Friday Freebie: Men in the Making by Bruce Machart

Congratulations to Andrew Beck, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst.

This week's book giveaway is Men in the Making, the new short story collection by Bruce Machart from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Regular Quivering Pen readers will remember how I gushed like Old Faithful over Machart's debut novel, The Wake of Forgiveness.  I said the story, revolving around two generations of one south Texas family, was one of the few contemporary novels to deserve comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.  And now comes this collection of stories which will likely cement Machart's reputation as a literary superstar in the making.  Here's the publisher's blurb for the book:

Whether they find themselves walking the fertile farmland of south Texas, steering trucks through the suffocating sprawl of Houston, or turning logs into loose leaf in the mills just west of the Sabine River, the men of these stories find themselves beset by the insufficiencies of their own ingrained ideas of manhood. Like Richard Russo, Bruce Machart has a profound knowledge of the male psyche and a gift for conveying the absurdity and brutality of daily life with humor and compassion. Alternately lush with lyricism and starkly candid, these stories emerge from inside a vividly scrutinized everyday of farms, refineries, hospitals, and homes to explore what it means to be a man at the rise of a new millennium. What it means to be a man who can’t protect his wife from violence, or protect his children from tragic accidents, or protect himself from loss and heartbreak. Machart’s characters have a deep and abiding humanity that makes their hardscrabble lives all the more unforgettable. 

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Men in the Making, all you have to do is answer this question:

Fill in the blank: According to Machart's website, "My first creative writing professor, Jim Robison, once said something to the effect that he couldn’t trust a story in which the characters didn’t ______."

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 27--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 28.

Baseball & Bullets: The Ringer by Jenny Shank

The crack of a baseball ringing off a bat and the crack of a bullet leaving a gun intersect in Jenny Shank's debut novel The Ringer, one of the best overlooked books of 2011.  Released in March by The Permanent Press, The Ringer is like that talented rookie who jogged onto the field during spring training but, despite impressive batting and fielding skills, never caught fire with readers who were distracted by bigger, flashier new releases.

Well, here's one fan who's still standing in the bleachers, waving a big foam hand and yelling, "Go, Ringer, go!"  Written with warmth and depth and plotted with the precision of a stopwatch's gears, The Ringer deserves a wide audience.  If your "October dreams" leading up to the World Series include immersing yourself in good baseball fiction, I'd suggest pairing The Ringer with the season's MVP of breakthrough fiction, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.  I read both novels side-by-side and let me tell you, while I tremendously enjoyed Harbach's John Irving-esque debut about a small Wisconsin college's baseball team, Shank's story of a Denver cop coaching a Little League team was just as good.

As The Ringer opens, we meet tough, gruff Ed O'Fallon as he's surrounded by his daughter's T-ball team, the Purple Unicorns.  He's been busted down to coaching the littlest of leagues by his wife Claire who says his temper was starting to spiral out of control when he coached their two older sons E. J. and Jesse in Denver's competitive Police Athletic League.

Ed stood on home plate, holding his clipboard, and surveyed his team: cleatless, capless, untutored six-year-olds, his girl Polly among them, their clothes the colors of an array of ice cream....Ed cleared his throat. "Hello, Unicorns," he heard himself say. He'd debated about what to call them. He'd always addressed his sons' teams as "Men," but "Women" didn't seem right, not for six-year-olds, "Ladies" sounded like a vaguely creepy term for a thirty-seven-year-old man to use with little girls, and "Girls" wouldn't have the appropriate, spirit-bolstering effect he was looking for. So he settled on calling them Unicorns. "We need to work hard today, Unicorns, because our first game is in two weeks." He looked down at his clipboard, and then added, "It's against the Southeast Denver Baby Kittens."

It's a charming way to open a novel--thrusting a burly cop into the midst of giggling six-year-old girls--and it immediately gives us a warm-fuzzy for Ed.  Which is a good thing because eight pages later he shoots and kills a man during a SWAT team raid on a supposed drug flophouse.  Ed later learns that the address on the warrant was wrong and that he killed an innocent man named Salvador Santillano.  This is the linchpin moment of The Ringer, the stone thrown into the pond with ripples shimmering across every page of the book.

Here's where Shank gets clever (but not precociously so) with her plot.  The son of the man Ed kills is also a talented pitcher for another Little League team and the two families are about to clash in the middle of what becomes a race-relations scandal in Denver.  The Ringer is based on a real-life incident, a similar shooting in 1999 which ripped the city apart.  Shank took that shooting, added the drama of baseball, and wrote a novel that works on all levels.

The chapters alternate between Ed's life after the shooting and the story of Santillano's wife, Patricia Maestas.  As Ed's partner tells him, "When you kill a man, his life and yours are intertwined until you die"--haunting, chilling words which form the foundation of The Ringer.  Just as the cop must deal with the psychological effects of killing another man, so does the victim's widow have to pick up the pieces of her broken domestic life and carry on bravely for her two children--young Mia and her older son Ray who is a wizard on the pitching mound.  Meanwhile, everyone has to cope with the incident which has become front-page news:

The newspapers and TV anchors were calling what happened..."The Santillano Shooting." Ray's teachers and many of the kids surely had found out about what happened to Salvador. Neighbor told neighbor until everyone knew, and whenever Patricia left the house, she felt like she and her kids were wearing neon signs that flashed: "Please, stare at and whisper about us!  We've had a tragedy!"

Ed buries himself into coaching the Purple Unicorns and, later, supporting his sons' team as it goes to the state championship.  Patricia salves her grief by weighing her options for a lawsuit against the city and by getting involved in a grassroots organization which protests what it calls the police brutality of no-knock warrants.  She also attends her son's Little League team as it heads for the championship tournament.  Through a series of plausible circumstances, neither Ed nor Patricia meet each other until one of their sons is standing on the pitching mound and the other in the batter's box.

You can see where the drama of the book is headed, can't you?  The Ringer runs on parallel tracks for most of its pages, but gradually we know those lines will converge.  The individual stories of Ed and Patricia are interesting enough in and of themselves, but Shank keeps the tension of their ultimate, inevitable confrontation humming in the background the entire time.  When the two families do eventually meet, The Ringer delivers the made-for-the-movies goods in compelling, knotty ways.  Readers will be able to predict some of the plot twists, but others will come as a surprise.

The Ringer could have been a schizophrenic book--imbalanced between a police procedural and a heartwarming Bad News Bears tale.  But to her credit, Shank blends the two halves of the book nicely, bringing us fully into the lives of these families.  The SWAT team shooting may have torn their lives apart, but it's baseball which eventually heals them.

Mag Watch: One Story, Issue 154 ("Who Cycles Into Our Valley" by Benjamin Solomon)

I have an unfair prejudice against stories which are little more than dense paragraphs with few discernible breaks for dialogue.  I think, This is a story which will be heavy on description, boggy with exposition, and will drag my eyes along the page like they've got leaded weights attached.  Like I said, it's completely and irrationally unfair and I realize many great stories are light on dialogue ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Big Two-Hearted River," and "The Swimmer" among them).

So, it was with wariness and a slight sinking of the heart that I opened the latest issue of One Story and saw continent-sized chunks of text.

It took only two pages, however, for me to realize that, while not perfect, Benjamin Solomon's short story "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" is engaging and deeply effective--enough to make me think once again about the prejudices we carry as readers which can make or break an otherwise good piece of fiction over the smallest and silliest of "rules."

Here's a summary of the plot in this issue of One Story: a father and his son ride a tandem bike around the hills of Spain one afternoon.

That's it.  The only movement you'll find here is the uphill-downhill momentum of the bike.  "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" concentrates on the inner lives of these two characters who find themselves at crucial crossroads: the father is newly divorced, the adult son is falling out of love with his girlfriend.  But, as with all good short fiction, it's the interstitial pockets of insight where you'll find the true movement.  Solomon glides back and forth between the heads of the two nameless characters, revealing the nature of their relationship through idle musings and flashbacks.  Here's one from the father's perspective:

He was twenty-two years old when his son was born, still in college, and nights he worked as an orderly in the burn ward at the hospital, and one night he had to wheel a little burned boy his son's age down the hall.  The boy's face was covered in bandages, his arms, his legs, all burned under circumstances the father would never know, and yet as he wheeled the little burned body down the hallway and stared at the perfectly unmarred fingertips protruding from the bandages, the father imagined scenario after scenario of his own son getting burned, and with each one he felt it heavier and more intense, the utter pain of loving a child, and how that pain would only grow and multiply were he to have more children as he and his wife had planned, and suddenly he was surrounded by burned children, all of them his own, little boys and girls bandaged and festering and crying in pain, and at that moment he knew he couldn't bear to have any more children, and that doing so would be like striking matches beneath a cradle and hoping everything would be okay.

The story is characterized by silence--minimal dialogue between father and son, the stillness of the countryside, the singular ambition to pedal forward over the approaching hills with only the sound of breath and wind filling the ears.  Without the clatter of speech, we pay attention to the loneliness of the characters and Solomon's symbolic use of the countryside and the tandem bike (the story begins with the father in front, but a shift in power occurs at the end as the son takes the lead).

If "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" has a fault it's in the fact that we never get intimate enough with the unnamed father and son, despite the startling emotional details of their lives we're privy to.  For whatever reason, Solomon holds them from us at arm's length.

It's the one drawback to a story which, despite the heavy blocks of paragraphs, carries us along with clear and beautiful language.  By the end, I felt like the son as he pedaled across the Spanish landscape: "giving himself over to the bicycle and the road and the hill."  As a reader, "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" allowed me to abandon all my wrong-headed notions and be briefly propelled by the author's momentum.  It was quite a ride.

(If you don't already subscribe to One Story, you can order a copy of Issue 154 on this page.)

Tuesday Tune: Songs About Books by Carey Wallace

If ever there were songs tailor-made for the Tuesday Tune feature here at the blog, Carey Wallace's EP Songs About Books is it.  The five tracks are exactly what the title says they are: songs inspired by books Wallace has read over the years, ranging from Wise Blood to Ender's Game.

You can get the CD at Amazon, iTunes, and Bandcamp for a minimal cost, or you can go to the Songs About Books website and snag the tracks for free.  If you pay for the music at iTunes or Bandcamp, you get the added feel-good factor because all proceeds benefit African women and children through Fount of Mercy.  Another way to get the CD is to email Wallace and she'll work out a artisan's trade deal with you.  Make no mistake, this is a very unique music collection.

(By the way, I'd strongly recommend you get your hands on the CD version of Songs About Books.  The packaging is a work of art, filled with liner notes and vintage photos of readers with books--like the one on the cover art--which come from Wallace's private collection.)

Though Carey Wallace is not a professional singer--she's a writer whose novel The Blind Contessa's New Machine came out in paperback earlier this year--there's an undeniable earnestness to her voice which burrows deep into her lyrics.  At times, she reminds me of Liz Phair; at other times, she reminds me of a debutante from 1911 who has gathered the family in the parlor to sing ballads for their evening's entertainment.  (Both of those are compliments, by the way.)

Carey has partnered with her brother Mark and father Rick to record music that ranges from lullabies to folk-rock.  It's a diverse line-up which is sure to appeal to a wide audience of ears.  From the first bass guitar chords of the opening song "Wise Blood," you know you're in good hands.

Wise blood knows how to walk the way the wind blows
Wise blood hears grace whisper right behind

My favorite track is "Heavenly" (inspired by Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth), which you can hear near the start of this trailer for Songs About Books:



Carey was kind enough to answer some questions about the project via email.  Here's our interview:

Tell me about how the idea for the EP was hatched.

The EP was a way for me to make something creative in the midst of promoting a book.  Often book promotion brings all other creative work to a grinding halt.  This CD was my attempt to keep making things and doing creative work even while trying to let people know about The Blind Contessa's New Machine.  And it was also a way for me to say something I believe deeply: that no writer works alone.   All of us owe a huge debt to a large community of writers and readers throughout the world and throughout history.  Making an EP of Songs About Books was a way to celebrate them, and not just my own work.

When did you first start writing the songs?

I first started writing the songs when a good friend loaned me his copy of Ender's Game just before The Blind Contessa's New Machine came out in hardcover.  I started writing a lullaby for Ender on the train on the way home, and that gave me the idea for writing other songs about books.

Were you reading these books and heard the songs in your head, or did you come up with the idea for a conceptual album first and then go back to pick the stories to write about?

Writing fiction is a very deliberate process for me: I put in the time every day, no matter what.  Songwriting is almost the opposite: the songs come unbidden, based on what's happening in my world.  So the answer is: some of both.  "Ender's Lullaby" arrived on it's own, but after that I began to read books in the hope they might set off songs in my mind, which some of them did.  And in one case, "Heavenly," I began to write a song about what it was like to return to my own hometown after a long absence, and then added the details of Sweet Bird of Youth, because they seemed to dovetail with the themes that had already emerged in the nascent song.

I loved the CD package and especially the vintage photos.  These came from your personal collection, right?  How long have you been collecting photos like these?

I've been collecting these old photos for over a decade.  I first ran across them at antique stores, and somewhat shamefacedly couldn't stop myself from buying them--but also couldn't explain to anyone why I had, other than the even more nonsensical statement that I had fallen in love with the people in the pictures.  Later, the father of one of my creative writing students turned out to be a collector of real photo postcards, and helped me to focus my collection on them, rather than the vast category of all print. Over the years, the habit I couldn't originally explain has become a potent part of my own art: I've used the images in feather-boxes I make for solo art shows, and they're the foundation for the cover design for all the albums my brother and I have put out.  They're also wonderful images to spark my imagination as a writer: full of detail, but containing almost no facts, so your mind has lots of information, but also incredible freedom to interpret it. 

Who are some of your musical influences?

I listened exclusively to my parents' record collection as a child, and was allowed only minimal doses of "rock and roll"--so I'm incredibly familiar with the classic musicals (if you start singing Oklahoma at any point, my brother will continue singing all the songs through to the end), James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkle, and The Beatles.  These days I listen to an enormous amount of Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and gospel, along the lines of The Blind Boys of Alabama, Mavis Staples, Iris DeMent, and Nina Hagen.

What other albums have you and your brother recorded and released?

My brother and I have released about 80 other songs together as The Wallace Bros, and almost all of them are available for free download at www.wallacebros.org. Our first five albums came out under the title Popular Songs That Will Live Forever. Volume 1 was Lullabies, because Mark originally said that was all he was interested in as a songwriter. For Volume 2 we got a Casiotone keyboard with 16 drumbeats, so we called it Hip Hop. On Volume 3 I began to channel the voice of a 1920's backwoods preacher's wife, so it's a mostly a capella and fiddle record of Gospel tunes. Volume 4 is Country and Western, and Volume 5 is Rock and Roll. Our most recent record is called "Turning Night Into Day", and we record a Valentine's Single for our fans every year. You can hear the most recent ones here and here.

What was the reaction from your brother when you said you wanted to record this CD?

My brother was excited, because he loved the songs. You might think this would be a given since he's my brother, but in fact he's always been my most vocal critic, which is something I really value. If he likes something, I know he really likes it, because when he doesn't, he doesn't have any compunction about telling me. He was a more than full partner in this project, in everything from the arrangements to the packaging. I like to say that I write the songs, but he makes the music. I could never have done it without him.

Tell me a little more about Fount of Mercy and why you chose it as the beneficiary of profits from the CD.

Fount of Mercy is an organization dedicated to partnering with existing grass-roots organizations in Uganda to serve vulnerable women and children.  Many of my friends have been involved with global aid work, and I've heard all kinds of terrible stories of Americans doling out aid that has nothing to do with local needs: providing motorcycles in areas where gasoline is not readily available, in one simple example--or imposing western expectations in places where they move beyond absurd into dangerous.  Fount of Mercy is distinctive in partnering with organizations that Africans have already founded to meet their own needs.  I know and respect the American leaders, and am certain that they're using the funds in ways that are sensitive and respectful--and meet genuine needs.

Are there any more "Songs From Books" in your future?

I'm not sure! But in the meantime, if any of your readers would like to get a copy, they can find free downloads at my site, or get a hard copy by trading me for something they've made. So far I've received beautiful paintings, ceramics, cookies, translated poetry, short stories--even a container of homemade marinara sauce. I'd love to trade with any of your readers. They can just contact me at my email: theblindcontessa@gmail.com

My First Time: Tyler McMahon

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.   Today's guest is Tyler McMahon whose debut novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, is out in bookstores now.  The book tells the story of Seattle rocker Laura Loss, one-time teen bass player in her brother's successful early-'80s hardcore punk band SCC, who is surprised to find a career comeback with the grunge band The Mistakes, and then is equally surprised to find herself in the middle of a love triangle with the two other members, Sean and Nathan.  Kirkus Reviews sang its praises by calling it "a rock novel good enough to wish you had an accompanying soundtrack."  McMahon was born and raised in the Washington, DC area.  He studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University.  His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Antioch Review, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere.  He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches in the English Department at Hawai‘i Pacific University.

My First Writing Contest

You’ve never heard of the Glenn Balch Award for Fiction.  It’s an obscure short-story prize offered to the graduate students at the writing program I attended.  With a dozen or so entries per year, the award is mostly a matter of beer money and bragging rights among your peers.

After the end of my first year, I put my best story—a piece that involved a jaded surfer who’s carried away by a riptide while wearing a tuxedo and clinging to a stray dog—into an envelope and submitted it to the contest.

The minute the semester ended, I packed up for a Peruvian surf trip that I’d funded entirely through student loans.  Three days before I was meant to leave, an email thread went out to a group of my old Peace Corps El Salvador colleagues—my best friends in the world.  Without warning, one of us—a girl from New York named Laurie—had died from a brain aneurysm.

I found myself on a red-eye to New York City without luggage.  There I was met by close friends, old friends, ex-girlfriends, and my dead friend’s distraught family.  This was May of 2005, and Ground Zero still seemed a gaping, smoldering reminder of unfairness and pain—barely visible from the apartment where we all stayed.

For the next 48 hours, dozens of us drank and cried.  I attended the funeral in flip-flops and jeans.  Friends sang a few of Laurie’s favorite songs at the service.  We covered her body in shovelfuls of dirt at a cemetery in Queens.

My old friends asked about my life.  I did my best to explain that I was studying to be a writer.  They remembered me as an exaggerated, arm-waving storyteller from late-night bullshit sessions in El Salvador.  I struggled to explain that the short stories I wrote now were quieter, darker, possibly not something they’d be interested in.  And that I aspired to publish them in journals they’d never hear of and were unlikely to find in any store.  Nobody asked why I’d chosen this route.  Nobody had to, I suppose.

Impossibly, I made my return flight to the West Coast.  Even more impossibly, I managed to collect my backpack and make my flight to Peru—something I’d forgotten all about the second I heard of Laurie’s death.  After a blurry montage of airplanes, cab-rides, and airport bars, I found myself lying awake in the top bunk of a Lima hostel—listening to the snores from other travelers in the surrounding beds and not quite sure what I was doing here.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Laurie.  The last time I’d spoken to her was after a butt-call I made from a bar that woke her up.  It took us a moment to realize who each other was and why we were speaking.

Though it sounds—and is—selfish, Laurie’s death also forced me to ponder my own mortality.  She was about to finish a Masters program of her own.  In two years, I’d be exactly her age, and also closing in on graduation.  What might my funeral look like, were I to drop dead just as suddenly?  Would those same friends have come from all corners of the country to pay respects?  Would they have sung the same songs?  I’d recently begun to call myself a writer, yet if I dropped dead tomorrow, there’d be no real body of work left behind.

For the next couple days, I wasn’t able to leave the hostel.  I took all my meals there, and tried to avoid eye contact with the other travelers: Germans with hiking gear and trekking poles, dreadlocked Californians, one older Canadian who wore sweatpants and rolled cigarettes all day long.  The thick fog layer that covered the city could make you forget that there was such a thing as the sun.

Finally, I summoned the courage to pay the hostel’s clerk 5 soles for a half hour of Internet access.  She stood up and had me slide behind the computer at the front desk.  The dial-up connection whirred and puttered its way towards my inbox.  I closed my eyes and hoped for some kernel of good news in my small corner of cyberspace.

Among the gaggle of new messages, there was one with the subject: “Glenn Balch Award for Fiction.”  I clicked on the title to see which of my classmates I’d need to congratulate.  It turned out that I’d won the award.  That felt surreal, more than anything. I’d be paid $750: the first and still the biggest paycheck I’ve ever received for a short story.

But it was the text of the email that mattered more than the win.  To my surprise, the judge had been Ira Sher—author of Gentlemen of Space and Singer.  He summarized my novice story with compassion and intelligence.  I don’t have a record of what he said.  The exact text was lost along with that University email account.  But I know it ended with a sentence something along the lines of: “This is a story about a man literally and figuratively adrift, a story for an age and for a world that is both beautiful and indifferent.”

I began to weep there behind the front desk.  Part of it was flattery.  I was proud to have my work considered the top of any heap—no matter how small.  But more than anything, I was moved by Sher’s words.  I said the phrase, “a world both beautiful and indifferent” under my breath over and over.  Never—not before and not since—have I been so certain about the incantatory power of language.

I continued to say that phrase to myself as I left the hotel and walked for miles along the streets of Lima.  I bought myself a new surfboard and a bus ticket to the northern beach towns.  In the weeks that followed, I never quite got Laurie out of my mind.  But so armed with a few hundred bucks and a mantra, I was able to keep surfing and writing my way through this, a world both beautiful and indifferent.

Soup and Salad: Rejection Sucks, Daniel Woodrell, Inside Denis Johnson, Other People, The writer as entrepreneur, Shann Ray plants seeds of atonement, The Radium Age of science-fiction, Reading during Hurricane Irene, Short Stories vs. Novels: Round 22

On today's menu:

1.  Leslie Pietrzyk is sick and tired of rejection: "In the end, I DO NOT believe that, like cream, all good work rises to the top. I’m convinced that a lot of good work simply gets lost or set aside or overlooked or forgotten; many good writers simply give up."  It's a nice Howard Beale-ish rant, one that eventually erupts from every writer who's sick and tired of getting return SASEs (Old School) or assembly-line emails ("Though we enjoyed your work very much, in the end we...").  But after the red clears from our faces and the veins stop throbbing, it's time to get back down to the business of writing, submitting, writing, submitting, et cetera--all the while, watching out the window to see if we can see our ship come in.


2.  Daniel Woodrell is one writer whose luxury liner has finally pulled into port after he's spent most of his career writing off the radar of most readers.  While I wasn't as enamored with it as most critics, I was still happy to see the movie version of Winter's Bone do so well at the box office, catapulting Woodrell to a larger audience.  This year has already seen the repackaging of three of his earlier novels into a handsome trade paperback called The Bayou Trilogy; and now, his new collection of short stories, The Outlaw Album, has just been released.  Joey McGarvey has an excellent review over at The Millions which further convinces me this is the must-get book of the year:

In Woodrell’s superb new collection, The Outlaw Album, characters are fueled by desperation, anger, and (one suspects) a sense of humor either incomparably keen or completely nonexistent. How else could you explain the book’s first sentence, found in a story called “The Echo of Neighborly Bones”?: “Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him.” After burying his neighbor in a makeshift grave, this Boshell makes a habit of stopping by whenever he’s feeling blue. Nothing takes the edge off a rough day, or soothes the memory of his wife’s tears, as well as going at the rotting corpse with a heavy stone or a blunt hatchet.

3.  I love studying and discussing the Process of writing--dumping the nuts and bolts out onto the table and sorting them according to size and shape--that's why I thought these scans of Denis Johnson's notes for Train Dreams were especially cool, including the enigmatic "Eagl Scout" on one notebook page.  Most of the handwriting is hard to decipher, but that just lends itself to the impression Johnson was in such a rush to get everything out of his head and onto the page that his pen couldn't keep up with his thoughts.


4.  Have you heard?  Brad Listi of The Nervous Breakdown now has a weekly podcast called Other People in which he talks to "people who write stuff, people who write books, people who sit there all day long staring at a flashing cursor, people who write even though they're deep in poverty, people who continue to try to write books even though the books they're trying to write are eluding them, people who quietly endure the monumental frustration of trying to put the words in the right order."  The first episode was a conversation with the never-boring Jonathan Evison who may or may not be wearing pants during the phone interview.  Subsequent podcasts feature Victoria Patterson, Blake Butler, Emma Straub, Greg Olear, Jessica Anya Blau and other, um, people.  Click to the site, cock an ear, enjoy!


5.  Though New West seems to have gone the way of the tumblin' tumbleweed (a moment of silence, please, for the dearly departed), books editor Jenny Shank isn't letting the grass grow under her feet.  She's started contributing to PBS' Media Shift, including a nice piece on how authors need to be their own entrepreneurs in a "Brave New Book World."  She writes:

      I live in Colorado, and I've never met my agent or my editor, who live in New York. There have been a few phone calls, but most of our interaction has occurred via email. We copyedited my book [The Ringer] digitally, using Microsoft Word's track-changes feature. I've never had the sense that someone has "been looking for me." Rather, I knew from the start that it was my job to go out and look for people who might write a review, interview me, or maybe even buy the book.
      I'm not complaining--I accept this self-marketing as part of publishing a book today. My chance to publish my first book came now, in the middle of massive changes in the publishing industry--the rise of e-books, the fall of Borders, and a prolonged economic downturn that leaves people with little disposable income for books--and I'm thankful to have this opportunity.

6.  Jenny also has a good (though rather short) interview with Shann Ray (American Masculine) in a recent issue of High Country News.  Here's how the conversation kicks off:

      Q: You've said that redemption is one of your favorite themes in literature. Why is that?
      A: I think people are hungry for it. Coming out of modernism and branching into postmodernism, we have a glut of irony, cynicism, nihilism and characters that are difficult for people to identify with -- characters that are so interiorly dark or shattered that they're not going to rise to any type of redemption, they're just going to fall and make the reader feel like that's just life and that's what you have to do. Last century was the bloodiest in history, with 120 million war-related deaths; I think that we can see why (contemporary literature) would want to emphasize the nihilism and the emptiness of life. But I believe there's a need for balance. I feel like a lot of the new territory in writing will come from attending to the desolation, but not ignoring the consolation, not ignoring the notion that there is in each person the seed of the potential for atonement or redemption.

7.  HiLowbrow has 10 classic examples of dustjackets and "boards" (the paper- or cloth-covered stiff cardboard forming a book’s covers) from what they call the Radium Age of science-fiction (1904-1933).  As a collector of vintage books, I'm drawn to these dustjackets in ways that are inexplicable and perhaps best left private.  I love them all, but I'm especially turned-on by the board art of The Panchronicon, the 1904 novel by Harold Steele Mackaye.  I want me one of them there airships!

8.  I'm behind in catching up on the backlog of email and so a few "Soup and Salad" items have been sitting in my Inbox for well over a month.  Here's one from the Reader's Quest blog which I've been meaning to tell you about: "Reading During Hurricane Irene."

      I tried again to concentrate on Tolstoy while the wind roared over the roof. It was impossible to see the corners of the ceiling--never mind anything that might be happening outside--but I could barely resist the urge to get up and try to look out a window that could shatter at any time. The dog hid in her crate and we tried not to flinch when we heard the unmistakable crack and thud signaling the demise of one of the seventy-foot tulip poplars somewhere behind the house. At least it hadn’t fallen on the house. “I like the candles, Mom,” said my 13-year-old with a reassuring smile. “It smells like Christmas in here.”
      Tolstoy wasn’t going to happen, at least not until the storm had passed us over. Instead I opened the Book of Common Prayer to read the Service of Light and Evening Prayer:
      “Be our light in darkness, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night….”

9.  And here's another must-read from back in August: Josh Rolnick's "My Life in Stories" from The Millions:

      “So,” the agent said, “I like your stories. Are you working on a novel?”
      I was sitting in the venerable Dey House, the 1857 Victorian home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, meeting with another agent--the fifth or sixth I’d met since I’d arrived in Iowa City. She sat in a chair, facing me, across a large wooden desk, the question lingering in her eyes.
      I’d known the question was coming. Every other agent I’d met had come around to the same thing, eventually.
      The answer--the truth--was that I was not. Writing a novel. Perhaps eventually I would. But at the time, I was writing stories, exclusively. Even worse, the stories had nothing to do with each other. They had no re-occurring characters; they were not linked, even thematically. I had a vague notion that one day, the stories would miraculously interweave into a collection that felt somehow organic. But try telling that to an agent, whose job it will be to actually sell your book. The starry light goes out of their eyes. They hand over the obligatory business card, ask you to keep in touch.
      No, I thought, eyeing her across the desk, I do not have a novel.
      “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
      She leaned forward, intertwining her fingers on the blotter.
      “What’s it about?”
      Here, I paused. There was still time to save myself. It’s about nothing. I don’t even have an idea. I haven’t written a single word. I don’t know what came over me.
      But I had come across something interesting the week before, while researching a short story.
      “It’s about life saving stations. Funded by Congress in the 1800s?” I sat back, hoping to discern some flicker of interest in her expression. “They were a precursor to the Coast Guard. Red houses that dotted the Atlantic Coast, manned by young men--kids, really. They’d stand watch in a storm, waiting for shipwrecks.”
      Her eyebrow went up. “Tell me more.”
      “Well, when they spotted one, they’d head out in a small dinghy--a rescue crew. My novel’s about a saving station crewman on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. A terrible shipwreck in a violent storm.”
      I swallowed hard. Clearly, she could see right through me. My career as a writer was over before it’d even started.
      “It’s a love story,” I added.
      “I love it!” she said.
      And that was that. I’d been writing short stories seriously for half a dozen years. Revising, polishing. Sending them out. Tallying rejections. Revising some more. I’d published one story by that point, with a second forthcoming. And she was all but ready to represent me on the basis of a few-sentence novel synopsis I’d concocted right there on the spot. Practically from thin air.

It only gets better from there.  Like I said, a must-read.

Friday Freebie: Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

Congratulations to Teresa Lukey, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories by Frank Bill.

This week's book giveaway is the new memoir by Jeanne Darst, Fiction Ruined My Family from Riverhead Books.  I've previously highlighted Fiction Ruined My Family at the blog and if you click here you can find the witty, zing-y opening lines.  Ira Glass, host of This American Life (where portions of Darst's story first aired), had this to say about it:  "Fiction Ruined My Family had me laughing out loud, which I almost never do, with one jaw-dropping scene after another. On nearly every page there's some sentence that's so perfect, in an old-school Oscar Wilde/Dorothy Parker sort of way, that it made everything I've ever written or said seem like dull, drunken mumbling."  Here's the Jacket Copy for the book:

The youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated St. Louis family of prominent journalists and politicians on one side, debutante balls and equestrian trophies on the other, Jeanne Darst grew up hearing stories of past grandeur. And as a young girl, the message she internalized was clear: while things might be a bit tight for us right now, it's only temporary. Soon her father would sell the Great American Novel and reclaim the family's former glory. The family uproots and moves from St. Louis to New York. Jeanne's father writes one novel, and then another, which don't find publishers. This, combined with her mother's burgeoning alcoholism--nightly booze- fueled weepathons reminiscing about her fancy childhood--lead to financial disaster and divorce. And as Jeanne becomes an adult, she is horrified to discover that she is not only a drinker like her mother, but a writer like her father. At first, and for years, she embraces both--living in an apartment with no bathroom, stealing food from her babysitting gigs, and raising rent money by riding the subway topless, or performing her one woman show in her living room. Until gradually, she realizes that this life has not been thrust on her in some handing-down-of-the-writing-mantle-way. She has chosen it; and until she can stop putting drinking and writing ahead of everything else, it's a questionable choice. She writes, "For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself." Ultimately, Jeanne sets out to discover if a person can have the writing without the ruin, if it's possible to be both sober and creative, ambitious and happy, a professional author and a parent.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of this seriously funny book, all you have to do is answer this question:

According to her website, Darst's plays have been performed in her living room in Brooklyn, an eco-resort in Hawaii and a  _______  in Vermont.

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 20--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 21.

The Big Sky is Full of Literary Stars

Montana is big.  Montana is sparse.  Put them together and there's a very good chance I'll never grab a ribeye at the Cattle-Ac in Scobey or roam the forests of Yaak, sticks crunching under my boots.  It's just something we accept as a way of life here in the Big Sky State: our 147,000-square-mile rectangle lends itself to an every-man-is-an-island mentality.  As writers, we populate even smaller communities of fellow scribes and readers, rarely bumping into others of our ink-stained ilk.

But once a year, a five-pound bag of book-lovers' sugar is dumped onto the ground in Missoula and, like ants, we stream toward the Garden City to get our two-day fill of readings, panel discussions, autograph sessions, poetry slams, and more than a little bit of after-hours writerly drinking.  The Montana Festival of the Book is a literary gorgefest.  Every year, I stagger home with armloads of books, my hands still warm from the handshakes of new friends.

The hub of the Fest: the bookstore in the Holiday Inn's atrium

It's the premiere book event of western Montana, perhaps the entire state--though some would argue the merits of the High Plains Book Festival in Billings, the Helena Festival of the Book, and the on-again off-again festivals in Great Falls and Meagher County.  I don't know about those other gatherings, never having attended--though I hope to someday--but I can vouch for the fact that this year's Missoula festival (the 12th annual) was a slam-dunk delight.

Sponsored by Humanities Montana, the Festival of the Book always manages to attract headline acts--Montana writers as well as literary stars from beyond our borders.  This past weekend, we were treated to the likes of Bonnie Jo Campbell, William Kittredge, Thomas McGuane, Melanie Rae Thon and Rick Bass.  The 2011 Montana Festival of the Book was made double-good by the fact it ran side-by-side with the annual conference of the Western Literature Association.

It's taken me five days to fully process everything that went down last weekend and I'm still not fully clear and functional in thought, so I'll just give you a few snapshots of the event as a sort of scattered tribute to everyone who worked so hard putting together the festival.


Thursday, Oct. 6

David Cates reads at Fact & Fiction (photo by Ken Stolz)

The festival unofficially kicked off with two events: a celebration of the Missoula Writing Collaborative at Fact & Fiction bookstore where we were treated to readings by David Cates and Caroline Patterson and a special tribute to Montana's new poet laureate Sheryl Noethe by a young, poised student named Chelsea Niewald who held us breathless with a story of how, as a Native American student just arrived from the reservation, she was inspired by Noethe's poetry.

McGuane reads "The House at Sand Creek" (photo by Ken Stolz)

Then it was off to the Wilma Theater to watch Tom McGuane receive a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association.  After spirited introductions by Missoula Mayor John Engen and William Kittredge, McGuane took the stage.

"I find that the more distance I have from a story, the less I like it," he told us. "Well, this one was just published last week in The New Yorker so it's not yet distasteful to me."

He clutched a sheaf of papers which glowed under the stage lights.  It was the typed manuscript of his short story "The House on Sand Creek" and he read it to us in an ebullient voice, often cracking himself up mid-sentence (and rightly so--just mention the words "rubber fried-chicken drumstick" and you'll bring smiles back to the faces of those who were there).  My only complaint with the story is that it ended too abruptly.  Perhaps it's part of a larger McGuane mosaic?  A chapter from his next novel?

McGuane signs one of his books for Shann Ray after the reading

Friday, Oct. 7

Contributors to the new anthology West of 98 debate cowboys and suburban "ranchettes" at a long table at the front of the ballroom in the lower level of the Holiday Inn, talking about the challenges of defining the West against its longstanding, iconic place in literature.  Here are a couple of snippets from that conversation:

William Kittredge:  New York feels about Montana the same way that France feels about the U.S. (appreciative laughter from around the room).  So yeah, I'm a regional writer and I'm proud of it....People don't always understand the state.  Friends will ask me, "How're things out in Montana?" and I ask them, "Which Montana do you mean?"  We have 50 different Montanas out here--we have the Missoula Montana with retired old English professors like me; we have the Hutterite Colony Montana; we have the Latino Montana with its farm laborers; and on and on.  You can find many Montanas and our literature reflects that.

Robert Wrigley:  All writing for me is either elegiac or celebratory or both....The West will always retain for me the potential for wildness.  Maybe it's just the illusion that we still have a place to run to.  But for me, the West will always manage to abide.

*     *     *

In a smaller, more intimate room, Jenny Shank reads from her novel The Ringer. It's a powerful story about a Denver cop who shoots a Mexican immigrant he mistakenly thinks is a drug dealer during a no-knock raid.  Later, Shank will tell a different audience she felt compelled to spotlight the Mile High City because you just don't find much about it in American literature.  "I wanted to write a novel about Denver," she said, "because there's not really a lot of literature about the city.  You have to go back to John Fante or even Katherine Anne Porter's 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' to find Denver as a main setting in fiction.  I can't say I added much to the canon, but I at least wanted to get in my two cents."

She clears her throat and starts with The Ringer's opening scene where the tough-guy cop finds himself coaching a little girls' tee-ball team called the Purple Unicorns: "On the first day of tee-ball practice, Ed O'Fallon learned that his primary mission in coaching his daughter's team would be to convince the fielders to pay attention to the action at the plate. Instead, the girls preferred to concentrate on refilling aeration holes with the grass-topped earth plugs that littered the outfield like turds."

A rough-looking man who appears to have started his drinking early this day ("early" meaning somewhere in the vicinity of 8 a.m.) wanders in and takes a seat at the side of the room.  He fidgets for a few minutes, then pulls out a janitorially-large keychain which includes, among other things, a nail clipper and begins trimming his fingernails.  When he's gone through all ten fingers, he restlessly fiddles with the keyring, keeping rhythm with some internal music.  Shank plows forward, reading over the jangling.  The drunk dude is annoying, but we let him be.  He's just part of the 50 different Montanas in the room.

Jonathan Evison (left) and Alan Heathcock parley at the evening reception as Kris Saknussemm listens in

There is a Readers' and Writers' Reception at The Florence on Higgins Street that night.  Let me just say two things: 1) I hadn't eaten all day.  2) The free wine went down cold and delicious.  Let's leave it at that.


Saturday, Oct. 8

Festivals and conferences like this have a way of leveling the playing field between author and reader, creating some curious intersections.

This morning, eager to sweat out an evening of alcoholic toxins, I rose early, made my way to the hotel's fitness room and got on the treadmill.  As always, I'd brought along my trusty Kindle and started reading the stories in Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage as I walked my five miles.

He was standing in mud, leaning on his round-end shovel, when he saw the big orange snake folded on the rocks beside the driveway, its body as thick as his stepson's arm. Jerry dragged himself out of the waist-deep hole where he'd been digging around the dry well and moved along the side of the building, approached the rocks heel-toe in his mud-caked work boots, trying to move silently in the overgrown grass. The snake was orange with red and gold, but close up, its skin reflected green and blue as well-strangely, the blue of his wife's eyes-and the shiny coils of the snake suggested his wife's coppery hair.

I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be the oddest thing if right now Bonnie Jo Campbell walked through that door while I was reading her book?

I don't have to tell you what happened next, do I?

It was a total Field of Dreams moment: If you think her, she will come.

Bonnie Jo, her hair neatly tied back in a rubberband, pushed through the door of the fitness room, got herself a towel, then stepped on the treadmill next to mine.  I could have (should have) said something, but my tongue was paralyzed--like I'd almost stepped on a thick coppery-orange snake--and the opportune moment passed.

I continued to walk the belt, my knees a little shakier than before.  I tried to concentrate on the words on my Kindle, but the presence of their author jogging in place next to me made it next to impossible.  Just as I'd idly thought her into existence, I fervently prayed she wouldn't look over and see American Salvage on my screen.  Would she be flattered?  Or would she think I was some kind of pathetic stalker of writers?

I reached forward, clicked out to the main menu of the Kindle and switched to Our Mutual Friend.  No chance in hell Dickens would be coming through those doors for a session on the weight bench.

Like I said, odd intersections abound at the book festival.

*     *     *

Six hours later, I'm back in the ballroom for a panel called "I'm in a Western State of Mind--the Novel" with Jonathan Evison, Jenny Shank, Joe Henry (author of Lime Creek) and...yes, Bonnie Jo Campbell.  I sit a goodly number of rows from the front, hunched over, hoping Campbell doesn't recognize me as the Treadmill Stalker.

Moderator Kim Anderson opens the panel by saying, "I think most of us are tired of defending and defining Western literature.  Wouldn't you all agree?"

And from there, the panelists are off and running with another session of wrestling the notion of the West into a clear-cut definition.  Not an easy thing to do.  It's like wrangling greased eels into a tin can.

Saying she set out to write the "quintessential American novel" with her latest book, Once Upon a River, Campbell (who hails from Kalamazoo, Michigan) offers this great line: "The West is more American than America.  The West is like America on steroids."

Evison chimed in with an explanation of how and why he wrote West of Here: "There are 42 different viewpoints told in a bifurcated narrative.  I wanted to create a kaleidoscope of characters and events all colliding together.  What I ended up with was a fucking mess."  (Empathetic laughter from the writers in the audience.)  "With West of Here, I wanted to subvert history and tell America's story.  I wanted to ask the question, 'Where do we go when we can't go any farther West--literally and figuratively?'  Since the novel's publication, I've been to a lot of these types of panels and events and no one's been able to answer that question."

*     *     *

There's more, so much more, to tell you about this year's Festival of the Book.  I haven't even mentioned the panel discussion on the Coen Brothers' western films, the steampunk art workshop, the reading called "Horses, Hookers and Hellions," the poetry karaoke tribute to the late great Ed Lahey ("He had the most beautiful and large soul and it spilled over into all our lives," Noethe eulogized), or the two panels I moderated--one on blogging and one focused on the non-death of the short story.  There just isn't enough space or time to do the festival justice.

Besides, I have a new stack of books waiting to be read.


*Unless otherwise noted, all photos by David Abrams

National Book Award finalists announced

The National Book Foundation has just announced the finalists for this year's National Book Awards.  Here's the list:

Fiction:
The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction:
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel
Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
Malcolm X by Manning Marable
Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Poetry:
Head Off & Split by Nikky Finney
The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa
Double Shadow by Carl Phillips
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Adrienne Rich
Devotions by Bruce Smith

Young People’s Literature:
My Name Is Not Easy by Debbie Dahl Edwardson
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai
Flesh and Blood So Cheap by Albert Marrin
Shine by Lauren Myracle
Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

This comes from the NBF's website: "Established in 1950, the National Book Award is an American literary prize given to writers by writers and administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. A pantheon of such writers as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, E. Annie Proulx, and Colum McCann have all won the Award. Each year, the Foundation selects a total of twenty Judges, including five in each of the four Award categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. Judges are published writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field, and in some cases, are past NBA Finalists or Winners...Each panel reads all of the books submitted in their category over the course of the summer. This number typically ranges from 150 titles (Poetry) to upwards of 500 titles (Nonfiction). In September, each panel compiles a "shortlist" of five Finalists...No one, not even the Foundation staff, learns who the Winners are until the day of the National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner, which takes place in mid-November in New York City. That afternoon, over lunch, each panel collectively decides who the Winner in their category will be. Often, this decision has been made ahead of time, but occasionally the panel works to come to a consensus until the very last minute. The panel chair announces the Winner at the Ceremony that evening."

You can cut the suspense with the edge of a friggin' page.

Last year's winners included the dark-horse in fiction (Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon) and a revered rocker (Patti Smith) in non-fiction.  So anything can happen this year.

I haven't read all of the nominees--okay, I've only read two--but there's little suspense for me as to who should take home the $10,000 and bronze sculpture in the fiction category.  While I deeply admired Andrew Krivak's The Sojourn and Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision is still high on my To-Be-Read list, my money is on Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife for the win.  It remains the most powerful book I read this year, both in terms of story and storytelling.  In the other categories, I'll take what we in the Army used to call a SWAG (seriously wild-ass guess) and say it will be Swerve in non-fiction and either Komunyakaa or Rich in the poetry category.  As for Young Adult, flip a coin in the air.

Now let's talk about who wasn't on this year's shortlist.  I'm surprised and disappointed not to see Volt by Alan Heathcock, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, or The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach pop up in the Fiction category.  In Nonfiction, what about Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean or What It Is Like To Go To War by Karl Marlantes?

Ah well, guess I'll be having sour grapes for dinner tonight....

The winners will be announced at the 62nd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner in New York City on November 16, hosted by John Lithgow.

According to the National Book Foundation, in 2011, there were 1,223 books submitted for the National Book Awards. The number of books by genre were 315 for fiction, 441 for nonfiction, 189 for poetry, and 278 for young people's literature.

Update: An unprecedented sixth nominee has been added to the Young People's Literature category after a snafu during the announcement of the awards shortlist. As reported at The Huffington Post:

Shine by Lauren Myracle was announced in the live broadcast as one of the five nominees. However, Associated Press later reported that the book Chime by Franny Billingsley was supposed to have named instead. The National Book Foundation, which administers the awards, lists both on their website, which means that the category has an unprecedented six nominees, despite the description of the process on their own website stating that there are only five nominees in each category.

Nothing like a little "Oops!" to spice up (and draw attention to) what could be a hum-drum affair for most Americans unobsessed by books.

Update to the Update:  In a sad, bizarre turn of events, the NBA asked Myracle to withdraw her book from consideration "to preserve the integrity of the award."  Myracle did so, but I can only imagine the anger and resentment she felt as she did so.  She went from feeling on top of the world ("I was over the moon last week after receiving the call telling me that Shine was a finalist for the award") to someone who's had an honor snatched out of her grasp.  All because someone somewhere along the line misheard the title: Shine instead of Chime (whose author must be feeling pretty bad now as well).  Hey, NBA, I have another couple of words for you to play around with: "shame" and "blame."

My First Time: Ron Franscell

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today's guest is Ron Franscell.  His memoir The Sourtoe Cocktail Club has just been released by Globe Pequot Press. Franscell is a bestselling author and journalist whose atmospheric true crime/memoir The Darkest Night was hailed as a direct descendant of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and established him as one of the most provocative new voices in narrative nonfiction. The Sourtoe Cocktail Club, the true story of a life-changing road trip with his teenage son to the Yukon to sip a cocktail containing a mummified human toe, is his eighth book. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, San Jose Mercury-News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Franscell grew up in Wyoming and now lives in Texas. You can find him hanging out on the web at this address.

My First Conceit

I started reading young. I fell in crazy-mad love with books, or at least became addicted to the way they made me feel.  I began to wish I could use words to make other people feel things, too. So I wrote vivid (if imperfect) grade-schooler epics in spiral notebooks, then worked on every campus paper from junior high to college, and became a newspaperman. I got paid to write and even won a few awards because I was pretty good at it.

But it wasn’t enough. Somewhere deep down in the heart of the heart of my ink-stained heart was a dirty little infatuation.  I wanted to be a real writer, and real writers wrote books.

How hard could it be?  The transition has been made by so many writers--such as Hemingway and Twain--I believed it would a natural, painless, pleasant metamorphosis...like a colorful-but-earthbound caterpillar becoming the brilliant butterfly it was meant to be.

OK, maybe not quite that enchanting. Maybe more like shifting gears in a sleek sports car, where the transmission is set differently for shorter and longer trips. I saw book-writing as just a longer trip. I was already a storyteller of sorts, wasn’t I? Just do it a little longer and use more words. No problem, just shift into gear and settle back. And so I began.

Unfortunately, no butterflies were born. The engine never clicked.  I spent six arduous, unsatisfying months starting a novel that I literally destroyed in a fit of frustration. Broke the floppy disk into a billion tiny pieces and shredded about 20 awkward manuscript starts into the compost bin. The story sucked.  It was too reportorial, too distant.

Then came a low-grade epiphany. I realized I must become a beginning writer again, after almost 20 years in newspapering. Once I got past the errant and arrogant notion that a newspaperman was naturally gifted to write a book, I was free. I shed my conceited cocoon. I took a college creative-writing class, read a lot of writing books, and tried to separate what I knew about journalism and what I didn’t yet know about fiction.

Much of what we learn in journalistic storytelling is anathema to longer writing, especially fiction. In a newspaper, we’re taught to distance ourselves from the material, to put our emotions in a box, to write short and fast, fabricate nothing, produce a publishable first draft, and put the most important thing first.

Well, a novel would be very short if we put the most important thing first! And everything is fabricated, the revision is endless, and the story would be empty if it wasn’t filled with an author’s emotion. Think about it: a poet, a songwriter, a news anchorwoman and a technical writer are all wordsmiths and each tells a kind of story--but none of an anchorwoman’s skills make her a natural poet, not one of a songwriter’s talents ensures he could be a good journalist. We have many storytelling modes, and each requires special proficiencies.

I emerged from my self-imposed (and unpaid) internship with a new perspective. I restarted the novel and a few years later my first novel, Angel Fire, became a critical and commercial hit that’s still in print more than 13 years later.

In the end, my newspapering inspired my fiction, and vice versa. My fiction has benefited from the authenticity of my newspaper writing, and my newspaper writing has benefited from my development of a more distinct voice and confidence in long forms. And they are blended most inextricably in my recent nonfiction books, where I’ve told true stories using some of the tools in a novelist’s toolbox, such as foreshadowing, dramatic pacing, dialogue, and a more literary flourish. Over time, my wings have strengthened and take more naturally to the wind.

Today, beyond my newspapering, I have written three novels, six book-length nonfictions, a few screenplays, and plunged headlong into narrative journalism...all with some degree of commercial and artistic success. At each pivot, I swallowed my arrogance and went back to the beginning, to learn the conventions, skills and techniques that prepared me to tell those stories the best I could.

What always came next after the chrysalis of conceit was easy. I merely had to...fly.

Photo by Mary Franscell