THE WRITER’S CAVE – Final Part

 

JOHN:   QUESTION: Can writers fly?

     Despite being able to leap effortlessly from one subject to another, writers are not bats, but if they are on some kind of flying device like a plane or a helicopter, yes writers can fly.

What I’m suggesting is there are eight stages of the creative process:

 1. In the first stage we absorb the world and its experiences through our senses and intuition.

2. In the second our unconscious dreams and fantasies put these in a form we can handle.

3. As we take ownership of the subject our empathy grows for the characters or people who are part of the story and we further invest our feelings in their conflict.

4. Next we make this tangible as a short story, poem, article, play or book, giving it dramatic structure that heightens those emotions.

5. Fifth, we test its effectiveness on others through classes, readings, and critique groups—clarifying, refocusing, reinterpreting.

6. In the sixth stage we incorporate that feedback into our project often mirroring a larger theme beyond our original scope.

7. We find an audience through being published or performing the piece.

8. And finally, encouraged by success we return to the initial stages and do more of the same at an even deeper level. 

John grabs a sheaf of papers. He begins to read

Or to put it more simply, you are what you dream.  “You Are What You Dream” is the name of my short story I wrote last year.

You Are What You Dream

     When the twice-divorced John Larkin introduced himself at a downtown business card exchange to an attractive woman easily fifteen years younger than he was, he surprised himself by saying his name was “Jack.”

     She had a million dollars worth of tortoiseshell-colored hair, a soft, serious face and teeth that were even and strong and very white. She wore a faux fur jacket and skin-tight leather slacks. But her most unusual feature was one he could not see.   

     John Larkin suddenly remembered twenty-five years earlier, on the first day of boot camp.  A man waiting in line, Skip, had introduced himself to John and John had given his name, “John Larkin.” Moments later when they were joined by two other new soldiers, Skip had told them John’s name was “Jack.” He probably had had a friend, John, who went by “Jack” or perhaps—this was only a few years after the presidency of John F. Kennedy—he thought that this nickname was universal. It wasn’t. But instead of correcting him, John thought, “Why not be Jack.” It had a tough, aggressive ring he liked. Rash.  And so for the month and a half of crawling under barbed wire, breaking-down and re-assembling weapons and binge drinking every Friday night he was “Jack.” He could have been sent to combat in Vietnam. He even hoped he would be. But when reporting to his subsequent hospital administration position in Kansas, “Lieutenant John Larkin,” was the name written on his assignment orders. It once again seemed right.

     That’s why, so many years later it was strange he would say his name was “Jack.” But then he thought, as he had before, “Why not?” He knew the consequences of being “John”—the nothing person everyone dumped on. For once he wanted to be the guy who grabbed what he wanted. This was his first mistake.

     Perhaps she was hearing impaired or had been born with deficient vocal chords, but the volume and tone of her voice was like she was holding her nose when she talked, or pronouncing words she’d never heard anyone else say. It was the voice of a cat that had somehow learned to speak

     Cats are my business, she said. “Cass aaaa maaa bizzzz-nesss.”

     “I’m a dog person myself…” Jack was self-conscious. At first he had been embarrassed by the unexpected peculiarity of this woman’s speech, now he was trying to show he wasn’t. As he looked over the business card she had offered him, this was the best he could come up with. “Though it’s not that I don’t like cats. I do. But I’ve never had one myself. And I’ve never heard of a cat spa.”

     Then a strange thing happened. It was as if she were a silent-screen actress and the ballroom was flickering in black and white. Words, sound, didn’t seem to matter. It was the look in her large eyes. It was seduction.

     In his movie version it would have meant getting a room here at the hotel, ordering a bottle of champagne, peeling apart the crisp sheets and getting cozy under the covers of a king-sized bed. But Jack found himself in her feature, pulling out of the Sheraton’s parking lot as they headed to the address of the Meow Spa and Cat Salon off of East Washington Avenue.

     He smiled, remembering the old Steve Martin joke about how his cat enjoyed being bathed…though the hard part was getting the hair off your tongue afterwards. Maybe there was something kinky going on, but Jack was too horny to care. He wanted to press this little prize into the corner of a leather couch in the spa waiting room and pump the hell out of her while from cages in the other room cats in heat yowled.

     The Meow Spa and Cat Salon was located in the old Humane Society building. Jack had been there once when his Norwegian Elk Hound wandering in the park had been picked up by the police. They had not called him and Jack had been frantic. Then the next day, to release the dog, the Humane Society was demanding he pay for its overnight stay. Jack had argued, “You never phoned me he was here. In fact I called and no one knew anything about Orson, my dog.”

     “The dog was riding in the back of the squad car most of the afternoon,” the suddenly attentive woman behind the desk had tried to placate him.

     “Humane Society, hah. What a joke. You people aren’t good for anything except killing animals!” he’d screamed, and they had dropped the overnight charges.

     But that rage was still there, Jack realized, as they pulled in front of the out-of-way building along the railroad tracks. All parking spaces for the Meow Spa and Cat Salon were empty.

     She unlocked the front door and ushered him in. There was a small lamp lit on the ultramodern reception desk, the rest of the room was resplendent in art-deco shadows. There was no couch.

     Here’s what they teach you in the army, it’s called “An Estimate of the Situation.” Take stock of your surroundings, assess your existing resources, set priorities, act decisively, evaluate results. OK, Jack thought, there is no couch but the building seems to be empty of other people. Bang her and leave. Don’t even think about this after it’s over. However, one question did gnaw at Jack: How had she gotten to the business card exchange without a car?

     The woman stepped over to a large metal door. She let her faux-fur jacket dangle and fall to the floor. Then she began to unbutton her blouse. Jack felt like he was again watching a black and white movie—but now it had become one of those ancient porn booths where you inserted a nickel and a pulsating Parisian beauty stripped off her clothes. In that moment this woman seemed to unleash all the wild desire he’d ever felt. She kicked off her shoes and was stepping out of her black-leather pants. There was a skulking, feline quality to her movements as she pulled one leg then the other free. She caressed herself and looked directly at Jack. He was staring at her breasts and at that inviting patch of fur between her legs.

     That’s when he did something stupid—his second mistake. He hurried out of his own clothes as if he and she were two animals preparing to mate in the woods. And when he saw that Mary Pickford-look of slight alarm cross her face, he felt himself grow hard as a dog’s bone. But before he could reach over to touch her, she had opened the steel door to the back.

     Beckoning to him with her outstretched finger she slowly slipped out of view.

     Jack, completely nude, followed her. Mistake number three.

     When the door shut behind him, he felt a moment of panic. He was in some kind of hallway and it was completely dark. But he could hear footfalls of the little tease ahead of him and he had already seen all of her body he needed to.   

     The end of the corridor. Then there was a ninety-degree turn right. Down this hallway he became aware of metal bars on either side of him. He heard breathing.

     “Uuuuu arrrr  wha yrrrrrrr dreeeeam,” her strange cat-like whisper seemed to summon him. He sensed he was standing in the entrance to some kind of enclosure. As he stepped forward he heard its door clang shut behind him.

     War, to those who have never experienced it first hand, seems to be about noble causes. They imagine the soldiers who participate as exhibiting valor. But only people at a distance have the luxury of such sentiments. For men going into battle it is something else. Something less noble. Less rational.  Something more real.

     The fluorescent lights blinked on. Jack saw he was in a barrack of naked men, like dogs in cages, smelling death.

JOHN:  So what happened?  It’s over. You’ve arrived.  Where?  THE WRITER’S CAVE.  The Writer’s Cave, now we’re ready to begin.

THE WRITER’S CAVE – Part 6

WRITER AS REDEEMER. 

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JOHN:  QUESTION: Can a writer be killed if one drives a stake through the writer’s heart or chops off his or her head?

     Yes, but that would also kill regular humans if one does the same to them. By the way, killing a writer is murder and murderers are arrested and put in jail.

     Each year I teach at a kind of back-to-nature folk school in Door County called “The Clearing.” Last summer in the short story workshop we read a story by Joyce Carol Oates called Images and I thought it might be interesting for all of us to write some scenes like she did:

He stands up as if addressing a class.

     “So you see the problem in creating a scene between two people in a piece of fiction or creative nonfiction is getting into the mind of the second character—the one who is not a stand-in for you and your sensibilities,” I tell the class.

John in an aside to the audience.

     Blank faces of the workshop participants stare at me.

John, as if to the workshop.

     “I mean,” I continue straight-faced, “you have to become schizophrenic.”

John in another aside to the audience.

     No response.

John, as if to the workshop.

     “Crazy,” I bellow.

John directly to the audience.

     They laugh.

     The exercise I am giving them is to write a dialogue between two people in which one person—an unlikely candidate for the job—is trying to seduce another.

John to the students.

     “You need to look at the motivation of each,” I insist.

John, back to the audience.

     Blank stares.

John (to the students).

     “For example, in the Joyce Carol Oates story we just read, the adolescent

girl—a surrogate for the author—wants to break loose from her family and the small town where she is going to school.

John explains to the audience.

     Heads nod in agreement. Who doesn’t want to break out of their environment? Start a new life, not as someone else but as the real you who you never got a chance to be?

As if at the workshop again.

     “But what about the pedophile teacher she is smoking cigarettes with?” Garret asks—an intentional or unintentional jab at instructors.

     “Yes, what about him?” I repeat the question, using a teacher trick of responding to a question with a question in order to gain time to think of an answer.

     “He should be reported to the authorities,” Hugh pipes in. Hugh is a former grade-school principal.

     “Well, yes,” I say. “But that’s why we have fiction, so we don’t all wind up in jail. But in the context of the story what is his motivation?”

     “He’s just a loser,” Heidi answers. She could play the story’s strong female lead in a movie version.

John stands at the podium, lost in thought. Finally to the audience, and himself.

     Am I the loser? What the hell am I doing? Where am I going with this?

 John, getting a grip, plows forward.       

     Plato wrote about a cave in which the philosopher sees only shadows from a fire. He moves outside to discover truth in the blinding glare of the sun.          

     Freud gave this a literal twist—bringing our neuroses from their unconscious depths to the rational surface.

     But wait. We may want to bring the truth out into the open but initially we need to go inward…into the writer’s cave. It’s there we will discover truth. When we do emerge it is the audience who keeps us from being self-indulgent and merely projecting our feelings onto other people and events.

     Am I saying that when I change the encounter with Orson Welles or when Lorine Niedecker writes about one thing when she may have other things in mind and when Bergman’s art searches below the surface to address subjects he needs to bring out into the light…that this is some kind of terrifying journey?

     Well, you are what you dream.

THE WRITER’S CAVE – Part 5

Undercurrent of the foreboding as John explains.

         It may be dangerous to do this with someone else’s work, but as writers it is key to our uncovering greater depths in our own. In time, anyone can become a good writer; but to become a great writer, you must learn to become a great reader of your own work.  

         My making Orson Welles central to a poem about my marriage shows me that I want to “direct” my relationship with women. Not that this is a conscious process. As one writer says: “I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it. But I must not know or I will kill the story by controlling it. I work to surrender“ 

Something in the water 

like a flower

will devour 

water 

flower

The stage goes dark.

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BOB: Part Four ,  THE WRITER AS DEVIL

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JOHN:    QUESTION: Are writers visible in mirrors?

         This goes back to the Christian notion that any creature lacking a soul would not produce a reflection in a mirror. But, actually, with a few exceptions (and I think we all know who they are), writers are visible in mirrors, although interestingly enough, they are often quite discomforted by their own reflection.

John returns to the laptop again…almost trance-like.

         In his 1966 movie, Persona, Ingmar Bergman explored the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown and the nurse in charge of her as the actress recuperates on an isolated, island cottage.      

          As I watch it now, its implications begin to haunt my life.     

         An actress—played by Liv Ullman—freezes up in the middle of a theatrical performance of Electra, thereafter refusing to speak. We aren’t told why. She watches as the nurse, Bibi Andersson, chatters away about her troubled sex life. Then comes the weird moment on the screen in which the two women physically merge into one.

John puts on the woman’s wig.

          Bergman said that making the movie saved his life. Most of its significance, I believe, centers around the photographic combinations of their faces while at the same time in a way transferring personalities between the mental patient and her lonely nurse.

          For a while the two women really seem to become intermingled. Suddenly, through the silence of the other woman, the nurse is able to put herself in that actress’s place and understand the world with its senseless violence through the other woman’s eyes. 

           That sounds much like something a writer would do, doesn’t it?

           I now live in the country with my second wife who one day meets a younger woman, Liviana, who resembles Liv Ullman a little. She is walking to town, a mile and a half away. At first she seems mildly retarded to Talia, my wife, but in reality she has a severe hearing problem. Liviana’s speech is garbled and she consequently says very little. For some reason my wife thinks this is profound.

           What I don’t understand is that when my wife spends time with Liviana, she comes to believe that the silent young woman may have a spirituality she has been searching for in herself. 

          All of her life, ever since my wife was a little girl, she has had a deep and profound love for God. She sees this as about changing consciousness in our lives and unhinging and unlimiting ourselves so that we can be all we can. She believes that ultimately that is the reality of God awakening in human form.”

John shrugs his shoulders. He is oblivious to where Talia is going with her words.

In any case…what I really want is to learn something about Bergman and Persona or, even better, gain some insight into the creative process.

           Bibi Andersson had been Bergman’s mistress, now Liv Ullman was assuming that role. The plot of the movie makes no sense in itself. Movie critics have been arguing over its meaning for nearly 50 years. But as a symbolic representation of Bergman’s evolving relationship with the two women, it is as sharp and clear as a writer’s image in a mirror. What we in the audience are seeing is not the characters played by Bibi and Liv but the artist’s projection of his own feelings onto them.

Somewhat pointedly.

 …Is this just another case of a male projecting his feelings onto females?

          Maybe, but maybe it’s more, and even goes beyond this film. What if a soul must navigate this world of suffering before reaching its ultimate destination? What if a person must embrace pain as intimately as someone would a lover? Meet pain and be annihilated by it? Make pain, illness, sickness and the diseases of humanity their own?

         …To recognize this passage is necessary to the divine process by which all things are born, all things die, and all things are once more made new.

         So for me, Liv, or should I say Liviana, came to represent…

         …One who steps forward, not to console, but to complete the devastation—to destroy all vestiges of false hope. I’m not talking about Liv or Liviana now, I am talking about something beyond them. What I have in mind is a female with fiery eyes, pointed teeth and a sharp, lolling red tongue.

Grabs the sword.

         She carries a sword in one hand which she wields with abandon. She lops off the heads of both angels and demons. She drinks the blood of the vanquished. All things are transformed in her and returned to the earth. They are rendered harmless in her…in time. She is time. She is Kali, destroyer of false hope.

         She is the Hindu figure named for kala, which means “time”?

         She was first born from the forehead of the goddess Durga during a battle in which this, the Great Mother, was called upon by the male gods— Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—to protect the earth and all its inhabitants from the forces of evil.

        Kali steps forward, not to console, but to complete the devastation that has already started.

        Follow her into the mouth of the wolf. Through its enormous jaw. Past its razor teeth is a tunnel that leads down into darkness.

         She is naked because she is ultimately pure and unashamed. And, she has three eyes in order to see past, present and future in one glance…to pierce through illusions. She is dark because she is not separate from the ultimate void out of which all things are born and into which all things die. Her tongue is extended because she desires blood and the life force of sex

With animation.

          She wears a skirt of severed arms because they are instruments of power. And her hair is untamed, because each hair represents one of her followers, all of whom will run wildly in different directions trying to find their way back to her. We must chop off the head of illusion.  Through art we must know that life and death are one.

John as if he is reading an historic account. 

          In that original battle, Kali had not stopped with slaughtering demons. She continued her rampage, threatening to devour everything on earth. That’s when the gods sent down Shiva himself—the lover to the Divine Mother in her many forms. Shiva laid himself down on the battlefield in Kali’s path. She stepped on him. She felt his power under her feet. She stopped, looked down, smiled. The balance of the primordial Feminine with the primordial Masculine had been restored.

THE WRITER’S CAVE – Part 4

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BOB:  Part Three,  WRITER AS ESCAPE ARTIST

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JOHN:    QUESTION: Do writers (who are known to stay up all night and sleep all day) burst into flames in sunlight?

     Sunlight renders writers with their hyper-dilated irises, blind. It also causes neural pathways to fire randomly in the writer’s brain, creating an extreme epileptic reaction. As dramatic as this reaction may appear, it will not be enough to start a fire, though some writers do sunburn easily.

Back to his own saga.

     So I decide to dump the title “Unearthing the Writer as Vampire.” No big deal. But what should I change it to? I don’t know. 

     Six months after the Centennial I’m able to get a national distributor for the Niedecker book.  But the book doesn’t prove particularly successful. Her work isn’t uplifting in the same way that a popular song or a decorative painting might be. These are not poems to be recited at graduations or anniversaries. That’s because there are troublesome things deeply ingrained in them; though even here she’s selective.

     She writes about her working-class husband, but very little about her philandering father who “kept” another family (a mistress and her daughter). He bought silence from his mistress’s husband with gifts of land. Can you imagine? Their land. Lorine’s land.    

     She criticizes her deaf long-suffering mother, but not Louis Zukofsky or Cid Corman whose friendships she courts over her lifetime.

     They both eventually dump her.

     She writes about Paul—Zukofsky’s young son—not about her aborted twins. 

Looking directly at the audience.

Or is this true? That she did not write about them?

     Someone who lives a life of metaphors can easily substitute one person for another when, for her own mental health, she needs the kind of distancing art provides. Her father and her husband do meld together, as do her mother and her, and the live child and her dead twins.     

     It’s complicated. But her writing is full of clues.

     Wilderness

You are the man

You are my other country

and I find it hard going

You are the prickly pear

You are the sudden violent storm

the torrent to raise the river

to float the wounded doe

 

     What is clear is that she not only chose subjects that are difficult, but ones that have multiple layers of meaning offering some kind of personal resolution.

     I think there are different, identifiable stages to the creative process—from the first in which we absorb the world and its experiences through our senses and intuition, to a second in which our unconscious dreams and fantasies put these in a form we can handle,… through to an audience-testing phase and eventual publication or performance.  

     And what is the purpose of the journey?

     To dig deeper and deeper? To write poems no one reads?

     No, Lorine is infatuated by Louis Zukofsky for some reason and fantasizes about a life with him. She makes that dream a reality or try to. But he doesn’t want the pregnancy…

… so through poetry she creates an alternative—projecting her feelings onto Paul.

     But that is not acceptable so Lorine eventually turns to another subject—the man who becomes her husband late in life who is less able to object to her treatment of him in her work.

     Albert O. Millen was a hard drinker, 60, divorced. He’d lost his right hand in a printing press accident in Oshkosh in his 20s, and when she met him he was a maintenance painter nearing retirement.

     Millen bought a grey cottage a few lots east of her cabin as a place to live and fish.

     Lorine’s father was a hard drinker and he had been a carp seiner.

     Lorine, were you trying to regain Zukofsky through his son, Paul, or get back your father through a poem about Al?

Or were you, yourself, the child you wanted to save?

Something in the water

like a flower

will devour

water

flower

 

Undercurrent of the foreboding as John explains.

     It may be dangerous to do this with someone else’s work, but as writers it is key to our uncovering greater depths in our own. In time, anyone can become a good writer; but to become a great writer, you must learn to become a great reader of your own work.

THE WRITER’S CAVE – Parts 2 & 3

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John is suddenly exasperated.

     Did I forget that we had a marital property agreement, and at the time of our divorce—our kids were gone and the two of us were barely talking to one another.

     She didn’t steal anything from me.

     If anything, I was misrepresenting the situation for my own purposes. I was stealing from her.

John, now more detached.

     In his essay on the Orson Welles movie masterpiece, film critic Roger Ebert says of “rosebud,” “it explains everything…and nothing.” Who heard the dying Kane say the word before his death? The butler says, late in the film, that he did. But Kane seems to be alone when he dies; and the reflection in the broken paperweight shows the nurse entering an otherwise empty room.

Directly to the audience again.

      Do writers, use events to mirror things that have different meaning for them later on? Like vampires, take the blood out of the actual situation and transform it into something that gives them…what? Immortality?

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BOB: Part Two, WRITER AS ILLUSIONIST

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Lighter in spirit than the first.

JOHN:   QUESTION: Will religious symbols ward off writers?

     Holy water does not affect writers other than it gets them wet, and getting them wet might really aggravate them. The same is true of religious symbols.  Simply holding them up in front of a writer will do nothing.

      I’ve learned, from years in advertising, to do a little test-marketing before jumping into projects with both feet, so when a publisher I’ve known for a long time asks me what I’m up to these days, I tell her I’m putting together a presentation called…

John delivers this title directly to the audience with over-the-top enthusiasm.

      “Unearthing the Writer as Vampire.”

Now more reflective.

     When she doesn’t even slightly acknowledge this, I realize with a start that what I have is a “guy idea” that women (who are a high percentage of the writers I come in contact with) will not be intrigued by. But is this a subject restricted to males? I remember Lorine Niedecker and my first experience with publishing.

John now very much in reminiscent mode.

     A little over 20 minutes down the road from where I live in Wisconsin—and 60 years ago—there was a woman who scrubbed floors in the Fort Atkinson hospital and spent much of her life beside a flooding river in a barren cottage without electricity or running water. Unknown to those who came in contact with her, she also wrote relentless poetry which today is included in the Norton Anthology alongside such literary giants as Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams.

For example:

Fog-thick morning—

I see only

where I now walk. I carry

my clarity

with me.

     Now there are various small collections of her poems and two books of correspondence she had over a 20-year period of time, but nothing that correlates her life with her work. I figure this is something I can handle and since we are coming up on the 100^th anniversary of her birth, there may be a marketing opportunity for a short, inexpensive paperback that I publish myself. I call the book America’s Greatest Unknown Poet.

John holds up a copy of the book.

     Lorine tells us, “I had set my sights beyond Blackhawk Island…and my connection to that other world was Louis Zukofsky—a young New York intellectual making waves.”

     Here’s how Zukofsky’s friend, Jerry Reisman, described her first meeting with Louis:

John dons an old fashioned cap.

     “In the early 1930s I lived in the South Bronx with my parents and was a physics major at CCNY. Louis Zukofsky and I were close friends. Frequently, on weekends, I rode the subway to his Manhattan apartment and did my homework there.

     “I had read most, if not all, of his letters to and from Lorine Niedecker. Neither Louis nor I had ever met her and we both looked forward to her impending visit. I believe Louis expected her to stay, at most, two weeks. The year was 1933.

John looks at an imagined Lorine Niedecker.

     “When Lorine arrived, she and Louis exchanged shy greetings and Louis introduced her to me. Of course she already knew about me from Louis’s letters. Later, when she began to unpack her things and Louis saw what she had brought—an ironing board and an iron, for example—he concluded that she was prepared to stay a long time. And…

John holds up an iron.

…he looked a bit worried. He had not planned to have a long-term live-in relationship with Lorine.”

John paces around a bit. Then nervously comes back to the audience.

     Well Louis Zukofsky and her hit it off OK. In fact, she became pregnant.

     Lorine wanted to keep the child, but Louis insisted that she terminate the pregnancy.

     She pleaded, “I’ll have the child in Wisconsin, raise it on Blackhawk Island and never bother you for support money or anything else!”

     But, Louis was adamant.

     Nothing remained but to find a reliable abortionist and the money to pay for the operation.

 

John removes his cap, he is now back to the present thinking about Niedecker in the past.

      One of Reisman’s cousins recommended a female doctor. Her fee was $150—a lot of money in those days.

     Lorine got the money from her father.

     After the operation, the doctor revealed that the patient had been carrying twins.

     Lorine named them ‘Lost’ and ‘Found.’

     Physically, she recovered quickly, but…

     …In her poem about Mary Shelley, she wrote:

                             Who was Mary Shelley?

What was her name

before she married?

Who was Mary Shelley?

She read Greek, Italian

She bore a child

Who died

and yet another child

who died.

Directly to the audience.

     Do we men realize what women go through?

     Mary Shelly gave birth to four children, and only one of them survived to adulthood. Her first died eleven days after its birth. The next, born a year after, died of malaria, and a third perished from dysentery the following year. During her fifth pregnancy, Mary miscarried and nearly lost her life.

     And then there were Lorine’s twins. She ached for them all the years of my life

      As I am researching my America’s Greatest Unknown Poet book I discover that Lorine went back to Wisconsin.

      And Zukofsky? He eventually got married and had a son, Paul, by his new wife. During the period of his son’s childhood, Zukofsky’s letters are full of accounts of Paul’s antics. Lorine used these anecdotes to write poems about Paul, which also suggest an embedded homage to Zukofsky.

     Louis feared she wanted  to lay claim to Paul with her words. Perhaps she did.

John plodding ahead.

     She continued to exchange letters with him over the next ten years, often more than one a week—a correspondence that is for each of them, their greatest output.

John becomes deeply distracted.

     No wonder her novel Frankenstein showed Mary Shelley ’s real-life preoccupation with pregnancy, labor, paternity, and death. In 1815, shortly after the death of her first baby, Mary Shelley recorded this entry in her journal: “Dreamed that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived.”

     And your work, Lorine, showed a preoccupation with Louis’s son, Paul.

     You sent Paul a book and said you hoped he would read it each summer. Did you want to connect with him, in some way, on an ongoing basis? You wrote:

     FOR PAUL

Paul

now six years old:

this book of birds I loved

I give to you.

I thought now maybe Paul

growing taller than cattails

around Duck Pond

between the river and the Sound

will keep this book intact,

fly back to it each summer

maybe Paul

     Niedecker’s For Paul poems created a ‘family’ composed of the Zukofskys and herself. At first, Celia and Louis welcomed her attachment to Paul, and the child apparently enjoyed her attentions too.

Sadly shaking his head.

     But her choice of Paul as a focus for her poems went…awry. His wife claimed her poems for Paul pressed into the Zukofskys’ privacy. And in 1961, when two of the poems were to be published in her volume, My Friend Tree, Louis asked that she remove the overt biographical content from the titles and dedications.  She did.

John, now lost in his own conclusions.

     Ah ha! I think as I discover the story behind Lorine’s poems about Paul. What if our writing is more than a means for us to delude ourselves by transforming one thing into something else? In fact, what if it is the opposite. What if writing allows us to confront indirectly what we cannot head-on? I recall a mystery novel I wrote whose hero was my rather non-communicative son. Though it is fictional I had to flesh out many of the emotions from my own experiences and in some strange way, I came to know myself through this use of him. …Even better than I could have through poetry, which I’ve always considered more personal and more revealing than fiction.

         And my novel?

Embarrassed.

     My novel? Oh well…it is never published, but looking back at it now the remarkable thing is that at its conclusion, the young narrator goes to live at the house where his father recently died. Digging through that man’s possessions the son begins to appreciate his dad.

To himself, more than to the audience.

     So I wanted my son to appreciate me, big deal. I didn’t see that it was also my job to appreciate him.

 

 

 

THE WRITER’S CAVE – Part 1

Buy this today. Great to listen to in the car and share with writer friends.

This is excerpted from my CD, The Writer’s Cave, Why Writers Write What They Do. It is available from amazon for $10. To order click here: 

The Writer’s Cave is now available from amazon for $10.
Click here to order:
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The Writer’s Cave, True Stories of Why We Write What We Do, written and presented  by John Lehman

Music

BOB: Part One, THE WRITER AS VAMPIRE

Music

JOHN:  Question: Do writers sleep in coffins?

     In the old days, victims of writers, e.g. readers, were occasionally interred while still in an author-induced deep sleep.  This may have given rise to the myth from gravediggers and others who observed them emerging from coffins and crypts that literary people do sleep in coffins. So the answer is “no,” though a writer may choose to sleep in a coffin for other reasons. I understand coffins are quite dark and very quiet.

 John, excitedly.

     I get this idea for a one-person presentation. A DVD commentary on an Ingmar Bergman film, Persona, suggests that a director/writer is like a vampire. Wow, I think, the writer as vampire.  So I write something up. It begins this way:

     It’s 35 years ago in one of the Slavic countries that gave rise to the legend of vampires in the 11^th century. My first wife and I are wandering the streets of Split, Yugoslavia—an ancient Venetian city on the blue Mediterranean with white buildings stacked up its hills.

He turns to the audience.

     Come along with me.

John continues conversationally.

     I’d just left the Army and we are on the first leg of a year’s journey that will take us to Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Austria, France, Spain, Portugal and back to Germany.

          Anyway, it’s a warm early fall afternoon and a crowd is gathering several blocks away. With our one-year-old in a carrier on my back, we hurry down the seaside street to see what possibly could be going on.

      There’s the snapshot in my memory that remains. A movie is being shot in front of an old hotel. This is intriguing in itself. But then we look past the actors and cameras and see that the man directing it is none other than…the legendary…

…Orson Welles.

John looks off to their left. His initial enthusiasm is replaced by disillusionment.

     He looks terrible. As wide as he is tall, he’s dressed in a black shirt, black trousers, and a black suit coat that he must have slept in. His hair is greasy and hanging straight over his forehead and his corpulent face is a sweaty, beet red. He seems to be tilting slightly backwards to balance his colossal weight.

     But it is the Orson Welles. Orson Welles directing!

John looks back as if they are seeing the action of the movie shoot.

     A taxi pulls in front of the hotel entrance and as the woman gets out the camera on the other side zooms in, shooting into the interior of the automobile she’s leaving.

       All this is done without any verbal direction. In fact this seems to be more a rehearsal for a scene that will be shot.

       Orson Welles is turning to the cameraman.

       My God, I am going to hear the greatest cinematic genius of all time actually tell his cameraman what to do.

     He says, with that still-sonorous Orson Welles voice coming from deep in his diaphragm as if from the bottom of a huge, empty barrel,

     “Mario, keep your eyes on the camera, these people will steal anything.” 

     That’s it?

     That’s it. Probably no one in the crowd but Pat and I understand English, but we laugh all afternoon repeating the words:

     “Mario, keep your eyes on the camera.”

     And the baby laughs too…so hard and so beautifully…

     … that during the whole rest of the trip if we want him to roll with laughter, we say…

“Mario, keep your eyes on the camera!”

Laughing.

John  returns to his own thoughts. The joy starts to dissolve.

     What an anticlimax, but looking back what could he have said that would be more memorable? For Orson Welles—known as the boy genius because of his early masterpiece, Citizen Kane—making movies for TV in Yugoslavia was probably the low point of his career.  And here was my son beginning his life…with wonderful giggles. My little boy’s laughter was his masterpiece. To his parents, he was “our baby genius.”

 When John begins again his voice is weary, more confessional.

He sighs.

     A nice story, but now, almost 35 years later, here’s why I think it fits the topic, “The Writer as Vampire.”

      As writers, we’re consumed with finding significant “meaning.” We are elated when we think we have that. But then times change. Life moves on. And what is significant changes for us.

     When I sit down to write a poem about the Orson Welles encounter 20 years later, my son is a teenager in the Air Force—neither a “teenage genius” nor an “Air Force genius,” and my wife has left me. So the cheery ending of the little memory doesn’t seem quite appropriate anymore.

      Here are the last two stanzas I come up with:

U

His shot seemed a curious choice.

When the woman stepped out from

the cab a camera entered through

a door that opened on the other

side. Did it make sense, to film

the empty  space  where  once she

had  been, leaving us to watch her

parting shape from the dark inside?

In twenty years, my wife, herself,

would go, never once looking back

on unedited footage decomposing

in the can.

U

His face was crimson with broken

veins and greased with sweat; his

voice—that voice—no longer Harry

Lime’s, but the mumbled growl of

Hank Quinlan toward his seedy end. 

What I wanted most that day, was

a shimmering globe to hold forever

dear, instead, in his voice I heard

only shards of broken glass. “Mario,”

he said, “you keep your eyes on the

people or they will steal everything.” 

And she did.

U

     I like the Citizen Kane snow-scene-in-a-glass-globe allusion, but now, my emphasis switches from watching the camera to “keep your eyes on the people.” Now I had “truth” that fit my current situation.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Final

 

"Damn this is good!"

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

 

      A.         Choosing and developing characters 

1. pick minimum characters to convey scene
2. use the questions from the characterization, Exercise 3

(subtext). What is going on underneath the text.  For example, if on the day your sister dies, you are buying a pair of gloves, the subtext of her death would greatly affect the way you felt, even if the action of buying gloves is ostensibly everyday.  A good autobiography is a mirror of the way human beings behave.  The writer’s job is to provide what is also underneath the behavior of human beings. 

1. give each a purpose in a scene
2. remember events trigger action, action leads to discovery
3. use narrative summary sparingly—it is a connector or a door into a scene, never the substance—see your life as a movie (dramatic scenes linked by narrative summary)

    B.         Dialogue “do’s and don’ts

                        Do

                        1.         point of view for each character (attitude)

                        2.         impression of natural speech

                        3.         use dramatic structure to shape the sequence of

                                    what is said

                        Don’t

                        1.         let characters make long speeches

                        2.         put in dead dialogue

                        3.         write dialogue in which nothing is left unspoken

                                    (no subtext)

     C.         Composite voice of autobiography (the person you are today versus the person you were then–both are critical)

     D.         Other techniques worth exploring through your reading of others

                        1.         foreshadowing

                        2.         incorporate external events

                        3.         stretching and condensing        

                        4.         composite characters/scenes

                        5.         changing vantage points

1. flashbacks (juxtaposition)
2. altering order to build drama 

 E. Disclaimers (to give you more freedom to tell the truth)

Some names and biographic details in this book have been altered.

                                                                            or

    This book is fiction though based upon events that really happened.

 EXERCISE 5

 Pick one of your scenes (initial or interim).  Choose a setting that reflects theme and one–like Getting Closer–in which they are physically doing something.  Who are the characters you will use in the scene?  What is the subtext?  What is each striving for? 

 EXERCISE 6

 Write the scene.  It helps if the people in it are involved is some kind of activity other than just talking (such as cooking in Getting Closer).  This is a first draft, it is more important to write continuously than “correctly” or artistically.  Write from your feelings, creating a scene that kindles them for you.  Be brutally honest.  You can go back later and polish the result, what you are after here is the raw energy and sharp detail that can’t be added when you edit. 

 TRUTH

             “If you tell the whole truth, the complete picture, if you include all sides of a person, the dark and the light, then it is possible to tell even ugly truths about someone without committing character assassination–if your motive is not to condemn but to understand.  It is not the objectivity of the reporter you should strive for, but a human treatment of the truth, a feeling for the vulnerability of human beings.

            “Autobiographic narrative is more than simply remembering on paper.  it is a second chance, a chance to get it right.  Not that you change events, not that you don’t write about helplessly watching your sister drown with all the pain and guilt you experienced, but that this time you are on your own side, even in pain and failure.  Now you can tell the story with insight and find the meaning of the single experience within the context of your whole life.  Remembering one’s suffering from the perspective of acquired wisdom is different from simply replaying it.

            “Autobiographic stories don’t require happy endings, but they do require a reason for being, a purpose, Knowing the end of the story means that even if a painful memory temporarily casts a pall over your present while you are writing it–and it well may–it is only a point in the story, not the entire story.”

                                                                                                –Tristine Rainer

SAMPLE MEMOIR – THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL 6

CREATING AND FINE TUNING SCENES

                                                Editing My Wife’s Autobiography

                                                I am a saboteur

                                                behind the lines

                                                eliminating adjectives

                                                adverbs and other

                                                old lovers.

                                                            -John Lehman

In the following excerpt look for:

1. description  (how much?–the telling detail, not adjectives or adverbs, get the audience to judge, use of motion, atmosphere—setting mirroring character, conflict or theme (remember “opposites,” especially between characters and within the central character)

2. introducing characters through action (suggest singularity and temperament, gesture–body language)

3. dialogue–emotional subtext (each character in a scene has an agenda) summary dialogue, indirect dialogue, direct dialogue, hidden dialogue

4.   realization–reaction, inner response, ie, emotional beat (Getting Closer) different from expository writing (topic sentence then development), the beat, not the paragraph is the unit, and its tempo is the changing intensity of your story.

5. changing place (and time), begin scene with establishing dialogue or description.

GETTING CLOSER by Frances Metzman (Rosebud #10) 

            I smell the earthy root odor of potatoes boiling on the stove.  Smoke billows upward.  As I lift the heavy pot and drain the water, steam burns my eyes.  My mother’s heavy footsteps thump on the linoleum behind me.  The sound chills my blood.  Turning my head, I see she is only retrieving eggs from the refrigerator.  Although I promise myself not to anticipate the worst, I am jumpy, worried.

            Dumping the potatoes into a mixing bowl, I blink away the sting of heat and add several tablespoons of butter, the sautéed onions and eggs.  I beat it all together with a portable hand mixer.  Adding salt and pepper, I watch as the ingredients are pummeled into a smooth batter.  The odor of melted butter wafts upward.  The filling for the knishes is nearly done, and, so far so good.  No fights that draw blood.

            “You shouldn’t use electric appliances.  The knishes have to be made totally by hand,” my mother says, making a depression in a mound of flour and breaking eggs into it.

            Without the mixer I’d have to stay longer.  I feel my back stiffen.  “This is 1996,” I say.  “Your great-grandmother in Russia would have loved to have one of these.”

            “The woman couldn’t read, and sold bread by the roadside.  They had no electricity.  What would she do with your mixer?”

            I concentrate on a bowl as though I’m inventing a cure for cancer.

            I love knishes, those round, flaky-doughed turnovers filled with pureed potato.  When I had asked my mother to show me how to make them, I’d hoped we’d use the opportunity to declare a truce.  We’ve gotten adept at shouting matches, but in the last year or two I can hardly face her.  I visit as little as possible.  Give it one last chance, I told myself.

            At first, she’d been excited by the prospect; now I see her expression has dulled.  She’s cut me off again.  Why do I feel like an orphan around her?

            My mother excels in the kitchen.  It’s not that she’s nicer, but her obsession with food seems to give her a measure of control over her life.  She commands every utensil within her reach and any hapless human in her way.  Parboiling, braising, steaming, sautéing, roasting and frying are performed like sacred rituals.  I hold out little hope that getting her to initiate me into her hallowed sanctuary will reunite us.  But it’s the last-ditch effort before I turn my back forever.

            A tall large woman, my mother has developed thickening petrified slabs of flesh on her body over the years, kind of like the rings of a cut tree that tell its age.  Yet now she moves like a musical conductor, stewing flour on the board as though bringing a violin section to a crescendo.

            As she rolls the dough flat, each push forward seems calculated.  It’s as though she must duplicate that motion exactly the same distance each time.  I want her to stay in that position since I won’t have to hear the flat slapping, that odd rhythm on the floor that fills me with dread.

            She folds the sheet of dough over her rolling pin and holds it in front of my face.  it is beautiful, evenly translucent and a near-perfect oval.  My sheet of dough has ragged edges and tears in the middle.

            Using the back of a spoon, she runs the filling along a section of dough.  Then she folds the overlapping sides over and seals it by brushing the seams with a beaten egg.  A long puffed tube emerges.  After dipping her hand in a bowl of flour, she cuts off sections with the side of her hand.

            “I cut it this way because the dough sticks together naturally.  Cutting with a knife just makes it fall apart.  You didn’t know that, did you?”

            “No.”  I smack the rolling pin against my palm.  “How the hell would I know that”  You never let me in your precious kitchen.”  And when you give me a recipe, I want to shout out loud, you deliberately forget to tell me the most important ingredient anyway.

            My mother claps her hands together and a cloud of flour dust rises.  “That temper of yours again.  That’s why you’re thirty-five and not married.”

            “Knock it off,” I answer in disgust.  Why can’t I hide my anger?  I feel tired although we’ve only been at it for half an hour.  As I wipe the sweat from my face with a tissue, I

think it’s one hundred degrees inside.  My mother never opens the windows in the summer time.  She prefers to close everything out, even changes of seasons.  I glance at the doors and windows, checking escape routes.

            “I don’t know why you bothered me about cooking.  You don’t eat my food, and you never come for dinner,” my mother mumbles.

            “That’s because your meals are like feeding frenzies.  You’re never satisfied no matter how much I eat.”

            “Everyone loves my cooking but you.  You can never give compliments.”

            When her back is turned, I jab a potato-covered middle finger in the air.  I taste bile at the back of my throat remembering how, as a kid, she forced me to eat every morsel of food put in front of me.  At least those memories keep me thin now.

            Rolling out a new ball of dough, I flip it over the rolling pin, trying to lay the opposite side on the board in one smooth gesture, just like she does.  It slips off, and falls to the floor.  She gives me a wilting look.  Slowly, I pick it up.  My arms ache.

            She’s staring at me.  “You’re just like your father.  You even look like him.”

            “Please, please don’t start that again.  Let’s just have a nice time.  Then we’ll eat the knishes.”

            She’s jumped into bad territory.  My mother dates her unrelenting unhappiness from the time my father left us twenty-five years ago.  That’s when my memories turn ugly, from a mother who asked me how my dad had gone too one who seemed not to recognize me whenever her eyes happened to look my way.

            I fan my face with a towel, recalling my dad’s explanation of why he left my mother for another woman.

            “Your mother, she only gives me food, nothing else.  Nothing for the soul, nothing for the body,” he had grumbled.

            “Sure.  What do you care about me anyway?  Your father left me and so did you.”

            “I have a life, too.”

            “Some life.  Hundreds of dates and no husband.”

            “I think I’d better go,” I say.

            After my father left, my mother talked of suicide.  Day after day I’d rush home from school, watching her closely.  When she went to bed, I’d sit up for hours listening for signs of life.  Only when I heard her toss in bed or heard those heavy, scary footsteps was I able to sleep.  Although she never attempted suicide, she managed to do some pretty destructive things.  I sense her heading in that direction now.

            Untying my apron, I notice flour is streaked all over my hands and shoes.  Stepping behind me, she grabs the apron strings and reties them.  The battle of the apron is on.  The old familiar knot of anger pulls tight.

            “The potatoes need more salt.” 

            “I hesitate, then I pick up the salt shaker.  ” Will you be good if I stay?  I speak softly.

            “Okay,” she says.  “I will.”  She looks remorseful for a moment.  I know she can’t help herself, but I pray for a miracle…

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 5

EXERCISE 4

            Briefly identify each of the following for the example below and then for your own autobiography:

1. your story’s final pivotal event–(climax).

            A turning point that could be the end of my story where something in me died so something could live or be born?

2.  the initial scene

            With what scene was I aware of the problem that would result in the final climax? 

3.         Your problem/desire

            What incited my problem, whether I was aware of it or not?  What did I want  in response to this?

 4.         Adversaries or obstacles

             Was there a person, people or factors that stood in the way of the achieving  my desire?

5.         Interim scenes  (use events/desires from Exercise 1C) 

List at least five other scenes or events that mirrored and intensified my problem in different ways?

                        a.

                        b.

                        c.

                        d.

                        e.

6.         Realization

            What did you realize at the moment of transformation that made the

transformation possible?  Did something in your behavior change as a result of the realization?  

Here is an example. The conflict is over having a second child (it might be stated in mor general terms as: How do I keep the space I need to grow as an individual, yet stay close enough to my husband to keep love alive in our marriage?

1.    Richard told me when we were dating that he wanted a big family. I wanted him and that sounded romantic to me.

2.    We were both overjoyed when I delivered John.

3.    Richard was supportive when I went back to work because we needed the money.   

4.    I got a promotion.  Now I was making more than Richard.  It made me feel in control of my own life for the first time.  Richard was silent about it, except he made jokes about my being head of the family.

5.    John started begging to have a little brother or sister.  I knew Richard had been  encouraging him.  Richard reminded me that our plan was t have a big family.  I said it wasn’t the right time.

6.    I saw there was a chance to become director of the arts center and I knew I wanted this and I would be devastated if I didn’t get it.

7.    Richard joined a Christian church and started taking John on Sundays. I used the  time to catch up on work.  I felt their disapproval.

8.    Richard got a promotion at his job.  It made him more confident and fun at home.

9.    We took a long-planned trip to Europe without John. Unexpectedly it was like a second honeymoon.

10. The director of the arts center announced his resignation.

11. I discovered I was pregnant. I wept.

12. I knew if I told Richard I was pregnant he would never forgive me for not having the child.

13. I became irritable and started to have morning sickness, which I tried to hide.

14. Richard was more kind than ever, which made me feel guilt. I almost told him I was pregnant, but I lost my courage.

15. My friend took me to get an abortion.

16. If Richard ever suspected, he didn’t say anything.  But something had died between us. Trust.

17. I got the directorship.  I knew I had made the right choice. I loved my position and the power that came with it.  This was all my life, what I was meant to do.

18.  Richard and I began to live very busy and independent lives, and he never again  mentioned having another child.

19. Now so many years later when John himself has three children and Richard and I are comfortably retired, but not really close. I still believe I made the right choice for me, but I often wish I’d had the courage to tell Richard and we’d fought it out, instead of  each of us taking a solitary, silent road.

Once you have put these elements in order, turn to your own story and try to do the same.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 4

 EXERCISE 3

Answer these questions for the other major character in your scene (from Exercise 2).  If you don’t know what the actual answer is, use your intuition and role playing ability and from what you do know project answers.

 

A.    Who is the love in this person’s life?  Think about the emotions this person has in a relationship with whom he or she is involved.  Limit your answer to a single choice. 

 

B.    What is this person fighting for?  What or who interferes with this subject accomplishing his or her goals.  Most of us don’t live for realities, but for dreams of what might be. 

 

C.    What of special significance has happened to this person the year before, or if it’s more appropriate, what will happen to your subject within the next year? 

 

D.    Describe the humor in this person’s life.  Often we alleviate the serious burdens of life by doing things that strike others as humorous (Hamlet has some hilarious lines).  Identify the sense of humor of your subject or something  he or she does that strikes others as humorous. 

 

E. What opposites exist in this person?  What fascinates us about other human beings are their inconsistencies (if there is love, there is bound to be hate too; if  there is a great need for someone or something, there is a resentment of that  need as well).  

 

F.    What kind of discovery is this person likely to make about himself or herself?  Is there some kind of a revelation your subject will have?  What is it? 

 

G.   How does this person interact with others?  Particularly with regard to someone the subject should care about.  

 

H.   What is the source of this person’s importance? Reputation, money, power, title? Answer that for your subject.    

 

I.    With what place does the person have a close association?  It can be a geographic location, an office downtown or a summer cottage, or it can be a particular room in the house–a workshop in the basement, the kitchen, a couch in front of the TV…even a car.

 

J. What is intriguing about this person?  (When I think about my father I’m fascinated by how similar we are and how different we are.) 

 

 

SOME COMMON METHODS FOR ORGANIZATION 

by decade, 10 year increments or other intervals of time), or season–Time magazine, A Year in Province

around a key event as touchstone—(it’s like a slice of a sub sandwich)–On the Road,

embroidered thread or relationship –Fear of Flying, Bird by Bird                     

“bookends”—start in the present, go back, return to the present just before the end–Titanic.

a quilt-like pattern (such as interweaving past and present parallel situations)–Joy Luck Club

 

NINE ESSENTIAL STORY ELEMENTS (Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story)

 

            Beginning                     Initiating Incident          

                                                      Problem

                                                      Desire Line

            Middle                          Struggle with Adversary

                                                     Interim Pivotal Events

                                                     Precipitating Event

            Conclusion                  Crisis

                                                     Climax

                                                     Realization

 

Every autobiography is the telling of:

            1.         The story the world told me.

            2.         The story I told myself.

            3.         (The story about myself I’ve discovered through writing about it)

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 3

USING OPPOSITES 

             Before we do the fleshing out of these scenes, there’s something worth remembering.  Inexperienced writers are afraid they’re going to loose their audiences if they don’t hook them with the title and a gimmicky first line.  Give your audience credit for more intelligence than this.  Remember they’re not coming to this work critically, but with the hope that this is the story that will…go deeper in, take them further out… make them more of what they are.  It’s why we go to plays expectantly, despite the fact that most performances are disappointing. Why we read the next novel, though left unsatisfied by so many before.  We aren’t disappointed by tricks, but because a writer has squandered the opportunity to do so much more.

            As you write, picture a person lovingly reading over your shoulder who wants more.  Who says, “I want to feel it just as you did, don’t rush through the details.  What was the temperature?  How did the light shine in through the window?  When she made that remark, did her expression change ever so subtly?  What is the reason these characters are here? What are their relationships?”  The scene, the characters are a means to express your and my fullest feelings, deeply and importantly.  Explore the richness of each possibility.”

            Michael Shurtleff (Audition) notes that in everyday living we try to avoid or resolve conflict, but conflict is what creates drama.  Under the control of the written page we explore ramifications beyond everyday life.  It’s not enough to capture reality on the page.   We want heightened reality.  The writer needs to find out what the characters in every scene are fighting for, to fully play out the opposites that exist within each character.  You have many creative choices in the selection of what you include and what you exclude.  Make choices that intensify real life drama.  Find romance; it’s everybody’s secret dream.  Whenever you have two conflicting personality traits that cancel each other out, do both.  Michael Shurtleff says, ” One of the great results of using opposites is behavior that is unpredictable, therefore always more intriguing to an audience.  It’s why people are forever astonishing us in life: We don’t know what they’re going to do next, they’re not consistent, we’re always being surprised by their doing something we didn’t expect.  Interesting acting always has this risk element of the unpredictable in it.  That’s why actors like the early Marlon Brando and De Niro and Pachino interest us so; we never quite know what they’re going to do next.  They make us want to know.  They make us keep watching them.  They surprise us with their unpredictability.”

            As a writer you need to supply these opposites, even if you don’t see them in your subject in real life.  What’s there is obvious.  It’s what is underneath the obvious that makes for interesting writing.                                     

FROM GOOD MOTHERS, BAD DAUGHTERS

by Charlotte Nokola (Rosebud #11) 

            My mother had an old friend.  This in itself surprised me, since my mother seemed to me to have little history aside from taking me to parks and frying up bacon.  Her friend’s name was Hope West, which I knew from seeing it on the binding of one of the books in our house.  She was an anthropologist, and she and my mother had been in college together at Washington University.  In August of 1959, when I was seven, my family took a short trip to Chicago, to visit the Field Museum, to have lunch in the Marshall Field’s tearoom and to visit Hope West.  In the museum I was thrilled by displays of Kodiak bears, hunks of alabaster and chrysolite and dinosaur bones.  My other main concern on this trip was eating fried chicken as often as possible.

            It seemed a little dreary to visit one of my mother’s fiends in the middle of all of this, and the August heat was thick.  All of the old college friends I had met so far seemed to fall into one not very interesting category.  They had given up their jobs, married and had children.  They had “luncheon,” not lunch, with card parties once or twice a year, on card tables in their living rooms, were all very pleasant, and all seemed to be named Mary Helen or Helen Louise.  But this old friend had no children, I was told, was not married and worked as a writer.  Never had I met a woman like this.

            Further, she lived by herself in an apartment.  In my limited experience as a girl growing up outside St. Louis in a suburban house with a scrubby field behind it, an apartment in the city seemed to be a shrine to one’s own mind.  Especially this woman’s apartment, since she was the author of books.  As far as I knew, she and my mother hadn’t seen each other since college, and now it was more than twenty-five years later.

            So I knew, when we walked into her apartment at the end of a humid August afternoon, that some kind of moment had arrived for my mother.  Our family–my sister, my brother, my mother and father and myself–were much too large for Hope West’s apartment.  We were a bulky group that disturbed the streamlined serenity of this “modern” 1950s brick skyscraper.  My parents tried to make us look spotless and presentable, dabbing at our collars or the corners of our mouths, catching stray strands of hair.  But here was a seven-year-old with legs long like a young horse’s, with scabby knees from falling in blackberry patches.  A fourteen-year-old boy in wilted khaki pants, whose voice was changing and who was obsessed with meteorology.  And a sixteen-year-old girl with three or four crinoline petticoats and upswept blond hair so that she could look like Kim Novak in Picnic.

            My father stood slightly aside in shirt sleeves because of the heat and smoked a Pall Mall.  His social bearing was a bit confused because this woman was a scholar and a writer.  He didn’t seem to know whether to adopt the polite, deferential mode reserved for elderly maiden aunts or the bossy, commandeering mode used with business friends.  And there was my mother, a mother with white gloves, responsible for all of these children who were now either bumping into coffee tables, in danger of breaking the African artifacts or rudely staring out the window at Lake Michigan.  But I remember thinking, despite our gangliness that Hope West was certainly the one to be pitied.  She was “a woman without children”–a fate always presented in our family as a lifetime tragedy, a sadness to be avoided at any cost.

            Yet, Hope West did not look sad.  She did not look like any of the other women I had ever met, the mothers with comfortable tummies, generous upper arms, curly hair with a little breeze in it, wearing a print dress that puffed out at the waist.  Mothers who actually spent time crisscrossing the prongs of a fork on top of cookies for decoration.  Hope West was tall and wore a tubular green suit.  Her whole face gathered toward her hair, which was pulled up in a French twist, and seemed to collect what she was seeing and thinking.

            There were no cookies waiting for us on the coffee table.  One side of the living room held a wall of books, more than I had ever seen in anyone’s house.  Most important, most amazing to me, was that all of these books were hers.  On another side of the room was a huge picture window that overlooked Lake Michigan and the tops of buildings.  Not flowers and a swing set.  No one but Hope West enjoyed this view of Lake Michigan’s endless blue tabletop–hard to imagine, when the five of us crowded around the kitchen window at our house to look at rabbits or possums traveling through the backyard.  Her own view, and her own books–and some of them were undoubtedly hers, of her own writing.  How would it feel, I wondered, to have your own book on your own bookshelf: Her bookshelves, her room, her Lake Michigan.  I had never met a woman who didn’t share everything with everyone.  Who didn’t have to give up the best pork chop for the father or the children, who had more than a few private things in a bureau drawer that her children always raided.  Hope West seemed strange and monumental, standing straight and gray-eyed in her French twist, in front of her books and a long vista outside.

            Suddenly, the seemingly inevitable and unfortunate outlines of women’s destinies fell into relief for me.  You could be Hope West, alone, with your books, with no children.  Or you could be my mother with children, and no books of your own.  I felt that each of the old friends looked at the other and saw what she did not have.  It seemed that I had to choose sides, then and there.  Of course I thought, maybe in loyalty, that I would be like my mother, the one with children.  But I had always wanted to write a book, to hold a book of my own in my hand.  Did I have to choose?

            We took Hope West out to dinner with us.  I ate fried chicken again, and wondered what Hope West did for dinner, alone, on all those other nights, when we weren’t there to take her out.  My mother never did become Hope West, the writer of books, the mother of no children.  But she did bring her impressionable children across four hundred flat miles of Missouri and Illinois to visit her on an impossibly hot summer day in 1959.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 2

THE NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY 

The New Autobiography is a vibrantly democratic and deeply personal type of narrative writing that, while little understood, is becoming popular in our culture.  it is new because it is being written by new voices, not only those who represent the official and dominant view from the top.  It is new because it is written as self-discovery rather than self-promotion.  It is new because it beholds the individual’s life, not through Puritan mandates of moral edification, nor nineteenth-century credos of materialistic success, nor twentieth-century formulas of reductionist psychology, but through the cohesion of literature and myth. It is a way of saying, “I matter; this life I have lived has meaning!  And because I tell it from my perspective, because I frame it, it has the meaning I give it.”

            Like the New Journalism developed by Tom Wolfe and other magazine writers of the late 1960s, New Autobiography appropriates storytelling devices from the realistic novel.  It is often written in dramatic scenes with dialogue and interior monologues.  It uses novelistic devices to reach inner truths, not just the truth of facts.

            To shape an autobiographic story, in the process you recall your yearnings and dreams and their place in your destiny.  You are led away from perceiving your history as a series of accidents or calamities that wrongly formed you.  “We are less damaged by the traumas of childhood, James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) writes, “than by the traumatic way we remember childhood.” and  “We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.  We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair.”  Through the autobiographic process you restore the “romance” and the “fictional flair” of story to your own life, and you replace old stories of powerlessness with stories of consciousness and revelation in which you are the protagonist.  By applying story structure to your life you necessarily replace unconscious, unexamined scripts with consciously chosen stories…  Stories lead to a climax that is a point of transformation. 

            When I view myself as the heroine of my own story, I no longer complain about the conflicts in my life and in myself.  I am no longer a victim of circumstances…  I am a protagonist in a world of unending dilemmas that contain hidden meaning that is up to me to discover.  I am the artist of my life who takes the raw materials given, no matter how bizarre, painful or disappointing and gives them shape and meaning.  I am within each scene and each chapter of my life, defining my character through the choices I make.  I am on my own side, rooting for myself, aching for myself, celebrating my sensual experiences, marveling in the exquisite subtlety of feeling in my life that novelists have made me aware of in their books. I am as engaged with the ongoing story in my life as is a reader who eagerly turns the page.

      In its simplest form a story is: what you wanted, how you struggled and what you realized out of that struggle.  A story is a series of interrelated events that you made happen and that happened to you, and the consequence.  The consequence is a change in you.  In an autobiographic story, change may occur in other characters, but it must also occur in you, because you are the protagonist.  The change may come form an event (you married, you got old), but it is also a moral change.  You had a realization, a shift in values or perception.  In other words, within the story you made a “character arc,” you had a change in character…  You trace this character arc in an autobiographic story by including your feelings, reactions to the events you experienced and your realizations.  You give the events of your life significance because of what they meant to you and how you changed from your engagement with them.  An autobiographic story is not just an account of events; it is the charting of your emotional, moral and psychological course, which gives meaning to those events.

                                          –Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story

 

EXERCISE 2:

             Sit in a comfortable chair with your pen and paper at hand, at a time and in a spot where you won’t be interrupted.  if it’s your office, turn off the phone.  Begin by relaxing your body and mind.  Systematically tighten and relax all your muscles, then take a deep breath, hold it–then release it completely, releasing all tension.  Close your eyes and take another deep breath.  Release the tension.  And again.  Allow your breathing to become deep and regular.  When you feel relaxed, allow that  special place to come to mind, where as a child you were most yourself.  Is it a wide open expanse or is it confined in some way?  Sense the size and strength of your body at the age you were when you enjoyed this place.  Are you moving, sitting, standing?  Are you alone or with another?

            Now begin to accumulate more information by asking yourself questions.  Each time you think “I can’t remember,” relax and invent an answer. Don’t worry if you are fantasizing rather than really remembering, as long as the answer feels plausible.

            Ask yourself and imagine: What do I see?  What do I feel on my skin?  What do I hear?  What do I smell?  What do I taste?  What is the light like here?  What do I want?  What do I think/ What feelings do I have?  In a minute you will write in the present tense what comes to you.  Allow your imagination to take over where memory stops as you write.  So far the scene you are describing is probably like a slide, full of detail but without movement.  Now add movement.  Turn it into a film.  See and feel yourself move a part of your body.  If you can, actually move as you would have then.  Ask yourself: And then what happens?  What do you do?  What do you think or say?  What changes?  Write whatever comes without censoring it.

 

(Option): On a large piece of paper draw the floor plan of the house or apartment you lived in when you were 7 years old, including the hallways, bathrooms, bedrooms, back and front yards.  After you have completed it with as much detail as you can, put it aside and find a quiet place to write a reverie about it.  Imagine yourself approaching this house the way you had to get there, from a sidewalk, driveway, up three steps to the door–however you entered.  Once inside, walk through and enter a room or place of your choice.

            Now imagine the details, furnish the room–where is the bed or table, is there a fireplace or cupboards, are there rugs or carpets on the floor?  Is it day or night?  Are there lamps or overhead lights?

            Place yourself inside this room and allow your writing to go where it will, exploring your feelings and thoughts at the age you were when you lived there, concentrating on your interaction with other people in the house.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 1

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL                                            John Lehman

 

WHY WE WRITE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

You want to see how your life makes a story by setting it down.

You want the catharsis and self-forgiveness of an honest and complete confession.

You are in mid-life and want to gain from the life behind you the wisdom to mold the life still before you.

You are nearing the end of your life and wish to understand and share what it has meant.

You are a journalist, short story writer, screenwriter or novelist who wants to find your personal voice.

You want to find some eternal form of truth in your own contemporary life.

You are motivated by family love to leave your descendants knowledge of who you were and the life you lived.

You are motivated by desire to relieve the loneliness, fear or ignorance of others who may find themselves in a situation you’ve been through.

You have a whopper of a story to tell and you want to make a bundle by selling it.

You wish to write about your family as a way of ending destructive cycles and creating cohesion  based on truth.

You are a notable person who has been invited by a publisher to write your life story and don’t wish to rely on a ghostwriter.

You are a not-at-all famous person to whom life has given experiences too valuable to fade into oblivion.

You want to know what is true, true for you.

You never enjoyed writing in school, but you want to experience the pleasure of writing like the contemporary authors you enjoy reading.

You want to relive and relish the best years of your life.

You know that the only thing that death cannot destroy is memory, and you wish to preserve from forgetfulness those you have loved.

You can endure your life only by transforming it into a work of art.

Your way to cope with your troubles is to make yourself and others laugh at them.

You wish to celebrate the mystery and complexity of your life.

Your nature is to tell your story.

 

 

EACH OF US IS A STORY

If we want to know about a person, we ask, `What is her story?’ `What is his story?’ For each of us is a story. Each of us is a biography, a singular narrative that is constructed and reconstructed continually through our senses, our actions and our words.

Biologically, psychologically we’re not much different from one another. To be individuals each of us must posses our own story—recollect (re-collect) our lives and act out their drama.

                         –Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

 

THE PROCESS

 

PRE-WRITING. Making choices in form and content.

           

WRITING. Specific techniques for making what you write more interesting to readers—dialogue, introducing characters, descriptive detail—using scenes

 

EDITING. Clarifying, transitions, assuming ownership The first draft is always for you, future drafts direct the material at a specific audience

 

EXERCISE

Part A: Stepping-stones are a list of the marker events that surface when you look over your life.  You simply put down a phrase or sentence for each significant pivotal event in your life as it comes to you.  Begin with “I was born” to get started, and then think of the next important turning point in your life, and the next, and the next, up to the present.  Your list can be any length, but try to keep it between fifteen and twenty items.  After you have finished writing your life stepping-stones, reread your list to get a sense of the continuity and movement of your life.

 

Part B:  This second exercise is as easy as the first one.  It is simply another list, this time of your desires as you moved through life.  Each item on this list will begin with “I wanted…”

Think back to your infancy.  What did you want? Your mother’s love and attention?  To explore a world without any limitations?  Then list the next major desire that motivated you on further.

 

Part C: The third part of this exercise is (on a new sheet of paper) to combine both lists by sensing which desires preceded which pivotal events.  Some desires may be followed by only one stepping stone event–for example, “I wanted to get married” by “I got married.”  Other desires may be followed by numerous events–for example, “I wanted to become an actor” might be followed by “I moved to New York,” “I enrolled in the Actor’s studio,” “I got fired from a play.” Now read your blended desires list and your list of stepping-stones as one merged list that tells a story.  What do you notice about the relationship between your desires and your actions?  As you sense a shape or direction in this combined list, play with it.  Are there missing desires or events that will create greater continuity?  Add them.  Are there clusters that seem to go together, making distinct seasons in your life, periods that were devoted to the same desire?  Delineate them.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Final Part

THE JOHN DILLINGER CAPITAL OF AMERICA

 

Richard Brautigan was like the John Dillinger of poetry, robbing from the rich, giving to the poor:

      Mooresville, Indiana, is the town that John Dillinger came from, and the town has a John Dillinger Museum. You can go in and look around.  

     Some towns are known as the peach capital of America or the cherry capital or the oyster capital, and there’s always a festival and the photograph of a pretty girl in a bathing suit.

     Mooresville, Indiana, is the John Dillinger capital of America.

     Recently a man moved there with his wife, and he discovered hundreds of rats in his basement. They were huge, slow moving child-eyed rats.

     When his wife had to visit some of her relatives for a few days, the man went out and bought a .38 revolver and a lot of ammunition. Then he went down to the basement where the rats were, and he started shooting them. It didn’t bother the rats at all. They acted as if it were a movie and started eating their dead companions for popcorn.

     The man walked over to a rat that was busy eating a friend and placed the pistol against the rat’s head. The rat didn’t move and continued eating away. When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kind of friendly look as if to say, “When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin.”

     The man pulled the trigger.

     He had no sense of humor.

     There’s always a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville, Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.

 

A friend of the poet, Keith Abbot, says, “Over the nineteen years I knew Brautigan, I never heard him refer to any people of the Northwest by name—not his sister, mother, father or stepfathers, not his girlfriends or teachers… The effect was ghostly, as if Brautigan’s past had faded into a kind of surrealist museum whose holdings were indicated only by chalk outlines. He once recalled his abandonment in a Montana hotel by his mother when he was nine or ten and he mentioned to me that he had met his biological father twice, once in a barbershop and once in a hotel room. Each time his father gave him some money to go see a movie.”

 

     Perhaps you felt bad when she said that thing to you. She could have told it to someone else: Somebody who was more familiar with her problems.

     That is my name.

     Or it was a game that you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting at a chair near the window.

     That is my name.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Part 3

THE SIXTIES AGAIN

As I saythe kids at the high school where I found myself teaching didn’t go on to college. Oh maybe one or two went to some kind of car-mechanic training or beautician school. So threat of poor grades or homework assignments or anything didn’t really carry weight. These students were there because their friends were and if they were going to learn anything it had better have some relevance to their life that day. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald…forget it. That’s when I zeroxed this poem by Richard Brautigan:

If I were to live my life

in catfish forms

in scaffolds of skin and whiskers

at the bottom of a pond

and you were to come by

     one evening

when the moon was shining

down into my dark home

and stand there at the edge

     of my affection

and think, “It’s beautiful

here by this pond. I wish

     somebody loved me,”

I’d love you and be your catfish

friend and drive such lonely

thoughts from your mind

and suddenly you would be

     at peace,

and ask yourself, “I wonder

if there are any catfish

in this pond? It seems like

a perfect place for them.”

 

And then…

 

     I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

     I couldn’t say: Well, she looks just like Jane Fonda except that she’s got red hair and her mouth is different and of course she’s not a movie star.”

     I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma, Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or ’42: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect 1930s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.

     The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio.

     Then they built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

     There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

     Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.

     Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.

     The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

     It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt or hearing him on the radio.

     “…The President of the United States…”

     I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.

     That’s how you look to me.

 

And finally I gave my high school kids this. They didn’t know it, but it was how they would be graded…

Oh, Marcia

I want your long blonde beauty

to be taught in high school,

so kids will learn that God

lives like music in the skin

and sounds like a sunshine harpsichord.

I want high school report cards

     to look like this:

 

Playing with Gentle Glass Things

     A

Computer Magic

     A

Writing Letters to Those You love

     A

Finding out about Fish

     A

Marcia’s Long Blonde Beauty

     A+

 

What Brautigan brought to those kids was a sense of, not how great and important he was, but how great and important each of them was. One convinced the principal to let him make the morning announcements, a bunch of others started an underground newspaper. “Creative Writing Class” became “Movie Making” and unemployed kids who had graduated the year before  joined the cast. And I, who had missed The Sixties was getting a chance to see them first hand all over again.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Part 2

Trout Fishing in America

“I WAKE UP JUST BEFORE THEY COME.”

 

(John reading from a book)

 

Richard Brautigan was born January 30^th, 1935, in the Pacific Northwest. He was the author of eleven novels, ten volumes of poetry and two collections of short stories. He lived for many years in San Francisco and become a literary idol of the 1960s whose iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. Maybe you were around then? Maybe you even remember reading this:

     We’re staying with Pard and his girlfriend in this strange cabin above Mill Valley. They have rented a cabin for three months, June 15^th to September 15^th, for a hundred dollars. We are a funny bunch, all living here together.

 

     Pard was born of Okie parents in British Nigeria and came to America when he was two years old and was raised as a ranch kid in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

 

     He was a machine-gunner in the Second World War, against the Germans. He fought in France and Germany. Sergeant Pard. Then he came back from the war and went to some hick college in Idaho.

 

     After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk café. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.

 

     Pard’s girlfriend is Jewish. Twenty-four years old, getting over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Part about a nude photograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in Playboy Magazine. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “If they use that photograph, it only means that 12,000,000 men will look at my boobs.” This is all very funny to her.

 

     What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, cantaloupes, Popeyes, salads, cheese—booze, grup and Popeyes.

 

     We read books like The Thief’s Journal, Set This House on Fire and The Naked Lunch.

 

     Pard and his girlfriend sleep in the cabin and we sleep outside, under the apple tree, waking at dawn to stare out across San Francisco Bay and then we go back to sleep again and wake once more, this time for a very strange thing to happen, and then we go back to sleep after it has happened, and wake at sunrise to stare out across the bay.

 

     Afterwards we go back to sleep again and the sun rises steadily hour after hour, staying in the branches of a eucalyptus tree just a ways down the hill, keeping us cool and asleep and in the shade. At last the sun pours over the top of the tree and then we have to get up, the hot sun upon us.

 

     We go into the house and begin that two-hour yak-yak activity we call breakfast. We sit around and bring ourselves slowly back to consciousness, treating ourselves like fine pieces of china, and after we finish the last cup of the last cup of the last cup of coffee, it’s time to think about lunch or go to the Goodwill in Fairfax.

 

     One morning last week, part way through the dawn, I awoke under the apple tree, to hear a dog barking and the rapid sound of hoofs coming toward me. The millennium? An invasion of Russians all wearing deer feet?

 

     I opened my eyes and saw a deer running straight at me. It was a buck with large horns. There was a police dog chasing after it.

 

     Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

     The deer didn’t swerve away. He just kept running straight at me, long after he had seen me, a second or two had passed.

 

     Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

     I could have reached out and touched him when he went by.

 

     He ran around the house, circling the john, with the dog hot after him. They vanished over the hillside, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them, flowing out and entangled through the bushes and vines.

 

     Then along came the doe. She started up the same way, but not moving as fast. Maybe she had strawberries in her head.

 

     “Whoa!” I shouted. “Enough is enough! I’m not selling newspapers!”

 

     The doe stopped in her tracks, twenty-five feet away and turned and went down around the eucalyptus tree.

 

     Well, that’s how it’s gone now for days and days. I wake up just before they come. I wake up for them in the same manner as I do for the dawn and the sunrise. Suddenly knowing they’re on their way.

 

HOW I DISCOVERED RICHARD BRAUTINGAN

 

I couldn’t hang out in the Army forever. For one thing, my wife back then couldn’t stand it. For another, I was curious about what was going on at home. We had some whitewashed accounts, but it was time to experience this for myself. The only practical way I could do that without money was to attend grad school on the GI Bill. What would I take? Anything I wanted, because I was going into high school education.

 

The school that hired me, Whitehall Michigan, was interesting. They had fired all their hippy teachers from the year before, and I couldn’t have been more surprised when, after my interview, they hired this guy with a foot long beard and shoulder length hair (My wife, infant son and I had been camping around Europe for a year after I was released from the service.) But here was the catch.

 

The kids at that school didn’t go on to college. Oh maybe one or two went to some kind of car-mechanic training or beautician school. So threat of poor grades or homework assignments or anything didn’t really carry weight. These students were there because their friends were and if they were going to learn anything it had better have some relevance to their life that day. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald…forget it.

 

That’s when I xeroxed this poem by Richard Brautigan:

 

If I were to live my life

in catfish forms

in scaffolds of skin and whiskers

at the bottom of a pond

and you were to come by

     one evening

when the moon was shining

down into my dark home

and stand there at the edge

     of my affection

and think, “It’s beautiful

here by this pond. I wish

     somebody loved me,”

I’d love you and be your catfish

friend and drive such lonely

thoughts from your mind

and suddenly you would be

     at peace,

and ask yourself, “I wonder

if there are any catfish

in this pond? It seems like

a perfect place for them.”

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Part 1

Richard Brautigan

PART I

(standing, speaking directly to the audience)

Hi, I’m John Lehman, not Richard Brautigan. He’s dead, but I am a big fan of his work and tonight I want to share some of it with you and perhaps figure out why, years later, it still seems special.

 

HOW AND WHY I MISSED THE SIXTIES

First of all, let me tell you that I missed most of what people today think of as “The Sixties.” Oh I remember how as a senior at Notre Dame in 1963 we all felt somewhat discontent. Some said it was the fluoride in the water, or the fact that we had had the worst football record for our four years in the history of the school. But now, looking back, I wonder. Our parents had worked hard to buy nice homes, nice cars, nice TV sets. They’d put us through college and now we were about to go out into the world and become managers of savings and loans, get married, have kid… be unhappy like our parents and their parents before. Or were we?

Here’s what I do remember. About a week before graduation several hundreds of us gathered on the quad. The university president, the Reverend Theodore Hesburg, had for years been pushing “academic excellence.” Perhaps he meant it, or perhaps it was a ploy to get our minds off the losing Irish. In any case we all came together chanting, “To hell with excellence!”

Now the oldest building on campus was the Administration Building at the head of the quadrangle. Tradition had it that undergraduates were not allowed to walk up the old, stone stairs leading to the second floor main entrance. That privilege was reserved for graduate students and complete strangers. On this warm, May evening, we hesitated then rushed up those stairs, turned around and rushed up them again. Causes were to become more serious and the demonstrations more violent, but “The Sixties” had begun.

Why I missed the rest, is because I joined the Army. Most of the rest of the next seven years I spent twiddling my thumbs overseas.

 

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN SPEAKS

Here’s what he says:

I am an unknown poet. That doesn’t mean I don’t have any friends. It means mostly my friends know I’m a poet, because I have told them so.

Let’s pretend that my mind is a taxi and suddenly (“What the hell’s coming off!”) your are riding in it.

 (pause)

 

I remember

a very beautiful,

quite proper

young woman

letting

a fart

that sounded

like

a gunshot.

 

(pause)

 

     I guess you’re kind of curious as to who I am, but I’m one of those who don’t have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.

     If you’re thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer.

     That is my name.

     Perhaps it was raining very hard.

     That is my name.

     Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.

     That is my name.

     Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.

     That is my name.

 

(John settles down into an easy chair, relaxes into memory.)

This is Brautigan too:

     The cover for my book Trout Fishing in America is a photograph taken late in the afternoon, a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square.

     Born 1706—Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture. He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other.

     Then the statue speaks, saying in marble:

PRESENTED BY

H.D. COGSWELL

TO OUR

BOYS AND GIRLS

WHO WILL SOON

TAKE OUR PLACES

AND PASS ON.

 

     Around the base of the stature are four words facing the directions of this world, to the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME, to the north WELCOME, to the south WELCOME. Just behind the statue are three poplar trees, almost leafless except for the top branches. The statue stands in front of the middle tree. All around the grass is wet from the rains of early February.

     Way in the background is a tall cypress tree, almost dark like a room. Adlai Stevenson spoke under the tree in 1956, before a crowd of 40,000 people.

     There is a tall church across the street from the statue with crosses, steeples, bells and a vast door that looks like a huge mouse hole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and written above the door is “Per L’Universo.”

     Around five o’clock in the afternoon of my cover for Trout Fishing in America, people gather in this park across the street from the church and they are hungry.

     It’s sandwich time for the poor.

     But they cannot cross the street until the signal is given. Then they all run across the street to the church and get their sandwiches that are wrapped in newspaper. They go back to the park and unwrap the newspaper and see what their sandwiches are all about.

     A friend of mine unwrapped his sandwich one afternoon and looked inside to find just a leaf of spinach. That was all.

     Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin…

     Kafka who said, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

 

Here’s another of Brautigan’s poems:

 

 

The moon

is Hamlet

on a motorcycle

coming down

a dark road.

he is wearing

a black leather

jacket and

boots.

I have

nowhere

to go.

I will ride

all night.

SHORT STORY MAGIC – PART 8

This studio-recorded CD is now available to Cool Plums readers.  Just click on this link to order. The cost is $10 plus $2 postage/handling. $12 total. http://rosebudbookreviews.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/the-writers-cave-cd/

 

Editor Reaction to a Submission  

This is an actual submission that was accepted and printed in Rosebud Magazine. I have added my editor’s reactions to the piece in italics to give you an idea what happens on the “other end” when you send something in.

 

Robert Wake  name is prominent

608-423-47XX  phone for contact if accepted (e-mail is good too), but also include address in case the manuscript is separated from the SASE. 

 

Visiting 

 

This title is OK, a good title will stand out in the Table of Contents, a great title get on the front or back covers of the magazine. We  are in the business of selling magazines. If a title or the name of an   author (or there is something about author that makes him or her  unique) will help do this, the chances of the pieces being accepted  are increased. 

 

                Restless in the bed of his father’s childhood, Michael awoke to the Wisconsin summer.  We know where we are, who the character is and even get a little background. We are into the story very quickly. A neighborhood rumor was circulating: two hot-air balloons would be launched that morning in the park.  Foreshadowing that something out of the ordinary will take place. Michael, even half-asleep, knew the skies were clear.  He had stayed the night with his Grandmother Booth, on Saukfield’s east side, just off Otter Lake on La Salle Avenue.  The house was small, built sturdily of sandstone blocks and cedar shingles, but crooked somehow, as if one edge of the foundation were sinking into the geraniums.  An enormous bur oak towered above the garage and hid the sun.  Enough significant descriptive detail to make the image vivid. Michael imagined his father waking up when he was Michael’s age, listening to the clank of basement pipes below, and following with ten-year-old eyes the arc of a garden sprinkler outside the window.

            “Sleepyhead,” whispered Grandmother Booth from the bedroom doorway.  “You’ll wish you were at the park.”  Dialogue gets this happening here and now for the reader. In dim morning light his grandmother seemed weightless, her robe a billow of smoke.  Her skin was talcum white and smelled of Ivory soap.  Michael tried to recall a dream, but the details were lost and the fearful momentum had dissolved.  His dreams were visited frequently by dogs.  Sometimes playful, sometimes rabid, the dogs changed from dream to dream.  Sometimes the dogs talked.  An Alaskan malamute said to Michael, “Come run with me and we’ll circle the lake.”  In another dream a bullmastiff — black as a storm cloud — sunk its teeth into Michael’s testicles.  He awoke in the middle of the night, a phantom pain searing his groin.  “I once wet my bed,” his mother told him.  “I dreamt I was flying, floating over rooftops and trees, and then suddenly falling like a rock.  Dreams are carnival rides.”  Suggestive, that the evennts have meaning beyond there literal significance. This gets the reader thinking and tells and editor something will be happening on different levels that makes for rich reading.

                “Breakfast in two minutes,” said Grandmother Booth.

            He opened his left eye.  His grandmother appeared to him behind a blur of lash and mucus.

            “Reports of your mother’s banishment are premature,

although — in my opinion — not ill-advised,” she said.

            “Reports?”        

            Michael’s right eye popped open.  He blinked to clear the haze. 

            “A diet of lies will starve the soul,” said his grandmother.  “I would suggest that you carefully weigh all evidence in support of either one of your fickle parents.  Ask yourself, young man: ‘Why indeed am I waking up this morning in this house, and not my father’s house, or — God forbid — my mother’s or my mother’s parents’ house?’  You ought to be thinking about all of these things.”

            She was straightening and dusting everything in sight, gliding around the room as if motorized, and edging ever closer to the window blinds that were still thankfully shuttered.

            “When your father was a boy,” she continued, “his guile was tempered by innocence, like Tom Sawyer.  But once he was out of my hands, and beyond the sphere of my influence, he grew into some kind of wayward sorcerer, some kind of antic druid.  He didn’t really begin losing his marbles, however, until he met up with your mother and quit his job at the drugstore.  It’s been one dead end after another.  His current job is insane.  He has no business working as a bartender for the Knights of Pythagoras.  Such a disgraceful organization!  Does he seriously believe that bowling for charity once a month is a humanitarian agenda?  I ask you: where are the comfort and guidance a good Christian wife provides?  Am I surprised your parents no longer are able to endure the sight of one another?  No, I am not.  More important is where they stand in the sight of God, I’m afraid.  That’s the $64,000 question, little mister.” We get some background exposition here, but in a way that throws light on the teller’s character. When providing background always be advancing plot and/or character at the same time if you want to keep the reader’s attention.

                And then she disappeared from the room.  Her shadow darted across the ceiling.

            Michael wondered if there had been a dream of mad dogs that morning, or the night before.  He sighed heavily, like his grandfather used to sigh, deep within his chest.  The bedsprings swayed with a timeworn wobble.  Hurrying into the bathroom, Michael peed and flushed, and nearly slipped on the rug while brushing his teeth.  Finally dressed, he sauntered (having been told never to run) through the hallway to the kitchen.  His grandmother’s odd green toothpaste was still bitter in his mouth as he sat down for breakfast.  Waiting for him was a scoop of oatmeal as stark and elemental as clay.

            “You know the words,” said Grandmother Booth.

            “Help me with the words,” said Michael.  His father often joked that Grandmother Booth’s mealtime prayers were the only salvation from food poisoning.

            “Dear God,” she began, her eyes closed.  “Bless this food to our bodies.  We ask in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord –  ”

            Michael was staring at the glass of grapefruit juice on the table.  He hated grapefruit juice, and proceeded to stick out his tongue just as his grandmother finished saying “Amen.”  Slowly he looked up and met her cold, clear gaze.  She was watching him.

            “I wish you would try harder to be good,” she said.  “Sometimes your behavior verges on blasphemy.”

            At breakfast the day before, in Kenosha, his mother said: “Grandmother Booth needs you, kiddo.”  Michael was assigned the chores of sweeping out his grandmother’s garage and bundling old newspapers.

            “Are you listening to me?”

            “I’m listening,” said Michael, dousing the oatmeal with sugar and milk.

            “Your father loved grapefruit juice when he was your age,” said Grandmother Booth.  “Nowadays he debases the juice with vodka.  Grapefruit juice, vodka, and something else.  Soy sauce?  Tabasco?  I don’t remember.  It’s a horrid concoction.”

            She buttered a slice of toast.  “Don’t stare at my hands, Michael.”  Her hands are a revealing detail. Later he is concerned about losing her. The writer has introduced age and health in a very real way, without directly telling the reader she may not have long to live.

                “I wasn’t,” he said.  His grandmother’s fingers were so thin that Michael felt he could reach out and snap them like bread sticks.

            He looked quickly away, toward the kitchen window.  Two bearded irises stood in a vase on the ledge.  Outside, the yard was filled with armies of lilac, iris, and hyacinth.  A breeze rich in garden smells — simultaneously subtle and overripe — swirled about the room.  Grandmother Booth was up from her chair now and placed the vase on a corner of the table.

            “I think they’ll make me sneeze,” said Michael.  The flowers were as large as any he had ever seen.

            “Nonsense,” said Grandmother Booth.

            “I get sneezes from flowers.”

            “Your grandfather liked to say irises are the true beginning of summertime.”

            Michael poked with a spoon at his breakfast.  The oatmeal had hardened into an igloo surrounded by tepid milk.  He was trying at that moment to remember if he had ever actually seen a hot-air balloon lift off from the ground.  Hot-air balloons usually appeared mysteriously in the sky, moving silently across the horizon, origins and destinations unknown.

            “Do you have memories of your grandfather?”

            “He slept alot,” said Michael.

            “Well, he was very sick,” said Grandmother Booth.  “But he talked to you.”

            The irises were inches away and glowing as if radioactive.  Michael could detect the pressure in his sinuses begin to build.  His grandmother showed him the furry lip that sprouted within each flower’s center.  The spot of fuzz looked to Michael nothing like a beard, more like an eyebrow, or maybe the backside of an exotic insect.  A picture came to his mind, an image (in slow motion) of his grandfather moving through the house one September afternoon.  Michael was visiting his grandparents and practicing at their piano.  He had spent hours repeating a simple Chopin waltz.  “I love the music,” his grandfather said.  The day was wet with rain and the air sultry.  Oscillating in a corner of the room an electric fan tick-tocked like a metronome.  His grandfather carried potato chips in his shirt pocket, five or six large potato chips, and that afternoon he handed one to Michael and said, “Here’s a chip off the ol’ Booth.”  Nearly dancing, his slippers tapping the carpet, Grandfather Booth circled the piano as if he were a heavy old moth drunk with porch light.  A masterful little scene within a scene. We feel we are in the hands of a sensitive observer. This trust is necessary if we are to allow him to take us into more riskly, emotional levels.

                Michael’s grandmother added a spray of faucet water to the irises and returned them to the window ledge.  (She thought of death as a seasonal eruption, an attribute of meteorological forces.  Hot and cold were conditions of the heart as well as of the air.  Hadn’t autumn been her husband’s season, just as ancient summers seemed to flow through her own veins?  Heat turned flesh to water, and water was lifeblood to all of the backyard gardens with which she had felt psychic kinship throughout her life.)

            It was on a November morning that Michael’s grandfather died, a morning of ice and rain.  The old man had spent weeks in bed, his lucidity erratic, his breathing fluctuating in union with the wind that rattled the windows.  A large green tank of oxygen — sleek as a torpedo — stood sentry next to the night table.  The day before, Michael and his father had been by to rake the torrent of brown and yellow leaves that layered the yard.  “Your grandfather carries autumn within him,” Grandmother Booth once said.  The transmigration of his grandfather’s soul was sure to have a crisp, pungent presence, like the burning of leaves.

            “Eccentricity is not a sin,” his grandmother was saying now.  She paused, measuring her words.  “People claimed your grandfather was an eccentric man.  He was a musician, his feelings ran deep.  But there are some members of this family whom I would call ‘willful misfits,’ and their selfishness hurts me very much.”

            Michael glanced at his grandmother’s toast, left untouched on her plate.  He thought of the toast that was always left behind at breakfast with his mother.  Because of toast, breakfast was forever an unfinished meal.

            “Am I a misfit?” he asked.

            “That will be your choice to make.  Let your father’s reckless ways be a warning to you.  He’s a hit-and-run driver on the highway of life.  But if you remember nothing else about this family, remember this: Never listen to your Aunt Etta.”

            “She has dreams about Grandpa.”

            “Eat your oatmeal,” said Grandmother Booth, her mouth tightening.

            Michael reached for the sugar bowl.  “Aunt Etta is eccentric,” he said.

            “You’ve taken quite enough sugar.”  Grandmother Booth drew a deep breath.  She set her toast aside and took a sip of grapefruit juice.  “Etta is a misfit,” she said.  “Someday you will appreciate the distinction.”

            A family scandal had erupted during the previous winter.  Michael’s father found a Post-it note stuck to his car’s windshield like a parking ticket.  “Papa suggests adding B vitamins to your diet,” the message read.  The handwriting was Etta’s.  She never talked of dreams, but rather “impressions” that Grandfather Booth, two years dead, had spoken to her.  Other messages followed, including one to Grandmother Booth: “The polar ice caps are melting — protect your bones with calcium supplements.”  Michael’s father was furious with Etta.  “There is a fine line,” he drunkenly yelled at her on the telephone one evening, “between psychic phenomenon and psychic humiliation.  You have crossed that line!”  The piece also walks a fine line between the comic and the poignant. It makes the piece unique, but also increases its chance of failure. That risk taking is exciting to an editor, above and beyond the subject.

                “Is Grandpa in heaven?” asked Michael.  He sliced into the oatmeal with his spoon, carefully trapping a puddle of sugar and milk.

                “Etta believes that your grandfather died and went to work at a health food store,” said Grandmother Booth.

                Michael’s tongue ran a gob of oatmeal around the roof of his mouth.  “Do ghosts take vitamins?” he asked.

            “That’s enough.”

            “I found a book that belongs to my dad — ”

            “What did I just say?”

            “But this book — ”

            “Michael, please.  Swallow your oatmeal.”

            He longed for a glass of orange juice and a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.  His grandmother was again buttering toast, which had gone soggy.

            “Your grandfather never took vitamins,” she said.  Her knife tore straight through the toast and screeched across her plate like blackboard chalk.  “He sustained a rich, full life, and he never took vitamins.”

            “My dad has a book — ”

            “Here we go again.”

            “ — about people who got phone calls from dead relatives.  They call up and say stuff they forgot to say when they were alive.”

            “I know all about your father’s books,” said Michael’s grandmother.  “What happened to the book I gave you?  Great Expectations is a wonderful story.”

            “It’s five hundred pages long,” he said.

            “And?”

            He wanted to tell her that Pip was no name for a boy.  It put him in mind of Pippy Longstocking, an even worse name for a girl.

            “The great books are long books,” said his grandmother, none too convincingly.  “The Bible, certainly.  There’s Anna Karenina and Raintree County.”

            Michael managed another bite of oatmeal.  “What about

The Old Man and the Sea?” he asked.  “The Old Man and the Sea isn’t a long book.”

            “As if you’ve read it.”  His grandmother snorted.

            Admittedly, Michael knew of many more books than he had read.  His father’s library — which filled dozens of bowlegged shelves tilted against the basement walls — offered a grand visual excursion.  The books were divided roughly 50/50 between accepted literary classics and outré occult manuals and overviews.

            “Wanna know my dad’s favorite book?”

            “Don’t tell me, Michael.  Is it the telephone book of the dead?”

            “It’s called The Mind Parasites.”

            “Yes, I’m sure,” said his grandmother.  “He also collects those awful Bela Lugosi movies.  I’ve no doubt you’ve seen every one of them by now.”  She was clearing the table, save for Michael’s grapefruit juice.

            “Yeah!” he said, eyes wide.  “The best one is The Devil Bat.  Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who’s got a giant vampire bat hanging upside down in his laboratory.  It’s kinda stupid, actually.  But the bat is cool.”

            “Very inspiring,” said Grandmother Booth.  She slid the glass of grapefruit juice nearer to him.

            He heard a rustling outside in the garden.  The kitchen window shone with glare; Michael squinted into the light.  Emerging from behind a row of lilac bushes and running at a steady clip across the lawn was Kimberly-Ann Stohl.  When she reached the house, she raced up the porch steps two at a time and slammed breathless against the screen door.  Michael knew that Kimberly-Ann was at an age of outlandish and accelerated growth — her limbs shot out from her body like tendrils and crashed unceasingly into every object that stood in her path.  The latest development, of which he had previously been unaware, was her hair: it was dyed with streaks of Day-Glo pink and yellow, and clipped unisexually short for the summer. This character is in direct contrast to the grandmother and that use of opposites creates drama. This is what readers want. Not reality, but the heightened reality of art that plays out the extremes of that opposition (the conflict).

                “I knew you were here, Michael!” she said.  She was pulling at the damp front of her T-shirt.  “Why didn’t you come to the park?”

            “Michael will be with you as soon as he finishes his breakfast,” said Grandmother Booth.  “Why don’t you sit on the steps and quiet down?”

            “It doesn’t matter,” said Kimberly-Ann.  “The balloons are already up.”

            “What?” said Michael.

            “The hot-air balloons.  You can see ’em right here from the porch.”

            Michael, startled, looked at his grandmother.  She pointed to the juice.

            “Away from the door, Kimberly-Ann,” she said.  “You and your Martian hairdo can wait on the steps.”

            Kimberly-Ann struck some adults as precocious, while others — like Grandmother Booth — found her hyperactive.  Her father was a Unitarian minister, a somewhat cultish vocation in Grandmother Booth’s Methodist circle.

            “I was at the park early with Alexander,” said Kimberly-Ann.  Alexander was her six-year-old brother.  “We were the first ones except for the joggers and the dogs.  Two pickup trucks turned off Cross Point Bridge and drove along the grass down to the middle of the park.  I knew what was happening because the trucks had gigantic baskets in back.  The baskets were for the balloons.”

            Kimberly-Ann’s face was pushing at the screen.  “Why are you staying at your grandmother’s house this time?”  she asked.

            “Cleaning out the garage,” said Michael.

            “Are you gonna come out here?”

            In one long, long gulp, Michael drank the grapefruit juice.  The aftertaste was horrible.  No wonder his father added vodka and tabasco: grapefruit juice by itself was a nightmare of wretchedness.  Even his eyes burned, and his lips bunched into a sour frown.

            “Jesus Christ!” said Kimberly-Ann.  “What the hell are you drinking, Michael?”

            Grandmother Booth whirled around to the door.  Her face was flushed a violent red.  She tried to smack the tip of Kimberly-Ann’s nose, which was still pressed up against the screen.  Kimberly-Ann stepped back in enough time that Grandmother Booth’s fingers merely strummed the wire mesh.

            “Maybe you talk that way at home,” said Grandmother Booth, her voice trembling with anger.  “Maybe you talk that way around your father, who would as soon pray to the rocks and the trees, and who cares not a whit for the unborn babies in this country.  But while you’re in my house — ”

            “I’m not in your house,” said Kimberly-Ann.  She was sitting on the porch steps, her head bowed.

            “ — while you’re on my property,” Grandmother Booth continued, without losing a beat,  “you’ll not use that language.”

            In the silence that followed, Grandmother Booth busied herself at the sink, drawing water, and adding soap to the basin.  One by one, she submerged dishes beneath the bubbles.  Michael stood by the door.  High above the trees, and seemingly stationary in the sky, were two hot-air balloons, luminous in the sunlight.  Grandmother Booth poured a cup of coffee.  She opened the refrigerator and removed a plate of fudge brownies that Michael had spied the night before.  “Take one for yourself,” she said.  “And one for Kimberly-Ann.”

            Michael hurriedly piled one brownie on top of the other and pushed his way outside.

            “Don’t let the door slam,” said his grandmother.

            Kimberly-Ann was standing in the yard and motioning to Grandmother Booth.  “You should see the balloons from here, Mrs. Booth,” she said, the enthusiasm returning to her voice in an apparent ploy for redemption.

            Michael handed a brownie over to Kimberly-Ann, while at the same time elbowing her in the ribs.  “Don’t tell my grandma to come outside,” he whispered sternly.  “She’s practically in her underwear.  How come you didn’t show up and get me earlier?”

                “Screw you, Michael Booth,” said Kimberly-Ann, assaying the same tone and volume as Michael.  “Do you even live in this neighborhood?  You love to pretend you’re a friendly kid, but you blow in and out of your grandma’s house like some kind of Surf Ninja.”

                “Call me the devil bat!” he hissed, in an off-the-cuff Bela Lugosi impersonation.  “See my teeth?”  He exhibited an open mouth of brownie slush.

            Grandmother Booth walked out into the sunlight.  Michael could see the silhouette of her spindly legs through the silk fabric of her robe (patterned with orange, yellow, and red chrysanthemums).  Her slippers clacked on the porch floorboards like drumsticks methodically marking time.  She stopped at the railing and reached up to gently arrange the blooms of a potted fuschia hanging in the shade.

            “Alexander asked one of the truck drivers how you learn to fly a balloon,” said Kimberly-Ann.  “The man said that you have to go to balloon school.”

            Grandmother Booth rolled her eyes.  “I think the fellow was making a joke, Kimberly-Ann.”

            “The man said balloon school, and I think I believe him.”

            “Nonsense,” said Grandmother Booth.  She set her coffee cup on the steps.

            “How do they blow up those balloons?” asked Michael.

            Grandmother Booth stretched out her hand toward a bamboo rake that was leaning next to the house, and then she abruptly reversed the gesture and pulled her arm to her side.  Michael watched his grandmother take several deep breaths and slowly sit down on the porch steps.  The color had drained from her face.  (The pain she felt was not new, nor was it unexpected.  However, it was usually accompanied by a shower of lights like a Fourth of July sparkler going off inside of her head.  Today the pain was dull and leaden, and minus the fanfare.)  For several minutes she quietly rubbed her shoulder, as if smoothing wrinkles in her robe.

            Kimberly-Ann was kneeling on the lawn and working at a handstand.  “We helped them look for broken glass and things on the ground that might hurt the balloons.”

            “The balloons were spread on the ground?” asked Michael.

            “I’m getting to that,” said Kimberly-Ann.  She lost her balance, flipped over, and landed flat on her back.  Michael imagined her as the clumsy scarecrow in the movie The Wizard of Oz. The movie nostalgia and literary allusions may not appeal to everyone, but they do to editors who have spend their lives in the worlds of books, movies, paintings  and music. But the writer uses them to enhance his storytelling, they are not superfluous to building the story’s arc.

                “I mean they laid the balloons out on the ground like pancakes as big as swimming pools,” Kimberly-Ann was saying.

            “But how do they blow them up?”

            “Michael, I’m trying to tell you if you’d shut up.”

            He envisioned hordes of winged monkeys swooping out of the sky and setting upon Kimberly-Ann, tearing off her straw-filled arms and legs.  His grandmother would surely hurl a fireball. . .

            Grandmother Booth intervened, rising to her feet.  “Let her tell her story.”

            “I’m just asking,” said Michael.  He was curled up in the porch swing, furiously rocking, and nearly panicked with despair that he had, without question, missed the balloon launching.

            “Please stop fidgeting,” his grandmother said.  “That old swing creaks and it’s giving me a headache.”

                “Sorry.”  He narrowed the swing’s compass by shifting his boby weight.

                “Okay, okay,” said Kimberly-Ann.  “So can I tell my story now?”  She took a deep breath, and then exhaled through pursed lips, as if smoking a cigarette.  (Michael, in fact, had seen Kimberly-Ann on several occasions inhale real cigarette smoke with practiced aplomb.)  “The baskets were set on the ground,” she said, “ — big wicker baskets like snake charmers use.  The balloons were filled with a bit of air using a sort of electrical fan.  They were still lying on the ground, filling up kind of wobbly, and you could look inside of them like a cave or tunnel all lit up and glowing from sunlight shining through.  I mean it was like seeing inside of a whale.  And then the fire tanks were ignited.”

            “Fire tanks?” said Michael.  He was looking skyward, but the balloons were drifting behind a tangle of telephone wires and tree limbs.

            “When they got everything pointed upright,” said Kimberly-Ann, “those balloons were like circus tents as tall as skyscrapers.  The fire tanks boomed like jet engines.”

            “This is sounding very dangerous, young lady,” said Grandmother Booth.  “And exhausting.  I’m worn out just listening to you.”

            Michael lay in the porch swing.  He stared up at empty skies and remembered the vast rolling clouds in the series of drawings his grandmother used in Bible class to illustrate the Ascension.  In his graceful white robe and his long flowing hair, Jesus seemed ill-equiped for liftoff.

            Grandmother Booth taught Bible class during the spring and summer months.  In the years before Grandfather Booth died she had also operated year-round a tiny Christian bookstore on Paquette Avenue, right across from the lake.  She sold framed pictures illustrating every scriptured moment in Jesus’ life, and there were Bible verses imprinted on items as diverse as oven mittens, ashtrays, and Ping-Pong paddles.  Michael still owned several plastic glow-in-the-dark crosses that were so bright he could read comic books by them beneath the bedsheets.

            Suddenly Grandmother Booth appeared, hovering overhead.  “Sweetheart, do me a favor,” she was saying.  “Grab me another cup of coffee from the kitchen.”

            Michael brought the swing to a halt by dragging his heels like Fred Flintstone stopping his car.  He carried his grandmother’s cup into the house and poured the last of the pot from the Mr. Coffee.  The brew was thick like hot chocolate, but smelled much worse.  He was reminded of the scorched odor that resulted when he once leaned in too close to a Christmas candle and a lock of his hair sizzled and popped.

            The telephone rang in the living room.  He turned off the coffee machine and carefully balanced his grandmother’s cup, which was full to the brim, and walked with it across the hallway.  He set the coffee cup down beside the telephone and picked up the receiver.

            “Hello?” said Michael.

            He recognized the voice, but there was a wavering of the signal, a crackling like potato chips, like burning leaves. There is no doubt after the competence of the first few paragraphs that an editor would read on. But the piece could go either way, that’s the chance it takes. Believe it or not an editor is cheering that it will succeed. In this story, this phone call supposedly from the dead grandfather, clinches the decision. There is a creative leap here, like the last line of a great poem, yet it has been beautifully set up by everything that has gone before. Even if the ending were to be flawed or there were some dialogue that needed tightening, the editor is committed to publishing this piece and now looks at it as part of the magazine, not as a submission.

                “How’s the visit with your grandmother?”

            “I don’t know,” said Michael.

            There was silence on the other end.  Michael held the phone tight against his ear.

            “Hello?” he said.

                “Michael, don’t ever be afraid.”

                He watched the steam from his grandmother’s coffee cup rise and filter into the air.  He thought of the balloons that were somewhere overhead, kept aloft (he now knew) by the thunderous roar of fire tanks.

            “I don’t know why I’m here,” said Michael.

            “Think ‘calcium.’  Think ‘iron.’ ”

            “What?”

            “Her bones are brittle.  I think you can understand that.”

            “So what if I can?”

            Michael could hear a heavy, bottomless sigh that seemed to echo deep within the phone line.

            “Let’s step outside the world of the Froot Loop and the Frosted Flake.  Can you do that, Michael?”

            “What’s that s’posed to mean?  I mean, I hate Froot Loops.  Frosted Flakes are okay — ”

            “Listen, there’s more to your existence than warm blood and cold soda pop.  Don’t you get it?  Heaven is in your head, but you’ve got to peer beyond the corpuscular threshold.  Turn off the claptrap and the time clocks.  You have too much fight in you, too much anger.  Your grandmother is the same way.”

            He had only been in one fight — or near-fight — in his life, a gym class altercation.  A student named Brillo was accidentally beaned in the head with a volleyball and blamed Michael.  No fists were brandished, only threats and hostile glances.  He remembered feeling not anger, but rather astonishment that someone could bestow malicious intent upon an innocent act.

            “Grandma doesn’t need my help.”

            “That’s where your dumb kid logic breaks down, because you’re wrong.  What I’m asking is this: Would you stay a few more days with her?  Keep an eye out?”

            “Why would I do that?  Is she gonna die or something?”

            “I would imagine so.”

            A sudden rage flashed across Michael’s consciousness.  “I don’t live here!”  he shouted.  And he thought: I’m talking to a dead man.  I’m talking to a dead man.  I’m talking to a dead dead dead dead dead man.

                “C’mon now.  Is that really the issue at hand?  Hang in there two more days.  Read a book, watch a movie.  Keep an eye out –  ”

            Before Michael heard another word he slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

            The telephone began ringing again.  Michael was out the back door with his grandmother’s coffee splashing his arm.  Grandmother Booth was climbing the steps.  “I’m hearing telephones,” she said, taking the cup from Michael.  He jumped down the steps as his grandmother disappeared inside the house.

            Searching the yard for Kimberly-Ann, he finally noticed her running between houses some distance away.  An overpowering fragrance of lilac welled up before him and poisoned the air.  He stood at the garden’s edge, near the large riverbank stones his grandfather had hauled from Merrimac twenty years ago.  An ocean of green encircled Michael’s feet: hosta, sedum, juniper.  Grandmother Booth’s garden was a maze of layered plants and flowers that were timed like a Disneyland diorama to burst forth one after another, wave upon wave throughout the spring and summer.  Faded daffodils and tulips were offset by the nascent bloom of poppies and honeysuckle.  Irises — flowered in dense, wrinkled flesh — currently ruled the land with the sheer heft of their presence.

            Arms outstretched, Michael began to spin himself round and round.  His fingertips swiped at the fringes of Technicolor blossoms.  The lawn, the world, the kaleidoscopic swirl of foliage, all seemed to orbit about him in glorious madness.  The energy in his head continued pumping like a Ferris wheel even after he stumbled dizzily to the ground and his skull cracked hard against the rocks.  “The carnival of dreams,” his mother had said, “will carry you to the very tip of the sky.”  And then always the descent through weighty perfume: the garden’s usurping gravity.  Michael felt the grip of strong heavenly hands taking hold of his soul, scooping him up like fallen fruit.  As he closed his eyes he prayed he would be able again and again to conjure this delicious loss of selfhood, this wonderland of vegetable darkness.

            Grandmother Booth was sitting in the grass and cradling him in her arms.

            “Are you all right?” she was saying.

            Michael nodded.  He had a tremendous headache.

            “You nearly knocked yourself dead,” said Grandmother Booth.  “I was watching from the window.  Your father called back.  Why did you hang up on him?”

            “He said you were going to die this week,” said Michael.

             “Oh, he did, did he?”  She laughed out loud.  “I’m sorry your father sees fit to drop you here like a stray dog, Michael.  You have every right to despise the confusion in your life.  But I want you to hear this: I know a thing or two about living and dying.  I know how life begins on this planet, and I know how it ends.  If I should decide to die this week, or any week, you’ll hear it directly from me.  That’s a promise.  Do you understand?” The phone call can be explained away, but not the boy’s confusion. The theme of the story is loss, being left behind, wanting to rise up above all the mess of living as an adult on earth. But the grandmother is the salvation. Not just her as a person, or her fundamentalist beliefs, but the human strength and courage she represents that has served many generations in their anguish. Too often new writers depend upon a plot twist. That’s why they write a piece, they have a clever idea. But more often in a short story the reader’s insight comes from the better understanding of character. There isn’t enough time for a lot of plot development and reversals, as in a novel, so they are sketchy at best when attempted in the short story form. The ending should suggest a resolution to the external conflict, but more important speak to the underlying theme. It’s at that level, that it’s most satisfying.

              “I think so.”

             “Enough, then,” she said.  “Let’s get you inside and wash the blood from your face.” 

“Wash the blood from your face,” is suggestive of religious salvation, and that is symbolic for the hopefulness we feel for the boy and ourselves. I would like to thank Bob Wake for allowing us to use his story and hope these comments are hopeful to those of you considering submitting material to Rosebud and other publications. Good luck. John Lehman, Rosebud Founder/Publisher

 

THIS ENDS SHORT STORY MAGIC. HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED IT AND FOUND SOMETHING USEFUL. I WELCOME ALL COMMENTS.

SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 7

Getting published is easy as launching a small boat.

The Five Myths That Prevent You from Being a Successfully Published Writer and Five Realities That Change This Around. 

1.     Myth: Only the best writers get published.

Reality: This will be true only when only the best readers read books. Have you been to a book store lately?

2.     Myth: It’s impossible to make a living as a writer.

Reality: Maybe writing poetry, but how about business stuff for the local paper or for trade magazines (Have the businesses pay you to write about them). The one thing every business (big or small) needs is someone who can communicate their message internally and externally.

3.     Myth: A good piece of writing sells itself.

Reality: Nothing sells itself any more. Persistence, blind persistence and then deaf and dumb persistence. You have to get their attention first before an editor, publisher or agent will read what you’ve produced. There’s as much art to this as there is putting words on the page. Also, know someone whose name you can use.

4.     Myth: Work your way up from the bottom.

Reality: Free work leads to more un-paid, free work. Use what you’ve done as credibility to get to the next level. And use that to get to the one above that.

5.    Myth: It’s harder to succeed than to fail.

 Reality: You are a writer, like it or not. It might be more fun to direct movies or be on TV, but  this is what you are. To not do it is failure. That’s what is impossible to accept.  

“Where we are is who we are.”—Toni Cade Bambara 

Setting as Mirror

• Setting as Backdrop
• Setting as Atmosphere
• Setting and Believability
• Setting as Situation
• Setting as Motive
• Setting as Metaphor 

Exercise

Walk through some familiar places and describe what it feels like; portray the sights, scents, sounds, textures, earth, trees, walls, view out the windows, etc. If you had a strange experience in a place this reminds you of, make a story out of it and augment it with the perceptions you are feeling now. If you didn’t have a strange experience, imagine one and use these perceptions to support your imagination. 

Share stories and challenges

The first rule for the writer is simple, painless and even fun: Read before you write—fiction, that is both short and long. Read to the point of intoxication, if you will, so that your bloodstream is changed by the alcohol of fiction, and then believe in the visions that fill your head. The sober and important fact about deep and wide reading of other short-story writers is that one begins thinking in fictional terms, and does not lapse into propaganda writing, or merely expository writing, or any other kind that does not contribute to that single, intense and limited effect that is the short story.—Hallie Burnett  

Titles (make a list of five)

Now Write a Sub Title (tag line) for each

Queries—What to send magazine/book editors and publishers along with your best piece: 

            Marketing Exercise (S.T.A.R.T.) 

Story Idea (put this in one sentence)

Treatment (Genre, Dramatic Shape, Characters, Locations)

Audience (very important this match the market the publisher is trying to reach)

Research (go to a large bookstore and look around at what is out there like this. You need to state there  is an audience looking for what you offer, but also tell how you are unique from what is now available)

Timeline (of Delivery) 

A story is not putting one sentence after another. It’s a series of aimed sentences. 

“Fiction deepens feeling…if it doesn’t do that it isn’t fiction.”—Richard Bausch

 Write a Movie Trailer for Your Story

 Exercise

Have a person think about three unrelated incidents in his or her life while something else is going on now. Perhaps the person is undergoing surgery or going on a date. Once you decide what these apparently unrelated incidents are, write approximately a page about each incident and three pages of current action. Then mix: one paragraph of present action, followed by one paragraph of one of the incidents, then present action, then another incident, and so on. Orient the reader enough for each incident with different names and places.

Exercise (Choose One)

A. Begin a story with a scene of public humiliation from the point of view of the humiliated person. think of something truly embarrassing. This is an exercise in kicking off your fiction with emotion. An opening like this will immediately give you the passions and pain of a character and hence, a strong motive force for revenge or to comeback in glory. 

B. Open a story with a scene in which someone or something is discovered  missing. Who’s responsible? What does this mean? What’s to be done next. You are opening with a problem so right away there is something to be solved. 

C. Open with the summary of a story. Tell what the story is going to be about and who’s in it, in the most straightforward terms. Sometimes storytelling can start the old-fashioned way, with the telling that’ll raise questions, ask for explanations; the details will come in the evidence of what we are talking about. 

Personal Timeline What?  When?  How?  What happens if you do it?  What happens if you don’t do it? Put this on a half sheet of paper and tape it to your computer screen. Next thing you know it will be accomplished.

 Know everything.—Isaac Babel 

Next: An editor analyzes a short story submission paragraph by paragraph. Don’t miss this.  

Macabre Short Story Formula Think quicksand hypnogogic state Believe in the subject Use reaction instead of tags Make the reader the central character a rejection that leads to wanting something else an idealization of this unreachable person or goal circumstances that reinforce this details that make the reader uncomfortable push it to extreme false resolution someone is on to him MORE  The clue shell-game Smell and touch The climax—physical things described in maddening detail (and short sentences/rhythm) Ironic twist

 

“That which hinders your task is your task.”  –Sanford Meisner 

Five Steps to Getting Published

1. Discover what you’re good at, what makes you unique.

2. Find an audience (your focus group).

3. Think about how you can expand upon it.

4. Do market research.  (How do magazines/publishers make their

      money?)

A.   Writer’s guides

1. Bookstores
2. Advertising Standard Rates & Data (demographics) at all libraries
3. Publisher catalogs
4. Position your writing (in terms of audience) or yourself.
5. Know your competition
   1. Why not to self-publish (trouble getting stores to carry without a distributor)
   2. Courting Publishers and Agents
   3. Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc., 10 Astor Place, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003 ($2 and self addressed stamped envelope)
   4. Proposal—Concept, Market, Competition, Book, Methodology, Qualifications, Delivery, Sample
6. Have an organized way of communicating this. Evaluate results and reward success. 

A Few Extra Hints 

Treat getting published as part of the creative process

1. Look for back doors (get to know people)
2. Go to readings and make contact
3. Have a writing marketing partner
4. Go public with your effort
5. Help someone else get published 

Recommended Books 

How To Get Happily Published, Judith Appelbaum, HarperPereneal (1992)

The Self-Publishing Manual, Dan Poynter, Para Publishing (1996)

Guide To Literary Agents, Donya Dickerson, Writer’s Digest Books (1999)

Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, Barbara Kuroff, Writer’s Digest (1999)

Be Your Own Literary Agent, Martin P. Levin, Ten Speed Press (1995)

How To Write A Book Proposal, Michael Larsen, Writer’s Digest (1985)

SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 6

Five Elements (in three to five scenes)

                        Conflict—External vs. Internal conflict

                        Complication

                        Twist

                        Climax

                        Resolution (Revelation)

 

The king died and then the queen died, is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief, is a plot.—E.M. Forster

 

Transition Hooks

Never settle for any other type of transition without first trying to use one in which an emotion is involved. Here are some examples of different types of transitions:

Emotion only

Gradually, his sadness dissipated; new hope and a growing sense of purpose stirred within him.

Time only

She started job-hunting that morning but by evening she had not yet found a position.

Time plus emotion

She felt brave and full of hope when she left the house that morning to go job-hunting; by evening she was weary and discouraged.

Place plus emotion

            When he boarded the plane at La Guardia, Fred was certain he had made a mistake in accepting the new position. An uneasy premonition of failure was still with him when they touched down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, but as they left Denver the air turbulence seemed somehow to jolt him out of the downbeat, portentous mood that had clung to him. When he walked down the ramp at San Francisco International, he was buoyant and confident, and he knew his decision to come West had been a wise one. 

Alternative Extended-Exercise

Write a short unified piece, like the example below from Flannery O’Conner’s short story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” which begins with a summary and then shifts into the forward motion of a direct scene, makes a seamless transition that carries us to a pertinent flashback, and ends in slow motion.

Summary

Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weights. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her. 

Flashback

     “I remember going to Grandpa’s when I was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that went up to what was really the second floor—all the cooking was done on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the walls smelled. i would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhights but your grandfather Chestney paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced circumstances,” she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they were.”

     “Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian muttered.  

Slow Motion

The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared at Julian’s mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over his shoulder. Julian’s mother was on the sidewalk.