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Behind the Book—MLPR, "Bathed in Pink"

2/25/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Just when you are feeling the peace, perfect peace that emanates from a cat, it gets up, goes out into the garden, turns into a long sinuous snake right in front of your eyes and starts to crawl up on some bird that you've begun to become acquainted with; and you have to start throwing stones or chasing it with a long stick; and all your participation in its smug enjoyment is turned into rage and indignation.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, from Winter in Taos
Born February 26, 1879

A Long Journey

This post concludes Behind the Book, a weekly series in which I've discussed the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts. And stay tuned. On March 12, I will begin a series of podcasts: each one will consist of a short reading—fifteen to twenty-five minutes—in which I share excerpts from many of the stories.

I’m not sure, but I believe "Bathed in Pink" was the result of a writing prompt I responded to at a writers’ workshop. It may have read something like this: “Write a story from the viewpoint of someone of the opposite gender, someone who is older than you.”

So . . . I selected . . . in some sense, my mother as a model. In her mid-sixties, my mother was hit with two health blows at once. She was diagnosed (as both her parents and one sister had been) with glaucoma. At almost the same time, the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis hit her full out. And she only lived a little more than another decade. I believe the strain of caring for my Down Syndrome sister for forty years had exhausted her to the point that it stymied her autoimmune system, and that in combination with ingesting methotrexate for her RA pain, her heart just gave out.

However, my character lives a much more robust life. My character has a dimmer view of both her sons than my mother may have had of me. One son calls her every day, usually when she’s about to sit down to a meal, during his lunch hour. The other son only calls when he wants something, usually to sit with her young grandchild, a girl—whom she utterly adores and will travel across town to see at the drop of a hat.

Her grandchild shares with this woman a narrative that she’s made on her “computee” by clumping together little animated duck characters, and yet the child has no idea that singing in your throat is called humming, what the old woman happily does while she’s looking over her grandchild’s shoulder.

The title comes from the last line of the story, as the woman speaks: “Your grandfather and I walked the streets of Madrid,” I say. “As we reached our hotel, I looked over my shoulder . . . and the street, every brick along the street was just like your room . . . bathed in pink.”

This story, which won an award in 2005 from the now defunct Tennessee Writers Alliance (I used winnings to buy a photocopy machine), never found itself a journal home, but now it appears as sort of a coda to my collection. And I believe it works rather well in that role. Short and sweet.

Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"

MARCH 12: MLPR Podcast 1 "A Certain Kind of Mischief"-Tune in!

New Yorker Fiction 2015

2/21/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Born February 22, 1892

Michael Marcelle

February 23 & March 2, 2015, Haruki Murakami, “Kino”: When Kino finds his wife in bed with a colleague, he divorces her and opens a bar. ¶ Kino’s bar is a quiet place located off the beaten path, where he shares his favorite jazz LPs with his clients. Odd characters enter his establishment: Kamita, a young man with a shaved head, who drinks weak Scotch and reads at the end of the bar; a woman with cigarette burns on much of her body, a woman with whom he sleeps once; and a gray cat with a lovely tail. ¶ One day Kamita “convinces” some rowdy men to leave the bar, and he also convinces Kino that he must vacate the premises for a while, take a long trip. For some reason Kino trusts the man and takes his advice. He travels a great distance only, at last, to come to grips with his heart’s hurts, its losses. This is one of the longest stories the magazine has published, but because of the author’s fascinating, engaging narrative, it passes as if it only takes a few minutes to read—one of the more interesting translations in recent years. Marakami’s most recent novel is Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
Michael Marcelle, Photographer

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book—MLPR, "Bathed in Pink"

The Heart's Journey

Behind the Book—MLPR, "The Age I Am Now"

2/18/2015

A WRITER’S WIT
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read—which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I'm told my books are on required reading lists.
Amy Tan, Author of The Joy Luck Club
Born February 19, 1952

An Ageless Pursuit

Behind the Book is a weekly series in which I discuss the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.

In the last decade I took several writing seminars from the writer Pay Houston. She would often begin by asking group members to take up to half an hour to write down several of what she called “glimmers.” Glimmers were either events that had happened in the writer’s life recently, or just as good, incidents or little narratives one had observed in his or her life. Again, as in “Killing Lorenzo,” I chose to weave together three strands that emanated from “glimmers” in my life.

The first glimmer involved a trip I made in 2004 to Majorca, Spain, for one of Pam’s workshops (nice, eh?). When it was over, I flew to the Netherlands to visit my relatives in s’Hertogenbosch in the southern part of the country (only an hour’s train ride, by the way, from Amsterdam). During that first week in November, all the Dutch media could talk about was the Bush/Kerry fight for president. But when Theo Van Gogh, great-grandson of Theo van Gogh, brother to the famous artist, Vincent, was assassinated, the country was in a huge uproar; it was all you saw on TV. My aunt, normally quiet and well-spoken, cried out in Dutch, “Jesus Christ,” upon hearing the news over the phone. I did not witness the event, as did my character, and perhaps the event doesn’t register as much shock with him as it does with the natives. But I believe both of us felt relieved that there was no delay at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, that we were able to get out of the country as planned.

Another glimmer occurred after I arrived home in Texas. I was at the gym one day and finished up my swim with a trip to the dry sauna. Indeed, two Asian women (I transform them into Koreans for the purpose of connecting with my narrator who is a Dutch/English/Korean translator) saunter into the sauna and commandeer the space by laying six towels each to make pallets. The rest, of course, I imagined. I was so upset that Bush had won again (not like the previous election, which my character refers to as the “the supreme court junta of 2000”), and I’m afraid my character becomes a mouthpiece for my rants from the period.

The third “glimmer” was handed to me by my partner, Ken, who had observed something quite odd one morning in Lubbock traffic. He said that he looked out his window while stopped at a light and observed a woman who opened her car door and lay a Styrofoam bowl of cereal in the street, where obviously cars would run over it. The nonbiodegradable substance would scatter somewhere across the West Texas landscape and get trapped, mostly likely, at the base of someone’s chain-link fence. If it made it into the landfill, it would molder for at least a million years. The narrative was so bizarre that, even though I didn’t observe it first hand, I claimed it as my own, embellishing it in every way possible. It is one more indignity my delicate character must suffer.

So . . . worldly Texas translator travels to Holland to work short term for Dutch government. Witnesses assassination of famous and controversial film director, Theo van Gogh. Meets and engages with beautiful Dutch woman. Back home in Texas, he observes Korean women taking up more space than he believes is necessary in the genteel arena of a dry sauna. And finally, he has an altercation in traffic when he sees a funny-looking woman lay a bowl of unfinished cereal on the pavement. He ends his story rather philosophically, trying to fit himself into the larger picture of life, something we all do from time to time.

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
“I was born in 1950, my grandparents in the 1890s, their kinfolk having related to them passed-on tales of the Civil War. That world is now as yellow as the Stone-cutters’ world, and it occurs to me that some day the time in which I live will be much the same for those who will have reached the age I am now. In an instant I jump up and flip on the floods outside my bedroom patio. Without a robe on, I slide the door open, and, in the stark, stabbing cold, I grab my hand shovel and dig six holes in the crusty soil. I quickly bury Lotte’s bulbs five inches beneath the surface. I mark the holes with flat vertical sticks that, in the light, shine like tiny grave markers. I mumble a little something over them and jump into bed, where, under the thick covers, I can barely breathe” (269).

The story was first published in Colere, a literary magazine run by students of Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"

A Nation Still at War with Teachers

2/16/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
“Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart."
--Bess Streeter Aldrich
Born February 17, 1881

My Book World

Goldstein, Dana. The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

More than any book I’ve read recently, this one is full of what I call “nuggets”—tidbits of information that are so astounding, so stupefying in their obviousness that they have flown under the radar for decades or even centuries of education in this country without due notice. Or else, as I suspect may be true of national, state, and local officials in control of educational funding, who could help, DON’T CARE.

[I use the term “loc” to indicate the place in my Kindle where one might find this citation; unfortunately, on this particular book, the publisher does not also indicate the page number from the hardcover edition.]

From the Introduction

“After all, one-fifth of all American children were growing up poor—twice the child poverty rate of England or South Korea” (loc 88). Yikes!

“Why are American teachers both resented and idealized, when teachers in other nations are much more universally respected?” (loc 96). Why, indeed?

“Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.” (loc 116-9). We’re all in good company!

“ . . . even the highest-poverty neighborhood schools in cities like New York and Los Angeles employ teachers who produce among the biggest test score gains in their regions. What’s more, veteran teachers who work long-term in high-poverty schools with low test scores are actually more effective at raising student achievement than is the rotating cast of inexperienced teachers who try these jobs out but flee after one to three years” (loc 134). Clears up a certain myth.

“Even we set aside the nearly 50 percent of all beginner teachers who choose to leave the profession within five years—and ignore the evidence that those who leave are worse performers than those who stay—it is unclear whether teachers are formally terminated for poor performance any less frequently than are other workers” (loc 155).

“But teaching employs roughly five times as many people as either medicine or law. There are 3.3 million American public school teachers, compared to 691,000 doctors and 728,000 attorneys. Four percent of all civil workers are teachers” (loc 166-7). Quite a statistic.

“We must focus less on how to rank and fire teachers and more on how to make day-to-day teaching an attractive, challenging job that intelligent, creative, and ambitious people will gravitate toward” (loc 218). Hear hear!

“Advocates for universal public education called common schoolers, were challenged by antitax activists. The détente between these two groups redefined American teaching as low-paid (or even volunteer) missionary work for women, a reality we have lived with for two centuries—as children of slaves and immigrants flooded into the classroom, as we struggled with and then gave up on desegregating our schools, and as we began, in the late twentieth century, to confront a future in which young Americans without college degrees were increasingly disadvantaged in the labor market and those relied on schools and teachers, more than ever before, to help them access a middle-class life” (loc 222-7). This missionary philosophy couldn’t be truer than in the state of Texas.

Chapter One: “Missionary Teachers”: The Common Schools Movement and the Feminization of American Teaching

Educator Catherine Beecher said: “[A] woman needs support only for herself” while “a man requires support for himself and a family,” she wrote, appealing to the stereotype that women with families did not do wage-earning work—a false assumption even in the early nineteenth century, when many working-class wives and mothers labored on family farms or took in laundry and sewing to make ends meet. Black women almost universally worked, whether as slaves in the South or as domestic servant or laundresses in the North. What was truly new about Beecher’s conception of teaching was that it pushed middle-class white women, in particular, into public view as workers outside the home” (loc 375-7).

Chapter Two: “Repressed Indignation”: The Feminist Challenge to American Education

“In 1850, four-fifths of New York’s eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state’s $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers” (loc 613).

[Goldstein uses the word “snuck” instead of “sneaked,” the past participle of the word sneak (loc 753). “Snuck” is largely slang. In the context of writing about education, the author should, I think, favor the more formal word, “sneaked.”]

Chapter Three: “No Shirking, No Skulking”: Black Teachers and Racial Uplift After the Civil War

“The federal government had acknowledged that the education of former slaves should be one of the major goals of Reconstruction, but Congress never appropriated adequate funding for the task, nor did it compel states to do so” (loc 906). What’s new?

Chapter Four: “School Ma’ams as Lobbyists”: The Birth of Teachers Unions and the battle Between Progressive Pedagogy and School Efficiency

“A study by education researcher William Lancelot explained how administrators could record a ‘pupil change’ score for every teacher by testing how much the teachers’ students knew on a given subject at the beginning and then the end of a term. (Today this calculation is called a teacher’s ‘value-added’ score.)” According to peer reviewer Helen Walker—as well as many of today’s critics of value added—the pupil change measurement ultimately had a ‘low relationship’ to true teacher quality, since so many factors beyond a teacher’s control could affect a student’s test score, from class size to family involvement in education” (loc 1457). Value-added: a fancy term for such a deadly practice!

Chapter Six: “The Only Valid Passport from Poverty”: The Great Expectations of Great Society Teachers

“What Coleman’s research really revealed was that compared to white students, the average black child was enrolled in a poorly funded school with less qualified teachers and fewer science and foreign language classes. Those black students who attended integrated, well-resourced schools, however, tended to earn higher test scores than black students in segregated schools, and reported feeling a greater sense of control over their lives” (loc 2014-6).

Chapter Eight: “Very Disillusioned”: How Teacher Accountability Displaced Desegregation and Local Control

“In Japan the average teacher earned as much as the average engineer; in the United States, teachers earned only 60 percent as much as engineer” (loc 2882). Tokyo, anyone?

Chapter Ten: “Let Me Use What I Know”: Reforming Education by Empowering Teachers

“When many teachers resign each year, institutional memory is lost, and ties to the community weaken. There are fewer veterans around to show newbies the tricks of the trade” (loc 4205). Makes sense, doesn’t it?

“But the latest research shows schools simply do not have an unlimited capacity to absorb and train first-year teachers, and that students suffer when they are assigned to a string of novice teachers in grade after grade” (loc 4213).

Epilogue: “Lessons from History for Improving for Improving Teaching Today

“Since these schools are now producing a huge oversupply of prospective elementary school teachers—in some states, as many as nine times more prospective teachers than there are jobs—states ought to require these institutions to raise their standards for admission or to shut down their teacher prep programs” (loc 4471).

I could go on citing nugget after nugget of truth, things that to me, as a former teacher, are so OBVIOUS, but to the general public, even educated people, might not be quite so apparent. I urge anyone unsure about the history of public school teachers in this country to read this book by Dana Goldstein. It is worth its weight in value-added teaching.

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book—MLPR, "The Age I Am Now"

New Yorker Fiction 2015

2/12/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.
Georges Simenon
Born February 13, 1903

This Maze is a Labyrinth

February 16, 2015, Amelia Gray, “Labyrinth”: A man named Jim agrees to enter the labyrinth that his friend Dale has constructed from a field of corn. ¶ This story is yet another New Yorker foray into the mytho-logical—this time, the Greek myth of Theseus. Jim enters as a mere mortal with a number of failings. But by the time he reaches the center of the labyrinth, he can hear people on the outside singing his praises. All along he’s carried a clay trivet with images of the Phaistos Disk on it, and as he reaches the center of the labyrinth, the disk seems to overpower him, taking him down, down, down. The narrative comes from Gray’s upcoming collection, Gutshot, due out in April.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Killing Lorenzo"

2/11/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin
Born February 12, 1809

Why Lorenzo Must Die

Behind the Book is a weekly series in which I discuss the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.

The author, Michael Cunningham, an openly gay writer who tackles much larger issues and populations in his stories and novels (The Hours was a huge literary success and a fine film with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep), is also known for tackling three issues or three characters at once in a sort of triptych format and braiding their narratives together into one. I went through a period in which I attempted to do the same, although I don’t believe I was imitating Cunningham; I simply liked the challenge.

In “Killing Lorenzo” I blend three narratives: one is about a gay man in his late fifties, who is fired from his job and returns to playing the pipe organ, an instrument he gave up when he was thirty. I take this narrative directly from my own life. I began studying the organ in eighth grade, earned a bachelor’s degree in organ, and also played until I was thirty. Part of my withdrawal was an issue of time. I’d become interested in writing and had to give up something in order to find the time to do so, and the thing I would give up couldn’t also be my teaching job. But more important, I’d finally decided I could no longer sit on an organ bench and (as much as I loved sacred and concert organ literature) contribute to an institution that, if it knew, would in some way persecute or at the very least criticize me. I know! Perhaps it was my duty to stay with it and try to change the course of the church. But I didn’t. Then in my fifties, after retiring, I timidly approached a friend who, as director of music of a very progressive church (like the one in “Ghost Riders”), lent me an organ key so that I could practice on a regular basis. Even in this accepting environment I went through the same agony. I no longer believed in the Church. How could I participate in its most sacred acts, when it failed to recognize my being, let alone the marriage of gay men? Once again, for good, I withdrew from its grasp.

A second strand of the story occurs, when this character (like Larry in “Basketball Is Not a Drug”) must undergo a prostate biopsy. Like women enduring the breast-squeezing torture machine to see if they have lumps, men who undergo this biopsy can also suffer a most painful and humiliating period in which they lie on a gurney-like bed to determine whether they have cancer or not. You don’t want to have untreated cancer, so you submit . . . in my case, three times in four years! The good news: all three had a negative result.

A PASSAGE FROM THE BOOK:

“In the days to come,” says my urologist, “you may see blood in your urine, your stools, especially your ejaculate. Here’s a towel. If you want to clean up, the bathroom’s through that door.” He and Nurse Barkley leave me damaged on the table.

There seems to be a ton of gel slathered across my bottom. I wipe and wipe and still, I can’t seem to get it all off. I sit up and stumble to the bathroom and lower my sticky self onto the toilet, trying to ignore what feels like a hot poker stuck up my ass. For ten minutes I wipe, filling one wad of toilet paper after another. I look down and almost gag. The bowl is full of blood. I reach back to flush, bursting into insane laughter that quickly turns to tears. Stanching them with a Kleenex, I fold another one and stick it between my cheeks. I pull my pants up and stagger to the door, out to my car. Again I laugh, because I’m never going through this again. Not as long as I fucking live.

A third strand of the story lets the reader in on a private party that the narrator and his partner are throwing in their home, during which they play a game. When I took classes from writer Pam Houston, she taught us a game called Two Truths and a Lie, in which a person tells two truths and lie, and the guessers must figure out the latter. Well, in my story I changed the game to Two Lies and a Truth because, as one character claims, “Going for the lie is so boring. Besides, for every situation there’s only one truth, so don’t you see, it’s more realistic this way.” Each character, before the story is over, reveals one “truth” that heretofore the others have not known, and some of these Truths cause, naturally, a bit of trouble.

I alternate scenes from each of these strands until the climax explodes across the pages. “Killing Lorenzo” was published in one of the last issues of Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, sadly, perhaps one of the best journals of its genre. In fact, the issue never came out as printed matter. If you have the right password, you can view a PDF copy of it online, but I was never able to access it.

Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2015

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"

LOOK FOR MY FIRST PODCAST IN EARLY MARCH. In it and the ones to follow I'll read excerpts from many of the stories in My Long-Playing Records. If you haven't been able to make it to any of my readings you will now have an opportunity to listen in!

My Book World

2/9/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
--Boris Pasternak, Author of Dr. Zhivago
Born February 10, 1890

Carol Morgan's Romance with History

Carol Morgan. Of Tapestry, Time and Tears. Morgan/CreateSpace, 2010.

This novel is largely a Romance, in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter--in which two people in love forge a life against the strictures of society. In this vein Morgan operates from an emotional stance to portray the life of her protagonist, Edwina Kleberg. Edwina evinces certain ideals, like the equality of all people, the revelation of truth in her writings as journalist, and the historical construct that if we do not learn from our mistakes we are doomed. But the most important thing Morgan does is to create a narrative that is difficult to put down once one begins to read it.

Briefly, Edwina’s father, Joseph Kleberg, a German immigrant, is orphaned in nineteenth-century Galveston, Texas, when a hurricane hits the Gulf coast. He makes it to adulthood and marries, and he and his wife produce two children: the protagonist Edwina and her brother, Paul. A good bit of the novel is about Edwina’s education and her work as a journalist in India during the World War II era. Edwina Kleberg is quite a daring writer, plunging into dangerous situations without thinking of her own safety, even posing as a nurse in order to get an important scoop—proclaiming a feminist stance before such a thing is widely popular. But journalism is only one career Edwina pursues, as she later opens and operates a school for many years—largely to be close to the man she loves.

A couple of important motifs arise throughout the novel, one in particular resonating from the title. At one point Edwina views a woman’s tapestries, and the woman tells her they are a metaphor, that when turned over the back is a jumble of threads, “like the times when we make mistakes. But those mistakes are necessary for the finished product” (237). The threads of Edwina’s life are indeed a jumble: she witnesses murder, mutilation, and violent political retribution; she bears a child out of wedlock in an era and a culture that are not very accepting; she descends into alcoholism when her longtime lover, Raj, a married man, is assassinated. Only many years later does she tell her son who his father is (although he has figured it out himself). Her life, her “jumble of threads,” ends in a rather spectacular way.

Morgan develops the narrative on through Edwina’s eighties. Ending with a tragic event, as the novel has begun, the author concludes by having Edwina go up in smoke along with the twin towers in New York—on her way to speak with her editor about publishing the autobiographical novel that it has taken her a lifetime to write. Yet Edwina’s death is one suitable for a person who has spent her life searching out and publishing the truth. The last sentences of the novel brings into use the other important motif, as two doves, a black one and a white one, descend on the ashes of 9-1-1 and one pecks the jewel from Edwina’s mangled ring, thus in some way continuing her life.

In spite of a few problems with presentation on the page, Of Tapestry, Time and Tears is a narrative that is as unforgettable as Gone with the Wind or The Thorn Birds! If you enjoy this combination of history, Romance, and heroism, you should enjoy this novel. Give it a whirl!

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book—MLPR, "Killing Lorenzo"

New Yorker Fiction 2015

2/5/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Io non odio persona alcuna, ma vi son uomini ch'io ho bisogno di vedere soltanto da lontano.

I do not hate any person, but there are men that I need only see from a distance.
Ugo Foscolo, Playwright
Born February 6, 1778

Morrison Makes One Think

Van Sarki

February 9, 2015, Toni Morrison, “Sweetness”: A sixty-three-year-old African-American woman with “light skin” narrates the story of the daughter she bears, one who is “midnight black, Sudanese black”—something that is quite a shock to her and her husband both. ¶ Morrison is such a master of language, weaving back and forth between the distant past, the past, and present as if all three are one tense. The story seems to explore, or at least hint at, the self-hatred that some so-called light skinned blacks have had for themselves in the past, yet also the self-hatred of the narrator, who can’t seem to decide what her place in the raising of her daughter is: “I wasn’t a bad mother, you have to know that, but I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her.” The narrator sounds as if she, abandoned by her husband and then her daughter, has one foot in the last century and one in this century—can’t decide whether she loves her “blue-black”-skinned daughter or merely tolerates her. Morrison’s writing is always a wild ride you must trust as you jump aboard. This story is a fragment from her novel, God Help the Child, which is forthcoming in April.
Van Sarki, Photographer

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD (I promise.)

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Snarked"

2/4/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on.
William Burroughs
Born February 5, 1914

Tweaking SnarkY

Behind the Book is a weekly series in which I discuss the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.

During the last ten years of my teaching career, I taught at a central-city high school that really housed two populations. Roughly one half consisted of the largely Mexican- and African-American students who lived in the neighborhood. The other half were students who transferred in from the mostly “white” part of town to take advantage of the academic magnet school that eventually gained Blue Ribbon school status, an award conferred upon the school by the US Department of Education. Many of our graduates matriculated at Ivy League schools, Stanford, Caltech, and other distinguished institutions of learning.

As a pre-AP and International Baccalaureate English teacher, I primarily taught students from the latter group (which also contained black and Hispanic youths, as well as Indians and Asians). A few semesters, however, I was called upon to teach “regular” classes, both during the Monday-Thursday schedule and on the shortened Friday schedule. This apparent racial division always bothered me. Prior to teaching high school, I’d worked in elementary education for seventeen years. There the nitty gritty of forced busing (the school board’s rancorous rhetoric) hit me every day, but with a certain sensitivity to both sides, we teachers were able help students see that it was a good thing to intermingle. It now seems to have been prophetic. Our larger world becomes more racially diverse each voting cycle, and yet I wonder where those former students of mine are today. Does race matter to them? Do they have a diverse group of friends? Might they, hope upon hope, still know some of the kids they became acquainted with when they were stuffed into the same classroom?

Anyway, this issue becomes background noise for the story “Snarked,” in which I take a term that widely means one thing (to be snarky is to be sharply critical, sarcastic) and turn it on its head to mean something else (a bit of onomatopoeia, in which “snark” becomes a nasal sound, snaaaark, acquired by one of the above populations to be obnoxious/the other group’s members are called . . . the fags). I write the story from the first-person point of view of a seventeen-year-old boy (a “fag,” but actually one of those many invisible heterosexuals) going to this El Centro, Texas, high school some time in the late nineties. Again, as in “Basketball Is Not a Drug,” I allow the young narrator to overtake my psyche. It is fun being “young” again. Having observed such behavior for ten years, I feel like I might be able to capture a certain insouciance, an arrogance that high school kids acquire until . . . uh oh . . . they’re suddenly pushed out into the big bad world on their own. Enjoy “Snarked.” I think it’s a lot of fun!

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
The fag girls feel sorry for me; the snark girls laugh behind their hands. Other fags offer me rides until I find an old Corolla my dad buys for me. The snarks . . . snark . . . make that obnoxious laugh as I walk to my new wheels. It’s said they patented the sound when a principal caught onto their yellow bandannas around the neck, trying to get around our no-can-do dress code. We can’t wear earrings either, so snarks invented this laugh that makes like a loud snore attached to the syllable “ark.” It’s such a great sound that even the fags imitate it when no one’s listening. If you want to make fun of one of your fag friends, you snark him, like this. Snaaaaaark! (227).

"Snarked" was originally published at FRiGG Magazine, an online journal that features (if I may say so) fine fiction.

Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2015

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Bathed in Pink"

A Long Journey

New Yorker Fiction 2015

The Heart's Journey

Behind the Book—MLPR, "The Age I Am Now"

An Ageless Pursuit

A Nation Still at War with Teachers

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2015

This Maze is a Labyrinth

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Killing Lorenzo"

Why Lorenzo Must Die

My Book World

Carol Morgan's Romance with History

New Yorker Fiction 2015

Morrison Makes One Think

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Snarked"

Tweaking SnarkY

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