heart to heart chats regarding the world of a writer who is something of a genre slut. jon-ra slut: writer who keeps no genre boundaries; creates new genres
Thursday, October 10, 2013
"After Long Silence"
Yes, it is
right, my dear poet, to speak after long silence, but for me, Mr. Yeats, it
won’t be about the supreme theme of Art and Song, there being far too much of
that in my Great September 2013 Novel Revision that I’ve just this moment at
10:10 a.m. on October 9, declared done—ah, how cool it is outside.
Done. Done.
Done. The number of times I’ve declared this novel over and done don’t bear
counting. I nearly abandoned it after the first two hundred pages. The sweet
siren of short stories moved in and inhabited me during my first fiction
workshop with Mary Clyde and Robin Lippincott, both masters of the short story.
Mary Clyde, my mentor that summer, must have thought I was coming unhinged with
the number of new stories I was sending her each month—all under a pseudonym: V.
Hasseltine Taylor. LOL Sounds like a romance that should have Fabio on the cover.
Au contraire. I was looking around at the realities of life as I knew
it—growing up in a mill town, rehabbing a hand surgery in a roomful of other
recovering patients, vacationing with four other couples we had known since our
first Savannah days when the kids were young—everything, all of it was gritty grist
for my short story mill.
The next
semester when I studied with Brad Watson, he was less cheerful about my eternal
output. He wanted to see some revision rather than more new stuff. “Stop trying
to sound like Eudora Welty,” he wrote, regarding my new “Envenomation” which
was over the top with snakes. Written by Kathleen Thompson. Well, Brad Watson
was the age of my son...just saying. I doubt he would ever have figured out the
business of a pseudonym. I wrote him back that neither Eudora Welty nor his
beloved state of Mississippi had the corner on names like Lovie and Radio, or
cottonmouths.
Writing short
stories had run its course by my fifth and final workshop, so I picked up the
old Lost (working title) manuscript
and submitted twenty pages. And did I say the idea was conceived the summer of
1991? My son was home from college teaching Savannah kids how to play tennis. I
told him I would kill for a plot. Easy for him and he was eager to help out. He
wrote on a yellow legal pad. Very little remains of the plot on that page, but
how many embryos resemble the resulting adult? The seed was sown. 1991. Think
of it. Twenty-two years.
My son has
named me Queen of Revision. I do enjoy making things better and better. But
it’s so much easier with a poem or essay whose length is more proportional to my narrow pea brain. (My higher math.) I’ve actually looked around for a
clear wall and thought of imitating Faulkner (truly I like most things
Mississippi including good ole boy Brad and his short story dogs) but the only
open wall spaces are ceilings so I’d have to pull a Michelangelo if I outlined the
novel as Faulkner did. I settled for a new set of big index cards as my
organization tools.
And, all this
is just my first baby step. Just call me Queenie. And now the harder parts: finding
an agent who can help find an editor who will, no doubt, insist on more
revision. Right now I need to plant a few violas and snapdragons. First
things first.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Fruits of An Age
September 9, 2013
7:50 a.m. A week ago today I started this blog post, my final day (in my grand
scheme of things) to have my agent query package for my novel ready to send
out.
But, tell me,
with such an important writing deadline pending, why is it that my whole household
goes berserk? Why am I out of my usual spot at the kitchen sink washing dishes,
planning another meal, preparing another meal...? What else is new? My writing
plans often take a back seat to life.
I set this
goal in the spring after Spalding’s homecoming. I could learn a lesson here; listen to the Bard. Spring doth not a summer make, nor can spring predict all summer activities. Family reunions, visits from family members, my son and his family
going to the Alabama-VA Tech game in Atlanta, etc.? I did know we had committed to keeping Will,
our four-year-old grandson, for most of the games, but who knew the first game
was on Labor Day weekend? Will they soon be starting football on the Fourth? Life--and football season, happens.
I woke up last Monday with two 5-gallon buckets of beautiful pears, a
basketful of magnificent peaches, and about two quarts of muscadines in my
kitchen. Let me remind you that I cannot stand to waste anything. It’s in my
genes. My mother and sisters were recycling and re-purposing before the words were
coined. Truly I’d much rather write about pears and muscadines than preserve
them, or blog about how my sweet nephew climbed on a tall ladder to pick the
pears because he knows I want the large ones and he knows I do not want them
shaken from the tree to end up with bruises. Thank you, James. Or about his brother
who ate with me recently and I complained about how tasteless the peaches were
this year with all the rain. He told me then he lived near an orchard and was
going to bring me some good peaches. Thank you, Claudy.
And then
there was the Great Muscadine Pickin’ in our back yard last Sunday after
church. Will (remember, he’s four) wanted first to take those pears to
“Grandmudder’s house to feed the cows.” We did that last year in
Anniston when the two old pear trees were loaded with pears. His excitement was
unequaled in any child I’ve seen since his daddy was a child. Although I told
him the pears had to be peeled for pear preserves, he couldn’t hear that. He
didn’t even know the word preserves, so I decided to teach him a new word:
muscadine. He didn’t forget his goal: “Go feed the cows at Grandmudder’s.” Even
after a nap those were the first words from his mouth. Muscadines, I kept repeating. We have to go pick some muscadines for jelly this afternoon. I
knew they were ripe and that he could pick some of the low-hanging ones and
some of the higher ones with a step stool from the kitchen.
“Okay,” he
conceded, “we’ll pick the Muscadines, and then we’ll go to Grandmudder’s to
feed the pears to the cows.”
I thought my
perseverance and tenacity and downright “stubborn as a mule-ness” equaled
anything I’d ever seen, but he has me outdone in spades. Fortunately he got so
sidetracked with picking the Muscadines that the afternoon passed very quickly.
By the time he had watered my wilting Old Maids in the pot by the garage, and
watered my neighbor’s plants at her garage while they were away, he was happy
to go inside and take a bath before his dad arrived to pick him up.
Any fruit in
my kitchen is like a magnet; I’d rather write about it than work all the kinks
out of a plot in this everlasting and infernal novel I’m revising. I’d rather
slice the peaches, pour sugar over them, let it melt, freeze them, or just go
ahead and bake the peach cobbler. Worry the dough, worry the dough... And
washing pears, peeling pears, and slicing pears is not a bad thing to do: you
can do it and be just about brain dead. Cover them with sugar and let
them sit overnight for that amount of sugar to melt before cooking pear
preserves with the thinnest lemon slices. Wash and squish and cook the
muscadines for their juice. They have the strongest pull—their tart
tickles my nose.
The ending to this blog I wrote last Monday:
We’ll see if
Will is higher on the cussed determination ruler than I am. We’ll see whether I
can abandon the kitchen, abandon this blog, and move right into Libby’s plight
in the novel with so much tragedy going on in her life. I don’t like tragedy. I
don’t like to write about tragedy. I want to stir a pot of bubbling pears. I
want to watch the big bubbles grow small, pack the golden sugary pears into
fruit jars, seal them, give them a boiling bath for ten minutes, and listen for
each separate click, the final step in preservation that assures the fruit will
last until Will turns five next summer.
The revision
of the ending:
I know where
Will got his determination—or some of it. I didn’t abandon the kitchen or my desk. I determined that the hours between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. are totally
mine. No one calls. No meals are required. No laundry. No meetings. Perfect time. I could be at my desk during my most fruitful hours. Any of the
other hours of the day could be spent preserving fruit. I have canned 20 pints
of pear preserves and cooked one gallon of grape juice for jelly. (James later brought me a bucket of Concord grapes.) I’ve started the jelly: nine pints, a
good start. Four were from Will’s muscadines and their juice to which I added
some grape juice. This weekend we had both Will and his big sister, Victoria.
We picked muscadines again. Guess what’s simmering on the stove as I write? And I'm about to post this blog. Fait accompli!
Friday, August 16, 2013
Why do I Blog? Or Tweet?
Why We Tweet.
That title on the cover of an old Atlantic (October 2012) was enough to make me read the article. Frank Rose based his conclusions on a report published by a couple of neuroscience researchers at Harvard who suggested that humans may get a neurochemical reward from sharing information, and a significantly bigger reward from disclosing their own thoughts and feelings more than reporting someone else’s.
Sometimes the why’s of my whole puzzling existence can be explained in one sentence from an old magazine. Why did my four-year-old Will have a melt-down/come-apart (alternately referred to according to one’s age) on Sunday at a birthday celebration here for my older sister? Let’s start with the fact that he’d already been to one birthday party and arrived at his usual naptime, sugared up. Given that, and the fact that the older folks at our party had not seen him or each other in a while, there was a lot of talking to be done all around.
I heard this loud wail from Will. He had pulled out the wooden blocks and was surrounded by various groupings of stacked blocks. When I inquired what was wrong, he wailed again, by now in the arms of his grandfather: “Nobody listens to me!” More crying and wailing. The entire party was alerted and gathering. His dad advised in a stern voice, “Will, 99% of the population has felt that same way at some point in their lives.” I pleaded, “Will, come and tell your gran what’s wrong. “No,” he said, emphatically. “I want Papa.” So it was not just anyone he wanted to listen, but very specifically his grandfather who, by the way, never says no to him.
Why have I decided to write a memoir? I’ve written enough unpublished work to completely wallpaper a few large homes, maybe even a small town. After first writing a ton of poems and personal essays, after three published poetry books, a first novel that hadn’t fit anyone’s list, a collection of short stories with only a few published, and upon completion of the MFA, I returned to the second novel started in the 90s, and its 200 completed pages. Simultaneously, I began writing a few stories, since shorter pieces are much easier for me. I had read Olive Kitteridge. I would write a linked series in the manner of Elizabeth Strout. So, I charged back to the short stories with renewed vigor. My character was already named in two Christmas stories that had been published. Clyde. One of those stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Still after writing a couple more stories now and then, I decided I must get back to that second novel and finish it. I’m not one to leave things unfinished.
When I finally stamped the novel done, again, for maybe the 998th time, I started a round of queries. While some NY editors found parts of it they really liked, my agent was unable to sell it. I grew sick of the sight of its sheer bulk; I chunked it behind the doors of a bookcase already bulging with aging manuscripts until...
... along came WELD and its founding editor, Glenny Brock, a fellow alum from Spalding University. WELD would publish a hard copy weekly newspaper with an online edition all the time. Truly ambitious. I submitted an essay for the first issue on the potential demise of cursive writing and Glenny used it as the whole inside back page. That started a marathon of writing essays/blogs that were published by WELD, and I was right back where I was in the pre-fiction days when I was interviewing folks, writing essays, and pairing the essays with poetry. Happy as a mudlark!
How I jumped from that to writing a memoir is not totally clear. Reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory may have contributed to this latest folly. I knew that I wanted to take a workshop in Creative Nonfiction, so I signed on for Paris with Spalding, 2012. Still wary of my reason, my submission to workshop included a piece in which I ruminated about whether or not I really wanted to write a memoir. During that time in Paris, the decision was clinched. Nicholas, my oldest grandson, and I stood in the Musee D’orsay and could see Sacre Coeur on its distant hill through the hands of a wall-sized clock. Looking through time. This metaphor I couldn’t shake. I would write the memoir looking back through time in small chunks of writing. In essays—the form I was so happily producing regularly.
A year later, this memoir is still on going. Last spring at Spalding’s homecoming, I found myself sidetracked and pulled back into the novel after being asked about my writing by a new (and very kind) faculty member who suggested a literary agency that I might try for the novel. Hope welled up and pooled in my throat, and I could hardly express my gratitude to D.M. for his interest.
Why has the need to get the novel out there returned? Well, for one thing, I have a renewed passion for the novel as I’ve discovered new things about my protagonist Libby during this revision. Not long ago in reading the introduction to a collection of poetry of Yeats, it occurred to me that Libby is part Irish—a thing I’d all but overlooked—so she blames everything on the moon.
Truth to tell, both my novels have dealt with loss and women and their need to be heard within a friendship. The first novel had to do with the friendship of two sisters and the death of their mother. The second has a lifelong friendship threatened by a deathbed confession regarding an illegal abortion. This “neurochemical reward” we humans get from sharing information must truly be greater for the female gender. My girlfriends along the way have been so important to me that Libby, is an amalgam of all my best girlfriends. She and her lifelong friend, Clara, have begun to reveal their truest nature in this 999th revision.
Rose makes a good point. All of us—writers and their literary creations, Will, et moi—would be heard. In the Atlantic article he offers, “by telling stories effectively, we gain status, obtain social feedback, and strengthen our bonds with other people.” And aren’t all writers happy to hear this?
Rose continues, “And on the flip side of all this nattering—or tweeting—by our fellow humans ensures that we don’t have to discover everything on our own. We have no end of people telling us what’s what. Hence the real paradox of sharing: what feels good for me probably ends up benefitting us all.”
That’s what I’m counting on. It feels really good to get this written down.
And, by the way, my MFA graduation lecture was “Death as a Fictive Technique.” I may write a similar lecture based on this blog. The epilogue of my novel indicates that Libby had been telling her stories through journals, and now that I’ve just revised the prologue, it heralds, as it should, that journal keeping.
My next lecture? “Tweeting as a Fictive Technique: What Feels Good for Me.” What do you think?
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Birthdays, Snakes, and Bleeding Hearts
Tuesday July 16, 6:08 a.m.
As if three score and ten were not enough, along comes
another. I’m not too good with math, but even I can figure out the cap on how
many are potentially left to go. Ah, but they are as inevitable as the Bleeding
Hearts just outside my office window, just starting to blossom out, and as
certain as the hummingbirds that will soon follow to thrust their long bills
into the tiny red folds, sipping nectar, wings aflutter.
Birthdays.
This one will be one of the most unusual I’ve ever had. In
about an hour I’ll leave to drive to Tuscaloosa to visit my oldest sister, Ann,
88, in the hospital. Now just by my saying 88 you will presume she has
difficulty walking around (and she has slowed) and that someone is usually
pretty close by in case she needs help. Not if she can help it! Yesterday she
decided she would go out to her flower garden and loosen up the soil with a hoe
and then push some of the dirt around the base of the hostas she started from
one rooted from my house in Prattville in the 80s. I’ve seen her do it a
hundred times, so I can see the scene. This part was new: she felt the bite
before she saw the head of the Copperhead dart back after his strike.
We only have two other poisonous snakes in Alabama—the
rattlesnake and the cottonmouth, if you don’t count the more southern coral
snake. Frankly, I’ve never seen a coral snake and I’m not certain I could
remember the jingle in time if I did. Red
on black, friend of Jack; red on yellow, kill a fellow.
Ellie Bryant inspired the first line of my snaky story “Envenomation”
in the Lectorium at Spalding with her comment: “I’m an e-mail slut.” So my
first line of this story became “My daddy handles snakes, and my mama is an
e-mail slut.” But, you know, now that I’ve remembered this incident, my story
begins in humor and ends in tragedy. I remember Lovie and the demise of her
Radio. I don’t like the ending of that story this morning. Lovie fares somewhat
better because she still has Silas—named after Silas House, the good preacher
from the snake-handling church. Still...
My brother-in-law, a doctor, and my consultant on snakebites
for the story, assured me last night that a copperhead bite is less dangerous
than a rattlesnake bite. He also said that the antivenin has improved some and is
not so apt to trigger an allergic reaction now that they use sheep instead of
horses—oh, but not to get into that process. It was good, he said, that they
were observing her overnight at the hospital.
As unlikely as this snakebite strike was the gift I found on
my kitchen counter this morning, a typed sheet of paper. You read that
correctly, typed as in typed on the
Smith Corona typewriter, borrowed from this same brother-in-law whose dad gave
it him to use in college. This typewriter has been sitting at the end of my
kitchen table for a week as my grandson Nicholas has typed on thick paper for
an art installation. This is his
“creative summer” following his freshman year at Syracuse University in
architecture. He hopes to have a complete art show before his return to
Syracuse in late August. That familiar sound of striking keys against paper has
lulled us to sleep nightly. It calls up my eleventh grade typing class at
Montgomery High, and a more recent memory, Jessica pounding out stories on
“Murder She Wrote” when our children were young.
My birthday poem.
I read it three times through before crying. Nicholas has
been the inspiration for many of my poems, and is the subject of the title poem
of my full-length collection. The realization hit home that in poems it is okay
to just lay bare our hearts. It is the only place we can do that without seeing
our words grow fuzzy and too precious.
He has given me a sweeping overview of the installation-in-progress.
It is filled with all the darkness teenagers experience in relationships in a
divorce situation, situations that even the adults involved can’t fully
understand. He has typed nearly a hundred pages of words this week spilled from
the gut and recorded in his notebook over the past year. He is still toying
with an arrangement of these words. Always eager to help with ideas, I’ve
pointed out to him the light and dark in Bruegel’s print that hangs in my
powder room, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent.”
This newest poem, a glorious song beaming from my
refrigerator, may be the start of balance for arranging his installation, adding
that warm, sunny side of healing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Message in a Blog
About twenty Birmingham language arts teachers endured my holding forth yesterday in my current gig as a Road Scholar ...
-
Who could have ever guessed? The Shortest Distance is a full-length poetry book that I've been working on getting ready to publish sinc...
-
Thank you, dear Picket. Thank you, dear friends of Picket. I can't believe I have a blog, and now I have Picket's friends at my blog...
-
About twenty Birmingham language arts teachers endured my holding forth yesterday in my current gig as a Road Scholar ...