Blog Archives

New Yorker Fiction 2014

11/30/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
My theory is that people who don't like detective stories are anarchists.
Rex Stout
Born December 1, 1886

The Cost of Contraband

December 1, 2014, Etgar Keret, “One Gram Short”: The Israeli narrator, wishing to impress a young woman, goes through some rather extreme machinations to procure some very illegal weed from a lawyer (who receives it as a prescription). ¶ To obtain small amounts of the contraband, he and his friend Avri must go to court and pose as part of the family the lawyer is representing. The two must protest vehemently against the Arab man whose driving has killed a young girl. But things go awry in such a setting, and even though the attorney lives up to his end of the deal, as the narrator does quite painfully, he and his friend come up short . . . of something. And the most important part of the deal, whether the woman the narrator wishes to impress will go out with him because he now has weed? Well, we’ll never know—the story fades quite abruptly—but I think we can make an excellent guess. Keret’s new memoir, The Seven Good Years, comes out in 2015.
Illustrator, Jason Booher

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, MLPR, "Ghost Riders"

Behind the Book: MLPR—"A Certain Kind of Mischief"

11/26/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.
James Agee
Born November 27, 1909

MLPR—"A Certain Kind of Mischief"

This story, “A Certain Kind of Mischief” is the most recent to be published, Spring of 2013, by Beloit Fiction Journal—a publication I’d been trying to break into for a long time. I was thrilled when I got the phone call from editor, Chris Fink, professor at Beloit College, Wisconsin, saying that he and his staff wished to publish it.

I seldom write stories “about” anything in particular—preferring to allow interesting characters to “create” their own story—but in the case of this one I did have a vague desire to write a story about “bullying.” I cringe every time local or national media publish another feature about a kid being singled out simply because he or she is an easy target (not always gay, sometimes just weak, small, or different in some way). I should have been bullied as a kid—I was skinny, not an athlete, took piano lessons, read five books a week—but for some reason my classmates liked me. Or at least they didn’t pick on me. The result was what mattered.

At first I didn’t know how to go about writing this story, but I was positive I didn’t wish to hit the reader over the head with the topic. I wanted the characters to enact the entire bloody mess, so I turned it over to them. Gave them a setting, a situation. And let them take it from there.

One of these Texas characters, Lenny, has a single father who’s a dentist. He’s a latchkey sixth grader with probably a bit too much freedom, and bit too much stuff. His mother has deserted them to become an artist in New Mexico. Five blocks over in this town of El Centro lives Brad, who’s father has also deserted the family. His mother, a drunk, still manages to work as a temp and as a spammer. On the bus ride home one day from middle school, these two boys strike up an unlikely friendship, if you want to call it that. Brad, an eighth-grader, right away threatens to kill Lenny for no good reason. In their spare time, before their parents arrive home from work, they engage in a number of “mischievous” acts, including harvesting a woman’s credit card number and using it to secure a number of expensive toys from a high end catalog. After they get the hang of it, they also order a stun gun. And . . . as the proverbial rule of writing goes, if a gun appears at the beginning of a story, you know what must happen some time before the end!

Seriously, the “toys” are only a vehicle for demonstrating the bereft nature of these middle-class boys’ lives. Neither one has learned to be a bully in a vacuum, and as you become acquainted with their single parents, you begin to see how, at least in this story, bullying can come about. As with any “issue” of the day, bullying has no simple explanations or solutions. I place it first in the collection because I think it might shake up readers and tease them into reading further. There are more interesting characters to come—each with his or her unique story.

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
"Not long after that, the garage opens, and I groan. My dad turns in the driveway and parks his F-150 in the left-hand stall. Dressed in gray slacks and a new pink tie, his white shirt wrinkled from a hard day of pulling teeth, he comes over and says, “What’s going on, boys?” He’s trying to sound casual, which, of course, makes it seem like he’s about to come unglued. “Yeah, well, I decided the lawn isn’t going to scalp itself.” He disappears into the house, but a whiff of his Eternity remains. A lady he once dated informed him he wore too much of the stuff, and he told me he dropped her like a hot patootie. In a few minutes, he stands at the door in a T-shirt and jeans and calls me inside. God, even after a full day, the cologne seems to envelop him like a cloud. I almost cough" (17).

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

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: BEHIND THE BOOK—"Ghost Riders"

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

Family Tree

11/24/2014

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A WRITER'S WIT
When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgement a world of pains.
Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy
Born November 24, 1713

The Stratton/Aikman Family

Cousin Anne Stratton Hilts has produced a fine history and family tree, and I would like to share it with family and readers at large here on my blog. You can read it by scrolling down or download the PDF file, which it listed below. —RJ

our_stratton_and_aikman_family_tree.pdf
File Size:	8052 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

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New Yorker Fiction 2014

11/20/2014

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A WRITER'S WIT
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Voltaire
Born November 21, 1694

Watson's Cul-de-sac

Leslie Herman

November 24, 2014, Brad Watson, “Eykelboom”: In what seems like a sub-suburban cul-de-sac of the 1960s South, Emile Eykelboom, aka Ikey, moves in from Indiana with his brute of a father and whisper for a mother. ¶ Mr. Eykelboom, who drives a dump truck, couldn’t be more abusive if he tried. The three McGowan brothers have Emile cowed for a while, but Emile is actually bigger than they are, and one day he snarls back, fights them off. Watson does a great job of recreating a period in our history in which parents beat their kids, especially if “they had a good reason.” ¶ The boys realize the difference, however. Mr. Eykelboom seems to enjoy abusing his son. After a neighborhood incident that leaves everyone on the cul-de-sac shaken, the Eykelbooms move away. To say any more is to say too much. Watson’s latest book is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. Illustration by Leslie Herman.

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Behind the Book: "My Long-Playing Records," The Story

11/19/2014

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Don DeLillo
Born November 20, 1 936

I knew the first week I was married that it was a mistake. I’d tied the knot mere weeks after I graduated from college in 1970, with a woman I’d courted for over two and a half years. Not only had I lied to the deepest recesses of my consciousness about being gay, but after proving to myself that I could adequately engage sexually with the beautiful young woman who had beguiled me into marrying her, six months or so, the novelty wore off, and I noticed I’d not lost my attraction to men—as the books about adolescence had indicated I might. Following a two-month honeymoon, during which time neither of us earned a dime, I entered seminary, and my spouse worked, first as a secretary and then as an elementary teacher, what she’d trained to do.

The next realization that came to me, three years later, was that I was never going to be a proper minister—that is to say, I was never going to throw myself under the bus for any deity. While I’d been raised a Methodist, attended a private church college, and was now enrolled in seminary, I didn’t wish to be awakened in the middle of the night by someone who told me she’d just taken a bottle of barbiturates; I didn’t wish to spend long hours counseling someone who didn’t really want to change; I didn’t wish to write fifty sermons a year and orate with the inspiration ascribed to Moses or other Biblical figures. For those few years I wasn’t a very happy person, not until I’d given up these two illusions—both of which had been instilled in me as a child, in slightly different ways—which were intricately woven together in their demands. I would neither remain married nor would I remain a minister.

The one element that probably helped me through much of my life was music, whether I played keyboards myself, sang in an ensemble, or listened to music. It tested my intelligence—the learning, memorization, and performance of new music. It teased my creative powers: bending the score to make it mine, while still being true to the notes and musical directions provided by the composer. But most of all, music provided solace.

In this story, “My Long-Playing Records,” all three of these elements—marriage, seminary, love of music—converge like storm clouds to deliver much needed relief to the protagonist, Evan Wiseman. I chose “Evan” because it’s a name I might choose if I were to rename myself, and “Wiseman” because of its obvious irony. Story writing, for me, often provides a bit of wish fulfillment. Unlike me—I would take another five years to unburden myself of a wife and three years to let go of an archaic obedience to religion—Evan figures things out by the end of the story. His wife (unlike mine, who would try to hang onto our pitiful union) easily sets him free, “a kind of benediction, really” (175).

Finally, this story provides much of the thematic material for the rest of the collection: fatherless boys or those who’ve had ineffectual male figures in their lives (and how fatherless can you get if you give up G-o-d?), souls who struggle with religion, yet always, with a certain soundtrack of music in the background. Nearly every character is influenced by music, either by way of his or her performance or by way of recorded music, whether it be an LP, cassette, CD, or a digital file.

Wearing Bose sound-reducing earphones makes music sound as if it’s playing between my ears. That’s how I wish for this book to hit the reader—between the ears. To belabor the metaphorical talk, may the stories strike a chord in you, whether you’re old or young, gay or straight, white or a person of color. “My Long-Playing Records” is buried in the middle of the collection, providing its “spine,” if you will. You can read it first or in the content order. Either way, I think you’ll appreciate its properties as the title story.

MLPR—The Story

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
"He grunted, cradling me in his musky arms, and I hummed along with the ballad singer, a woman with a soft whiskey tenor. It was a voice I could never grow tired of, a warmth I could never reject, no matter how many times I heard the song, no matter how many times the red label made thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, the turntable clicking to a stop when the song was over" (167).

This story first appeared in Boulevard, rather tangentially associated with Saint Louis University in Missouri.

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

NEXT TIME:
NEXT THURSDAY: BEHIND THE BOOK: "Ghost Riders"

CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records

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New Yorker Fiction 2014

11/14/2014

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A WRITER'S WIT
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J. G. Ballard
Born November 15, 1930

November 17, 2014, Dave Eggers, “Alaska of Giants and Gods”: Josie, thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, leaves her husband and profession as a dentist behind to begin a new life with her two kids in Seward, Alaska. ¶ Eggers is an individualist, writing the way he wishes to, for example, occasionally wending his way into the third person omniscient. Contemporary writing teachers sometimes refer to this practice as head-hopping, particularly when amateurs do it, but Eggers performs this magic with aplomb, instantly--“Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he lost twenty years, forgot all the funerals” (77)—and effectively, because he's slipping into the man's head through Josie's suppositions. ¶ Eggers leads readers on what they may believe to be a journey through the Alaskan wilderness—after all, Josie the ex-dentist has left her husband, disenfranchised her children—and then readers wind up climbing aboard one of those huge white cruise ships (just like that, guests of a crazy old man) to witness the show of a magician from Luxembourg. Josie consumes three glasses of wine in short order, and a certain insight hits her:

Eggers Is Magic

“With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity she’d made precisely the wrong choice. She had been a dentist for a decade but for most of that time had not wanted to be a dentist. What could she do now? (80).

What Josie does is something we're not privy to, but we certainly feel, intuit, that with all imaginable hope, Josie’s life will now be different. Eggers’s latest book is Your Fathers, Where Are they? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, "My Long-Playing Records," the Story

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Behind the Book—Intro

11/12/2014

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A WRITER’S WIT
[Following wife's death]: Writers go bad when the angels desert them. Dylan Thomas was a marvelous poet and drank himself to death. Somewhere along the way the angel deserted him. An angel has left me too, but the writing angel is still with me.
William Gibson, Author of The Miracle Worker
Born November 13, 1914

My Long-Playing Records-Intro

People often ask writers—not me necessarily—how they came to write a particular story or novel. To give an answer to that question may not be possible. After all, there is a bit of magic, I believe, involved in the process of creative writing. For me, a few stories have come to me as if I’m channeling them from a greater, or at least separate, source. Other stories begin with a fragment—sometimes only voice, a narrative voice in my ear—that takes months or even years to work into a satisfying narrative.

For me the former happened with regard to the title story of my story collection, My Long-Playing Records. I sat down and channeled wherever it came from, polished it in less than a month or so, and sent it out to perhaps ten journals—most of which turned it down before it was placed. Boulevard, a highly respected and venerable journal out of St. Louis, accepted it almost a month to the day that editor Richard Burgin must have received it. You have to understand that Boulevard is considered by some to be one of the top literary magazines in the country. Ah, I thought. I’m finally making it. Now every story will come out of me wrapped with a bow.

Ah, no.

Only “Basketball Is Not a Drug”—also part of this collection—had a similar history. Blackbird (VCU) contacted me also very quickly and said they wanted to publish it. Both of these journals, by the way, paid me: $400 and $200 respectively. Wow, I mused. It’s also going to be lucrative, if this keeps up. Well, it didn’t. Most every story I’ve written, published or not, bears the stretch marks of a difficult birth: many revisions and setting-asides, months, even years. And the remaining journals accepting my work have paid by way of copies, if at all . . . not that I’m complaining.

So I wondered . . . which stories to include in my collection, and how should they be arranged? I began with the obvious: use the pieces already published by journals; they have, in a sense, already vetted the stories. Somewhere, sometimes at the smallest colleges, an editor or editorial staff have thought enough of my story to call or write and say they wished to publish it!

Alrighty, then, what order? I tried to look for patterns or motifs that I might repeat: at first, I arranged all the stories by age of the protagonist, from youngest to eldest. Didn't work. So then I saw there were several stories about or narrated by young people, several middle-agers, and several aged characters. So I created three waves: young, middle-aged, old; young, middle-aged, old; young, middle-aged, old. Also, I didn't wish for the casual shelf reader at a store to think these were all stories about gay characters, so I didn't introduce the first "gay" story until after the midway point. Tricky, eh? That way I hoped people would have the chance to fall in love with my writing, my characters, and not give a fig about his or her sexual orientation.

I also saw that my stories echoed certain refrains: boys with weak or ineffectual fathers, abuse, musical motifs, and more, and I didn't wish for any two stories with similar themes to be exactly next to one another. I have confidence that I chose the arrangement that works best.

Over the next several months—one post per week—I shall share with you how each story has come into being. How might I use autobiographical material? Which stories evolve from observing my fellow human beings? From what source do characters seem to emanate? This process is a bit self-indulgent, I realize--information a writer would never include in an actual book. But perhaps this idea demonstrates one of the benefits of having a blog: sharing your thoughts over the back fence of cyberspace. You can write about what you wish, and because you can, you do! I hope you’ll enjoy reading about the adventures I had putting together this collection. More important, I hope you'll buy a copy!

Click here to purchase My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: MLPR-More about the Title Story

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New Yorker Fiction 2014

11/8/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Born November 7, 1952

no harm Done

Jon Contino

November 10, 2014, Antonya Nelson, “Primum Non Nocere”: The teenage daughter of a psychiatrist is home alone when one of her mother’s ex-patients shows up at their door. ¶ I love this story. I’m a fan of Nelson’s earlier collection, Female Trouble, but I’ve had difficulty appreciating her New Yorker stories of late. This one, however, by comparison, seems more complex, more nuanced, and more sophisticated in ways that others from the last five years are not. ¶ Nelson loves lists, it seems: lists of a character’s likes, lists of traits—which carry the reader to a deeper understanding. She provides a list of characters, though this time only nine: Jewel, the daughter who’s shocked when the patient suddenly materializes in their kitchen; Claudia, Jewel’s psychiatrist mother, a woman who loves retro so much that their New Mexico home is furnished with nothing but rotary phones; Robby, Jewel’s brother, is off at college but is also a buddy to Jewel; Zachary, Jewel’s stepfather, thirty-three, nine years younger than her mother, a misplaced surfer wearing old band T-shirts; Kenny, Jewel’s “gentleman caller,” giving a nod to every high schooler’s chore of reading Tennessee Williams’s fine play; Anthony, the boy Jewel really likes, someone who lives down the block; Joy, the disgruntled patient who shows up with knives, a gun, and a bullet, to square some kind of slight perpetrated against her by the shrink; and finally, Lester, the gray-haired man Claudia comes rushing home with to end the fracas Joy has caused in her house. Turns out, he’s indeed not Dr. Lester as he asserts, but one of the doctor’s patients, whose session has been stunted in media res, so to speak. ¶ Nelson cleverly toys with Latin to provide a certain texture to the story. The title, familiar to physicians, means First, do no harm. The words Ad astra per aspera come into play, as well, when Jewel’s classmate Kenny ends his screened message with those words. It is the Kansas state motto (where Nelson hails from): To the stars, through difficulty. Jewel thinks it means "failure," and she’s sort of right. Kenny is failing to win her over. Jewel senses somehow, that her mother has done some harm, perhaps not to Joy, but to everyone in general, with her abrupt, know-it-all, have-it-my-way plowing through life. The story ends with everyone standing in the kitchen, frozen, waiting for the good doctor to do no more harm. Nelson’s most recent collection is entitled Funny Once.
Jon Contino, Illustrator

DIY PUBLISHING: The Final Product

11/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Who fears to offend takes the first step to please.
Colley Cibber
Born November 6, 1671

DIY PUBLISHING: The Final Product

"Unfinished Target" By Ken Dixon

For me the journey of publishing My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories began last April. The idea had nagged at me for some time. After all, I said to myself, I’d published over twenty stories in literary journals, fourteen of which I believed were appropriate thematically for one collection. (The remaining five were fragments of a novel I still hope to publish and didn’t want to mix them with the others.) I’d read articles or blog posts by published writers, like Steve Almond, who chose, under certain circumstances, to publish their own work. My main fear was that the work would be viewed as amateurish or worse, as a vanity project.

Throughout April and May, the idea gained momentum. My mind began to play with the best arrangement of stories. There seemed to be no question that I would make “My Long-Playing Records,” first published by Boulevard, the title story. The idea of making music, recorded music in particular, a continuing motif, seemed plausible, since so many of the other stories also referenced music. What really made the idea come to life was when Ken Dixon, my longtime companion, offered me a choice of images for the cover. I jumped on “Unfinished Target” immediately. The center image’s shape, reminiscent of an old LP, its bright colors, Ken’s characteristic work with woodcuts, the square nature of the canvas—perfect for occupying the top half of a cover!

Throughout June I polished the preface and acknowledgements pages. I proofread and revised all the stories so that they would fall more uniformly as a collection. For example, I had chosen, when two stories were written at different times, the name of “Vivian” for two different characters. Not good. So I set priorities and decided that the Vivian in “Tales of the Millerettes” was more important, and so the Vivian in “Men at Sea” became “Winifred.” I made a number of changes like that, eliminating the overuse of certain words in stories that were located next to one another.

In July I began researching self-publishing companies, which I blogged about in an earlier post. After due consideration I decided to go with CreateSpace at Amazon. Shortly after I engaged friend and colleague Barbara Brannon, author and editor, to copyedit the MS. She located a number of other visual difficulties I had not considered: the use of small capitals for certain phrases or words so that they do not scream at the reader. Questions about word usage. Places where I had coined a word or altered spellings for certain effects (most of which I retained). But she also provided an overview, asking me to think about certain thematic issues before I uploaded the manuscript: the use of active voice in a strategic spot; changing “theatre” to “theater” throughout; inadvertently misplaced modifiers (I do know what they are); the question of whether a character portrayed in WWII would be wearing silk stockings or nylons; homonym problems (hail or hale); word choice for youthful characters (too sophisticated?); the word “der,” which was, for a short time, used interchangeably with “duh”; and many more. With her sharp eye and ear, she helped to shape the manuscript so that it reads as one integrated whole.

September brought on the back-and-forth exchange of information with CreateSpace. Uploading my Word document. Receiving the “interior proof” of the MS. A careful reading. My submission of changes. Uploading a revised Word document along with a submission of a list of changes. The reception of a second interior proof. Another careful reading to make sure that the old changes were indeed oncorporated and that no new errors were created. Uploading another revised MS along with a list of changes. And then the final interior proof. I say “final,” because after examining both the PDF proof and the printed proof received through the mail, I then clicked on the “Approve” button at the CS website . . . and my book became real. This event took place yesterday, November 5, 2014! [Is there an Emoticon for a champagne glass?]

The publishing schedule is now as follows:

Available in the CreateSpace eStore immediately (Remember to "Like" me on FB)

I'll post the following as the links become available:
Available at Amazon.com in 3-5 business days
Available at Amazon Europe 3-5 business days
Expanded distribution channels (the opportunity to access a larger audience through online retailers, bookstores, libraries, academic institutions, and distributors within the United States) 6-8 weeks

My first reading for this work will be held as part of a larger event, when four other members of our Ad Hoc writing group will read from recently published works or works in progress. December 4, 7:00 p.m., at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, at 2801 42nd Street, Lubbock, Texas.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

New Yorker Fiction 2014

The Cost of Contraband

Behind the Book: MLPR—"A Certain Kind of Mischief"

MLPR—"A Certain Kind of Mischief"

Family Tree

The Stratton/Aikman Family

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Watson's Cul-de-sac

Behind the Book: "My Long-Playing Records," The Story

MLPR—The Story

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Eggers Is Magic

Behind the Book—Intro

My Long-Playing Records-Intro

New Yorker Fiction 2014

no harm Done

DIY PUBLISHING: The Final Product

DIY PUBLISHING: The Final Product

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