Lee Martin's Blog, page 30

Revision: Special Tips from a Special Girl

Revision: Special Lessons from a Special Girl

 

Here are some stories about a four-year-old girl we’ll call Parker. Parker’s mother recently took her with her to a wake and told her she should be sure to ask whatever questions she might have. Taking note of the fact that the legs of the departed were covered by the lower half of the casket, Parker asked, “What kind of shoes do you think she’s wearing?” Parker’s mother, of course, had to say, “I don’t know. We can’t see her feet.” Sometimes the evidence of things unseen are present only in the imagination.

As writers, we too often close off the imagination at a crucial time in the writing process. As my friend, David Jauss, points out in this splendid piece about revision (https://gristjournal.com/the-flowers-of-afterthought-premises-and-strategies-for-revision-by-david-jauss/) we should remind ourselves that the revision process should be one of play, one in which the writer engages the imagination anew. David says, “We often hear writers praised for their work ethic, but what writers really need is a play ethic.  If we approach revision as work, we’re not in the right frame of mind to create anything of value.” He goes on to quote Robert Olen Butler, who says, “Rewriting is redreaming.” We can take a lesson from children such as Parker who has the playful common sense to ask the question most adults wouldn’t even think to wonder: “What kind of shoes?”

At another point of the wake, Parker said to her mother, “She’s dead, right?” “Yes, she is,” Parker’s mother said. Parker looked at the casket. She looked at her mother. Then she sighed and her shoulders slumped and she shook her head and said, “I should’ve brought her a card.” At this point, Parker was revising the scenario she was witnessing, including her and her mother’s own place within it. One advantage we writers have over the living or the dead in the real world is we can make anything happen that we choose. We should never feel married to the first words we’ve put on the page in a rough draft, or in any subsequent draft. Everything can be rethought, reimagined, restructured, recreated. The act of revision is often one of trying out slightly different scenarios. A card for the departed? Why not?

Then there’s the story of Parker, who after seeing a portrait of Jesus with his long hair, dubbed him “Special Girl.” If you ask Special Girl for something, she decided, Special Girl will you bring it to you. How closely this connects with the notion of a muse guiding us through the writing process. For me, the idea of a spirit offering us inspiration, has always been more correctly articulated as the writer’s own willingness to engage the imagination, or, as in the case of revision, to re-engage it.

When revising a piece, why not try putting it away? Don’t look at it. Dream it. In other words, instead of looking at a manuscript with thoughts of line editing, cutting, adding, why not divorce yourself from the actual words? Why not take yourself to a quiet place where you can close your eyes, conjure up the world of your piece, and let yourself daydream other possibilities. Maybe your imagination will come up with scenes you haven’t yet thought to write, or layers of characters and their situation that haven’t quite risen to the top in your early draft or drafts. What questions haven’t you thought to ask? What possible turns haven’t you taken? What special aspects of the piece haven’t come to the page? Just as Parker can ask Special Girl for help, you can tap into the imagination to see what gifts are waiting there for you to open.

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More Writing Advice from Stella the Cat

I remember many years ago reading this passage from Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington:

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp … The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

I’ve loved cats all my life and have found them, in my adult years, to be instructive to my work as a writer. Like the writer in Muriel Spark’s novel, I’ve found a cat’s presence to be enough. Our current cat, as many of you probably know, is an orange tabby named Stella—Stella the Cat, if Cathy and I are being formal. At some time each morning, Stella makes her way into my writing room, jumps up on my desk, circles my computer monitor, and finally settles down, either between my keyboard and the monitor or else in the circle of light cast by my desk lamp, where she just is for as long as she desires. By so doing, she reminds me not to worry so much about a problem I’m trying to solve in whatever I happen to be writing. When we hit those challenges, we have a tendency to try to rush to a solution. Stella, with her calm presence, tells me to relax, to slow down, to just be in the moment. Usually, when she’s on my desk, something will catch her attention. Maybe the way sunlight moves across the wall, maybe a paperclip left on the desk, maybe her own tail, and she gives it her utmost attention. She’s telling me to look closely at the details of what I’m writing, to see what’s there to be put to use in moving things along.

Like all cats, she can’t resist her own curiosity. She flattens herself and burrows under bookcases or beds. Any open drawer is an invitation. She finds her way behind couch cushions. More than once, she’s ended up closed up in a closet because she sneaked in while the door was open and didn’t let us know she was there when we shut it. Such is the way of the writer. We make ourselves curious and we poke around trying to satisfy that curiosity. I love this encouraging quote from the American Tibetan Buddhist, Pema Chödrön: “Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.” What sage advice for writers. We have to have the courage to follow our curiosities and our obsessions, to go down this trail or that one, even if we eventually find ourselves at a dead end or maybe shut up in a closet. Have faith, Stella the Cat, would say. Eventually someone opens the door, and usually they feel so guilty for closing you in they give you plenty of head rubs and treats and you feel like the Queen you really are.

Victory awaits those of us who are brave and who persist and who are genuine. That’s the other thing Stella reminds me of each day. Watching the way she reacts to everything around her—with pleasure, with displeasure, with temper, with curiosity, with play, with contempt—I note how she’s incapable of hiding how she feels. “A cat has absolute emotional honesty,” Ernest Hemingway said. “Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” 

 Stella reminds me to be patient, thankful, curious, observant, fearless, genuine, and honest. I don’t think she’d mind that I’m sharing this advice with all of you.

 

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Stories Can Save Us

It can be easy in these days of doubtful facts, deliberate deceit, and dubious truth, to worry about the value of storytelling. Our politicians threaten narrative; our fractured world can do the same. Even when it comes to the writing of creative nonfiction—that genre that deals in facts—we may be tempted to question the value of a story well-told. The lyric impulse has invited forms that rely on fragmentation, association, contemplation, juxtaposition, wordplay. Practitioners explode narrative. Many find story to be suspect, oft times even tyrannical, because it forces a logic and a causality that our contemporary world often lacks. David Shields, in his manifesto, Reality Hunger, says, “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.” I once told one of my MFA students who loved working with the lyric essay that I was going to get her a tee-shirt with the word, “Narrative” on it. Without missing a beat, she said, “I’d take scissors and cut holes in it.”

To me, narrative has always been a method of thinking and a means of exploration. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I’ve always embraced story as a useful strategy for discovering what I think and feel and for learning what I’ve come to the page to say. In this age where so much threatens the efficacy of narrative, we have to hold faith in the art of storytelling. We have to see that the threat isn’t merely to the story itself, but to we, the tellers. We have to be aware of those who would wish to take from us our individual, particular stories, and to put into place a more controlled account that tries to eliminate our right to think and feel for ourselves.“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion says. Indeed, stories are our way of protecting the fact that individual lives matter.

I find this quote from the German philosopher, literary critic, and essayist, Walter Benjamin, applicable to our current political situation: “Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” Bearing witness as he did to Hitler’s rise in Nazi Germany, Benjamin knew that those who controlled the facts ultimately controlled the story, which presumably led him to say, “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic slice of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”

I hope the art of storytelling isn’t reaching its end because I believe in the necessity of narrative to a life well-lived and a world well-considered. I believe that story invites us to interrogate, to think, to feel, to shape, to acknowledge our common imperfections and our mutual desires and fears. Story reminds us of our shared humanity. “Stories have to be told,” novelist Sue Monk Kidd, says, “or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.” I dare say there are those today who would want us to forget the self and an individual’s right to assert a place in the world. We desperately need storytellers these days because, as film director, Jean-Luc Godard, says, “Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.” Our reality these days is more complex than perhaps ever before in our history, and the future of independent thought ultimately depends upon our retaining our right to shape the chaos of that reality. We have to keep telling our stories. That telling may be the only thing that can save us.  I choose to hold to the claim of Margaret Atwood: “You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”

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The Artifacts of a Life

I have a small iron hammer, threaded at its end, that belonged to my father. Someone, although I don’t know who, made this hammer and threaded it to screw into the end of one of the hard plastic holsters where my father’s hooks usually fit. This way, my father, who’d lost both of his hands in a farming accident, could, if he chose, have a hammer to use when working on our farm.  I have little memory of him actually using this hammer, but the hammer itself endures, and I often wonder what someone, finding it, will think, once I’m gone from this earth. The story behind it, its purpose, and everything it means to me will most likely be lost forever.

We memoirists traffic in the artifacts of the past. We preserve them in print. We use them to access the lives we once lived. Even if we don’t own them anymore, they exist in our memories. Memoir holds power over time’s unstoppable march. A good memoir protects the past, keeping it safe from all that threatens to encroach upon it.

So this hammer. The black iron of it. Its weight at the end of my father’s arm. It’s easy to see how the hammer represents the burden he carried after his accident, or the force of his determination to go on with the life of a farmer, a life he’d always loved, or his unyielding will, or the coldness that was often the underside of his strength, or the oddity—part man, part machine—people may have thought him to be. In short, this hammer represents my father in the years after his accident, and it represents the often difficult relationship I had with him, particularly in my teenage years when he often tried to impose his will on me with force. Its presence in my home now is a reminder of the life I lived with him on that farm, a life that in some ways seems so far away and in other ways so close at hand.

What artifact lingers from your own past life? Maybe it’s an object, like my father’s hammer, that you still own, or maybe it’s something you haven’t seen in years but is still vivid in your memory. What are the facts of it? What do you associate with it? What memories do you have?

When writing memoir, we can use objects to create scenes from our pasts. People in memoirs have to have something to do, and that’s where objects come into play. Maybe my mother was sitting at her Singer sewing machine rocking the treadle with her foot, guiding the material over the feed dogs, being careful not to let the needle catch her fingers, when she saw a car coming down our lane—or maybe she heard our telephone ring and went to answer it—and the news came about my father’s accident, and our farmhouse, and our lives changed forever. You get the idea. Find the objects—the artifacts of a life—and put them to use in a scene.

We can also use objects as metaphors. In many ways, my life with my father seemed like an encounter with a hammer. Likewise, he must have met my rebellious teen years the only way he knew how—with force. He must have seen me as someone he had to hammer into place, someone he had to attach to a right-thinking, upright way of life. Objects are always more than their physical appearance. A good memoirist can always fashion an object into a representation of the lived life it happened to be a part of. When you think of a certain object, what do you think or feel about the people who used it? In my case, I think of the burden my father carried with him as a result of his accident, but I also think of the difficulty of love—the desire for it, the fear of it, the hard ways we often make for ourselves.

The artifacts of past lives are there for the using when it comes to writing memoir. All we have to do is recall them.

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This Is Who We’ve Always Been: Writing Memoir

I’m teaching a creative nonfiction workshop this semester for people who, for the most part, have never worked in the genre. I remember my own first steps into memoir. I had my first tenure-track teaching position, and I had to teach a graduate level cnf workshop. At that point, I’d published my first book of short stories, and I thought that was my genre. But if I were going to teach graduate students how to write creative nonfiction, I figured I’d better try writing some of my own. I wrote an essay called “From Our House.” It was the first time I’d directly addressed the farming accident that cost my father both of his hands and the difficult relationship we had as a result of his anger and my stubborn nature. Most of the stories in my first collection were stories about sons in fraught relationships with their fathers. Writing that essay was the first time I claimed and announced my own experience, and it was liberating. The figurative floodgates opened, and I wrote four more essays about my father. At that point, I saw a narrative arc for a book, and I surrendered. I became a memoirist. Since then I’ve gone on to publish countless essays and three memoirs with a fourth coming out in 2021. From the first time I used the upright pronoun, “I,” in an essay, I was hooked. I fell in love with this genre that allows me to investigate everything about my life that won’t leave me alone, those moments that still haunt me and wake me up in the night, wondering why.

I write nonfiction because there’s so much I don’t know. What was it like that day in 1956 when my father got his hands caught between the rollers of his corn picker’s shucking box? Why did he insist my mother take a teaching job in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago, even though it meant we’d have to leave our farm in southeastern Illinois and move five hours north? Why, when we moved back downstate and bought a house in the small town of Sumner, did he rent a post office box instead of having free home delivery? In writing to discover, I sometimes come to other questions I didn’t know I had. Likewise, I sometimes come to things I didn’t know about myself. To write memoir, one has to have a curious mind and an inclination toward empathy. One also has to have an appreciation of scenic depiction, recreating pivotal moments in a life through action and detail and dialogue so readers will feel as if they’re participating in them. Above all, memoirists have to have the ability to interrogate experience, to interpret it, to speculate on answers to the questions they pose, to explore, uncover, and discover. All writing is a means of thinking on the page. Memoir, particularly, leads the writer to the making of meaning.

I’m reading Tara Westover’s Educated now. At one point, she writes, “Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.” That sharp insight speaks powerfully to why I write creative nonfiction and why I love teaching others how to write it. Memoir, particularly, has this power. It reacquaints us with the people we’ve always been, the people someone else perhaps tried to keep ourselves from knowing, or we ourselves tried to erase. Memoir is power. It gives us control over experience. It invites us to give it an artful shape, and by so doing, to claim it, to announce it, to feel it, only now to feel it from the insight that time gives us, to think about it, and to use it to lead us to what has always been true, if hidden for a time, about ourselves.

 

 

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Struggle and Empathy

We’ve reached the final week of January, which always feels significant to me. A native Midwesterner, I’ve always thought of winter as an endurance test, and each signpost along the way—the end of January, Valentine’s Day, the NCAA basketball tournament, etc.—a mark that brings us closer to spring. Here in the Midwest, we earn our springs. We go through the cold and snow and ice, and because we endure, we deserve the warm days that finally are ours. I admit our winter this year has been fairly mild, but still, even the gray and damp attacks the spirit and we find ourselves longing for sun and flowers and trees and shrubs in bloom and long hours of light.

Our fictional characters want to live and prosper in the grand lives we all deserve. The characters in our nonfiction are no different. They, too, want to live lives of splendor. The problem, of course, is there are always struggles along the way. In nonfiction, we’re sometimes so wounded by the insensitive acts of others we have trouble finding our common humanity. We have difficulty imagining the pain of those who have hurt us. It’s understandable, of course, but I’m convinced the effort to empathize is worth it, not only for the sake of the writing, but also for our own sakes. If you’re writing a memoir, for instance, what might you do to humanize someone who hurt you? Could you, perhaps, recall a moment of vulnerability for that person? Maybe it’s a moment when that person didn’t realize you were watching them. Maybe you found some sort of document—a letter, a shopping list, a doodle—anything that gives you a glimpse into what that person may have been carrying that contributed to their poor behavior. We have to make the attempt to better understand people’s actions, so we can come to an awareness that those who hurt us aren’t so different from us. Maybe someone tells you a story about a relative, for instance, that surprises you with sympathy for that father, mother, sister, brother, etc. Or maybe you challenge yourself to imagine your relative as a small child. Put that person into an imagined scene in hopes of seeing something you ordinary wouldn’t.

We all have our struggles, but we all have the capacity for love, forgiveness, and deeper understanding.

Which brings me to characters in fiction and the need to let our main characters create their own trouble. In nonfiction, we have to reckon with events that happen, events that are sometimes random and without logic. In fiction, though, we’re money ahead if we let our characters’ actions cause their problems. Characters should create their own fates. Once we have a character into some sort of troubling situation of his or her own making, we shouldn’t hesitate to complicate the trouble even further, thereby increasing the intensity of the struggle. Don’t let the characters off the hook easily. Complicate the trouble, so the character has to make choices. Each of those choices should put increased pressure on the character until the highest moment of intensity leads to resolution.

Here’s a writing activity for fiction writers. A character is supposed to deliver a message to someone but decides not to. What sort of trouble does that decision create? What does the character do to try to get out of trouble?

And for nonfiction writers? Remember a time when you were supposed to do something but didn’t. What sort of trouble did your decision create for you? How do you feel about your decision as you look back on it from your present perspective? Does looking back give you any insight into yourself or others?

“Never underestimate the pain of a person,” the actor, Will Smith, says, “because in all honesty, everyone is struggling. Some people are better at hiding it than others.” Amen. Struggle is there to test people, both in fiction and in real life. In fiction, characters create their own trouble. In nonfiction trouble often happens to us. In both cases, the act of empathy is the greatest gift we can give.

 

 

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Miami of Ohio Low-Residency MFA Program

I spent last week teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Miami of Ohio in Oxford, Ohio, making trips back to Columbus two days so I could teach my classes at Ohio State. Needless to say, if anyone needs to know the route from Columbus to Oxford, I’m your guy. During that week, I talked the talk with undergraduates at Ohio State, writers in our residential MFA program, graduate students and professionals from other departments on campus, and, at Miami, writers who are pursuing the MFA degree in a less traditional way. The common factor among all these populations? A desire to tell the story or to write the poem or essay, and an appreciation of time spent with those of like mind. We find our community of writers however we can, and for the folks in low-residency programs that means they find that community during two residencies on campus, one in summer and one in winter, and in the mentorship provided by faculty members in the months between the two, and in the bonds formed with other students in the program.

The reasons that people choose a low-residency program are myriad, but most of them have to do with geography or convenience. For some, it’s impossible to pick up stakes and to move somewhere to attend a residential program. People with families, for instance, often don’t have the same sort of flexibility of location that others have. It’s one thing to be able to move across the country when you’re twenty-seven, say, and single, and it’s quite another when you’re maybe forty-five with children and spouses to consider. There are also economic factors involved. Even though the low-residency programs are costly—I want to be honest about that—you’re able to keep your day-job which usually pays much better than a graduate teaching assistantship would in a residential program.

There are a number of excellent low-residency programs, and many books have found their way into print because of them. Still, again being completely honest, the same caveat we offer students in residential programs applies: An MFA doesn’t guarantee publishing success. Knowing that, why do people go to the expense and effort of seeking this degree? For most, I imagine the answer is the same as it was for me thirty-eight years ago when I entered the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. I had a dream of being a writer and a teacher of writing. I followed my heart, and I ended up being one of the lucky ones who had that dream come true. Whether someone is in a residential program, a low-residency one, or simply apprenticing oneself to a writing career on one’s own, a common truth holds true. We write to shape experience into something artful. We move words about on the page to express ourselves and to offer some sort of order to a world that can often be chaotic.

If you’re someone who’s looking for a community of writers that will deepen your understanding of craft and hasten your development, but if circumstances make it difficult for you to attend a residential MFA program, then a low-residency situation may be ideal. I know I’ve returned from Oxford stimulated by the conversations in the writing workshops, the craft talks made by faculty and invited visitors alike, and the readings I attended.

At Miami of Ohio, you can study the craft of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in workshops led by folks like New York Times best-selling author, Jacquelyn Mitchard; Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author, Hugh Sheehy; and poets, Hoa Nguyen, a finalist for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and Laura Van Prooyen, winner of the McGovern Prize. If anyone is interested in learning more, here’s a link:

https://www.miamioh.edu/cas/academics/departments/english/academics/graduate-studies/creative-writing/low-res-mfa/index.html

As for me, in spite of the weary driving I had to do, I had a fabulous week with my colleagues and students in the Miami of Ohio low-residency MFA program, and I returned energized and eager to get back to my own writing, which is what we hope from our time with other writers—that infectious feeling of being engaged in a common enterprise of doing the good work made possible by our talents, our perseverance, and the hours spent in the company of those who understand what it is to follow a dream and who wish us well.

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Driving at Night in the Fog: Strategies for Beginning a Novel

 

E.L. Doctorow said this in a Paris Review Writers at Work interview: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I’m sure, like me, you’ve felt that fog as you contemplate starting a new project. Stephen King said, “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

For novelists, the journey through that fog can seem endless and, quite frankly, intimidating. Here, then, are five ways to open a novel along with what each requires to be successful.

 

The Water with Lemon Opening: This is an opening that relies on a slice of life grounded in commonplace details with just a spark of urgency to make things interesting. Often that urgency comes from the main character and the complicated motivations they have for putting themselves into action as the book opens. I’ve written before about Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive, Again, which opens with Jack Kennison driving to Portland, Maine, to buy a bottle of whiskey because he doesn’t want to risk running into Olive Kitteridge in their hometown of Crosby. A simple opening with a character driven by the desire to avoid someone. That little spark of tension—the zing of the lemon in the water, if you will—is enough to keep us reading. For this strategy to succeed, the writer has to first catalog the important details and then be able to create round characters who can find the significance in the ordinary.

 

There’s No Place Like Home:  This is an opening that trusts in Eudora Welty’s belief that all fiction relies on the authoritative depiction of setting. The novelist must have an intimate knowledge of that setting, not only the facts of it, but also how those facts create a certain atmosphere and make possible certain characters and actions.

 

The Hello-Goodbye Opening:  Sometimes a novel opens with an arrival or a departure. Each must be significant enough to matter to the main character, to set them on a course that challenges and ultimately changes them. The arrival or the departure becomes the engine that propels the narrative. To succeed with this strategy, the novelist must understand the cause and effect that the structure requires.

 

The Oh, Shit! Opening: Starting in the midst of a huge problem to be solved is one way to draw the reader into the world of the novel. The trick here is to open with an urgent situation while not making the writing melodramatic. Paying close attention to the particular details always helps the novelist to avoid the maudlin or the sensational. Antonya Nelson’s novel, Bound, for example, opens with the focus on a woman trapped in her car after an accident.

 

The Just a Moment Opening: This is the sort of opening common to prologues. A novel opens by creating suspense. It lets the reader know up front that something momentous has happened. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History opens like this: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” To utilize this strategy you first have to have an event of notable significance. Then you have to trust that you can maintain your reader’s curiosity through the plot that will eventually take them back to where the book begins.

 

These are only a few ways to open a novel. I encourage you to read widely so you can identify others. No matter how you decide to begin, the most important thing is that you use a strategy that arouses the curiosity of both you and the reader. The prospect of filling the blank pages can be a frightening one, but we can demystify it to the point that we feel comfortable following the trail as it goes, or to put it another way, letting the novel write itself.

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New Year, New Writing: Tips for Moving Ahead

Here we are at the start of another year, and though the winter weather has yet to be harsh here in central Ohio, we can safely assume that it will eventually slap us with cold and snow. We know this because we’ve lived through it before and will surely do so again.

Each flip of the calendar—each sunrise, even—gives us a chance to rededicate ourselves to our writing lives. We know those lives are made up of peaks and valleys. We have days when we feel the writing is going well, and we have days when the words just won’t come. We have our successes, but we also have our disappointments. We have to learn to chart an even course through both, knowing that one success doesn’t  necessarily predict another just as disappointment will never be permanent. The highs and the lows are a given. We can’t control when they’ll come. What we can do, though, is keep moving ahead. A couple of years ago, I posted some tips to keep us writing during those times we’re tempted to quit. Now seems like a good time to post those tips again, so here’s what we can do to keep ourselves moving ahead.

 

Accept the fact that the world does indeed doubt the value of the work we do in our writing rooms. It’s a fact. We have to live with it. We can use that fact to our advantage if we’ll also acknowledge the fact that there’s something noble in our knowing the value when others don’t.

Embrace our family of writers wherever we find them—in writing workshops, at summer conferences, in the books we read. These are the people who know what it takes to do what we do. Not a one of them has ever avoided the same periods of disappointment and dejection that we feel.

Give as much to the group as we hope to receive. We should be good literary citizens, knowing that what we offer will come back to us. Offer encouragement to others. Offer clear, constructive criticism when someone asks for it. We should be present and active in our communities of writers so we’ll never feel alone.

Relax with the knowledge that we’ll fail more often than we’ll succeed. Once we accept the fact that we’ll consistently fall short, we’ll be more able to let disappointment roll off our backs, and we’ll be quicker to move on to the next attempt with our minds and hearts open to the spontaneous leaps of the imagination that creativity requires.

Be steadfast. We need to be consistent with our work habits. We need to know we have a schedule that we can stick to. Maybe we won’t write every day. Maybe we’ll only have one day a week that will be our writing time and we’ll come to cherish that time. Whatever time we can dedicate to the work will reward us. Consistency becomes generative.

 

My final wish for all of us as we move into 2020 is that we’ll learn to take more joy from what we do in our writing rooms. This is the life we’ve chosen. In spite of the ups and downs, my wish is that we’ll all be able to be more joyful even when the results aren’t what we wish them to be. Be joyful in the work itself, the work that sustains us even through the most brutal winters.

 

 

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On the New Year

Something about the current state of things in our country invites me to share this post from a few years ago, updated a tad to account for the passing of time.

When I was a boy, it was my family’s New Year’s Eve tradition to gather for an oyster soup supper, followed by a rousing round of Rook, a trick-taking card game, that pitted one set of partners against another. We played a lot of Rook in those days. My father and my uncles were competitive, and the games were full of big talk and big egos. One uncle in particular absolutely hated to lose, and he could occasionally be goaded into a fit of temper.

I remember the first time it happened. His son stepped into the game mid-way through, replacing my father as my partner, and it was clear that my cousin was intent on getting my uncle’s goat. At first, it was all great fun. I paid very close attention to the cards I should play, not wanting to make a mistake, and my cousin was happy when we took in trick after trick. He kept ribbing my uncle until a breaking point came. I’ve forgotten exactly what happened, but it may have been that my uncle didn’t make his bid and went set. I just remember that during the next hand, my cousin said something my uncle didn’t like, and he threw down his cards, pushed himself away from the table, and stormed off.

You have to understand that my uncle was a good man who always treated me with kindness. He liked calling me Leander for some reason, which I didn’t understand, but I knew it was a term of endearment, and I knew it gave him pleasure to use it. I looked forward to his visits and to the times that we visited his house where I learned to pitch horseshoes, where I got to play with the family cocker spaniel, where my uncle was always in good spirits.

I don’t know what it was that caused my cousin to try to get a rise out of my uncle that night, but given my own experience with my father, I can imagine the sort of rivalry that rises up between most fathers and sons. At a certain point, you want to be your own man, and sometimes the way you do that is by making it plain that you’ve somehow moved on beyond the need of a father’s supervision and advice.

Then the time comes, as it did for me, when you’re in the last days of your life with your father, and sometimes you don’t even know it. The last time I saw my father alive it was summer, the hot days of the end of July. He came to bring potatoes from his garden. As I walked him to his car, I told him not to work too hard, which embarrassed him. I didn’t mean to, but I know now that when I said what I did, I called attention to the fact that he was sixty-nine years old—a heart attack survivor—and he was at an age when his son felt he had every right to worry about him. I remember once back in the winter, when he and I repaired a bed frame at my parents’ house. We finished the job, both of us sitting on the floor. I got to my feet, and then I reached out and took him by his arm.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“I’m helping you up.”

“I don’t need your help.”

He was miffed that I’d offered. He could stand on his own two feet, thank you very much, but I know, now that I’m sixty-four, that getting up from the floor takes a bit more effort as each year goes by. Still, my father wasn’t ready to admit that he might need a bit of help from his son.

That hot July day, I said to him, “Don’t work too hard.”

I heard the embarrassment in his voice when he replied, “I won’t.”

Then he got in his car and drove away, and a few days later he was dead. His heart stopped  while he was mowing his yard. And then there were funeral arrangements to be made, my mother to see to, and suddenly my life felt very different to me because for the first time ever I was without my father.

There are still times when I wish I could ask him for advice, just as there are times when I’d like to see those aunts and uncles and cousins who gathered on those New Year’s Eves. I felt safe and cared for in their company. They were the ones who knew things I didn’t. Now I’m the one who’s supposed to know things, and sometimes I’m not sure I do, but there’s no one to ask, so I  go ahead and do the best I can, and what’s clear to me at this age is that it surely must have been the same for my father and my uncle and my cousin, and for all the adults around me. They were all caught in a game of Rook, having to make a bid, leading cards, hoping for the best.

The night when my uncle exploded everything went quiet. We were all little children, not knowing what to say, what to do, because my uncle, usually a genial man, had been goaded into losing his temper. I remember that slowly things came back to normal. Someone said something, and someone said something else, and maybe we had cake and ice cream and the conversation turned toward anything but what had happened, and we went on like that because that’s what you do when you’re a family.

I remember all this as my way of wishing you and yours a very happy 2020. May your bids be sure. May your cards be true. May you win your hands. But when you don’t and you let yourself be less than you should be, may there be someone there to remind you of everything you offer to all the imperfect people whom you love and who love you in return. May you have peace and joy in your hearts as we go on through the days to come.

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