Across the Great Divide

Pardon me, are you using that life?

Writers must have a tiny, undiscovered organ that makes us salivate when we hear certain stories.

Someone donated a copy of my novel to the Peace House library, so I'm not totally undercover as writer here.

The account I heard of a tragic childhood event could have been the premise of an entire novel. As told in a few sentences, the story immediately suggested how an infant's death might resonate through four or five generations.

The incident belonged to a memoirist, for whom it was not fiction. The version she chose to tell supported her tale of personal growth, leaving aside for the most part the rich plot implications already percolating through my imagination. 

I wonder if I could use that, I thought.

No, writers don't have an extra organ. We have a disease.

Last week, I spoke at length with a man who is bi-polar, recently spent time in a psych ward and just discovered that the therapist he likes is not covered by his health plan. He lost his phone while in the hospital and lacks the Minnesota ID required to get a new one. He has some supportive relationships and participates in programs that help him, but they are spread across the metro, which he travels by bicycle.

The day before, he had a flat and his repair failed, leaving him shaking in frustration beside the path until another cyclist saw him and, in an exceptional act of kindness, helped him get back on the road. 

The story would be better with more of the details but I am still feeling my way here in the Peace House. 

For years in this blog, I have been sharing accounts of my shelter and day center encounters with people who have experienced severe disruptions to their lives. I've also written a novel that draws upon knowledge gained as a volunteer.

Some of the people I've written about know I am a writer, others probably see me as just another grey-haired volunteer. The organizations I serve know about this blog and have never asked me to do anything differently, so I take that as a sign that I haven't overstepped.

They think of what I'm doing as outreach, awareness-raising, lifting the scrim that obscures the issues related to homelessness.

But in this new place, I find my role as listener altered. I'm not an unpaid worker who is tending the door, wrangling preschoolers, handing out towels or scrubbing toilets. The conversations I enter aren't incidental to my assignment—they are my reason for being here.

And that makes me question anew how much of what I learn I should disclose. If community members are conscious of a writer in the room, will it affect their comfort or inhibit them? I tell stories, but maybe some don't want to be in the story, even if it's told with empathy and tact. And I certainly don't want to become an institutional filter. Been there, done that.

People who have been placed in a category we call "homeless" know all about selective context, of having the details of their lives either exaggerated or left out, of being a character in someone else's narrative—whether it's fundraising for a cause, representing a point of view about social breakdown or simply playing the dead body at the opening of a "Law and Order" episode.

 

I'll have to find my own proper place in these stories, too, if I am to be an authentic participant and not just a fly on the wall.

Whose story are we telling here? It's something we should talk about.

 

 

An Old Father's Letter and an Early Father's Day Post

It's been quiet here as my volunteering has been interrupted by a busy travel schedule. This entry is cross-posted from my author blog as "The old news and a few remarks on events intervening."

Last night, we heard artist Andy Sturdevant describe his residency for Coffee House Press's In the Stacks program. He'd taken items from old issues of a community newsletter and updated what had happened in the intervening years. This morning my wife found a letter folded in sixths marking a spot in a volume of Orwell's essays. 

Its discovery, common vintage and similar typeface to that newsletter may have simply been a coincidence...

Each Sunday night for seven years, almost without fail, my father cranked seven pieces of onionskin and six carbons through a manual typewriter and then with brute force wrote his way to the bottom of the page.*

He never revised and rarely made typos or other errors. I can't remember a letter from him that left more whitespace than was needed for the date and standard salutation, Dear Everyone, and the signoff, Love, with Mom + Dad written by hand.

The letters started when his one and only baby daughter left home. They ended when he fell into the severe depression that led him to end his life.

 

The reports were detailed yet succinct, one paragraph per subject, though the thread might range widely. 

In his letter dated July 27, 1980, he manages to cover my sister finding a job and playing in the state softball tournament; one brother planning to come home and then being unable to get time off; another brother and his wife visiting, then driving with my parents partway across the state before splitting off to their home. As he wrote that evening, the same brother called with the news that my mother and father were about to become grandparents for the first time.

A lot of life packed into that narrative of one week—and that was only the second paragraph.

Certain themes recurred—local politics, charities and public service boards, and travel, usually together and mostly for work (him) and public meetings (my mother was the town's first woman mayor). Story threads came and went—a home-built gazebo project it seemed would never be completed, racketball (sic) adventures, and a Subaru he'd won in a lottery that behaved like a gift horse with bad teeth.

Here he is reporting on the annual bank picnic:

Had it in Lincoln Park and had to have the police clear the pushers out of the park for the picnic, then in the later evening they picked up some of the jobs corps boys who thought they were making off with a keg of our beer, but it was actually an empty keg. ^Guess we'll have to find a better place or give up our annual picnic. The group has gotten too large for the usual back yard picnic.

Yes, the floating G is a sign of man who types fast and hard, barely waiting for the shift. You could tell if you'd received the top copy. Some of the periods might be drilled right through the sheet.

His letter-writing wasn't Art, but it was an art. His own family had scattered with good reason, and the pieces would join only briefly and uneasily.

Unlike today's Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/email, which might as well be for Dear Everyone, his letters reached his children through the Postal Service. There were six of us around the country. Had a daughter not finally arrived, the Quimby family might have grown beyond the reproductive capacity of that day's carbon paper technology.

My father was a bank president by then. He could have dictated the letter. He could have dashed it off longhand and had his assistant type it. Either way, he could have had it photocopied, sparing the recipient of the stack's bottom copy from too much squinting and head scratching. 

But that would use the bank's dime and set a poor example.

He addressed the fading image problem in his own frugal way, rotating which copy each child received. Somehow, he kept track. 

I no longer remember the sequence or the order from week to week. Perhaps we all got to experience the sensation of slowly going blind, followed by a miraculous recovery. But it might have been that our vision seemed to gradually improve, until we were plunged back into a faint and disappearing realm.

Neither of those subtexts seems quite right, but I am sure of one thing.

He took care to the very end to keep it straight. 

_______

* If you find the ancient technology references here puzzling, I hope you can find a parent and ask them.

Tracking Down My Cowboy Legacy Takes a Strange Turn.

My grandfather died more or less as expected. He had been half gone already and the liver disease put a period to a long story with the bottle.

My father made the trip alone from Colorado down to the ranch, a remote, hardscrabble cattle operation on the Arizona-Mexican border near Douglas. He came home with a few artifacts, including a lever action Winchester and a mare named Cherry. Since I was away at college in Minnesota and everyone out west had pity on me, I inherited a mail order ranch coat that was fine for the desert but wasn’t much good to me until April.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve asked for him to bring back a book.

Lately I've been reflecting on some of the sources and inspirations for my novel. Monument Road is a contemporary story featuring a rancher who's isolated and out of time—both in his life and his place in the century.

The book didn't start out at all as a "western," and it had little to do with the traditions of western novels—whether the old time fantasies of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, the horse-crazy books by Anna Sewell and Marguerite Henry or the modern westerns by Thomas McGuane, Kent Haruf, Cormac McCarthy, James Galvin and Richard Ford.

But damn, once a rancher shows up, pretty soon there are horses, maybe cows, and land that is either failing or outgrowing its usefulness. Next thing you know, you're penned in.

Leonard Self started out as just one of the cast, invented to be part of an ensemble playing variations on the tune of suicide. A diversity hire, you might say.

But as I began making him a real character, with credible reasons for ending his life, the old cuss started to grow on me—and before I knew it, he'd taken over the narrative and I was stuck writing western fiction, a regional novel or some such.

I blame it on the horses.

There's no surer way to be branded a genre writer—okay, plus spaceships and vampires—than to put a ranch in your story. I mean, your protagonist could be a writer, an architect or even, god help us, a horny college professor, and you would be considered right in the mainstream. But give a character a corral as his workplace?

I tried to subvert the stereotype. Leonard wants to free himself from the land rather than cling to it. I put several guns in his hand that were never fired. His experiences around horses revealed character but were largely tangential to the story.

I wonder if reviewers will notice.

Once I started getting a complex about this, I remembered a book at my grandfather's ranch I'd seen as a boy. A relative pointed to a character named Russ (my grandfather's middle name which he preferred to Homer) and said, that's grandpa.

I was too young and too interested in the ranch itself to read more than a few paragraphs. I got the impression it was a cowboy novel with rough cowpokes riding the range.

Many years later, after my own father's death, family history became more important, and I wondered about that book. I thought I remembered the title as Red Embers, and occasionally I searched for that title, but all I came across was a novel about a California girl and her polo pony by another juvenille fiction writer, Dorothy Lyons.

Polo? I figured the book with my grandfather's name in it was some pulp fiction that had turned to dust by now.

But today, I took one more stab and tracked down an Arizona cousin. If the book had survived in the family it was likely to be down there.

She wrote back saying she didn't remember the book, but she had heard that Grandpa Quimby had trained polo ponies back in the early 1920's in California.

The book I remember didn't have a dust jacket. The cover art for the Lyons book would've made clear the novel wasn't about fading cowboy campfires. I'm doing more research before I declare myself—including finding a copy to read—but it looks like I might be more connected to the horsey tradition than I thought.

Distraction or Inspiration?

Yes, I've been working on a novel and yesterday was asked, do you have trouble getting distracted and staying disciplined?

For readers of the shrunken blog, the answer may seem like no. After all, I've severely curtailed posting and reading material that would send me wandering off in some new, brain-sapping direction.

But there are other perils.

Like this morning, for instance.

I'm writing about a youth pastor in 1979 who gets a new washing machine and illustrates his homily using the minor miracle that brought it to him.

Since I'm writing on a computer, it's a simple matter to pause and check out what the control panel of a 1979 model would look like.

What I didn't anticipate was this — an entire subculture of people who videotape their washers. There's even a site dedicated to automatic washers and the collectors who love them.

Look out, it's a rabbit hole!

Gotta go.

Local Color Finds its Way.

I'm in low-blogging mode, but it's hard not to pass on one connection I feel with my old home place as I work on a novel based in this valley.

Wait... a bobcat just walked past my door.

No, that wasn't it.

It's the names. Writers like to stretch names to the limits they can, nudging them toward the realm of improbability. But here in western Colorado, I grew up with great names all around me — fiction-worthy names like Janet Toogood, Verna Tibbetts, Mira Doss and Floyd Smallwood.

I thought of this especially today as I read the newspaper.

Summer Chastity Honesty Hazel, 31, 2956 Parkway Drive, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of second-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespass and theft of less than $500.

Puck Stair of Salt Lake City practices kiting with her paraglider just off North Avenue this morning while she waited for a trailer hitch to be installed on her vehicle. 

“We came out ready to go from the get-go and it’s something we’ve emphasized with the kids, being ready to go first pitch to last pitch,” Montrose coach Landon Wareham said. “They did that today.”

I don't need to make things up when it comes to names.

And the bobcat is real, too.

If the Shoof Hits, Whereat.

Former Strib editor Tim McGuire comments on the move afoot to reduce copy editing as a cost-saving measure. Although many people think copy editing is a form of proofreading that would prevent the increasing bone-headed errors we see cropping up in daily newspapers, McGuire sets it straight:

Copy editing corrects context errors, provides expertise on local points of history and location and supplies subject matter expertise that often saves a piece of copy. Copy editors also supply a little thing called judgment. Every writer pushes a point too far, uses language that is ill-advised or makes assertions that can’t be supported. A copy editors [sic, was that a test?] job is to catch those.

In addition, he points out that copy editors are in the flow of production in a very particular way. They have an appreciation not just of the story being written but where it fits the paper being made and how it's being read.

I've had the varied experiences of being edited at a newspaper, editing the work of experts and not-so experts, editing other writers, and editing myself — as a blogger and the head of writing company where, if we didn't get the nuances as well as the basics right, we lost clients, which is far more painful and concentration-inducing than losing a subscriber.

[Copy editors are invited to have a go at that paragraph.]

I should add that I've had the experience of editing former newspaper reporters, and I would agree with McGuire: "Reporters and others are simply not prepared for the sophisticated enterprise called copy editing." [h/t to Hal Davis, who must be a hell of an editor]

Weekend Read: A Different Look at Diversity.

As a writer, I once made my living from the reality that many highly functional people can't write as well as their as their jobs require. Jack Miller teaches "developmental" English at Normandale Community College, where he sees students who arrive equipped with "life experience" but not the rudiments of written language. For some of them, it's a new language; for most, it's a language they have used for decades but not learned.

Some of his essay for Center of the American Experiment makes the liberal in me cringe, the college scholarship reviewer in me nod, and the citizen in me glad for teachers like Miller.

Don't judge the essay just by these excerpts. The whole thing is worth a read. [h/t Hal Davis]

Other causes, less tangible, contribute to students’ poor record and performance in college (especially that 20 percent or so who demand extra time and energy from the professor), and here I venture on more speculative ground.  Some are not sure what is done in the classroom—how to behave.  They don’t know when or how to take notes.  They perennially miss due dates, drift in late, drift out during the break not to return.  They sabotage themselves and then seem to expect forgiveness and accommodation from their professors.  Someone showing up one day after having been missing for five or six weeks, only vaguely recognized by the professor, will assume that a way can and will be found to bring him up to speed and on track with the rest of the class.  Is all this the result of repeatedly being forgiven in the past?  I think so. 

[...]

A system is in place to cushion failure, and students who have always been praised for just showing up need it.  They have been told time and again, “You can be anything you want.”  All that is needed is “passion.”  So when the academic path contains a detour, explanations to yourself and to others can come easily.  Scholastic problems don’t emanate from within but from without. So determined is the college to offer “support” and so long is the list of reasons to receive that support that almost anything can be explained by or blamed on an external cause—poor time management, attention deficit disorder, you name it.  

Back When I was a Word Man.

This is a test of Typepad's audio player, which in my browser doesn't display as a player in my preview mode. It appears to require a right-click on the box to open the link in a new tab/window. But now that it's posted, a play arrow does seem to appear if you hover over the bar with your mouse.

Word Man

A Paragraph from Behind the Curtain.

This is the stuff I'm supposed to be working on.

Leonard was willing to give the Reverend Quentin Peasley the benefit of the doubt. Peasley was Inetta's pastor, and no matter how he rubbed Leonard, she was not one to be taken. Still, he did not know how else to put it: Peasley had that self-satisfied manner of preachers that seemed as if he had put on an entire special outfit, skin and all, before he showed up at the house. His eyes,  artificially bright and welling with empathy. His voice, a touch too reverberant. His words, selected like steaks at the butcher counter. And he seemed overjoyed to see a man who was not glad to see him.

Why This Just Might Take Awhile.

Three times, I've started novels, and twice before, they never got finished. These efforts have been sufficiently spaced in time that the writing was done using different technologies.

The first was composed using a typewriter and sheets of newsprint. That meant any page requiring significant revision had to be retyped from the start, which encouraged even more revision. This laborious process was not responsible for the novel's incompletion. I was freelancing and had a lot of spare time. It was a coming of age novel, and in the writing, I discovered I had not yet come of age.

Having learned my lesson, years later I started what I called my potboiler. It had no literary pretensions but it did have a pretty good premise and explored a world of intrigue that most writers never attempt because holding a corporate job long enough to learn the real twists and turns of business is harder than making up stuff about international spies or serial killers.

Anyway, this time, I came into work several hours early each morning and wrote on an early "office automation system" my company had developed. It had a word processing system that at the time was competing with the centralized typing pool. My files were stored on a central server somewhere, and I could print them out on a tractor-feed printer.

My son was born before I got even halfway, and that changed everything in my days. Eventually, the company discontinued the system, and an alert department secretary asked me if I wanted her to print out a copy before all the tapes were scrubbed.

For a long time, the draft sat in a box. I started it up again much later, but world events had moved on to make the central plot device much less original. So had technology. OCR scanning the old paper version into my computer proved to be more than I was ready to take on. And an even bigger problem was I was no longer the same writer.

Novel number three is now under way, and there are even more miraculous tools for turning words into books. Research is also considerably easier. But using an internet-connected computer also poses hazards.

For example, today I wondered if a character would refer to a Quaker Oats container as a "box." Instead of just calling it a box, since it is not a significant point, I decided to search for terms people might use and came across this video.

Then another, by the same creator.

Then, of course, I had to write about this. Meeting the video creator was a gift. I'm just not sure it was any help.