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Behind the Book—MLPR, "A Gambler's Debt"

12/31/2014

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. See the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.

A WRITER'S WIT
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say.
E. M. Forster
Born January 1, 1879

MLPR—"A Gambler's Debt"

Cover art, Unfinished Target, by Ken Dixon

During a trip to Las Vegas, Cecilia Prine, a school nurse from El Centro, Texas, recalls her physician husband, Neville, and his affair with her best friend, and how she spends almost twenty years punishing him for it. Of all the narratives collected in My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, this one may be the most removed from my personal experience.

In 2010 Ken and I spent our first Christmas holiday in Las Vegas, as guests of a friend who has built up enough points throughout the years to take us each December. We stay in a venerable, old hotel that some would even say is a little shabby. But when you stroll into the newer casinos along the Strip there is really very little difference in the games you can play. Our hotel has neat, clean rooms and a world-class restaurant that maintains the same great menu year after year. The staff there may serve the tenderest filet mignon or lobster tail I’ve ever eaten . . . but I digress.

On one of our visits, I noticed a couple in the Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport. You could tell they were together, but they said very little to one another. He read his newspaper, and she texted on her phone. Each possessed an air of detachment, as if he or she would really rather have been alone. As we all entered the plane for our nonstop Southwest flight to Vegas, I noticed that the Mrs. sat nearest the window, plopped her things in the middle seat, and her apparent husband took the one by the aisle. Today there would be no empty seat (because the airline overbooks each flight), but that year, for some reason, the seat remained vacant, and the couple enjoyed having a space between them—they used it as a storage console. The act seemed to symbolize something about their relationship. And my imagination went to work with regard to what might have caused such a deep rift between the couple who now had two adult children, also successful professionals, and a few grandchildren. How would such a couple spend their week in Sin City? Again I had great fun designing the perfect vacation for this estranged couple.

This story was first published by The Mochila Review out of Missouri Western State University in St. Charles.

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

NEXT TIME: THE NEW YORKER PROJECT 4—INTRO
NEXT FRIDAY: MLPR—"Tales of the Millerettes"

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"

New Yorker Fiction 2014

12/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genêt
Born December 19, 1913

Young and Old Alike

Design—Gaffney / Photo—Sassen

December 22 & 29, 2014, Nuruddin Farah, “The Start of the Affair”: James MacPherson, a retired professor of politics at Wits, Johannesburg, buys a North African restaurant in Pretoria and becomes attracted to a much younger man, a Somali, who owns and runs a nearby shop. ¶ James acts somewhat like a cunning animal, as he envelops the Somali youth in his net of generosity. James sees that the young Ahmed is fed properly each day, takes him to his own dentist for his first visit ever, and clothes him. Ahmed even comes to stay with James in his huge house. ¶ They become close, emotionally as well as physically, holding hands as they watch TV. In the last scene the two men—James is three times the youth’s age—lie down together, but Ahmed begs off going any farther. The patient MacPherson prepares to wait even longer. The man is that confident. Nuruddin’s novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, was released this year.
Design by Evan Gaffney / Photo by Viviane Sassen

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book—MLPR, "Blight"

Behind the Book: MLPR, "Handy to Some"

12/13/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.
Saki (H. H. Munro)
Born December 18, 1870

Handling with Care

When I was eight years old, my grandparents moved in from their Kansas farm to a nearby town where they built their “retirement home”—a two-bedroom, one-bath dwelling with a full basement. My grandfather had built the farmhouse they’d lived in, as well as a couple of others in town, and initially he’d planned to go on building as his retirement job. But then he began to go blind from glaucoma and worked feverishly to complete the job in town while he could see a bit. He and his crew were still in the construction process one day when my family went to visit my grandparents.

While everyone was outside, I opened the front door to find my grandmother sitting in her wheelchair. She’d broken her hip the month before and was still recovering. I noticed that she’d thrown up grape juice on the floor and ran out to tell my mother. I remember my mother saying, “Good, now maybe she’ll talk to me.” I intuited that Grandma was not talking for a good reason and stayed outside to play. When my mother entered the house and began to shriek, I came in after her, and she screamed for me to get out. An ambulance was sent for, and it took my grandmother away. My mind was so innocent that it hadn’t picked up the real cues, that the dark fluid on the floor wasn’t juice but blood, and that my grandmother had cut her wrist with what Grandpa called a buzz saw. Years later I was told that my grandmother had suffered her entire life from depression, was in and out of its grasp for long periods of time. And that day certainly hadn’t helped.

Tilde’s story is actually told from her point of view. The little boy in the narrative is only a footnote, a grand nephew who happens to walk in and discover the carnage. Still to this day I can’t recall what I saw. My mind was indeed protecting me from what really happened, and I’m grateful. In spite of her problems, my grandmother was an intelligent and loving person until the day she died at ninety-three, and that is the way I prefer to remember her. Tilde is someone entirely different.

And I must confess that skeleton of the narrative is sort of a “found” one. At some point in my thirties, I was going through family mementos my mother wanted me to look at, and I came across my grandmother’s writing, in which she related a time in the 1940s. To say that it was a journal would not be right. She’d merely written out about eight pages on a stationery tablet about what happened when she was given a sedating shot the day her brother-in-law had died. Yes, I used many of her words verbatim, building my narrative around her written account, my memory of her accident later in life, and an imagined session with a psychiatrist. My grandfather once lamented that people were saying she’d attempted to kill herself, but he insisted she’d been trying to move the electric skill saw and cut herself accidentally. I’ll never know the “truth,” and I don’t think I wish to. “Handy to Some” is my oldest published story, a tribute to the strong woman inherent in my grandmother’s body, and it first appeared in Southwestern Oklahoma State University’s Westview in 1985. I’d almost completed my MA, and again, I’d falsely thought that from that point forward I would place stories any time I sent them out. It would be another twenty years before another journal accepted a story of mine.

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 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: MLPR, “Blight”

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"

Behind the Book: MLPR, "The Best Mud"

12/10/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Born December 11, 1918

"The Best Mud," An Exercise

“The Best Mud” comes largely from a few writing exercises I took part in at the Taos Summer Writers Conference one year. When asked to read some of my results aloud, and everyone in my group—including the instructor, Elizabeth Stuckey-French—laughed full out, I felt I had the beginning of something good.

Cooper Mason—a mentally challenged man who lays brick for a living, within the sheltered egis of his elderly father’s home—injures his back and begins to seek help at a pain management clinic. Because I grew up with a Down Syndrome sister, I always have a soft spot for characters who appear weaker than the rest of us. And yet such a character creates a challenge for the writer, doesn’t he? How to make Cooper not a stereotype? How to create him with all his endearing features and faults, as well? How to write with a third-person point of view that doesn’t try too hard to get inside his head (because we can’t, now honestly, can we?). In Cooper’s case, I rely primarily on his actions and his own idiolect. My parents often turned to me to “translate” what my sister had said, because somehow I understood perfectly (we were two years apart). I wanted to do the same with Coop, create an idiolect that would show the reader what he was all about.

Coop’s construction boss, proclaims that Coop makes the “best mud,” his mixture of concrete mortar, in all of Texas. But in addition to laying brick, Coop also delivers bunches of balloons in a clown costume to mostly children’s birthday parties. In this case, his "balloon" boss can’t make a particular delivery to the school district on the opening day convocation with 2,000 educators present, so she asks Coop to do the job for her. He breathes in some helium from an extra balloon to make his voice sound funny.

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
“On stage Coop grabbed the mic. To the accompaniment of ‘America,’ Coop serenaded the superintendent of schools with ‘Happy Birthday,’ sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk” (53).

The addled response of some people onstage spooks Cooper, and he flees the auditorium. Sadly, Cooper must face an even more difficult situation at the end of the story, but we must wonder . . . wonder, with his sense of humor and innocence, if he doesn’t wind up better off than most of us would in the same place.

The editor of Cooweescoowee, the literary magazine at Rogers State University in Oklahoma, accepted two of my stories over the years. Due to a long drawn-out affair with her printing situation there, "The Best Mud" almost never came to fruition!

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 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: Behind the Book—MLPR, "Handy to Some"

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"

New Yorker Fiction 2014

12/10/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
Gustave Flaubert
Born December 12, 1821

An Old but Comfortable Pun

December 15, 2014, Elizabeth McKenzie, “Savage Breast”: A woman returns to her apartment to prepare for a party, but because she is tired she easily falls into a nap. ¶ Once the reader catches onto the writer’s intent, the story unfold easily, and one must follow. The nameless narrator finds herself in her childhood home, revealing to us those details we all have stored in our memories: for her, a stained blind with a crocheted ring on a string to raise and lower the blind, and many other clues. The savage beasts she encounters seem to be representations of her childhood family. In the sequence she seems to spend days with them, recalling the past—even the fat fifth-grade teacher-beast whom she believes hates her for daring to pun a revered literary passage into “savage breast.” The narrator has an odd ability to float back and forth between different time periods, not at all like the little girl-beast of her reverie: she recalls the Korean War, a specific issue of a 1953 issue of Life. ¶ One imagines that we all are capable of such a reverie if only we’d fall onto our beds exhausted and refuse to go to a party that no one cares whether we attend or not. Stop That Girl is one of the author’s most popular books.
[The magazine gives no credit for the illustration.]

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, MLPR—"Handy to Some"

Behind the Book: MLPR, "Blight"

12/9/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castaneda
Born December 25, 1931

Blighted Childhood

“Blight” is also set in Kansas. I grew up on the south end of Main Street, two blocks from the Arkansas River (in my head I still say AR-kanzus) in Wichita. Except for a few times when it reached near-flood stage, the Arkansas was a lazy brown river, torpid, and you could often hop from sandbar to sandbar without getting your feet wet. I, according to house rules, wasn’t supposed to play there, but I found it an irresistible place to be for a few hours on a summer afternoon.

This story echoes one of the collection’s recurring themes: fatherless boys, or at least boys with absent or weak fathers:

“My own father was a kind of ghost who worked the second shift at Boeing, and he was either at work or in bed behind a closed door. On weekends he sat at our breakfast table in a T-shirt not much whiter than his skin and issued orders no one followed. Jed was in better shape than my father, whose doughboy figure had surrendered to the slow, tortured death of an assembly line” (66).

My father did not work at Boeing, though a number of my neighbors did. And I myself was not lonely. There were too many neighbor kids for that to happen. And except for the river, I didn’t usually leave the property without asking permission. “Jed” is my recollection of a young neighbor man, whose name may have been Jake. But he and his wife moved away, and a man who’d escaped from China some time in the past bought the house.

Nothing like the violent events in this story ever happened to me. I was more compelled to write about the geographical and climatological indicators: the river, cockleburs getting stuck in a boy’s bare feet, summers in which the temperature soared to over a hundred day after day, elm beetles shredding the leaves off trees. It seemed to be the right backdrop for something creepy and almost dangerous to happen. As with the story “Ghost Riders,” I’m too much of a coward to carry this narrative any farther than it goes. The boy emerges as a hero of his own story! Or at least an escapee.

This story first appeared in riverSedge, the literary magazine out of the University of Texas-Pan American at Edinburgh.

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 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: Behind the Book: "A Gambler's Debt"

Tennessee Williams: Always Relevant

12/8/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of
heav'n.
John Milton
Born December 9, 1608

My Book World

Thornton, Margaret Bradham, editor. Notebooks: Tennessee Williams. New Haven: Yale, 2006.

I’ve been drawn to writers’ notebooks, journals, and letters for a long time, having read documents of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and others. William’s notebooks are multifaceted. He makes clear that he is writing for himself; many entries have the same dreary tone that an ordinary person might use to write in a journal: physical complaints, gossip [“Gielgud too difficult to work with, somehow antipathetic” (485)], critiques of other people’s work [“Helen Hayes has flashes of great virtuosity but her performance lacks the heart and grace and poetry of Laurette’s and sometimes it becomes downright banal” (485)]. But you can categorize many threads found throughout Williams’s notebooks.

Daily complaints: his health (he must spell the word “Diarrhoea” scores if not hundreds of times), and while he does have a number of documented health problems, most of them are self-inflicted by way of extreme alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, which he freely admits to, enumerating the number of seconals he would take in a day, along with how many scotches.

Sex: if not narrative accounts of his numerous sexual pursuits with individual men, Williams gives at least a mention of said person and how long the affair did or did not last. He would remain lovers with a man named Frank Merlo, until the latter’s death, even though they were often separated and conducted a rather “open marriage,” long before the 1970s term was ever coined.

Things about which he had no compunction: stealing books from the University of Iowa and New Orleans libraries; being jailed along with a male companion as suspicious characters and not having his draft card with him.

His ideas on cruising: “Evening is the normal adult’s time for home—the family. For us it is the time to search for something to satisfy that empty space that home fills in the normal adult’s life” (281).

His opinions on writing: “A sombre play has to be very spare and angular. When you fill it out it seems blotchy, pestilential. You must keep the lines sharp and clean—tragedy is austere. You get the effect with fewer lines than you are inclined to use” (305).

On loneliness: “This evening a stranger picked me up. A common and seedy-looking young Jew with a thick accent. I was absurdly happy. For the first time since my arrival here [in Florida] I had a companion” (325).

Personal philosophy: “One lives a vast number of days but life seems short because the days repeat themselves so. Take that period from my 21 – 24 yr. when I was in the shoe business, a clerk typist in St. Louis at $65 a month. It all seems like one day in my life. It was all one day over and over” (349).

Success: Williams is clear in a number of places about how the purity of his writing life is upended by success (Glass Menagerie in 1944):

“The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me. They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all. When that happens I will be nothing because I cannot be a professional writer” (493).

“I have been twisted by a world of false values—And the talent died in me from over-exposure, a sort of sun stroke under the baleful sun of ‘success’—naturally I will go on trying to live as well as I can and the probability is that tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, I will begin to edge back into the state of illusion. And hope” (515).

“The tragedy [suicide of Tom Heggen, writer of Mr. Roberts] points up once more the crying need for a different sort of theatre in America, one that will be a cushion to both fame and fortune which will provide the young artist with a continual, constructive contact with his profession and a continual chance to function in it. Otherwise these losses will be repeated then, and there is no field of creative work in which they can be less afforded” (503).

“I want to shut a door on all that dreary buy and sell side of writing and work purely again for myself alone. I am sick of being peddled. Perhaps if I could have escaped being peddled I might have become a major artist. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just a dirty circumstance, and now’s maybe too late to correct it” (635).

Books Williams read that I believe I must now put on my list: Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. The Denton Welsh Journals, edited by Jocelyn Brooke. Denton Welch’s Maiden Voyage, In Youth Is Pleasure, A Voice Through a Cloud, Brave and Cruel, and A Last Sheaf. Jean Cocteau’s Le Livre Blanc. Donald Windham’s The Dog Star, The Hero Continues, Two People, The Warm Country, and Emblems of Conduct.

Countless interesting or titillating photographs of Williams (and some of his paramours) when he was young:

Thornton, the editor, sites New York Herald Tribune critic Walter Kerr, concerning Williams’s Camino Real, when he addresses the playwright: “You’re heading toward the cerebral; don’t do it. What makes you an artist of the first rank is your intuitive gift for penetrating reality, without junking reality in the process; an intuitive artist starts with the recognizable surface of things and burrows in. Don’t swap this for the conscious, rational processes of the analyst, the symbolist, the abstract thinker” (565). It remains the creative writing teacher’s biggest caveat: always begin with the concrete, and the metaphor will rise out of it naturally.

So much of Williams’s life seems to be self destructive. Not until 1957, at the age of forty-six does he consider beginning psychoanalysis. “The moment has certainly come for psychiatric help, but will I take it?” (701).

To anyone who wishes to understand Tennessee Williams and his work, you must realize your work is probably not complete until you read this tome, including the 1,090 footnotes (most of which I did plow through because they are substantive and interesting in their own right).

NEXT TIME: Behind the Book, "Handy to Some"

New Yorker Fiction 2014

12/5/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I am most fond of talking and thinking; that is to say, talking first and thinking afterwards.
Osbert Sitwell
Born December 6, 1892

Reverence for the Man

December 8, 2014, Tim Parks, “Reverend”: In this reverie, Thomas, a British man of fifty-eight, contemplates the life and death of his father, a minister. ¶ Parks uses a traditional and effective way of developing character, both of Thomas, who is recalling, and the recalled, Thomas’s father. As readers we drift with Thomas, in and out of his thoughts: growing up with a brother and sister; his father marrying Thomas and his wife, from whom he is now divorced; his mother. Thoughts of why Thomas didn’t believe as his father had. Thoughts of his father’s attempt to exorcise the demons from his brother’s life. Thoughts of what his father now means to him, now that he himself is reaching the age at which his father died. ¶ Thomas finally recalls an event from his youth, when the family vacations at the seaside. His father, with poor eyesight, calls out to Thomas who has swum further away from the shore.

“He’s worried for me, Thomas realizes. He’s worried that I’ve gone too far and may never make it back.”

This final line captures the essence of this father-son relationship, a perfect metaphor for how far Thomas would stray from the religious faith his father had tried to instill in him.

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo is Parks’s most recent book.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT THURSDAY: Behind the Book: "The Best Mud"

Behind the Book: MLPR—"Ghost Riders"

12/3/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
Born December 4, 1835

MLPR-"Ghost Riders"

A feature on the TV news—about young people standing atop driverless cars, mostly in California, allowing them to float beneath them like big surfboards—became the impetus for this story. I was also intrigued by an actual newspaper headline: "Woman Wrecks Car Teaching Dog to Drive." I altered it to read "Vet Crashes Car Teaching Dog to Drive" and pared the narrative’s use way down in the final draft. While one editor loved that narrative in a premature draft I’d sent out, “Ghost Riders” seemed to fail until the absurdity of the dog narrative was limited to a single headline.

The youngish minister in this story is the kind I wished I could have been if I were going to have been one in the first place. He’s with it: cites current statistics on pollution to goose up a sermon about protecting and repairing God’s crumbling Earth. And yet, as we see, he’s human, as well. He pops one of his young sons on the arm when the boy doesn’t obey him, right as the father needs to be going out the door on a Sunday morning. The man is so irritated with his wife and sons that he doesn’t even eat breakfast—and his behavior is an echo of how his father treated him and his brothers when they were young.

More important, this man of God challenges his parishioners to live up to the ideals of the Church: loving those whom it is difficult to love, in this case, a street person and documented sex offender who decides to make his church home with this pastor’s congregation. Yikes. The man smells to high heaven (pardon me), but worse, has an unnatural attraction to adolescent boys. Don’t worry. Nothing bad happens. I couldn’t go that far. I found that delivering this man to the altar of a smug, liberal congregation of forward-thinking believers creates quite enough tension for any reader!

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
"In the reflection of late sunlight, his gums were gray and sad. Every time I saw Brewster I had a great desire to embrace him, as if doing so would restore him to his former glory. In part I felt that way about most of my parishioners and maybe the world at large. I wished to restore it to some kind of normalcy, though it would have been difficult to describe such a state. War or no? Clean air or smog? Paper or plastic? I suppose I saw ministry differently than most pastors. My father had heard one of my sermons, one in which I’d urged people to forgive our president his adultery, as well as the men in Congress who had persecuted him for it; after that my father never spoke. My mother sent Christmas cards from them both, but her signature only confirmed a certain complicity with my father" (25-6)

This story first appeared in The Gihon River Review (now called Pamplemousse) out of Johnson State College of Vermont.

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 2014
NEXT WEEK: BEHIND THE BOOK, "The Best Mud"

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"

Behind the Book—MLPR, "A Gambler's Debt"

MLPR—"A Gambler's Debt"

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Young and Old Alike

Behind the Book: MLPR, "Handy to Some"

Handling with Care

Behind the Book: MLPR, "The Best Mud"

"The Best Mud," An Exercise

New Yorker Fiction 2014

An Old but Comfortable Pun

Behind the Book: MLPR, "Blight"

Blighted Childhood

Tennessee Williams: Always Relevant

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Reverence for the Man

Behind the Book: MLPR—"Ghost Riders"

MLPR-"Ghost Riders"

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