My First Time: Darrin Doyle

Stuart Dybek

My First Writing Workshop

My first workshop in the Master of Fine Arts program at Western Michigan University was taught by Stuart Dybek. The class met, as most graduate workshops do, in the evening. I remember being nervous but excited by the sense that I was now joining the “big leagues” so to speak. I was thrilled to have the chance to enter a community of people who devoured literature and longed to create art. I had taken undergraduate workshops, but I was optimistic, quite honestly, that this class would do nothing less than usher me into a new life. At age 25, I had finally begun to sniff at the possibility of a career rather than a menial job (of which I had worked a dozen in my life at this point).

Stuart (he told us to call him Stu) had asked a second-year MFA student to bring copies of a story to class for discussion. Since the class only met once a week (this pre-dated electronic story distribution), Stu wanted to hit the ground running. The idea was that the class would take a 30-minute recess, disperse to find a comfortable nook where we could read this short-ish story (8 pages or so), comment on it, and re-convene to workshop it.

The workshopping second-year student in question (I’ll call him Frank) was an older gentleman of medium build, probably in his early 40s. He had longish hair beginning to go gray. I offer this description for visualizing purposes only.

The story was a Vietnam War story. I don’t recall much detail about it; it was decently written. Nothing terribly good or terribly bad. After our short break the class gathered, and we engaged in what I thought was a productive discussion about the story’s strengths and weaknesses. From my perspective, it felt great. We talked seriously and deeply for a solid 40 minutes, balancing praise with suggestions; nothing contentious or controversial was mentioned. When we were finished, Stu asked Frank if he had any comments or questions for the group.

I’ll never forget the pregnant pause and the way Frank drew a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “I could go point-by-point,” Frank said, “and tell you all why you are wrong. But I’m not going to do that.” There was a definite change in the air at this point. “Andre Dubus says that the danger of workshops is that other people will tell you how they would write the story rather than how the story needs to be written. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Stu flashed a bemused look, then a resigned one, raised his eyebrows, and said, “See you all next week.” We were dismissed. I wandered around outside on the way to my car, encountering another new MFA student. We both were pretty shell-shocked and angry. Why had we bothered to read and comment on this dude’s story if he clearly didn’t want or need our advice?

Happily, this experience turned out to be the exception rather than the rule in graduate school. Over the next three years, I completed my MFA; a few years after that, I earned my PhD in literature with a creative dissertation. The vast majority of my workshops were extremely helpful, and I wouldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what I’ve accomplished without the help and guidance of my mentors and peers. Over the years, in addition to working with Stuart Dybek I’ve received invaluable guidance from amazing writers/teachers like Jaimy Gordon, Elizabeth McCracken, Brock Clarke, Michael Griffith, Denis Johnson, and Christine Schutt. My peers, too, provided inspiration, wisdom, eagle eyes, and a feeling of camaraderie for which I will always be indebted.

Often we’re warned about the dreaded “workshop story” – that piece of writing whose vitality has been sapped by too many grad school critiques; that piece of art once rife with potential now beaten and crushed into something lifeless, something safe and tepid and designed to please everyone (therefore pleasing no one). I’m sure that at times creative writing workshops can have this result. However, my experiences reflect the opposite: the workshop as a safe place of experimentation, of exploration, of inspiration. I could never be the writer I am today without these experiences to challenge and push me.

These days I’m the teacher in the workshop, and fortunately I haven’t had any Franks in my classes. I sometimes miss being the student and having the opportunity to share my newest stories with a diverse group of smart folks. The truth is, however, that my students’ writing and conversation–and enthusiasm–continues to inspire my fiction year after year.

Here’s hoping Frank is finding inspiration in his writing life, too.

Darrin Doyle is the author of Scoundrels Among Us, a short-story collection now out from Tortoise Books. has lived in Saginaw, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Louisville, Osaka (Japan), and Manhattan (Kansas). He has worked as a paperboy, mover, janitor, telemarketer, pizza delivery driver, door-to-door salesman, copy consultant, porn store clerk, freelance writer, and technical writer, among other jobs. After graduating from Western Michigan University with an MFA in fiction, he taught English in Japan for a year. He then earned his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the novels Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story (LSU Press) and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (St. Martin’s), and the short story collection The Dark Will End the Dark (Tortoise Books). His short stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Harpur Palate, Redivider, BULL, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He currently teaches at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with his wife and two sons.

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. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

Sunday Sentence: Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Jack wanted to escape his marriage; she wanted to live with hers; they drove north to the woods and made love. Then they dressed and drove back to what had brought them there.

Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus

Sunday Sentence: Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Larry Guidry was a short wiry boy with biceps like baseballs, thin curly hair, a small head, and a face the color of housedust.

“The Bully” from Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus

Sunday Sentence: Separate Flights by Andre Dubus

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

He lives in a small town, so already he is out in the country; he runs past farmhouses, country homes, service stations. There are not many cars and most of the time he has the privacy of his own sounds—his steady breathing, his feet on the wet plowed and sanded blacktop—and, more than that, the absolute privacy of his body staking its claim on a country road past white hills and dark green trees, gray barns, and naked elms and maples and oaks waiting for spring: his body insisting upon itself, pumping blood and pounding up hills.

“Going Under” from Separate Flights by Andre Dubus

Sunday Sentence: We Don’t Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

I am surrounded by painful marriages that no one understands.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus

Books for Dark Political Times: Michael Copperman’s Library

Reader:  Michael Copperman
Location:  Eugene, Oregon
Collection Size:  Five hundred books
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  I Have a Dream: The March on Washington by Emma Gelders Sterne
Favorite book from childhood:  James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Guilty pleasure book:  Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

My personal library is small. I live in a converted garage and rent out the rooms of my house, and I have boxes and boxes of books away in storage and in my office at the university. My awkward little secret is that I am often not much of a reader of contemporary fiction—I tend to read poetry as one consumes fuel, and keep those books thrown about the living room, where just now I am reading the collected work of Langston Hughes as if it might save my life. With everything else, I am immensely selective, and more likely when I am deep in work and process to reread something essential to me which speaks of mystery than I am to begin the latest NY Times bestseller. For instance, I have read Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours, five times, and would gladly begin it again. I have read the collected stories of Chekhov two or three times, and these days, every couple months I read his great short story “The Student,” an irreducible and indescribable little short about immanence, which in that story is the suggestion of imminence in the absence of wisdom, meaning, and God.

I keep the books which I am intending to read in a stack atop the rest on the right shelf on one side of the bed—books by friends or acquaintances, gifts, books which I feel I need to read or should have read. Sometimes books jump the queue that demand attention—on top now is a book by my great-grandmother, the writer Emma Gelders Sterne, I Have a Dream: The March on Washington which was published in 1965.

Recently I pulled that book from my father’s shelves of all Emma’s books as if drawn to it—to find a note from my father to me, his unborn son, five years before my birth, charging me with bearing on his grandmother’s legacy of writing, activism, compassion, and justice. As this is one of Emma’s books I did not read in my childhood, and speaks of a strength and solidarity and rising up I feel I may need to summon now, in these dark political times, I am excited to begin.

Atop the left shelf are books I’ve pulled from the shelves because I needed to read them as I work to complete an essay or my novel-in-progress—usually books which have been a long love of mine, or have particular resonance. So it is that Cesar Vallejo, translated by Roberty Bly and James Wright, sits atop that shelf. Vallejo, the music of my heart on big sad days of reckoning. So it is that Hamlet, has been set to the top, too, in this bitter winter, as has Willa Cather’s Five Stories, perhaps her least known work, but so large in lyric and retrospective force. I turn to these books as if to a holy book, a source—they do not directly instruct me, but their art and ethos are somewhere so near to what is in me as I work that they show me a way.

Michael Copperman is the author of Teacher, a memoir of the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. He has taught writing to low-income, first-generation students of diverse background at the University of Oregon for the last decade. His prose has appeared in The Oxford American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Waxwing, and Copper Nickel, among other magazines, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. Visit www.mikecopperman.com for more information about Michael and his book. 

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

My First Time: Rachel Hall

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 Rachel Hall, author of Heirlooms, a collection of linked stories which was BkMk Press’ 2015 G. S. Sharat prize winner selected by Marge Piercy. Rachel’s short stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday and New Letters, which awarded her the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction. She has received other honors and awards from Lilith, Glimmer Train, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, the Ox-Bow School of the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Rachel is a Professor of English in the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Geneseo where she holds the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives in Rochester, New York with her husband and daughter. Click here to visit her website.

My First Fan Mail

In the hot house that is graduate school, we were all madly trying to publish our poems and stories. That was the goal, the sign we were real writers, the golden ring. During my second year, I was thrilled to have a story accepted for publication in the Black Warrior Review. In those pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook days there was no easy way to let the world know that you held in your sweaty hand that golden ring. There was no posting or sharing or humble bragging. One’s work arrived by post, bound, and in this case, attractively so. I added the publication to my fledgling CV and sent my extra contributors copies to my family, who ohh and ahhed sufficiently. The End.

Or so I thought. Some months later, I received a letter from BWR. I’m not sure what I thought it was—payment perhaps, or information about ordering additional contributors’ copies. I opened the letter to find another envelope and on it, a pink post-it on which the editor had scrawled “A letter for you.” The letter was addressed to me c/o BWR. I didn’t recognize the handwriting or the return address, but I most certainly recognized the sender’s name: Andre Dubus. I had loved Dubus’ stories since I encountered them in my first creative writing course—“The Winter Father,” “Killings,” “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” and especially the beautiful and tender, “A Father’s Story.” I’d taught these stories in my role as a graduate teaching assistant (I still teach these stories regularly), pointing out the ways Dubus makes us care for—like even—characters whose actions are troubling—dishonest, sometimes cruel or violent.

I leaned against the knotty pine wall in my apartment, slid down to sitting, and tore open the envelope. Inside, on a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook, was this letter from Andre Dubus:

Hello Rachel Hall:
     Your story, “T’ai Chi” deeply moved me, and it is beautifully put together, beautifully written, with breathing characters. It could have been a story about my own grown children whose parents and parent’s friends were married in the sixties, and now are not. Painful for me, in a lovely musical way.

The letter went on for another paragraph after this—first to offer me an introduction to his agent when I was ready, and to wish me continued growth in all things, a lovely closing, which says so much about Dubus and his generosity.

I reread the letter. I loved especially that final sentence: Painful for me, in a lovely musical way. Not that I wanted to cause pain, but I did want, without really knowing it, to move readers as Dubus’ stories had moved me, evoked feeling: sadness and recognition, identification. Of course I did. This is the real goal of writing, not publication. Publication is—and this is easy to forget, and not just in graduate school either—the means to reach readers. It’s the beginning of a conversation, not the whole conversation.

In her book Making a Literary Life, the late great Caroline See writes that writers should do two things five days a week: write a thousand words and send a charming note. Many writers recommend a writing schedule or routine, but as far as I know, no one else recommends writing a charming note as part of a writing practice; and yet, it is brilliant advice. See devotes an entire chapter to this practice. Charming notes are letters to authors whose work has touched you, made you think or remember. At the same time, they say to the author, while writing is lonely, “you are not alone.” In addition, when we write charming notes, we announce our presence. In effect, we’re saying, I’m here, too, and I want to engage in this conversation. A charming note is many things; it’s a wave of recognition, a thumbs up or a handshake, the answering voice: I see you, I hear you, I get it. An affirmation.

Over the years I’d drafted in my head letters to my literary heroes—Dear Alice Munro, Laurie Colwin, John Updike, Lorrie Moore—but I hadn’t ever actually put pen to paper to write them. For several of these writers, it’s too late, something I will always regret. I have so much to say to Laurie Colwin about her characters (how like my family members they are!) or their homes, which I can see clearly, as if I were a guest there, their tastes and preoccupations and concerns. It wasn’t until reading Making a Literary Life, that I realized Dubus’ letter was in addition to being incredibly kind, a model of this crucial component of literary citizenship. This is what engaged members of the literary community do, his letter indicates. We keep up our end of the conversation. We respond.

While See strongly recommends buying nice personalized stationary for writing charming notes, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. It seems to me that the important thing is to get those letters out there, to speak up, and in doing so, engage with the literary community. I’ve emailed charming notes or sent them via Facebook messenger. Some are very brief and to the point. Others are longer, more detailed. Here’s the thing: Nobody will reject fan mail of any length, in any form. I’ve always received a response to my charming notes, and the recipients have always seemed both thrilled and surprised to hear from a reader. After all, who doesn’t want to know that their words had impact?

Since I received Dubus’ letter, I’ve moved five times—across the country, from city to suburbs, from apartments to houses. In each place I’ve lived, I keep the letter close. At present, it’s tacked to the bulletin board next to my writing desk, still in the original envelope. I’ve kept the pink post-it too. There are stains on the notebook paper, and the return address is smudged. But it is one of my most treasured possessions. It’s helped me weather rejection, uncertainty and anxiety, dry years and thwarted ambition. Andre Dubus liked my story, and he wrote to tell me so, I’d remind myself, and that has helped me keep going.

Photo of Rachel Hall by Pamela Frame

Glancing Back at Pete Duval’s Rear View

On the first day of this year, as I was cleaning, organizing and otherwise fondling my massive book collection, I came across a slim paperback that quietly, almost shyly, squeezed its way between larger, louder book-spines. I recognized an old friend. My breath caught and a memory hiccuped to the surface.  I pulled out the book from where it was lodged between John Gregory Dunne and Stuart Dybek and stared at the pine tree air freshener on the cover of the advance reading copy I’d received more than a decade ago. Rear View: Stories by Pete Duval.

I reviewed the collection for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004 and though I found fault with a few of the stories, overall I loved it enough to have these happy memories well up in me when I stumbled across the nearly-forgotten paperback on my shelf. This is one reason I love organizing my 11,000-volume library: it allows me to touch past favorites, now dusty and page-wrinkled from humidity.

I immediately set about searching for Pete Duval, starting with Amazon, that long and winding river which delivers all books to our shelves.

Nothing, apart from Rear View.

I Googled, I Facebooked, I sent homing pigeons into the skies.

I learned this about Mr. Duval: Rear View is the only book he’s published (though he’s been writing other short stories and working on some novellas), he lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing and film studies at West Chester University and in Spalding University’s Brief-Residency MFA program, and he takes outstanding photographs. By now, I’d hoped that Rear View would have other company beside it on my bookshelf; but alas, it stands alone. Hey, I understand: life happens and crowds out your writing time, or maybe publishers pass on the next manuscript, or maybe you’re still diligently working hard on that next book and the words are marinating to perfection. After all, my own Fobbit (released in 2012) waits for a shelf companion. As a writer, I know how these things go; as a reader, I wish Duval would put another book out into the world.

For now, all I can do is tell the rest of you about Rear View, in hopes you’ll add it to your own collection. And maybe give Mr. Duval the tiniest encouragement to keep on writing stories that, as Jay Parini says in his Foreword, have “a holy hush.”

Here’s my review as it appeared in the Chronicle:

As the title suggests, hindsight permeates Pete Duval’s short-story collection Rear View. In these dozen stories, characters are always casting nervous glances in a metaphorical car mirror, checking the surrounding traffic and gauging the distances they’ve traveled down life’s highway.

In the collection’s opening story, “Impala,” that highway is a literal one as Roy and Maysle Potts head south on the interstate toward New Orleans in a borrowed convertible. Roy hopes to recapture the Mardi Gras exuberance of his college days, Maysle wonders whether or not she should tell her husband that she’s gone into menopause; but as the silences stretch like miles between the couple, they both know their journey is a futile one: “I’m forty-two years old, he thought. Jesus Christ, what the hell have I been up to for twenty years?”

That epiphany could be injected into nearly every one of the other stories in Rear View, a collection that’s alternately bleak and optimistic (though, granted, much of that optimism is forced). Selected as the winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, Rear View tiptoes into Raymond Carver territory (what bleakly optimistic fiction doesn’t?), but then quietly stakes out its own parcel of land.

Duval pulls us into the lives of his characters by filling the book with closely observed details—like a church full of parishioners who murmur Mass “like furniture being moved around on another floor of the building” (“Midnight Mass”) or the hush of a nursing home, TV volume on low: “Jeopardy! ended in a whisper of applause, and the drums and trumpets of the evening news filled the room” (“Wheatback”).

The author writes about “a world coiled mean-tight and waiting to go off in your face if things got too good” in “Something Like Shame.” Wives berate husbands with the cold snap of icicles in their voice, bakery workers get hands caught in machinery, short-tempered bullies brawl in a hospital emergency room. For these characters—predominantly men—it’s a hard life lived in trailer parks, bars, barbershops, burnt-out factory towns and, in the best of the bunch, an industrial bakery. Their collars are blue, their beer is warm and their sex is passionless.

Like another of Duval’s literary forefathers, Andre Dubus, the stories are also streaked with occasional flashes of redemption as lapsed Catholics seek out the solace of the confessional. Rear View closes with “Pious Objects,” in which an aging priest hears the confession of a man responsible for a box of Virgin Mary statues being dumped in the river. The man’s spiritual agony over the tossed-out icons causes the priest to reflect on the simpler days of his youth, a relatively uncomplicated world that now seemed to have vanished forever. The priest gives the man his penance; but after he leaves, the burden remains: “For hours the heaviness stayed with him. It was evening before Father Gaston emerged from the curtained stall of the confessional, long after he had sent the other man out into the world with a clear conscience.”

Each of Duval’s characters is weighed down by something—unrequited love, faded dreams, alcoholism, dying parents—and even though lip service is given to the redemption of religion, people like the narrator of “Scissors” can never truly be happy in their circumstances: “I was sitting in Renny St. Cyr’s barbershop, looking out at the textile mills across the highway and the big clock without hands. I hadn’t been home to New Bedford in years. But I was out of work. My wife had left me. I had no savings, and at the age of thirty-one no choice but to move in with my mother until—her words—‘something turned up.’”

As interesting as these down-and-depressed characters are, Rear View doesn’t always live up to its early promise. Some of the stories are, frankly, flat as beer left out overnight, and the collection would have benefited by the author or his editors dropping stories such as “Welcome Wagon,” a vignette featuring a volatile character from another, better story; or “Fun With Mammals,” which finds the narrator baby-sitting for a narwhal strapped to a flatbed heading north toward Canada. At times, Duval doesn’t trust his writing enough not to shove epiphanies down our throats.

However, when he’s relaxed and running at full throttle—as in “Bakery,” “Impala,” “Pious Objects” and the title story—Duval is able to get under the grimy fingernails of working-class Americans and capture exactly what it is about contemporary life that drives us to distraction, drink and depression.

Rear View is a confident, hard-muscled debut from a writer who knows how to handle the wheel even while flicking glances up at the mirror where all those miles recede behind us.

Friday Freebie: Ed Falco Prize Package!

Congratulations to Rhonda Lomazow, winner of last week's Friday Freebie giveaway, the quartet of new novels: Fallout by Sadie Jones, Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson, Secrecy by Rupert Thomson, and The Wind Is Not a River by Brian Payton.

This week's contest celebrates the release of Edward Falco's new novel, Toughs, freshly-published by the good folks at Unbridled Books.  Here's what Kirkus Reviews had to say about the book: “The action moves from the mean streets of the Bronx to basement speakeasies and the fabled Cotton Club, showing Falco's grip on environments from cold-water tenements to greasy spoons....an intriguing read for crime-fiction fans.”  In addition to Toughs, one lucky reader will win a copy of two previous novels by Ed Falco, Saint John of the Five Boroughs and Wolf Point, and the short story collection Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha.  The deepest of thanks to Greg Michalson who provided the books for this week's giveaway.  You can learn more about Ed Falco at his website.

Now here's the lowdown on the books up for grabs...

Toughs is set during the Great Depression and based in part on real characters and a series of historical events.  The novel follows the story of Loretto Jones as he finds his life intertwined with the fate of Vince Coll, a 23-year-old Irish gangster who for a brief moment rose to the level of a national celebrity during his war with Dutch Schultz, Owen Madden, and Lucky Luciano.  Tagged "Mad Dog Coll" after killing five-year-old Michael Vengelli in a botched assassination attempt, Coll was the subject of a shoot-to-kill order issued by New York City Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney, a $50,000 bounty offered by Dutch Shultz and Owen Madden, and $30,000 in reward money from the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the city's newspapers.  Loretto and Vince are bound to each other by years spent in an orphanage and on the streets, but in the summer of 1931, with Loretto in love with newly-divorced Gina Baronti, and Vince in thrall to the beautiful Lottie Kriesberger, their world of tough guys in tough times is hurtling toward disaster, and Loretto finds himself faced with impossible choices.

Saint John of the Five Boroughs “dissects the effects of violence, both personal and cultural, on his characters' lives and does so in a novel that transcends the suspense genre.” (Richmond Times Dispatch) When 22-year-old Avery Walker, a senior at Penn State, meets Grant Danko, a 37-year-old performance artist from Brooklyn whose stage name is Saint John of the Five Boroughs, her life changes radically as she leaves college to live with Grant in Brooklyn and pursue a life as an artist.  Worried about Avery, her mother, Kate, and her aunt, Lindsey, and Lindsey’s husband, Hank, travel to Brooklyn, where they all face a crisis of their own and make life-altering choices.  Grant is an angry guy with a curiously attractive personality and a coterie of bright, artistic friends.  He’s used his good looks and his accomplishments, and the accomplishments of those friends, to get by while he works hauling stolen goods for his gangster uncle.  He carries dark secrets that have caused his life to go off the rails.  Grant is about as lost as a man can get, adept at making wrong choices.  But when he finally faces his explosive moment of truth, something extraordinary happens.  Saint John of the Five Boroughs is beautifully turned—a stunning and layered novel about the effects of violence, both personal and cultural, on its characters’ lives.  It’s about the way violence twists character, but also about the possibilities for redemption and change, for achieving a kind of personal grace.  Edward Falco once again proves to be a master of urgency and suspense, of events careening out of control, as he brilliantly explores why we make the choices we make—both the ones that threaten to destroy our lives, and those choices that might save us.

Wolf Point is, according to the New York Times Book Review, “Hitchcockian...the story hurtles like a brakeless truck toward its bloody denouement.”  Tom “T” Walker, a 57-year-old businessman, knows better than to pick up a beautiful young woman hitchhiking with her dangerous-looking boyfriend, but he stops for them anyway.  He’s been living alone, his life ruinously off course, in such utter isolation from everyone he has ever loved that he welcomes the company and the excitement.  But as T finds himself pulled into the chaos of their world in a way he will barely survive, he comes to see his personal history and experiences in an altered and troubling light.  “Wolf Point is beautiful, bold, heartbreaking and wise.  It calls to mind the work of several contemporary masters--people like Richard Yates, Andre Dubus, Richard Bausch and Theodore Weesner--writers who never get in the way of their own stories, truth-tellers for whom the lives of their characters are the most important element of all.  This is a major work by a writer who deserves legions of loving readers." (Steve Yarbrough)

Here's the publisher's dust jacket copy for Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: For a long time now, Edward Falco has quietly established his place among the absolute best American storytellers.  Those who haven’t yet read him don’t want to miss this chance.  That’s why we’re so excited to offer the very best of his work, gathered together for the first time, to a wider readership.  Falco’s stories are unforgettable, dangerous as a high-wire act without a net, filled with dramatic action, and peopled with believable characters challenged by events into making risky moral choices, so emotionally true that readers will carry them around for a long time.  His prose is tense, sharp, and beautifully, wonderfully rich.  In story after story, Falco’s characters find the comfortable order of their lives ambushed by an upswelling of dark forces beyond their control.  In order to protect the lives of family—lovers, wives, and especially children—from a catastrophe, they often must summon up the personal courage to climb back from their own monsters, to set aside old, private scars.  The decisions they make reveal their bonds, the set of their hearts, and the harsh nature of the culture we all live in today.  If someone out there could write the contemporary counterpart to Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” it would be Falco.  His are good, old-fashioned, hard-to-find stories set way out there on the edge.

If you’d like a chance at winning this fabulous Falco freebie, simply 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 Aug. 7, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 8.  If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week 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 any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

It Came From Facebook: An interview with Lou Beach and his 420 Characters

In preparation for the Short Story Month party here at the blog, I sat down last week with Lou Beach's flash-fiction collection 420 Characters.  It was a mind-blowing experience.

And when I say that, I mean Beach's book left my skull a smoking, hollowed-out crater, marveling at the possibilities of fiction.  What he does on the page, within the straitjacket of 420 characters (including spaces and punctuation), leaves me in awe and admiration.  This short story collection began as status updates on Facebook, back when Mr. Zuckerberg and Co. limited updates to the constraints of 420 characters.  Beach began it on a whim, out of boredom with the social networking site, but it quickly turned into an enjoyable challenge to see just how well he could create miniature works of art.  The author is, by trade, a visual artist and several of his collages are interspersed throughout the book, serving as a metaphor for the fragmentary nature of the fiction.

Beach's short-short stories may appear to be vignettes, Polaroid snapshots of scenes caught from the corner of an eye, but they have the emotional depth and heft of 300-page novels.  His subject matter ranges across a huge spectrum of setting and style.  In one story we read of a husband accusing his wife of messing with his tools ("How is that possible?  Did you dip them in the bathtub like a tool fondue?"), and in the next we're on horseback with a cowboy in the Old West.  Or we'll meet a skydiver whose chute fails to open and he crashes into a pigeon on his fatal plummet ("He felt the pigeon's heart beating against his own") and then later we're backstage with the Rolling Stones discussing women, drugs and clothes. And I haven't even mentioned the miniature person who lives inside the bright paisley shirt pocket of another man.  Each of the one-page stories in 420 Characters gives readers a crumb, a sip, one nostril's-worth of breath, to an entire world which lies just beyond the door of the story.  There is clear movement--physical and emotional--within each of these stories.  As in the best short fiction, we "join the story in progress" and leave it just before a crucial denouement.  Here's a good example of how well that works--this is the entire story as found on page 4 of the book:

I am exploring in the Bones, formations of caves interspersed with rock basins open to the sky. I hear a sound like a turbine as I exit a cave and approach the light ahead. I'm sure it's a waterfall. What I encounter is a massive beehive, honeycomb several stories high, millions of bees. I crouch down to avoid detection and notice a shift in the tone of the hive's collective drone. I turn around and see the bear.

Would it be fair to say Beach draws the lines in the coloring book and we fill in the spaces?  Yes, that's accurate, I suppose, but it sounds a little like I'm reducing his artistry to mere scaffolding.  Let me be clear: each of these tales is complete and satisfying in and of themselves.  Do all of them succeed?  Not always; there are some which come across as clever jokes or odd, failed experiments--but that's a very small percentage--maybe 3%--of the 169 stories in this book.  Everything else is a red-carpet invitation to a fully-formed world, sprung whole and complete from Beach's rich imagination.  Like this story found on page 42:

Huey "Pudge" Wilson, county sheriff, never met a man he didn't like to handcuff. What he knew about law wouldn't fill a thimble but what he knew about power would overflow the rain barrels between here and the river. Justice was just a tool of power, meted out in back rooms and measured in bruises and broken bones. When he was found slumped over in the cruiser, dead, Happy Hour took on new meaning.

Click to enlarge

Lou Beach was kind enough to answer a few questions via email.  Here's our conversation:

420 Characters began its life on Facebook.  Was this a deliberate plan on your part, or was it something that just happened one day while you were posting to social media?  In other words, tell me the birth story of your flash-fiction collection.

It evolved from an amusement, a goof really, writing something fictional as a post, into an actual experiment where I'd write a piece every day.  It was a challenge and on-the-job training, learning to write in front of an audience.  The positive response to the posts definitely helped fuel my resolve to keep at it.  ("Like"! )  I was excited by this new-found facility to squeeze a narrative into a limited format.  It was the perfect storm too, a felicitous zeitgeist.  It would not play today, given that the character limit has been so expanded on Facebook.  Also, the film The Social Network was fresh in the public consciousness then so I think it was attractive to publishers.  It also didn't hurt as well to have a website which was fashioned as a book.   It made it palpable and included some celebrity readings that drew attention.


Are all the stories in the collection exactly 420 characters long?  I've been too lazy to actually go in with a pencil tip and do a manual count by hand.

In spirit, yes.  I believe there are a few that were massaged to include a few more characters to make the story clearer, but I was scrupulous to stay within the 420 limit on Facebook, which of course wouldn't post if I was over by even one character.  There are some that are shorter...it seemed silly to pad out a story just to hit the magic number on the nose.  It was more often a process of paring down, editing, than adding.


Your range is so varied and full of surprises.  What triggered you to bring so many different characters to life (human characters, in this case)?

I have no idea.  I operate on a purely intuitive level, listening to my dreams and snatches of dialogue from films or songs that trigger something that has the germ of a tale, then I get to work on it, pulling out the story.  I have found that often reading some great author's work will compel me to hit the keyboard, not in imitation of their voice or plot or whatever, rather an excitement to create.  Other writers inspire me very much, but so do film makers and painters and musicians, and chefs and athletes....Man, it's a world of wonders, isn't it?


Do you have a daily routine as a writer?  I picture you carrying a notebook with you everywhere, jotting ideas and fragments as they pop into your head.

I wake up quite early, sometimes before five, and my mind is working on a story that I'd thought about before going to sleep.  I lie there and move words around in my head, actually see it on the page.  Then after breakfast I'll type it out and read it aloud, then revise and maybe think it stinks, then do something else, walk the dog, whatever, then come back to it and hope it's better, keep returning to it day after day until it rings true.  That's speaking for what I'm doing today, which is writing longer pieces.  The 420 stories were much more spontaneous and were often posted with no editing, sometimes to my chagrin.


What was the revision process like for 420 Characters?

Really not much.  My editor at the time, Tom Bouman, was a fan of the work and except for a few push-and-pulls on what to include, we agreed on the format.  He was good at choosing the sequence so that there was some kind of rhythm to the book, so that not all the western-themed ones were clumped together, for instance.


I only ask about revision because, as we all know, in fiction every word matters--from word choice to word placement.  There is not a single syllable out of place in your flash fiction--entire worlds, pages of exposition, fully-realized characters are created in such short, tight spaces.  Did you think about how readers' imaginations would start spinning and weaving secondary backstories to each of these pieces?

No, I didn't think about that, but for a long time there were a number of people who felt compelled to "finish" the stories or at least add on to them, a few at length, as if it were an interactive game.  I didn't want to be a churl about it and ask them to stop--after all it's an open forum, but it was annoying at times.  I had to not take myself too seriously...it was obviously something they enjoyed doing and ultimately it didn't really matter, didn't take anything away from the bigshot author.


How long did it take you to write these stories?

Sometimes a story would take 20 minutes to write, others an hour or two, others a day.  It was probably two-and-a-half years from inception to completion of the book.  After it came out and Facebook expanded the character limit, I was less interested in that concise form, though I would still try my hand at it.  I wrote one the other day and was surprised at the difficulty I encountered.  It's good practice though, like playing scales.  I'm focusing now on longer pieces.  They are still short, but I've managed to stretch out to several pages.  As we say in Authors Anonymous, one sentence at a time.


I'm assuming there are others which never made it into the collection?

Oh yeah, there are hundreds.


At your website, you say you came to writing fiction as a surprising and "miraculous second act."  In what way did the fiction grow out of your years as a visual artist?

I'd always entertained a fantasy of being a writer because I'd so often been astonished and intrigued by how a great writer can illuminate aspects of human nature, can use language in unsuspecting ways, can create worlds that are emotionally true.  There are two aspects to my visual work.  One is as an illustrator, primarily an editorial one, where my job is to find the kernel of the article and make a picture to go with it to draw the reader in, to advertise the article, basically.  The other is my personal work, which is much closer in method to the writing.  But in each aspect of the visual work, I create a narrative.  The individual images within the composition are characters on the little stage set that is the page.  And in the writing, I often "see" something from which I springboard into a tale.  The other day I had a vision of a woman standing at the end of a dock on a lake.  Where that image came from, I don't know, but I used it as the basis of a little story.  Also, the making of a picture is an exercise in editing, removing elements and distilling the image, which is what I do in the writing.


The book really works well as a visual work of art--from the half-band dust jacket, to all the white space surrounding the stories, to the full-color collages included throughout.  Did you have a hand in the design of the book?  What feeling or message did you want to convey to readers about how fiction is bundled and packaged these days?

The cover was a recreation of the one I created for the book's website.  The idea of the belly band came up in discussions with Martha Kennedy, an art director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the page design was done by Melissa Lotfy.  They are pros.  I chose which collages to include. Everyone at Houghton was very supportive and excited about the book and made me feel that I was, indeed, a writer, when my own inclination was to think of myself as a lucky wanna-be.  I love books, the physical feel and I wanted readers to have a satisfying tactile and visual experience in addition to the content, and I think we succeeded.


Are there any authors who specifically influenced your writing?

Oh man, I hate that question because there is always someone I feel I've left out or remember once the answers have been printed or posted.  I admire George Saunders for his imagination and humanity, Elmore Leonard's mastery of dialogue and unfussiness, J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, Pete Dexter, Carver (of course), Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, Alan Heathcock, the two Andre Dubuses, Scott Bradfield, Hemingway, Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, James Salter, Charles Baxter, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Stone and on and on...where do you stop?  It seems with each book I pick up I find something that knocks me out, some passage, some turn of phrase, some insight into character that makes me want to be able to do THAT.


Do you have any favorite short stories or collections you typically recommend to readers?

Well, I don't typically make recommendations to readers, but any of the writers I just mentioned offer a wealth of treasures.  In particular, I've been recommending Alan Heathcock's great Volt lately.  It's a marvel.


Artwork: "The World of Men" courtesy of Lou Beach
Author photo by Issa Sharp

Andre Dubus' Hard-Luck Story

While preparing to post Edward J. Delaney's contribution to the "My First Time" feature here at the blog a few weeks ago, I spent a little time at his website and discovered this clip from a film he directed and produced: The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus.

Delaney explains the project at the film's website:

      In 2006 I began work on the film The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus, an 86-minute documentary that chronicles the life of the great short story writer Andre Dubus (1936-1999).
      I interviewed dozens of people in Dubus’s hometown of Haverhill, Mass., and beyond; in the late fall of that year I departed on a 9,500-mile circuit around the country that took me to Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming and California, speaking to writers who knew Dubus, to friends and former students, and family. It was a wonderful trip.  It is, I think, a “talking” project, one in which the insights of authors such as Tobias Wolff, Richard Russo, James Lee Burke and Andre Dubus III illuminate Dubus’s writing. His family members helped underline how closely Dubus’s life and work were intertwined.

Further Googling eventually led me to an article from the New York Times Magazine written two years after Dubus' accident. Here's a vivid description of what happened that night on the interstate:

       In the early hours of July 23, 1986, Dubus was returning to Haverhill from Boston, where he'd been visiting bars in the Combat Zone, a neighborhood of some rugged renown, in order to research a story he was writing about a hooker.  ''I'd never been there,'' he says. ''And I can't write about anyplace I haven't smelled.''
       It was a bright night, and there was little traffic. Nearing home, on a four-lane segment of I-93 North near the town of Wilmington, he had no trouble spotting a car ahead of him, with its lights off, stalled in the third lane. Another car was parked on the right shoulder; someone was already summoning the state troopers from the callbox. ''So I thought, 'I'll just go into the speed lane, pass by and see if there's anyone hurt in the driver's seat,'' Dubus says. When he saw a woman standing beside the car, crying and bleeding, he stopped, pulling over against the center guard rail.
       The woman's name was Luz Santiago; she was Puerto Rican, and neither she nor her brother Luis, who appeared from the other side of the car, spoke much English. ''As I remember, he was well-built,'' Dubus says. ''He was 23. He said, 'Por favor, senor. Please, help. No habla ingles.' I don't remember him ever saying anything else after that.''
       The Santiagos had hit a motorcycle that had been left lying in the road, and it appeared the motorcyclist was trapped beneath the car; a dark, viscous liquid was beginning to pool at their feet. ''I was sure it was blood,'' Dubus says. ''It was oil from the crankcase. But we don't know that then. Me and Luz Santiago, we don't know.
       ''I thought, 'Oh, man, I'm going to have to look. I just had an image of somebody down there really...flat. All I wanted was to get Luz Santiago off the road, lie her down, stop her bleeding, treat her for shock. Take care of that, then go look under the car and wait for the state troopers. I started waving down another car, you know? Because I wanted somebody to go with me. Well, the woman driving that car ran over us.''
       Luis Santiago was killed. Luz Santiago, who suffered relatively minor injuries, told the doctor that Dubus had pushed her out of the way just before he was hit himself. The woman driving, who was not drunk, not on drugs, and who remained at the scene, escaped prosecution. She never spoke to Dubus afterward, never sent a card, for which, he says, ''I hated her for a long time.''
       Dubus draws an occasional deep breath, or his voice will quicken against the strain of a painful detail. But overall, it is a tale told with equanimity, even restraint. ''It's funny,'' he says. ''I don't regret it,'' and then he talks about the motorcyclist, whom the police found stumbling beside the highway, drunk. He'd fallen off his bike, and confused, fearful of arrest, had left it where it lay. For that, he served a year in jail.
       ''He never tried to deny it. He made a videotape for the police, and he never changed his story. He was a stand-up guy,'' Dubus says. ''His wife had fallen in love with another guy and left him, left his kids. He got drunk. I met him. I said, 'Your kids think you're some kind of outlaw or something?' He said, 'No.' He said, 'I explained it to them.' ''
       In court, Dubus spoke on the man's behalf.

I've read the bulk of Dubus' short stories and hope to read his novels and collected essays someday soon.  Dubus sits on the same shelf as contemporaries Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, writers of fiction that writhes with muscles, occasionally throws a punch, but will clean you up and buy you a drink afterward.  The stories have heart and kindness beneath their tough exteriors.



As his son Andre Dubus III notes in that clip from Open Road Media, "He wrote so that he wouldn't die before he was dead."  What a great line!  It's a maxim that all writers adhere to whether they know it or not: we write to stay alive.

Still, it makes me melancholy just thinking about the tough times Dubus had to go through.  In his darkest moment on the shoulder of that interstate, he was only trying to be a Good Samaritan.  For his actions, he was nearly killed and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.  It's the sad stuff that fiction is made of.

And finally, I leave you with a quote from Dubus himself which I found in an essay by Joshua Bodwell at Fiction Writers Review which cautions us not to read too much autobiography into Dubus' fiction:

      In the end, no one--no scholar, nor his children, family, or friends, not even the author himself--can truly give us impartial insight into Dubus’s fiction. Fiction need only be true to itself.
      On February 23, 1999, the day before Dubus died, he gave a brief interview to Greg Garrett. When asked how he wrote dialogue that is “so real,” Dubus insisted that it wasn’t in the least bit real; it was, he said, human speech purified to a poetic rhythm. “We’re not trying to be real,” Dubus told the interviewer, on what he did not know then was the last afternoon of his life. “We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true.”