Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 2

A Crash Course in Revision

With a deadline upcoming (January 31st 2023) for Red Wheelbarrow Writers next anthology, many of my friends are furiously trimming material to fit into the 3000 word limit for prose. To help I’d like to offer here a sort of Crash Course in Strenuous Revision. As a general rule, I have always found that it’s far easier to cut whole chunks of info, swaths of information, whole paragraphs, and then, later, return and effect new transitions between or among what is left. As a practice, this is much better than nickel-and-diming yourself to death, cutting one adjective at a time.  Also, truth be told, there’s something strangely satisfying about slashing through your own prose. I recently took a portion of an (unpublished) novel, a chapter that was 9000 words long and sliced and diced it into a Story, word limit, 5000 words. Mine was 4989 words. In cutting those four thousand words of the novel to make this Story a stand-alone piece, I did it in as a process (all writing is process until it has an ISBN; then it’s a product).

Step One: Slash and Burn

First, I went through and roughly chopped out everything in this chapter that referred to What Came After in the book.  That is to say info and even characters I needed in subsequent chapters, things and people, references that would be developed later. Did I need them here? No. Out they went. Slash and burn. I did this (to begin with) with no thought of transition or connective prose, or any of that. Just cut them out. Delete. I also went through and deleted everything that referred to characters and incidents that harked back, referred to earlier chapters in the novel. Trash and slice. This was more difficult. These were references that already situated my central character (and first person Narrator) in her physical and emotional environment. How had she come to this weird place, a railroad town full of rough men and rough justice? She was seventeen, a bride, a knocked-up bride in the year 1887. Now I needed to establish her situation swiftly, and in a way that would not detract from the Story at hand.

STEP TWO: Be Elastic

To simplify the Story into 5000 words, I had to change the central conflict. In the novel, this chapter chronicles the deterioration of the Narrator’s marriage, the undermining of her relationship with her young husband, a process that required several subsequent chapters for a dramatic climax. Here, for this 5000 word Story, I changed the dynamic: the central conflict is between the Narrator and her father-in-law who has brought the young couple here ostensibly for his son to work. As a result, I diminished the husband’s role, and cut nearly all of his dialogue except for two informative exchanges where backgrounds are given. The reader needed to know that the husband’s family was wealthy and that my Narrator was an orphan who had been a ward of that family, and educated with his sisters.  Beyond that important bit of info, I offered nada.  (Nothing on how they fell in love and she got pregnant, and the scandal that ensued, events that had taken up reams of words and paper and chapters in the novel.) When I cleared away the debris, I found I had rooted the largest part of the Story in only two well developed scenes.  In one, teatime with a bunch of prim, judgmental matrons, the Narrator is a participant.   In the other she is an observer of a rough-justice trial.

STEP THREE: Stitching

Having done that clear-cut through the material, I waited for the smoke to clear and then I returned to mend the torn places. I needed new transitions stitching one paragraph to another. This was not easy, but again, there was something satisfying about the work, seeing how new transitions could be effected. A novel has a more leisurely narrative pace than a story. (Writing tight prose is one of the pleasures and rewards of writing a story, as opposed to a novel.)  For this Story, I speeded up the pace, moving information around, repairing the connections, making swift transitions where I had chopped out not just sentences, but whole paragraphs. So, the slash and burn, done. The repair work, done. Now what? Now I had to ask myself what absolutely needed to be on the page for readers to immerse themselves in this 5000 word story and see its poignance?

STEP FOUR: Adding Detail

Historical fiction (like science fiction and fantasy) requires the author to be generous, even slavish with detail. These authors cannot simply say, “It was a lovely day in June” and plop the reader in an easily imagined moment. For this Story, I had to have sufficient detail and description to remind readers that this was a railroad town in 1887. Thus, I waxed on about the light from torches and lanterns for the trial scene. The oppressive heat, the high collars, the stiff corsets in the teatime scene. Throughout my Narrator responded vividly to the dust and noise, the dung of horses and mules in unpaved streets.

STEP FIVE: Align the opener and the ending with the changes.

Now that the Story was so altered, the opening and closing paragraphs presented their own challenges. The opening paragraph ironically remains almost the same as from the novel inspired  by that great scene in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West when we first see the town as Claudia Cardinale gets off the train. However, readers of the novel knew very well why this young couple had been brought to this town. The reader of the Story did not. The Narrator’s father-in-law wants to break them both, to punish them for their sins. In the Story, the last sentence of the first paragraph reads: “And punish us he did.” So, from the opener, the nub of the Story is clear. In the novel, I didn’t need to say that; it was already clear. After a four-space break, the closing paragraph of this Story stands all by itself.  It is clipped, matter-of-fact, short sentences. It does not elaborate or explore the Narrator’s thoughts or emotions about what she has witnessed. None of that. The reader ought to know that (assuming my teatime scene and trial scene were successful and effective). This sparse final paragraph was more dramatically effective than any wordy eloquence. When I had thrashed through the story maybe twenty times, I noticed something odd. Those two primary, well developed scenes—the tea party and the trial—they had changed hardly at all.

UNEXPECTED BENEFITS

Even odder, having sloshed around in the bowels of the story (unfortunate metaphor perhaps, but apt) I had a new understanding of what needed to be where. In essence, I had effected a new dramatic economy. I didn’t need three or four long scenes between the husband and wife to convey the pressures they were under.  I could do it in two artfully placed and well-tailored exchanges.   I had tightened up the narrative pace so the chapter moved at a better clip toward the tea party and the trial. I went back to the novel, pulled this chapter out and revised it, using many of the changes I’d put in place with the Story. In short, revising for the Story helped the novel. Were my efforts successful? Did the Story stand on its own? I don’t know. I wasn’t altogether happy with the title; it floated loosely like a canopy over the Story rather than the sure ping of a tuning fork. But I sent this Story off to three places. Two declined swiftly with the usual non-comment about their needs blah blah blah. The third promises to get back to me sometime before the Arctic icecap melts and the Big One breaks California off into its own island republic. I’m waiting.

A USEFUL EXERCISE

When I first taught creative writing at University of Washington, my colleague there, Shawn Wong had created one of the best exercises ever for his students. I’m paraphrasing,  but it went something like this:  First week he told them to write 2000 words of story. Fine. Next week said take those 2000 words and turn them into 10,000 words. Whew, lots of work, but OK. The third week he told them to take those 10,000 words and cut them down to 5000. Have at it. When those students were through wailing, wrestling with their prose and ideas, can you even imagine how astonished they were at what they had learned?

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The Barn Owl

Though Emily Shaw is the central character, the heart of Graced Land belongs to Joyce Jackson, a remarkable woman who steadily defied those who sought to break her spirit. But Joyce’s unique qualities, her innate resilience stir envy and anger in Marge Mason, her first social worker when–pregnant and broke, her husband in prison for unarmed robbery–Joyce applies for welfare.

Years later young Emily Shaw becomes Joyce’s social worker. By this time Marge Mason is a powerful supervisor in the welfare department.  “Marge Mason had been a WAC  and she still wore clothes with a martial air, uniforms of checked dresses, gray gabardine skirts wrapped round her impossible bulk, and white polyester blouses rippling over her enormous breasts. Her graying hair was cut in a no-nonsense bob and she wore strong sensible shoes. She had a way of sucking on her bottom lip that made Emily shiver. When Marge’s heavy-hooded eyes met Emily’s during staff meetings, Emily felt like a near-dead mouse twitching in the beak of a barn owl.”

The impoverished mothers I met in this capacity often left me humbled with their stories

Graced Land is fiction, but this character, Marge Mason, this was from life. My life. In one of those youthful moments when one realizes Oh wait! Life is not going to pick me up and carry me forward on a glorious tide of true love and unsullied happiness, I took a job as a social worker.

My supervisor in the welfare department had a mean streak a mile wide. She hated men and she also hated any woman who had ever loved a man. This category included the single mothers among our AFDC clients, the acronym for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The impoverished mothers I met in this capacity often left me humbled with their stories, their lapsed pride, their hemmed-in, desperate situations, their love for their kids.

The Spencers had a case file two inches thick dating back to when Mr. Spencer went to prison.

One family was unusually intact, father, mother and two children still living at home after several others had fledged. The Spencers (I have changed their name) had an enormous AFDC file, dating back perhaps a decade or more when Mr. Spencer went to prison, leaving his wife and children penniless. By the time I met them Mr. Spencer was long out of prison, but confined to a wheelchair. I can’t remember why he went to prison or what had put him in a wheelchair, but at about age fifty he was still a powerfully built man, with broad shoulders, massive hands and muscled forearms. He was on Disability so basically all their income derived from the state of California. Mrs. Spencer was doughy woman, a shapeless blur of gray, gray hair, gray dress, gray face.

They lived in a tiny hovel built at the back of another rundown house in the proverbial bad neighborhood. I knocked on the door, introduced myself as the new social worker, and Mrs. Spencer warily showed me into their cramped kitchen. We sat at the scarred table, Mr. Spencer smoking in his wheelchair. A family friend was also present, a middle-aged man who said little, but stayed on while I conducted the Home Visitation, a twice-yearly routine for AFDC clients. I asked the obligatory questions about the two children still at home, a boy, age sixteen and a younger girl.  I notched off the parents’ responses about the children’s health and were they still in school, etc. etc. The Spencers signed the forms. I too signed, thanked them and left.

Thoroughly shaken, I hung up on this betraying bastard.

That afternoon a phone call came to my desk, a male voice refusing to identify himself, but advising me that the Spencer’s teenage son was not in school, and hadn’t been for some time.  I guessed that this male voice was the Spencers’ so-called friend. I knew, of course, that the rules required that any school-age child must be attending school to be counted in figuring the family’s grant, but I hung up on this betraying bastard, and told no one of his call. Thoroughly shaken, I hoped it would come to nothing.

A few days later my supervisor, the Large Marge prototype, called me to her desk. The same anonymous caller had phoned her with this info.  She instructed me to investigate. Not surprisingly, my findings corroborated the betraying bastard’s assertion: the boy had been truant for so long the high school had taken him off the books.

Large Marge had nailed them good, but I had to deliver the news.

Once given the facts, Large Marge personally did the financial calculations, worked on them for days, down to the penny.  She presented these figures to me with visible satisfaction. She had nailed them good. Their grant would be cut, indeed cut off entirely and they would receive nothing until the sum they owed on behalf of the boy was paid back to the state. It would take months, close to a year. Large Marge called the Spencers and told them we knew the boy was not in school.  They must come in for an interview.

“Now,” she said, handing me the folder with her calculations and the documents for them to sign. “You will meet with them.”

“You don’t mean that I should go tell them this, do you? You did all the work.”

“They’re your clients,” she replied malicious glee lighting her broad face.

Heart pounding, I walked the length of that huge office out to the reception room where all sorts of suffering humanity hunkered down. The Spencers were there, including the teenage son whose pale face was mottled with bruises.  Wheelchair or not, Mr. Spencer had beaten him with those powerful hands. All three Spencers radiated anxiety, pulsating fear and throbbing anger.

Mrs. Spencer began to wail, banshee-like wails

The son pushed his father’s wheelchair as I showed them to the grim interview room, florescent light, a metal desk. I outlined what we had discovered, making no mention of the betraying bastard who had turned them in.  As I described the penalties, down to the penny, Mrs. Spencer began to wail, screeching, banshee-like wails, and Mr. Spencer swore and pounded the table with his big fists. The boy burst into tears, sobbing, hiccupping.

Mrs. Spencer whimpered and Mr. Spencer howled that they knew nothing of their son’s cutting school. The boy swore he had not told them, vowed he would go back to school this very instant, only please… please…. the boy cried. The parents wept and moaned they had no other income except Disability….they had nothing…Please, please couldn’t I …

And of course, I could not. I was a servant of the state, and they had broken the rules.

After the interview I felt nauseous. I went to Large Marge and gave her the documents the Spencers had signed. I told her the boy had been beaten. She smiled like a barn owl with the mouse in its beak.

“Fuck off,” said Emily very politely. “And take your father with you. If you have one.”

Toward the end of Graced Land, Emily gets an anonymous phone call at the welfare office, a male voice. He speaks at some length, and she realizes this is a so-called friend of Joyce’s, someone who had been present when she won money on Saturday night. Emily murmurs something ineffectual, and thoroughly shaken, she hangs up.

But he calls again and again. “The low, anonymous voice coiled around her ear. ‘Did you do it?’

‘Who is this?’ Emily demanded.

‘You know I’m doing the state a favor. You know Joyce Jackson won $2700 on the radio station’s Memory Jackpot. She’ll never declare it. Fraud. You better get to thumping and get her for fraud.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Emily very politely. ‘And take your father with you. If you have one.’

Art did not imitate life. In the novel there is dramatic showdown between Emily and Marge.

When Emily fails to act on his accusations, the anonymous male phones her supervisor who is delighted to collect evidence against Joyce and eager to use it.

Graced Land is a novel, and so naturally toward the end there is dramatic showdown between Emily and Marge. Re-reading Graced Land for the Paint Creek Press edition, I judged the showdown scene to be overlong and probably overwritten. Ah well, the energy there is fueled by my long-suppressed empathy for the Spencers and many other families my supervisor eviscerated. (Cases alluded to, though not developed in the novel.)

I never gave that job another thought until I picked up the pen to write Graced Land.

After a mere six months I quit the welfare department and returned to graduate school.  I never gave that job another thought until I began to write Graced Land when it all came viscerally back to me.  The novel is not autobiographical, though Emily Shaw and I do share certain traits.  We were both young, bookish and unsuited to the job for all sorts of reasons, not least because “Emily saw life in moral and dramatic terms, and trusted life to reward her in moral and dramatic ways.”  Writing Graced Land allowed me to do just that.

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From Trash to Antiques

 

When I write fiction the central characters come to me first. They have names and trail a bit of backstory the way a child pulls a ragged blanket behind her on her way to bed.  After the characters, I need an opening scene or an opening line. I need a title.  The title can and often does change in response to the final element, the themes that ribbon their way through the story.  Themes—ideas and concepts that lie at the core of any literary novel—those only emerge as the drafts multiply and the characters make choices and act on those choices.

In Graced Land one important theme is the tension between history and story. The former is ostensibly factual, the latter ostensibly embroidered.  For Joyce Jackson and her daughters, Priscilla and Lisa Marie, this tension is portrayed with the notion of trash and antique, as in buy at trash, sell at antique.

If someone was to say, Wear this or go forever naked, you’d say, Okay, naked it is.

Joyce, Priscilla and Lisa Marie, haunt the weekend garage sales, buying lowly stuff, refurbishing it, and later, reselling at their own garage sales. The prize items are “antique quilts.”

“We take the really ugly clothes,” Cilla tells the reader, “so ugly that no one would wear it, so ugly, if someone was to say, Wear this or go forever naked, you’d say, Okay, naked it is. We take them and it’s my job to cut these up into neat little squares for the scrap box. Mama sews these scraps into quilts and we sell them as antiques. We always say our grandma, ninety, and near blind, sewed her arthritic little fingers right down to the bones making these antique quilts. (Never mind our one grandma’s dead and the other don’t speak to us.) Mama sews the quilts up quick, but she hand-stitches the hems. That’s all people look at anyway. People think a hand-stitched hem must of been done by angels, sitting by cozy fires with the kettle steaming, buttered toast, snow outside, and a little dog at their feet.”

You call it trash, it costs a quarter. You call it antique and it’s four and a quarter

At one of their garage sales a woman tearfully recognizes a family quilt she is certain her sister stole. Cilla goes on, “She tells us this Heartbreak Hotel of a story about a quilt her mother had made with a family tale for every piece in it. Me and Mama and Lisa, we listened to the woman’s sad story without looking at each other. We all shook our heads, and said, Really? Is that so?”

Sentimentally satisfied, even uplifted, the woman pays good money for the quilt and leaves.

Joyce, counting out twenties, comments to Priscilla and Lisa Marie, “Let that be a lesson to you girls.  It never matters what something really is, it’s the story you tell about it. It’s not the thing itself. You call it trash, it costs a quarter. You call it antique and it’s four and a quarter. They’re both true, but which one is going to matter? People forget trash.  They remember antique.”

A story that could also be described as a bald lie.

In the opening chapter of Graced Land the new, young social worker, Emily Shaw, makes a Home Visitation to her welfare client, Joyce Jackson.  Emily‘s fiancé is a law student in DC, and she is friendless and alone in St. Elmo.  Joyce Jackson is so warm and welcoming that this obligatory Home Visitation turns into a couple of hours as they drink iced tea and share confidences.  When Emily is leaving, Joyce gives her an antique quilt (complete with the story about the grandmother sewing them all by hand). A story that could also be described as a bald lie.  But to Emily the gift is meaningful, and endowed with comfort, even friendship.

History is so unbearable it must be dignified with story.

Stories evolve out of histories. Do we not, all of us, endow our histories with story of one sort or another? In the telling of anecdotes  our experiences are made sprightly or lively or funny, incidents that, in the living, might not have been funny at all. History is cruel and random, messy, inefficient.  Stories have form and shape denied to history. Stories may be cruel, but not random, or messy. Stories have beginnings and endings, and within those confines, stories—as Joyce recognizes—have significance that is denied to history. 

But in history, people just croaked. Look at Elvis.

Later in the novel, Emily, reflecting on her experience in Italy in August 1977 when news of Elvis’s death makes the papers, she stumbles on a fundamental human truth:

“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? 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.

Random scraps and random crap

Fiction writers turn histories into stories. To create story the author shapes events and the choices characters make into actions that have dramatic significance and thematic resonance. In nearly fifty years of writing I have taken a lot of random scraps, one might even say random crap— bits of insight, wads of pain, drops of sweat, unwiped tears, tales told by others,  heartbreak, elation, landscapes, laughter—and turned it into antique quilts.  Though I must say none of this has happened swiftly.  And much still remains in the scrap box awaiting assembly, and the hand-stitched hem.

Paint Creek Press has reissued GRACED LAND, now available wherever books are sold.

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Graceland to Graced Land

Never has folding laundry produced such creative results as that day in 1990 my mother and I were working our way through the laundry basket, casually reminiscing. We were remembering the elaborate shrine to Elvis on the front porch of a small tract house in San Bernardino. I remarked, “I always thought a woman with two daughters must live there.”

As soon as the words crossed my lips, I knew the girls were named Priscilla and Lisa Marie. I knew that central character, Emily would call on a long forgotten episode in my life when I was briefly a social worker. I knew the #1 Elvis fan, Joyce, must clearly have been born Rejoice. And I knew the title would be Graceland. Not just Elvis’s house, but the very notion of a place of Grace, a place where you could be assured, comforted and uplifted, all at the same time.

I was deep into the writing before the thought crossed my mind: what if I can’t use that title? I scoured all over the finest of fine print of Paul Simon’s 1985 glorious album, Graceland and I saw not one word of trademark or permission granted or any such thing. So I went ahead and wove the notion of Graceland into the fabric of the book.

Graceland™. Oh no! I don’t know how Paul Simon got away with this, but we were in trouble.

In 1991 Grove Press (then Grove Weidenfeld) bought the novel. I went to New York to meet the agent and publisher. I brought with me a bunch of coffee mugs I’d ordered from the Graceland gift shop, and handed them out like party favors to the Grove staff, young people mostly who were eager and personable. Everyone was delighted with the coffee mugs, delighted to have so bright a novel with such lively possibilities. Then, glancing more closely at the coffee mug someone noticed, wait there was a little trademark sign there beside Graceland™. So tiny that I had never seen it, even with my glasses. Oh no! I don’t know how Paul Simon got away with this, but we were in trouble.

Thus began a flurry of letters (this is 1991) between Grove’s attorneys and the formidable, the monolithic giant, Elvis Presley Enterprises. Grove and I waxed eloquent about how the novel only added luster to Elvis’s name, to the legends of his generosity, and extolled both his tragedy and his triumph etc. etc. Finally it was decided that Grove would mail a copy of the galley (the advanced reading copy) to Jerry Schilling, the Main Vein (other than Priscilla) of Elvis Presley Enterprises. Schilling would read it and get back to us. (Schilling who is still alive has a key role in the new movie Elvis, instrumental in helping Elvis perform the 1968 Comeback Special that revitalized his career after nearly a decade of schlocky malaise.)

Schilling did get back to us. In fact he telephoned me, personally. The answer was no. He gave no reason and was deaf and dismissive to anything I might say. Elvis Presley Enterprises had the power to withhold permission of the word Graceland, and withhold they did.

Gnashing ensued.

What to do? The advanced reading copy with a striking cover had already gone out to booksellers and the press—with the title, Graceland. Moreover, by now, the all-important sales conference loomed. The publicity person, Ken Siman, insisted that whatever we called it, it had to start with G, that people would only remember that much. Booksellers and press would not know it by any other name. Gnashing ensued.

At some point I remembered the great Elvis song, “Promised Land,” an energetic late-career number about the pleasures and tribulations of road trips.  Grove and I settled on the awkward Graced Land. It started with a G. It alluded to the book’s thematics. It wasn’t great, but it would do. Moreover, Elvis Presley Enterprises couldn’t touch us. And it could be gently elided when spoken drawled over, you might say, Grace…dland.

Ta-da! Graced Land was officially Grove’s stellar offering at the sales conference.

To tout the book at Grove’s December sales conference, my son Bear (age thirteen) made a video tape of me at my desk talking about Elvis and the novel. My mom held the old VCR camera (semi-steady) while he and Brendan (age nine) joined me for the final scene.  My dad helped me recreate the shrine as it was described in the novel, packed it all up and sent it UPS to New York. Ken Siman unpacked it, plugged in the Christmas lights, popped a cassette tape of music I had recorded into a boom box, and hit Play.  Ta-da!  Graced Land was officially the stellar offering at Grove’s sales conference in December.

The novel went forward into print, collected a tsunami of rapturous reviews.  Also, happily for us, in spring 1992 the US Postal Service unveiled the first Elvis Stamp after a nationwide voting process: did people want the “Young Elvis” or the “Old Elvis?” “The Young Elvis” won. (Why could there not have been two?)

The book itself seemed to bubble with the spirit of Elvis.

I went on a lengthy tour. Graced Land played well everywhere, bookstores, lit festivals, lots of radio and even TV. Readers responded to the emotion, the infectious joy, the humor and music.  The book itself seemed to bubble with the spirit of Elvis, connecting me with fans all over the country. For years afterward they continued to send me their homespun mimeographed newsletters, their buttons and bookmarks. Nearly all of these fan clubs collected money, sent funds to charities in Elvis’s name. (His incredible generosity, a little known fact of his life, was detailed in The Best of Elvis, by my friends Cindy Hazen and Mike Freeman).

Books get read—they get passed-around dog-eared with love—in paperback.

Despite all this excitement surrounding the book, I was alarmed because we still did not have paperback sale here in the States.  Grove assured me they’d paperback it themselves if need be. Books get reviewed in hardcover, but they get read—they get passed-around dog-eared with love—in paperback.  I so wanted that for my novel.

I felt like going to the hotel bar and having a great big swig of What Happened? over ice.

Graced Land won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. In March 1993 I went to the Booksellers’ meeting held at Spokane hotel. On the last day the PNBA winners sit on a dais and booksellers line up before them for autographs on the free copies supplied by the publisher. O Happy Day! The career author (moi)  gets to sign for enthusiastic booksellers, to  bask in all that praise and make all those much-to-be-envied connections for that book, and the next book, and the book after that….

Only. There weren’t any books. Maybe a dozen copies of Graced Land that the rep had brought with him, but nothing from Grove. Nada. The booksellers lined up in front of the other authors, signing away.  Pretty soon I took my pen and my purse and left. I felt like going to the hotel bar and having a great big swig of What Happened over ice. There was nothing to do but go home.

I never did know What Happened. Word percolated furtively about in bits and dribbles that morning that, put bluntly, some sort of really bad shit went down at Grove. The entire staff with whom I had worked so cordially and fruitfully, they were all out the door. Gone. Gone so fast they probably didn’t have a chance to grab their Rolodexes.

 I laughed and cried all over again. And I felt like perhaps Elvis never truly left the building.

If this had happened now in the 21st century, whatever bad shit went down, it would have been all over the internet instantly. Everyone (or everyone who cared) would know in a matter of hours. But in 1993, there was no one to ask. No one to write to. No one to call.  I do not know if bookstore orders went unfilled. Certainly there was no talk of an American paperback. Not long after, Grove (the new Grove) declared the hardcover out of print. I bought back a bunch of copies that went into the basement, and got damp. Reeking of mildew they linger still in my basement.

But now, thirty years later Graced Land is restored to glorious print. June 2022 Paint Creek Press has reissued Graced Land in a beautiful trade paperback edition. It’s part of the reissue of all my St. Elmo novels and stories. When I first re-read Graced Land ,  as we were prepping for publication, I laughed and cried all over again. And I felt like perhaps Elvis never truly left the building.

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Audubon

Above: 1034 Audubon in flames, 2017

When I slept there, no ghosts rapped, though I hoped the wallpaper would ripple.

The publication of Graced Land opened my life up to friends, experience and opportunities I could never have guessed at. Grove Press sent me on a book tour that included Memphis, a city I had never seen. At one of the bookstore readings a couple came up to me, Cindy Hazen and Mike Freeman. That very same month, May, 1992, they had published The Best of Elvis, a book detailing the King’s generosity, a theme deeply resonant in Graced Land. I’ve always felt that Elvis himself must have nudged the universe to bring us together. Both books celebrated Elvis for more than just his music. Cindy and Mike said they’d like to show me some of Memphis, Elvis style, but they had a family barbecue that Saturday night. Happily the barbecue was cancelled, and what followed was for me a truly memorable night on Beale Street.  Live music, dancing, meeting the early rock legend, Rufus Thomas, and an array of Elvis’s best friends, including members of the Memphis Mafia who had known Elvis since high school. They were all eager to read my book.

Graceland, a manicured museum, uninspiring.

Of course I went to Graceland on that visit, but I found it a manicured museum and the tour, led by a lady with a soothing accent, uninspiring. More interesting  than Graceland was 1034 Audubon Drive. Cindy and Mike drove me past this modest ranch-style house with four bedrooms, two baths, a two car garage, low fence and a broad front lawn. Elvis had bought this house with the first flush of his new money in 1956, the year his life would change forever. (Beautifully documented in the film, Elvis ‘56 which can be found on YouTube.) You could just imagine the family’s happiness here, affluent for the first time in their entire lives, at the crest of a wave that would recognize and reward Elvis’s talents.

One can only imagine the neighbors’ chagrin and the Presleys’ desperation for privacy.

When Elvis and his parents moved there, Audubon Drive—and its prosperous but not splashy neighborhood—were suddenly splashed all over national magazines, descended upon by photographers and mobbed with fans, teenagers who parked their cars, got out, roamed around. The police were often called to control the crowds. One can only imagine the neighbors’ chagrin and the Presleys’ desperation for privacy. Elvis put in a swimming pool and a game room. I have a fan club card, a 1956 photograph of a bunch of girls sitting around the Audubon pool, to bask in Elvis’s presence as much as the sunshine. The pool was only ever half-filled because (the story goes) Gladys was afraid of Elvis drowning. I also remember reading that Gladys had some chickens and they too disturbed the neighbors. After only thirteen months at Audubon, Elvis, Gladys and Vernon left, moved to Graceland to live behind the famous gates for the rest of their lives—and where they are now buried in the memorial garden. In 1998, Cindy and Mike learned that 1034 Audubon Drive house was about to go on sale. They made an offer that was accepted. I happened to be in Memphis then, touring with my novel Caveat. Cindy and I went together for a first look inside the house.

The current occupants were into taxidermy, stuffed animals everywhere and a strange odor.

Nothing structurally had been done to it since the Presleys left. However, the current occupants were into taxidermy and there were all sorts of stuffed animals with glassy eyes on the walls and shelves, including their pet Pomeranian. The place had (as you might well imagine) a strange odor. We left suppressing shudders, and with a better idea of the work that lay ahead for Cindy and Mike who were committed to restoring Audubon to its 1956 Elvis Glory. To recreate authentically they scanned hundreds of photographs, especially the famous Alfred Wertheimer photos of the family. They spoke with Elvis’s friends from that era who remembered the house. They gently scraped away the accretions of wallpaper down to the layer that matched the Wertheimer photos. They scoured flea markets and antique stores, thrift shops and estate sales. They put out word locally and abroad of what they were looking for, and people contacted them. They bought dishes and kitchen items that would have been in use when Gladys cooked there. The swimming pool had gone to ruin and that had to be restored as well. One thing not from the Fifties that graced the Audubon bookshelves was a copy of Graced Land. This made me very happy. Occasionally small groups, mostly European fan clubs, came to 1034 Audubon, and Cindy and Mike showed them around. But for the most part the house was always a work-in- progress while the couple lived there, diligently restoring it. They had their own lives as well. In 1997 John F. Blair published their book, Memphis, Elvis-Style allied to Mike’s tour bus business taking fans to Memphis sites associated with the King. They were also working on a new book annotating a trove of Patsy Cline’s letters they had bought at auction. (Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline’s Letters to a Friend, Berkley Books, 1999.)

I slept in Elvis’s original bedroom that faced the street.

I visited Memphis again in the early 2000s. By now Cindy and Mike had painstakingly given Audubon a 1956 vibe, complete with décor and musical motifs. I experienced strange twinges of déjà-vu to see myself in settings I vividly remembered from the Wertheimer photographs. I slept in Elvis’s bedroom that faced the street. That was his original bedroom, but later Gladys and Vernon gave their son the master suite at the back of the house so that he could get some rest. They slept in the front bedroom. (You have to wonder if teenage girls were still rapping at the windows disturbing Gladys and Vernon.) When I stayed there, no girls or ghosts or anyone rapped at the windows, though I kept hoping to see a ripple in the wallpaper, or to hear the twang of a lonely guitar.

Reverend Al was shouting, and we were all on our feet and I was crying.

On that visit Cindy and Mike took me to a Sunday service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, Al Green’s church. Every touring musician who can stopover in Memphis on a Sunday will play in Al Green’s church. The music was spectacular. Great, rousing opening acts stirred the congregation before Reverend Al emerged. Clearly there were regular churchgoers present, and lots of visitors as well, and the congregation jumped and shouted, all of us. Deacons passed the hat many times throughout the service and people were happy to throw their money in.

When trouble descends on my life, “I’m still here” is a mantra I return to time and again.

When Reverend Al finally stepped out to address the congregation he based his sermon on the phrase, “I’m still here!” He began low and slow (like the way Tina Turner sings “Proud Mary”)  leading the congregation through a litany of woes that can beset any life, illness, job loss, divorce, foreclosures. He followed each with “I’m still here, Lord, I’m still here.” He gathered momentum and intensity as he enumerated life’s trials, tribulations, challenges, and I’m still here, Lord, and soon Reverend Al was shouting, and we were all jumping up and shouting the chorus, I’m still here, Lord, I’m still here! I was crying. When trouble descends on my life, “I’m still here” is a mantra I return to time and again.

Perhaps predictably shit got weird after that.

The demands of restoration, the responsibility of creating not just a home, but a tribute  worthy of a legend, all that took its eventual toll. In 2006 Cindy and Mike divorced and the house was sold in an astonishing eBay auction in which the “spoonbender” magician Uri Geller was said to have placed the winning bid. Perhaps predictably shit got weird after that, resulting in a lawsuit that is still taught in law schools. The final buyer was Mike Curb, a record executive who paid a reported one million dollars. The house was added to the National Registry of Historic Places just before the sale. Mr. Curb entrusted Audubon to the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College in Memphis. They filled in the pool. The house was only used for occasional small recitals or recording sessions. Students sometimes disrespected the property throwing beer bottles on the lawn.

Fire and flood? Sounds almost biblical to me.

Damage after the fire.

In the winter of 2017 the Audubon house was badly damaged by burst pipes flooding the rooms, followed by a fire. Fire and flood? Sounds almost biblical to me. Since then 1034 Audubon Drive sits unrepaired, unused, sad, scarred, dark and empty. The grass is mowed, the yard tended to by groundskeepers. The neighborhood is quiet. Any ghosts uneasy with the shiny glitz and ersatz glam of the Graceland corporate complex are no doubt welcomed at Audubon. It’s almost as the house is quietly saying, “I’m still here.”

The post Audubon appeared first on Laura Kalpakian.

Audobon

When I slept there, no ghosts rapped, though I hoped the wallpaper would ripple.

The publication of Graced Land opened my life up to friends, experience and opportunities I could never have guessed at. Grove Press sent me on a book tour that included Memphis, a city I had never seen. At one of the bookstore readings a couple came up to me, Cindy Hazen and Mike Freeman. That very same month, May, 1992, they had published The Best of Elvis, a book detailing the King’s generosity, a theme deeply resonant in Graced Land. I’ve always felt that Elvis himself must have nudged the universe to bring us together. Both books celebrated Elvis for more than just his music. Cindy and Mike said they’d like to show me some of Memphis, Elvis style, but they had a family barbeque that Saturday night. Happily the barbeque was cancelled, and what followed was for me a truly memorable night on Beale Street, Live music, dancing, meeting the early rock legend, Rufus Thomas, and an array of Elvis’s best friends, including George Klein and members of the Memphis Mafia who had known Elvis since high school. They were all eager to read my book.

Graceland, a manicured museum, uninspiring.

Of course I went to Graceland on that visit, but I found it a manicured museum and the tour, led by a lady with a soothing accent, uninspiring. Walking past the fountain in the memorial garden was poignant. Elvis’s grandmother is also buried there and she outlived him. More interesting was 1034 Audubon Drive. Cindy and Mike drove me past this modest ranch-style house with four bedrooms, two baths, a two car garage, low fence and a broad front lawn. Elvis had bought this house with the first flush of his new money in 1956, the year his life would change forever. (Beautifully documented in the film, Elvis ‘56 which can be found on YouTube.) You could just imagine their happiness here, affluent for the first time in their entire lives, at the crest of a wave that would recognize and reward Elvis’s talents.

One can only imagine the neighbors’ chagrin and the Presleys’ desperation for privacy.

When Elvis and his parents moved there, Audubon Drive—and its prosperous but not splashy neighborhood—were suddenly splashed all over national magazines, descended upon by photographers and mobbed with fans, teenagers who parked their cars, got out, roamed around. The police were often called to control the crowds. One can only imagine the neighbors’ chagrin and the Presleys’ desperation for privacy. Elvis put in a swimming pool and a game room. I have a fan club card, a 1956 photograph of a bunch of girls sitting around the Audubon pool, to bask in Elvis’s presence as much as the sunshine. The pool was only ever half-filled because (the story goes) Gladys was afraid of Elvis drowning. I also remember reading that Gladys had some chickens and they too disturbed the neighbors. After only thirteen months at Audubon, Elvis, Gladys and Vernon left, moved to Graceland to live behind the famous gates for the rest of their lives—and where they are now buried in the memorial garden. In 1998, Cindy and Mike learned that 1034 Audubon Drive house was about to go on sale. They made an offer that was accepted. I happened to be in Memphis then, touring with my novel Caveat. Cindy and I went together for a first look inside the house.

The current occupants were into taxidermy, stuffed animals everywhere and a strange odor.

Nothing structurally had been done to it since the Presleys left. However, the current occupants were into taxidermy and there were all sorts of stuffed animals with glassy eyes on the walls and shelves, including their pet Pomeranian. The place had (as you might well imagine) a strange odor. We left suppressing shudders, and with a better idea of the work that lay ahead for Cindy and Mike who were committed to restoring Audubon to its 1956 Elvis Glory. To recreate authentically they scanned hundreds of photographs, especially the famous Alfred Wertheimer photos of the family. They spoke with Elvis’s friends from that era who remembered the house. They gently scraped away the accretions of wallpaper down to the layer that matched the Wertheimer photos. They scoured flea markets and antique stores, thrift shops and estate sales. They put out word locally and abroad of what they were looking for, and people contacted them. They bought dishes and kitchen items that would have been in use when Gladys cooked there. The swimming pool had gone to ruin and that had to be restored as well. One thing not from the Fifties that graced the Audubon bookshelves was a copy of Graced Land. This made me very happy. Occasionally small groups, mostly European fan clubs, came to 1034 Audubon, and Cindy and Mike showed them around. But for the most part the house was always a work-in- progress while couple lived there, diligently restoring it. They had their own lives as well. In 1997 John F. Blair published their book, Memphis, Elvis-Style allied to Mike’s tour bus business taking fans to Memphis sites associated with Elvis. They were also working on a new book annotating a trove of Patsy Cline’s letters they had bought at auction. (Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline’s Letters to a Friend, Berkley Books, 1999.)

I slept in Elvis’s original bedroom that faced the street.

I visited Memphis again in the early 2000s. By now Cindy and Mike had painstakingly given Audubon a 1956 vibe, complete with décor and musical motifs. I experienced strange twinges of déjà-vu to see myself in settings I vividly remembered from the Wertheimer photographs. I slept in Elvis’s bedroom that faced the street. That was his original bedroom, but later Gladys and Vernon gave their son the master suite at the back of the house so that he could get some rest. They slept in the front bedroom. (You have to wonder if teenage girls were still rapping at the windows disturbing Gladys and Vernon.) When I stayed there, no girls or ghosts or anyone rapped at the windows, though I kept hoping to see a ripple in the wallpaper, or to hear the twang of a lonely guitar.

Reverend Al was shouting, and we were all on our feet and I was crying.

On that visit Cindy and Mike took me to the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, Al Green’s church. Every touring musician who can stopover in Memphis on a Sunday will play in Al Green’s church. The music was spectacular. Great, rousing opening acts stirred the congregation before Reverend Al emerged. Clearly there were regular churchgoers present, and lots of visitors as well, and the congregation jumped and shouted, all of us. Deacons passed the hat many times throughout the service and people were happy to throw their money in.

When trouble descends on my life, “I’m still here” is a mantra I return to time and again.

When Reverend Al finally stepped out to address the congregation he based his sermon on the phrase, “I’m still here!” He began low and slow, leading the congregation through a litany of woes that can beset any life, illness, job loss, divorce, foreclosures. He followed each with “I’m still here, Lord, I’m still here.” He gathered momentum and intensity as he enumerated life’s trials, tribulations, challenges, and soon Reverend Al was shouting, and we were all jumping up and shouting the chorus, I’m still here, Lord, I’m still here! I was crying.

Perhaps predictably shit got weird after that.

The demands of restoration, the responsibility of creating not just a home, but a tribute  worthy of a legend, all that took its eventual toll. In 2006 Cindy and Mike divorced and the house was sold in an astonishing eBay auction in which the “spoonbender” magician Uri Geller was said to have placed the winning bid. Perhaps predictably shit got weird after that, resulting in a lawsuit that is still taught in law schools. The final buyer was Mike Curb, a record executive who paid a reported one million dollars. The house was added to the National Registry of Historic Places just before the sale. Mr. Curb entrusted Audubon to the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College in Memphis. They filled in the pool. The house was only used for occasional small recitals or recording sessions. Students sometimes disrespected the property throwing beer bottles on the lawn.

Fire and flood? Sounds almost biblical to me.

In winter 2017 the Audubon house was badly damaged by burst pipes flooding the rooms, followed by a fire. Fire and flood? Sounds almost biblical to me. Since then 1034 Audubon Drive sits unrepaired, unused, sad, scarred, dark and empty. The grass is mowed, the yard tended to by groundskeepers. The neighborhood is quiet. Any ghosts uneasy with the shiny glitz and ersatz glam of the Graceland corporate complex are no doubt welcomed at Audubon. It’s almost as the house is quietly saying, “I’m still here.”

The post Audobon appeared first on Laura Kalpakian.

Myth and Music

Elvis is not an icon, static as Mount Rushmore. Forty-five years after his death Elvis remains a presence though not present—exactly his role in my novel, Graced Land. Elvis informs the book like lightning illuminates a landscape.

Fittingly, Elvis adopted a lightning bolt for his logo and from the very beginning of his career, when he was not yet twenty-one, till he died at forty-two, Elvis Presley electrified us. His life ended, but as one critic has noted, his career did not. Why does he still have the power to leave us all shook up? The answer lies, broadly speaking, in the music and the myth.

Elvis radiates energy, tension, intensity, desire, unleashed sex appeal. Danger.

In his first television appearance in 1956, Elvis was preceded by the June Taylor Dancers. One look at these tap-dancing tutu’d cuties tells you why—and how—Elvis Presley changed everything in America. With their bustled behinds bouncing in unison, the June Taylor Dancers could have come straight from a 1910 Floradora chorus line. Exit ladies, enter Elvis. Immediately, this young performer radiates energy, tension, intensity, desire, unleashed sex appeal, and (depending on your point of view) untutored genius. The Floradora sensibility is in serious trouble. Elvis was dangerous. Young people in 1956 not only copied, courted up, embraced this danger, they looked for more with other musicians, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Sam Cooke.

Elvis set off an equally negative reaction among the old guardians. With suspicious minds, dire warnings, they heaped abuse, blamed Elvis—his hair, his clothes, his body language, his lyrics,—for juvenile delinquency, for teenage sex, for the unthinkable, that most dreaded word: integration. The music Elvis unleashed was not pure. On the contrary, early rock music was all about convergence and integration, melded of guts and gospel, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, sex, suggestion, energy, mystery and—to the old guard’s dismay—race.

Music flows over barriers and under closed doors and through the locked transoms of closed minds.

No coincidence that the mid-Fifties also gave momentum to the Civil Rights movement. In 1954 the Supreme Court issued Brown vs. the Board of Education declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott went on for over a year while people walked to work rather than ride buses segregated by law. In 1957 photographs of the National Guard, armed, escorting Black children into an Arkansas classroom burned into the American psyche. These events coincided with the birth of rock music because music is like water: it flows over barriers and under closed doors and through the locked transoms of closed minds.

Invisible radio waves washed over America, into urban enclaves and rural outposts

Brown vs. the Board of Education, notwithstanding, decades would pass before schools were integrated. Nor did radio stations instantly shed Perry Como and Nelson Riddle. But invisible radio waves washed over America, into urban enclaves and rural outposts. Between 1956 and 1959 Elvis had twenty-eight Top Forty hits on the charts, for a total of 184 weeks. But Elvis is more than music, or musical history. He personifies the myth, “Made in the USA.” His tragedy is pure Americana.

The King died on his throne in August 1977, found face down in his bathroom.

[image error]In American tragedy, unlike Shakespeare’s, the hero cannot start at the top and tumble into ruin. In American tragedy, the hero must start at the bottom. He must claw and scramble, overcoming obstacles, reach the top, shine in his moment, and then, die grimly and before his time. In short, stories like Abraham Lincoln’s, or Malcolm X’s, greatness born in poverty, achievement against the odds, early and unlooked-for death.

In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in the equivalent of a log cabin, a two-room “shotgun” house. His parents were uneducated and impoverished. Elvis was three years old when his father went to prison for forging a check for the sale of a hog. For the eight months Vernon was in prison, Gladys and Elvis boarded with relatives. In 1948, this hardscrabble family left rural Mississippi for that post-war frontier, the city. Elvis spent his teen years in a federal housing project in Memphis. He attended (segregated) Humes High, graduating in 1953. He took a job as an usher at a local theatre and then as a driver for Crown Electric. He went to Sun Studios and paid to make a record for his mother. The secretary at Sun (so the story goes) asked him who he sounded like. He replied, “I don’t sound like no one else, ma’am.” And that was true. He touched the minds and hearts (the tapping feet and clapping hands) of millions; he attained Graceland, and died a tragic wreck. Following a long, insomniac’s nightmare, the King died on his throne in August 1977, found face down in his bathroom.

“All that cheerful damn democracy stained everywhere with slavery and injustice.”

A character in Graced Land, Sid Johnson, a middle-aged Black man, and Emily’s colleague at the welfare department, tells her about an Elvis concert he had unwillingly attended in Chicago in the fall of 1976, especially remembering “American Trilogy,” a song that carries the silt of American sadness.

“Elvis was so drugged that he starts to talk and all he could do is slurp, and slip up,” said Sid. “He’s up there spluttering on, getting all misty and modest. His face was puffy and bloated and he was sweating like a pig under those lights. He’d been poured into his clothes. Or maybe they’d been painted on, but you could hear the seams groan. He was drugged and exhausted, his eyes were like little slits in all that fat, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in months. He could hardly stand, but by God, Emily, the man could sing! ‘The Impossible Dream!’ Elvis sang that song so you remembered it was Robert Kennedy’s favorite song and you remembered the courage of everyone you ever admired, the living and the dead, from Martin Luther King, to my old grandmother. And as if that wasn’t enough, Elvis goes on to ‘American Trilogy,’ ‘Dixie’ and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic!’ I mean, Emily, we are dealing here with old war-horses of songs, songs that have been beat to death and yet live. Can these old, spavined pack mules of songs live while they’re carrying the freight, the weight, of the history of this country? All that cheerful damn democracy stained everywhere with slavery and injustice? Elvis made these songs live, Emily. We all felt it. We’re all crying and clapping, and next thing I know we’ve all jumped up and reached out, holding hands with those beside us. We’re singing, shouting! Crying out!” Sid drew a deep breath. “It was just like church.”

If every unhappy hypocrite in this country were suddenly struck shoeless, there would be a lot of barefoot Americans.

Elvis remains both American myth and American mirror. He embodied and exaggerated standard American traits: high voltage energy, boundless generosity, endemic humor. He also had demons that called forth a complex hypocrisy. The devout boy in the Assembly of God congregation, the gospel singer, the great supporter of law enforcement (as in the film Elvis and Nixon) the flamboyant entertainer in beaded capes throwing sweaty scarves into the adoring audience, this man went to bed drugged mindless, night after night, or rather day after day in hotel rooms with foil-covered windows to maintain darkness. Elvis’s death still haunts us because he reflects us, and he reflects on us. We mutely recognize that if every unhappy hypocrite in this country were suddenly struck shoeless, there would be a lot of barefoot Americans.

He was so dangerous they put him in irons made of schlock, musical manacles

Elvis’s death was both tawdry and genuinely tragic. His enormous talent was often channeled, trammeled into the tawdry, the mediocre. Certainly after he returned from the Army in 1960, his movies grew increasingly static, some of them excruciatingly stupid. As my character Joyce Jackson watches him onscreen, she mulls, “Elvis was being punished for the sheer raw energy, the excitement he’d so effortlessly generated in his early days. He was so dangerous they put him in irons made of schlock, musical manacles, movies where he remained an everlasting boy, never was allowed a man’s pain or a man’s pleasure, a man’s needs or a man’s response to women, not even a man’s music, just prescription tunes with which the audience was to be dosed at regular intervals.”

The research I did for Graced Land convinced me that his mother’s death in 1958 was the lynchpin of his tragedy, and that Colonel Parker was the villain of his story. I believe that the Colonel hovered over Elvis like a greedy cloud, and that anything Elvis was able to do with any merit (the ‘68 Comeback Special, for instance) he did in spite of the Colonel. In the seven years between 1970 and his death in August 1977, Elvis gave over a thousand concerts. Mathematically, the equivalent of a live concert every two and a half days. “He sang himself to death,” says Joyce Jackson.

I will go to the Pickford to see Elvis even if I have to wear a Covid space suit, and inhale powdered popcorn through an air filter

We shall see what the brand new Baz Lurhmann biopic makes of Elvis’s myth, his music, his career, and the role of Colonel Parker. Casting the beloved, genial actor, Tom Hanks in this role gives me some pause. But I will go to the Pickford Film Center to see Elvis, even if I have to haul my own Covid bubble like a space suit, and inhale powdered popcorn through an air filter.

In dying he left behind the bodyguards as he left behind the body.

The King may have left the tired old building of this life, but he moved into a larger arena than he ever actually filled with fans. In dying he left behind the bodyguards as he left behind the body. Free at last, he joined the rest of us in the supermarket, the pizza palace, the bowling alley, the donut shop where his music still plays, rains down from tinny speakers. Elvis’s myth and music live on in all these places. Why should his spirit be anywhere else?

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“Now You Know What I Do for an Encore…”

On the anniversary of Elvis’s death international crowds always gather at Graceland for remembrance and a solemn candlelight vigil. But here, in this house, we celebrate his birthday, January 8th 1935.

Beginning with an Elvis-centric family dinner while I was still writing the book (and before I had a publisher, or even an agent to represent it) Elvis’s birthday party evolved. For ten years it was the occasion for crowded, complex festivities: twelve solid hours of music, movies, jigsaw puzzles and specialty foods like Fools Gold Loaf.

Sophisticated palates might disdain Fools Gold Loaf. Too bad for them.

Fool’s Gold Loaf became an important ritual, the official ticket of admission.   At the front door you had to sing an Elvis song before you could (literally) join the party. Any song would do. We had books of sheet music, and lots of people to play the piano if you wanted. After you sang (with lots of backing vocals from people already there) you kicked off your shoes and came in the kitchen for your Fools Gold Loaf sandwich.  From there while music played, you could join people in the livingroom, or those chatting in the kitchen, welcome others at the front door, or try your hand at the thousand piece Elvis jigsaw puzzle set up on a card table (and usually completely finished by the end of the party.)

We were able to watch all of Elvis’s movies in one twelve hour period.

For my fam, Elvis’s birthday party, held on the closest Saturday to January 5th, rounded out our holiday season.  Getting everything ready was a huge process (and even longer to clean up!).  The day before the festivities Bear and Brendan moved our three upstairs TVs into the living room and borrowed some VCRs. These were placed on various small tables on either side of the big TV, and wired up (lots of extension cords and power bars). Elvis’s later, lesser and often goofy movies (Stay Away Joe, Tickle Me, Girls, Girls, Girls etc. etc.)  played on these small TVs with the sound off.  When one film finished Bear or Brendan would take it out and plug in another. In this fashion we were able to watch all of Elvis’s movies in one twelve hour period.

Only the big TV had sound coming from the speakers, and on this television we played our favorites. Once King Creole got slid into the VCR, if you wanted to talk, go into another room. (Movies are a serious business in this house.)

Everyone in our livingroom would stand up and cheer!  We’d play that scene two or three times.

King Creole (1958), a rather dark film set in New Orleans, is adorned with great songs, and directed by Michael Curtiz (who directed Casablanca, thank you.) Elvis’s co-stars were Walter Matthau as Maxie, a thuggish gangland boss (utterly unlike the genial comedic figure he later became) and sultry Carolyn Jones as his long suffering mistress, Ronnie. As with many of the early Elvis movies, a virginal ingénue offers what amounts to palliative care for the Elvis character, Bad Boy Danny Fisher. But the sparks truly smolder between Danny and the older, experienced Ronnie.

In an early scene, Danny is cleaning up in the bar.  Maxie, Ronnie, and a few thuggish minions come in and insist that he entertains them.  Reluctantly he sings one song. They want an encore. He refuses. When Ronnie says, “Oh let him be,” Maxie starts to rough her up.  Elvis leaps to her defense, cracking a bottle on a table, shattering it, and brandishing the jagged edge like a lethal weapon, “Now you know what I do for an encore,” he says as he escorts Ronnie out the door.  Everyone in our livingroom would stand up and cheer! We’d play that scene over two or three times.

Ann-Margret was the only co-star to equal Elvis in talent and charisma.

After King Creole, we always watched another black-and-white, Jailhouse Rock (1957) and following that usually, Kid Galahad, a boxing picture that was surprisingly risqué for 1962. Without fanfare it portrayed an unmarried couple living together, the two of them chatting in the bedroom, the woman in her lingerie.  (The sort of lingerie made famous by Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) It also had Charles Bronson in an important role. Viva Las Vegas too played on the big TV just to see the chemistry between Ann-Margret and Elvis. They never did another film together (at the Colonel’s insistence, so the story goes).  She was the only co-star to equal Elvis in talent and charisma. The rest of them were just girls, girls, girls.

Gladys died the following year, 1958, leaving a hole in her son’s life. He was only twenty three.

Following those movies we might watch Loving You, another early film (1957) this one in color. Again, the ingénue, Dolores Hart (who became a nun!) got the boy, but again the sparks that fly are between Deke (Elvis) and husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott who is a dozen years older than he. Toward the end in a concert scene, one of the anonymous people in the audience is Elvis’s mother, Gladys. As he finishes singing, Gladys jumps out of her seat applauding wildly. I’m happy that Gladys got to be part of that because she died the following year, 1958, leaving a hole in her son’s life no one else could fill.  He was only twenty three.

Bear and Brendan blew out the candles on the Chocolate-Orange birthday cake.

After a couple of movies my dad would carve the turkey and the ham (or pork loin roast) and guests would line up to get a plate and move around the dining room table. There was always cornbread cut into squares and piled high, Maudie’s Potato Salad, red beans, rice, and much else adapted from any number of Elvis cookbooks. Following dinner and another movie, everyone gathered in the dining room to sing “Happy Birthday” and “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” Bear and Brendan blew out the candles on the Chocolate-Orange birthday cake.

We usually saved Blue Hawaii (1961) for last. By now it was late, and only the hardcore was left, perhaps ten of us.  Blue Hawaii too has a gaggle of girls, and a reserved older woman. But it also has the charmingly silly Angela Lansbury playing Elvis’s mother (“Chadwick!”). At the end of the film, we would all spontaneously stand up, and sing along, “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” (“Wise men say……”)

We wish Elvis had the opportunity to show the world “Now you know what I do for an encore.”

Our Elvis parties ended in about 2002 because lives change. Bear graduated from USC and went to work; Brendan left home for USC. Still, all these years later, we and our friends all share an email salute to the King on January 8th. We wish he had had the opportunity to show the world: “Now you know what I do for an encore.”  Instead, throughout the 1960s he made one dispiriting picture after another, twenty-seven movies in eight years.

His last film, a Western, Charro! (1969) had no songs, no bouncing babes. In it Elvis plays the title character, a sweaty, unshaven, weary adult, a man who wants to turn his life around.  Sadly, that was a role he fulfilled all too well.

RECIPESFOOLS GOLD LOAF

Sophisticated palates might disdain Fools Gold Loaf. Too bad for them. It was created by a restaurant in Denver. Elvis loved it so much he would load all his friends into his private plane, the Lisa Marie, and fly from Memphis to Denver, land there, and have Fools Gold Loaf sandwiches delivered to the tarmac. Then fly back to Memphis. (I have recently read in the classy pages of the New York Times Cooking column of a French sandwich, a jambon-beurre. that sounds suspiciously like Fools Gold Loaf minus only the peanut butter.)

Take several loaves of French bread; slice them in half lengthwise and warm in the oven   till they are crisp. In half of them cut an oval in the center and scoop out innards so you have a sort of “dish” in the middle. Fill this with peanut butter, then grape jelly and top with lots of bacon, fried crisp and kept warm. Take the other half and put it on top. Slice for individual sandwiches. Have napkins on hand.

CHOCOLATE-ORANGE CAKE

This is my sons’ favorite birthday cake.  I wish I could say it was a gourmet creation, but no. Use your usual boxed chocolate cake mix.  Instead of water use orange juice, or better yet, concentrate orange juice not quite full strength. (That is, less water, so you still have liquid, but the orange taste is more concentrated.) Over the bowl using a cheese grater take a big orange chosen for its peel (fresh, moist, preferably pretty thick-skinned) and grate the orange zest off.  Stir into cake mix.  Bake as directed as a sheet cake. This cake can be made the day before.

When cool, frost with powdered sugar and softened butter or cream cheese frosting. When the recipe calls for vanilla, use orange liqueur, or orange juice.  (Of course you can do this with frosting from a can too!) Spread thickly and evenly over the cake. Then, again using your cheese grater, grate a whole lot of orange zest all over the cake so it’s showy.

MAUDIE’S POTATO SALAD

The real pleasure of Maudie’s Potato Salad is the time and care she puts into dicing the potatoes up really small.

Boil ten pounds of potatoes up whole and with the skins on till tender. Drain and cool. Peel and dice pretty small into a big bowl. To this add some chopped celery and chopped red onion.  Parsley and green onions, chopped.   Maude sprinkles with Lemon Pepper as she goes along. For color too she also adds, a jar of pimentos, drained. A can of sliced olives, drained.

All this can be done in advance and set covered in the fridge. This gives the flavors time to meld.

Dressing:  In a bowl combine big dollop of mayo with some mustard (Dijon is best), some salt and pepper and a dash of lemon juice.  Do all this to taste and preference. Stir well. Fold into salad. Serve topped with thin-sliced hard boiled eggs and sweet or smoked paprika.

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The Story Behind the Story

Of all the novels I have published, all the stories, all the work and words and time I have invested in creating fictions, Graced Land has had the most impact on my life. In 1992 it was released to rapturous reviews both here and in the UK where the London Observer selected it as one of the Best Books of the Year. It won prizes. It paid for a new roof and bought our first computer. On tour with the book, I met people who have remained friends ever since. I still use the coffee mugs and tee shirts I bought on my first trip to Graceland. More poignantly, Elvis became a sort of presence in our lives. And on June 28th 2022, Paint Creek Press will reissue Graced Land in all its rock-and-roll glory.

The novel emerged from a seemingly random collision of circumstance

The New York Times described Graced Land as a “charming, wonderful book.” The pages ripple with humor and energy because even the writing was joyous and rewarding. Elvis’s music pulsated through the speakers while I pounded on the typewriter. I reveled in creating the first-person voice of Cilla Jackson, a sassy, snotty know-it-all thirteen year old girl. I re-arranged the mental furniture for Emily Shaw, a bookish young woman afflicted with too much imagination. (I have autobiographical access to both of these characters.) There were chapters where I wept to finish them, but there were also chapters where I (still) laugh out loud. Some of these chapters (“Burning Love,” for instance) I needlessly revised again and again just to enjoy the high that went with them.

Once the novel was finished I worked with an enthusiastic agent, Charlotte Sheedy, and when offered a choice of a corporate house or Grove Press, I opted for Grove and their artistic cachet. At Grove I worked with energetic young editors and creative publicists in a relaxed and supportive atmosphere on the phone and several trips to New York. The book got optioned for a TV movie that came out the following year, and though I was not happy with the movie, I was happy with the money.

Instantly the core came to me: a callow young social worker interacts with an Elvis Nutburger

However, before writing Graced Land I had not given Elvis Presley a thought since the day he died. I was not a fan. This novel, like much else in a writer’s life, emerged from a seemingly random collision of circumstance.

One afternoon in 1990 my mom and I were folding laundry and we began to reminisce about a shrine to Elvis on the front porch of a tacky little tract house in San Bernardino, California. The small porch was festooned with posters of the King, black streamers, twinkling lights and fake flowers. It was a corner house by a stop sign, and my mom passed it every day as she drove to her job as a secretary to an orthopedic surgeon at County Hospital. The shrine was still there when she retired in the mid-1980s.

I said to my mom, “You know I always thought that a woman with two daughters must have lived there.” And as soon as I said it, I knew their names were Priscilla and Lisa Marie. Instantly the core story came to me: a callow young social worker interacts with an Elvis Nutburger welfare client. (I also knew the title would be Graceland, but as they say, that is another story.)

I had once been a callow young social worker. For the novel I salvaged this otherwise forgotten brief episode to portray Emily’s job: the florescent-lit office, acres of metal desks, the punitive supervisor, the array of humanity I would never otherwise have met, homes I would never otherwise have entered

I earned a PhD in Elvis

But how to portray the Elvis Nutburger, Joyce Jackson? I had to know what Joyce knew and to feel what Joyce felt. As I wrote I educated myself in Elvis’s music, the books, the movies, the life, the legends. In truth, I earned a PhD in Elvis.

Like my character, Emily, I was in Italy in the summer of 1977. I had a whole glorious month, at the invitation of a UCSD friend, Paola who lived in Venice. I paid for the trip with the advance from my first novel. In mid-August when news reached us that Elvis Presley had died, I was astonished at the outpouring of grief all around me. In Venice people were crying in the streets. Paola was devastated. Really? I thought. Why are these people all so stricken? Wasn’t Elvis just an overweight, cape-swinging relic, his heyday long past? Clearly, that estimation could not be altogether true, or his death would not evoke such grief. I seriously re-thought what Elvis might have meant, but on my return to the States, I forgot him altogether.

Until that day, many years later folding laundry and talking with my mom about a tawdry front porch shrine festooned with posters, black ribbons and fake flowers. Who was the woman who erected it in August, 1977, and maintained it for years afterward? (The novel takes place in 1982.) What must her life have been like? What did Elvis mean to her? “A presence without being present,” Joyce Jackson says, Though Elvis (literally) informs the novel, Joyce had never seen him in person, and he makes no appearance in my pages. Except. . .

“A presence without being present,” Joyce Jackson says

Late in the book Emily is in County Hospital awaiting word from a doctor. She leaves her friends to find some more deserted place to make a private call. There in the phone booth she looks up and detects an ambiguous presence nearby. “His eyes were full of pain, both endured and inflicted. The tensions in his hands and his expression were at once humble and dramatic; everything about him simultaneously evoked, implored, and offered pity.” When she looks back up, he is gone.

Emily returns to her friends, pacing in front of a bank of elevator doors. “Down the hall in the Orthopedics office, a secretary played an unrelenting riff on the electric typewriter.” A few minutes later, “At the end of the hall, the typing came to a halt. The light in Orthopedics went out and the secretary locked the door. She waited for the elevator, nodded, smiling at Emily.”

This cameo appearance is my mother, working late, after hours using the typewriter in the Orthopedics office, as she did for months, typing the manuscript that became my first novel, the book that sent me on that life-changing visit to Italy in August, 1977 that I was able to revisit when I wrote Graced Land. This month, that novel will be reissued in a new edition. On my birthday, no less!

The Paint Creek Press edition of Graced Land will be published on June 28th 2022.

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Caveat

Most of my novels remind me of a bag full of mewling cats. Noisy characters preen, elbowing others out of the way, assorted backstories threaten to overwhelm, insistent themes shove their way to the fore. But Caveat (and one other book) are so tightly woven, the narrative so thematically coherent that you could slide a butterknife into the prose and it would come out clean. Everything is in place. It took me eighteen years.

The possibilities leapt to mind when I read a little article in the Los Angeles Times in 1980 about a flood in 1916, occasioned by rainmaker; the city refused to pay his fee unless he accepted responsibility for the damages the flood had wrought. St. Elmo, California, (which I had created) was fertile ground for a tale of drought, rain, revenge and greed.

The novel still felt like a mirage, just beyond my artistic reach. I quit again.

I saved the little article in my wallet till it disintegrated. I didn’t write anything even though the opening scene was always clear to me. Finally in 1983 I pounded out some fifty pages, then quit. My domestic life was such that I could not concentrate on something so demanding.  After moving to Washington, I returned to the book. In those fifty I had established a place and time, (autumn 1916 while the long inconclusive bloodbath of the Great War raged in Europe.) I had the major characters: Hank Beecham, the rainmaker, Jeremiah Beecham, his drunken, demented father, Eulalie Beecham, Hank’s long-suffering mother, Miss Emmons, the schoolteacher who married him. Also, Dr. Lucius Tipton had his role; I already knew Lucius from These Latter Days. Caveat grew to a hundred pages, but it still felt like a mirage, just beyond my artistic reach. I quit again.

Years passed, and in that time I did extensive, if erratic research. The LA Times article had mentioned that the rainmaker got his ideas on how to make the heavens open up from listening to Civil War stories of his father who maintained that rain followed every battle. I thrashed around in a lot of random reading about meteorology and gunpowder and battles, and my research bore this premise out.

I felt as though that book had somehow found me, rather than me finding it.

As a result, Jeremiah Beecham, ex-Confederate, failed rancher, brutal drunk, began to emerge more clearly in my imagination. But the Civil War was too broad a canvas. Fiction only thrives on the particular. I narrowed Jeremiah’s experience to Shiloh as the battle that had shaped him indelibly. (He lived and fought through to the end, the South’s defeat, after which he came to California to homestead, a ranch he called Shiloh.) I deepened my reading about the battle, the armies, the tactics, the commanders, the music, what the troops ate and wore and suffered. As I was writing the very last drafts of Caveat, I went to the Bellingham Public Library and stumbled on The Story of a Common Soldier by Leander Stillwell, a private in the 61st Indiana Infantry writing in 1916 of his experience at Shiloh. I felt as though that book had somehow found me, rather than me finding it. I used his words for an epigram.

The word Shiloh means “place of peace” in the bible, a cruel irony, given what happened that April of 1862. At the end of fighting that first day, the Confederates had routed the Union troops. By the end of fighting the next day, the re-enforced Union troops were victorious. The only certainty to emerge from the battle of Shiloh was the knowledge—on both sides—that the war would be long and bitter and hard fought.

The city fathers make him a bet; Hank accepts with one caveat.

With this new, much deeper context I was able to make Jeremiah’s rants all the more specific and terrifying. Hank, though much abused as a boy, eventually pulled from his father’s harangues crucial insights into the atmospheric conditions that arise with gunpowder and smoke. At seventeen Hank took his mother, left Shiloh, and moved into town where he opened a sewing machine repair shop. A young man of native but untutored genius, nights Hank read, weekends he experimented. When Eulalie died of cancer Hank left St. Elmo, and went on to earn success as a rainmaker all over the arid West. In the opening scene of Caveat Hank returns to St. Elmo some twenty years later when the city fathers request his expertise to save them and the town from a killing drought. The city fathers make him a bet: fill the reservoir (so dry it’s cracked) and they will pay Hank Beecham an astronomical $50,000. Fill it not, and they will owe him nothing. Hank accepts with one caveat.

The novel moves between a third-person narrator, and Dr. Lucius Tipton in the first-person. Dr. Tipton is the only person in St. Elmo for whom Hank Beecham has a morsel of respect. The ingredients I mention for Hank’s formulas are probably correct, but I’m no chemist, and the book could only describe the effects of these formulas. That was Dr. Tipton’s narrative task to begin with. As the book grew, his role broadened beyond mere bystander.

When I returned to the novel Hank’s character had changed—and so had his fate.

Slowly, over a few years, these various elements—structural, historical, thematic—coalesced. By the time I returned to work on Caveat, Hank’s character had changed—and so had his fate. Miss Emmons had changed, and far from being a wisp in Hank’s past, she became a powerful force in the novel. Even Eulalie Beecham had changed. Only Jeremiah remained the same ugly, cruel person he always had been.

I knew that I stood where the young Leander Stillwell had stood.

In the fall of 1998, eighteen years after I cut that newspaper clipping, Caveat was published by John F. Blair, Publishers, a small independent in North Carolina. I found this publisher through Memphis friends, writers I had met through my novel, Graced Land. That fall my Memphis friends and I drove out to Shiloh, now a national military park. We went via the back way, the entrance nearest the Tennessee River. We walked all around, but at a certain place, I stopped abruptly and swallowed hard, fighting tears as I remembered Leander Stillwell’s descriptions. I knew that I stood where he had stood. The terror and confusion of the battle rose before my eyes, and for the first time in eighteen years I felt pity for Jeremiah Beecham who, like Leander Stillwell, was little more than a boy when he went to fight.

Today April 5th, 2022, I’m proud and delighted that Caveat has been reissued in a uniform trade paperback by Paint Creek Press. But I also think it ironically fitting that April 5th was the Eve of the Battle of Shiloh. On April 6th and 7th 1862 that battle raged, inflicting suffering beyond anyone’s imagination, then or now. Despite the one hundred and sixty years between us and Shiloh, Leander Stillwell’s poignant description still rings with sadness. His unit had come down the river on the night of the 6th to re-enforce the battered Union Army. The atmospheric conditions had already created rain.

Rain set in about dark….I made a sort of pillow of my gun, cartridge box, haversack and canteen and stretched myself out on the brush pile, tired to death. . . And the rain drizzled down while every fifteen minutes from the river one of the big guns roared and sent a ponderous shell shrieking into the ravine in the direction of the enemy. To this day, whenever I hear an instrumental band playing “The Girl I left Behind Me,” there comes to me the memory of that gloomy Sunday night at Shiloh. I hear again the ceaseless patter of the rain, the dull heavy tread of the marching columns, the thunderous roar of the navy guns, the demoniacal scream of the projectile and mingled with it all is the sweet plaintive music of that old song.

Caveat is avaliable anywhere books are sold. Amazon Barnes and Noble

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