Lee Martin's Blog, page 71

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 6

We've been talking quite a bit about how a story gets resonance from the proper pairing of characters and the pressure of plot that causes something surprising and yet inevitable to rise at the end. As we all know, it's one thing to say this is what has to happen in order for a story to be memorable, and it's another thing to offer advice on how a writer makes this happen. With that in mind, we turned yesterday to Richard Bausch's story, "The Fireman's Wife." In this post, I'm going to try to use this story as a way of illustrating the techniques by which a short story writer can lead us to the inevitable in a way that surprises us. Only in retrospect do we take note of what Bausch had to do in order to make his ending resonant and memorable, to make us believe we were reading one story when really we were reading another.

The opening of  "The Fireman's Wife" immediately poses the question that drives the story: Will Jane leave her marriage to Martin? I like having a question to hang on to as we move through a story, something to be resolved by the end, rather than feeling as if we're moving through a series of scenes that seem to have been randomly selected. Everything from the opening of the story needs to be leaning toward what will eventually be the end. Rust Hills in his fine book, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular says that the end of a good story is always present in the beginning, and I think he's absolutely right. The key for the writer is to make that ending present from the git-go without the reader being overly aware of it, to let it rise covertly through the progression of the narrative.

The opening scene of "The Fireman's Wife" dramatizes an evening, growing long in the tooth, on which a group of friends have gathered. The men in the group aren't willing to let the night end. They may play cards. They may play the time-consuming game of Risk. Jane, though, has had enough of it all–enough of the evening, enough of the group, enough of her husband Martin: "She hasn't been married even two years and she feels crowded; she's depressed and tired every day. She never has enough time to herself. And yet when she's alone, she feels weak and afraid." Here's a woman leaning toward the door if she can only work up the courage to make the move. Toward the end of the opening scene, her friend Milly tells her that even she used to wonder whether she'd made a mistake in marrying her husband Teddy. Then she says, "But, you know, all I had to do was wait. Just you know, wait for love to come around and surprise me again." Although we don't know it at the time, that line contains the story's end. The question becomes one of how Bausch keeps the end in doubt while moving toward it all along.

As Jane's dissatisfaction with her marriage deepens, another story takes shape, floating just below the primary narrative and for the most part out of sight. From time to time, we glimpse it, and we may not even be sure of what we're seeing. At one point, Jane surprises herself by telling a co-worker that she thinks she'd like to have a baby. As one of my students smartly pointed out yesterday, Jane seems to be trying on various lives for herself by latching onto the lives of those around her (her friend Milly is pregnant). At another point, Jane views herself through the lens of her co-worker's parents and the furnishings of their house: "Everything seems to stand for the kind of life she wants for herself: an attentive, loving husband, children; and a quiet house with a clock that chimes. She knows this is all very dreamy and childish, and yet she looks at Eveline's parents, those people with their almost thirty years' love, and her heart aches." Passages such as these create that shadow narrative, the one that's rising. Add to these moments, the one in which Jane, hearing the fire sirens, remembers what it was like when she and Martin were first married and she'd hear the sirens and worry about what might happen to him while out on a call. Jane has a longing for love and happiness, even a memory of tenderness, at the same time that she has a strong desire to leave the marriage.

Now notice how Bausch, just as this more tender story is working its way through the primary narrative of a marriage dissolving, pushes it back down a tad. The result is to thwart any certainty that we may think we have of where the story is headed. Jane thinks about all the Sundays she's spent in her in-laws' home where her father-in-law's conversation is banal: "Jane realizes that she can't stand another Sunday afternoon listening to him talk. It comes to her like a chilly premonition, and quite suddenly, with a kind of tidal shifting inside her, she feels the full weight of her unhappiness." This move brings the primary narrative into sharp focus again and serves the purpose of inviting us to forget the more tender story of which we've had glimpses. It's at this point that Jane actually begins packing her bags in preparation for leaving Martin.

But before she can leave, Martin's fellow firefighters bring him home, his hands badly burned while fighting a fire. He sees the packed bags, and he knows what they mean even though Jane claims she just had too much to drink and was only going through what she has to wear. The next morning, while Martin sleeps, she goes outside and walks to the end of the driveway. There, she takes in the neighborhood, the flatness of the Illinois plains, the clear day. She remembers what it felt like when they first moved into the neighborhood, and the particulars make clear it was a calm, hopeful feeling. She goes into the garage and sees Martin's model airplane engines. She remembers all  the things that she liked best about him when they first met and fell in love. That tender story is rising again, and, again, Bausch pushed it back down: "She puts the engine down, thinking how people change. She knows she's going to leave him, but just for this moment, standing among these things she feels almost peaceful about it. She has, after all, no need to hurry. And as she steps out onto the lawn, she realizes that she can take her time to think clearly about when and where; she can even change her mind. But she doesn't think she will." The question posed in the opening of the story of whether Jane will leave her marriage seems to be answered, but wait, we have that shadow story, the more tender one, still in place. All it takes is the right arrangement of circumstances to make it rise above the primary story of a marriage ending.

An accident, a husband lying down to rest, a wife convinced that one day she'll leave him. They have a brief conversation. "Jane?" he says, and that one question is loaded with meaning. The subtext is clear. Will you forgive my shortcomings? Will you stay? Will you let us have another chance? She says, "Try to rest some  more. You need to rest now." She can't give him the answer he wants, so she gives him no answer at all. She waits until he's asleep and then she leaves the bedroom, closing the door. It's here, in the final paragraph, that the shadow story overcomes, at least temporarily, the primary narrative: "At last he's asleep. When she's certain of this, she lifts herself from the bed and carefully, quietly withdraws. As she closes the door, something in the flow of her own mind appalls her, and she stops, stands in the dim hallway, frozen in a kind of wonder: she had been thinking in an abstract way, almost idly, as though it had nothing to do with her, about how people will go to such lengths leaving a room–wishing not to disturb, not to awaken, a loved one."

The simple act of closing a door, given all that has come before it, becomes the means by which the inevitable surprise breaks through the story that has attempted to dominate it. Of course, this implied reawakening of affection may only be temporary, but it occupies the fiinal position of the story, and the narrative resonates with its arrival. It's an arrival that's inevitable, and I've tried to highlight the moves that Bausch executes to subtly make us aware on a subconscious level that this ending is coming. He give us just a few glimpses of it and then gives us enough reason to forget it. It's a sleight of hand, a game of peekaboo, a promise and a subversion, a covert operation that becomes clear to us only after we've reached the end and lived within the reverberation of that surprise that's been waiting for us all along, a surprise that gives us more truth, hits upon more layers of experience and emotional response that coexist in that final tableau.

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 5

Here we are at the halfway point of our ten-week workshop. I hope things are going well and that the posts are giving you some important things to consider as you develop your craft. I know it's been a good thing for me to think more deeply about the techniques, strategies, and issues that have come to our workshop table, either the physical table in Denney Hall, Room 368 at The Ohio State University, or the virtual table around which we're all gathered, The Writers' Table.

Yesterday, we considered some things about the short story from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners. In fact, why don't we start with what she has to say about each of those. "The peculiar problem of the short story writer," O'Connor says, "is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible." A story is finished, she suggests, when there's nothing more about the mystery of the main character's personality that can be shown or dramatized through particulars. Such is the case for the character of Hulga in O'Connor's story, "Good Country People." Hulga, as you may all recall, is the daughter of Mrs. Hopewell. Hulga, with a Ph.D. in philosophy. Hulga, the atheist. Hulga with the wooden leg that attaches at the knee. Hulga who dreams of seducing a Bible salesman, who in turn steals her wooden leg, and leaves her, as O'Connor herself says, to confront "her deeper affliction for the first time," which I take to mean her lack of belief, her lack of connection with those around her. Allen Tate called this story "the most powerful story of maimed souls by a contemporary writer." It's that maimed soul that Hulga has to confront at the end of the story.

In reference to manners, O'Connor says they come from "the texture of existence that surrounds you." In other words, the world built from particulars that come from a specific culture, a specific way of living, a character's connection or resistance to the landscape and the culture around her, the idiom that characterizes a society. O'Connor points out that "when you ignore an idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful character." She goes on to say, "You can't cut characters off from their society and say much about them as individuals. You can't say anything meaningful about the mystery of a personality unless you put that personality in a believable and significant social context." This is a reminder to us to build our fiction worlds from the particulars of our real worlds, the ones we know most intimately, to build them from details and language that give expression to the society and the way our characters operate within it.

"Good Country People" is an amazing story for the depth of meaning that it brings forth from the particulars of its very vivid and specific world. It's also amazing for what O'Connor does with point of view and structure. Obviously, the story is Hulga's, and even though we occupy her point of view during most of the dramatic present of the narrative (she meets the Bible salesman, goes to a barn with him, climbs up into the haymow, takes off her wooden leg, and has it stolen), it's interesting to note that we spend a good deal of the story away from her pov. In fact, we're a few pages into the story before Hulga appears. We open with her mother and Mrs. Freeman, and we learn so much about the culture of this world and about Mrs. Hopewell's belief in "good country people," of whom she believes Mrs. Freeman to be one. We also learn how Mrs. Hopewell feels about Hulga, her Ph. D., her atheism, her wooden leg. So the story begins away from the pov of the character most affected by its events, which seems to fly in the face of the logical advice to tell the story from the consciousness of the character with the most at stake. Even at the end of the story, we're away from Hulga's pov. We don't have a single thought from her after her leg is stolen, though we do see from her perspective, the Bible salesman leaving the barn and setting out for the road. Then we switch to Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who are in the pasture pulling wild onions. They see the salesman come from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. Mrs.  Hopewell says that he was such a simple boy and then adds, "but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple."

Of course, he's not simple at all. He's actually quite calculating and evil beneath his facade of being good country people. Nothing about the sequence of events in the dramatic present is simplel, and while we linger with Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman in that meadow, we can't forget that Hulga is in that haymow, her leg gone, her maimed soul hers to deal with, and somehow because she's off stage, what she feels is felt more profoundly by the reader.

We also considered the opening chapter from a novel-in-progress by one of the students yesterday, a chapter that involved a young man leaving his wife in a small village in Japan to travel to Tokyo to interview for a better job, an interview that doesn't go well. He returns to the village and his wife, and he faces the fact that their marriage is loveless and that she will soon leave him under the guise of having to care for her sick father. It's clear, though, that she may not return. The draft of this chapter opens after the unsuccessful interview, and folks in the workshop pointed out that this keeps us from seeing the wife and husband in action before he leaves the village for his trip to Tokyo. I made the point that the first chapter of a  novel usually sets into motion the central drama of the book, in this case the threat to the marriage. Opening, then, with the husband getting ready to leave for Tokyo, might provide a sharper focus, not only to the chapter, but to the novel as a whole. It would establish very clearly and immediately, what the novelist Thomas Keneally calls "the cookie cutter." I heard him say once that he couldn't begin a  novel until he knew what that cookie cutter was. In other words, the thing to which everything in the novel would stick. Take his novel "Schindler's List," about Oskar Schindler's efforts to save more than one thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust. That list, those efforts. There's your cookie cutter. Emma Bovary's adulterous affair; Holden Caulfield having to leave his prep school and return home; Jay Gatsby's efforts to recover his lost love, Daisy; Huck Finn's trip down the river. All of these are cookie cutters.

If you're working on a novel, what stands at its heart? What's the plot element to which everything will stick? How have you announced this in the opening of your book through particulars? How many story threads have you set in motion? Does the end of your first chapter, or the first part of the book, lean forward into the future? Does your reader have an anticipation of things to come? Just for the heck of it, grab a novel at random off your shelf and read the first sentence. Here's one from a novel I'm reading now, Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River:  "The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane's heart." Already, the novel is announcing its cookie cutter, the river upon which the drama of Margo's life will take place. The central dramatic event of Chapter One, is Margo's molestation by her uncle, an event that sets into motion the dramatic heart of the novel. A good novel, though it may move willy-nilly in space and time, has a clearly defined heart, or focus, if you will, or cookie cutter. Even if the novel isn't particularly plot driven, as is the case in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, there's still a central dramatic thread, the giving of a dinner party, and the book opens with Clarissa Dalloway setting forth to make preparations for it.

Ask yourself what you're setting in motion with the first sentence of your novel. Ask yourself how the opening is announcing the cookie cutter while pushing ahead toward its dramatization, a dramatization that will make use of mystery and manners, and will continue until there's nothing left to show.

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 4

We took a dip into Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners yesterday, reading the section called "The Nature and Aim of Fiction." She spends some time reminding us that fiction is concrete:  "The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions." The important thing for us to note here is that fiction creates a convincing world through its particulars. Slight the reader on sensory details, and it's tough for the world of the story or the novel to seem real. If the world doesn't convince, then it's likely that the characters and their actions and thoughts won't either. So much of the work of fiction is done on the seemingly small scale of what things look like, smell like, sound like, taste like, feel like. The blending of two or three sensory details (isn't it funny how often three is the magic number in fiction?) in a scene immediately creates a vivid world that the reader will have a hard time denying. Instead that reader will be immersed in that very specific world.

O'Connor quotes a brief passage from Flaubert's Madame Bovary as an example. Charles Bovary is watching Emma at the piano: "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand." Notice the level of concreteness in this passage: the way Emma plays the piano, the buzzing of the strings traveling to the other end of the village through an open window and to the ears of the bailiff's clerk, who is bareheaded and wearing list slippers. He stops to listen, a sheet of paper in his hands. As O'Connor points out, Flaubert had to create a believable village in which to put Emma. Before she could exist, the village had to exist. For her actions to be convincing, they had to happen in a vivid and specific place. O'Connor says, "It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks." Get the particulars right and they will contain the "grand ideas" and "the bristling emotions."

O'Connor also makes us aware that fiction is presented rather than reported. A piece of fiction is "a self-contained dramatic unit" that carries its meaning inside it. She says, ". . .you can't make an inadequate dramatic action complete by putting a statement of meaning on the end of it or in the middle of it or at the beginning of it. . . .when you write fiction you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action." This is what we mean when we say that a good writer creates his or her characters from the inside. In other words, through the concrete particulars and the way a character responds to them, a writer inhabits that character, taking him or her through a series of meaningful events.

I was very interested yesterday in thinking about how a writer allows the meaning to lift up from the particulars of a piece of fiction without comment on the writer's part. I used what O'Connor has to say about the vision of the writer to invite us to investigate how the proper arrangement of characters and events can convey the significance and the resonance of a piece of fiction. O'Connor talks about anagogical vision which allows us "to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation." I'd like to add the word character to that situation, inviting us to think back to where we began our conversation from our first workshop meeting in which we talked about how interesting characters are made up of contradictions, in a sense holding different levels of reality simultaneously. O'Connor allows us to think about this as a matter of the writer's vision. In other words, how capable are we, as writers, to see what exists simultaneously within a character, a situation, a detail, an image? O'Connor talks about the importance of having a way of reading the world and its people that includes the most possibilities, and she says, "I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature. It seems to be a paradox that the larger and more complex the personal view, the easier it is to compress it into fiction."

So how do we begin to develop our anagogical vision? I've always thought that it begins by putting it into practice in our personal lives, but I'll leave you to think about how that works or doesn't for you. I know that as a writer, we live among our characters in these convincing worlds that we create. We get inside a character's skin, and we experience the world the way he or she experiences it. Does the way a character chooses to see herself and the world around her have a good deal to do with the vision that the writer has of the world around him or her? My instinct tells me to say, yes. As I said yesterday in the workshop, we can take the basic elements of any piece of fiction (yesterday, one of the MFA stories under discussion included the following: (1) a man in his post-divorce life (2) an ex-wife who, along with the man, was a hoarder (3) the man enjoying running through a wooded park (4) the man seeing what may be a homeless family living in a tent in those woods (4) a fallen tree, possibly cut down across the running trail (5) the fall the man takes when he doesn't see the fallen tree (6) the backpack he steals from the family's tent, thinking it perhaps contains the hatchet that cut down the tree , but it actually contains a sack of change that the family obviously needs in order to make modest purchases of food, etc. (7) the confrontation scene with a member of the family (8) the revisionary version of the story that the man tells to his ex-wife, a story in which he casts himself as the hero and not the crook), give them to five different writers , and I bet we'll get five unique stories that use those events. In other words, those events will contain different meanings, each dependent on the vision of the individual writer. But to answer my question about how we develop our anagogical vision when we're writing, let me suggest that we challenge ourselves to think in terms of opposites.

Take, for example, the chain of events from the story that I describe above. The main character comes out of that confrontation scene a slightly different man than he was when he entered it. When he goes to his ex-wife's house to tell her the story, he's a man who wants to deny that he stole a backpack that held the money the family had and then threw into the deep woods where they'll have a hard time finding it. He wants to pretend he had every right to do that because the family has no business squatting in the woods of the park. He wants above all to forget that the family exists. So he enters this final scene passing judgment. Using this as a test case for how thinking in terms of opposites can pay off for a writer, I'd say we're at a make or break point for this story. So much depends on what lifts up from this final scene. It seems to me that the resonance will come from the writer's ability to hold opposing ideas in his head simultaneously. If we ask ourselves what the opposite of judgment is, I suppose we'd say compassion or forgiveness. The arrangement of the story has brought the writer to this point where, if he so chooses, the door can stand wide open, making room for what's on either side of it: judgment, forgiveness. Keep in mind the detail about the man and his wife being hoarders and the way their marriage came to ruin. Isn't this the common ground that the man has with the family in the woods who have obviously come to come degree of ruin themselves? When he stands outside his ex-wife's home, which used to be his home, too, and sees the physical clutter and ruin of that house, isn't he ready to enlarge his vision of the world, to dismantle the facade of judgment behind which he's been operating, behind which waits the rising compassion for imperfect lives? Can't that judgment and that forgiveness co-exist in a moment that contains the meaning of the story? Please note that the final move of the story can't execute a 180-degree turn for the character, shifting from pure judgment to pure compassion. That's too simple and not convincing at all because it doesn't hold enough layers of truth. There's the benefit of thinking in opposites, getting at that rich layer of meaning. Remember what O'Connor says, ". . .the larger and more complex the personal view, the easier it is to compress it into fiction."

So create a convincing world through sensory details, move your characters through a meaningful sequence of events within that world, and practice enlarging your personal vision so you can think it terms of opposites. Be on the lookout for that aspect of the story that you may not have known was rising but was actually there from the very beginning. All you have to do is adjust your vision to look for it.

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 3

We've been talking quite a bit in the fiction workshop about the necessity of a story arriving at a surprising and yet inevitable end. We've talked about how to build multidimensional characters by paying attention to their contradictory impulses, and how to defamiliarize a character or a situation by allowing a misfit detail to arise. All of this asks us to keep an eye on the mysterious. By this I mean, being on the lookout for the essence of a character or a situation that is in some way unsayable, and, therefore, in need of the story to dramatize its energy.

To that end, we stayed with Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House yesterday and looked at a chapter called "Counterpointed Characterization." In this chapter, Baxter takes to task the conflict-model for the structure of a short story. That is to say, the protagonist pitted against an antagonist; one person wants something, another person wants something else. Voila. Conflict. Baxter argues that stories often don't work that way. He says that conflict can actually be very slight in a short story, and that often counterpointed characterization creates the tension.

By counterpointed characterization he means the pairing of characters who "bring out a crucial response to each other." When that happens, as Baxter says, "A latent energy rises to the surface, the desire or secret previously forced down into psychic obscurity." Therefore, Baxter argues, instead of asking the question connected to the conflict-model story ("Will the protagonist get what he or she wants?"), the more appropriate question for a story that depends upon counterpointed characterization for its tension is, "What's emerging here?'" To this, I'll add that our interest in characters and their situations in a well-crafted story almost always comes from wondering what aspect of character or situation will show up at the end of the story, having worked its way up through whatever denial or facade the character has constructed, to be that additional element of truth, surprising and yet inevitable, that gives the end of a good story its resonance.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," two sisters share center stage. Maggie, the slow-witted but lovable sister, lives at home with her mother, who narrates the story. As our narrative opens, Maggie and her mother are awaiting the arrival of Dee, the beautiful, articulate, and upwardly-mobile sister. The two sisters are all wrong for each other, and for that reason, they make a good pairing for the tension of the story. Notice, though, that they aren't complete polar opposites. Although very much different, they're still of the same blood and they recall the same ancestors, family customs, etc. As Baxter points out, a short story writer has to be a good matchmaker, and if the match is too simple the resulting story will be, too. For that reason, it's good to pair characters who, though different, also have some common ground. Think of Felix and Oscar in Neil Simon's play, The Odd Couple. A neat-freak and a slob. Polar opposites. The stuff of comedy in this case. But Oscar is a divorced man, separated from his ex and their children. Felix is living outside his  home, fearing that he's on the verge of becoming the ex-husband. He and Oscar, then, share the loneliness and regret of men who no longer have their families, and that's what deepens their characters and their situations, and the gravity of their loneliness works its way up throughout the course of the play. In "Everyday Use," Alice Walker gets similar mileage from the pairing of Maggie and Dee, and a mother who must make a choice. Dee, upon arriving for her visit, asks for some of the family quilts. She'll hang them on her walls, she says, pointing out that if Maggie gets them she'll put them to everyday use and wear them out. So we have the right pairing of dissimilar characters within the same family, and the tension that results over the request for the quilts and the mother's decision to give them to Maggie. The character whom we imagined might be overlooked, is the one who rises to the top by the end of the story, by virtue of her goodness and her appreciation and knowledge of family history. The more intelligent, more glamorous, more successful Dee is left out in the cold.

Think of any story that you admire, and see if the appropriate counterpointed characterization makes possible the interest that you have in that story. In our workshop yesterday, thanks to Baxter's thoughts and his examples from "Everyday Use," "The Misfit," and "The Dead," we kicked around ideas for how a third character in the student stories we discussed, could be put to use at the catalyst to whatever shifts between the two main characters. Often in a good story, a character maintains a certain idea of himself, and he finds himself acting from behind that facade in his interactions with another main character.  The entrance of a third character can cause that facade to crumble. Emerging, then, is the truth of the character that he's either not been aware of or has been trying to conceal. Think of Michael Furey in James Joyce's "The Dead," and how his evocation at the end of that story, causes everything to shift for Gabriel and his wife, Gretta. Gretta's story of how Michael, years ago, stood in the rain to profess his love for her and then died soon after, makes it impossible for Gabriel to maintain the facade he's constructed for himself. The passion in that story points out Gabriel's own lack thereof. He'll never be able to think of himself in quite the same way.

The lesson in all of this is the interesting dynamic that results when the right pairing of characters exerts pressure until something emerges that wouldn't otherwise. It's that "something" that usually gives a good story its resonance.

 

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 2

Our conversation in the fiction workshop began yesterday with a consideration of a chapter from Charles Baxter's excellent book, Burning Down the House. The chapter, "On Defamiliarization," deals with how writers can sometimes know their stories too early in the writing process. A writer might, for example, decide early on that his or her story is about the disruption of a family due to a father's alcoholism. Each scene, then, becomes one more example of the father's drinking and the ugly moments in causes for the family. As Baxter, says, everything about the story fits. All of the arrows point in the same direction. He goes on to point out that in such cases the writers understand their characters too quickly, and, therefore, the characters aren't contradictory or misfitted. "The truth that writers are after," Baxter says, "may be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first;  if the story, in other words, pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place."

To help us think about how that magic trick happens in a good story, Baxter offers up the term, "defamiliarization," from Russian formalist criticism and the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky. Defamiliarization is the process by which the writer makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. For me, this boils down to the writer always being on the lookout for the unexpected that is also convincing and organic to the world of the story and its characters.

In Sherwood Anderson's "Adventure," from Winesburg, Ohio, a young woman named Alice Hindman constructs a narrative that she needs in order to believe in the future. The man she loves, Ned Currie, will come back to Winesburg from Chicago, as he's sworn he will, and they'll live happily ever after. But the years go on, and Ned doesn't return. At the end of the story, on a rainy night, Alice, so desperate for Ned Currie, so desperate for love, allows this desperation, which is mixed up with eroticism, to overwhelm her. She  strips off her clothes and runs out into the rain. She feels full of youth and courage. She sees a man stumbling around on the sidewalk ahead of her. "What do I care who it is," she thinks to herself. "He is alone, and I will go to him." She calls out to the man: "Wait!" she cried. "Don't go away. Whoever you are, you must wait."

I'd like to pause here and consider Anderson at this point of the composition of the story, facing the choice of forming the man's response. What are some of the predictable options? The man reacts with shock? He reacts with lewdness, pleased by the site of the woman and her nakedness? Either choice would fit nicely with what we expect, and for that reason, each choice is flawed because it takes the story down a predictable path. It make all the arrows point in the same direction. It fails to make the moment memorable. The story arrives somewhere familiar, and, therefore, forgettable.

Now back to the story. The man, Alice notices, is an old man, perhaps somewhat deaf. He puts his hand to his mouth. He shouts. "What? What say?" Here we have a touch of what Baxter calls "surprising banality" to stand in contrast with Alice's brazen act, and to throw it into bolder relief. Alice, noting the man's disregard of her nakedness–to him, it doesn't matter a whit–recoils with shame. She runs back to her home and wonders whatever could have possessed her. She lies in bed and turns her face to the wall, accepting the loneliness that is now hers, a loneliness wrought because of the man's disregard. The story would never have reached this point if Anderson would have followed a more predictable path with the man's reaction.

The lesson in this is that writers need to walk around their first ideas to see whether they've taken full advantage of the misfitted detail, image, or action. Providing a contrast between the familiar and the strange is often a way of drawing out that contradictory and concealed moment that's waiting at the end of a story. Ann Beattie  once said that she wrote a story to a point where one of her characters said or did something unexpected and then another character said or did something equally unexpected. End of story. The key, of course, is to make sure that the unexpected is convincing given what we already know about the characters and their worlds. You can't just cue the ax murderer at the end of the story and call that a convincing surprise!

It's always amazing to me how often the stories that writers bring to workshop on a certain day have things in common. Yesterday, our two stories under consideration both utilized multiple points of view. To me, whenever a point of view strategy is something other than the customary third-person limited or first-person, it's wise to ask how that slightly less common point of view–omniscient, say, or second-person–is necessary to creating the effect that the writer wants the story to have. Not always, but often, when a short story writer works with a multiple point of view strategy, it's used to ironic effect in the sense that it shows the reader how one character's assumptions about another character or a situation may be wrong. Characters make assumptions about their situations and about the other people involved, and the multiple point of view can allow the reader to know much more than the characters. This sort of point of view choice works well in some cases for stories about the difficulty of communication. All sorts of comic and tragic ironies can come to the surface as a result of what the readers know that the characters don't.

Next week, we'll be looking at another chapter from Baxter, "Counterpointed Characterization," and a story by Alice Walker, "Everyday Use." We'll be thinking about how a writer has to be a good matchmaker when it comes to choosing which characters will occupy center stage in a story. That and whatever else pops up during our conversation in the workshop. By the way, you should feel free to grab yourself a piece of chocolate and to set a windup toy into motion; both events occurred yesterday during workshop in Denney Hall, Room 368, on the campus of The Ohio State University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Fiction Workshop: Week 1

There's a moment in Tobias Wolff's story, "An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke," where Brooke's colleague, Riley, asks him to tell him the worst things he's ever done. As I was walking upstairs to meet my MFA fiction workshop for the first time this quarter, I was thinking about how in all good fiction we get the sense that the story or the novel really mattered to the writer–that the subject matter hasn't just been chosen willy-nilly, but instead exists because for whatever reason the writer has to work with it. We don't know why it matters the writer, but we feel the urgency in the telling. I know that when my own drafts fail to interest or touch me, it's usually because I haven't figured out why I need to write about a particular situation or character.

I began yesterday's workshop by asking folks to consider how they would answer Riley's question if it were put to them. "What the worst thing you've ever done?' I told a story from my own experience (sure I've done worst things than the moment I shared, but, c'mon, do you really think I'd tell you everything?) that happened when I was in the fifth grade.  Our community was in the midst of a hepatitis outbreak, the kind that makes folks very, very sick, and it was known that the father of one of my classmates, April, a quiet, nervous girl, had been dramatically ill. One morning,before our lessons began, my teacher, Mrs. Frank, asked April how her father was doing. April said he was much, much better. I raised my hand. I said, "Isn't it true that people can die from hepatitis?" I intended to impress Mrs. Frank with my knowledge. I had no idea that my question would send April into a fit of choked sobs, or that Mrs. Frank would give me a stern look that would make me shrivel up with shame. A lesson for the future writer: someone's intent can often produce the opposite result, and that sort of dramatic irony can lend resonance to a piece of fiction.

Wolff is a master of this sort of irony. Professor Brooke, who thinks of himself as a decent sort, can't help but sit in judgment of Riley. The story opens with this line: "Professor Brooke had no real quarrel with anyone in his department, but there was a Yeats scholar named Riley whom he could not bring himself to like." Right away, then, we have a character Brooke, who's interesting to us because he's a character made up of contradictions. He's someone who likes to think he's a decent sort, but he also has this judgmental and moralistic side. I'm interested, as the story opens, to see what the consequences will be for him. I'm interested because he's what I call a dynamic character, "dynamic" in respect to be capable of motion in more than one direction. All it takes is the pairing of Brooke with Riley at a regional meeting of the Modern Language Association to provide the dramatic present for the working out of Brooke's character.  That and a woman named Ruth, whom Brooke meets there. That dramatic triangle of characters provides the means for Wolff's exploration of Brooke and how he comes up against the hard knowledge that the way he insists on seeing himself, this decent man, isn't the whole truth. His involvement with Ruth begins when he hurts her with an unintentional slight. She's prepared  sandwiches for the conference, each of them having a literary quotation typed on a slip of paper attached to a toothpick stuck into the sandwich. Brooke, not aware that she's been the one to choose and type those quotes, tells her that they're "hard to swallow." When he sees that he's hurt her, he feels bad, and their journey begins, culminating in a night spent together, a fact that Riley, whom Brooke has always suspected of having affairs with his students, comes to note. At the end of the story, Brooke, who has always sat in judgment of Riley, had now traded places with him. Brooke understands how we all have to kneel down before one another.

If the story ended there, the epiphany would be too neat and not trustworthy. In our workshop yesterday, we talked about why Wolff made the choice to extend the story, widening the point of view, to tell us that the chapter of his life that seemed to be closing for Brooke wasn't closing for others. Anonymous love poems appear in his mailbox at school. His wife, unpacking his bag after his trip to the MLA, smells perfume on his tie and his shirt. She fears the worst, but when Brooke comes home for dinner he's so much like himself that she feels unworthy of him. The story ends with a reference to how the fearful feeling she has fades and becomes the sort of flutter that stops one cold from time to time and then goes away. There's a lesson here about how the end of a good story shouldn't be too neat, how it should close and open at the time, and this is what Wolff accomplishes by letting the point of view widen after Brooke's neat observation that we all must kneel down before one another.

So with Wolff's story as support, I suggested to my MFA students that the focus of our workshop this quarter should be on deepening characters and situations and learning to think in terms of opposites. My objective would be to see if I could give them some shortcuts toward creating interesting dynamic characters, allowing them to create their own troubles, and bringing the story to a moment of inevitable surprise, a moment in which something present from the beginning but submerged, rises to the surface.

When we turned our attention to the stories from two of our own members, we spent time talking about how to complicate a main character's motive to give him or her that dynamic nature that Wolff gave Professor Brooke. The first story by one of the MFA students involved a complicated brother relationship and a dramatic situation that put pressure on that relationship. Our narrator, thinking that his married brother has had a sexual relationship with a girl that the narrator is sweet on, sets out to prove that. He tells himself he's doing so in order to protect the girl. What will make the narrator's motivation even more interesting, will be to throw in another layer to his motive, one that's in opposition with his intent to be the decent man protecting the girl. If we can hint at the fact that the narrator resents his brother, we can establish the submerged thing that will rise by the end of the story, and that will be the narrator's desire not to prove his own decency but to prove his brothers indecency. This movement is suggested in the draft of the story, but we talked about pointing it up earlier. Complicating the motive is a good lesson for us all to learn, and this writer's instincts had done just that. The key, it seems to me, to that inevitable surprise we're all wanting at the end of a story, is to hit upon the contradictions within the main character relatively early in the narrative, and to work with the story that the character tells himself about his motives versus an opposite layer that will rise because of the pressures of plot.

During our consideration of the second story from a member of the workshop, this issue of "tightening the screws" came up for discussion. Here, I'm talking about letting a character's own actions in connection to the pressures from other characters, or the pressures inherent in the dramatic situation, make the main character squirm with uncertainty. In this particular story that has a bit of magical realism blending with a very realistic style of telling, a young boy in long-ago England has an angel who it seems will leave him. The theory is that angels attach themselves to people who are virtuous and then leave them when that virtue is compromised. The story opens with a few pages of explanation of the situation, the characters, the setting, and it's all beautifully written. Then a few pages in we hit the complication. The family has always assumed the boy's angel will leave before the boy goes off to university, but that time has come, and the angel is still there. What will  happen when the two of them are at university? That becomes the central question that "tightens the screws" on our main character. Sometimes a structural adjustment can  help tighten those screws, putting pressure on the main character right away. I had a writing teacher once who said we should begin our stories as close the end as possible. That strategy has the effect of immediate pressure on our main character. In the case of the story of the boy and his angel, I wonder what might happen if the story opened at University, opened, that is to say, in the midst of the dramatic present of the narrative. No need to lose the beautiful exposition from the opening. It can always be layered in after the dramatic present gives the story forward momentum.

So to sum up: (1) urgency in the telling that comes from a writer connecting with the material in a profound way (2)contradictions within characters (3 ) dramatic irony (4) complicating a character's motive (5) preparing the way for the submerged layer to rise at the end (6) putting pressure on the character (through structure and characterization) to make that submerged layer rise in a surprising and yet inevitable way.

I've invited my students to read my blog entries because I know they'll have some valuable thoughts of their own to add. I also know, though, that they're very busy with the demands of graduate school, and may not have time for this extra "duty." I invite everyone's comments, questions, etc.  I also want to point out that I could be wrong about everything I'm saying. It's just one writer's and teacher's opinion. Our students in the MFA program are extremely talented, and the two stories we discussed yesterday were extremely rich drafts. I can't wait to see where the writers take the revisions, and I hope they don't mind that I offered up a few details from their wonderful work as a way of illustrating some of the craft points that we made yesterday. Sorry to go on so long with this post.

Next week, we'll be looking at two more stories from the MFA students and also reading a chapter from Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, "On Defamiliarization." We'll also read a story from Sherwood Andeson's Winesburg, Ohio called "Adventure."

Until then–happy writing and reading!

 

 

 

 

The Fiction Workshop Begins

On January 3 (we start our Winter Quarter quickly here at Ohio State), I'll meet my MFA fiction workshop for the first time. I've been preparing my syllabus. In addition to the discussion of original fiction from the twelve MFA students in the room, we'll take a look at stories by Tobias Wolff ("An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke"), Alice Walker ("Everyday Use"), Sherwood Anderson ("Adventure"), Flannery O'Connor ("Good Country People"), and Richard Bausch ("The Fireman's Wife"). We'll also read two selections from Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House ("On Defamiliarization" and "Counterpointed Characterization"), as well as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners. Our aim will be to think about fiction from a consideration of the artistic choices a writer makes to explore with resonance what Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the heart."

I'd like to share, then, this description of the workshop from my syllabus:

What is it that makes a piece of fiction memorable, makes it something an editor just can't refuse? Why do certain stories and novels stay in our heads and hearts, the way Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" does for me, or Joyce Carol Oates's "Heat," or Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," or our own Lee Abbott's "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," or the other too-numerous-to-mention stories and novels and novellas that in some way shake me and make me say with admiration, "Damn, I wish I'd written that." What is it that makes a piece of fiction special, somehow unique among all its thousands of companions? More important, what is it about such work that I can steal for my own intents? We have to be a greedy crowd, we writers. We have to always have our eyes out for whatever we can learn from one another. What better place than this, the workshop, to practice such thievery? In the process, I hope we'll gently, kindly, and smartly nudge one another's work to levels of excellence heretofore unseen. We'll all profit. One's success pays honor to every member of the workshop.

So back to the original question, which is really a question about how fiction succeeds or doesn't. I'd like to convince you, if you're not persuaded already, that on a technical level stories and novels are the result of a series of artistic choices in point of view, structure, detail, language, and characterization. Writers make choices, either consciously or unconsciously, and certain effects result. Sometimes the final effect is exactly what the writer intended; the story has come out fully realized. More often, however, the story we end up writing is not the story we started out envisioning, and we end up rethinking some of our artistic choices, coaxing the story, which has always been wiser than we, to more completely reveal itself. We learn something with each draft until finally we've made the story what it wanted to be all along.

But does technique alone—those choices we make in the crafting of the fiction—determine whether our story or novel will be one of the memorable ones? I wonder—and, of course, I'll ask you to wonder, too—whether the writer's vision might have something to do with what makes a piece of fiction succeed in staying with first an editor and then a reader. I wonder whether much of a story's or a novel's success depends not only on technique but perhaps more importantly on a writer's eye for what can't be seen at first glance. Charles Baxter, in Burning Down the House, argues that a story can't succeed unless it "pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place." It's the precious thing, he says—the crucial truth, present but repressed and nearly lost—that emerges at the end of a good story. One of my former writing teachers used to tell us that a good story would give us more truth than we thought we had a right to expect. How do we get to moments such as the initially jaded husband in Carver's "Cathedral" who, as he draws with the blind man's hand on his at the end of that story, feels himself filled and humbled with awe?

Perhaps we reach such moments in our writing because we've learned to think in contradictions, to know that anything contains not only what we can see and name but also its opposite. Flannery O'Connor, in Mysteries and Manners, speaks of the writer's "anagogical vision," which she defines as "the ability to see different levels of reality in one image or situation." A good story or novel stays with us, not only because it's well-made, but ultimately because it surprises us with how much it sees about the contradictions and complexities of human existence. Point of view, structure, detail, language, characterization? They're a snap. Now see what Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the heart" and put that on the page. Such is the daunting task we all face each time we sit down to write.

 

I'll try to post reports from the workshop as it goes along (reports from the trenches, so to speak), offering up thoughts for us all to consider as we chase around the question of what makes a piece of fiction stand out, what makes it resonate, what makes it memorable. Here's an observation to get us started. The short story is a well-designed and executed magic trick. We think we're watching one thing when actually we're observing something quite different. We watch the story moving along its surface, and it's like we're watching the magician's hands. We think we see how they move. We think we know exactly what they're moving toward. We don't realize that the magician (or in this case, the writer) is working by sleight of hand. There are movements we don't register, and then we arrive at the end of the trick or the end of the story, and we're delighted with surprise because what emerges isn't what we thought we'd see. With a magic trick, we can't go back through it to see the choices the magician made in order to construct and execute the trick. With a short story, once we have that final move, we can go through the story again and again, as many times as it takes for us to see the moves that barely registered with us at the time but that ended up being the groundwork for the story's magic.

Characterization, structure, detail, point of view, and language: These are the five elements of craft that allow a writer to make magic on the page. If you'd like to read Wolff's "An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke" (from his collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs) before January 3, pay attention to how Wolff creates a complex and dynamic (in the sense of being capable of motion in more than one direction) main character from wisely pairing him with a similar and yet very different man. Focus on how the plot of the story unfolds from that initial pairing and from the fact that these two men can't escape each other. Notice how the story opens out at the end while also coming to a close–everything made possible because Wolff put the right two characters together.

More to come. . .but in the meantime, Happy Holidays!

 

Meet Your Best Friend, Mr. Right Margin: Characters Creating Plots

I've been teaching a fiction workshop this quarter designed especially for poets and nonfiction writers in our MFA program at Ohio State. In addition to its official course number, English 765B, I like to attach a subtitle: "Meet Your Best Friend, Mr. Right Margin." That's directed mainly toward the poets, of course, who sometimes have a fear of that right margin. As my colleague, Andrew Hudgins, said once, poets should be told that if they touch that right margin they might pick up a disease.

At our first meeting, I asked the students to tell me about their fears when it came to writing fiction. I seem to recall quite a bit of conversation about how to utilize the imagination (some of the nonfiction writers in particular were so steeped in an aesthetic of fact that it was hard for them to consider making things up) and how to structure an extended narrative, something the poets and lyric essayists have sometimes had problems with in past versions of this workshop. So  how to use the imagination and how to write long. I'm happy to report that I believe the students met both challenges and succeeded in overcoming them. I know I've seen some very inventive uses of the flash fiction form, and I've also seen some long stories structured nicely from a consideration of character and a creation of a causal chain of narrative events. I've enjoyed watching my students take their tentative first steps into the genre. I've particularly enjoyed watching them gain confidence as they've gained a deeper understanding of the tools at their disposal and how to use them.

Now they're faced with turning in revisions of two drafts, one of them a piece of flash fiction and one of them an extended narrative. Today, one of the students asked me how I worked with character when starting a story. Did I first write down everything I could think of about that character as a way of knowing him or her before beginning to write the story? I know this technique works for some, and that's great, but I haven't used such a strategy in a good while. My student wanted to know how I came to know a character? I said that I prefer to put my main characters into motion at the beginning of a piece of fiction, and I like the dialogue and the actions to tell me who these characters think they are. Then I try to find a narrative that forces them to the point where it's impossible for them to maintain this self-serving narrative. There's always another narrative running along beneath the surface of the one that the characters tell themselves, and their own actions and their consequences can force those other narratives up through the surface of the first narrative.

In the creation of a first draft and also in revision, it can be a good idea for the writer to think in terms of opposites. If  a character gets into trouble of his or her own making in the opening of a story, and then tries to get out of that trouble, a causal chain of narrative events can unfold, one that puts pressure on the character and the way he or she likes to think about him or herself. The pressure, usually enhanced through the character's own actions, finally reaches a point where  something opposite from the self-constructed image, comes to the surface of the narrative. That opposite has been present from the very beginning, but it's taken the pressures of plot to bring it to light.

Ever seen that optical illusion image that looks like a face in profile, but when you look at it long enough, it turns into a vase? That's sort of what I'm talking about. Two very different characteristics contained in the same person or situation, one of them privileged, but not for along. The submerged characteristic is always rising through the course of the narrative until it breaks through at the end.

Make up a character right now. A man whose job it is to clean up crime scenes? (Yes, I've used this one in my story, "The Least You Need to Know.") What do you think most people would assume about that character from the git-go? That it must take a creepy sort of man to do that kind of work, perhaps a calloused man with little emotional response to anything around him? Okay, then, what's the opposite of that? A deeply caring man? Fine. Let an initial action on the part of that man, create a sequence of events that puts pressure on him until it becomes evident, as it did for the man in my story, that he just wants the best for people, that when he cleans a house where a murder or suicide has taken place, he's offering a blessing to the people who will live in that house in the future, people who'll never know about the horrible thing that had happened there.

We could even create a writing activity here on the spot. Choose an occupation for a character. What would people assume to be true about the person who had that job? What action involving that job could set the character into motion in the the opening scene of the story? What consequences might arise that would require further actions from the character? What would be the cause and effect between the resulting scenes of complication? How could the pressures of the narrative flip a reader's initial assumptions about the character? Perhaps, the characters own assumptions about the self will flip as well.

Anything's possible as long as we keep writing toward that right margin.

Generosity in Memoir

Not long ago in my creative nonfiction workshop, I found myself talking about the necessity of the generosity of the writer. I find this true, of course, no matter the genre, but I find it particularly true when we're talking about memoir. We need to be generous enough to make room for the characters in our narratives. We need to make an earnest and sensitive attempt to see the world from their perspectives, to understand what they've lived through that shaped their personalities, and when those personalities are flawed, as of course we all are, we need to be generous enough to forgive those flaws, knowing that we'll need to forgive our own as well. We need to be generous to ourselves, to admit how imperfect we are, to see ourselves from the perspective of others and from our vantage point in the here and now, so we can try to figure out who we are and why. Isn't every narrative, whether fiction or nonfiction, in some way about identity?  We write and we read to know ourselves and others better.

Writing a memoir is an act of love, or should be, not an act of revenge or self-indulgence or self-loathing or justification. It's an act of love because it requires empathy and compassion. An act of love because it strives to tell the truth in all its complexity. An act of love because it requires patience and sacrifice, because it honors the lived life, respects it, treats it with care. Writing a memoir is an act of love because it requires so much faith that words alone can take us down to that place where, as the poet Miller Williams says in his poem, "Compassion," "the spirit meets the bone."

Here in its entirety is that poem:

Have compassion for everyone you meet,

even if they don't want it. What seems conceit,

bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign

of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on

down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Sounds to me like good advice to live by. Sounds to me like good advice for the writer whose very job it is to figure out something about those wars going on inside people, the push and pull in the heart that makes our living noble for the strivings beneath the imperfections that mark us.

A Miscellany from the Road

It's been an autumn of travel for me, having done readings in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio , and Tennessee, and it's been so good to renew friendships and to start new ones. Here's a compilation of where I've been and what's happened on the road, just a glimpse of what it's like to be on a low-budget tour when you're a writer of literary fiction who's trying to grow a wider audience.

 

September 8-9; Evansville, Indiana

Years ago, I lived in Evansville, so returning is always a homecoming of sorts. This time, I got to renew friendships with the folks at the University of Southern Indiana, who were kind enough to invite me to pay a visit. A blood drive was underway in the student union building where I was reading, but fortunately the audience wasn't after my blood, in either a literal or a figurative sense. In fact, there were old friends from Kentucky in the audience, as well as someone who was in a workshop I taught in New Harmony, Indiana, a few years back. Add to the mix students whom I remembered from my last visit to USI (don't you people ever graduate?) and members of the writing faculty whom I consider my friends, and the experience was very pleasant and non-blood-letting indeed. The buffet at the reception after the reading was outstanding. The best vegan meatballs, made from eggplant! I don't even like eggplant, but those vegan meatballs were outstanding. Thanks to Noley Reid for inviting me and for taking the extra pains to make sure I had something to eat. In the true small-town Midwestern tradition, "a good time was had by all" (at least I hope so).

The next evening, I read from and signed copies of my latest novel, Break the Skin, at the Barnes and Noble on Green River Road. A small group on was on hand. How small?

Gulp. . .er. . .um. Maybe six or seven people, including the events coordinator who had my books for sale, even some I didn't write. The Trail of the Dangerous Gun? Nope, not mine. Starbright? Ix-nay. Provocation? Nope. As you'll recall from one of my previous posts, there are other Lee Martins publishing books. The meager attendance didn't faze me. Believe me, I've had enough experience with small turnouts over the years to not even worry about it any longer. In fact, there's something intimate about that size of an audience that I rather enjoy. When I arrived, I saw a couple sitting in chairs, each of them reading a copy of my novel, The Bright Forever. Soon, the gentleman brought his copy to the table where my books (and those of other Lee Martins) were stacked, and he placed it back on the pile. "I see you're reading something by that hack writer, Lee Martin," I said to the man, and he was taken aback momentarily before I told him I was the Lee Martin in question. We struck up a fine conversation that eventually included his wife. While I was reading from Break the Skin, I saw a woman browsing the stacks who was keeping an ear tuned to what I was saying. Eventually, she came closer, lingering at the fringe of where my audience was sitting, and I stopped reading and said to her, "Please join us." She did and afterwards she introduced herself. She was a children's book author, and she ended up buying a copy of my novel. Small audience, yes, but also one with a lot of heart.

 

September 15; Western Kentucky University

Next stop, Bowling Green. I once taught a three-week workshop at WKU , and it was good to pay a visit to a nonfiction course being taught by Dale Rigby, the man who was kind enough to let me have a room in his house during that summer of 2008. It was stimulating to talk about nonfiction, particularly memoir, with Dale's students, who had all sorts of interesting questions. They'd read my memoir, From Our House, and I had that odd sensation I always get when I realize that my audience's perception of my image in the flesh is influenced by the image of me that they've taken from the page. I was glad to spend time with WKU writers, Molly McCaffrey and David Bell, and to see Brent Fisk, a student from my 2008 workshop, and his delightful wife, Holly. Mary Sparr , another student from that workshop, put in an appearance at the dinner before my reading, and then her rock-star boyfriend whisked her off to Nashville. The reading itself? My, my, my. Those folks at WKU are doing something right. The place was packed. Standing room only. I couldn't have been more please, as I hope the audience was when I read from The Bright Forever.

 

September 22; The Cuyahoga Public Library–Bay Village Branch

Another small audience in the lovely Bay Village west of Cleveland, but something happened that made it all worth the trip. A woman, after my reading, wanted to talk to me about her son. He was, she told me, a talented writer. She wished that I could pay a visit to his eighth grade class. She wished she'd brought him with her so he could have talked to me. She wanted to know what she should do to encourage his talent. I told her that he should not only read the novels that he wanted to read, but he might also read about how to write. She said Stephen King was a favorite of his, so I suggested King's craft book, On Writing. I don't think eighth grade is too early to start thinking about how stories and novels get made, and I admired this mother's dedication to developing her son's talents. I'd love it if someday I got to meet him, and I'd love it even more if someday I sat in one of his audiences and later I asked him to sign his book for me.

 

September 29; The Lawrence Public Library

This was truly a homecoming, the library in the county seat, eight miles from Sumner, Illinois, where I went to high school. How many times did my parents drive me to Lawrenceville (and once I had my license how many times did I make that drive myself) so I could do research for school papers. I remember with great fondness, searching the card catalog. I mourn it's demise. As I told my audience of forty-plus people when they clapped for me after my introduction that I'd walked into that public library a number of times when I was a high school student and not once had anyone applauded. What a wonderful evening. I saw old friends I hadn't seen in well over thirty years. I met a cousin I'd never known. I met the aunt of the girl upon whom my character of Laney in Break the Skin is based. That was an odd and mysterious moment. The aunt had come to the event not knowing anything about my book. She said, "It feels like I've been called here." I told her I felt the same.

September 30; Olney Central College

This is the community college where I spent two years before transferring to Eastern Illinois University. More old friends, more relatives. I did a question and answer with OCC students before doing a reading for the public. My excellent host, Charlotte Bruce, had everything running in smooth order. The public information and marketing coordinator, Deanna Ratts, had done a wonderful job with publicity. The reading was at noon, with lunch served, and after my reading I got to sit down with some food and visit with family members. My tasty bread was made by Charlotte's husband, Terry, a former member of the United States House of Representatives. It's not often that I can say that a former congressman cooked for me.

 

October 4; Columbus, Ohio

The Thurber House was kind enough to host me for an event, and I had the honor of being introduced by my colleague and friend, Erin McGraw. She pointed out in my introduction that I had a vast knowledge of pop songs from the 1970s. True. I'm guilty of that. Ohio Express? Hamilton, Joe, Frank, and Reynolds? The 1910 Fruitgum Company? Well, you get the point. Man, was I nervous for this reading. As I told the audience, it's always a little nerve wracking to read for your students and colleagues and people you know from the community because I really care what they think of my work.  It's not that I don't care what strangers think (please, like me!), but many of those folks I'll never seen again. My students and colleagues? I have to face them at school. What a great crowd that night. Standing room only, and I made some new friends from books clubs here in Columbus. I love visiting book clubs, and maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get to visit some of the ones I learned about on this evening.

October 14; Nashville, Tennessee

I always love being part of the Southern Festival of Books. This time I was part of the Authors in the Round benefit dinner, where I hosted a table of folks who had paid a fair sum for the evening's food, drink, and conversation. I took note of a couple at an adjoining table who had taken ample opportunity to enjoy the wine. The woman was tipsy, but that was ok, she assured people who inquired. She wasn't driving. Her husband was. But lord-a-mercy, he was in worse shape than she was. The next day, I got to enjoy a football watch party with the local chapter of the Ohio State University alumni association. I'd had that privilege a few years ago, and it was good to see my kind hosts, Melissa and Jeff Linkinhoker again. Oh, and in the midst of all those ancillary events, I read from Break the Skin. Again, a small audience, but I'm not complaining. It was October and sunny in Nashville, and I was with folks whose company I enjoyed.