Mark Hummel ~ Confluence Journal ~

On Days You Are Feeling "Small"

2011-12-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

Some wonderful writing advice from writer Sean Ferrell for those times you are convinced you can't carry on writing any longer.

When You Are Struggling to Stay in a Writing Routine

2011-11-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

The other day a good friend and former student (thanks, Jessika) emailed asking for the name of a classmate who had a writing process she had always remembered. I came up with the name almost immediately (something nothing short of astonishing given my poor recall for names). I remembered likely because this classmate's writing ritual is one I shared frequently with other classes through the years. I tended to rely on this story when students were full of complaints about writing blocks, or when they simply weren't producing. Call it motivation; call it embarrassment; call it what you will. They tended to remember her story, as I have, all through these years.

She remains an inspiration to me. Her name is Leslie. When Leslie was my student, she had returned to college a couple of years before after taking some time off having nearly failed college once before. In the intervening years she had served her country in the military, she'd married, had become a mother. When I knew her she volunteered an extraordinary number of hours at a local middle school on top of her own courses. She worked evenings delivering pizzas. She raised children. Several times a week she drove one son over an hour to the nearest city with a good children's hospital for leukemia treatments. She was a remarkable student and a remarkable woman. She was serious about school and she was serious about her writing.

Taking me at my word about the need for consistent work habits as a writer, that year she set her alarm to go off early in the morning. I mean early. Like 4:00 or 4:30 such that she could get some writing time in before the rest of the house woke up and she had to start making breakfast and kid's lunches and get ready for her own long days. One of her sons caught on to her quickly and soon tried to join his mom in the early morning dark and quiet, brought with him his own pen and pad and wanted to join her in writing. She insisted that he needed his sleep. And since the plan for alone time to think and to write hadn't panned out, she left the house. She started writing in the play fort her husband had constructed at the top of the slide for the kids. This was Colorado in the winter. It can get cold in a Colorado winter. Her methodology: for every page she wrote, she rewarded herself with another blanket.

And how she wrote. Before the semester was done, not only was her growth as a writer with each piece she submitted to the class, she sold a piece to a national magazine.

My charge to future students was simple: if Leslie could find a way to write, they could.

On the bad days, I remember her lesson for myself. I have time now. I have a warm place, indeed a room dedicated to nothing but writing. I don't have a child battling cancer. If Leslie can write, I can find a way to write today.

bioStories Call for Submissions

2011-10-02T19:57:00.000-07:00

bioStories, the on-line nonfiction literary magazine I edit has placed a new call for submissions that appears in the October 1st New Pages classified:
http://www.newpages.com/classifieds/calls/. Please consider submitting.

Visit bioStories at http://www.biostories.com/

Artwork to the left appears on the site and is by my daughter, Jennifer Leichliter.

NewPages Blog: New Lit on the Block :: bioStories

2011-08-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

NewPages Blog: New Lit on the Block :: bioStories: "bioStories is a new online literary web publication edited by Mark Leichliter, writer and freelance editor who publishes fiction, poetry, a..."

Jennifer Egan Interview/Chat Session at Goodreads

2011-08-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

For members of Goodreads, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan graciously took reader questions in a video chatroom session on August 2nd 2011: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/9

Reaction to the Debt Ceiling "Compromise" Deal

2011-08-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

This Pat Oliphant cartoon from Tuesday, August 2nd about says all that needs to be said about what transpired within our "representative" government in the last number of days:

Book Recommendation: Volt by Alan Heathcock

2011-06-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

Volt, Alan Heathcock's debut collection of stories is one of those books that makes you celebrate the continued existence of small presses. Volt is a 2011 release from Graywolf Press, and sadly, as a debut collection, it is one of those books likely passed over by the large houses, and as a result, unnoticed by most readers despite outstanding reviews. That Mr. Heathcock will not benefit from a larger marketing budget and greater distribution is a shame, for it is a collection that should be on every one's "best of" lists for 2011. Graywolf has a long history of championing such fine writers, and they've got a winner here. It is a stunning collection of stories linked by a common setting and frequently featuring common characters. The collections are a study in realism done right. All may not want to face that characters who so often demonstrate such profound loss and sadness such as these, but we would be missing a glimpse at our own towns and our own lives if we turned from such realism.

Heathcock is masterful at offering more plot than many contemporary literary writers without sacrificing anything in depth of character or lyricism of language. We may turn away in our own lives from characters such as those who people Volt, but we will be wiser and more compassionate if we face them. It is a fairly thin collection with only seven stories, and you will be tempted to read the book straight through in one sitting, but you will fight that urge only because you want to savor each story. Indeed the stories are likely to haunt your dreams. Heathcock writes beautifully. He develops realistic characters who offer complexity and depth. He is the sort of writer who other writers will be copying sentences from in journals just to study craft, and yet you would hardly know it, for the pace of the stories keeps the reader bolting through them and the grip of the narrative carries such truth that most readers will have to stop once and again to remember how beautifully Heathcock writes.

Alan Heathcock

Heathcock also reveals himself as one of the first and certainly the most dexterous writers to begin and face the homecoming realities for some veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Largely those lives have been ignored, not just in our newspapers but in our novels. It is not exactly a pretty picture of these lives as painted here, but I suspect, at least for many, it is an accurate one. Such lives are not the focus of the collection but they seem to inform it throughout and certainly they echo its themes of morality and mortality, of guilt and shame, of bravery and persistence. Heathcock's deftness in managing such complicated themes with understatement and his ability to rescue lives that we might dismiss is reminiscent of another debut writer I have championed--Josh Weil (The New Valley) and both writers will rightfully earn comparisons to the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and to Andre Dubus (both II and III).

Support a debut writer while supporting a small press and buy Volt. While you are at it, buy one or two more copies for friends. They will thank you. And you will thank yourself for helping make possible more books from this fine writer in the future.

Stone Masonry and Writing

2011-04-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

From my good friend Wilmer Frey, writer (and occasional obsessive stone mason). When not writing, parenting, or farmining, he is building a 140' x 8' dry stack retaining wall on his wall in New Hampshire. Always wise, in an email Will reminds me : "Have I mentioned before that stone work is kinfolk to writing? One stone, one word, each of them one after another, over and time, one line/row at a time. Sometime they fit, more often they do not. But when they do...lordy. That celebrated stay against confusion."

On Writing

2011-04-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

So we think we cannot write. We don't have enough time. Our lives are too stressful. We are "blocked." The words are coming too slowly. We can't get the language right. The images in our head have become a chaos. The lines we compose in our head when we think we are not writing disappear and never reappear...

I don't know how many times I have said such things, aloud or within my mind. How often have I complained about the "struggle" I am having with writing? And then there's this little reminder: Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated the entire text of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye. Paralyzed by a massive stroke, he composed the book in his head at night from his hospital bed and then dictated the book using a process called "partner assisted scanning" where the person taking dictation recited the French alphabet slowly over and over and Bauby blinked when the right letter was reached. The average word took nearly two minutes to spell out. He died within days of the books publication.

I think we can find our way to words.

The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise

2011-04-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

Few books have marked my literary life more deeply than The Great Gatsby. I learned several courses worth of instruction from reading and re-reading and scrutinizing Fitzgerald's promise. That I could read the novel as an indictment of the modern American ruling class (even if Fitzgerald could not), speaks to my proletarian core. The Gatsby house is no more apparently: The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise. I suspect a new McMansion, one of grander scale and equally empty rooms, will soon no doubt take its place.

Sontag on Writing

2011-04-14T18:21:00.000-07:00

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove

or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about

paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with

others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

~ Susan Sontag, from a lecture about writing at Vassar College

A Matter of Perspective

2011-04-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

Last night my wife and I watched the wonderful HBO biography film "Temple Grandin." I've followed Grandin's work in the past and have heard several interviews with her and have long been fascinated by her. An autistic, Grandin has revolutionized the cattle industry by designing cattle-friendly apparatus that help move the animals from feedlot through to slaughter in a humane manner that focuses on keeping the animals calm. A repeated line from the film is "Nature is cruel but we don't have to be." She developed radical new ways of managing cattle by close study from their perspective, literally by dropping to all fours and moving through pens and chutes and by watching the patterns of milling cattle. An autistic who thinks entirely in images, she is capable, in essence, of seeing like a cow. Put plainly, she thinks differently from most of us. She offers an entirely different perspective. Indeed early in the film Grandin is depicted (in a stunning performance throughout I might add, by Claire Danes) in her first year at boarding school when a sympathetic teacher watches and listens closely enough to begin to recognize some of the patterns of her thinking process and then challenges her with a science experiment to explain how an optical illusion that shifts perspective can make two identical objects look of different sizes.

There are valuable lessons in the film about accepting people who are different from ourselves, about challenging our own patterns of thinking, about how we define intelligence, about how we should support the efforts of our children and how we meet their needs, about how we see our food sources...the list could go on. But what does this have to do with writing? Everything. So much of writing, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is about trying on other skins, as one of my poet friends likes to say. To succeed in portraying with authenticity the desires, thoughts, goals, worries, and philosophies (to name but a few qualities) of other people, be they fictional or real, we must come as close as possible to understanding how they think, just as good teachers must recognize that in any given classroom they have any number of individuals who will access the material that one is attempting to teach in radically different ways. We can't get all the way inside some one's skin no matter how hard we try, but try we must to enter an other's mind, to enter their very thinking processes if we wish to portray in them in a manner that feels authentic and believable and if we truly wish to access their interior lives.

And still there are other applications to be learned here as well. Among them is this: it is inevitable in a writing life that we will encounter problems within manuscripts that will seem insurmountable obstacles. Very often the only real way across those obstacles is to think about them in entirely new patterns, literally to change our perspective. Sometimes this means reconsidering the cause of the problem. The problem that may seem linguistic in nature may have its real roots in character psychology. The problem that may seem a matter of ill-defined character may actually be one of structure. The thematic flaw may prove simply mishandled within the language used to express it. The solution that is revealed when you think you're at the copy-editing stage may be one with its true roots all the way back to a needing a different narrative point of view. The point is we must be open to re-imaging text at times. We must see it from new perspectives. A universal need in all revision for writers of every type of material is a kind of perspective-based optical illusion--the need to step outside the writer's vision and achieve success in reading the material as a reader will do. Failure to do this will always result in a failed text.

(And a postscript--the film "Temple Grandin" can prove instructive to the writer as well, for its creators had to imagine ways to convey Grandin's perspective and did so with innovations that are clean, artistic, effective, and entirely transferable to the writer producing text.)

Editing--"Skipping the Door"

2011-04-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

This is the opening paragraph to Sherman Alexie's short story "Breaking and Entering" as it appears in his book War Dances:

"Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film--how to construct a scene--my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, 'You don't have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If people are already in the room, the audience will understand they didn't crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience uderstands that a door has been used--the eyes and mind will make the connection--so you can just skip the door.'

...'Skip the door' is a good piece of advice--a maxim, if you will--that I've applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life. To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, 'An editor must omit all unnecessary information.'"

I read this after a long day during which many of my hours were spent editing other people's work and encouraging still others to consider undertaking substantial editing on their own. If only we all had this text in common and I could have typed "Skip the door," and they all would have known precisely what I meant, and thereby I could have edited a good deal of myself. Of course such shorthand rarely exists, at least not outside the context of contained classroom, one where the good students will, after years have passed, find themselves writing extraneous material when suddenly they remember a teacher telling them to "Skip the door," perhaps even skipping as (s)he says the phrase like Alexie's character does, and they'll begin the necessary and satisfying task of striking through sentence after sentence, watching language curl and skrink like bacon in a frying pan.

Ten Rules for Writing: Anne Enright

2011-03-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

Anne Enright (from The Guardian)
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

‘Visit From Goon Squad’ Wins Critics Award - NYTimes.com

2011-03-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

‘Visit From Goon Squad’ Wins Critics Award - NYTimes.com Yeah!!! I love this book. I've become its champion. Egan is simply brilliant, as GOON SQUAD and her earlier novels abundantly prove.

Convertible Bison

2011-03-09T06:07:00.000-08:00

I know you thought this couple has to be from Wyoming, but in fact it is more evidence that Canadians may be crazier than Wyomingites.

Roddy Doyle: 10 Rules for Writing

2011-03-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

Roddy Doyle (from The Guardian)

1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Rembering the Wisdom of a Mentor

2011-03-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

Working on revision today, slugging through fat manuscripts and trying to find their zits and scars and blemishes, I'm reminded of a story a mentor, Don Murray, used to tell about how he could walk into an unfamiliar newsroom, observe reporters at work for the span of walking to the editor's office, and then boast to the editor that he could identify for him who the best writers in the room were. Editors, shocked at Murray's accuracy asked him how he knew. "I watched them while they wrote," he said. "With the good ones, their lips move as they read their work."

I don't always know if my work is good or not, but I know this morning that my lips are moving.

Vonnegut Writing Rules

2011-03-04T11:36:00.000-08:00

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Is This the Culture We Want?

2011-03-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

A random compendium from a string of news stories in the cycle today: a London opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a lock of Justin Bieber's hair is auctioned for $40,000 (albeit for charity), a Detroit official has proposed one means of meeting budget needs is to cut funding for HALF of the city's schools, Fox News releases two likely Republican presidential candidates from its payroll (but continues to employ three others, two with their own weekly shows--no platform there, and clearly unbiased news gathering), oh, and yeah, don't forget Libya is bombing its own people for wanting democracy.

Let's hope the Libyan protesters succeed and win their freedom, and let's hope they form a democratic society to a bit higher standards than much of the west has done. The Tunisians, now helping feed and house tens of thousands of fleeing Libyans seem to have set the real standard even in their fledgling days as newly freed people. Should we have high hopes for Libyan futures? Not if Iraq and Afghanistan are our measurements, or if by those examples, certainly not so if the west remains involved in the "nation-building" that follows, which essentially amounts to funding corruption in all corners. I know we are more than the stuff that wants operas on big-breasted nude models and memorabilia from plastic-molded teenagers, but you have to wonder, is this any culture to aspire to?

Borders Bankruptcy

2011-02-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

As industry experts have been suggesting for months, Borders recently filled for bankruptcy. How this goes, we'll have to wait and see, but part of their initial reorganization is to close a number of stores. Having been back to our last hometown in Colorado last week, one begins to imagine the scenario, for there they have already announced that store's closing. In this instance, it will leave a town of something like 75,000 people without a retail store aside from a small independent primarily devoted to textbook sales near a college campus. I'm a great believer in independent book stores, and this one received a great deal of my business when I lived there, but it attracts a small and focused customer base at best. The real result will be a continued movement towards on-line purchase and ebook purchases. The only brick and mortar option will be a Barnes and Noble (aside from a B & N on campus where almost no one but students venture) some twenty miles away. I know this is the inevitable movement of the industry, and I've voiced my qualms of chain book stores before, however, will we all want to move towards electronic books all the time or the environmental expense of warehouse to doorstep delivery as we support one behemoth on-line retailer. I want a world back with options, one with quirky, independent retailers who know their books and know their community. Somehow the likely failure of Borders is likely to make my wants more remote rather than more possible. With every retail collapse, be it a giant or an independent, how many readers does the market lose?

Beam Me Up

2011-02-23T06:18:00.001-08:00

Beam Me Up
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

From a recent trip to AZ. Perhaps the vortex has become visible?

Small Bookstores Struggle for Niche in Shifting Times - NYTimes.com

2011-01-24T06:22:00.000-08:00

Small Bookstores Struggle for Niche in Shifting Times - NYTimes.com

Your Own Worst Enemy

2011-01-21T07:47:00.000-08:00

There will be days (weeks?) when you will hate everything that you write. The only real solution I have found to this inevitability is to write some more.

NewPages Blog: Literature Rewards Patience

2011-01-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

There are rewards for slowing down. This post from "New Letters" echoes something that a writer friend and I have been talking about a great deal lately--the need for deep reflection in an age where most everything happens at lightning speed. NewPages Blog: Literature Rewards Patience

Solitude vs. The Hermit Who Forgets to Shower

2011-01-06T08:10:00.000-08:00

I've been having something of an ongoing conversation with two writer friends lately. It's a serious conversation that has important impact on our writing, although we toss in lots of jokes to take the edge off and because we tend to know ourselves and our writerly depressive tendencies well enough to be suspicious of ourselves. We tend to know that we're capable of never leaving the house, of forgetting to shower and forgetting to breath when the world seems suddenly and surprisingly either a) extraordinarily clear or b) baffling in its complexity. The conversation is about a writer's need for solitude--that tremendous gift of personal space for long thoughts (which often suggests either neglecting other parts of our lives, failing abjectly at "normalcy," either having money or not caring about money, and generally swimming against the "see me now" tide of the larger culture). I can only speak for myself, of course. But I need quiet and time alone to write. I'm a slow thinker and I need a certain amount of space and time to allow thoughts to form fully. I need contemplation. Without it, I'm sunk--both mentally in general and certainly as a writer who (don't say it!) values serious ideas. I'm painfully aware that the surrounding world is a cacophony of noise (much of it meaningless) and this cacophonous climate that too often can seem intoxicating. It is a surrounding world that wants action to happen fast, that moves from one thing to the next as quickly as synapses fire, a world that demands attention--all traits that lean against the flimsy framework required by writers asking hard questions about how humans think and work and view themselves and others.

This focus on the need for solitude is an old topic among writers, one perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf. I, at least, need a room of my own to work. It's the balance point that becomes difficult if one has a lifestyle that allows certain room for contemplative time, for in my experience, with such time and space it is easy to fall entirely into the work, to become swallowed by the book you are writing and largely loose touch with the remainder of the world. It's easy as well to become to caught inside the mind and all those shouting voices, those contradictions and chaotic arguments. It's important to resurface. The most important writers must also be full participants in the actual world if they are to write effectively about the human condition. We have to participate in community. Real community. Increasingly, because nearly all of marketing now falls back upon the writer individually, there must be participation in that larger, less real community of the marketplace as well. These are competing forces, the need for quiet and solitude and the need for interaction and stimulation, and they are forces that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding balance between them isn't as easy to accomplish as the outsider might think.

I am a great believer in balance in all aspects of my life. We are a culture full of people who too easily get knocked off balance, a culture that tends to go to extremes, for better or for worse. I've always preferred finding the middle path. And in this instance, finding a balance point between participating in a culture and contemplating that culture is a requirement for my personal approach to craft. Part of the trick becomes finding working mechanisms that help me maintain such a balance, tricks that usually come down to little, common sense things like staying on a firm writing schedule, putting writing first before listening to the cacophony of noise out there, taking the long view with writing by working everyday within the immediate, choosing writing projects that can I can remain passionate about throughout, saying thanks each day for the people in my life who believe in me and allow me space to pursue this maddness called writing.

Book Recommendation: A Visit from the Goon Squad

2010-12-23T16:39:00.000-08:00

I'd have to label Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad not just as one of the best books of 2010, but as one of the best books of the decade. Strikingly original, smart, penetrating in its insights on both individual nature and collective American consciousness, the book is as rewarding to read as it is fun. A reader's book for sure, this is a must read for writers. What Egan does with structure alone--taking the notion of suddenly popular "linked stories" to a place perhaps only ventured into with as much authority by Tim O'Brien and Elizabeth Strout--the book could be required reading for writers wanting to examine a book's architecture. It's made a couple of dozen "best of 2010" lists already and it certainly tops mine. Navigate towards this Washington Post review for not just more praise but an excellent summary and analysis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/15/AR2010061504751.html

After Setting Record, UConn Women Keep It In Perspective : The Two-Way : NPR

2010-12-22T06:35:00.000-08:00

As the father of three daughters, all three of whom have competed in athletics in college and all of whom have "kept it in perspective," getting it done in the classroom first and participating in sports second, all of whom have always exhibited class and humility, my own perspective on the UConn Women's record is a bit jaded. It is a view in total agreement with this commentary: After Setting Record, UConn Women Keep It In Perspective : The Two-Way : NPR. How refreshing it is to see a group of athletes show the class they have to celebrate their success without tarnishing the successful history of others. Some lament UConn's total domination of women's basketball in the way we so enjoy hating those who are so wildly successful. I say give the women, their coaching staff, and the program the credit it deserves; you have to build programs like these and you have to do so with a relentless pursuit of excellence. We should show them something akin to the class with which they have reached this milestone and congratulate their success. Then we should move along, people; it's just basketball. The real repercussions of such achievement reside in the things we can learn from it: hard work, camaraderie, goal-setting, high expectation of the self, surrounding oneself with others who demand excellence...

Query Mistakes

2010-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to an excellent article by JH Tohline compiled from interviews with agents about the most common mistakes they see from first time writers in query letters: http://www.jmtohline.com/2010/12/biggest-mistakes-writers-make-when.html

Hurray for Small Presses!

2010-11-30T21:37:00.000-08:00

The 2010 National Book Award for fiction goes to Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule and published by McPherson and Company, a small New York press that typically plans print runs of 2,000 copies for literary titles (they bumped this one up to 8,000 for the first run when the nomination for Lord of Misrule was announced just before the first run, knees shaking, no doubt, with worries of unsold returns.)

On the bestseller list...the first volume (and a doorstop at that) of Mark Twain's autobiography, published by the University of California Press. It has now sold something over a quarter of a million copies after a planned initial print run of 7,500.

Another NBA finalist this year was I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press.

Just a few recent examples of wonderful success stories from small publishers. Good for the editors at these and other fine small presses.

Dare to be smart and buy books that fuel the imagination and challenge the mind. Don't let sales volume and marketing budgets determine what should be read. One way to see a more eclectic vision and read a greater breadth of work is to support small presses with your purchasing power.

Book Recommendation: The New Valley

2010-11-30T21:23:00.000-08:00

Remember the name Josh Weil. When he produces a book to follow up his debut collection of three novellas The New Valley (2009), buy it. Once in a while a new writer comes along who reminds you why you love books, why books allow you to see people in ways you'd forgotten you could, books even that teach you to question yourself and your preconceptions. In this beautifully, honestly written novella collection, Weil continuously shows us characters we tend to, at first glance, think that we should dismiss, and in some instances, characters we dearly want to hate. And then he does the remarkable--he redeems them, or rather, he presents them in the fullness of their humanity and allows us to redeem ourselves. You'll never see the hill country between the Virginias in quite the same way after reading this book. He writes himself into situations that seem like they might well prove impossible for a veteran author and then every time he gets it just right.

2010 National Book Awards, The National Book Foundation

2010-11-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

2010 National Book Awards, The National Book Foundation

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

2010-11-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

This story is several years old now, from 2007. but it is not only tremendously well written, it forces us to ask critical questions about art and the role of art in our lives, our ability to recognize beauty, our tendency to believe there is value in the shear industry of our busy lives, and our current hierarchy of values. Focused on the world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell, the Washington Post put on a fascinating experiment with music in a public space. This is well worth reading: Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

Book Recommendation: The Lady Matador's Hotel

2010-11-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

Christina Garcia's new novel The Lady Matador's Hotel is wonderfully original, employing a cast of six radically different characters whose live cross through their stays at an affluent hotel in an unnamed central American capital. The novel's structure is complex and original. The atmosphere of a place in perpetual turmoil is spot-on in its portrayal. And the narrative, like the character depiction, is energized by occupying some space between realism and Magical realism--an altogether fitting style for the setting, the character's backgrounds, and the events. You can read reviews and learn more about Garcia through her website.

Women's Basketball - Blogs - Denver Pioneers Official Athletics Site

2010-11-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

"Abbey's Angles" a daughter's view of Wyoming, etc. Women's Basketball - Blogs - Denver Pioneers Official Athletics Site

Looking Back At The Great 'Life' Photographers : The Picture Show : NPR

2010-11-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Looking Back At The Great 'Life' Photographers : The Picture Show : NPR

Standing on the Lake Bottom

2010-10-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

(This essay appears today at http://www.earthstorys.org/ as well.)
Depending on the time of year, the amount of snowfall, and the thirst of people and potatoes downstream along the Snake River, I live anywhere from a third of a mile to a little over a mile of the Palisades Reservoir. I run with the dog for miles along its edge with frequency, particularly in late spring when snow keeps me out of the mountains and early fall when hunters push me back to the flatland. This late in October I can drive for miles across the lake bottom, bumping along on a ever-narrowing strip of old asphalt pock-marked with gaps where the lake gradually erodes the pavement during the few months each year the abandoned highway is underwater. Sometimes the dog and I explore the lake bottom and the high-tide line. This day I stand on the low foundation remains of a farmhouse, the neat grid of cement blocks the only legacy of someone’s home before the dam was completed a dozen miles away in 1957. Silt anchors the blocks in the ground and covers more than half their small elevation.

The lake has receded for the winter, drained to fatten Idaho potatoes to McDonald’s uniformity, or to be fair, to the uniformity demanded not just by McDonalds but by Burger King, In and Out Burger, Carl’s Junior, Ore-Ida, and a few dozen other purveyors of the American obsession with the French Fry. A bit of the water goes to Idaho cities of course, which largely means Kentucky bluegrass imported to Idaho, and some of it feeds sugar beets and alfalfa and wheat, but mostly it goes to potatoes, for Idaho is practically a case study in industrialized monoculture, which means it hosts many “managers” with expertise in irrigation storage and chemical soil enhancement. The reservoir is 34% full the Bureau of Reclamation tells me in its daily statistics, nearly two thirds of its million and a half acre feet of storage removed. The summer boaters are gone too. No anglers here in a land that is often cracked like an aging palm.

What those “managers” mostly offer me this day is a place for contemplation from a small rectangular pad of cement that probably served as the front stoop of a farmhouse. From there I contemplate the surrounding mountains that are my daily companions and try to imagine the valley as it might have once been. Now miles of that valley succumb to a mostly flat expanse of spongy soil tinted faint green by the limited hardy plants and grasses that can sprout during the brief time between burial under summer water and winter snow. In the days of the farmhouse I assume I would be looking at a waist-deep expanse of hay meadows turning autumn gold and awaiting the reaper’s scythe. I have followed the irrigations ditches that once curved along the valley floor, have seen the labor evident in rock piles from cleared fields. I wonder if any neighbor’s rooflines would have been visible. I imagine the work: the labor of digging irrigation ditches and tending animals and harvesting enough hay to get them through brutal winters, the effort of hauling enough wood from the surrounding mountains to heat this tiny home through six months of bitter cold when the snow would pile four feet deep against the now missing walls

And what was here before these foundation stones where laid in their neat, small grid? Probably sage flats, and in October that would have meant the presence of bison to be joined in November or December by elk. Would there have been cottonwoods and willows along the river? How many pools and unexpected falls would the river have offered, how many braided channels and choked-off islands?

I stand on these thin strips marking the outline of a once-house and I wonder. There are a few cliffs that protrude from the mountainsides above me, though such palisades are not the dominant topography of these timbered mountains. What fences, what barriers then did the managers choose from when naming their new lake? There is not a fence in sight. Only the occasional roofline dots the last fall color in the surrounding mountains. No army settled here. No, the only true barrier seems the lake itself, slowly silting the past.

Death in Western Forests

2010-10-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is a post "recycled" from an article I wrote last month for Earthstorys (http://www.earthstorys.org/):

I dreamed of flames last night, a forest erupting around me: fogbanks of smoke, a landscape of living flame, come-hither gestures of fiery fingers followed by encircling snares of engulfing orange demons. I awoke trying to run among persistent runnels of fire, smoke filming my eyes and clotting my throat. The root of the dream is no mystery, for the day before we had travelled deep within the smoke of a smoldering forest—the Bull fire in the Gros Ventre Range—a scene made surreal by the dampening effect of an elongated rainstorm, a storm that would prove to save thousands of forest acres no doubt. With the fire suddenly manageable again—for it had grown quite unmanageable, adding more than 1,000 acres every twenty-four hours—the Forest Service hopes to direct the burning back to the mosaic pattern that might be the best hope for preserving the forest’s long term health and its best defense against a burgeoning invasion: the western pine bark beetle.

It is a forest in need of health, a forest, like most in the region and soon throughout the west, sickly with the ravages of the pine bark beetle. Rocky Mountain forests are dying. It is a crisis so severe that it is difficult to describe to those who don’t live in the west or are not frequently visitors over time. Entire landscapes are changing and death is everywhere apparent—mountainsides where brown has replaced green as the dominant color, stands of pine where the death rate can reach greater than 80%. Colorado may have seen the worst ravages thus far, and aerial photographs there reveal National Forests inundated. The standing dead that remains creates a tender-box of fuel in regions that have already suffered year upon year of drought and decades of fire suppression that has created a lethal understory and where often there are twice as many trees as scientists view as healthy.

The current and future devastation is far more than aesthetically unpleasant or visually shocking. Like all radical changes in an ecosystem, this dominant presence by a single species will have caustic effects on most others, and in this case that will ripple all the way up the food chain. For example, the double blow of pine beetle infestations at high altitudes when coupled with the deadly presence of white pine blister rust threatens overwhelming loss of white pines, which means the loss of white pine nuts, a critical staple in grizzly bear diets. Similarly, sudden blow-downs of standing dead wood are not only lethal to the living things in immediate proximity—be they animal or vegetable—the soil disruption will create new erosion hazards, impacting streams, rivers, and their inhabitants alike.

Western forests are in critical condition and there is no clear cure. There are few sure means to kill the beetles. The most effective means is fire, though even then the timing matters, for it needs to occur while the next generation of beetles remains in larval form. One can cut and burn diseased trees at this stage or cut and bury them in an attempt to save those nearby, though this is entirely unrealistic when considering the millions upon millions of acres already in one stage or another of infestation. The traditional environmental control—freezing—where there are -30° temperatures sustained for at least five days, rarely have occurred in recent years. Thus every year the beetles advance further north, though the pundits who deny the existence of global warming refuse a relational view.

If viewed in ecological time, the forests will recover, even if they will be dramatically different forests from the ones we have been familiar with previously. Those who are informed understand the multiple fingers of the human hand that has accelerated conditions where such devastating insects now thrive, including decades upon decades of “management” practices that suppressed fires and encouraged logging techniques detrimental to natural reproductive patterns. Eventually succession will be revealed and western forests will feature more deciduous species and fewer coniferous ones. In my little neck of the woods, this will mean more aspen and more Rocky Mountain maple. Human settlements in wooded western regions probably will fare worse than the forests we have built within, and it is certain our strategies for recovery will prove impoverished by comparison. Coupled with our inability to have the patience for natural transformation, this may well spell intellectual disaster in our relationship with the forest equal to the consequences of catastrophic fires. Indeed the forests will eventually recover, if in ways that we are not accustomed to seeing. The greater question may be whether we will prove capable of learning to change as well, and most particularly change the patterns that aided in the development of the crisis in the first place.

Each morning this week I have awoken to the aroma of smoke, for the Bull fire is but one (and among the smallest) of fires burning in the greater area in a fire season that has proven relatively mild and winds carry far. I suspect we in the west should prepare for a future where the smell of smoke will be the least of our worries and but one lethal element encroaching on our dreams.

Employee of the Month

2010-10-07T07:24:00.001-07:00

Employee of the Month
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

Gee, thanks a lot for the honor.

New Project ~ bioStories

2010-10-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have launched a new writing project, a website devoted to honoring the lives of ordinary people called bioStories. Visit the site at http://www.biostories.com/. I am actively looking for contributors as well as trying to build a readership base. For a clearer sense of the project's intent, I am posting the following from the "About" page.

bioStories offers word portraits of the people surrounding us in our daily lives, of the strangers we pass on the street unnoticed and those intimate to us who have been most influential and most familiar but who remain strangers to others. We feature daily posts from a diverse variety of writers and select some of the portraits they offer as featured essays. We particularly look for work that offers slices of a life that help the reader imagine the whole of that life, work that demonstrates that ordinary people's experiences often contain extraordinary moments, visionary ideas, inspirational acts, and examples of success and failure that prove instructive. In short, we believe every life displays moments of grace. bioStories wishes to share pieces of these lives and celebrate them.

View the pieces of the lives presented here as portraits, sketches, tributes, memories, remembrances...pieces of lives that enrich our experience for having shared them. We ask writers to, as Toni Morrison has said, "Imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar." Share a life. Introduce us to someone we don't yet know.

October

2010-10-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

October 1st and we've just seen the hottest week of the year in Western Wyoming. The world seems topsy turvy--snow in late August and now highs in the 80s. It was still a pleasant temperature somewhere in the mid 40s for this morning's run, a soothing, mind-cleansing sort of 5 or 6 mile run in easy, flat terrain. October, and I avoid the woods as hunting season is in full swing, so it was the lake bottom today, for the lake has gone away, swelling potatoes now that will soon swell MacDonald's french fries that will then swell American bellies and arteries. I ran at random across the lake bed veering into what must have once been an irrigation canal in hay meadows before the construction of a dam and the stopping of the Snake River. Barely identifiable, silted over, I suppose, in places there are hummocks of piled rock on each side slowly giving way to grasslands. How much work that? Decades of a rancher clearing rocks. The ditch bottom is relatively smooth, easy running in most places, the grass laid over by the presence of the lake part of the year, a faint game trail giving over to sand for much of its length. The lake gives way to grassland, the grassland was once hayfield, the hayfield once meadow and likely tree-lines along the river course. Flat. I can see 15 miles north until the river bends, 20 miles or more south. Rising east and west are the Snake River Range and the Caribous, sporting patches of aspen orange and yellow and highlights of red from the last of the Rocky Mountain Maples now losing their leaves. Absolute silence. The only sound that of my feet on the earth and the "jick, jick, jick" of the dog's collar. Rejuvinating. Room to think and clear my mind.

U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

2010-09-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting results from a Pew Study...U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. I'm just sayin'... 'cause there are those days where it feels like there's a lot of finger pointing by some crooked fingers...

I'll leave the conclusions to you.

"Speak" Latest Victim of Attempted Book Banning

2010-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

A reminder: September 26th – October 1st is National Banned Books Week. If you live in a school district where those with closed minds are attempting (or have succeeded) to ban books, please take the time to write your newspaper editor or your school board members or your school administrators and speak up against such ignorance and injustice. The latest victim of attempted book banning is Laurie Hals Anderson’s Young Adult novel Speak. She offers details of the idiot behind the attempt to ban the book at her blog, along with links to write on the book’s behalf in Missouri where it is under attack.

I spent twenty years of my life teaching writing and literature at the university level. I can't tell you the number of students I encountered in my career who talked about having read Speak as teenagers and having it become the book that motivated them to want to write. Moreover, many students spoke passionately about how Speak touched their lives and encouraged them to share their voice, to speak out against injustice, and in one case, gave a student who had suffered a similar fate the courage to face her past and speak out against violence.

I have read only a handful of YA books. I read Speak because of these students I mention. I found it eloquent, smart, and respectful of its subject, its characters, and its readers. I remember reading the book in one sitting and feeling I had known some of the people who populate its pages. As the father of three daughters, it is one of the books that I suggested each of them read when they reached their own teenage years.

It is exactly the sort of book that should make all of us speak loudly against ignorance and simple-mindedness, two qualities shared by those who suggest we ban books. To ban books is to ban ideas. It is an affront to freedom and we should speak out against those who try and disperse injustice.

Fall Sky

2010-09-27T08:45:00.001-07:00

Fall Sky
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

Aspens against that impossibly blue September sky. We are in full fall in Wyoming.

“Upwards Condescension,” Ravenous Paranoia, and Why I Despise the Tea Party

2010-09-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

I have a coworker who generally keeps to herself and does her job well and without much complaint, a person who is typically pleasant and polite if too quick to doubt herself and her abilities and a bit fast in harboring jealously that other coworkers might be receiving preferential treatment. She is frequently a person who seems full of self-doubt and an unfocused, likely unvoiced, longing for a life she hasn’t quite found. She is rather shy and self-effacing in a classically Midwestern sort of way, keeping largely to herself. She is blond-haired and blue-eyed and all-American in appearance, though the darkness at her roots defies the blond dye and the contacts exaggerate the natural color of her eyes. She spends an undue amount of time dismissing herself and her abilities, a trait that I, in the quiet of my own head, label “preemptive error insurance.” And thus, when she does share opinions, they sometimes come as something of a surprise and are direct and simply rendered and clearly very personally held views guided often by emotion. The surprise is exaggerated once you start to recognize that her means of attempting to voice dissatisfaction or affect office politics tend toward the Machiavellian. She would hate me for using that word “Machiavellian.” Indeed there is a touch of paranoia glimpsed in her nature at moments, and she would find my use of the word pretentious, possibly suspicious, and she would hold her lack of familiarity with the word against me. She has commented to me on several occasions when she dislikes people we both know because they act “superior” or “show off that they are smarter than me.” Sadly, particularly if the person in question is formally educated, she genuinely seems to believe she is inferior. She has a particular dislike for professors (and having been one in a former life, I admit inclination to trust her instincts in this regard) and seems critical of all in the teaching profession.

What takes me by greatest surprise then is the realization that her reaction to people and ideas she dislikes is to be condescending. Given her tendencies towards self-effacement and lack of self-confidence, such condescension feels backwards, like a mirror shone back on those to whom she ascribes feelings of superiority. Sharing this observation with my wife, she coined a term: “upwards condescension.” Today, when in a meeting I reminded our staff to promote an upcoming event sponsored by one of our patrons for a talk to be provided by a Rwandan journalist, I received a teenager-like eye roll from my coworker. She has spoken before about how much she dislikes the patron sponsoring the event, dismissing him as “weird.” When I suggested, my dander up at the eye roll, that our rural town, capable too often of holding parochial views on the larger world (an idea suggested in no such language as this), would benefit from such a unique guest speaker, I was met with another eye roll. When she spoke, she said, “Oh, yeah, I saw the sign. She’s going to talk about teenage pregnancy or something.” I merely replied that the poster was specific, that the journalist would be talking much more broadly about the state of Rwanda today. I added that the journalist’s series of articles about single Rwandan mothers had been the prompt for a lecture she had been requested to provide in New York. How I longed to take the clarification further, to explain that the fates of these mothers was further complicated by the extreme poverty of the country, that they were frequently raising their children in the squalor of a post-war world and from within a nightmarish psychology of post traumatic stress disorder, that these were women who might have to wait three or four hours after walking miles to get a day’s supply of water in a place where some men will trade sexual favors as a promise to supply water, that most of the women had likely witnessed the murders of their families, and that many of the children in question and now of age to risk pregnancy themselves had been conceived during acts of rape, rape used both as an externalized threat of more deadly violence and as a means of ensuring the end of an ethnic bloodline. To my regret and shame, I said nothing. Indeed it took me a good long bit of contemplation to realize the amount of recent history that would need conveyed or to process completely the subtext of what had been said and left unsaid in our brief, workplace exchange during a meeting where we had also discussed “the illegality of photocopying money, passports, and driver’s licenses at actual size.”

I had long thought my coworker was simply dismissive of people she found intimidating out of defensiveness. Today I began to recognize that there was something more complicated and entrenched than defensiveness at play, something beyond dismissal out of ignorance or self-doubt. In fact, observing her past reactions to others who displayed excitement at learning of the larger world or exploring new ideas, I came to realize that there was an active, if unconscious, desire to defend such ignorance and to sustain the myopic comfort of a xenophobic mindset. (Would she read this sentence, I have little doubt she would seal her vision of me by the very presence of words unfamiliar to her.)

It came by almost immediate extension to me then that what I had observed in my coworker paralleled nearly exactly what has made me come to despise the current “Tea Party” movement. I do not use the word “despise” lightly, nor do I fail to admit that my direct interaction with its participants (who do not seem to value interacting but rather proselytizing) is minimal and likely not comprehensive of the breadth of its adherents, nor do I fail recognition that using so strong a word risks placing me into a position that replicates the condemnation I accuse them of harboring. Yet that is one of the symptoms of extremism, it tends to generate hatred and fear. And in truth, I do fear the rise of Tea Party candidates into positions of power having too often witnessed the results of extremism and having too long watched the world suffer at the hands of American governmental policy and corporate action from positions of false superior belief and self righteousness. The observations allowed via the rhetoric of the movement in its public face, certainly as exemplified by its most visual and vocal icons, most notably Sarah Palin, appear to display a movement that defends ignorance and isolationism and fears smart people. It appears to prefer “homespun” talk to the need in a frighteningly complex world for nuance and precision. At the very least, it asks the most intelligent among its ranks not to display that intelligence at the fear of appearing an “insider.” It feeds unfocused worry, fear and uncertainty to a public that feels the world is increasingly unpredictable and unfriendly. It is a movement that closes doors and builds bomb shelters, a movement that waves patriotic flags and then defiles the constitution by denying equal rights for anyone who holds beliefs in opposition to theirs. It is a movement that shouts “no” to everything and refuses to discuss specificity of solution for anything.

It is wrong to attribute all I fear in the Tea Party to my coworker. Indeed she is outwardly apolitical. Rather, identifying what can prove so unnerving in her personality provides me a window to a mindset much larger than hers. Her desire to abdicate a responsibility to the world beyond her front door and fearful of those who strive to be informed and engaged in that broader world helps me find an ability to articulate why I believe that we must, regardless of political leaning or party affiliation, stand opposed to those seeking power who cannot distinguish common sense from simple-mindedness.

Toni Morrison on Writers

2010-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power." --Toni Morrison

Barry Lopez on Reverence

2010-09-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

"I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life." --Barry Lopez, in an interview with Bill Moyers

Book Recommendation: The Lotus Eaters

2010-09-20T07:15:00.001-07:00

Looking for new voices? I highly recommend the debut novel by Tatjana Soli The Lotus Eaters. The novel follows Helen Adams, one of the few female photojournalists covering the Vietnam War. The novel paints vivid and haunting images of Vietnam and of the war and Soli proves an outstanding researcher. The characters succinctly drawn, and while the love stories that fuel Helen’s larger love affair with the country and with covering the story are often rushed and a bit overly romanticized, the novel offers a compelling vision of the past and a protagonist who feels real and complex. This book is a strong debut from a novelist who will be worth watching.

Read a Bad Book

2010-09-18T06:41:00.001-07:00

If I start a writing day by first reading something, I tend to read work that I respect, work that inspires me, that reminds me why writing matters and of the role books can have in our lives. I still subscribe to such a theory and advocate its application. However, after a conversation with my oldest daughter about an ethnography she was assigned early on in a graduate course, I am reminded that there is merit and instruction in doing the opposite—read a BAD book.

Why waste your time, you are inclined to say. Well, one could offer the argument that I recall no lesser writer than William Stafford once made, that reading a bad book can bolster your confidence to write a good one. There is something more, I think. It is something that requires you to read differently, for if you are reading a bad book as part of your writing development, then you must identify, specifically, what makes it so bad. Here you can’t just dismiss opinion or consider your reaction a matter of taste, you really have to identify how and why the book fails in its writing. (Remember, there are books written badly on important and compelling subjects and those who wish earnestly to have value, as well as those that simply offer bad “B” movie treatments of tired, weak-limbed, I’m-not-pretending-not-to-waste-your-time wood pulp destroyers.) You must get analytical and study a bad book with the same intensity the smart writer studies a good book. Once identified, the hard part is not repeating the same errors.

Try this useful exercise the next time you are frustrated, but don’t give it too much time because not only are there droves of good books you need to read, you’ve can’t afford another excuse to delay returning to your own work (remembering that it might just take a great deal of bad writing to ever get to the good stuff).

Learning from Gardens

2010-09-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of time. How much is enough?"
--Wendell Berry

Time

2010-09-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

Writers have few real needs. It can be a simple, fulfilling life. The commodity I need most is time. Time to write. Time to think. Time to love. Time to live.

I have learned to edit in short bursts and breaks. Certainly research can be done in lots of settings and in bits and pieces. But to truly create text, to find stories and hear characters, I need the luxury of uncommitted hours, a long enough stretch of time to find my way. We all have busy, crazy lives. To write is, for me, to run against the grain, to slow down and think with depth, to look into the dark corners. There is no greater gift than that of time if one tries to lead this writing life.

Learning to Let Go

2010-08-31T18:08:00.001-07:00

The house is quiet. The daughters have all left, returning to their respective schools and the lives they are creating for themselves. These departures remain one of the hardest parts of parenting—the constant letting go. The departure of children is a melancholy thing, for the ache of missing those one loves so greatly is real, but it is pain tempered by the pride one has in the people these young women have become and the shared excitement for futures that are vibrant and full.

At the best moments the brightness of their potential becomes nearly infectious and I believe in the possibilities of my future too, one made more conceivable by their presence within it, even if an altered participation, one featuring adults come into their own. There is joy in watching their lives unfold, despite the knowledge that they will face heartache and indecision in moments along the way to rewarding lives. You can’t protect children forever, although every parent wishes to try, no more than you can protect oneself from the empty space when they are not in one’s immediate presence. The distances are a bit greater, the quiet more disconcerting, but adventure awaits—for them and for their parents as we step uncertainly onto that path that grants entrance into the unknown future.

When the %^&( Flows Without End

2010-08-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

So what does you do when you can’t string three words together without it sounding like the equivalent of fried shit on a crisp Ritz cracker? The cracker isn’t enough to pull this off. A full sentence simply scares the hell out of you. You’ve written pages and pages of excrement.

Welcome to my present writing life.

Well, if you really can differentiate the excrement from the cream, you are off to a good start. Sometimes a smallish fire is worthwhile. There might be catharsis in the burning of manuscript pages. (I picture Toby from “The West Wing” now, burning speech drafts in his office and suddenly wish I smoked cigars—reason enough to keep an old Zippo around.) Don’t burn just anything. You might need some of the shit. But still, knowing when you suck can help. If you can separate the pages that need burning from the others, you’re already off to a good start.

Not great advice? Step two: remember that crazy, lovely, lonely, brainy Georgian who made art out of simpletons, yes, good old Flannery O’, and you will be reminded that you’ve got to stay in the chair. Sit down. Face the page. Maybe, okay, quite likely, write some more shit. But you’ve got to do it. Face the blank page. Stare into the empty air. Pick up the pen. The only real way through is to produce work.

In the meanwhile, change form if it helps. Write in a different style. Use a different technology. Write in the journal rather than on the stack of manuscript pages. Post to the blog. Sometimes you can trick yourself into quality by changing the venue or fooling yourself into lowering your standards (because really you are aiming to raise your standards—you just need a springboard into text).

Be productive in other ways. If you are being judgmental about the text you are failing to produce, maybe all that negativity is actually perfect for going backwards and facing the story that you said was done but that you know in fact really isn’t done because it has that one fatally flawed scene, or is it that whole damn chapter of the novel that you know you’ve let slide on every revision, every reading, acting as if the good teeth around the festering, infected, pus-filled decaying one won’t really bother you (or kill you for that matter if you wait long enough). Maybe it’s time to tackle what you’ve been putting off. Hate your work at present? Then go hate the work that can really cause good work harm.

Finally, basics like reading. You’re producing shit. Read more. Read the good books, the hard books you keep putting off. Learn from them. Study them. There are days where it is important you read more than you write, if for no other reason than to prepare for the days when you will write more than you read.

Think I’m full of it? Probably. But what have we got to lose?

Barnes & Noble: “Piazzas of American Culture” - Deal Journal - WSJ

2010-08-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

More evidence that the book world is changing, and changing rapidly. Here's a Wall Street Journal blog post regarding this week's news that Barnes & Noble is likely looking to sell themselves in an attempt to save themselves. Think the Kindle hasn't already garnered most of the market share in ebooks? Think ebooks are little more than a passing fad? Thing again. Barnes & Noble: “Piazzas of American Culture” - Deal Journal - WSJ

Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks 'Under The Radar' Reads

2010-08-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

Among the most trusted reading sources is Nancy Pearl, author of the Book Lust series and simply a reader of impeccable taste. From NPR, follow her summer reading advice: Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks 'Under The Radar' Reads

Book Lovers, Carbon Footprints, and Moral Dilemmas

2010-07-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

Among editors, agents, writers, and others associated in one form or another with the publishing industry, you can’t have a conversation or open a industry journal or blog post without encountering the varying debates on what e-books will do (are doing) to transform the medium of how reading materials are presented to the consumer. Every sort of argument is posted, from the economic impacts, the contractual language of book deals, the future for publishing houses, the role of gatekeepers, to the very structures and contents of books themselves. Forgetting aesthetics, personal preferences, individual fondness (the heft of a good book, the pace of turning real pages, the portability, the possession of a library built over years and years of reading…), e-book technology is here, it is growing exponentially, and it is quickly gaining real aficionados among serious readers and techies alike. For the first time in its history Amazon reported that last month the sales of e-book titles surpassed sales of physical books. According to Eco-Libris, e-reader sales saw a 176.8% increase in 2009. The world moves on. E-books will continue to become a growing presence in the publishing marketplace and likely will one day dominate book sales.

One question often lost in the debates among industry insiders is whether this explosion of e-books is good for the environment. The more studies one reads, the more unclear the answer often is, due in large part to most all of the voices weighing in on such debates having vested interests one way or another on the answer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I must reveal my own interests here, for as a writer, the price-per-item of initial e-book titles vs. physical books will almost certainly reduce my future earnings significantly should e-books outpace physical books.) While likely imperfect, a study put out by the Cleantech Group would seem to indicate that e-books can have substantial positive environmental impact. Their study finds that the carbon footprint of an e-reader (factoring in manufacture, energy use, delivery to consumer, raw materials, etc.) is equivalent to that of 22.5 physical books (which do not use vast quantities of paper but have extremely high transportation costs). There is a good deal of statistical data to weigh through in the full report and a good deal of base point assumptions about the reading habits of those who own e-readers, etc. but their initial findings seem to be generally corroborated elsewhere. Whatever may happen in the commercial market, and we probably would be guilty of mimicking ostriches if we don’t see the inevitability of this growth, e-books hold tremendous economic and environmental savings in large niche markets such as college textbooks (removing the paper waste associated with multiple editions with minimal changes) and medical texts, among others.

What we can know is that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t exactly been environmentally conscious, and only in recent years have major publishing houses made much of any push to increase their use of recycled paper. Even among those publishers who have made such commitments, we’re still talking about 25 – 30% recycled paper usage at best. Estimates vary, but even towards the conservative side, the book publishing industry alone is responsible for the harvest of 30 million trees annually (and this grows explosively once the newspaper and magazine publishers are added).

More hard evidence is needed, for the manufacturers of e-readers aren’t exactly forthcoming on all the component materials that go into the construction of their devices and the environmental impact of those materials. Debates continue; a good beginning place for further investigation is present at Eco-Libris (an organization with its own vested interests we must note) that offers links to a number of related articles about environmental sustainability and carbon footprints in traditional and in electronic publishing. As an aside, I will point out that Eco-Libris may be an organization lovers of physical books want to support, for their mission is to provide readers with easy means to plant trees to offset the physical books they own.

Like most issues, this one gets really complicated, and almost no scenarios for the future seem to bode well for local, independent booksellers or community libraries, to say nothing of emphasizing the quality of book content or the development of a serious literature. At the very least, it is my hope that consumers will become educated such that one of the leading questions they ask as they contemplate the purchase of a product or their participation in an industry is focused on the environmental impact of that decision. If the demographics among frequent book purchasers hold up and we are looking at consumers who tend to be highly educated, frequently urban, and typically upwardly mobile, the trickle-down effect of becoming environmentally educated consumers becomes even more critical. In a consumer culture, like it or not, where we spend our dollars matters a great deal. Our culture needs books. We need good books. And we need intelligent, curious readers. The medium by which we get those good books may mean a great deal to our collective future as well.

(This post also appears on last Wednesday's blog over at Earthstorys.org.)

Seeing Vs. Thinking Part 2

2010-07-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I don’t wish to be misunderstood and have it believed that I don’t believe thinking is important. Quite the opposite. Indeed, part of the potency of writing is that writing offers organized thinking. The finished writing product is carefully constructed, ordered. It is architecture with engineering. What I do wish to distinguish is where and when that kind of formalized thought process occurs. As the cliché suggests, most of writing is re-writing. Revision takes a great deal of concentrated thought. Much of the work of revision is identifying relationships, ordering ideas, pursuing patterns, developing a cohesive, forward-moving, engineered text, only one where the reader can’t quite see all the elements of structural support. But you must provide the ideas legs and means of expression. You must have text first, and I am firmly convinced that over thinking a text before you have the raw materials will keep you from ever producing much of anything. It doesn’t necessarily take much to start or to move deeper within a text, not much more than the ability to see an image or a scene, although this does mean releasing control to the text rather than to the logical mind. That comes later and is equally vital.

We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.

Word Temple

2010-07-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

This reminder from the press stamp of Copper Canyon Press: the Chinese symbol for poetry, when broken into its parts, are word and temple.

Seeing Text Vs. Thinking Text

2010-07-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

I find that among the greatest writing dangers for me is to outthink a work in progress. When I catch myself trying to answer questions about a character, about that character’s motivations or thought processes, I get in trouble. Instead I must see. I must see an image, however incomplete, or a scene, or a character in action, or I must hear characters speaking. I only need shadows to write. Once I can see shadowy silhouettes, I can proceed, find the full scene, convey the moment or frozen image for which I have vision, and then, typically, doing so will allow me to see what I must see next or to power through a whole scene or even a chapter without too much thought. It is the translation of seeing through the vessel of the pen that matters, for the pen delivers the language on to the page. Once written, there remains a lot of work to be done, a great deal of development and revision and finessing, but as I then look back to move forward, I realize the logical questions now have answers. I don’t have to ask so many questions now for the people have stepped nearer to becoming whole and can supply the answers. For me, this is one of the great ironies about writing, for I am convinced that writing is about real clarity of thought and I pride myself on producing texts that develop ideas, but the only way forward into those ideas for me is not thinking too much. It is a matter of trust: trust in the self, trust in the medium, trust in the characters, and trust in the nature of the human story.

On Trying to Write

2010-07-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Today I have arrived at the study seeking morning sunshine, warmth on my skin, natural air, space and time to allow the expansion of stories and ideas that clutter the page and clutter the mind. So I step out onto the little deck that opens from the study. There is birdsong and slanted light accenting the intricate fibers of spider webs. The mosquitoes are put to bed. The day will be warm but the night still lingers in the air.

I seek quiet and find it, seek words and stumble. The quiet helps me find footing. Scrambling to locate toeholds, I jump from a muddled manuscript in progress to a muddled journal. I switch pens. I stare at the horizon. I watch birds in flight. It is easier to turn to the volume of Ted Kooser I have carried through the French doors, easier to venture into his Iowa farmyards than to locate the elusive figures emerging from the shadows of my pen. Easier as well than face the inevitable shadows of memory or the silhouettes that extend into those unknown places of a thousand tomorrows or the equally unknown of the book unwritten. The faces in Kooser are familiar but not mine. The birds we share, or at least many of them. His words are lovelier, his images more honed, but it is language I need. Language and memory and metaphor and idea, and mixing with the sunlight he helps ease me into this dark world of my own making, this density of inky pages and monochrome figures needing to become flesh.

Guest Blogging at Earthstorys

2010-07-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's been forever since I've posted on my own blog, so who am I to be trusted? Despite my absence here for June, I'm now guest blogging every Wednesday at Earthstorys. Please visit the site, not because I'm blogging there, but because it is an excellent hub for sustainability culture, one loaded with information and insight, containing a daily blog, feature ideas, news articles, an almanac--all things Earth. Learn more about farm cooperatives, solar technologies, updates on the Gulf crisis and much more.

Wisdom from Maya Angelou

2010-05-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

These are some simple but wise words appropriate to anyone but especially for writers and other artists:

"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off of you."
--Maya Angelou

If It Would Have Been a Snake...

2010-05-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

When we are deep in the bowels of working on a writing project, does the world really offer up magic to us with astonishing frequency or are we just paying attention? For instance, this week I stumbled upon a William Stafford poem "Ask Me" that includes in four lines the distilled essence of a central theme I've taken 500 pages and 10 years to get right in a novel. Would I have understood those lines without the years and pages? Would I have seen them at all?

I'm honestly not sure. The world does seem full with magic at times. I do know I must be awake to see it.

Endless Editing

2010-05-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

How is it possible that you can work through your manuscript dozens of times spread over years and still realize how much it benefits from editing. I'm prone to verbosity, so eliminating wordiness probably shouldn't come as a surprise. And, as an editor recently reminded me (something I told myself and my students for years), there are times you need to trust your reader to get what you are spending too much time detailing. Then there are the filler words, like a freshman stumbling through the first speech. Still I thought I'd caught it all. I haven't. You can't come close to the aggressiveness of editing the manuscript needs until you let go. Give it to a near stranger who has nothing at stake. She may not see the editing needs, but your psychology can change for having given it to her. I did. Again. The book will be better for it, and that's what counts.

Accepting Critiquing from Querytracker.com

2010-05-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

This is a really good post on accepting critiques from Querytracker.com:

Often, we try to sweep unpleasant feelings under the carpet to avoid dealing with them. But experiencing them can help us deal with and get past them. So go ahead and admit to yourself -- and your crit buddies, if you need to -- that sometimes it's hard to take even constructive criticism. I bet they'll tell you they feel the same way!

Now that we've established the problem, let's look at how to deal with it.

1. Realize that a critique of your work is not a critique of you.

Like I said above, it can be hard not to take crits personally. But nobody -- and that includes people like, oh, Stephen King -- started out as a brilliant writer. Yes, some folks (like King) have a definite head start when it comes to raw talent, but everyone needs some work to get it right.

For example, King was determined to get published from the time he was a teen. He began sending short stories out and, like the rest of us, started racking up rejections. He put a nail in the wall, and each time he got one, he stuck it on the nail. Pretty soon the nail fell off the wall and he had to put up a big fat spike instead. But when he got feedback from an editor or a mentor, he didn't feel sorry for himself or swear to give up writing -- he buckled down and figured out how to be a better writer based on that feedback.

And we all know how that turned out.

So separate critique of your work from a critique of you.

2. Even if you can't help but take critiques personally, realize that the criticism (and the bad feelings that can accompany it) won't kill you.

People who choose to pursue clinical or counseling psychology need to be aware of their own biases and the messages they're sending others verbally and nonverbally. But when you start grad school, you're rarely as self-aware as you need to be. So guess what happens when you get there? That's right -- they start pointing out every little mannerism, bias, and trait. Worse, they videotape you so they can point to the behavior and say "That is a problem." If you can't see it, they play it over and over -- often in front of a crowd -- to force you to acknowledge the problem.

It's enough to make anyone want to crawl into a corner and curl into a fetal ball. But you know what? Even in such a situation, you start to realize that you can survive it. Eventually, you realize that the fear of taking in constructive criticism is often worse than actually facing it head-on and dealing with it. Sure, you might have some mannerisms or vocal tics that need work, but that doesn't mean you're a failure as a person.

The same thing is true with writing. You may have a lot of trouble not feeling bad when someone doesn't like your character or the twists your plot took. You may want to throw everything out the window when someone believes you need a major change to make the story work. But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with you as a person. It just means that your vision isn't coming through as clearly as you'd hoped.

Still, sometimes we need to feel the sad and frustrated feelings before we can look at things more clearly. So if you need to, go ahead and feel sorry for yourself for a day or two, but then it's important to pack up your pity party and get down to business.

Criticism can be tough to take, but you CAN take it. And the more practice you have at taking it gracefully, the better you will get at it. Promise!

3. Rather than getting overtly defensive, ask questions and find ways to improve clarity.

Now that you know that it's okay to experience the bad feelings -- they won't kill you -- you can have them and then move on. One of the best ways to move on is to look at places your crit buddies see problems and find out more so you can make good changes. Try asking questions like:

What made this [plot point, character motivation, etc.] confusing? What would help me make it clearer?

Is this a problem you're seeing consistently through the story/novel? What skills do I need to hone to correct that problem? Can you recommend any resources that might help me/have helped you?

Could you suggest ways I might fix this problem? Examples might help me see possibilities.

Remember, the goal in soliciting crits is to make your story better -- so follow up on anything that's unclear!

4. Keep your eye on the goal.

Remember, growth and change are usually difficult. But if they get you closer to a treasured goal, it's all worth it!

So...what have I missed? How do YOU deal with constructive criticism?

Listening to Your Draft Readers

2010-04-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

When you use readers for your work (and you really must), don't forget to listen. Sounds obvious, huh? But you'd be surprised. Listen to them. Listen to what they are really saying. They are being heartfelt (Or are you really so far gone you don't chose readers you know you need to listen to?) Think about what they say and then think some more.

I'm not saying you have to agree with them. You don't. Perhaps much of the time you shouldn't. But you have to consider the work they've put in at your request, think about the greater objectivity they can bring to a text, ponder the points of your work that provide them struggle.

Once you've listened to them, once you've contemplated their reactions, then really listen to yourself. Not your dreaming of being done with this damn thing self, not your dreaming about publication self, listen to the part of you that has been whispering in your ear since the beginning. About that nagging part of our character you never actually portrayed. About that little logistical problem you keep avoiding. About that really difficult chapter you have never written because you're not sure how. You've been unsure before and you have found a way. Part of why you gave your readers the text is so that you can finally face the revisions you've known are necessary for so long now. Listening to them will help you listen to your honest self.

Earthshine

2010-04-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

Earthshine Define Earthshine at Dictionary.com: "–noun Astronomy .
the faint illumination of the part of the moon not illuminated by sunlight, as during a crescent phase, caused by the reflection of light from the earth"

Don't you love it when simple language is so evocative and lyrical while remaining spot-on specific in meaning. Okay, I'm a total geek, but it is a simple, beautiful word.

The Bookshelf

2010-04-13T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have way too many books. Shelves and shelves of them and still I use the library every week. But I have one bookshelf, the one closest to my writing desk, that gets preferential treatment. Only the books that I love best--a very select few--are housed there. These are the books I come back to again and again. Dog-eared, their covers often worn soft from use, they are books I turn to not only out of love but for study. Some I read parts of virtually every week. They are joined by the books I need for research at that particular moment, but that purpose is different from the use I make of these--which is something more like carrying photos of the ones you love. A few titles change from time to time. More will be added. But there are a few that will always have a place on that shelf. Among them:

The Collected Poems of Rilke
The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Joe by Larry Brown
Fay by Larry Brown
Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Stout
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
American Primitive by Mary Oliver
The Paradise of Bombs by Scott Russell Sanders

Those are some of mine. What's on your shelf?

A Sort of Bio

2010-04-13T18:39:00.000-07:00

As you've gathered by now, I write. I write every day. That's the thing, writers write--a complete cliché and the stuff of truth…
…some of that writing has been rewarded and you can find my work regularly in literary magazines, more of it is before agents, stating its case for representation. (For a traditional credits list and information on my books, skip to the bottom of the page—this post, like everything else I do, probably appears backwards. To read my stance on the value of writing, read on.)
I write literary fiction. I'm serious about craft and I have a love affair with language—so much so I have to watch becoming indulgent. I differentiate between the architecture of story from the engineering of plot. Now I recognize this all makes me sound pompous and pretentious. Perhaps I am. However, I think it is vitally important that all artists know who they are and stay true to themselves.

Writing is a way of seeing, a way of being, and it is typically the only way I can consistently make sense of the world and articulate my eccentric and often chaotic mind. I enter my writing knowing that it asks work of its readers—not hard labor, but mindfulness. Writing worth reading is a sacred exchange. It is not television. It is not candy. I like candy, but I want to eat it, not read it and certainly not write it. I believe that fiction is a means towards truth. When I speak about truth I mean, in part, that I wish to know human character, to understand people as they are and as they wish to be seen. The human mind is fragile and potent; it is beautiful and it is capable of doing unspeakable things. To say that I value character-driven fiction over plot is an understatement. A reflective life is more than a string of events, no matter how dramatic those events. There is meaning in living a life fully awake.

Such ridiculously bold statements are some of the essentials about me as a writer. I may well prove myself wrong over time. I'm willing to take that risk, for I want to lead an examined life and for me that means producing writing that tries to examine lives—mine, those in the culture around me, and those who preceded me.

As for the more pedestrian elements about, I offer the following synopsis:

I am a husband and a parent of three grown daughters. Those roles are more important than writing or anything else. I spent twenty years teaching writing at the college level, work that I valued for the contact with students and with their writing. At some point every day for those twenty years I was humbled by something powerful a student wrote, said, or realized. I continue to feel privileged to spend so much of my adult life working within the vibrancy of the unique setting of a university. Beyond teaching, that setting allowed me contact with genuine intellectualism and the perks of coordinating a writing program and a writing conference. I now live and write in one of the most beautiful and largely unspoiled American wildernesses at the edge of greater Yellowstone ecosystem just south of Jackson, WY.

I write primarily fiction, dabble regularly in essays, and occasionally produce really bad poetry. My work has appeared in the following publications, among others, and I am deeply indebted to the editors of such literary magazines, editors who typically toil in obscurity and without pay: Arlington Literary Journal, The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, The Externalist, Fugue, Matter, Porcupine Literary Arts, Talking River Review, Tar River Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, Zone 3. I publish under the pseudonym Mark Hummel. I have completed three novels, each radically different from the next. A synopsis for each is available under their corresponding titles in the menu bar.

On Publishing (or Not-Publishing)

2010-04-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

“…I would advise you not to waste time feeling ashamed for being an unpublished writer. Each time you sit alone and give your most honest and complete effort, you’ve earned the title of writer, particularly on those days when you struggle the hardest, when you spend all afternoon and evening refining an idea or the precise phrasing of a few descriptions, when you’re pushing yourself beyond your own abilities. These hard-fought and seemingly inconsequential victories accumulate over time and make all the difference.”

--John Dalton

Needing Inspiration

2010-04-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve been struggling these past few days with writing, both in the story I am working on now and in editing old work (badly needed edits, I am realizing). These are times with the isolation of a writing life begins to close in, when the darkness seems near at hand. So you have choices: give up, give in, or get back to work. I try and get back to work. In such times I often turn to the writers who mean the most to me, the ones who make me push myself to be better. I re-read their texts, study them, allow myself to feel inspired by them anew. For me, one mainstay is always Andre Dubus (right). Not only did the tough old bastard write like an angel, he wrote even when the world often ignored him. And he wrote what he wanted to write, stories that moved him, characters who wouldn’t let him go. He concentrated on getting people right, even if it meant facing hard truths about himself and about humanity. One would be hard pressed to find stories more powerful than “A Father’s Story” or novellas that said more than most writers’ novels. Reading him can be like reading a voice that has existed inside my head for years. Dubus suffered hardship—physically (after an accident suffered while coming to another's aid), personally, financially—yet he never backed away from writing fiction that matters. His work sets a kind of standard for me. Some days I think if I could just write one story or one chapter that could come close to measuring up to the quality and precision of his work, it would be a successful writing life. So I read him and I learn. Again. And then I set back to work.

Make Sure Your Train Stops for You

2010-04-08T06:47:00.000-07:00

"Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station."
--Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Basketball Addicted

2010-04-03T20:31:00.000-07:00

When you are a college basketball fan, you've got to love the first weekend of April. There have been so many buzzer beaters and improbable success stories this tournament, which are exactly the sorts of things I love about college basketball.

It's so good to see Duke back in the NCAA finals (Don't hate them because they're successful). Class program. Class coach. Wonderful players. I would never have thought they'd make it this far this year (much to the chastisement of my daughter, who looks like a genius now that she picked them to win it all), but you take their top three and let them have a stellar night at the same time and they're nearly unstoppable.

It's equally good to see a team like Butler in the finals. Team ball. Defense oriented. It's been a long time since we saw those characteristics take a team to the top.

As a twenty year college faculty member and as a father of three college daughters, I'll reveal my true geekdom when I say that it is so much easier to root for these two programs when both post a 90% graduation success rate for their players (Butler at 90%, Duke at 92%). Indeed, the NCAA should bar teams from the tournament that can't even match their institution's overall student success rates.

As a basketball purist, I'm also loving this finals match-up because it features two teams that understand the nature of team and that actually play defense on every possession.
Can't wait for the Monday match-up. An always present powerhouse that exudes class against an upstart mid-major (and what, is their coach like 12?)--loving it.

Speaking of class and disciplined programs that play defense, understand team, and hold a hand in creating successful individuals, how about the UConn women (again, hating programs because they are successful is human nature but just isn't fair)? One name: Maya Moore, 3 time All American, pure shooter, 3.9 GPA, Rhoades Scholarship candidate. We need role models like her.

New Sustainability Journal

2010-04-01T18:08:00.000-07:00

Eathstorys is an exciting new on-line venture, part journal, part community and focused entirely on sustainability. Edited by my old friend Wilmer Frey, Earthstorys, which went live on April 1, promises to be an wise, varied clearinghouse for a modern sustainabilty movement, one that balances intellectual depth with honest practical applications. Visit and bookmark the site; it has offerings that will leave you wanting to return.

Remember This

2010-04-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons--the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions.
--Walt Whiman

Backcountry Editorial

2010-03-25T06:47:00.001-07:00

Does This Need a Title?
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Really, do I need to say anything?

Words on the Nature of Books

2010-03-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

'"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands,every time somene runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and stregthens."'
--from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Goat

2010-03-16T07:21:00.001-07:00

Goat
Originally uploaded by wordwright

We look for spring in unusual ways in snow country. Seeing mountain goats usually means that south-facing slopes are melting and revealing new feeding opportunities. There is a group of regular visitors right near the mouth of the Snake River canyon this time of year.

Some Life Advice

2010-02-15T09:35:00.000-08:00

"All my life I concentrated on moving forward." --the great Willie Mays

Boycott Amazon

2010-02-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

Okay. I've been an Amazon customer before like most of you. There are times the used book prices just look TOO good and the purchase is just a little too effortless. But really, why should an ebook cost less than a real book? (Don't bother me with the paper argument and the labor argument and all the rest; I get it.) The thing is that the book didn't cost the writer any less blood to produce. It didn't save the agent any time. It didn't remove the role of the editor both in selecting it or in making it better. Doesn't Amazon already get these services essentially for free?

Amazon has aleady largely run most of the best independent booksellers out of business. Now they want to dictate to publishers what they must charge to place their books on the precious Kindle. I'm sure some of you love your Kindles and certainly there must be a place for digital books in the marketplace, but hasn't Amazon become just a little too identical to Walmart? Yes, even those who have a bit more money like to save money, but haven't we learned the lesson of what is incurred when we always try and reduce commodities to the lowest common denominator? Mediocrity. (Doubt the role of mediocrity? Turn on the TV for a moment to any reality series or any network show; sample most of what lingers on the bestseller lists, try cutting a steak with some Soviet era East Bloc untensils...) If ever there was a demographic that can afford to pay real market value for a commodity, surely it is Kindle owners. The day Amazon wants to get the classics into every school kid's hands for, say $1.99, or if they decide to distruibute free, current textbooks to every high school science class, then maybe I'll cut them a break. Until then, if they continue to insist on telling publishers what they will publish and what they will charge, I say boycott. I'm not a Luddite, but books still read like books and there remain quality, sophisticated writers producing work if you are willing to look hard enough to find it (which, by the way, is a tougher search if limited to titles currently available on the Kindle). The digital age can be transformative, but let's make sure it is change for the better rather than change for the mediocre.

A World Far From Familiar

2010-01-20T06:06:00.000-08:00

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenudin
W.W. Norton and Company (2009), 247 pp.

Daniyal Mueenudin’s debut title suggests a book that will force readers to step far outside their lives and enter unfamiliar worlds. Indeed perhaps the greatest reward in reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is gaining entrance to the largely unfamiliar, nearly dysfunctional world of contemporary Pakistan, a culture so stratified and so deadened to its own corruption that its inner-workings may well fascinate many American readers. Mueenudin, a Pakistani-born, American-educated newcomer on the literary scene, has garnered wide critical praise and a National Book Award nomination for this group of eight linked stories. The book is beautifully written and culturally enlightening, though the stories themselves may often prove to keep American readers too distant from its characters and events and sometimes struggles to bring closure to the individual stories. The characters are well crafted and identifiable, though the patterns of their lives may seem largely alien. The vision granted of the vivid and unflinching portraits of Pakistani culture—from its wealthiest landowners to their lowliest servants—can, for readers interested in places and people beyond their own immediate frame of reference, make up for the lack of closure and the grand scale of the collection.

The stories are all linked in one fashion or another to one of its principle characters, wealthy landowner K.K. Harouni. Whether exploring Harouni himself as his once vast landholdings are slowly sold off to low bidders in the effort to maintain his luxurious lifestyle or centering on the tales of his servants and managers, the linked stories eventually allow readers to recognize that everyone within Pakistan may share similar linkages. These stories are connected by association to Harouni and, more importantly, by themes that focus on bartering and greed and manipulation, by the sexual politics of advancement for women and the power hunger exhibited by those who can touch the fringes of wealth. It is not a collection of stories that assembles to form an alternative sort of novel, rather the stories offer the reader, as the title suggests, glimpses into rooms they have never inhabited. The Pakistan that Mueenudin introduces us to is one where corruption and near chaos exist at every social level, where middle managers skim profits from their employers, women attempt to sleep their way off village streets and into the manor house, where the educated and the powerful are often bored and harm themselves and others by their attempts to resolve boredom, and the peasants often mimic the wealthy they serve. While the stories sometimes fail to complete a storytelling arc that is comforting to American readers, the characters and their sometimes desperate measure to better their living conditions prove fascinating and likely universal. For literary readers who recognize the role essential elements of Pakistani culture will play in the West’s inevitable future interdependency within Pakistani politics, the book can prove particularly fulfilling.

Mueenudin sees his own culture with astonishing clarity (the author has returned to Pakistan after earning degrees from Dartmouth and Yale to run a family farm). Importantly, he refuses to be overtly charitable nor chastising with any of his characters. Nearly all seem deeply flawed individuals, characters whose very flaws may arise either from the expected “back-scratching” reality of their deeply stratified culture or by elemental human envy and desire for advancement. The tale Mueenudin tells is larger than any of these individual characters, larger than Harouni, larger perhaps even than Pakistan. While some Western readers may feel kept at arm’s length from the events that unfold, they will find themselves thinking about the world Mueenudin portrays long after they close the final story.

Language and Structure

2010-01-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Consider this rich quotation from T.M.McNally's The Goat Bridge (a greatly under-read book, a powerful novel that conveys the complexities of the Baltic wars with grace and intelligence):

"Study the common things of this world long enough and things reveal increasingly what they have in common: namely, the language by which we describe them. This search for detecting forms of order and arrangement, always, is the work of all artists, regardless of form.

"Art joins,war, like pornography, seperates."

New Year's Words

2010-01-07T11:07:00.000-08:00

"He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future."
--Francisco de Quevedo

Winter Visitors

2010-01-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of living in the rural West, we had three elk wandering around on the back deck last night eating the last holdovers out of the apple tree. I suspect some would find them a nuisance or worry about the damage they might do to landscaping, but I can't help but feel blessed by their presence. After all, we live in their winter feeding grounds, not the other way around. It was a biting cold night, somewhere in the 12 below range, a clear night with good moonlight--all in all a perfect night to be indoors and admiring some impressive ungulates just a few feet away, even if it was two in the morning. The irony is that we usually don't get such visitors at all, probably because we've had two winters of record snowpack that's made moving in the valley as difficult for them as in the surrounding mountains and thus it is easier to mosy down the road to the refuge where the state of Wyoming benevolently feeds them fresh hay. It's good to see them here in their traditional winter range and a comfort to be reminded of some of the "others" we share this landscape with.

Structure and Shape

2009-12-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

As I was working on the never-ending revision of an early novel, a particularly layered, difficult novel to be fair, I found myself asking the question: can structure alone save a story? Now even as I type that, I know it is a ludicrous question, for no element alone can carry a story, let alone save it. Everything in a novel works in harmony if it works at all. It would be asking too much of any element, be it structure, plot, character to do the work a whole book must do. But as I contemplated the intended revisions, I saw also that by giving careful, renewed attention to the shape of the story I also found entrance to other elements to partner with it, aspects of narrative and character that echoed the logic behind the desired structural revision. To the journal I turned. From the journal to the manuscript. Work begets more work, but perhaps together solutions emerge.

A Word from Lethem on Invention

2009-12-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. "

— Jonathan Lethem

On Wild Boars, Backyard Bones, and the State of Modern Marriage: A Review

2009-12-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

New World Monkeys: A Novel
By Nancy Mauro
Shaye Areheart Books (2009)

In a quality, wonderfully imagined and darkly comic debut novel, Nancy Mauro has certainly written one of the most memorable opening chapters of the year, a chapter that swings between the metaphoric rendering of an accident that reflects Lily and Duncan’s troubled marriage in the second paragraph:

            “What they won’t talk about is the way Lily’s arm shunted
            across his chest in an attempt to grab the wheel. To steer
            their destiny in the space before impact. He’ll later recall
            this moment as something stretched and precipitous over
            which he was suspended, eggbeater legs and arms akimbo.”

Creating a blackly humorous turn three pages later, Mauro stages the other unexpected result of this accident once they discover the object they had tried to miss was a wild boar (and a new source of tension for the couple):

            “…when he [Duncan] looks back at the tire iron, Lily
            herself brings it down with a batter’s crack against the
            base of the animal’s skull.”

This becomes one of the many things Lilly and Duncan don’t talk about. And the wild boar turns out to be the mascot for the Hudson River Valley town where Lily intends to retreat while she finishes her dissertation on architectural history (specifically the history of the pointed arch), an animal beloved by certain of the town’s strange citizenry. The boar even has a name: The Sovereign of the Deep Wood. The house in this strange town of Osterhagen is part of Lily’s birthright, a decaying old house as loaded with questionable familial history as it is with bad wiring and rotting floorboards. Some of that history includes the disappearance two generations ago of the family’s nanny. The plan is that Duncan will flee his pressure-ridden job as the de facto creative director of a Manhattan advertising agency for weekends of respite in pastoral Osterhagen with Lily. Action such as killing the town boar and finding human remains while gardening in the back yard begin to put a damper on Duncan’s enthusiasm for these weekends and add renewed strain to an already strained marriage. Just wait until Lily meets up with Lloyd, a self-declared peeping Tom and want-to-be pervert. Or perhaps it is the lynching proposed by some town elders and nightly cannon firing, both seemingly targeted at Lily and Duncan, that worsens Duncan’s fragile sanity.

Sound strange? You bet, but wonderfully so in its best moments. The book is one of those reads that makes you wonder sometimes while you are reading but dares you to put it down. Consistently surprising, always strangely funny, and excellently crafted, Mauro handles this dark comedy with deftness. Moreover, along the way she makes readers consider the nature of marriage and identity and offers such a scathing (while hilarious) indictment of the advertising industry that readers won’t be surprised to learn that Mauro worked in the industry prior to becoming a novelist. This element of the novel is so pointed that—once we stop looking at accident scenes and following local voyeurs—we recognize something elementally tragic in our image-driven, consumer-fixated culture. Maybe these are some of the themes we often fail to talk about.

This won’t be a book for every reader, but it will be a welcome read for those who love sarcasm and something just a little askew. Mauro certainly will be a writer we will hear more from as her career progresses.

Man, Underground: a new novel excerpt

2009-12-10T07:46:00.000-08:00

While still in the early stages of revision, the first chapter of my new novel feels ready to share. So here it is, the premier of Man, Underground, a dark, contemporary comedy. Comments welcomed. I hope you enjoy and want to read more:

The world of men, like the world of trees, is overwhelmingly an upright world, one of verticality such that when isolated in a horizontal landscape—when we emerge from our cover like prey within the field of vision of hunters or snipers—we are always seen. Even if moving at a distance, we are visible, just as the upright things we build are visible, like our houses and our skyscrapers. While obviously we need rest and so we must join the horizontal world at regular intervals, we typically do so in private, and thus, encountering a man in public disobeying the expectations of the upright world, we find his presence incongruous, just as we find something awry, maybe even sad, in the tree that is no longer upright, knowing as we do, that life has gone out of it.

We are so accustomed to made objects that occupy only the vertical world, like walls and doors, we find them ordinary. Yet we become so conditioned to their function we don’t know how to respond when such objects adhere to our expectations of verticality but not to our perceptions of context, no more than we know how we are supposed to behave when we pass the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Such as it is for people when they encounter my front door, a door that stands alone in a field, a door without visible walls, without the context of “house” as we’ve come to expect it. If you can’t picture such a thing or you imagine only a two dimensional world with a door in a frame standing isolated in space, go back a few generations and think root cellar where the door only provides entrance to what’s below and you will have a fair equivalent of my front door. Picture the entrance to a place meant to preserve vegetables within the consistent cool womb of the earth, only this one preserves the sanity of a man. Maybe it is easier for you to accept its presence if you consider it as belonging to another age, another function, or another context. Perhaps I am easier to accept if you consider me in the same way.

Most people build houses against space. Give them a hill where the wind never stops blowing and they’ll build a house on top of it. It can be a hilltop in the middle of the prairie or in an otherwise flat valley or one rising from a suburb and still they erect a two or three story monstrosity atop it. They’ll build a private road to it if they must, install guardrails and hire a sand truck in winter and they’re at risk of sliding off the side of their beloved hill. They’ll complain at how the wind whistles through gaps in window sills and door frames and bemoan how they can’t keep water on their lawn for the steepness of its slope. All the while they’ll tell you how much they admire the view, but the only evidence you’ll see that they are home up there on that hill above you is the constant blue flicker of their TV screens at night. I know. I live below several hills. I live in a place where it hasn’t forgotten how to snow in winter even if people have forgotten how to drive or how to wear sensible shoes that accommodate the weather, a place where the wind blows and where smart farmers from another century planted wind breaks, and where, once upon a time, root cellars were common.

It is no great mystery how people are, no more than it’s a mystery that people talk about anyone who is different from them. People who live atop hills know they are the topic of conversations. And it may be simple-mindedness on my part, but I have little doubt that, consciously or not, those who live atop hills feel a kind of superiority. The house on the hill is a concept nearly as old as time. Like I said, people like to talk about those who are different from themselves. The poor talk badly about the rich and the rich about the poor and the powerful about the powerless and on and on.

I know people talk about me. I’d be a fool not to know. The crazy man in his cave. The recluse who lives down there with his spiders and snakes. Mr. Underground Man. I know they talk about more than my little underground house. Funny how people who don’t have anything to say to you always have a lot to say about you. I say let them talk.

Now I don’t really live in a cave or a hole in the ground. Let’s set that clear from the start. My home may be unconventional but it’s not primitive. Quite the opposite: complete with two large freezers and a well-stocked pantry, not to mention high-end, energy efficient washer and dryer. In designer color no less. I just take advantage of what the good earth provides. Like insulation during cold winters and hot summers.

Few people have ever crossed my threshold, so mostly they make assumptions. Like they take one look at my front door and assume that I’m more than a few bricks short of a full load. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them. I’m not so thick-headed I can’t realize how funny a door sticking up out of a field looks to most. Because my front door is little more than a gap cut into a berm, a door that opens onto a down stairwell, maybe it’s natural that people assume I live in the dark. If only they’d take a moment to consider the landscape falls away beyond my field, that there is a view the berm intentionally blocks. If they’d only consider the perspective of my home they don’t have from the road, they’d see it is purposely built into the side of a tall cut-bank, that indeed the south side of my home is visible from above and is full of windows and that in the winter, when the sun is low on the horizon, I get long hours of good light and fine solar heat. They don’t see the overhung roof that blocks the angle of mid-day sun in summer of the tile near the windows that absorbs and retains the heat. I wasn’t mindless when I built this place. But most people see my lone doorway and know I must be stone crazy.

Not that I go out of my way to correct them. And not that I didn’t build that door in the style I did for a laugh too. You’ve got to find humor where you can. Sometimes you’ve got to take pleasure in what is not said, have some confidence in the conversations that will occur regardless of your absence.

I don’t talk much to folks. I stick mostly to myself. I like talking to kids and eccentrics best when I am out and about in the world because they aren’t afraid to say what’s on their mind, or to ask questions, or act on their curiosity. The curious just might learn something. They might just stumble into a fact or an answer that opens their mind a crack. So when children approach me when I’m out at the library or the grocery store or just out for a walk for exercise in good weather—contrary to popular belief, I do leave home fairly regularly—I make it a point to talk with them if they approach me and I answer their questions. Okay, I’ll admit that sometimes I tease them, and if they ask if I live with snakes like they’ve heard, I’ll tell them I do, that the place is rampant with poisonous diamondbacks and that I cook them for my supper and decorate my Christmas tree with their rattles. I like watching their eyes grow wide and then that wrinkle of healthy skepticism furrow their brows. Mostly though I answer their questions honestly—the way I like my questions answered—and mostly kids know when a guy is teasing them. So I don’t mind when they play on my roof, because what’s it going to bother me if some little kids are running around up there in a field or they use it as a place to throw a ball back and forth. Just so long as they stay out of my garden, I’m content. What do I care? It’s not like I hear them, what with two feet of earth and a field full of native grasses and a foot of concrete between me and them. It’s not like they’re going to set fire to the place. Just so long as they don’t come bearing shovels and a jackhammer and a desire to dig a deep grave.

Of course I know there are stories about how I bury people down here or commit some other atrocious crimes or that I’ve filled the walls with sacks of money, but those stories usually have their origins with adults and the stories get screwed up and turned over and twisted, kind of like how bible stories get handed on. You might have a hard time getting to where the story began by the time it gets passed along enough and everybody gets their own agenda tagged on. They certainly bear little resemblance to the truth. But in my experience most folks wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on their backside. Such stories are a way of explaining what you don’t understand, a way of labeling and categorizing something or someone that seems outside of you and your range of experience. It’s like people who collect insects and keep them neatly labeled, the wings all shiny and rigid with shellac and safe inside their glass cases. They just seem to forget the pins stuck through the thorax that allow for this bit of otherness to seem permanently knowable and contained.

I realize I sound bitter and I don’t mean to. I really don’t. The truth is I don’t know much about other people any more than they know about me. I don’t really understand the rest of the culture, so largely I’ve withdrawn from it. I have a history like all of us do, and my particular history helped me to decide I’d had enough of the world’s patterns—the above ground world, as I call it—and I retired to this underground world.

Now don’t misunderstand that. I fear I can make it sound as if I’m making some grand political statement, that my decision to “unplug,” as it were, has significant attachments to it. It doesn’t. I’m not Ralph Elision’s invisible man. I pay for the electricity I use same as the next guy, only perhaps I’ve learned to use a lot less. I remain disillusioned with the culture we’ve created, maybe more than disillusioned, but I can’t claim that I was used for a greater cause or that I became a spokesman for those who are alienated and abused and dehumanized or that I came close to a power that I eventually saw as corrupting. No, I’m an ordinary man. Or I was an ordinary man if choosing to live one’s life by simpler patterns makes one extraordinary. I don’t think it does. Quite the opposite. I’m so ordinary you could clone me and I’d look just like the rest of us out wandering through our lives complaining about what hand we’ve been dealt, convinced that we’ve been disrespected for one trifle or another, living by the entirely ordinary, mundane patterns of our sleeping lives, each year a bit less hair where I want it and a bit more where I don’t. I’m no different from you other than you look at me with the same disdain as you do the guy with the sign at the off-ramp looking for a handout. No, mine is no political cause, no statement, no protest. Remember back in the day when Timothy Leary said “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out,” well I dropped out. Maybe I still wore cowboy pajamas when he said it and maybe it took me almost another forty years after he said it to heed his advice, but I finally did nonetheless, I dropped out, opted out as the insurance folks like to say.

Now perhaps I’m being unintentionally misleading. As I’ve suggested, I came along a good while after Leary. I grew up between wars, came of age in that time when America had visibly failed, yet it still wanted to believe it was required to pass its values around the world whether others wanted them or not but it allowed Coke and Pepsi and Exxon and Halliburton and McDonalds to fight the wars rather than employ planes and bombs and grunts on the ground. I was a Cold War kid all the way. Tuck your head and kiss your ass goodbye while presidents and premiers called each other names. By the time I cast my first ballot, we had already forgotten most of the lessons of Vietnam and, along with a few missing brain cells, we had pretty much forgotten Leary too. We’d hired an actor to pretend to be President and got our news from animated Max Headroom, who offered another version of that President. We’d killed Lennon. We’d long since stopped selling planes to Iran and started selling them to Iraq and had watched a Sea Stallion helicopter fly into its refueling plane. Yeah, those blissful, turn your head and cough days of “peace.” Even after the wall came down, those “peaceful days” prepped us for machete murders in the millions across Africa and snipers in an Olympic city, for “wars” on drugs and “wars” on terror.

I shouldn’t complain. I’ve got no room. I chose the path of inaction. I have become Melville’s Bartleby responding to the world around me with a continuous “I would prefer not to.” Buy this product. I would prefer not to. Follow this fad. I would prefer not to. Join this campaign. No thanks, I’d rather not. Sit and watch mindless drivel manufactured in the TV studio’s writer lounges and newsroom editing floors. Perhaps not. Join an on-line “social community” while an actual community lies beyond the computer connection. Pass. Accept the lies of our beloved and bribed elected officials. Thanks, no, I’ve had my fill.

I only encountered Melville’s Bartleby within the past year. I didn’t really use to be much of a reader, which is ironic given that my degree states otherwise. But I’ll admit I’ve taken much of my solace in the world of books in the last years, and when I met a character like Bartleby I had no difficulty understanding his actions, or his inactions as the case may be. Am I, like Bartleby, too lazy to fight a corrupted culture? Damn straight. For years I tried to tune it out, but the noise is cacophonous, so loud and so constant it still tries to creep in long after I opted out.

I get Bartleby. He makes perfect sense to me. Just as I get Elision’s invisible man much more clearly in his below ground squat than I do when he was the one behind the podium. I’ve long understood his blind rage more than I do his youthful hope. I get his silence more than I get the voice over the microphone. I understand silence. I crave it. There’s just so much noise in the world, like everyone is vying for your attention so they try and shout louder than the next guy. Have you noticed? When was the last time you heard quiet? My little place snug down here inside the earth helps. It can’t block out the world, but if you get enough insulation between yourself and all the noise, it helps.

Letting Go

2009-12-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

I have just finished writing the first draft of a new novel. It has been nearly a year in the making. I have but a bit more typing to catch up on and I have been, with the indulgence of my patient wife, reading the full book for the first time. So now I reach that critical stage of revision, that process of assessing the book and seeing its needs and attempting to locate the solutions for those needs. It is always precarious stuff, for the completion of a project of this size can cloud your vision. It is like faling in love. You are are so certain you are falling that you can't see clearly, yet of course love scares you, for it is an investment in another and in yourself and in blind belief, and out of that fear the logical part of you knows you must act a bit carefully, knows that you can't make real commitments without intelligence and respect while also remaining true to your core emotional self. With a book, it is too easy to love it and just as easy to despise it. Niether are useful places for edting and revision. You must find the middle ground wherein you can identify what is deserving of loving and what cannot be passed over without more exertion, more discipline. You have to find a way to walk the line between emotion and logic--the book will need both.

It is also a time of beginning the long goodbye. You have lived this book every day of your life for nearly a year and you will continue to live with it daily for some months more. Its people and places are as real to you, maybe more real to you than your waking life. But if you get it right, if you finish the revison and give the book its own life, you must let it go out into the world and suffer the ravages of the world on its own. You're trying your best to make it ready. You want it strong and hardy and ready to succeed in the world. You have devoted yourself to the thing and now you must let it go. (And maybe more scary still, you must now go find its sibling and start all over again--but that is, as they say, another story.)

I have written this current book in the year where my youngest child has also left home and gone out into the world. We've tried our best to make her ready, and while we celebrate her success, we are in a kind of deep grief, for she and her sisters have been the focus of our live's most important work for the span of a generation now. It is hard work for her too. Like the book, the world we face upon our own is not always an immediately kind or welcoming one, or so it seems. The hardest lesson for the parents, and for writers, maybe harder still for children (and books?) is to recognize that letting go is not saying goodbye, that the bonds remain every bit as strong, as formative even once we've had to share this being with the larger world.

Moran

2009-10-05T08:23:00.001-07:00

Moran
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Okay, so some of us have an easier time finding inspiration (not to mention being humbled) than others. Mount Moran on a fall morning--Grand Teton National Park.

Contrast

2009-09-16T06:57:00.001-07:00

Contrast
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Fall is beginning to show its colors here in Wyoming. Actually, that is untrue, for this picture was shot in Idaho, just a few miles from my home in Wyoming. My running joke (pardon the pun) is that most days I jog into Idaho--making myself sound impressive and all that. The picture shows off a local sub-species, the Rocky Mountain Maple peeking around the stark white of an Aspen trunk. Fall is my favorite time of year in this neck of the woods.

Ms. Freebush

2009-09-14T07:31:00.001-07:00

Ms. Freebush
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Okay, I know, how low can I go, posting a blog entry on the dog? Let me attempt all my lame excuses at least. Let's face it, I'm a writer and as such I spend a great deal of time alone working. It's a big house. There are SO many blank sheets of paper. Ms. Gracie Lou Freebush is my primary company a good deal of the time. All three daughters have abandoned me for college. My wife, silly girl, seems to think she is required to go to work five days a week. Need I go on? You have to admit, this face is pretty irresistible.

Learning

2009-09-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Just a quick quotation from the late David Foster Wallace:
"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

"Organic" Writing?

2009-09-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

Obviously I use the term "organic" a great deal throughout this blog and throughout my discussions of writing process. It is, I must admit, a favorite way of talking about writing (and about life, for that matter), which should come as no surprise as it appears in the subtitle of this blog. But what is it? For me, the application of the term organic comes as an extension of viewing the writing process as natural, of wishing to see the act of creative enterprise as a true element of interacting with the larger world, including the world of ideas, as a natural expression of human nature. It means that one takes one's cues from what the world provides. It comes from a fundamental belief that humans have a need to communicate ideas and have evolved in ways ideally suited to doing so. Much of it has to do with trusting the writing process. I believe in trusting organic forces, whether one sees those forces as harmony or karma or faith or feng shui or chi or any other expression of a belief that there are natural states of harmonic convergence and that when we tap into them we are tapping something universal within human consciousness. It is this view that helps explain the frequent occurrence that accompanies writing in a very focused manner on a project where the facts one needs seem to appear suddenly everywhere--in what you are reading at that moment, on the news, in other people's conversations. Now, lets face it, those facts were probably circulating out there anyway, but now you're paying attention. Still, it can feel as if the world placed them for you to encounter.

Okay, that's all rather mystic and abstract and perhaps sounds a little ridiculous. Let me put it into simpler terms within the confines of writing. While I'm not saying to turn a blind eye to the hard work and the revision that is inherent in producing writing worth reading, I am saying that there are times where you have to trust the process of writing itself. It its most extreme form, sometimes this means getting the editor within you out of the way of the child, for there is something about employing the imagination that we associate with childhood and the editor in you is more likely to be telling you about things you can't do or shouldn't do rather than things you might experiment with. It is about trusting that there will be time to revise later but that you must have text in the first place in order to revise. It means trusting that the act of creation is a natural desire.

Organic can mean, as an example, trusting that writing tends to form a natural structure unique to the task at hand and that part of revision is learning to see such structure and capitalize on it. Take a look at a brilliant story like Tim O'Brien's "They Things They Carried" as an example. One doesn't have to be a brilliantly insightful reader to quickly recognize that the base form of the entire story is essentially a list and that the base rhythm throughout is the cadence of a march. Given that it is a story centered on a platoon in Vietnam, a ground unit "humping" (marching with every conceivable tool and weapon they might need) from checkpoint to checkpoint, isolated in the jungle, connected to comrades outside the platoon only by radio, the cadence and the list both make sense. They are alone. They are powered only by their own legs. They carry the weight of death with them always. They are convinced they will never return to the world they knew before Vietnam. Because O'Brien is the soldier poet that he is, and because he is nearly the definition of the literary crafts person, surely he saw these elements of listing and rhythm within his drafts and openly focused upon employing them fully. But we must also allow that both elements arrive naturally from the very thing being described, from the nature of combat in Vietnam, perhaps even from the nature of the place itself. It can be simpler than that too: isn't it natural that a writer trying to transcribe a languid dream falls into elongated,, serpentine sentences mired with funky syntax? Or that the writer attempting to convey a fist fight suddenly writes staccato? Isn't that what the subjects naturally lead the writer towards?

It is in this view of writing that what I speak about bears relation to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of organic architecture. From early on, even in his "prairie house" period, Wright studied the lines of the prairie, the rolling hills, the expanse of sky, the way the sky squeezed the light at the horizon, the ways vertical structures like tree lines altered the sense of space, the notions of line and rectangle. These studies then infused his constructions, lowering roof lines, playing with angular light, taking away walls to open living space, using simplicity and minimalism. This was the world he walked within daily, and he began to extend those naturalistic elements as he encountered other sorts of geographies. He took what the world offered. Writers do something similar, for all material has its own set of natural inclinations and its own inherent restrictions, not just from setting but from character sensibilities, actions, historical context, and naturally occurring metaphors.

It can be deeper than this too, yet for me much or my obsession with the application of organics in writing is simply trusting that eventually the story will find its way to getting told. I am a writer who rarely knows the full scope of any story I am writing during the time of the writing. The ending is almost never known to me until I've exposed enough of the story to see it, rather like the archaeologist unearthing an object; not only must much of the object come into view, it must be taken into context with the other objects around it, within the facts of history and theory and other available evidence, all this before one might know the object and conjecture its purpose with any authority. Such blindness scares many but I actually take comfort in it. I believe that I must see scenes in my mind to have any hope of writing them, but if I can only see a scene or perhaps two scenes ahead, I'm perfectly content. Or perhaps I can only see a vague image on the horizon or I have some rather inarticulate sense of where, psychologically, I hope characters might reach, yet that is sufficient, in my experience, to trust that consistent daily writing, close listening, and careful reading will get me to the whole story.

Ultimately, while writing is about ideas and universal experiences and about the conveyance of honest emotions, the vehicle of writing is always language. Words. Words are all we really have as writers. But of course words are organic creations that arise out of experience and natural sound, and vocal recreation of shape and form, out of mythology and recounted history. Together words start to bump and grind. They create rhythm and sound and music. They are as elemental to humans intent upon expressing their experiences as are the other organic elements needed for sustaining life and soul. It is in this context that I employ the roots of the term organic within writing.

Organic suggests to me that there are reasons dominant metaphors exist across languages and cultures and texts. Metaphors like the garden and the river. We don't have to share the same language to recognize the presence of natural cycles in both or to see how those cycles help us to understand the metaphysics of life and death, rebirth and time, sewing and harvesting. Nature gives us the actual and nature gives us the metaphorical too. Creative artists in any medium can recognize the presence of both as well as the applications to their forms and to their ideas that become appropriate extensions of them.

Guiding lights

2009-09-06T06:51:00.001-07:00

Guiding lights
Originally uploaded by James Jordan

My obsession with lighthouses continues, so I've included this photo from Flickr by James Jordon. My last name actually means "lamp lighter," and although I'm reasonably confident that is a reference to lighting street lamps, perhaps I can claim my name has some birthright to this obsession. I love the form of the lighthouse as well as its symbolism. Besides, who couldn't use a little guidence to get them safely through the dark?

Parallelism

2009-09-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the role of parallelism in literature, the way that in good work it can be as if we've entered a hall of mirrors, a hall of mirrors erected at angles and cantered by varying degrees such that images reflect back on themselves although never in a direct line, never a simple exact duplicate. This is how jazz works differently than pop music where you can hear the recurrent theme but it never repeats precisely, instead the theme gets reborn again and again in new variations. In pop you get simply, overt repetition of the theme--catchy, sing-worthy, but predictable on many levels. Good books work more like jazz. Sometimes they do so at the largest levels of construction and sometimes only in the most nuanced bits of metaphor and image. The best books often do both.

Perhaps I've been thinking about this so much lately because I am nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Frequently on a given day I am writing new material in the morning, material that is creeping up on the awareness that it is pushing near the ending, and by late morning or early afternoon I am either typing material or editing material (more often both--well always both as I type) that was originally written months ago. This constant forward backward movement allows me to look at the earliest passages of the book from the distance of some hindsight (and a new awareness of where the story actually goes) and to see in the newest material the moments when it best reflects the language, tone, images, and rhythms of its origins. Of course this allows me to see, and I hope, capitalize more fully on the echoes and parallelisms that are organically present in the text. That's how it is for me: discovering what has occurred organically at the rather subconscious phase of the original writing and then stepping away into the analytical ability to see in it what is natural what works, and then, with luck, enhance that.

The presence of such development was made material for me the other night when my wife and I were watching a commentary from the writers and directors of "The West Wing" about an episode titled "Two Cathedrals." (Okay, I am rarely a fan of TV, and the series is now years removed, but we are rapid fans of this show; one of those rare shows that is powerfully and smartly written, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted--why aren't there more?) The writer and director spoke at length about the way they began to envision the use of the convergence of two story lines and the employment of the past and the present through the parallelism of events and of settings. Employing parallelism, symbolism, repeated image and gesture and parallelism in dialogue lines, they move the viewer seamlessly in time, going so far as to trust the viewer enough to be intelligent enough to catch more nuanced points of time transition (something TV rarely does--trust the intelligence of its audience). Beyond employing parallelism in time, they also used these patterns to allow the personal life of the President to reflect the political and executive decisions he encountered, which is one of the very things that drew viewers to the series in the first place, the humanization of a fictional equivalent of those in power from whom we are so otherwise removed and yet so dependent upon. Is that not one of the roles of literature after all, to humanize and activate ideas and experiences that otherwise seem removed and too large in scope to comprehend.

About the same time as seeing this commentary I was finishing my reading of an older Stewart O'Nam novel The Names of the Dead. Now O'Nam is consistently an enviable craftsman, someone whose work I not only enjoy but learn from. He uses parallelism in both plot and image to do something similar and move the reader within two time periods--past and present. Given that Larry Markham, his protagonist suffers PTSD from his service as a medic in Vietnam, the creation of the reader's ability to inhabit the two time periods is critical, for of course Larry does, as do all people who have survived horrific and traumatic circumstances. Memory does not leave. Indeed science shows us that without biological manipulation, the memory of absolute fear cannot leave. The reader must experience this in order to begin to formulate and understanding of Larry's present. The fluidity with which O'Nam transitions such movement in time is precisely the sort of thing writers must study if they are to learn the larger elements of craft.

Of course literature can succeed with employing identifiable applications of parallelism in part because life does. We often fail to see the images and symbols and interweaving lines of such parallelism in our lives simply because our lives are to close to see in focus. Literature allows us to examine such structures and to ask why they exist, to examine what they reveal. As always, when we encounter such applications in good books, we examine our lives and our world anew as well.

Mothers and Daughters

2009-08-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Last night the cell phone was thrust upon me by my crying wife as she proclaimed, "I can't do this any more." On the other end of the call was our youngest daughter, also in tears and loaded with repeated apologies, a daughter who had been crying for days as she struggled to adapt to college on the other side of the country. The tears came through the phone while more tears emitted from the other room. They were both emotionally exhausted, both drained because of their love for the other, both lost in missing one another.

Now typically, my three daughters give me endless grief for being the emotional one. My wife, excited for the opportunities they face at their respective colleges, typically puts on the braver face, is quicker to remind them of how rich and full their lives are. But this is our baby. And she is struggling with the newness and the distance, and even her stoic mother finally crumpled. Is there anything worse than hearing those you love cry while in the knowledge you are incapable of removing the source of their pain? Yet the pain is caused not by harm but by love. Perhaps that is the greatest source of pain after all. Their love will see them through, even if they find that hard to believe in the moment.

In the meanwhile, because I was needed, it was a time to swallow my own feelings of missing this youngest child, to push them aside and remind them that the love shared throughout the family will prove our solace too. Tonight, I try to find the words that might offer comfort. Tomorrow, I'll leave some space to cry.

One Hurdle into Another

2009-07-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

So, you're writing a novel. You've been writing the novel for months. You meet the book every day, first thing in the morning. It waits for you. On good days it is friendly and talks to you. You start to feel the characters in the room. Some days the writing soars, some days it slogs along, its feet stuck in the muck at the swamp bottom. It's the typical stuff of writing a novel. Each day goes by and more pages are full of ink, and if you're lucky, with each day you begin to see a bit further ahead, begin to see scenes, however murky, images in sepia and a bit out of focus, like E.L. Doctorow says when he talks about writing being like driving at night with the headlights on; you can't always see everything around you, but if you pay close enough attention you can reach your destination. As the story begins to unfold and more scenes become visible to you, the horizon seems a little closer.

Eventually, as happened to me this week, I reached a scene that I've been writing towards for months, a scene that offers a critical turning point in the novel. It occurs more than two hundred pages into the novel. It is a scene I've seen vaguely for months, the exposure of a character's past that is pivotal to the novel. In this case, it is a scene that stands at the apex of the rising action, so I have approached it like a climber, and like a climber, I hope the way down off this summit is an easier route than the way up. I want to think it will be, for the flat lands beyond should be visible now, right?

I finished the scene after many days of work on it with elation. Like all writing worth reading, it will need work still. A great deal of work. But essentially the scene feels as if it has accomplished what I had hoped for. The drafted scene felt fulfilling. It seemed to move the characters into a space in which they were comfortable and established the past I had in mind in a way that felt organic and believable.

The elation lasted about twenty four hours. Then came the realization (as if this should have been any kind of surprise) that I had no real idea what happened next, no real ideal of how these characters will resolve their lives. If this surprises you, it holds no such surprise for me. This is the nature of how I work. The further into the text I am, the more I've learned about it and its direction, but at best the full story appears rather like a Polaroid developing out of the haze. In this instance I've reached a critical moment alongside my characters, but there is more story of course. So I go back to work. I listen for their voices. I try not to panic. I return to that strange but wonderfully satisfying place of semi-consciousness where fiction happens most often for me, so focused on the novel that it begins to mix and distort with actual life at times and writing seems a sort of perpetual dream state. I hang on to the shadows of the larger book, the blurry horizon of its potential ending, the abstractions of what the characters need to accomplish in their lives. From these abstractions I scan for the detailed scenes that will give them motion and voice and possibility, and I wait. I write more and I wait more. I watch for shape. I watch for scenes that begin to form in my subconsciousness. I read backward and I write forward and listen.

I would be lying if I failed to admit that such moments scare me a great deal. There are days when I fully believe I will never find the next word, let alone the next scene or the book's ending. It has been a week full of such days where writing a paragraph takes exhausting effort and the result still looks like it has been insulted with an autopsy. I long for the days when the writing takes control and I turn pages of new material one after another. This must be something parallel to how the bipolar patient feels all of his life. Still, the only answer I know with certainly is that it is time to go back upstairs and work some more. Find the next word and trust that it leads to one after that. If these are characters worth asking someone to share their lives with, then I must trust them to offer direction, for if they are written with real integrity, they will reveal the next events their lives hold.

New Books of Note

2009-04-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Murray Edwards, an editing client of mine through my business theWORDwright (http://www.thewordwright.net/), has recently published a new collection of short stories. Looking for Lucy Gilligan is a wonderfully quirky collection that is often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes irreverent, and still manages to prove frequently touching. Don't be fooled by Edwards' dry humor, for he proves a sensitive writer, one who paints portraits of complex, concrete characters unafraid of showing the world themselves as they really are. It is a rewarding first collection. The book offers a wonderful individualized vision of contemporary Texas. Visit the website for the book at http://www.lucygilligan.com/.

Another recent book of interest that is receiving very good reviews is the true story of a Nazi concentration camp survivor. I am biased on this one, I must admit, for the author is an old college friend--Von Petersen--and I had the pleasure of reading the book while it was still in manuscript. Carl's Story: The Persistence of Hope is a moving true account of one man's unlikely survival of the Nazi horror and of the time he endured at three of the infamous Nazi camps. The book is extremely compelling and an edge-of-the-seat adventure ride of narrow escapes, happen-chance salvation, and enduring hope. It is an important book about commonplace heroism and stoicism. The author and its subject were recently interviewed on NPR, and the book has been well-received by notable authors who have written on the Holocaust. It is available at http://amazon.com/.

Mark Hummel ~ Confluence Journal ~

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