Lee Martin's Blog, page 74

Seduce Me: Editor, Teacher, Reader

I had a very pleasant experience last week. I serve as the Fiction Editor at a literary journal, which means that every so often, the Managing Editor sends me a packet of stories that have made it through the first readers and now get my consideration. I choose a few each time that I think deserve to be in a future issue.

One story from last week's packet caught me immediately and wouldn't let me go. The world of the story was so richly rendered, the characters so complicated and interesting, the premise so fresh, the ending so resonant. I had to have this story, and to our great fortune it was still available.

When I looked at the author's name, it seemed familiar to me. Where had I heard it before? A quick Google search confirmed what I thought was the case. Twelve years ago, when I was the Editor-in-Chief of another journal, I'd published a story by this same writer. I believe it may have been the first or second story that he'd ever placed. I remember that he was a student in a good MFA program at the time. His career was just beginning.

What a thrill it was to see this new story from him, and to fall in love with it without even knowing it was his. How happy I was to see that he was still writing, still creating gorgeous, moving fiction. My research tells me that he's still waiting to publish that first book, and I know I'm rooting for him to have that golden call one day soon, the call that tells him an editor has fallen in love with his manuscript and wants to bring it out into the world.

I entered my own MFA program in 1982, and it was 1987 when I placed my first story in a literary journal. It was 1996 when my first book came out, fourteen years past the date when I decided to get serious about writing. You can see, then, why I like these examples of folks who keep working at their craft. So  much of our work is a matter of perseverance as we dedicate ourselves to what we love.

We are, after all, a small family of writers, books published or not, stories or essays or poems published or not. We reach out to a reader, and sometimes we're lucky enough to make a connection. This story of the writer I found twelve years ago and found again last week reminds me of one of the reasons I started writing. I wanted to touch someone, wanted to move at least one person with words. I'm reading an MFA thesis right now (it's that season here at Ohio State), and I'm having that exact experience, the feeling that I'm alone with a writer and he's telling me things, the most private things, and I've stopped reading to find fault. I'm reading because it's necessary. If I stop, I'll be less somehow. I keep reading because this one person has so much to shape and show me. I am utterly and willingly seduced.

On Mother's Day

Here on the day before Mother's Day, I feel like writing a little bit about my own mother who has been gone now for 23 years. She was a grade school teacher for 38 years, beginning when she was 18, as was possible in 1928. She taught during the school year and then went to Eastern Illinois University in the summers to work on her degree. At the end of the summer, she came home to begin the next school year.

This was in southeastern Illinois where she taught at places such as Victory, Berryville, Calhoun, and Claremont. In the early 1960s, the school board at Claremont refused to renew her contract because they felt she didn't discipline her students severely enough when they needed it. Funny, because I remember a story about her tying a boy to a chair when he refused to behave. Took a rope and tied him to a chair. Sounds pretty severe to me. That boy must have gotten under her skin and chewed through her last nerve. I can barely imagine my mother doing something like that because she was the kindest, most compassionate person I ever knew. She could be timid. She could go unnoticed because she never drew attention to herself. She believed in forgiveness. She didn't hold stock in gossip. She knew that anyone, no matter his or her flaws, deserved our understanding. Anything I learned about how to treat people, and I'm not sure I've learned enough, came from her.

She never asked for me. I came unexpectedly into her life when she was 45 and my father was 42. I was her only child, and she loved me even when I disappointed her. She taught school, taking a position in Oak Forest, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, after losing her job downstate, and at the same time she gave my father the assistance he needed after the farming accident that cost him both of his hands. On top of all that, she found herself having to raise a son well into her middle years. I never heard her complain. She was a woman of endurance and charity and faith.

A part of me feels guilty for writing about her in this post, for having written about her in my memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones, for having posted her photo on my Facebook page today because she was such a private person, and I'm not sure that she'd approve of any of this if she were still alive. In the past, I've written about her to try to understand the story of our family. Today I write about her (and I post these photos) because she was indeed a person that folks might have barely given a second thought, unless, that is, they happened to be the recipient of her kindness. I write about her to know that her life mattered. Even now, all these years later, I carry her with me every day. I wonder how many of her students over the years have been glad that she was their teacher.

I know this: We've all been blessed by the presence of good, loving women. May our Mother's Day be filled with memories of the ones who have made a difference in our lives. Peace and love to everyone.

 

 

 

The Put-Upon: From the Heart in the Heartland

Oh, Lordy, here I go again, a splinter under my skin that I just have to worry up to light and air.

This time, it's the term, "trailer trash," that's got me worked up. A name for those folks in economic dire straits with fewer and fewer chances to rise above their circumstances. A category into which to bunch the "miscreants," the "losers," the"hoodlums," the "hillbillies," the "rednecks," the "worthless,"  the "shiftless," the "lowlifes." To put them there so as not to have to think of them as human, as people just like anyone, people who want comfort in their lives, who want to love and to be loved in return. People who want to lie down at night and close their eyes and feel the contentment of a life full of splendor. Who doesn't want that?

Want to hear a term even more offensive than "trailer trash?" Try "tornado bait." Try that out for size, particularly now when the spring storms are wreaking havoc across the country. Look at the photos of the damage–homes destroyed, lives lost–and ask yourself how anyone can  say those words. A turn here or there, a misstep, and that's us on the evening news.

I grew up in a part of the country, the agricultural southeastern Illinois, where want was often the norm: want for food, want for shelter, want for comfort, want for love, want for opportunity. My family was luckier than most because my mother taught school, and no matter the whims of weather that could decrease the value of my father's farm crops, we had her paycheck to keep us steady. Then one year she lost her job. The school board forced her to resign because they claimed she wasn't strict enough with discipline. There we were, having to watch our pennies.

I remember my father driving us into Sumner on certain Saturdays to meet the commodities train. My grandmother lived with us, and she was blind with cataracts in a time when there wasn't much to be done about that fact the way there is now. She received what they called "old age assistance." I remember the line of folks at the railroad crossing in Sumner, standing there with their empty cardboard boxes, their bushel baskets, waiting for the train to arrive, waiting to fill those boxes and baskets with containers of powered milk, syrup, dry beans, peanut butter, rice, and more. I was too young to feel ashamed. I thought it was all grand.

Were we trailer trash? I suppose not since we still had our land and our house, but still we were struggling, the way so many people are these days. We were standing in that commodities line for a handout. I prefer to think of us at that time, just like I think of many of my characters, as being put-upon.

Here's what I know: People end up in dire straits, sometimes from their own poor choices, sometimes because of circumstances they can't control, and sometimes by a combination of both. "You could be that person you saw sometimes on the news," Laney says at the end of my novel, Break the Skin, "that person who'd done something unforgivable and could barely face it. Trust me, I wanted to say. It can happen."

I understand the impetus for those ugly terms of  "trailer trash" and "tornado bait." Generally, people use them so they won't have to look too closely into the spirit of a person in trouble. Maybe it's easier to dismiss that person than to face the fact that  he or she isn't as different from us as we might want to think.

What does this have to do with writing? Empathy. The ability to live inside someone 's skin. It's everything. The "put-upon" have voices. I tried my best to listen to them when I wrote Break the Skin. I didn't mind where my characters happened to live. I didn't mind the ill-considered moves they'd made. I felt privileged to be invited into their stories, to see what they had to teach me about the human heart and its longings.

 

Get to Work: The Value of Jobs in Narratives

Yesterday in my fiction workshop, I was talking about the value of having something for the main characters of a story to do. I've always thought that jobs were useful in this regard. A character in a story can engage in all sorts of interesting activities on the basis of his or her job alone. This can also be true in creative nonfiction. Jobs require action, and action reveals character while also constructing a narrative.

Some years back, a friend sent me a letter. Yes, it was that long ago. A time before the time when we had e-mail. A time when people still wrote letters. Anyway, my friend worked for a realtor, and she was telling me in this letter that the man who owned her agency had a number of duplexes that he rented to folks. Recently, a murder/suicide had taken place in one of his duplexes, and after the police released the crime scene, the landlord had to call in a man to clean the house, a man who specialized in such cleaning. "I thought this sounded like your kind of story," my friend wrote to me. She was absolutely right, no matter what admitting that might say about me.

I wasn't so much interested in the gruesome details of the job as I was in how different it seemed. It wasn't what I considered an ordinary job, but it was a job nonetheless, one someone had to do, and I thought it would be interesting to write a story about such a man to see how I could use the facts of his job to explore whatever was going on inside his own house.

When I write a story, it's usually premise that interests me first. I'm willing to let the more abstract concerns of the story surface through my attention to characters involved in a chain of "and then, and then, and then." So I wrote the first line of this story: "When I was a boy, my father cleaned up crime scenes." Okay. Got that ball up into the air. Now, what else to go with it?

Well, if there's a son, there's probably a mother. Hmm. . .wonder what she does for a living? "This was the year she wrote travel  guides to countries she had never seen. . . .She spent her days in the reference room of the public library [using encyclopedias, almanacs, and hotel registries to gather information about various sites]."

Hmmm. . .a library. Bet there's a research librarian there. What if the librarian is a man, and what if the mother is smitten with him, and what if the son comes home from school one day and finds his mother and the librarian sitting on the sofa in the living room? What if the boy's father unexpectedly comes home from work early? What if he's got a story to tell about something that happened while he was on the job? What if the librarian, a know-it-all, is unsettled by this story? What if the father doesn't particularly cotton to this man being in his house? What if the librarian says he has something the father should know, and what if the son realizes the family is on the brink of coming apart: "I sensed, even then, that a decision was about to be made, but that no one had the courage to make it. It would be years before I would understand that it had something to do with the violence we can do to love, and the will it takes to mend it."

There I am at the climatic moment of the story, or am I? In a story that starts in the particulars of jobs and becomes a story about how much we can stand to know about ourselves and the people we say we love, perhaps there's one more thing to be revealed.

"But that's not the story I need to tell," the narrator says, "at least not all of it." Then he confesses his shame over rebuffing an unpopular girl at school who one day laid a love note on his desk. A few days later, she committed suicide, and it was that scene that the father was referring to when he told the librarian his story.

So much surfacing through the details of the characters' work. So much arrived at because I got curious about what people did for their livings. The story ends with the father's mental breakdown and eventual recovery. The son longs for him to come home from the hospital and for life to start for them again. The story ends with this passage:

The best part of his job, he always said, was leaving a house after everything was clean: "What keeps me going is thinking about years later, when it no longer matters who we were or what we did while we were alive. Someone else will live in that house, and if they're lucky, they'll never hear about the horrible thing that happened there."

That was the blessing he left them, he said, the one they would never know.

My apologies for writing at such length about my own story, "The Least You Need to Know," but I wanted to illustrate how much mileage a writer can get from giving characters jobs. Those jobs, whether in fiction or nonfiction, can become metaphors for the larger concerns of the material. Jobs can also lay out a series of events in the narrative because jobs require action and can include complications. Finally, jobs and the actions they require can reveal the layers that make up characters. I've used my father's job of farming in a number of essays and in my full-length memoir, From Our House. Real people have jobs, too (well, if they're lucky these days), and those jobs can do the same things in nonfiction as they do in fiction.

I guess there's nothing left for us now but to get to work.

E-Readers and Public Library Books: A Tribe of Readers

An article in this morning's Columbus Dispatch regarding e-readers and the downloading of library books has me thinking about how we've been quick to exchange an aesthetic experience for convenience. I already have nostalgia for the now defunct card catalog in libraries. How close are we to only having virtual libraries and no printed materials at all?

I've always been one to believe that there are too many of us who are in love with the sensory experience of a book (the feel of the paper, the smell of the binding, etc.) as well as with the artistry that goes into making such an object, that books will always exist.

But listen to how Robin Nesbitt, director for technical services for the Columbus Metropolitan Library,  is indirectly quoted in this article: If users flock to digital books, it's possible Columbus and other libraries will begin to shift their materials budgets from physical to digital versions. I don't know about you, but that leaves me just a tad uneasy, even though a librarian friend of mine says that she thinks for the time being e-books and printed books will have a friendly coexistence in our public libraries.

Here's a link to the article, in case you're interested:

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/04/23/amazon-finally-adding-library-books-to-its-kindle.html?sid=101

I was watching a scene in a movie recently where someone was showing a card catalog to someone else, and it brought back memories of sliding out a drawer and flipping through the index cards. I remember how I could slide a drawer all the way out and rest it on a table if I chose. I remember the little pull-out shelf that I could use to rest a notebook on and jot down the call number for a book I wanted. Who can forget those stubby pencils in a box for anyone who needed one and the slips of paper that you could use if you didn't have a notebook?

What a joy it was to wander through the stacks, looking for the books on my list, gathering them in my arms, and hauling them to the front desk where the librarian would remove the cards from the pockets inside the covers and stamp them with the due dates, which he or she would also record on the slip of  paper glued inside the back cover. That slip would have a record of all the other due dates for patrons who had checked that book out before I found it. What a miracle, I still think, that we can essentially be given the gift of a library book. For a time, it's ours, free of charge. All we have to do is to agree to bring it back. And, oh, what things one can find in those books, items left behind by others who've read it–a grocery list used as a bookmark, a dogeared page, maybe even a penciled exclamation in the margin, a stain from a coffee cup, a burn hole from a cigarette, a hairpin, a paper clip. All the signs of others come before me, signs of this tribe of readers.

What will our signs be if printed books vanish and our novels, our collections of poems and stories, our nonfiction books, are merely blips of data stored on computer chips? How will we know that others have read these "books," that they mattered, not only to a single reader, but in a way to all of us?

 

 

Make Room, Make Room!: Landscape, Character, the Writer's Heart

Last Thursday, I did a reading at Indiana University-East in Richmond, Indiana. The reading was in the library on campus, and the podium was in front of a wall of glass that looked out onto a grassy area at the edge of woodlands. Just as my excellent host, TJ Rivard, called me to the podium, two does came out of the woods and ran across the grass. I've never been upstaged by deer, but it was a wonderful upstaging, the grace and sudden appearance of those does at a time when those of us inside had nary a thought that my reading would feature wildlife. How could I even hope to complete with the grace and wonder and beauty of that sudden and breathtaking appearance?

After my reading, a woman came from the audience to say, "I'm glad you're writing about the Midwest." The woman then went on to tell me about a well-known writer, whom she didn't name, from "back East," who, at a writers' colony, asked her where she was from. "Indiana," said the woman. The response from the well-known writer? "I hate Indiana."

That's the sort of story that makes me bristle because it smacks of the disparaging eye folks often cast on the Midwest, particularly the rural parts of it, the parts that have always seemed like home to me. What is it about people that makes them want to think that nothing noteworthy goes on in those small towns and in those farming communities? What is it that makes it difficult to recognize the beauty of the terrain? To me, even the subtle distinctions between shades of brown in the freshly worked fields this time of year is wonderful. Not to mention the redbud and dogwood in bloom in the woodlands, or the brilliant green of spring wheat, or the skeins of tender soybean plants just now breaking through the soil. Even the winter landscape charms me: a dusting of snow in the furrows of a corn field; the bent stubble; an iced-over pond; the steamy breath from cattle in a feedlot. Something severe and glorious at the same time. Something stark and beautiful. Like the people themselves.

The people are never separate from the landscape, no matter the locale. "Place is fiction," Eudora Welty said, and it's true no matter if we're talking about fiction or nonfiction. People are inextricable from their surroundings. Where they live helps determine what they might and might not do.

Yesterday in my fiction workshop we were talking about a student story set in Ohio. But what part of Ohio, we wanted to know. How does the region come to bear on the characters? Not only is Ohio distinct from Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, it's also distinct in its own regions. Athens is not Columbus is not Cleveland, etc. No matter whether we're writing fiction or nonfiction, we're smart to pay close attention to the settings and to understand that someone's life takes certain directions in part because of the place where those lives begin and unfold. Landscapes are as unique as individuals. Why would we ever disparage a place because of its difference? Why wouldn't we celebrate its idiosyncrasies, knowing that it's the ability to appreciate and respect difference that makes us more fully human? Why would we dismiss any particular part of our planet, knowing, as we surely must, that the same things are going on there as they are anywhere: people are living with whatever it is that pushes and pulls at their hearts and lying down each night, alone in the dark with their various aches and joys. Although different landscapes may influence us, we're all part of the same striving. What would make one so vain, so insular, that he or she wouldn't be able to make room for that fact? I suppose it's the natural inclination toward prejudice, something else that makes us human and something else that requires our understanding.

I know this: nothing is more dangerous for a writer than to be dismissive. To dismiss means to judge, and nothing kills a piece of writing faster than that. Make room, make room! Let the world in all its shades and tones and terrains take you more fully into the human heart.

 

Write a True Thing: Let the Zing Knock You Slobberjawed

Did you hear about the toddler who was served alcohol at an Applebees restaurant in Michigan? Apparently, some left-over mixed cocktails ended up in the apple juice. Now there’s a zing for your tyke to put a little extra giddyup in his roll!

How interesting that when I first typed the last sentence above, I typed, “Now there’s a zing for your type. . . .” Maybe I was tapping into something that I have to say about adding some zest to your typing, as in bringing some energy to your prose. By the way, how did the parents notice that their toddler was tipsy? Don’t all toddlers seem drunk?

But I digress.

The issue relevant to the writer is one of becoming awake to your work and to the world around you. I’m reading the memoir, Townie, but Andre Dubus III right now, and I love the passages where he talks about what it was like for him when he first began to write short stories. After an adolescense and young adulthood of violence, in which he boxed and got into a number of street brawls, one night Dubus picked up a pen and a notebook instead of going out to train for his upcoming Golden Gloves bout, and he began to write. The experience left him, more aware of himself and the world around him:

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing–even writing badly–had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

I talked with my students today about the importance of writing the true things, the things that are genuine and true because they are inextricable from us. I had a teacher once who said he thought that we all had at least one sound that was wholly and purely ours. One of mine is the sound of a wringer washing machine, the kind my mother used each Saturday on the wash porch of our farmhouse. She taught during the week, and before I started school, I stayed with my grandmother during the day. The sound of that wringer washer woke me each Saturday morning and filled me with such a comfort. I knew it was Saturday. I knew my mother was home. For me to write about that sound is an act of faith in the integrity of memory. I don’t have to think about how to choose the words or how to shape them. I only need tap into the deep connection that I have with the sound of that wringer washer. It holds so much that makes me feel awake and alive. It will allow me to write another true thing and yet another, until finally I’ll have an essay, or a story, or a novel. All built on the foundation of something that’s mine, that sound so connected to who I am. Let one true thing create another until, finally, something knocks you all slobberjawed, and there you are, awake.

Write a True Thing: Let the Zing Knock You Slobberjawed

Did you hear about the toddler who was served alcohol at an Applebees restaurant in Michigan? Apparently, some left-over mixed cocktails ended up in the apple juice. Now there's a zing for your tyke to put a little extra giddyup in his roll!

How interesting that when I first typed the last sentence above, I typed, "Now there's a zing for your type. . . ." Maybe I was tapping into something that I have to say about adding some zest to your typing, as in bringing some energy to your prose. By the way, how did the parents notice that their toddler was tipsy? Don't all toddlers seem drunk?

But I digress.

The issue relevant to the writer is one of becoming awake to your work and to the world around you. I'm reading the memoir, Townie, but Andre Dubus III right now, and I love the passages where he talks about what it was like for him when he first began to write short stories. After an adolescense and young adulthood of violence, in which he boxed and got into a number of street brawls, one night Dubus picked up a pen and a notebook instead of going out to train for his upcoming Golden Gloves bout, and he began to write. The experience left him, more aware of himself and the world around him:

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing–even writing badly–had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

I talked with my students today about the importance of writing the true things, the things that are genuine and true because they are inextricable from us.  I had a teacher once who said he thought that we all had at least one sound that was wholly and purely ours. One of mine is the sound of a wringer washing machine, the kind my mother used each Saturday on the wash porch of our farmhouse. She taught during the week, and before I started school, I stayed with my grandmother during the day. The sound of that wringer washer woke me each Saturday morning and filled me with such a comfort. I knew it was Saturday. I knew my mother was home. For me to write about that sound is an act of faith in the integrity of memory. I don't have to think about how to choose the words or how to shape them. I only need tap into the deep connection that I have with the sound of that wringer washer. It holds so much that makes me feel awake and alive. It will allow me to write another true thing and yet another, until finally I'll have an essay, or a story, or a novel. All built on the foundation of something that's mine, that sound so connected to who I am. Let one true thing create another until, finally, something knocks you all slobberjawed, and there you are, awake.

"Live Forever!": Ray Bradbury and What It Takes to Make a Story

Sometime this past autumn Mort Castle, a writer near Chicago, asked me if I'd consider contributing a story to an anthology that he and co-editor, Sam Weller, were putting together. The anthology, Live Forever!, was to be a tribute to Ray Bradbury. I just learned yesterday that the anthology sold at auction last week to an editor at William Morrow and will most likely be out in the summer of 2012.

The title comes from something that happened to Bradbury when he was a boy. He went to a carnival to see a magician named Mr. Electrico. This man sat in an electric chair and was electrocuted at every performance. As the electricity shot through his body, he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row near his platform. Here's how Bradbury describes what happened when it was his turn to be knighted: "When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, 'Live forever!'"

Here's a link to the rest of Bradbury's story about how Mr. Electrico gave him a future with his exhortation and also, the next day, a past when Bradbury returned to the carnival and Mr. Electrico claimed that he, Bradbury, was the reincarnated spirit of an old friend:

http://www.raybradbury.com/inhiswords...

A past and a future. These are important things for the writer to consider when constructing a piece of fiction, even a piece of flash fiction such as Bradbury's "I See You Never," the story of a man sent back to Mexico because he's in America illegally. No matter that he's built a fine life for himself, a pleasant life as the boarder of a woman named Mrs. O'Brien. When the police come for the man, Mr. Ramirez, she says, "I wish there was something I could do." The police lead Mr. Ramirez away, and he calls back to her, "Mrs. O'Brien, I see you never, I see you never!" Mrs. O'Brien returns to her family at the dinner table and is suddenly struck by the sadness of never seeing Mr. Ramirez again:

The policemen waited for Mr. Ramirez to turn, pick up his suitcase, and walk away. Then they followed him, tipping their caps to Mrs. O'Brian. She watched them go down the porch steps. Then she shut the door quietly and went slowly back to her chair at the table. She pulled the chair out and sat down. She picked up the shining knife and fork and started once more upon her steak.

"Hurry up, Mom," said one of the sons. "It'll be cold."

Mrs. O'Brian took one bite and chewed on it for a long, slow time; then she stared at the closed door. She laid down her knife and fork.

"What's wrong, Ma?" asked her son.

"I just realized," said Mrs. O'Brian–she put her hand to her face–"I'll never see Mr. Ramirez again."

The full brunt of her loss comes to her when it's too late for her to express her sadness to him the way he has to her. Notice the irony in that last move, I tell my students when I teach this story, and how it comes to us covertly because a skillful writer lets it emerge from the details of the story's world.

The story I wrote for Live Forever! (I believe that when invitations come, it's the universe's way of telling us we need to accept), "Cat on a Bad Couch," was a response to "I See You Never." My story started with something close at hand I could grab onto. Someone in our neighborhood had lost a cockatiel, a bird called Popcorn. Popcorn was missing, and the story made the local news. The owner posted signs far and near, started a web site, gave interviews, had an open cage installed on the top of his house, in hopes that Popcorn would one day fly into it and be home. I knew I wanted that to be the main thread of my story, but I also knew, like a trump card, I wanted to save it and not play it until the other threads demanded it, in fact created it.

I didn't know what those other threads would be, but I was willing to use the core of the Bradbury story to help me find them. In tribute to "I See You Never," I wanted to write a story about someone who is unable to fully connect with the one person left who might be most sympathetic to what he's lost in his life. So I knew I had a story about neighbors, my narrator and the man across the street, a man who owned a cockatiel.

As Charles Baxter tells us in his book of craft essays, Burning Down the House, so much of writing stories requires us to be good matchmakers. Think of The Odd Couple. Felix and Oscar: two characters who are interesting because they're so different (one a neat freak, the other a slob) but also because they share something (the sadness that comes after a marriage breaks up or threatens to end). How important it is that they have this in common. How funny and interesting their dynamic is because they get on each other's nerves due to their different lifestyles. Just enough alike and just enough not alike to make for an interesting character pairing.

So a neighbor who owns a cockatiel, and why not a narrator across the street whose marriage is shaky and whose wife adopts a snarly, ill-mannered, street cat she names Henry? And what if, the cockatiel owner is one of the boat people from Cuba who left behind the love of his life? And what if the narrator has a drinking problem which leads him to buying an ugly couch? And what if the cockatiel owner receives a letter from his lost love? And of course the narrator has to have something to do with that cockatiel's disappearance. . .and there's that cat. . .

In the midst of all that what-iffing, I'm setting in motion three distinct threads: the story of the cockatiel (a present action), the story of the woman left behind in Cuba (a crucial part of the cockatiel owner's past), the story of the narrator's marriage (the cat, the couch, the drinking), all in preparation for the major thrust of the story, the cockatiel's disappearance and what it'll mean to the relationship between the two neighbors.

The point here? One thread has a hard time making a story. In addition to the dramatic present, there's a past and a future bearing down on it, leading us to a moment at the end of the story, where past, present, and future co-exist. Think of Mr. Ramirez heading back to Mexico at the end of "I See You Never." Think of Mrs. O'Brien looking both back and ahead as she mourns his leaving. Think of birds flying away, old loves returning, a cat on a bad couch in a house where a man faces up to his life. Everything co-existing because there's no other choice. That's what creates the electricity in a story, that spark, that exhortation to "Live forever!"

 

 

 

 

Western Carolina Literary Festival and Thoughts on Teachers and Novel Revision

I just got back from the Western Carolina Literary Festival at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, from where I'd hoped to do a new post, but, gosh-darn it, the lit fest was just too hoppin' of a place. So now, back on flat land, I write to report on the festival, the climate and terrain, and whatever else nudges its way into this post.

The very excellent Catherine Carter and Brian Gastle picked me up at the Asheville airport Saturday evening and took me to dinner at the very excellent vegetarian/vegan restaurant, The Laughing Seed. We laughed, and we "seed" and were "seen" in  return. Catherine has a new book of poems coming out from LSU Press, and Brian is apparently a Renaissance man (he's actually a Medievalist) as he not only chairs the English Department at WCU but also prepares excellent Ethiopian food, keeps bees, drives a snazzy sports car, and can perform Old English recitations. I greatly enjoyed my time with Catherine and Brian, who also drove me back to the airport on Wednesday. Catherine even made vegan sandwiches for me so I could have something to eat before my plane departed. I won't soon forget Catherine and Brian's warm hospitality.

Nor will I forget the good humor and care of the festival coordinator, Mary Adams, another member of the WCU English Deptartment, who happens to be a fine writer, and that most excellent of all human beings–a lover of animals. On Sunday morning, Mary took me to the home of Karl and Veronica (Karl is an emeritus professor of linguistics, and Veronica is, like Mary, a great animal lover) who on Sunday open their home to whoever wants to drop by for breakfast. The call the gathering "The Church of the Pina Colada" because from what I can tell that tends to be the drink of choice. Karl and Veronica were kind enough to indulge my nearly vegan diet by preparing blueberry pancakes with soy milk instead of the regular stuff and soy sausage patties and links. As we say in the small town social items of the newspaper from the place where I grew up in southeastern Illinois, "a good time was had by all." I met actors, musicians, singers, and artists. And Kark had found morel mushrooms in his yard! In southeastern Illinois, one has to tromp through the woods, eyes peeled for those deliciacies. He had them by the baggie full.

Oh, yes, and there was a literary festival! Elizabeth Kostova started things off with a conversation with the book critic from the Asheville newspaper, a conversation in which several audience members participated. The next day, Ginger Murchison and DeLana R.A. Dameron read from their poetry. It was an extremely powerful reading and a fortunate pairing of poets. That evening, Don Lee read from his new novel that's coming out soon, and it was one that the college students in the audience greatly enjoyed–a novel about the Asian-American experience and, as Don said, "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll." The next day, Tuesday, I read from my novel, The Bright Forever (thanks to Brian Lawrence for his generous introduction and his fine conversation and driving later), and it was a treat to have Bret Lott in the audience not only because I admire his work so much but also because he was one of the early supporters of TBF. That evening, Bret read from his own forthcoming novel, a sequel to his book, The Hunt Club. I think I've got Bret thinking now about a web site, a blog, Twitter, Facebook–the whole nine yards. If I can do it, Bret, so can you!

But the highlight for me was speaking to a group of 25 public school teachers at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching. These teachers were spending the week at WCU as part of their in-service training, and they were taking advantage of the lit festival. I and other writers paid them a visit to talk about the writing process, the teaching of writing, our own work, etc. I had breakfast with a few of them before my presentation, and I listened as they talked about how tough things were as far as salary and advancement. I hope it will shock you as much as it did me to hear that some experienced teachers were making around $34,000 a year. I can't tell you how much I admire these people who set our young people off on a path of lifelong learning. It's one of the most important jobs one can have, and, unfortunately, one of the most under-appreciated.

My mother taught third grade for 38 years. At the same time, she took care of my father and me. My father, as many of you may know from reading my work (particularly my memoir, From Our House) that my father lost both of his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He wore prosthetic hands from that day forward, and he continued to farm, but he had to rely on my mother for help with things like greasing the fittings on a combine, milking cows, etc. She did chores in the morning, taught all day, came home and, depending on the season, did more farm work, kept the house in order, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, and somehow found time to prepare her lessons.

I've been thinking quite a bit about mothers today and everything they sacrifice and take on for the sake of their children. Mothers who are also teachers take on so much of the load of educating other people's children. Being with the teachers in North Carolina reminded me of how much we need to champion teachers and to give them the respect and admiration that they so richly deserve. I did my shoe exercise with them, and they told some powerful stories about their own experiences.

Oh, and I managed to read through the novel that I'm revising, the one that I hope will come out after Break the Skin. My agent hasn't seen this book yet. She's only heard a little about the story. The title I'm giving it right now is, Late One Night, and its epigraph comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

On this read-through, I concentrated on seeing how well the elements of the plot (there's a bit of a mystery at the heart of the story) fell into place and were convincing. I changed a few things in that regard, concentrating on the logic of the narrative, but I also took note of some opportunities for enhancing the character relationships in a way that will, I hope, prove more resonant. I did a bit of work with the characters and their interactions today. Now I'm going to put it away and let it cool off again before I read it a second time. This time, I'll be looking at what I can do do make the characters unforgettable and their situation something that will draw out the human heart, or as Faulkner said, "the human heart in conflict."

Now I'm off to what I'm sure will be an excellent reading by visiting writer Rebecca McClanahan here at Ohio State.

More to come soon about all sorts of things. Cheers!