Following the Brush

Yesterday I took David Shumate’s IWC class, “Following the Brush,” which was about where poems come from, how to cultivate the posture of the of the mind that invites them. We talked about the importance of letting your guard down in the first phase of writing a poem, messing around, not working toward a specific goals. "Think of yourself as a witness to the poem coming," Dave said. "Recognize that the poem has an intelligence of its own." 

The early process is prelinguistic: impulse, image, development of a notion, he said. Not words. The proper state of mind is: I don’t know what to do with this. Let’s see where it goes.

“Follow the brush” is a Chinese term that describes this early process. The brush is the tool, the implement. It knows better than we do where to go. You have to allow the brush to emerge. This was a new term to me, one I like very much.

In this state, you are the “pilgrim of the poem,” a representative of the real “I.” The pilgrim disengages immediately from the “me,” allowing the pilgrim to discover vicariously what might happen. The pilgrim is utterly willing, naïve, stupid to go out on these pilgrimages in the first place. It disengages hesitance to let the “I” do things it wouldn’t actually down. 

I like the idea of the poet as a pilgrim very much, too.  And the idea that being in this state gives you entry to the territory of myth, where the ordinary world filtered through the prism of the imagination.

Early in the class, Dave asked us to describe where/how we get into the posture of mind that allows poems. I misunderstood, sort of, what he meant—and instead of describing my writing place, I tried to recreate how poems most often come to me (when they come, which I wish happened more often.)

Fall day, last leaves, yellow against the blue sky.

I’m sitting in a glass building, considering

where poems come from and notice a dog outside--.

red as the fallen leaves, straining against the leash.

A woman in a blue jacket—blue—hurrying after him.

It’s always blue that stops me. Blue moving

Across the landscape, becoming a poem.

Right now I’m thinking now about “blue.” The blue of the Italian paintings I love: the blue of the Madonna’s robe, the blue Italian sky. And “View of Delft.” Vermeer’s blue that captivated me for years. Early in the class, I said that when I write a poem it’s usually about something I want to own, to keep—but know I can’t. Looking at whatever it is the way I need to look to make a poem reconstructs that thing in my head in a way that makes me feel like I own it. 

Which is, of course, what I’m always writing about: trying to keep, to hold something I love (a painting, a person, a time, a place). When the little poem (draft) came yesterday I thought it was the opposite of that: something totally random. Now I see it captured a moment that trigged a few thoughts about my own process that I wanted to keep:

1. Whatever blue is often delivers me to the posture of mind that invites a poem to come.

2. Dogs don’t need to write poems; they just are.

3. Which, (of course) paradoxically, puts the poet in the posture of mind that produces the brush to follow--then somehow, magically, become the brush herself.

4. Ergo: the poem on the page is made of who we are…when we aren’t.

These ideas aren’t new to me. But it was lovely to revisit them by way of a poet I deeply admire, such  a delight to follow a brush that made them present themselves in a new 

way--and carry me to the holy place that invites poems (stories, novels) to come.

Funny How Writing Works

Funny how writing works. Not so funny how, when for reasons legitimate and absurd—despite the excellent advice you give to others—you don’t write for a while and it seems impossible to begin again. Which is pretty much where I find myself at the end of this rather difficult year. I could play the breast cancer card; being sick for a while certainly does rock your world. But, okay, that pretty much over by April—and, while I was tired and there was a lot of catching up to do, I felt fine by early summer. I feel fine, now.

So, Jeez. Write.

But what? There were so many things I meant to write about in 2013. Maybe I tried and couldn’t make them seem interesting, even to me. Maybe, more likely, they didn’t seem possible. Hello. Which is a big part of why you (we) need to write something every day. One idea leads to another idea. Words lead to more words.

Anyway. Last night I promised myself I would not end the year in a slump. I would get up in the morning and write something. But when I sat down at my desk, everything still seemed either bland or impossible. I thought, okay, how hard could it be to write about my favorite books of 2013? That perked me up a bit. It felt possible, though unlikely to involve much, if any, process. Still. It would be a start.

Probably to avoid that start, I Googled “Quotes about Books.” A gazillion popped up; you’d probably be familiar with most of them I read. You might know this quote from St. Augustine’s Confession, too. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” I remember reading it somewhere myself. But today, for some reason, it created a small combustion in my mind. Books and travel; travel and books.

When I was a girl, books were the only way out of a world where I so did not want to be. There were train tracks just beyond the backyard of a house we lived in for a while, and sometimes I’d stand and watch the passenger trains go by. Their lit windows at dusk, the people inside, reading, chatting, dozing filled me with longing. Where are they going, I’d wonder. Did the people looking out the window notice me? If they thought of me, that girl watching the train go by, when they reached their destinations, wouldn’t it be a little like being there myself?

Before I could read by myself, Eloise made me want to live in the Plaza Hotel in New York. In grade school, I gravitated toward books about perfect families, perfect friendships. The “Little House” series, which made the harsh life of pioneers seem glamorous; “Betsy, Tacy and Tib's,” deep bonds to one another made Minneapolis seem exotic to me. If I went there, would I have friendships like that, too?

I loved books like The Boxcar Children, in which spunky, resourceful children solved their own problems and made independent lives. I adored shabby gentility of Little Women, four sisters—so different, yet so fiercely loyal to one another. Little Women's Jo made me want to be a writer—though, I see now, was awfully pious and set a ridiculously high standard for selflessness. Nonetheless, I still have it on a shelf near my desk—a beautiful, illustrated book that my Uncle Joe gave me for Christmas when I was ten. The pages are worn from reading and rereading. It falls open to the scene where Beth dies and Jo grieves for her. 

The books my English grandparents sent took me to London—a world my mom talked about with a yearning that made me sad. Big Ben. Red double-decker buses. Rows of neat brick houses, the windows and the brass fittings on their doors polished until they gleamed. A place where people wore “jumpers,” not “sweaters.” Where they went on “holiday” instead of “vacation.” Where “favor” was “favour” and “theater,” “theatre.” These things thrilled me. In time, I discovered Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. What were moors, I wondered. What, exactly, did a primrose look like? 

The more I read, the more I wanted to travel into the real worlds of the books I loved. I vividly remember my first view of England—from the air. “We’ve gained land,” the pilot announced. “If you look down…”

A thrill shot through me; at the same time, I felt like I might cry. I thought, what if it’s nothing like I imagined? What if it’s just like everyplace else? It took me a moment to gather the courage to raise the shade. But, oh! When I did! There it was: a patchwork of green fields, villages here and there, even the occasional thatched cottage. It felt like going home—which, at the time, I assumed was because my mom and been born and lived there before she met my dad. But now, writing, it occurs to me that arriving in the places I’ve read about in books always makes me feel as if I've come home—that each book is a home in its own right, not just an escape from a home that makes you unhappy.

Note to self: Isn’t it so cool how, suddenly, you write something utterly new? How you feel a kind of map inside you, guiding you and how, even though you can’t see it, you trust it to take you where you need to go?

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward,” Kierkegaard said. Writing is like that, too. You can’t understand what you’re writing until you’ve written it and look back to see what you said.

But what about St. Augustine: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." It sparked something; it got me going. It made me think of traveling through books and traveling into books. But looking at the quote again, it's clearly about point of view. Books take you to other places, but they also take you into other people’s lives and minds. In the end, this is probably the most important thing that books do. It seems strange to me that the quote set me on a whole other path.

Maybe a topic for another day. Maybe I’ll start writing about that and end up in a whole other place. The idea excites me. Writing, going where writing takes me, excites me. 

But I only remember this when I write.

So, duh. Again.

In any case, if you were counting on that list of books I loved in 2013 that I didn’t end up writing about either, here you go.

·      Blood of the Lamb/Sam Cabot (Full disclosure: Sam Cabot is really my pals SJ Rozan and Carlos Dews. Nonetheless a fabulous book with a “Whoa!” ending.

·      Dear Life/Alice Munro

·      Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk/Ben Fountain

·      Benediction/Kent Haruff

·      The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye/Rachel Joyce

·      Life after Life/Kate Atkinson

·      The Burgess Boys/Elizabeth Strout
·       All of the Harry Potter Books/JK Rowling (Thanks, Heidi!)

·      The Humanity Project/Jean Thompson

·      The Dinner/Herman Koch

·      Stoner/John Williams

·      The Black House & The Lewis Man/Peter May

·      Fools/Joan Silber

·      The Interestings/Meg Wolitzer
·      Just One Evil Act/Elizabeth George

·      We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves/Karen Joy Fowler

·      Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets/Evan Rosko

·      Vienna/Eva Menasse

·      Fort Starlight/Claudia Zuluaga

·      The Goldfinch/Donna Tartt

·      The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls/Anton Disclafani

·      Wonder/JR Placio

·      When We Were Bad/Charlotte Mendelson

·      Consequence/Penelope Lively

Happy reading in 2014!

My Song

"My Song" Marilyn Yanke

I’ve always loved to look at paintings and to write about paintings and painters, but a while back I began to feel that I was missing some fundamental piece of understanding. What does painting feel like? Where do visual ideas come from and how do they evolve? In 2007, I applied for a Creative Renewal Grant through the Indianapolis Arts Council, proposing a project that would allow me to attend Art Workshop International’s workshop for beginning painters in Assisi.

Lucky me: they said yes.

And I’ve been back every year since.

Think of it: two whole weeks in which writers and painters come together, write and paint all day—with a little time off to stroll through the charming town, maybe take a pass through the Basilica with its magnificent Giottos—then gather for a fabulous meal and fabulous conversation on the terrace as the sun sinks behind the mountains beyond.

Art Workshop deserves a post of its own—and I’ll do it. Soon.

But today I want to write about Marilyn Yanke, an amazing painter I met there, who’s become a mentor and friend—and, who, recently, gave me a gift that took my breath away.

She lives on a ranch way out in the middle of the Texas Panhandle and has to schlep herself and her art supplies though numerous airports to make her way to Assisi, where she sets up at one of the dozen or so easels positioned around the spacious painting studio...

...where I could sit and watch her paint forever—especially when she is making a painting of something inspired by an experience we shared.

One year the filmmaker Charles Hobson taught at Art Workshop, and the group spent an evening watching his documentary, “Harlem in Monmartre.” It chronicles the small, but very talented community of African American musicians who settled in Paris after World War II and created a vibrant music scene that introduced jazz to the French and flourished until the Germans occupied the city in 1940.

Marilyn is a quiet, reflective person. I doubt she said much, if anything at all, in the lively discussion that followed the film.

But in the next days, I watched her paint what she had felt.

Here’s one example of the whole series of paintings honoring Hobson's work born of that evening.


"Lost in the Moment"

For others, visit the figures gallery of her website at www.marilynyankee.com

I love all of these paintings, but my very, very favorite is the one you saw when when you clicked to read the blog post: "My Song." I love how the boy is so utterly present, yet also goes beyond the frame. I love the crisp white-blue of his shirt, the blue blur of the world behind him and the shine of his trumpet set on it. I love jazz-like the energy in the visible brushstrokes that made them. The stillness of the moment filled with a song that touches me deeply, even though I can’t hear it.

For me, the painting captures the essence of what it feels like when you’re making art: that paradoxical combination of not being here, in the real world, but at the same time being in touch with every single thing that world has ever taught you in the process of creating a world of your own—a story, a painting, a song.

It’s the part I know (but all too often forget) is the best part of writing, the only part that really matters. Making the “song” is what sustains me, what I need to stay in any kind of balance in the real world.

This is knowledge that Marilyn and I share.

Not long after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I came home to find a big, flat cardboard box on my porch with Marilyn’s return address on it. I opened it with excitement, unwound the bubble wrap, and found “My Song” inside.

I’m not a crier, but I looked and looked at it and sat down and cried. Because the painting was such an amazing gift, of course, but mainly because Marilyn had understood I needed it. She knew how important it would be for me to remember who I am as I set out on that path—a writer, who needs to write, no matter what. She knew that what I would be going through was just another kind of song—and I would need to sing it.

I hung the painting over my writing desk. I look at it every morning and then, fingers on the keyboard, I begin to play my own song.

Here's Melissa Fraterrigo's take on "The Next Best Thing."

I was tagged by the amazing and prolific Barbara Shoup, the centrifugal force behind the Writer’s Center of Indiana, the author of seven books, a teacher and mentor to many writers in Indiana and beyond.

Meanwhile, here goes with the questions:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Teensy’s Daughter

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote a story, “Teensy’s Daughter,” which storySouth published in 2011, but I found that unlike other stories I had written, these characters were still trolling around in my brain. Gardner is an alcoholic under house arrest for causing the death of his girlfriend, Luann, and when the story opens, Gardner is certain Luann has been visiting him.

Gardner’s girlfriend also happens to be the daughter of his childhood enemy, Teensy. Once I started writing about these characters and their interconnected histories, I couldn’t stop, and my novel-in-stories was born.

What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction, unless some other genre would like to claim it.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

The book encompasses four decades, so I’d need a youthful and strung-out Jeff Bridges for Gardner, Gary Oldman could probably play both a young and older Teensy, and a rough-looking Michelle Williams would electrify Luann.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Teensy’s Daughter follows the inhabitants of Ingleside, Indiana, for four decades as their livelihood shifts from farming to tourism when an amusement park, Glory Days, is erected, amidst change and malice.

Do you have a publisher for your book yet?
No

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I am still working on the manuscript but I am close.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
The town of Ingleside is an agrarian community, but hard times come a knocking, and an amusement park is erected in the middle of town.

The Quickening by Michelle Hoover offered insight into the mindset of farmers, and if I can somehow strike even a close approximation to the carnival life depicted in Cathy Day’s A Circus in Winter, I will be beyond pleased.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I’m one of those folks who has great intentions of writing a novel. I love to read novels—shouldn’t I be able to write one? Alas, I’ve tried, and time and again I have discovered that stories are my thing. The novel-in-stories has provided a framework to explore character and immerse myself in small-town life.

If the book is read in the order that it is arranged, in reverse chronology, readers will have the opportunity to understand how each occurrence in a character’s life has ramifications for other characters so that all of the stories in Teensy’s Daughter ultimately build on each other and at the end, offer resolution similar to that of a novel.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Teensy’s Daughter follows a group of characters whose lives intersect, beginning in 2000, but then the book rewinds backward in subsequent stories to an earlier time to reveal a moment of crisis to explain why these same characters make the choices that they do.

Teensy’s Daughter explores what happens to a small community and its residents when its agrarian livelihood is replaced by the prosperous pageantry of an amusement park.

Check out Melissa's blog: www.melissafraterrigo.com

Arsenic, Gall of Boar, and Three Tablespoons of Hemlock Juice

I’m an extremely curious (some would say nosy) person by nature, so it still surprises me a little that I haven’t been compelled to find out every single thing I can about breast cancer. I did some initial research; it seemed the responsible thing to do. But I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available, not to mention the fact that my eyes glazed over every time I picked any one article to read because I didn’t have the base of knowledge about science and medicine or the vocabulary necessary to understand what I was looking at. So I gave up trying to be a breast cancer expert and put myself in the hands of my very excellent doctors, learning only enough to be able to ask intelligent questions about my own treatment along the way.

As I tried to put what was happening into perspective, I talked to friends who had undergone treatment for breast cancer over the years; I read some cancer memoirs, including Jan Lucas Grimm’s brutally honest My Beautiful Leukemia. I read about the history of breast cancer, too.

Briefly (and not very scientifically)…

Hippocrates (460 BC-380 BC) named cancer “karkinoma” (carcinoma), Greek for “crab,” because the tumor with its extensions reminded him of the body and legs of a crab. He believed the body was made up of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. When a person became ill, it was because one of these humors was out of balance. Cancer, according to Hippocrates, was caused by an excess of black bile. It was curable only in its earliest stages, with bloodletting, which was believed to purge the patient of bad humors, and by applying a variety of kinds of pastes, most containing arsenic, to the area where the tumor had appeared. The pastes caused tissue necrosis, which sloughed off, leaving the wound to heal by the formation of new tissue.

In the second century, the view of cancer was much the same as Hippocrates’s. But the Roman physician Galen wrote about surgical cures for breast cancer in cases where the tumor could be removed at a very early stage. Surgical tools were primitive, though—scalpels, forceps, hooks, and cauterizing tools that must have struck terror in a patient’s heart just looking at them. And here’s the recipe for anesthesia, which might also have given her pause: “Gall of boar, 3 spoons of hemlock juice, wild briony, lettuce, opium poppy, henbane vinegar. Mix together, boil a little, put into glass vessel, well stoppered. Add 3 spoons of good wine or ale, mix well.” The patient was to drink the whole bottle next to a warm fire, where she would fall asleep and could be operated on. A mixture of salt and vinegar was used to awaken her when the operation was over—assuming the loss of blood or anesthesia hadn’t killed her.

These same practices and beliefs would have informed the treatment of a woman diagnosed with breast cancer well into the sixteenth century, when the first book of anatomy was published. Anesthesia as we know it wasn’t invented until the mid-1800’s. It wasn't until the late twentieth century, when biochemistry and technology combined to create the field of molecular biology, that scientists began to understand what causes breast cancer, leading to the kind of treatments I'm undergoing today.

Talk about perspective! That little dose of history made a lumpectomy and moderate courses of chemo and radiation look not so bad, after all. Nonetheless, I know that this experience will change me--and I knew from the moment of diagnosis that, eventually, anything and maybe everything from small, seemingly insignificant details to the essence of the experience will make its way into a novel.

The novelist Muriel Spark said of being a writer, “Nothing is lost,” which I believe, absolutely--and which makes me wonder sometimes, What do people who aren’t writers do with the joys and sorrows of their lives?

Impossible Questions

Richard Russo read at Butler last night: three parts of an essay and two novel excerpts that were connected to the material he explored in it. He talked about writing the same kind of scene all the time, sometimes inadvertently repeating a description or turn of phase in his stories and novels. How there were a few things you looked at all your life, in different ways, trying to capture the essence of them but never quite succeeding—or at least it didn’t feel like you’d succeeded. All true, from my own experience.

But the most interesting thing he said was in response to a question a student asked. He was reading Russo’s collection of short stories in his English class and observed that all of the stories set characters in situations that seemed impossible to deal with. “What’s that about for you?” he asked.

“Science has answers,” Russo said. " A story can’t be interesting if the problem it posed didn’t seem impossible to solve. If a story has only two possible outcomes—what the character clearly should do and what he clearly shouldn’t do—it’s boring."

He said he knows he has a good story idea when he asks himself what he’d do in the same situation and thinks, “I have no idea.”

I love that. It’s not the cleverness or intricacy of a plot that creates tension, but the sense that the problem it poses seems impossible to solve—and, in fact, is impossible to solve, like any human problem that really matters. You keep reading to find out whether/how the characters will make the best of it or whether/how it will destroy them.

Worlds & Houses: Thinking about the Novel

The last month or so I’ve been trying to make myself write creative nonfiction-—skimming the surface of some ideas that are compelling to me for a variety of reasons. But I can't seem to engage.

The other day I took out a novel I started last fall, still in the early stages, and fell into it,as if into a whole different world.

It is a whole different world, and that is I love most about writing novels.

I also love teaching and writing about writing because of the way I have to try to get to the bottom of how writing works to make it as clear as it can be to students and readers so often enlightens my understanding of my own process.

This passage was in Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process (University of Georgia Press), which I co-authored with Margaret-Love Denman:

You have seen or felt or dreamed something that you can't name, but that you know you can't live without. You set off on a journey to find it. There is no map; no one has ever been to this place. You barely know the people you are traveling with—your characters—but you know that they are the only people who know the way. You watch them, listen to them. You follow along, putting down the words to mark the path they make. It is a long journey, with many wrong turns and surprises. Every day, or as often as you can, you go to the world of the novel. Months pass.

Sometimes years.

Your journey through this world becomes an alternate reality. The people you "see" there every day are as real and confounding as your own family. You live with these characters, worry about them at unlikely moments. You are amazed, sometimes, at the way all kinds of things work their way into the story: newspaper stories you read, stories friends and family tell in passing, memories, ideas that delight you; the occasional glimpse of something beautiful, funny, or sad that you cannot forget; a passion for some person, place, or thing that you feel compelled to preserve—or that, perhaps, your life in the real world will not accommodate.

Sometimes you have to stop and do research; sometimes you have to stop and get a clear picture of what's there. Sometimes, like a recalcitrant child, the book just stops, and you have to trick and tease it into moving forward.

As the end nears, possibilities narrow, as in real life. This is partly comforting, partly appalling. The novel won't be all you hoped it would be, but you keep on anyway. To abandon it now would be unthinkable, like walking away from your own imperfect life.

And finally it is done. For a few days, you feel wonderful, free. You attend to business, clean your house, rake your yard, change the oil in your car, read, watch movies—actually pay attention when someone is talking to you. Then you begin to miss where the novel took you, the people in it, what it was. You feel anxious. There's nothing to organize your life around. What are you going to do? Have you written every single thing you know?

Yes, if you were doing it right.

But pretty soon you know some new things. You look at the book again, and you see that what you thought the book was the day you finished it and what it actually is don't quite match up. So you go at it again. And again, if you must. Until it is as close as possible to what you wanted it to be.


Trying to get to the bottom of why I can't resist the novel, why it almost always trumps the impulse to write creative nonfiction, pondering the completely different feel of the two processes, (don't ask me why) I started thinking about houses.

Writing creative nonfiction is like looking for something in a big house that has many rooms in it, each containing a mystery about my own life. The house is very much in the real world. What I'm looking for is mine, but I won’t know what it is until I find it. Some rooms lead to other rooms and sometimes back into rooms I’ve already visited, but all of the rooms are inside the house. The pleasure is in the possibilities, the connections, the insights, the release and resolution and, finally, the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve let somebody else in to the house and (for better or worse) made it feel like home to them. Maybe even made them see something they need to know about themselves. The house is, of course, my own mind.

Writing a novel, I have to create the world and find the house in it. Then I have to live in that house for a really long time with a bunch of people I might or might not like but have to get to know because they hold the keys--the clues--to the mysteries inside the rooms but won’t open the doors until I prove that I truly want to know what’s inside and won’t judge them, no matter what the rooms reveal—even if it’s something I don’t really want to know about myself. Paradox (lovely paradox): Though the house is not in the real world, once I find it I have to stay inside it to find the story.

The pleasures are in many ways similar to writing creative nonfiction—possibilities, connections, insights, release and resolution. The house in the alternate world is my mind, too—but maybe comparable to the difference between a seed and the flower that grows from it. Vivid, real—invisibly linked to its origin. The satisfaction lies in the knowledge that I’ve created a world that others can live in and believe in, and that may even hold some insight that will make it easier for them to live their own lives.

Each finished (and unfinished) novel has its its own physical feel--not unlike the physical feel of memories. Each is a whole world, a whole life inside my head. No so different from the feel readers get, first living inside, then remembering a book they love.

This floated up taking my dog, Louise, out this dark, rainy morning: A work of creative nonfiction is the story of a person thinking about the real world; a novel is the story of a person thinking about the real world…in metaphor.

The world and the house idea works for essays and stories, too—the worlds and houses are just smaller. A collection of essays that explores a particular world would be comparable to a collection of linked stories—the house of each essay or story in the same neighborhood.

What do you think?

The Amazing Lynda Barry

I went to hear Lynda Barry at Herron School of Art last night, part of IUPUI's Reiberg Visiting Writers Series. She was absolute and total genius talking about image. It’s where all art comes from, she said—what gives it power. She asked us to remember our first crush—then for everyone to say the name aloud. She big-grinned, put her open hands beside her face as we did it. “This is what everybody looks like when they remember their first crush,” she said.

“Now remember your fourth,” she said, and laughed.

No image, no physical response.

She talked about kids and their sacred objects—blankets, stuffed animals—in one case, the battered leg of a doll, which was all that was left of it. Kids know these things aren’t alive. But if you ask them if they’re dead, they look at you like you’re crazy. They’re something else: a physical metaphor of comfort and security. The image is the object, which is why, if lost, the object cannot be replaced.

And invisible friends, alive as very specific images in children's minds. A friend’s Mr. Sprinkle could only be talked to through a blowing fan, she said. (I thought of my daughter Jenny’s Christine, Doodle-Duck, and the Turtle, who came every morning to play—until, one day, they refused to "cooperate" and she flushed them all down the toilet. Kate’s Linda, who lived in the closet. They played checkers together.)

Images are satisfying even when they don’t make sense to the “top of the brain,” Barry said—and sang a few bars of the old Sixties song, “Groovin’,” by the Young Rascals. “Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie.” A song she loved until she found out the lyric was actually, “Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly.” Without the image of Leslie—whatever h/she looked like and what being with him/her might mean—the song became stupid and boring.

(Until last night, I thought the lyric was “…you and me and the sea.” Yep. Without the sea, the song just doesn’t have the mojo.

I love this stuff. I love how the brain works. We’re so much weirder than any of us imagine; there’s so little we can ever really know about…anything, least of all ourselves.

Like, how weird is this! Barry described a guy who had his hand amputated and experienced the phantom limb thing—but, in his case, the lost hand was clenched in a tight fist. It hurt and it was driving him nuts. Nobody could do anything for him, until a brain researcher tried this experiment. He made an open box with holes on either side and a mirror that reflected the real hand. He told the phantom hand guy to put his forearm with the real hand in one hole and his forearm without the hand in the other hole. “Make a tight fist in your real hand,” he brain guy said. He did. “Now slowly release it, looking in the mirror.” Yikes! The phantom hand unclenched simultaneously—and stayed unclenched.

Who knows what the brain did to make that happen, but it for sure had something do with image.

I believe that writing can be taught, that grown-up things like discipline and devotion to craft are absolutely crucial to good writing. But what I love is that magical, completely unpredictable part of writing--and all art--that Lynda Barry talked about last night. The child-place you have to go to get the images to write about, the playfulness and what-iffing, the state not-being-in-the-real-world required to keep those images alive and powerful until you can get them to the page.

The Revenge of the Original Novel

I love Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s new novel, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady, and it’s been a kick to watch it take off these past weeks, with great reviews from the very literary New York Times Book Review (every serious writer’s dream) to People Magazine (every serious writer’s secret dream.)

This starred review from Publishers Weekly sums up the book nicely:

“Glowing with dark humor, Stuckey-French's fabulously quirky second novel (after Mermaids on the Moon) spotlights a wild would-be killer: Marylou Ahearn, a 77-year-old retired teacher in Memphis, Tenn. She's obsessed with killing Dr. Wilson Spriggs, who gave pregnant Marylou a radioactive cocktail in 1953 during a secret government study. Helen, the daughter Marylou gave birth to, died in 1963 from cancer. Accompanied by her Welsh corgi, Buster, and as "Nancy Archer" (the heroine of the 1958 movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), Marylou moves in 2006 to Tallahassee, Fla., where Wilson lives with his daughter, menopausal Caroline; her husband, Vic Witherspoon, who's contemplating an affair, and their children: 18-year-old Elvis-obsessed beauty Ava; 16-year-old science geek Otis, who's secretly building a nuclear breeder reactor; and overachieving, attention-deprived 13-year-old Suzi. As "Radioactive Lady," Nance creates mucho mischief for Wilson, but her revenge plans mutate after discovering the old doc has Alzheimer's, and dang it, she really likes his kinfolk.”

The book is, indeed, “glowing with dark humor.” Also, in the words of other reviews…

“…generous”

“…fabulously wacky”

“…poignant”

“…funny”

“…sad”

I am in total agreement with them all.

But what I love most about the novel is that it is utterly original, by which I mean nobody who’s living on the planet, ever lived on the planet, or ever will live on the planet could have written this book except Elizabeth Stuckey-French.

Which got me wondering, “What is originality, anyway?”

Everyone who’s ever studied literature knows about Hemingway’s iceberg: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

They are also probably familiar with Grace Paley’s advice to fiction writers: “Write what you don’t know about what you know.”

Apply Grace Paley’s advice to Hemingway’s iceberg theory and you get something like:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” But it’s the process of writing the story, wrestling with what he doesn’t know about what he knows, that provides the opportunity for the writer to earn the knowledge needed to write the story. And what the writer doesn’t know, starting out, needs to matter to him—desperately, and in the most personal way. Which means that the part of Hemingway’s iceberg beneath the surface is also made of bits and pieces of the writer himself.

So, yeah, idea behind The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady is delightfully original. But its true originality lies in the honesty and courage with which Stuckey-French wrestled down the big, unanswerable questions beneath the surface of this deceptively goofy story.

What is a happy family?

Can we ever really know…anyone?

What can and cannot be forgiven?

And speaking about what people don’t know about what they know, it would be nice to think that The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady might make publishers consider what they don’t know about what they (think they) know about what the market wants.

All too often, they’re are scared to death of original work. It doesn’t fit anywhere. It can’t be hailed as the next Twilight or Harry Potter. They have no idea what to do with it.

So, bravo to Doubleday for believing in this wonderful, original novel.

And, of course, to Elizabeth Stuckey-French for writing it.

Elmore & Eudora

Last night I heard Elmore Leonard read, the last of Butler University’s visiting writers this semester. He’s in his mid-eighties now, but the moment he began reading from his novel, Freaky Deaky, years fell away and he was at the same his own low-life characters carrying on a hilarious dialogue about a gangster who might or might not be about to get blown up by a bomb and the writer delighting in his own words, sometimes half-chuckling at a line.

During the Q&A a guy asked, “What’s the secret to good dialogue?” Leonard looked bemused. “Don’t you hear it?” he asked. “There are people all around us, talking. I listen.”

Someone else asked if he knew what the end of a story would be when he started it. He said, no, he just got a couple of interesting people talking and let them go. If someone gets boring, he shoots him. About three-quarters of the way through the book, he starts thinking about how it could end. A book could end in a lot of different ways, he said.

I loved the matter-of-factness and pleasure with which he talked about writing. Though he didn’t say it exactly this way, I think he’d agree that his message was: Pay attention to the world you’re living in; be curious about people, listen to them talking; if something interests you that you don’t know about or don’t understand, find out about it. Being a writer is seeing the potential for stories in the world around you, taking time to find out about things you don’t already know about or understand. Asking, what if? And when you find the story, leaving out every single thing it doesn’t need—the parts people skim.

Don’t. Be. Boring.

Later, it occurred to me that hearing Elmore Leonard read was a lot like hearing Eudora Welty read in Birmingham, Alabama, years ago, when she was around the same age. Sitting onstage during the introduction, dressed in a flowered church-dress, her turquoise pocketbook set firmly on her lap, she looked like the archetypal little old lady. But when she went to the podium and started reading “The Petrified Man,” years fell from her voice and she became the ladies in the beauty shop, every single one of them.

Another writer who talked about writing plainly, she once observed, “Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover the same way…Or now and then we’ll hear from an artist who’s never lost it.”

Elmore Leonard is one of those artists. So was Eudora Welty.

Their work couldn’t be more different, but both have seen the world through the clear lens of a child, both retained their sense of wonder about the sheer strangeness of it all their lives.

Summer Break

A former student of mine once sent me an essay she’d written in a college class that began, “I asked God to give me a break.” She was a lovely girl, a straight-A student. Sweet, earnest, with a flinty streak of determination that I loved to watch in action. She had been raised as a conservative Christian and was active in her church.

She was a good, solid writer in high school, but she had trouble engaging fully in the mess of creative process, especially when a piece took a turn and she found herself making an observation or asking a question that made her strong faith waver.

I remember writing in the margin of her journal, “God gave you a questioning mind. Why would He have done that if He didn’t want you to use it?”

College cracked her mind open in that wonderful way it does, when it works—and made her the writer I always knew she had it in her to be. The essay she sent me was about the evolution of her conservative childhood faith into one that embraced the questions and contradictions of a person fully awake in the universe.

I loved that she asked God to give her a break so that she could do whatever she needed to do to make that happen. If I believed in the kind of God that grants requests, I would ask him to give me a break, too. But from myself.

Seriously. I would like to take a break from feeling so driven about—everything. At least for a while, I would like to write without ambition, for the joy of it—just to see where writing would take me—instead of constantly wrestling with the puzzle pieces of a novel, obsessed with trying to put them together when I know that crucial ones are missing, not to mention the fact that the shapes of the ones I do have keep shifting. Plus there’s no box with a picture on it that shows what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like.

I love writing novels. I really, truly do. But right now, I feel weary of the long process, the constant clutter of people and places in my head.

Lately, I've been thinking about a summer day a few years ago. Steve was gone, fishing, and I’d just returned from a trip and hadn’t gotten back into my routine yet. For a whole Sunday I just did whatever I felt like doing.

Mainly, I remember being on my bike on the Monon Trail and being so happy. It seemed like the world was offering up all sorts of things as I rode along to make me see this was how life is supposed to be. There was a man with a parrot on his shoulder! There were babies and dogs. The trail felt like a big parade and I was in it.

I remember thinking, is this the way some people live their lives? You feel like riding your bike, so you just…do? Or watch a movie, go to a museum, dig in the garden for a while? What would it be like not to be thinking constantly that you should be should be attending to some made-up world in your head, trying to wrestle it into words?

I’d like more days like that in my life.

So, it’s official. I’m taking a (summer) break.

From myself.

(If I can.)

Interview with Jane Hamilton

Click here to read my interview with novelist Jane Hamilton in Butler University's online literary journal, Booth.

Anal-Rententive Left-Brain Novel-Assessment Exercise

This exercise is guaranteed to help you assess the first (second, third, whatever) draft of your novel and set revision tasks for the next. It takes ages, but it's worth it. You'll be amazed what it reveals!

Go through your manuscript chapter by chapter. Type the first line of the chapter, use bullet points to summarize what happens in it, then type the last line of the chapter. Skip a line. Do the next chapter. Keep going...

Weirdly, keeping your left brain busy allows the renegade right brain to range all over the place, triggering useful ideas and observations once you get into the flow. So keep a notepad nearby. But don't get side-tracked for too long. Keep going.

When you get all the way to the end, consider what floated up to make a list of things you want to look at closely. For example: character, emotion, description, the balance of scene and narrative, dialogue, transitions.

Isolate one element, and go through your "outline," highlighting/marking each place it appears on the page. Work through everything on your list, using a different color or symbol for each element.

You might track a character through the book, highlighting every place that character is present, mentioned or even thought of. Insights and ideas often occur in the process, as they did when you went through the manuscript page by page. Jot them down, of course.

But the greatest insights will most likely come when you finish the highlighting, spread the pages on the floor, and literally see the path of the character through the novel. Are there whole chapters or sections where the character is not there at all? If so, is his absence appropriate or do you need to find ways to weave him more tightly into the novel? What might those ways be? Scene? Narrative? Flashback?

Perhaps it occurs to you, looking at one character, that it would be helpful to see his relationship with another character more clearly. In this case, highlight the second character with a different color. Where do both colors appear on the same page? What happens between the characters on those pages? How does the accumulation of moments define—or fail to define—the relationship?

You can highlight for anything. If you notice a lot of narrative passages, highlight for both narrative and scene to see if they are in good balance. If your novel moves back and forth in time, highlight each level of time with a different color to help you see if they are in the right balance. If it has multiple points of view, highlight each. Is each character given equal space? Should each be given equal space? Is each different point of view necessary?

Perhaps tension concerns you. Consider the various elements in the novel that contribute to the overall tension, and highlight for each one. For example, if one of the novel's tensions lies in a character's realization that his girlfriend wants to get married fear that his girlfriend is pregnant, highlight every place in the book where marriage or anything relating to it comes into play. What do your discoveries about this and other tensions in the novel suggest in terms of heightening the tension throughout?

Where are the tense moments in the novel? Where, exactly, does the story torque? Are there enough torques, are they paced effectively, do they work? What do they suggest in terms of heightening these elements throughout?

When you’ve finished highlighting, spread the pages on the floor end-on-end. Viewed this way, the outline looks rather like a tapestry, the various elements threading their way through it. Let your eye take in the effect. Do the colors seem in proper balance? Are there any chapters that are significantly shorter or longer than the rest?

Now consider the elements you highlighted, one by one. Use your eye, your analytical skill, your intuition, and all you know about the craft of fiction to create a list of specific observations, questions, and tasks to consider during revision.

...Revise!

This exercise is adapted from Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process, by Barbara Shoup and Margaret-Love Denman. (University of Georgia Press)

The Real Slaughterhouse-Five

Sixty-five years ago today, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans, setting in motion the experience that would eventually morph into his greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Two years ago today, I had the privilege of talking with the late Bob Kelton, who shared that experience with him.

My friend, Joan, had mentioned Bob in the past; he had lived with his family in the neighborhood where she grew up up, in Danville, Illinois. I’m not sure how it came up that he’d been captured with Vonnegut—maybe in the course of conversation about Vonnegut’s death, which had occurred earlier that year. In any case, I’m fascinated by the intersection of reality and fiction and asked Joan if she thought he might be willing to talk to me about what he remembered from that time. He kindly said, yes—and invited us to his home in Champaign, Illinois, where he told us the story.

A student in chemical engineering when the war started, Bob had been selected to receive training in chemical warfare at the University of Tennessee—until, as he said, “…they decided, we don’t really need college graduates, we need fresh cannon fodder. That’s you!”

He was sent to Camp Atterbury in Indianapolis for thirteen weeks of training before he would be shipped out as a buck private in the infantry. That’s where he met Kurt Vonnegut, who showed him around town and introduced him to his friends. There were six of them who hung out together—Vonnegut a little less so because Indianapolis was his home, and he had a girlfriend there at the time. They arrived in Belgium together on December 16, at the beginning of what would come to be called “The Battle of the Bulge.” All six were assigned to intelligence reconnaissance, which meant they would go ahead of the front line to find out where the enemy was, what they were doing, and how many there were.

“We were captured running our first patrol,” Bob said. “We came to an opening about one-hundred yards long. We were in the woods and there were woods on the other side. My best friend, Bill Sieber, started to go across and got about halfway, when there was a shot. Bill dropped to the ground and called, ‘Get the medics. I’ve been hit.’”

If they went into the clearing, they knew they’d be shot by the Germans. Even if they escaped, the Germans would follow them. So they went back to camp and asked for a medic. The colonel said, no. They were going to surrender in moments, they had to turn in their weapons.

“There we were,” Bob said. “Our best friend had been shot, we didn’t know how seriously, and we couldn’t go back. I’ve thought about that ever since then. We never found out what happened to him.”

“There’s that moment in the book when Billy Pilgrim is standing in the clearing and the Germans shoot at him,” I said. “He’s paralyzed. Then Roland Weary grabs him and saves his life. It’s exactly like the scene you described.

“[Kurt] played that a little different,” Bob said.

The capture was different, too. In the book, it’s more…personal. Roland Weary is beating up Billy Pilgrim, the two of them having been ditched by the other members of their patrol, and five German soldiers appear, with a police dog on a leash,

In fact, 8,000 Americans were captured at once. Kelton, Vonnegut and the others were part of a group of 150 whom the Germans marched eastward for several days, until they reached the railroad tracks. “They put us on what they called ’40 & 8’ boxcars—they were made to hold forty men or 8 horses," Bob said "They put sixty of us in one. There wasn’t room to lay down. They traveled us by night, not by day because we could have been seen. We traveled until we came close to the Dresden area, then they marshaled us into that location. We had to stand outside for six or seven hours when we got there. They weren’t prepared to interrogate 8,000 men. That’s how we ended up with the frozen hands and feet, the frostbite. Finally we got in. Name, rank, serial number—that was about it. We were assigned to walk to Dresden, that same group of 150 or so, where we got into a barracks. It was on a hill, on the very outskirts of Dresden.

“So the part about being in the slaughterhouse was made up?” I asked.

“Yes and no. We went into the slaughterhouse, but later—to help out where we could help out. There was meat in there. With the fire from the bombing, some was cooked, so we just grabbed some of the meat and ate it. But we weren’t incarcerated there. We were in the barracks. After a short time there, they put us to work in this malt factory, where there were a few older ladies who befriended us and would give us something extra.”

“That sugary malt syrup, in the book,” I said.

“We’d get a spoon of it,” Bob said.

“And what about the British? In the book, they had all that food. There was that party. And the crazy theater production.”

They didn’t have that much food; there was no party, no theater production. “But they had more Red Cross packages than we had—and they shared it,” Bob said. “Somehow they were able to put together a crystal radio set, and they could get the BBC on it. So they kept track of what was going on in the war and passed that on to us.”

The Americans worked in the malt factory till after the bombing, then guards marched them into Dresden to help clean up the rubble in the streets. “Almost everything was leveled,” Bob said. “They wanted to make the streets passable, so we had the job of going in with shovels and wheelbarrows. Hard physical labor—and our diet was a bowl of soup and a piece of bread for the day.”

One day, they were walked through a bank vault—one guard at the front, one at the back. “We came to large area with safety deposit boxes,” Bob said. “I glanced over and saw that they were open. Darn fool that I was, I looked. There were watches and rings. I thought, well, the guards are going to get these, the people who own them are not going to get them back. So I reached in and grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and put it in my pocket.”

“The diamond ring!” I said. “In the book, Billy Pilgrim’s wife has a diamond ring that he found in the pocket of his overcoat.”

Kelton smiled. “When we went back they put us in an area, the guards on the periphery. We sat down on the ground and I dumped the stuff out of my pocket. We split it up. My trousers had a big fly, so I pulled the threads and stuck my share in there.

“[Later] I sold one of the rings for a peck of potatoes. I traded a pearl and some flanking diamonds [from another ring] for a Mowitzer pistol.”

Near the end of the war, Kelton, Vonnegut and the others were moved to Pilson, Czechoslovakia, where they were housed on the second floor of a gasthaus. They thought about trying to escape, but one of the older, decent guards caught wind of their plans. “Don’t try to walk out of here,” he said. “The war’s going to end pretty soon, but if you walk out now, they’ll shoot you.”

“We slept on hay,” Bob said. “We’d go out in the field and find some dandelion greens and eat them. We found that sometimes, if we sneaked into a house with a cellar there’d be a jar of canned goods or something we could get. When the S.S. found out about it, they marched to where we were staying that night and took one of the individuals and told him to dig a hole. After he dug the hole, they shot him and pushed him into it.”

“It’s the teapot,” I said. In the book, Billy Pilgrim keeps talking about the guy who was killed for a teapot. It feels exactly the same. It’s just…weirder.

“Yep,” Bob said. “That’s where that came from.”

There is a mystery at the center of every good book, of course. Still it is so interesting to discover fragments of reality that the imagination uses to create something realer, richer, more meaningful than whatever the whole real thing was. In this case, also a cautionary tale which should be required reading for any person, anywhere who holds the power to send young people off to war.

Rest in peace, Bob. Thanks for telling me your story.