Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 11

RWB January Book Club

We met on a dank winter afternoon in the warm, well-lit lobby of the Pickford Film Center, the smell of popcorn wafting. Our January theme, fittingly: New Beginnings, Fresh Starts.

The Red Wheelbarrow Writers  are poets and seekers, philosophers and haiku writers, memoir writers, and mystery writers. Their sense of Fresh Starts goes far afield from the classic sorts of books I think of. As a novelist, and given my historical backgrounds, time travel novels like The Time Machine come to mind, classic novels: Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Huck Finn.

A poet brought in her own Fresh Starts, an intuitive journal, the sort of book that in the 18th century would have been called a Commonplace Book, full of bits and pieces, shards of poetry, post cards, scrawled notes, small paintings. Not a diary but a book of fresh ephemera, each bit testifying to some small burst of inspiration, some new beginning.

She also brought in several small elegant books guaranteed to ignite inspiration. Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, David Bayles and Ted Orland, 1993, focuses on the artistic process, and strategies for keeping the process going. And she mentioned Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren, 2008: the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, modest, incomplete.

Other seekers and artists brought books that described in archetypal, fairy tale terms, finding one’s creativity. Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992), by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Estes describes the inner predator, stopping artists from achieving their full creative life, and how to outrun, or outsmart, or possibly even maul, best and eat up those predators.   Estes has also written a book about crones asking us to think beyond the stories and into the inner psyches of women.

Two other writers cited works of fiction, both classic and contemporary:  Much Ado about Nothing, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, both about second chances (and fresh starts) in love. Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life asks the question: what if you had the chance to live your life over and over again until you got it right. And Atkinson’s new book, A God in Ruins, which our reviewer said had the best description ever of living through the Blitz in London. And Peter Ferry’s novel, Old Heart that insists you’re never too old to start again. One writer mentioned my novel These Latter Days about a Mormon wife in frontier Idaho who takes the extraordinary step of leaving her husband, and taking her five children with her to begin a new life in St. Elmo, California.

The best travel writers are always writing about new beginnings, seeing things afresh. Bill Bryson got special notice,his Notes From a Small Island, about his having moved from America and starting afresh in the UK.   And then, on returning to the USA, Notes from a Big Country, as well as his latest, The Road to Little Dribbling. Phil Cousineau’s The Art of the Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Another travel book of fresh experiences is Conversations on the Hudson, by Nick Hand, 2014. An Englishman bicycles five hundred miles through the Hudson Valley meeting and having conversations with craftspeople along the way.

The philosophical among us noted Hilary Mantel’s early novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, a fresh start that descended into chaos and a bloodbath. And the work of David Mitchell, best known for Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, his 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, about a Dutch clerk in Japan in 1799.

Another sort of Fresh Start got tagged in Jennifer Finley Boylan’s book She’s Not There, about her transition to a woman. (And along those lines, we should also mention the travel writer, Jan Morris’s early Conundrum, about becoming Jan having been born James. )

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Jennifer Steil chronicles the life of journalist who is asked to go to Yemen for six weeks to teach a quick course to journalists there, and who ends up staying for life-changing years. The Art of Fielding, the 2011 best seller about a kid who is an amazing short stop whose talents change the course of his trajectory. Another classic brought forth was Animal Farm by the great George Orwell.

By the time we’d polished off the bottle of wine, and the last of the Christmas snacks, we had a stack of great new titles to explore. And one of our number went over to the Limelight theatre to see a film about the proverbial Fresh Start, The Danish Girl.

We agreed that our February theme would be Love. Some wanted to make it lost love, or thwarted love, but we left it just the great undifferentiated Love. Join us, 4 pm at the Pickford on Valentine’s Day to see what great new swath of insight the Red Wheelbarrow Writers bring to Love.

A Promise Made to a Character: Educating Waverley

Behind every novel there is a story. Members of a Book Club recently approached me with questions about the story behind Educating Waverley.

Educating Waverley is the result of a promise I made to its central character. In the late 90’s I had a two book contract with Morrow. The editor attached only one stipulation: both books must be set in the same place. I had already begun Steps and Exes, a contemporary novel of fractured family, set at a B&B called Henry’s House, a big, elegant edifice in a remote location on the fictional Isadora Island. Why was it there? (The novelist has to ask.) How did it come to be? Ah. It must have been a school to begin with.

What began as a mere background paragraph about Sophia Westervelt and her school grew into pages of Sophia’s personal history: the rebellious, artistic daughter of a conservative Northwest family, her doting father a timber baron. Smart, spoiled, willful, in about 1910 Sophia goes to Paris, chaperoned by an aunt whom she quickly ditches. Sophia plunges into the artistic life of Montparnasse in those crazy, fruitful years before the Great War, generous with her money, careless with her affections, and her time until she meets the love of her life, the French painter, Denis Aron. After the war, and losing Denis she returns to the Pacific Northwest and using her doting father’s money, sets up Temple School on Isadora Island, a school to educate girls to become North American Women of the Future. She even names the island in honor of her friend, the iconoclastic Isadora Duncan.

Sophia’s story swept me away. I wrote so much and for so long that she threatened to take over the entire novel. I had to return to the contemporary tale, but Sophia clung to me. Finally, I made her a promise: let me finish Steps, and I will come back to you. You will have your own book.

I kept my promise.

Yet, when I returned to Sophia, I felt that telling her story in a chronological fashion would not serve the truth at the core of that story. I stumbled about, typing (yes, still typing) lots of pages that seemed unanchored. And then, winking at me from the pages of Steps and Exes, was the minor character, Nona York, the stout, doughty, no-nonsense romance writer. Surely she had a past. And she did.

Nona York, it turns out, is a nom de plume. This character was born Waverley Scott. When Waverley arrives at Temple School in 1939 (shunted off by her unmarried parents) the place is failing in every way. Waverley finds the diet dreadful, the faculty pinched and quarrelsome, the four other students nasty, but in Sophia Westervelt she finds an icon, an immortal teacher.

In 1940 Sophia receives a letter from the wife of Denis Aron. He had, in fact, survived the war, returned to Paris, married a woman named Judith, and had a daughter, Avril. Once Paris falls to the Nazis, and sensing what is to come for French Jews, Judith Aron sends her daughter on a dangerous pilgrimage walking across the Pyrenees, eventually to come to Temple School. She implores Sophia to accept and protect her daughter. Sophia honors her promise. Judith and Sophia begin a remarkable, long distant friendship. Avril becomes the daughter Sophia never had. Avril becomes a beacon of love in the life of Waverley Scott. Avril’s daughter will…. well, thereby hangs the proverbial tale in this braided narrative of women’s lives over the course of a century.

There are other stories behind this novel, too many to narrate in this brief post. But one question the Book Club readers asked was especially interesting: would I do anything differently with the book now? Indeed I would. In the latter stages of the writing, a trusted friend offered editorial advice, insisting that I should put the contemporary part of the novel first, that to begin with the past would put readers off. I did this. In fact, just the opposite is true. The real story is there in 1939 to 1942, years that Waverley was a student at Temple School. Were I to offer Educating Waverley in ebook format now that I have the rights back, I would actually rearrange the structure of the book.

The original title was Tempo, which I meant to resonate with Temple School and to suggest time and timing in all its many forms, including music and dancing. My editor, correctly advised that Tempo was too arcane for a title and that really it was about education. The education of a North American Woman of the Future.

To proudly support one’s principles while they are flourishing is easy. To be true to those principles when they face failure and ridicule, that takes strength of character. Sophia Westervelt is one of those women, like the figurehead on a ship, fearlessly meeting waves of adversity. Sophia Westervelt was right even when she was wrong.

Celebrating Elvis! Graced Land is an ebook!

GRACED LAND–the novel celebrating Elvis, his life, his music, his significance–is reincarnated today, January 8th, Elvis’s birthday, as an ebook!

GRACED LAND first appeared with Grove Press in 1992 to rapturous reviews applauding the novel’s humor, energy and depth. It won the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award. The London Observer selected the British edition as one of the Best Books of the Year.

GRACED LAND explores the swath of the King’s career, not as a conventional biography would, but as Elvis and his music echoed through the lives of people who never met him, the

passionate fan, Joyce Jackson, and the young, untutored social worker, Emily Shaw.

I fashioned this novel out of a chance conversation with my mother one afternoon, reminiscing about a shrine to Elvis that she used to drive past on her way to her job at the County Hospital, and from shards of my own experience. I was once a social worker. All my English major friends were social workers; it was the only job they could get. So I tried it too. I lasted six months, and after that I went back to graduate school in history. Those six months were but a blip in my life, a tiny detour that, had I been writing a memoir, I would not have mentioned at all.

But once I started the novel, the whole experience came back to me! Such clarity and vivacity: the florescent-lit office with acres of metal desks, the punitive supervisor who enjoyed cruelly slashing clients’ budgets, the clients themselves, an array of humanity I would never otherwise have met. Writing Graced Land salvaged that whole episode of my life.

Unlike any other novel or story I have written, Graced Land connected me with readers in those pre Facebook days.   Chief among these is my friend Cindy Hazen of Memphis who, for a time, lived in Elvis’s Audubon Drive house, the first house he bought for his parents. I saw the house with Cindy before it was sold, an experience I won’t soon forget. And visiting her in Memphis later, I slept in Elvis’s bedroom. Not too many writers can claim that!

In some ways, writing the novel also gave me Elvis. I see him as a tragic figure with an indelibly American story. The novel throbs with music and humor, but its central thematic core is the relationship between story and history.

That is, history is cruel and random, messy, inefficient, finished off only by death. Thus, humans always grace or drape their histories with story. Story may be cruel, but it is not random; stories have form and shape denied to history. Stories have beginnings and endings, and within those confines, stories have meaning. On the day Elvis died in 1977, Emily, in Italy stumbles on this very epiphany.

“History is so unbearable it must be dignified with story. That’s why and how people dignified battle with bravery, dignified lust with love, dignified digestion with cuisine, dignified sleep with dreams and death with Last Words. In a story, no one ever dies without Last Words. Oh, they might die gruesomely, but it is always to some dramatic purpose; without dramatic purpose, they would not die at all and you know that from the beginning. But in history, people just croaked. Look at Elvis. What did the morning paper say? Emily fought to remember what she had thought merely trivial. Elvis had been found on the bathroom floor, fallen ingloriously off the toilet. The King fallen from the throne. The man who could move and touch so many disparate lives, could he truly be found mute, face down on the bathroom floor? Not in a story, he couldn’t. But that’s how real people died. That’s why Carlo raced to get here, knowing that justice and Last Words are only guaranteed outside of history, in that storied catholic country where imagination reigns and rewards gallant gesture.”

My family and I have loved Elvis now for more than twenty years. (See October 29th blogpost, Revisiting Graceland.) So it is fitting that we should release the ebook version of Graced Land on his birthday.

Graced Land as an ebook is available on Amazon, Kobo and at Barnes and Noble.

Readers,  I would love to hear from you, either on Facebook, Goodreads, or here at this website.

Oh, and one other important lesson I learned from Graced Land? As a verb, rock-and-roll cannot be past tense. It’s always present.

“I’d like to thank…..”

Acknowledgments

Dedications are short and sweet. Acknowledgments are long and fulsome, even tedious, but I always read them. Acknowledgments offer a glimpse into the writer’s process. Who offered advice and direction? Who granted them time or money? Who ferreted about in dusty archives? Who are their illustrious writer friends, and who are the nearly anonymous amigos who dispensed cups of tea or shots of alcohol? The long suffering spouse always gets the last buttery acknowledgment—unless of course, the writing broke up the marriage.

Novels didn’t used to have acknowledgments. People think a novel must spring full blown on the half shell from the writer’s mind. Though one author does the hard work of writing and assembling the novel—the proverbial blood sweat and tears—many people contribute.

The first book of mine to have Acknowledgments was Graced Land which we will soon release as an ebook. My e-book editor, Andrea Gabriel  asked if I wanted to use the same Acknowledgment page from the book.

Originally I had used only the first names of people who had offered up various sorts of help. Appallingly, I have no recollection of two of them. Who was Mary? Who was Vickie? What did they contribute, and how could I have forgotten? Two other names, friendships that had once been so sustaining and important they merited a printed salute, have ended. One with a bang. One with a whimper. Both losses remain for me indelibly tinged with sadness.

But an e-book is a new incarnation. A fresh medium for the message. The past never stays the same. This time I intend to use full names, specific info.

Thank you, Paola Rizzoli!  Paola  had invited me to visit her in Italy in 1977. In mid-August when Elvis died she and I were seeking out Paola’s ancestors, comically trooping through obscure Umbrian villages with names like Fratta Todino. We were getting rides when no bus or train service went there, getting leered at, followed, hooted at by local ill-bred men. We were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. You need not doubt who was the knight on a quest and who was the lumbering Sancho. I wore four inch platform sandals and hauled around a heavy suitcase.

Thank you, Frank!  Frank Johnson, my father’s younger brother, was a man of great charm, a born raconteur who was mostly full of bullshit. However, Frank’s stories were very useful to a novelist, and I used them in several books. For Graced Land, Frank was my source on the Studebaker Starlight Coupe. Frank Johnson was one of those men (and they are mostly men) who divide up the eras in their lives by what car they drove at the time. Frank’s cars were more important, more memorable than his women.

Thank you, Meredith!  Meredith Cary, my longtime friend and early reader, read the first, raw hundred pages of Graced Land and offered restructuring advice which I followed. She never did like Elvis, though she liked the novel.

Thank you, Connie!  Connie Eggers and I went to the same high school in a town rather like St. Elmo. Connie kept her yearbooks. I threw mine away in 1979. The era was different, but the place was the same. Her yearbook pictures were essential for my reconstruction of St. Elmo High School.

Thank you, Paul!  Paul Klein was my sons’ music teacher, a respected local musician, and a font of background info on early rock. He even made me tapes of seminal recordings.

When my then-agent Charlotte Sheedy told me that two houses were bidding on Graced Land, Grove and a mega-house, I went with Grove on instinct. A good instinct. My publishing experience there, though many years ago, was the best ever. My longtime friend and agent in London, Juliet Burton, found a congenial home and editor for Graced Land and other books with Constable. (Now defunct.)

Graced Land is dedicated to my mother, Peggy Kalpakian Johnson. It’s not the only nod to her. Late in the novel Emily and Howard Hansen stand in front of an elevator one night at the County hospital listening to a typewriter clack at the end of the hall. The woman who was typing comes out and joins them. She smiles. That was my mother who typed all my scripts for years in the hours after she had worked a full day as secretary to an orthopedic surgeon. (With the advance from Graced Land we bought our first computer.)

And Vickie? Now I remember! My character Emily Shaw is a Tri Delt, but I had absolutely no notion what a posh sorority house was like. One autumn afternoon Vickie and I crashed the Tri Delt house at USC. We collected info I, alas,  never used in the book, but our venture certainly was fun; the girls were too well bred to throw us out. However, all these years later Vickie is too dignified to want to be reminded of that romp.

And Mary? If you’re out there, Mary, and remember your contribution to Graced Land, please do let me know and accept my sincere apologies for forgetting. We will add you to the e-thanks.

Red Wheelbarrow Writers December Book Club

Red Wheelbarrow Writers Book Club December 2015

Our theme was Celebrations! As with most things RWB, we left it loose and received a diverse assortment of titles from readers and writers.

We all agreed that perhaps the best celebration story ever is BABETTE’S FEAST by Isak Dinesin, the story of a woman, a cook, a refugee from the France of Napoleon III who lives in bleak, cold Norway, keeping house for two spinster sisters. She comes into money and uses the funds to create a fabulous life changing meal and celebration for everyone around her.

Another beloved celebration is the tea party in ALICE IN WONDERLAND. And there are great celebrations in the HARRY POTTER books, as well as LORD OF THE RINGS, especially Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party. The Mary Poppins books too feature celebrations.

The Great Virginia (Woolf) created two wonderful celebrations in her novels. MRS. DALLOWAY begins on the day of the party and follows through it, rattling the lives of her characters . And of course Mrs. Ramsay’s famous bouef en daube at the summer dinner in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a celebration not to be missed.

James Joyce’s classic THE DEAD is wholly formed around a Christmas tradition, the Misses Morken’s Christmas party where the reader is an invited guest to the merriment—and the undercurrent of mortality.

Gertrude Stein’s THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS has a wonderfully comic chapter on a dinner party celebration these two and a few of their friends (Picasso etal) threw for the painter Roualt in about 1907. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong, and the results are absolutely antic and memorable. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B TOKLAS has made other appearances in these RWB Book Club discussions. It remains one of my favorite books.

And of course there is Katherine Mansfield’s famous novella THE GARDEN PARTY. Not as well known as THE GARDEN PARTY, but in my opinion just as devastating is her story BLISS about a young woman getting ready for a dinner party for her friends, and the mood of happiness that overcomes her. And then, of course, what sadly ensues. This would make an excellent pairing with MRS. DALLOWAY esp. as Woolf and Mansfield were contentious contemporaries.

Carson McCullers’ A MEMBER OF THE WEDDING was a favorite of RWB writers, though the wedding itself is not as important as the events before and after, still it is central.

Eudora Welty’s LOSING BATTLES opens memorably with the preparations for a huge family celebration to welcome home a son and husband who is getting out of prison.

Another reader recommended an anthology with the great title, DRINKING, SMOKING AND SCREWING. How’s that for celebration!

If the above titles also suggest the possibility of hangovers to go with celebrations, some readers took the notion of celebration in a more spiritual context: SOUND OF WILD SNAILS EATING by Eli Tovah Bailey celebrates life, and her friendship with a snail in a terrarium while she was recuperating. This book too makes a return visit to the RWB book club. We talked about it when we discussed Friendship as a theme.

HOW TO WALK by Najaf Hahn is a collection of short reflective essays to celebrate and urge you to think about your own life.

Two RWB writers had Christmas celebrations of their own to share:

Janet Oakley’s THE CHRISTMAS WELL

Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Christmas-W...

And Pam Helberg reposted her Christmas memoir/blog after our meeting. http://pamelahelberg.com/author/phelb...

Merry Merry Happy Happy Celebrations to all the RWB Writers.

We will meet again January 10th 2016 and our canopy/theme will be (fittingly) Fresh Starts, New Beginnings

Red Wheelbarrow Writers November Book Club

RWB Book Club Nov 15

Our canopy theme for DECEMBER is CELEBRATIONS, so any book in which a celebration figures prominently. Any kind of celebration. We’ll meet at the Pickford on December 13th at 4.

Our canopy theme for November was WRITERS, fiction or memoir  We met Sunday November 15th at the Pickford

A great discussion which led us to interesting questions of writers’ lives and ways of depicting them on the page and in film and if writers were generally more egotistical and narcissistic than much of humanity. The consensus was yes, followed with a sigh, and the observation of : how could we not be? Then we passed the wine bottle around.

Interesting how some of these books are repeat returns, that is they have been a favorite book in another a category as well.

In no particular order, save that I shall place DAVID COPPERFIELD first, they are:

DAVID COPPERFIELD, the quintessential story of the writer’s young life and struggles. It mirrors Dickens’ own life, save that David does not have ten children. (published about 1850 at the height of CD’s career.)

TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Ann Patchett, the story of two writers’ lives and their friendship through grad school. This book was selected by several in the month we did memoir as well.

WRITING IS MY DRINK by Seattle writer, Theo Nestor. Yes, there re writing prompts and thoughts about the process, but the book is also about her life as a writer. Again, this was a memoir choice as well.

STILL WRITING by Dani Shapiro. Similar to Nestor’s book. Tells the story how she, Dani became a writer and struggles with her mother, an unsuccessful writer.

HANDLING THE TRUTH by Beth Kephart Memoir

THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY (2014) did not get the author’s name. A novel about Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny Osborne.

A PARIS TRILOGY

LK note, these three books read together create an incredible picture of that fabled time in Paris from about 1900 till 1930, and the lives of writers and artists. Gertrude and Alice moved in together in about 1904 and Gertrude’s book (her only book that ever sold well) about Alice is a testimony too to their long marriage, and Alice’s enduring belief in Gertrude. Hemingway’s book has its charms as well. A new edition of his book out in the last ten years edited by his grandson.

THE ALICE B TOKLAS COOKBOOK by Alice B. Toklas. [not to be missed!]

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein

A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway

THE PARIS WIFE a novel about Hadley Hemingway, EH’s first wife I didn’t get the author’s name, but this is a recent book. Very well researched and satisfying.

EXILE’S RETURN by Malcolm Cowley, Another Paris memoir by a man of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s vintage who also went to Paris to be a writer in those years. This book is a series of essays about their generation. Cowley himself is a fine writer, but he made his reputation as an editor of genius for something like half a century.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT by Norman McLean, again a return choice in memoir. A beautiful memoir beloved by many, including moi

An Annie Dillard Trilogy This battered and much loved trade paperback was brought by its owner who clutched it the whole time. She told a cosmic story of having found it in a book bin tied with a red ribbon, and clearly meant to be found and loved.

The three books in this trilogy were touted by other readers as well.

PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

THE WRITING LIFEE

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante, the first of four very popular new books about two friends from childhood in postwar Naples, their competition and affection. This book too showed up last month in Friendship.

A Joan Didion duet Not about the writer’s life per se, but still fitting under our canopy.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

BLUE NIGHTS

ON WRITING by Stephen King

Nora Ephron ANYTHING SHE WROTE (Not a title, just a suggestion)

DOT TO DOT, a YA novel whose author I did not get the name.

WEST OF SUNSET by Stewart O’Nan, a new novel, 2015 about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sad last years in Hollywood before his death in 1940. Told with tenderness and compassion for a man who was difficult and destructive. Portrayal of alcoholism is vivid and terrible

THE MASTER by Colm Toibin a novel with Henry James at its core. Beautifully structured, it begins and moves forward from about 1895 with the crashing failure of his play Guy Dombey in the West End and moves to the death of his brother William in about 1905. But the book goes back too, uncovering the childhood and youth. You can read this w/o knowing your Henry James, but if you do know his work, there are lovely little gems here, sparks for the various novels.

DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON by George Orwell, Memoir after a fashion. Orwell’s penurious life in the mid-30’s. Filled of course with his politics and passion, but full of unforgettable portraits of people and circumstances that helped to shape him.

THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham. This book was a latecomer to the list, but as with the Henry James above, the portrayal of Virginia Woolf is indelible.

Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees

Every year in November, RED WHEELBARROW WRITERS (a loose affiliation of lively writers in Whatcom County, Washington) has a round robin or collective novel.  This to celebrate National Novel Writing Month, the belief or hope or stubborn conviction that if you write about 1600 words a day, you can have a whole novel in a month.  We certainly can.  Thirty writers sign up to write a chapter a day.  The results are usually crazy funny, sometimes just crazy.  This year, however the novel actually just gets better and better, narrative possibilities billowing out from the original, the first chapter.   I wrote that.  It’s here below.  A link to read the rest of the novel follows.  For a delightful time, follow JUICY FRUIT DON’T GROW ON TREES.  Especially if you are of a writerly or literary bent, if you believe in books having an impact on one’s life, this story is for you

Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees

Red Wheelbarrow Writers Collective Novel

NaNoWriMo, November 2015

  Chapter One

When Our House Bookstore was closed for the night, the books came to life. They carried on noisy conversations, affable exchanges, the occasional flirtation, and now and then, a roaring fight. However, they were always back on the shelves, usually in their appropriate places, when they heard the key turn in the lock.

Annie Madigan, breathless and out of sorts, came in through the storeroom door, and turned on the light switch. She was late to work. Not by much, but late nonetheless. She grabbed a feather duster, dashed into the store proper, and dusted over all the shelves, tickling the books, though she did not know it, and the books did not let on.

The store cat, Ahab, rounded the corner, stretched, yawned and gave her a look of feline inquiry. Annie returned to the storeroom, dropped off the feather duster, freshened Ahab’s water, put some more kitty-kibble in his dish, and—nose-held—emptied his litter box in the bin outside. She returned to the store, washed her hands, and pretended she hadn’t just done that.

Annie popped on the store computers, but checked her personal email on her phone. Her heart sank. Nothing from Jason. He should have written or called. He ought to apologize. He was the one who had cheated, after all. He had slept with her house-mate Erica on Saturday when Annie went briefly to her parents’ place. She knew because Erica told her. Gloating. Today was Monday, and still no word from Jason. She loved him. Loved him still. Love is not a faucet one turns off and on. One little misdeed, and presto! Finished? Oh, sure she knew all the self-help books (of which there were half a dozen under her bed) told you to be strong, keep your own self-worth front-and-center, never doubt that you deserve the best, the truest and most shining. And Annie was strong, didn’t doubt her self worth. But she loved Jason, even if he was not the truest and most ….she suppressed a small sob. She so wanted the chance to forgive him, but he hadn’t so much as texted her.

Disappointed personally, she returned to the store computer, perusing the usual professional blogs and posts, ShelfAwareness, Goodreads, Off the Shelf, and other forums to see what was inciting publishers’ and literary and booksellers’ excitement. Tom Clancy wannabees, and more frigging post-apocalyptic dystopian novels? Annie sighed. Then there were the celebrity memoirs with celebs’ thoughts on love and life and their eight million dollar advances. And, of course, the books that promised a distinct equation between cleaning out your closet, great sex, and enough cosmic fulfillment to turn you into a goddess. Or how to Lean In without Falling Over. Lyrics from an old song on a record her mother used to play rolled through Annie’s head, “I wish I could find a good book to live in…..”

A knock sounded at the store’s front door, though it wasn’t yet nine. Annie jumped up to open it, only to find her colleague Sean Cary, pushing his bicycle.   “You know you’re not supposed to bring that in through the front,” Annie reminded him, wishing she didn’t sound so didactic. A hangover from having taught first grade, no doubt.

“Tough shit,” said Sean cheerfully. He was a tall, rangy youth, blond hair and blue eyes that crinkled at the corners, not from age, but from squinting into the sunlight on a bike. He didn’t even own a car. “Old Blood and Thunder isn’t here yet.”

“You shouldn’t call him that, Sean.”

“Why not? He’s not here. Is he?” Sean sounded suddenly worried.

“No, he’s not here, but you’ll slip one day.”

“Like the way my mother called the doctor Beasterbrook?”

“What?”

“When I was a kid. Our doctor’s name was Easterbrook, but my mom couldn’t stand him, thought he was a total quack, so she named him Beasterbrook, and that’s what we all called him.”

“Why didn’t she just change doctors?”

“He was a good tipper.”

“The doctor tipped you?”

“No, my dad was a bartender at the Angel Pines Country Club, and Beasterbrook was in there all the time, drinking booze and playing golf. And a great tipper. So all three of us kids had to keep going to him, and we called him Dr. Beasterbrook.”

“To his face?”

“He didn’t know the difference. Like I said, booze and golf.”

“Well, anyway,” Annie returned to the matter at hand. “I’d suggest you refrain from calling Obie Old Blood and Thunder. If it gets back to Sandra, she won’t like it.”

“Oh, what do you want to bet she calls him that in bed? You know, just to boost his confidence.” Sean lowered his voice and rolled his eyes, “‘Come on, Old Blood and Thunder, give it to me like the Big Boy you are….’”

Annie’s face fell, and that’s when Sean knew that Old Blood and Thunder had just walked into the store behind him.

“Haven’t I told you a thousand times!” Old Blood and Thunder hollered as Sean wheeled his bike into the storeroom. “Don’t bring that frigging bike in through the front!” Then he flung himself down in the armchair between Biography and Memoirs, flung his feet out, and rubbed his temples.

“Is something wrong?” Annie asked with some trepidation. Old Blood and Thunder was generally in good spirits, but his funks could leave a genuine pall over the bookstore.

His real name was a rather dull, Otis Branch, Obie, they called him to his face. Sometimes Obie-Wan, which was a name he liked.   But secretly the Our House clerks, and customers, Bonnie, the barista at Java Jive, Antoine, the barber who cut his hair, the servers at El Taco Loco and Thai One On called him Old Blood and Thunder. OB&T for short. He was the longtime lover of the Our House owner, Sandra Thompson. They were an odd couple. Sandra was thin, petite unto bony, with a high bridged nose and big brown eyes, made to seem even larger behind her enormous glasses. She always wore long cardigans silvered with cat hair, long skirts or jeans, and Birkenstocks, sometimes with support hose. Her hair was long and wild and gray, and she kept it tamed in a knot at the top of her head. OB&T, by contrast, was an enormous man, still barrel-chested in his sixties, bearded and blue-eyed. His hair was short, shorn close to his head. He often wore leather vests with silver studs. Standing beside him Sandra appeared like a flighty little bird in the shadow of a mighty oak. They had been together for over ten years, devoted to each other. Without a blink of embarrassment, they called each other Porky and Petunia, their pet names for one another.

Old Blood and Thunder came by his name by virtue of his storytelling prowess. Anything you cared to bring up, OB&T had done it. Any book you ever mentioned, he had read it. Sailed solo down the Baja Coast. Sure, 1975. Served in ‘Nam. Yup. ‘69 to ‘70, more’s the pity. Marched alongside Caesar Chavez? 1966. Surfed with Frankie Avalon. Uh huh, 1962 (And boffed Annette Funicello too.) Somewhere in there he got an English degree from UCLA. Stevedore on an arctic icebreaker, 1980. Roadie for Joe Cocker, 1984. Disciple of the Maharishi, 1988. (Too late to meet George Harrison, but OB&T had slept in the same ashram as George who, OB&T insisted, had left something of his gentle spirit behind.) He had been a lighting gaffer for Frank Zappa’s shows, and changed Weezil’s diapers. He had fished in Alaska. He had bussed dishes at Chez Panisse, and smoked weed with Ken Kesey while typing stream of consciousness poems. He had briefly been a staffer at Poetry Magazine.   He could quote Auden, Yeats and Shakespeare till you wept.   His stories were legion, and he told them well, full of bombast and rhetorical flourishes. Listeners’ jaws dropped. People would come to Our House just to hear him talk. They would always buy a book he recommended because he placed these books in their hands as though the print and paper and words were somehow holy.

But now, to Annie, he looked like a crestfallen old man. She inquired again if everything was all right.

“All right?” he boomed, though he looked stricken. “Who wants to live with everything being All Right? Don’t you want to live at the peak of experience, Annie?”

Annie thought about this. Her beloved, Jason, and that bitch Erica had just brought her to the peak of a certain kind of experience, and it was painful. “No, Obie. I don’t think I do.”

Obie’s blue eyes pierced hers. “Why, Annie, you’re too young to give in like that! Why, when I was your age, I—”

But Annie had no wish to hear how Old Blood and Thunder was banging Marianne Faithfull in Mick Jaggers’ own bed, or drinking with Kurt Vonnegut and Kurt’s second wife,   or any other such achievement. She changed her tactic. “What’s the matter with you right now? Today.”

He seemed to visibly diminish. “Well, you know that author we have coming in tonight, the woman who wrote Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees.”

“Laverne Lutz.”

“Yeah, well Laverne and Sandra go way back, Parkview Elementary, Bellingham High School, class of ‘74. They both played the flute in the school band.”

“Sandra played the flute? Really? The bongos, maybe. She’s too…. too….”

“Wild, right? Sandra is one wild woman, my old lady, sweet Petunia!” OB&T glowed at the thought of her. Then his face fell. “But this Laverne Lutz? She’s stayed at our house last night to prepare for her reading at Our House tonight. She drove me bat shit crazy! Everything about her is neat and tidy, and fussy, persnickety and critical. Talking to her is like talking to a tea cozy!   She rearranged the silverware drawer while Sandra was cooking dinner! She actually sniffed the butter. She brought hand-tatted doilies for the toilet tank. She talked nonstop till one in the morning, and she was doing frigging yoga on the kitchen floor when I got up this morning.”

“What?” said Sean, joining them.

“Obie was just saying that Laverne Lutz stayed with Obie and Sandra at their house last night.” said Annie.

“My condolences, dude,” said Sean.

“You know Laverne Lutz?” asked Annie.

“No, but I read Chapter One of Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees, and it is El Suckaroo, man. Made me want a stick of Dentyne, or Double Bubble. A swig of Listerine. Just to clear the palette, know what I mean?”

“Please don’t say that books suck in the store, Sean,” said Annie, sotto voce as she nodded to their first customer, none other than Rosemary Leach who would chew your ear for half an hour, making you search all over for just the right book, and then she’d leave and buy it from Amazon. They all three looked away from Rosemary who headed toward cookbooks.

“And don’t let Sandra know that you hated Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees,” OB&T advised. “Sandra loves it. Loves Laverne. Loves Laverne’s writing. Can’t wait for the writing classes to start.”

“What writing classes?” asked Jenna, the third Our House Books clerk. Like Annie and Sean, Jenna was an ex-English major, a committed reader, a wistful, hopeful writer, though she had never quite had the courage to put pen to paper. She wore glasses that constantly slipped down her nose. Her hair was short and curly and framed a classically oval face.

“Sandra has invited Laverne Lutz to teach a class, for writers, here, at Our House, one night a week for four weeks,” said OB&T sadly.

“Wow,” said Jenna. “Maybe Sandra will let me take it for free! I loved Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees. It popped right along.”

“It’s selling very well,” Annie admitted.

“I don’t care about the book!” thundered OB&T which was a surprise to his listeners. He always cared about the books. “Laverne Lutz will be staying with us, at our house, for four weeks! What’ll I do? I’ll go bonkers!”

“Tell Sandra, it’s your house too, dammit, and you don’t want Lutz around,” said Sean, offering the male perspective.

“Doesn’t Laverne Lutz have a life of her own?” asked Annie. “You know, rent? A job?”

“She says she’s Between Things,” OB&T sighed. “but the truth is, I think she has an old flame here she wants to reconnect with, a doctor who is recently divorced and drinks too much. She never quite used his name, but she and Sandra were giggling like the schoolgirls they once were. Sandra’s a sucker for love.” He rose slowly, and made his way back to his office in the storeroom.

Sean and Jenna and Annie all saw Rosemary Leach coming. Sean and Annie quickly took up other tasks. Rosemary snagged Jenna and dragged her back to cookbooks with lots of questions.

Annie, busying herself the checkout counter, wondered fleetingly if she, too, might be called a sucker for love.   Not an appealing thought. Why should she so want to stay with someone who had brought her such pain? Why should she wait passively for word from her errant lover? Don’t you want to live at the peak of experience? The question rang in her head and her heart as the store began to fill with customers. She felt the need to act instead of merely suffer. To act now. She took out her phone and texted Jason in unadorned prose. Clean. Simple. I see no reason to court more heartache. You and I are finished. Was it just that easy? To upend her love life with a single “Send?” We’ll find out, she thought, pressed “Send” and waited for remorse to set in.

Young mothers pushing their toddlers’ strollers, wandered into the bookstore congregating in children’s books; retirees sought out fiction and finance; a couple of high school truants enthusiastically checked out the graphic novels. In an hour Annie would lead the Our House Book Club that met around the community table. In the meantime, and so she wouldn’t have to think about Jason, or the peak of experience or the need to act instead of merely suffer, Annie took a copy of Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees from the display rack by the checkout counter, opened it, and started to read.

The door flung open and a woman stood there, framed momentarily, her eyes quickly scanning Our House Books like a general looking over the placement of artillery. She flung her long scarf over one shoulder and strode in wearing stiletto boots, a smart skirt and jacket over a red blouse. Large hoop earrings brushed her shoulders, and her fingers were arrayed with a dazzling set of rings.

“How gratifying to see you reading my book! ” she said, coming up to Annie at the same time that Rosemary Leach seemed ready to dart out of the bookstore. The woman snatched Juicy Fruit Don’t Grow on Trees from Annie’s hand, turned to Rosemary and declared, “This is the book you want to buy! And I can sign it for you right now.”

 

 

http://www.redwheelbarrowwriters.com/...

 

 

 

Revisiting Graceland

Revisiting Graceland

“The writer needs a cupful of pain to get a thimbleful of prose. It’s the same for a musician, or a singer. That’s what we demand of our artists. They need to live like that. If they’re any good at all, they die like that.”

From Graced Land, Grove Press, 1992

In 2014 I finally succeeded in getting the North American rights to all my books returned to me, a tedious process that took far longer than it should have. But that is another story. Eventually I will offer them as e-books. Alas, the earlier novels were not produced on a computer, and the original manuscripts are probably in the basement where only the foolhardy venture.

Fortunately, I discovered that my friend, the very talented Andrea Gabriel, renowned illustrator, and children’s book author is technically adept. To begin with, Andrea took a hardback of Graced Land and somewhere out in Etherland it got torn apart and its guts fed into a machine that rendered it electronic. Andrea returned to electronic file to me for proofreading.

As a writer, it is, for me, an article of faith never to read my work in print. I might glance through the pages, read a bit here or there, but once in print, I never again revisit a book I have written. Why? Because I always immediately think: I could have made that better. Why didn’t I change that? I should/must revise. And yet, once your mss is turned to print, gifted with an ISBN number, that ship, as they say, hath sailed. I wrote Graced Land in about 1990. A long time ago. I might not like it now.

For these reasons and others, I came upon this proof-reading task with trepidation. I dilly-dallied.(Not least because I have an adversarial relationship with Microsoft Word, and I dreaded dealing with its barrage of pedantic tics and giggles.) But finally (after Andrea nudged me) I went to work.

In proofing the book, yes, I wanted to revise. But didn’t. Yes, I wanted to re-punctuate. But didn’t. But to my surprise, I found that revisiting Graceland (the original title; Elvis’s estate made us alter it) reminded me that of all the books I’ve written this was, without doubt, the most fun. I laughed all over again. Got misty all over again.

The original idea for Graced Land came from not from Elvis at all. I was not a fan. Rather, a chance conversation with my mother about a house in a neighborhood not far from the old county complex where she used to work as secretary ignited my imagination. On the porch of this modest house there was a shrine to Elvis that the locals referred to as Heartbreak Hotel. That inspiration, lightly mixed with something of my short, ill-starred career as a social worker, begat a novel with Elvis at its center, though invisible. (He does however, make one ghostly appearance.)

When I began writing I knew very little about Elvis, and cared less. My Elvis education (a story all on its own which I shall spare you) began with the music. I wrote the book with Elvis’s music blaring. I used headphones after the kids came home from school in the afternoons, so they could do their homework.

In some ways, while I was writing the novel, Elvis moved in with us. He stayed here long after the book was published, a benign sort of presence. His music permeated the house and our lives. Pictures and posters that went up when I was writing Graced Land remain on the walls still. Bear and Brendan took some of these pictures and posters with them when they moved to LA; they now hang in their homes.

For about ten years, every January 8th, we had noisy Elvis Birthday Parties. We played the music nonstop, ate Elvis’s favorite foods (like Fools’ Gold Loaf) assembled a 1000 piece Elvis puzzle in the one room and watched all the movies on three different TVs in another. We always began with the hands-down favorite, King Creole. We all stood up and shouted with Elvis, “Now you know what I do for an encore!” You had to sing an Elvis song to get in the front door. We had lyric sheets for those who needed them. People brought their instruments, and jammed. These parties lasted for ten or twelve hours. Perhaps thirty or more people, a crowd scene fueled by music.

In proof-reading Graced Land, the crowd scenes fueled by music were the most fun to read. And to write: some of these scenes I had a revised a hundred times, not because they needed that much work, but because I got to plow the music into the prose itself. I found the experience exhilarating.

Almost as exhilarating as the main character, young, bookish/literary Emily Shaw feels in the Burning Love Chapter. Emily, drinking, dancing in a local bar to a band playing All-Elvis, imagines Elvis and Shakespeare, the Burning Bard, on stage, performing together:

Everyone on the dance floor, happy heretics all, hotfooting over coals, Burning Love, their sweat flying like steamy smoke, sizzling out of that short fuse: put the key of imagination into desire and start the ignition. Imagination and desire fired Emily, who danced like the floor had been torched, like her very flesh was turning on a musical spit,  smoking, and she laughed out loud to think of Shakespeare, of the violent delights, the violent ends, the fire and powder, flash of heat you could feel radiate off the Bard’s immortal pages. Shakespeare, he knew all about Burning Love, that’s why he smokes up the pages of the Norton Anthology while the rest of them just trundle and grump. Shakespeare could catch the throb, throttle, combustion of imagination with desire, lust, and suction. Oh, Little Willie, the Burning Bard, he’d met that general of hot desire, all right, he knew Burning Love and he knew what to do with it: melt it all down and pour it—molten, liquefied, and, above all, hot—into words, form them into perfect sonnets, that’s why his words still smoked up off the page, singed your very fingers: because that’s what Burning Love is all about. Shakespeare knew it. Elvis too. Emily threw back her head and laughed, imagining them both up there, the Burning Bard and the King, that hip-thrusting hunk of—what else?— Burning Love. The King in sequined white and Little Willie in sequined black, each gripping a mike while the flames flared all around them, two masters of emotion, singing to one another and anyone else who cared to experience the flames you love to lick, turn you into smoke you like to die of and here, right here, with heat wavering, flames snapping all around, Elvis and the Burning Bard who knew that water cools not love, hell no, not Burning Love. And what other kind was there? What other kind was worth having? Emily spun into Howard’s arms and out again. He caught her, pulled her up close against his hot body, and she combusted spontaneously, Burning Love at both ends, steaming spirit, just like Elvis and the Burning Bard. Breathe deep, O Burning Love, and fear not, fear not the heat, the smoke, the sizzle.

The e-book, Graced Land, will be available January 8th 2016 for Elvis’s birthday.

 

Shoe Sacrifice to Elvis, 2001

Cultivating the Past on Paper

The Memoir is a like those old chia pets:  water it with words and it will sprout and grow and surprise you.  Below you’ll find the handout from last night’s Introductory Memoir class at Village Books.

If you were there, then you know how important community is, and how much energy you can imbibe from other writers.  If you weren’t there, you can nibble on the below.

Writing Your Memoir: Making the Narrative Journey

# 1 of the Red Wheelbarrow Writers/Chuckanut Writers

WhaMemWriMo Series                          

©Laura Kalpakian                                                                                                                              September 3 @Village Books

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley

Everyone has memories, but not everyone writes a memoir. To turn your memory into memoir is a self-conscious act of preservation, presentation, and editing. The memoir is a narrative construct, literary shape that you give to the past.

The memoir pulls the past into a pattern. It gives the past shape and meaning that it did not have when it was the present. The experience described in the memoir is not fresh. Not raw. The grit of daily life has been expunged, polished, washed away. The Memoir has always the advantage of hindsight. It recognizes significance of people and events.

As a literary form, your memoir will have a Structure, and for it you will create a Narrator.

FORM: As memoir writers you need not be shackled to a long, continuous narrative (ala Frank McCourt’s year by year account of his childhood/youth. For Memoir the essay is a great form to begin with . The structure and coherence obliged of you, the writer, are more easily managed in an essay, especially writing on a daily basis.

SUGGESTIONS for Memoir Essays that will lead (eventually) to a broader book:

Addresses: Places you have lived, describe and then fill up

Cars/Vehicles: What did each car mean at the time that you drove it?

An Important Object: an heirloom, a tool used in some endeavor, a gift, even some humble object Memorable Events: Not just weddings, funerals, or graduations, but say, the …..tiny, vivid moments in which you recognized…..?

Memoir is like a chia pet. You sprinkle words on it like water and it will grow and blossom, fill out and fill up. The Memoir flourishes at the confluence of memory and imagination. The more you write, the more context and background, mood, meaning and significance will come to you. Expand! Don’t be afraid to go off-topic; that’s what revision is for. WhaMemWriMo is not for the completion of a work of genius. You’re part of this endeavor so you can create draft that you can later weigh, measure, and edit.

The intended reader of the Memoir is someone unknown to the writer. This puts the burden of description on the author. Make use of the tools of fiction: scenic depiction, dialogue, character development. Plumb the implied depths of your situations, and enhance with telling specificity. Develop and add detail. (Water for the chia!) Create landscapes. Portray your people and emotions in some kind of action as you move them through the landscapes you have created. The question for the author is this: Have I transformed my private memory into an experience the reader can vividly share, in short, a memoir.

Foremost:

The Memoir is not the story of what you know, it is the story of how you learned it.

 

 

 

A Memoir for Memoir Month

For September 1 2015. An old memoir, but, still true.  That’s the beauty of memoir.  This is the story–not of what my mother learned, but how she learned it. c.1450 words

ANOTHER STORY

This is not my story. I wasn’t even there. But like a stone well-worn, polished by the waters that run over it, this story has come to have a pleasing roundness in our family, the sharp edges, the pain buffed away. It is my mother’s story, how she became a convert to John Steinbeck. She tells it well, as someone might recount discovering the True Faith. Like most converts, she is emphatic, vocal, eager to spread Steinbeck’s Word. Her conversion story testifies to broadening your notions of what is relevant. Do not be narrow-minded: that’s the implicit moral in the pain-free version. Like most such time-honed tales, the story itself can be reduced to a sort of punch line. The poignancy is in the context, always left unspoken in the telling.

The punch line goes something like this: in about 1969 or 1970 my sister’s high school home tutor required her to read Cannery Row. My sister Helen loved it and she said to my mother, You should read this book. My mother said, Oh no, I don’t like Steinbeck. And my sister replied, What have you read of his that you don’t like? The answer to this was: Nothing. I have never read a book by Steinbeck.

As a girl growing up in Los Angeles in the Thirties, my mother, Peggy Kalpakian, had absorbed urban prejudices against the Okies pouring into California. Steinbeck of course was associated with them, and with other generally unsavory Not Nice people. But my mother agreed with Helen that this was an ancient, unthinking prejudice and so she read Cannery Row. Read Tortilla Flat. Read Sweet Thursday. These, the lighter, lively novels first made a convert of her, though not yet a True Believer.

My mother moved from the charms of Cannery Row to The Grapes of Wrath, and Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, on to the tapestry of Shakespearean struggle in East of Eden. As she waded further and deeper into Steinbeck’s work and life, she quit getting the books from the library. She bought them all. Bought multiple copies. Pressed these books into the hands of unbelievers, or even the merely indifferent, saying, Steinbeck is a wonderful writer. Here is a book you will love. Read. But her conversion was not an altogether literary experience. John Steinbeck rescued my mother, as surely as if he placed his hand at her elbow and walked her through a dark time.

As I said, when she became a True Believer, I did not live there. I was 3000 miles from Southern California, living back east going to graduate school and contributing my feet, my voice, to the protest, to antiwar marches. In our family, I was the first person to go east since my mother’s parents, fresh off the boat in 1923, got on the train in New York, went to Los Angeles and never looked back. On my father’s side, the Mormon side, in the 1850’s some plucky ancestor had pushed her handcart and her surviving children westward, walking to Utah from Iowa City. She never looked back. For us, living in a dry, unglamorous California town, there was no old country. No looking back.

When I was back east, my brother Doug was 6000 miles west of California. Vietnam.

U. S. Army, Fourth Infantry. His letters home from Vietnam were erratic, erratically received and erratically written. Reading his letters, which were terrible, terrifying and enigmatic, my parents feared. They despaired when there was silence. Strange phone calls came to my parents’ house, cryptic inquiries, references to military prison from the parents of a boy in his unit. (And they were boys, make no mistake; my brother was in the Fourth Infantry, thrashing through jungles at nineteen because he’d cavalierly, or stupidly or wantonly dropped a course at the community college and was thus no longer a full time student, ripe for the draft.)

My parents woke each morning sick with unspeakable foreboding and went to bed each night sick with unspoken grief. During the day, in addition to their ordinary jobs, a secretary, a salesman, they bore these unshared, unbearable burdens. How can you tell the neighbors, the supercilious boss, the client whose business you need, that you fear for your son’s life, his health, his freedom, his sanity? In these same years, my parents trembled too at the prospect of losing my sister. At seventeen, stalked by Crohn’s disease, Helen was too frail to go to school. She underwent one massive surgery after another, none proving successful.

Into this daily vat of anxiety, dread, unexplained illness, the possibility of death in a distant jungle, there came into my mother’s life the austere presence of John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s books, his vision, his characters, his prose spoke to her. Steinbeck stood beside my mother in the way that old gods might have stood beside sufferers, save that in becoming Californians, my family’s old gods had dissipated. Vanished. The Mormon faith that had sustained my father’s people across the plains was not my mother’s faith (nor by that time, my father’s either). The Armenian Apostolic church that had sustained her parents relied on a language she did not understand. The protestant faith of her youth seemed smug, unquestioning, unequal to the incipient tragedy that gnawed at her sleep and greeted her on waking. But Steinbeck was equal to the possibility of tragedy. Steinbeck recognized sorrow when he met it. He knew struggle. Steinbeck’s rolling prose became a kind of Holy Writ. My mother cut passages out of his books and pasted them inside the china cabinet (where presumably few but she would ever look).

Steinbeck’s characters do not (to paraphrase Faulkner) prevail. But they endure. And there are times when the enduring is sufficient. Indeed, when it is all that’s possible, when the enduring itself bestows on suffering a kind of invisible nobility, which, in turn, creates courage. My mother—her life outwardly ordinary, middle class—found herself like Steinbeck’s Okies, and like his beleaguered workers, like the limited Lennie, like farmers facing drought: overwhelmed by forces she did not understand and could not control. These characters gave her the courage to endure. Beyond his books, Steinbeck’s own life and personal struggles, his hard work, his self-doubt, all that spoke to her. When she read that his son had been in Vietnam, my mother knew that he understood. In some strange way, John Steinbeck stood at her side. A grizzled ghost.

That he too was a Californian helped. Steinbeck’s pastures of heaven were hers. He wrote of things and people, the light, the fields, the landscape, sensory experience my mother could easily picture, remember. His prose was not Shakespearean, shaped in pleasing but arcane constructions; his sentences were hewn in California, beside the Pacific, in and of the long valleys. In the winters of her discontent, dread and anxiety, Steinbeck, his characters, his words, his evocations, his tragic vision came to my mother’s rescue when she most needed rescue, when all else failed.

My brother needed rescuing. One at a time she mailed Steinbeck’s novels to Doug. Those books may still be in Vietnam.

Young and full of my own endeavors, I did not need to be rescued, but she sent me the novels too. I read them. I was a literary enthusiast, but not a convert. On reading the paperback Steinbecks (and wishing even then, hoping to be a writer myself, but not brave enough to write) his work only whispered to me that fiction could be created from the dust, the dry wind, the tumbleweed and oleander, from anonymous arroyos, the canyons of the California that I knew. Even great fiction. It’s possible. Possible. But that is another story.

All those years ago I did not know what I have since learned as a parent: what it is to love someone more than you love yourself, and the despair in finding yourself powerless in the face of that child’s peril.

All these years later, my mother is still a True Believer. John Steinbeck remains her favorite author (next to me, I think). She has since pressed Steinbeck’s novels into the hands of my sons. They have said thank you, but they are young and full of their own endeavors; they are readers, but not converts.

My sister endured and prevailed, survived, has a full life as a teacher and an excellent horsewoman.

My brother came home from Vietnam. But that is another story.