Andrew Scott's Blog, page 39

"When I’m doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it..."

“When I’m doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something.”

- Alice Munro

"This is the book I was sending out in 2010, the one that came close at a couple of national book..."

“This is the book I was sending out in 2010, the one that came close at a couple of national book contests. It was more like sixteen stories, 150 pages. I’d also sent this collection to Victoria Barrett at Engine Books, and she, too, offered a pointed criticism that I took to heart. She thought two of the stories didn’t belong with the rest, and so I cut those two stories and added four more. The book was eighteen stories now, still around 150 pages, and the first place I sent it to in 2011 was the Iowa Short Fiction Award.”

- Chad Simpson, author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi

"I’d love to be able to write poetry, but I think if I ever brought my attention down to that..."

“I’d love to be able to write poetry, but I think if I ever brought my attention down to that meticulous level of utterance, I’d never be able to ratchet it back up to the wider level of reference that, for me, fiction requires.”

- Richard Ford

"A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

- Eudora Welty

Dear Mr. Romney

Lately I’ve been thinking about old wounds.

The weather has turned colder. When the air dries out and I don’t drink enough water, my right hand reveals burn scars from my first job, slinging wings and scrubbing “bird cages” in the back of a Kentucky Fried Chicken on Teal Road in Lafayette, Indiana. I earned minimum wage. After four months of arriving on time and never screwing up, I was rewarded with my first raise—a nickel more per hour.

What did I spend my money on? Comic books. Compact discs. My parents weren’t rich, but back then, families like mine could afford to send both of their sons to college without loans, though it meant my parents made eight years of monthly payments on a budget plan.

As I write this, two spots on my right hand, cracked open and aching, remind me of that summer, although I can’t remember which fryer got me: Original or extra crispy? Given the scaly patches on my fingers, I want to joke and say extra crispy. But it was likely one of the four cylindrical fryers we used for the original recipe batches. We dropped metal cages full of battered chicken into the cylinder. The goal: Lock the lid before the rising oil blasted out. Once, a co-worker on work-release from the local prison didn’t close the hatch in time. The oil rocketed up, searing parts of his face. I remember another co-worker who requested every night shift—and every weekend shift—even though he had a full-time job at a factory in town. Child support, he said. I recall a single mother whose son also worked at the restaurant. Men and boys, mostly boys, worked in the back. Women and girls, mostly women, worked in the front. I can still see the color of the kitchen tile and smell the bleach beneath towering boxes of raw chicken in the cooler—every physical detail in the place. I still laugh about the time we dunked a frozen biscuit in hot water to soften it, and then threw it on this one jerk’s front windshield, so it would freeze solid during his December shift. We weren’t bad kids. We had a bit of the devil in us, but we never held down another boy and cut his hair.

I’m talking about people, Mitt. Are you still with me? Not numbers or unemployment rates. People. Do you remember to think about people? Maybe you don’t care. These are “my fellow Americans,” and if that phrase means anything, it must also conjure a few faces and names. Your work history has involved facts and figures and lots of paper. Risk assessment. What do the numbers say? Except that, really, there’s no risk when you start out wealthy and are handed the keys to a golden kingdom. A candidate who makes a joke about his accountant during a debate can’t fully understand “my fellow Americans”—most of us don’t have an accountant, for starters.

When you and other politicians say “my fellow Americans,” I picture my friends, my coworkers now and then, my neighbors. As a fiction writer, I like to think I have a pretty good imagination, but nothing you’ve done allows me the chance to think, even for a moment, that your vision for the future would help any of my fellow Americans.

There’s a poem I love by Detroit native Phillip Levine. It’s called “What Work Is,” and I hope you take a few moments to read it. As I talk about my first job, I realize you might not know what it means to work:

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you.

…You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,   

just because you don’t know what work is.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Have you ever read a poem, Mitt? I know your opponent has. In debates, and in the immediate weeks before an election, candidates like to offer respectful-sounding sound bites about each other, as if we’ll forget the two-plus years of mud-slinging that quickly—I’m sure he’s a good person—but I don’t know about you. I don’t think you’re a good person. Your dismissal of my fellow Americans angers me. And your arrogance is beyond measure. You’re the kind of man who would start bossing around my KFC co-workers from the comfort of your car, pissing them off via the drive-thru microphone. Maybe one of the teenagers should dump your mashed potatoes in the trash, then scoop them back into the container, tucking them into the bottom of your to-go bag so you don’t find out until you are already home. You deserve that.

Me? I’ve got this burn scar on my aching middle finger. Have a closer look. I’ll show it to you. You’re old enough to know what work is, Mitt, though you may not do it.

Forget you.

Note: This was originally written for We Represent the 47 Percent, a website chronicling personal responses to Mitt Romney’s comments, that Julianna Baggott and David Scott have put together, but I took too damn long and they were flooded with responses, so I thought I’d share mine here.

Stubbornness and the Writer

A writer only needs a thimble of talent to get started. If you have more in your cup, congratulations, but there are many kinds of talent, remember. You may have a talent with words, or you may be a talented reader (which might be more useful). Or maybe you have the uncommon ability to park your butt in the chair for hours on end.

Take a hard look at yourself-as-writer and consider the many aspects of talent. If you want, go ahead and quit now. Don’t stop reading books, unless you want to become a brain-dead Neanderthal. Just stop writing if you don’t think you can do it. Life will go on. Books will be written and published. You may even be better off. 

But be careful with what comes next. I mean it. Yoda meant it, too: If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny…

Once you say I am a writer, then you are, and what follows is a lifetime spent trying to embody those words. I’m incredibly stubborn. It’s one of my only talents. I’ve tried to make it useful in my life as a writer, and I work to limit the ways in which being stubborn hinders other aspects of my life. I’m still working on parking my butt in the chair for hours on end.

An Interview with Me at Prime Number

An Interview with Me at Prime Number:

Sahar Mustafah, a writer and teacher in Illinois, interviewed me about Naked Summer after I visited a fiction writing course at Columbia College Chicago earlier this year.

An Interview at Prime Number

An Interview at Prime Number:

Sahar Mustafah, a writer and teacher in Illinois, interviewed me about Naked Summer after I visited a fiction writing course at Columbia College Chicago earlier this year.

Brain Work vs. Body Work

This is how I’ve started labeling the tasks on my daily/weekly “to do” lists.

The body work—yard work, mostly, or work I otherwise do outside, such as refinishing the deck or trying (finally) to finish renovating the garage—never goes away, of course, but it’s somehow easier to ignore because it’s outside. It’s been five weeks since we got Mosley, the adorable (not so) little guy below, which means I can’t go a day without stepping into the back yard anymore. He needs to go out, of course, but he also needs to play, which means tossing the rubber ball or flipping the Frisbee—which he often leaps and catches, amazingly enough. Going to the gym is body work, too. Literally. And I need to go more often. Don’t we all? There’s also the basement, which needs some attention.

The brain work has taken over in September, without fail, every single year of my professional life—responding to student essays and stories, editing fiction (by this writer or that) for Freight Stories, reading book-length manuscripts for Engine Books, answering interview questions and interviewing other writers, giving writer-friends advice about marketing their first books or publishing contracts, responding to an editor’s suggested cuts and changes to a short craft essay, sharing some kind of advice for the blog of a journal that published one of my stories a few years ago, planning the details of two classes I’m guest-teaching for a colleague next week, and so on. A good deal of brain work takes place in the summers, too, but as the weather turns colder, the indoor activities dominate my days. 

Teaching is both. Brain work, yes, because engaging students, challenging them, pushing them beyond the boundaries of their expectations, finding ways to have each individual click into recognition and understanding —this all takes brain work. But it’s body work, too, because of the performance. Standing on your feet all day is hard work. Ask a restaurant server. And talking all day wears a dude out, you know? I’m never so exhausted as I am at the end of a long teaching day. I also never feel so accomplished.

Andre Dubus used to go for a run after a day of writing. His son recounts one such run at the beginning of Townie, his memoir published last year. So while I’ve got a long day of brain work ahead of me today, I need to remember to get outside, to move around, to tire the body as well as the brain. Maybe that’s why I decided to wear this gray, Rocky-ish sweatshirt today.

Rocky runs up the stairs from Antonio Gomis on Vimeo.

Review of FIRES OF OUR CHOOSING

My review of Fires of Our Choosing, the debut story collection by Eugene Cross, is now available at the PANK website. 

You can sample one of the stories, “430,” originally published in Freight Stories.

Cross will visit Ball State University next semester for its annual In Print festival celebrating debut authors in three genres.