Beginner's Mind

And ... we're live!

2010-01-26T10:17:00.002+04:00

This is just a quick note to officially switch from Blogger and begin posting over in Wordpress. If you haven't already, nose around the rest of the site (start at the Home page, which I'm kind of proud of), and then stay tuned as I begin posting here from now on. Also, if you used to follow me in here Blogger, update your RSS feeds to this: http://snoekbrown.wordpress.com/feed/

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I'll leave this blog open through the end of January, maybe a bit longer, but all my new posts will appear at the Wordpress site, so please visit me over there.

And now--back to the fiction!

New blog site nearly ready

2010-01-25T13:36:00.003+04:00

The big move is just around the corner: Look for a link to the new home of Beginner's Mind in the next day or two.

Also, I have a new addition to the list of resources for helping Haiti. And if you haven't already, check out Lori Ann Bloomfield's post on compassionate writing.

Compassion in action

2010-01-24T15:34:00.000+04:00

My friend Lori Ann Bloomfield, over on her blog First Line, has posted an excellent comment on how writers can help not only Haitians but all human beings, simply through the act of writing. By writing more human characters, she says, we come to understand our fellow human beings better, and it's a very small step from there to full compassion for all humanity. Better still, when we compassionately write fully realized, human characters, we invite our readers to a broader, more compassionate view of the world. It's a beautiful post, and I encourage everyone to check it out.

I'm moving the blog

2010-01-22T14:16:00.000+04:00

Just a heads-up: I plan to migrate this blog over to Wordpress next week. I like Blogger a lot and I've enjoyed posting here, but I'm moving for the website-like functionality of Wordpress. I'll keep this blog up through the rest of the month, and I'll keep posting here for a while even after I've moved to Wordpress, but early next week, look for a link to my new home on the Web.

Research wrap-up: More resources than you ever wanted (but not nearly as many as you'll need)

2010-01-21T15:53:00.003+04:00

As I said in the first post of this series, there’s a lot of advice out there. I’ve just hit some highlights that have intrigued me over the years, but if you want to push further and see what other ideas exist, here are some articles and resources I've found online. I’ve also included a short bibliography of some books that at least mention researching for fiction. And in case anyone was curious, yes, I did mention Anne Lamott and Jesse Lee Kercheval a lot, as well as a few references to Paul Lucey. That’s because when my wife and I first moved overseas, I only had room in my luggage for a handful of books, and at the time I was wholly enthralled with Bird by Bird and Building Fiction, and Story Sense is just a terrific reference guide for plotting, so they got to tag along for the ride. The other books on the list below are equally fantastic, though (I own them all), and I would have quoted them as well if I’d been able to bring them with me.

Web articles about research:

Historical Fiction Writing and Research: How and Where to Research a Historical Novel, by Delphine Cull
Blood at the Source: Research Tips for Mystery Writers, by Barbara Fister
True Lies: Libraries, Research, and the Facts of Fiction, Barbara Fister
How to Research Historical Fiction, by Rita Gerlach
How to Write a Traditional Western Adventure Novel, by Laura Griffin
Fiction Writing: Research is Just a Road Trip, by “Harry” (at Men with Pens)
Historical Research for Fiction Writers, by Catherine Lundoff
Research for Fiction Writers: Ensuring Accurate Details for Authenticity When Writing a Book, by Suzanne Pitner

(actually, the Cull article above and this Pitner article both come from Suite101.com, where you can find a slew of other articles on writing and research, including a few written by my friend Ryan Werner)

Bibliographies and databases:

Here are a couple of links to bibliographies on research resources, both of them special collections related to science fiction and fantasy research:

Science Fiction Research Bibliography: A Bibliography of Science Fiction Secondary Materials (at Holland Library, Washington State University)
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection (at Cushing Library, Texas A&M University; also check out their searchable online database)
Science Fiction Research Association (not really a database or collection so much as a vast resource)

And, because my own research that started all this was on the American Civil War, I thought I’d toss in a few of the sites I found invaluable during my own writing (there are thousands of Civil War sites online—these are just the few I stopped at, and they were plenty):

American Civil War
The Civil War
The Civil War (supplement to the excellent PBS film by Ken Burns)

Bibliography:

These are books I own. They discuss, at least in brief, some aspect of researching for fiction:

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction (I actually don’t remember any specific advice on research in this, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t touch on it at least a couple of times—this is an excellent and wide-reaching book)
Jesse Lee Kercheval, Building Fiction
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Paul Lucey, Story Sense
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

Also, check out some of the standard magazines and journals about writing. You might try Writer’s Digest or The Writer, but I do remember reading some terrific articles on research in The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers, and I strongly recommend both those publications.

Just when we thought we had things under control, that maybe since the aid was arriving we could let up on our contributions, a vicious 5.9 aftershock rocked Haiti again today. Which means we aren't finished helping yet—not even close. So, once again, please visit my links page to find out how you can help.

Research tip #6: Marbling

2010-01-20T12:33:00.003+04:00

So now you have all your research done and you’re ready to get back to the writing. But you’re writing fiction here, not a research paper—so how do you use this research you’ve done? Sometimes the answer is easy: You were looking for a particular detail, and you found it, and you just plug it in and keep on working. But other times your research will be background—you’d written a quick rough draft but needed to learn a lot more about the time period, or the industry, or the culture, or whatever it is you’re writing about, so you’ve spent days or weeks or even months plowing through piles of research, and now you need to return to that draft of yours and work in what you learned. And this is where things get tricky.

The simple answer is to always focus on the writing. If you learned what you studied, if you absorbed all that research you did, then you should be able to just start revising the text and the details will fall in on their own. But let’s be honest, writing is almost never as easy as shaking our heads and letting the genius sift down. You’re going to have to work at this, and it’s going to have to be precise and intentional.

So let’s set aside the writing for a minute and go bake a cake.

In his screenwriting book, Story Sense, Paul Lucey discusses working research into a story:

A certain amount of your research may be cited in the script, but it should not be dumped on audiences to impress them. Instead, research should be worked into the story in the same way that the history of the characters and the locations is worked in through a process called marbling. This term refers to information that reveals the characters and the plot indirectly, through dialogue and images. When marbling is done skillfully, audiences are hardly aware that they are receiving exposition.

Because we’re writers and therefore probably also book nerds, we might be tempted to think of marbling in terms of paper-dying, the art form in which you swirl inks and dyes on paper to produce wild, psychedelic patterns. But I think this is a poor metaphor, because the result is a disorienting churn of color that does not help anyone perceive either the larger picture or the individual hues. Instead, I think the term “marbling” as used for fiction is best related to marbling in baking. For those of you who’ve never been up to your elbows in flour, marbling in baking refers to swirling two contrasting batters—one light, one dark, usually vanilla and chocolate—into a single cake, so the baked cake comes out looking like marble (or like marbled paper). But bakers know that the secret to a good marbled cake is neither the separation of the flavors nor the blend of flavors, but the complement of flavors: we don’t want to taste chocolate and then vanilla, and we don’t want to taste chocolate-vanilla; we want to taste how chocolate and vanilla play off each other in a single bite.

In fiction, we “marble” our details in such a way that they neither stand out as a distinct list of details (“Look what I learned!”) nor blend in as indistinct jumbles of words. Instead, marbled details should work their way into a story so they complement the story—they show us details not to inform the reader but to inform the story, to provide depth to character, to drive the plot, to set the mood.

And we should never forget that this is the function of our research—to serve as details in a story. This can feel frustrating sometimes in the same way that cooking frustrates some people. You spend hours and hours in the kitchen, tossing up a huge mess and stacking dirty dishes you’ll just have to spend hours cleaning later, but the final result is a single plate of food that someone wolfs down in maybe 20 minutes, and then it’s over. Similarly, when you spend hours or days rubbing your weary eyeballs and your hands have gone dry from flipping pages and you’ve learned an entire history inside and out, it can be terribly frustrating to find that all that work boils down to a single detail, a phrase in a sentence. You are tempted, I bet, to pour on the details, to load in everything you learned just to prove that you did the work. But this is not why we did the research; we’re not out to prove anything, we’re out to tell a story.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, puts it this way:

Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth—a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well. Bad liars pile on the facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blinds alleys, while good (or at least better) liars know that it’s the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story and tells us to take it easy, we can quit our dreary adult jobs of playing judge and jury and again become as trusting children, hearing the gospel of grown-up knowledge without a single care or doubt.

Yes, your research lends your fiction a certain authority, a sense that you know what you’re talking about, or at least your narrator does. A lot of great authors made sure they did know what they were talking about—when you read Hemingway’s vivid descriptions of lion-hunting in Africa, you know that old Papa Hemingway actually hefted a rifle and trekked out on safari, actually shot at the king of cats himself. But in Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott tells of writing a story about gardening based solely on research and on going to the source (in this case, a horticulturalist as well as dozens of happy home gardeners) and then catching people off guard when they assumed she herself was a gardener. “I’d let them know that I had only been winging it, with a lot of help from people around me. [. . .] ‘You don’t love to garden?’ they’d ask me incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent [. . .].”

So you find only those details that are necessary, only the research that serves the story, and then you work it in where it’s necessary and only there. In her book Building Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval explains how Tim O’Brien (who, to be fair, was indeed a Vietnam veteran, so his details came first-hand) worked in whole lists of specific facts to lend realism to his short story “The Things They Carried.”

As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men. . . .

As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.

The information here accomplishes several things at once: They give the narrator (and O’Brien himself) authority through the specificity of the details—the weight of packs, the caliber of firearm, the curious detail about the “M&Ms for especially bad wounds.” Only someone who’d been there, we would reason, could know details like that. The lists also inform us about the characters, “the cumulative impression they leave of a character’s rank and specialty,” as Kercheval puts it. (Notice that the medic carries comic books, too, which, combined with the M&M detail, tells us something about Rat Kiley the human being as well as Rat Kiley the medic.) And they move the story itself forward—the description of the platoon leader, with his weapons of war and his “responsibility for the lives of his men,” precedes the description of the medic, whose gear helps him heal the wounds of war, and this pairing creates a tension that propels the story forward.

But for the best example of how to use your research in your fiction—how to marble in the details so that they complement the story you’re telling—I will turn to the master, Cormac McCarthy, and his greatest novel so far, the brilliant historical novel Blood Meridian. (For a fascinating discussion of McCarthy’s own research and writing process, check out this rare interview, with John Jurgensen.)

In Blood Meridian, a group of men led by the violently mythic Judge Holden are running from a band of vengeful Native Americans; as one might expect in a Western, they are shooting at each other as they gallop across the West Texas desert, firing so much that the judge’s men run out of ammunition. Actually, they have plenty of bullets and plenty of empty casings and are used to recycling their rounds by recasing their own ammo, but they have run out of gunpowder. So they run to the volcanic mountains to escape, and there on the burning peaks the judge sets about making gunpowder by hand.

The process of making gunpowder involves chemically mixing potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfur powder, and charcoal. But these men are on the run, trapped at the top of a volcano—they’re not leisurely tinkering around with a chemistry set. McCarthy did his research, though, and he learned that human urine contains nitrogen and that saltpeter can be made from urine by mixing it with potash (wood ashes). He also must have discovered that sulfur naturally occurs in volcanic regions. And it wouldn’t be hard to come across charcoal at a volcano, either.

I did a little looking myself (okay, a very little—I just hit Wikipedia), and learned that just before the Renaissance, Europeans discovered a way to add liquid to the ingredients and create a kind of gunpowder paste, which they then dried and crushed to form gunpowder. And, according to the Wikipedia article, “gunners also found that it was more powerful and easier to load into guns.”

Perfect! But these men in Blood Meridian are on the run, in the middle of a shootout, fighting for their lives. We don’t have time to pause the action and explain all these technical, alchemical processes. We need gunpowder and we need it now! So McCarthy marbles—he keeps the action moving fiery and relentless even as he describes the powder-making process in grossly vivid detail and reveals volumes of insight into Judge Holden’s feral genius and his devlish nature:

We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out for us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughing the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life.

(For any chemistry nerds reading, I should point out that most information online explains that making gunpowder takes an incredibly long time, upwards of two days or more, so I know there’s absolutely no way that the judge’s men could concoct makeshift gunpowder on a mountaintop and reload and carry on their fight with the Native Americans in the span of time McCarthy describes in his novel. But we don’t care—the story has us, we are committed, and now we just want these guys to shoot the bullet.)

Tomorrow, a short summation and a list of links to other articles and books you might find useful.

If you haven't already, please visit my links for charity and aid organizations that are helping Haiti. Also, today I discovered the website for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which is another place you can donate (I've added it to the existing list as well). And as always, if you know of any news or any other organizations I can add here, let me know.

Research tip #5: Shop the catalogue

2010-01-19T15:15:00.004+04:00

I’ve written about this before, but just to recap: Tom Franklin hates doing research. Yet his first two novels were historical fiction, which stuck Franklin doing the very thing he hates. Still, Franklin prefers to focus on the writing, to let the fiction drive his work (which is probably the way we all should work), so he developed a way to conduct the research he needed to do without letting it get in the way of his writing. The idea wasn’t his—he credits Steven Scarborough for the suggestion—but he made it his own.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Franklin has a thing for details. The way he sees it, a story might be entertaining if you focus on character and plot, but the characters aren't real and the plot won’t ring true without the help of minute details. “You can't write convincingly unless you know the tiny details of a place, of people, buttons on their britches or zippers, how much their snuff costs, the caliber of their sidearm,” he once told interviewer Rob McClure Smith. But in Hell at the Breech, Franklin was writing about the late 1890s, a period he had little access to. So, how to get the details right?

Scarborough suggested he find an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue. “Everything in the world you could get you got through Sears & Roebuck,” Franklin told Smith. “I got one from 1897 and it's filled with pictures of everything from Adzes to zebra lined boots. [. . .] This Sears catalogue’s got it all.”

The catalogue became his springboard into the fiction. He’d write and write (and revise as he went), and just keep plowing away at the story until he couldn’t write any more. He was dry; he needed a dip at the well. So he’d pull out his facsimile copy of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalogue and flip through it. Eventually, he’d find something—sometimes an item he was looking for, like, say, a pocket watch, but often he’d stumble across something he hadn’t expected, like a stereoscope for viewing photographs, a kind of Victorian-era version of our old 3-D View-Masters—and he’d start describing whatever he found. The catalogue, after all, contained drawings or diagrams of the items for sale, descriptions of what they were and how they functioned, ads explaining who might find them useful, and so on. And absolute wealth of information—practically a time machine. So Franklin would describe the item, would perhaps assign it to a character and let him or her use it, and just keep working over the bit until it developed into a scene. The next thing Franklin knew, the fiction was rolling along again and the story progressed.

Franklin got lucky, of course, that anyone was bothering to print facsimiles of the old Sears catalogue at all, let alone that it was from the same time period he was writing about. But it's not hard to find similar items for yourself, and the more we writers come to need these books, the more our demand will create a market for them. That same 1897 Sears catalogue is actually available now through Amazon, as is an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalogue and an 1886 Bloomingdale's illustrated catalogue. A quick search through your local library might also turn up books on the history of advertising, in which you can find ads and illustrations from years past. You can also find useful information in histories of clothing and costumes, antique furniture guides, even old cookbooks.

And while you’re there, look into the library’s newspaper archives. Most public libraries—even the small town libraries—will keep archives of the local papers, and many larger libraries will keep archives of major national papers as well. If your library is well funded, you might even be able to search through the microfilm or microfiche collections for newspapers that are decades, even centuries old. (If your library is not well funded, lobby your local government to increase library funding, and join your area Friends of the Library group to help raise money.)

I mention the newspapers because they’ll also have print advertising and can help add a little local color to your details, and while you’re there, you can also browse some of the community articles to see what people were writing their editors to complain about, what people were gossiping about, what the local community was interested in. Check out the photos, too--you can see what people were wearing, which, as Sherlock Holmes would tell you, can provide excellent character details. You can do the same with magazines, sometimes with surprising results (the library at one of the colleges I attended has the entire run of Playboy—in full color—on microfiche, though you have to know who to ask to get access to it and sorry, I’m not going to help you with that one).

When I was working on my Civil War novel, I found myself slowing down about halfway through and I started wondering how I was going to push on through. I thought about Franklin, in the same predicament while working on Hell at the Breech, and I decided to follow his advice: I shopped the catalogue. Of course, I don’t have a copy of that or any other historical catalogue, and living overseas as I do, it was going to be difficult to get one on short notice. But with some search guidance from a librarian (actually, my wife), I started poking around online and I stumbled across the excellent web site titled simply The Civil War. The site is good for all its history and essays and trivia, sure, but the pot of gold is their collection of Civil War-era Harper's Weekly magazines, which they’ve scanned in and posted online. (The coolest thing about their project is that they preserved the text as text, so the magazines are fully searchable!) Now, not only did I have access to contemporary news about the war, but I also had letters, political cartoons, sketches of battles, and, best of all, advertising. Thanks to these magazines, I was able to add vivid realism to my battle descriptions, give depth to characters’ personal sentiments about the war, and include rich details about daily life. In one scene, my characters come across a few worn old books in a dead soldier’s rucksack, and I listed the titles, which I’d found on a bestseller list from 1863. In another scene, some characters are haggling over the price of a few blackmarket firearms, and I was able to describe some of them based on advertising in the magazine, which sold pistols alongside ladies’ stockings.

The Harper’s Weeklys weren’t as easily perused as a Sears catalogue, maybe, and they were comparatively limited in scope, but they got the writing going every time, and that’s the only point anyway—it is always the point—to get back to the writing.

Of course, once you shop the catalogue, you have to unpack all that stuff and arrange it, which is for some people the biggest trick of all. So, tomorrow, I’ll write about marbling….

Bonus link: For more recent cultural and material research, check out the delightful Retroland website. Remember Trapper Keepers? Yeah, so do they. Loads of nostalgic fun.

Obama has tweeted about Haiti—his first post on Twitter—and asked Americans to continue supporting Haitian relief efforts. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for troops and aid organizations to unclog the bottleneck of supplies, and indeed the US military (according to some, a source of the bottlenecking once we took control of the main airport in Port-au-Prince) has agreed to help speed the distribution of supplies. Yet as the death toll mounts, with some estimates now reaching more than 200,000 dead, survivors continue to be miraculously pulled from the rubble, alive and in dire need of food and medicine. That means it remains important—is perhaps more important now—to continue giving to relief efforts. There are reports now of fake support groups popping up on Facebook, which is unfortunate, but the list I put together a few days ago remains a good starting point for finding legitimate, carefully vetted aid organizations. Please check out that list and consider giving.

Research tip #4: Shoot the bullet

2010-01-18T12:30:00.006+04:00

A few years ago, I was at the big national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a friend of mine, Tom Franklin, was on a panel discussing research in fiction. Franklin joined the panel by virtue of his historical novels Hell at the Breech and Smonk (particularly Hell, which is based on a true story), but Franklin freely admits he dislikes research, so I knew the panel discussion would be fun. The panel did turn out to be a pretty lively one, frequently digressing into friendly banter and swapped anecdotes between Franklin and his friends and fellow panelists Julianna Baggott, Justin Cronin, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Mark Winegardner. In fact, the stories the panelists started telling sometimes had little to do with research—the group quickly became just a bunch of practiced storytellers trying to outdo each other—but they all did a terrific job of bringing their rambling stories back to the point at hand: research.

Among the planned topics for that panel, some (“what really happened!”) seemed fairly gratuitous, and others (“what to look for and how to look for it”) fairly dry and mechanical. But there was one point that people keep debating, and after the comments from this panel, I’m not sure why, because the answer seems pretty simple. The conference program lists this point three different ways: “negotiating between historic fact and story-truth,” “approximating what can't be looked up,” and “what's better made-up,” but they all boil down to one axiom: Sometimes it’s better to shoot the bullet.

I should confess here that I don’t recall who told this story. I know it was a guy, and I know it wasn’t Franklin. That leaves Justin Cronin and Mark Winegardner, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Winegardner. That should make it Cronin’s story, but my memory keeps adding a fourth guy, tacked on the end of the panel as a late addition, and I don’t want to put words in Cronin’s mouth that weren’t his. But until someone corrects me on this (I e-mailed Franklin, but he doesn’t remember, either), we’ll say it was “Cronin” who told this story.

And the story goes like this: “Cronin” was working on an action sequence in which a character has been shot in the leg but must run to escape his enemies. He has no surgical experience and no time to stop and dig out the bullet even if he knew how, but he also cannot run effectively with that bullet still lodged in his thigh. What he does have is an almost superhuman expertise in firearms, and he has a pistol. So he does what any desperate action hero would do in this situation: He aims his pistol at his own thigh, muzzle pressed into the open wound and angled along the same trajectory as the original bullet. He grits his teeth. Then he pulls the trigger and fires a second bullet into his leg. The result is something like projectile-billiards—his bullet strikes the first bullet and knocks it out the far side of his thigh, and his bullet then continues on the same path and exits the same wound. No more bullets, and now he can run. And off he goes.

We in the audience all laughed at this story, as did the guy who told it. It is a ridiculous scene, he admitted. (In my head, I recalled the scene in Rambo III when Rambo, out in the deserts of Afghanistan and wounded in the stomach, uncases two rifle bullets, pours the gunpowder into his wound, and ignites it—fire bursting from his muscled torso into the desert night—to cauterize the wound). Still, “Cronin” said, shooting the bullet was just too cool to pass over, and it sounded vaguely plausible to him. He wanted it to work.

He’d already been poring over medical references and firearms manuals in the course of writing this book of his, but he’d never come across anything that would either confirm or contradict his idea to shoot the bullet. This sounded like specialist information, the kind of thing you could probably only deduce from experience. So “Cronin” went to the source and called a doctor friend of his. He explained the situation, described how his hero would shoot the bullet, and then asked his doctor friend if such a thing would work.

His friend laughed in his face.

“Of course that wouldn’t work!” the doctor said. “Medically speaking, it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—and the odds against it are astronomical!”

Disheartened, “Cronin” began thinking then and there of alternative possibilities, but he didn’t get far in his silent, dejected reverie, because the doctor leaned in close and said, “But the way you describe it, shooting the bullet sounds cool as hell. You should let him do it anyway!”

And that was the lesson for the day: Sometimes the research can get in the way of good writing. Sometimes you have to say to hell with realism, to hell with the facts, and just write a cool story. Sometimes you have to shoot the bullet.

This doesn’t mean you can get away with shoddy writing. You don’t always have to operate within the rules of the real world, but you do have to operate within the rules of your established world—you have to remain true to your story. Take my novella, for example, which involves a couple of teenage boys running around causing trouble just outside Boerne, Texas, in the woodsy little subdivision where I grew up. I have spent a lot of time constructing complicated calendars and character note cards, and I’ve gone through every line of the story checking that the timeline adds up. I can’t say my character is 14 in the winter and 15 the summer, for instance, without knowing that he has a birthday sometime in the spring (it's March 14, if anyone cares). I don’t have to mention the birthday at all, but I do have to know that I can’t mention his birthday in the fall is it had already happened in the spring. The rules of my story won't allow it.

But I’m not tied to the physical details of my old neighborhood. This is fiction, after all. So I have my characters tearing loose in a version of my own back yard even though the reference sites for each boy's house are nowhere near my parents’ actual home. I can manipulate geography because I’m not drawing a map—I’m writing fiction. The point is not that people reading my story can go out to my old subdivision and find the secret hiding place where these boys spend their time—they can’t, because the geography is imprecise. The point is that someone can read the descriptions and, if they know Boerne or my old subdivision, they can recognize the general landscape (which I hope people can).

When I was an undergrad student, Madeleine L'Engle once visited my college as a visiting speaker. Among the many insights she touched on during her audience Q&A session, she explained what she saw as the difference between fact and truth. Facts, she said, are details, data, pieces of information that we can record and prove and quantify . . . and manipulate. They are not inherently true. On the other hand, truth is not always dependent on facts—truth is just as much something we can feel or something we believe as it is something we can point to or measure. And fiction, according to L’Engle, is often more truthful than factual.

Fiction writer and memoirist Bill Roorbach has alluded to a similar phenomenon in his own work. He likes to joke that his greatest frustration is when he reads from his nonfiction and people challenge him, shouting out from the audience, “That didn’t happen! You’re making that up!” but when he reads a piece of fiction, people creep up to him and lean in conspiratorially, wink at him, and whisper, “I know that’s based on a true story—I know all that really happened to you.” The point, Roorbach says, is that people often confuse fact for truth, so when he writes a story full of truth, people mistake it for fact, and when he writes an essay full of truth, people want only the facts.

We are not in the fact business. We are in the truth business. It doesn’t matter what form our work takes—fiction, essays, poetry, scripts, aphorisms, whatever—so long as we strive to tell the truth. And sometimes, telling the truth, or even just telling a damn good story, requires us to bend or even ignore the facts.

When Tom Franklin was writing Hell at the Breech, his first novel, he spent a lot of time interviewing people who knew the true story, whose relatives had lived through it and passed down their version through the generations. He wrestled and agonized for a long time over how to reconcile all the variations of the local legend, how to write the most factually accurate story possible and please all the folks he’d talked to. But eventually he realized he couldn’t, and in his author’s note in the book, he explains that his is a work of fiction, not fact. Once he let go of trying to get in all the factual details, he discovered he could tell the truest story possible.

Which isn’t to say Franklin gave up doing research. What he did, though, was a specific kind of research best suited to his writing style, something I like to call “shopping the catalogue,” but that’s for tomorrow’s post . . . .

The situation in Haiti is getting better, but it's also getting more desperate. Supplies are bottlenecked, relief organizations are tripping over each other, and what little order people managed to cobble together in the immediate aftermath is deteriorating. Let's not make this sound prettier than it is. But let's also focus on what is getting accomplished: Supplies are arriving and are getting distributed. In fact, despite the bottleneck, supplies are running out as fast as they're arriving, which means relief organizations still need your help. When you return from the public celebrations of the Reverend Dr. King's life, and before you switch on the Golden Globes, take a moment to give a donation. See this list of organizations for more information.

UPDATE: United Arab Emirates, where we live, is joining other Arab nations in sending aid to Haiti, both through Khalifa Bin Zayed Charity Foundation and through the UAE branch of the Red Crescent Society, the organization we're donating to.

Research tip #3: Go to the source

2010-01-17T14:22:00.005+04:00

A lot of great writers started out as journalists, and critics have offered a lot of reasons for that shared background. Journalists know how to work under deadline, they have an instinct for finding a story, they’ve learned how to find an angle or a hook to draw a reader in, they have developed a sense of concision and compression in language. But I think there is at least one reason that critics tend to overlook: Journalists know how to interview people.

I’ve been writing so far about how to conduct research for fiction, but up till now that research has been primarily textual—books, articles, websites. However, sometimes research in books or online isn’t enough. There are some things you can’t learn by reading, but Hemingway’s or Annie Proulx’s examples aside, there are also a lot of things you can’t learn by living through or traveling to, either. For some things, you have to go to the source, you have to talk to other people who have lived through it, who did travel there—you have to talk to people who know.

This is a hard thing for many introverted writers to do. We’re much happier holed up at our desks with our desk lamp, our music, and our cat for company. We’re writers, we tell ourselves, because we don’t like to talk. So actually tracking down people and meeting them is at best a chore—at worst, terrifying. But hey, you've managed to get out and meet a librarian by now, right? (Right?) So you can do this too. Talking to people isn’t really much different from the kind of research you’ve probably been doing, except instead of asking questions in a search engine or a database or a catalogue, you’re asking a human being. And sometimes, this is the only way it can work.

The simplest thing to do is start with people you already know. For example: I’m currently working on a story in which one of the characters is a Mexican-American who understands English fine but does not speak English. I can write the character without any problems, because I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, in a small town with a significant, proud Hispanic population. My perspective remains irrefutably white, of course, but this isn’t really a problem in the story—most of what we see of this guy is through a white perspective. But he needs to speak, and I need his speech to be authentic. Yet no matter how many Hispanic friends I hung out with at lunch or on weekends, and no matter how many Hispanic coworkers I worked with (this character is in fact based loosely on a guy I used to mow lawns with), my Spanish is limited, academic, and frankly, terrible. I’ve used the language in stories before, but it’s an issue I always wrestle with. I can (and have) used dictionaries and online translators to temporarily write the dialogue I’ve used, but we all know this is inauthentic—no one speaks their own language the way it’s written in textbooks or constructed by translators. So, for my Mexican-American character’s voice to ring true, I turned to some of my Spanish-speaking friends from back in high school, because they can help me with the spoken rhythms of the language, the idioms and the slang. (This is an on-going project, by the way, so if any of my friends want to volunteer as translators, I’d love to hear from you!)

More recently, I learned a wealth of invaluable information while working on that Civil War novel I keep mentioning. One of the characters in that book has the bizarre habit of skinning wolves and wearing their pelts as clothes—he even wears a real wolf’s face as a mask. But I’ve never been a hunter and I’m now a vegetarian, not to mention that many wolf populations are protected today, so this not only was something I was unfamiliar with, it is something I’ll never have a chance to try for myself. I tried reading some guides online but the specific information I was looking for was difficult to find, and besides, the skinning and preparation of these pelts is, for my character, an intensely personal process, so I needed some kind of inside information. I put out the call online, and several friends came through for me immediately, including my friend Amy Smith Hicks, who is a self-described “country girl” and regularly helps dress and butcher deer during the annual hunting seasons; better still, members of her family are in the taxidermy business, so she had some insights there as well. Amy not only was able to explain the mechanics of the process better than the manuals I was reading, but she also described the sounds and smells of the skinning process, how the skin feels as you strip it from the carcass, and some personal tips for an easier job. These are details I would never have gotten from reading a book or even watching a video.

If you’re lucky, you can do the same with other complicated professional information as well. Despite the stereotypes, most writers are not insular homebodies who hang out only with other writers, if with anyone. You probably have friends or acquaintances in a wide breadth of fields, from grocery store clerks to construction workers to computer support technicians to police officers to accountants to college professors. You also conduct a lot of business with people in various professions. When you get your cable installed, talk to the person hooking up your tv. When you go to the doctor for a check-up, ask questions about your characters' fictional conditions.

Sometimes, though, you’ll simply need to dive in and play reporter, to call up a professional or an organization and start asking questions. Say you’re writing a crime thriller but you’ve never lived in a dangerous neighborhood, you don’t know any cops, you’ve never even seen a firearm up close. Call up your police department and request a ride-along. (You can usually do the same for your local fire department and sometimes the paramedics as well.) Or let’s say you’re writing about an employee at an animal shelter. Call up your local humane society and ask about volunteering; while you’re there, talk to other volunteers, talk to the vets.

Some professions or people are going to be trickier than others, of course. I don’t recommend diving into dangerous situations without a LOT of preparation and help from other professionals, and even then, I would never condone any writer participating in dangerous or illegal activities just to write a story. When in doubt, go back to the old rule of writing what you know. But you should embrace a certain sense of adventure and talk to interesting people; your readers want to read about those people. Talk to professionals in the fields your characters work in; your readers they want to know that you know what you’re talking about, or at least that Val, your lawn-mowing main character, knows his way around a commercial-grade Walker mower.

When I was hospitalized in 1999 with a bleeding ulcer, the doctors explained to me how they would insert a gastrointestinal scope down my throat and take a look around inside me to find the ulcer, and then they’d use the laser attached to the scope to suture the ulcer shut. I was going to be unconscious for all this, they assured me, and then I asked what struck them as a strange question: Would they be recording the scope? Sure, they explained, they would keep a video record of the procedure for reference later. I said, “Will I be able to see this video?” They reminded me I would be under anesthesia, but I clarified that I wanted access to the video after the procedure. “I just want to see what it looks like,” I said. I had no plans for the information—at the time, I’d lost a couple pints of blood and was lying weak and woozy on a gurney, already in the surgery room where they were preparing the scope, so I wasn’t thinking about fiction at all. But I knew I needed to see that video, and indeed, a few weeks afterward, I returned to the hospital and asked to see my file. I watched the video and asked a lot of questions about what some of the images meant, what they’d done during the procedure, what the instruments did and how they worked. And then I forgot it. It became just another piece of information I knew, trivial and quirky but not of much immediate use. But sure enough, more than four years later I had an idea for a story that involved a scope down the esophagus, and I remembered that video; my story “Horror Vacuui,” about a sword-swallower with a dangerous case of intestinal blockage, would not be the same if I hadn’t seen first-hand what the inside of my own bloody intestines looked like. These details matter, and sometimes the best way to get them is from the source itself.

That's why, tomorrow, I'm going to offer some specific advice based on a story about a doctor and how you, too, can "shoot the bullet."

Relief efforts in Haiti are going slowly and the situation is dangerously precarious, but a lot of supplies have already arrived on the island and volunteers are working hard to help the Haitian people. The harder they work and the more they give, the more they're going to need your donations! Please see my list of charity and action organizations, and as usual, if you know of more I need to list, please let me know.

Weekend repreive

2010-01-16T00:30:00.001+04:00

The research series is on hold for the weekend (I live in a Muslim country, where our weekend is Friday and Saturday), so look for Tip #3 on Sunday.

In the meantime, if you're on Facebook: Today a friend of mine who is a Unitarian minister alerted me to a "Prayers & Thoughts for the people of Haiti" event on Facebook, hosted by the group "Long Live His Holiness the Dalai Lama." I'm certain there are many other groups associated with other faiths or with secular organizations who are hosting similar pages/events, so look them up.

And keep those donations going!

More help for Haiti

2010-01-15T09:55:00.003+04:00

The links just keep coming, thanks especially to my friends Rima Abunasser, Beth Davidson, and Diana Pearson. I'm re-posting the list from yesterday, but some links are to organizations and some to lists of organizations, so I'm listing the lists first:

NEW: Microsoft Community Involvement site (Microsoft has put together a list of resources, not all of them merely financial. I can't vouch for the reliability of all those resources, but it's worth a look, especially for the non-monetary ways you help)
Charity Navigator (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences)
InterAction (from my friend Rima: "a list of legitimate organizations who are participating in the relief effort")
Google (my friend Beth pointed out that Google is listing charities; you can search yourself or just follow the link she sent me)
BBB Wise Giving Alliance (Beth also pointed out this clearing house, "for 'vetting' charities")
The White House (this comes directly from President Obama, via an mass e-mail he sent out; it lists all the efforts our government is taking and how you can help, and it's where I got this web badge for today's post)

Here are some individual charities and organizations:

International Red Cross Red Crescent (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)
Doctors Without Borders (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)
Oxfam (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)
Heifer International (Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis. Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.)
Episcopal Relief and Development (my friend Diana says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.")
World Vision (my friend Rima says, "according to ABC, they're already distributing first aid kits and and other staples in Haiti.")
Save the Children (also from Rima: "using grassroots methods like sending motorcycle teams to help people in Port au Prince")
Care (Rima: "distributing high protein biscuits they already had in warehouses in Haiti"; Beth highlighted this one, too)
UNICEF (a time-honored and reliable group--I used to "trick or treat" for donations when I was a kid; thanks to Beth for pointing this one out!)
Clinton Bush Haiti Fund (a new addition to this list; this is the organization set up by former Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, as the request of President Obama)

Thanks everyone for your links and support! Keep those ideas coming, and keep the words, the money, and the helping hands going!

Haiti

2010-01-14T09:31:00.002+04:00

I want to pause in the series on researching to focus on more important matters: Haiti. As I write this, the death toll is not yet known, and like the horrible tsunami catastrophe of 2005, we may never truly know. What we do know is that millions--that's millions--of Haitians are injured or dying, and all Haitians, both in their homeland and living abroad, are suffering terrible, unspeakable grief.

There have been a lot of calls for prayer in the past day or so, and I'm among those people who believe that prayer, or meditation, or any other form of mental or spiritual offering can be hugely beneficial in tragedy, not only to those on whose behalf we pray but also for ourselves as well. It's why I'm here now: I view writing as a kind of prayer, like a message in the Wailing Wall or a sutra on a prayer flag or calligraphy from the Qur'an, and I write this because I want to send my hope and compassion out into the world, on the off chance that it can help someone who is suffering, if only to know there's someone like me who cares.

But I also believe that words alone are not going to help the people of Haiti, and I agree with all those people who suggest that action is as important as prayers--maybe, for the time being, action is more important.

I know things are hard for a lot of people the world over. Just today, as I browsed messages and status reports from friends and family, I found as many people despairing over their own hardships as I found despairing for Haiti. I have friends who have lost their jobs, or who have been seeking jobs for months to no avail; I have friends who wake each morning wondering how they're going to feed their children. I have friends who are suffering from terrible illness, or whose family members or spouses are dying of cancer. I have friends who are fighting day after day just to retain (or in some cases earn for the first time) their basic human rights.

But I also know that there are also plenty of us who can afford to help. It doesn't take much. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit several years ago, I had students approach me asking to be excused from class for a week. They wanted to head south, down to the Gulf Coast. I said, "You have family down there?" They said, "No, I'm joining a group of volunteers helping to clean up." I excused them from class. A couple of years later, up in Wisconsin, another group of students asked the same thing--they were driving down to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. These actions cost time, but they rarely cost money, and they have enormous impact.

I don't yet know what sorts of actions are available to help Haitians; the Haitians themselves do not yet fully understand the terrible scope of this tragedy or what their needs will be, and the governments of the world, including my own, are scrambling to help but don't yet know how. I hope by the end of today we can know, at least to some degree, and the help can begin. But in the meantime, I do know that one thing needed desperately is money to fund the efforts of those brave volunteers waiting to rush to Haiti's aid. So if you can afford to, please consider donating. Some places are willing to accept anything you can spare, even if it's only a dollar.

To that end, here is a short list of charities to consider, compiled by myself, some friends on Facebook, and one of my favorite blogs, Cake Wrecks:

Charity Navigator (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences)
International Red Cross Red Crescent (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)
Doctors Without Borders (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)
Oxfam (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)
Heifer International (already an addition! Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis. Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.)
Episcopal Relief and Development (and another addition, this one from my friend Diana Pearson, who says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.")

If you know of any more than I can add to this list, or of any non-monetary ways in which we can help, please tell me--I will [continue to] update and repost the list as long as it's necessary.

Research tip #2: Know your limits

2010-01-13T16:05:00.006+04:00

Sing it with me now: “To everything there is a season . . . A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to research, and a time to stop researching and get back to the writing . . .”

Every good academic knows there comes a point in the research process at which you have to quit looking at other people’s ideas and start working with your own. Failing to do so, you risk letting other people’s ideas take over, and what you wind up writing is not original argument but regurgitative reporting. Fiction writers, though, seem to know less about this magical balancing act and aren’t always aware when that moment comes.

The first thing you need to bear in mind as a researcher is what your skill set is, what things you know about researching and what things you’ll need help with. (If you read yesterday’s post, you know at least one thing: Ask a librarian!) Many fiction writers come from academic backgrounds and know a great deal about researching, but many fiction writers don't. And it's not a problem, not in terms of researching for fiction. The point is not to become expert researchers but to become excellent writers, which means we must always stay focused on the writing and not worry so much about the research. You’re not out to learn new processes (though it’s always helpful if you do learn some things along the way—see yesterday’s post), so what you want to do is work within the skills you have, find what you can as fast as you can, and then—say it with me—get back to the writing.

Maybe the only thing you know to do is jump onto Google or Wikipedia and look stuff up. That’s fine, though the Internet is notoriously time-consuming and conducive to procrastination (or, as my friend Tanya’s son Aaron brilliantly calls it, “procrasturbation”). If that’s what works for you, use it: follow a few links in, see what you can see. But if you linger too long or start clicking on too many links, shut it down and get back to the writing.

Maybe you have a small collection of standard references in your home, and you like to dive into those now and then, hit the encyclopedias or the indexes or The Dangerous Book for Boys, and read till you find what you’re after. That’s excellent. I can’t tell you how many trivia books and instruction manuals and dictionaries I’ve read over the years, and boring as it might sound, I’ve enjoyed them all. There’s some fascinating stuff out there in the world, and I love to learn. But there’s a difference between reading to write and just plain reading. Put the book down. You have a book of your own to write.

Maybe you’re well versed in complicated research methods, you know your library’s article databases inside and out, and you have personal access to the archives or the rare books room, and you head down to the library to put in some good hard research. Great. But take your writing with you—your laptop, your yellow legal pad, your lovingly worn, floppy old journal and fancy pen—and be prepared at any moment (the right moment) to drop everything and get back to the writing.

So what is the right moment? How do you know when you’ve done enough research and are ready to write again? Well, that’s a tricky question, and the simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate truth is that only you can know. It reminds me of the very short chapter on knowing when a story is finished, from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: “This is a question my students always ask. I don’t quite know how to answer it. You just do.” But I call it fortunate because you get to determine this—the “right” moment depends on you.

In his book on screenwriting, Story Sense, Paul Lucey suggests that “the amount of time spent on research depends on the topic, how quickly you work, and how much background you need to feel comfortable” with writing the story. “Some writers spend months research and mulling the story, which is also an aspect of writing. The research and story pondering continues until the writer feels charged with energy and begins working out the plot.” But I think Lucey’s description is a bit disingenuous, or else he drinks better coffee than I do—I’ve never felt “charged with energy” after a long research session. I feel swollen, full of new information and unsure what to do with it all. But sometimes I also feel driven, sometimes frantically, to get down an idea or a scene, in much the same way I’d feel driven by any flash of inspiration or sudden insight I knew belonged in fiction. It is a gratifying moment, to flash on the one piece of information you were looking for (or better yet, a piece of information you didn’t know you were looking for) and suddenly know you need to get it into writing. But I worry that Lucey’s initial image of writers sitting around poring through tomes of research and pondering and mulling ad libitum gives us exactly the excuse we need to avoid writing. Fan as I am of Hemingway’s pinching orange peels and staring at the fire routine, we don’t really need any more excuses to avoid writing, and sometimes you have to recognize that, right information or not, you’ve put off the writing long enough and it’s time to go back and just write the thing. There will be time enough for follow-up research later. Right now you need to write.

When I was working on the Civil War novel that spawned these posts, I was under the daily pressure of NaNoWriMo to pound out a few pages every day, so even though I wound up doing a little research every day, I also had to force myself toget back to the writing. In some cases this was easy: One time, I needed to find out how to defeat the Cajun folklore creature known as a rougarou (a bit like a werewolf), so I looked up the answer, found it, and moved on. Other times, I risked letting the research run away with me, like the day I looked up Civil war battles in southwestern Louisiana. I wanted to reference a particular battle in dialogue in order to set a character's background and establish some of the real history behind my story, so I started looking up historical accounts of battles. At first I was just looking for date and place, but once I'd found several, I needed to pick one, and to pick one—I told myself—I needed to know a little about each battle. So I started reading. After a while I'd narrowed my battles down to two or three I could use, but then I decided that the only way for my character to talk about the battle effectively was if I knew that battle from the inside, so I tore off searching for first-hand accounts, letters and diaries from Civil War veterans, and newspaper reports contemporary to the battles. Before I knew it, I'd spent hours and hours reading, and I was started to feel overwhelmed. Worse, I hadn't written more than a few dozen words for the day. There was no magic trigger, no a ha flash of inspiration. There was only the weary realization that enough was enough, and it was time to get back to the writing. So I dropped everything, picked a battle at random, and dropped a single reference to it in a line of dialogue, and I moved on. I'm glad I did the research I did because it'll be easier to find again when I go back and fill in the details. But the point that day was to write, and my mind told me when I'd finished with the research.

Determining the moment you’re ready to get back to the writing will take a certain degree of self-awareness, which means that you’re going to have to practice this a lot. Research and write, write and research, back and forth, until you can figure out that delicate balance. It’s a lot like meditation, what Buddhists and psychologists call “mindfulness” training: you need to learn what your mind is doing, learn to notice when you’re getting distracted from your goal, which in this case is always the writing.

In one version of mindfulness meditation, the meditator is supposed to focus on his breath. He notices when he breathes in; he notices when he breathes out. That’s it. Sometimes, he counts the breaths in order to remain focused on the breathing, but this becomes tricky, because it’s very easy to use that as a crutch, to stop focusing on the breathing and start focusing on the counting. And the counting is not the goal—the goal is breathing, and the counting is just a tool to facilitate the breathing.

The same is true with writing and research. We must begin with writing and we must end with writing. Sometimes we need the tool of research to help facilitate the writing, but the research is not our goal, not our purpose—we are doing the research only so we can continue writing.

This is easier said than done, of course, because for some people, research is a fantastic crutch. In a blog post on WordPlay, author K.M. Weiland explains one reason she quit writing exercises is because they became a good excuse to not write: “It’s much easier to scribble away on exercises that don’t matter, rather than buckle down and work on that tough scene opener.” I’m a fan of exercises myself, just as I’m a fan of research, but Weiland has a point—we can sometimes allow what started out as work to become a distraction from work, and research is especially nasty about this. Paul Lucey himself admits this, following up his idyllic image of pondering, intense writers hunched over their research with the warning that “in some cases the research can go on for so long that it becomes an excuse for avoiding writing.” Try reading anything interesting on Wikipedia and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You reading something interesting and it points you to something else, some other related tidbit, so you go read about that, which links you to a different article, and soon your “research” has snowballed into “not writing” and you’re spending all day browsing useless information that won’t wind up helping anything. So you have to force yourself back to the writing.

Jack Kornfield, Buddhist and psychologist, in his chapter “Training the Puppy” from A Path with Heart, puts it like this:

In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, “Stay.” Does the puppy listen? It gets up and it runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. “Stay.” And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over, and pees in the corner or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again.

This is true for everyone’s mind, not just meditators. Your mind is a puppy, and it’s squirmy and restless and playful as hell. That’s fine. Let it play—we are creative writers, after all. But don’t let it make a mess. In researching for fiction, we have to learn what our own limitations are, we have to discover—through practice—that in the end we can only research so much, and we have to remind ourselves to return to the fiction over and over again, because that is what we’re really doing: We are writers, and we need to write. Listen to your mind, and when it says “A ha!” or “Enough,” let go of the research, and get back to the writing.

Of course, one way to cut down on your research time is to skip the books and go straight to the sources—to cultivate connections with experts and to learn from people on the street—but that’s for ~~tomorrow’s post. . . .~~

[EDIT: I've postponed the entry on sources to focus on the dire need in Haiti--please read tomorrow's post for more information.]

Research tip #1: Marry a librarian

2010-01-12T15:27:00.008+04:00

I’ve been hanging out in libraries since I was a kid, and I was a regular at my town’s public library during high school. My first year of college, I was commuting 40 minutes to school and had a huge gap between classes my first semester; with no dorm room or home to return to between classes, I did the only thing that felt natural to me and I hung out in the library. A lot. Sometimes six hours a day. And I wasn’t sleeping in there—I was reading books, not just fiction but nonfiction too, usually researching arcane and ridiculous subjects in addition to my serious scholarly pursuits. My habits didn’t change when I met the woman I would later marry, because she took a work study job in the library, which just meant I hung out in there more.

So I got to know a lot about libraries and librarians. I knew the card catalog inside and out (that’s right—we still had one when I was in college, though they transitioned to an online system before I graduated). I knew the vertical files and the atlas room. I’d been inside the archives and even the dim basement storage affectionately nicknamed “the catacombs.” The librarians and library staff all knew me by sight; most knew me by name. And I knew where to look for most kinds of information (or thought I did at the time), and I had already learned the most valuable lesson of research: when in doubt, ask a librarian!

(That bears repeating: ASK A LIBRARIAN!)

I didn’t set out to marry a librarian, really. But it makes a lot of sense that I did marry one, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Better still—and I say this objectively, based on a lifetime of hanging out in libraries and chatting with librarians, as well as on a professional career understanding my own research needs—I was lucky enough to marry one of the best librarians I’ve ever worked with. I know that if I have a pressing research need, I can call or text or e-mail my wife, and she can find the answer. Most of the time, she’ll find more information than I was even looking for, or better information than I was looking for, and more often than not, she’ll have pointed me toward that information by the end of the day. More than once she’s tracked down truly arcane information I’d spent two whole days looking for, and I swear (I’m not making this up), she’s found it inside of five minutes.

Librarians are like that, or the good ones are, anyway. It’s what they’re trained for; it’s why they have advanced degrees (technically speaking, you cannot claim to be a librarian without at least a masters in library science). And it’s why, if you plan to focus on your own writing without getting too bogged down in research, it’s going to be a good idea to marry a librarian.

Okay, I know. There are only so many librarians in the world, so maybe you’re not going to be fortunate enough to marry one. But you can still make friends. I was friendly with all the librarians I worked with long before I fell in love with one, and they were always helpful, because any good librarian will view his or her job as a service profession. Sure, all librarians collect information, and it’s a small step from collecting to hoarding, and yes, most librarians have some professional obligation to preserve and protect the information they collect. But for most librarians, the main reason they’re collecting and preserving that information in the first place is so we, the public, can use it. That means their primary concern on any given day is to help you find the best information in the fastest, most painless way possible. So if you can’t marry a librarian, make friends with one.

And don’t say you don’t know any librarians! Head to your nearest library and meet one. Walk up to the reference desk. Say, “Hi, are you a librarian?” (The person on the desk might be a staff member or a student worker, so it’s helpful to ask.) If they say yes, tell them, “I’m a writer, and I’m going to need a lot of help doing research. I don’t need any help right this second, but I wanted to meet you so I’d know where to come in the future.” Smile when you say this. Offer to shake hands. Bring the librarian chocolate. And thank the librarian, frequently and sincerely.

But meeting a librarian isn’t enough. To get the most out of the relationship—and out of your fiction—you also have to . . . say it with me now . . . ask a librarian. Which means you need to know what to ask.

I said in the previous post that the first step to writing historical fiction is to write the fiction. Get a story down, or at least an outline. Have some sense of where you’re going with this piece. Put in your share of “butt in the chair” time. Because the best way to get the most help out of a librarian is to know what you’re looking for in the first place, and to know what you’re looking for, you need to start the writing.

But let’s say you’ve got a draft started—or even just an outline. Let’s say you’re writing about the 19th-century grave robbers known as “resurrectionists” (as did the delightful Hannah Tinti, in her novel The Good Thief), and you find yourself stuck in a passage about the process of robbing graves. So, first things first: Do the research yourself. Librarians love it when you’ve made a little effort on your own, because any good librarian, like any good detective, is going to start with the simplest solutions, which means that if you’ve eliminated some of the basic steps of research before approaching a librarian, the librarian will be able to move that much more quickly to the really juicy stuff you couldn’t find on your own. These basic steps will depend on your own skills as a researcher (see tomorrow’s entry for more details), so I won’t go into those here. Your process is your own.

But let’s say you’ve now done a little of the preliminary work yourself, you've looked where you can think to look and found some good stuff but you want more. So you get in touch with the librarian. Personally, I love libraries—I view them as sanctuaries, academic temples worthy of the highest reverence—and I prefer to physically visit the actual buildings when I can. But this is the digital age and librarians—who are by definition as up to date as anyone can be in the Information Age—are happy to work with you over the phone, via e-mail, or even in a chat session. (While working on my Civil War novel, I started looking for information on the bayou in the mid-1800s, and I e-mailed the community library in Cameron Parish, Louisiana—which was all but wiped out by Hurricane Rita back in 2005—and the librarian there was not only quick to respond but provided me with some extremely helpful information. Shout out to the wonderful Dede Sanders!) The capabilities will vary by library, but the process is the same regardless of the medium you choose.

What will happen is what my wife (and any other librarian) calls the “reference interview.” And, like any interview, you should come to it at least a little prepared, which means whatever work you’ve done until now you should be prepared to describe to the librarian. Gather those materials, or at least remember what you have managed so far on your own, and then contact your librarian. (My wife recommends calling or e-mailing and making an appointment. “We love people who make appointments!” she tells me. “Also, you might find out there’s a subject specialist—especially at big public libraries or academic libraries—if you inquire about appointments.”)

First, tell the librarian, as specifically as you can, what you’re looking for. As my wife says, “We would want the same thing from a fiction writer as a person who is without a job and needs to look for job resources: a clear understanding of what they need to find out. That's really what it boils down to.” In our example, you could tell the librarian that you’re looking for information on resurrectionists, but that’s an awfully broad term, and unless the librarian asks you to be more specific, you could wind up with information on early Christianity, modern religious cults, body snatchers, zombies, even a Massachusetts rock band or a German metal band. So it’s best to be specific: “I’m writing a book on grave robbers in the 19th century, who were sometimes called ‘resurrectionists,’ and I’m trying to find out what processes they used to steal body parts.”

Then you explain what you’ve done so far. “I’ve looked on Wikipedia using these search terms . . . .” “I checked the card catalog and used these search terms . . . .” “I tried searching article databases in journals of medical history, using these terms . . . .” (It’s always good to explain what terms you’ve used, because in my experience, the librarian will almost always come up with one or two terms you hadn’t thought of, and they’re usually better terms.)

From here, the librarian will probably ask you a series of questions to help narrow down the search (Are you looking for general info or for specific info? Are you writing about a particular country or geographic region? Are you interested in the legal aspects at all, or the medical aspects, or just the digging up of bodies? And so on . . .). My wife puts it like this: “Lots of times, patrons [that’s us] don't know what they want to know, so we have to ask a series of questions to get them—and us—to a point where we both know what we're looking for.”

Also, my wife says, it’s helpful for patrons to know what format of info they're wanting—books, articles, web sites, etc. If we’re writing an historical account of grave robbing in the 19th century, for example, we would probably want some contemporary accounts, so we could tell the librarian that we’re interested in memoirs about grave robbing, if any exist, and probably some 19th-century newspaper articles that report on grave robbing.

You should expect to work with the librarian as much as possible—it isn’t exactly fair to just dump a load of research in a librarian’s lap and then sit back and twiddle your thumbs—but like any good professional, sometimes the librarian will want to dive into the research themselves or confer with other librarians, and you should also give these professionals the space they need to work. Besides, that will give you some time to get back to the writing (always go back to the writing!) while you’re waiting on your information. (Research should never be an excuse to stop writing, but more on that tomorrow.) Most importantly, never approach a librarian and expect an answer then and there. (This bears repeating, too: Never approach a librarian and expect an answer then and there!) I mentioned earlier that my wife, brilliant professional that she is, is sometimes amazingly fast at finding information. But only sometimes—there are limits to how fast some information can be found, and good research is like good cooking: it takes time, and it’s always best to be patient. No matter how long a librarian takes to track down the information, just remember that it’s faster than you were finding it on your own.

Finally, expect to learn something. A librarian’s first goal is to help you find information—not to simply give you information. That means that at the end of a search, the librarian will probably explain how she or he found the information. (If she doesn’t, ask her.) Pay attention to this, and take notes if you need to. What she’s doing is teaching you how to find similar information on your own the next time, so as you progress in your novel, you will be able to do more and more of the research for yourself. We researchers, my wife says, should learn to “feel more confident about starting out next time.” The librarians, she adds, are “here as guides, not crutches.”

Now that you’re learning to feel more confident as a researcher, check out tomorrow’s post about knowing your limits!

Re-researching fiction: The new, expanded edition!

2010-01-11T11:33:00.003+04:00

A while ago I wrote a blog entry on the research I was doing for my NaNoWriMo novel, a twisted little Civil War novel set in southwestern Louisiana during the last of the war years. At the time I was just counting some of the cool things I’d learned while writing the first draft of that book, like how to build an Acadian shack or what sort of bait to use when catching crawfish, but I also made a few comments on the apparently contradictory act of researching for fiction. Then a friend of mine, Midwestern rock star and fellow writer Ryan Werner, started a conversation about writing with a friend of his (we writers are a molecular bunch, clustering together in little clumps of “I know someone who knows someone” and hoping something alchemical results). This friend of Ryan’s is thinking about writing an historical novel and wondered if Ryan had any thoughts; what Ryan thought is that he despises research (I’m euphemizing—Ryan was a bit more emphatic than “despises”), but then he remembered my blog post, and he sent me an e-mail asking if I might elaborate. So here we are. Now you know who to blame.

There's a lot of good advice out there. There's a lot of bad advice, too, and half the time the good advice sounds almost identical to the bad. What works and what doesn't depends on what sort of writer you are and on what sort of researcher you are, so like anything in fiction writing, no one tip or exercise is going to solve your writing problems for you. You live and you learn--or, more accurately, you learn through living, through the practice itself.

That said, it often does help to get a few pointers at the outset, a kind of nudge in one direction or another, and who cares if it's the right direction, because at least you're moving. So over the next several posts I'm going to start discussing a variety of tips, some of which work for me, some of which don't--but they worked for someone, so maybe they'll help you, too.

But first, some general advice:

The first thing any writer of historical fiction needs to do is sort out his or her priorities, and I promise you, no matter what sort of writer you are, your first priority is to write. That means now. Start a draft, even if it’s terrible, even if you’ll wind up chucking 99% of it. There is an old and oft-quoted (and oft-disputed) axiom in the writing world, that we should write what we know. On the surface that sounds antithetical to researching for historical fiction—if you don’t know it in the first place, some purists would have it, you shouldn’t bother looking it up. But what that axiom really means is that you should stay true to your own vision, and whatever time period you’re writing about, it will inevitably conform to your world view now.

Or, I'll put it another way. There's a long-standing critical truism that all science fiction, however distantly futuristic it pretends to be, is a commentary on contemporary times (Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which I'm reading now, is not so much a novel about the drug culture of a near future but a commentary on the drug culture of the times Dick wrote it, just for example). But there’s an adverse example, too: In Jorge Luis Borges’s excellent short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," we read about a contemporary author who, having never read Cervantes’s Don Quixote, sets out to write a modern version of it. Instead he winds up recreating the text verbatim, so that Pierre Menard’s Quixote is utterly indistinguishable from the original. Yet—the story tells us—critics rave about the genius of Menard’s version because it has become a reflection on all that has changed in the centuries since the original Quixote was written. In some respects Borges is poking fun at the pomposity of academia, but there is a more serious point underlying this, that any historical fiction we might write today must become relevant to contemporary readers and therefore must reflect a contemporary perspective, however accurate or inaccurate the resulting historicity might be.

So it is always a good idea to begin by writing cold, without research. Get the story down, however sloppy or short or inaccurate, and then go back and correct the historical details through research. If you begin with the research, you will wind up writing a report, which no one—not even college professors—really wants to read. But if you begin with the story, you will have something engaging and exciting to build the historical details into, and that’s what will make for good fiction.

Tomorrow: Tip #1--Marry a librarian!

Counting beans (now with more numbers!)

2009-12-30T12:24:00.004+04:00

I'm not one for math--anything more complicated than my checkbook and I break into a sweat, and even the checkbook is a chore I'd much prefer to avoid--but I have always been fascinated by numbers. Ask me to prove anything with them and I'll freak out and slip into a coma, but ask me to play with them? I'm on board. I love numerology, I love our planet-wide obsession with the number 12 and all its variables, I love counting the years I've been married (a little more than 8) and the years I've known my wife (almost 13), the number of chapters in, say, For Whom the Bell Tolls (43; the events in the Metallica song based on the novel take place in Chapter 25). Before there were the loads of obsessive explanations and musings that exist online today, I once wrote a lengthy and absurdly complicated essay unpacking the mathematical gymnastics of the numbers in LOST (4 8 15 16 23 42), not for an assignment or even a public blog but just because I was fascinated by them.

Right now I'm knee-deep in revising a novel that has long frustrated me, including numerically. For complicated symbolic reasons I won't go into right now, I have divided my novel into 3 "Books" and a total of 12 chapters. But as soon as I'd got through a 1st draft of this thing, I noticed how lopsided it was--the 1st 4 chapters, making up Book 1, took up nearly 1/2 the novel, relegating Books 2 and 3 each to just over a 1/4 of the text. Consequently, what should be the last 2/3 of the book move along far faster than the 1st 1/3 and feel rushed, sloppy, and amatuerish, while the 1st "Book" is sluggish, equally sloppy, and amatuerish in an entirely different way.

One of my goals in revising this novel was to tighten up the 1st 1/2 and expand the 2nd (by which I mean tighten up the 1st 1/3 and expand the other 2/3--such is the confusing nature of math and/or my novel). Today I checked my page count: In the 1st 2 chapters I have managed to add--not delete--a full 20 pages to my novel. Right now the total count sits at 293, yet, just a few pages into chapter 3, I am currently working on page 92. By page count, I am 1/3 of the way through my novel, but by chapter count, I am just over 1/6 through. I'm not saying all the chapters or all the "Books" have to be of equal length, but I'm a fan of balance if not symmetry, and I'd like each section of the book to carry similar weight. Which means, if I'm going to pull that off in this revision, this novel is going to have to wind up a little over 500 pages by the time I'm done, with the bulk of the extra 210+ extra pages showing up in chapters 5 through 12. Or I'm looking at yet another revision to follow this 1, in which I strip out all the fat from Book 1 and clean it up like I'd originally intended. Which might be what I have to do. Not just for the sake of the numbers, but for the sake of the prose as well.

UPDATE: I've finished revising (for now) all of Book 1. As it stands right now, Book 1--the 1st 4 chapters--total 141 pages, out of 298 (that's up from an original page total of 271). The word count for Book 1 is around 43,000; the word count for the whole novel, so far, is 91,300. So, by chapter count I'm exactly 1/3 through the book. But by page count and word count, I'm almost 1/2 (47% by either page or word count).

The good news: if 141 pages is what roughly 1/3 of the book is supposed to look like, I'll only have to add 125 pages to round out the last 2/3, which is considerably less than I was first counting on, and 400+ pages actually doesn't sound too unreasonable for a novel of this sort, though if a final revision can squeeze that down to, say, 350, I'd be happier.

Is there anybody out there? Sensory deprivation and creative writing

2009-12-21T16:06:00.006+04:00

I'm currently (and rapidly) revising my second novel, which also served at my dissertation and which is set in an afterlife, with a dead narrator and a whole mess of dead characters. The harderst part, I think, is the opening, the first third of the book, because at heart the novel is a roadtrip adventure story and I've always struggled with getting my narrator out on her journey in a way that doesn't feel hackneyed or forced. In my revisions, her impetus for setting out is still a bit hackneyed and forced but it's starting to make more sense.

One of the things I'm trying to do with this novel is adhere (very loosely) to Buddhist concepts of the dying process as laid out in the scriptural text Enlightenment on Hearing in the Intermediate States (mostly known by its shorter title Bardo Thodol and, to Western audiences, as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead"). I've already walked my narrator through the first three cycles of death described in Yangchen Gawai Lodro's The Lamp Thoroughly Illuminating the Presentation of the Three Basic Bodies--Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth (as translated by Lati Rinpoche and Jeffery Hopkins), but in my dissertation drafts I let my narrator effectively skip the fourth cycle, in which she loses all sensory perception and effectively dissolves into her after-life existence. This is a profoundly difficult thing for me to describe, of course, since I'm still alive and still tied to my sensory perceptions. The closest thing I could imagine to such an experience is a float tank or sensory deprivation chamber, but I don't have access to such a device. So, how to describe what my narrator experiences?

Winter here in the Middle East is impossibly mild, temperatures lullingly comfortable during the day, and I've been leaving the air conditioning off most days. So I decided to take advantage of the weather and I created a kind of sensory-deprivation experience for myself. Using the audio-editing software Audacity, I created a 20-minute track of white noise. Then I took my laptop into our guest room (also known as my meditation room, where my Buddhist altar shares space with a fantastic little futon from IKEA), and I lay back on the futon. I'd shut the windows to block any distracting breezes. I donned an airline eyemask and a pair of light headphones plugged into my laptop, I covered myself in a thin blanket, and I started a recording program to document anything I might say out loud. I put myself in the mindset of my narrator, then I started the white noise, and I simply lay flat for 20 minutes.

The result is not earth-shatteringly profound, but I did have some fairly vivid visions of things my narrator might experience, and as they occured I described them aloud. On the recording, I sound bizarre--sometimes simply bored, sometimes stoned, and toward the end flat-out asleep, which I might have actually been--I catch myself snoring on the recording--but I remain in character throughout, and the text I dictated, though brief and strange, has resulted in some interesting and usable prose for the novel.

I've been intrigued by sensory deprivation since watching the 1980 movie Altered States, but now I'm wildly curious. Word online is that float tanks are common features at spas these days, and though I've yet to come across one, I'm going to start asking around. Who knows what else I might wind up writing?

And now, a word from our sponsor: Some of Jennifer's thoughts on Vienna

2009-12-14T22:24:00.001+04:00

The list from the listmaker. I love making lists, yes, but I don’t feel the pressure Sam feels of having “the” list. Maybe that’s why I like Family Feud so much – it’s all about the list that’s true in the moment. So looking back on our Vienna trip, what are the things/events/activities that stand out in my mind right now?

Coming across the painter painting a copy of a painting of a painter painting in the Kunsthistoriches. We had been dutifully looking at the history of European art and winding our way to the center (in my mind at least) of the collection, the lone Vermeer. Vermeer has been my favorite artist for as long as I can remember, and I love, absolutely love, that I got to see that particular painting, Allegory on the Art of Painting, as the center of a kind of real-world, ironic tableau.
The pastries. Sam loves his coffee – and I did like the Viennese specialty, the mélange – but for me, it’s all about the pastries. The apfelstrudel (with real cream!), the sachertorte, the doughy, chocolate-filled dumplings covered in powdered sugar and strawberry sauce. And best of all, the total unapologetic, unabashed attitude toward pastry – why would you deny yourself something sweet?
Our spur-of-the-moment decision to have dinner one night by picking out some delectable goodies in the Christmas Market in the Maria-Theresia square. Spicy and seasoned potato wedges, complete with its own tiny fork; the above-mentioned chocolate-filled dumplings; a cup of glühwein. Bliss.
The transportation. Absolutely the best transportation system in the world. And it all has to do with the attitude of Austrians, I think. Why wouldn’t you have a reliable, cost-efficient, and on-time system of buses, trams, trains, subways, and airplanes? It just makes sense. And it does, and it works, beautifully.
The library at the Benedictine monastery and abbey in Melk. I try to make it to at least one library in the different places we visit – so I was really thrilled to visit one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. It was odd, though, to see all these incredibly old volumes all encased in matching 18th century gold-leather bindings, and all stacked up by height on these carefully managed shelves. A part of me loves that – order reigning supreme – but another part chafes at the thought of destroying all those individual covers and bindings and mashing them into this homogenous, monochromatic front. And most librarians usually dislike being asked questions like, “Where’s that blue book?” so organizing by something so arbitrary as height – rather than by author or by subject – just doesn’t feel natural to me at all now. But then, I’m probably overthinking it. It’s a beautiful library – and it feels like a library in a monastery should, with hidden hinges (bookcases that hide windows behind, so from the outside, the library matches the grand ballroom design!) and row upon row of books and a spiral staircase leading to unseen extra rooms (12 in total).
Being mistaken for natives – by natives AND by tourists!
The gorgeous coats and boots. The first day, I didn’t see any other footwear other than flat-heeled boots. And the women – from teens to elderly ladies – are so chic. I remember on one subway ride, I couldn’t take my eyes off this older woman, with her white hair artfully arranged – she had on knit gloves that had stripes of different shades of purple; a purple knit hat, kind of like a loose beret; a dark purple wool coat; grey slacks and suede boots; and a lavender scarf. Fabulous!
Discovering Schiele and his version of Cubism. I’ve never really gotten into the Cubism art movement, but I love how Schiele kept on experimenting and made a kind of internal cubism – his shapes of humans and buildings and trees were recognizable as what they were, but they were made up of different shades and colors that echoes the Cubism movement. Fascinating. And he painted some memorable trees. I love trees and almost always tend to include them whenever I get hold of the camera (whenever Sam relinquishes the camera strap!).
Watching Sam light up with joy when he discovers something he likes – which are almost never the things that I expect or particularly like myself sometimes. This is an everyday occurrence, really, but it’s especially fun while travelling. Example: Sam taking tons of pictures of the black bears (!) while on the trail bridge at the Schönbrunn Zoo.
The total ease of an old European city. Go down a side street, filled with charming cobblestones, and you come across a lovely, tiny park in the middle. You spy a lovely, centuries-old building, with a modern glass bit perching on top. You visit a tiny sliver of a museum – in this case, the Römaner Roman ruins museum – that has done the best it can with a very limited space (really, about 12 feet wide, 3 stories tall) and presented artifacts in a modern, engaging way with kids’ activities and a walk-through basement of Roman ruins. Really fascinating to see how modern Viennese lifestyle fits so snugly around its history. It’s quite inspiring to see and feel the atmosphere and energy of a city that’s proud of its heritage, and proud of where it’s going. Viva Vienna!

Vienna: final thoughts (almost)

2009-12-13T22:55:00.003+04:00

Day 7 and final thoughts:

We woke early our last day in order to enjoy a full breakfast and take our leisurely time getting out to the airport. On our way into the city, aboard Vienna’s CAT train, we’d flopped wearily into the nearest seat and leaned against the windows to watch the countryside flash by, and so we missed out on the views from the upper deck of the train. Heading out to the airport on our last day, we made sure to climb the narrow stairs to the upper floor, where we enjoyed fleeting streaks of little Viennese suburbs, the pitched roofs and yellow-painted walls flying by but somehow noticeably serene.

The flights home were trying, especially for Jennifer, who has a knack for accidentally winding up in conversations with the people next to her. It helped that both ladies Jennifer talked with on our two flights back were terrifically pleasant, and Jennifer had good conversations the whole way back, but it also meant she never got to sleep on the planes. Consequently, we both were tired—and Jennifer doubly so—when we finally waddled through our front door at 12:30 in the morning, and we didn’t bother unpacking at all. Instead, we grabbed the cats for some fur therapy and then promptly fell asleep.

Jennifer is a dedicated list-maker. It’s part of her job, of course, to be organized, but she’s so good at her job because she’s naturally organized anyway. So it’s never any surprise to me when at the end of a day on vacation she’ll ask, “What were your top five favorite things about today?” Our first full day back, as we unpacked and sorted through our souvenirs, she upped the ante: “What were your top ten favorite things about our trip?” I’ve enjoyed these sorts of lists myself ever since reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which is chock full of Top Fives, though I admit I often hesitate to call my lists “top” anything, lest I inadvertently leave something out or shunt something into a lower order of memory where it doesn’t necessarily belong. (Unlike Jennifer, I’m a chronically disorganized person and fear lists because I’m certain to leave something out or put something in the wrong order or include something absurd, and I’m constantly second-guessing myself.) Still, it’s a fun game to play, and it frequently serves us well as a way to concretely root certain parts of our trips to memory. Favorite moment during our two trips out to Dyersville to the Field of Dreams farm: Literally disappearing within three steps of entering the corn field (that’s no movie magic—you really do just vanish). Favorite historical site in Scotland: The hill fortress atop Dunnydeer where Jennifer and I ate a secluded picnic lunch amid the brisk winds and the tumbling castle walls.

Favorite moments in Vienna?

Walking pretty much anywhere. It’s a beautiful city, and the tightly compact Innere Stadt is perfect for leisurely strolls day or night. Popping down a narrow cobblestone street and emerging into a hillside clad in stone stairs leading to a looming Renaissance church is a treat on any occasion, but it was the normal state of affairs pretty much anywhere we walked in Vienna as well as the few old towns and villages we visited along the Danube valley, which meant nearly every walk was beautiful.

The Friedhof der Namenlosen. Actually, bizarre and morbid though it sometimes was, I enjoyed the Viennese fascination with death and their elaborate efforts to celebrate it in their cemeteries and churches, but the Friedhof der Namenlosen was a deeply reverential experience for us both. Here were the graves of people no one knew, people who’d washed up anonymously on the industrial shores of the Danube Canal with no one to vouch for them or pay for their burial, yet the Viennese saw fit to cultivate a beautiful and solemn little cemetery to allow these poor lost souls some rest, and even today, some seventy years after the most recent burial there, people continue caring for the cemetery. Every year a group even comes out to hold a candlelight vigil and float a huge raft of flowers out into the Danube as a memorial to the nameless folk buried there. It’s a beautiful thing.

The coffee. To be honest, I think the coffee here in the Middle East is better—stronger and more flavorful—but what I loved about Viennese coffee was its abundance. I’ve been a fan of coffeehouse culture ever since discovering it in college—I love the intellectualism, the artistic and cultural vibrancy, and the democratic blending of social strata that have long been the hallmark of the traditional coffeehouse experience—and Vienna literally invented the coffeehouse. When we sat down in the Café Benno on our last evening in Vienna, after spending several minutes browsing the Kaffeemuseum inside, it felt almost like a homecoming or a kind of pilgrimage.

The museums—all of them. At the end of our trip Jennifer and I agreed that the Belvedere was probably the best museum we’d visited, and indeed it was the brightest, best designed, and most visitor-friendly museum (in one room they invited visitors to scream as loudly as they could just to hear the echoes off the high vaulted ceiling), and it contained some of the most impressive and unique art we’d seen. But then I remember that we’d said the same thing about the Leopold when we first emerged from it, and though the Kunsthistoriches Museum was dark and oddly arranged and I’d been disappointed in the coin collection there, it held some phenomenal pieces of art, including the most singularly thrilling art experience of the whole trip: seeing Vermeer’s “Allegory on the Art of Painting” and watching a painter practice a copy of it, as though the allegory had come to life. Every museum we entered was more impressive than the last, it seemed—and even if I only count the major museums, we still barely managed a quarter of what Vienna has to offer, and that's not even accounting for the dozens upon dozens of smaller, specialized museums in the city.

Talking with Jennifer. This doesn’t seem fair, really, to include in a list of favorite memories on vacation, since we talk to each other all the time anyway, but travelling does something for Jennifer and me. We’ve always been able to talk about anything at any time and still, after almost thirteen years together, we find ourselves amusing and intellectually stimulating. But on vacation we really get rolling, having long intellectual conversations over breakfast or cracking each other up on subway trains. Talking to my wife is one of my favorite things about being married to her, but it’s also always one of the highlights of our vacations.

And so it seems only appropriate that tomorrow, my wife will join the conversation and offer her own final thoughts (in list form, of course!).

Until then....

Vienna: Day 6

2009-12-12T22:54:00.000+04:00

Day 6

Thursday, December 3, 2009

We have had as solid a last day as I could have hoped for, made all the better for its spontaneity—while we knew the handful of things we wanted to fit in today, we weren’t sure we’d get around to them all or in what order we’d do them, but in the end we managed everything we’d planned as well as an impromptu trip, and we picked up a few last-minute souvenirs. Then, to crown our day and our vacation, we went to a recommended vegetarian restaurant down near the Schönbrunn and not only had a good meal in a delightfully atmospheric restaurant but also got to experience Viennese long-form dining at its fullest, spending (not entirely willingly) a full three and a half hours at dinner.

Which put us back at our hotel late, meaning we started packing late, meaning I have precious little time left for this entry and will have to revisit the last few days in a final mammoth entry later. But such is the nature of vacation—sometimes this sort of leisure writing makes way for other forms of leisure, and especially in my case I usually wind up tidying up the recounting in the days following vacation, which has actually served me well over the years, because it gives me a chance to relive our adventures and solidify my memories.

But the memories would be far less worth having if they didn’t include Jennifer, so I think I’ll set this aside for now and join my wife for our last hours in Vienna, because that’s really the point in all these travels anyway—to have our adventures together.

2:40 am

Day 6 follow-up:

Jennifer and I had been wanting to drop by the Hundertwasserhaus since our friend Steve Bowman recommended everything Hundertwasser-related, but I’d been waiting for a bright sunny morning to see the multicolored building at its best. On the other hand, we’d come to Vienna for some much-needed cold fall weather, and while the first few days were cool but sunny, the latter half of our vacation was exactly what we’d hoped for: overcast, windy, and quite chilly. Which meant that when our final day in Vienna dawned gray and cold, we shrugged and decided to head out to the Hundertwasserhaus anyway, because it was now or never, and we definitely didn’t want to miss this childish delight.

From what I’d read of Hundertwasser, the guy seems rebelliously whimsical, bored as he was with the austere blocks of concrete that seemed to dominate Austrian architecture during the first half of the 20th century. His reaction is almost excessively in the other direction—he refused to draw straight lines, splashed every surface he could find with all manner of incongruous colors, and seemed to revel in mixing artistic style almost at random. He’s like a child who all his life have been using eight crayons to bubble in the little black outlines of a coloring book and suddenly, for Christmas, receives a pad of blank white paper and the big box of 128 Crayolas and a pack of glue sticks and glitter and told, “Have fun, kid!” The result is a delight, as much fun to behold as it must have been to create, and Jennifer and I had a lot of fun just walking around the building. But our favorite find—Jennifer’s discovery, actually—was not officially connected to the building at all. Across the street, as a diversion for overly curious tourists (the Hundertwasserhaus is still a private apartment complex, and the residents get a little weary of people like us poking around their homes), Hundertwasser’s admirers have set up a kitschy little souvenir boutique, and outside, on an arrow pointing into the shop, Jennifer found a sign reading “Toilet of Modern Art.” It seemed somehow simultaneously a legitimate directional sign and a comment on the effusive art-related souvenirs found within (or even on the art itself).

Our last day seemed a day for catching up on things we didn’t want to miss, because after Hundertwasserhaus, we hopped on a series of trams and worked our way over to the Upper Belvedere. We weren’t sure we’d get over to it this trip. But on our tour of the Danube valley our fellow travelers raved about the art collection there so enthusiastically that we decided we had to fit it in. Besides, as impressed as we were with the Klimts on display at the Leopold, we knew the grand prizes were at the Belvedere: Klimt’s “The Kiss” and “Judith I.” Plus, Jennifer had fallen in love with Schiele’s art, and the Belvedere boasted a healthy collection of some of Schiele’s best as well.

Klimt’s work was indeed phenomenal to behold in person. I have always loved “The Kiss,” though of course I’d only ever seen it in art books and poster shops and on postcards. Seeing it in person illuminates the true depth of the painting, the most intriguing aspect of which is the way it plays with light. I had always assumed that Klimt’s highly detailed figures wrapped in very flat, stylized cloaks and clothing was a means both of trapping the figures in two-dimensional space and of showing off the human form, alive against that flat, dead surrounding. And indeed from one angle this is precisely how it looks, and the effect in person is even more striking, because you can see the fine brushstrokes and textures in the figures. (The Belvedere also displays some of Klimt’s unfinished works, which reveal that he liked to paint his human being fully and in great detail before swathing them in flat clothes, as though in process he wanted to acknowledge the living person underneath the painted clothes.) But then you move to the other side and catch the painting in the light, and something interesting happens: The muted gray and pink fleshtones of the human form recede to the background as the gold and silver paints of the clothing catch the light and flare up in almost religious illumination. The paintings wind up looking like the negatives of themselves, the colors and their effects transverse to produce an opposite painting every bit as powerful as the original. For an artist who was so fond of playing with dimension and perspective, and who was so technically proficient, this cannot be just an accidental trick of the light, and it was wonderful to discover.

After a light (and somewhat disappointing) snack at the Belvedere’s café, we headed back into the Innere Stadt to try for the Stephansdom catacombs we’d missed a few days earlier. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the catacombs, and our guide seemed almost bored with his own tour, but the catacombs were precisely what I’d hoped to see. They aren’t as extensive or, indeed, as grisly as the vast catacombs under other European cities, but they were somber and cold and rife (literally) with the history they represented, particularly in the mass plague graves where the stale odor of rot lingers like wet leaves in the shallow-roofed corridors, the blackened shreds of ancient clothing like burned paper still visible among the disheveled piles of ribs, thigh bones and skulls. When we emerged out a back stairs into the gray daylit square of the Stephansplatz, we all were a bit relieved to be among the living (and, smartly, the tour waits to charge your fee at the back door, jokingly threatening not to let you out until you pay!).

To celebrate and, as I’d wanted to do our first trip to the Stephansdom, to complement our subterranean tour with an elevated view of the city, we headed north across the Danube canal to the Prater, the giant park filled half with deep wild forest and half with a glittering old amusement park. It was once the private hunting grounds for the Imperial family, but in the 18th century the Emperor gifted it to the city as public grounds and it quickly became the most popular spot in Vienna, great for family picnics, casual hikes, and—very soon after it become public—a fun fair full of old-fashioned games and rides. It remains so today, and while it was sparsely populated on the chilly autumn afternoon when we went, it was still a fun place to be. We’d come, of course, to ride the giant Reisenrad, the Ferris wheel made famous in movies like The Third Man and our beloved Before Sunrise. We hopped aboard and road our circuit more or less quietly, observing the city as though in farewell, and when we descended from our red railroad-like boxcar, we were ready for a quiet coffee in a traditional Viennese coffeehouse to wrap up our afternoon.

Jennifer had the terrific idea to head out to the Café Benno, where there is a small but recommended Kaffeemuseum. I’d read about it in one of our tour guides but wasn’t sure we’d be able to fit it in, but now, in search of coffee and wanted to get in the best of Vienna before we left, Jennifer insisted it’d be worth the trip out of the city center to find it, and indeed she was right. The now-traditional Viennese coffeehouse is a modern but charming hybrid of traditional coffee shop and hip bohemian pub, and the Café Benno seems the perfect embodiment of that ideal. The wood-paneled walls are covered in quirky, coffee-related décor like antique signage and various coffee-making apparatus as well as loads of pop art and posters. Best of all, they serve a special version of the Viennese café mélange (a small coffee something like a mix between a cappuccino and a latte, but in a double-espresso-sized cup); the Benno mélange comes topped with cinnamon smiley face!

The big treat for me, of course, was the Kaffeemuseum, really just a broom closet stuffed with display cases, but the displays were excellent and included coffee urns and pots from all over the world (including Persia, Turkey, and Morocco), every variety of bean grinder ever invented, and several bizarre and ingenious brewers, some with multiple hoses and gears that looked something like alien torture devices or machines for milking cows. There were also displays of coffee bean varieties, coffee containers, and coffee cups, and a few very cool displays on early coffeehouse culture and the near-vitriolic outcry against the evils of coffee (and the equally vehement supporting ads and editorials promoting coffee and coffee culture!). I loved every inch of that tiny “museum”!

After coffee we headed back to the hotel to change for dinner, which we’d arranged to eat at the hip and highly recommended Hollerei Vegetarian Restaurant (where we also had a discount thanks to our Wienkart, a special promotional card for visitors to Vienna). We’d been hearing, too, about the leisurely dining in Vienna, how you can—and should—spend hours in any Viennese café or restaurant and shouldn’t expect anything approaching “fast” service from a Viennese server. So far we’d avoided that cliché, partly by asking for our bill early in the meal, but on this night we wound up in a restaurant slammed with two large parties and only two servers on staff, one who was learning the ropes her first day on the job and the other who was training her. So we spent a full three and a half leisurely hours nibbling, chatting, and waiting around, and it was very, very late by the time we got back to the hotel.

We packed, we searched the room for any sundries we might have left lying in the closet or behind the desk, we set our alarms, and we collapsed. We’d done our share of walking through Vienna and beyond, and the day ahead was all sitting—on a subway, on a train, in an airport, on a plane….. Still, reluctant though we were to leave this beautiful city, we knew we’d nearly exhausted it and ourselves, and would leave the next morning satisfied that we’d done all the Vienna a person can manage in a week. It was a stupendous little holiday and we can already add Vienna to our list of favorite cities in the world.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

10:47 p.m.

(Tomorrow: Final thoughts and things I missed!)

Vienna: Day 5

2009-12-12T00:01:00.000+04:00

Day 5

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

I’m not sure how to briefly write about today, and it will have to be brief because it’s very late and tomorrow is our last day. In some respects, today actually felt like two days, one a trip down the Danube to tiny medieval villages and a vast Baroque abbey, and the other a long evening stroll through the Christmas market and a delightful carriage ride through the city center. In one of the todays, we endured a trio of obnoxious tourists, and in the other today we endured a viciously unpleasant film; but in one of our todays we followed a goofy and pleasant tour guide through quaint little hillside villages and another mousy but delightful guide through a sprawling monastic complex, and in the other we savored an impromptu treat of hot potato wedges, fresh donut-like desserts and hot glühwien before riding through ancient narrow streets on a horse-drawn carriage piloted by the most charming and adorably stereotypical little mustachioed Austrian driver.

But sleep and who knows how many tomorrows are calling to me now, and this, my shortest entry, will have to wait till another day for the fuller details.

1:14 am

Day 5 follow-up:

As our trip has sifted through the mental filters, I’d have expected the details to intermingle, like two colors of sand sieved into the same bowl, but indeed the separate days I first described have stayed that way, and the largest part of our Wednesday—our tour of the Wachau region in the Danube valley—has far outweighed the brief evening that followed it.

We woke that morning supremely sore first from our long hike out to the Friedhof der Namenlosen then our drizzly tour through the Schönbrunn zoo, and we were glad this day to be spending most of our tour on a bus. After meeting our guide (a chipper, funny man with limp disheveled curls who, Jennifer said, looked like an Austrian Michael Palin), we settled into our bus seats and gazed out the huge windows as the city slipped past and we ascended into the foothills. As we crossed the Danube for the first time, the tour guide began humming the Blue Danube Waltz into the buzzing microphone and then explained how lucky we were to see the Danube blue, as it reportedly only appears to people in love. Jennifer and I wanted to take credit for the color of the river, but in fact there was also a delightful older Scottish couple who seemed very much in love and, just across from us for most of the bus ride, a young honeymooning couple, so Jennifer and I had some help turning the Danube blue.

Along the way we marveled at little villages tucked away in the hillsides and towering church steeples reflected in the waters, and all Jennifer and I gasped when we came into sight of the Dürnstein Castle, a ruined medieval fortress where Leopold V, Duke of Austria, briefly held captive Richard the Lionheart, King of England. In the late winter of 1192, Richard was on his way home from the Crusades, where he’d offended the Duke by denying him credit in sacking a city, and as he passed through the Austrian Empire the Duke saw an opportunity and had the King kidnapped and held for ransom. Of course, kidnapping a crusader was against Church law at the time, and it got Leopold V excommunicated. Our tour guide apologized on behalf of the Austrians and claimed they were still ashamed of the episode, but then he delightedly explained that Leopold used his share of the English ransom money to build a new city, Wiener Neustadt, which—our guide declared—was intended to benefit future tourists to Austria.

About halfway through our drive we stopped in a little town called Krems, or, more fully, Krems an der Donau. The town today is actually a melding of three medieval villages, Krems, Und, and Stein, and for some reason the old gates leading into the once-separate walled cities are named backward: when we alit from the bus for a short walking tour and shopping trip (on which I bought a fantastic tweed hat), we walked into the dolled-up downtown Krems through the Steiner Tor, while the matching gate leading into Stein is called Kremsor Tor. Whatever the reasons behind the gate names, the towns are today, as far as I could tell, indistinguishable, and the little cobblestone shopping lane through downtown Krems was window-dressed and sugarcoated but charming nonetheless, mostly because no matter what they did to try and evoke a romanticized Renaissance atmosphere, the streets were undeniably medieval in their narrowness and the winding, organic way they lay against the hillside.

The same was true of Emmersdorf an der Donau, where we had lunch at a little hotel restaurant called Zum schwarzen Bären (The Black Bear), as well as the tiny village of Melk, our final destination for the day. Melk, actually, was a kind of detour: our true destination was the Melk Stift, a huge Benedictine abbey settled inside a medieval fortress that in early 18th century had been renovated with much elaborate glitz and pomp in the Baroque style, but we’d arrived early for our scheduled tour and our guide led us down steep stone stairs into the narrow Melk.

But charming as these little towns and villages were, the crowning jewel was definitely the abbey, a huge complex that despite its Baroque extravagance retains its monastic solemnity. Sure, the ceilings were richly painted in wild and sometimes surprising frescos, and yes, the columns and friezes and altars were literally dripping in gold, and okay, the museum section of the abbey was jarringly modern. But the atmosphere was restrained, and frankly, the ceilings were beautiful, the gold-drenched the architecture and furniture were so dimly lit that they offered a kind of quiet warmth, and the museum was so intriguingly designed along a kind of metaphorical narrative that I felt pulled through it. The Stiftkirche, the huge cathedral at the rear of the complex, was especially beautiful, particularly seen from the long curving terrace across the back edge of the complex, which also overlooked Melk and the Danube valley in a stunning panorama.

But for Jennifer and me both, the highlight was the library, a tall multiroom wing of the abbey stacked with stuffed bookcases rising at least fourteen feet and displaying only a fraction of the library’s thousands and thousands of volumes. For Jennifer, the library held the same personal attraction of all libraries, since she is herself a librarian. I confess that I, too, was thrilled at the library, partly because I’ve always viewed libraries as sanctuaries of learning, and being in an ecclesiastical library that was literary in a sanctuary was a secret treat for me. But more importantly, I was surprised to learn that the abbey’s library had long been devoted to combining religion and science, first as a repository for astronomical tomes (the main reading room included a large telescope) and most recently as host to a series of conferences on religion and science. Each of the delegates attending the annual conference contributed an essay recording their musings and conclusions, which was then sealed in a metal scroll-tube and installed in a large figure-eight sculpture representing eternity; among the scrolls in the library was a contribution by former conference attendee the Dalai Lama (whose scroll is labeled simply “Tenzin Gyatso,” omitting his title).

Descending from the library, we made our way into the Stiftkirche and marveled at the huge, gilded interior and bizarre side altars. The latter held particular interest for me, especially the twin altars dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. Michael, each of which included a full—and very real—human skeleton of some anonymous martyr dressed in Baroque-era finery and reclining inside a glass display case. But the personal thrill was learning that the first side altar on the left, as you enter the church, was dedicated to St. Nicolas, a personal favorite of mine since I first saw his holy relics (a jaw bone, some fingers and a rib, as I recall) in a museum near his home city of Mira, Turkey. And, of course, we’d come to Vienna in part looking for a little Christmas spirit, as we were at the time only a few days away from St. Nicolas’s saint day of December 6, so it was a fortuitous find.

We napped in the early dark on the bus ride back to Vienna, but back in the city center, we decided we were in the Christmas spirit and headed out for a stroll through some of the Innere Stadt’s several Christmas markets, including the small affairs at Freyung and Am Hof, and then headed to the Stephansplatz to pick up a fiaker, one of the city’s traditional horse-drawn carriages. These rides exist in every major city in the world, I think—I remember seeing them running the circuit through downtown San Antonio, and we even have a few trotting around the Marina Mall here in Abu Dhabi—so we knew they might seem an absurdly touristy thing to do. But the fiakers in Vienna were in fact once the city’s official taxi service, and touristy though they might have become, they do have a legitimate history and purpose in the city, and when we met our fiaker driver, we knew we had to hop aboard. Our driver was a short, round gentleman with superbly practiced manners—when Jennifer approached him and said good evening in German (guten abend), he actually gave a small bow. We discussed prices and then he helped us both into the half-covered carriage, handed Jennifer a faux-fur blanket, and we were off. Mostly it was just a clopping trot through the same narrow old streets Jennifer and I had walked already, but it was nice to ride in style, and our driver had excellent and easy control over the horses. When we rounded our last slow corner and rolled in to the Stephansplatz again, I helped Jennifer down and then took out the camera, and before I could even ask, our driver gestured toward his horses and said in his thick accent, “Picture?” I nodded and said “Ja,” and he proudly posed with his horses—then waved Jennifer over to join him! She leaned over him (Jennifer was at least a head taller) and took his politely offered elbow, and then he stepped forward and motioned that I should join Jennifer with the horses so he could take our picture! A truly delightful man and a wonderful way to end our evening.

Friday, December 11, 2009

11:47 p.m.

Vienna: Day 4

2009-12-10T12:57:00.000+04:00

Day 4

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Tonight might be short because it’s nearly midnight already and we’ve had another exhaustive day of heavy walking and are looking forward to an early morning. Fortunately(?), full as our day was it contained relatively few individual activities—we stayed focused today.

When we woke up we found it raining, and the temperature had descended with the rain, so we scrapped plans for an early-morning jaunt up to the Hundtertwasserhaus (we might try again another day) and headed straight for the subway. Our destination: Schloss Shönbrunn, the former summer palace of the Habsburgs. Today it’s a vast museum of the Empire, but Jennifer and I had elected to forego the palace itself and focus instead on the grounds, which include a large maze and a labyrinth, several flower gardens, a wooded area, walking paths, dozens and dozens of statues and several impressive fountains, and even fake Roman ruins added by one of the emperors to give the illusion of some connection between the Habsburgs and the Roman Empire. There’s also a sprawling and highly embellished triumphal arch call the Gloriette, but it closes for the winter. But our real destination was the Tiergarten, the zoo housed on the grounds of the Schönbrunn. It’s described as the oldest zoo in the world, having evolved from the private royal menagerie kept by Franz Stephan in the mid-18th century, and because of this description I’d half expected it to be a simple affair of a few dozen wild animals—a zebra, a few moneys, maybe a big cat—but when we arrived we found a vast and extremely well-designed zoo spread across a huge area, including a wooded hillside with a treetop catwalk overlooking timberwolves and owls. Among the pleasanter discoveries were a small red panda, a pair of snoozing koalas, a European lynx, and a small but well-executed rain forest. We missed the lions because their habitat was being cleaned (we think), and the tigers were restive and barely visible, but the elephants were active, we got very close to the giraffes, and we spent several minutes petting a housecat named Sergei, who lurked in the doorway of the monkey house and invited us inside (we think he belongs to one of the employees, which is how we learned his name).

The monkey house, too, is worth mentioning, because despite the updates required of a modern zoo, the architecture remains the Baroque original and retains much of its old charm, as does the octagonal pavilion in which Franz Stephan and the royal family once ate their breakfasts among the animals—the enchanting building operates now as an excellent little café, but it has retained the ornamented wooden walls and the painted dome ceiling depicting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, all original to the pavilion.

We had a delightful time, but the zoo required a LOT of walking—again—and so after a long, cold, wet adventure, we decided to pack it in and head back into the city, where we hoped to put in a little shopping before finding dinner and heading back to the hotel. However, on the way into the city, I talked Jennifer into visiting the genuine Roman ruins in the heart of the Innere Stadt, just north of the Stephansdom on Hoher Markt. There, excavations have uncovered the foundations of the ancient Roman fort of Vindobona, an important military outpost during the wars with the Germanic tribes and a common stop for Marcus Aurelius—according to some sources, he might even have died here. As a fan of Stoicism and a reader of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, I was thrilled to learn of the connection and was anxious to find the ruins. Today, not much exists in public view, but what archaeologists have unearthed is very well presented in a small but excellent museum built over the foundations of two soldiers’ homes. The basement level is particularly fascinating, as here they have not only preserved the foundations in such a way that you can walk through them, but they also display some of the inner workings of the home, including the ingenious underfloor heating system. Upstairs are displays and videos on everything from fortress construction and religious beliefs to funeral rites and Roman toilets, and there are several great interactive exhibits for kids (which I’m unashamed to count myself among, because I played with the toys, too!).

Still, it had been a long day already and by the time we slipped south again to put in some shopping, we both were feeling more in the legs than we’d thought we would, so instead of an extensive shopping tour we decided to head back to the Spittelberg Christmas markets, where we sipped glühwien (mulled wine) as we browsed for Christmas gifts, and for our “dinner” we simply grabbed a handful of specialty cakes and pastries and ate a dinner of desert back in our hotel room.

Jennifer and I enjoyed a healthy trip to the hotel’s sauna, watched a sad but terrific movie on BBC, and then Jennifer called her mother to wish her a happy birthday, and now we both are collapsing, so that’s it for tonight. Tomorrow, more adventure awaits.

11:56 pm

Vienna: Day 3

2009-12-10T00:09:00.002+04:00

Day 3

Monday, November 30, 2009

Today has felt longer than it has been, partly because despite all our hopping on and off trains and buses today, Jennifer and I have put in more than our share of kilometers on foot and partly because it has been a day of adventurous misdirection.

We started off with a simple errand to the main post office to mail some letters, but when we exited the U-bahn, we accidentally headed the opposite direction we meant to and wound up circumnavigating several blocks, working our way around the commanding, militaristic Kriegsministerium, a government building guarded by a pair of grim soldiers and a huge mounted counter-revolutionary, with a gigantic double-headed eagle swooping over the rooftop. We ducked down several side streets and past the prettyish Dominikanerkirche before finally discovering the backside of the post office, a block-wide building we then had to find the front of. When we finally left the post office we slipped into a covered corridor looking for an alternative route back and discovered—to our bemusement—the very subway station we’d first exited.

Our errand finished, we headed along the U3 east toward the edge of the city, where we hoped to catch a bus out to the terminus of the Danube Canal and the little industrial inlet called the Alberner Hafen. We knew from write-ups and from Before Sunrise that at the edge of the Alberner Hafen, at the end of a lane and down into a small copse of trees, we would find the melancholy but beautiful Friedhof der Namenlosen—the Cemetery of the Nameless. (I’ve come to prefer the German name for the little cemetery because it’s so much more descriptive: literally translated, it comes out as something like “Peace-yard of the Ones Who’ve Lost Their Names.”)

Along our route, we learned several things:

We did not need to go to the end of the U3 line and walk up to the bus stop—the next-to-last stop was directly opposite the bus route we needed.

Though the bus route we took did indeed go all the way to the Alberner Hafen, it did not go there consistently, nor did it travel its route all at once. Instead, it stopped halfway, where we alit and waited ten minutes for a change of drivers and a new destination printed on the bus’s sign, then went most of the way toward Alberner Hafen; however, we were riding the wrong bus, or on the wrong day, or in the wrong direction…. Whatever the reason, our bus only took us within “walking distance” of the Alberner Hafen. We discovered this, thankfully, with the help of an extremely kind Austrian woman riding the bus with us and who lived in the neighborhood where we got off. Which reminds me:

We didn’t need to be fluent in German to understand the language—this woman rattled off extremely complex directions as though we were native speakers, yet through her generosity of spirit and a little sheer determination she miraculously helped us understand that our intended route would mean extra walking, that the neighborhood had a secret short-cut through a field and up to a road-side bicycle path which should only take ten minutes to walk, and that our destination was in the vicinity of a group of tall industrial buildings which we could use as landmarks along the way. All of this was exclusively in German, with only a bit of pantomime to help us along, but we managed to understand it all. The only thing we knew to say in reply was “Dankeshün,” but she seemed to understand that she’d helped us—and indeed she had, tremendously!

And so we hiked out, along a paved path raised up from the roadside for several minutes, across a road, and down an interminable grassy lane between a woodchip mill and what looked like some kind of refinery, wondering if our friendly Austrian woman had led us astray, when finally, peaking through the trees and well off the beaten path (literally), we spied the small chapel that accompanies the little Friedhof.

Which is how we learned #4:

Before Sunrise is tricky and ingeniously misleading in its choice of camera angles, because in the film we get the impression that in just a half hour or so Jesse and Celine drift over to the cemetery from town, approaching it from the road and descending the little stairs hugging the chapel. In reality, it takes something in the area of ninety minutes to get out there (if you know where you’re going), and there is no approach from beyond the stairs—the only way there, from the direction Jesse and Celine would have traveled, was along a rutted country lane between two factories, through a gated ditch, and across the delivery drive of a working refinery. Such is the nature of film, I suppose.

Once inside, though, the cemetery does become eerily quiet. It sits in a shallow depression surrounded by trees, so it seems to block out all the racket of industry and rests in a timeless solitude, the chalk-drawn plaques of the “nameless” beneath the crucifix gravemarkers solemn but somehow inviting. We spent a good half hour in the cemetery, walking among the graves and noting the few names discovered, straightening fallen flower pots, and saying silent prayers. On one grave I found a decapitated teddy bear, the head rolled face-down nearby, and I replaced the head on its lonely body atop a grave. It was a deeply meditative moment for Jennifer and me both, and very much worth the long, confusing trek it took to find the place.

Almost two hours later we made it back into town and stopped in the heart of the Innere Stadt, at Stephansplatz. We grabbed a quick bite of cake and coffee at the Café Diglas then braced ourselves for the mammoth cathedral that is Stephansdom. I had two missions in mind for the day, the pair of them somehow symbolic: I wanted to climb the 343 steps of the south tower to view the city from above, and then descend into the cathedral’s catacombs to explore the subterranean tombs. Peak and nadir, bustling city and slumbering dead… The dichotomy appealed to me. But by the time we’d clambered nearly dizzy up the narrow spiral staircase and then down again—the whole way down dodging gangs of wild teenagers recently released from school—we were both so exhausted that the idea of the catacombs seemed overwhelming. Besides, when we’d first arrived I narrowly missed the scheduled tour (despite Jennifer’s reverently hushed calls that it was leaving without us) because I was busy setting up a photo of a floating crucified Christ, and when we finally got back down from the tower we narrowly missed the next tour. We decided we’d had our share of cemeteries for the day and opted out of waiting around for an hour to catch the next tour.

Instead, we hit the atmospheric but miniscule (there were only two and a half tables and three stools!) American Bar just off the Stephansplatz for a quick cocktail and an inside peek at a building by Adolf Loos, one of Vienna’s most important architects. The room was almost smokily dim, with ochre-painted glass blocks covering all the lights and the few small chandeliers fitted with what looked like 10-watt bulbs, but instead of feeling claustrophobic, it felt cozy, like the downstairs den of someone’s home.

After the American Bar, we drifted down the Kärtnerstrasse to the Franziskanerplatz, where in Before Sunrise Celine and Jesse enjoy a coffee from the tiny Kleines Café and get their fortunes told by a gypsy. No gypsy for us, and with the cool evening of autumn, the café was a strictly indoors affair, and it was barely larger than the American Bar and twice as crowded, so we contented ourselves with the ambiance and with studying the looming statue of Moses.

Tired as we were, we decided to ride the U-bahn across the Innere Stadt to check out the Sigmund Freud Park and the beautiful twin-spired Votivkirche, which we’d been seeing and photographing from almost everywhere in town since we got here and which Jennifer has been especially keen to see. It’s under restoration and is closed on Mondays, so we didn’t get to go in, but we enjoyed the evening in the park and the beautiful lights on the façade. Still, by now our feet were aching and we needed to grab a dinner before we headed to a concert, so we trekked back to the hotel.

Our evening was unexpectedly capped by the invitation of a costumed music student hocking tickets outside the Stephansdom. As part of a practicum for his studies and as a fund-raiser for a local repertory of classical musicians, he was selling seats at an intimate “parlor concert” by the Vienna Residence Orchestra, a tiny troupe of classical musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers that perform in the historic Palais Auersperg, where the boy Mozart gave early performances for royalty. It was a short, simple affair clearly marketed toward tourists (the bulk of the audience arrived on two huge tour buses), but we enjoyed getting dressed up for an evening out, we knew we’d need to get to some music-related event sooner or later, and the setting was rather appealing—just a small gathering to hear a small group perform some simple, classic pieces by Mozart and Strauss. For the most part the performances were quite good—nothing stellar, but solid and proficient, with a rather dedicated solo violinist and a delightful soprano. The ballet dancers seemed superfluous, though, not because they lacked talent or technical merit but because their stage was so tiny they had little room to do anything but showy vertical jumps and poses. Jennifer did enjoy watching them attempt their maneuvers on the small stage, though, since with every jump or twirl the young man nearly slapped, kicked, or toppled into the solo violinist—she was delighted by the facial expressions of the violinist as he ducked or reeled away from the ballet while trying to maintain composure and his music; she affectionately called the whole scenario “cartoonish,” which is as apt as it gets, really. Still, the fact that the ballet dancers never did hit the musician seems a great compliment to their prowess in their art! So, in all it was an excellent evening out and precisely the thing we needed to unwind after a very, very long day.

12:12 am

Vienna: Day 2

2009-12-09T00:23:00.003+04:00

Day 2

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Jennifer figured out this evening that she’s been to the cinema in six different countries. She saw a film in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico, while I was in Turkey, and I didn’t go to any theaters in Istanbul or Ankara or Izmir, so she’s one up on me. But her sixth and my fifth was 500 Days of Summer at the Haydn Kino English Cinema here in Vienna. It was cleverly written and cleverly directed—I told Jennifer it flirted with the line into too clever, but I thought it maintained its integrity well. And it was an excellent cap to a surprisingly full day.

We started with a filling and extensive buffet breakfast (at which they offer free champagne, though we skipped that indulgence this morning), then walked across the street to the MuseumsQuartier. We weren’t sure what we planned to see, though we knew we were interested in the Leopold Museum with its impressive collection of Klimt; the Leopold is also currently showing a loaner exhibit of Munch, which was an added and unexpected thrill. We both also discovered some new interests in art: Jennifer fell in love with the Secessionist painter and Klimt protégé Egon Scheile, including his quirky self-portraits and his moody, meandering autumn trees, while I found myself utterly sucked into the unnerving world of Alfred Kubin, whose nightmarish, fantastical drawings and sketches are like the inner ravings of some brilliant but tormented child. (We each bought a book of their work.) Seeing the Klimt, too, was an education, because while we both were familiar with his more inventive and more popular works (“The Kiss” is among our favorites, though it’s housed at the Belvedere in another part of the city), we discovered he was a brilliant technical painter in any form, and we saw some impressive landscapes and portraits, including a dark, emotional portrait of a blind man that actually moved me to tears. Another prize of the day was the Munch; the collection is thin, Munch being hard to come by, but we did see an extremely rare lithograph of “The Scream” as well as both the lithograph and the painted versions of “The Vampire,” a favorite of mine for almost twenty years now. To see it in person was perhaps the highlight of the visit, though I am still reeling over the discovery of Kubin—his artwork is fascinating enough, but he was also a writer; his novel The Other Side was a major influence on Kafka!

After a light lunch in the pretty Café Milo outside the Architekturzentrum (The Architectural Center), we crossed the Ringstrasse to the Maria-Theresien-Platz. We spent a few minutes browsing the Christmas market there and gazing in awe at the huge Maria Theresia statue-complex (it is one monument, but it contains so many full-sized sculptures of ministers, musicians, and mounted equestrians, that it can really only be described as a conglomeration, with the regal Maria Theresia enthroned high above all her statuary-subjects). But our true purpose was to cross the platz there on our way to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, one of the world’s largest and finest classical art collections. So it is billed in all our guidebooks, and they don’t oversell it—the building itself is a work of art, and the collection is so vast and so exhaustive that we barely managed a third of it in our hours-long visit.

On the ground floor we browsed a small but impressive Egyptian collection, including an array of splendid sarcophagi, and upstairs we drifted past the coin cabinets (for which I’d had high hopes, being an amateur numismatist myself, but most of the “coins” were more accurately commemorative medallions and cast portraits, though the handful of true coins I saw were extremely cool). On the main stairway we saw two terrific Klimt frescoes commissioned for the museum when it was built, as well as a massive marble statue of Theseus slaying a centaur. And in the main painting gallery, we saw an amazing array of Brueghels and Rembrants, some fantastic Van Eycks and a handful of truly awesome Rubens paintings, and some fascinating Velazquez portraits of Habsburg family members, including a series of one young princess painted at various ages, showing her maturity, and a hilariously unflattering portrait of a Habsburg Spanish cousin. But the genuine highlight of the museum—and, for Jennifer especially, of the whole day—was the one Vermeer in the collection. Vermeer has long been a favorite of ours, and he holds a special place in Jennifer’s heart particularly, so she was looking forward to seeing his “Allegory on the Art of Painting,” but when we entered its room, we found a painter set up with his easel and palette, practicing technique by copying the Vermeer! It became a living allegory, and I was quick to set up and snap several photographs. We now have photos of a painter painting a copy of a painting of a painter painting; the original is a whimsical and ironic study of the art of painting, the student-painter we saw became a literal study in the art of painting, and my photograph juxtaposed the two to further irony—it was all any of us could do (for by now a small crowd had gathered to watch) to keep from laughing out loud. And the painter, consummate artist that he was, painted on the while as though he were alone in the room with Vermeer himself, learning from the master.

By the time we left (after a terrific coffee and sachertorte in the museum’s café), it was 4:40 and already deep into evening—the sun sets distressingly early here and continues to catch us off guard. We headed back to the hotel to unwind, and then out to our movie. We arrived at the theater a full forty-five minutes early, so we amused ourselves by wandering the shopping district in which the theater lies, including a pleasant jaunt down an interior lane of connected courtyards full of shops, cafes, pubs, and even a psychiatrist (the sign read “Psychoanalytische Praxis”). The streets were packed with pedestrians wrapping up their Sunday, and we enjoyed the life of a modern city, feeling very much at ease here. After the movie, though, we discovered something strange: The streets were almost entirely empty. The sidewalks were all but vacant and only a handful of cars drifted down the streets. I worried that the movie had gone on far longer than I’d thought and we’d wandered outside after midnight, but when I checked the time it was only 10:30. It was another reminder of how unique this city feels to us—we expected a large European city with bustling activity and rich arts and shopping districts, and so far we are supremely satisfied, but Vienna maintains its conservative roots and behaves very much like a small town, shutting down especially early on Sunday night. It’s an unexpected difference, but I think I’m liking it because in many ways it offers the best of everything I’d want in a city—huge civic resources for social and artistic services and a wide variety of shopping and culinary options, but without the crush and frenzy of a metropolis.

Of course, it is still Sunday (or was—it’s now after midnight here), so I’m looking forward to seeing what a weekday brings to our Vienna experience….

12:34 am

Vienna: Intro and Day 1

2009-12-07T14:25:00.006+04:00

I like to keep a travel journal whenever I go anywhere far from home--it's a habit I was assigned on a college winter-term trip to Turkey eleven years ago, but one I've enjoyed keeping since then--and so I kept one last week while Jennifer and I jaunted around Vienna. But I've always viewed my travel journals as something of a hybrid between true, in-the-moment journaling and quieter, more reflective personal essays, so I decided not to post my entries during vacation. Besides, we were supposed to be getting away for some time together, just the two of us, and if I'd started posting daily updates then, I'd have felt beholden to a larger world, which sort of defeated the point of the vacation. So, here I am now, retroactively posting the entries I made each night.

For fun, I've decided to post one entry each day, as though I were on vacation this week instead of last. Makes for easier and slightly more authentic reading, and gives me a chance to polish the entries as I go. I do believe in the honesty of a journal, though, so I promise not to revise my entries--I'm just editing them for typos and for clarity, so what you're about to read it true to the day I wrote it.

I realize, by the way, that many of these comments have little to do with writing or teaching, so they seem out of place in a blog like this. But they're also a record of what a writer and a teacher does on vacation--I am obsessively academic about my vacations, meaning I spend most of my time before, during, and after my holiday reading, researching and writing about the place and the people and the experiences--so we'll call that my excuse to post these here. Just go with it, okay?

________________________________________

Day 1

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Jennifer and I are getting used to travelling, yet somehow we never seem to feel used to it. This is a mixed blessing, I think—we are generally familiar with airports regulations and know our way through security screenings and long lines and foul-smelling fellow passengers, but for some reason we’re still aghast when a passenger makes an ass of himself or an airline employee chooses to assert her bullyish authority simply for the sake of doing so; we know each other’s habits and routines yet can’t help but let our travel fatigue occasionally turn us into taciturn ogres (yep, that’s me); and for all our careful planning we wind up winging half our trip, yet for all our joy at exploring a city ad hoc, we usually wish we’d planned better. We’re full of contradictions, which is part of the fun, I think.

Today we flew to Vienna, using the opportunity of a week-long holiday back home in the UAE to travel north and revisit some cool fall weather. We picked Vienna because…. Well, I’m not entirely sure why, and that’s part of what makes this trip unique. In the past we’ve always had specific reasons for visiting a place—Prince Edward Island for the LM Montgomery/Anne of Green Gables history, Scotland for my family, Chicago because it’s Chicago. We even drove from our previous home in southwest Wisconsin out to Dyersville, Iowa, just to visit the filming location of the farm in Field of Dreams—in fact, we went twice, and we loved it. But this time, we knew only that we wanted to head north, that we wanted fall and old-world European charm, and that we wanted a city for its size but not all the hassle and crowding of a major metropolis. We thought about a number of places we’ve casually mentioned over the years, including various parts of Italy as well as Amsterdam and Prague. And then there was Vienna which, I admit, we’d first added to the list primarily (and for us, not surprisingly) because we love the film Before Sunrise. But the more we looked at Vienna outside the context of the movie, the more we fell in love with its bizarre history, its compact pedestrian-friendly size, its culture and charm, and, most thrillingly, its joyous obsession with Christmas, which is manifest in the dozens of outdoor Christmas markets dotting the city. So Vienna it was, and here we are.

Before we left Abu Dhabi, we rewatched Before Sunrise and Jennifer--the consummate librarian--found online a fun though abbreviated guide to some of the film’s featured locations. We bought a few guidebooks, started practicing a bit of German, and became enchanted by the strange and sometimes hilarious history of the Viennese, who seem somehow simultaneously extraordinarily blessed and doomed with bad luck, and whose morbid fascination with death has become so intertwined with the culture that one can hardly mention a major historical figure without also describing his untimely and sometimes bizarre demise or her lavishly elaborate funeral. Still, it was the film that first drew us to Vienna, so it seemed fitting when we arrived that we should visit one of the first featured locations, the Zollamtssteg Bridge over the River Wien, a walled channel containing the former tributary to the Danube. We’d spent an hour wandering the alley-sized streets of our little Renaissance neighborhood, which includes a charming if disorganized Christmas market scattered over several streets in the Spittelberg area, before settling into a terrific lunch of veggie pizza at a pleasant little Italian restaurant with a sweet and (for a Viennese) attentive waiter. Then, once we’d checked into our hotel, we set out for the bridge. The early sunset here surprised us (it was nearly dark at only 4:30 pm), so by the time we found our way to the bridge it was already twilight, and there was some repair construction going on on one side of the bridge, but the sight was still fantastic, perhaps more so under the amethyst dusk with the first of the city’s multitudinous Christmas lights winking on to reflect in the shallow runnel of the Wien’s canal.

Afterward we rode the tram around the Ringstrasse to the Neues Rathaus, the towering Neo-Gothic city hall lit up against the night sky and overseeing a vast Christmas market that from the outside seemed magical, with its huge central Christmas tree and the platz’s many other trees bedecked in inventive light displays (including a tree full of illuminated Santa-angel-bears); we ventured into the market, however, to discover it a madhouse of swarming tourists and shoppers, people sipping hot cocoa or mulled wine literally shoulder-to-shoulder and rocking in a mass undulation, like an ocean, complete with a riptide of scurrying children tearing underfoot. We drifted out and walked back toward our hotel near the MuseumsQuartier, marveling at the looming statuary of the Parliament building and the squat façade of the Volkstheater. We were looking for a quiet café to enjoy a cup of famous Viennese coffee and a bit of torte or strudel, but strangely, we managed to wander down all the wrong streets and could find only hip, modernist bars or expensive restaurants. We finally ducked into what looked like a cozy corner spot with cakes in the window, but when we entered, the place hushed in surprise, and though we stuck it out through a cup of coffee, we quickly realized we’d wandered into a local café so quiet and so comfortable it was meant only for the neighborhood regulars, and we interlopers had just interrupted their routine evening.

We finished what was actually good coffee and then, content to leave them their café, we headed back to the hotel and here I sit. It’s only 9:30 here, but my body tells me it’s after midnight and I, like Jennifer, am tired, so I’m off to join my wife and rest up for a new adventure tomorrow.

9:39 pm Austrian time

Acknowledgments: NaNoWriMo update #4

2009-11-17T17:37:00.000+04:00

One of the reasons I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year was the pressure. I don’t mean just write a bunch in November. I mean sign up at the site, with a profile and picture and everything; I mean post regular updates and excepts on the site and in Facebook and here in my blog; I mean do all this out in the open. I need that kind of transparency or else I’d never be able to pull this off.

I know a lot of people who participate--and do so gloriously--without bothering to sign up at the site, and I think that's cool. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be for fun, damn it. I also know plenty of people who do sign up but don't bother posting updated word counts, and that's cool too. Really, this isn't a contest. But when I signed up I decided to commit not only to writing each day and to posting daily updates at the NaNoWriMo site, but also to posting those regular updates on Facebook and to making these occasional comments in this blog, and all my friends out there in the cyberverse caught on pretty quickly as to why: I needed the pressure of public exposure to keep me moving. I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I'm afraid, so in my academic and writing career I've had to develop tricks and gimmicks to force myself into a disciplined situation. Nothing has worked better for me than a sense of responsibility to others. When I'm teaching, for instance, I often explain to my students that because I expect them to meet deadlines for their assignments, they should expect me to meet deadlines with their grading, and if I start falling behind I make a deal with them: They don't have to turn in their next paper until they get the previous paper back with my comments. For the first novel I wrote, which was my undergraduate thesis, I asked my director and reader for a schedule and they both shrugged and said, “Whatever works for you,” but I protested: “I need a schedule, guys! Discipline me!” So I told them I'd get them 20 pages every week until the draft was finished, and then I'd get them 20 pages of revisions every week until they said the book was good enough. Turns out they had plenty of other work to do and I was just making their lives more complicated, and it wasn’t long before I’ll piled several weeks of writing on them and they hadn’t even gotten around to the first 20 pages, but I never would have finished that book if I hadn't convinced myself that they were sitting across the campus tapping their fingers and waiting for me to hurry up and send my pages.

So this year, when I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, I knew I needed to do it publicly, not because what I’m writing matters but because I needed to trick myself into thinking it mattered to someone, I needed the illusion of some impatient audience out there in the world tapping their fingers and saying, “All right, dude, show what you did today.” It’s worked so well I’ve already surpassed the official 50,000-word NaNoWriMo threshold, in only half the allotted time (I broke 50k on November 15), and it’s continuing to work so well that even though I could quit now, I have kept working on the novel and plan to finish the first draft before the end of the month, not because I need to but because I have this vision of disappointed friends and family staring at my empty updates and saying, “Damn it, Sam, you brought us this far and then you just quit, left the novel unfinished? Not cool, man.”

But here’s the genuinely amazing thing, and the reason I started this post: I actually have people out there monitoring my progress. Much as I have to pretend to get any work done, I don’t seriously delude myself that anyone is logging onto Facebook or checking my blog every day to see how many words I’ve written. And while I think most of my friends would take a look at my draft out of kindness and maybe even legitimate interest, I don’t imagine anyone is hankering to get their paws on this thing. (Though if you are anxious to read it and you know an agent or a publisher, we need to talk!) But none of that matters. What matters is that a whole slew of my friends has recognized my need for support and has been fantastically generous with it. Hardly two updates go by without at least one expression of incredulity at my rapid progress or voice of encouragement on the discipline I’m engaged in, and at least a few times each week someone has stuck up a Facebook wall post or sent me an e-mail expressing interest in the book or supporting my continued work. When I sent out a call for research help the response was swift and tremendously helpful.

I’m not going to call anyone out by name here in this blog because I don’t know who would mind and who wouldn’t, but you know who you are. If you’ve ever commented on my work here or in e-mail or in Facebook, I owe you, and I’m extremely grateful. I just wanted you to know that.

And now, for some excerpts:

from day 9:

[the women try to trade their stolen goods in the swamp store but learn the war is over and there is no more of their kind of business to be done, a discovery which endangers and infuriates them]

At the hut they fumed for some time, dragging the pail of soaked clothes still warm in the sun out to the pond to rinse and scrub them and rinse them again, their fists tight around the wrung skirts and uniform shirts, the knuckles bright against the dark blues and grays of the cloth and the remaining purple and fuscia stains. They whipped the clothes into the air over the pond so shake the water off the ends of them and they carried them back to the hut to string up between two poles and dry in the warm breeze. They sat on their stump and bucket out front and watched the clothes blowing, both the women with their jaw muscles jumping, their fingers interlocked and gripped white. Finally the old woman said To hell with it then and she disappeared into the hut. When the door opened one of the packs shot out it like it was fleeing some brawl within, and another pack followed, then the woman emerged bent under the weight of the remaining packs.

Let’s re-sort these here goods and figure what we ought to keep for ourselves. Then we can see if it’d be worth a run into Texas ourselves.

Where would we go?

Don’t seem to matter. That fight we come across the other night must of come from that direction, so I figure we head toward the Sabine we’s bound to run into one army or the other.

That still feels a long ways for just a chance of coming on something, and who knows what they’d do to us either army and us just two southern women among all them men. Maybe we just take this stuff on up into Leesburg, see if anyone wants it for they home defense like you said.

That’s a good idea and maybe we do that first, then see where we stand.

They pulled apart the assorted gear, a few cook items and some personal effects like watches and tiny photographs but most of it knives and swords and rifles and pistols. A few lever-action Spencers and one short Henry, even a Colt revolving rifle though the cylinders had fired all at once and the rifle was bloody and blown half apart. A collection of big Bowie knives many with the names of men carved into the hilts, Jesse, Sam, Pedro. They separated all the money both Confederate and Union, sorted them by denomination and issuing country and stacked the coins and cam e up with seventeen dollars and forty-three cents all together, though what was the worth of either nation’s cash they couldn’t determine. They wrapped the bills of each country around each country’s coins and tied the bundles in string, then they put the bundles together in a filched tin mess pot and tied the lid down tight. In the hut they flipped up the mattress and the woman held the pallet at a high tilt while the girl dug a hole in the earth floor with a large metal spoon and dumped the tin pot in. Back outside they bundled the rifles like kindling sticks and wrapped them in a blanket and tied it, and they did the same with the sabers and long bayonets. Among the pistols they found a pair of engraved Slocum side-loaders, barely longer than the girl’s hand from palm to middle finger, and they set them aside and sorted through the ammunition till they found a collection of bullets that would fit the cylinders, and they kept these revolvers one apiece for themselves. The rest of the pistols they collected in a knapsack with a few hats and some shoes. They found four mildewing books in the sundry personal effects, a bible and three dime novels: The Hunted Unionist; Zeke Sternum, the Lion-hearted Scout; and The Imps of the Prairie, or, The Slasher of the Cave. They set aside the bible then sat thumbing through the novels but soon gave up and tossed in the novels with the pistols and hats, and after considering it for a moment the woman tossed in the bible as well.

from day 11:

[in the worn-down shop of a free black man in Leesburg, the women tried to trade but the old woman's hatred of black men gets the better of her....]

We’ll do you a trade, nigger, but according to my own terms. I don’t let no nigger boug dictate to me.

She opened the sack and flung out a pair of worn shoes and a Kepi hat, a wooden canteen, a brass belt buckle. She grinned at the man. For the fields, cause free or not we’ll get you in em.

He looked at the small collection before him then raised his eyes.

What the hell I gonna do with a bare belt buckle out in some field.

Whatever the hell a white man tells you to, the woman said.

He laughed and crossed his legs again and waved a hand toward the door as though swatting at mosquitoes. Shoot, y’all is crazy. Y’all get on out my store afore you get me mad.

The woman screwed up her face in a fury and reached into the sack, fumbled in it with her eyes locked wide and wild on the man while the girl watched, her own features settling into a dangerous calm. The girl reached for the second sack and began to drag it toward the counter as the woman produced a pistol and aimed it at the man in his chair.

He regarded her.

I done checked that gun already, maam, so I know it ain’t loaded.

Maybe I loaded it, she snarled.

Maybe I can see the cylinders empty from where I set, he said, his voice calm. His eyes flicked toward the girl then back to hold the woman steady in his gaze. His voice a level louder he said, Missy, I’ll ax you not to put none of my wares in your sack less’n you plan to put some of yours on my counter in trade.

We’ll just take whatever we damn please, the woman said.

The man uncrossed his legs and with his hands on his knees he unfolded from the chair, stood tall before the woman with her empty pistol shaking.

Y’all ain’t gonna rob me, he said.

The girl had shoveled what she could into the bag and she turned to the woman. Let’s go now, mother, we got what we can.

The man reached and closed his big hand over the pistol the woman held in her left hand. The hammer retracted and clapped closed, then again, the woman pulling frantically on the trigger. Don’t you touch me nigger, don’t you touch me!

I’s just taking recompense, the man said. He stepped forward and twisted the pistol to break it free of the woman’s grasp but as he neared her she leered at him and he saw her right shoulder jerk, realized too late she’d been waiting for him to come to her. The pain in his side was fierce and hot, and with own right hand still holding the pistol he calmly stepped backward and put his other hand over his side, the shirt slick already with his blood.

Run, mother! the girl shouted and with the sack swinging heavy over her shoulder she lumbered behind the woman and out into the street. The woman with her knife outheld bent to pick up her sack but the man reached across himself and with one great swipe he backhanded her with his pistol fist and sent her reeling to the floor. He coughed once and swayed where he stood, his dark hand gleaming in his blood.

No maam, he said, his voice low but strong still.

The woman scrambled to her feet and with the knife raised in her fist she ran screaming at him but he twisted with his feet rooted on the floor and he hammered her another blow that sent her flying against the doorjamb, where she spun and sat down half inside and half out on his store’s front step. He faced her but stayed put.

I done told you, you ain’t gonna rob me.

She looked up at him from her place on the threshold and for a moment they regarded each other. Then he stood one deliberate step toward her and she rolled backward down the step hollering Save me, save me from the nigger! but when she’d got to her feet in the road the girl grabbed her arm and they ran together out the wrong side of the town. It took them an hour to circumvent Leesburg, another half hour hiking north along the river to find a crossing point they could wade through, the bridge too near to town for their liking, so it was humid orange dusk before they managed to aim themselves west again, and by the time they staggered into the brake and collapsed exhausted into their own small hut it was well past midnight.

from day 16:

[a violent hurricane has flooded the bayou and Buford and the girl are adrift in his shack]

Oh Lord, Buford shouted. That’s Lake Calcasieu done jumped its banks--these two currents is merging. Hold on! though with nothing to hold on to they simply continued clinging to each other. They hit the wall of rapids in a spray of foul, salty water, and they spun in long crazy ellipticals in the water until finally they’d settled into some diagonal course up the bayou toward the swamps. They rocked and rode the current and watched through their two open walls as items floated past them from Leesburg, many with their own passengers in refuge from the storm. A wooden crate of oranges and a gang of oranges loose and following like ducklings, a thin snake coiled in the crate and seemingly asleep. A wardrobe on its back and the doors flung open, with a dog inside peering overboard wide-eyed and panting with his tongue out. An uprooted sapling with a cow tied to it, the cow choking on the leash and thrashing in the water. A little while later they saw an old black woman, tiny and frail with her hair the color of brushed steel and her skin heavily wrinkled, floating on top of a hay stack somehow still intact. She waved to them and called out for help but neither person in the shack moved. They regarded each other, the pair and the old woman. Then the old woman shook her head and shouted across the water, Well, thass all right. God bless you anyways. And she floated on. Later they caught up and past the tied cow again and the cow was dead. A locked trunk floated past and Buford watched it a moment as it drifted near them, then he scuttled across the floor and slung out the ax and chopped at the trunk. His first swipe missed and the ax went in like an anchor and nearly dragged him after, and the girl screamed, but he held onto one of the wall-less stud timbers and brought the ax around and hooked the trunk and dragged it aboard. He hacked at the lock then ripped up the lid to find a collection of fine dresses wrapped in muslin. The interior layers were still mostly dry, and he hauled out all the clothes then kicked the trunk overboard again. They rode the rest of the day and into the evening draped in silk dresses like blankets. As dusk settled and the sky glowed hot amber in the wake of the storm the gable of a two-story house with the roof and walls still intact floated slowly past them, and through the broken glass of the gable window sprawled a lady limp and with her arms in the water and blood running down the siding. Her, too, they watched pass in silence.

It was a dark and stormy writer's block....

2009-11-12T09:25:00.000+04:00

A long time ago, when I was a nerd in high school, I hung out with a bunch of other nerds in high school and we played role playing games. You know the bit Mike Myers did on his 2001 appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, with one eye crossed and speaking in a lisp as he rattles on about his D&D character Lothar and magic spells and hit points and multisided dice? That was us. My parents, being parents of their generation, sometimes expressed concern over the role-playing, worried I'd get "too caught up" in it the way their scary news reports and misguided exposes told them I might, so I had to explain to them that role playing was a means of developing creative skills, that I wanted to be a writer and developing and running characters in a game wasn't much different from developing and writing characters in fiction. And indeed several of those friends were also writers.

I mention all this because one of my old friends from high school sent me an e-mail the other day to share some writing he's working on. We're still at it, we old nerds, making up characters and setting them off on adventures, and my friend--with whom I'd fallen out of touch for a while so we're now catching up online--wanted to share some recent work. But he also mentioned he was stuck, refered to the myth of writer's block, and wondered if I had any tips for hurdling it. I said I'd reply via e-mail, but here I am instead, carried away as usual and turning the response into a blog post.

They say you're supposed to set yourself a writing habit and stick to it, like brushing your teeth or going to work each day. Hemingway famously would leave off at the peak of his writing flow, often midsentence, so he had an energetic and necessary place to begin again the next day. Bill Roorbach says he likes to write the same few hours in the day, each day, every day, like a meditation regime, and he tends to keep things fresh by alternating his work: long-form fiction or memoirs on the weekdays, and short fiction or essays on the weekends. My friend Tom Franklin credits the birth of his daughter for his fiction habits--he said the only time he was ever able to get any work done was when his daughter Claire laid down for naps, and because that time was limited he had to write like mad and really make it count. Said she was the best thing that ever happened to his writing and he never would have finished his first novel without her.

Of course, some people have day jobs, but they say the routine is important anyway. Most academics I know set aside separate office hours, some for students and some for writing. most of us also disappear for a month or more during the summers, sequestering ourselves in some dark corner of the house or cloistering like monks into writers retreats to frantically pound out what we had been wanting to work on all year. A friend of mine in grad school used to work tech support for Microsoft, and for a while she'd stay up till four am writing thousands and thousands of words, then at work that same morning she'd just doze through the day waiting on calls and sometimes dozed through the calls, too. Elmore Leonard reportedly wrote his first five books longhand on legal pads he kept in his desk drawer at work--he'd write his advertising copy on his desk and, wrong-handed and blind, he'd simultaneously scribble out his fiction inside the drawer, then stay up nights transcribing it to his typewriter. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.

But I used to discount the writing-routine rule and still do to some extent. I think every writer is different, really, and for some the routine doesn't work. I've always been bad about discipline so having one set schedule hasn't really cut it for me; I keep needing to mix things up. It's getting different lately, as I'm realizing that most of the die-hard "writing routine" adherents are actually professional writers who A) can afford to set their own habits without life interfering with them, and/or B) need some self-imposed routine to take the place of the restrictions of job and family and life in general.

I'm realizing this because this semester I'm in the middle of a brief teaching hiatus, out of the classroom for the first time in 10 years, so I am actually a "professional" writer with few other demands on my day but the prose. Fiction is not just my avocation right now--it's my job. And indeed I have settled into a kind of routine now, especially this month as I pound out this NaNoWriMo novel. It's not set in stone, my routine, but the gist is, I get up, fix my wife lunch and see her off to work, feed the cats, then kick back for a couple of hours of music and video games and multiple, heavy doses of coffee. Once I've finally managed to wake up, I get to the writing. Used to be I'd pick up whatever took my fancy, but I've discovered that it's true, you really do need a plan when you're writing full time, so the past few months I've been focused on finishing a story collection I've had in the works for years and on beginning a major revision of my dissertation novel. Then the past two weeks this NaNoWriMo novel has taken over entirely. But whatever I'm working on, I'm not too rigid about how I go about it. A lot of writers will tell you to just freaking write--if you're in the chair you need to be scribbling or typing, period. No revising, no researching, no reading, no thinking.... Just write. There's something to be said for that, but I prefer Hemingway's story about sitting in front of the fireplace in his flat in Paris, pinching bits of orange peel into the fire and watching the sparking blue flames they made. He was thinking about writing, he claimed, and therefore he was writing. My theory is, if the work I'm doing is in service of the writing--whether it's research or revision or just reading a damn good book that will help lead me back to the writing--then I'm still writing. There will come a time when the reading or the research just becomes distraction, when the revision or the thinking become an evasion tactic, and there's no way to pick up on the switch from productivity to procrastination but bitter freaking experience, but as long as I keep my ass in the chair each day, I develop the habits and the awareness necessary to continue being productive regardless the actual activity.

But then, that doesn't usually help with writer's block, because with writer's block, anything that isn't words on paper is just procrastination. There's good news, though: there's no such thing as writer's block. Period. Doesn't exist. If writer's block is defined simply as the inability to write, and writing is itself simply the act of putting words on paper, then all you have to do is start writing. Block hurdled. What you write in the throes of an alleged block will almost certainly be crap, but it'll be written crap, and the brain, funny muscle that it is, sometimes just needs to be warmed up first. Once the words start coming, the brain realizes it's supposed to be writing, and if you stick with it, eventually the right words will start coming.

So there it is in a nutshell: Develop the discipline to make yourself sit in a chair once a day, with at least the intention to write. And then, once you've established enough muscle-memory that you find your way to the chair even when you don't want to be there, start developing enough discipline to force words out of you, regardless how shitty they are. Anne Lamott wrote a widely anthologized chapter in her book on writing, Bird by Bird, called "Shitty First Drafts." In it she explains that "very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow." (I can quote this because I love Bird by Bird so much I brought it with me overseas--I'm looking at my copy right now.) "We often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. [...] For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts." Stephen King mentions similar advice (and probably quotes Anne Lamott, too, though I don't recall) in his excellent memoir On Writing, and even goes so far as to show us his shitty first drafts. They truly are shitty. It's nice to see.

I think for me the affliction I used to call writer's block mostly stemmed from anxiety. I knew the way I wanted the prose to sound in my head--these days, mostly like Cormac McCarthy, because the English language just doesn't get much better than it sounds in his prose--but the minute I start putting what's in my head down on paper or on the computer screen, it starts looking or sounding different. It's NOT Cormac McCarthy, it's not even bad Faulkner when he was at his drunkest--hell, it's not even half decent. In my head I'll have a passage like

A warm wind on the mountain and the sky darkening, the clouds looping black underbellies until a huge ulcer folded out of the mass and a crack like the earth's core rending rattled panes from Winkle Hollow to Bay's Mountain. And the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth's turning and then that too ceased and with a clatter and hiss out of the still air a plague of ice.*

But when I write it down for the first time it comes out, "It was a dark and stormy night."**

So what's the freaking point? It took me a lot of time and study and Buddhist meditation before I realized that what I expect and what I come to perceive are almost never going to be the same thing, and neither of them will be inherently true anyway; what I expect will never really happen and what I perceive is never really accurate, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. In other words, I have to let go of my expectations and not worry about my perceptions, I have to empty my mind of what I want to write and just freaking write. Of course, that sounds a lot more esoteric than it actually winds up being--what I really do is just lower my expectations, so that, expecting a shitty first draft, I am never disappointed and am occasionally even surprised.

Until I start revising. But that's a whole other conversation.

* from Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper

** from Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford and, subsequently, everything Snoopy ever wrote.

Researching fiction (NaNoWriMo update #3)

2009-11-08T23:50:00.002+04:00

Here I am at the end of day 8 of NaNoWriMo. My current total word count is 25, 504.

I know that makes it seem I've spent every waking moment of the past week writing, but really, I've managed to work in more than my share of reading and research, and I have this week learned a fantastic amount of information, some vital and much trivial and some deceptively important but tiny in size, all of it necessary to the novel I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. It seems like a lot of work for what is supposed to be a haphazard and frenetically composed string of text, but this is an historical and regional novel, and the details of time (the US Civil War) and region (the bayous, reed brakes and prairie grasslands of southwest Louisiana) and culture (predominantly Cajun, but a watered-down, Anglicized Cajun) are indispensible to the progress of the novel. And besides, I love to learn. This wouldn't surprise my father, who used to share volumes of the Bathroom Trivia Books with me until I began reciting passages from them at random and often inappropriate occasions. Nor would it surprise my wife, who once patiently suffered through my reading nearly half the text of The Left-hand Turn Around the World to her aloud in bed just because I found it so damned fascinating. This is what I do: I learn, I distill, and then I share, in this case through writing.

So as a result of the writing the first half of my NaNoWriMo novel, I now know the following (I've omitted links so you can do your own research):

how to build a variety of traditional Acadian and Cajun houses from the ground up, using traditional materials and antique tools
how to build a variety of crawfish traps of both wood and net, and what is the best bait to use in which season
what a rougarou is and how to defeat it
what weaponry and clothing and other gear were common among both Union and Confederate troops in the late US Civil War--and the slang they used to describe it
a whole slew of Cajun slang and a handful of truly fantastic Cajun names (my favorite, and the name of a character in my novel: Hippolyte)
a little bit about flora, fauna, and geography of southwestern Louisiana, including the reed brakes, the marshes and swamps, the prairie grasses, and the cherniers (a delightful name); several marsh birds and gulls, and the beautiful but now-endangered red wolves, and
a great deal more than I ever thought I would about every hurricane season from 1856 to 1865. (You thought 2005 was bad--you should have seen 1860!)

My friend Tom Franklin's first novel, Hell at the Breech, was an historical book (so was his second novel). He often is invited to conference panels and workshop discussions to discuss the research process in composing an historical novel, but his comments usually boil down to two points: 1) He doesn't like doing research. It feels limiting in some ways, and he claims he only really was able to break into his first novel when he set aside the historical facts and just wrote the damned book. But, 2) he loves historical detail for the authenticity it adds. In his award-winning story collection, Poachers, he littered his fiction with such authenticity, regional and cultural details he referred to as "STP stickers" (as in, "None of my trucks had STP stickers on them, and I knew I needed to add them. That’s not a detail you can make up. That’s real." These comments are from interviews I did for my masters thesis on his work, back in 2001). With his historical fiction, Franklin likes to tell people, he picked up a reprint copy of the Sears catalog from around the period her was writing about (the late 1890s). In those days, Franklin explains, you could buy almost anything through a Sears catalog, from razors and flower vases and clothes to shotguns and automobiles and even houses. So if he ever found himself stuck in the novel and unsure what to write next, he'd simply pick up the Sears catalog and find something interesting and start describing it, then how it might be used, and assign it to a character and let him or her use it, and the fiction would pick up from there.

I've long admired Tom Franklin and am not shy about taking my cues from him, and on this novel I've been doing something similar. Today, for instance, I sent my old woman character out in the marsh to collect crawfish from her traps. I had some sense of the process, having come from a fishing family on one side and a gaggle of half-Cajuns on the other, but I'd never set nor collected the traps myself and decided to stop the fiction with the woman in midstride, and I set to researching crawfish traps. I found information not only on what the traps looked like but also how to build them by hand, how to set them, and how to collect from them. I researched contemporary traps as well as antique traps. I looked into the variety of baits used, the best types of traps for different bodies of water, how the season and the temperature affects crawfishing. I watched videos of crawfishers out in their pirogues or wading through the shallows of a creek, hauling in their lines--I listened to the comments they made about the crawfish and to the accents, the patterns in their voices. I looked into recipes for crawfish both contemporary and historical. And then--and only then--I sat down to write. That research resulted in fewer than 200 words of prose, but that's 200 words of prose I didn't have before, 200 words where previously I'd had two dozen, and the passage is packed with details I hope will sound authentic. Better still, I now am armed with the information to reuse it later if I need to--that old woman has returned with her catch of crawfish but she hasn't yet cooked them, and I might yet pull a half a page or more out of a crawfish boil supper if I need to.

Tomorrow the Civil War ends in my novel, but the story carries on, and I intend as much as possible to look up details of the aftermath of the war in southern Louisiana, to read scholarly articles and contemporary letters in the Times-Picayune and to look over photographs and epitaphs and anything else I can find, but I have half this book yet to write and a lot of authenticity still to build into it.

And I'm loving every minute, every word of it.

Speaking of every word. Here are some excerpts from the past few days (from now on my excerpts will get fewer and farther between as I push through the last half):

from day 5:

The old woman stepped from the plank into the marsh where they’d killed the cavalrymen and she waded out till the water was at her chin, then she swam until she could touch again. There the sodden weeds deep in the marsh sucked at her feet and whenever she came this way now she grew nervous, worried that the bodies they sunk in the marsh instead of dumping down the well as she preferred had not forgotten her transgressions and waited there in the murk to pull her down to their revenge. She swam a ways further with her knees bent high and her toes curled, her gaunt arms pulled hard on the water and the salty marsh lapping up her chin to her lips. But finally she could dogpaddle no more and she let down her feet into the soft bottom and mucked up through the weeds to crawl ashore on the sandy bank beyond. She jogged panting up the grassy ridge of the cheniers and paused at the top where she gazed across the marsh to the thin line of the Gulf out beyond. Even from here the soft crash of surf was audible and she could smell the pungent piscine scent of the beach. She put up a hand to shade her eyes and scanned the flat line of the horizon till she found the light blot she was looking for on the rim, and she wallowed out across the marsh toward it. For several long minutes there was only lighter salty marshwater sluicing her ankles and her own huffing breath to match the lick of surf, but after a while she climbed a shallow rise and walked it till she met the girl, standing at the lip of a tidal cove, tossing baited lines out into the water. She wore a boy’s breeches with the legs rolled up and a wide straw hat. Beside her a bucket clacked with a half dozen angry crabs scrabbling inside, seeking purchase enough in the soft wood to escape but never succeeding. The woman said nothing for a while, only watched and caught her breath. The girl’s arm jerked slightly and she sorted among the lines in her fist until she found the one with tension and hauling it in, hand over hand, to collect the small crab that clung there.

from day 6:

A sharp gust rocked them on their small ridge and they were awash in the dueling rush of the rustling trees back on the chernier and crashing Gulf before them. The girl reeled in another crab and dropped it clacking in the bucket. Out on the horizon a bank of clouds was rising up in shades of indigo and steel, a feathery brush drifting down from the lip to the edge of the Gulf. The woman raised an arm and passed her hand over the horizon as though petting the clouds, trying to smooth them out.

You remember the year before the war, all them storms we had?

I remember. It was one them storms brought my family here and another made me near an orphan.

That was a hell of a year, girl. Three hurricanes in two months, just poured on over us like the flood of Noah. God’s own wrath, like we was being prejudged for what only he alone knew we was about to engage in. Did you know the first one hit on the very anniversary of that Last Island catastrophe in fifty-six? You wasn’t here then, of course, but Last Island is a story they was still telling and then here come that trinity of storms. There must be a reason to it, that first hurricane hitting on the same day as its predecessor. Didn’t hurt us much beyond all the wind and rain, was just a rowdy storm but it scared us and we’d no idea what was coming.

The girl reeled in a crab. She sorted the empty lines from her fist and handed them to the woman to coil and tie. She said, Our ship come in to land ahead of the storm, beached our ship right up here in these salty marshes and unloaded us into the water. That old captain must have had some idea. I think I must have had some idea, sick as I was on that ship and glad for land even if it was this old marsh. I don’t recollect, though, was you and yours among them that came to help us up the chernier and into the brake, out to town?

I was among them though I don’t remember you, girl. Hippolyte and Remy was out in the canes doing what they could though it was fool’s work, nigger’s work. I think those boys must have gone into Leesville to get theirselves a drink, though, because I don’t imagine how else he could first have seen you. I didn’t allow no drinking in those days, not in my house.

You still don’t.

Not having any drink about ain’t the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body’s perspective.

Why was your men out in the canes anyway? You said ain’t no one knew what was coming.

I meant we didn’t know the magnitude of God’s plans, but we sure knew it was something. Like when you was little and knew you’d got in trouble but your mama told you to wait till your papa gets home, and then all that day you know he’s coming but can’t imagine in your child’s head what he’s gonna do. The weather that summer it’d been awful hot, the air so think you’d think it was smoke not just the humidity, and both sunrise and sundown alike was heavy with mist and bloodred in the coming or dying light. We knew for certain the sky was going to break open sooner or later. There here come that cloud, one great one like God’s own anvil somehow floating around up there and waiting to fall on us. They was some strange light in that cloud, not like no lightning I ever saw, not just the blue or yellow flashes you see but all sorts of colors including colors I ain’t even got words for and utterly silent, no thunder ever to reach our ears. And then it just passed on. Weren’t no wind nor rain, just a show of what we was in for. So we all knew something was coming.

from day 8:

They stepped out to the front of the hut, sat in the steamy night on a stump and an upturned bucket. The sky glowed an eerie shade of burnt ocher, a thick quilt of cloud slung low in the sky and the evening light unearthly over the marsh. The air soupy and astir with cricketsong. The old woman rubbed her neck and looked about.

Shoot, the air's so thick now they ain't no breeze.

No, the girl said.

They listened to the song a while, the girl staring seemingly into nothing but her gaze to the sky near the direction of Buford’s house. The old woman watched her watching the brake, and she thought of something to say. Finally she closed her eyes as if in memory and then looked at the girl.

I was dreaming earlier, the woman said. Dreamed Remy come back from the war.

The girl looked at her. You miss him something terrible, don't you.

Don't you?

Sure, mother, I miss him.

You ain’t never even cried over him, I noticed. Ain't you sad your husband is dead?

The girl glowered at the woman, tightened her fingers over her bare knees.

I am sad, yes maam. But he ain't coming back. You and me learned enough about death these last few years to know they ain't no use in pining. They don't come back, they don't even hear you.

The woman leaned on her stool to touch the girl’s hand on her knee. The girl pulled it back and stared hard at the woman.

I'm sorry, the woman said, I am. I didn't mean to accuse you of nothing. And I know you must be lonely, too. An old woman ain't no kind of company for a girl such as yourself. She closed her eyes, then she opened them bright in and smiled at the girl.

I tell you what. I'll find you a good husband. Soon's this war is over I'll go on into Leesburg with you, we'll go to that hotel again and we'll find you someone good to marry.

The girl looked hard at her then out across the brake, in the direction of Buford's house.

The woman continued undeterred.

When this war ends the men'll come back, not just the deserters and the ruffians but the officers, good men of some distinction. We'll find us such a one from among them and get the cane fields going again. Them's part yours now, you know.

I don't know nothing about no cane fields.

You'll learn, we'll find you a good sugar farmer and you'll learn.

The girl made to shake her head but then they heard loud reports out in the distance and they bolted upright, the bucket toppling over. A faint orange glow in the clouds and a black plume of smoke rising out to the west. Another explosion and the rapid pop of riflefire.

Damn, they's fighting out there!

The woman grabbed her by the arm, tugged her toward the hut.

We best get started that direction. We can't wait no more for them to come wandering in to us, we got to get closer.

They dashed inside and dressed quick and silent in the darkest clothes they had, grabbed their various weapons, armed heavier than they'd ever been, and they rushed out into the night, racing stealthily through the rushes toward the ominous glow in the clouds.

Writing in the middle (NaNoWriMo update #2)

2009-11-04T16:26:00.008+04:00

When I was doing doctoral work at UNT, my writing professor Barb Rodman once commented that I could write more story in to less space than anyone she'd seen in a long while. "I'm always surprised when I finish a story and I look at the page count to see how short it is. Your fiction feels longer than it winds up being." It wasn't necessarily a compliment--she was trying to get me to expand my writing--but I took it as one and still do. But it's becoming a problem for me now, as I work on my NaNoWriMo novel. I have a clear outline and know the things I need to get done in the book, and that outline has allowed me to become extraordinarily productive, which I love. I'm currently wrapping up day four but my word count--11,544--is at day-seven levels, so in that sense I'm way ahead of the game. Except I'm running out of story to write. As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm moving through my outline faster than I'd thought, and today I realized I'd finished a third of the story I've set out to write. That means I'm going to run out of novel before I hit 50,000 words--I'm actually writing a novella.

One solution, of course, is to simply over-write, to ramble on with as much verbosity as possible and try to fill out the last two-thirds with enough text to make the final word count. And I intend to try that. But I am taking this novel seriously and would like it to turn into something useable in the near future. So I'm also thinking of writing it the way I'd normally write it: get through the outline, regardless the word count, and then go back and fill in gaps where I need to until I hit 50,000. I already know of several significant gaps I need to fill with historical or regional information. Technically, though, this is revising and therefore against the guidelines governing NaNoWriMo, but I don't think it's necessarily against the spirit of the challenge since I will only be adding, not cutting or changing text. And this is what a novelist does, or this novelist anyway, so I now have a back-up plan. I'll write all I can to the end of the story and then I'll just keep writing and sort of turn a blind eye to where in the story the new text appears.

That said, here are the first paragraphs I wrote yesterday and today, typos and all:

from day 3:

As dusk shadowed the brake and the sky glowed hot and gloomy like fired iron, as the cicadas set in and far off the frogs began a song, a spectral figure emerged hat and shoulders from the rippled surface of the backwaters. He carried a long walking stick with which he plumbed the path before him, and tied to the top of the stick hung a heavy black sack. He pushed his way through the weedy murk and emrged onto the damp ground of the brake dripping and naked save the wide black hat on his head. He leaned against the stick and felt carefully over his flesh in the last of red light, picked a few dangling leeches like mutant teats of blood from his wiry thighs and knotted buttocks, then he untied the sack which was in fact a preacher’s cassock looped over a heavy Bowie knife and rotting string of beads. He removed the hat and hung it float atop a clump of reed and he draped himself in the cassock, tied his waist with a rope and hung the beads from the front of the belt and slipped the knife into the rope to hang at his back. He donned the hat and inspecting first the sky and then the dark ground before him, he discerned some sense of direction and struck out through the unseen trails in the reeds. He meandered for some time, the night falling heavy around him till he could no longer distinguish the hem of his cassock from the black ground below it. His own hands seems to float in space like incorporeal spirits guiding him through the marsh. At last he pushed aside a stand of reeds like curtains and stepping into a small clearing of hard earth in the back of which nestled of burrow of reeds with a door. A drift of smoke rose less dark than the darkness around it in a thin cloud from a lifted hatch in the roof. He looked around the rest of the clearing but so no other markers and checked the sky for his bearings but could make out no stars for guidance. He bent low to the ground and laid his stick gently there, then slipped the knife from the rope behind him and crept up on the hovel.

from day 4:

Buford’s shack tilted in the reeds and listed one side half down a slope into the water. It had fallen off its thick cypress blocks. In the night it looked like some giant angular concoction of the marsh slinking back into the muck and water whence it had come. As he approached the side with his knife in his fist to peer in the one side window he still could reach he half-expected to find the blazing eyes of a rougarou leering back at him through the paneless frame, the hot wolfen breath through the dripping teeth the breath of the swamp itself. He saw nothing inside but smelled it nonetheless, though it was a form of death he’d known already these last few years and nothing supernatural about it. He slid down an embankment into water up his ankles and bent to prise open the door, had to wrench askew and climb over the corner of it just to enter. He crouched and waited for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness inside. He heard a scuttle of some creature and felt the matted grizzly fur of a muskrat scrape past his foot but he held his ground and waited still. When nothing else moved he reached into a fold and pocket he’d stitched into the cassock and popped a match with his thumbnail. The inside of the shack wavered in the yellow light like it was underwater, but nothing else moved. A wreck of moldering reeds in one corner, the scent of scat by the wall that cantered into the marsh. His lantern bent and glassless still hung on a nail by the door but it was drained and wickless, pilfered long ago. A pole warped along the far wall, some shards of crockery and some bones he’d collected in his youth and never saw fit to discard. Nothing else remained. His few utensils, his table and two chairs and his bedframe, his old cookstove, everything pillaged. The match expired on his thumbtip and he hissed. He shuffled into the corner where he’d remembered seeing the pile of reeds, popped another match and reached for the bent pole to poke among the damp wreck but nothing emerged save a few insects. He blew out the match and shook it to cool then pocketed the last of the stick, stirred the nest with the pole till he was satisfied whatever had called it home had now absconded, and then he kicked the reeds together into a loose mat and fell back on it to sleep. He lay instead for some hours just staring up into nothing.

NaNoWriMo update #1: So it begins.

2009-11-02T16:31:00.000+04:00

I'm now two days into November and so two days into my new novel for National Novel Writing Month. So far I'm off to a strange but delicious start: I've had a very clear vision for this novel for about four years now, so at the outset of this project I set myself up a relatively detailed outline. Then I upped the page count (NaNoWriMo requires about 175 pages, but I was shooting for 210) and divided it as well as the word count by the 30 days of November, and then I synchronized the whole thing to my outline so I'd know not only how many words I should write each day (1,667) but also where I should be on my outline each day. Strangely, I've already fallen a handful of pages behind my outline, yet I'm more than a thousand words ahead on my word count. Conclusion: This is going to be a longer novel than I'd planned, and I might wind up completing NaNoWriMo without having finished the novel.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

For those friends and scattered readers who might follow this blog but aren't participating in NaNoWriMo, I'm going to post periodic updates here. Today I'm also posting the synopsis and the two excerpts I've included on my NaNoWriMo page, so I'll tell keep the rest of this short and simply report that I've hit 4,500 words so far. I wrote about two hours yesterday and another two and a half today, so I'm average 1,000 words an hour, which is good for me. Of course, I spent another four hours yesterday and another two or so today doing background research (I am writing an historical novel, after all), so when you factor in that time I'm probably running slower than some of my fellow NaNo-ers. Still, I'm happy with my progress and I'm still getting work done on other fiction as well, so everything's rolling along smoothly so far.

And now, the synopsis and excerpts.

Synopsis:

During the Civil War, a mother and her son's wife eke a living out of the Lousiana bayou by robbing the bodies of passing soldiers. Sometimes they kill the soldiers first. Into this comes a neighbor deserted from his regiment and hiding in the reed brakes where they live; he brings news of the son's/husband's death. Now both women enter a silent, unacknowledged war of lust and jealously trying to possess the runaway hermit.

For the excerpts, I've simply pasted here the first paragraph I wrote on each day of writing. I can't keep this up or my "excerpt" will wind up book-length itself, but this should give you the gist of where I'm headed:

from day 1:

For days on end the only sound in the reed brake was the wind in the rushes. There would be other sounds for those who knew how to discern them, the soft crash of a gator slipping from the prairie grass into the muck and water, the rustle of ducks breaking for the sky or the dip of a heron beak as it fished the shallows. But all kept quiet enough that by day few sounds were louder than the sighing of the reeds, and at night the baritone croak of the frogs was cheerless and departed. The two women listened anyway, silent and languid themselves in their meager chores, and when at last they’d catch out of the hot breeze the long-off reports of canonshot or riflefire, they would set aside their baskets of wash and reel in the crawfish traps and the few lines they’d laid, and they would gather their one musket with its fixed bayonet and a long stiff cane they’d sharpened and wrapped with a grip, and they would crawl out into the marsh to lie in wait.

from day 2:

They took almost half an hour to drag the men to the forgotten well in the marsh by a long abandoned homestead where now remained only the well and a packed foundation they alone would recognize. They dragged their pairs of legs to the low stone wall of the well and propped the naked ankles atop the rim. With such a ramp created from the dead legs they bent and rolled the third man like a log up the bodies until his rump hung over the lip and they pushed so he bent in the middle and fell into the well. Echoing up from the maw came a wet crunch of various limbs when he landed in the deep below, the bodies down there already risen past the water line. A cloud of gnats ascended to behold them that had disturbed the deep, and with the gnats came a stench of swollen meat and festered gases like the reek of hell itself. They paid the not gnats nor the stench any heed, bent already to the second body and hauling it up by the shoulders. The girl held the man steady while the old woman shifted the legs until the knees caught and held the rim. They together they lifted his back and pitched him headlong into the well. They did the same for the last body, and the cloud of gnats followed in a descending vortex like a school a fish chasing a proffered meal. The women did not notice; they returned to the trampled and bloodstained clearing to collect their piles. They stuffed what they could into the haversack then slung the straps of the sack over two of the rifles like poles for a spit. The old woman hung the third rifle crossways over her shoulder , the strap bisecting her pendulous breasts, then both women bent and rested the rifle-ends on their shoulders to raise the haversack slung between them. The girl in the lead and carrying the musket and cane pike while the old woman steadied their load. Neither had said one word the entire time, all their deeds by habit unspoken.

Bleeding regions; plus, NaNoWriMo and happy holidays!

2009-10-31T11:05:00.000+04:00

Still working on the Texas writers list, though it's looking more and more impossible. Where do I put an author like Katherine Anne Porter, for instance? She was born in South Texas, lived a long time in Central Texas, and one of the major writing contests that bear her name is headquartered in North Texas. And a lot of her fiction isn't even set in Texas. So which region gets to claim her? I'm consciously focusing most of my recent fiction in the Texas Hill Country, but as I've written before, I've lived just about everywhere in Texas and have set stories in the Pandhandle, in North Texas, and down in the Valley, a lot of my Hill Country fiction includes references to or even drifts into San Antonio, and I have plans for work set in East Texas....

See, here's what I think about Texas regionalism: unless a writer is dogged about it, most of us Texas writers are going to move around the state a little, because Texas is so damned big we almost feel obligated to spread out and touch the edges of whatever region we're in. And much as the media and, to be honest, the "Lone Star State" tourism industry sometimes like to portray some unified simple-cowboy-oilman image of Texas, Texans like to celebrate the diversity of the state. (If you've ever been to a Six Flags in Texas, you know that the chain started there to celebrate the cultural and historical diversity of state, each flag representing a national status that Texas once or currently enjoys, though it often ignores Fredonia, Texas, which, as a one-time independent city-state, actually gets to claim seven flags.) So it works the other way round, too--those regions that border our own like to bleed into ours whenever possible and influence us a little, just to remind us they're there. A friend of mine from high school, now a chef in North Texas, the other day reminded me that he sees the same phenomenon in the culinary world, observing that great West-Texas steak is easy to come by in his own North Texas region.

This bleed-over effect is why Cormac McCarthy can write his Border Trilogy set by turns in West Texas, South Texas, and an occasional foray into the Hill Country--often in the same book--as well as set scenes in New Mexico and drift down into Mexico itself, and still remain a (new, or "repatriated") Texas regionalist. On the other hand, my chef friend also commented that good Mexican food is rare his North Texas because the vast region of Central Texas separates Dallas-Ft. Worth from the great Tex-Mex food down in the Valley. Sharing border culture is common in Texas, but getting across a region to share with the other side of the state is a difficult prospect. In literature, too, it's pretty rare--and I'm speaking off the cuff here, so this isn't gospel truth--to find a Texas story or novel leave its own regional borderlands. You wouldn't find Rick Bass, for instance, move from Houston to Amarillo in a single story, but you could easily see him move from Houston to San Antonio or even Houston to Waco if he was daring. This is because Texas is, as I've written in a short story, "too big to get out of in a day," so any literary attempts to cross more than your own borders is going to ring false. Even a rambling cross-country road trip novel like Tim Sandlin's Sorrow Floats, which takes us across Texas on its way from Wyoming to the North Carolina, can't bring itself to cross more than the Panhandle before slipping into Oklahoma and leaving Texas behind. I couldn't swear to this, and I plan to look into it more sometime in the future, but speaking from my own experience, I'd say it was probably true that we writers have problems crossing too much of Texas at once, and therefore blending too much of Texas culture.

But this, like the regional authors thing, is fodder for a future post. Today I am gearing up for National Novel Writing Month, and to make things more complicated, I'm setting my new NaNoWriMo novel in Louisiana. This might seem a shift away from my own professed regionalism, but to be honest, the new book will be set in southwesten Louisiana, where my mother was born and one of her brothers still lives, so I'm not straying too far.

I'll be posting occasional updates on my progress in NaNoWriMo, but if you want to sign up and sacrifice all your spare time to the project like the rest of us fools, my NaNoWriMo user name is simply Snoek-Brown, and you're welcome to follow my progress at the website.

Happy Halloween and Festival of Samhain! And if I don't get back online tomorrow or the next day, happy All Saint's Day and Dia de los Muertos too!

Y'all is from where?: Texas regionalism

2009-10-22T16:11:00.001+04:00

This is LONG overdue, but since my last post, I've been thinking a lot lately about regionalism and my identity as a writer. This has been an ongoing internal discussion for me, but lately, as my friends list expands in Facebook and I reconnect with old pals from across the state of Texas but especially back home in Boerne, I've started thinking of my own work in explicitly regional terms. Many of the friends I've recently reconnected with have noticed my profession and my current focus on writing, and they've asked me for some of my work. I've linked them to a few pieces online (like "Coffee, Black," "Distance," and "How Long My Bruises Will Last"), but right now I'm heavily into a story collection set entirely in Texas and mostly in and around Boerne, so to appeal to our common background in the Texas Hill Country, I've started sending them drafts of stories set there, and this has got me thinking once again about what sort of writer I am and how I am presenting myself. It turns out, I think, that I'm a regionalist. But then, aren't we all?

I've had regionalism in the back of my mind ever since early grad school, when I began studying the then-new author Tom Franklin a full year ahead of my masters thesis on him. Back then I was primarily concerned with Southern regionalism and spent a great deal of time exploring various definitions of the literary South, paying special attention to Joseph M. Flora's division of the South into eight subregions (this from his introduction to Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, 1993). I was working to explain what Franklin meant when he called the swamps of southern Alabama "my South," but in the process, I started wondering what exactly my south might be. Flora sets aside an unconventional region of the South he calls the "Southwest," which includes at its westernmost edge Louisiana and parts of woody East Texas, the childhood stomping grounds of Rick Bass. My parents come from this region, my mother born in the bayou of southwestern Louisana and my father born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, and I spent a significant part of my childhood there either living in nearby Port Neches, Texas or visiting my granparents in Groves and Nederland. So, I figured, this must make me a Texan writer.

But I've always felt at odds with the old home state, and to complicate matters, as I studied more I learned that Texas has no signular regional identity. Rick Bass, whose brilliant The Watch is set in the southeast Texas where some of my cousins still live, has since moved several times and is now as identified with Colorado or Montana as he is with Texas. Cormac McCarthy, whose popular fame depends on his novels written in and set in Texas, is technically an Appalachian writer (according to Flora) since he and his style hail from the hill country and mountains of Tennessee. And there are plenty of anthologies and literary journals that lump Texas in with the Southwest instead of the South, and with Texas's self-promoted cowboy identity and heavy Mexican influences, it does seem more at home there.

There are some who argue that Texas is in fact both Southern and Southwestern, the dividing line between the regions as easy to find at I-35. I don't recall the source, but I remember reading somewhere that Dallas and everything east is Southern, and Fort Worth and everything west is Southwestern, for the simple reason that you can grow cotton east of Dallas but you can only grow cattle west of Fort Worth. Despite the wide expanses of Panhandle cotton fields I'd pass on the long drives from San Antonio to Canyon when I was in grad school, the distinction made some sense to me, and explained why Flora included only East Texas in his "southwest" region of the South. When I was living in Denton and spent my weekends hanging out in Dallas and Fort Worth, I became convinced, because despite their mid-mitosis ameobic abutment, the disparity between Big D and Cowtown is unmistakable. (For a great illustration of this dialectical divide, check out this page on American dialects.)

That left the question of which side I wanted to toss my lot with: South or Southwest? The answer turned out to be neither. A lot of people have argued that because Texas is somehow both, it winds up being neither, and thanks to its size (and sense of self-importance), it deserves to be a region unto itself. Readers of Texas Monthly, or the Texas Review, or those bumper stickers that declare Texas is "a whole other country," would certainly agree. But those same Texans will also recognize the diversity within their own "other country": Cattle ranchers in the Panhandle have only a little in common with the dairy farmers of East Texas, less in common with the German goat farmers of the Hill Country, even less in common with the oilmen of Southeast Texas, and nothing at all in common with the artists, musicians, film-makers, and self-professed "freaks" of Austin. In fact, when governor Rick Perry falsely claimed Texas had a constitutional right to secede (again) from the US and set itself up as its own country (again), the clause he was actually thinking of was a provision for the massive state to divide itself into five separate US states, each reflecting the distinctive regions that exist in Texas.

So, like Flora and his eight-fold partitioning of the South, I want to acknowledge the regional divisions of Texas and place myself among them, and this is what I've been thinking of since that last post. My own divisions are for now largely dependent on demographics and linguistics, since I've studied as a hobby some of the Texas dialects and accents and since I've lived in most parts of the state. In a future post, I'll list some of the authors from these regions, but doing so is going to be hard because, big a state as Texas is, people tend to move around in it a lot. I've lived in every region but West Texas, for instance. Also, this list isn't conclusive or even necessarily concluded--I might move some things around once I get a better feel for the kinds of fiction coming out of these regions--but for now, here they are:

East Texas: On the border of Louisiana, from the Piney woods and dairy-farming country down into Southeast Texas, and including Houston and the Gulf Coast as far as Galveston.
South Texas: the heavily Spanish- and Mexican-influenced region the Rio Grande Valey up to San Antonio.
West Texas: despite my masters alma mater's claim on the name, I'm using this to refer mostly to the mountains and deserts west of the Hill Country and south of the Panhandle. I might consider Lubbock as the bordertown between West Texas and the Panhandle.
The Panhandle: Lubbock north, with the capital--of course--as Amarillo.
North Texas: I'm going to lump DFW together in this and let it run from Wichita Falls in the west to Greenville in the east, from the Red River down to Waco.
Central Texas: The dead center of the state, from San Antonio north to Waco, and from Killeen to Katy. It's a strange region because it's hard to define in terms of culture--it seems to bleed its culture from the regions that border it, with the great liberal donut hole of Austin setting itself apart entirely. Still, if Texas had a "heartland," this woulod be it.
The Hill Country: My stomping grounds, mostly the old German farming communities and the leftovers of the German Freethinkers movement, this tiny pocket between South, Central, and West Texas is distinct enough to deserve its own definition. Just ask LBJ.

The Hill Country Years

2009-07-23T20:31:00.000+04:00

I've spent the last few days running around my old home town, taking pictures and scribbling notes, overtly to document scenes in some of my stories and to refresh memories I rely on for my fiction, but also, I admit, just to relive some of my childhood. It's a weird feeling, really, because I spent so much of my adolescence and even a lot of my young adulthood disparaging this town and region, complaining of the staunchly conservative folk who live here, or of the absence of any worldly culture, or simply of the oppressively hot, humid weather (of which we've had plenty this trip!). Yet, in the face of how much has changed around here in the last decade or so, I have been forced to look beneath the surface of the Texas Hill Country to find what I remember, and in doing so, I have uncovered a lot of charm I had, as a teenager and young college student, refused to acknowledge: the folksy simplicity and quiet pride of heritage in the people here, the unique and unexpectedly varied history and artistic culture of the region, and the fun of the surprise summer shower rolling over the scraggly hills.

Also, in noting how much has changed around here, I have realized how much I remembered--and apparently relished--from my childhood, because the Texas I write about in my fiction is always the Texas of my youth. The other day, I ventured down into the woods behind my parents' house to relive some of the hikes that informed my long novella about two boys spending a summer in the woods, and I had to search hard to find those memories under the changed terrain and through the new neighborhood construction. On various drives through town I searched for businesses and homes and even streets that feature in various short stories, only to find the businesses and streets changed, or gone. And yesterday, driving up to Kerrville on an impromptu trip, I toured my old campus--which makes an appearance in the story I'm working on now--and stopped at the bridge over the Guadalupe in Center Point--which provides the final scene in what is probably my best story--and I found both wildly altered.

The bridge was almost unrecognizable, and if anyone were to visit it looking for the final scene in my short story, they'd likely drive over it and move on, searching for the bridge I describe. It's no longer there. In fact, the bridge as it appears now renders the final scene in my story impossible, which was at first a bit annoying. (If anyone asks, that story is now officially set "in the past.")

My old college campus, though, is a different matter. There are certainly a lot of changes, with a huge new student center, a new welcome center, and a large new science building, as well as a massive building (I'm guessing a dorm) currently under construction. Yet when I reached the heart of campus--which, to my great relief, is still the old academic building and the library--I found very little changed. The quad and its surrounding buildings, like squat brick professors paternally but benevolently overseeing their students, looks so precisely as they did a decade ago that when I posted the new photos of them online, a former classmate thought they were old photos.

I am reminded of Tom Franklin's essay, "The Hunting Years," with which he opens his debut collection of short stories. In it, he returns to his old stomping grounds in the woods and swamps south of Mobile, Alabama. He had gone there to revisit some of the scenes in his stories, seeking fresh details to enliven and finalize his fiction. Instead, he encountered a man with a rifle, warning him off a public trail so the man could hunt in peace. This begins a reverie for the South that Franklin remembered, one in which hunting was a communal, not a solitary, event--a South in which friendly manners were more important than private land. Yet he, too, found less changed in his South than in himself, and he was not only able to access and use the details from his old home area in exactly the way he'd hoped, but he also was able to see his South in a new light, through a fresh perspective, in a way that lent his fiction greater depth.

I have to admit that some of this trip back to my own hometown, I modeled after Franklin's journey home. I, too, hoped to find new details and refreshed memory. But I also knew, from Franklin's essay, that other possibilities existed, that new opportunities might present themselves. I might have thought that knowing--and expecting--such an outcome would have prevented it, because I shouldn't be able to recreate what was for Franklin a spontaneous and unexpected realization. But such is the depth of the Texas Hill Country, that even knowing what I'm looking for, I can find surprise and insight nonetheless.

On a life, our liberty, and the pursuit of reading: a reflection on the life and work of Judith Krug

2009-07-13T17:17:00.000+04:00

Two years ago, I had the great privilege of eating dinner with Judith Krug. My wife was giving a two-hour presentation on librarians in film at the annual conference of the Wisconsin Library Association, and as a member of WLA's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, she also got to meet and work briefly with Judith Krug, the founder and director of the American Library Association's Freedom to Read Foundation and a co-founder of Banned Books Week. Krug was always looking for fresh voices in her passionate campaign for intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights, so after their work was done, she met for dinner with several librarians, including my wife; they graciously invited me to tag along. Krug was the center of attention, of course--she is an icon among librarians, practically a superhero and a living embodiment of the dearest ideals and values of librarians everywhere. She also was a charming woman, witty and outspoken and stylish, both engaging and engaged--she even expressed some interest in my own work, asking after my creative writing and, when the evening was over, wishing me luck on my dissertation, which I was then deep in the process of finishing. She was a delightful, impressive figure even to me, a library proxy who usually only gets to enjoy these sorts of evenings because I was smart enough to marry a librarian, and since that dinner I came to admire and respect her a great deal.

My wife admired and respected her even more, not only because she is a fellow librarian but because Krug later invited Jennifer to join ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee, a position which allowed Jennifer to occasionally work with Krug more closely. She frequently speaks of Krug with a kind of reverence, as though speaking of a mentor; indeed, the more librarians I meet, the more I think many people--and not just librarians--viewed Krug as a kind of de facto mentor.

On April 11 this year, Judith Krug died. The nation mourned. (President Obama sent her family a letter of condolence.) But a nation also celebrated her life, none more enthusiastically than librarians and, among librarians, none more than Krug's friends and colleagues at ALA.

Last night, the Freedom to Read Foundation celebrated its 40th anniversary, as well as the life and legacy of their founder and hero, Judith Krug, with a gala at the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. My wife, of course, attended as a member of the IFC, and I--ever the grateful adjunct to my wife's library adventures--joined her as a guest. During the course of the evening, book lovers of all sorts chatted over drinks while enjoying a balcony view of Millennium Park and later gazed at the astounding modern art collection (Picasso's The Old Guitarist is nothing short of breathtaking in person, but I also was stricken by the stark emotion in the early Kandinsky paintings), though, to be honest, the highlight of the gallery was a brief meeting with Judy Blume. Blume was browsing the art with her publisher and with Judith Krug's husband, but she was kind enough to greet all the admirers who crowded around her, my wife and I among them. We shook her hand and praised her speech in Madison, WI, which I have written about elsewhere--she said her husband thought the speech was disjointed and rambling, but I strongly disagreed, much to the delight of Blume's publisher--and Jennifer told Blume how much librarians everywhere, including Jennifer's mother, love and admire Blume. Finally, we left Blume alone and descended to a wide reception gallery to gather at small round tables, to eat and celebrate.

After dinner, the Foundation presented a series of awards, including two to Judith Krug--both awards had been announced prior to her death, and the latter, the William J. Brennan, Jr. Award, given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, was a rare honor indeed: the award has existed since 1993 but has only been given five times. The second, the FTRF Founder's Award, was in fact created in her honor, and was presented by Krug's long-time friend and fellow champion of intellectual freedom Judy Blume, who cried during her speech--as did many of the rest of us (yes, including me). Later, we heard a long but pleasant speech by Chicago lawyer and author Scott Turow, of Presumed Innocent fame, and some delightful closing remarks by the FTRF's treasurer, James G. Neal, but though both men had broader purposes in their speeches--to support the freedom to read and the FTRF's important mission of promoting First Amendment rights--neither could help praising Judith Krug's legacy as well. As the founder of the FTRF, long-time director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, outspoken advocate for readers' rights, and dedicated warrior librarian fighting censorship everywhere she found it, Judith Krug was, in every way imaginable, literally the reason we had all gathered last night.

These were not the first of Krug's awards and accolades--she collected pages of them in her life, all to honor her dedication to fighting censorship and promoting the freedom to read--nor were they the first of Krug's memorial ceremonies at this year's ALA conference, and they are unlikely to be the last of either. In his letter to Krug's family and friends (published in the evening's program), President Obama writes, "I trust that her spirit and strength will continue to serve as a guiding force for everyone who benefited from her life and her life's work." The fact is, if you have ever read a book or visited a library, you have benefited, whether directly or indirectly, from Krug's life and work. That's how far-reaching and how important Krug was, and how deeply important she remains, to all of us.

Writing in Chicago

2009-07-12T00:28:00.001+04:00

I'm in Chicago this weekend and most of next week; my wife has a professional conference here and I get to tag along and soak up the city. I love this town, and if I controlled the universe and could orchestrate my life, I'd probably fix myself with a nice brownstone in the Gold Coast area and just revel in this city until I retire (at which point, PEI, here we come!).

My plan was to get some writing done in the hotel room while my wife is off at meetings and conference panels, and in fact, I've done quite a bit already; last week, in Texas, I knocked out two new drafts of long-troubling short stories, and yesterday, as it rained outside, I began work on a third. This morning, I read a story from a friend of mine and offered some comments, then went back to work on my own story, but I made the mistake of opening the window, and I didn't last long at the desk. Compared with our summer weather in the Middle East, and last week's weather in Texas (where we were visiting family), the weather here in Chicago is gorgeous, so today I rode the El down to the loop and then walked over to the newly revamped Sears Tower, with the intent to visit the new observation deck there. Word was, the new owners of the building built these clear glass "pods" in some of the 103rd-floor windows, so you can actually stand inside the window and gaze through the clean nothing between your feet all the way to the street below. I don't suffer much from vertigo and generally love heights (despite my back-breaking tumble from a tree two years ago), and I was looking forward to the chance for a Spider-Man view of the building, but when I arrived, the line wrapped around the block, and I decided to grab a bit of lunch instead. I think I'm going to head out early tomorrow morning and try again, when the line might be a few dozen people shorter and I can more comfortably enjoy the long wait.

Instead, I walked a few blocks west to check out a diner I'd read about, Lou Mitchell's, a 1923 diner that bills itself as the start of Route 66 and is famous for their fluffy omelets and homemade pastries. I arrived right at lunch time, and the place was jumping, but the service, mostly from delightfully cliched old women I kept wanting to call Flo and Alice, was swift, friendly, and efficient. The line was almost out the door but I was seated--at one of a series of nifty U-shaped bars--in minutes and had ordered and was eating just 10 minutes later. Though it was a bit noisy, the atmosphere was classic and the food fantastic; I ordered a simple breakfast (which they serve all day) of two scrambled eggs, with hash browns and toast. The eggs were the thickest, fluffiest eggs I've seen in my life, bigger than my two fists together, and the toast tasted like it was made not from bread but from pure butter, squared off and fried crisp. And the coffee, though nothing earth shattering, was nice and rich, the way I like it, and came in true diner style, tossed onto the table to slosh, just a few drops, over the rim of the thick mug and into the heavy saucer below. Their fresh-squeezed orange juice, by the way, tastes like liquid fruit. Amazing.

Afterward, I decided to made my trip downtown worthwhile by hoping on the Brown line and riding the El around the Loop and out into the city. I didn't go all the way to the end of the line, but I did ride across the river, through the city to North Ave, and up into Lincoln Park a ways, before I realized it was time to head back. The Brown is practically a tour train; it rolls slowly from stop to stop, easing through wide intersections, around turns, and across the river as though pausing for photographs (which I took plenty of), and it makes for a leisurely ride. When I hopped off and transferred to the Red line back into the city, we dipped underground and shot through stop after stop, making what the return trip in less than half the time.

All in all, a wonderfully satisfying afternoon. Tonight is the first of Navy Pier's twice-weekly summer fireworks, and the weather is perfect for that, too. Better still, my wife's conference schedule, unusually, is wide open this evening, so I'm looking forward to a quiet night on the beach. Tomorrow morning, it's back to Sears Tower, and then maybe, if I can resist the bright blue skies and cool breeze, I'll get back to work. Or else I'll just take a notebook and pen over to Grant Park and gaze at the Buckingham Fountain and Lake Michigan beyond, holding my pen thoughtfully and acting like a writer but, let's face, simply enjoying the view instead.

"Insanely busy"

2009-03-30T08:12:00.001+04:00

So, today I read an article in Newsweek about Paul Krugman, the liberal economist and Nobel Prize winner who has been criticizing the Obama administration's method of handling the economy. And I came across this description of Krugman:

He is, to be sure, insanely busy, producing two columns a week, teaching two courses and still writing books (his latest is "The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008"). He posts to his blog as many as six times a day.

This is almost exactly my own work-load: I am writing a column--not weekly, but it's still a job--for an online magazine, and I'm polishing up an academic article to send out soon. I am also working on and submitting fiction and poetry as I can manage it. I am teaching two courses--both writing classes, which come with a hefty grading load. And I am writing two books, one nonfiction and one fiction, as well as trying to adapt the latter as a graphic novel. And I'm posting to blogs--not six times a day or even six times a month, but between this blog and my activity on other sites, I'm doing a fair bit of writing.

And I do not feel "insanely busy"--in fact, I feel decadent, almost lazy.

Only a few months ago, I was sitting in department meetings at my former campus in Wisconsin, discussing the workload of the freshman composition teachers. To prepare for my end of the conversation, I started listing the work I did, and I figured out that, on average, I was working between 60 and 70 hours a week and reading the equivalent of 3,000 pages worth of writing, as well as writing another 1,200 pages or so, just to stay on top of the five classes--not two, five--that I was teaching. These figures did include some of the "professional development" work I was doing, reading articles related to teaching and academia, but this did not count the service work I was doing for the university, the time and effort I was volunteering to help writers who were not my students, the work I did for my position as faculty adviser for a fraternity, or the reading and writing I was doing on my own time, when the lines between pleasure and work become blurred. (I posted a similar entry on this subject back in May 2008.)

My old friends and former colleagues back in Wisconsin still work on this schedule, as do my friends in Texas, Indiana, Michigan, and Georgia. They still teach four or sometimes five classes--a semester, by the way, so we're talking about eight to ten classes a year--as well as volunteer, serve on committees, write, read, and then decide whether to sleep or try to enjoy themselves, because sometimes that's the decision they're left with.

That, Mr. Krugman, is "insanely busy."

A writer is a writer: on understanding and humility

2009-03-17T15:17:00.000+04:00

Today my university hosted a panel discussion with the six authors who were shortlisted for this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). I've long hungered for the kind of "visiting writer" experiences I used to enjoy in grad school at University of North Texas, and with this I had a chance to meet and listen to authors from traditions, cultures and a language completely outside my own, so of course I headed to campus on my day off and strode enthusiatically--and quite early--into the auditorium.

It turned out I'd passed the authors in the campus lobby on my way in, where they were meeting department and administrative officials, and with all the attention paid to hospitality and polite conversation here, they remained in the lobby for a while and the program started late. But once on stage, the set up looked comfortably familiar--the small couches, the little coffee tables with flowers and bottles of water, the podium at the side for all the requisite introductions--I could have been on any campus anywhere, and the familiarity of the scene was very relaxing. After a while, the visiting authors filed in ahead of their hosting professor and took their couches on the stage (as they were seated, from left to right):

Inaam Kachachi, nominated for her book The American Granddaughter

Habib Selmi, nominated for his book The Scents of Marie-Claire

Mohammad Al-Bisatie, nominated for his book Hunger

Yusuf Zaydan,* nominated for his book Beelzebub

Ibrahim Nasrallah, nominated for his book Time of White Horses

Fawwaz Haddad, nominated for his book The Unfaithful Translator

What was different about this panel, however, was that the entire discussion was conducted in Arabic. The introductions, the requests for the students to shut off their cell phones (and the later demands for them to shush during the discussion), the initial remarks by each author, the Q&A that followed.... All of it was in Arabic, and though I am trying to pick up what little of the language I can manage, I only understood a single word: the oft-repeated shukran, "thank you."

Still, sitting there for the hour offered me an interesting opportunity to observe things I sometimes miss at English-language panels, to notice the mannerisms of the authors and the tone of the discussion and the physical reactions to audience questions. What I discovered was that, just like the setting, everything felt familiar. I recognized the authors' tones so immediately I could tell when they were speaking for each other and when they were speaking to the audience; I could guess in most cases when an author was speaking about craft in mechanical, skill-based terms and when an author was speaking about art in reverent, poetic terms; I could even predict in some instances when someone was telling a joke before the audience had a chance to laugh. It was amazing.

This became most evident during the Q&A, which consisted of only four questions because the questions and/or the answers were so lengthy. In some ways, it makes me wonder if such Q&A sessions, everywhere for all authors, are scripted, because while I couldn't understand the topics or the responses, I recognized the pattern: The questions began with a somewhat long question from a junior faculty member, who seemed a bit nervous but was thrilled to be speaking to these authors. But after her question, the authors all glanced at each other and, without waiting for a mic, announced a short, one-word answer, and the audience in turn laughed. (Tommy Franklin, I'm thinking of you at every panel you've been on, man!) The second question, by a more senior faculty member who seemed to have something to prove, went on for a good three minutes, more a speech than a question, and when he finished his comments, the panel all nodded and several said "Shukran" respectfully, making me think the faculty member had either praised their work effusively or else offered a lengthy critical analysis of some sort to which no one knew what to say other than, "Um, thanks?" The third question, also from a faculty member, was apparently more thoughtful, because while it was also long, it ellicited a very long response that took two (and a half) of the authors to answer. And, once they'd attempted to answer this question, the second guy--still with something to prove?--leaned forward in his chair and offered what sounded like a counterpoint of some sort, which in turn lauched all six authors into a lively discussion of that point and, as though to defuse the conversation, Mohammad Al-Bisatie ended with a joke. Finally, a student bravely stood and asked a question, which I assume had something to do with the nature of writers or the art of writing, because Yusuf Zaydan took the mic, leaned forward toward the audience, and began a long answer that was very different in tone from any of the previous comments--from his eye contact, his hand gestures, and the tone of his voice, I knew he was attempting to teach and to help all the young writers in the room.

But more amazing for me, personally, was the moment I realized I'd been humbled by the entire experience. I couldn't understand specifically what these authors were saying, and I cannot read their novels (translations are forthcoming and I look forward to reading them, because they sound fantastic), yet I recognized that I felt great respect for these authors simply because they are authors--not because they have published or because they were shortlisted for the Arab world's equivalent of the Booker Prize, but because they are writers, people who do what I do and value it at least as much as I do. But I wondered.... What if I do read their work and I discover they are all terrible writers? Would my respect diminish? It shouldn't. Yet I recall my recent, frequent rants about the low standards of popular fiction and my attacks on authors who do write work I don't regard as of high quality, what I have called "sloppy" or even "inexcusable," and I have to wonder, why did I denegrate those other, "lesser" authors?

Part of me wants to adhere to my own standards for fiction, even if those same standards often prevent me from sending out my own "subpar" writing, because I think art deserves to be as brilliant as it can be. But I realized today that my respect for writers stems primarily from the act, not the product, of writing. Take Stephenie Meyers Twilight series, for example, a collection of fiction I have not been shy about berating online. I have sometimes faulted Meyers herself for the poor quality of her novels, but while I stand by my assessment of the flaws in those books, I think now I have given Meyers an unfair shake. The work should have been better, and her editors and publishers should demand better writing, and the reading public should expect a higher standard, which doesn't mean all fiction must be complex but which does mean all fiction should attempt beauty as well as entertainment--in other words, we should not be entertained by art that is less than beautiful (and if you know me, you know that for me, beauty includes the horrific more often than it includes the benign, so I'm not calling for roses and happy endings here). But good or bad, trained or untrained, a writer's process is the same for all of us. Though her technique or her schedule or her imagination might be different from my own, I am sure Stephenie Meyers struggled with her stories just as I struggle with my own; I'm sure she both loves and loathes--remembers fondly and finds constant fault with--her writing just as I do my own. And a writer is a writer, whether a student, a teacher, a published author, a hack, a literary giant, a prize winner.... even in another language, they take delight in a world I recognize as my own, and I am proud to listen even when I don't understand.

* My apologies to Yusuf Zaydan, but I could not find any sites regarding his work as an author; I was only able to find sites mentioning his work as director of the Museum of Manuscripts in Egypt's Alexandria Library, but I am choosing here to focus on Mr. Yusuf's work as a writer, so I have not linked to them.

The English language

2009-03-02T09:21:00.000+04:00

I have always enjoyed teaching English--especially freshman English--for many of the same reasons I love the English language in the first place: Students invariably introduce me to new ways of using (read: abusing) or interpreting the language. This has been true everywhere I've taught, regardless of demographic, though I admit I had more fun in Texas because Texans--who believe they live in "a whole other country"--often speak a different language than English. The regional dialects vary (linguists will tell you there are at least five distinct dialects in Texas), but the language itself is largely the same: A weird variation of English with heavy influences from the deep South, the Cajun of neighboring Louisiana, the "hillbilly" dialects from the Arkansas Ozarks, southwestern accents, and a combination of New Mexican Spanish, true Mexican Spanish, and "Tex-Mex" Spanish. Consequently, I would have students routinely and consistently swap spellings of "fill" and "feel," "sale" and "sell," or--incorrectly--"could have" and "could of," because they spell according to pronunciation; or I would see proudly intentional uses of the double conditional, as in "I might could of made it to class today if it hadn't of snowed a quarter inch."

But my favorite moments occur with genuine non-native speakers, because it is from them that I both learn more about English and discover new possibilities in English. They feel freer to experiment, and they frequently stumble across beautiful phrases. This is similar to my own experiences in a foreign language: As an undergraduate studying French, I was most praised--and won the "French student of the year" award--when writing poetry in French. I was neither a good poet nor a great French student (my conversational French was less than adequate), but turned loose in another language, I discovered a capacity for play and imagery that I found impossible in English, and my French professor adored my work.

Similarly, I have always loved the compositions of my non-native speakers, and now, teaching a class full of only non-native speakers (all are native Arabic speakers), I am delighting in the expressions and explanations of my students. For instance, the other day I learned--from my students, during a class discussion--that one of the most common grammatical errors they commit is the comma splice. They know this, yet they continue to fall into the error, because--as my students explained--they are translating from Arabic, and in Arabic, is it perfectly acceptable (perhaps necessary; I'm still learning the ins and outs of Arabic) to connect separate ideas with a phrase similar to "and, and." In Arabic, this signals a transition from one idea to another and so both connects and separates them, something akin to the semicolon in English but far more prevalent. Therefore, according to my students, the most logical translation is to link ideas with a comma, and they frequently forget about the period.

And then there are the constructions of syntax and the poetics of expression they casually drop into e-mails. Just today, for instance, a student e-mailed me a list of people she'd like to work with in small groups. One of her requests, she said, was based on her classmate's advanced understanding of the English language, but my student's means of explaining this was, "I can feel the strength of her language."

I can feel the strength of her language.

I love that she has made language into a tangible thing, something we can touch and flex, like a muscle--something we can literally "grasp." I love that she has made language into an atmosphere, something we can get a sense of, like emotion or tension filling a room, or like an odor (something else we describe as "strong"). And I love that she has an awareness of other students' grasp of language in comparison to her own. Native speakers back in the States frequently acknowledge the "good writers" in their classes as simply talented or smart, and either cleave to them in hopes of getting a better grade or distance themselves to avoid looking like "bad writers" in comparison. The same is likely true among non-native speakers as well, but it is refreshing to see in this student's e-mail an expression not only of genuine admiration (the e-mail goes on to say, "I like the way she expresses her ideas, which I recognize in class") but also of a desire to learn from her fellow student ("She is an interesting person to work with").

I think I might repeat these phrases to my students in class today: "I can feel the strength of your language. I like the way you express your ideas. You are all interesting people to work with!"

Learned writers write academic essays.

2009-02-16T16:33:00.000+04:00

Has it really been since Halloween that I last posted? Longer, even, since I posted anything directly related to writing or teaching. Shame on me.

But it's been a busy three and a half months, in which time my wife moved overseas and I tried desperately to wrap up a semester teaching without my wife around to motivate me, while at the same time I also packed up/donated/sold/recycled three years worth of house (or seven years worth of house, if you count from when my wife and I first combined our lives), shipped cats overseas to join my wife (a gruelly, torturous ordeal I've documented elsewhere), moved myself overseas to join my wife, and attempted the long process of settling into a foreign culture....

And now I'm teaching writing, in English, to a classroom full of Arab women. My life has not been dull.

Which isn't to say I haven't had time for writing. Quite the opposite, in fact--I've gotten more productive writing (and a lot of unproductive writing) done in the past few weeks than I have since before I finished my dissertation, I've published a story and a poem in the past month (a personal record for brevity between publications--and one of them is in a genre that ordinarily terrifies me!), and I'm feeling great about my life as a writer in general. I just haven't managed in these past few weeks to migrate over this way and scribble some ideas.

So, why today? As usual, it is teaching more than writing that has inspired a post: My students and I were discussing today the merits of education and the purpose of learning to write. My new university here in the Middle East is a Western institution, with instruction in English and accreditation from an American education agency, so, like most Western students, my new class has adopted a general equation of "college degree=good job" (though, unlike most American students, my new class doesn't openly avow a "tuition dollars=earned degree" attitude of entitlement). In the interest of challenging this education-for-financial reward concept, I asked them consider the value of education as self-inherent, ie education for education's sake, and they were quick to take my idea and run with it. This led to a conversation about the purpose of studying writing, and it was this conversation, happily, that produced the most interesting comments, especially when the students launched into a heated debate (without my prodding!) over whether writing is rooted in talent or learned skill.

Eventually, I had to draw pictures on the board, and I illustrated a metaphor of a scale and four weights, with one weight labelled "Talent," one labelled "Learning" and the other two "No Talent" and "No Learning." One student had suggested that talented writers could get by without learning how to write, while learned writers could make up for lack of talent with education, but another student challenged this, which led me to ask: "If we put these on a scale, so we have a talented writer with no education on one side and a learned writer with no talent on the other, would they weigh the same?" Some students said yes, but others argued that untalented people could not learn to write--that talent was a necessary foundation from which to begin to learn writing--and so the question was pointless, while still other students suggested that an untalented person can learn to write better than a talented writer, but never better than a talented writer who has also learned about writing. (Though I didn't say so in class, this is a position closest to my own.)

Finally, one student offered the gem of the day, which I wrote on the board--in quotation marks--and lauded her for, and which spurred me to write this post. She said, "Talented writers can write beautiful stories. Learned writers write academic essays." She said this latter sentence with a audible sneer, and I laughed out loud. I said, "So what you're saying is, it's possible for boring, untalented people to write and publish academic essays?" She tried to backpedal but I stopped her and said, "Because I agree! I've read a lot of those essays, most of them by my own colleagues!"

Halloween Horror Fest

2008-11-01T06:05:00.000+04:00

I've watched an abnormal number of horror movies this year. Some of that is because my wife is researching portrayals of librarians in film, and the most recent batch she added to our collection simply happened to include a lot of horror flicks. But I've also been re-embracing my horror roots, not only in film but also in literature (for a while this summer I returned to reading my beloved vampire novels, though only a handful turned out to be any good; I do highly recommend Robin McKinley's Sunshine) and in my own writing.

In that vein, I've been more in the mood recently to watch horror, and I've seen some interesting movies (Rob Zomebie's The Devil's Rejects and his remake of Halloween) and re-watched some old favorites (the original Wicker Man, Interview with the Vampire). But for this Halloween, I thought I'd list a few of the disappointments.

Weirdest/lamest/silliest horror movies I've seen this year:

House of 1,000 Corpses
Yes, I know it's Zombie and has become a cult classic of sorts, and it is fun in places, but it's also chaotic and mostly absurd; The Devil's Rejects was better.

The Dunwich Horror
Despite the lame "Satan spawn" write-up on the DVD case, it stays surprizingly faithful to the story, at least as far as this sort of movie can remain faithful. But Dean Stockwell tries way too hard for "intense and creepy"; he only ever manages "numb gaze" and "dull breathy monotone." Plus, in a weird sexploitative move that violates the tone of the original story, they tossed in a "sexy" leading girl, who winds up being one of the stupidest "blonde bimbos" in the history of horror cinema--and that's saying something.

Chainsaw Sally
Imagine an unintentional spoof of House of 1,000 Corpses crossed with a intentional (but failed) attempt at an homage to the bizarre but far superior Suspiria, all on a $6,000 budget. The hick-cop dialogue was sort of funny, though, and I admit I enjoyed all the serial-killer references.

From a Whisper to a Scream
Actually not half bad, but the Vincent Price interludes are the best part--the four sketches that make up the rest of the movie range from idiotic to hilarious to mildly interesting, sometimes in the same sketch, but it does manage to stand in the great tradition of the old Amazing Stories and Twilight Zone serials.

Judy Blume

2008-10-16T18:00:00.000+04:00

Last night I drove with my wife and another university librarian (our education librarian, who oversees our children and young-adult literature collection on campus) to Madison to attend a lecture by Judy Blume. Blume's speech was part of the larger Wisconsin Literary Festival underway this week, but her specific appearance was at the invitation of the Cooperative Children's Book Center, a youth-lit organization my wife belongs to; Blume was giving the 11th Annual Charlotte Zolotow Lecture, named for a children's-lit editor and author and anti-censorship activist who attended UW-Madison in the 1930s.

Like most kids in this country, I read Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I was myself in fourth grade. And, like most kids in this country, I thought that book was about me. Blume has an almost eerie ability to tap the minds of young people and write about our universal confusions, questions, explorations, and discoveries as we grow up. Because of her ability to access our universal experiences, her books have long felt timeless: I was surprised to learn, as an adult, that Tales had been published a full four years before I was even born; she so convincingly related to my own experiences I was long convinced the book was contemporary, that Tales could only have appeared the year I read it, when I was in fourth grade. More amazing still is the revelation that the book's sequel, Superfudge, didn't appear until 1980, eight years after its predecessor, yet none of the characters had aged more than a few years and the sequel felt just as contemporary as the first, as though they had appeared back-to-back (which, incidentally, is how I read them). Most of her character-series (the Sally Freedman books, the chronicles of Fudge and his family, the saga of the Great One and the Pain) follow that pattern, some letting whole decades lapse between books. Yet every one of them feels new, familiar, contemporary, and, because of this, timeless.

Blume's fiction shares another magic, related to or perhaps even the cause of her timelessness--she writes with superb realism. We connect with her books because they are about us, our lives, the real world in which we live and fear and love. And it is this second quality that sometimes--thankfully--gets her into trouble. Some people feel Blume's fiction is too real, that it exposes children and teenagers to subjects they should not be exposed to (underwear, death, sex, religious doubt, etc.). The truth is, Blume is simply describing the reality in which children and teenagers already live; she is voicing the questions and doubts and fears and curiosities that children and teenagers are already longing to express, and in acting as a voice for them, Blume is helping them make sense of their world. "How can children possibly understand when no one tells them what's going on?" Blume asked toward the end of her speech. "They live in fear and confusion, and have to invent their own truths."

Blume's speech last night dealt with issues of censorship and intellectual freedom, but she spent most of her time focused on her own career as a writer. Brilliantly, she organized the speech into three "chapters," which followed her brief introduction explaining how she'd been invited and how nervous she was to be following previous Zolotow Lecturers Lois Lowry and Patricia MacLachlan (whom Blume called "Patty"). She also asked a question, which she waited till later to answer: are storytellers born or made? (She was careful to clarify, though, that in her view "storytelling and writing are not the same thing.")

The "chapters" of her speech-proper were all centered on fear, beginning with her own childhood fear of sharing her made-up stories. The closest she came to sharing her own fiction, she said, was a period in the fifth grade when she would have to give book reports in school. As a child, she had almost unlimited access to books--her parents never wanted to censor what she read or protect her from books other people felt she wasn't ready for, though her aunt did instill an almost religious reverence for the printed word, making Blume wash her tiny hands and display them for inspection, palms and backs and fingernails, before allowing the young girl to even touch a book. Her parents also frequently took her to the public library and let her spend hours reading from the shelves, anything she could reach and pull down to the floor where she sat. Consequently, she quickly read through everything available at her age level and began very early to read books well beyond her "appropriate" reading group. She described reading books like Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead at a very early age; even if she didn't fully understand what she was reading, she felt compelled to always have a book in hand, and even as she grew older would continue to read anything she could pull off the shelf. (Later, she related how so many of her family members, including her uncles, had died while she was growing up--"I spent my childhood in shiva," she said--and her mother had developed the habit of constantly knitting sweaters because, as Blume explained, "God wouldn't take her in the middle of a sleeve." Blume, who was attached to her father and worried about his safety, decided to read books in order to save his life; she became convinced that if she always was in the middle of a book, God wouldn't dare take her father--as though Blume's salvation could be passed along to her father. It was a touching moment.)

As a result, when Blume was in fifth grade, she knew she couldn't give a book report in class on anything she was currently reading because no one would understand the material she was reading--or, worse, everyone would think she was "weird." Instead, when book report days arrived, she would stand in front of the class and invent a book--title, author, and all--and spend her entire presentation expounding on the characters and themes of this imaginary creation. They were usually about horses, she said, because she had some idea that girls in her age group all liked horses (or were supposed to like horses), even though Blume herself was indifferent to horses.

Her second chapter dealt primarily with her discovery of fearlessness and her growth as a professional writer. And it was in this section that she revealed that, for her, storytellers are indeed born--that a true storyteller must have some innate ability and desperate need to tell stories. It's not a view I completely buy into, but it's not one I can much argue with, either, because I have certainly read people and met people I remain in awe of, people of whom, despite all my education and years analyzing the craft of writing, I continue to ask, "How did they do that?" I think this is perhaps why Blume made her early distinction between storytellers and writers, the implication being not only that writers can be made and that storytellers must be born, but also that some writers can study forever and never be storytellers and, conversely, that some storytellers can write forever and never be writers. This, I suppose, I might more readily agree with. Whatever the case, Blume clearly feels she is a storyteller, though she doesn't attach any pride to this label or suggest she is in any way an accomplished writer. She seems to claim her status as storyteller mostly by merit of her continual surprise at her own work--even she doesn't fully understand how she does what she does. "I'm not aware of where things come from," she says, referring not only to her story ideas but also the craft of her books, though this latter she is inclined to credit to her early editor and mentor, Dick Jackson. She described one of her early meetings, to discuss her book Then Again, Maybe I Won't, and despite her "professional" demeanor (she laughed that she had worn a yellow turtleneck with a plaid kilted skirt and go-go boots, because it made her feel "professional"), she claimed she was nervous through the whole meeting. Jackson kept asking her what her book was about, and she stammered through a very short list: "I don't know. It's about Tony, it's about his family...." For Blume, everything revolves around character and dialogue; she struggles with plot and loathes descriptive writing (a view I've written on recently). But Jackson wasn't after any of that. He didn't want to know whom the story was about, but what is was about. "A book has to be about something!" he told Blume. Finally, they began working on a list of things the book could be about--not themes, precisely ("I hate themes!" Blume said while slapping the podium), but ideas, issues, even physical objects that became central to the narrative. This, she claims, is how she learned to focus her writing.

Still, she seems suspicious of craft and relishes the "freedom" of pursuing ideas outside analysis and criticism, the ease and joy of writing that can occur when we don't have our educated self-editor on our shoulders. "It's great not knowing anything when you're starting out," she says. "I envy people that now." I can see her point, though I've recently been arguing against just this perspective with a friend of mine. I think the issue isn't one of education ruining a writer, but of how we engage that education and what we do with it. I agree that some people pursue an education in writing--or some people teach writing--only to the point of introducing us to our shoulder imps with their forked tongues and their little red pens. We get to the point in our writing where everything we do is wrong, or at least everything we do could be better, and for some reason--we get fed up and leave too early, or our teachers through laziness or ignorance choose to take us only so far--we never get past the critic, we never learn how to set aside the education and rediscover the joy. I maintain that studying craft is important--perhaps vital--for a working writer, but I also remain a fan of the axiom that we must learn the rules in order to know how best to break them. There must be a way to re-access the joy in writing without abandoning the craft. My friend is in the process of struggling with that now--I hope successfully, and her recent blog posts sound promising. Blume claims to have found her method in setting aside the writing entirely until a story builds up in her and she can't wait any longer to burst into her little writing room and sit down for her two hours a day. This, of course, is a luxury only an established writer can afford, but the result is the same--she finds a way to set aside whatever "rules" she's learned in her long career and re-access the pleasure and necessity of writing.

Her final "chapter" moved from her own fearlessness in writing to combating the fear-mongering of censorship (Blume herself has been labeled "the most banned author in America" on a number of occasions), and intellectual freedom has become one of Blume's most-championed causes, for which she has frequently been recognized. (She recently edited a collection of stories related to censorship, all written by banned authors; the collection is called Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers.) This is where I began this entry, and it's where she would want me to leave it, so I'll end by pointing out only two things: 1) Without ever revealing her candidate of choice (though it wouldn't be hard to guess), Blume made several references to the debate we were all missing last night (and which she encouraged us to watch online later) and to what she perceived as the importance of this year's election--"the most important election in my lifetime," she said--and she urged us to act with our votes to preserve intellectual freedom and encourage an attitude of hope for our nation and our nation's children. 2) She insisted, repeatedly and heatedly, that banning books creates ignorance and supporting intellectual freedom is a necessary component of any free society; we must, she said, work to preserve the First Amendment rights of our children as well as ourselves. Throughout this blog entry, I've placed links to various sites about intellectual freedom and Blume's own efforts to protect books and the children who want to read them; please click on those links and take up Blume's call to action.

Taboo: The answers

2008-09-28T01:18:00.001+04:00

Your grandma makes it--it's warm. You sleep with it.
This is a really old famous writer.
It's Friday! It's a candybar!
It's coming out of your nose.
- "Boogers! Snot!"
- Yes--another word for what's happening....
(hilarious laughter) Just skip it!
Thing in the sky. When you're little, you make fun of it.
People who can't have regular bikes use this.
Uh..... no.
When a little kid wets himself, he had a....
When you get owned, you get....
You're an animal in the jungle, and you have an abnormally large butt.
They're white. They're really annoying.

Also, most disturbing outburst, followed by most awkward silence, followed by funniest/most appropriate pass on a card:

A student turned over the word "Kiss" and shouted, "Oh, this is what you do with your girlfriend!"

His partner shouted, "Fight!"

The reader said, "No, the other thing!"

Everyone went silent and looked around at each other.

The reader said, "Come on, man!"

His partner gave a nervous laugh and said, "Uh, what do you want me to say here?"

The reader waved his hand and said, "No, not that! Before that!"

His partner said, "Oh! Kiss!"

The next card they turned up was "Sexism." They skipped it.

Taboo

2008-09-26T19:36:00.000+04:00

This week I have my students playing Taboo. The exercise serves a number of functions, actually: 1) It helps them form bonds within their newly-created workshop groups; 2) it allows them to practice description by finding alternate ways of describing things or ideas, since they have to avoid the obvious descriptive terms on the cards; 3) it teaches them tactics of audience analysis, since they have to make sure their teammates can understand their alternate descriptions; 4) it gives them bonus points on their workshop grades; and 5) it's fun.

But the best part of today is that I get to walk around the room and hear some fascinating descriptions, sometimes depressing ("This is what you do on Friday nights"--"Get drunk!"; "When you've been drinking, you're eyes look..."--"Bloodshot!"), but sometimes hilarious. In fact, some of the things I overhear, whether in context or out of context, struck me as so funny I've started keeping track, and I'll share them here (watch for updates throughout the day).

For fun, I'm going to number these and leave the item being described blank. Anyone reading this, feel free to guess what my students are after here [NEW CLUES--6-8] [and EVEN MORE new clues--9-12]:

1. Your grandma makes it--it's warm. You sleep with it.
2. This is a really old famous writer.
3. It's Friday! It's a candybar!
4. It's coming out of your nose.
"Boogers! Snot!"
Yes--another word for what's happening....
5. (hilarious laughter) Just skip it!
6. Thing in the sky. When you're little, you make fun of it.
7. People who can't have regular bikes use this.
8. Uh..... no.
9. When a little kid wets himself, he had a....
10. When you get owned, you get....
11. You're an animal in the jungle, and you have an abnormally large butt.
12. They're white. They're really annoying.

The most-sexist-clue award: "It's a chick who's at a game." Answer: Cheerleader.

And, strangest outburst: "You are a..." Answer (immediate--not even a pause): "Badger!" They were going for "teenager," but we are in Wisconsin, the Badger State.

I'm watching The Watchmen, that's who!

2008-09-21T04:44:00.001+04:00

Thanks to a generous loan from a former student/current fraternity advisee, I'm reading The Watchmen. I'd long heard of the book, but back in the apex of my high-school comic nerdism, my tastes tended more toward the X-Men, a healthy dose of Spidey and the Punisher, and a handful of mainstream DarkHorse titles (if there was such a thing back then). I wasn't terribly picky in what I read, but my one fast rule back then was that if DC published it, I wasn't interested. (Alas--I had learned from bad childhood experiences to equate DC with cheap Superman and Batman runs in which the heros pontificated in long strings of spoken exposition, which even then felt horribly false to me.) Consequently, I missed out on the genius of Alan Moore (and Frank Miller, for that matter), and I am reading The Watchmen now for the first time.

Initially, I'd planned to pick it up only because the movie is due in theaters this coming spring, and I like to read the books ahead of the movies when I can (which is the main reason I subjected myself to the Twilight series this summer). But since deciding I needed to read The Watchmen, I've begun studying graphic narrative and reading more graphic novels (I finished the initial ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman this summer as well) in an effort to learn more about the medium and the genre--because I suspect it is both, and more--as I set out to write my own graphic novel. In my studies, I've seen Alan Moore's name come up repeatedly, and though I was already familiar with his stature thanks to works like V for Vendetta, From Hell, and his important additions to the Batman mythos, the book most people talk about is The Watchmen. Except they never actually talk about it--they mention Moore himself off-handedly, almost as a given, the way we might mention Shakespeare or Austen, yet they always write The Watchmen in a whisper, as though they're all afraid to inadvertantly disrespect scripture. And that seems to be the way most serious comics writers and scholars and critics approach The Watchmen, as the Bible of graphic novels. (Or, perhaps, the "New Testament" to the power of the comics medium, the "Old Testament" being Will Eisner's The Spirit, a film version of which is also due in theaters soon, this time directed by comics legend Frank Miller.)

I am barely a fourth of the way into the novel, but already I see why it is so revered. I cannot yet comment on the intricacies of the story--of the plotting and the structure as a whole--though I am already picking up on subtlties of visual structure that astound me. But even only this short distance into the story, I am amazed--awed is not too strong a word, I think--at the sheer scope of Moore's storytelling prowess, particularly as regards his understanding of character and of symbolism--which, in the comics medium, is somehow textual and visual simultaneously. Moore is famous for his angry disavowal of any film versions of his work: he insists that the comics medium is unique to the degree that no other medium, even film, can possibly accomplish what he can do in a graphic novel. I have long been prepared to disagree with him, and I am still looking forward to the film adaptation of The Watchmen, but reading this novel now, I'm beginning to see his point. And I am beginning to understand for the first time the full possibilities of the comics form, which excites me for my own writing so much that I'm hoping to assign comics to my own creative writing students, not because I can teach the form but because I am so thrilled at the potential for it and want desperately to see what students would do with it.

Passive voice

2008-09-17T17:18:00.000+04:00

I don't lecture on passive voice with the same frequency or fervor as I did back when I taught technical/professional writing, but it's still a sticking point for me, and I like to point it out when I see it. My favorite example remains the Reagan line during the Iran Contras of the `80s: "Mistakes were made." By whom were those mistakes made, Ronnie? What a "clever" way to deflect blame! Why Bill Clinton didn't use the passive voice is beyond me--how much news coverage might we have been spared (yep--passive voice deflecting blame here, too) had he simply told us, "Sex was not had with that woman." Still, I have discovered a resurgence of the line in recent politics: Three years ago, expressing his frustration with the Bush administration's non-response to the Katrina disaster, Sen. Trent Lott told the press that "mistakes are being made" (Lott is a Republican and, angry as he was over the tragedies unfolding in his home state--his own house was destroyed by the hurricane--he was understandably reluctant to openly blame his fellow Republicans for the fiasco). And more recently, in an interview with Charlie Gibson, vice-presidential hopeful Gov. Sarah Palin explained away the military mess in Iraq and Afghanistan with the old line, "Mistakes were made."

Today, I was reading an article about hiring Amish contractors, and I discovered a convenient example of the kinds of misinformation and obscurity passive voice can create. In the article, the author extols the benefits of Amish craftsmanship and the Amish work ethic, but she follows this with a caution about the "special challenges" associated with Amish contracting:

"Imagine trying to keep in touch with a contractor who doesn't own a phone--most are forbidden to have one at home. They also aren't allowed to drive, so they need a driver or other means to get to the job site."

Most Amish "are forbidden" by whom to own a phone? The Amish "aren't allowed to drive" according to what? My problem with the passive voice here is that it implies a kind of authoritarian moral structure in which individuals or even religious texts are dictating the lifestyles of the Amish. And this simply is not true.

The answer to these questions is that those Amish who refuse phones or cars forbid themselves (or, I suppose, each other) these technological luxuries. And even this is dependent not on religious law or even widespread custom, but on individual communities. Each Amish community revolves around the Ordnung, a word referring both to the community itself and to the system of ethics and rules governing that community. Each Amish community gathers in regular meetings, presided over by community elders, and decide in an essentially democratic process what sorts of ethical and moral guidelines they would collectively like to hold each other responsible for. And most Amish elect to forgo technological luxuries because they view such luxuries as distractions from a simple, contemplative religious life. I like to refer to the Amish as secular monks, communities who choose to live highly spiritual lives focused almost exclusively on their faith and their God. For the Amish, tilling the fields and washing the linen and eating dinner all become a part of their regular religious experience; mentally, they are always "in church."

The use of the passive voice in the article confuses this important feature of Amish life. The author has made it sound like the Amish live restrictive, oppressive lives dominated by antiquated laws that originated and continue to exist outside the group or the individual. In fact, the opposite is true: the Amish choose to live their lives within the spiritual liberty of work and family, free from the distractions of our modern "English" lifestyles. The passive voice takes that away from them; I am writing this in an effort to let them have their freedom--and to correct the mistakes that were made in the article.

Dissertation vs. Novel

2008-09-11T22:11:00.000+04:00

Today (yes, it took that long--it's been nearly a year), the bound copies of my dissertation arrived in the mail. It's an odd thing to see, this document long finished here anew in my hands, in a solid form suggesting something like legitimacy. In some ways, I dread looking through it--over the past year, while revising portions of the novel and revisiting sections of the scholarly preface, I have found many dozens of typos and whole paragraphs, even chapters I'd like to significantly rework--and since this new printed form has such an air of finality about it, it makes that dread all the worse. Still, I've been browsing the print version of the preface just now, and it turns out this isn't half so bad as I thought it was. Maybe it's simply because it is in print and appears authoritative for that: Also a year ago, around the time I was finishing this dissertation, I quoted in this blog a line from Dylan Thomas: "I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear bad with conviction."

Which might explain the joy I get from the second document to arrive today. In placing my order for bound dissertations, I selected several copies in the traditional large, hardbound versions, as this is what those family members who'll receive them requested. My wife, too, demanded a large hardback version for our shelves, and of course she's right--it will look quite nice sitting next to our masters theses and her undergraduate thesis. But on a whim, I also ordered a single copy in paper, run in reduction on smaller pages so it looks like a trade paperback. That's the only difference really, but when I took to flipping through it this afternoon, I discovered it does indeed look quite like a published novel, and seeing it in that form has allowed me (rather giddily) to excuse all sorts of flaws and faults in the writing and start imagining it as a novel again.

I'm in the middle of adapting that story into a graphic novel, which has been an education in economy, in plot development, and in visual imagery (to say nothing of visual narrative and the totally new possibilities available in so different a format), but I'm beginning to wonder if I can take what revisions I've made and re-adapt them to the old novel format. (One of my earliest writing mentors used to compress his novels by rewriting them as screenplays and to develop his film characters by writing them into novels; I find myself in a similar process with this novel-to-comics endeavor.) I'm starting to think this novel might not be as hackneyed as I'd first considered it. And I might just shop this thing around in both forms.

Lost won; Fringe is frayed: a study of character vs. plot

2008-09-10T16:36:00.000+04:00

Okay, lame title for a comparison of JJ Abrams series.

For the past several weeks I've been embroiled in an on-and-off argument with a friend of mine. It relates to how we define quality writing and how we use the terms "literary" and "genre," among other things. (I use "literary" in a positive way and until recently had been using "genre" derogatorily; she extols the virtues of "genre" and uses "literary" derogatorily, though she also considers "literary" as a kind of genre itself. This latter point I cannot disagree with and I've come to shift terms, describing the schlock I once called "genre" as "Wal-Mart fiction" or "airport novels.")

One of the issues we've hit on in our debate is the importance of plot versus the importance of character. And last night, I stumbled across an interesting comparison of the two approaches: I watched the pilot episode of Fringe, the new JJ Abrams series on Fox, and found myself comparing it to Abrams's creation Lost on ABC. Fringe, I would argue, is a plot-driven series (or, at least, the pilot was, and from what I saw of the series teaser and from what I've read in reviews, the rest of the series follows that formula). Lost, my friend and I have often agreed, is character-driven.

But, to return for a moment to the argument of craft and writing: My friend (who is finishing a PhD in creative writing from the same program I earned my degree from) has observed that most writing teachers avoid teaching or even refuse to teach plot. She contends that some people choose not to teach plot because they fail to understand plot beyond its basic elements. But I have to wonder if no one teaches more than the basics of plot because there is no more beyond the basics. Plot, in my experience, is a basic element, quickly understood and mimicked. I suppose one might look for ways to go about constructing complexity in plots, strategies for creating intricate patterns of action (I do--it's an area I continue to work on, usually without much success), but then we'd be teaching formula, which is a very different sort of writing, and it can be found more easily and more appropriately in books on the subject than it could in a classroom.

I was glad to stumble across a similar idea in the comments of Robin McKinley, a sometimes-YA author whom many would probably label a "genre" writer, though I want to argue she manages to transcend the trappings of genre and write with a literary attention to art. I've only read the one book so far, her fascinating vampire/sci-fi novel Sunshine, but the writing was good enough that I plan to read more. I also looked her up to see what she has to say about the craft, and I discovered a handful of comments in her FAQs online.

McKinley professes to be an inspiration writer, claiming her stories "come to her" or "happen to her" as though through a muse; she barely claims ownership of her own work. But that doesn't prevent her from being aware of her process and the influence she has over the stories that happen to her. She does acknowledge what my friend is seeking--the need for instruction in how to construct plots: "One of the trickiest bits about writing a story is getting the connections to look inevitable," she writes in one section of her FAQ. "When I've managed to put a scene in the wrong place, it's not merely a question of putting it in the right place; I have to rewrite all the connections too — including checking all other scenes in the vicinity to make sure there aren't references to the newly-moved scene in its old location." But she claims to have learned how to accomplish this from exactly the sources I'd have expected: not in a classroom but in books.

You can also learn a lot by sheer plagiarism, so long as you recognise that that is what it is and that it's only a writing exercise. I wrote an awful lot of very bad Tolkien pastiche when I was younger — I didn't realise what I was doing at first, but even when I began to, later on, I could see that I was learning a lot about characterisation and plot development, how you get people from one place to another, how much background you need, how to slip in information your story is going to need later, how to lay a good ambush for the innocent reader — and so I kept on with it, when I couldn't think of any stories of my own.

I love McKinley's comments because (and I suspect this is true for most writers) they sound familiar to me. I was writing great plots when I was 14 years old. Really fascinating, action-packed narratives, stories about drug dealers and alien races and genetic experiments gone wrong. But they were cartoony, with broad outlines and only four colors. I needed the attention to detail and the nuances of a nearly psychological focus on character to make my fiction live, to make it real. I'll grant you, I'd have liked more concrete suggestions on how to go back and recombine those things, but then, I don't believe it's always necessary. John Irving does--he says fiction begins and ends with plot, and to hell with anyone who says otherwise. But I disagree. I can pick up a textbook on natural science and read about the formation of the planet, and it'll be rife with plot--the world is full of conflict and action and resolution and even narrative arcs, and we don't need people to create those. But it's not story--it's science.

Alternatively, you can drop a character in an empty white room and take away all the doors and windows, and you can still have a compelling and fascinating story. There is no plot at all--nothing to accomplish, no physical action--but there's plenty of character, and I say that's where fiction begins and ends. I'm oversimplifying, I know--to simply drop in a character and describe their situation and environment is, at best, a sketch, so if the fiction is to be successful, the plot will develop from the character, and our lonely soul in the white room will slowly go mad trying to escape or else become enlightened in the acceptance of their fate, and this would be the plot. (The film Johnny Got His Gun--source text for Metallica's epic "One"--deals with an even better scenario, in which a man is hit by a mortar shell and winds up with both arms and both legs amputated, blinded by the flash and deafened by the roar of impact, and his spine severed in such a way that he's lost all sense of touch or taste or smell. He is literally left as only a mind, alone in the dark, deprived of everything--including "plot." And yet, from this, we receive narrative.) But my point is, if we write a plot and then try to place characters into it, we have a terribly difficult time making those characters believable or interesting, whereas if we write a character and then see what happens to them, the sky's the limit plotwise and we might also stumble upon art. This, I would argue, is the mode of probably 85%, maybe 90% of all contemporary literary art.

Anne Lamott agrees, I'm happy to say. In her book Bird by Bird--a simple text on writing, famous for its often-anthologized chapter "Shitty First Drafts"--she writes a chapter on "Plot":

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.

Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters.

Which brings me back to JJ Abrams.

My friend and I are both Lost fans. (I would say "fanatics," but I've read some of the Lostpedia, and I know how obsessive the real fanatics can be, so I won't diminish their devotion to the show by claiming to be one of them.) We both love the show for similar reasons, and when we both first began geeking out over Lost, we mentioned how terrifically character-driven the show is. I've read interviews with Abrams and the other creators expressing exactly this intent: that the show was intended as a study of characters, both of individual characters and of their interactions with each other. Whatever plot developed (and until recently the writers freely admitted that there was no plot--they were just making things up as they went), the story was directly dependent on the nature of the characters. The pilot episode of Lost begins with a close-up on Jack's eye precisely to illustrate that whatever we're about to see is going to be through Jack's experience, from his perspective, focused (if you'll excuse the pun) on Jack's character. And, true to form, most of the first-season episodes begin in the same way--a close-up on a character's eyes to hint at that episode's focus on that character. The show dropped the visual device eventually, but with the exception of a few season-three missteps, it has never abandoned its focus on character. Yet it also boasts some of the most complex plotting in the history of television, and it does this not through any speculative sci-fi formulas but through following the natural developments and possible interactions (a Buddhist would say interdependence) of its characters.

Last night's pilot for Fringe, co-created by Abrams, lost all that magic and settled instead for the coincidences, conveniences, and forced developments of a plot-driven narrative. Like Lost, it begins with a plane crash, and like Lost, it relies on some vast underlying conspiracy and strange, inexplicable events to set up the situations in which the characters exist. But the characters are never characters. They're "Sort of Smart but Really Just Lucky FBI Agent," "FBI Agent's Lover Who Is Also An Agent," "Creepy Boss Who Seems At First to Be A Jerk But Who Really Has a Secret Agenda," "Mad Scientist" (I'm not making this up--it gets that cliche), "Mad Scientist's Brilliant But Edgy Son," and, of course, "The Villain." We're never expected to question these characters or really even care about them--we begin the story with "an incident" on a plane (all shock and horror, but not much substance), which thrusts our agents into the plot without more than a 30-second introduction, and the "action" (if you can call it that) railroads us through the rest of the episode. There is no concern on the part of the writers for who these people are, why they do what they do, what the implications are for them. They are tools in the story.

This is why Fringe failed for me as a show, and it serves as an interesting example of my problem with formulaic, plot-driven narrative as opposed to the introspective, character-driven narrative exemplified by Lost. Even though they're from the same creator.

An assignment for me

2008-09-09T18:19:00.000+04:00

My students are busily typing away at an assignment I've given them. Which surprises me. Ordinarily, when I bring my classes to a computer lab, I have to all but beat students away from IM, Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other distractions I, too, would ordinarily have open in side windows. But either they're getting better at hiding their in-class extracurricular activities, or they're genuinely interested in getting some writing done. Better in class than at home, which is why I'm offering them the opportunity in the first place.

But it creates a kind of onus, I think, that I should write alongside them, and so here I am.

Worse, I once joked that I should tackle their assignments in order to set an example, and though I'm reluctant to do so while they're still working on a piece (I wouldn't want anyone to feel even subconsciously beholden to imitate me), I do believe in modeling as an educational tool. The good news: They've already turned in a much shorter version of this same assignment, so I will tackle it.

The assignment: To write a short credo about my views related to community. (I'm basing these assignments on suggestions from curriculum offered by the This I Believe series on NPR, but I've tailored it to my particular classroom project.)

Yesterday, I was writing in my online classroom site about the origins of the word community, because a student had made some guesses about the etymology and the intentions of "the founder of the word community." I promised I'd look into it, because I'm a geek and enjoy such investigations, and I did so that very evening. I discovered (thank you, OED) that the word stems from an early Latin noun communis, an abstraction meaning "fellowship, community of relations or feelings."

But this word in turn developed from the Latin roots that form our contemporary word "common." There are differing theories about how these roots originally combined, but I prefer the combination of com ("together") and munis ("bound" or "under obligation"), because it reinforces my belief that a community holds certain communal or social obligations, whether the whole is somehow obligated to assist its individual members or each of the members is obligated to assist the whole (why not both?).

And this is what I believe about community: that it is a group of people who, for whatever reason (and these are myriad) come together for mutual support and compassion, who understand each other to the best of their capacity and seek to help each other for the common good.

Or, this is what it should be.

"The Bullet Surprise," courtesy of "beta amphetamine"

2008-09-04T07:56:00.000+04:00

My friend Beth Ann Fennelly has a new book of of poetry out, Unmentionables, which I've been salivating for since I finished her nonfiction book Great with Child a year ago. I haven't ordered it yet, but I've been thinking about the book, so to whet my yearning I've picked up an old favorite, her book Tender Hooks, to browse the poems there. If "browse" is possible--it's accidentally apt, her title, because while there's nothing "tender" about her poems (they are sweet, but sweet the way of baker's chocolate, sharp and honest and un-sugared), they do tend to reel me into them, to snare me so I have little choice but to read the next poem, and the next poem, and the next. She's a hell of an angler, Beth Ann.

Anyway, in reading the next poem tonight, I found all over again a section that reminded me that this is my first week back in the classroom, teaching--what else?--freshman comp. It's the second section of her disjointed but delicious poem "A Study of Writing Habits":

2. It's a Doggy-Dog World

for poets who grow up to be comp teachers
because our spelling is recked forever
so are our idioms and old wise tales

a student writes of the novel
that won "the Bullet Surprise"
it drives her "out of my mime"

It's good to keep a sense of humor
if your name sounds like "beta amphetamine"
and you find yourself thinking
when you're supposed to be sleeping
a bullet surprise would be fine

***

This afternoon, before I indulged in a Beth Ann Fennelly fix, I finished reading Robin McKinley's Sunshine, a fascinating and well-written sci-fi/vampire novel. I liked her prose and her imagination enough to look her up online (my wife's a HUGE fan, but I'm new to McKinley), and as I was browsing her FAQs, I found a neat little paragraph about what Anne Lamott famously calls "shitty first drafts":

And you don't have to think you've got it all right and perfect to be proud of what you've done. If you come to the end of a story or any piece of writing you've sweated and bled over, and you can look at it and say, I've done the best I know how to do, and really, it's not at all bad — then you've done very well indeed. Give yourself a pat on the back — and then get on with the next story, the next thing.

If any of my students are reading this right now--this is what I mean by permission to screw up, permission to revise, and permission to move on.

New journey, no map

2008-09-02T18:20:00.000+04:00

I've been neglecting this blog nearly all summer. That doesn't mean I've been neglecting my writing, of course: I've written reviews of the books I've read, I've typed up my journals from my trip to Scotland (and written a 20,000-word photodocumentary of the trip for friends and family), I've worked on stories and even started adapting my novel into a graphic novel. And since this blog is, presumably, for my students, I suppose I can excuse myself for writing elsewhere these past few months. But then, when I started this last September, I claimed I wanted to demonstrate writing practice, and when I end each academic year in the spring, I send my students away with the reminder that writing doesn't adhere to a calendar, so I also suppose, if I'm being honest, that I ought to extend this visible means of writing practice into the summer months myself. But I chose to write elsewhere.

So be it.

I'm back now, is all I know--here to begin anew, to rediscover Natalie Goldberg's "beginner's mind," to remember that "each time [I sit down to write] is a new journey with no maps." After a long and meandering hiatus, here I've wandered into this blog again. So I write on.

Mapless or not, I've been thinking of setting myself certain goals this semester, at least related to this blog. So, for myself, here's what I hope to do:

I'll try to post at least once a week.
I'll try to keep tabs on the writing I'm doing, even if I'm not doing that writing here.
I'll occasionally comment on the teaching craft, perhaps as a means of developing an idea I've had for a book on teaching.
And, because I enjoy the stupid things, I'll keep tossing in any meme I find related to reading or writing or creativity in general, because, well, why not.

At least, that's the plan. But now that I've made the map, I'll go ahead and throw it away, because frankly, I often find wandering more fruitful, when I have the time to do so.

Books meme

2008-06-27T01:21:00.000+04:00

How can I resist? Some friends of mine in another blog site have been passing this around, and though it's nothing new, I can't help but participate:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Strike out the ones you thought SUCKED.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible (also, may I please add The Dhamapada? the Tao Te Ching? the Bhagavad-Gita? the Qur'an, which, though I've not yet finished it, is so far glorious?)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of the plays)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I need to re-read it)

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen (Why are the Austens separate?)

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (how is this distinct from the entire series?--see #33)

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [I'm proud I haven't read this!]

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (I've forgotten most of it--I should read it again)

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold--part of my dissertation!

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte's Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (should I really admit to having read this? oh well--it was almost part of my dissertation, but I found a way to get rid of it)

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (are you reading this, Grey!?!?!)

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery--and in French, no less!

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (I started it; I need to finish it)

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (again, how is this distinct from the complete works?--see #15)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My eyes, they are strained

2008-05-13T21:29:00.000+04:00

I've been going through my students' online discussion posts this semester, looking at the statistics, and I think I'm about ready to collapse.

So far this semester, I've written 276 discussion posts. Many of them are short replies to questions or comments on other posts, but several have been lengthy essays. But that's not the part that hurts my brain.

I have also read 1,218 posts this semester.

Of those, a full 999 were formal response essays, and while the average of all my classes was well below the required 600 words per essay, the posts did average around 400 words a pop, which is roughly a single typed page, double-spaced. That means, had I been reading these on paper, as if my students had turned them in during class, I'd have read almost 1,000 pages this semester.

And that's only counting response essays. It doesn't count the slew of questions, workshop group discussions, and pop-culture commentary my students also posted. It also doesn't count their formal research papers.

If I count only the papers I received and read, and I assume an average of 3 pages per short paper and 8 pages per long paper (which is about what the averages were), I also read 1,124 pages of research.

And then there were my students' research portfolios, full of abstracts and outlines and bibliographies and notes.

And their e-mails, sometimes as many as a dozen a day.

On top of all that, I also judged our campus Creative Writing contest, which added another 400 pages or so of reading, and I've been working with a student creative writing group (though I admit, I don't always find time to read all their work), which has added another few dozen pages.

With all this, somehow I've managed to also stay on top of my New Yorkers, half my Shambhala Suns, and a few of my issues of One Story; squeeze in three books this semester; and regularly read several blogs and news articles, as well as every word of every issue of our student newspaper.

No wonder I've finally had to start wearing reading glasses once in a while.

Typos

2008-05-04T22:31:00.000+04:00

I ought to put this on a stamp and keep it on my desk, so I can just slap it on a paper whenever I find cause:

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing."
~ Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 7-3-05

(This, courtesy of my dad. Was he trying to tell me something?)

Happy Passover!

2008-04-19T22:47:00.000+04:00

Happy Passover (Hebrew: Pesach or Pesakh)!

National Nonviolence Week

2008-04-16T09:35:00.000+04:00

Please visit this site. If you have a MySpace page, consider joining the group.

Happy Easter!

2008-03-23T18:09:00.000+04:00

Catholic, Orthodox (Coptic, Greek, and Russian), and Lutheran views (which I've included for regional reasons and because Lutherism is one of the earliest--perhaps the earliest--of the Protestant denominations). If I've left out a doctrinal view you prefer, feel free to post it in a reply--I'd love to see some other beliefs.

Germanic/Pagan traditions

San Francisco and Pop Culture

2008-03-20T05:06:00.000+04:00

As I did in New York, I decided to write blog entries about my conference in San Francisco, so my students can see what I'm up to at these conferences (this one over Spring Break no less!). But this time around, my conference hotel is not offering free wireless, so I'm having to write these offline and post them later. Still, I'm dating them retroactively, so they'll still reflect the intended date of the post.

Flying into San Francisco, I was more taken by the West Coast mountain-and-Bay scenery than I thought I would be, particularly with the sun high overhead but the Bay and low hills thick with gauzy fog. On the ground, I found the warm, breezy hills and meandering roads relaxing, the sight of all those thick evergreens and swaying palms oddly comforting, even as I realized that I was recognizing them only from film and television: I had been coddled and nursed by Hollywood, and now felt almost infantile in the presence of California. It was like the Chili Peppers song internalized, brought into an almost religious reality. Perhaps it was the BART subway train we rode from the airport to the hotel--it was hands-down the cleanest, most comfortable, most efficient rail system I’ve ridden so far; the seats are larger and softer than those on our plane from Madison!

Our hotel is downtown, in the center of a shopping and arts district that is home to what seem like hundreds of what my friend David Horsley calls “alleywalkers.” (I remain in the habit of calling them “homeless,” but in a personal essay titled “The Alleywalker,” Horsley argues that for many people who live on the street, a home is the least important of the things they are “less.” Therefore, he chooses to call them “alleywalkers,” a better descriptive of their lifestyles.) I’m used to encountering alleywalkers in my travels--I’ve become something of a magnet for them, often chatting with them for blocks as I walk to a restaurant or a reception or a bar and they follow, hoping without begging that I’ll hand them some change (which I often do, in exchange for the conversation). In Atlanta last spring, I actually followed a man more than a mile into the depths of back-alley Atlanta; he’d asked me to put him up for the night in a shelter, and rather than simply hand him the money, I chose to walk with him and see the shelter myself, in part out of curiosity, in part out of suspicion (I didn’t know what he’d really do with my money), and in part out of simple human companionship. He told me about his children in Florida, about his struggles to find work without a local permanent address, about his life on the street. When a gang of shadowy figures began crawling from beneath a distant overpass and making their way toward us, he stopped me and explained that we were entering a part of town dangerous for white people (he used the word “Caucasian”; he was African-American), and that on second thought, he’d feel better walking me back to my part of town. He didn’t ask for any money. I gave it to him anyway, along with my leftover Indian dinner, and he hugged me and offered again to walk me back, but I waved him off and wished him well.

Here in San Francisco, the alleywalkers are different, or at least, more open. I’ve seen more in just these several blocks than I have in all the other cities I’ve visited combined. Having so many in such close proximity, many camped out in front of the swanky downtown hotels and the pricey shopping centers hoping to catch wealthy tourists, I’ve had the opportunity to make some observations I had long assumed from pop-culture presentations of the homeless but had never fully encountered before. Here, many of the homeless have gathered into tight communities, small traveling congregations of friends and fellow beggars. Some of the lone wanderers carry signs and sit silent, as though in meditation or stoic repose; others try to sell trinkets made from found paper clips or woven bits of discarded thread, or hand out free community newspapers in hopes of a donation; others simply sleep, an empty Starbucks cup held loose in their hands. But the congregations conspire, they arrange themselves in lines to beg collectively or vote on representatives to follow shoppers and tourists, debate the amount to be begged and then allot the money they collect, like a church charity plate in reverse. As my wife and I walked down Market Street to the city’s public library--a regular pilgrimage in all new cities we visit--I overheard such a conversation, a stooped, bearded man in a dirty denim jacket explaining to his colleagues that he needed five dollars, the rest electing him to track down the money (and telling him he needed to get more than five dollars if he expected his share), at which point he tucked away the capless prescription bottle he’d been holding, stuck his long-reused plastic water bottle under one arm, and followed us across two streets and half a block, shuffling in a limp, rambling a barely coherent but clearly practiced narrative in hopes of getting our change.

I find such encounters difficult. The truth is, I often have some change to spare, and if I can do so safely, I’m always willing to offer a bit of help. But here, the alleywalker population is so dense that I can’t donate funds without revealing the money I have on hand, and--excuse though this may be--I worry about giving some money to some people while excluding the rest, and I certainly can’t afford to help out everyone. So I choose to help no one, often explaining--falsely--that I’d love to help out but I have no change. Everyone I’ve encountered seems to accept this, not as truth but as the code that it is: I have some change, but I don’t have enough, and I’m not going to give. No one has so far seemed offended. It’s just a part of the culture, a part of the dialogue of this place. It’s been an education for me.

The other thing I’ve encountered here, not for the first time but in the most open ways and in the greatest numbers, has been vocal activism of various sorts. On our way to the library, my wife and I watched the set-up for an anti-war protest we’d heard announced on the previous night’s news. On our way back, we strolled through an open market of vegetables, baked goods, and falafel vendors, and we wandered into the United Nations Plaza, where I met a young Tibetan woman handing out flyers about the Olympic torch and it sole stop in the US (in San Francisco), a Free Tibet tote slung over her shoulder and a quiet sadness on her lips, in her eyes. (I thanked her when I took the flyer then, once I saw what the flyer was, I turned and said, “Thank you very much!” but she’d already gone, gently pushing flyers at the crowd behind us.) When we got closer to our hotel, we got stopped by a small crowd of people, many with their cameras and cell phones raised to snap pictures. I cast about, unsure what was happening, but then I remembered--it was the protest, quieter than I’d expected because it was less angry march and more guerrilla theatre. On one side of the small square, a group of people in fake fatigues held cardboard machine guns aimed at hooded “prisoners” like the ones we held at Abu Ghraib or that we currently hold at Guantanamo or other “secret” prisons. In another corner, a man in a fishing vest displayed a Ken-doll Bush hung in effigy from a flower-wrapped fishing pole; behind him, signs were arranged like a bouquet in a large white bucket, with a note to “Return signs here.” Across the street, arrayed in front of Bloomingdale’s as though protecting the shoppers, a line of twenty police officers sat on blue-and-black dirt bikes like a street gang or a motocross team. Down an alley half a block away was a large police bus prepared to cart away arrested protesters.

Happy St. Patty's Day!

2008-03-17T20:38:00.000+04:00

St. Patrick

(Plus, some fact vs. fiction.

Tibet

2008-03-15T21:50:00.000+04:00

I'm in Chicago, working on my novel and some short stories and preparing for my reading at PCA/ACA next week while my wife attends an important Intellectual Freedom committee meeting with ALA. I plan to post about my pop-culture conference in San Fransisco, so I had intended to spend this week posting a preview of sorts, writing about my revision process and what I am doing to prepare for my presentation.

Instead, I find myself in tears.

I don't like using this blog as a political platform, in part because I allow my students to read it and I don't like propagating my political beliefs via this blog any more than I would do in my classrooms; I believe both should be open and available to the free exchange of ideas, which requires if not my silence then at least some semblance of my neutrality.

But I can remain neither silent nor neutral on this issue, and I feel I must share my thoughts here as I did when writing about similar anti-protest crackdowns in Burma just a few months ago.

For those readers--especially my students--who are unfamiliar with this news I'm referring to, here are some links:

I was (slightly) relieved to read yesterday that Prince Charles is planning to boycott the Beijing Olympics in protest over China's Tibet policies--and that he'd announced that decision before the demonstrations. Talk of boycotting the Olympics is spreading, and I'd like more world leaders to step forward in this form of protest, because, as the Olympic Games are designed to represent the possibilities of human cooperation and friendly competition, it seems a travesty that this Olympiad's events are taking place in so disharmonious a nation as China. If ever we needed a better demonstration of that travesty, the tragedies unfolding during these brave Tibetan protests are it.

Yet I am dismayed that the situation in Tibet has reached this point. (Full disclosure: I am a practicing--if poor--Buddhist of the Tibetan Mahayana tradition, and, having attended teachings from His Holiness and intending to attend more this summer, I consider myself one of his millions of students.) His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, who is the exiled but beloved leader of the Tibetan people, has long called for what he calls the "Middle-Way approach," resisting these sorts of violent protests and insisting on dialogue and compromise. While the Chinese government has for years claimed the Dalai Lama is a "separatist" causing unrest in the interest of Tibetan independence, His Holiness has remained steadfast in his insistence that he only wants autonomy within and with cooperation with the broader Chinese government system, in the interest not of preserving Tibetan nationalism or Independence but of preserving Tibetan religious beliefs and Tibetan culture (which the Chinese are systematically trying to stamp out). In his speeches on the situation in Tibet, His Holiness has consistently called for patience and compassion, which has frustrated a lot of young Tibetans who find patience difficult and resent the Dalai Lama's "passive" (he would say "pacifist") approach, and these riots, I fear, are the result of those young Tibetans' pent-up frustrations bursting loose. This is not what the Dalai Lama wants, and it is not in the best interest of the Tibetan people.

Nevertheless, now that the violence has erupted, I think we need to make what good of it we can by calling attention to the frustrations of Tibetans and to the brutality of Chinese policy regarding Tibet. Through that, I hope, we can most quickly restore peace and begin the more productive process of restoring Tibetan autonomy and Tibetan cooperation with China. But to do this, we cannot relax our attention. So please, anyone reading this, try to stay on top of this story, these events, this long-standing political situation, and speak out--call or write our own government, which only several months ago awarded the Dalai Lama a special medal of recognition, and demand that we increase our pressure on China to show restraint in their dealings with Tibet and, ultimately, to work with the Dalai Lama to find the most beneficial compromise for everyone.

In the meantime, here is the official statement from His Holiness the Dalai Lama: http://www.tibet.net/en/ohhdl/statements/10march/2008.html.

Good-bye, New York

2008-02-04T00:19:00.000+04:00

Good-bye, Manhattan.

Good-bye, Hilton New York. Good-bye Best Western President.

Good-bye, Chrysler Building. Say hi to the others--I’ll catch them next time.

Good-bye, Broadway. Good-bye 5th Avenue. Good-bye 59th Street. Good-bye corner of Grove and Benton--what great Friends you made.

So long, Times Square. You’re a little flashy, but I like you anyway.

Good-bye, $5 silk pashminas, $5 hats, those wrinkled old paperbacks arranged on the folding table next to the old Dylan albums.

Good-bye, King-Kong-sized M&M. I loved how you aped that movie in your gargantuan ads. While I’m gone: no monkey business up there.

See you around, Radio City Music Hall, Ed Sullivan Theater, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library.

Good-bye, Patience and Fortitude.

Hey, Bryant Park: thanks for being so cool.

See you later, NY Giants. Good luck this afternoon.

Ciao, all you little pizza joints. Tell Starbucks to piss off.

Good-bye, New York cabbies, city buses, and grubby old subway trains. You have charms all your own, and you treated me well.

At ease, mounted police. You did a great job.

All the best, NYFD. It was a pleasure abutting your firehouse. This city is proud as hell of you all, and it shows.

Good-bye, frail old black woman in the puffy pink coat who only wanted quarters for the bus. I hope it was enough, and God bless you too.

Good-bye, people singing out loud to the music on their iPods; good-bye street musicians; good-bye that guy in the subway who only knew one chord and just kept strumming it over and over like a mantra, like a prayer for spare change.

Great show, Hunting and Gathering; I have new respect for off-Broadway theatre.

Good seeing you, Isaac Byrne. Glad to reconnect--you’re one of the coolest freakin’ people I know.

So long, The Village. Nice to meet you, Four Faced Liar.

Good luck, pretzel vendors. It can’t be easy out there. (Watch out for those hot nuts carts--those people are crazy.)

Shalom, gang of somber Hasidim protesting against the state of Israel--I admire your discipline, but I admire your chutzpah even more.

Sorry I missed you, World Trade Center site. Hang in there--I hear you’re making a comeback.

I hadn’t heard from you in ages, Beastie Boys on the radio. Let’s stay in touch.

Good-bye, Lady Liberty. I’ll always love you from afar. (Don’t loose your head.)

Good-bye, Martin Amis, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose. Wish I’d gotten to know you better.

Good-bye Billy Collins, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, John Irving, Frank McCourt, Hannah Tinti--you’re an inspiration, all of you.

Good-bye, AWP. See you next year in Chicago.

Three things: notes from yesterday

2008-02-03T05:35:00.000+04:00

To try and catch up from yesterday, I'm sitting on the floor against an out-of-the-way pillar in the conference hotel, writing this over a tiny, cold, and weirdly tasteless portabella mushroom sandwich that cost $7.50. Anywhere else, this sandwich would have come from a vending machine and cost $1.25, but this is New York. When I called Isaac, my director friend, last night to arrange our evening plans, he asked if I had any place in mind. I said, "You tell me--you live here. I'm just looking for a beer cheaper than eight dollars." He said, "Oh, then you might be out of luck. This is New York, man." (Isaac, a born-again New Yorker who lives in Brooklyn and works in midtown Manhattan, spends a lot of his time in between, hanging out in The Village. He took me to his favorite bar, the Four Faced Liar, where he found me beer for only four dollars. What a great friend!)

Among the events of yesterday--the conference panels I attended, including some ideas for teaching creative writing to children and teenagers and a discussion of the difficult transition from writing short stories to writing a novel--three stand out.

The first, and most absurd, of the three was the fire alarm.

It happened during a reading for my current favorite literary magazine, One Story, a brilliant little publication that takes the unusual approach of publishing and distributing only one story at a time, which you can then collect into "box sets"--they even sell a box to put them in. It's a tiresome, hectic, and largely selfless endeavor--they're actually a non-profit now--that I appreciate more for its ambition than for its novelty. The editors also have remarkable taste in short fiction (which may be why they keep politely rejecting me); the fiction they've published has gone on to appear in every major anthology and prize series available to short fiction, and the magazine has gotten mention in New York magazine and in O, Oprah's magazine. Also, I love Hannah Tinti, one of the cofounders, who is always polite and chatty at these conferences and who does an amazing job representing the magazine and nurturing their writers.

Anyway, aside from its purpose of commemorating One Story's 100th issue, the set-up of the panel was a typical reading, in which various writers who've appeared in the magazine stood to read their fiction aloud. (For my students: this is exactly what I'll be doing at my Pop Culture conference in March.) The authors were terrific, a little funny without being goofy or loosing the seriousness of their work, and clearly practiced in performance reading (though one reader was awfully quiet at first). The second reader, Nicole Kelby, was particularly hilarious, giving a bombastic and rich delivery of her story about two hapless middle-agers, both unattractive, both married to different spouses, about to fumble their way through their first experiment with adultery. And then, as though ignited by the sexual friction of those two characters rubbing desperately on each other, a blaring fire alarm erupted throughout the hotel. Everyone turned momentarily in our seats, but--lovers of fiction that we all were--no one got up and, perturbed but undaunted, the author just read louder.

After a few moments of brilliant fiction out-voicing the grating whine of the alarm, the tone and pitch changed to a low grit like the wrong-answer buzz from a game show cranked up to maximum volume. Nicole Kelby paused, we all chuckled nervously, and then Kelby shouted at the alarm on the back wall, "Shut up! We're trying to talk about sex in here!" When several people impulsively grabbed their bags and headed for the door (some claimed they were only going to check the situation, though I admit, even I stood up, just in case we all needed to run), the author shouted again: "Come back! We have sex!" Now everyone looked torn, anxious about the situation out in the hotel but also caught up in the inferno of sex and now enjoying the jokes Kelby was making on the fire's behalf.

Then an announcer came over a loud speaker (loud speaker may be giving it too much credit; it sounded more like an amplified drive-thru speaker at Wendy's) and told us all what we already knew: "An alarm has been received."

He went on to explain the hotel's heroic response to this potential disaster: "We are trying to determine the cause of the alarm."

And then, as though to put our minds at ease, he said, "As soon as a cause is know we will inform you of the cause."

He would not, apparently, tell us what to do if the cause was a fire.

Still, this seemed to settle the matter for those in the room--we wanted to get back to the sex, and now that the alarm had ceased, leaving us only the lasciviously winking strobe of the emergency light, Kelby raised her voice and plunged us all back into bed. But--appropriately for a story about the awkwardness of illicit sex--she kept getting interrupted. The inane announcer, whom Kelby later dubbed "Inspector Clouseau," returned again and again to repeat his message about investigating the alarm. Finally, after Kelby had made several comical attempts to get the story back on track, Inspector Clouseau gave us an update: "The cause of the alarm has been determined. The alarm is determined to have been false. Thank you for your patience."

"You're welcome!" Kelby shouted.

And then, because the people in the Starbucks one storey down and across the four-lane street hadn't heard him the first time, Inspector Clouseau returned: "The cause of the alarm has been determined."

"Oh God," Kelby said, and I couldn't tell if she had given up making jokes about her frustration, or if one of the characters in the story had just orgasmed.

The second, and bravest, event yesterday was my trip on the New York subway. Though the complexity of the routes and the stations was a bit intimidating (this is the largest subway system in the world), the subway itself wasn't nearly as frightening as popular conception has built it up to be. True, the cars were older, dirtier, and less recently maintained than the trains I've ridden in Atlanta or Chicago. And the stations are quite murky, the walls brushed dark gray in dust and grime like shavings from a wet pencil lead. Staring into the black, tarry-floored rails between platforms, and then up and the dim tiled platforms themselves, I couldn't help but think of the movies and TV shows and novels in which some unfortunate character trips, or jumps, or gets pushed into the train as it comes marauding into the station. For the first time in my limited metro-rail experience, I got the definite impression that I wouldn't come away from a late-night excursion unscathed. Still, the cars weren't nearly as crowded as I'd expected, and though one frightened girl seemed to think I was following her and kept inching away from me (how did I become the scary one?), everyone else was quite polite. The rail rode fast, the tide of passengers ebbed and flowed smoothly, and in just a few short moments, I'd made it from midtown to the Village, where I embarked on the third, and best, of the events yesterday.

When Isaac Byrne and I were in college together, he was probably the strongest actor on our small campus. I saw him in almost every play he did those few years, and I even went to some of his community-theater shows. Then, because that college's theater department was extremely supportive despite how absurdly tiny and underfunded it was, Isaac managed to direct a few plays, and he proved at least as good in the chair as he was on the stage. He not only had an actor's understanding of the performance process, and therefore was able to coax impressive performances from even unskilled actors, but he also had a fantastic eye for scene-setting and lighting--even in a theater the size of our living room, he managed to create an immediate mood and invested the audience easily in the reality of the play. He may not know this, but excepting my then-fiancee/now-wife, he and our playwright/screenwriter pal Justin Cooper were among my strongest friends back then. (And given the knack I had for stirring up trouble through our school newspaper, of which I was editor, I needed all the friends I could get.)

Now Isaac is living in New York, where he has worked his way up from acting in small parts on stage and in indie films to co-founding a production company and directing critically acclaimed and award-winning off-off Broadway theatre (Isaac won the 2006 Innovative Theater award for Best Director, and his company's productions picked up five other IT awards; IT is like the Tonys for off-off Broadway theatre).

He met me just to grab a few beers on his way to the theater (I drank; Isaac is getting over a cold and stuck to water). He's working as assistant director for an off-Broadway play called Hunting and Gathering. (For those of you who don't know, off-off Broadway and off-Broadway are technical distinctions in the theatre industry, and they form a ranking of prestige leading up to, of course, Broadway. This gig Isaac has now, though thankless and only a small-print item in the playbill, is actually an important step up for Isaac.) Because Isaac is cool as hell, he invited me to join him, and when we got to the theater, he managed to get me in for free.

The play details the migratory apartment-hunting that consumes so many New Yorkers' lives and, blended into that structure, the interwoven narratives of four people: A divorced English professor and his seductive, predatory student (played by Meryl Streep's daughter!), the professor's ex-girlfriend (whom he had an affair with while still married), and the professor's nomadic, neo-hippy Buddhist half-brother (who is best friends with--but also in love with--the professor's ex-girlfriend).

The script feels short, though the production comes in at 90 minutes, and the text is still a bit rough in a few places (it developed in a workshop not unlike the workshops I lead my students through, though of course professional and much more intense), but the writing is witty, efficient, and surprisingly complex, dropping innocent lines that turn out to be important set-ups for more revealing scenes later and pulling the characters apart and remixing them in new relationships in such an organic flow it was like dropping liquid mercury on the floor watching it break into little silver balls and run around on its own until reforming into new shapes.

The production was also impressive; I especially liked the city skyline created, symbolically, out of blank brown moving boxes and which opened in various places to reveal refrigerators, linen closets, and couches as we shifted from one apartment to another. The actors, too, were terrific; I loved Ruth, the ex-girlfriend (she had both an honesty and an intensity that projected her character all the way up into the last row of seats, where I sat even though I felt like I was on stage with her), and Astor, the Buddhist couch-surfer, who reminded me of a blend of Jack Black in School of Rock and "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski and who delivered his comedic lines with a pitch-perfect high-on-meditation drawl while also demonstrating an explosive emotional range during serious scenes.

But regardless how much I enjoyed the play, it wasn't really the highlight of the evening. The best part was simply seeing an old friend, chatting and hanging out and running around the city together. It made the city seem smaller, if you could imagine that of Manhattan, much less of New York. It made it seem familiar, more livable, less a metropolis and more a home.