that arises, forms, lingers, from an episode of face-to-face communication, and the combination of literary talk and real life, feed us like little else. I look forward to this stuff.

FBR 100: It's all still there . . .

There are two new books of letters that I yearn to acquire. One includes those between Elizabeth Bishop and her various editors at The New Yorker. The other collects the correspondence between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, presumably those he wrote in his role as her editor at the magazine, but also outside it. They were friends, as a lot of folks were with him in his years there. I have to have both books, but, as usual with my Amazon carts, I hesitate, I wait, I fill up, empty, tinker with the selection, waffle, then finally muster up enough oomph to checkout.

Before he checked out, Maxwell was interviewed on a public television special about the 1918 flu epidemic. His early memories were outstandingly vivid of that time (he was nine), and he had quite a bit to say of both personal and historical value. He's also written about these years in memoirs. If I'm remembering correctly, the riveting part of his interview was his claim that everything he ever experienced remained in his mind. "It's all still there," he said. He may have said this more than once in different places; if he did I conflate the interviews.

Significantly, he insisted that it was the same for everyone, and I believe him. He said you had to find a way to tap that great store of memory, and there was no denying it was a long way away, but it still resided there. Perhaps it was only our deficiency or the untried and forbidding paths of memory that didn't invite us to go back among the ghosts of our long past, but those ghosts were there, and we could speak to them.

This has always been a comfort to me: that we contain the enormous store of our previous life, every instant, and that it moves inside us even when the present closes in so tightly we can't see out. There are times, often in the warm moments between wakefulness and sleep, when I can feel the gray wind across my open backyard when I was five, smell the woody hallway to my bedroom, taste the iron water from the fountain outside my classroom door. And a million other moments. That they are gone as quickly as I recognize them is unimaginably sad; but knowing they still breathe somewhere far away, but not inaccessibly so, is a grace.

FBR 99: Nearly there . . .

This would have been the hundredth issue of the Report, except that last week had a bit more of the nutty than I anticipated.

One of the hundred things that took my time was writing an essay. As you cannot possibly be unaware, the upcoming book deals with a couple of boys in 1959, visiting battle sites from the Great War of Secession. But because the book won't be let out until July, I was pained to see the 150th anniversary of the war celebrated without me. So my wife and I conceived of an essay that would appear now to herald the future coming of the book.

I first tried to put the whole blasted story into it, describing the novel, the memories that underlie it, how my wife and I visited my Cleveland neighborhood last spring, how we retraced the drive from Ohio to Georgia by way of the original TripTik my mother had saved for five decades. I even included some colorful memories of life in South Euclid, such as the day my brother lost his shoes and the FBI coming to the house and all that. Good stuff. Alas, it proved a stew with too many flavors. My wife, a copyeditor and copywriter for decades, had at it, chopping it with merciless love, reforming, melding, dulling here, punching-up there, and . . . voila! I had a quick "at" at her "had-at," and a 1500-word essay was born.

My favorite essayists Orwell and Capote were consulted during composition and revision, and I must say, it turned into a nice little piece, something on the order of: "the past that is always with us." I'll let you know if and where and when it appears. In the meantime, there's all that other work to do.

FBR 98: From the heavy to the light . . .

Dots and Dashes again, I'm afraid, since we have had a frantic week, not without some exciting business, however.

First, we received three new books for the bulging library. I'd been toying with bringing Delmore Schwartz to the table for a while, and was pushed over the edge by James Atlas's Bellow biography. Atlas previously published a life of Schwartz, who died in 1966, and Bellow uses the short life of his friend as the impulse for Humboldt's Gift, published in 1975. I have picked up both the Bellow novel and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the 1938 volume of stories Schwartz published to fairly widespread critical acclaim, as Atlas claims in his introduction to the book. Dreams contains some marvelous stories and a style both spare and lyrical:

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar.

Still swimming around Salinger and his stories, I've come across a book from 1962, reissued to near silence last year as a Harper Perennial: Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald (and now subtitled The Classic Critical and Personal Portrait, which I suppose is accurate enough). I saw the volume in the biography section of our local Borders, but as the store is closing and mobbed with sudden shoppers panting for the fire-sale discount, I passed on it there, and got it from Amazon (a book-hoarding man in my financial position has a responsibility to purchase books at a discount). The collection contains some twenty-seven appraisals and essays on Salinger's output to that time, not all of them complimentary, from such novelists and critics as John Updike, Leslie Fielder, Joan Didion, Joseph Blotner, and Granville Hicks. I haven't scratched the surface, but am excited about getting into it, a night-table volume, if there ever was one.

Neither a Dot nor a Dash, but a genuine delight, I've been asked to join the faculty at Lesley University's MFA program in creative writing for a second semester, meaning that you'd all better call me Professor Tony when you see me, walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn, or anywhere else.

FBR 97: The Reverse Migration . . .

Buried in this morning's New York Times article about the recent substantial movement of black Americans from cities in the Northeast and Midwest cities to the South is this remarkable little paragraph, referring to the primarily young make-up of the migrating families:

Not everyone was well off. Katherine Curtis, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specializes in demography and inequality, said blacks who returned to the states where they were born tended to have a higher poverty rate than those who went to other Southern states. One reason could be that they moved back for family, not economic opportunity, she said.

Now, aside from the (fascinatingly determined) fact that the individuals and families moving to their ancestral areas had a higher poverty rate, and there is nothing good about that, I find the return home, after decades, to be a potent and touching human act. It conjures a host of images and sounds of what one might call the dust tracks on the road. This is a simpleton's notion, of course. The walk up the road to the old homestead. It's not Odysseus's return, after all. So why does it take on the quiet aura of a Eudora Welty photo? Why does it hold so much appeal to a non-migrating, non-black?

When I went back to Cleveland last year after almost fifty years, and stood in front of the small house I grew up in, I felt something tremble that hasn't really stopped. The fact that my white neighborhood has become a primarily black one is a wonderful tiny part of this big story. The vastness of the first migration, whose historical treatment is found in such books as The Promised Land by Nicholas Lemann and, more recently, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, has come a kind of full circle, and ostensibly for the same reason: opportunity. That blacks may have returned to their Southern roots for family (and family memory) is even more powerful. The wisdom in the blood. That the South is becoming a more accommodating region, and that its population incorporates an ever more interracial makeup, as also detailed in the Times, are both beautiful occurrences. Those streets and yards are being recolonized and redeemed. It's nowhere near as simple as that, of course. But I think we can take at least part of this as a very good thing.

FBR 96: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum . . .

Fifteen years ago this week, amid a flurry of confetti and well-wishes, I left twenty-two years of continuous gainful employment to ride the rails of freelance authorship. It was an enormous and dangerous move for a man with a wife, two daughters, and a mortgage: "Me I'm gonna stay home now and sometimes use me a pencil. Don't you worry."

It was a move I've never regretted. The lean years balanced out the flush ones. The flush ones are a thing of the past. The longer I've gone the more impossible it has seemed to me that I'd ever be able to work in the normal way if I was forced to. I've written some ninety books, most of which have been published, others are on the way, some will never see the light, but they are thankfully few. A friend told me once that you really never know you've had a career, what with all the hustling for the next job you have to do, until you stop, pivot, and look back on your life. And there you see it, warts and all, the thing you've been doing for years. Which is a wonderful surprise; but that is the biographer's view. We still hunt for work daily, and that's part of the excitement.

Is it scary sometimes? Yes, and more than sometimes.

Why don't you work

Like other men do?

Setting aside how often my two daughters asked that question when they found me home every day after school, I recall how often I've asked myself that question. But the answer comes quickly: This is work, and it's good work, with the goal, sometimes, on a good day, of helping to illuminate a small part of a dark world.

Why don't you save

All the money you earn?

If I didn't eat

I'd have money to burn.

There is the unbeautiful aspect of this glorious calling: making ends meet. So you cast around. I've recently begun to teach. Not something I ever really thought I would do — or would get to do. Both my parents were teachers; my mother in high school before she was married; my father as a professor of history for three decades. Here I was, writing all day, every day, while some measure of the professorial life was, apparently, in my blood.

So when an invitation fell into my lap, I snapped it up, and it has proved to be a riveting assignment, one that makes sense of so much fringe work I had been doing since college. Studying fiction and critical work, speaking about writing, writing about craft, wanting to share the awe I felt when reading a masterpiece — or a brilliant word choice. So, the career turns in another way, freshens itself, transforms the landscape of the desk and of the writing mind.

Who to thank for this bounty? So many people. My family, of course, every day, every hour. My friends. My writer-friends, with whom frank discussion and camaraderie become more necessary by the day. My employer for seventeen years, whose faith in me provided the foundation to launch out into the unknown fifteen years ago. My agent, the best in the business. My instructors in high school, college. The teachers and writers who I'm privileged to call colleagues, even if for a little while. My editors, from the first to the most recent. All the dead, in my family, and on the bookshelves. It goes on and on. But now . . . after a pause for gratitude . . . I have to get back to work, not ready to pivot for the last time.

FBR 95: What's crawling across the desk . . .

The second installment of Dots and Dashes finds me with a couple of new items of interest. Last night Jonathan Safran Foer was the honoree at a reception at a local library; his latest book was chosen as the town's "One Town, One Book" program. I attended with a fresh copy of one of his novels in hand and left with it signed. I have not read Foer, but, well, you don't pass these things up when they are so close. I asked him if he taught somewhere. Yes, he said. NYU.

Today, I've been reading about Saul Bellow's short-lived literary journal The Noble Savage. Its first issue appeared in 1960, and there were only five altogether when it ceased two years later; not a long run, but it got me to thinking about the impulse in writers to start up magazines or journals in the hope of satisfying urges writing fiction can't. The lure of empire, I suppose. Colonization. The gathering instinct, the desire to collect around you a number of like minds. To create a living physical object, a sort of paper salon where you can spend time. The political impulse. To spark social fireworks, perhaps. Dickens and his journals. Ezra Pound's involvement in The Egoist. The glorious story of The Paris Review. Dave Eggers and McSweeney's. Examples are all over the place of novelists and poets on the editorial boards of various serial publications. Bellow wrote that the journal was "a move against the cold, companionless boredom of a writer's life."

In his biography of Bellow, James Atlas describes the air of creative excitement at the start up, and the later inevitable editorial squabbles, and I searched to see if any of the contributions are available (the first issue featured work by Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Jules Feiffer, and others). It turns out that original copies of The Noble Savage are available from rare-book sellers. I ordered a first issue for $4.95 plus shipping. Can't wait to read something by Herbert Gold called "How to Tell the Beatniks from the Hipsters."

There is, by the way, a nice bibliographic piece about the journal by Jim Burns on the web at http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose...

Finally, I am reading William Lychack's handsome new collection, The Architect of Flowers, a slim gathering of haunting little stories. There is a place conjured in these tales that is quiet and quietly dangerous. As readers we struggle with each new text to find our way through it, hoping we can latch on to something normal, find our balance, and not be upended. Lychack isn't going to let you come away so easily. The first story, "Stolpestad," is a second-person monologue about a policeman called to put down an injured dog. You grope your way through the narrative as in a fog of limited visibility, and everything seems a little off. How much more than a little off, you don't understand until the story veers into a breathless conversation between the cop and the father of the boy who's dog it is, and how in that simple act something happens that may or may not ever be righted. It is a short book to be savored and, what with my schedule, it's bound to be. Two weeks into it, I am only on the third story. Which is good; that fog has been curling around in the corners of my room since I started it.

This last book, by the way, is an original release in paper. The practice seems to be happening more and more, and I love the trend. Perhaps it's being done with first story collections? I don't know, but Legends of a Suicide by David Vann and The Possessed by Elif Batuman came out last year, both in original paper, and all three are from different publishers. If it means we get to read these things sooner, I'm all for it.

FBR 94: Taking just a moment . . .

. . . to look through Seamus Heaney's new volume, Human Chain, we settle on "Miracle," a quiet gloss on Mark 2: 1-12. The scripture story concerns "one sick of palsy, which was borne of four" to a house in Capernaum where Jesus was speaking. "When they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay." Jesus heals the man, saying, "Arise and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them all. . . ."

Heaney's poem seem to me to number several miracles. He takes in this episode as if he were a part of that human press outside the house, and the fact of his perspective in the crush of the crowd is one of his points. Jesus is not mentioned. As one of the crowd, he likely would not have seen him. He may have seen, briefly, the palsied man. These are singular sightings at the heart of the Gospel story, but they are participants in only one of the miracles here. What one of the crowd would have seen, and for some time, since they are on the roof, are the "four."

He begins,

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

Beginning with a negation, Heaney recasts the familiar scene. Its actors are no longer who you think of when you hear this story. Neither Jesus nor the healed man, but the others, who Mark characterizes for us simply as a number. Heaney sees in them the center, or one center, of another story, and he gives them life. As the ones who have known him all along, they are, simply, the sick man's friends.

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deadlocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat.

These men are made real. Perhaps this is another of the miracles of the poem, Heaney's conjuration. Anyone who has carried a stretcher knows what it feels like in the shoulders and back; anyone who has rolled a wheelbarrow knows what it feels like. And the handles, yes, there is sweat; we all know that.

But there is so much — of human and divine importance — going on here, why take the time to make these four men real? I think it's to prepare us to apprehend what may be the real miracle taking place in Capernaum that afternoon.

Heaney continues and ends:

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

"Be mindful." A biblical construction. A commandment of its own. But so subtle, is it not? Simply, be aware of those who had known him all along. Who suffered to bring him here to make him whole. Those men are the miracle. The friends who carry you when you are a burden. Those who will gently strap you tight, lower you for healing, their hands burning, who will stand and wait on the roof for you.

Acknowledging these four men, knowing that they have not been healed, allows the viewer on the one hand to see in simple friendship perhaps the most enduring miracle of that — or any other — day. On the other hand, in pointing to those who take on burdens and suffer quietly, Heaney is gently reminding us of the healer unmentioned in his poem, but who is at the center of Mark's story.