Trailer Park Tuesday: Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

The cover design for Maryanne O'Hara's debut novel Cascade was what first drew me to the book (more on that in a later Judging a Book post here at the blog), the plot's premise (romance, racism, and community theater set in a Massachusetts town about to be flooded by a reservoir) really set the hook, but the trailer ultimately convinced me I need to read this book sooner rather than later.  The trailer shifts moods several times over the course of its two-and-a-half minutes, but I like the sense of unease with which the video begins.  A ticking clock, the rush of a river's current and the fact that Desdemona Spaulding is figuratively drowning in Cascade, a summer resort town during the Great Depression, and is "caught between duty and desire"--this all gives the trailer a sense of urgency.  There is a lot at stake here and the potential for great tragedy.  O'Hara herself appears in the trailer, explaining how she got the inspiration for her fictional town of Cascade from an actual community which was drowned in the name of progress during the 1930s.  She points to a historical placard overlooking Quabbin Reservoir and says, "I was stuck by the image of this town that had existed--houses, a post office, farms, cars.  I could never really get the setting out of my mind--the fact that you could just take a town and dismantle it and say it no longer existed."  If the book trailer is any indication, it will be hard to shake O'Hara's novel as well.

My First Time: Jennifer Spiegel

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 Jennifer Spiegel, author of The Freak Chronicles, a collection of short stories freshly-published by Dzanc Books.  Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia, had this to say about the book: "The Freak Chronicles is a miracle of a story collection: passionately political and a shout of ambivalence about political passion, intensely personal and furiously global."  Spiegel's next book, a novel called Love Slave,will be published by Unbridled Books in September.  Spiegel is an English professor and lives in Arizona with her husband and two kids.  She reads a lot, tries to buy mostly organic food, and drinks strong coffee with cream.  For more information, visit her website, and be sure to stop at the Twenty Random Details About Me page for interesting tidbits.  Like the time she set a microwave on fire with fish crackers.

My First Flop

I mean, My first brush with success.  I’ve been wanting to talk about it, so thank you for asking.  I’m going to change the names, not to protect anyone; I doubt they need it.  But just in case they don’t want anything to do with me.  I’m fine if you-know-who comes forward and admits it’s true.

So, let’s do this.  You know how there are a handful of big New York publishing houses?  Well, this is about one of those, one of the really big ones.  I’m going to christen it Big House.   Then, there’s this young editor at Big House.  I like to think of him as some young hotshot upstart editor who was being groomed for greatness, discovering young hotshot upstart writers—like myself.  I’m going to christen him Alistair I-Love-You.  Why Alistair, you ask?  Because—I’m going to let slip this one revealing detail—he was British.

I was twenty-five, living in Manhattan, working at a nonprofit, international organization of some sort.  Recently, I had graduated from New York University with an MA in Politics (International Relations).  Sounds impressive, though the truth is I sucked.  Even though I got the degree and I did fairly well, I’d be willing to bet that everyone present—especially my committee chair guy—knew I was not Ph.D. material.  I knew it, too.

Frankly, I didn’t believe in it.  It wasn’t my Gen X cynicism that separated me from the other political scientist students.  We were all cynics.  It was this: I was uncomfortable with what seemed to me to be the quantification of topics that were predominantly matters of qualitative inquiry.  Game Theory seemed dumb to me.  We were talking world peace.  We were talking saving-the-world.  This was life and death stuff, the problem of #$*%ing evil.  Philosophy!  Religion!

Um, Art!

This wasn’t an inclination that came out of nowhere.  I had an undergrad degree in creative writing, and, yeah, I really wanted to write.  Who doesn’t?  I figured I should do something else instead, something to pay the bills.  You’ve heard this one before.  But once I actually got a job in my “field,” I knew I’d better get out.

It took me about a year of wild nights in Manhattan.  I wrote a novel called So I Slept With Mickey Rourke.  I worked hard on that mother and, when it was done, I sent it to Big House.  Time may not be accurately represented here, because this was nearly twenty years ago—but, in a short period of time, I got a phone call.  Mr. Alistair I-Love-You at Big House had read my book, and he wanted to meet with me—at Big House.

Of course you’ve got to picture me.  Twenty-five, pretty good-looking but not spectacular, probably wearing a dress from Express since we’re talking Manhattan in the nineties.  Student loans up the wazoo.  I hated working in politics, and it showed.  My life was becoming increasingly enmeshed in books and writing, which sounded highly fantastical to those around me.  And, suddenly, a Big House guy wanted to talk to me.  To me!

You better believe I hopped on the subway to midtown Manhattan on my lunch break.  You better believe I was already planning for my resignation from the day job.

Alistair I-Love-You escorted me into his office.  He was young, too.  And he had an accent.  “I like your book,” he said in a sexy British rock star voice.  “There are things I’d like to discuss.  I’ve got some thoughts on revision.”  (I’m paraphrasing, okay?  I don’t know what-the-heck Alistair really said.)

“You like my book?  Okay.  Okay.  Whatever you want.”  I probably really said this.

After our chat on edits, he said, “Call me when you’re done.”

So I did.  I don’t know how long it took, but I do know that I had nothing else going.  I also knew that I had to be a writer.  I had to accept my student loan fate, abandon this career path, and embrace the absurdity of “being a writer.”  I mean, if we were talking about saving the world, let’s just admit this one small thing: politics wasn’t going to cut it.

Alistair I-Love-You wanted my edited book, and so I mailed it to him.  We met again after he read it.  He still liked it.  “I’ll talk to some people.”  I walked out of that midtown Big House skyscraper, singing, I made it!  I made it!  This, my friends, was my first brush with success.

And then he kept it.  For, like, seven months.  I didn’t hear a thing from him.  For seven months, So I Slept With Mickey Rourke was at Big House.  During that time, I re-defined myself, gained too much weight, and decided to get my MFA.  I’m not totally sure who called whom, but we finally spoke on the phone.  My guess is that I called him, because I remember what he said:

“I’m sorry.”

Alistair I-Love-You told me he tried; he really did.  He showed it to some people.  He had hoped it would work.  He asked me, “May I keep it?”  He wanted to remember it, he said.  He told me it was good.  I should keep writing.  I should put this one in a drawer and write the next one.

My first flop.

I took So I Slept With Mickey Rourke to another New York publishing house and did a little finagling.  “Big House looked at it for seven months,” I said.  “Though they decided it wasn’t going to work for them, I thought you might want to take a look.”  They did.  They rejected it in about four minutes.  My second flop.

The years passed.  I did what Alistair I-Love-You suggested.  I put it in a drawer, but I took it out sometime ago.  I turned it into a short story called “The Mickey Rourke Saga,” which can be found in The Freak Chronicles.  I do have a strong emotional attachment to the story.  I can’t help but love it.

That dusty original book in the drawer?  Well, I haven’t read it in years, nor do I think there are any copies left.  Maybe Alistair I-Love-You has his.  I think I officially turned any remaining copies into scrap paper for my girls.  I will say this: Alistair was generous.

The book really wasn’t very good.

Is your pen quivering? I'm looking for contributors to the blog

As subscribers to the Quivering Pen newsletter* already know, things will probably get a little sparse around here in a couple of months, content at the blog thinning out as I go full-frontal Fobbit.  To that end, I'm putting out a call for guest book reviews.  If you or someone you know would like to contribute a review to The Quivering Pen, I'll be happy to consider it for publication.  Sadly, I can't pay you for your efforts--but hey, you get the everlasting glory of internet fame, right?

Please pitch titles to me at david.abrams@gmail.com and I'll try to respond as quickly as I can.  Or query me for a list of Books-I've-Been-Hoping-To-Read-But-Now-Realize-It'll-Be-Months-Before-I-Can-Even-Think-About-Pulling-It-Out-Of-The-TBR-Pile.  You can click the reviews tag to get a good idea of the kinds of books I review.  But in general, I'm open to most new releases in literary fiction, poetry and--to a smaller degree--non-fiction like biography/memoir and history.  I'm dealing with the age-old bibliophile's problem: Too many books, too little time.  My thanks to anyone who can help unbury me from the deluge of new releases.

In addition, if you are a published author (or about to be one soon), I'm always looking for contributions to the My First Time feature.  Feel free to write to me at that same email address and I'll send a copy of the submission guidelines.


*If you aren't already subscribing to the weekly newsletter, what are you waiting for?  Click here to sign up.

Terrorist Whack-a-Mole: London, July 7, 2005

During my year of deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, it sometimes seemed like the most dramatic news was happening outside the borders of Iraq.  A quick mental scan of headlines in 2005 reminds me that we watched Terri Schiavo's slow death, Michael Jackson's trial, and Hurricane Katrina's wrath from the distance of several continents away.  Filtered through CNN, Stars and Stripes and our phone calls with family back home, it was like watching bizarre and troubling theater through high-powered binoculars.  Here we were, supposedly in the hot center of conflict (which Baghdad certainly was), but it felt like the rest of the world was melting into a puddle of consecutive tragedy.

On July 7, all eyes in the Army task force headquarters where I worked were glued to the TV screens as smoke rose out of a London Underground station.  I'm sure a few of us were convinced we were watching another 9/11 unfold--it even had its own catchy name: "7/7."  It fueled us with equal parts despair and determination--a sinking feeling that our work would never be done in the fight against terrorism, but also fresh resolve to keep plugging away at the fight.  That night, I sat on the edge of my cot and wrote the following journal entry.

July 7, 2005:  Sometime in the afternoon, midway between the chatter and clatter of our day here in Baghdad, it happens.  The regular TV news broadcasts stop mid-syllable and start showing pictures of gray London streets, hazy with pending rain and the flat cold light of grim “terror,” as the new TV label calls it.  I stare at the screen as the news breaks.  Explosions on the subway.  A double-decker bus peeled open by a blast.  The first reports, delivered with dramatic hysteria by the Fox News anchors, tell us there were six simultaneous bombs and at least 90 dead, hundreds wounded.  The numbers will later be downgraded to four bombs and 52 dead, but in those first minutes, there is a very real question as to how large this attack will turn out to be and the newsman’s panting perspiration is to be forgiven.

            I walk over to Sergeant First Class B. and Specialist R. on their side of the cubicle where they are putting the final touches on the latest edition of The Marne Express.  “You guys watching this?”

            “No, what?”

            “Terrorist attacks in London.”

            “No shit?”

            “At least 90 dead.  Doesn’t look good.  Not good at all.”

            I go back to the TV, the demands of our own pending press releases temporarily set aside.  The live video coming from London is, frankly, undramatic: an aerial shot of the entrance to one of the subways, static with fire trucks and ambulances; a stationary view down a now-deserted street in another part of the city, police caution tape fluttering in front of the camera as the breeze catches it, and it takes many minutes for me to realize we’re looking at half of a double-decker bus—no bodies in sight, just bent red metal and exposed seats.  There are interviews with survivors who have emerged, blinking and soot-covered, from the Underground station.  But even these are banal.  There is no hysteria, no garish rivulets of blood, very little sobbing or wild, darting eyes.  Even in shock, the Brits keep their cool-as-yesterday’s-tea composure.  This, the TV later tells us, is “the worst attack on Britain since World War Two.”  When Tony Blair steps up to the microphone, there is hardly a tremble in his voice.  If anything, his upper lip has stiffened with more resolve.

            There is speculation about how this will only serve to make England more determined to join the fight here in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The terrorists, whoever they are in this instance, thought they could frighten Britain into withdrawing its troops from around Samarra.  However, it seems their objective backfired and now there is nothing but contempt and condemnation in the voices of leaders from around the world (including Iran) as they echo G. W. Bush’s rhetoric at the G-8 conference in Scotland: “We will not give in to terrorism.”  For this one instant on this sad, gloomy day, it’s possible to see Churchill picking his way among the bombed-out ruins of the Blitz, clamping his teeth on his cigar and growling, “Never give in--never, never, never, never.”

            The London attacks simultaneously piss me off and deepen my sorrow at the fact that we’ve plunged ourselves into what feels like an unwinnable war.  We can kill terrorists, we can “detain” them by the thousands, we can strip them of their weapons caches, but it seems like the more we do to “win” the war on terrorism, the more we fuel the religious and political fire that burns in the Mideast breast.  When one terrorist falls, there will always be two more to rise up and take his place.  It all goes back to the Whack-a-Mole theory I’ve held from the start: you can hit one guy with a rubber mallet in one place, but then another pops up somewhere else, and while you’re whacking that guy, another one has popped up elsewhere.  The only difference is, in the carnival Whack-a-Mole, the game’s over when you run out of quarters.

Friday Freebie: Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru

Congratulations to Laura Kay Bolin, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Gilded Age by Claire McMillan.

This week's book giveaway is Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms by Carmela Ciuraru.  It's a fascinating and lively look at the lives of authors who, for whatever reason, chose to live behind an alias.  Here's the jacket copy from the publisher:

What's in a name? In our "look at me" era, everyone's a brand. Privacy now seems a quaint relic, and self-effacement is a thing of the past. Yet, as Nom de Plume reminds us, this was not always the case. Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame. Biographies have chronicled the lives of pseudonymous authors such as Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, and George Eliot, but never before have the stories behind many noms de plume been collected into a single volume. These are narratives of secrecy, obsession, modesty, scandal, defiance, and shame: Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" (as they were called by the poet Ted Hughes) from Yorkshire--the Brontes--produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Grounded by research yet highly accessible and engaging, these provocative, astonishing stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities--sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. A wide-ranging examination of pseudonyms both familiar and obscure, Nom de Plume is part detective story, part expose, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

Joyce Carol Oates (aka Rosamond Smith, aka Lauren Kelly) had this to say about Ciuraru's book: "Nom de Plume is a fascinating collection of stories—populated by individuals whose ‘doubleness’ is so distinct that they acquire secondary personalities, and, in some notable cases, multiple personalities. It’s a richly documented literary excursion into the inner, secret lives of some of our favorite writers."

If you'd like a chance at winning a new paperback copy of Nom de Plume, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on July 12—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on July 13.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Library Journal: Fobbit is "a slice of awesome"

I'm sorry Douglas Lord had to be beaten to a bloody pulp by henchmen in order to cough up his reviews for Library Journal this week (or, as he puts it, "sploop out a glob" of words), but I'm full of ever-lovin' gratitude that he liked Fobbit.  In his "Books for Dudes" column, Lord writes:

[I'm] happy to report that this darkly comic novel is a slice of awesome....This ain’t Hogan’s Heroes. Like the best writing of M.A.S.H., it is true dark comedy in that it reinforces how unpleasant life can be for soldiers, and how ridiculous, funny, and stupid life can be. And it reminds us how cheap life is; how cheap American lives are.

You can read the full review at this link (after scrolling past the bloody, post-Book Expo America beating D. Lord suffered at the hands of two nefarious knuckle-draggers).

Sgt. Shultz shortly after finding
an unauthorized copy of Fobbit under Hogan's pillow

Paperback Flashback: One For Hell by Jada M. Davis

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.
But mostly the cheesy.

Let's start with the cover, shall we?  A laughing pinup in a negligee stands over a salt-and-pepper-haired man who looks suspiciously like a wayward Mitt Romney clutching his chest as he's crumpled to the floor beside a bed (and is that a spot of blood coming from under his hand?).  One for Hell by Jada M. Davis screams political sex scandal to me.

But, after some careful and thorough internet detective work this morning, I find that One For Hell has been hailed as a classic noir novel on the order of Jim Thompson, one of my favorites of the hard-boiled typewriter.  In a nutshell, the story is about Willa Ree, a boxcar hobo who hops off the train in a small town, determined to pick it clean in a one-man crime spree, but who ends up become chief of police.  It's an easy plot to mock...but, frankly, when I turned to page 100, I found some pretty decent writing:

click to enlarge

What's easier to lampoon is the back cover of the Red Seal paperback (which I picked up in some now-forgotten antique store here in western Montana earlier this year):

click to enlarge

Jada who?  According to this website, Mr. Davis seemed to suffer from a life of hard luck and bad choices.  Brutal poverty in his Depression-era childhood, tuberculosis while serving with the Army in World War Two, volunteering (!) for "atomic medical experiments" after the war, and turning his back on a writing career to take a job with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, "where he worked as a PR executive until his retirement."  That's the stuff novels are made of, my friend.

Win a copy of Fobbit (and some Fobbity swag)

Good morning, my little Fobbiteers!  It's a glorious Fourth of July here in Butte, Montana.  The sun is shining, the flags are waving, and the hospital's emergency room is prepping to receive those revelers who just don't know when to let go of their firecrackers.

In honor of the red-white-and-blue day, I'm giving away an advance reading copy of Fobbit, my comedy about the Iraq War.  The novel doesn't officially release until September 4 (T-minus two months and counting), but the good folks at Grove/Atlantic have given me an extra ARC.  So I thought I'd pass along the book to a reader who wants to get a jump on everybody else.

By now, most of you know what Fobbit is about, but for the unbaptized, here's a thumbnail synopsis:

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The FOB is like the back office of the battlefield—where the grunts eat and sleep between missions, and where a lot of U.S. Army employees have what looks suspiciously like an office job. These are the Fobbits. The FOB offers all the comforts of home, including Burger King and Starbucks, though there’s the unpleasant possibility that a mortar round might hit you while you’re drinking your Frappucino. The base is always a hive of industrious activity: male and female soldiers tracking down an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, and senior staff busily coordinating the optimum strategy to get to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special. Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, the most Fobbity of all the Fobbits, is one of the people lucky enough to call the FOB his home. He works for the Army’s Public Affairs Office, sequestered in a lovely cubicle in one of Saddam’s former palaces. There, reporting to the nosebleed-prone Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, he drafts and redrafts press releases and PowerPoint presentations, sweltering in the desert heat. Any time an IED blows up or some Iraqi citizens accidentally get caught in crossfire, it’s up to Gooding to put a positive Army slant on things before the news goes out into the world. When Captain Abe Shrinkle, a well-meaning but rather ineffectual infantry commander, makes a series of ill-judged tactical decisions, Gooding has to try to make everything smell like roses. But there are some things that no amount of spin can hide. Fobbit paints a warts-and-all portrait of the Iraq War, taking us behind the scenes of the U.S. Army’s two great battles: for security in the field, and for “hearts and minds” at home.

Publishers Weekly was kind enough to choose the book as a Top 10 Literary Fiction pick for the Fall, and called it "an instant classic" in their review.  Other folks, like Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng, Half a Life), have been equally generous in their praise: "Fobbit, an Iraq-war comedy, is that rarest of good things: the book you least expect, and most want. It is everything that terrible conflict was not: beautifully planned and perfectly executed; funny and smart and lyrical; a triumph. David Abrams has taken up Joe Heller’s mantle—or not mantle; more like his Groucho nose and his whoopee cushion—and so his debut marks the arrival of a massive talent."

So, without further ado, here's what you'll get in the prize package:

One person will receive the following: an ARC of Fobbit the novel, a Fobbit tote bag, a Fobbit coffee mug (which may look slightly different than the one you see pictured here), and a handful of Fobbit postcards.  Since that tote bag looks a little empty right now, I'll also throw in a half-dozen ARCs of novels I've gotten from other publishers--I'll send a list of available titles to the winner and they'll get to choose the six they want to read.  Not included in the prize package: Ash with his "I am NOT amused" expression (though I guess it would be appropriate since Grove is issuing Fobbit under the Black Cat imprint).

Here's how to enter:

Email your name and address to david.abrams@gmail.com.

Put "FOBBIT ME!" in the e-mail subject line. The contest runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on July 11—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the winner on July 12.

Want to increase your odds of winning? Get extra entries in the contest by:

1. Posting a link to this giveaway webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. (1 entry)
2. "Liking" my author page on Facebook by clicking here. (1 entry)
3. Following me on Twitter at @ImDavidAbrams (1 entry)

I'll add an extra entry for each person who does 1, 2, or 3 (or all three).  Once you've done this, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've done a #1 (or #2, #3, or whatever combination thereof)" and I'll put your name in the hat the appropriate number of times. If you already like my author page on Facebook or follow my tweets, I'll still give you extra entries--just drop me an email stating this fact.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Anna Karenina and Keira Knightley's Bulldog Underbite

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

(With apologies to Mr. Leo Tolstoy:) All period-drama movie trailers are alike; but each eye-popping, brain-dazzling movie trailer is eye-popping and brain-dazzling in its own way.  Into a summer already crowded with spidermen, batmen and All the President's Vampires, we get a fresh blast of cinematic promise.  Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright and written by Tom Stoppard, is scheduled for release in November and if the two-and-a-half-minute trailer is any indication, we're in for a real treat, Keira Knightley's underbite aside.  My feelings for Miss Knightley are....complicated.  She has the kind of facial beauty I should fall for--bowl-of-cream complexion, pert nose, black-jellybean eyes--but....but yet, I'm distracted by her mouth.  It wasn't until five movies had gone by and I reached Pride and Prejudice (also directed by Joe Wright) that I realized what was bugging me about her performances.  It was her underbite which gives her mouth a steely determination as fierce as any bulldog's chomping at the script.  This is especially troubling when it comes to her role as Anna K.  I could be proved wrong come November, but I just don't know if Keira Knightley is right for the role of the insecure, unstable wife of Count Alexei.  Maybe I'm just stuck on the perfection of Greta Garbo's performance in the role and maybe KK will be great as AK.  We'll see.  One thing of which I'm pretty confident, however, is the beautiful staging of the movie.  From the stylized, theatrical scenes we're given in this trailer, I'm expecting great things to come from Wright's camera.  Horses thundering across a stage, dancers frozen in a tableau, drawing room doors opening onto an outdoor pond with ice skaters--this is the freshest of cinematic dreams.  Wright is, after all, the maestro behind the incredible five-minute, one-take, Steadicam tracking shot near the end of Atonement (whose script Knightley didn't chew up too badly).  So, I'll be going to watch Anna Karenina for the visionary beauty and will do my best to ignore Keira Knightley's bulldog mouth.

My First Time: Michael Downs

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 Michael Downs, author of The Greatest Show, a book of linked short stories about the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944.  You can read more about the collection and how he came to write it in this article from the Hartford Courant.  Downs is also the author of House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.  He has won literary fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has published stories in the Best American Mystery Stories series (2001, 2002).  He teaches creative writing at Towson University in Maryland and lives in Baltimore.  With his wife, who is 17 years older, he writes the blog Him + 17 about love and age.

The First Time I F---in’ Choked Up

The other day, after supper, as the dogs came nosing about the table, my wife said, “You don’t have a foul mouth.”

“I do!” I said.  We were talking about an earlier draft of this essay, in which I first tried to connect choking up—you know, crying–with the need to cuss.

My wife shook her head.

With my hand I made a traffic cop’s motion, as if a gesture could stop her disbelief, and said something like, “You don’t hear me in the car when I’m alone and playing music really loud.  Sometimes I just shout F---!  F---!  F---!”

Her facial expression didn’t change.  My wife had mastered skepticism long before she became a journalist, and the profession has only honed the trait.

“You know when I’m in the shower, and from another room you hear me say something, and you shout, ‘What?’ and I shout back ‘Nothing!’  Most of the time what you heard was a muttered curse.”

She said, “After 18 years of marriage, I’m just learning this about you?”

It is true that I try not to throw F-bombs in my wife’s presence or in polite company.  I don’t cuss people out.  Never have I found myself yelling at someone to, well, you know, or insulting them with profanity.  But a generalized g-d--- or f--- feels as good as a deep exhalation of breath; it relieves stress.  Some folks crush a squishy ball or lift weights or meditate.  I spew venom.

Usually, I don’t intend to say anything.  I’m in the shower or driving or walking the dogs, thinking or reliving some past anger or joy.  A word slip-slides out.  Automatic as breathing.

A few years ago, I spoke publicly as part of a graduation ceremony.  This was at a university where I’d worked several years, but was soon to leave.  Standing at a microphone on a blinding blue day, in front of all those black-robed beautiful people, I broke down, choked up, blubbered.  It was the end—thank God, it was the end–of long, stressful, emotional years.  Inside me roiled a concoction of joy and grief and exhiliration, before which I was helpless.  Helpless as a baby, helpless as my leg when a muscle cramps.  Some cruel thing possessed me, limiting my choices for self-expression to two.  One option was to lean into the microphone and curse like a m-----f----r.  The other was to cry.

So, I blubbered, right up there in front of God and everybody.

Often when I give public readings something similar happens.  Put me in front of a group of interested listeners, and ask me to read from something that has been part of my life for so long­­­–over which I’ve worried/exulted/banged my head–and my throat will tighten.  My eyes will burn and sometimes tear.  I’ll swallow hard, as if to keep down a “Holy Sh-t.”

The first time this happened?  Graduate school.  The class subject was Danté in translation.  The professor offered the option of a creative response rather than a paper, so I wrote a short story that challenged an idea put forth in The Divine Comedy, that sinning requires the desire to sin.  My question: Couldn’t a person sin–even intentionally–without wanting to?

Thus, a story about a man who kills his terminally ill wife, at her request, to relieve her suffering.  To write the most emotional scenes, I imagined my wife and me in my characters’ places.  I imagined her as terminally ill, and me as helpless.

On the last afternoon of class–a warm, sunny May day–students and prof met at a bar near campus, a place that had Woodstock-era furnishings and which served sprouts and day-old breads and beer by the pitcher.  I’d like to blame the beer.  Or the way the sunlight fell on our table.  I didn’t see what was coming.  Then it was there.  The professor had asked me to read from my story.  As I declaimed my way through the last scene, my throat tightened.  I choked.  I smiled, tight-lipped, sipped from a sweating glass as somewhere in the lizard part of my brain a @%*&!! struggled to emerge.

A few years back, the magazine Scientific American Mind published a piece called “Why Do We Cry?”  In the article, science writer Chip Walter notes that crying is part of the autonomic nervous system.  That system has two parts, one sympathetic and the other parasympathetic.  The sympathetic part kicks in during stress: the fight or flight responses that include adrenaline bursts and racing hearts and dilating pupils.  The parasympathetic-self does its work following these stressful moments.  These are the involuntary ways our bodies and ourselves recover equilibrium.  Crying, science shows, is parasympathetic.  Crying is ourselves coming back after stress.

That grad school day with Dante?  For years I’ve thought I choked up because I had to imagine again my wife suffering a fictional terminal illness.  But that never seemed correct.  Sheri was home, safe and healthy.  More likely, it was that at the end of a difficult semester I’d written what was probably my first decent short story.  I had a beer in hand.  It was a beautiful day with friends.  What choked me up, I think, was relief.

At every reading since, I’ve risked the embarrassment of tears.  This is not because readings are stressful, though sometimes they are.  This is, I think, because writing is stressful, because every time I sit down at the desk I face a fight-or-flight moment: the adrenaline rushes, the pupils dilate, the heart rages.  Every sentence.  Every word.  For years.  Fight it or flee.  Fight it or flee.  Fight it.  Fight it.  Fight it.

Then, the writing ends.  Book in hand, I go to a party.  Or a reading.  Someone hands me a beer.  Or I see the faces of people I love, smiling up at me from a row of folding chairs.  They’re happy.  Me, too.  Time, then, for those long, slow parasympathetic F-bombs.  Or for the choking up that stifles such blessed words.

Publishers Weekly calls Fobbit "an instant classic"

Things have been a little topsy-turvy in my head since I got the email from my editor at Grove/Atlantic a few days ago giving me a sneak peek at Publishers Weekly's pending starred-and-boxed review of Fobbit.  I'm not a man who cries easily, but I'll admit that when I finished reading those 264 words of praise I had to reach for a Kleenex.  I was living every debut novelist's dream, sitting bull's-eye in the moment for which I'd been waiting nearly 30 years.

Since the review was embargoed until late last night, I had to sit on the news....but now I'm free to share what will appear in the July 2 print issue.

I am humbled and eternally grateful to PW for this vote of confidence for my first novel:

Abrams’s debut is a harrowing satire of the Iraq War and an instant classic. The Fobbits of the title are U.S. Army support personnel, stationed at Baghdad’s enclave of desk jobs: Forward Operating Base Triumph. Some of the soldiers, like Lt. Col. Vic Duret, are good officers pushed to the brink. Others, like Capt. Abe Shrinkle, are indecisive blowhards. But the soul of the book is Staff Sgt. Chance Gooding Jr., a public relations NCO who spends his days crafting excruciating press releases and fending off a growing sense of moral bankruptcy. A series of bombings, street battles, and media debacles test all of these men and, although there are exciting combat scenes, the book’s most riveting moments are about crafting spin, putting the “Iraqi Face” on the conflict. A sequence in which a press release is drafted and edited and scrutinized, held up for so long that its eventual release is old news, is a pointed vision of losing a public relations war. Abrams, a 20-year Army veteran who served with a public affairs team in Iraq, brings great authority and verisimilitude to his depictions of these attempts to shape the perceptions of the conflict. Abrams’s prose is spot-on and often deadpan funny, as when referring to the “warm pennies” smell of a soldier’s “undermusk of blood,” or when describing one misshapen officer: “skull too big for the stalk of his neck, arms foreshortened like a dinosaur... one word came to mind: thalidomide.” This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.

Earlier in the week, PW gave another nod to Fobbit in an article by Mike Harvkey, called "Gone Hollywood," in which he picked the book for a Top 10 list of literary fiction* coming out this Fall: "I'm going with FOBBIT by David Abrams, because he has looked at the horror [of the Iraq War] and had the same reaction that Stanley Kubrick had when trying to find the art in thermonuclear war."  That made me about as happy as Slim Pickens riding bareback on a bomb.

*The list also included The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu, A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins, One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper, The Lawgiver by Herman Wouk, Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan, The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling, Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe, The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, and The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle.