Lee Martin's Blog, page 75

Pass Me the Cookie Cutter, I Have a Novel to Revise

A non-teaching day for me today, so I spent some time this morning looking at the draft of what I hope will be my next novel. I finished the draft back in October, and I've been letting it rest all this time. I hadn't looked at it until recently. Now I'm going through it chapter by chapter to see how it holds together and what I may still need to do to it. I'm trying to go very slowly, and I'm trying to think the way a reader would who had no idea what lay ahead in the book. I'm trying to see how the parts either do or don't fit together. I'm also looking for missed opportunities (particularly involving ironic turns), and I'm taking note of turning points that aren't sharply enough drawn. Finally, I'm taking a hard look at the characters and whether their motivations are clear and believable, and whether their actions are sometimes a little surprising in an inevitable way.

I took a break today to watch the Yankees/Tigers game on ESPN. Hooray for Opening Day! Between innings, I channel-surfed, and for some reason I was fascinated by the show, American Chopper. A reality show (what isn't these days?), the program follows, far as I can tell, a father and his two sons who design and make choppers. I have little interest in motorcycles, and I'm not mechanically inclined, but for some reason I loved looking at this chopper being made. I loved the sight of the bike before the gas tank, the fenders, etc., had been completely cut. I loved the stark look of all that steel before it was shaped and painted. I guess I loved that so much because writing a novel gives me a pleasure that I assume is similar to the reward that those chopper guys get when they envision a design and then set out to make it work. A little cut there, a little cut here, some custom touches, and before too long the bike starts to take its final shape.

A good editor (and eventually we all have to be the best editors we can be for ourselves) can make you feel stupid in a wonderful way. I remember when I got the edits for my first book, I looked through them and time after time I thought to myself, Of course. Why didn't I see that? A novelist's relationship with an editor is so important. I always like to feel that the editor and I are collaborators. The give and take between a writer and an editor should feel like a creative process and not solely a corrective one. My best experiences with editors have been those where she (my editors have always been women) and I threw things back and forth at each other (no, not literal objects, though wouldn't that be interesting?), playing that game of what if? What if this happened? What if Character X said this? Etc. A true creative process much like what goes on in a good writing workshop where like-minded spirits are in sync with the material before them.

When I was in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, I took a workshop with visiting writer, James Leo Herlihy, best known for his novel, Midnight Cowboy. I remember being in Jamie's office one afternoon talking about a draft of one of my stories. I've forgotten a good deal about the story (this was 1983), but I recall that it was set in Evansville, Indiana, and at one point the main character got in a car and made a drive to a local motel.

Jamie and I were doing some version of the what if game, and he said, "So this guy drives up Highway 41, and. . . ."

I stopped him. "So you know Evansville."

"Never been there," he said. "Don't know anything about it."

I was amazed. Highway 41 is the main route through Evansville. Nowhere in the story was it mentioned.

"That's exactly the highway the character would be on," I said.

Jamie looked at me very earnestly. "That number just came into my head. It shows you how in touch I am with the world you've created."

That's what I'm trying to do when I look at the draft of this new novel. I'm trying to make sure I've stitched together a world and its people that will invite my readers in and make them feel that at least for a time, they live there, too. To do that, I have to make the details of that world vivid and convincing. I have to add layers to my characters and their situations, being on the lookout for those aspects of personality that might seem contradictory to the baseline I establish for each main character as the novel gets underway. I'm looking for those variations that make the characters interesting, that get them into trouble, perhaps, and then allow them to try to get out of it. I particularly love it when characters get into trouble in a way that's almost accidental because they have a chance to avoid it but also willful because their choice of action or speech comes from a submerged emotion they didn't even know they had. It's my job to bring that layer of the character up to the top and to let it drive the forward momentum of the book. At least, that's my aim in this particular novel. Naturally, each book finds its own shape. I'm reading now to see if this draft has found its shape, and, if so, what I can do to further define it.

I've been lucky to have wonderful editors who are skilled at entering the worlds of my novels and seeing the same shapes that I do. Then we set about the business of making sure we've cut away anything that doesn't stick to that shape and adding things that do stick in dramatically interesting ways.

I heard the novelist, Thomas Keneally, say once that he couldn't begin a novel until he knew what his cookie cutter was. In other words, the central dramatic event to which everything in the book would stick. The list that Oskar Schindler made of the people he wanted to save from the concentration camps in Keneally's novel, Schindler's Ark (did you know that it was first published with this title and then later reappeared as Schindler's List to tie in with the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name?), for example.

I've always remembered what Keneally said about the cookie cutter that impresses its shape onto the shapeless. My first novel, Quakertown, was a historical novel about the forced relocation of a thriving African-American community in 1920s Texas. My novel, The Bright Forever, was about a young girl who never came home from the library one summer evening. My new book, Break the Skin, that's coming out this June, is about a revenge plot that goes wrong. At some point, perhaps I'll tell you the cookie cutter for this novel in draft that I'm going through now. But not quite yet. I want to make sure everything sticks.

 

 

"Murder" by Barry Lopez: How Do Writers of Memoir Know When to Show and When to Tell?

Yesterday, the first meeting of my Spring Quarter classes, I shared a Barry Lopez piece with my creative nonfiction workshop, a short piece of memoir called "Murder." The essay opens with the then twenty-year-old Lopez setting forth from New Mexico on his way to see his girlfriend in Salt Lake City. He's carefree, enjoying the pleasure of driving, and is as innocently in love as, he tells us, one can only be at that age. Then he nearly clips a police car making a K-turn outside a small Utah town, and Lopez, gaining control of his car, drives slowly and carefully until he can pull into the lot of an A & W, where he watches the police car drive on by. As he eats his lunch in his car, a strange woman opens the door and gets inside. After some chit-chat, she asks him what she's come to ask: "Will you kill my husband?" Said husband is alone in a garage outside the city limits, working on his car. The woman has the gun. All Barry Lopez need do is go out to that garage and murder her husband.

This essay is a grand example of how to use narrative in a piece of memoir, how to build tension from the complications that come to bear on the original premise (the trip to Salt Lake), how to move our narrator to a moment of choice, and then to let that choice have far-reaching consequences.

I'm hoping now, of course, that the longer I keep talking about the essay, them more you're wanting me to shut up and to get back to the story where I left it so you can know what  happened. Did Lopez agree to the woman's request? The delight of narrative is the delay of information. The writer promises us something. We anticipate what's to come. How long can the writer put off delivering the piece of information we most want to know?

In a skillfully constructed scene of dialogue, each distinct section of that dialogue paced expertly with description and stage business, each "beat" of the scene building in intensity from the "beats" that come before it, Lopez doesn't say a word, doesn't respond to the woman at all, and, finally, his silence makes his choice clear to her and she leaves the car. "I sensed a border I did not know," he tells us.

The climactic moment of the narrative done, all that remains is the brief falling away of the resolution, but it's that falling away that contains the most important part of the piece, the effect that the encounter with the woman has had on Lopez and how it's changed him. This is the point where many writers of memoir would retreat to that position of the writer at the desk speaking in a more reflective voice, telling us what this experience did to him. Lopez, though, remains the participant, the character in the midst of the dramatic present of the narrative. He drives out of town, the joy of that activity now ruined for him, paying careful attention to staying within the law. He stops to let his dog out to run, watches the dog enjoying his playtime, and then suddenly impatient, Lopez whistles for the dog to return and the narrative ends. It's clear to us without him having to say as much that the encounter with the woman has shown him the ugly side of adult love and has, as one of my students pointed out during our discussion, murdered the innocent love that Lopez felt in the beginning of the narrative.

I offer this description of the piece because it's made me think, as it always does, about Patricia Hampl's observation that unlike fiction, which operates so much on scenic depiction (showing), memoir gets to show and tell, gets to move from scene to reflection, gets to utilize the character that the writer was at a previous time as well as the person that writer is now. It leads me to this question: How does the writer of memoir know when to show and when to tell? How did Barry Lopez know that showing was sufficient at the end of this piece, sufficient to create the experience for the reader that he wanted this narrative to provide?

I'm going to let the question of when to show and when to tell hang in the air at the end of this post in hopes that some of you will make a comment and together we can start to figure this out. As writers of memoir (or even as fiction writers who create first-person narrators), how do we know when to let the scene do the work and when to give that scene the extra help that the more reflective, thinking mode can provide? I'm eager to hear your thoughts.

 

Our Lives Are in the Details: Notice Everything

Sundays often tempt me to give in to nostalgia. Probably because I'm getting older and there's more to look back on than there used to be, or maybe there's something about the day that's still a day of quiet for me, the way it was when I was younger and Sunday meant church and then afternoons of leisurely visits and stories told, a time of pause before the work and school week took up again. I still feel the rhythm of those Sundays, even this is a much different time than it was, and I go more inside myself and often end up looking backward. I've often thought that this is the way the writer (well, at least this writer) operates best. I move out into the world and then retreat from it so I can process what's been happening out there for me. I guess I need to let things settle and leave their mark on me so I can make something of the experience later.

Tomorrow, for example, I'll start the new Spring Quarter here at Ohio State, engaging with thirty new students, fifteen in each class I'll be teaching, an advanced undergraduate workshop in fiction and another one in nonfiction. I'll spend ten weeks moving back and forth between the two genres. This Friday, we'll be hosting our Open House for newly admitted MFA students, and I'll be doing my part to welcome them and to try to sell our program to them so that by April 15, the national day of reckoning for such matters, they'll be willing to say yes and become Buckeyes in the autumn. Then on Saturday I'll be off to Cullowhee, North Carolina, to appear at the Western Carolina Literary Festival along with a group of writers I'm looking forward to getting to know. The world made big and then small, shrinking from classrooms and airports and auditoriums to the 200 square feet of my writing room.

Just recently, I made my first Facebook connection with someone I knew when I was in the seventh and eighth grade at Arbor Park Middle School in Oak Forest, Illinois, and our pleasant exchanges have made me nostalgic for those days. Although I was born in Lawrence County, downstate, my parents and I moved to Oak Forest when I was in the third grade. My mother was a grade school teacher, and she took a teaching position in Arbor Park District 145. Thus began six years of moving back and forth between Oak Forest and our farm in southeastern Illinois. We spent our  holidays and summers on the farm, and the school year in Oak Forest. As a result, I always felt like a "tweener," not fully belonging in either place. I've read that the creative impulse often comes from this being caught between two cultures, which was certainly the case for me. Folks in Oak Forest had customs and language that were different from what I'd known in our rural part of the state. In Oak Forest, folks ate lunch at noon and not dinner as we did on the farm. Their dinner was the evening meal, which we called supper. Up north, as my father always called Oak Forest, people said "wash" instead of "warsh." They said "root" with a short "o" sound instead of the long "o" common downstate.  As a child, trying my best to fit in, I had to be a careful observer. I had to watch and listen and then try to match the customs. I had to be the sort of person that Henry James said a writer had to be, that person upon whom nothing was lost.

It makes me think of the Miller Williams poem, "Let Me Tell You," one of those poems whose title leads into the first line:

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.

 

So reads the poem's first stanza. It's a poem that offers a number of excellent writing tips: "Invent whatever will support your line./Leave out the rest." Or the following: "Be suspicious of any word you learned/ and were proud of learning." Then it turns to its stark and yet ultimately redemptive end:

When your father lies

in the last light

and your mother cries for him,

listen to the sound of her crying.

When your father dies

take notes

somewhere inside.

If there is a heaven

he will forgive you

if the line you found was a good line.

It does not have to be worth the dying.

 

It's a poem that I share often with people, and on this day of rest, I think particularly of its first piece of advice to notice everything, a skill that serves us well whether we're writing poems, stories, novels, essays, or whether we're just doing our best to live a well-considered life. "Miss nothing. Memorize it."

Tomorrow, I'll probably ask my new students to remember pairs of shoes that they wore when they were very young. I'll ask them to choose a pair that still carries some sort of emotional resonance for them. I'll ask them to do a freewrite that begins with the words, "I was wearing them the day. . . ." I'll trick my students into recalling a moment that left a mark on them, and from there we'll spend ten weeks building essays and stories. I'll try to  convince my students that those shoes if they "put them on" again, will carry them far. They aren't just shoes, anymore than what I recall from Oak Forest days (the Yankee Woods Forest Preserve where I both lost my first-baseman's mitt and then a few years later had my first kiss, Tony's Corner Store where my mother sent me up Laramie Street from our apartment , the lagoon near the Pick 'n' Save where I watched my friends skate and play hockey, the 159th Street viaduct that during a hard rain would fill with water, the bakery where my friends and I stopped on the way to school to buy long johns and brownies) are just things. Our lives are in the details. Everything matters.

First I Did This and Then I Did That: The Anatomy of a Story

In a recent post, I told the story of my aunt and uncle and the evening they went out for dinner, and in front of the restaurant, before they could go inside, a young woman got into their backseat and said she needed them to drive her somewhere because the police were after her. My aunt and uncle declined because. . .well, gosh-darn it, they had dinner to see to. . .so the young woman left. Aunt and Uncle went on into the restaurant, ate their dinner as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened., drove home, and went about their business. End of story.

But not for me. I knew material when I heard it. I began writing a story, "Anywhere, Please," narrated by a woman who was sort of my aunt and sort of not, a woman I was creating out of a little of this and a little of that. Mostly I was just listening to her voice:

The woman's in our backseat before I can say shoo. A skinny thing with too much eye makeup and a high forehead that shines in the glow from our Buick's dome light. I've come around the front of the car and found the Mister talking to her, not flustered a bit. An old newspaper reporter, he's concentrating on getting the facts.

So there I was recreating the story my aunt told me and with no idea of where the story might go. I just wanted to get that opening scene on the page and to see what would be in it that would merit further dramatization. To see what clues the opening scene might offer for where the story would need to go next. By the end of the scene, I'd learned that my narrator was a retired grade school teacher and that she knew the woman who was asking for a ride. When I first started writing stories, I'd come up with an opening scene and then spend countless hours trying to figure out what would happen next. Now, I understand that the opening always lays out the scenes that need to follow. I work more by intuition and by listening carefully to what the story is trying to tell me. In the case of this particular story, I made a choice right away to have my narrator and her husband know the woman in their car. In general, it's a good idea for your characters to have a shared history because that creates all sorts of possibilities for tensions, actions, and consequences. It's also a good idea to arrange things so it's nigh on impossible for your characters to escape one another. In the story that my aunt told, it was possible to separate her and my uncle from the young woman. Not so in my version of the story. I had my narrator, after the young woman, Lucy, told her she was on the run because her mother called the police on her, insist that she join them for dinner. Seemed that my narrator carried some sort of old grudge against Lucy's mother, something that would complicate the give and take between the characters. By the time I'd finished the opening scene, I had no idea what that grudge was all about or how it would come to play in the action that would ensue. But I was curious, and I'm finding more and more these days that curiosity for the writer is a valuable thing in the composition process.

By the end of the first scene, I was rich with questions. Each needed an answer, and that's what I set out to do. I crafted two crucial scenes from the past that dramatized the difficulty between the narrator and Lucy's mother, a difficulty that involved a daughter I didn't know the narrator had, but whom she introduced to me with the line, "We had a little girl of our own, Pattianne." Another aspect of starting a story successfully is to see how many balls you can get up into the air. That is to say, how many elements that will enrich the story without overwhelming it. At the point, I wrote the line about the narrator's daughter, I had the texture of the life lived among the major characters of the story, and I knew that something had  happened during the time when Lucy and her mother were borders in the narrator's home years ago when Pattianne was thirteen and just starting to get a head of her own and to resist her mother. Something involving Lucy's mother, Pattianne, and my narrator had resulted in long-lasting consequences between the narrator and Pattianne.

From that point, it was a matter of letting each narrative element have its fair space. The narrator and her husband and Lucy were in the restaurant, and the narrator was chewing over that story from the past and the current state of affairs between her and her daughter from whom she was essentially estranged while the police car was pulling into the parking lot. Of course, I had to have the police officer come into the restaurant. I had to have him approach the narrator, her husband, and Lucy. The police officer told them why he was there. He said he was looking for a woman named Lucy Keen. He told them why he was looking for her (see, how I'm answering the questions posed by the story's opening; in this case, why did Lucy's mother call the police?), and asked Lucy for identification. At this point, I knew I was close to the end of the story. I was at that moment of decision that provides the climax for so many stories. So I had Lucy say she'd left her purse back at the house. She put her hand on the narrator's hand and said, "Isn't that right, Mom?" The police officer said, "Is this your daughter?" And there I was knowing that the narrator's next words, next actions, would change her forever.

At the end of a story, I'm always looking for the unexpected action and consequence. The irony of an action producing an result opposite from what the actor expects will always resonate if the surprise is inevitable and not imposed. That opposing action or piece of dialogue is always present in the opening. It's just a matter of the writer paying close attention to answering the questions that those first moves present and answering them in a way that's always alert for the opposites that characters and situations contain. The opening sets the trail, and the writer follows it to its end.

 

"The Blog of the Year": The Boffo Art of the Blurb

'Tis the blurb season. . .but then when is it not? Each book accepted for publication sets off a chain of editors and authors asking other authors to please read an advance copy, and, if they feel so inclined, offer a few words of support. A "comment," or "a promotional quote," is we're being tasteful about the whole process. A "blurb" if we're being crass.

I've quite a number of requests right now, and I'm doing my best to honor each of them because I know what it's like to be on the asking end, hoping beyond hope that those I approach will say yes. The whole process makes me feel like I did when I was a teenager and I'd make a phone call to a girl, asking her for a date. Do teenage boys even do that anymore? Not having children myself, I rely on my students for such info, and I seem to recall that these days, teenagers tend to gather as a group, thereby eliminating the character-building experience of making that call, often having to get by the girl's mother, or more terrifying yet, her father, before talking to the girl herself, hoping for a yes, dreading a no, or, as happened to me once, hearing the girl say, "Well. . .I can't, you see. Friday night? No, Friday night is out of the question. I'm helping my mother can tomato juice that night." Home economics aside, I knew a brush off when I heard one.

Ever wonder, as I have, where the word, "blurb," comes from? It seems that an American humorist, Galett Burgess, published his book, Are You a Bromide? in 1907. The custom of the time was for the publisher to print the picture of a damsel–"languishing, heroic, or coquettish" [perhaps while canning tomato juice !]–on the cover of every novel. I've garnished all this information from the web site, Wordorigins.org. It seems that for Are You a Bromide, Burgess provided a picture of a particularly buxom woman and labeled her Miss Blinda Blurb. Later, the term came to identify not only drawings of buxom women, but also extravagant testimonials.

One of my teachers in the early 1980s, when I was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas, was William Harrison, who is perhaps best known for the title story of his collection, Roller Ball Murder. That futuristic story became the impetus for the movie (from Bill Harrison's screenplay adaptation), Rollerball, starring James Caan, John Houseman, and Maud Adams. The movie was remade in 2002 with Chris Klein, LL Cool J, and Rebecca Romijn. One of the stories in that same Harrison collection is "The Blurb King," a story narrated by Harry Neal who is expert at the art of the blurb. In fact, he owns and runs the Neal Blurb Service. Said service uses a computer to provide "Bigger Names and Better Blurbs." Noting how the "Quality Lit game" relied on everyone agreeing to blurb everyone else ("Norm Mailer liked Jimmy Baldwin who adored Ken Kesey who dug Susie Sontag. Et cetera.), Harry Neal creates "The Cornucopia of Blurb," which allows all people, no matter how famous or unknown, to be blurbed:  "Mickey Mantle blurbs Frankie Avalon who blurbs Elmo Roper who blurbs Ed Sullivan who blurbs Herbert Marcuse who blurbs Bobo Rockefeller who blurbs the H.R. Block Corporation." Harry Neal even creates Blurb Buttons for people to wear. If someone gets endorsed, he or she can wear that blurb ("HERE'S A NEATSIE-POO ACTOR!–Rex Reed). The idea catches on like wildfire and soon there are cottage industries setting up shop, such as THE VERMONT BLURBERS CONFERENCE: A summer Writing Program with the Accent on Leisure Hours and featuring a staff of Editors, Children's Authors, & Old Professors. LEARN THE ART OF THE BLURB IN OUR WORKSHOP SESSIONS! UCLA even starts the MFA Program in Creative Blurbs.

In this business, where who knows whom can be so beneficial, it's good to be able to smile at ourselves, as Bill Harrison clearly is in "The Blurb King."  Of course, once a writer really makes it, there's no need for blurbs. The name and the reputation is sufficient. In the early stages of a career (or in mid-career, for that matter) having such well known writers speak for your book can help generate the buzz that the publisher is hoping for, the noise in the industry that here comes a book and a writer to be noticed. May we all, then, as we make our journey, remember what it was like when we were first starting out. Like making that phone call, heart in your throat, hoping the girl you wanted said yes and didn't tell you instead that she was sorry but there was tomato juice in her future and it just had to be canned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The End Is Always in the Beginning

The Spring issue of The Georgia Review arrived today. It's a special issue that celebrates the fiction published in that journal during the past 25 years. I'm humbled to see my name included with the following writers whom I've long admired: Lee K. Abbott, Margaret Benbow, Kevin Brockmeier, Frederick Busch, Robert Olen Butler, Phil Condon, Jack Driscoll, William Gay, Jim Heynen, Mary Hood, Rene Houtrides, Barry Lopez, Phyllis Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Marjorie Sandor, George Singleton, Liza Wieland, and Ronder Thomas Young. I'm also humbled. My story, "Light Opera," which eventually became the second story in my collection, The Least You Need to Know, first appeared in The Georgia Review in 1995. Seeing it in this Spring issue is like reconnecting with an old friend you haven't seen in years. It's thrilling and a little scary at the same time. Above all, I'm happy to see the company it's keeping even though I'm not sure it deserves the honor.

When I first found out that the story was to be included, I felt a bit like my aunt must have felt on a recent evening when she and my uncle had gone out to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant in their hometown in Illinois. They're both in their eighties, and my aunt does all the driving. She parked the car in front of the restaurant that evening (it was just beginning to get dark), and my uncle got out on the passenger side of the car. My aunt has trouble with her knees, and it takes her a while to get out of the car. By the time she made it around the front, she could hear my uncle talking to someone. She looked into the back seat of the car and saw a young woman sitting there.

My uncle, a tremendously gracious man, was nonplussed. He said to my aunt, "This young lady would like us to give her a ride somewhere."

"Where is it you need to go?" my aunt asked her.

"The police are after me," she said.

My uncle said, "I told her we were about to go in here and get something to eat.'

My aunt confirmed that this was true. "We can't give you a ride right now. We're going to have supper."

The young woman got out of the car, walked down the row of parked cars a few feet and got into another car. It's not clear to me whether that car belonged to her. If it did, why would she be asking someone else for a ride. Did her car not run? Was her request a ruse meant to get my aunt and uncle into a vulnerable location where she could practice criminal intent? Or did she get into a car someone else had left unlocked? All these questions and more. Questions my aunt couldn't answer because she said that for the first time ever (they live in a small town in central Illinois) she locked their car. Then she and my uncle went into the restaurant and had their supper. Did they tell anyone what had happened? Did they call the police? No and no. They ate their supper and then they went home.

"I really couldn't have told the police  much," she said to me when I asked why she hadn't called them. "A girl wanted a ride, and then she was gone."

I'm glad the element of mystery still exists in this narrative. It's left me just enough room to imagine the rest, which I've done now in the draft of a new story, "Anywhere, Please."

I like the element of surprise in my aunt and uncle's story. The surprise and the mystery and the nonchalant attitude my aunt expressed. Yes, there are a number of ways this story could have turned tragic, and I'm relieved that no harm came to these two people who are mother and father to me now that my parents are gone. Relieved to the point that I could look at this episode like a writer, tantalized by the sketchy details, eager to let my imagination get to work, wondering who that woman in the back seat might be, what she might have to do with the elderly couple who found her there, and how her appearance might invite an investigation into who all these people are on this planet Earth.

It doesn't take much to get a fiction writer interested.  Something out of the ordinary, something that invites you to wonder how and what if. When I wrote "Light Opera," I began with a curiosity about the people who provided the Time and Temperature voice on the telephone. This was in the day when a quick way of finding out those two things was to dial a certain number and to listen as a pleasant voice filled you in. What if the woman who provided that voice lived in a small town, was married to the local undertaker, and had a son who felt distant from them both:

In 1952, the year my mother feared she might lose me, she became the time and temperature voice on the telephone. The phone company selected her, after a nationwide search, because she had a bright voice with no discernible accent, and that meant her recorded messages could be distributed throughout the country. For a while, this gave her a certain status in our town; then, the novelty wore off, and she was again Lois Sievers, the undertaker's wife, who gave piano lessons to any pupils whose parents didn't mind marching them up the funeral chapel's steps.

I remember crafting that opening, getting as many balls up into the air as I thought I could reasonably sustain throughout the story, and then letting the elements of the opening suggest the scenes that would follow. I made myself curious and then had to keep writing to try to satisfy that curiosity.

Rust Hills, in his book, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, says that the ending of a good short story is always contained in its beginning. I've always thought that a good ending sends your back through the story, makes a resonant sound that reverberates back through all that has produced it. It's as if that sound is there from the beginning, but repressed, and it takes the pressures of plot and the way it makes characters rub up against one another to bring that sound to the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Madness for Hoopsters and Wordsmiths

I just got back from a visit to the University of Indianapolis where I did a reading and visited an Editing and Publishing class. Just like at my school, Ohio State, some of the undergraduates were already thinking about applying for MFA programs. We're in recruitment season now, trying to convince those who received offers from us to join our program next year. A number of those people will have offers other than ours, and we'll enter into a seductive dance as we try to persuade them that Ohio State has the MFA Program that will be best for them. We do have a very fine program here, named one of five up-and-coming programs a few years ago by the Atlantic. But there are a number of very fine programs out there, and sometimes we lose some folks to them. Often, though, we get the people we want. Our success rate is pretty danged high. It's always interesting to me that this wooing of writers heats up at the same time as the NCAA basketball tournament. March Madness–for hoopsters and wordsmiths.

While I was at the U of Indianapolis, I heard more than one undergraduate talking about making those applications to MFA programs. As I say, I see my own undergrads go through this same process, and I've come to understand that somehow–possibly because MFA programs are so numerous these days?–undergrads have come to think of graduate study in creative writing as the next logical step. In some cases, I get the impression that the undergrads have started to believe that entry into an MFA program is a right guaranteed to them. My advice to my own undergrads is that they wait a few years after graduation before they get serious about graduate programs in creative writing. This isn't to say, of course, that it's impossible to make a successful move from the undergraduate degree to an MFA program immediately, but I do think that with most people, a few years of seasoning is a good idea. More life experience is a good thing for your writing. You only get once chance to do your MFA. Why not wait until you're at a time in your life when you're most capable of taking advantage of the tremendous opportunity that you have when you spend two or three years studying your craft, working closely with like-minded people, and creating a manuscript that with a bit of luck and a ton of hard work just might become your first book.  I also think it's a good idea to be away from school a while, working a job that you really don't care all that much about, so you can test how committed you are to a writer's life. Is it something you think you want to do, or is it something that you have to do? Will you find time for it even when the demands of your job make it difficult, or will not writing be something easy for you to accept? I guess I'm saying that there's no hurry. The MFA programs will still be there when, and if, you decide that this isn't just something that you think you want to do. It's the way you want to live your life–is the only way, in fact, that your place in the world can make any kind of sense to you at all.

I write stories and novels and essays and memoirs because that writing allows me to give some shape to the world swirling around me. Being at my desk, working with language to dramatize, express, interrogate, reflect slows the world down for me. I enter a meditative state, one that's essential to my being able to see more clearly, to understand, to believe that patterns exist even within something that appears chaotic or shapeless. As I told the class I visited in Indy, I think of my work as a spiritual experience for me–spiritual in the sense that I pay close attention to the small details, that I write my way toward knowing that those details contain this life, all the lives that have come before, and the life on the other side of this one.

 

 

 

If Your Name Is Lee Martin, You May Just Be a Writer

There must be a joke in this story somewhere. It all started a few weeks ago when I received an email from a soldier stationed in Iraq. He explained to me that his girlfriend's birthday was coming up, and he'd like to give her a copy of a book signed by her favorite author. That author, he told me, was moi. Would I be able to help him out?

Sure, I said. Send me the book, the girlfriend's name, and an SASE, and I'd write a nice inscription, sign my name, and send the book on its way to wherever he wanted me to send it.

As soon as we sealed the deal, I felt a bit of doubt creep over me. How could I ever be anyone's favorite author?

Today, I received a package from the soldier. Inside was a book swaddled in bubble wrap. I carefully undid it, only to find a novel I didn't write–a novel by another Lee Martin. What I'd feared might be the case indeed was. The soldier had found the wrong Lee Martin.

For brief instant, I considered writing the inscription, signing my name, and sending the book on its way. Then I thought, no, that wouldn't be honest and besides the soldier would tell his girlfriend the story of how he found Lee Martin's email address at Ohio State University, mailed the book to him, and yadda, yadda, yadda until the girlfriend realized the signature was bogus.

So instead I looked up the Lee Martin who had written this novel, found his web site and his email address. I sent him an email explaining the situation, telling him that he was the author the girl fancied and not moi. I asked if I could send him the whole kit and kaboodle to him for his attention, and he graciously said, yes, he'd be happy to receive the book and the SASE and to provide the genuine signature.

I was curious, so I started looking for other Lee Martins who were writers. I found three more, which I think is amazing. I mean, I always thought my name so bland. Who would think that that combination of first and last name would create so many artful liars?

I just now realized what the joke might be. Maybe the girlfriend really does think of me as her favorite author. Maybe she said to the boyfriend, "I love Lee Martin's novels best of all." And maybe, just maybe, the boyfriend ran out to buy a Lee Martin novel and that was the only one he could find. Maybe the girlfriend will get that signed copy and wonder why in the world her boyfriend got her that book by someone she doesn't know.

 

The Value of Silence to the Writer

I've been thinking quite a bit about silence lately and how little of it we have these days. We're surrounded by noise, and so much of it doesn't make an audible sound: the email we write and read, the web sites we check, the Facebook statuses we scroll through, even this blog post. All of it, though, makes a noise in our heads, and if you're like me, sometimes it gets to be a bit too much. I realize I'm not saying anything new here. Folks much smarter than I have covered this ground, but still I feel compelled, particularly when it comes to the matter of silence and the creative process.

Before the days of the Internet–before computers even–I remember sitting in a chair with a pen and either a yellow legal pad or a spiral notebook, writing stories mostly in longhand. My chair had to be facing a window, so I could stare out it at those times when the words weren't coming, and I needed a quiet space from which to invite them. I used to joke that much of my "writing" was actually "staring." Now that I've moved to the computer for most of my composing (I still take up the pad and pen from time to time, especially when I'm starting a project; there's something about the movement of my hand, the words coming with that motion, that announces the voice and rhythm of a piece in a way that composing on the computer can't quite replicate.), I sill make sure that I can look out a window. I still take those stretches of time that allow me to look away from the screen and gaze out at the world and listen.

What I hear, if we count only the audible sounds, might be the rumble of the UPS truck coming down the street (by the way, where in the heck are the galleys of my new novel that were supposed to have been here Saturday or today?), birdsong, a car door slamming, a dog barking, or the ever present rush of traffic on the I-270 outerbelt which isn't distant enough from where I live in Columbus, Ohio, to suit me.  But if I sit still long enough and let my mind go as blank as I can get it to go, sooner or later, I hear my characters talking, I hear pieces of memory, I hear favorite passages from favorite books, I hear the idiom of the people I grew up with in southeastern Illinois, I hear my parents' voices. I hear language, and that takes me back to the writing with something fresh to say. So much of my composing process, then, is a matter of operating within the text and then moving outside of it until I hear something that takes me back to it. Here's what Alice Walker has to say about silence:

"Everything does come out of silence. And once you get that, it's wonderful to be able to go there and live in silence until you're ready to leave it. I've written and published seven novels and many, many, many stories and essays. And each and every one came out of basically nothing–-that's how we think of silence, is not having anything. But I have experienced silence as being incredibly rich."

Before my family moved to Oak Forest, a suburb of Chicago, when I was in the third grade, I lived on a farm downstate in Lawrence County. Even after we moved to Oak Forest, so my mother could take a teaching job there, we spent our summers on the farm. Although, I don't own the farm anymore, I still enjoy going back to Lukin Township, often to drive the gravel roads and visit the old country cemeteries where my ancestors are buried. If I'm lucky, I'll hit a piece of time that contains no human sounds–no tractors, no chainsaws, no airplanes–and the silence will take me back to those days when I was a boy and my essence was being formed, an essence I need to reacquaint myself with from time to time, remembering who I am and where I've been so I can be more attentive to the voices and the plights of my characters. So I can listen more carefully.

 

 

 

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Break the Skin, Watershed, and The Least You Need to Know

I'm very excited to launch my new web site and this blog to accompany it as we start counting the months until the June 14 publication of my new novel, Break the Skin. Galleys should be available soon, probably sometime this week, and foreign rights have already been sold to an Italian publisher. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for more good news about the book to come.

The title of the book comes from a song by a group called Watershed. One of its members, Joe Oestreich was a student in our MFA Program at  Ohio State University (or The Ohio State University, if you feel like using the official name of the school, and, yes, we often make fun of that pompous sounding article that leads it off), and he was kind enough to allow me to use the following lyrics from "Black Concert T-Shirt" as an epigraph:

My steel toes start kickin'

My new tattoo just ain't stickin'

You gotta break the skin

Take the needle just stick it in

If you're interested in the band, please check them out at www.watershedcentral.com

If you'd like to hear "Black Concert T-Shirt," please go to http://www.myspace.com/watershedcentral

The title of my blog, "The Least You Need to Know," comes from the title of my first book, a collection of short stories which won the first Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. That book was essentially my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, and I take no small degree of pleasure in knowing I earned a Ph.D. with a dissertation called "The Least You Need to Know." On this blog, I'll be talking about writing, publishing, teaching, and other stuff. If you're interested, I hope you'll come along for the ride. Right now, I have to go teach my seminar in the forms of creative nonfiction. I'll leave you with a quote I'm going to pass on to my students today, this from Dani Shapiro's excellent book, Devotion: "It wasn't so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there."  Good luck with your own questioning. I'll be back soon with some more of my own.

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