Donald Levin's Blog, page 5

“The plague full swift goes by”

Like most other people in the world today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been taking me back to the time in the 1980s when I worked as speechwriter for the commissioner of the Department of Health in New York City. At that time, the prevention of AIDS/HIV was the main public health concern in the city, followed closely by tuberculosis.

There were, of course, many other problems, some particular to NYC (window falls by children, for example) and some more common everywhere (dog bites, drug abuse, the diseases associated with poverty, and so on).

The commissioner at the time, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, was very active across the five boroughs, speaking on public health problems. He strongly believed that public health was a political process, and he spent a good deal of time out of the office, explaining and garnering support for the department’s policies across the city and in Washington.

(One policy was the necessity for widespread testing for infection by HIV, which exactly parallels the discussions over testing─or lack of testing, I should say─that we are hearing today.)

It was a wonderful job for me . . . I felt I was contributing to the most important health issues of the day in the best way that I could, though my words.

Sometimes I wrote up to eight speeches a week, along with op-ed pieces and articles for medical journals signed by the commissioner and other physicians in the department. And whenever the Mayor’s Office needed something for Koch to say or write about public health, I was often tapped to write that, too.

Afterwards I calculated that I wrote roughly four hundred speeches about AIDS/HIV in my five years there.

And yet, the job had its consequences.

When I started, they found desk space for me in a cubicle in the Office of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Every day when I came in to work, I passed full-color posters of chancres, rashes, warts, and all the other lesions that STIs can cause.

I certainly don’t mean to make light of any of this─but in the beginning, writing speeches every day about the effects of AIDS/HIV and tuberculosis, and spending my days among public health workers who spent their days tracing contacts of people who might have been infected with STIs without knowing it . . . all had an impact on me.

Riding on the subway to and from work each morning, I began to imagine the city as a vast sea of infection and all the people I passed as unknowing vectors of disease.

Not a healthy outlook.

I got over it, of course, but I’ve been reminded of that time a lot lately. The same issues that the city faced then─the critical need for testing to stem the spread of HIV despite (at that time) there being no treatment for it─are issues now.

When I began to write poetry seriously, infection as a metaphor was one I came back to time and again, due in large part to my time at the Department of Health.

Today’s blog entry includes two poems about infection. The first one, “Serial Killer,” is based on a story an office mate of mine years ago once told me about a job he had infecting mice in a vaccine development lab. It seemed a particularly gruesome occupation when he told me about it, and it stuck with me until I tried to exorcize it in the poem.

As you think about labs trying madly to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, give some thought to the little creatures who give their lives to the effort.

The second poem, “Influenza,” uses the idea of infection as a metaphor for how we respond to other things in our lives.

As always, please enjoy. And stay healthy!

Serial Killer

So the god swooped down, descending like the night.

                                    ─Homer

They weighed next to nothing, their bones

more fragile even than a bird’s

when I reached into the cage and

cupped one in my palm, tenderly.

Tenderly, too, the needle, filled

with what poison, what rare

killing toxin tested on these

small creatures, deftly slipped between

their brittle shoulder blades, the fur

bunched in my thumb and forefinger,

a move I learned the first week, saving

time and wasted motions.

They all died. Before injecting

my day’s subjects, I harvested

stiff tiny corpses from the

night before. Or else collected

those I had to sacrifice with

another kind of shot. How like

a god I was, reaching in and

randomly selecting this for

Vaccine Beta, that for Toxin

Alpha, this for a quiet end

in its sleep, that to be rudely

snatched away from the life it knew.

How they feared me, feared the shadow

of my hand as it moved into

position, nudged the cage door open,

and plunged down with unconcerned

speed to snap up the unlucky

and slip in my fatal point,

forcing them to yield up, squealing,

all of their terrible knowledge.

© Donald Levin, 2002. A version of this poem first appeared in Delirium, November 2002.

Influenza

All language is vehicular and transitive.

                           ─Emerson

The vehicle of

a moving tenor

catches us unaware.

When it first appears

we try our best to

ignore its urging

but when it makes its

presence felt, we take

some certain pleasure

in surrendering

to it. At the end

it makes us feel so

awful we wish we

had never been born

though after, we are

better protected

against its striking

again. People the

vehicle with the

rider of your choice:

love, death, sadness, joy,

or even the flu.

© Donald Levin, 2005

Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet

This is one of my older poems. I wrote the draft of it on a plane on the way to Boston in 2002 to visit cousins and an elderly uncle whom I hadn’t seen in years. It was the first time I had flown since 9/11.

I wasn’t scared, exactly, but I was plenty uneasy.

Flying is not my favorite activity under the best of circumstances. But I was flying in the near-aftermath of the terror attacks, when everybody was on edge, and lots of other things down on the planet Earth below me made it seem as though order was collapsing.

This was the time when a sniper in a blue Caprice was shooting people randomly on Washington DC highways. Chechen rebels held 700 people hostage in a Moscow theatre, and the attempt to rescue them went horribly wrong. Bombs were routinely going off on Israeli busses.

The world seemed a tad nuts.

As it happened, I had assigned Jane Austen’s Emma to my Intro to Graduate Studies students that semester. I brought the book along to reread—and as we always say literature does, it took me out of myself and my worries and transported me into Austen’s world.

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If you’ve read Austen, you know it’s very different from our own. Though her world was also in transition, her characters negotiated the changes with civility and grace

I tried to capture the differences—along with my yearning for a more orderly world—in the poem.

At the time, it seemed as if things couldn’t get any crazier.

Except today, 2020 says, “Hold my beer.”

There’s a new movie of Emma out, and I saw it last night. It was a decent translation of the book to film, with the exception of some casting choices I took issue with. (Note to producers: next time switch the actors who play Knightley and Robert Martin; if you’re going to use the great Bill Nighy, give him more to do).

It reminded me again why great novels like Emma hardly ever make great movies: novels are all about language, and no film can do justice to the sparkling wit of Austen.

But shifting into Austen’s world is still a serene experience as disease, financial catastrophe, corruption, and stupidity rage outside the darkened theatre.

It helps us realize that once there were people who were civil and agreeable to each other. And maybe there will be again.

Hope you enjoy “Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet.”

 

Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet

A voice from the flight deck mumbles—something

about the weather in Boston—as the plane lumbers

into the dawning day above it all,

the sniper’s nest in the blue Caprice, endless

wars, dead hostages, suicide bombers

blowing nailed starbursts through sunblind busses.

 

Jane, how I welcome your astringent lines, sly

as a measured throw of cards on green felt tables,

the ordered games of Hartfield after dinner

while poor cold Woodhouse worries over the dangers

of rich cakes, and pretty Emma schemes.

Sealed in steel dread six miles up, I enter

your safe art gladly, shaking the dust

of crumbling civilizations off my boot-soles.

[© 2005 Donald Levin. A version of this poem appeared in my poetry book, In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005; reprinted in Detroit Metro Times, November 23, 2005).]

The Poddification of Everyday Life

[I don’t often subject you to leftovers from my former life in academia, but earlier today I was having a GIF interchange with two friends, writers Andrew Lark and Wendy Sura Thomson, and the movies The Invasion of the Body Snatchers came up (the 1956 and 1978 versions). I was reminded that at one point in early 2000s I was quite taken with the films, and had written a book chapter and several conference papers on both movies, along with the 1994 re-remake. Here’s one of the papers. Unlike many academic critics, I tried to keep it mostly in English. Enjoy!]

“The Poddification Of Everyday Life”

All three of the filmed versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Don Siegel’s 1956 original, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of the same name, and Abel Ferrara’s 1994 Body Snatchers—posit as their central horror the systematic replacement of the real with the simulated that French theorist Jean Baudrillard suggests is characteristic of postmodern life. In all three films, mothers, fathers, wives, uncles, lovers, and friends are replaced with simulacra that look and sound “real,” but have no connection to the human reality they resemble. This paper will examine the original and two remakes to suggest that these films offer a progressively grimmer critique of American culture.

Each of the three begins by posing the central question of personal identity—“Who’s there?” as Bernardo demands at the beginning of Hamlet. Relatively uncomplicated readings of these films have interpreted them through the lenses of broad (or global) social concerns current at their times of production. Thus the first has often been associated with what James Monaco called the “political paranoia” of its era (232), in particular with the discourses of communism and McCarthyism, connecting the dehumanization of being replaced by pod people with the “soullessness” of the former and the mass hysteria of the latter. The second has been variously associated with Vietnam and the death of the hippie movement, and critic Roger Ebert suggested the third film might be driven by the spread of AIDS.

And in fact, in each version, the main characters meet the proliferation of people who suddenly believe their loved ones have changed with a search for reasonable explanations that reference elements exterior to the film. In the 1956 version, the main character, Dr. Miles Bennell, first suggests his small town is seeing an epidemic of mass hysteria brought on by worry about world events, and later wonders if the pods result from atomic radiation, foregrounding the prevailing cultural fears of atomic warfare at the height of the cold war.

In the 1978 version, the scientist hero is Matthew Bennell, not a physician but a civil servant who works for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco. He approaches the problem as a public health epidemic, viewing pods as a kind of disease vector; considering its setting, we might see the second film rather than the third as driven by HIV. Later in the film, Nancy Bellicec, who runs a bathhouse in San Francisco, initially thinks the pods are part of a pattern of global environmental damage.

And finally, in the last filmed version, a tentative explanation is first offered within the context of psychotropic effects of the chemicals used in biowarfare.

As the three films offer these early explanations of the invasions, it is tempting to locate these as the heart of each film’s cultural critique. However, an analysis of each film reveals that in each “poddification” becomes a trope for a different, what I might call “local,” cultural discourse supplied by the film itself. While these are related to cultural trends and concerns of the films’ moments, they are more complex and darker in their views of the culture than traditional interpretations have suggested.

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Thus poddification in the 1956 film becomes a metaphor not of the communist or anti-communist menaces, or of concern about larger world issues, as Miles opined, but rather of what the film suggests are the pernicious effects of creeping mass culture represented within the film itself. The events take place within a carefully constructed nostalgic representation of a “typical” American small town, Santa Mira, which appears at first glance to be a kind of Anytown USA, with its city center of small businesses surrounded by quiet neighborhoods and rich farmland, where everyone knows everyone else, children are named Jimmy and one’s childhood sweetheart is named Becky, and when things seem out of joint everyone looks for answers to the kindly, dedicated Dr. Bennell in his small office that overlooks the town square.

As events unfold, we begin to realize that this artificially nostalgic view of Santa Mira also supports a social reality based upon a rigidly hierarchical system of class and gender that the film offers as normal (racial difference having already been erased in the film before it even starts, as all the characters are white). On their way home from the train station where his nurse has come to pick him up, they almost run over a youngster who has noticed his mother has changed; Miles stops to speak briefly with his grandmother, a farmer’s wife whose rough housedress clashes noticeably with Miles’s suit, and even with the nurse’s crisp uniform, marking the class difference immediately. Though his image plays into the nostalgic vision of the dedicated doc who makes house calls, Kevin McCarthy, who plays Dr. Bennell, is anything but the rumpled and overworked country doc. His classic aristocratic good looks, with pinched nostrils, tailored suits, and ever-present cigarette, are all markers of a higher socioeconomic class. He cares for working class residents in his practice but in his private life hobnobs with others on his level at the town’s tony restaurant, and his former girlfriend, Becky, has a pseudo-British accent and elegant bare shoulders in the revealing dress she wears when she first meets him after her return from living in England, where her marriage has broken up. Both Miles and Becky are divorced, which lends to them both the frisson of modern scandal in the staid 1950s small town.

Jack Bellicec, a writer in the film and friend of Miles, is also surrounded by signifiers of upper-crust sophistication. He lives in a house with a wet bar from which he serves up the martinis and bourbon that he and Miles knock back constantly, a pool table in his rec room, foreign-language posters, pottery, and expensive knick-knacks scattered throughout. The film is full of these markers of 1950s caste privilege, as the upper-class characters drink martinis, tool around in new cars, wear impeccably styled clothing, and comport themselves (at least before the pods take over) with an impeccable urban sangfroid.

When the pods do arrive, the first to change are not these members of the higher socioeconomic class, but ordinary working people; the pods enter this community through farmers. As more people change, we realize the class distinctions marked by what the characters wear, do, and value are all being leveled under the relentless onslaught of the pods. Suddenly the pod people come from every class in this microcosm of American society, and the higher-class now mingle with shopkeepers, police, housewives, meter-readers, and gas station attendants in common cause in ways that were not previously sanctioned.

As Santa Mira’s social distinctions are leveled, so, too, do the characteristics that the film supports as essentially human disappear once the pod people begin taking over. These, the film asserts, are foundational to the nostalgic, rigidly stratified social reality the pods replace. The film makes clear that the lovers Miles and Becky resist poddification so staunchly in large part because their transformation will mean the end of the intense emotion they feel for each other. Yet the film also suggests this emotion is only one characteristic pod people will lose. Poddification also means the end of desire, ambition, and faith, arguably the three cultural elements most responsible for the power and status enjoyed by Miles and the rest of his class in the film’s mythic meritocracy of America. When these pillars that prop up their class-stratified society disappear, the discourse of “normality” changes and Miles and Becky lose their privileged status, worth, and material advantages, and literally take to the hills, on the run for their lives.

Only at the end of the film are these distinctions restored, as another man in a suit takes charge at the out-of-town hospital where Miles makes his way. At first believed to be insane, not only because of his story but his dirty, disheveled, sweaty (that is, working class) look, he finally convinces the physicians at the hospital when a truck driver is brought in after dumping his load of pods across the highway. The original ending had Miles wandering through the highway traffic shouting, “You’re next!” as the pod-bearing trucks spread the invasion. The final ending, the outer parenthesis of the frame added on by the studio that felt the original ending would have been too depressing, restores the social distinctions the pods undermined.

Thus this view of the discourse of the 1956 original offers poddification as a trope for the leveling of well-entrenched social distinctions brought about by the mass culture of the modern world then taking shape in post-World War II America. A casualty of this leveling, the film asserts, is the elimination of emotion, desire, ambition, and faith. The “happy ending” halts this, at least temporarily, and the status quo is upheld.

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With no such happy ending, the multi-layered 1978 version asserts a considerably grimmer vision of poddification. Within the local discourse of this remake, the invasion becomes a metaphor for the spread of the antihuman culture of commodification and religious fundamentalism represented in the discourse of the film, and, in a broader frame, the cosmic inevitability of the erasure of disenfranchised groups. The scene switches from small Santa Mira to San Francisco, an urban milieu that has already devolved into the mass culture for which poddification was the first film’s metaphor. Where everyone knew everyone else in the small town America of Santa Mira, the characters in the San Francisco of the 1978 film careen through the anonymous teeming crowds of a modern neon metropolis. In such an atmosphere, human contact becomes all the more important, and the sense that “something’s missing” in the ones we love becomes all the more disturbing (as well as inevitable). The images of starbursts and webs scattered throughout the second version also suggest the extent to which the society has become interconnected, as the visual tendrils of the growing space plants are mirrored in the crack in Bennell’s windshield, and, structurally, in the reappearance in different settings of characters involved in the pod conspiracy as they pass their secret between them. As in the first film, “Who’s there?” becomes the key question, and in the mass culture of the 1978 film that question achieves enormous existential importance. A knock on the door can mean help or destruction.

In such a milieu, the 1978 film targets a number of local discourses, particularly the relentless commodification of daily life. The cost of everything is always among the first considerations in this version, as for example when Elizabeth Driscoll, Matthew’s coworker and friend (and Becky’s counterpart from the first film) early on has trouble getting a pod flower analyzed at her lab because it will cost too much. The smug well-to-do psychiatrist David Kibbner represents the commodification of emotional life as a hustler promoting his newest book on relationships at a book party that is one of the set pieces of the early part of the movie. Time, and everything else, is money in the film’s social reality, which is driven by what Cornell West called the market morality of American capitalist society. Indeed, West’s description of market forces could stand as a description of poddification in general in this remake, noting that “Postmodern culture is more and more a market culture dominated by gangster mentalities”; it is a voracious culture that, like the pod people, “engulfs all of us”.

Kibbner is also responsible for much of the localized cultural discourses for which poddification is a metaphor. His language is a mélange of psychobabble about the dangers of “shutting down feelings” (with massive irony, of course, since emotions are the first to go when one is replaced by one’s pod replica, and Kibbner becomes a malevolent agent for the pod transformation), relationships, 1970s therapies, and, most importantly, once he is revealed to be a pod person, fundamentalist religion. If Matthew and Elizabeth would only give themselves up to poddification, Kibbner tells, them they will be “born again into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear, and hate”; he cautions them, “don’t be trapped by old concepts . . . you’re evolving into a new life form.” Kibbner’s use of the religious discourse of being “born again” explicitly connects poddification with religious transformation in addition to the market culture noted earlier; both religion and capitalism appear to result in the loss of what makes us most human.

The religious association gains resonance near the end of the film, when Matthew hears bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” by the docks when he is looking for an escape. He discovers the song is only on a radio playing as pods by the hundreds are being loaded onto a ship for distribution to far ports. The transformational salvation the song describes becomes an ironic false salvation that is no longer possible in the new, poddified world.

The metaphor of birth assumes additional importance in this film as the remake uses birth imagery to mark how women’s insights, ways of knowing, concerns, and especially bodies are replaced with a crushingly brutal cultural and cosmic imperialism that is clearly associated with power and patriarchy. The film begins on another planet, with a series of striking images of the original space seeds. The seeds are shown as gelatinous and sperm-like, and gradually break away from their seedbed on the alien world to enter the solar winds exactly as microphotographs show sperm being ejaculated and rushing on their way to fertilize an egg. After they reach this planet (round as a human egg, contributing to the visual metaphor of cosmic fertilization), they fall to the ground in rain, an obvious image of fertility, and are shown clinging in seminal lumps to vegetation on the ground.

Later in the film, the large pods are seen in great detail as they break open and expel the replicants in visual images that exactly duplicate birth. The heads of the pod replacements gradually protrude through the cervix-like opening of the pods, and the plant creatures being expelled into the world reproduce, ontogenetically, the development of a human from wet squirming newborn to adolescent to full grown pod person in a matter of minutes.

The meaning is clear: pods replace women’s bodies as the source of the race’s regeneration. The need for the replacement of women is clear considering that, since women are the first to notice the changes in their loved ones in all three films, women seem to be more attuned to emotional nuances than men, and in a new world without emotion, they must go. Furthermore, in this film women are the repository of not only emotional intuition but also the important impulses for caretaking; a woman, Nancy Bellicec, speaks one of the film’s most emotionally resonant lines: “We’ll watch over each other when we sleep,” she says, voicing the key human impulse to care for each other. While the original conflated emotion with ambition and faith as American values, in the first remake these have been commodified and poddified and what is at most stake, what makes us most human, are what Cornell West calls the “nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations” (27). These are precisely the communitarian values that West says the market culture (like the pods) overwhelms.

What is left at the end of the 1978 film is a social reality dominated by men. Not only do men change first, but men who occupy positions of social control: health providers (Elizabeth’s boyfriend Jeffrey, a dentist, and psychiatrist Kibbner both become agents of poddification); police, who, as in the first film, are among the first to become complicit in the pods’ work; even the ubiquitous garbage collectors who haul away the desiccated husks of the replaced humans, are all male. From the first images to the last, the film suggests this dominance is a matter of cosmic, not simply cultural, imperative.

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The third film, Ferrara’s 1994 Body Snatchers, takes this cultural erasure of women further. Set in the aftermath of Gulf War I, it strips down the setting, characters, plot, and title to focus the film’s purpose more clearly. Gone in the third version is the playful postmodern intertexuality that enlivened the second film. Body Snatchersinstead zeroes in on the cultural characteristic that predominates in its world: the violent male imperialist culture of the military.

The film establishes the rhetoric of replacement immediately as the narrator and main character, the teen-aged girl Marti Malone, talks about her stepmother as the woman who replaced her mother. The third film establishes a binary between the vulnerable anti-authoritarianism of the young, displaced Marti and the brutal world of affectless military automatons. This is seen most clearly on two occasions, once when she falls asleep in the bathtub and is almost replaced by a pod and a second time when she is taken to the base infirmary and again is almost replaced; in both scenes she is nude, and the frailty of her slender body is in stark contrast to the fully clothed soldiers whose presence is everywhere. The representation of poddification as a sexual crime of aggression is also most evident in these scenes, where the tendrils snaking out from the pods to envelope, overwhelm, and replace the sleeping girl is a kind of rape that quite literally sucks the life from the victim.

The general setting is one of violence simmering below the surface of daily life as the screen alternates scenes of Marti’s family life with images from the discourse of war: helicopters, jeeps, guns, looming soldiers in camouflage, all relentlessly controlled by military protocol. While admitting women into the ranks as desexed soldiers, this is a world of men at war. In this case, the literal war is for the perpetuation of a race of creatures from a dying world; the credo of the warrior is the soldier’s credo: the race, not the individual, is important. Ultimately, the conformity of life on a military base filled with the looming silhouettes of impassive soldiers becomes indistinguishable from the conformity of the pod people who replace the humans.

The third film offers the harshest vision yet of a poddified America “purified” of dissent and difference. In the first two films, the systematic distribution of pods moves out from the towns to other cities (working through families and friends), yet in the third film the pods are distributed through military bases. This not only literalizes the metaphor of poddification as a war against humanity, but also suggests that a ubiquitous military culture is what will survive, a notion with particularly disturbing implications for post-9/11 America. The film sees the proliferation of pods as a trope for the relentless militarism and endless state of war of post-Gulf War I America. Concerns over what is lost in poddification—whether emotion, ambition, faith, or simple human kindness—disappear as the fight becomes one against an implacable imperialist force bent on domination.

At the end of the 1994 remake, Marti and her pilot escape to an army base in a big city, where, in the film’s final chilling image, they are met by an anonymous and ominous figure of a soldier looming over the camera. The implication is that, as in the second version, resistance to poddification is futile; there is no place to run. This remake is a far more straightforward, bleaker, and devastating vision of what local discourse poddification becomes a metaphor for. Though the society of the end of the 1978 film is purged of communitarian values, the outward appearances of the culture remain essentially as they were before the pod invasion. People go to work, children go to school, government functionaries still go about their business clipping newspaper articles, and except for a regimentation evidenced in the penultimate sequence where the public health employees all march off to some common destination, things will go on as they have been.

In the 1994 version, however, the vision we are left with is of the world as armed camp. Thus from the “happy” ending of the 1956 version, to the black hole of poddified hero Matthew Bennell’s shrieking mouth caught in freeze-frame at the end of the 1978 film, to the figure of the soldier blocking the sun in the final image of the 1994 version, each view of the culture that remains following the Invasion of the Body Snatchers becomes progressively more desolate. The pernicious effects of mass culture that the first film resists become embedded in the second film, and by the time the final version of this important cinematic artifact ends, the outward appearances of “normal” daily life have been totally eclipsed by the strict militaristic control of poddified life during a time of endless war.

The latter is all the more terrifying, of course, for its remarkable resemblance to the conditions of life in the early years of the twenty-first century, when the uncertainties facing Miles and Matthew Bennell and Marti Malone—determining what is real, what we value, and who really is there —have become our most urgent questions.

The Return of Toby

Last week I did an interview with Jeff Milo from the Ferndale Area District Library for his new podcast, “A Little Too Quiet.” We had a relaxed and wide-ranging conversation, including taking about my writing and background. As you might expect, we spent some time talking about my series of mysteries, the Martin Preuss mysteries, set in and around Ferndale.

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As I write this, the show is scheduled for the end of February 2020. You can listen to all the episodes of the podcast here: https://alittletooquiet.podbean.com/. Jeff’s conversations with other local authors (including Josh Malerman, Kathe Koja, and Michael Zadoorian) are thought-provoking and enjoyable.

Jeff and I also talked about my more recent writing. The last pieces I’ve published have been in a different genre from the mystery novels: they are a pair of dystopian novellas. One, “The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth,” appears in an anthology, Postcards from the Future: A Triptych on Humanity’s End (Quitt and Quinn Publishers and Whistlebox Press, 2019) along with the works of two other fine writers, Wendy Sura Thomson and Andrew Lark.

My other novella is a stand-alone sequel to “The Bright and Darkened etc.” published separately as The Exile (Poison Toe Press, 2020).

Writing dystopian fiction—or really post-apocalyptic fiction, as my two recent works are—turned out to be more taxing than I thought it would be.

I have to admit, at first it was fun.

I had published six Preuss mystery novels in a row from 2011 to 2019, and I felt like I was getting stale. I thought turning to dystopian fiction last year in response to an invitation from Andrew Lark (who spearheaded the Postcards project) would be a good change. It would let me take a break from mysteries, and indulge one of my long-time pleasures, post-apocalyptic fiction and films.

After I wrote the first novella, I had an experience that I’ve never had before, even with the Preuss series . . . an entire world sprang up in my brain as I thought about the characters, their situations, and their world, and I could see possibilities for continuing to write about them in several more novellas. My plan evolved into writing The Exile and maybe two or three more installments set in that world, and then combine them all into one large work.

I took to thinking about the different pieces as part of The Dry Earth Series—so called because the action takes place in a world devastated by climate catastrophes.

And here’s where it starts to get depressing.

I think of these novellas as “speculative fiction,” to use the term that Margaret Atwood uses: fiction that begins with current conditions, and then engages in a kind of thought experiment to project forward in order to imagine how things might turn out, given where we are starting from. She’s a master of it in works like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and most recently The Testaments.

Several current trends came together in “The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth—not only the climate disasters that we are starting to see already (vide Australia burning), but also emerging global pandemics (vide the coronavirus), the breakdown of our lawful democratic system and the failure of the American experiment (vide your news today), looming failures in agriculture leading to widespread famine (vide Monsanto’s latest annual report) . . . all of these converged to create the nightmarish hellscape of “The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth.”

And I continued to explore their impacts in The Exile.

And not by simply discussing the problems themselves, of course, but rather by showing their devastating effects on the desperate lives of individual characters.

Without getting into spoilers, it’s not a pretty picture.

The more I wrote about the world of the Dry Earth Series, the more all the problems I was writing about—climate devastation, cultural suicide enacted daily in the political sphere, an uninhabitable earth, mass extinctions of plants and animals, violence released into the air along with lingering radiation—began to seem so possible.

Even, unfortunately, so likely.

As this country seems to be embracing its own apparently inexorable dystopian future, thinking seriously about the kinds of nightmares the future holds became more and more difficult and disheartening for me.

My mental state, already reeling and fragile from the corruption and mean-spirited, willful stupidity spewing nonstop out of Washington, began to decline even further.

I decided I need a break from my break.

The solution was simple: for my next project, I’m going to return to the world of Martin Preuss and his son Toby.

After I finished “The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth” and sent it off to the editor, I launched into the seventh Preuss book and finished about 13,000 words on the draft. I stopped when the novella came back from the editor, and then I found one of the characters in the novella to be so compelling that I began another manuscript that turned into The Exile.

Talking to Jeff Milo about the Preuss series made me realize how much I missed the characters of Martin Preuss and most especially Toby.

Toby, who brings so much light into his fictional father’s life, does the same for me. Profoundly handicapped, he is an accurate and loving portrait of my grandson Jamie. Toby is a source of enormous comfort, joy, and wisdom for his father, as Jamie was for those of us who knew and loved him.

[image error]Jamie Kril, the model for Toby Preuss

Regretfully, Jamie is no longer with us. But while we were privileged to have him, Jamie taught us so much about love, patience, the necessity for presence in one’s life, and what is really important in a world that seems crazier and more out-of-control by the day.

Writing about Toby, and showing how sweet and loving he is and how important he is in his father’s life (and, indeed, the lives of everyone he touches), gives me the chance to celebrate his great gifts, and by extension the gifts of all the children and people like Toby and Jamie.

We need that now, more than ever.

So that’s what’s next for me. I’m shelving the harsh, nightmarish, disintegrating world of the Dry Earth Series, and returning to the world of Martin and Toby—which is harsh and nightmarish in its own way, but at least tends toward order and social reintegration. Crimes are solved, mysteries are cleared up, criminals are held accountable.

And at the end of each day, a regenerating visit with his dear Toby always awaits investigator Martin Preuss.

My sabbatical from dystopian fiction might turn into a “Mondical and a Tuesdical,” as folksinger Lee Hayes said about The Weavers’ enforced break from music during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. Right now it’s hard to tell.

Regardless, look for the next entry in the Martin Preuss series in the fall of 2020. I can’t give out any details of the plot just yet—except to say that due to overwhelming demand from my readers, Martin Preuss may—just may—finally get a girlfriend.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, when you have a chance, please have a listen to Jeff Milo’s podcast at https://alittletooquiet.podbean.com/.

 

Indie Monday

Today’s guest: Joe Spraga

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On occasional Mondays, I’ll be featuring other authors on my blog—authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.

I’m delighted that today’s featured guest is Joe Spraga. Joe is the author/illustrator of two books for children, The Snitch, the Witch, and the One Who Was Rich (2015), and Phrebbel The Phrongol’s Vacation Pictures (coming soon).

Recently I posed some questions to Joe. Here’s what he told me.

DL: Welcome, Joe. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

JS: I was raised in the Detroit Metropolitan area. I’ve always been artsy and I’m a graduate of Western Michigan University, with a Bachelor’s of Arts in English (Creative Writing) and a Minor in Philosophy. I’m a former musician who had to reluctantly retire and became legally disabled in 2015 due to health problems. I enjoy spending time with dogs, as should all right-thinking people.

DL: Tell us about your latest book and works in progress. Where did the ideas for those works come from?

JS: I wrote my first book, The Snitch, the Witch, and The One Who Was Rich, because the chorus of the book popped into my head one day while in a painting class in college. It had been an ear worm for me for many years. I knew then that I had to make a story out of it.  My writing style for my children’s literature is verse. However, I make sure to be as didactic as I can be with overtones of social commentary while still keeping it entertaining.

My new book, Phrebbel The Phrongol’s Vacation Pictures, will be out in a couple of weeks. It is a “brain game” style book that promotes critical thinking in a fun and interactive way for children. STAY TUNED FOR THIS ONE!!!

DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?

JS: I knew I was a writer in college, but I did not start taking it seriously until many years later. I have always observed life, and read books. Seeing the connection between the two is a very natural and important thing for me. I write because I want to make the world a nicer place with quality ideas that can be fun and entertaining for children and adults. I also write because it comes naturally to me and it’s fun!

DL: Please talk a little about your writing process. What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?

JS: Well, let’s see here . . . I honestly don’t know if I can explain this clearly, but I’ll give it my best shot. I feel my books are more “written through me” than writing them myself. I have a very “sing-songy” type mind, and things just pop into my head. I feel the universe is using me as an antennae to receive these ideas. Once I have the ideas, my process is very structured. I lay everything out ahead of time, visually, like a story board. Then, I make the words and pictures as entertaining as possible for the reader while being didactic and stimulating at the same time. That’s easy to understand, right? HA!

DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?

JS: Being a writer has given me a purpose. With all of my health problems, being disabled is a constant struggle. Being a writer gives me a reason to get excited about something and get out of bed in the morning. It is also cathartic for me. I understand my place in the universe better, and it helps me work through my own personal issues. I hope my writing helps my readers do the same.

DL: What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?

JS: My website is https://joespraga.com/ All of my social media links are on my website. I can also be reached via email at the bottom of my website. My email is joe@joespraga.com.

The First Chapter of THE EXILE

 

[image error]I’m releasing a new book this week . . . a novella, The Exile (Poison Toe Press).

I’m calling it Book 2 in the Dry Earth Series. It’s a self-contained, stand-alone companion to Book 1, The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth, which appears in an anthology of three dystopian novellas, Postcards from the Future: A Triptych on Humanity’s End (Whistlebox Press and Quitt and Quinn Publishers, 2019).

Also included in Postcards are excellent, gripping, and thought-provoking works of dystopian fiction by Andrew Charles Lark and Wendy Sura Thomson.

The Exile describes eight days in the life of one of the characters from Book 1, an elder named Mae. She’s a secondary character in the first book, but I found her story compelling enough to want to continue it.

The Exile follows her banishment from the underground settlement where she lives with her tribe in a bleak post-apocalyptic future. It’s not a pleasant world (post-apocalyptic realities usually aren’t). I like to think of it using the term that Margaret Atwood uses, speculative fiction. Like her Handmaid’s Tale, Books 1 and 2 of my Dry Earth Series take current events and circumstances and speculate on what they might evolve into.

The Exile takes place in the same world as The Bright and Darkened Lands of the Earth, and contains a few references to events in that first book, but nothing that will spoil your enjoyment of it. If you’re a fan of dystopian fiction, I hope you enjoy The Exile, and if you do then I guarantee you’ll find Postcards from the Future impossible to put down (as many reviewers have noted).

Like Postcards, The Exile is available for purchase in print and Kindle versions from Amazon; you may also order the paperback version where ever books are sold. It’s literally brand new, so if you can’t find it on Amazon then give it another day or so.

 

The Exile, Chapter 1

And she’s awake.

A muffled noise, a whisper of rag-wrapped feet on the dirt floor, some words of murmured instruction: these pull her from sleep. In a sweat, heart pounding. The sounds are not loud, but she has always been a light sleeper; even with only one good ear, she could be awakened by the echoes of distant noises in their underground settlement back when she was a child, imagining monsters.

Now Mae is an old woman and she doesn’t have to imagine the monsters. They are real, and already here. Wandering in the Upground.

And sometimes down below, in her underground settlement, too.

Sitting up, she is surprised that she has even fallen asleep. After the meeting of the Council of Elders, of which she is part, she had lain awake for most of the night, worrying over whether to tell Odile about what had happened.

Odile is the chief elder of the Council, as well as her companion. The other members of the Council did not let Odile know about the meeting, and made Mae swear she would say nothing to Odile until the Council as a body could speak with her.

It was a brutal, unfair request to make of Mae, and what the Council decided was equally unfair. After agonizing about it for most of the night, Mae had decided she needed to let her companion know about it, regardless what she had promised.

Mae looks over at Odile’s mat. Her friend is still asleep, a small bundle with a grey head protruding from her tattered cover. It is cool and airless in their underground settlement, but Odile is old—older than Mae—and gets chilled easily.

Mae watches the rise and fall from her companion’s breathing. The sound that woke her did not come from Odile.

Mae looks around the room where they sleep. In the dim light from the lantern out in the tunnel, all seems quiet.

She lies back, adjusts her aching bones on her sleeping mat, and closes her eyes.

She tries to calm herself. Whatever dream she had been having (now dissipated entirely) and the tense Council meeting of the night before have left her with a deep feeling of unease.

She opens her eyes and stares at the support beams crisscrossing the rock overhead.

Now fully awake, she begins to feel the familiar pressure in her bladder, and decides she must find her way to the sanitation chamber to relieve herself before she can try to get back to sleep.

She makes her way down the tunnel outside her room to the foul-smelling chamber, where she squats over the trench in the dark. She rinses her hands in the water standing in a bowl carved into the rock walls, and goes back out into the tunnel. It is lit, as all the corridors are at night, by the flickering light of a small lantern.

That’s where they take her.

Someone comes up from behind and pins her arms in a bear hug. She struggles, but she is held fast.

Someone else—she can’t say who because they approach her from behind—ties a rag over her mouth and throws a hood over her head. The material of the hood is threadbare, like most of what they own in the settlement, and it lets in some of tunnel dim light but not enough for her to make out who her attackers are.

One of them strikes her over the head with a heavy object, not hard enough to knock her out but with enough force to make her old legs wobble and let go from under her. The arms that pin her release her and she is allowed to fall to the ground, heavily and clumsily.

The fight goes out of her, along with her breath.

Dazed and winded, she feels hands grasping her roughly and half-carrying, half-dragging her down the tunnel away from the sanitation chamber and her own sleep chamber. She is too confused to figure out which direction they take her.

At last, she feels her attackers pushing her up an incline. She panics. It must be the passageway to the Upground.

Why are they taking her there?

She tries to shout, but with the rag across her mouth she can only emit a high screech. She tries to shake herself free but the hands that hold her are too strong.

Can anyone hear her?

Can anyone help her?

Her shins bang and scrape against the rocks on the ground as they pull her up the passageway. She is still barefoot and wearing only the nightshirt she sleeps in.

She can feel the air warming as they drag her up from the underground and rise to what was once the entrance of the nickel mine where they have made their settlement.

Finally, they bring her to the opening. She can feel the full heat of the above-ground world through her thin clothes and the flimsy hood on her head.

She hears her attackers exchanging words with the entrance guards. Their voices are low and urgent, but she can’t make out what they are saying.

She is pulled over the rubble that surrounds the entrance. The jagged old concrete blocks, bricks, bent and burnt wood slats join with the remnants of old weeds and branches from the dead trees to cut and scrape her bare feet and legs as they pull her away from the settlement.

Disoriented, she has no idea how far they drag her. At one point, her attackers pick her up off the ground—she is old and malnourished and does not weigh much—and she feels them begin to trot with her.

They go on like that for what feels like hours.

When they finally stop, they let her fall to the ground and pull the hood from her head. It is still night, but the sun never sets in the far north where they live, so the sky is a dim golden color. The sun of early morning makes her squint so she still can’t tell who has taken her, but she hears them panting from the exertion of carrying her.

She lies on her back. Someone unties the rag from around her face. Her mouth is dry, cottony, bitter with the oily taste of the cloth. She tries to scream, protest, call for help, but her tongue doesn’t work and all that comes out is a hoarse croak.

A face looms close to her own. She sees it is Cyn, one of the security squad. Cyn cradles her head and holds a container of water to her mouth. Thankful, Mae drinks. It loosens her tongue enough for her to rasp, “Cyn, why do you do this?”

“Sorry, elder,” Cyn replies. She lets Mae’s head down and sets the water container on the ground beside her.

“Come,” another woman barks. “Leave her!”

Cyn gets up but Mae grabs at her cloak. “Wait!”

Cyn gently pries Mae’s hands free. The other woman now looms over Mae. Mae recognizes her as Meela, the leader of the security work group. In the light of early morning, Meela’s eyes are black, the color of pitch darkness underground.

Glowering down at Mae, Meela says, “Know this, elder Mae. You suffer banishment from the settlement by order of the Council of Elders.”

“No,” Mae protests, her voice still rough from the rag that was wound around her mouth. “That would never happen. Odile is the chief elder. She would never—”

Meela holds a hand up to cut Mae off. “Nay appeal,” she says, “nay protest. If you return, you will be dragged up.”

Killed.

“How can this be?” Mae asks. She is an elder herself, as well as Odile’s companion—when did the Council take this vote? She was present at the last secret meeting, and this never came up. How would Odile ever agree with it?

Mae tries to sit up, but Meela puts a foot on Mae’s shoulder and kicks her down flat onto the red dust of the ground.

“Come,” Meela orders Cyn.

“Cyn,” Mae cries, “nay go!”

The two women ignore Mae’s pleading. They jog away without looking back.

 

The Mysteries of Time Passing

I’m reading a book now called The Order of Time by an Italian theoretical physicist named Carlo Rovelli. Its subject is time (duh), and more specifically what contemporary physics has to say about our received notions about time.

Rovelli asks questions like, why do we remember the past and not the future, do we exist in time or does time exist in us, and what does it really mean to say “time passes?”

He talks about the ways in which modern physics has basically upended everything we thought we knew about time. Our beliefs that it flows uniformly, runs in a measurable course from a fixed past to an open future, and so on . . . all our assumptions about time are provably false, Rovelli claims.

The book examines how our ideas about time have crumbled, and what we are left with.

Fascinating stuff.

And yet, I think it’s fair to say that most of us still abide by those old verities of time. In this season particularly—when we count down the final days and hours of one year and look toward the beginning of a new year and the promises we hope it holds—we seem to be called to reflect on time. Not as an abstract concept of contemporary theoretical quantum physics, but in its more human aspect . . . we are drawn to think about how we used the time we had, what it meant for us, what we might do differently when we have the chances that (again, we hope) the coming year will allow us.

I’m especially fascinated by what I can only call the mysteries of time passing. I regret I don’t have a more nuanced vocabulary to describe what I mean here. This past year I turned 70, which has been more of an “uh-oh” milestone for me than I thought it would be. This year I’ve also been in touch with some friends whom I haven’t seen in decades, and even though I know intellectually that people age, it’s still a surprise to see how thirty or forty or fifty years turn dark hair white, expand thin waistlines, corrugate smooth skin . . . and seem to turn people I knew in their teens and twenties into their own grandparents.

One of my favorite photographers is a man named Milton Rogovin, who was an optometrist in Buffalo until he lost his profession when he was discredited by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ‘50s. Then he became a social documentary photographer of people whom he called (as the title of one of his books says) “the forgotten ones” . . . working people whose lives were overlooked, as well as the poor and marginalized and immigrant communities who lived on the lower west side of Buffalo.

His genius was not only to focus his camera on those groups and reflect back to them the meaning of their own lives, but to return several years later to photograph them again, and then return years after that to photograph them once more.

His photos therefore take on an added temporal dimension. They become enormously moving documents that invite us to reflect on, among so many other things, what time does to people.

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One of the photos of his that I find most intriguing is the photo used for the cover of the book, The Forgotten Ones.

I love this photo. It’s  endlessly fascinating for me. I love the people and actions and setting it portrays; it continually invites me, as a writer, to enter into it imaginatively. It’s a partner to another photo of the same two men that Rogovin took years later, and the difference between the two is striking: youth and age, hope and despair, promise and failure.

I don’t have permission to post either the early or the late photo, but the one on the cover of the book is the early photo, so I feel pretty secure in posting that. My continued engagement with the photo resulted in the following poem, “Time Lapse.”

As I said, I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to do justice to my thoughts and feelings about the mysteries of time passing, but in this poem I try to use language to catch something.

 

Time Lapse

(after a photograph by Milton Rogovin)

How is it possible to capture

a moment in a life—

and not just any moment, but

the instant before everything changes,

youth goes to age, future goes to past,

might do goes to have done?—

because here are Johnny Lee Wines

and his friend Ezekiel Johnson

paused on the cusp of their lived lives

caught in a black-and-white photograph

in a lower west side Buffalo bar

in their hats and cut-rate disco clothes

after working all day at the ice factory

doing the Kung Fu Fighting

in nineteen-seventy-three, at

eleven twenty-six p.m. exactly

(and how do we know that?

so says the Genesee Beer clock

cocked between two crooked Genesee signs

on the painted particleboard wall

preserving this moment forever)

with Johnny the hopping happy one

the one with personality

saucy untroubled face looking off

cigarette in hand pointing out to

the future where they both head

and Zeke, he’s the quiet one

behind his square shades, grooving

in his own cool way but without

Johnny’s sassy pop in the reek

of cigarette smoke and old beer

though in the next jolting second

time will change them both forever

when Johnny shifts his willowy weight

from right foot to left, right-angled ankle unbends

and the dancer turns away, all put-on cheek still,

and Zeke (he’s still the cool one)

shifts his hips on the tawdry

checkered linoleum bar floor

where they dance in nineteen-seventy-three

(Everybody was kung fu fighting

Them cats was fast as lightning)

and their short-lived convexity

will alter and propel them forward

into what future awaits them,

where two tired and portly men

will stand in the bleak Buffalo snow

years from now in another photo,

after all the fights, reunions,

exiles, returns, mistakes,

regrets, chances lost, found, and lost again,

Johnny’s face sad and bloated with woe,

Zeke’s youthful cool now equally absent

in his worn-out and broken body

two casualties of the mysteries of time passing

that release their power in the instant

after Johnny and Ezekiel

jumped into the upcoming.

© 2019 Donald Levin

still inside

The college in Detroit where I taught for twenty years is closing for good this week. As I’ve been reflecting back over my experiences there—twenty years is a long time—one event in particular stands out.

It concerns a sequence of eight poems I wrote, titled “still inside.”

I originally wrote these back in 2007. Every so often when I give poetry readings, I bring these out to read because they’re among my favorites. After all these years, I still find them tremendously moving, and my audiences usually do, too.

The poems are monologues written in the voice of a little girl who suffered, as the poems describe, every kind of bad luck a child can have.

The sequence is based on the situation of an actual little girl. The basic events in the poems are true—a baby was born as a twin, but suffered life-altering hypoxia because the medical staff didn’t know there were two babies and she stayed inside her mother too long. She was born into a world of poverty and disregard.

That much is true. The rest is “truly imagined.”

(As Marianne Moore said, poets should create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”)

My stepdaughter is an attorney specializing in rights of the handicapped, and she’s the one who told me about this girl. The third poem in the sequence mentions an attorney who steps in because the little girl’s regular lawyer wouldn’t release enough money for her proper care; my stepdaughter is the one who intrudes to help the child. (The other attorney said to her, “What are you, an avenging angel?”)

The story of this little girl affected me for a long time, until it moved and saddened me to the point where I felt compelled to give her a voice that the circumstances of her short life had denied her.

I felt I had to bear witness to all she endured.

But I didn’t just want to focus on her sadness. My grandson Jamie was also born with a number of severe handicapping conditions, and everyone who came into contact with him during his own shortened life was profoundly transformed by his loving nature. I wanted to imaginatively imbue the little girl with some of Jamie’s indomitable spirit as a way of counteracting all the misfortunes of her life.

I had always thought these pieces could form the basis of a multi-media project consisting of words, music, art, and dance. I showed them to one of my friends and colleagues, Geoff Stanton, when we were both teaching at the college. Geoff is a phenomenal composer and musician, and he jumped at the chance to compose music for them.

[image error]The result was a stunning series of eight songs using the poems as lyrics set to music for two voices, piano, and cello. We presented them as part of one of Geoff’s annual concerts, and I was thrilled with the way they turned out. I’m including the poster for the event, left.

(As I write this, I don’t have a recording of the music available, or else I’d include a sample of that, too.)

As these things go, I haven’t moved my multi-media plans forward. Perhaps at some  point in the future they will come to pass.

Until then, I offer this sequence in the hope the pieces will affect you as much as they continue to affect me.

 

still inside  

by Donald Levin

i

another one

 

no doctor saw my momma

before we came

no exam no test

no money no thought

for another waiting

when it was time

it happened so fast

at the poor people’s hospital

my sister came quick

but after she was born

nobody knew

i was still there

awaiting my turn

quiet as i ever was

they turned away

to bathe and weigh the new one

and while i was waiting

i ran out of air

in the dark channel

of my momma’s narrow body

and it wasn’t till later

when she started screaming

that the nurses and doctors

caressing my sister

ran back

and discovered another one

still inside

and they did what they could

but the story of my life

was written by then

 

ii

absence of air

 

hypoxia

the doctors called it

to explain why my sister was good

and i was the bad one

right from the start

which meant no walking

or talking for me

though i could understood

what people would tell me

if only to hum in reply

and i did try to smile

if i thought it would help

which wasn’t often

though i cried at the seizures

that made me go stiff

and roll my eyes

and afterwards whimper

till i fell asleep

the medicine made me so

dizzy and tired

couldn’t see either

no sight in my eyes

except shapes and shadows

and the flashing lights of seizures

the only things i could see

retarded, they said

which probably i was

since i couldn’t learn

the way my sister did

who was always quick

even when she was born

she was the first

and i was last

 

iii

the house we lived in

 

momma bought with the money

they gave her for me

at first a lawyer handled the money

but wouldn’t give us enough

till another one made him

we never could have had

such a big house

there was supposed to be

a ramp and special bath

but momma never had it made

used the money for sofas

i was not allowed to sit on

so i couldn’t ruin them

by drooling which

i couldn’t stop

and she bought the other children

clothes there were two more

after me and my sister

so i stayed inside

for most of the time

and when a nurse came

to care for me

which wasn’t often

i was clean and dry

but when nobody came

i had to wait for gramma

who watched me when momma was out

but she didn’t always remember

so i stayed in my diaper

till it got so heavy with wet

she couldn’t lift me

or turn me over

when she finally remembered

so i had to stay still

inside my room

in pants that were heavy and wet

till someone remembered

and came to take care of me

but i was patient because

i was already such trouble

my momma told me

 

iv

school

 

when the bus came to take me

every morning

they would strap me inside

in my wheelchair

so i wouldn’t bounce

on the trip to school

with the driver and an aide

who cleared my throat

if i needed it

and when i got to school

my teachers were so happy

to see me

when they rolled me off the bus

they’d take my coat

and change my pants

and my teacher who is very tall

held my hands to say hello

and later they all sang

good morning to you

good morning to you

and sang about

my bright shining face

which i had because

i was so happy to see them too

every morning i also saw

my friend zach

who was in my class

and who liked me too

our teacher wheeled us together

so we could sit and hold hands

even though we couldn’t see

we felt each other’s hands

which were both crooked

because our muscles were so tight

but the touch of our fingers

twisted together

kept us warm

till it was time to go to music

which i also loved

 

v

momma always wanted

 

to be where she wasn’t

before we bought our house

we lived in different places

and she always wanted to be

someplace where we weren’t

when we moved to the city

from the town we were born in

she wanted to go back

to our old home town

and when she went back

at night to meet friends

she wanted to be back

inside our new big house

and when she was with us there

she yearned for jamaica

where she came from

she said she never was happy

since she left jamaica

if she had stayed there

she said her life would be

completely different

she must have been right

because i never remember

seeing her smile

or hearing her laugh

except when her friends were around

and i thought she must have

lots of friends

in jamaica

to miss it so much

 

vi

on valentines day

 

one year i got to eat chocolate

which i never had before

i never ate by my mouth

always got formula

through the button in my tummy

when i tasted the chocolate

i couldn’t breathe

gramma called an ambulance

momma wasn’t home

and gramma had to stay

with the other children

so I went by myself

to the hospital

they said i couldn’t breathe

because i was allergic to

peanuts in the chocolate

they gave me medicine

which i was also allergic to

the doctor gave me something else

that worked this time

and i could breathe again

so he sent me home

but i couldn’t breathe again

at home my throat closed

so i had to go back

in the ambulance

the doctor wanted to put

something in my throat

a little hole

an always open o

so i could keep breathing

but he couldn’t do it

without momma’s permission

and nobody knew where she was

so the doctor called the lawyers

in charge of my money

they must have said sure

go ahead then the doctor said

well you know

this will be permanent

it’ll mean round the clock care

from now on

it will mean a nursing facility

it will be pretty expensive

i just wanted you to know

he listened

and hung up

and told the nurses

who were holding my hand

her trust won’t fund the care she’d need

let’s try something else

he sent me home

with a machine

to suction my throat

and now when the mucous

collects in my throat

i get suctioned

if anybody’s there to do it

the lawyers must have said

they would pay for it

but somebody has to remember

to suction me

which doesn’t always happen

and i wind up coughing

until i can spit out the mucous

and sometimes i can

but sometimes i can’t

and i just have to lay there

and cough and cough

 

vii

sailing

 

my momma didn’t want

nursing care for me

didn’t want people around

telling her how to take care

of her daughter

but once when a nurse came

her name was nancy

she took care of me for a while

brought a big boat

and hung it from the ceiling

i couldn’t see it

except as a blur

but she described it

it was different colored ribbons

like a rainbow

with sails so big

when the breeze blew in

when the windows were open

in the warm weather

nancy said the boat would float

back and forth like a real boat

sailing on the waves

of the ocean

and after the company

nancy worked for took her away

to care for another child like me

who they said needed her

more than i did

she left my boat

hanging in my room

and when i laid in bed at night

waiting to be turned over

i would think about the boat

waving in the breeze

and pretend i was the captain

sailing around the world

on my boat of colored ribbons

and everywhere i went

people would wave

and clap as i sailed by

 

viii

still, inside

 

though everyone did

the best they could

i was not to live long

scoliosis twisted my spine

like a cane’s bent handle

in my fifth year

and as it curved around itself

my organs compressed

till one day

my lungs couldn’t move

enough air

and all my spit pooled

in the back of my throat

and i inhaled it

and got pneumonia

a speck of mucous

was all it took

hidden like a grain of sand

in my chest

the bright red ring of sickness

pearled around it

and because i couldn’t rise

or blow it away

the infection overwhelmed me

and the fever

made my seizures so bad

i couldn’t breathe at all

and before anyone knew

to call the ambulance

i died

but at my funeral

everyone came to say goodbye

momma my sister my gramma

the rest of the family

the lawyers and doctors and nurses

who took care of me

and i could feel them all

standing crying

over my coffin

as i lay still

inside

 

©2019 Donald Levin

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Revising

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Whether you’re just coming down from an adrenaline-fueled National Novel Writing Month high or you’ve been working at a more leisurely pace, at some point (if you stick with it) you’ll write “The End” on that first draft of your novel.

Good on ya! Feels great, doesn’t it?

So . . . now what?

Now comes what some authors (me included) consider to be THE crucial part of the entire process: revising. Here is where your book really comes together and you polish (or maybe discover) your unique vision and its execution.

I once read a good analogy for the first draft: its purpose is to get all the sand into the sandbox, so you can then start building your castle.

Your first draft is your raw material. It’s the revising that turns it into a book.

Sadly, there’s no magic formula for revision. It always depends upon what’s on the page and what you’re striving for, as well as your own background and experience.

In this brief post, I can’t cover the specifics of how to revise. There are literally hundreds of books, articles, checklists, and blog posts out there that will tell you exactly what and how to revise.

Sometimes these are helpful, sometimes not.

From my 20+ years of experience as a writer and another 20+ years as a teacher of writing, I’ve found there are some things that are helpful for writers to keep in mind about revising, as well as some critical mistakes that writers make when they try to revise.

Here’s my take on what those are.

1. Take a break.

It doesn’t do to jump right into revising when the draft is still hot. The general wisdom is to let the draft sit for a while, and in this instance the general wisdom is correct. Though your impulse might be to turn around and start in on the next version, let it cool down from the heat of composition. Take a break. Catch your breath. Clear your head. Reduce your sleep debt. Reintroduce yourself to your family. You need distance before you can move on.

[image error]Some authors like a little help from their friends when they revise.

2. Remember what you’re up to.

Revising literally means “re-seeing.” You’re taking another look at your work with an eye toward making it as good as it can be. Some people distinguish between revising and rewriting; they say revising means working with the draft you have, whereas rewriting means tossing it all and starting over. I tend to conflate the two because I do some of both.

Revising is sparked by a conscious and critical assessment of a draft’s meaning, significance, and potential. It’s different from composing. And here’s where your reading background makes a real difference in how you approach your work; the more you’ve read, the more you’ll understand how your novel can (and should) take its place among the ongoing conversation of literature.

3. Remember what you’re NOT up to.

Revising does not mean either copyediting or proofreading. These are both key elements of bringing your work to completion, but they just get in the way if you do them too early.

Copyediting means bringing your draft into conformity with conventions of format, grammar, spelling, and punctuation; those tasks aren’t important now. “Proofreading” means reading a proof of your book and marking any typos or errors in grammar, style, or punctuation.

Neither of those help you with the substantive intellectual and creative act of revising. Sometimes a writer’s tendency is to start the work of revising at that level, thinking you’ll work up to the big stuff. Correcting those simple errors at the sentence level might feel good and make it seem as if you’re off to a good start.

But if that’s your impulse, you have to block it. Save that for the end. It’s just going to keep you from the real work you have to do, of “re-seeing” what you’ve written.

4. Start at the top and work down.

This doesn’t mean simply starting at the beginning. Rather, I’ve found it’s helpful to think about revising as a series of activities that move from the macro level (that is, the story level) to the micro level (the level of sentence structure and word choice). Even if you like to plunge into revising with a kind of “all-at-onceness” approach, consider these as conceptual guides for how you approach your project:

a. Revise for story structure and major plot points.

The story is the skeleton of your novel—what keeps it standing and moving. At this stage, you’re rethinking or even discovering the purpose of the book, what it is that drives the telling of the story, and sharpening the focus that gets your reader engaged.

Many authors look at their drafts in terms of “story beats”—that is, the key points of action that form the plot. These can be helpful, but even if you don’t think of the story in those terms, there will be high points of action or emotion that you should be aware of and craft for.

b. Revise for structure and development.

These are the muscles and tendons of your book. I like to think of this stage as being broken into different parts: character (thinking about character arcs, character development, dialogue, and character descriptions), scenes (sharpening scenes, pacing within and between scenes, and transitions), setting (describing the locations in time and place where your story unfolds), and point of view (clarifying the narrative voice through which the story is told).

c. Revising for sentence and word-level clarity.

This is the skin—the surface of the book. Here is where you plunge into sentence- and word-level revising, looking for improvements in style (making your writing more graceful and flowing) and clarity (making the writing more accessible to the audience).

Or not . . . if grace and clarity are not what you’re going for, then it’s good to know that, too.

This comes at the end of the process of revising for good reason. Why take time to correct an error or polish a sentence that might not make it to the final version? Also, when you revise a sentence, there’s a tendency to think, Yup, that sentence is done, which will make you less likely to edit it out if it doesn’t work.

[image error] 5. The basics matter.

If the previous suggestions sound like the elements of fiction that you might have learned in a creative writing course or workshop, that’s no accident. These form the core of your revising strategy because they form the basics of fiction.

As a certified Cranky Old Guy, I strongly believe that success as a fiction writer—or a poet or dramatist or essayist (or artist or musician or lawyer or engineer or anything, really)—means having control over the basics of your craft.

For the fiction writer, these elements of fiction—story, plot structure, character, point of view, language—are the foundations of your novel. And when we talk about revising, those are the elements to focus on. Learning about them takes time and effort, but the results repay that time.

Just as you can’t write a symphony without ever hearing one and knowing how it’s put together, you can’t write or revise your novel without knowing what the possibilities are for you. The more tools and understanding you have at your disposal, the more options you’ll have when it comes to the immensely complicated tasks associated with writing.

Despite its importance, I know some people find revising tedious, and approach it as an onerous chore. I would argue that revising is more important than the actual process of composition. Personally, I find it to be enormously satisfying, requiring you to marshal all your skills and talents and creativity. I hope you will find it so, too.

Planting Daffodils

My blog’s taking a short break this week. In its place, please enjoy this poem apropos of the season. It’s from my collection, In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005).

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