Donigan Merritt: Random Literary Blogging

Needing time to concentrate

A note to the three or four of you who read this blog regularly, I'm going to take a break for a couple of weeks to focus my attention on the real thing.  I am too tempted to use this blog as a substitute for working anytime working doesn't come easy.  So unless you just get bored and want to read old stuff, or maybe try to get through some of those 10,000 word comments, there's no need to bother for a while.  Check back in a couple of weeks, say, after the 20th of November.  By then I hope to have a serious progress report. Thank you for bothering at all.

When you borrow or lend books ...

This subject came up in the comments to a previous post and it seemed to warrant more specific attention than it received there.

What is the harm in sharing books with your friends? Isn't it a good thing to have more readers?

It's not the same thing. Yes, it is a fine and wonderful thing to have more readers. But this is the harm done when you let others borrow your books --

I am a professional novelist. Writing is not my hobby or my therapy or an excuse to avoid getting "a real job" or an avocation. It is my profession, no different from being a professional professor, a professional lawyer, a professional architect, a professional physician, a professional gardener, a professional name-it. Details vary, incomes vary, training varies, but professional means the specific work one does and from which one earns income, distinguishable from amateur or hobbyist, who "work" for nothing, rather, for no income (some have the gorgeous luxury of working for simply the love of the doing).

Many professional novelists also teach or pump gasoline or sell property or something else, because they are not able to make a survivable income from their books alone. A part of the reason for this is because not everyone pays for the books they read. It is no more reasonable to expect to utilize the work of a professional novelist than it is to expect you do not have to pay a lawyer or a doctor's fees, that you can expect the mechanic to get your car running again as a favor, or that you can borrow your neighbor's clothes to wear because you don't want to pay for your own.

This is not different from stealing pirated CDs or DVDs or software. It is not different from shoplifting. There are probably some of you, I hope not many of you, who do not understand the harm in this sort of "petty" stealing. But in fact we all pay more for almost everything to compensate for what thieves take. An educated guess would suppose that the prices for most of these things would drop by half if everyone actually paid for what they use. So all the rest of us are paying a double premium so thieves don't have to pay at all.

Since when is simply borrowing a book from a friend stealing? Because you did not pay for the work you are enjoying, the producer of that work earns less; that money is taken from him or her. In general, a hardbound book that retails for $25 will earn the author something between $2.50 and $3.00. That doesn't seem like much to steal from the poor writer. Three bucks? Come on! But studies that are not so old have shown that on average, one purchased book is read by six people; really popular books see one to ten, on average. So one person buys the book, nine people don't. That single book sale earns the author $3, but loses $27. Next time you see a professional novelist spending time away from his work while teaching somewhere, or mopping floors, or selling shoes, you will know why. You might take the time to say thank you for entertaining, enlightening, or educating me for nothing.

But it's not just about the money lost.

There is a more seriously insidious aspect of this. Authors, and they are almost always writers of literary fiction, who are not in the popular blockbuster group, continue to be published at all based entirely, exclusively, on reports of their sales. The bean counters at a company called BookScan are deciding what gets published in this country; don't think these decisions rest ultimately with editors and publishing houses. Accountants make these editorial decisions now. (It's the same in television, for example; Nielsen determines what you will be able to watch on TV.)

Non-genre fiction, which essentially means literary fiction, is difficult to promote and sell, because there is no marking hook for it. And the sales and marketing departments for most publishing houses show little evidence of the kind of creative thinking it would require to sell books that do not have an obvious and easy hook. (I am inevitably asked by people what kind of novels I write, and if you cannot answer mysteries, adventure, romance, thriller, etc., then they don't know what to make of it. There is no precise descriptive term for it, which is why literary fiction is not genre fiction.) This is precisely the problem faced by marketing and sales departments. If you can't tell a bookstore what this is and what shelf it goes on, they are nonplussed.

All the foregoing is to say that literary fiction already faces a built-in handicap in the publishing industry. On average, a literary novel sells about one thousand copies, some with connections that can be promoted, might sell two thousand. Five thousand copies for an unconnected literary novel by someone not famous for something already would be wildly successful. Now, back to the 3 bucks a book. A wildly successful literary novel might earn the author $15,000. Average sales: $3000. Most literary novelists never earn out of the advance.

BookScan counts copies sold. They report these numbers to publishers. Publishers then have to decide what to continue putting into print. They are not going to keep printing books by an author whose sales figures never go above average. (Publishing houses, as I have written previously, are not charities, they are businesses.)

So you and ten others have borrowed this really good novel from your neighbor or the guy at work, who praised it so highly that you wanted to read it, too. Maybe you pass it along to your cousin, who passes it to his brother ... . One book purchased, unknown number of readers, but probably at least ten per one purchased. It is easy to see that maybe ten or a dozen people have read that one copy of a novel you all keep passing around because you think the author is so good.

BookScan counts the beans. Sends a report. Good author's sales are 1000 copies. Now he likely had 10,000, maybe 12,000 actual readers, but BookScan reports just the copies someone paid for. Good author puts out a new book. Same story.

You have just seen the end of Good Author's books, and what you enjoyed will not be repeated, because no publisher wants to keep printing books that don't make money, or at the very least break even.

That is what is more important than the loss of income to the author. All of you "borrowing" books you don't pay for are helping to make sure that author will not be able to publish more books in the future.

This is not speculation. I have a number of ex-author friends whose sales were not consistently high enough for them to see future work published. They wrote fine books, and they had readers and fans. But thanks to all the "borrowing" going on, they cannot get new work published.

That is the path you take when you borrow books.

PS: This is not about libraries. Libraries are often a literary novelist's last best hope, and commonly half or more of a literary novel's sales numbers are due to library purchases.

Sage advice from a sage-less writer

There has been a lot of chatter on this blog, and lots of elsewheres, about changes in writing and writers, changes in reading and readers, the life and death of the book, speculating if pixels mean anything, really, and notes about the writing life. I get emails via this blog from time to time, and more than half of them contain requests for advice, ranging from the practical (How do you get an agent?; What is the form for a mss submission?; Better to use a header or a footer?) to the esoteric (When you say "theme," what does that mean?; How do you write "what you know," if you have only limited experience?; What kind of pen do you like best?) to the sublime (Is the novel still an art form?)

So here's a bit of sage advice from a sage-less writer:

Yes, write what you know. Always. This does not mean, necessarily, what you have done, although that is not precluded from knowing. What you know means what you are capable of imagining in ways so realistic that it is as if you have done them. A writer's first tool, preliminary even to vocabulary, is imagination. There is a story the author Kaylie Jones shares about her author father, James Jones. She says he often confused what he had written about someone and what he had actually done or said. (My wife kindly claims that her husband is "always editing.") She writes that sometimes her father believed that what he had written was as real as what he had done, that it had really happened, not just a product of his novelist's imagination. That is how you write what you know in spite of what you may or may not have done. If your imagination cannot make your story-telling as real as the concrete actions of your day, then find another way to spend your time.

Beware of writing teachers (and this includes being wary of writers like me who are giving you advice). I do not mean this in the trivial cliche sense that those who can do and those who can't teach; many, maybe most, writing teachers (at least at the MFA program level) are themselves fine writers, many well-published, and they are teaching instead of doing because they prefer eating to starving. No, beware because with only the most rare of exceptions, writing teachers are teaching you to write the way they do. (One of the main reasons so much "workshop writing" looks the same.) How can I (or a writing teacher) presume to know you, the other, from me so well that I can prescribe the functioning of your imagination? In the philosophical sense of the self / other dilemma, all I know of you is the projection into you of what I know of me; I "know" your broken arms causes you pain because when I broke my arm it caused pain to me; I am projecting into you, the other, what I know of me, the self. Few writing teachers will admit this, but what they are doing with their students, what they are condemned to do with their students, is to show them how to do what I do.  Run from this.

The previous piece of advice should make you wary of anything that follows.

Become comfortable with writing tools that slow you down. In this sense, computer word processors are admittedly fine tools for editing at the end of your work, but they are dangerous at the start or along the way. I write everything with a pen on paper because it is the slowest way to go about writing a story. (Thanks to my most useful class in high school, and some years as a journalist using manual typewriters, I am a speed demon with touch typing -- 100 words a minute is easy.) Similarly, work on your penmanship, especially early on, before sloppy habits have ruined it. Write in such a way that you assume a hired typist has to produce the print copy. (My biggest penmanship fault is that I make the personal pronoun I like a 2 in script, but once a reader figures that out, it's not hard to accept all those 2's as I's.)

Continuing for a moment with the slow writing advice: When I was a journalist, I could write very fast, and always on a typewriter. It was nothing to crank out a 500 word article in minutes. There is a place for fast writing. But there is a difference between a newspaper story and a novel, obviously. The purpose of a story in journalism is to transmit the facts about something, sticking mainly with the five Ws. It's nice when it's well-written, but that isn't the point. Contrarily, a novel is about the truth, which requires so much more than who-what-when-where-why, and the best novels, those that make the transition into art, are also beautiful things, I mean not that the story or the plot or the action is or is not beautiful, but that the totality of the work is a thing of beauty. I don't think you can make art fast.

This bit of sage advice from a sage-less writer is meant for writers who want to write books. I don't know anything about pixel writing in cyberspace and should therefore remain silent about it. I cannot even read fiction pixel writing in cyberspace.

You will need an agent. There is no decent way around that. Therefore, your effort to connect with a compatible agent is far more vital than wasting your time wondering about editors and publishing houses. That's what agents worry about. There are trillions (only a slight exaggeration for effect) of novel manuscripts, not to mention biographies, histories, political essays, and the rest, flooding the transoms of publishing houses (and if they don't have a transom, then they might as well be selling soap or cars) every week, so many that outside readers are often hired to read this stuff at so much an hour or so much a page and make a report on an index card -- this is probably done by email now, I am still floundering in olden times and ways -- so an editor gets a preliminary separating of wheat from chaff. In other words, without an agent, the first reader of your life's work is going to be some grad school English major sitting in Starbuck's with a mountain of paper (or the glow from a laptop) that he will evaluate on an index card, and you can only hope he or she is not hungover, cocained up, or has just been dumped by a lover. You will need an agent, and sorry, no, I am not able (I suppose that really means willing, doesn't it?) to get one for you or recommend you to mine.

You are not going to make a living doing this, probably. The odds that you will are slightly higher than your odds of winning a powerball lottery or getting struck by lightning by lightning on a winter day while in your cellar sorting potatoes. Make sure you have a Plan B. All those Plan Bs are certainly one of the reasons there are eighteen million MFA degree programs in the States (slight exaggeration for effect), along with the fact that these programs are cash cows for their universities -- not like a winning football team, but pretty good for academics.

Newspaper journalism used to be a good training ground for novelists and story-writers (Hemingway, famously), but I think those days died with Hemingway. Maybe magazine journalism can offer a good start. No, probably just do what you have to do to keep from starving to death, and write when you can. Here is a top of my head list of some of the ways I staved off starvation in the adult years before my first novel was published (when I was 36 years old): gas station attendant, jug-hustler (term used in the oil fields for the person who lays out geophones to absorb and record waves from dynamite blasting in oil exploration), pizza waiter and then cook, cargo loader at an airport, janitor in a field house, charter fishing boat captain, skipper of a sailboat cruise, philosophy teacher, and yes, writing teacher.

Don't think you are going to become a better writer because you attend conferences. Conferences exist to augment the paltry writing incomes of the writers who appear at the conferences. Although fucking one of those writers might get a recommendation. Not only Hollywood has casting couches.

Finally -- because it is a pretty spring morning down here in the far south and I sense a long walk around the lake in the park coming up -- writing novels is an utterly solitary activity, and if you are going to do it, you might as well understand that from the start. No one is going to teach you much of anything, no writers clubs are going to do much more than give you some folks to drink with, no conference is going to make you a better writer, and you are probably never going to see your work in print. And if you are a writer, none of this will phase you in the least. If you are a writer, you don't have any other choice.

I wish you all good luck. 

Compare and contrast

There is growing old with curiosity, grace, and history, and there is junk.

The book may become dusty, raggedy, crumbly and at some point in some hundreds of years will return to dust, as will we all, but until that time it can still give the education, the pleasure, the entertainment, the philosophy, the solace and the sanctuary it did from the first day. Our electronics simply breakdown, cease to function utterly, and become dangerous junk.

If the book does not survive and is replaced by these machines, then I believe that humanity will not long survive, ceasing to live as anything other than dangerous junk littering the remnants of our planet.

Speaks for itself

From a recent "New Yorker."  It's making the rounds among editors, agents, and authors, for what you will see is an obvious reason when you read the article:  it is more tragedy than comedy, more true than not.  If you are what Dr. Bose over in India continually refers to as a "real writer," if you are condemned to write, whether or not you have yet to be published, and especially if you already are published (I don't mean on line), then have a glance at the future of book publishing, and note -- the future is now.

Care to discuss it?

The new office

This is the Boutique del Libro, which is on Calle Thames in the Palermo Soho barrio of Buenos Aires, half a block up from the corner with Costa Rica. It is principally a bookstore, also selling music CDs, with a small café area in the rear, an upper area selling foreign language books (mostly dictionaries and language books), and a narrow café along one side (which allows smoking, so not for me). I have been going there off and on for many months, but realized that lately I've been writing there more often than other places.  Besides being surrounded by books, and the fact that there is always good music (not radio pop) playing, there is Carla, the friendly waitress.

That is Carla on the right, in the smoking part of the café.

Below are a couple of other photos of the place, including the table where my stuff is.

The ladders are often used to retrieve books from the highest shelves.  In the front of the store is a children's cubbyhole filled with books and things that children like. Get them reading young!  As usual, if you click on the pictures they get bigger.

A consideration of literary writing

I am reading Lies My Mother Never Told Me, a memoir by Kaylie Jones, who is the daughter of the novelist James Jones, and although not quite yet finished, I expect to finish it this evening. This memoir is ostensibly about the horrific relationship between Kaylie Jones and her mother, Gloria Jones, although not without due consideration of and respect and love for her father. It is also about alcoholism, and especially alcoholism within the community of novelists. Ms. Jones writes very well and this is a compelling memoir, but I am not writing a review of the book or of Ms. Jones as a writer.  This consideration is stimulated by one scene late in the book, when Ms. Jones is in Paris with Norman Mailer not long after 9-11, translating for him during an interview for French radio.  The first question put to Mailer is about the 9-11 terrorist attack in NYC.  Here is Ms. Jones on Mailer's answer:

Norman laughed and said he was amused that the French were more interested in his opinion of 9/11 than the Americans. He said, with a bemused smile, that literary writers' opinions no longer held any sway in America. The time of the great American novelists had passed. In the forties, a few writers thought they could change the world. And perhaps they did. James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity, for example, changed the U. S. Army, Norman said. "I still think that's the role of literature: to try to change the world. But that's no longer what preoccupies American writers, unfortunately. If I had to do it over, I'd be a film director."

While talking together after the interview, Mailer and Jones have this exchange:

"Norman," I blurted, "I haven't written a word in ages. I was so depressed over the fate of literature in the U. S. that I felt completely useless. But now, listening to you, I see it's not an option. I have to write. I see it's more important than ever."

"Yes, it is," he said. "Even more so if you do it without any expectation of success."

This seems like an odd contradiction to me -- Mailer says thinking that literature will change the world is no longer the preoccupation of American writers and he'd just as soon have been a film director, to which Jones determines that her being a writer is more important than ever.

Regardless. I am curious about this question. Is the time of the literary novel essentially finished?  What about Mailer's implication that the themes that once belonged to great literature are now revealed more often in great films? Who would you claim to be the contemporary equivalents to the rather long (and old) list of great American novelists? Melville, Henry James, Dreiser, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Jones, Richard Yates, Walker Percy, the Wolfe Toms, Bellow, McMurtry ... and those who have not come immediately to mind, but I am sure some reader will hasten to add. We did not always have to wait for the determination of posterity to know when we were in the presence of great literary writers; many on this list were thought to be great within the span of their lives.

Which writer(s) published after 1985, about 25 years, would you add to this list? What are the great literary novels of the past quarter-century?  (Are there great "genre" novels?)

I look forward to discussing this with you.

Here's a closing cartoon to bring a loud laugh from those of you who are authors. Click on the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

Progress report

If the work goes badly there would be no progress report, but the work goes well, it goes steadily, slowly, and very, very well. I owe it to her, whoever she really is. In the story, her name is Daniela Tolárová; she is called Danika.

I'm calling this novel "And it's only Love." (See post with music videos below.) It is Danika who takes Tom Valen and turns him inside out.

If you have read my 2005 novel, "Possessed by Shadows," you might recognize the name, for this new story is the sequel to that book; Tom Valen more than 12 years after his wife's death in the Tatra Mountains.

After living for a decade in the rugged mountains of northwest Slovakia, along the border with Poland, Tom Valen has only a year or so earlier returned to the city, to Bratislava, and returned to teaching.

Danika is in his philosophy class.

The story takes place in the period between the end of February, 2001, and September 11, 2001.

Every word is earned, but I don't mind; that's why they call it work.

 

basta de tonterías already!

(Enough of this nonsense already!) I will try to keep in mind that I started this blog a little over a year ago intending to use it as the title implies, for random literary thoughts and a means for any curious readers to explore the methods and intentions offered in my books, as well as hoping to maintain a platform where writers might exchange ideas about work and art.  Rational and reasoned argument will never, has never, overcome the hold of unwavering faith in myth or the political disaster of the all-knowing uneducated. It is like quitting smoking; it's never going to work until the smoker really wants to stop, all reasoned pleading from friends, family, and science are never going to make headway against addition.  Let's get back to literature and writing.

 Spring has arrived to Buenos Aires, as Autumn portends the coming winter in the north, we can smell summer with the sun drifting toward the equator again. Now we can end the day with a glass of wine on the balcony without a jacket or sweater.

There is really no winter in Buenos Aires.  Porteños, as the people of this city refer to themselves -- people of the port -- would have you believe there is a winter season here.  No. Not if you have ever seen a winter in Toronto or Omaha or Warsaw. San Diego gets more winter than Buenos Aires, and in spite of the odd appearance of down parkas, wool ski caps, gloves, boots, as soon as the temperature here drops into the 40s fahrenheit, people who really know winter might decide to wear a sports coat or leather jacket in such weather.

I did not experience any form of winter for the last year, and now the long, languid summer comes again. I am reflecting about winters survived, but also about winter days and nights in a kind of ecstasy, whisky nights. The winter I will not see again in Buenos Aires, and miss sometimes. The winter night that has once been perfectly described in a narrative paragraph. This fellow in the picture liked it so much he had it printed on his tee-shirt. If you can't read his shirt, here it is:

*A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.*

From James Joyce's story, "The Dead," within "Dubliner's."

A little gift to my friends in the north, who are in their Autumn days, knowing what lies ahead.

Just to rub it in a little

My hero.

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Rage of the rabid mob

Here is offered a portrait of the public face of the new Christian, the rabid face of the Christian Conservative Right. If you haven't yet seen the face of the new Christian, simply attend any gathering where reasonable (and reasoning) people are attempting to explain why it is the decent, moral, honorable thing to provide universal health care to our nation's people, the last civilized nation on earth to do so, and have a look at the faces of the new Christians who foam at the mouth over the thought that one penny of their holy money might be used to give their brother a decent shot at life, in spite of the fact that it is guaranteed in the very opening lines of the United States Constitution -- which they like when it gets them warm guns, but hate when it might cost them holy money to help those less fortunate.  (Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)  The insurance system they wish to sustain is the most anti-life (but certainly pro-business) of any health care insurance system in the civilized world. Have a look, the people behind these faces are on a mission from one or another of the usual gods, some god has spoken to them personally, they are marching in their god's army against the Great Satan (who happens to be black, naturally).

By and large I have intended to keep this blog exclusively for literary and writerly matters, leaving politics and polemics to those who enjoy the spin. Besides, there are books, quite good books, written about the problems raised by the human susceptibility to religious superstitions; far better than anything I can produce in a blog post, even in summary.

But also this is stimulated by a discussion taking place on the blog of one of my oldest literary friends. It can be found here. The post of 8 September. It is, thankfully, so far, a polite, literate, and intelligent exchange. I expect that by posting something like this here, this blog will begin receiving holy missives from the faithful, banged out with venomous glee from their dutiful keyboards, from people whose faces will look like the one above as they pursue another blasphemer. I am not interested and, being a fan of Kahlil Gibran's advice to never argue with drunks or fools, will refrain from useless wars with people who may or may not be sober, but the other option is not in doubt (would that the Bush-Chaney team knew how to refrain from useless wars).

I find it ironic to the point of sick hilarity that with no exceptions I can find, the only people who are fighting so viciously to avoid spending a penny of their taxes to help improve the lives of the millions of less fortunate describe themselves as Christians, followers of the teachings of a man they supposedly worship, who, unless I have read the Bible completely wrong on this, would find the attitudes of these people to be horrible in the extreme. This is not to say that there aren't Christians on the other side, fighting just as hard, well, maybe not quite hard enough, for the utterly and obviously moral principle of universal health care for every person in the country (how could anyone be against this?). After all, President Obama is a Christian, and at least he more or less always acts like one.  That is, if he's not really a not so secret African born muslim terrorist just pretending to be a compassionate Christian.

There seems to be more of the nasty, angry, bitter, and rabid Christians around than the President Obama kind of Christian -- who, again, may not even really be a Christian anyway. If this is not the case, where are the voices of the Obama Christians? If there are any who actually have read, understood, and try to live by the message in the historical teachings of the man whose name they take to define their philosophy? Why are they not crying out in legion against this rampant perversity of the message of the man they also worship? Maybe in the Yeats quote Ken uses in the blog linked above, and which I offer from it here:

All weekend, I kept recalling these lines from "The Second Coming," a poetic masterpiece by W.B. Yeats:

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

I take note that the Fox channel, which is the most astonishingly hateful, rabid-inducing, mucking voice of all things Christian Conservative, is the most watched cable channel on television. There can be no one watching a station like that who is not a card-carrying member of the rabid Christian right, so those audience numbers are indicative of their numbers in the mob at large.

We are being slaughtered by our clinging to ancient superstitions.

I have vented.  Thank you. 

Revenge of the first wife

As a result of a semi-review of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano on Bob Conoboy's blog, I recalled when I first read the book at least thirty years ago, and considered rereading it. My original copy went out with all the rest when I gave away my library to take up a vagabond's way, so I looked for a used copy. Along the way I came across this bitter, defensive, and egomaniacal memoir by his first wife, Jan Gabrial. Oh, the horror, the horror!  Hell hath no fury ... !  The nightmare for an author who acquires some repute only to know that hiding in the past is the short-term ex-wife poised to have her revenge. Why did anyone publish this? Obviously because if there is any potential money to be made from it, there are publishers who will blithely and unconscionably publishing anything at all. The good news is, there is no evidence that this diatribe sold many copies and it is not easy to find either a copy or any information about it. Good.

The brain on music

The first time I heard this song, I imagined a novel within it. Other novels intervened. A few months ago, during the floundering time after completing "Island in the Pines," I happened to hear the song again over a folk station on Internet radio, which usually plays in the background when I'm working at home. It was the original Anna McGarrigle version, the woman who wrote it, which I do like, but it is impossible not to fall madly for the Linda Ronstadt version, which is embedded here. By the time the song ended, my brain had created the novel I first imagined lived within those lyrics. I knew I wanted to write a novel that would reveal the truth embedded in the lines of the chorus: And it's only love, and it's only love, that can wreck a human being and turn him inside out." I had most of the pieces, except the essential one -- the focus of that love. Then came that day I was walking along and saw her, the young woman whose picture decorates the post - "Flounders Can Swim." Ironically, as I have time to consider it, she, that stranger on the street, looks uncannily like the woman singing this same song in a video by The Coors (see it below) .

Now I am well into that novel, which is titled: And it's only Love. It is the best work I have ever done.

Bra / Female, 1 ea.

This probably isn't "flash" fiction, but it is fiction, one of the shortest pieces I've ever written, so it's flash for me.    

Mr. Cafferty, who managed the Patio Iguana apartments, thought that old John Ackers was stealing brassieres off the clothes line. 

But it wasn’t John, who hadn’t stolen anything since a couple of shoplifting adventures he had before the age of twelve, and who anyway would have thought that stealing under wear was kinky; unless, of course, the thief happened to be a woman and she planned on using them, which would be just being practical.

That morning John wasn’t thinking about Mr. Cafferty or brassieres. He was sitting on the side of his bathtub and watching Glenda eat breakfast in the nude.

Glenda was in the Navy. Every woman, so far as John knew, in the entire pink stucco complex was either in the Navy or married to somebody in the Navy. John’s pickup truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot that didn’t have a base sticker on the windshield.

He had seen Glenda in her white uniform, reminding him of the waitresses at the Night and Day Diner, except for the three red slashes on her sleeve, which John didn’t under stand, because he didn’t keep track of Navy ranks. He didn’t know much at all about the Navy. John wasn’t a military type of man.

He knew her name was Glenda from the mailbox: Glenda Kol­wolski/3B. Because of its proximity to the Navy base, the Patio Iguana was a transient sort of place. People didn’t get to know their neighbors. Apartment 3B was a one bedroom on the second floor of the B building, which formed the back connector in the U-shaped Patio Iguana apartments. Imagine: Hotel California in pink.

John had a one bedroom on the first floor of building C, which formed the building’s left leg. His bathroom window looked up toward 3B’s kitchen windows.

Mr. Cafferty told John (treating it like a joke, but John wondered if it was just a ploy to see what he’d say) that a couple of the girls in B building thought it was John stealing the bras. Why? John asked him. Mr. Cafferty said because John was always around, because he didn’t go out to a job, and because he was the only man (besides Mr. Cafferty him self, of course) around the place all day long, because he was divorced and nobody (meaning Cafferty, again) ever saw him dating much, as if loneliness itself could be the root of the crime.

John wondered if it might not be Mr. Cafferty himself making the accusations, that maybe nobody in building B had really ever claimed it was John Ackers doing it. Mr. Cafferty never did like John because from the start John didn’t put up with Cafferty’s landlord shit, and John wouldn’t have put it passed Cafferty to be jealous because John Ackers could make a go of it on his little disability pension and didn’t think he had to go out and make work for himself just to be validated, or something like that. John Ackers figured he had paid his dues in the labor pool: Twenty-two years a lineman for Arizona Power and Light before he took the fall.

John didn’t usually get up so early. What for? It only made long days longer. But, three days ago, awakened by a beer-filled bladder, he was in the bathroom about 6:30 when he happened to look up and see her: Glenda, eating breakfast in the nude. It was astonishing.

John didn’t think much about it then, except to consider it a stroke of luck. Naturally, he found himself looking up that way whenever he went to the bathroom. Anybody would, he figured; it’s only natural.

The next morning, there she was again. And then the next.

John could see her clearly. She was seated at the table. Reading the paper. Eating from a bowl of cereal. Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. She had juice and coffee. Two, sometimes three cups. He could only see from the stomach up. But he wasn’t complaining. Her hair was still damp and her skin just a little pink. John guessed she had come from the shower.

 Glenda’s breasts were awfully pretty. Big for her general size. Bountiful, came to John’s mind. Although big didn’t have to mean pretty. Often it didn’t; John thought about the cow udders on some women. Glenda’s nipples were bronzed, round, and large, about like a burnished peso, parked right in the middle where they were supposed to be; the genuine article, John decided. The curve of her breast seen from the side and below was the softest line John could imagine. It weakened him, to tell you the truth.

That morning a fog came in. It rolled down the street from the base main gate like something alive. You couldn’t see the tops of the palms, or the streetlights. Because of the fog, Glenda had turned on the light. Back lighting made it seem like there was nothing between her and her embarrassed but excited admirer.

 All that stuff going on about stolen underwear made John wonder what size Glenda’s bras would be? Would they be grey, like a battleship? Would they be identified in some military code? Maybe stenciled inside: Bra/female, 1 ea.?

He watched her get up for another cup of coffee. Now he could see the athletic line of her thighs, the dark swatch of pubic hair, the utility of her wide hips, her flat stomach, earth mother breasts, and her oval, cameo face.  She walked to the stove, allowing him to study her back.  Her ass was a little whiter than the rest of her skin.  The residue of a tan, he supposed. Although she was pale for southern California.

She picked up the paper and unfolded it to an inside page, then refolded it and looked at something while sipping the fresh coffee. She didn’t sit back down, seeming to be impatient, as if running late. John glanced quickly at his watch and saw that it was twenty to seven. Yesterday, she stayed until seven, then he saw her leaving for work, or whatever it was Navy people did behind those big fences.

Finally, she turned and walked out. If her apartment was laid out like John’s, she went into the bedroom.

John had only seen her like this three times, but he already missed her when she left for work, and found himself wondering about her through the remainder of the day.

Watching Glenda eat breakfast in the nude was the most interest­ing and unusual thing to happen in John’s life in a long time. What did that say about John? On the other hand, what did it say about Glenda? John wished he could get to know her better; which meant to get to know her at all, since they were strangers.

It was not impossible to imagine that John had fallen in love with Glenda. There were times he had dates with prettier women, not so long ago. He was divorced by a prettier woman, although she would never have eaten breakfast in the nude. Not even in windowless room. Glenda was the paradigm of boldness and freedom. He would like to suck those attributes from her from her marrow. Feed his deficiencies.

Since John didn’t know Glenda, he could not separate how she made him feel sitting naked to eat breakfast from whatever she might be, actually.

It dismayed him! Feeling like that about Glenda; thinking that he was falling in love with her just because she ate break fast in the nude, behind windows where anyone could see. It was obvious that there must be twenty-five or thirty years between their ages.

But in fact, he would like to have a piece of Glenda’s under wear. Her bra, he decided. Why not? The rumors of an underwear thief were what made him think that way. It had never before crossed John’s mind to possess a woman’s bra.

He wondered what it would be like to have Glenda’s bra? To keep it in a secret place. To know it had haltered those breasts, her breasts. It might become a conversation piece, especially if it were stenciled with some Navy jargon: That is, if John were not to remain so much in love with her that to show her bra would be to desecrate it, and Glenda. But wasn’t that a painfully silly notion?

*

The fog hid John, making him feel like Jack the Ripper prowling behind building C.  He considered what he might say just in case someone caught him, but there was no thing to say. If it looked dangerous, he just wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t that important.  It was just a notion, a little itch of curiosity.

He walked nonchalantly around the trash dumpsters in the alley, then ducked quickly, unseen, through the back entrance. The few things hanging on the line looked, in the fog, like apparitions; a white uniform shirt (with two blue stripes) made him think of Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

He pressed himself against the alley wall and filed down the laundry line to the opposite end. To get out of there he would have to backtrack to keep from going through the complex courtyard, where he’d likely be seen.

It occurred to John that he could have done this better had he given it more thought. He could have brought down a basket of his own laundry and mixed her bra up with his stuff. Nobody would have been suspicious if he were spotted.

But he was already there. And no one had seen him. He would just stuff her bra into his shirt, or down his pants. She had only one bra hanging out. There was also a pair of jeans. They would be damp all day if the fog didn’t lift. Although this late in the fall the fog usually lifted pretty quickly. The sun would be out in an hour, John was willing to bet.

He eased by a blouse, a pair of white panties (that seemed awfully big), and a khaki shirt he had seen Glenda wearing when she washed her VW Beetle on Saturdays. He stopped by the bra. It was white, not grey. There was nothing stenciled on it that he could see from that angle. There was a tag he could barely read. Leaning forward, his face almost touching the thin, nearly transparent, material, he could now see that it said: Warner’s My Skin, fits sizes 36 C,D.

It felt like dry, cool skin. Smelled like fabric softener. He wanted to put it over his face. He wanted to wear it on his head and dance for her. Make her laugh.

He was holding the bra against his cheek when she came around the corner with a pair of damp blouses and some other items in her hands. There was a plastic bag of clothes pins dangling from her teeth, which fell when she opened her mouth. The bag clinked when it hit the concrete.

Glenda didn’t say anything, she just looked at John. Sadly. Her eyes heavy.

He let go of her bra, but it hardly mattered at that point. He might as well have taken it. He ducked beneath her clothes and jumped over the low gate into the courtyard.

Behind him Glenda called out: “Hey! You asshole!”

But he was running as fast as his bad leg would let him, through the shallow fish pond, through Mr Cafferty’s new hedge, and out to the street. The Patio Iguana began to fade into the fog. A sailor honked and swerved around John as he darted across the street and ran, bent and sideways like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, toward the ocean.

*

The knock on his door came from a policeman. John hadn’t finished supper; the solitary microwave plate on the table embarrassed him. There was a beer bottle in his hand, and he had an impulse to hide it behind his back when he saw the police officer.

“Yes?” John said. The cop had a piece of paper in his hand. The patrol car could be seen out front. A second officer was coming from the area of the parking lot to join the policeman at John’s door.

“John Ackers?” He read John’s name off the paper.

“Yes. Is something wrong?” Of course John knew. His stomach had known all day. He had already vomited with fear.

“There’s been a complaint filed, Mr. Ackers, regarding some incidents stealing articles of intimate wearing apparel. Women’s under garments, to be specific, Mr. Ackers.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re not here to get an apology,” the newly arrived officer said.

“I meant to say, ‘excuse me’ . . . that is, I’m not sure I understand this.” John felt weak in the knees, light in the head, heavy in the heart.

“You’re going to have to come with us,” the first cop said.

“But . . . “ John was afraid he would cry. He noticed that both the officers were putting on rubber gloves, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gloves.

“Do you have any open sores, cuts, anything like that,” the second officer said, coming into John’s front room, putting his hands on John’s shoulders from the back. “Give me your hands.” But he didn’t wait for John, the cop just took them, jerking them behind John’s back and wrapping them in a plastic band.

“Needles, razors in your pockets?” the first cop added as the second turned John to face the wall.

“Needles?  Ah ... .”

“Don’t make it hard for us, Mr. Ackers, and we won’t make it hard on you.”

“Yes, but ... .”

They patted him down quickly and took him out, making sure the door locked behind them.

“You have the right to remain silent ... .”

The two girls who lived below Glenda were standing by the laundry room door, baskets in their arms, watching John being pushed toward the patrol car.  Mr. Cafferty was standing in front of his manager’s apartment with his arms crossed over his chest. Loud enough for everyone to hear, Mr. Cafferty said: “I knew it, knew it from the start. Could of told you.”

*

They took John Ackers down to the small station house and booked him in front of everybody. They told him he was being charged with Petty Larceny, Lewd and Lascivious Behavior, Prowling, and Public Indecency. It was obvious how people at the police station felt about perverts and sex offenders. The female dispatcher kept staring at him, giving him dirty looks.

They put him in a holding cell with two illegal aliens from Mexico waiting for an INS pickup, a drunken driver (who had puked on the floor and was now sleeping in it), and a sailor off the Ranger picked up last night for Drunk and Disorderly and Carrying A Concealed Weapon (a Buck knife).

John didn’t know any lawyers, and he only had his small pension, so they said he could have a Public Defender. It was Saturday. John might get a hearing on Monday.  They’d see about getting a lawyer in before that. The booking officer told John: “Sit tight and think on your behavior.”

John took a seat on the concrete bench built out from the wall. The two Mexicans sat on the other end and ignored him. John buried his face in his hands and considered his behavior; but he had only -- and even that was a big maybe -- been going to steal a bra. What could one of those things cost? He was sure he had never been prowling, even if he didn’t know what it meant to prowl. What had he done that was lewd? In his thoughts, yes, maybe, sometimes, but since when can they charge you for thinking something?

The sailor off the Ranger, who smelled like kerosene and rusting metal, sat down next to John, touching shoulder to shoulder, until John raised his head.

“Want a first class blow job?” the sailor whispered, smiling, as he took out his false teeth and mouthed a grin.

“No.  I sure don’t.” John stood and went to the bars, where at least he could yell for somebody if he needed to. “Please leave me alone,” John told the sailor, who was putting back his teeth.

Pretty soon, John had to urinate. There was a toilet in the cell, a lidless, stained, stinking piece of tin bolted to the concrete floor between the slab benches. John would have to stand there in front of everybody.  He’d rather have his bladder blow up and burst.

An hour later, two INS officers came for the Mexicans. An hour after that, the drunk driver’s twenty-four hours were up and they let him out.

“I can’t stay all night in here with him,” John whispered to the officer who brought two small pillows and two small blankets to John and the sailor from the Ranger.

“Can and will,” the officer told John, and pitched their bedding onto the nearer slab.

Then John had an anxiety attack. He couldn’t get enough oxygen, although in fact he was getting too much, and his heart beat so hard and fast that he thought he could see it bulging out his chest wall. His brain sent panicked flight messages to all John’s muscles and nerves, but there was no place to fly. He paced hurriedly, almost at a run, back and forth across the small cell, right at the edge of the bars.

“If you’re going to do that, man,” the sailor called out from under his blanket, “at least take off your goddamn shoes.”

John wanted to cry for help. But who was there to help him? He took off his shoes and paced like a starving, broken animal for five hours, until exhaustion slumped him to the floor and he wrapped the blanket around his cold shoulders before falling into a deep sleep.

Sometime while he slept during the next three hours, John’s bladder let go and he pissed all over himself and the cell floor, where it remained like sticky stigmata.

*

The lawyer, who looked like a football player, wasn’t too thrilled with being called out on Sunday, especially for some thing as trivial, nay, as stupid as John Ackers’s charges. Prowling, for Chrissakes! There was no such thing. The booking officer just said it was a mistake and took it off.

John begged the lawyer to find a way to get him out of the cell. He explained about the sailor’s offer. The lawyer said he’d say something about the sailor, but John couldn’t get out until bail was set, and that wouldn’t happen until Monday. Too bad they picked you up on the weekend, the lawyer said.

“But look,” the lawyer added, “this is a nothing deal. If, as you told me, you never actually took any of the clothing, and unless they got a witness saying you’ve been walking around there with your pecker hanging out, the most you’ll end up with is a small fine and maybe six months probation. I don’t think you’ll get on the sex offender register.”

“Sex offender? But I didn’t do anything,” John protested.

“Then we’ll just prove that and the charges will get dropped. Don’t worry about it, Ron.”

“John.”

But the lawyer was already on his way out.

*

They let John go after his hearing Monday morning. The unnamed witness to John’s lewd and lascivious behavior refused to appear and press charges, and they were unable to connect John with any of the previous clothing thefts. They turned him loose to walk home, with a final warning from one of the arresting officers: “We got your number, bud.”

John sat in his apartment, surrounded by the liquor boxes he had gathered up to pack his things. There was nothing to do but go. Where? He didn’t know yet. He liked the beach town. He even liked the Patio Iguana. He had always dreamed of living in a Hotel California sort of place, like the one in the Eagles song.

Back to Phoenix, he supposed. He could take the heat; he’d done it for half his life. Twenty-two years a lineman. Twenty-two years climbing poles. He felt like a hot wire hit him, sort of the way it felt the day 50,000 volts knocked him off the pole.

He never blamed Glenda, it wasn’t her fault, John still liked her.

Glenda was there, eating breakfast in the nude again when John woke up that morning and went to the bathroom. No, it wasn’t her fault. What else could she think? John knew it was purely stupid for him to have even considered stealing one of her bras, so when you looked at the whole thing objectively, John had brought all this trouble down on himself. There was nobody to fault but himself.

At first, John wouldn’t let himself look up toward Glenda’s kitchen windows. He kept his eyes down on the toilet bowl as he stood before it in his pajamas. But he had seen her in a single glance when he first went into the bathroom, standing with her naked back to the window, making coffee at the stove.

Pretty soon, John’s head began to slowly come up, his eyes raised to the top of their lids, and Glenda came into view. She held the bowl in her left hand, and spooned cereal into her mouth with the right. The newspaper, which John could not actually see, must be laying on the table, for Glenda looked down intently at something there.

Glenda kept her plain brown hair cut short. When wet, it curled around her ears in dozens of tiny ringlets. John’s view was so clear and unobstructed that he could count the rings; he could see her tongue reach into the left corner of her mouth to nab a droplet of milk. He could see the soft, bulging curve of her left breast and ache over it.

Something moved low and to his right, catching his eye, and John turned to see Mr. Cafferty, tool box in hand, walking along the sidewalk between B and C buildings. If only he looked up, John realized, Cafferty too would be able to see Glenda. It felt like, John realized to his dismay, being cuckolded.

But Mr. Cafferty seemed to be in a hurry and did not look up.

John didn’t look anymore, either. It simply wasn’t the right thing to be doing. He finished his business at the toilet, flushed it, and left the bathroom without another glance out the window. In fact, he closed the blinds tight. He had packing to finish if he was going to be on the road by Thursday, the day his rent was paid up to.

*

They didn’t find Glenda Kowolski’s body until early Thursday morning, which was how long it took for the Shore Patrol to send somebody around after she was reported AWOL for not showing up at work on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Glenda had been killed Tuesday morning, as best the medical examiner could determine. She had been stabbed repeatedly with a Phillips screwdriver, which had been left sicking in her chest just below the breast plate. Her body was nude and she had been raped, both before and after.

Mr. Cafferty told the investigating officers that the yellow handled screwdriver, which had the initials JA etched into the handle, looked like the kind one of his tenants, John Ackers, had in his truck’s took kit. And interestingly enough, Mr. Ackers had just that very morning taken off in his truck, pulling a U-haul trailer, headed east. The same John Ackers who had spent the previous weekend in the city lockup accused of sexually-oriented crimes of some kind involving the very same naked corpse Mr. Cafferty, who was called in for identification, could not now keep his eyes off of.

They picked up John Ackers on a warrant for suspicion of first degree murder Thursday before noon; he was driving his pickup and pulling a small U-Haul trailer eastbound on Interstate 8, just on the California side of Yuma.

John had no alibi. In tears and shaking like he’d just contracted Parkinson’s, John told the police that he had spent Tuesday and Wednesday gathering boxes and packing. But he couldn’t tell them why he was in such a hurry to leave. He didn’t know. How could he tell them he was just embarrassed.

They took the tool box from John’s truck, but many of the tools were missing, including his yellow handled Phillips screw driver. All John’s tools had his initials etched into the handles, since the time in Phoenix his tools were stolen. John was sure he had loaned some of his tools to someone a while back, but he couldn’t exactly remember who; he was too scared to remember anything. Maybe it was Mr. Cafferty that time he was replacing all the window screens in the complex. But Cafferty said he never borrowed tools, he had all the tools he needed supplied by the Patio Iguana’s owners.

This time they put John in the County jail to await his hearing. The Public Defender told John that it didn’t look too good, but on the other hand, John’s fingerprints weren’t found in the girl’s apartment, and there were no witnesses placing him there. It was all circumstantial: The prior arrest on sex charges involving the deceased’s underwear, for which the deceased had reported him; the fact that an initialed screw driver like the murder weapon matched the tools in John’s kit, and his happened to be missing, the fact that John could not account for his time on Tuesday, combined with his running away the day Glenda Kowolski’s body was discovered.

“Okay,” the PD told a distraught John Ackers, “so you’ve got motive and access, that doesn’t make the whole package. If worse comes to worse, we can always cut a deal for second degree and get you off with twenty. You’ll be out in six.”

John had a devastating anxiety attack and had to be medicated to keep him from thinking himself to death, from unconsciously willing his heart to stop.

The police didn’t think much of John’s anxiety attacks, and after the third one in three days, they just ignored him. But the other prisoners sharing the overcrowded holding cell weren’t so generous. They got tired of his incessant pacing and his continual mumbling; it was almost as if John was jogging around the interior of the day room while reciting some montonous jibberish about his innocence.

“The man just won’t stop,” a black man with blue tattoos complained to the guard.  “Give him a day or two,” the guard said, “his battery’s bound to run down.”

But somebody couldn’t wait and decided to pull the plug. Early Sunday morning, they found John Ackers dead in his bunk, apparently asphyxiated, probably with a pillow over the face.

*

A long time later, it was more than a year, an 18-year-old female sailor was raped and stabbed to death with a knife from her own kitchen at the Patio Iguana. During a search of Pat Cafferty’s apartment, police found a drawer in his bedroom dresser containing more than 100 assorted brasseries, along with 174 pairs of panties in various sizes and colors. In Cafferty’s tool box, they found a pair of pliers, a yellow-handled straight screwdriver, and an adjustable wrench, all etched with the initials, JA.

But there was no evidence connecting Cafferty to the murder of the teenaged sailor and he was not charged.

Last week, Cafferty moved to Las Vegas, where he’s managing the Roulette Wheel Apartments.

Questions without answers

The world I find myself in for a while is as littered with unanswered and maybe unanswerable questions as Bourbon Street in the New Orleans French Quarter on a Mardi Gras morning (which I have experienced up close and personal). Over the years I have tried to cull my personal list down to the top five thousand, but it's hard. Here I offer just the cream off the top of those thousands, in hopes one of my readers will assuage my confusion and help me to reach my eternal reward just slightly more satisfied. Not presented here in order of importance or relevance, simply randomly, here are a few from the top section of my list.

* Why is it flagrantly and absolutely impossible for people to simple be nice to one another?

* If there happens to be an actual god, even close to the sort usually described in the superstitions of religious texts, why is that god always pissed off and wanting to do harm to us?

* Why is the architecture offered from all communist governments uniformly ugly?

* Why do so many car drivers lay on their horns for no obvious purpose or result?

* Why do so many people cheat as often and as much as they can?

* Why do we lie so flagrantly to one another?  Not the little your hair looks nice honey lies, but the really big things?

* Does dead feel like anything at all?

* Is it something debased in human nature in general that within seconds turned the World Wide Web into a dank, smelly, embarrassing cesspool?

* What could possibly induce any person with a tenth of a working mind to want to commit suicide?

* What genetic defect makes a Republican?

* Why do we have to die?

* Does Dick Chaney really believe his own bullshit?

* Why didn't the Jews swept up in Hitler's holocaust rise up and kick the shit out of the Nazis?  (Maybe the memory of this is what drives Israel today to take no shit from anybody?)

* Why are men abjectly fascinated with the female breast?

* Why isn't the preponderance of ignorance in the world considered to the the most important health issue of all time?

* Why don't the poor, who comprise 97% of the world's population, rise up and get the rich straightened out on things?

* What can people who pray possibly be thinking they are achieving?

* Why are so many men so fascinated with guns that one would think they are having oral sex with the barrels in the privacy of their bathrooms?

* What happened to Africa after 5000 BC?

* Why isn't what's patently obvious obvious to everyone?

There's twenty or so from my top five thousand. Anyone want to help me out?  I sometimes lay awake at night wondering about these things.  Help me get at least one good night's sleep.

Oh, one final one,

* Sarah Palin?

Interesting discussion with Tom Conoboy

Tom Conoboy's blog has two posts that I find interesting to consider and discuss, one on the release of the Lockerbie bomber, the other on rationalism vs. spiritualism. If any of the readers here might be interested, just follow the link.  There is a lot of good reading with stimulating ideas on Tom's blog, not just these two current posts. I strongly recommend it.

 

My father

In the spirit of equal time and fair play, something about my father, who died quite long ago ... 1970. In this picture, he was in his twenties, about the time he left the ice company (he delivered ice, when there were iceboxes, before refrigeration in homes), and got a lease on a small, side-of-the-road gasoline station out on the edge of town.

I have little to no information about these old photographs, which were in a shoebox, but I suspect from the background that this picture was taken about the same time, if not at the same time, as the first one in the post below. Maybe he was expressing his pride over his brand new boy?  Or getting a service station lease? Or just cocking around.

He played football in high school, and that seems to have been just about all he got from those educational years, and he did not graduate. Like my mother, he was born into a large family on the outskirts of a podunk Arkansas town. He went into the army during World War II, but, as far as I know, served only at a post in LIttle Rock, where he was a truck mechanic. That may have been due to his age; born in 1908, he would have been pushing his mid-30s when the war began.  This picture was taken during those war years, with my mother, and judging from the corporal stripes, he had been in for a while by then. I wish they had written some information on the back of photos.

The most enduring memory I have of my father is that he was always at work. He took the first service station and used it to get another, and another, and another; he bought a tree farm, three houses he rented out as investments, and had a Texaco products distributorship for the area. By the time I showed up on the doorstep, he was doing well and I would live something of an upper middle class life, such as things were in the hicks.

I know almost nothing else about him. He worked. In my memory, he closed his businesses and did not work on Xmas day, and the day his mother died. We took maybe three holidays as a family in my life, the last one of those when I was about ten years old.

He left for work no later than 6 a.m., and returned no earlier than 6 p.m., everyday but Sunday, and even some Sundays. At home, we ate supper right away, and he downed his in minutes. Then he spent some time cleaning oil and grease off his body, and after that he descended into his Lazyboy recliner with the newspaper and, after I was twelve, the addition of a television set. He liked Ed Sullivan (unless a black entertainer was being featured), Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Gunsmoke, and Ponderosa. He did not like drama or news; he had the newspaper for news and, he said, life offered plenty enough drama. I have no idea what he might have meant, because I thought he lived the most sedentary and repetitive life I could imagine.

He smoked fanatically, at least three packs of Camels a day. Once, I was maybe seven or eight years old, he blew up one of his gas stations and a good deal of himself (and most of his hair) because he had a Camel hanging from his lips while pumping gas into a car. I visited him in the hospital and learned fear, the fear of permanent loss. I don't know if I learned much of anything else from him.

I always thought the photo to the right looked a little obscene. You know what I mean.

My father was a bigot and stuffed with the most astonishing prejudices. This is nothing particular or special; he was nothing more nor less than a man of his time and his place. I have called this geography as ontology in a book. In fact, my next book is largely about my father and the place where he and my mother took me. That book is called "Island in the Pines," which comes from this description of the time where I spent the first seventeen years of my life:  After all, Magnolia was just another of those junk-cluttered, ramshackle, unconsciously ugly roadside hamlets lost deep within the evergreen forests like atolls in a great green sea, islands in the pines, one of those curious, mysterious southern towns that appear and disappear around curves in washboard roads like dead skunks in ditches.

I know why my father and I were estranged, and why I did not see him or speak to him during the last four or five years of his life. I became involved in the civil rights movement in the south during the 60s, which lead to a violent confrontation with both my father and some of his good old boy cronies, and I left home never to return. I was living in Hawaii when he died and did not hear about it until he had already been buried.

He died from a brain aneurysm at the age of 61. I have outlived him by three years. This photo is how I remember he looked when I was in high school. I do not have a picture of how much he had deteriorated in his last years. I also have no pictures of us together, after I was five years old.

A blood vessel busting in his brain is what happened at the end, but what killed him was chronic disappointment, having a son who became, in his words, a nigger lover, and my mother leaving him.

She left him for another man, a man she had been having an affair with for years during her numerous business trips related to a side business she had distributing bulk beauty supplies. She left him because it was not in him to show love or affection; displaying such things was as alien to him as ... well, having a son spending most of his time working in the civil rights movement. What he understood was work and money, and they filled up his world.

But he loved my mother (and probably me, too), and when she left him and then I left him, he went from being a teetotaler to a pill-popping alcoholic, and that is what killed him -- loss, grief, sadness, and unrequited anger.

I wish he could have known how I turned out. I was 25 years old when he died, living in Hawaii with a whole bunch of dark-skinned people.

Mom & Me

My mother died ten years ago, in 1999, while I was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and I did not return for her funeral to San Antonio, Texas, where she had been living the last decade of her life. The photo to the left is the first photo ever taken of me (in the late summer of 1945), in my mother's arms. I was adopted at the age of six months, and judging from my apparent age in this photo, it had to have been taken at that time, maybe the first day or the first week of my life with her. I found this photo in a box and there is nothing written on it; obviously I wouldn't remember where the photo was taken, but nothing in the picture looks like anything around the house where they took me to live at summer's end. Maybe I was being displayed for relatives?

Of course I don't remember anything from the year of my birth. I think anyone who claims memory from birth is mistaken or fantasizing. I could be wrong about this -- there's no way to prove it.  There are people who remember more, and more thoroughly, than others; I am not one of those. I have a wonderful abundance of memories, but they exist in a real mess of time, place, possibility, fantasy, and lie. That I was born at all is acknowledged by my presence in the world; that I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the 18th of February, 1945, is a less substantial fact. The only record is a suspect birth certificate filled with prima facie lies -- the names of my "parents" (who were in fact not my biological parents), their address, my newly adopted name, maybe even the hospital in which I was alleged to have been born. Such information had to have been added to the certificate at least six months later, at the time of my adoption from the Baptist Orphanage in the town of Monticello.

I have wondered if I was given a name when I was born, if the woman who gave birth to me ever saw me. Was I held, fed at a breast, loved?

The photo (right) is about six months after the photo (top), and I was a year old. My mother came from a large family of dirt poor farmers and grew up in the sticks outside a southwestern Arkansas village called McNeil. She was a pretty girl and acquired some of the vanity pretty girls in tiny towns sometimes have. She became a nurse and was working in that occupation when I came into her world. Later, she left nursing and opened a beauty shop, where she spent quite a bit of time with her own beauty.

They named me after my father, Henry Donigan Merritt, Sr. But he was called Bill and I was called Donny; both of us probably hated the name Henry; I did, for sure. I didn't much like Donny, either. I wanted a studly name, like Scott or Anthony. They took me to a little town just a few miles further down the pine-lined highway from McNeil. I grew up there, in the inappropriately named Magnolia, a southern boy in a hick town in the middle of the 20th century; until the age of seventeen, when I left and never lived there again.

I knew very little about my mother's life (and far less about my father's). Both my parents worked ferociously, both in their places of business six days a week, twelve or more hours a day, and rarely taking a holiday off or a vacation. I was raised in those early years by a black nanny-housekeeper named Naomi. I thought Naomi was my mother until I got to kindergarten and was informed of the real situation by playmates. Naomi even let me call her mommy when no one else was around. It did not occur to me to take notice that she was as black as coal and I as white and blond as a little viking.

We were not estranged, my mother and I, although she might have occasionally thought so; according to my sister, our mother favored me to a fault and was madly in love with me; I don't know if that is true or jealousy of some kind. Yet, after I left home in my late teen years, I had only rare contact with her (and less with my father, whom she would divorce when I was in my early twenties). Now I cannot say why; it just happened that way. But then, I had virtually no contact with anyone, including my parents and sister and school chums, ever again; I can't say why, there seems to be no significant or noticeable reason.

I had a charmed childhood, was not abused, was generally playful and happy and given everything I desired by parents who clearly worked themselves to death for me, and no one can be faulted for my emotional separation and physical departure; I have the DNA of a loner and vagabond.

In the picture left, I am kindergarten age. We are in the drainage ditch that ran alongside our house -- that is the breakfast room off the kitchen in the popout -- which was my favorite playground at least until I stopped playing in mud.

Mom was still a nurse at the time of this picture; I don't remember when she left nursing (she was a private nurse working in a doctor's clinic) to open her beauty shop, but I was likely older than ten. Her name was Wilma, and that was the name of her shop until after a few years she took on a partner and expanded; her partner, Marie, was the mother of my best friend, Bob.

That beauty shop is still there, in the same building, essentially unchanged since I last saw it well over forty years ago. The owner is a woman who apprenticed herself to my mother as a teenager, and now, a woman of age, she owns the shop and runs it identically to the way my mother did. (I went to my 45th high school reunion a year ago -- and wrote a post about that journey elsewhere here -- and visited the beauty shop at that time.)

I did not see my mother but maybe half a dozen times between the age of twenty and forty-something. This photo is from one of the rare times we found ourselves in the same place at the same time -- the wedding of my oldest daughter, her first of two granddaughters, and the grandchild on whom she showered the abiding love and favoritism she wanted me to have.  I don't know how old she was in this picture, about seventy-three or four.

My father spanked me from time to time, and I have no doubt each time deserved, but only once did he strike me in the face, I was high school age. I was arguing with my mother over something inconsequential enough to be utterly forgotten, when I screamed at her that I hated her and wished she had had her own child and not adopted me. That was not, is not, true in any sense, and I deserved being knocked to the floor out of my chair. I came to learn and understand many years later that I had wounded her irrevocably.

My mother got pregnant once, and it ended when the fetus ruptured her fallopian tube and she had a hysterectomy, thus the adoptions of my sister and me, some three and a half years apart.

I don't know what she thought of my books, I had published five novels before she died; I don't even know if she actually read any of them. We never talked about my writing. The son of her business partner, Bob, did tell me that he knew she told everyone of her customers when I had a new book out.

She married again after divorcing my father, and her husband, Paul, doted on her, treated her like a princess, and I think she was happy during most of her life. But I believe that she always wondered why she felt estranged from me, why I was not the typical loving and caring son, and had she done something wrong, and did I really love her ... ?

This is the last time I saw her. I can't even remember what year. In the mid-90s, a few years before she died from congestive lung disease, the obvious and inevitable result from decades of breathing in hair spray and the fumes from "beauty chemistry." Yes, she does look good for a woman in her Eighties. She went to a beauty shop every week of her life. Beauty is what she had, the way I always knew that words are all I have.

When we go about listing our regrets -- and if you claim to have none, then either you are lying, deceiving yourself, or you have had no sort of life at all -- that I did not often and explicitly show my mother how much I loved her and how honored I was that she chose me among all others to love and care for and make a life for, is at the top of my very, very long list.

If your mother lives, go hug her for me.

Reading biographies

Because I am (finally) immersed in a new work (of fiction), I read almost entirely biographies. There is a subtle, unconscious creeping, or leaking, between novels, I believe, so avoid reading any while working on my own. Whatever natural spillover there is from what my mind has absorbed during a reader life that has so far lasted more than half a century, I cannot say. I'm just trying to avoid the fresh stuff.

(The current exception to this is that my bedside table book is Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. Anyone who knows me or has read my novel, Possessed by Shadows, knows of my mountaineering interests.)

A couple of weeks ago, I finished a biography of John Cheever, by Blake Bailey -- Cheever: a life. I liked it, and didn't. I mean, it was awfully well written and researched, but I have always liked Cheever's writing; I didn't want to know that I don't like Cheever. His life story perpetuates the notion (myth, I think) that writers are alcoholic, sexually dubious, chronic whiners and general assholes. I thought of quitting the book time and time again, but finally read it to the end. I can only recommend this for its gossipy qualities; there is very little about Cheever, the writer. It's one of those "I wish I had not" sort of reads.

I am currently reading another in Reynolds Price's series of memoirs; it doesn't really count as a biography.  It is called Ardent Spirits. I've read something more than half of it, so far. The title, Price explains in a preface, comes from a visit to Thomas Jefferson's home, where a guide said that Jefferson "kept very few ardent spirits" among his wines. Ardent spirits turns out to be hard liquor. I am a fan of Price, especially his novel, Kate Vaiden. There is nothing here that would cause me to develop a bad taste for Price, although it is not a biography, it is a memoir, so not likely to dredge up the usual writerly dirt that is always available in our lives.

I just finished a biography of the Wittgenstein family (as in Ludwig). It is called, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. I have read all of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical writings, and a biography or two about him, but this one is more about his family -- parents, brothers and sisters. Also about the the early years of the 20th century in Vienna, which interests me, as well, especially as depicted in one of my favorite novels -- Robert Musil's, The Man Without Qualities.

Waiting on the table is a 2004 biography of Borges -- Borges: a life, by Edwin Williamson. (Notice who wrote this review.) I am not much of a fan of Borges's fiction, it is a bit too much on the surreal side for my tastes. But since I am living only a few blocks from where he lived much of his life in Buenos Aires, and since, well, it is Jorge Luis Borges, I'm going to give it a try.

When I return to reading fiction, I had intended to read again (for the 4th time, it would be) Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, but after coming across a sort of review on Tom Conoboy's highly-intelligent literary blog of Malcom Lowry's, Under the Volcano, I have decided to give it a second reading, some twenty years after the first. I am curious to see how it holds up over its time and over my time. I read it the first time on the recommendation of my then agent, Peter Matson, who told me it was the best book he knew for a writer to read. I can't remember if I agreed at the time, or not, but I do remember that I was stunned by it.

What are you guys reading?  And why?

Picture below is from a reading group in Hilo, Hawaii, and the photo is titled -- Happy Sexy Readers.  Couldn't have thought of a better title myself.  The photo to the right is just a little reminder of how sexy women look with a book in their hands, regardless of what position they are in.

Just creeping along ...

Creeping is not the same as floundering, and floundering is better than drowning, and creeping is better than both, but all in all, I wish I could race along like the hare for just a little while, see if I can remember what that was like.

I have been making something of a fetish of slowness, telling myself that slow is good, it makes space for concentration, for thinking things out, for 'getting it right," and all that; when in fact, maybe these are just rationalizations attempting to disguise a loss:  speed. Praising slow like a man without legs praises his arms.

In the old days, I remember that I would work for just as long as I could maintain my own interest, and that was always a few pages a day, everyday, and some days, and not all that rare, really, I would end a work day having moved forward 10, 15 pages. A few books later, I had to start establishing serious goals -- three pages today, sort of thing -- or maybe I wouldn't write anything at all; still I worked everyday. I don't know why or when the writer-hare in me got winded and slowed down.

I became a writer-tortoise. Steady, slow, but always moving ahead; writing a page a day was the new goal. And maybe taking off Sundays to goof around.

Now I am a writer-snail. A good day is a paragraph or two, a bad day is drinking wine with lunch so I will have an excuse to take a nap instead of taking up the pen.

I thought of this because yesterday I wrote the same sentence, consisting of nine words, ten times. Then I wrote the first two words of the next sentence before deciding that I really should go back and start the chapter again, after noticing that I had twice slipped into the past tense (the easiest of all ways to write) when everything else is distinctly in the present. The chapter that needs to be started again is chapter 5, but the chapters are mostly short, and chapter 5 begins on page 28. I have been working on this story for more than two months now, and there are only 30 pages I will probably keep. Guess that's an average of half a page a day, so stop bitching!

This has no point. I am just sharpening some pencils, dusting the bookcases, taking a walk, whistling a tune, drumming my fingers, cleaning my glasses, getting another glass of water, charging the phone battery, looking out the window ... .

Digital books? The end of real books?

The following article is from the Times (London) online and is two months old, but I just saw it when a friend forwarded it to me. If you are a writer and/or a reader, you might find this both interesting and provocative, as I did. This could set up a useful debate between the digital fans and the paper fans. I wonder how much of the debate divides by age? How much are we more or less a product of our experience, of what we are used to?

I am not particularly opposed to print-on-demand books, because at least the result is a book. What I am more dubious about are "books" that appear only as pixels in cyberspace. I am trying to understand what "publishing" means when the work "published" does not exist in any tangible form? Are pixelated dots floating on a tv-like screen the same as a book, books like those in the picture above? Is there a consequential difference? And how is a pixel writer to be paid for his work? Are artists in the future going to offer their work free? Nicely social and egalitarian, but then, if artists are to offer their work for free, what do they do about things like eating and paying the rent?

I find questions like these to be haunting.

My writing is published in books, and anyone can get any of those books from most bookstores and, of course, Amazon. You buy a book, I get something around $2.50 from the sale, depending on the cover price. This webblog, except for its marketing value, is work for free; I get nothing from it. That is one of the reasons it feels to me like play or goofing around, while anything I do seriously is destined for publication. But am I a dinosaur that just hasn't bitten the dust yet?

Here is the article in full, the link to it is above.

The decline and fall of books

Traditional bookshops are closing; vending machines are churning out novels; and e-books are the new paperbacks; so is this the final chapter for the book industry?

Nicholas Clee

 

Like so many prototypes of supposedly revolutionary inventions, the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) fails to impress. Sited in a branch of Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road, London, the machine resembles an oversized photocopier with extra bits. Can this be part of, as a Blackwell's executive has claimed, “the biggest change since Gutenberg”?

It is an attractive idea. Wouldn't it be marvellous to go into a shop knowing that if the book you wanted was not in stock, you could get it printed specially for you? Or that you could browse the catalogue and get copies of whatever you fancy in minutes. Blackwell's claims that the EBM offers 400,000 titles, which are digitised texts from libraries and other sources. On receiving an order, the machine takes about 20 minutes to set up the file and then prints a perfectly acceptable paperback book in five minutes. A 400-page book costs about £9. Those produced from digital files look good; those produced from books that have gone through a scanner look a bit rough.

On May 6, Amazon unveiled a new Kindle e-reader (a widescreen version of the handheld device for reading electronic books). “You never have to pan, you never have to zoom, you never have to scroll. You just read,” said Jeff Besos, Amazon's chief executive, at the New York launch. It is yet another indication that the book industry could do with a new way of distributing and selling books.

Booksellers are struggling to make a go of shops with large ranges of slow-turning stock, and they are paying prohibitive rents. Leading publishers are gambling scary sums of money on books by top authors and celebrities and struggling to underpin their lists with less glamorous titles. Authors, unless they are talented or lucky enough to make the bestseller lists, look on as these firms' ever fiercer battles over dwindling margins eat into royalty payments.

No doubt future generations of the EBM will be less clunky. Then the machine will be well adapted to conform to the theory advanced by Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail. Businesses would thrive, Anderson argued, by supplying deep ranges of items, many of them selling in small quantities to niche audiences. Amazon is an example. The internet retailer promotes bestsellers heavily, with deep discounts. But it really scores in offering a huge catalogue of titles - many more than a terrestrial bookshop can stock. Even more profitable is Amazon's Marketplace business, through which it acts as a middleman for sellers of second-hand and out-of-print books.

The effects of Amazon's activities can be seen all around Blackwell's on Charing Cross Road, once the heart of London bookselling. Now only Foyles, Borders and Blackwell's remain. Blackwell's specialist neighbour, Sportspages, is long gone. Another specialist, the crime and science-fiction bookshop Murder One, closed recently, blaming competition from the internet. The art booksellers Zwemmers and Shipley have disappeared too, and the women's bookshop Silver Moon survives as a department within Foyles. Murder One was a great shop to browse in. But even the most conscientious supporter of independent bookselling must have found Amazon too tempting to ignore. Buy from Amazon and you start getting recommendations of new titles. If you made a trip to Murder One you could not be confident that, for example, every title in Andrew Taylor's Lydmouth series would be there; they are all on Amazon, though some are second-hand.

A visit to Blackwell's on a weekday afternoon illustrates another problem for terrestrial booksellers. There are fewer than ten customers in the shop. They have the run of thousands of square feet of selling space and of thousands of titles. Many of these titles attract buyers just two or three times a year; and those long-awaited sales may bring in no more than the price of a paperback. Meanwhile, Blackwell's is paying premium rents.

Booksellers have managed to make profits from this bizarre business model by balancing new titles, which sell quickly, with deep ranges of stock. The bestsellers pull in customers and generate instant turnover and profits; the backlist ensures continuing custom. The problem now is that profits from the bestsellers have sharply declined. The abandonment of retail price maintenance on books in 1995 allowed supermarkets and Amazon - the only retailers to achieve substantial growth in their book businesses in the past few years - to discount bestselling titles at levels that specialist booksellers struggle to match. As a result, independent bookshops have largely given up selling celebrity memoirs and other mass-market titles. Waterstone's, as the biggest bookseller in the country, has to try to compete, but by offering far deeper discounts than it would like. In its last set of financial results, Waterstone's profit margin was less than 3 per cent. Its latest strategy is the “Discover” campaign, an effort to promote its shops as unrivalled places to find expected or unexpected gems.

From the producer's end, the economics of the book business are just as challenging. The leading publishing houses are international giants, hungry for bestsellers, which are very expensive to acquire. Last autumn, Transworld had a huge hit with Paul O'Grady's memoir At My Mother's Knee. This spring, the company signed up a further volume from the chat-show host, but reportedly had to double its previous advance, to £2 million - because O'Grady, or his agent, wanted to match the sum that Dawn French had received for her memoir, Dear Fatty. So Transworld has paid twice as much for a book that will probably sell half as well. Another company found itself similarly penalised for success: to buy a second novel by the author of an unexpected bestseller, the publisher was asked to pay a sum equivalent to the profit it had made on her first book. It meant that the new book was almost certain to be unprofitable unless it reproduced the earlier success. It didn't.

In spite of the scary economics, celebrity books and other blockbusters have made a lot of money for publishers in the past few years. Will our appetite for such books be as strong in a credit crunch? It must be doubtful. Publishers are praying that the trend can survive, however, because the economics of the rest of their businesses is also looking dodgy.

The publishing model has a lot in common with the bookselling one: in theory, the bestselling titles bring in the turnover and profits and the rest of the list provides the bedrock of the business. But publishing the so-called “midlist”, or any book that does not come with some kind of marketing angle, has become more difficult. A book has to be “promotable”: the author will be young and attractive, or have an interesting CV; the work will tell an extraordinary story. Biographies of literary figures outside the top rank, or novels with undemonstrative virtues, do not cut it.

The reason why Tindal Street Press - an Arts Council-funded imprint in Birmingham - was able to publish Clare Morrall, the Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, and Catherine O'Flynn, the Costa award-winning writer, is that no big publisher saw the potential of these authors' novels. (They do now: Morrall is with Sceptre and O'Flynn with Penguin.) Some acclaimed authors have moved to small houses: Maggie Gee (formerly HarperCollins), for example, is now with Telegram Books, and Tibor Fischer (formerly Chatto & Windus) is with Alma Books.

Practices that have been normal in the book industry for years are becoming unsustainable. You pay an author an advance - say £15,000 - that is probably too large, even though it is too small as recompense for what may have been a year's work. You print 1,000 hardbacks and manage to sell 800 copies to booksellers. Lorries bring them to your warehouse and take them out again to the shops. The book gets a few reviews, but no recognition from prize jurors. Half of the copies come back and they, along with the 200 that never left, get pulped. A year later, the paperback comes out. Richard and Judy fail to recommend it, the booksellers do not select it for their three-for-two promotions. The lorries go to and fro again and more books get pulped. No wonder publishers are looking for new authors through low-cost ventures such as HarperCollins' Authonomy, a self-publishing website, and Macmillan New Writing, which pays no advances.

This is where digital technology, such as the EBM and electronic devices, including the Sony Reader, comes in. Printing thousands of books that sit in warehouses or on booksellers' shelves, only to be pulped, is unsustainable. But remember the long tail: there may be a demand, albeit “niche”, for these texts. It makes sense to create digital files that can be downloaded or printed according to demand.

This prospect causes book industry figures to look with alarm towards their counterparts in music, where digital downloading, legal and illegal, has caused turmoil. It seems that consumers expect digital books to be cheap. But giants such as Penguin and HarperCollins will not be able to remain profitable if all their books cost less than, say, £10; and authors' rewards from these books, unless sold in large quantities, will be trifling. Worse, many consumers expect digital content to be free. While digital piracy is a minor problem for the book industry, it will grow.

Perhaps the digital revolution will decentralise publishing and bookselling, as Gutenberg's movable type did in the 15th century. Publishing, printing and bookselling may come together again. Will the bookshop of the future consist of a few hundred bestsellers and a print-on-demand machine? At Blackwell's, such a prospect required an imaginative leap. The EBM would print only some out-of-copyright works and those only if purchasers knew exactly what they wanted. The customers' terminal in the store was not functioning: you had to ask the bookseller to search for a title. The copyrighted works that various publishers are making available had not yet come through, and there was no search function on Blackwell's website.

A Gutenberg-style revolution is not, on this evidence, expected in the next few months. But if you are a lover of well-stocked bookshops, then you should enjoy them while you can.

Nicholas Clee is the joint editor of the book industry newsletter BookBrunch and the author of Eclipse (Bantam Press)

 

Glover's kid makes music

I have written previously about Doug Glover. He is a Canadian writer who lives in the States mostly, and I think was the best writer among the 25 of us in my MFA class at Iowa. This is his website (not a blog): Doug Glover.

This is not about Doug, although you should get and read all his books. It is about his 15-year-old son, who instead of following in his Dad's path, has taken off on his own and decided to make music. Doug sent me this link to a Youtube preview of Jonah Glover's first CD, and you can listen to it here.

I am quite a bit too old for Jonah's sound, but I suspect that many of my readers will like it.

So give it a try. Maybe one day you will be able to say, oh, I heard Jonah a long time ago, when he was just starting out.

Rethinking the Iowa Writers Workshop experience

Just read this essay-review by Louis Menand in the June 8-15 issue of The New Yorker. Using a review of Mark McGurl's book, The Program Era, Menand goes into a lengthy and quite interesting reverie about writers workshops and the writers who have attended them and taught in them. The title of Menand's piece is: "Show or Tell (Should creative writing be taught?)"

The "should" instead of a "can" in the subtitle gave me pause. I have elsewhere here offered my opinion that elements of essential writing craft can be taught, and quite obviously is taught, beginning in first or second grade of elementary school, but if by creative writing is meant when that leap is made from being able to write a coherent sentence to the artful act of story-telling with sentences, the creative part of writing, then I stick to my opinion that creativity of that kind is not taught, cannot be taught. Therefore, "should" is irrelevant. Not different from stating that I should flap my arms really hard and fly to Saturn. Should ought to imply can.

Menand opens by stating: "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem." Change poem to story or novel and the theory remains unaltered.

At Iowa, he explains, the theory is somewhat different, in that the Workshop (staff) makes no claims to teaching writing; the purpose is to encourage writing. It is assumed that if you made the intense cut for acceptance into the program, you are already a good writer.

I applied to, was accepted, and attended the Iowa Writers Workshop between 1980 and 1982. There were 25 students accepted that year (into fiction, with another 25 in the poetry workshop), and, I was told, we came from an applicant pool of some thousands. Is that possible? Regardless, I had no illusions that I was moving to Iowa City to "learn how to be a writer." I thought I had been a writer already by that time for well more than a decade; they would not have even accepted me if I wasn't already a writer. What I wanted to be, and what I hoped Iowa would open opportunities for, was an author; if that failed, the fallback position was the MFA, a terminal degree in a talent field which would allow me to try to find a teaching job somewhere. I did not find garret-living attractive.

I became an author the same year I finished the MFA, so I never did end up using the degree to "teach" writing. And I do credit my attendance at Iowa for opening the door to my career as an author. I got from the program precisely what I hoped to get: an agent and then a publisher.

But, in spite of the Iowa theory that the workshop existed solely to support writers so they could write, there was this insidious little notion that persisted among some members of the staff that students who had never published a word were going to help other students who had never published a word to become published novelists. All our instructors were published writers, some with novels and some with story collections, but they acted in workshop sessions more as traffic cops than teachers; their task being to help move the critique sessions (students on students) along when things bogged down, and to help mop up the blood when students cut each other's throats.

A writer I know recently sent these lines to me in an email (and I hope he won't mind if I use them here):  "Almost all the workshop advice that I've ever received has been aimed at excising those elements of my prose that I feel make it distinctive and alive.  Most of the workshop writers that I encountered wanted to sculpt other people's work to resemble their own -- or in some cases to cripple a text so that it didn't shine brighter than something they wrote.  I find that the stack of books on my desk offer plenty of advice without the snarkiness and sly malevolence."

I participated in Iowa workshop sessions as little as possible, because, like my friend above, after watching the blood sport that workshop critiques are like, I couldn't see any useful purpose in diving in headfirst. I saw my attendance in workshop sessions as essentially a necessary aspect of having accepted the offer to attend, and a prerequisite to getting the degree.

There was in my day one notable exception, Don Hendrie, Jr. He died a young man in 1995. He had published a couple of novels and a few story collections with small literary presses, and I have now read everything he wrote. He was an awfully good writer. He was also the best teacher I had at Iowa. Not so much because of how he moderated the workshop sessions, but because he actually read carefully what we submitted, and in private sessions in his office, taught me what editing is, the power of writing a story word by word, sentence by sentence, rather than in some great free-writing leap, which I was inclined to do in those days. (I rather fault drugs and alcohol for this.) If you read Don Hendrie's books, and you should, you can find them by Googling his name, you will see that he was passing along to anyone he thought good enough, what he was doing in his own work. He wasn't teaching craft, he was offering a way to think about craft that he had already figured out through his own trial and error work.

I think Don Hendrie, Jr. was as rare a find as the Iowa program itself was in those days, but as I do not think Iowa remains; it's prestige and value likely not lasting as long as Don did. The point of programs in creative writing has been so diluted that the original Iowa experience simply may no longer exist -- gone with manual typewriters, mimeograph machines, and pens on paper. Menand says in the article that in 1975, just five years before I entered the Iowa program, there were only 15 degree-granting creative writing workshops in the country. Today, he notes, there are 153 MFA creative writing programs.

I am a small is better kind of person. I much prefer small publishers to large. I detested my author experiences with huge publishing companies (see the post below this one). I am in love with my small publisher. Being one of ten offers a kind of intensity and quality that being one of a thousand cannot. In this regard, I think that whatever value existed in creative writing programs before my day in the early 80s, when I attended one of fifteen, it was probably more valuable than what the same experience is today. There is as much logic and experience in this judgement as simple nostalgia for "the good old days."

On the other hand, put a dozen or so writers in one small university town, and the parties are going to be really, really interesting.

Why my career has a part one and a part two ...

I was sure I had done this somewhere here, but I can't find it, either. I hope this is not another Alzheimer's moment.

I have written posts about my first two novels: One Easy Piece and My Sister's Keeper. Left, is a photo of the cover of the third, first in a trilogy involving the same main character. This cover provides the first clue.

I began work on this novel, which was originally titled "The Last Island," in 1983, while living in Coronado, California, which forms the head of the peninsula making San Diego Bay. Coronado is, besides being a typical, and rich, California beach town, is also a military town -- the North Island Naval Air Station (where a carrier fleet docks) dominates the peninsula north of town, while the Naval Amphibious Base stretches along the beach strand to the south. The Amphibious Base is where the original "Frogmen" where trained, and has been the training base for the Navy's special warfare SEAL teams since they were formed in the early 60s, about the same time as the Army Special Forces. (It was a team of SEAL snipers who shot the three pirates holding an American ship captain off the Somalia coast a couple of months ago.)

My favorite bar in Coronado, only a few blocks from my house, was McP's Irish Pub, owned by a retired SEAL and hangout for all sorts of special forces people. I was there almost every day. These guys liked to tell stories when they thought they had a compatible and closed-mouth audience. During months of listening to these adventures, a story idea began forming (common trait of every writer I know -- stories appear everywhere). This idea became "The Last Island," over the next couple of years.

I wrote this novel in honor of and in the tradition of two of my favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Especially Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Victory, and Greene's A Burnt-Out Case. That was both the vision and the reality of the novel I wrote, which relied on a mix of various tales floating around McP's in those days.

My agent, who was (is, actually) one of the most famous and respected literary agents in NY, sold the mss to Bantam Books for a hefty advance. All is well.

Then I got a call from my Bantam editor, who said that in an editorial meeting, it had been suggested that "The Last Island" was quite a large book and the story had so much potential unrealized, even in that large space; so the editorial board wondered if I would make it into a trilogy?

I wasn't sure how I would do this, since I thought I had told the story I wanted to tell within the pages of the mss they had. But then, he added that they would triple my advance.  Holy shit! That was real money.

I had not made much money from my first two books and was more or less broke at that time. The idea of getting enough money to live on for years was nothing to scoff at. Even if I didn't know how I could write two more books about the same guy. Poverty won out over reason, and I signed the contract.

I had less trouble than anticipated by dividing my original mss into two parts, which became books one and three in the trilogy; the problem was the middle book, which I had to make up out of nothing to fill the space -- it is a pretty terrible book, which looks to me exactly like something made from nothing to fill some space.

Unless you are an author with the incredible power of blockbuster audiences, when you sell a mss to a publisher, they own it, literally. Most of them try to be accommodating to an author, but they believe that publishing is what they know, and writers ought to stay out of that part of it. (I don't entirely disagree with this.) The conflicts began. I saw Conrad and Greene, Bantam saw Rambo! (See cover.) They changed the titles on all three books -- the original titles, The Last Island, A Dark and Dangerous Place, and Among the Dead, became Hatch's Island, Hatch's Conspiracy, and Hatch's Mission. They chose Ramboesque cover designs, which I completely detested. And they marketed the books as a "men's adventure" series. I was thoroughly embarrassed by what the publishing factory had done to my work.

I thought the novel had been utterly ruined, and there was nothing I could do about it, but to back out of the process and absolve myself from anything to do with those books as published. I instructed my agent that I would never, no matter what the offer, let Bantam have anything I wrote. My feelings about my agent soured and I asked to be released from our contract. I was also soured on the entire "factory publishing" process I had experienced with Bantam. If this was what could happen to a novel, a work I spent years of my life, years of my psyche, creating, then, well ... fuck it. I quit writing for publication after the last of the Hatch trilogy came out in 1987. Because I still held an active Coast Guard Captain's license, I became a sailing instructor. Part one of my career as an author had ended.

I had been living in Europe during most of the decade of the Nineties, still writing, but only in journals, only ideas, only scene sketches, before the idea that became Possessed by Shadows so possessed me that I decided to write a novel again. When Kathy Green sold it to Other Press, I decided to use my full name, Donigan, for this and all future books, in order to separate that author in the Eighties from this author in the new century. Part two of my career as an author began with that book, which I finished in 2001, although it was not published until 2005. One of the reasons Kathy is a good agent, she actually listened to me when I complained about my previous foray into the publishing world, and spent quite a lot of time looking for a publisher where she thought I would be happy.

Now I believe that in spite of the reasons, the long break was good for my work. I am a far better writer now than I was thirty years ago; more patient, more demanding of myself, maybe even a bit wiser about themes. I seldom make explicit references to the work of the Eighties; as if I actually became a novelist brand new after 2000.

Interview with my agent

Here you can read a brief interview with my agent, Kathy Green. The photo shows us at a book launch party for The Common Bond.

We are a nice fit, Kathy and I. But we came together pretty much by accident.

The story, like all stories, has a background. I think of my career as an author as divided into two distinct parts. Part one occurred mostly during the decade of the Eighties, when I published five novels using the contraction of my name, Don, instead of Donigan. This was the decade immediately following my graduation from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and I had a different agent, one of the most famous and well-respected in the business.

The story of why part one ended at the end of the Eighties, and why I stopped publishing and broke with my agent, has been told here earlier, as I recall.

I stopped publishing anything I wrote during the Nineties, and instead taught philosophy for a university in Europe, and traveled widely, writing only in my ubiquitous journal.

Late in the Nineties, I began working on a story idea that was to become Possessed by Shadows, my first published book as part two of my career as an author began.

Because I had been away from publishing for a very long time and had broken all my ties with that aspect of a writer's life, I essentially started all over, as if I were a new, never published writer; sending out the usual query letters to agents I found in the usual places. Kathy was the only one of these to answer positively. In 2002, we met in a hotel restaurant for breakfast in Washington, DC, where I happened to be passing through between South Africa and Berlin, and discovered that we were comfortable with each other. (This is vital.)

It is nice to find some attention being paid to her with this interview.