Sunday Sentence: One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

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

Both his parents were almost wholly incapable of showing affection. Lindbergh and his mother never hugged. At bedtime, they shook hands.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

“A Little Bit of Everything” in Glimmer Train Stories

I have a new short story appearing in the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories (Spring/Summer 2016).

Yes, you can file that last statement under “Dream Come True.” I’ve long harbored hope, a small flickering flame, that one day I’d have a short story in its pages. I did have an interview with novelist Allen Morris Jones (Last Year’s River) way back in Issue #46, but this marks the first time my fiction has landed at Glimmer Train. “A Little Bit of Everything” is an 850-word catalogue of circumstances which lead to one woman’s death, based on a line I read from an obituary in The Montana Standard which said an older woman had died from “a little bit of everything.” Here are a couple of lines from the story:

It was the two husbands, one of whom gave her true love while the other gave her a child. It was the divorce of the right husband and the heart-attack death of the wrong husband. It was the hard work of single-parenthood, putting everything into her child, only to find, when he was a teenager, it had been like pouring water through a sieve.

Getting to this publication day comes after about 25 years of submissions—not every year, of course, but enough to make me feel like Charlie unwrapping the Golden Ticket when I opened the email from editor Linda Swanson-Davies which said they were interested in my story. So, I guess if there’s a takeaway lesson for other writers out there, it’s this: keep stoking that flame of hope with kindling because your Golden-Ticket day will eventually come. (And, it goes without saying, keep reading Glimmer Train to get a feel for the kind of stories they publish.)

Part of what makes Glimmer Train Stories so appealing to its subscribers is the fact that you can see the fingerprints of Linda and her sister Susan Burmeister-Brown on every page. They read every story that comes their way (“We have no assistants”) and they make sure their authors aren’t just a name and a short biographical note. Apart from the quality of its fiction and interviews, the thing I’ve always loved most about Glimmer Train are the two pages—one accompanying the story, and one at the back of the issue—where authors share childhood photos of themselves or their families and give some backstory to their piece of fiction. When it came time for me to submit supplemental material, this is what I chose to include for the “story behind the story” portion of “A Little Bit of Everything.”

     This is the earliest known photograph of me. A little bit of everything lies in wait for me over the course of the next fifty-plus years. But for now, peaceful slumber and memories of the recently-evacuated womb.
     I wrote a complete draft of “A Little Bit of Everything” on the day I read an obituary in my local newspaper, The Montana Standard. I was struck by the wording of the death notice (which I’ve used verbatim, changing only the woman’s initials and the date, out of respect for the deceased). We all basically die of the same thing—“stoppage of breath”—but this woman died of an accumulation of “things.” Because I am a writer, I started imagining bits and pieces of her cluttered life. The Hostess Sno Balls and the ozone layer were obvious suspects, but the daughter-in-law pouting in the parking lot was a surprise.
     Made-for-fiction moments like this are why I read the obituaries in The Montana Standard every day. The writer in me sits up alert when I read someone died of “a little bit of everything” and I immediately want to fill in the blanks. Other priceless obituaries include the one for the “party-hearty” dude who asked to be buried with a six-pack of Budweiser in his casket…or the man who was born on a Wyoming ranch in 1937, weighing just three pounds: “He was a tough little scrapper from the start. He was put in a shoebox, surrounded by heated bricks as a makeshift incubator and was given the name ‘Humbug.’”

I haven’t had a chance to read all of Issue 96, but what I have read, has been tremendous. Adam Soto’s “The Box” follows the titular container as it passes from owner to owner across an epidemic landscape in Africa. Its first line is “A box is crafted with no consideration to its contents.” The same could not be said about Soto’s story; there is excellent craft on display in every paragraph. Aurora Brackett’s “Beginnings” also takes some daring narrative loop-de-loops as it follows two “hippies from a commune” and their daughter across the decades. It is inventive and surprising as it gets to the heart of why and how we love the way we do. Family ties are also at the core of Lillian Li’s “Parts of Summer.“ Here, narrator Benji travels back to his Chinese homeland with his mother and his sister. To say he and his sibling are having a Cold War is an understatement. I really do love the first sentence of the story: “The summer they find my grandmother’s stomach cancer, all the feral cats in her courtyard are gassed to death and I turn twenty-one.“

Other highlights (and their sample lines) I’m looking forward to in this issue: “Waterside“ by Marni Berger (“My body keeps on without me. I see it, running alone through the dark and white world: the navy blue night and the sparkling snow.“), “My Brother is Back“ by Rowena MacDonald (“Fran is being her usual self. Completely furious with me. All the time, I’d forgotten how constant she is with her fury.“), “The King of India“ by Eric Thompson (“This was the beginning of an endless series of rash decisions about what their unborn child would and definitely would not be.“), and—most especially—the interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, husband and wife co-authors of The Tilted World (“Tommy and I have always brainstormed ideas to solve plot problems and marked up each other’s pages so extensively that they have more pen ink than printer ink.“).

If you’re not already onboard Glimmer Train, you should be. Click here to subscribe, and enjoy the literary ride.

Friday Freebie: Maisie at 8000 Feet by Frederick Reuss

Congratulations to Kara Shamy, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: The History of Great Things by Elizabeth Crane.

This week’s book giveaway is Maisie at 8000 Feet by Frederick Reuss. Thanks to the generosity of the publisher, Unbridled Books, I have four paperback copies to give away. Keep reading for more information about the novel...

Maisie at 8000 Feet is the story of an eight-year old girl who can fly and her idyllic summer in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey that ends in a moment of catastrophic loss. Following the death of her mother, Maisie travels the Pine Barrens with her artist/archaeologist father; meets his cousin and confidante, Sally, who wants to repair the little girl’s heart; and flies over it all trying to see how her life could have taken such a turn. Many years later, her son gone to college and her marriage ended, Maisie struggles to reconnect with the aging Sally. Doing so, she hopes to understand why her father didn’t raise her, what that long-ago summer was all about, and whether she has ever really been attached to anyone in any place. Seen from the heights of Maisie’s childlike imagination and the rootless perspective of the woman she becomes, the fractures in her life reveal the slippery connection between childhood and identity — and between remembering and forgetting.

If you’d like a chance at winning Maisie at 8000 Feet, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 14, at which time I’ll draw the winning names. I’ll announce the lucky readers on April 15.  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.

My First Time: Lawrence Coates

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 Lawrence Coates, author of five books, most recently The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San Jose in the aftermath of the first dot-com bust and the attacks of 9/11, and Camp Olvido, a novella set in a labor camp in California’s Great Central Valley (and a book I named one of the best I read last year). His work has been recognized with the Western States Book Award in Fiction, the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He is currently a professor of creative writing at Bowling Green State University.

The First Time I Wrote about Somebody Other than Myself

I’m looking at some notes I wrote on a manual typewriter in the Hotel Correo in Ciudad Juárez in 1986. I haven’t seen these pages for many years, and they only reappeared because I was rummaging through old boxes in the basement looking for some photographs my friend Victor had taken on our trip along the border in a Volkswagen bus nicknamed Shoebox.

At that time, I’d published three short stories in literary journals, and I’d also begun freelancing for some local tabloids in Santa Cruz, California. I found I liked freelancing. I liked the way people were willing to talk about things if you told them you were working for a publication. And I liked writing something, seeing it in print within a week, and getting paid fifty or a hundred dollars.

The trip along the Mexican border was Victor’s idea. He was Spanish, living in Santa Cruz with a girlfriend who eventually kicked him out, and he had done a lot of photojournalism for newspapers in Spain. He even had press credentials, which made him seem very official. There was a lot of debate about the border and immigration that year, and an immigration bill known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act was before Congress, and Victor thought we could work on a feature article we could sell both in Spain and in the States. I had graduated from college and was applying for graduate study in Literature to begin the following year, and the idea of spending part of my year away from higher education traveling and freelancing sounded intoxicating, like an adventure.

In Tijuana, we went to a gathering place close to the borderline we’d heard of, a place called Canelas. South of the border, small businesses had sprung up to supply the emigrants, selling food, beer, shoes, warm jackets, tequila, cigarettes. North of the border, the land was clear and open, criss-crossed by jeep tracks that the Border Patrol used to chase people down.

I was surprised then, and am still surprised, how willingly people shared their stories with us. There was an auto mechanic who worked in Los Angeles and who was crossing back north with his new bride, a young woman from his hometown. There was a farm worker who had carefully saved receipts from his jobs in past years, in case the new law being debated required that people prove they had been working up north for a certain number of years in order to receive a green card. There were men with young children at home who told me that they didn’t mind suffering, as long as their families benefitted. We stayed there until nightfall, until we saw small groups of people peer into the darkness, look up for the lights of helicopters, and then begin the walk north.

From there, we drove to Nogales, and then on to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. In Juárez, by sheer chance, Victor and I had coffee late at night in a neighborhood café on the Calle Mariscal, away from bright lights of bars and strip clubs that catered to American tourists, and we met Rosa and Cristina and Lorenzo, three people from Veracruz who were planning on going north to pick chiles in New Mexico. Rosa was the oldest, a woman in her mid-thirties, and she called the other two “m’ija,” and “m’ijo.” She talked about the husband who had left her, the two children she left behind with her mother, her dream about being able to be live in the north with papers, so that she could walk around without fear. And she talked about wanting to own a farm herself someday and work it with nothing but “mojados, puros mojados. Nobody but mojados will be able to work on my farm. And if anyone comes with papers, or with a green card, I’ll kick them out!”

We spent an entire night with them, walking on the streets of Juárez, being joined by a few other people planning to cross, waiting until near dawn, when they could slip into El Paso and find one of the buses that took workers up to the fields in New Mexico. When Rosa decided it was time, we walked through some open spaces of gravel and weeds and rubble and hopped over a low wall and onto the cement levee near the Río Grande. The river was low in that season, and the emigrants took off their shoes and pants and stuffed them in plastic bags. They went down to the river in pairs, holding hands as they stepped into the water. Victor’s flash fired intermittently as he took photos, and I noticed how thin Cristina’s legs looked in the flash, two long pale straws below her thick plaid shirt.

They walked across the river, and in a minute they were on the other side, climbing onto the levee and squeegeeing water off their bodies with their hands. They stayed low, out of sight, until they were dry enough to put on their clothes. Then they climbed toward a hole in the cyclone fence at the top of the levee. Victor and I called across the river, “Adios, que les vaya bien.” They turned back toward the Mexican side and waved. Then one by one they slipped through the fence and onto United States soil.

I began to realize something on that trip. I was struggling with it the next day, in the room in the Hotel Correo where I was putting down my impressions on my manual typewriter. I was writing about Rosa, especially, and the little bit of her life she’d shared with me, and I thought how spirited she was, interesting and intelligent and strong in the face of challenges I would never have to face. And though I didn’t work it all out that day, I began to understand she was much more worth writing about than I myself was.

Ironically, during that journey to Mexico, I was also working on my first novel. It was a semi-autobiographical novel, something about the sadly tragic life I was leading, or else about the tragically sad life I was leading. I can’t remember which. I completed a draft of the novel, and it was never published, and in retrospect I’m glad.

I also wrote a long feature about the border region that Victor and I visited, and I shopped it around to newspapers. To my surprise, it was picked up by The Chicago Tribune and published as the cover story of their Sunday Supplement.

When I look at those two pieces of writing now, nearly thirty years later, the unpublished novel seems dreary, self-centered, awful, and the piece of journalism seems vibrant, alive with setting and character and real story.

I’ve published stories and novels since then, and I think one of the real keys to all my work is the understanding I began groping toward in that hotel in Juárez – that I am far from the most interesting person in the world, that there are stories more important to tell than anything I could write about myself, and that my best work would be about the broader world. And also that, if I approach with some humility about my own limited understanding, people will show a generosity in sharing about their lives and their work that is always astonishing.

Sunday Sentence: Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison

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

Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet.

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison

Warblers on His Eyelashes: Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison

Lately, I’ve thought about death. How it comes for us all. How we should learn to embrace it (but most of us never do). How we weep publicly on Twitter when a writer, in particular, falls dead. How we should stop thinking of it as a premature snap-off of an artist’s career—a cruel em dash interrupting a life—but the completion of a life’s work: a period, or—if you want to take it more gently—an ellipsis. How we all will one day just come to a complete and utter stop.

I’ve been thinking about death because of Jim Harrison—his own passing at age 78 a week ago today as well as his last book of poetry, which is riddled with death, from the title of the collection all the way to the last poem (fittingly called “Bridge,” as in “Jim Harrison crossed a bridge from life to death”). Dead Man’s Float is a showcase of what made Harrison great as a poet (and as a prose writer). The poems in here are bracingly personal and reverberate with memorable images.

I finished reading Dead Man’s Float on March 26. The very day Jim Harrison died. I am slightly freaked out by the synchronicity. For me, the close of the book was not just a whispering snap of pages. It was an anvil-strike, a gong-blow, a thunderclap. The collision of Harrison’s death and the last stanza of his last poem still rings in my ears.

As I made my way through Dead Man’s Float (when Harrison was still very much alive), I was struck by his acceptance of The End. Though we can all wish he’d been allotted more years than what he got (damn that em dash!), the poems in these pages indicate he was ready for the whatever and whenever of the inevitable. In the last poem, “Bridge,” Harrison writes of how he spent his life building a bridge across an ocean, “though the sea was too wide.” It ends with him sitting at the far edge of the unfinished span, “wagging my feet above/the abyss,” and studying the universe from his perch. The last line of the book is: “I have the sky, the sea, the faint/green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.” I like to think Jim Harrison is walking those woods now, and that the hunt for wild game is a good one.

I went back through the book today, harvesting nearly all of the lines which spoke of death and dying. Blended together, they form a song of departure. I’ve copied them below, in the order they appear in the book. Each break represents a different poem (I’ve listed the titles at the end of this blog post).

He believes in the Resurrection
because he was never taught how not to.


Another night I was wailing and the attendant shook me awake. “I’m dying,” I said. “No, you’re not, you’re just wailing.”


A very old robin drops dead
on the lawn, a first for me. Millions
of birds die but we never see it—they like
privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so
I think. We can’t tell each other when we die.


My old alien body is a foreigner
struggling to get into another country.


Time rushes toward me—
it has no brakes.


Time is a mystery
that can tip us upside down.


A friend died leaning and dozing against
his mailbox, so near home.


Meanwhile seventy-four years of birds
have passed. Most have died of course
so I shouldn’t complain about the nearing
end of it all. I once saw a bird fall out
of a tree stone dead. I nudged it surprised
at its feather lightness that allowed it to fly.
I buried it in earth where they don’t belong
any more than we do. Dead birds should be
monuments suspended forever in the air.


We were so happy when the pretty girl
rose from the dead.
It was just past lilac time and the scent still hung
in the air like the death of the gods.
She didn’t stay around for long. Once you’ve
been dead you’re not happy to return.


There’s no true path to a death—
we discover the path by walking.


All of us die
in the caboose not of our choosing
but then we’ve always seen life
disappearing behind us, most always
into what we clumsily call the past.


Many of us can see our ends coming
as in a dream.


Mind you, I’m in no rush for this to end.


I’m told there’s no last page.
It’s just black and lasts forever.


When young I thought I’d die in my thirties
like so many of my favorite poets.
At seventy-five I see this hasn’t happened.


Yes, we’ll gather by the river,
the beautiful, the beautiful river.
They say it runs by the throne of God.
This is where God invented fish.
Wherever, but then God’s throne is as wide
as the universe. If you’re attentive you’ll
see the throne’s borders in the stars. We’re on this side
and when you get to the other side we don’t know
what will happen if anything. If nothing happens
we won’t know it, I said once. Is that cynical?
No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting, just
nothing. Then again maybe we’ll be cast
at the speed of light through the universe
to God’s throne. His hair is bounteous.
All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there.
The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back
so as not to frighten the little ones.
Even now they remember this divine habitat.
Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river?
We’ll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

Poems cited, in order of their appearance:

Where is Jim Harrison?
Hospital
Solstice Litany
Another Country
Zona
Seven in the Woods
Warmth
Seventy-Four
Risen
A Variation on Machado
Junk Pile
The Future (2)
Pool of Light
Universe
Tiny Bird
The River (complete poem)

Friday Freebie: The History of Great Things by Elizabeth Crane

Congratulations to Judy Young, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Perfect Days by Raphael Montes.

This week’s book giveaway is The History of Great Things, the new novel by Elizabeth Crane. Here’s what Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours, had to say about the book: “Like everything Elizabeth Crane writes, The History of Great Things is wonderful fun to read-smart, insightful, and witty-but it will break your heart, too. It stares down the poignant question so many daughters want to ask: How well did my mother really know me?” Read on for more information about Great Things...

In two beautifully counterpoised narratives, two women—mother and daughter—try to make sense of their own lives by revisiting what they know about each other. The History of Great Things tells the entwined stories of Lois, a daughter of the Depression Midwest who came to New York to transform herself into an opera star, and her daughter, Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in the forbidding shadow of her often-absent, always larger-than-life mother. In a tour de force of storytelling and human empathy, Elizabeth chronicles the events of her mother’s life, and in turn Lois recounts her daughter’s story—pulling back the curtain on lifelong secrets, challenging and interrupting each other, defending their own behavior, brandishing or swallowing their pride, and, ultimately, coming to understand each other in a way that feels both extraordinary and universal. The History of Great Things is a novel about a mother and daughter who are intimately connected and not connected enough; it will make readers laugh and cry and wonder how we become the adults we always knew we should—even if we’re not always adults our parents understand.

If you’d like a chance at winning a paperback copy of The History of Great Things, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 7, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 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.

Soup and Salad: RIP Jim Harrison, Emily St. John Mandel and Laura van den Berg Talk Dystopia, “Difficult” Women Puzzle Margaret Dilloway, Susan Perabo Marvels at Tobias Wolff, Ghosts Haunt Elizabeth Brundage, What Novelists Should Worry About, Jodi Paloni Comes to Terms with “Too Many Books,” Glen Chamberlain’s Funny Valentine

On today’s menu:

1.  The death of author Jim Harrison (The Ancient Minstrel, Legends of the Fall, etc.) a week ago touched nearly all of us in ways great and small. I was stunned but not surprised by his passing. He’d worked hard and played hard and it showed in recent photos of the 78-year-old. You could hear the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe every time you looked at that face. Nonetheless, the passing of a legend is always a sad, regretful thing. Speaking of coulda-shoulda-wouldas, the Barnes & Noble Review was kind enough to publish my essay about a late encounter with the legend. It begins like this: I met Jim Harrison on a flight from Bozeman, Montana to Chicago three years ago. I say “met,” but as we soared over the wheaty heartland, not a word passed between us. It remains one of the greatest regrets of my life.  Click here to read the rest.

2.  “An idea I’ve been thinking about lately is that perhaps we’re drawn to these (dystopian) stories because we long for less distracted lives. We’re tethered to, distracted by, and addicted to our technology, and maybe there’s a certain longing for a world where our phones no longer work and we have to talk to people face to face again and spend more time alone with our thoughts.”
      ~Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with Laura van den Berg at FSG’s Work in Progress


3.  “Difficult” women? Novelist Margaret Dilloway (Sisters of Heart and Snow) pins ’em to the page over at Read Her Like an Open Book:

This whole concept of “difficult” women still puzzles me. Sometimes, the word “difficult” is a code word for “bitchy.” Someone you don’t want to deal with. To me, to be “difficult” means to be human—imperfect, struggling with baggage from the past, responsibilities, aging, expectations, dreams. In real life, every woman I know would be classified as “difficult” the way my characters are. The women I know are fierce and mercurial. Everyone’s got some kind of problem they’re trying to overcome. They complain and they struggle even while they love. And women mess up their lives just as forcefully and thoroughly as men ever have, thank you very much.

4.  At Beatrice, Susan Perabo (Why They Run the Way They Do) talks about why Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” is a prime example of how much can be contained in just three short pages:

I’ve decided that the only single word that can possibly define this short story is “audacious.” I’ve read the story maybe forty times in the last twenty years, and I still can’t believe Wolff pulls it off. The tightrope Wolff walks, bridging the gaping canyon of sentimentality that this story should be, is so thin as to be invisible. Only through sheer audacity could a writer take this character, and this plot, and create something this good.

Related:  My own take on “Bullet in the Brain” (a mini-review that consistently ranks as the #1 most-read Quivering Pen post of all time)

5.  Head Butler reminds me to levitate Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear closer to the top of the To-Be-Read Stack. If nothing else, for the haunting story-behind-the-story. As Brundage explains:

      It was the late 90’s and my husband had just joined a medical practice in Troy, New York. For Mother’s Day the year before, he took me to a beautiful inn in Columbia County – the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company – and over the course of that weekend I decided that Old Chatham, New York was one of the most beautiful places on earth and I wanted to live there. We decided to rent a house in nearby Malden Bridge, a historic hamlet that had been settled in the late eighteenth century. One afternoon, with my girls in the car (our son was just a twinkle in my eye back then) we drove past this old house with a For Rent sign hanging from a tree. It was a lovely white clapboard cape with a small front porch. I pulled over and we got out. There was nobody around; the place looked empty. We roamed around to the back yard, smelling sage and wild onion, and discovered a Dutch door. On impulse I tried the knob, but of course the door was locked. And then the strangest thing happened. The bottom half of the door eased open all on its own.
      We ended up signing a lease and moving in. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that we were not alone. Every morning on the way to school the girls told me stories about the ghosts, three little girls who had died in a fire and whose mother and father were up in heaven. They knew details that seemed beyond their ability to fabricate, including the names of the ghosts, and historic details about an old mill down the road with tainted water...

6.  Worry. We’ve all got it, we all learn to seamlessly incorporate it into our routines, our personalities, the very fibers of our bodies. Creative types, I think, are especially prone to anxiety. At Lit Hub, Susannah Felts delivers a nail-chewing list for writers:

I worry that I’ll never finish. I worry that I’ll finish a draft and never revise it. I worry that I’ll finish the book and no agent will pick it up. I worry that an agent will pick it up and fail to sell it and then dump me. I worry that it will sell and get bad reviews. I worry that it will sell and get no reviews. I worry about the attention I’ll get when it’s reviewed. I worry what people in my hometown will think of it. I worry that I’ll fail at bringing the ideas to life the way they are in my head.

Click here to finger the rest of the worry beads.

7.  One of the things I tend to worry about (needlessly, as all worries are at heart) is the fact that I’ll never live long enough to read ALL THE BOOKS. At Read Her Like an Open Book, Jodi Paloni (They Could Live With Themselves) says she, too, has ”more books than a person could ever possibly read.” But she’s come to comfortable terms with it:

      It doesn’t matter how many books. Books are not just for reading. They’re for viewing, touching, dusting, sorting, stacking, arranging, re-sorting, shelving, un-shelving. They’re a source of pleasure.
      My husband has twenty-two screwdrivers, thirteen wrenches, and sixteen wood files.
      My goat cheese-making friend keeps a couple of bucks around for kicks and, out of compassion, nurtures elder chickens that are all done laying eggs.
      My daughter has 2,178 songs on her iPod.
      That we are a species of excess is another topic. My point here is to say that we pay attention (and dollars) to what sparks passion, nourishes obsession, furnishes joy, soothes.

Click here to read the rest.

8.  Your Friday is about to get a whole lot better. A new issue of High Desert Journal is now online and chief among its contributors is Glen Chamberlain. I suggest you take time this afternoon to do two things: 1) Read the short story “Her Funny Valentine” and 2) Go buy Glen’s new collection All I Want Is What You’ve Got. There’s a very good reason I call her “the Alice Munro of our American West.” Here’s how “Her Funny Valentine” begins:

Cash Gunn was born in Pocket, Montana, at the tail end of the Depression, and he never got out of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t try: when he was 18, he was going to go to college, but the Korean War came along. When he survived, all he wanted was something familiar, so he returned to Pocket and married Agnes.

Click here to read the rest at High Desert Journal.

Sunday Sentence: Daredevils by Shawn Vestal

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

At Wembley, every moment of the crash announces itself. Every altered atom in our body, each as it altered, a cracking network of breakage running through us, and every instant palpable. We land on our right shoulder, pulverizing the humerus and clavicle and driving one large crack through the scapula and two vertebrae, and then all the way down the right side of us by degree, crushing and chipping and fracturing, ribs, sternum, pelvis, femur, tibia, fibula, rolling over onto our back and sliding, sliding across the ramp and then the earth, chipping the spinous process here, the transverse process there, finely cracking the facet joints and the vertebral body but somehow not breaching the spinal canal, America, the magic of the thing, our majesty and life, protected. We roll, grinding across the asphalt covered with turf that buckles and bundles under us, and the breakage spreads to the other side of us, and the bike, that heavy fucker, the Harley XR750, lands on us, breaking our legs in seven places, our old friends fibula, tibia, femur, and when we grind to a stop, we feel like a receptacle of glittering, broken glass, like a deerskin bag full of coins.

Evel Knievel Addresses an Adoring Nation
from Daredevils by Shawn Vestal

Friday Freebie: Perfect Days by Raphael Montes

Congratulations to Martha Gifford, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo by Boris Fishman.

This week’s book giveaway is Perfect Days by Raphael Montes. You can see a trailer for the book here. Keep reading for more information about Perfect Days...

A twisted young medical student kidnaps the girl of his dreams and embarks on a dark and delirious road trip across Brazil in the English-language debut of Brazil’s most celebrated young crime writer. Teo Avelar is a loner. He lives with his paraplegic mother and her dog in Rio de Janeiro, he doesn’t have many friends, and the only time he feels honest human emotion is in the presence of his medical school cadaver—that is, until he meets Clarice. She’s almost his exact opposite: exotic, spontaneous, unafraid to speak her mind. An aspiring screenwriter, she’s working on a screenplay called Perfect Days about three friends who go on a road trip across Brazil in search of romance. Teo is obsessed. He begins to stalk her, first following her to her university, then to her home, and when she ultimately rejects him, he kidnaps her and they embark upon their very own twisted odyssey across Brazil, tracing the same route outlined in her screenplay. Through it all, Teo is certain that time is all he needs to prove to Clarice that they are made for each other, that time is all he needs to make her fall in love with him. But as the journey progresses, he digs himself deeper and deeper into a pit that he can’t get out of, stopping at nothing to ensure that no one gets in the way of their life together. Both tense and lurid, and brimming with suspense from the very first page, Perfect Days is a psychological thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley—a chilling journey in the passenger seat with a psychopath, and the English language debut of one of Brazil’s most deliciously dark young writers.

If you’d like a chance at winning a hardcover copy of Perfect Days, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on March 31, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 1.  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.

My First Time: Chris Bachelder

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 Chris Bachelder, author of the novels Abbot Awaits, U.S.!, Bear v. Shark, and most recently The Throwback Special. He is also the winner of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for Humor. His short fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

My First Lesson in Conviction

In the fall of 2001, during my second and final year in the MFA program at the University of Florida, I took a fiction workshop with Padgett Powell. This was a big deal, submitting my work to a writer who was so significant to me. Powell was not just the reason I was in Florida, he was also, more than any other person, the reason I was writing fiction at all.

Five years earlier, I had been a PhD student in English (but not in writing) in North Carolina. At that point, I had written very little fiction, and while I had vague yearnings to make something, something maybe bright and durable, I had no conscious or sustained ambition of being a writer. I was, perhaps without even realizing it, on the brink of disaffection—both with the degree and with the drift of my life more generally. At the beginning of the semester, a strange dude in the MFA program forced a copy of Powell’s Typical on me and said Powell was coming to read later in the fall.

I can’t imagine why I read the book—I certainly had plenty of other things to read—but I did read it, and I was astonished and exhilarated by the energy, the excess, the wit, the precision, the syntactic control, and the hilarious combination of a high, formal, literary register with gloriously low people, diction, and premise.

I had never seen someone wield language like this, with such a profound respect for the liberating and generative constraints of syntax, with such disdain for conventional phrasing, with such solemn skylarking. I began to see how style becomes a subject. Mostly, though, I was just excited, and post-adolescent excitement is a gift of some value.

Then, in October, Powell read on campus. He read from the story “All Along the Watchtower” in his new collection Aliens of Affection. In that very funny and urgent story about love and longing there is, yes, a “giant spoilbank of broken hearts.” (I see now that a 1996 reviewer for Library Journal, unfortunately reinforcing cruel librarian stereotypes, warns that Powell “is at times excessive.”) And Powell knew how to read his own work—with a restraint that accentuated both the humor and the pathos. My head, my plans, got rearranged. I began, at this very point, modestly at first but then with increasing urgency, to harbor literary aspirations, if only to try to do what Powell was doing, to get in on the excitement. That night I bought his books, got them signed. Beneath his name he wrote “October 1996 Greensboro” so I’ll always remember when and where this occurred.

It took me a couple more years to detonate my life and start over. I quit the graduate program, picked up odd jobs, and called my own bluff about my ambition to write. All during this time, I hoped eventually to go to a writing program, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go.

* * * * *

Padgett Powell

The first story I submitted in Powell’s workshop was called “Clemency.” The title was the best part of the draft. I wrote it the week after we read, out loud in class, Barry Hannah’s “Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa.” I still have my story somewhere but I refuse to look for it. As far as I remember, it was about a guy who was looking for another guy named Monroe so he could, I think, inflict some harm on him. There was, almost certainly, a lady in there too, with all the concomitant troubles that a lady will cause. Antic is, I believe, a way to describe the proceedings. Zany another. Glib would fit. There was not, in this story, a root system, a depth of commitment. Powell’s end comments on my story were written in pencil and they were numbered one to ten, as follows:

1. Hmmm.
2. Well.
3. Pretty good.
4. I don’t know.

(I’ll pause here to say that major pedagogical work had already been done at this point, and in just seven words.)

5. I’m getting a “Tuscaloosa” vibe here, big time.
6. Is it possible you got half of something here, but not yet the original other half?
7. That reservation might just be me.
8. Has hero actually beat Monroe up?

(By now it had been communicated to me that the story feels like an imitation, that the action of the story is not clear, and that, most troublingly, something is just not quite right. As a teacher of writing for the past fifteen years, I’ve learned that you almost always begin with this vague sense, then you grope inelegantly toward diagnosis. “Is it possible you got . . . ?” )

9. This thing does what this kind of thing is supposed to do, and I suppose that is what is preventing my applauding it.

(I have come to love this formulation, which seems at first glance so counterintuitive. One might think that a writer’s job is to get the piece to do what the piece is supposed to do, but that is wrong. That is exactly wrong. In class, Powell would occasionally say of a piece that it was “executed to conception.” This was not a compliment.)

10. Are you applauding it?

I offer this up as remarkable teaching disguised as careless teaching. You won’t find more effective “creative writing pedagogy,” even in expensive textbooks or at conference panels. I’ve written a lot of lengthy workshop letters, and it pains me to consider that in all likelihood not one has done for a student what this tidy list did for me. All his early hemming and hawing was a setup for a final blunt turn toward the writer: Are you applauding it?

The truth, of course, is that I wasn’t applauding it. And Powell’s point is not simply that one should applaud one’s one work, or that approving of one’s own work is linked to its quality. Self-applause is certainly not the lesson here. The lesson is about conviction, investment, ambition. His final question means, “Do you stand behind this?” And, “Does this story adequately represent the aims of fiction?” And, “Does this story matter to you?” My eight-year-old daughter has school assignments for which she must check a box – or not – that says, “I tried my best.” Powell was giving me the grad school version of that box, and I could not in all honesty check it.

A sense of whimsy and exploration and even imitation is particularly important during an apprenticeship, and playfulness in writing is vital. In fact, I’m sure Powell would say, as I would, that a sense of play is essential to good writing. But playful is not synonymous with wacky or frivolous. Johan Huizinga, a Dutch cultural historian and the author of Homo Ludens, spent a lot of time thinking about human play. He concluded that it is a grave and holy and sober business. “We are accustomed to think of play and seriousness as an absolute antithesis,” he wrote. “It would seem, however, that this does not go to the heart of the matter.”

Powell, though, went to the heart of the matter. It’s a lesson I carry around. If you don’t mean it, if you’re only trying to get the piece to do what it’s supposed to do, then you’re only writing for workshop, for deadline. You’re only trying to impress someone, maybe a teacher or a handsome classmate. You’re only writing for publication or adulation. You’re only writing for your cv, for a job, for tenure, for promotion, for money. You’re only writing tautologically, because you’re a writer. You’re only typing, and that’s not good enough.

Chris Bachelder photo by Jennifer Habel