Lee Martin's Blog, page 72

Details of Home

I'm reading Jean Thompson's novel, The Year We Left Home, and today I came upon this passage:

"But back home, I can look up and down just about any street and there's people I'm either related to or I've known them all my life and my parents have known them and my grandparents knew their grandparents and there's a comfort in that. I miss it. That's all I'm saying. Here, it's like we're not from anywhere."

It's a passage that means something to me, a displaced small-town boy living now in the big city. It's particularly meaningful to me now after returning from my native southeastern Illinois where I did two events, one at the public library in Lawrenceville and one at Olney Central College, the school where I studied for two years before transferring to Eastern Illinois University. At both the library and the college, I saw old friends I hadn't seen in over thirty years. I made new friends, and I saw family members. At every turn, I felt like I'd come home, to the places where, as Jean Thompson makes clear in her novel, folks can take comfort from familiarity.

Sometimes in fiction and nonfiction that doesn't pay close attention to place, it can seem like the people aren't from anywhere specific. They occupy generic places: the stereotypical small-town, the cliched big city, the nondescript suburbs. It's the particulars that make a place and by extension the people who live in those places. The fact that people in my part of southeastern Illinois, for example, have certain customs when it comes to food, matters. When I was growing up, we always ate dinner at noon and supper in the evening. We never ate lunch.  We had what I'd call our "native dishes," food that belonged to us and came from our ancestors, eaten over the generations. Want some pink stuff? Some corn bread broken up in a glass of milk? Some fried mush? Some sour dock or wild mustard greens cooked down and served with soup beans? Some milk gravy over white bread? I guess I'd call that food for the working class. Food that stuck to your ribs. Food, that by its very particulars says something about the place and its culture and its agrarian roots.

Miller Williams has a poem, "Let Me Tell You." Those of you who know me have perhaps indulged my quoting from it in class. The poem begins like this:

Let Me Tell You

How to do it from the beginning,

First notice everything:

The stain on the wallpaper

of the vacant house,

the mothball smell of a

Greyhound toilet,

Miss nothing. Memorize it.

You cannot twist the fact you do not know.

What do we know about the worlds that began to shape us? What do we know about the places that were our early homes and remain in our spirits to this day? As I told my audiences in southeastern Illinois, it took me a while to trust my material, to understand that if I couldn't make something significant out of the pink stuff, and the fried mush, and the countless other details from my rural upbringing, then I sure as heck wouldn't be able to make something out of places that were larger, more flashy, more noticeable. I had to understand that what mattered most were people's inner lives–their fears, secrets, lonely nights, private joys, to name a few possibilities–held up against the communities of which they're a part. I had to embrace my part of southeastern Illinois, to understand that it's the place I know most intimately.

I was reminded of my membership in that community on my recent trip back home. Not that I've ever forgotten it. I live with it in most everything I write. Still, it was good to be back in those little towns, to hear my cousin say, after my reading at the college, that he and his wife needed "to do some trading." That's the way my parents always described their need to go to town to buy groceries and whatever else they needed. Exchange money for merchandise. Do some trading. The details we use in our fiction and nonfiction are similar merchandise, purchased with the experience of our living and the closeness of our observation. We stockpile those details so they're there to tap into when we need them in order to make a world convincing on the page. My advice to young writers is, don't trade them away. Remember the Sunday evening dinners when your mother fried up corn cakes, or potato cakes, or opened a can of tomato soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches to go with it. Remember the way your father said, "Mister, you're breeding a scab on your nose," whenever you misbehaved. Remember the sound of a crow calling in the still autumn air, the hickory nuts dropping to the ground, the bellow of a cow in a barn lot, the rim of ice on a pond in winter, a dusting of snow atop a headstone in a country cemetery,  a shooting star on a summer night and your father saying, "That means someone just died."  Remember everything about home, even if you've left it.

A Story for the First Day of Class

Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn Quarter classes at Ohio State, where I teach. I'm starting my 30th year as a teacher, eleven of them here at OSU, and each year, when it's time to think about walking into that classroom the next day, I recall a story from some years back, when I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska. At the annual department meeting the day before classes began, our chair told a story about one year, the evening before the first day of classes, he found a young man in Andrews Hall, home of the English Department, standing in the doorway to a classroom, just looking in. Our chair asked the young man if he could help him with something. The young man, with wonder in his voice said, "My Freshman Composition class meets in this room tomorrow. I just wanted to see it."

I've never forgotten that story. I've never forgotten the tale of that young man, about to embark on his college career, in awe of a classroom where he would soon sit, where he would write essays and talk about language and literature, where he would be a college student. For those of us who have taught for a long time, it's good to remember our own feelings of excitement and anticipation when we were students walking into into our college classrooms for the first time. A feeling not so different from the way we felt when we taught our first classes. I remember how over-prepared I was for the first meeting of  the composition course I taught. I didn't get through a third of what I'd planned. When that first class was over, though, I felt elated. I felt that I'd finally ended up in the place where I belonged. Thirty years later, I'm still there, and as much as I sometimes grumble over the energy that teaching takes from my own writing, I still have that feeling of elation when I teach a class. I still feel I'm doing what I was meant to do. For those about to teach for the first time, I hope you feel that same elation, that same sense of accomplishment. Despite the frustrations you're sure to experience along the way, may you always know the excitement and worth of teaching. May we all remember that teachers and students alike are privileged to be where they are. That freshman at the University of Nebraska looked into his composition classroom as if it were a holy place. In many ways it is, as is any place of learning.  Sometimes I come close to forgetting that, but, when I do, I remember the story of that young man. In some ways, I think I've been teaching toward him all my life.

It's Chowder Season Back Home

When I began this blog, I promised I'd tell you the least you need to know about writing, publishing, teaching, and other stuff. Well, today's entry gives you some of that "other stuff," a bit of the culture from my native southeastern Illinois, where right now it's the heart of chowder season. Not chowder as in corn chowder, and not chowder as in clam chowder. The chowder from southeastern Illinois is a thick and hearty vegetable soup, but more than that it's an event that provides a homecoming for many folks who return to the small rural communities of their youth. A reunion, a party, a coming-together, a fellowship. It's personal.

When I was born, my parents had a farm on the Lawrence County side of the Richland/Lawrence County Road, not far from Berryville, Illinois. My grandmother lived there, in a small frame house, catty-cornered from the Berryville General Store, which at one time she and my grandfather leased. Just a hop, skip, and a jump down the road that ran by my grandmother's house,  was the Berryville School (grades 1-8), where my mother at one time taught. Across the road from the school was a grove of trees and a shelter house. I seem to recall that the grove belonged to my grandmother's neighbor, Billy Higgins, but I'm not positive about that.

At any rate, it was here in the grove where each Saturday before Labor Day, the chowder was held. The night before, the women of the community gathered at the shelter house to prepare the vegetables. I remember the women sitting beneath the bare light bulbs that hung from the shelter's ceiling as they cut up potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and whatever else from their gardens would go into the chowder. The men would come before dawn to build the wood fires beneath the iron cauldrons and to stir the mix of water, wild game, seasonings, and vegetables, until it was ready to serve. They used long wooden paddles to keep the chowder from scorching. Each community had its own recipe and most of them kept that recipe a secret.

Then the people would come, their cars and trucks pulled off onto the shoulders on both sides of the road. Folks would walk up that road, some of them toting gallon Mason jars so they could buy chowder to take home with them. Others just bought a bowl and maybe a hamburger or a fish sandwich and a piece of pie or a slice of cake. They sat at long tables in the shady grove, elbow to elbow with their neighbors, or with prodigals come home, and they ate, and laughed, and told stories, and remembered. Soon the entertainment began: a local country band performing from a hay wagon, a man who could play a cross-cut saw, a farmer who could do magic tricks. Whatever talents there were to be put on display. There might even be a raffle as night started to fall, all the items donated by local businesses. You could win a new grease gun and a case of cartridges, or a free haircut, or a gun cleaning kit, or any number of practical and useful things. I remember once there was even a queen contest. I remember the girls in their one-piece bathing suits for that part of the competition.

The chowder was the event I looked forward to all summer. I was an only child, and it was grand to have this one day and evening when I could play with other kids in that grove of trees, when I could eat ice cream served from round paper cartons and drink pop out of ice cold bottles pulled from metal cases filled with water, when I could see my father relaxed and jovial and eager to shoot the b.s. with the other farmers, when my mother visited happily with men and women who had been her students or with people who had been her girlhood friends and then moved away, when we were all a family there in Berryville, where such chowders had been held since 1946, and will be held again this coming Saturday. Sixty-five years of chowders in this little community that consisted in my childhood of that general store, two churches, that school that would soon close due to consolidation and become a community center instead, and a handful of houses. Sixty-five years of coming home, or, if you still lived there, reminding yourself why you did.

(my mother volunteering as cashier at some long-ago Berryville Chowder)

Stuart Dybek's "Sunday at the Zoo": A Class in Narrative Structure

When I was teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers' Conference, I offered a class on narrative structure that used Stuart Dybek's short-short story, "Sunday at the Zoo," as an example. If you're interested, you can find the story in the first edition of Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. I've long admired this story for how quickly and gracefully it moves from an initial premise to complications that resolve themselves with a resonance grounded in irony. I admire what this story has to show us about constructing narratives.

We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. That's the opening line of the story, a line that shows us how a variation of the habitual can be enough to set a narrative in motion.

Everything was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals. This second sentence introduces an immediate tension. "Everything was going nicely UNTIL. . ." Notice, again, how important variation and contrast are to the forward momentum of a narrative.

"That's not very profound," I said, "everybody who goes to the zoo feels that sometimes." This third sentence allows the narrator to express his (although the gender of the narrator is never identified, a reference in the fourth sentence makes it likely that the narrator is male) displeasure with the woman's observation. She responds with anger: "Oh, you cruel bastard," she screamed. "I'm not everybody."

It's interesting to note the use of subtext in this dialogue. Clearly, there's a history in the relationship that allows for this explosive exchange. As we know, arguments in any relationship are often not really about the subject of the argument, in the case of Dybek's characters, the observation about how horrible it is to cage the animals at the zoo. Something more personal and deep-seated is at the heart of this heated exchange.

The woman then acts in response to what the narrator has said: She bellied over the guardrail and flung herself against the bars of the wolves' cage.

It's a dramatic action, an over-the-top action. a crazy action, the action of a woman desperate to make the narrator see her and appreciate her. She's not everybody, and she's capable of this theatrical action to bring that to the man's attention. This is the action that propels the characters down a path that can't be retraced. Events are now in motion that can't be undone. The wolves in the cage stop their circling, freezing as soon as the woman flings herself against the bars of their cage. The fur along their spines bristles. The woman yells to the wolves, "Eat me! Eat me! Needless to say, we're at a moment of high tension, and this is where Dybek, knowing the readers are desperate to know what will happen next, delays the delivery of that resolution.

Instead, he inserts a quick piece of exposition. He gives us information at exactly the moment when we want the narrative to move forward, and that piece of back story helps us understand these two characters and their situation a bit better.

Just that week, the newspapers had carried an account of how a small girl had an arm gnawed off–she'd reached in to pet them and one wolf held it while the other ate. It was, in fact, what led us, along with the crowd, relentlessly to the wolves' cage.

Not only does this fact enhance the pacing of the story, it also reveals a new aspect of the characters' relationship. They're drawn to tragedy.

From this point, the story speeds to its end. a lunatic zoo attendant wrestles the woman away from the cage.  He slaps her face with a slab of meat he was about to feed to the animals. He makes a lewd comment and gesture to her. In short, he demeans her. The wolves rush against the bars, their teeth breaking on the metal. All that's left is the final line of the story, the final words from the narrator:

"Stop abusing that woman," I shouted from the crowd.

First, notice how the introduction of the third character, the attendant, complicates the sequence of events (he saves the woman's life, but at what cost to his and her and our humanity?). He also becomes the catalyst for the final surge of the story, the movement that ends with the narrator defending the woman albeit from a safe remove and in a very impersonal manner. That woman, he calls her. He presents an image of himself to the crowd that says he's a swell guy, quick to come to a poor woman's defense. We know, however, that the facade is ironic. We know that the first thing he said in the story about her comment not being profound began this whole sequence of events. We know he's much more guilty than he prefers those around him to know. So there's a resonant tension between what we know about the character and the story he's trying to tell himself at the very end.

Not only does this compressed form make Dybek's choices vivid to us, it's almost as if we're seeing the x-ray, the bare bones, of one kind of narrative structure:

1.     An opening that involves the variation of the habitual

2.     A quick exchange of dialogue to establish the tension and the problem to be dealt with in the dramatic present.

3.     A specific action from one of the characters that creates uncertainty at a moment of high tension.

4.     A well-placed bit of exposition that paces the scene and reveals other aspects of the characters.

5.     A third character who provides the final catalyst for the narrative.

6.     An ironic close in which a character tries to hide behind a facade while the readers know an opposite truth.

So, want to write a story (or a piece of creative nonfiction, or a poem) in imitation of Dybek's? Start by thinking of a habit, hobby, or obsession that you wish you or someone else could give up. Then think of an activity that most would consider wholesome or "normal." Write an opening sentence that provides a variation of the habitual. Then follow the pattern Dybek has set out for you. Feel free to post what you come up with. I'd love to read your imitations.

Shaping a Novel: A Report from My Latest Workshop

I'm back from teaching in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers' Workshop and I've been trying to get used to not having the stimulation of excellent readings by faculty and participants alike, thought-provoking craft talks, and the excitement of the daily workshop that I led. I had a group of six talented writers who are working on novels. By the end of our time together, I think each person had a re-energized plan for the work necessary to completing or revising their manuscripts. They were also a very good-humored group who tolerated my corny jokes and even told me some of their own. Also, I added to my wind-up toy collection when one of the participants learned from a former student of mine that I liked such things. Warning to my  Autumn Quarter classes at Ohio State. I'll be bringing my new wind-up caterpillar to class!

So much of my work with these novels, which were in various stages of composition, concentrated on the shape of the books. Teaching a workshop in the novel, especially one that only meets for two hours and fifteen minutes each day for five days, can seem quite daunting, but I've found that focusing each day's conversation on a separate craft element can lead to a helpful consideration of how to form the material that the writer has already conceived.

I like to start with a consideration of characterization since I believe that literary fiction exists for the purpose of allowing us to think more deeply about the mysteries and contradictions connected to what Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the heart." I want novelists to first understand that characters create the plots that unfold via their own actions and responses to the world around them. Then I spend some time talking about the structure that can emerge from an initial premise and a character's response to it. In this workshop at Vermont, we used The Great Gatsby as our common text, and I spent one meeting talking about the structure of that novel, pointing out how the original premise (Gatsby's desire to reunited with Daisy) gives rise to a sequence of events that takes us to the moment where the car that Daisy is driving, and in which Gatsby is riding, strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson. From that point, the structure that Fitzgerald has constructed from the elements of all the characters' through-lines, can no longer stand. The characters have pushed their own desires, fears, etc. too far, and now everything must come apart, as it does once George Wilson murders Gatsby and Nick Carraway is left to make the funeral arrangements. The final third of the novel is a dismantling of all that's been built.  It's as if the novel reaches a tipping point where the narrative can't continue along the path it's been charting during the first two-thirds of the book. The characters' actions have created events that have brought everyone to this point of no return. Of course, this tipping point and the resolution that follows are both contained within the very opening of the novel, but they're submerged. The pressures of the plot that the characters create bring them to this tipping point, and then their lives unravel. It's not the only way to structure a novel, of course, but it's one that can help a writer think about the shape of his or her own material.

I spend the other days of the workshop considering issues of point of view, detail, and language. Of course, when looking at an excerpt from each participant, we talk about all five elements of fiction (characterization, structure, point of view, detail, and language) because in a successful novel they all contribute to an organic whole (I wrote this term on the board in a class many years ago, and my handwriting was so bad some students thought I'd written "organic whale"; the class book that we published that semester had artwork on the front that was a drawing of a whale with my face attached to it!). Still, I'm convinced that the most important part of getting a novel underway lies in creating characters who are capable of setting a sequence of events into motion. Characters who are complicated because they're made up of contradictions. Characters who don't know themselves fully. Characters whom we don't know fully. These are the characters like Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and Nick and Jordan who are dynamic in the sense of being able to create motion. The motion of narrative. It all comes from the characters.

If you're working on a novel and would like to hear me say more about the strategies and craft issues relevant to the writing, please don't hesitate to post a comment and a request for me to talk more about whatever would be useful for you to hear. I welcome, as always, all your questions and comments.

 

Did You Hear the One About. . .?: Corny Jokes and Stories

Okay, I confess. I never met a horrible pun or a corny joke that I can resist. The dumber the better.

Q: What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?

A:  "Hey, where's my tractor."

See what I mean? There's something about the naked admission that the joke is stupid that wins me over every time.

A termite comes into a bar. Says, "Hey, is the bar tender here?"

Had to think about that one, didn't you? I enjoy the delayed response from the listener that I often get, that pause, pause, pause, and then the mouth breaking into a grin, then laughter, then, "I get it now." Sometimes they sneak up on you like that, and I enjoy that covert operation. The joke seeming to carry no punch at all, and then, a few beats after the last word, it all explodes.

Q:  How come there are so many Smiths in the phone book?

A:  Because they all have phones.

Bam! Sometimes a corny joke can be so logical it stuns you with its inevitability.

Hmm. . .a directness combined with a covert operation, leading to a surprise that is also inevitable? Sounds like there's something here that speaks about the way good stories get told, but I'll leave that all for you to articulate. I welcome your comments. Hmm. . .perhaps another lesson: the good storyteller knows when to stop, when to  not say too much, when to let the silence resonate out to the readers, inviting them to fill it.

I'll be in Vermont for six days starting tomorrow, teaching a workshop in the novel at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers' Conference. Vermont, where it's illegal to whistle underwater, but where, as the T-shirts say, you can "Let Your Moose Run Loose." I'll post something from Vermont if I can avoid the temptation of the aforementioned.

 

 

 

Nostalgia and the Writer

Last night, I started a Facebook group for folks who grew up in  my hometown, Sumner, Illinois. As some of you already know, I lived on a farm ten miles from Sumner until I started the third grade, at which time my mother took a teaching position in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southwestern suburb of Chicago. We moved back downstate when I was ready to start high school, and we bought a house on West Locust Street in Sumner, just a block from the high school in this town of a thousand people. Some of you may have read my memoir, From Our House, for which Sumner provides much of the setting.

I started the Facebook Group so folks could have a place to exchange their memories of growing up in this small town in southeastern Illinois. By the end of the evening, nearly a hundred people had joined. Today, that number has gone up to 164. It might not seem like much to those of you who grew up in larger cities and went to larger schools, but I can tell you the action has been fast and furious as people who now live in Amarillo, Texas; Owensboro, Kentucky; Collinsville, Alabama; Sarasota, Florida; Fort Worth, Texas; Sun Valley, Nevada; and places closer to Sumner, have converged "to remember this and remember that."

Which leads me to some thoughts about nostalgia. We've all heard how dangerous such remembering only for the sake of remembering can be for the writer. We're too tempted in the midst of all that recollecting to romanticize our history, whether we're talking about novels or stories or poems or works of nonfiction, to portray our  hometowns with the elevated homage that Garrison Keillor, tongue-in-cheek, pays to his fictional hometown of Lake Woebegone, Minnesota, in his Prairie Home Companion radio broadcasts. Lake Woebegone,  "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Well, the truth of course, is that no matter where we grew up not all of the women were strong, nor all of the men good looking, and most certainly there were children who were below average. Such are the facts of human flaws and weaknesses. The good novel or story or poem or essay recognizes those facts and uses whatever personal history the writer carries to the page to help him or her (and, by extension, us) to see human existence with more clarity, taking in not only the strong, good looking, and above average, but all the opposites as well as they often exist within the same person. To portray, in other words, people and their actions just the way they are, composed of contradictions and complexities. In my own work, I'm always trying to figure out the source of people's behaviors, not so I can condone nor condemn, but so I can understand, and by understanding, feel closer to the tribe of human beings, all of us precious because sometimes we're less than perfect.

In the midst of all the reminiscing on this Facebook group last night, what struck me most was the vibrant textures of people's lives. From the story of being sent, as a five-year-old, to the grocery store to buy over-the-counter medication for a flu-stricken family, the five-year-old deciding to haul her cat along in her red wagon, to the amazing home movie footage of a 1968 tornado that hit Sumner, the voices and images of people's histories, and of the town's history, rang out with great resonance.  The story of the actor Burt Lancaster coming to town, unannounced, to attend a funeral. The elderly woman who got her shopping cart stuck trying to push it across the train tracks and then didn't get out of the way of an oncoming locomotive. The British woman who worked at the bank. The Vietnam veteran who came home minus a leg. The young man who died working a drilling rig in the oil fields. The night watchman, rattling doors on the shops uptown to make sure they were secure. The attempted robbery of the bank and the dent a bullet left in one of the bars that the tellers sat behind. The list goes on, and what strikes me is the humanity contained in all those memories.

The lesson for the writer? Don't shy away from the history of your hometown. There's great material in all those memories if you can manage to tame the honorific impulse of nostalgia and to see the facts for what they are–evidence of the lived life in all its many layers and mysteries. You can't be afraid to see the ugly, the maimed, the tragic, the less than perfect, along with the glorious, the vibrant, the triumphant, the ideal. See it all. Remember it all. Let it amuse you, sadden you, mystify you, but above all, let it move you. Then put the words on the page so they can do the same for your readers.

 

The Forgotten Places: Our Shrinking Rural Areas

An Associated Press news article reports this morning that the rural United States now holds only 16% of the population. In 1910, the year my mother was born, 72% of the population lived in rural areas. It's no surprise to me that more and more of us live in cities, but one sentence in this article is stunning: "Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say."

I worry for what's going on out there in rural America. How can its remaining people have a voice in our country when they make up such a small percentage of our population? I fear that the smaller their numbers, the easier it will be for those in power to overlook them. Another article in my morning paper reports that folks who live in rural areas have more chronic health problems and less access to quality care. How will this situation ever improve as the economic slide and the population drain continue to hit the rural areas the hardest?

When I return to my hometown in southeastern Illinois these days, I'm saddened by how far its fallen into disrepair. A number of homes are abandoned or neglected, my childhood home among them. The last time I drove past it, I could tell that no one was living there, and I  remembered how well my father and mother always cared for it. It sits on a double lot, and I could see the fruit trees my father planted behind the house, now in  need of pruning. I saw the detached garage looking more rickety than I'd ever seen it. The shrubs around the house were overgrown. The mailbox on a post by the front step had its lid hanging open. The grass was wild and badly in need of cutting.

I recall what Nick Carraway says in The Great Gatsby: "Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe." He's talking about how his native land felt to him after he got back from the Great War and then decided to go East where he met Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and Jordan and got caught up in the ragged edges of their lives. At the end of the novel, when Nick knows he's going to return to the Midwest, he recalls the train rides of his youth, coming home from prep school and later from college in the East. He talks about the train coming into Chicago's Union Station, and how when it pulled out again into the winter night, it took him into what he calls "the real snow, our snow," the snow of his native Midwest:

We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That's my Middle West–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

As is the case with Nick, this feeling of coming home has never left me even though it's been over thirty-five years since I've lived in Illinois. I made my way out a long time ago. I went where school and work took me. My heart's still there, though, in the small towns and on the farms that were so much a part of my growing up. Perhaps I do penance for leaving by writing the books I do about that place and my characters who live there. I suppose I'm in the position that so many of the people who have fled for the cities are in; I've had to go where the better opportunities are. Sometimes, like now, I feel guilty about that. I feel guilty that the novels, and stories, and essays I write about that place can't do more to fix what's wrong. At the least, I hope that I provide, along with a number of other writers who write about the forgotten places, a voice in the literary world for those people who are shrinking, every trace of them threatening to disappear.

One Part of Me and Another Part of Me: Deepening the Important Moments in Memoir

Last week, I spent five days teaching a creative nonfiction workshop for ten high school students who were participating in our Young Writers Workshop at Ohio State University. Twenty-eight rising juniors and seniors from Columbus City Schools gathered for a week-long immersion into the study of creative writing. This is a residential program that allows the students to live in a dorm and to experience college life. It's also a chance for them to benefit from the instruction of faculty and MFA students from the Ohio State Creative Writing Program, as well as other writers who are usually Ohio State MFA alums, and who teach at other institutions. This year, the fiction writer, Mike Kardos, and the poet, Catherine Pierce (they happen to be married and they brought along their adorable baby, Sam), who teach at Mississippi State University, taught workshops in their respective genres. The students took classes in their primary, secondary, and tertiary genres in the mornings–so everyone had instruction and practice in all three genres–and then attended their primary workshop each afternoon. This is a program that I founded three  years ago with a gift from an extremely generous donor who was interested in doing something with the Ohio State Creative Writing Program that would benefit students from Columbus City Schools. I think we've hit  upon the right sort of program, patterned after other such summer workshops for young writers, the only difference being this: thanks to the gift from our donor, none of our students have to pay a cent for this experience. My colleague, Michelle Herman, now directs the program and takes it in new and interesting directions as it continues to grow.

One of the first things I learned from this year's group of nonfiction writers was that they hadn't read all that much nonfiction, though some of them had read memoirs such as Ellie Wiesel's Night, or The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I started our first workshop with an ice breaker that also serves as a writing exercise. It's my old standard, my shoe exercise, where I ask students to recall pairs of shoes that they can remember from their childhoods. Then I ask them to choose the pair of shoes from their list that seems to be calling them most strongly. I tell them that this attraction is usually because there's something unresolved in their life experience that is brought to the surface by those shoes. We then do a freewrite that begins with the words,  "I was wearing them the day. . . ." The shoes really don't matter, of course. They're only a trick that allows the students to recall some sort of complicated moment from their lives. I keep telling myself I'll come up with a new ice-breaker and exercise, but this one works so well that I usually stick with it.

It's one thing, of course, for the nonfiction writer to recall a complicated moment from the past. Perhaps it's a moment of choice, or a moment in which something out of our hands happens and changes us forever. It's another thing, though, to write vertically down through the layers of that experience to articulate and interrogate its complexity. So my exercise allowed the students to dramatize a significant moment without paying much service to investigating the many aspects of that significance.

That's why at midweek, I gave them another exercise. I asked them to think about the moment of complexity in the short piece of memoir they'd written from that first exercise. Then I asked them to find a place where they could insert a sentence that began with the words, "One part of me wanted/hoped/feared. . . ." Then I asked them to insert another sentence that began, "Another part of me, though, thought . . . ." The results were immediate and wonderful.

So this is now my sure-fire way of getting students to deepen the significant moments of their memoirs. "One part of me. . . , but another part of me. . . ." Of course, the language doesn't have to be exactly like that. Any variation will work. The important thing is to investigate your own contradictions. My ten young writers were eager and willing, and I was so proud of their results.

BREAK THE SKIN at the Richland County Fair

My special correspondent in Southeastern Illinois offers up a report from this year's Richland County Fair in Olney.

The traditional foods are back: funnel cakes, lemon shake-ups, corn dogs, cotton candy, salt water taffy, pork burgers, etc. My correspondent reports that the 4-H Club's lemon shakeups were the best from all the stands offering that drink

Olney is the "Home of the White Squirrels," due to the albino squirrels that have been there since around 1900. There are a couple of different stories about the origin of the first pair of these squirrels, and one of those stories involves my ancestor, George W. Ridgley, who owned a farm six miles southeast of Sumner. I've written about George and his connection to the Martin family in my memoir, Turning Bones. At any rate, the story goes that George found a white squirrel and a cream-colored one in the woods on his farm. With the help of a neighbor, John Robinson, he captured the squirrels and was able to raise several litters in an eight by six-feet cage before bringing a pair to Olney to sell to Jasper Banks, who owned a saloon. Mr. Banks kept the squirrels on display in "JAP's Place," until the state legislature made it illegal to confine wild animals. At that point, Mr. Banks released the squirrels near his home at 802 Silver Street, and hence the colony began.

The reason I offer this information about the white squirrels in Olney is to help you better understand the new fair food that my special correspondent reports: The White Squirrel Tail. Yum-yum! This is a Zero candy bar on a stick, dipped in funnel cake batter, deep fried, and sprinkled with powered sugar. Other foods that I don't recall from my childhood days spent at the fair include fried green beans and walleye sandwiches.

The special event of the fair last night was the tractor pull, a time-honored tradition that I recall from my childhood. For those of you who've never witnessed such a thing, it involves people seeing whose tractor can pull the most weight the farthest. I remember watching this event from the grandstand with my father. I remember the dust and the noise as the tractors pulled the sleds stacked with weights. I also remember when the county fair featured harness horse racing. Some relatives on my mother's side of the family owned and trained harness horses, and we'd watch them race at a specific gait. The horses were either trotters or pacers, and if they broke their gait during the race they were disqualified. They were harnessed to two-wheeled carts called sulkies. If you're interested in a terrific short story that features a trotting horse, a sulky, and an incompetent family, try "The Neighbor" by Russell Banks.

Each fair has a queen, and said royalty gets her picture taken a number of times for the local newspaper. She gets her picture taken with the winners of the tractor pull, the demolition derby, the talent show, the livestock exhibits. 4-H kids who have raised animals "show" them, and judges pick winners in a variety of classes. You can open the paper in the weeks to come and see these kids and the fair queen smiling alongside cows and hogs and sheep and the like. A representative from the local supermarket who's purchased the winning entry is also in these pics. Yep, the animal's prize for being "Best in Class" is a trip to the butcher, and the kid who raised that animal is grinning to beat the band. My correspondent reports that this year the stock barns held some excellent Angus cattle, some very cute rabbits with floppy ears, a white calf (hmm, maybe next year's White Calf Tails?), a duck who was very vocal, and also a group of chickens. At one point, my correspondent's nearly six-year old companion called out, "Mom," and all the chickens started clucking.

For the nearly six-year-old, the highlight of the fair was, of course, the rides, but she wasn't overly impressed with the kiddie ferris wheel. It bored her so that she almost fell asleep. She preferred the big kid swings, the giant slide, the fun house, and a ride that let her drive a firetruck. I remember being partial to the merry-go-round when I was that age. Then, when I got a little older, I tried out the more exciting rides like The Scrambler, the ride where you spin in cars and have the illusion that you'll crash into other spinning cars. I remember riding this when I was a kid and the cushion of the seat slipping off from the force of the car being pushed out and spun and pulled back. For some reason, I didn't get sick that time, which was my usual response to such rides. Maybe it was because I was too worried about the cushion.

My special correspondent also reports that the fair brought out a number of people who were heavily tattooed. I remember when the only tattoos I ever saw were on the arms of men who had been in the Navy. My cousin had a tattoo of a mermaid that he could make dance. Nowadays, though, ink belongs to the anyone with the money and the nerve to walk into a tat parlor and make a request.

It strikes me that Laney and Delilah and Rose and Tweet and Lester from my novel, Break the Skin, would have fit in quite nicely on that midway. After all, Olney is the model for Mt. Gilead in that novel. I like to think of Delilah taking aim at Rose on the bumper cars, Tweet trying his hand at the ring toss, Lester trying to win Laney a stuffed animal by throwing darts at balloons, and Laney taking it all in with her big eyes, taking in the magic of the fair, where, as my special correspondent reports, "a good time was had by all."