MY CLASS LAST TIME AT WILDBRANCH!

Come join us!  Last time it was a perfect combination of intense writing, great camaraderie, and a beautiful place.

In the week we are there I will take my class through the process of drafting two essays, one a braided essay that weaves three topics, and the other an essay with a focus on place.
Here’s the link.  Here’s the info:
The Wildbranch Writing Workshop is the country’s foremost writing workshop for people interested in honing their ability to write honestly and powerfully about the natural world. Join Christopher Cokinos, David Gessner, Ginger Strand, and members of the Orion editorial staff for a week of writing and conversation in the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Application deadline April 12, 2012.
Two editors-in-residence from Orion magazine offer participants the option of a one-on-one critique of a piece of their writing. A limited number of manuscripts will be accepted for review on a first-come first-served basis and a 4,000-word limit applies. Those wishing to take advantage of this opportunity are asked to submit their work to the workshop director by June 1.

RT @BDsCocktailHour: The last word on truth in nonfiction. He said boastfully. A cartoon essay.

My wife was recently reading Cleopatra: A Life  by Stacy Schiff, and found out this about March 15th, my birthday:

“Until 44 BC, the Ides of March were best known as a springtime frolic, an occasion for serious drinking. A celebration of the ancient goddess of ends and beginnings, the Ides amounted to a sort of raucous, reeling New Year’s. Bands of revelers picnicked into the night along the banks of the Tiber, where they camped in makeshift huts under a full moon. It was a festival often indelibly recalled nine months later.”

It all makes sense…..
 

Summers with Juliet, published February, 1992

 

Summers With Juliet started as an idea for a personal essay, one of my first ever (before that I’d only written formal essays and fiction), nothing more than this: My not-yet wife and I had seen an enormous fish in Menemsha Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, a sea sunfish, Mola Mola. One January day I started to write that story, and by late March, I finished it. After a year of revising and enriching the thing (while writing other stuff, of course), I sent the essay off in the mail. The Iowa Review published it, and “Mola Mola’’ eventually got an honorable mention in The Best American Essays, 1991.

Well, hey. I decided I was on to something, and wrote another piece—I considered what I was doing nature writing—about a great blue heron. Then another, about some blue crabs. My grad-school friend Betsy Lerner read them, kindly, and said the thing she liked best about them wasn’t nature so much as that Juliet was there in all of them.  Men usually left their women out of their nature writing.  She thought there was a book in there.  She even had a title for me: Summers with Juliet.  And then she helped me connect with a great agent.  Later, much later, she became my agent, but that’s another story.

So: a collection of nature essays in which Juliet played a role.

Juliet now, with a new character

My new agent–Binky Urban at ICM–asked for a couple more and an annotated table of contents to describe the unwritten ones.  She gave me ten days to do this.  She was testing me.  I did what she asked.  She liked one of the new pieces, tossed the other, formed a proposal, messengered it to ten or so top editors and sold the book on the second day out, to Houghton Mifflin.

I was kind of happy.  Then I had to do the work.  It took a year.

When I’d finished the seventeen essays that made the first draft of the book, everyone said to tie them together. And gradually, that’s how the structure of Summers With Juliet emerged. That structure is self-consciously classical: three acts—situation, development, denouement (this last is from the French, as you know, for untying).

Act one comprises six scenes (I should say “scenes,’’ since each is a chapter in itself, and some freestanding essays): “Hot Tin Roof,’’ “Berkshire Turkeys,’’ “Cross Canada,’’ “Volcano,’’ “Bluefishing,’’ “Turtles.’’ The situation: a callow young man (myself) in love with a young woman not impressed. A romance develops despite obstacles, mostly of the young man’s making. The last scene (“Turtles’’) ends with his realization that his own growth is required, and the arc of the narrative rises to act two.

In act two, which is comprised of “Out of the Frying Pan,’’ “Hummingbirds,’’ “Callinectes Sapidus,’’ “Mola Mola,’’ “Fishing With Bobby,’’ and “Canyonlands,’’ the situation (the romance) is developed in a series of tableaux, each built around a carefully nested central metaphor, each metaphor growing nearly absurd (especially when said directly, as will follow): Juliet is a wild trout in an unfished stream; Juliet is a bossy bird; Juliet is an elegant crab; Juliet is an ungainly and rare fish of enormous proportions; Juliet is a gawky heron; Juliet is dangerous as a snake and as big as the canyons of Utah. Or perhaps the word love should replace the name Juliet above: Act two has grand pretensions. Ends with our boy’s resolve to marry.

Juliet in 1982, Martha's Vineyard, Age 20

Now, while I was about knitting my various essays together into a book (we’ll get to act three in a minute), I realized that Summers With Juliet was doing something subversive: standing up to the boys from the cult of the expert and messing up the central mode of a traditional form—Nature Writing (yes, so self-important is the form that it must be capitalized). Which central mode is that a man goes alone into the wilderness and finds transcendence, glory, absolution, expertise, and so forth. As the central figure in his own autobiography, he finds his way to nothing less than him-ness (or Him-ness, if he gets to God, which is the Emersonian model). It’s a male figure made countlessly by male practitioners over centuries, a particularly American figure: I faced the wilderness alone, made peace with it, and in that way conquered.

Bill that same summer (too much sun)... Going on 29

All I really had to do to subvert was to introduce a woman. And make her and her feminine contempt for the rites of the male my foil and my catalyst (because they were in life). To end the book with a wedding was to complete the subversion: Male autobiographies have not, historically, ended with weddings.

Act three, our conclusion: “Water,’’ “Visitors,’’ “River of Promise,’’ “Bachelor Party,’’ “A Wedding on the Water.’’ The situation having been developed to an almost ecstatic height, our narrative arc begins its fall. The young man, now well feathered, bathes his beloved in an act of devotion, struggles with fear (again the trope is at work, everything to be read as an examination of love with its subtext of mortality), climbs a mountain to ask for her hand, goes fishing with his best man in Central Park (a reprise, a look back, a caesura), then is wed.

The book was published in February, 1992.  I can hardly believe it has been twenty years.  But it has.

Juliet and I met in July, 1982.  Thirty years this summer.  She was twenty.

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author photo, taken in Helena, Montana, 1991

This may seem like really bad advice at first….be like…Tricky Dick?  Of course he is starting to seem less creepy in a world of Santorums and Gingrichs and Ws…..But still plenty creepy.

No, I am not suggesting that Nixon should be your moral model, just that he had one habit that comes in handy when you are a writer.  The guy taped everything.

For my part, I use a Sony micro-cassette recorder, and this recorder has become an integral part of my writing life.  My goal is to re-create my voice on the page.  What better way to do that than to actually re-create my voice? 

Be warned that it can be an awkward tool at first.  I quickly got over the whole “I don’t like the sound of my voice” thing, but back when I started, over two decades ago, you looked a little crazy if you talked to yourself in public.No more of course, as we rush about, all chattering to ourselves like a nation of schizophrenics.  So you’ll fit right in–they’ll think it’s a phone.  But another problem was the pomposity factor.   Think of the Alan Alda character in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” talking into his tape recorder: “Brilliant idea for a scene…”

A larger challenge is to start to actually compose on the tape recorder, since most of us associate composition with privacy and typing/writing.  This takes a while but it can be thrilling once you realize that your rhythms  speaking into the machine can be almost exactly like your rhythms while writing.  My original use for the recorder was to simply remember things–chapter titles, good lines, snippets of dialogue I overheard.  I still use it to this end, and, like Nixon, I tape other people when they talk (though I ask).  In writing My Green Manifesto, I jutted out the tape recorder (snug in a ziplock bag) across the canoe to record Dan Driscoll as we paddled down the Charles River. 

But more vital, for me, are the long walks I take with dog and tape recorder.  Sometimes I’ll pose myself some simple questions when I start the walk: Where should the next chapter go?  How does this concept of wildness versus control fit into the essay?  Why does this section feel claustrophobic?  But I never try to answer them directly, letting the walk take care of that.  Then when the words–and sometimes the answers–start coming, I break out the recorder.

Often enough these sentences, spoken out loud, become a rough draft for what I’ll later write at my desk, without even re-playing what I’ve recorded.  But just as often, maybe more often, I get some good stuff, and as I transcribe it from the tape I fiddle with the sentences, which means the process becomes, in effect, another draft.  And on a very rare occasion I will speak an entire essay onto the tape.  That is what happened with “A Letter to a Neighbor,” an essay which I published in Orion magazine.  The occasion for this essay was a dawn walk below our neighborhood bluff on Cape Cod when I looked up to see the foundation and skeletal beams of the massive trophy house being built.  I was filled with love of the place and anger about the house and out came the essay, whole, right onto the tape.

One final advantage of this sort of composition is that it offers a change of pace after hours at the desk.  “A change is as good as a rest,” said both Churchill and Lady Grantham.  For me walking is a great writing rhythm.  Legs move and words come.  It was Churchill’s preferred mode of composition by the way, and, after a long day of politics, painting and partying, he would head to his study and dictate a few thousand words to his team of transcribers.  I don’t have a team, but my trusty Sony Micro works fine.

So be like Nixon.  Sweat a lot, lie, never fully shave.  And tape things, too.

I spoke at Penn State on Monday.  My hosts couldn’t have been more generous and engaging, but my thoughts weren’t always peaceful ones.  First, there was all the fracking going on up north in central PA, which seemed to call for a cartoon.  Here it is…..I call it….

THE FUTURE OF GROUNDWATER

 

What follows are some random observations (and pictures of me with Paterno’s statue….)

Joe Pa and Me

As I flew into the Happy Valley this past Sunday, I felt rather uplifted.  After a non-winter winter in North Carolina, I was actually tired of green.  I saw snow on the ridge lines, countless small farms, and enough open woods to put the lie to the more hysterical environmental cries of doom.  But I’m a literary sort and so remembered that in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas the title character never quite could find peace, even in a perfect world called Happy Valley.

Later, looking up at the statue of Joe Paterno, another literary allusion came to mind (one I began to work out on this blog a few weeks back).  I remembered The Brothers Karamozov, and the story of the beloved priest who was hero and mentor to the pious Aloysha Karamozov.  The elder lead a devote life and had even been considered a possible saint, but then in death his body had rotted and stank, which was seen as a physical embodiment of a deeper corruption.  Hadn’t something similar happened to Joe Pa, who for most of his life was seen not just as a great football coach but as the moral conscience of the game, and certainly the presiding saint of the town of State College, Pennsylvania?  That Paterno had played his part in the unspeakable tragedy that occurred here did not take away my sense of life of effort, passion, and commitment torn down at its end. And my sense of a town stripped of its illusions.

Less Reverent Pic

I spent the next couple of day’s with a couple of other vital, if less celebrated pillars of the community.  They were Penn State professors and the picture they painted was grim.  Over the last couple of years the governor had been trying to cut the University budget by 50%.  They did not need to describe for me the damage this would do to education, of course, but what struck me was all the jobs that would be lost. And something else was rotten in central Pennsylvania.  This same governor had refused to tax the energy companies that were busy hollowing out the hills to the north, fracking away and then rumbling off down the state roads in their huge trucks.

I imagined one of my heroes, Wallace Stegner, rolling over in his grave.  In envisioning an ideal town he had always said that a college should be at its center.  This led to what he called “stickers,” people who made the town their own.  In contrast, he held up “boomers,” people who come to a place, extract what they can and then leave it behind, hollowed out.  When jobs are touted we had better ask ourselves what kind of jobs those are?  “To hell with schools and others fancy pants institutions,” seems to be the rallying cry.  But wouldn’t education come in handy in the coming economy?  Never mind, they seem to say.  The jobs that matter most are the temporary ones.

Something rotten indeed……

 

Farewell, Happy Valley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s guest post is by Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory (Stories).  He’s at work on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries (a novel).  And he’s an all-around good guy.  Like Bill, he works all night.

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Beginnings

I. Bad Advice

At Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, when someone offers “bad advice,” the advice that follows is usually pretty good advice. The phrase “bad advice” is armor, because you know how it goes. First, you offer good and useful advice, and then somebody gives you the one example of why the greatest story anyone has ever read would be a terrible story if the writer followed your good and useful advice. And then somebody else puts on a black beret and lights a cigarette and talks about how all true art is boundary-breaking, and all true artists would never accede to the tyranny of conformity. Then the open mic night begins, and somebody starts beating the bongos, and somebody else yells abstractions into a microphone and uses the word “poetry” a lot. Three friends in the front row say, “This performance really flows,” and the four drunk guys at the bar watch the basketball game, which is, let’s face it, the better of the two shows.

If you ask me, as Bill and Dave have asked me, to offer some bad advice, I’m not going to give you “bad advice.” I’m going to give you some seriously bad advice.

So here’s some bad advice: Start all your stories in the middle. Start a scene without worrying about managing information in a way that helps your reader fall into the fullness of the point of view from which the story arrives. Don’t let the reader know who the speaker might be. (Better, yet, don’t know for yourself who the speaker might be!) Don’t let us know where we are or when we are. Don’t bother to establish the story’s ground rules. If we’re on the planet Jupiter, and our lovers are a swarm of gnats who breathe methane and know they’ll die the first time they profess their devotion to another swarm of gnats, don’t let us know that until page 14 of the 15 page story.

As a bad lover might, begin with the climax. Get it out of the way in the first ninety seconds. Be sure to stop the forward motion of the story near the top of page two, and then spend five pages doing the necessary exposition that helps us understand what we just read on page one. Don’t attend to the music language makes in the first sentence. Consider opening in unattributed dialogue. Consider attributing the dialogue to a speaker with a first name – Frank, or Joe, or Bob, or Mary – and don’t bother to let the reader know who Frank or Joe or Bob or Mary might be. Quickly introduce a second speaker with an equally generic name – Martha, maybe – and don’t bother to let the reader know the relationship between Frank and Martha. If they are sisters, don’t let us know that they are sisters until page seven. If they are lovers, page eight. If they are mother and daughter, page nine. If they are mother and daughter and they are also lovers, page eleven.

Don’t get quickly to the trouble (http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=2&s=2607). Let us first hear about the weather. Describe the characters by their faces or the color of their hats. Do a lot of gestural stuff—smiling, winking, nodding, arm-crossing. When we do get to the trouble, be sure that we start with a single-character scene where a character is alone in a room and crying about something that happened to her which we haven’t yet seen. Do a lot of interior monologue full of the language of felt emotion. Use abstract words like angry, happy, sad, love, exhilarated. Stick an -ly on these

Kyle Minor

words and be sure to get them into your dialogue tags. “I am so happy,” Mary said exhilaratedly. “Me, too,” Frank snorted uproariously. “Me, three!” Martha ejaculated spently. What a happy family they be!

Don’t avoid the impulse to make extraordinary generalizations. (“All happy families are the same,” Mary, Frank, and Martha said winkingly.) Don’t avoid the impulse to do any essaying your story might require at story’s beginning rather than story’s end. Don’t hang out with the kind of people who do the kind of work your characters do so you might know at story’s beginning that our dentist, Dr. Hewitt, would use the D-11 Root Extractor rather than a pair of tweezers to retrieve the shard of decayed tooth root he broke off during the extraction. (Let’s be fair: He was distracted. He bought this dental practice and the building that housed it from vain old Dr. Green, who painted the walls green in tribute to his own name, and no matter how many times Dr. Hewitt paints the walls white, a ghastly green tint peeks through. Why didn’t Dr. Hewitt negotiate more vigorously? Why did he overpay by $100,000 for this third-rate practice and this building with these goddamn green walls?)

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 II. Good Advice

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Here’s some good advice: Read everything. Pay close attention to how your betters are beginning. Build up a catalog of borrowed opening gambits. Note the relationship of point of view to time. If the first person narrator is offering a dispatch from the moment, and we don’t have a latter-day narrator to offer helpful expository runs, how does the writer compensate in offering the baseline information the reader needs in order to understand the first moment in the same way the speaker understands the moment? If our speaker is very old, and the story itself is therefore about all that has changed—all the possibilities now turned to what-if-I-hads—how, then, might the story signal that the reader’s greater patience with all the heavy-lifting will be rewarded with a corresponding pleasure?

 

How does the story manage the givens particular to time and place, which form the ground rules by which the characters understand the world and make their decisions? If we say that the story of Romeo (age 20, let’s argue) and Juliet (age 13), set way back when in fair Verona, is about star-crossed lovers whose love is fated to tragedy because they belong to incompatible rival families, then what happens if we signal good and early that our Romeo and Juliet is set in Toledo, Ohio, in the year 2012? Does the reader then know that we have a statutory rape story? What if we don’t establish time and place until page 20? Will the reader turn to page one, and read again the first twenty pages in light of the new and necessary information, or will the reader throw the book across the room in frustration?

 

Is it too much, to talk about all these things as abstract concepts? All right, then. Call down a parade of books from your shelves. Say: “Dance for me, baby. Sing.” It’s like a Broadway audition. Hundreds of thousands of fresh-faced singer-dancers are ready to offer their songs, but the harried old casting director, who has already seen it all, doesn’t have time to hear the whole song. Not everybody’s whole song. The only people who get to sing the whole song are the people who don’t hit one wrong note, make one wrong step, but that’s not all. Lots of our auditioners are technically proficient. There’s something else the casting director requires, too: A big chance, taken. A special quality of voice and movement. The promise of something visceral or cerebrally pleasing or otherwise new. The spark of life.

 

Five minutes ago, I gave this a try. See now the parade of my pretties, and the notes I made about them in my notebook of do-or-die:

 

1. Openings simply establishing who speaks and/or when and where we are in space and/or time:

“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.” – Stoner, John Williams

“When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.” – “Water Liars,” Barry Hannah

“I am Gimpel the Fool.” – “Gimpel the Fool,” Isaac Bashevis Singer

First, note the efficiency with which this strategy dispenses with the offering of necessary information. (This is why newspaper journalism has kept to the convention of the dateline, and why magazine journalism so often embeds the dateline in the first sentence.)

Second, note how little this strategy has to do with voice or speaker. Those are elements independent of the structural gambit, which is to open in the most clear manner possible. The voice of the speaker makes other kinds of promises about the story we’re about to enter. We know, right away, that John Williams is about to offer us a stately, measured, and plainspoken account of the life of William Stoner, something not unlike a biography. We know, right away, that Barry Hannah’s narrator will be a yammerer, possibly an exaggerator, a gather-round-the-campfire-and-let-me-tell-you-a-tale-son sort. And we know, right away, that our Singer’s Gimpel is going to stare his trouble straight in the face, and we trust and love him for it.

2. Expository openings whose primary purpose is to introduce us to the trouble at story’s beginning (and these often also include the matters of who speaks and/or when and/or where we are in space and/or time):

“Of the twenty stallions brought to Cap Francais by the ship’s captain, who had a kind of partnership with a breeder in Normandy, Ti Noel had unhesitatingly picked that stud with the four white feet and rounded crupper which promised good service for mares whose colts were coming smaller each year.” – The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier

“For the first three years, the young wife worried that their lovemaking together was somehow hard on his thingie.” – “Adult World (I),” David Foster Wallace

Again, could these two speakers be any less alike? The elegance of Carpentier’s language elevates story and speaker, as does the choice to fil[…]

We moved from Cape Cod to Carolina about eight and a half years ago.  I wrote this soon after our first school year in the South ended, when we returned to the Cape in June.  It turned out we weren’t the only ones with a new baby and this is the story of how we interacted with another pair of parents and their off-spring.  It was originally published in the great journal Isotope.  Long may it live! 

 

 

FIELD NOTES ON MY DAUGHTER

 

 

 

1. Fox

 

During these joyous days back on Cape Cod I am taking field notes on both the local foxes and Hadley.   Hadley is now just over a year old, a completely different animal than the one who moved south: a walking, talking, gesturing hominoid.   Last night she rode my shoulders to the beach, and we found that a fox family had built a den in the seawall rocks.  Hadley pointed at them and said “cat,” the word she is stamping on everything these days.  Still, if her term for them was not entirely accurate, she was close.  The two kits, their legs covered with black stockings, ambled right up to us, and she could barely contain her excitement.  Meanwhile, I tried to maintain my scientific sobriety, taking notes on their black eyes, their white-tipped tails, their foolish trust.        

 

            Hadley’s physical development, like those of chimps and apes, her closest relations among primates, is relatively slow compared to other animals, these foxes for instance.  In humans, physical growth, height and size, is retarded because time is required for us to learn the complex, symbolic and ever-changing world of our species.   But the mental growth is wild.  You see it in Hadley’s eyes and her hands and in her intense interaction with the physical world.  Not long ago I taught her how to snap, and now she moves around the house going at it like a Beat poet.  Her prose poem of course is made up of that one obsessive word, “Cat,” though she inflects a hundred emotions from the sound.  The other night she woke up from a dream and said quite clearly: “Cat.  A cat.”  The alliterative and vaguely homonymous “Cow” has also leaked out, so you get the feeling that a hundred other words are gathering, readying, almost a cloudburst.   

 

            Because I have the foxes handy for study, I’ve decided to take out some books and do field work, watching the kits grow.   I’d also like to try to record more exactly and objectively the changes in my daughter as she heads into her second year.  Things happen fast in an infant’s world, and since growth is by definition change it is therefore one of the most stimulating subjects for study (outside, perhaps, birth.)  The human mind, after all, is conditioned for growth—for novelty.  No wonder it’s absorbing to watch an infant turn to toddler and toddler to child.  It holds the same appeal as gambling or drag racing.  We are pre-wired for speed and change.  Taking field notes on a middle-aged man wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. 

 

            If explosive growth always captures the human imagination, then this is the appeal, not only of childhood, but of this time of year, of the approaching solstice.  Solstice is not just an announcement of summer but also the culmination of spring, and growth is spring’s great theme.  Right now the birds sing before dawn while the cup of the year fills to the brim with green.   Nothing becoming something.  The small blooming large.  Opening.  Bursting.  Overspilling.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Toward Solstice

 

This morning I am down at the rocks at 6 with my coffee.  All four foxes, mother and three kits, gradually emerge from the den.  They gaze at me, curious, with their black eyes.  Apparently I am not perceived as much of a threat for soon they are lazing on the rocks near me while I sip my steaming drink.  They have habituated to me in no time.  We all loll together, the kits resting their heads on their paws.  They scratch their ears, leaving spikes of orange hair standing straight up.  Finally it’s time for exercise and the three kits tear after each other on the sand.  At one point the smallest of the kits decides to play hide and seek.  All I see is two triangular oversized ears behind a beach rock.

 

            Back at my desk I learn that foxes are, according to my books, “a living symbol of intelligence,” made out in myth to be wily, clever, sly.  This is in part, from our human point of view, because of how difficult they are to trap (though this beach family would make easy prey.)  One book, The World of the Red Fox by the impressively named Leonard Lee Rue the Third, waxes poetic when it comes to the fox’s coat: “Its coat, captured by the sun, takes on the tints and highlights of burnished gold and copper.”  And: “The wind playing in its fur, as if passing through a summer wheat field, causes a constant change in its shadings and hues.  These are subtleties that the eyes can capture but the pen cannot.”  It’s true that watching the rust-colored family on the beach is a little like watching a fire, oranges and reds flickering.  As with all red foxes, the ends of their tails look like they have been dipped in white paint.  Their ears, cheeks, throat and chest are white, too, while the nose, back of ears and their leg stockings are black.   They are also, and I say this as scientifically as possible, unbearably cute.  The main job of a newborn, whether human or not, is to create a deep attachment in the adult, an attachment that motivates the adult to do all the necessary work of parenting, as well as compromise his or her own life.  It turns out that round faces and big eyes do the trick when it comes to creating this attachment.  As Stephen J. Gould, among others, have pointed out, there is an evolutionary advantage to looking like a Disney character.   

 

            But back to fur.  On the kits and their mother it is luscious, fiery, full.  It also is responsible for the substantial appearance of these small animals.  An adult fox actually weighs less than our cat, Tabernash, a former stray, and only a little more than our old cat Sukie, on average between eight and 11 pounds.  According to Mr. Rue, a fox, once skinned, has a long lean body “like a miniature greyhound” and the “chest is small and can easily be encircled by a man’s hand.”

 

            I record fox facts in my journal until 11 and then walk downstairs to find Hadley and head back out into the golden age of early June.  We will spend the afternoon on the beach, before heading back home for naps.  Then, when I wake up, I will grill chicken sausages for myself and my wife Nina and drink, I would guess, somewhere between three and five beers.  After that it’s off to sleep early—all in the same bed, still primate-style—so that I can get up before dawn and watch foxes again.  Solstice is only three weeks away.  And this, I tell myself, is not such a bad way to live. 

 

 

 

3. Handy

 

With so many miracles of growth speeding toward us—the beginnings of language and locomotion to name two—it is easy to forget a more commonplace miracle, the one that helped our ancestors survive the jungle and then far beyond the jungle: hands.  It is this transcendent tool that led to all other tools.   We think that our brains and our words separate us from the rest of the animal world, and it’s true that complex verbal language is our greatest distinction.  But so much starts with hands.  One difference between Hadley and the fox kits is that she “brings her food to her face while they bring their faces to the food.”   True, a raccoon does the same, as well as all her fellow primates, but the ability to hold and study objects, to place and move them, to manipulate the world in subtle ways, was our first great advantage.   How convenient—I’ll resist saying “handy” here—that the same equipment that allowed us to climb trees also had so many other uses once we came down onto the plains. 

 

            To watch the first year of an infant’s life is to see that hands are our first language.  Not just the Kerouac-like snapping that Hadley accompanies her Cat poems with, but all the gesturing and pointing and handling that have been one of her central preoccupations for the last 12 months.   She has been grasping and letting go for a while and now she is suddenly throwing and switching and turning and flicking.  She is a miniature Houdini, untangling and opening.  These are skills sets she shares with chimps and gorillas, though soon, as the unfolding of language begins, she will put some distance between herself and her fellow primates.  Yes, chimps have been taught sign language, gorilla society is complex and vervet monkeys have different “words” for snake and eagle that come out in their alarm cries.  But what is happening now in the human brain is unprecedented in the animal world and as close to miraculous as anything in nature.  While in some ways I believe that we humans are just another animal, it would be the species-wide equivalent of false modesty not to acknowledge that here is something that makes us remarkable.

 

            The brain and mouth work wonders, not to mention the frontal binocular (color) vision of our eyes.  But those hands!  Curling, gesturing, cupping, pointing, touching.   In Apes, Monkeys, Children and the Growth of the Mind, Juan Carolos Gomez writes: 

 

“The decisive evolutionary advantage of primate hands is their versatility…The primate hand is an organ specialized in having a general function—grasping—useful for a variety of adaptive purposes.  The case of the hand illustrates an important feature of the primate order: primates specialize in not being too narrowly spe[…]

A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932.  It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing.  And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject.  [here's a great interview with him in The Paris Review]

I revered him in my twenties, living with friends in a loft in SoHo, reading, reading, reading, writing a little, too.  He wrote a lot about sex.  Opus Pistorum, which he wrote on commission for some rich pervert, is almost disgusting.  What an imagination.  Or at least we hope it’s from his imagination!

Miller's studio at Villa Seurat

He would paint pictures for his keep in Paris.  If you gave him lunch, he made you a painting.   Imagine what those paintings–if any are extant–would be worth today.  He even kept a schedule of meals, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, all at friends and acquaintances houses, a whole month’s worth, to be repeated.

I learned that in The Books in My Life. Also that he didn’t keep books, but made a point of giving them away.  So I gave my books away for a few years there.  I miss some of them a lot.  Including The Books in My Life.

In any case, if you haven’t seen them lately:

Commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4 Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate.  Narrow down.  Exclude.
10.Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11 Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Going around Facebook

 

Mornings:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus
If in fine fettle, write.

Afternoons:
Work on section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No
intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for
good and all.

Evenings:
See friends. Read in cafes.
Explore unfamiliar sections–on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafes and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library references once a week.

 

 

There are those who think it’s hard to write every day.  Maybe.  I’m of the camp that it’s harder to write once in a while. The rituals of daily-ness are built to contain a writing life in a way that the formlessness of the occasional is not.  And for most of us who have chosen to make knocking words around our life, there are rituals a-plenty.  Mine include getting up early, stretching my back (chronically bad since I was a teenager), drinking a cup of tea for calm before starting in on coffee for intensity (I am currently on day 11 of no coffee for the first time in many years so I apologize if my prose is sluggish), keeping note of my hours at the desk on a chart, listening to music (different albums for different drafts—The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, for instance, for rolling along on first drafts), and, later in the day, long walks by the Cape Fear river armed with a microcassette recorder (and later still, notes in my journal armed with a beer.)  Right off I notice that there are a lot of liquids involved in my rituals which seems right since there is an element of communion, and ablution, in the whole thing.  Like most daily rituals mine was never planned but rather evolved, and did so for the single purpose of getting words on the page.

At the moment I am teaching a graduate class called The Writing Life, and some of you might remember that I posted the syllabus last year  (I’ll paste this year’s revised syllabus below).  The class starts, fittingly, with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and as I re-read that book I noted that her rituals were more extreme than my own, and seemed geared toward creating an intensity far beyond the everyday. She writes:  

“…writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.  If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours along with a hundred other Zulu warriors, you might be able to prepare yourself to write.  If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance that on a certain morning the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals and drinking dubious liquids, you might, when the time came, be ready to write.  But how, if you are neither Zulu warrior or Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

“How to set yourself spinning?  Where is an edge–a dangerous edge–and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?’

A couple of pages later she answers her own question in pracitcal terms:

“To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up.  I tightened myself like a bolt….I drank coffee in titrated doses.  It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist.  There was a tiny ragne within which the coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

“I pointed myself.  I walked to the water.  I played the hateful recorder, washed dishes, drank coffee, stood on a beach log, watched bird.  That was the first part; it could take all morning, or all month.  Only the coffee counted, and I knew it.  Now I smoked a cigarette or two and read what I wrote yesterday….”

This seems a tad extreme, even for me.  But I get it.  It’s close to trying to work oneself up into a berserker’s state of mind, and reminds me, not of my own rituals or those of other writers, but of the pre-game routine of the tennis player Rafael Nadal.  In his autobiography,  Rafael writes of his preparation before playing Roger Federer at Wimbledon:

“I was withdrawing deeper into myself, isolating myself from my surroundings, settling into the routines—the inflexible routines—I have before each match and continue right up to the start of play.  I ate what I always eat.  Pasta—no sauce, nothing that could possibly cause indigestion—with olive oil and salt and a straight, simple piece of fish.  To drink: water….Forty five minutes before the game was scheduled to start I took a cold shower.  Freezing old water.  I do this before every match.  It’s the point before the point of no return….Under the cold shower I enter a new space in which I feel my power and resilience grow…Nothing else exists but the battle ahead….[Next] I stood up and began exercising, violently—activating my explosiveness…”

This is very similar to the routine that Bill R. has described to me before he writes in the evening.  Kidding here, of course.  No writer I know prepares for battle with quite the intensity of Mr. Nadal (of course no writer has ever had to type against Federer ).  But if the preparation described is too extreme for our more sedentary profession, it isn’t too far off.   Here is Nadal stating his goal on the first page of his book: “Because what I battle hardest to do in a tennis match is to quiet the voices in my head, to shut everything out of my mind but the contest itself and concentrate every atom of my being on the point I am playing.”

Tennis, Nadal says, is a sport of the mind, and the best player is the one who has “good sensations on the most days, who manages to isolate himself best from his fears and from ups and downs in morale…”

Though he is talking tennis, this  does not sound entirely irrelevant to the writing life.  Nor does his conclusion:

“And of one thing I have no doubt: the more you train the better your feeling.”

 

 

 

Syllabus:

David Gessner

CRW 580—THE WRITING LIFE

3:30 pm-6:15 pm  KE 1112

Course Overview:

This class will focus on all aspects of the writing life.  What does it mean to live a life of writing and reading books?   The course will be broken down into two halves.  The first will focus on the spiritual aspects of the writing life, as well as work habits, and the second on more practical aspects, the brass tacks, from writing a cover letter to a book proposal.  But while we will end on a practical note we will keep our focus on the larger picture, and the philosophical aspects of choosing to be a writer in today’s world.  Our reading will include books on writing, biographies, and more practical writing guides.

Requirements:

The main requirement of the class is keeping up with the reading. You will demonstrate that you have done this by:

 1. Writing short reaction pieces that are due each class.  These are answers to pre-assigned questions on the reading that I will hand out the week before we discuss each new book.  The reactions should be short and creative, and are really meant to get you thinking about the reading so we can have a lively and engaged class.  I will collect the reactions to check at mid-term and at the end of the semester.

 2. Class participation.  Everyone is expected to engage in our discussions.  If you have shyness issues please come and talk to me.

 Everyone will be assigned to be a co-leader for one of the books and expected, with their co-co-leaders, to run the discussion that day.

 3.  Everyone in the class will be asked to give an oral report. 

Please focus on a writer who has influenced your work.  Please describe the ways in which your work has been influenced by the writer.  The report should also show some awareness of the author’s work.  But for the purpose of this class the real focus should be on how the author works: work habits, statements he or she has made on the writing life, overall arc and effort of career.  Please try to engage the class—-poke, prod, stimulate.  A great source for this, highly recommended but not required, is the Paris Review interviews: ªªhttp://www.theparisreview.org/interviews ºº

All books are available at Pomegranate Books.  I’ll e-mail you the ISBNS since it’s essential we have the same copies for page numbers.

BOOKS:

Part I: SPIRITUAL UNDERPINNINGS

1. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

2. Life Work by Donald Hall

3 . Winter Hours by Mary Oliver 

4. First We Read, Then We Write by Robert Richardson

5. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

 

Part III: GETTING PRACTICAL

6. Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

7. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner

8. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet by Walter Jackson Bate

9. The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner

10.  On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner

 

My Favorite Tree (from a bit earlier in the year)
Back on Cape Cod.  A happy four words, especially this time of year.  You feel like you’ve stepped into the pages of a story by Hawthorne.  The leafless pines and oaks, strain upward (though never too proudly), like gnarled hands against a sky bulked up with clouds.  Occasional shafts of light shoot down through the clouds like light I have never seen anywhere else.  (The closest I got was at a stopover once in Iceland—the same strange light spraying down on a purple landscape.)  The cranberry bog a purple all its own. The frozen whitecaps of the Bay letting you know it’s not summer anymore and that you wouldn’t last a minute out there.

#

I am taking my first true break in a year and a half and I have to say I am loving it.  Eating a lot, walking the dogs through the deserted summer camp near Slough Pond, sleeping a good nine hours, not checking the internet (much), reading Hadley the adventure book I wrote and gave her for Christmas.  And, while it may not go with the rest, drinking beer while staring up at those black branches from the hot tub that comes along with the house where we are dog-sitting   And reading, too, of course.  After a fall of hearing myself talk—at readings, in class, on radio interviews—I am pretty sick of my own words.  How nice to wake up and turn not to the pages of a writer named David Gessner, but to Mary Oliver’s poems and Jackson Benson’s biography of Wallace Stegner, and Ed Abbey’s Black Sun and Donald Hall’s Life Work.

And since this is Cape Cod in winter, I’ve also been dipping back into Henry Beston’s  The Outermost House, his account on living through a winter in a cabin on beach on the outer beach of Cape Cod. I’ve quoted Beston in this space before but today—the sun has just come up, smearing pink behind the Hawthorne trees—I can’t help but do it again. In fact, I’ll let him take it home from here with three quotes—one from the book’s first chapter, one from the middle and one from the end.  The language is old fashioned, but to me the sentences speak directly about what I get from spending so much time in the so-called natural world.

Take it away, Henry:

“My house completed, and tried and not wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

“A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual.  To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of the natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline….We lost a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun.  When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy and awe of it, not to share in it, isw to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.”

“Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude toward nature,  A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world.  Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love here, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life.  Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

 
 I don’t think I’ve ever written a book where I didn’t draw a map about the landscape I was writing about.  This goes for both fiction and non-, and includes the fantasy apocalyptic young adult book I’ve been writing with my daughter.   (For that one we’ve each drawn about a dozen maps.)  Maps serve as, among other things, living malleable outlines for my books.  They also serve as procrastination, inspiration and, in the case of two of the maps below, tools for the reader, since they actually ended up as the books’ frontispieces.  The one directly below is from Return of the Osprey, and marks out the four nests that I watched regularly during my osprey year.  
 

 

 This one above is from Under the Devil’s Thumb, my book about moving out west to Boulder, Colorado.   A shout out to Rahul on this one, since he reminded me, in Boston, that it’s a pretty good book.  Sometimes I forget about it–my orphan book.

 

 

 And finally here is the most recent map of the novel I’ve been writing, on and off, for twenty years.  If things go well I’ll be back at it on January 1, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a fine essay the other week in the back of the New York Times Book Review, a piece called “Building the Brand” by Tony Perrottet. The beginning of the piece was particularly good, where Perrottet writes about the uneasiness that most of us feel about self-promotion: “In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought.  And yet, whenever I have a new book come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention.”

Unseemly.  That’s it exactly.  As I head into my summer of promoting two books, anxious that they will sell 30 and 34 copies respectively, I feel both the near-desperate desire to get attention for them and a deep-seated ambivalence about that desire.The feeling is entirely different from writing the books themselves. While I was down in the gulf researching and then back home writing The Tarball Chronciles, I felt a sense of religious mission (or at least as close as I get to religious mission.)  Books are hard but they wonderfully organize the chaotic world; they make your priorities clear. They give you, as Steve Martin said in The Jerk, a “special purpose.” What young writers, and old writers like me, sometimes don’t understand, or forget, is that making a book is largely a matter of creating energy, and that excitement and focus are great energy creators. As it turns out, large challenges, sometimes nearly impossible challenges, are good ways to engage your otherwise unengaged mind, and that difficulty itself can create sustained excitement.   People don’t usually say this out loud but for me there is something frankly noble about making a book—it entails sacrifice and commitment.

It is hard to build up a similar sense of focus, sacrifice, and commitment when the task at hand is trying to get people to look in your direction.  By writers’ standards, I am pretty extraverted and in general do not mind attention.  I sing at parties, give impromptu speeches, and, after a few drinks, like to do a little something I call “the butt dance.” (Better not to ask.)  Though I have technically never worn a lampshade on my head, I do not consider myself above it. And I’ve always had a little Muhammad Ali in me: when I played Ultimate Frisbee I billed myself as “The greatest player of all time–by far.”  The point is I’m not shy.  And even un-shy me feels uneasy at the prospect of a summer of waving my arms around and yelling, “Hey everybody, look at me!”

When I am feeling particularly bad about the tackiness of the whole self-promo game, I think of the reassuring case of Jessica Lange.  Why Jessica?  Because long before she was an award-winning thespian, a smart, savvy professional married to America’s most famous living playwright (who also happens to be a movie star), she became famous for showing her breasts to a giant ape. I still remember when the issue of Time–or was it Newsweek?–arrived at our house on Beechmont Street in Worcester.  This must have been around 1975 and Dino de Laurentis’s new movie, King Kong, was featured on the cover and inside, over a series of photos, the huge ape held a young starlet in his hand, while, with the forefinger of the other hand, he pulled down the top the starlet’s primitive dress.  Of course that issue of Time did not get thrown in the trash at the end of the month with the rest, but found its way into the bottom of a young boy’s underwear drawer.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that without those pictures Jessica Lange might not have been Jessica Lange.  Without acting the tootsie there would be no Tootsie.  (Side note: these pictures have obviously stood the test of time: when I typed in “Jessica Lange” at Google images, the words “King Kong” appeared after her name in the first few options.)

So good for Jessica.  But where does that leave me?  I have a book coming out about the Charles River and if I were to follow her model I might consider paddling down the Charles again, for promotional purposes, only in a Speedo this time. But no one wants to see that.  Moreover, as I get older I not only become less interesting with my clothes off but less interested in doing things that draw attention to me. It isn’t just that I, like you, have been taught that this obvious and pushy forcing of self onto the world is simply impolite.  It’s also because promoting oneself, as a goal, lacks the same sort of overall mission, of quest, of pure juice, that a book project has.  A book is a mountain to be climbed while this other thing is….well, what is it?

In the past I’ve tried to go into these self-promotional periods with the same energized mindset that I go into a book with. Instead of making obsessive lists of potential chapters I make lists of radio stations I will contact, articles I will write, readings I will give.  But invariably I run out of steam, though I do grudgingly do most of the things I’ve set out for myself.  Perhaps the best advice I’ve read for keeping sane during these periods comes from Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees, where she strongly urges writers to get involved in their next creative project. This is a tad counter intuitive: how can you have time to do all that necessary hand waving and self-pointing if you are hard at work on the next thing?  Shouldn’t the commitment to getting the project out to the world be as strong as the commitment to the project’s completion?

This summer I will try to answer that last question in the affirmative.  This summer I will try to kill any new books that start growing in my brain, and try to get as excited about finding new readers as I get about writing new sentences.  And maybe this time it will all be different. Maybe, by sheer force of energy and will, I will end up trading quips with John Stewart on the Daily Show.  Maybe some young girl will smuggle away her family’s copy of Time, the one that features the Speedo-clad middle-aged kayaker.  Maybe, instead of getting up and drinking coffee and writing in the morning, I’ll get up and call my media contacts and tell them how great I am.

More likely, a little self-disgust will creep in. And that’s when another part of my brain will take over.  That part of my brain—dark, reptilian, primitive—will whisper to my conscious brain, “Hey, why don’t you blow off all this unseemly publicity stuff?”  My conscious brain will start to doubt itself until, and then, as it begins to teeter in its commitment, that older part of my brain will go in for the kill, whispering, temptingly:

“Hey, I’ve got this idea for a new book….”

 

 My daughter learned the word “douchebag” recently.  Since she is in first grade this is not a particularly good thing.  Of course she learned it from me.  And, of course, since I rarely use the word in normal conversations, she learned it from hearing me yell it at other cars and drivers while I was behind the wheel.  “Douchebag,” if you really think about it, is a strange word to use in reference to other motorists, but it’s also one of my favorites.  When I drive I am often surrounded by douchebags, and though it feels good to yell it out loud, I’m always left feeling a little bad afterward.  My hope is that the word doesn’t take hold in Hadley’s mind, and that she won’t start using it when we visit my Mom’s for Christmas.

            I was born and weaned–as a driver as well as a human–in Massachusetts, earning my chops in Boston, so that even New York–with its orderly streets and clear, if complex, rules of cab etiquette—seemed easy.  When I moved South, seven years ago, I assumed that the drivers would be NASCAR fans, and would therefore be fast and aggressive.  I assumed wrong.  If you are searching for a Southern cliché, think more of a hot day on the front porch of a mansion, lazily fanning yourself while rocking and sipping lemonade and staring at the bugs.  There is an intense sluggishness to the typical Southern driver.  It turns out that most of them, rather than drive like drunk bootleggers, actually float along in a stoned haze.  For instance they will stare at an about-to-change light, not with anticipation, but with a kind of mild, gauzy curiosity.  And when it does actually turn they will react not with quick foot down on the gas, as is their civic duty, but with a moment or two of lethargic appreciation, admiring the color change as if they were on LSD.  Though you could romanticize this if you like—oh, it must be so relaxed where you live, how sweet—there is at core a selfishness to this non-responsiveness.  I wasn’t joking about “civic duty”: if you fail to concentrate and don’t make that left when the red arrow turns green, the poor sucker three cars back will not make that light

          Still: if you are used to driving in cold northern cities you might insist that this is all sweet and quaint.  Let me say again that it is not.  I suppose what drives me most crazy, at root, is the inherent lack of ambition in this driving style.  What is ambition, after all, but wanting to get to someplace other than the place where you are now?  But these drivers seem content to float through life, drifting down highways that wind along like lazy, sinuous paths through the Land of the Lotus Easters.  It’s scary in its slowness, made more so by the fact that this overall vibe is not entirely consistent: just as you are being lulled into the communal drug-like state, barely accelerating at lights yourself, one of the drivers will leap out of their truck (plastered with the requisite confederate flag sticker and a sticker that says something like “How’s That Hopey-Changey Thing Working for You?”) and charge and threaten to kill you.  It really messes you up—this inconsistency.  It’s as if you are daydreaming on a beach in Hawaii, the waves lapping and ukulele strings plucking, while a psycho killer lurks behind the palms.

            Since I hector my students about the need for some growth or change in their characters in stories and essays, even short ones, I will follow my own advice.  The change here is not just a plot device either: I have evolved over the last seven years, becoming a mellower, quieter, and no doubt safer driver.  When the left arrow turns green I accept my fate, knowing I won’t be making that turn for at least another cycle or two of light changes.  I try to attribute this to sociological reasons—people in warmer climates are less inclined to move around a lot—or to even put a positive spin on it: it shows a more Zen-like approach to life.  But, deep down, I believe there should be strict punishments for slow reaction time and for un-ambitious driving in general.  At heart I know I am no Zen monk: inside me rages the need to be somewhere else.