The Closest Thing to an Orgasm

When I was working as a public affairs NCO with the 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad in 2005, my primary job duties included writing press releases based on significant-activity reports flowing into our task force headquarters.  The days were long, the paper cuts were many.  As a Fobbit (an office drone who rarely--if ever--ventured outside the safety of the Forward Operating Base), I grabbed job satisfaction wherever and whenever I could.  In going back over the journal I kept during that year-long deployment, I found these snippets from exactly five years ago.*  These are not excerpts from my work-in-progress (Fobbit), though as with many of the scenes in that novel, bits and pieces of real life bleed into the fiction.


My boss, Lieutenant Colonel W________tells me about an idea the command group has been floating around lately: to have the Third Country Nationals (the low-paid foreign workers outsourced by military contractors) eat at different times than the soldiers in the chow hall.  “It’s a Force Protection issue,” he said.  “Evidently, they’re worried something might happen.”

For about the millionth time since I’ve been over here, I think back to the Mosul dining facility and the shattered tangle of chairs, tables, bones, flesh and blood.  In that suicide bombing on Dec. 21, 2004, a terrorist wearing a vest packed with explosives slipped unnoticed into a chow-hall line on the U.S. military base and killed 22 people, wounded 66.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” someone else says.  Several of us from Public Affairs and Information Operations are standing around in a circle when W________ is telling us this.

“Wait’ll you hear their first idea,” he says.  “They wanted to build a blast wall running down the middle of the chow hall—”

“You mean inside?” I ask.

“Yes, a wall inside the chow hall, separating it into two sides and segregating the diners—one area for civilians, one area for soldiers.”

“Gee,” someone else says, “why don’t we just bring back the Jim Crow laws?”

W________ says they’re just ideas at this point and probably nothing will come of them.**

*     *     *     *     *

Yesterday, LTC W________ came down from the command group offices—not unlike Moses descending with two stone tablets in his hands—and told me the Commanding General wanted two specific press releases written: one on operational successes of the past 48 hours, the other on Operation National Unity—the name for the Iraqi-U.S. combat ops we’ve been conducting in the city since Sept. 29.  “He wants us to show our success in finding IEDs before they go off, weapons caches we’ve found, and terrorists we’ve detained.  He also wants us to show how terrorists have failed in their efforts to derail the democratic process.”

I practically had the press releases written before he finished talking.  All I needed was the data to back up whatever propaganda I wrote.

I spent most of yesterday writing the 48-hour story, citing numerous instances of terrorist failures (of which there were almost too many to choose from) in just one 24-hour period alone (Nov. 11).   That release was eventually blessed by LTC W________, Colonel G_____ and Colonel “Laser Eyes” B______ (the trifecta of approval my press releases must now clear before being sent out to the media).  I released it early this morning.

Today, I spent at least five hours working on the big-picture operational successes, writing things like, Though there have been isolated incidents of suicide bombers carrying out attacks against Iraqi Security Forces and Coalition Forces, military officials said the number of vehicle-borne IEDs detonated by terrorists has decreased during Operation National Unity and By maintaining a steady, visible presence on Baghdad streets with their combat patrols, Maj. Gen. William Webster said Iraqi and U.S. forces send a message both to terrorists (‘we’re vigilant and will not tolerate insurgent activity’) and to local residents (‘we’re here to protect you and clean up the neighborhood’).

I wrote and rewrote.  I tweaked, and then tweaked some more.  I patted, I molded, I baked it to perfection, until I was happy with it, LTC W________ was pleased and COL G_____ thought it was just what the CG ordered.  W________ took it upstairs (Moses ascending the mountain again) around dinnertime.  Two hours later, he came back down and handed it to me.  The Chief of Staff—the hard-to-please COL B_____ whose laser-beam eyes penetrated any bullshit and called it for what it was without bothering to consider anyone’s feelings in the process—had scrawled two words in red ink across the front of the release.  “Good Work.”

“You’ve grabbed the brass ring,” W________ said.  “The Chief loved it.”

“Wow,” was all I could say.

I thought to myself, I oughta frame this—it’s as rare as the Virgin Mary appearing on a grilled-cheese sandwich.

LTC W________ had to disappear upstairs again for something else and when he came down a few minutes later, he told me, “The Chief told me once again what a good job you did on that press release.”

“Gee, sir.  Now I can go to sleep tonight with a smile on my face.”

W________ chuckled.  “Yeah, that’s the closest you’re gonna get to an orgasm over here—the chief giving you a compliment like that.”

*     *     *     *     *

Walking home tonight, still glowing from the Chief of Staff’s compliments, I trudge through the gravel, which is now nearly ankle-deep.  The KBR dump trucks have been dropping loads of rock in the Life Support Area in anticipation of the flood months.  It's a pain in the ass because not only will the gravel not keep us dry during the coming monsoons, they make walking a real chore now.  We're like cartoons struggling to cross a slippery floor.  The rocks are oiled marbles under my boots and it’s tough going as I work my way back to the trailer.  I put my head down and lean forward, as if I’m wading through deep snow in a Montana blizzard.

I’m almost to my trailer when I hear what at first sounds like a crowd of girls whooping over a joke or perhaps a game of pickup basketball.  I stop and listen.  No, the sound is overhead, dopplering from right to left.  Now it sounds like a pack of coyotes howling and running across the sky.  Eventually, by the time the high-pitched howling-yowling-honking disappears and dissipates somewhere near the western horizon, I realize it was a flock of birds crying as they winged overhead.  Just as their mournful voices vanish, I hear a muted thud-boom behind me.  Somewhere in western Baghdad, an IED has just gone off.

The timing seems too perfect to be coincidental.  Did the birds feel the coming explosion and take to the sky?  Did they anticipate it, just as dogs sense earthquakes before the ground splits apart?

I’m still staring up at the star-spangled sky and now I start to think about how lovely it looks.  The deep blue-black velvet.  The glittering pricks of white light.  The fingernail of moon.  I stand there, ankle-deep in gravel, the thunder of a bomb still echoing through the city, and I think of Jean back in Georgia stepping out onto the porch and looking up at the same sky, the same stars, the same moon.  Perhaps she, too, hears the sad sob of a bird flying across the blue of dark.



*I wasn't keeping a mil-blog in 2005 (hell, I didn't even know how to spell "blog" back then), so in a sense I guess you could consider these backward-glancing journal excerpts a "live" blog, with a five-year delay.
**To the best of my knowledge, nothing ever did.

Friday Freebie: "The Wake of Forgiveness" by Bruce Machart

Congratulations to Lynne P who won last week's Friday Freebie, copies of Gregory Maguire's The Next Queen of Heaven and Ben Greenman's Celebrity Chekhov.

This week, we're giving away a signed copy of The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Machart's new novel about an early-20th-century Texas family.  Regular readers of this blog already know how much I loved Machart's debut novel.  I've spouted my admiration for The Wake of Forgiveness time and time again.  For the still-skeptical and the uninitiated, however, here's this nice summary at Amazon from Hannah Tinti (author of The Good Thief and editor of One Story):

       I’ve been a fan of Bruce Machart’s work since 2004, when I read his story "What You’re Walking Around Without" for consideration at One Story magazine.  His writing bowled me over with its skill, gripping narrative and pure emotion.  At the time, Bruce said he was working on a novel.  It took six years to get here, but boy was it worth the wait.
       In The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Machart tells a story that stretches wide across the Texas landscape.  Set at the turn of the century, it follows Karel and his three brothers, whose father drives them hard, yoking his sons as he plows the fields until they all carry a permanent mark on their shoulders.  But their father is also a gambler, and he drops his fortune on a high-stakes horse race with Karel as rider.  This moonlit race changes their lives forever, especially Karel’s, as he loses not only his father and brothers but his first love, a dark Spanish beauty.  Now, fourteen years later, he is forced to bridge the divide with his brothers that opened on that fateful night.  This is the gritty world of horses and men, of fathers and sons.  Bruce Machart writes with a richness that completely unfolds time and place, leaving behind its own beautiful wake of remembrance, inheritance, and the unbreakable bonds of family.

If you'd like a chance at winning a signed copy of The Wake of Forgiveness, all you have to do is correctly answer this question:

What is the title of Machart's next book, a short story collection which is due in early 2011?  (The answer can be found by browsing around Machart's website.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Nov. 18, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 19.

Bullets ring loud in Brian Turner's ears

It's Veterans Day and you know what that means, right?  Jeans are up to 75% off at Macy's!

For another portion of our nation's population, it's also a day when, as President Obama states in his proclamation, "we come together to pay tribute to the men and women who have worn the uniform of the United States Armed Forces.  Americans across this land commemorate the patriots who have risked their lives to preserve the liberty of our Nation, the families who support them, and the heroes no longer with us."

Furthermore, our Commander-in-Chief reminds us, "It is not our weapons or our technology that make us the most advanced military in the world; it is the unparalleled spirit, skill, and devotion of our troops.  As we honor our veterans with ceremonies on this day, let our actions strengthen the bond between a Nation and her warriors."

All day today, you'll hear people telling you, "Love this country?  Hug a Vet!" or you'll see bumper stickers like this one: "If You Can't Stand Behind Our Troops, Stand in Front of Them."  I can think of no better way to observe the day than this:

Thank a Vet, Buy His Book.

Specifically, I'm urging you to buy one (or both!) of Brian Turner's two books: Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise.  Turner served seven years in the Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.  Before that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division.

Turner went to war with an anthology of Iraqi poems stuffed in his rucksack.  He came home with the music of pain and loss crammed inside his head.  Of all the writers detailing the experience of what it's like to be simultaneous freeing a nation and killing its people, I have found no one better than Brian Turner.

HERE, BULLET

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood.  And I dare you to finish
what you've started.  Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

here is where the world ends, every time.

When Here, Bullet was published by Alice James Books in 2005 (the year I myself was plopped down in Baghdad courtesy of the 3rd Infantry Division), Turner received well-deserved praise for the collection.  I don't normally like to quote other critics in my reviews, but I've always loved this blurb which came from The New York Times Book Review:  “The day of the first moonwalk, my father's college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they'll send a poet, and we'll find out what it's really like.’  Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon—the war in Iraq—and deserves our thanks...”

It's true.  In the tradition of great war poets like Walt Whitman and Wilfred Owen, Turner has descended into the horrors of combat like a deep-sea diver.  When he resurfaced, he learned how to distill that experience into the purest of language.  In a blog for the Poetry Foundation, Turner himself put it best when he wrote:

       As writers, I think it’s crucial that we not only learn and research and study the emotional world the poem offers, but that we discover as much about the world of the poem as well.  That is, if the world of the poem is scuba diving, for example, then let’s learn something about what it means to dive as well.  Let’s learn something about the ocean depths, the currents, the strata of life buried in the ocean floor.
       Secondly, there are millions of people in Iraq.  There are hundreds of thousands of Americans (and those from many other countries as well) involved in the war in Iraq (they are either there, have been there, or will soon be there).  My own story, my own act of witnessing, is only one voice from among the many stories which need to be told.  Still, no matter how small and insignificant I might feel within so vast an experience, as a writer I must speak to what is wrong in the world.  As writers, and artists, I believe we must give witness and testimony to pain and conflict and loss.

In Phantom Noise, that "witness and testimony" takes the form of showing us what it's like to be a shell-shocked veteran walking the aisles of a Lowe's Home Improvement Center:

Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle,
I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails
open by accident, their oily bright shanks
and diamond points like firing pins
from M-4s and M-16s.
                                  In a steady stream
they pour onto the tile floor, constant as shells
falling south of Baghdad last night, where Bosch
kneeled under the chain guns of helicopters
stationed above, their tracer-fire a synaptic geometry
of light.
           At dawn, when the shelling stops,
hundreds of bandages will not be enough.
             --from At Lowe's Home Improvement Center

The soldiers in Turner's verse are wracked with guilt, and the regret of battlefield indecision.  They are haunted by memories of Iraqi prisoners "shivering in the piss-cold dark," of soldiers burning alive, of shrapnel "traveling at the speed of sound" and opening up a soldier "in blood and shock."  Long after they've returned stateside, their heads echo the chop-chop-chop of helicopters that "come in low over the date palms," and the "howl wind" of the mortar round that "accelerates to the apogee of its flight."  In every word of every poem, Turner sets the music of war to the "phantom noise" that rings like tinnitus: "this/bullet-borne language   ringing/shell-fall and static."

The enemy does not always come clothed in a dishdasha or a vest wired to explode; sometimes it's the enemy within our own ranks.  In what I think is Phantom Noise's most devastating poem--"Insignia"--Turner writes of what it's like to be a female soldier in combat.  The war she fights in these lines is with a higher-ranking NCO intent on rape (the poem begins with the statement "One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military").  The narrative voice of the poem urges the staff sergeant to think twice about what he's intending to do.  Take a smoke break, drink some of that gin your wife sent you "disguised in a bottle of mouthwash," take a deep breath before you go find your victim hiding beneath a truck in the motor pool:

It’s you she’s dreaming of, Sergeant–she’ll dream of you

for years to come.  If she makes it out of this country alive,
which she probably will.  You will be the fire and the hovering

breath.  Not the sniper.  Not the bomber in the streets.  You.
So I’m here to ask this one night’s reprieve.

Let her sleep tonight. Let her sleep…

The poem ends with these absolutely shattering lines, words I have read nearly two dozen times by now and they still twist my gut, flay open my heart:

In her dream, your eyes are pools of rifle oil.
You unsheathe the bayonet from its scabbard

while she waits.  On a mattress of sand and foam, there
in the motor pool, she waits to kiss bullets into your mouth.

Turner's poems catch like bones in your throat--you can neither swallow war nor spit it out.  His bitterness becomes our bitterness, his anguish threads its way into our hearts.

So today, if you want to do something for "our men and women in uniform," if you want to better understand what it's like over in Iraq or Afghanistan or Whatever-'stan-We-Fight-Next, then thank a vet by buying his books.

Literary APB: Jon Billman, Where Are You?

Starland Vocal Band:  Afternoon Delight
Michael Cimino:  The Deer Hunter
Jim Nabors:  Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Harper Lee:  To Kill a Mockingbird

One-hit wonders are the saddest things on earth.

How many times have we read, heard, or watched what looks like an artistic comet blazing across the sky only to learn there won't be a repeat performance?  Sure Michael Cimino directed other movies and Jim Nabors had a good run with The Carol Burnett Show, but The Deer Hunter and Gomer Pyle are the things that will top their obituaries.*  For that one moment, talent burns hot and bright...but then....nothing but crickets.  We wait, and we wait, and we wait.  In the case of Harper Lee, we pilgrimage to Monroeville, Alabama and dig through her trash, hoping against hope that we'll find some scraps of discarded drafts with fresh ink.

Alas, we can do nothing but go back to their one hit and wonder why lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

For me, one of the most agonizing of all the one-book authors I've read is Jon Billman.  A recent comment from one of this blog's readers got me to thinking, "Whatever happened to Billman's career?"

In 1999, the Wyoming writer published a short story collection called When We Were Wolves.  Billman was praised by the likes of Rick Bass ("a new voice that is almost alarming in its energy"), Annie Proulx ("mark him as an important emerging writer") and Larry McMurtry ("I look forward eagerly to what he does next").  Larry and the rest of Billman's fans are still waiting.  It may well be that Billman has been working on something during the past eleven years--after all, Marilynne Robinson took twenty-four years to bring out Gilead after Housekeeping--but prospects are looking a little dim.

Eight years ago, I wrote a review of When We Were Wolves for another site elseweb.  In my borderline manic enthusiasm, I probably got a little dewy-eyed and moist-lipped in my praise of his writing.  Such was the hyperbole of my early days as a book reviewer (which is not to say I still don't overindulge in the Moist-and-Dewy Department).  Though I might couch the terms a little differently if I were to write the review today, the fact remains that, at the time, I believed I'd stumbled upon the Next Great Thing.  This morning, I went back and read a couple of Billman's stories from that book and I find that, spittle-flecked lips or no spittle-flecked lips, I was right in my assessment of his work.  He is one damn fine writer.

Here's what I wrote nearly a decade ago:

I WAS ON PAGE 77 of Jon Billman’s short story collection When We Were Wolves when I did something I’ve never done before.  I wrote a fan letter.

I did a quick search of the Internet for “Jon Billman,” found an e-mail address and, even though I was only a few pages into the book, dashed off a correspondence dripping with praise.  I wrote sentences like “You've got my writer's blood all stirred up and you've given me renewed hope for the future of short fiction.”  I gushed.  I swooned.  I was a teenage girl stripping off her bra and throwing it at Elvis’ feet.

I don’t regret one word of the hyperbole.

Ladies and gentlemen, I haven’t been this weak-kneed about something since the day I cracked open Richard Ford’s Rock Springs.  Before that, you’d have to go back to the first time I kissed the girl who’d later become my wife.

In his debut, Billman writes with the kind of sharp, muscular prose that makes me happy to be a writer…not to mention positively giddy to be a reader.  I should tell you right now, this review is going to be about as balanced as a man walking down the street carrying a load of bricks in one hand and a sack of feathers in the other.  I tried to find something less-than-praiseworthy about these thirteen stories, but I couldn’t, I really couldn’t.  I just thought I’d warn you before the gush got too deep.  (And yes, for all of you who are wondering, Mr. Billman did write me back with a very kind and gracious note**.)

You should also be advised that I’m probably prejudiced toward this collection of stories because most of them are set in Wyoming—that squarish state populated with sagebrush, antelope and miles and miles of barbed wire.  I grew up in Jon Billman’s Wyoming.  This was my land; these were my people on these pages.

Many of the stories are set in Hams Fork, Billman’s Yoknapatawpha, a small town where “no one beautiful or vital ever stays long.”  The fictional Hams Fork is a place where the nearest tree is thirty miles north of town.  The isolation, the on-edge desperation of the state and its residents is evident on nearly every page.  At one point, someone says of Wyoming:  "No one wants to be here.  Permanence isn’t Western in nature.  You take what you can get, or get what you have to take, and move on, get the hell out.  Vamoose."

Billman is such a good writer that he easily transcends any thematic borders, leaping over the limitations of purely regional writing like a wild mustang clearing a barbed-wire fence, then continuing to gallop toward, say, New York City.  This is literature everyone can read and walk away from deeply affected.

In “Indians,” he writes about a Depression-era bush-league baseball team from the reservation whose one-armed pitcher can predict rain by way of his missing arm.  As the team barnstorms around the drought-stricken Dakotas, the tension rises like barometric pressure.

“Custer Complex” and “Ash” have forest firefighters as their main characters—a profession that Billman himself once worked, by the way.  In one, a computer error sends a firefighter to a blaze that burned out two years ago; in the other, a crew member falls in love with a girl named Ash ("She was big.  Not sloppy.  Not classically voluptuous.  Big.  She could hold her own.") and the relationship leads to recklessness.

In another incredibly subtle story, “Winter Fat,” Billman writes about an ex-con who befriends a family of Mormons.  All is well until they start hearing reports of public sculptures stolen from town squares.

A character named Wayne Kerr makes several appearances in When We Were Wolves, including the final story, “Albatross,” which is one of the most perfectly-written soliloquies I’ve seen since Shakespeare.  Wayne, a renegade artist who likes to airbrush topless women on water towers, slowly freezes after collapsing on a deserted golf course.  Here’s Wayne, paralyzed and fighting off hypothermia, staring at the sky:

Full-blown night had fallen on the Hams Fork Valley.  The Hale-Bopp comet loomed overhead in the northwest.***  So dark, so very dark, the light of the comet was brilliant—Wayne could clearly see the comet’s vapor trail.  To him it resembled a submerged Alka-Seltzer.

Billman has the clear, focused wit of Sherman Alexie and the gritty desperation of Raymond Carver.  While I’m at it, I’d also throw in all the best qualities of Rick Bass and Richard Ford as well.  He’s that good.

But he’s his own master—staking out plots of literary territory like a rancher stringing fences. This is a wholly accurate portrait of Wyoming—the land and the people—and it’s a parcel of earth that Billman knows intimately.  When We Were Wolves is the kind of book that makes me want to race through from start to finish in the same way I’d gulp a cold mug of sarsaparilla on a summer day.  But yet, I told myself to slow it down, to savor the language.  After all, you toss back that sarsaparilla and you’ll miss the sweet froth, the edgy bite.

Here are two more of my favorite sentences—both describing female characters—from this collection:

I’ve seen Copper open a beer bottle with her eye socket.

and

Robin is pretty in the way wood smoke smells nice.

If you’ll indulge me just a minute longer, here’s a pitch-perfect passage from the Carveresque “Sugar City” where a newlywed couple finds their impetuous marriage quickly veering toward disaster:

       Bonnie slumped against my shoulder and slept the fitful sleep of the depressed who don’t have their medication quite dialed in.  A rainbow air freshener that hadn’t bothered me before hung from the rearview mirror.  I ripped it down, looking over at sleeping Bonnie, and threw it out the window.
       Night would soon settle on the southern Idaho desert, northbound, and I began to need the ceremony of eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee.  It’s the surest thing about the road, breakfast at any hour, and something to chew on when driving all night: loss and breakfast.  Bonnie still didn’t know about the ten-thousand-dollar donation I’d made in Reno.

Right about now, you’re probably thinking, “He’s given away all the best parts of the book and there’s nothing left.”  Trust me, dear reader, there’s plenty of literary treasures I’ve left untouched.  The talent on display in When We Were Wolves is, indeed, as wide as the Wyoming horizon.

*     *     *     *

You may now clean the fanboy saliva from your computer screen.

Judging by the fever pitch of my excitement, you can probably guess the intensity of my disappointment when Billman never published another book after 1999.  Each year, I'd search Amazon and the shelves of Barnes & Noble in hopes I'd find something else he'd written.  Each year, the echo chamber got larger and more hollow.

Billman is still around.  I just Googled him and learned that he's written several articles for Outside magazine, adrenaline-injected accounts of biking and hiking around the West.  He's currently teaching courses in writing at Oklahoma State University.  Another online reference mentions that he is "finishing a novel, Embalming Will Rogers, that takes place in the Red Desert of Wyoming."

A novel?  That's certainly good news.  But I have no idea how long ago that bio-blurb was written.  It could have been 2003 for all I know and Embalming Will Rogers could be nothing more than a rigor-mortised novel by this point.

Following a side street during my afternoon of Googling, I came across a brief mention of Billman in a Salon essay, "Not Talented Enough," written in 1999 by a hopeful would-be novelist with the too-apt name Ellie Forgotson.  She tells how she struggled with rejections from agents who began their letters "We think you're very talented, but..."  Those were some pretty devastating "buts," Forgotson tells us.  Eventually, she gave up on that novel and went through a mourning period for her unpublished work:

       I began to ask big questions.  I began to reevaluate my life and myself as a writer.  Could I call myself a writer if I wasn't getting published?  Was I just fooling myself?  What kind of "talented" person could spend five years on the same 500 pages, revising and editing, reevaluating and recasting, without ever once realizing that it might not work?  For months I felt stupid and naive and incredibly ashamed, the way I felt after coming out of a long, bad, emotionally tortuous but sexually satisfying relationship, where everyone but me had recognized about three years earlier that Mr. Right was sinister and unstable and totally, completely wrong.  And no one had had the heart to tell me.
       "But I loved this novel," I wanted to say to these agents, my family, my husband.  You don't understand!  I was blinded by love.  Or ambition.  Or need.  Or whatever it was that made me spend five years believing in something, making efforts every day to make that something work.  I just kept writing, sacrificing my social life, an income, the well-beings of my new husband and dog.  I wrote to finish and I wrote for love.  And in the end it was all wrong.

As an unpublished novelist myself, this is a scary thought: have I foolishly, vainly, naively "wasted" nearly six years of my life driving the wrong way on the literary interstate?  Is this all for naught?

Channeling Cher in Moonstruck, I slap myself across the cheeks.  Hard.  "Snap out of it!"

Of course it's been worth it--every day I hit the keyboard I'm greeted with a fresh challenge of words that revs my brain.  That's beside the point.  What I'm more concerned about right now is whether or not Jon Billman has had this same experience.  Has he poured his time and talent into another manuscript only to find publishers rejecting his "sophomore slump" efforts?  Or has he been too busy biking across the Rockies to get serious about writing any more fiction?  Or, more likely, have the vicissitudes of All Things Not Writing (marriage, child-raising, a 9-to-5 job, heavy drinking) caused him to put his writing on temporary hold?  Or is he--best-case scenario--returning to his computer and picking up where he left off with Embalming Will Rogers?

It's foolish for me to even speculate.  In fact, it's impolite.  What writers do with their lives is their own business.  I hope Billman is happy wherever he is with whatever he's doing.****

In the end, we readers should be satisfied with the artifacts our favorite writers leave us: these books with their torn, rubbed-thin dustjackets and dog-eared pages.  The ones we've loved to death and never tire of praising to anyone who'll listen.  The ones scorched by the comet's tail of one-hit wonders.


*In Cimino's case, the ill-fated Heaven's Gate will probably trump his Oscar-winner.  Which would be a shame.
**The contents of which are lost and forgotten in the subsequent turnover of new computers and erased hard drives.
***See?  Sometimes even blazing comets write about blazing comets.
****I also hope the term "one-hit wonder" chafes him so much that he sets out to prove me wrong.

Driving around with John Reimringer

“Place is important to my writing, and one of my best practices is to get in the car and drive. Images from those drives—a janitor in a lighted skyway at night, two cop cars in an empty parking lot, a woman dressed for the office waiting at a bus stop in Frogtown—inspire scenes and form the whole tactile underpinning of a piece. When I wanted to set part of my novel in small-town Minnesota, I got out a map, picked an area that looked like it had interesting landscape, and spent a day driving around that particular county, taking notes on what was being farmed, the kinds of trees, church architecture, area businesses, how long it took to drive from one town to another. A whole section of the book grew out of that day’s drive.”*
—John Reimringer, author of Vestments (Milkweed Editions, 2010)

Good advice from a writer who, from what I've read, carefully crafts his descriptions of landscape in his debut novel.  I've only dipped in and out of Vestments, but I hope to take the full plunge later this winter.

While some might argue that to truly inject a sense of place in your fiction you need to spend more time than a drive-by allows.  But I believe if, like Reimringer did, you take careful notes and drink as deeply as you can from the geography, then at least a small amount of authenticity will leak out into your words.  I needn't have lived in Antarctica my whole life to convince you of my polar residency (as Kevin Brockmeier so skillfully did in The Brief History of the Dead).  My words should be enough to assure you I know what frostbite feels like.


*Courtesy of Poets & Writers website

Soup and Salad: Gina Frangello's Risky Writing, Laura Munson's Muse, Charles Dickens Disintegrates, Rebecca Skloot Tops Amazon, Killing Shakespeare

On today's menu:

1.  It's not often that I tell you that you MUST read something (I believe firmly in freewill and completely leave the click-aways to you), but today, I'm telling you that you must read Gina Frangello's essay on writing, family, and taking risks with both which has been posted at The Nervous Breakdown.  It begins:

There is a story I like to gloss over but rarely really tell. The short version goes like this.  Soon after my first novel, My Sister’s Continent, was published (while I was almost 9 months pregnant with my son, Giovanni), my mother-in-law stopped speaking to me because she was so appalled by the graphic sexual content of the book.  As the story goes—in the glib, cocktail-party version—she refused to even visit Giovanni after his birth.  Although it’s not a “nice” anecdote, this story frequently gets laughs from those who hear it, especially the part about how, every time her ire began to wear off, my mother-in-law would apparently reread my book so as to outrage herself anew.  She studied it as if for a test, it seems.  My closest reader may well have been my novel’s biggest detractor.

It only gets better from there.  Seriously, if you are a writer or if you know someone who's a writer (that should take care of about 20% of the world's population), you owe it to yourself to read Frangello's crushing exploration of what it means to be honest and revealing in our writing.  And then go out and buy her latest book, Slut Lullabies.

2.  Laura Munson (author of the memoir This is Not the Story You Think It Is... ) is also learning lessons about writing from her family as she describes in this essay she wrote for the blog The Bird Sisters.  Munson's muse is resisting the change of seasons up in northwestern Montana and, as she writes, her characters are anxious to get out and dance.  If only the mornings weren't so cold and sluggish!

3.  Three of Charles Dickens' original manuscripts are starting to crumble, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum where the original pages of A Tale of Two Cities, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and David Copperfield are being stored.  The museum is trying to raise funds to help preserve the documents.

Written in "iron gall" ink on low-grade blue writing paper, purchased by the author from WH Smith, the manuscripts were never "wonderful quality", according to John Meriton, deputy keeper of word and image at the V&A.  But they remain a crucial part of Britain's cultural heritage.   "It is an immense privilege to have them in the collection and just to see Dickens's rather crabby handwriting is a real thrill for me every time," he said.

4.  Like Christmas decorations going up on Labor Day weekend, it seems that "Best Books of the Year" lists start showing up earlier and earlier on our calendars.  Largehearted Boy is List Central for those who like to keep score.  Earlier this week, Amazon was one of the first ones out of the gate with their lists.  Leading the pack was Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is happy news for those of us who like a good science-y detective story. Skloot's book is a moving portrait of how one woman's cells benefited others long after her death.  Other top books on the Amazon lists include Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes and (surprise!) Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.  Of the two, I'd put Freedom higher than Matterhorn.  But Marlantes has a better back-story.

5.  Have you heard about Kill Shakespeare?  It's "an epic adventure that pits Shakespeare's greatest heroes against his most frightening villains"--sort of like Justice League of America goes all to-be-or-not-to-be on the Bard's ass.  It's already generated a predictable amount of controversy.  I don't think it's any worse than the Jane Austen zombie mash-ups.  But really, I think they should have named it Kill Will.  Forsooth, Tarantino would have a field day.

Friday Freebie: Gregory Maguire and Ben Greenman

I'm offering up two books for this week's giveaway: Gregory Maguire's The Next Queen of Heaven and Ben Greenman's Celebrity Chekhov.

In The Next Queen of Heaven, Maguire takes a slight departure from his Wicked world in a tale set well outside the boundaries of Oz.  Booklist said of the novel:  "Quickly but delightfully read, Maguire’s new novel has as its canvas the entire little town of Thebes in Upstate New York.  His natural compassion for people’s quirks gives his razor-sharp satire on small-town life a comfortable bed on which to rest.  Maguire looks backward in time, to the advent of the new millennium in 2000.  His theme is that, at this significant historical moment, town characters, including the church-lady Leontina Scale and her profanity-spewing daughter and the gay choir director, now face having their personal choices being called into question but eventually seeing the disparate pieces of their lives reconciled. Amusing entertainment but with a serious side as well."  The Washington Post review called it a "and warmhearted exploration of the sacred and the profane."

Ben Greenman's short story collection Celebrity Chekhov is also a departure from the norm.  The author of What He's Poised to Do and several other works of fiction takes 19 stories by the Russian master and mashes them up with celebrities like "former friends Nicole and Paris" and "talk show host Dave."  This might just be literary reinvention at its finest hour.  In his introduction, Greenman writes:

If we should trap these celebrities inside Chekhov's stories, is it possible that their insides--the inner lives that are elided by the tabloids, paparazzi and the Internet--might be liberated?  That a story of straying husbands and nervous wives like "Bad Weather" might move us more as an accurate, even revealing portrait of a contemporary golfer named Tiger rather than the tale of a lawyer named Kvashin?  That a tragicomedy of young love like "At the Barber's" might be enhanced if it starred the singer, actor, and stage parent Billy Ray Cyrus rather than the locksmith Erast Ivanitch Yagodov?  It should be specified--stressed, even--that the famous personages transplanted into these pages are in no way intended to reflect the actual lives of the actual talk-show hosts, actresses, golfers, and singers whose names they share.  No celebrities were harmed in the making of this book.

I should also note that these two covers are among my favorite designs of the year.  A good cover can often make a big difference in how I approach what's inside.  Me, I can't wait to start reading these two books.

If you'd like a chance at winning both The Next Queen of Heaven and Celebrity Chekhov, all you have to do is correctly answer this question:

What two things does Gregory Maguire hate most about writing?  (The answer can be found on this page)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Nov. 11, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 12.

A Voice Through the SMOG (an excerpt)

Lightening things up (hopefully), here's a small chunk from the novel.  "SMOG" is the Secure Military Operations Grid, a fictional version of the system we actually used in Iraq.  In Fobbit, commanders from places as far-flung as Basra, An Najaf and Mosul link their computers to the central hub at Multi-National Division-Baghdad Headquarters on Forward Operating Base Triumph and, among other things, participate in a twice-daily conference call with the commanding general and his staff.

The morning Battlefield Update Briefing was winding down.  Tremulous baritone voices had had their say, broadcasting from their various remote SMOG locations; the commanding general had had his usual responsive grunts of approval (or was it disapproval?  Sometimes the two types of grunts were indistinguishable); the Chief of Staff had had his requisite chime-ins, reinforcing what the CG had grunted, adding his own strenuous giddy-up-and-go admonitions.  The overall tone of the briefing was one of, “Okay, hold on, keep it together, we’re almost through with this, just pray he doesn’t single me out.”  (“He” being the Old Man himself whose raspy commanding-general voice could reach right through the SMOG speakers and choke even the most hardened artillery officer into incoherent stutters.)  Deep inside the BDU pants of the most nervous staff officers crowded around SMOG stations in the palace, assholes were starting to unpucker—if not quite all the way, then there was certainly a little more sphincter breathability in the wedged-up cotton Hanes; or, in the case of those who went commando, the sandy folds of BDU’ed butts. A couple of pent-up farts were ripped.

The next-to-lowest person on the division totem pole, the Civil Affairs officer, had just finished reporting on yesterday’s successful Beanie Baby mission to al-Khadhimiya: “the indigenous population was so receptive to our cultural handouts that they had to be restrained with a hasty-perimeter we quickly established using Force Protection measures 1 through 3.”

Now it was the chaplain’s turn.  Each day’s BUB was brought to a close with the daily homily—by order of the CG, a semi-religious man himself—and these 90-second sermonettes could sometimes get out of control, stretching to three or four minutes, which the CG allowed without interruption.  The chaplain’s voice over the SMOG loudspeaker would continue to chirp away unabated while all around the division’s Area of Operations—from Baqubah to Mahmudiya—staff officers at remote computer stations shifted their semi-relaxed butt cheeks on their chairs, many of them rolling their eyes or silently mouthing things like “waste-o-time” or “yea, though I walk through the valley of knee-deep shit,” all of them eager to get on with the day’s business.  The CG had issued plenty of marching orders during the BUB and now the staff officers’ minds were racing ahead to PowerPoint briefings, Op Orders, crisis management plans, and—in one specific case—ensuring enough lobster was procured in time for Friday night’s Bounty of the Sea dinner menu at the chow hall.

The chaplain nattered on, unleashed.  His too-kind, too-melodious voice washed out from the SMOG speakers, winding its way hither and yon across Baghdad and the surrounding vicinity, wherever men’s souls were tattered and in need of spiritual mending.  Today, it went something like this: “Do you often lie awake at night worrying about the burden of responsibility you’re carrying around?  We have all felt the weight of grief, the anguish of frustration, the gut-twist of impatience.  Maybe it’s a language barrier between you and the local sheik…perhaps it’s that young sergeant who insists on doing things ‘his way’ and tries to buck the system…or maybe you’re knotted up with problems from back home—the wife who let the car run low on oil and now your beloved ‘75 Mustang has thrown a rod, the son who is ‘acting up’ during kindergarten recess, the high-school daughter who adds a new body piercing every month.  Whatever your burden, please know that we all carry them around with us in our knapsacks.  Talk about your Load-Bearing Equipment, eh?”  The chaplain chuckled and paused, expecting that his unseen listeners would also be having a little chuckle at his joke, forgetting the Army had phased out the LBE while Clinton was still in office.  “But seriously, folks…Too many times, we hold everything inside rather than following the simple rule of ‘Let go, let God.’  I’m sure you’ve all heard that one.  Now, let’s put it into practice. Tonight, instead of trying to count sheep, maybe you should lie there and talk to the Shepherd instead.”

He paused, allowing this to sink in to its full effect.  The division staff scattered across central Iraq listened to the static crackle across SMOG, most of their ass cheeks now squirming with frustration and impatience.

The chaplain clicked his microphone again: “Today’s Scripture reading is taken from 1st Corinthians, Chapter 15.  You may follow along in your pocket-sized King James.”  (Save for a devout supply clerk at FOB Eagle and three die-hard Catholics over in Legal Affairs, none of them carried around the little Bibles handed to them during their Welcome to Iraq in-briefing.)

“'Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.  Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.'”

The chaplain droned on, burrowing like an insect into his listeners’ ears.  Alone in his office on the top floor of the palace, the commanding general clipped his toenails, aiming (not always successfully) for the wastebasket.  Three doors down, the Chief of Staff sifted through reports, sorting them into piles according to brigade.  On the ground floor of the palace, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad leaned closer to the computer screen of his SMOG workstation, hanging on the chaplain’s every word because, he feared, he might be quizzed later on the sermonette by the CG and he wanted to get all the answers right this time.  Two cubicles away, Major Flip Filipovich napped lightly, depending on the sudden absence of reports from the SMOG loudspeakers to wake him when it was all over.  And, two miles across FOB Triumph, Lieutenant Colonel Strong sat with the rest of his staff in front of the SMOG screen, thinking not about 1st Corinthians, but about his wife and his dog—though not necessarily in that order.

At last, the chaplain reached his crescendo: “'Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?'”

The chaplain left that word, “victory,” hanging in the air like the echo of a trumpet blast.

When the hissing SMOG silence had stretched to an uncomfortable length, the CG clicked on, cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, chaplain.  As always your words of inspiration are…are inspirational.  Now—”

“Sir, if I might—?”

“Yes, chaplain, what is it?”

A thousand butt cheeks groaned in agony.

“Sir, I almost forgot to put in a plug for this Sunday’s service at Lakeside Chapel: 8 a.m., Protestant; noon mass for our Catholic brethren.  I’m calling this week’s sermon ‘Good Grief.’  As you know—” his voice shifted into melody-mode again “—we have all experienced sorrow during our time here in Iraq, but we each handle it in different ways.  How one deals with ‘small grief’ from challenges and disappointments relates to how one handles ‘big grief’ such as the loss of a loved one or a particularly good soldier.  Be sure to come out this Sunday to hear the full prescription for Good Grief.”

Another extended pause, during which could be heard what sounded like the soft snick of a nail clipper.

“Okay, thanks again, chaplain.  Is that all?”

“Yes, sir.  Thanks for allowing me to jump back in with that.”

“Okay.  Well, if there’s nothing else, and no alibis…?”  Several staff officers clasped their hands in supplication, silently willing no one to utter a peep which would prolong the BUB with a bit of forgotten business.  “In that case, go forth and do great things.  Keep your chinstraps tight.  Nothing further.  Luck of the 7th!”

From a hundred SMOG stations came the echo of the division motto, “Luck of the 7th!”  They all clicked off and set about the day’s business.

From his concealment in the PAO cubicle maze, a groggy Major Filipovich lifted his head from the desk, then muttered, “And don’t let death sting you out there, motherfuckers.”

Another bad day of death

Leafing back through my Iraq journal when I served in the Army as a Public Affairs NCO, here's what I found for November 2, 2005 (and, yes, bits and pieces of this have found their way into Fobbit, the novel):

Today was another bad day of death.

Around 3 p.m., a personal security detachment driving along a road south of Baghdad hits an improvised explosive device—a big one.  Lately, the explosions have been getting larger, more powerful.  The terrorists are fashioning devices which detonate in two stages: one IED goes off and propels another IED into the vehicle, whereupon the second IED explodes.  In other words, they’re using an IED as a propellant for another IED, knowing the combined blast will be enough to penetrate the armored skin of our humvees and, occasionally, our Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks.  So, now our deaths come in clusters of twos and threes and fours, wiping out entire crews of humvees with a double-shot of fire and hot shrapnel.  In the last group of deaths, one soldier was burned so badly, they couldn’t even identify him at first.  All that remained in the passenger seat of the humvee were his boots with two charred stumps sticking out.

Today, we initially get a report of “four litter urgent.”  The medevac helicopters thump-thump-thump their way to the site south of the city.  They radio back: one of the L/Us is okay—he’s a walking wounded with a puncture wound in his calf and a hand injury; two of the others are already dead; there is no word on the fourth casualty.  Odd.  Why aren’t they accounting for him?  The Significant Activity report is vague and doesn’t get updated for quite some time.

The next thing I know, the Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver is scrambling his team to get ready to go down there and search for the body.  A few days ago, someone sent us these large, battery-powered spotlights.  They hadn’t even been broken out of the package yet.  Lieutenant Colonel W________ calls down and tells me to make sure the lights work, then get them up to the command group area ASAP.  I rip open the packages, do a quick test, then hustle the spotlights upstairs where I hand them off to Captain McK______, the ADC-M’s aide.  He’s got his flak vest on and is already panting with nervous excitement.  He and the rest of the team head out the door with urgent solemnity.

Half an hour later, we get the news: the body has been found (I don’t know what part, if any, our spotlights played in the whole affair).  It was trapped in the humvee which had overturned in a canal.

Meanwhile, I have already put out a release on the two deaths which had been confirmed by G-1 Casualty Ops.  I prepare a second release with this single death, hoping that Corps PAO won’t get confused by all these different “death releases.”

It takes a long time to extract the body from the humvee because the recovery team has come under small-arms fire during the operation.  Apache helicopters have been called in and now they hover over the site like black silhouettes of angels, firing bursts of rounds toward the ground to suppress the enemy fire.

The body isn’t recovered until about 8 p.m.  By 10 p.m., I’m still hanging around the office with the release, waiting for the official death certificate to arrive at G-1 Casualty.  Nothing can go out from our office until the soldier has been officially declared dead.  I make multiple trips down to G-1 cell, which is on the opposite end of the building, next to—appropriately enough—the chaplain’s cubicles.

Each time I go down there, the E-4 clerk at Casualty shakes his head.  “These morticians can be damned slow sometimes,” he says.

“Well, that’s okay,” I reply.  “I imagine they’ve got a set of procedures which they must follow pretty methodically.  You can’t be too careful with things like this, I’ll bet.  Wouldn’t want to pronounce the wrong person dead.”

“I suppose you’re right,” the clerk says.  “Still, they’re awfully slow at what they do.”

“I’ll be back,” I tell him.

I return another four times before I get his thumbs-up around 10:45 p.m.  Finally. I go back to my desk, punch the Send button on my email and push the death release out into the world.  I can go home now.

In all of this, there is one moment today when our spirits are temporarily lifted.

Soldiers from 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment responded to an explosion in central Baghdad and discovered that two terrorists had blown themselves up while constructing a car bomb.  Unfortunately, they killed another civilian and set a house on fire in the process…but, still, we rejoice in the fact that the world has two fewer terrorists tonight.  I bang out a quick, almost giddy press release.  I want to use the headline “Two terrorists vie for Darwin Award.”  Lieutenant Colonel W_______ doubles over with laughter and slaps his knee, we eventually sober up and decide on “Two terrorists self-destruct while building car bomb.”

It’s wrong to take delight in death, but after all we’ve suffered this past week, can you blame us?

I imagine their last words were something like, “Abu, should I cut the blue wire or the red wire?”

Echoes from Montana's Festival of the Book

I'm still reeling with a language hangover from the 11th Annual Montana Festival of the Book held in Missoula this past weekend.  It was 48 hours of 100 writers, dozens of readings and panel discussions, and several happy discoveries of authors new to me.  If you stood in the lower level of the Holiday Inn at the height of the festival, your head would whirl from the simultaneous buzz-chatter of book-centric conversations.

All that, and Ben Percy, too!  Hey, I'm not name-dropping here; I'm just re-affirming what I'd already suspected: the author of The Wilding is one helluva nice guy (even on four hours' sleep, jet lag, and the taste of last night's whiskey in his mouth).

I reported on the Festival of the Book for New West (click here to read the story), so I won't rehash the details of the weekend here at the blog.  Instead, I thought I'd share snippets from the works of some of those "happy discoveries."  Here then, are some of the greatest hits of this year's festival (which is not to say I didn't also enjoy James Lee Burke, C. J. Box, Jim Lynch, Laura Munson, or Rick DeMarinis--I just didn't have room for everybody).

I'd never heard of Idaho novelist Brian Hart before the festival, but once I listened to him read from his noir-tainted debut Then Came the Evening, he was hard to forget.  The book-jacket copy begins: Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his home reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover.  The bulk of the story takes place twenty years later when Dorner is trying to pick up the pieces of his life.  Here's a clip from the opening scene:

       Bandy Dorner woke to a fogged windshield, cracked and spattered with mud and grass, the watery shadows of two policemen banging on his car hood with their fists.  He opened the car door with his shoulder and fell into the canal.  The shock of the water stole his breath and when he went to stand the strong current knocked him down.  He dug his hands into the mud bank and pulled himself up to flat ground and stood dripping.  The fog was nearly as dense outside of the car as it was within and it took him a few seconds to orient himself.  The barbed wire from the fence he'd driven through was tangled up in his rear axle and strung across the field with some of the posts still attached.

       "You can't prove a thing," Bandy said.  He knew the two policemen and didn't like them.  Turner was the tall man's name; Meeks was the shorter.

       "I care about proof," Turner said.

       Meeks took a toothpick from his breast pocket and slipped it into his mouth.  "We got your bed ready in town.  It ain't even pissed in.  Yet."  He smiled and the toothpick pointed skyward.

In his thunderous, energetic reading at Missoula's Wilma Theater, Idaho poet Robert Wrigley's performance was like what we used to say about B-movie action movies: "He blowed up good."  After hearing his recitation of an ode to national phobias, "American Fear," we had to be peeled from our theater seats.  "American Fear" is too long, too epic to post here at the blog (and an excerpt could never do it full justice), so I found another choice selection from his newest book, Beautiful Country:

Misunderstanding

They've made love in the woods again

and now she's asleep, her head on his belly,

and he only wants to study her as she naps.

But the black carpenter ant, the one he's watched

climb the curve of her right breast,

now wanders from the pinkish aureole borderlands

in spirals round and round and round again,

which is why he reaches as carefully as he can

and plucks the ant up and flicks it back to the forest,

apologizing at just the moment she opens her eyes

and almost frowns, then closes them, and allows herself
to sleep again, although he was talking to the ant.

Billings author Craig Lancaster is something of a self-publishing Cinderfella.  Born out of a challenge to participate in National Novel Writing Month*, Lancaster's novel 600 Hours of Edward was self-published in February 2009; then, six months later, it was picked up by Riverbend Publishing.  The novel has gone on to win the Best First Book award at the High Plains Book Festival and was chosen as a Montana Book Award Honor Book.  The book is narrated by Edward Stanton, a young man with Asperger Syndrome, over the course of one month in his tightly-controlled life.  Here's the start of a typical morning for Edward:

       My eyes flash open.  I wait a moment for the dull blur of morning light to come into focus, and then I turn my head 90 degrees to the left and face the clock: It is 7:38 a.m.  I have been awake at this time for the past three days, and for 18 out of the past 20.  Because I go to bed promptly at midnight, I am accustomed to stirring at 7:38, but occasionally, I will wake up a little earlier or a little later.  The range isn't large--sometimes it's 7:37, and sometimes it's 7:40, and it has been 7:39 (22 times this year, in fact), but 7:38 is the time I expect.  It has happened 221 times so far this year, so if it were you, you would expect it, too.  (You're probably wondering how frequently I've been up at other times: 15 for 7:37 and 29 for 7:40.)  Although I do my part by going to bed at midnight sharp, the variances occur because of things I can't control, like the noise made by my neighbors or passing cars or sirens.  These things frustrate me, but I cannot do anything about them.

       I write down the time I woke up, and my data is complete.

Alyson Hagy is no stranger to me.  I've "known" Alyson (in the Internet sense of the word) since 2005 when I was in Iraq and she sent me a couple of much-appreciated care packages.  We've corresponded off and on and I thoroughly enjoyed her most recent collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, but it wasn't until the Festival of the Book that I got to meet the writer behind the words.  She's every bit as genuine, humane, and insightful in person as she is on the page.  Here's the first paragraph from her dazzling and ambitious story, "Brief Lives of the Trainmen":

He is awake before daylight greases the black pan of the sky.  The cook rousts him with the ring of her iron ladle across the brake spring.  He hears the cook curse her rheumatic gout, the withholding chickens, the moths that have drowned in her uncovered pots.  Her voice is as complaining as a crow's.  He worms his feet into the square-toed brogans left behind by the spike setter who caught gold fever from a bullwhacker out of Rapid City.  The brogans are too large, but he'll keep them until he can trade for something better.  He bundles his spare shirt and stockings with the grain sack that is his bed, then reties the rope that belts his woolen trousers.  The rope is a gift from the cook.  She used it to lead the pig before she butchered him.

Jess Walter was a bit of a revelation.  I'd heard he was good, I just didn't know how good he was until I heard him read an unpublished short story at the Wilma Theater.  The dude is so funny, he'd have a London palace guard bending double with laughter inside of a minute.  Though he's published several other books, the Spokane novelist hit it big last year with the highly-acclaimed The Financial Lives of the Poets.  Jacket-copy blurb:  What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse?  Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home....Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest- and most misbegotten-plan yet.  There are plenty of sections which sparkle with humor on these pages, but I'm awfully fond of this blank verse:

A Brief Political Manifesto

I was driving around the packed Costco parking lot
looking for a space and listening to some guy
on NPR talk about America's growing suburban poor
when I saw this woman with four kids--
little stepladders, two-four-six-eight--
waiting to climb in the car while Mom
loaded a cask of peanut butter and
pallets of swimsuits into the back
of this all-wheel drive vehicle
and the kids were so cute I waved
and that's when I saw the most amazing thing
as the woman bent over
to pick up a barrel
of grape juice:
her low-rise pants rose low and right there
in the small of her large back
stretched a single strained string,
a thin strap of fabric, yes,
the Devil's floss, I shit you not
a thong, I swear to God, a thong,
now me, I'm okay with the thong
politically and aesthetically, I'm fine
with it being up there or out there,
or wherever it happens to be.

My only question is:
when did Moms start wearing them?

I remember my mom's underwear
(Laundry was one of our chores:
we folded those things awkwardly,
like fitted sheets.  We snapped them
like tablecloths.  Thwap.
My sister stood on one end,
me on the other
and we walked toward each other
twice.

We folded those things
like big American flags,
hats off, respectful
careful not to let them
brush the ground.)

Now I know there are people out there
who constantly fret about
the Fabric of America:
gay couples getting married, violent videos, nasty TV,
that sort of thing.
But it seems to me
the Fabric of America
would be just fine
if there was a little bit more of it
in our mothers' underpants.

And that is the issue I will run on
when I eventually run:
Getting our moms out of thongs
and back into hammocks
with leg holes
the way God
intended.

Because he teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula, Kevin Canty is a regular mainstay of the Festival of the Book.  He brings down-to-earth wit to the panel discussions, and always has something good to offer during his readings.  His newest novel, Everything, is, by his own admission, epic in scope.  It follows a large cast of characters around Missoula, but primarily revolves around divorced empty-nester RL, his best friend's widow June, and his girlfriend Betsy.  Here's a short peek at Everything's action**:

He had slept with Betsy before, a long time before.  It wasn't a secret, it wasn't a key.  But it wasn't anything RL liked to think about much.  Like a lot of his life at the time, this experience just seemed painful and inconclusive, painful because it was inconclusive.

He remembered the shape of her body, naked, the slippery seal length of her in that hot springs in Idaho, out in the woods in the snow, snowflakes landing on their knees and hair while they watched them, stoned.  Was that the time they saw the moose?  Once they were lying naked in the gravel pool when a cow moose and two calves drifted into the far end of the clearing, quietly appearing out of the cedar trees and ferns and fog, and stood there grazing for an hour, paying them no mind.  Once they had strange submerged sex in the water and then she rolled him out into the snow and then followed and they rolled around in the snow like seal pups, tickling and teasing.  Did that even happen?  It seems like another life, somebody's else's.

*Which is taking place right now, for all of you hesitant Hemingways out there who need some motivation.
**And with this, I think I've exceeded my quota of outdoor-sex scenes in one blog post.