A Great Line

Now here's a sentence:

These footnotes are possibly the dullest ever written.

That's saying something.  From an interesting review of Elizabeth Bishop's collected letters to the New Yorker and other related books on the New York Times.

Kevin Canty’s Everything

Oh my gosh. I’ve had Kevin Canty’s Everything setting on my bookshelf for a long time, and I picked it up last night. Wow. It immediately drew me in. It’s got both that Western sparity that I love (a la Hemingway and McCarthy and Tom McGuane) but it’s also lush in interiority and subtle keen-eyed real-to-life detail and humanity. And the dialog is spot on, spot on. It’s unornamented but barbed as hell. Kevin, you rock! Here’s the beginning, for your reading pleasure.

The fifth of July, they went down to the river, RL and June, sat on the rocks with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and talked about Taylor. The fifth of July was Taylor's birthday and they did this every year. He would have been fifty. RL had been his boyhood friend and June was married to him. He'd been dead eleven years.

This side channel used to be one of Taylor's favorite fishing spots, but five or six years before, a beer distributor from Sacramento had built a twenty-room log home right on the bank and then drove a Cat D6 into the river and piled up a wing dam, to keep his house from falling into the drink. This pushed all the current out of the side channel and into the main river. A few last big fish lurked down deep in the channel but mainly it was suckers. Still, it was a pretty spot to sit on a long evening, the shade of the tall cottonwoods slowly deepening into green water. A pretty spot if you turned away from the log palazzo. They sat on the rocks and watched the water trickle by, the cool splash of river water over gravel.

I wish . . . said June.

You wish for what? RL asked her.

I wish I had a cigarette, she said, and laughed. June smoked exactly one day a year, and this was the day. RL got one out, gave it to her, lit it. He was smoking a cigar himself. He had bought the pack specially for her. The two of them stared at the smoke as it curled through the still air. RL could just barely hear the trucks passing on the interstate, a mile away. The sound always made him lonely, the thought of all that highway, all that American night out there.

These anniversaries, said June. They keep sneaking up on me. He's been gone, now, longer than I ever knew him.

That's not right.

No, I did the math last night. He was twenty-eight when I met him. twenty-eight to thirty-nine, thirty-nine to fifty. It doesn't seem like that long but it is.

Long time gone, said RL. I still, sometimes — I feel like I'm going to walk around a corner and see him on the sidewalk. You know, just sitting around the house, and I think, maybe I'll give Taylor a call, see if he wants to go grab a beer. Down at the Mo Club. See if I can borrow his pickup.

It's not like that for me, said June. Not anymore.

She reached for the square bottle of whiskey and took a demure pull on it. RL admired the workings of her throat, the little hollow at the base of her neck, her fine collarbone. She was younger than Taylor and him and still quite a good-looking girl.

I've been going to church again lately, she said.

Get the hell out of here.

I'm not kidding. Sunday morning ten o'clock.

Which one?

June blushed lightly. She was one of those transparent blondes where every feeling showed on her skin, pale or passionate. In tears she turned a blotchy red. RL had seen her in tears, not often.

I'm going to the Catholic one, said June. Weird, I know. A couple of the girls from work got me going there.

They got you all signed up? Human sacrifice in the basement and everything?

I think they quit doing that.

That's not what I hear.

It's safe to say that you would hate it, June said. I mean, you would hate even the good parts, which are all about doing good things and being nice to people in Central America and so on. They're so [expletive] earnest! But, you know, that's what I like about them.

You've always had an earnest streak.

And you've always been a cynical bastard.

With a heart as big as the great outdoors, RL said. That's me.

No, June said. That's somebody else.

Faith

Just an observation today. Have you thought about how much faith it takes to begin a writing endeavor? Or a scene or a paragraph or even a sentence? I’m not a traditionally religious person, but in this I believe.

You’re stepping off a ledge into thin air when you embark on your task. You have to believe that the process works, as it always has, and will not fail you. You need faith in your muse or higher power and the goddess or whatever you call it, the source of your creativity. You have to believe that what you write has worth and that maybe it might find an audience. You have to believe that writing makes a difference in the world. Above all else, you have to believe in yourself ~ writing is selfish in the best and worst senses of the term.

Maybe another way to look at is as trust. You have to trust the world and the process and yourself and your audience.

This is why I sometimes tell other writers: “Keep the faith, man.”

Question of the Day:  How do you "keep the faith"?

Let’s Be Hard on Ourselves, Shall We?

I’m recovering from another cold that took me to my knees on Saturday. My husband observed, “Why do you always get a cold right before you’re scheduled to have a writing weekend?” Why indeed?

But, we must rise above these things, mustn’t we?

Off and on, I’ve been watching episodes of the A&E show Heavy, about morbidly obese people who make the commitment to change their lives. It actually has quite a lot in common with A&E’s show Intervention. It’s about addiction and how we sabotage ourselves in the name of escape.

The number one thing that strikes me about these shows is how much these people’s lives have in common. Of course, these shows are scripted like all reality shows, so there’s a certain amount of that, but in reality, there are common patterns. A huge trauma. Family enablers. People whose coping mechanisms are very destructive.

The other thing that strikes me is that it’s damn hard to recover. Damn hard. It often takes other people confronting the person, holding them accountable in a new way. The person has to be broken down, sort of like they are in the military, in order to be built back up. They have to be confronted with the severity of their problems and coping mechanisms. The people have setbacks, but they keep fighting.

For example, there’s the story of Travis. During the course of the 6-month training, his wife gives birth to a second son, he has to get a job, his house is broken into, his possessions get flooded out, yet he still looses 98 lbs. He started at 431.2 lbs and gets down to 333.0 lbs. Don’t you just want to stand up a cheer?! Don’t you just admire the heck out him?

Writing is a lot like dieting actually. I mean long-term writing, like writing a novel or trying for long-term success. The major decision (“I am going to lose weight” or “I am going to write a novel”) is the easy part. The hard part is the small everyday decisions that face you every hour every minute of the day. “I’m stressed right now ~ do I give in to the cravings to numb myself with food the way I’ve always done? Or do I stay strong and make the healthy choice?” “I have ten things to do for work and for the kids and, oh, don’t forget my husband ~ do I do all that and not write at all today?”

Writing and dieting have the same sorts of out-there esoteric rewards. Why write a novel? Because I want to have the satisfaction of completing it, because I want fame and fortune, because I know I was meant to. Why diet? Because it’ll make me feel better, because I’ll be more attractive, because I’ll have the satisfaction of completing something hard. See what I mean?

Certainly, I get more day-to-day reward from writing. I mean, when I’m in my writing, I love it! It’s the getting started that’s the hard part and takes the same sort of willpower as dieting.

But I’m going to take courage from the example of Travis and so many others like him who decide to confront those demons and to be hard on themselves and to just do it, damn it!

Questions of the Day: Complete the sentence, “Writing is …”

Back on that Horse

Well, I'm writing again.  Let me say that again.  I'm writing fiction again!!!  Yay!

Last night I read through what I'd written in my wonderful headlong rush, and it was long enough ago that I could read it with some objectivity.  You know what?  I felt like I was in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing.  I felt pulled along by a good strong current, with enough eddies and digressions that the story had depth.

Maybe I'm not half bad. :-)

Happy writing!

Courage

I don’t usually write about politics, and I won’t today, not directly. What I want to talk about is courage.

What we do, us writers, takes a lot of courage. It obviously doesn’t take any special bravery to physically sit down at a desk and type something in. No, I’m talking emotional bravery, commitment to your art, the courage of your convictions. And if you want your stuff to be any good, you have to push even more, beyond the fear, and lay yourself naked and defenseless on the page. The best work is when you write about what makes you nervous, what you’re ashamed of, your deepest darkest secrets. As Steve Almond says, “Run screaming toward the pain.”

This is something I try to do with all my writing. I have to say, I don’t generally worry about what people think, even my mom. (Hi, Mom!) I write the subjects that fascinate me and tweak me. However, the courage that often challenges me is the emotional courage of confronting things inside me. Those really hard things. Like writing about when we lost our first baby in utero at six months. It took a long time and lots of writers block to get to that one. Finally I just had to sit down and write as if I were talking through an outline. That’s the only way I could get started. It’s things like this, the painful things, that challenge me the most.

Why am I writing about this? A report about the Wyoming Legislature by Rachel Maddow.  As I’m sure you know, Wyoming is conservative and republican, and I’m a liberal democrat. So I have some differences of opinion with some of my fellow citizens. But this report made me so proud to be a Wyomingite!

This story is not going to turn out the way you expect it, by the way.  I won't summarize it.  I'll let you go watch it.

Whether you’re republican or democrat, whether you’re for or against abortion, these legislators’ courage to speak (personal) truth to power is amazing. I mean, Rep. Sue Wallis’s courage to tell her own personal story ON THE FLOOR of the Wyoming House.

Oh, and there’s that legislator (Texas, was it?) that stood and told his story in order to encourage gay youths. I can’t seem to find it online at the moment. Such courage.  (I found it. Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns.)

I’m going to remember these every time I’m sniveling in my cups.

Question of the Day: Who else do you know who’s had such courage?

Appearances vs. “Reality”

My wonderful mother-in-law Jean has been visiting all week. She was going to be helping look after the kids while I was at AWP, but we got to visit instead. She’s a book fan-atic from way back, and she belongs to at least two book clubs, so we have a grand time talking books and authors.

She was telling me about David Pelzer’s A Child Called It. I hadn’t read it. It’s a memoir about David’s childhood. His mother singled him out from his brothers for significant abuse (making him eating feces and puke, making him drink ammonia, burning him, and much more). Really rough stuff.

As an aside, I told Mom that after having kids I couldn’t stand to read these horrible things any more. It just tears me up too much. This may be lack of courage on my part ~ I know the world’s a horrible place sometimes, but being so starkly reminded of it is hard. This is the reason I hardly ever read the newspaper any more.

Anyway, Mom and I were looking David Pelzer up on the web and came across the controversy surrounding the book. The parents are dead, and one brother claims it never happened and another claims it did and once David was taken away to foster care the mother focused on this other brother, who is now coming out with his own memoir. Another part of the controversy is that people claim that David made it up almost entirely and only for money (a la the unscrupulous James Frey).

One thing that struck me was the vehemence of some of his detractors. It was as if they felt personally betrayed by David, that he had said something that offended them way beyond the claims of a mere book. The very act of reading the book violated them in some way. Often, they would point out things that seemed factually incorrect, such as that David could remember some things, but he couldn’t remember exactly what his mom looked like. Well, if I had a mom that was that horrible, I’d forget as much about her as I could. They pointed out a bunch of other things. It was as if they so wanted the world to be black and white, not the complex thing that it is. Plus, it is a huge case of blaming the victim ~ which is very very wrong. So what if both are true: that David stretched things just a bit and he is good at self-promotion yet he was horribly abused as well?

I also read a New York Times review of the memoir called A Box of Darkness by Sally Ryder Brady. It’s about Sally and her husband Upton, who was a publishing executive and was also closeted and gay but had affairs. Much like the Pelzer memoir, what went on within the home was very different from outward appearances. There was the life of the family and then what the world saw. And not only that, each member of the family saw family life differently.

Which brings me to: You just don’t know what goes on in a family. Just because someone doesn’t look like an abuser ~ and what does an abuser look like, exactly? ~ doesn’t mean they aren’t. (Which reminds me of Mary Gaitskill’s wonderful story in this week’s New Yorker). Just as you don't know what goes on in a family, you never know what’s going on inside someone either.

And that’s why I’m a writer.

Questions of the Day: Where’s the line of truth and fiction for you in memoir?