I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.

He is perhaps best known for The Engineer of Human Souls, which is a fine and visionary novel about the role of the writer in society, any society, but takes on a deep irony by contrasting the life of Danny Smiricky, who happens to be Czech exile teaching in Canada (as was Skvorecky), with life under both the Nazis and the Communists. This makes it sound like a simple political novel, which it is far from being—it’s a deeply felt, albeit meandering, novel about individualism that happens to take place in multiple locales, with more than its fair share of pathos and humor. Skvorecky used Danny throughout his literary career—the early collections of Danny Smiricky stories are wonderful too, especially the jazz stories. And it’s all good–The Bass Saxaphone stands out here.

But the two that stand out in my mind are the two that concern America. Dvorak in Love is about just that—Dvorak’s journey to America in 1892 to 1895, which produced, among other works, his best-known work, Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Of course, what Dvorak did in America is pretty much what he did in Bohemia all his life—he wandered around and listed to music that people played and sang—in villages, in towns, wherever he could. The novel captures that wonderfully, as Dvorak adapts negro songs and spirituals to symphonic form. But it captures more—Dvorak was in love with America, what it was becoming, and what it represented to many of his countrymen–its energy, its freedom. It’s a wonderful novel, told from multiple perspectives, and not least because Skvorecky is not blind to America’s faults, particularly its racial history, but still, like Dvorak, is enamored of what America represented to Europe and much of the rest of the world—hope.

This theme is explored in more detail in The Bride of Texas, a longer (and much more experimental) novel set in the American Civil War, which follows the exploits of a group of Czech immigrants who enlist in the Union Army. This actually happened—the Union ranks were loaded with immigrants, including Czech immigrants who served, as do the book’s characters, in the 26th Wisconsin battalion under Sherman. And while motives likely varied, there’s no question that at least some of it derived from Skvorecky’s area of concern—the feeling of gratitude to a country that offered hope. The novel itself is probably the most experimental of Skvorecky’s works, with its constant shifts of time and character—but it’s well worth the effort.

It’s easy to forget this sometimes, when the current American political circus seems to offer nothing but ignorance, mendacity and viciousness about immigration (and, lord knows, so many other things), what America used to represent to the world–hope. And to some extent it still does, although the past decade certainly hasn’t helped. But we’re all (or mostly all) descended from immigrants from somewhere, and it’s good to be reminded of why that is. Skvorecky was a wonderful writer with the ability to create a broad canvas in a number of areas—and like his Czech soldiers, I’m grateful to him for having brought me so much pleasure, and I will miss him.

“Technology is a vehicle for our humanity,” declared the first poem, “Muse/Manifesto.” “It is the face of humanity, its functions reveal our designs, desires, deficiencies, deifications, discontents.”

I flipped through the book. Science fiction poetry. I’d never seen such a thing before. It was good stuff. So, after reading Age of Miracles, I called up Annie Boyle to ask her about it.

Chris Mackowski [CM]: I found Age of Miracles in a Barnes & Noble in Binghamton, New York, of all places. You published it through Lulu.com, so you wouldn’t really expect that it would randomly show up someplace like that since you’re from Salem, Massachusetts. How did that happen?

Annie Boyle [AB]: I’ve been trying to figure that out myself! (she laughs) It’s available on my website and on Amazon. It’s also sold locally here in the Salem area. I figure whoever was ordering volumes for that store in Binghamton must’ve seen it somewhere and liked it and so ordered a copy to have on the shelf there.

CM: I’d never seen science fiction poetry before.

AB: It isn’t common, although it’s more common now than it used to be.

Science fiction is always something I’ve read almost ever since I started reading. I read constantly, and it very much informs what I write. “Write what you know,” right? I know science fiction. I’m inspired by science fiction.

One of the first things I remember reading was There Will be War, a collection edited by Jerry Pournelle. The first volume. My dad had it in his book collection. There were a couple striking things in the anthology, including the original “Ender’s Game” short story by Orson Scott Card. There’s also a piece by Joe Halderman, who wrote the novel Forever War. There was a formal poem in [There Will be War] that he’d written, a sestina—which is a real bitch to write, but he did it beautifully. It was called “Saul’s Death.” I remember when I’d first read it, and so I’d always just had that in the back of my head that you could tell a story in a poem—a science fiction story.

I like the dichotomy of it. It looks to the future, real high-tech, using this ancient form of communication. You’re communicating using language.

There were stories I wanted to tell, and some of them were science fiction. I was more into writing short stories when I started. I wrote poetry as it came to me and not really as a project in and of itself. When I wanted to challenge myself, I started taking a closer look at what I’d learned about different kinds of writing. That’s what brought me back to the poetry.

CM: So poetry let you see your storytelling in a different way?

AB: In a poem, I’m telling a story or I’m writing a scene. When I write something like that as a piece of poetry, I’ll challenge myself to be very precise with the language but still make sure it has a flow to it. It has to have a flow to it.

I like lyrical poetry. By that, I mean that what I write works in my head as song lyrics. There’s not a standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure to it like that or anything, but you have to have a flow to it. There’s some repetition. I might start a “verse” and then change it up from stanza to stanza as the poem unfolds.

I kind of have Snow Patrol playing in my head for some of them, or maybe a David Bowie song. There’s a poem in the collection, “Ziggy,” that was very David Bowie inspired. I thought about changing it so that it didn’t seem so derivative, but I thought, “You know what? It’s Ziggy, so just leave the name in there. That’s how it works for me.”

I love David Bowie. Not only is he inspirational to me for his lyrics but also as a science fiction poet. He combines science fiction and poetry, and he’s treating it lyrically.

I have other poems inspired by songs or musicians, too, or other writers.

CM: Your dedication lists a lot of brilliant science fiction authors: Philip K. Dick, Warren Ellis, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, Dan Simmons, Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh, Kim Stanley Robinson…all these people who’ve influenced you.

AB: I could have a whole page of them! (she laughs) If I was going to write another science fiction collection, it’d be influenced by China Mieville, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Alastair Reynolds. They’re all people I’ve read since Age of Miracles was published. They’re fantastic. I loved them. They’re great. So, they’d probably show up if I did another volume.

CM: There are some other surprising people who appear in the book, too: Keats, Homer, Poe, Emily Dickinson, Christopher Marlowe….

AB: I really like Christopher Marlowe. I’ve just always loved him. He’s so mysterious, and mystery surrounded him. I first came across him when I was reading about Shakespeare and was very intrigued. Never mind even just the conspiracies about “Did he write Shakespeare?” He was surrounded by spy networks and espionage and murder. Because of some of that, he isn’t that well documented. Of course, Shakespeare isn’t that well documented, either, but there’s even less about Marlowe.

CM: I really liked that sequence where you’re ordering up clones of authors as pets. The idea of a pet Rudyard Kipling seemed hilarious.

AB: That’s the first idea I had for the poem “Age of Miracles.” I’m not particularly attached to Kipling, but I thought he worked well. I thought it made a make a great poem. So then I thought, “Oooo, who else could I do?” So I wrote a few more. I thought, “Maybe I could make this work.”

When I wrote the Keats poem, I thought of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series. In that, there’s a character who’s a Keats android, although it’s a completely different sort of story going on. I didn’t think of that until I’d started writing the clone poem.

CM: That’s, what, a seven-poem sequence that opens the book? That’s what really got me hooked. How long did it take you to write the collection?

AB: The vast majority of the poems were written over the course of a year. Once I started with the “Age of Miracles” set, I wanted to have more to work with. Obviously, there are things that are in there that are not strictly science fiction. It’s just what I was writing at the time. Not all the first-person narrators are me, either. Not every “I” is me–they’re characters.

CM: Your most recent piece is Nimue’s Challenge. Can you tell me a little about that?

AB: It’s the tale of Merlin and his apprentice. I’ve been obsessed with the Arthurian legend and Merlin. I read Mary Stewart’s series, The Crystal Cave—which was really excellent—when I was growing up. It made a huge impression on me.

So, along with that, I’ve done a lot of fantasy. I like folklore, mythology, postmodern retellings of fairy tales. I love that stuff. Like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber.

CM: You working on anything else at the moment?

AB: I’ve been having a few knee surgeries. I have a lot of leg pain, and I have fibromyalgia, so it’s difficult to sit and work at a computer. I haven’t figured out how to do that for long stretches yet. So, things like that have kept me occupied. I’ve given the local library a decent workout.

I have a few pieces I’ve been working on, though. I’m just not sure where they’re going to end up.

I recently put together an e-book of microshort fiction. It’s titled Servo8 Is Drunk Again, and it’s available through Lulu. It’s half a dozen really, really short stories. I wanted to see if I could tell a little story in a really short time. It’s my first venture to tell something a little more humorous, too. It’s been gratifying to me that others have found it funny. I’m so glad it wasn’t just me!

CM: Would you go back to Lulu? What did you think of that experience, self-publishing like that? What took you there in the first place?

AB: A friend had suggested it. Also, I knew that I wanted to do everything myself. I knew what I wanted—what the book cover would look like, the layout, the editing—and I wanted to try it myself.

I had a friend tell me that I deserved a medal for designing and basically publishing a book using Word. It was really a pain in the ass, but I really liked being able to go through in detail and say “This is what I like and this is what I don’t like.” If you go through Lulu, there are services you can buy, but if you want it to look good, you really have to pay attention. I was really, really happy with the print quality I ended up with.

For my next one, I want to look at an Amazon e-book. I haven’t done one yet, but I know people who have and they’ve been pleased.

CM: Does that include your cover?

AB: The cover is just as much a piece of work as anything in the book itself. I went to some craft stores to see if I could find mask, and it just started with putting some silver stickers on the lips, but then I wondered, “What else can I do to this?” I had a friend who’s a photographer take some pictures of me with the mask, and I had another photographer friend who does a lot with photoshop, and I asked him if he could make it look like so….He added the circuitry and made it look like part of the mask had been peeled back. The idea is that if you peel away the mask of the cyborg, if you peel away the technology, you’ll find our humanity underneath.

CM: Any final advice for people who pick up Age of Miracles?

AB: Don’t be afraid to take it in small doses. It’s kind of intense. Don’t be afraid to find humor in there, either. If you see something that comes across as sarcasm, or you’re wondering if it’s dark humor, it probably is.

————

As an S&R exclusive, check out two of Annie’s poems, “The Gears are Gods” and “Crisis Engine.”

In conjunction with our  interview with poet Annie Boyle, S&R is pleased to feature an exclusive look at a couple of her poems: “The Gears are Gods” and “Crisis Engine.”

The Gears are Gods

I am stretched thin as a wire
my soul writ infinitely large

copper cogs bite into my flesh
my blood turns to oil and quenches their maws

I am stretched thin as a wire
reaching from one star to the next

the lenses over my eyes show me spectra
the lenses within transmute them to joy

Crisis Engine

there’s a crisis that you’re having
about identity and dreams
can’t find the deus in your machina
no ghost in the machine
just an engine running clean
that can’t explain your dreams

you look inward on infinity
an eight turned wrong way round
a moïbus feedback loop
leaves you cursing the recursing
that leads you back to this
a helpless twisting on yourself
and turning on your world
the switches don’t explain
why you’re coded on this curl
why you can’t break and unfurl
the vicious cycle mandate
from a maker you can’t find
if there’s a tangle to untwine
to free your soul and mend your mind

you were built just to be broken
to shatter and break others
to wound with fractal flaws
once you’ve slipped under the wire
once you think you’ve learned the laws
learned the rules and found a place
then you know you have a heart
because you feel it break
as you watch with distant eyes
your own destruction’s wake

the nightmare eats your time
even riding in the day
vision just a blink away
of a line of spiraled numbers
of a set of switches signed
“deliberately broken
do not seek repair”
God’s abandoned your machine
you can’t escape your program
you can’t erase your dream
of a line of days unbroken
of your soul at peace and clean

I found her, just this autumn, because of some owls.

In my attempt to feed my head full of poetry this semester, I picked up one of Mary Oliver’s many volumes from the bookstore shelf because the title caught my eye: Owls and Other Fantasies. Just the idea that a writer would look at an owl as a fantasy held promise.

The poems in the 2003 collection hooked me at once. Filled with beautiful description, thoughtful metaphor, and peaceful insight, the poems seemed like everything I thought nature poems should be.

Take, for instance, “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard”:

His beak could open a bottle
and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder—
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation….

I can only imagine what an owl might read in Revelation, but even the thought of it wowed me.

I mentioned Oliver’s name to a colleague, and she shrugged and nodded and sort of brushed Oliver off with the casual tag “Nature Poet.” It wasn’t quite a slur, and it wasn’t quite dismissive, but it wasn’t an “Oh yeah, she’s awesome” either. I felt sad because, I admit, I had been quite charmed.

Oliver doesn’t necessarily put a lot of herself out there in her work. She’s not taking a lot of personal risks, which seems to be the currency of good poetry these days. But what I do appreciate about her work, aside from the imagery, is her willingness to let the nature challenge her.

“I live in the open mindedness of not knowing enough about anything,” she writes in her poem “Luna,” which appears in her 2004 collection Why I Wake Early.

Her poems continually celebrate nature’s ability to teach her new ways of understanding the world and herself. In “Goldenrod, Late Fall,” she says, “The weeds let down their seedy faces / cheerfully, which is the part I like best, and certainly / it is as good as a book for learning from.”

“O, good scholar,” she says in “Mindful,” from Early,

how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Her poems often cascade down the page in interesting arrangements (which I can’t capture here). I did find some of the poems in Early to be too distracting in their line breaks and physical dishevelment and alignment on the page.

She best articulates her wonder at the natural world in a selection from “Sometimes” in her 2008 collection Red Bird:

 Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Yeah, I can get into that, for sure.

Oliver has published some twenty-eight poetry collections, so I have some catching up to do. A trip through one of her books, though, is like a quiet walk in the woods.

…but of course the birds were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
As comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.

(from “This World,” 2004)

With cover adornments like “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry” and “Poet Laureate of the United States,” Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows (2004) lured me in like a will-o-wisp. Hell, there was even a single white streetlight—maybe a faerie light—in the painting used as cover art. I’m a sucker for that stuff.

But the book’s first poem, “Walking on Tiptoe,” offers a promise of seeing in the dark. In fact, through the whole book, Kooser seems very much concerned with what we see and how.

In fact, he’s so focused on ways of seeing that he epigraphs his book with a line from Emily Dickinson: “The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can.” Like the sailor’s compass, then, Kooser’s poems see what others cannot and point the way.

Attitude plays a huge rule in what you see, too. Kooser writes:

Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

The lines come in a poem titled “Mother.” The narrator’s mother has been gone a month—“three rains and one nightlong/watch for tornadoes”—and while the poem strikes an elegiac tone, the narrator speaks with profound gratitude, too. There’s always something fresh and new to see, and fresh, new ways to see them.

Consider the student he compares to a sea turtle

as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.

Or the “heart tattoo, a dripping dagger through a fist-like heart” that has faded and sagged with age on a man’s arm—“his heart gone soft and blue with stories.”

A booklover reads in the growing dark of evening, refusing to turn on a lamp because he “wanted to ride this day down into night.” A ladybird beetle freezes under a man’s stare in its march across a windowsill; the fear of death “as ubiquitous as light…illuminates everything.” A moth drinks the tears from a sleeper’s eye, who awakens to rub the dust of its wings from his eyes.

Even the instruments of seeing must be seen in a new way, such as the telescope:

This is the pipe that pierces the dam
that holds back the universe,

that takes off some of the pressure,
keeping the weight of the unknown

from breaking through
and washing us down the valley.

Because of the telescope, he writes, “we are able to sleep, at least for now, beneath the straining wall of darkness.”

There’s not much of Kooser himself in these poems, although the first-person “I” appears in many of them and some are based on events from Kooser’s own life. Of the many things he wants his readers to see, his own inner vulnerability is not among them, although he does tap into hopes and fears common to most of us.

Instead, he’s content to show, with a master storyteller’s rich voice, the familiar world around us. His poems are comfortable country quilts and calm prairie grasses.

“Grace fills the clean mold of this moment,” he writes.

It fills his poems, too.

Teresa Milbrodt is earning a good bit of acclaim lately, and her new short story collection, Bearded Women: Stories, should only amplify her reputation. Fiction Editor Dr. Jim Booth will have a review of the book in the coming days, and in the meantime we were able to persuade the gracious but extremely busy Milbrodt to field a few questions.

Scholars & Rogues: Bearded Women presents the reader with such a wonderful menagerie of freaks – there’s a gorgon, a set of conjoined twins, a giantess, a three-legged man, a woman with a parasitic twin, a woman with four ears, a Cyclops, women with beards, and the list goes on. I know this is a wide-open question, but can you explain for our readers where all these characters came from?

Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who don’t fit in. When I was a kid I was overweight and got teased a lot at school, so I often thought about people who were considered “different” or otherwise ended up on the margins of society. I also had a very independent streak from a young age, and was constantly asking why it was wrong to be different, and why I had to do things the same way everyone else did them.

This interest in difference and marginalization was one of the reasons why I took a class titled “Theories of Othered Bodies” from Dr. Jeannie Ludlow while I was getting my Master’s degree in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. The class focused on various kinds of bodily differences, body shaping, disability, disease, and why we consider certain kinds of bodies to be “normal” while other kinds are “not normal.” For that class our final project had to involve some sort of public presentation, so I decided to write a series of stories about women who were living with various kinds of bodily differences and then do readings. I did a lot of research on sideshows, so-called “freaks,” and the history of the “normal,” basically steeping myself in the subject until my head was about to explode. Then I shoved all that information to one side of my brain and wrote like mad. That’s where stories like “Cyclops,” “Bianca’s Body,” “Mr. Chicken,” and “Ears” had their genesis.

After all that reading I also became very intrigued with the idea of the sideshow, and wondered what people who could have made a sideshow living years ago would be doing in contemporary times. Working at gas stations? As coffee shop baristas? In tattoo parlors? They’d need to make a living somehow, and they’d probably be stared at even though no one was paying them for the privilege. But what if they could make people pay them for the privilege? That uncomfortable tension between money and being-looked-at-ness is a very interesting one to explore, which is why so many of my characters face it in different ways. Paying people to ogle them seems to us to be a very dirty and wrong thing, but it’s very prevalent. Reality TV is a great example of the modern-day sideshow in which we put people on stages and classify ourselves as socially “above” or “below” them.

S&R: Many readers will be instantly struck by the kinship between Bearded Women and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. But there’s a key difference, it seems. Dunn’s freaks saw themselves as superior to normal people, but your characters see themselves as being, for the most, very normal. And many of the people they interact with appear to accept them as they are, as well. Can you talk a little bit about the ways in which these characters seek integration within the everyday culture?

TM: Some of my characters have a choice as far as whether they want to “pass” as normal or not. The bearded woman in “Mr. Chicken” shaves. The barista in “Cyclops” has a wide shade to cover her single eye. The woman in “Ears” often uses a scarf to cover up her neck ears. The woman in “Bianca’s Body” sits behind a desk at her news anchor job, so no one can see Bianca. They’re all trying to pass as “normal” because they don’t feel any different than anyone else, they just have something that makes them corporeally exceptional.

For many of them who can hide their exceptional traits, the real tension is whether or not to reveal themselves to other characters, especially if they stand to gain monetarily. I would argue, though, that for the characters in these stories who can’t hide their freakish qualities, there is an uneasy tension between themselves and the rest of the world. Even if other people aren’t being outright rude, the women know they’re being looked at. It’s just a reality they have to face.

S&R: While we’re on the subject of Dunn, you did an MA thesis on Geek Love, right? What led you to that decision and what kinds of themes did you address?

TM: I read the book Geek Love in my “Theories of Othered Bodies” class, and it seemed to work well with other subjects I wanted to address regarding bodies and the economics of being-looked-at-ness. The characters in Geek Love unabashedly make a living because of how they look. They were genetically engineered (albeit rather crudely) to do just that.

Another chunk of my thesis was based on Judith Butler’s theory of “recognition,” in this case being recognizably or non-recognizably human. Generally we think of being recognizably human as a good thing and non-recognizably human as a bad thing, but in my thesis I explored the latter as a gray area. I examined Geek Love, two other published short stories, and three of my own stories, analyzing both the benefits and the drawbacks to being “non-recognizably human.” Again, much of that led back to the economic benefits of non-recognition, as well as the power those individuals have to control the attention and gaze of a crowd. On the other hand, there’s a level of danger and objectification that accompanies non-recognition, because people don’t see you as human or necessarily as “worthy” of the consideration afforded to a human being.

S&R: I know you didn’t set out to write a political economic treatise, but the book lands right in the middle of the whole #Occupy movement. Forgive me if I’m projecting, but I can’t help noticing that your characters live life on the fringe of economic solvency. Obviously the nature of their differences mean they’re going to find a lot of career doors closed to them, but it seems like you’re up to more than that. Would I be out of line reading your freaks as a metaphor for “the 99%” and the growing ranks of people who are just trying to make ends meet?

TM: As an author it worked well in terms of tension and plot to give my characters economic worries. Such problems forced them to make tough choices, and tough choices create good stories. At the same time, I’m very much aware of “the 99%” and the lengths to which people have to go nowadays to survive. Many of my characters face the decision of whether or not to sell themselves in some way, shape, or form. They’re speaking to the desperation and marginalization that many people face, so I think the metaphor for the Occupy movement works on many levels. I only wish I were that clairvoyant…

S&R: I have often called myself an exile. I’m from the rural South but now live in the urban West. You, too, are a writer who’s a long way from home. Being a native Ohioan now living on the Western Slope of Colorado, do you feel that artist-in-exile tension? If so, how has this affected your writing?

TM: I don’t feel a tension, no, but the move west has given me a clearer picture of how being raised in the Midwest shaped my identity and therefore my writing. Midwesterners often have a very stoic “we-can-deal-with-this-crisis” attitude. We are not drama queens. We blot a few tears on a tissue, mope to our spouses, then put our heads down and keep soldiering on. It’s a very down-to-earth culture, and not one that I realized affected my writing until people from New York and California started reading my stories and remarking how my characters seemed very understated emotionally. They’re not understated, they’re just from the Midwest. They’re dealing with it. The Midwestern motto should be something along the lines of, “It could be worse, and in fact it was last year, so really this isn’t all that bad.”

As far as I can tell, my characters are still from the Midwest. At least they’re behaving that way. I’ll let you know if and when that changes.

S&R: I thought your decision to begin Bearded Women with the story of a woman with a parasitic twin trying to conceive a child was brilliant. It sort of forces us to immediately confront the question of embodiment and identity, and in doing so establishes the tone for the rest of the book. But it’s incredibly uncomfortable for me in one respect: It almost feels as though her husband is cheating on her, even though it’s still her body. Am I overreacting to something or are you intentionally working to established a gendered tension here?

TM: Oh yeah, the gendered tension was very intentional. The husband doesn’t see himself as having an affair with a younger, cuter, lower half. He’s still having sex with his wife. The legs and other parts are still connected to his wife’s body, so what’s the problem? My protagonist is the only one who sees Bianca as being a separate person (with better legs, ones minus the cellulite). In that particular story I was exploring both the nature of personhood, i.e. who should we consider a person, and to some extent, the tension of the aging body. Women especially seem to feel that tension (just watch TV for five minutes and count the number of ads for skin rejuvenator creams), so I wanted Bianca and my protagonist to play out some of those issues related to aging and sexuality.

S&R: Your writing probably strikes a lot of readers as being very simple stylistically. I find it to be elegantly direct and spare, but that kind of economy has to be a lot harder than it looks. The end result, I think, is that your voice comes off as very honest and authentic, simply because there aren’t any spaces in the narrative for deception to hide. Is this style instinctive for you?

TM: It’s just my voice. A little sparse, very wry, and not overly emotional. It’s what comes out naturally. I have to be very conscious of voice and tone when I try to write in other ways.

S&R: I get the impression that you know your way around the ancient Greeks. Have you always enjoyed reading mythology or are we seeing the result of research done expressly for this book?

TM: One of my college professors classified my work as “Midwestern mythic,” which I thought was a fitting term. Mythic themes and magical realist plot lines have always been a fascination of mine. It’s fiction, so why be constrained to the boring old real world all the time?

But to actually answer your question, I loved reading Greek mythology when I was a kid, and I’ve returned to those tales since the characters in them are both interesting and skeletal. In other words, there’s already a backstory and history for mythological figures, but at the same time there’s a lot of space for a writer to flesh out exactly who these people/gorgons/cyclops are and bring them to three-dimensional life. Plus I wanted to explore what it might be like to go through life with snakes on your head.

S&R: This is probably an unfair question, but what’s your favorite story or character in the book?

TM: “Bianca’s Body” may be my favorite story because I think it delves into a lot of interesting questions about embodiment, freakishness, sexuality, personhood, and motherhood…. My favorite character is probably the protagonist in “Mr. Chicken.” She’s trying to maintain control of the restaurant she’s managing in the best way she knows how, even if that means growing out her beard to combat the leers of morbidly obese Mr. Chicken. I like her sense of responsibility, her creativity, and her no-drama work ethic. I guess she just strikes me as a real Midwesterner.

S&R: I’ll frame this as a comment instead of as a question since I’m not sure exactly how to word the question. Not only does Bearded Women raise interesting questions about embodiment, but in three of the stories you confront what I guess I’ll call, for the moment, extra-embodiment. In the lead story we have the parasitic twin. At the end we have conjoined twins. And the snakes that make up the gorgon character’s hair are, we learn, individual entities. So for these people, the “body” is a far more problematic concept that it is for most of us. I find myself thinking about Donne’s “Meditation XVII” and wondering about the implications of these stories, where our conventional sense of the boundaries of the body are being challenged.

TM: In all of those stories, the characters assume a sort of caretaking responsibility for the “extra” parts that go beyond what we’d consider to be the “normal” limits of the human body. The women realize they’re responsible for more beings than just themselves, and they take that role very seriously. While that’s putting a somewhat maternal spin on the issue, in the hugely cosmic macro sense, the actions of individuals generally affect more people than just that individual. Our choices affect our families, neighborhoods, towns, and society. It’s a real web of civilization, as many have said. I think the interdependency in the stories reflects those connections to some extent. (For strange reasons that will forever perplex me, some people seem loathe to admit this connectedness, like they want to believe we’re all living in our own little bubbles. Maybe they should try walking around with snakes on their heads.)

S&R: Throughout the book the freaks are routinely portrayed as being pretty normal folks. In spots they find themselves having to deal with normal people who are damaged, though, and the prevailing feeling is that the whole dynamic is upside down: that the freaks are normal and the normal people are actually freaks. At what point in life did you begin to suspect that we had things backward?

TM: Third grade. I was the only kid in my class who didn’t tease our new Thai art teacher because she spoke with an accent. She seemed like a pretty good teacher, and I remember getting really upset at the other kids. I didn’t consciously classify them as freaks, but those who resort to ridiculing others on the basis of difference certainly have their own emotional issues to contend with.

S&R: The world of literary publishing has changed so much in the past few years and it continues to change by the day. Tell us what it’s been like to work with an independent press like ChiZine. Do you have aspirations to work with one of the larger legacy houses down the road?

TM: The literary industry is both an exciting and confounding place. It’s difficult to break into the larger houses because the kinds of writing and authors they’re willing to publish is extremely limited. There are a number of excellent small presses such as ChiZine who are willing to take risks on new authors such as myself who have something interesting to say but are struggling to find a place to say it. Because they’re taking those risks, many small presses are putting out books that are arguably better than those being produced in New York.

My editors have been fabulous, they’re concerned about quality, attention to detail, and publishing excellent books that may have been overlooked by the mainstream presses. They’re also very focused on a particular audience and mission, putting out sci-fi, fantasy, and horror works that are pushing or defying the conventions of genre.

I’d like to work with one of the larger houses down the road, but that would involve a project that didn’t fit within the scope of what ChiZine publishes. Right now I’m working on a couple of middle-grade novels for ten to thirteen-year-olds that wouldn’t be quite ChiZine’s style since they focus on adult and young adult fiction. I’d love to work with ChiZine again on another short story collection or adult novel.

S&R: Last one: what question do you wish I had asked? Then answer it.

TM: I’m going to keep wishing you’d asked the question, and just answer it. Rene Magritte is my favorite visual artist, with Salvador Dali a close second. They paint like I write. My favorite quote also comes from Dali: “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

But coming ten years after 9/11, the book lacks any urgency and offers nothing new to ponder. Terrorist commit terrorism and, weeks later, people are still terrified. At the end, a wide-eyed character realizes one middle-of-the-sleepless-night, “No wonder we call it terror.”

It’s not the faux profundity that bothered me so much, though. No, it’s that Miller, one of the godfathers of the modern comic book, has cobbled together what might be the most derivative thing he has ever created.

His main character, a superhero known as The Fixer, comes with his own utility belt and cape and bad-ass attitude. All he’s lacking are pointy ears on the top of his costume. His quarry at the start of the story is a “cat burglar,” spray-painted with leather and fishnets and catclawed gloves.

And yes, there’s sexual tension between them. They fight and grope, and she says things like “You are mine, you do-gooder prick” just before she plants a big one on his lips. It’s Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle all over again. (There’s even an underground secret lair with a T-Rex in it for real aficionados!)

If any modern artist has spiritual “rights” Batman, its Miller, whose 1986 The Dark Knight Returns (along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen) reinvented comic books. Miller can steal from Batman if he wants to, I guess. It’s just a shame that he fees like he has to.

Even at its best, though, Holy Terror is Frank Miller phoning it in. “It’s cold, this city is. Cold and wet and noisy and so very proud of itself. Empire City. Cold. Wet. Noisy. Haughty. Arrogant….Empire City. America.” From a guy whose Sin City took hard-boiled noir and stood it on its edge, we get that.

Empire City has, standing in its harbor, a giant Statue of Justice, complete with blindfold, scales, and toga. He apparently didn’t think the “Empire” reference was enough to help people get the NYC connection, so he had to create a giant, suspiciously familiar icon just to be sure.

The politics of the book feel equally hamfisted. While he doesn’t come right out and say anything explicitly, the book reads like a “Good Guys vs. Evil Towelheads” bedtime story for right-wingers. There’s lots of shooting and punching and splattering blood.

Miller’s artwork is, as usual, blocky and bruised and marvelously moody. Even on his worst day, his stuff is punch-in-the-face. This is more of the same—but that’s all it is. Previously, Miller’s ability to keep pushing himself as a graphic artist has kept his work relevant and powerful. Holy Terror offers more of the same.

The opening fight between the cat burglar and The Fixer takes place in a storm, which Miller seems to have created by streaking and scraping porcupine quills across the page. He tosses in some smudges here and there for good measure. This is probably the single innovative artistic technique Miller brings to the book. Its overall effect is cool, but it does muddy the storytelling at times.

Miller fans who might be coming to Holy Terror looking for the storytelling grit of Sin City or the visual lushness of 300 might better wait for a movie adaptation. One of Hollywood’s greatest powers, to create derivative spectacle from written source material, might make Holy Terror into something exciting and new.

Charles Wright’s book-length poem Littlefoot declares in its second line:

You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.

You can look back, though. In Littlefoot, written in 2007, the year he turned seventy, Wright stands on the ridgeline between past and future, moving forward with an elegiac awareness of everything behind him.

I’m starting to feel like an old man
alone in a small boat
In a snowfall of blossoms….
Voices from long ago floating across the water.
How to account for
my single obsession about the past?
How to account for
These blossoms as white as an autumn frost?
Dust of the future baptizing our faithless foreheads.
Alone in a small boat, released in a snowfall of blossoms.

The poem is, as the book jacket declares, “an extended meditation on mortality”—but Wright also feels content, reconciled, ready for the final stage of the journey.

After the end of something, there comes another end,
This one behind you, and far away.
Only a lifetime can get you to it,
and then just barely.

While he might wonder what lies ahead, he spends little time ruminating on scenarios or possibilities. Instead, he seems to take stock in what he’s discovered that has prepared him to move in that direction.

Who knew it would take so many years to realize
—Seventy years—that everything’s light—
The day in its disappearing, the night sky in its distance, false dawn…
that all things come from splendor?

As is typical in Wright’s poems, he finds splendor in the natural world and then positions himself in it, giving voice to his meditations and observations and giving voice to the natural world itself.

So stub out your pencil, Pilgrim,
And listen to what the wind repeats
As it starts and erases itself,
Unstoppable storyteller with nothing to say.

Nature has much to say and no voice to say it in except its own, which is to say, in a voice most of us find unrecognizable. Even as he tries to listen to that voice and translate it, the natural world helps his own thoughts coalesce into voice, too.

There is comfort for Wright in just being, in experiencing that which cannot be articulated. His poetry works best when he shares that solace. Near the end of the book, Wright marvels at a neighbor’s maple tree, shining like a galleon in the dusk. “With such splendor, everything falls away, even our names,” Wright says.

In another instance, he writes about his love of watching falling stars, and how he

loved them, too, as they stayed in place,
Designs in the afterlife of dreams,
and beyond that,
Connecting the dots to nothingness.
It comforts me to know they’re up there,
and that their light
Keeps coming long after my sleep has gone forth, and my sleep’s sleep.

Albeit tinged with melancholy, the book strikes a tone not of regret but of satisfaction, not for all the things he didn’t do but for a life well lived. Littlefoot traces the process of contemplation that puts that life into context, that puts those lived experiences in their final places so he can move forward toward the last stage, whatever that might be.

“Sometimes I feel I’ve already told/every story I’ve ever heard,/Or even once heard about,” he writes. While that might sound like resignation or even defeat from another writer, for Wright the work rests in the flip-side of that “sometimes”—because, at other times, he knows there’s work to be done, stories to tell, poems to write.

But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever you ride.

Vermont’s vaunted maples have begun to flush crimson, but the oaks stubbornly cling to their sturdy green. By Robert Frost’s hillside grave, in Bennington’s Old First Churchyard, the birch trees have breathed in autumn and exhaled it as goldenrod.

These calico mountains, having abandoned most of the “Green” of their namesake, could not make a more picturesque Frostian site. He was the poet of rock fences, spring pools, and wood piles, of snowy evenings and roads not taken, of small-town New England life and simpler times. “I am an ordinary man, I guess,” he once told the New York Times Review of Books.

Frost has been on my mind since a Saturday trip last week to an apple orchard in North Chester, Maine. Al LeBrun balanced each Courtland, each McCoun, between his fingertips like a snowglobe, showing off its delicate beauty. A quintessential rite of autumn, apple picking always brings to mind Frost’s famous poem. “After Apple Picking” recounts the post-harvest fatigue of a man who is “overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.” The poem looks ahead toward winter, and sleep—“whatever sleep it is.”

And here Frost has slept since his death in 1963. “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” the tomb decrees.

With gold leaves sprinkling on his grave from the birches tree, it’s hard not to think of Frost’s great meditation on mortality, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

The graveside birches themselves come from another of Frost’s works, “Birches,” a poem that cracks and crazes the ice-enameled tree trunks in winter and subdues them into catapults for a boy, a “swinger of birches,” in the summer. The poem contains one of my very favorite images from any line in literature: “He always kept his poise/To the top branches, climbing carefully/With the same pains you use to fill a cup/Up to the brim, and even above the rim” [emphasis added]. The truth of that single observation taught me how to look at the world more closely.

Most people I know have a Frost connection of their own. At the very least, people can make allusions to “The Road Not Taken” and all the difference that choice has made in their own lives. For me, I first came across Frost in “The Pasture,” the first poem I ever had to memorize. I chose it then, in fifth grade, because of its brevity, but I have returned to “The Pasture” many times over the years to appreciate the wonder with which it views the world.

My son was a year younger, in fourth grade, when he first met Frost. He had to pick a poem and paint a picture to go with it. He chose “Stopping by Woods One Snowy Evening.” He brought it home proudly, and I had him read it for me. I framed the piece, and it now hangs in my office. My son, standing with me by Frost’s grave, reminds me about their collaboration.

Frost, I suspect, would have approved. He spent much of his career encouraging young writers even as he had been encouraged, early in his poetic career, by Ezra Pound, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. Ironic that the iconic Yankee poet found such influence during a three-year stay in England—a trip most Frost fans don’t remember.

By the time he returned from that trip, he’d published his first two poetry collections. He would publish eleven all told, winning four Pulitzer Prizes in the process. “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding,” said President Kennedy, who also lauded Frost for linking poetry to power “as the means of saving power from itself.”

Frost had read at JFK’s inauguration—“The Gift Outright”—the capstone to a remarkable career that had made him literally one of the most beloved and respected men in America.

“Remember,” Frost once told a young admirer, “what you think in a poem is never as important as what you imagine.”

The limitless potential embodied in that line inspires me like few other aphorisms—and Frost was full of them. I spotted one, perhaps his most famous, on a friend’s Facebook page just the other day: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

How true that is, I realize, even as I stand next to Frost’s grave. The leaves that fall on it will be replaced in the spring by new buds that will, in turn, explode to life. The Green Mountains will regain their namesake color. A new generations will follow the footpath down the hill past the white-spired church, through the rows of thin headstones and Revolutionary War heroes, and stand next to the birch tree in the footprints I have just walked with my son. He will read Frost for years after I am gone, and his children beyond him.

I recall again the repeated line that concludes “Snowy Evening,” which certainly resonates even though it’s an autumnal afternoon: “And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.” We’re in southwest Vermont, and my son and I need to be in western New York before we can roost for the night.

I am, to paraphrase Frost, done with woolgathering now—and apple-picking and birch trees and New England cemeteries.

But only for now.

Once upon a time, marketing music must have been so simple: in the ’50s you just bribed a local DJ and off you went. By the ’80s it was a little more complicated – in addition to cash you needed to bring coke and hookers, but still, it was a straightforward process and everybody understood the rules.

Maybe that’s understating the difficulty of getting discovered back in the Good Old Days^®, but there’s no arguing that things are a lot trickier here in the 21st Century, as nichification, genrefication, segmentation, fragmentation, the consolidation of major labels, the profusion of new media and the ascendancy of coolmongering has so dramatically complexified the challenge facing new bands that it’s a wonder anybody even tries anymore. (And if you’re naïve enough to think that hard work and talent will ultimately win out, well, welcome to math class.)

The problem is bad enough if you’re a young band targeting a young audience (like our boys Doco, for instance, who are insanely talented and had they come along in the ’70s they’d probably be doing arena tours by now). But imagine if you’re aiming for a slightly older audience with a sound that’s way too sophisticated and hip for commercial AC radio. I know a number of artists in this general boat and I really, seriously feel for them.

Last night I got an e-mail from Rich Flierl, the mastermind behind Dotsun Moon. To give you a sense for where they reside in the musical landscape, here’s part of what I said about them back in March:

Who do they remind me of (because since you haven’t heard them, we have to triangulate via bands you may know, right)? Well, I mentioned Portishead, and Flierl admits to a fondness for Massive Attack and Jah Wobble. “Who Do You Love?” suggests that he’s heard a bit of Love & Rockets, as well. There are places where Ognibene reminds me a lot of Girl Next Door’s Kat Green and the CD’s more animated numbers put me in mind of a sort of noir version of Supreme Beings of Leisure. Other places I swear I hear bits and pieces of The Church, U2, maybe a little Echo. Or maybe I’m projecting – hard to say. Sounds and influences sneak into a mix from all over the place.

There is no American Idol for bands like this, although if the networks put me in charge of an adult version of that show it would be the single best thing involving music and television since The Beatles played Ed Sullivan. There’s nothing terribly special about me, except that I’d pack the stage with so much real talent that you’d be embarrassed to admit that you’d even heard of  The X Factor.

Rich had a direct question. He knows I’m in marketing, so he wondered if I had any bright ideas about how they could reach a bigger audience, given who they are. My initial response, for all the good it does, was to note what we call “affinity marketing.” Basically, think about the people you want to reach. Now, where are they already united marketing-wise? What do they have in common? Are they members of a particular organization? Do they read the same magazines? Are they fans of a particular band? Where, in other words, are you likely to find them in one spot as it stands now?

Then partner with the thing they already pay attention to. If they read a particular mag or site, you need to score an interview or feature there. If there’s a band they all love, you need to be touring with/opening for/whatever that band.

Flierl has an important piece of the equation figured out. Here’s how he described the people the band is after:

Generally well educated. If not through college, probably read. Former lovers of punk rock that tired of its sonic limitations. People who wish Sting was more interesting. Want to go to shows but tired of festivals and standing around dives until midnight for a band, because they have jobs and/or kids. Probably listen to Pandora, Sirius or have an Internet radio. Probably like small-budget films.

Probably read Big Takeover. The women like Adele and Dido but wish they were a bit more like Massive Attack.

Generally consider themselves liberal. Listen to NPR. They are on Facebook but don’t want the hard sell. I just don’t know where they congregate. And the reaction to music isn’t as over-the-top like it is for a teen. The good news is they are more likely to pay for music than a teen.

I’ve been in marketing for a long time and have, on any number of occasions, dealt with start-ups (and even established companies) who cannot articulate their target market as well as Rich did in those three short paragraphs. So he knows who, but how is trickier. If he had lots of budget he could buy some awareness easily enough, but what indie band has budget?

The irony, of course, is that Dotsun Moon gets some airplay. A couple of times recently, in fact, Art and Tracey Jipson have played the band on their outstanding Tuesday afternoon School of Rock show on WUDR (University of Dayton). No indie band is going to be unhappy about that kind of exposure, but when push comes to shove they know they’re not going to make their bones on college kids. (True, Art and Tracey probably have a lot of older listeners, like myself.)

Flierl credits the band’s airplay successes to The Planetary Group, an artist development firm that helps bands with everything from radio placement to touring to Web design and digital marketing. (Dotsun Moon only uses them for radio.) “I don’t have the contacts and what they do in 10 weeks would take me two years. They’re a big reason we’re getting airplay. They’re a godsend.”

When an indie band does get big enough that you may have heard of them, Flierl emphasizes that “it just doesn’t happen by accident.” An artist like Bon Iver, for instance, has a serious management company. “We can’t afford that level of support and right now touring is the only way aside from commercials and movie or TV placement to make money. Most bands make the bulk of their money through t-shirts sales, etc.”

Touring is a bit of a problem, though, because the thing about bands seeking adult audiences is that they tend to be adults, too. Adults with jobs. Take Dotsun Moon. They have a lawyer, a physician’s assistant, a school teacher and college professor in the band, which makes extended touring, well, just about impossible. They’re hardly the exception, either – a significant percentage of the really exceptional bands I know are like this. Very few people are making enough cash off their art to live on. I don’t know all of the artists on last year’s Best CDs list, but my best guess is that at least five, and probably more than 10 have to work for a living to support their music habit.

It is what it is, but most artists, in any genre, really don’t hit their stride until they’re at an age when the teeny-obsessed music industry ceases to care about them. All too often, ugly economic realities keep our most talented artists away from the audiences who would love them most.

How about playing a festival, like SXSW or CMJ? Easy to say, hard to do. Flierl says the band’s rankings get reported to CMJ and they have been in the top 30 at 50 stations since April. “I’d say the chances of playing CMJ are nil.

“CMJ wants a band with extreme name recognition, extensive touring and constant blog coverage. We’re doing well, but we don’t have those requirements.” Listen to #4 (an actual mp3 interview recording) to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Still, despite the obvious frustrations, Flierl says he feels lucky. “We have careers so this is a labor of love. But it would be nice to make enough to cover the cost of recording, mastering and (even though the format is almost dead) printing the CDs. Honestly the payment for downloads or CD purchases is less about the money. There’s no way we could sell enough music to make up what we put into equipment and recording, anyway.

“Really, it’s just about loving the music and wanting to play for audiences who will appreciate it. When somebody buys a CD, it’s gratifying to know that they respect what you do enough to pay for it.”

I don’t have a magic bullet for adult bands seeking adult audiences. Any radio you can get is good. Tour, tour, tour, if you can, and especially tour with bands that have similar audiences but who are known in areas where you aren’t. (Dotsun Moon plays shows with The Lost Patrol, for instance. But heck, TLP is in the same situation, although they’ll be featured on what we hope is a major movie soundtrack next year – fingers crossed). Pursue all the press you can get in pubs that cater to the slightly older reader. If you can somehow get yourself featured on NPR, then that’s worth its weight in gold. If you really get it rolling maybe you can score with CMJ or SXSW. Keep working on your craft, obviously. Use the hell out of social media. Etc.

And pray that I hit the Powerball so I can spend my money promoting you and other bands like you. Because that description of your target audience above? Yeah, that’s me and a lot of my friends, and as I told someone yesterday, I live to connect people with music.

So, as a public service, let me take a second to prop Dotsun Moon and some others that you might like if you heard yourself implicated in Rich’s description of his target audience.

Hope everybody is having a nice weekend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s see, who else might you like? Well, there’s The Blueflowers. Here’s something live.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Baron Bane, for our European readers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s no video yet, but I love the new CD from Able Archer.

Here’s a great solo acoustic performance from the new Ron Hawkins disc, which is one of the best of 2011 so far.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And you knew I was going to mention The Lost Patrol, right? Here’s a page with a couple of videos, some tracks from past records and one from the forthcoming CD, to boot.

One more, from the inimitable Jeffrey Dean Foster, who may (or may not, depending on funding) have a new disc for us this year.

Click here to view the embedded video.

by Andrea Frantz

And so for you, I came this far across the tracks,
ten miles above the limit, and with no seatbelt,
and I’d do it again,
For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me.

–Dar Williams, “Iowa”

Driving Interstate 80 from Pennsylvania to Iowa seems endless when I hit Gary, Indiana. Then Chicago emerges in the distance, and Iowa feels like it’s within my grasp. But this trek’s a damned sight better than the stretch of I-80 across the state of Nebraska, so most of the time I just count my blessings that I’ll park the car long before the Kum & Go at the Iowa-Nebraska border.

I’d moved from Iowa to the Pocono Mountain area of northeast Pennsylvania in June. But because of my teaching schedule, it was December before I ventured west again to visit the homestead. In the six months I’d lived in the northeast, I’d negotiated new cultural realities. I could no longer say “pop” when I referred to Diet Coke, lest my students think I was talking about some new form of illicit substance. Gardening in my backyard now required rock drilling tools and coyote urine sprinkled liberally around the perimeter. And of course, I’d upped my aggressive driving skills which occasionally also involved dramatic, well-timed hand gestures.

Mostly though, I’d had to get used to the hills and trees, which at first didn’t seem all that challenging. October in northeast Pennsylvania is a thing to behold. The sugar maple and oak covered hillsides catch fire in autumn, and when I snaked down the mountain around one of many curves on the highway to work, I’d sometimes catch my breath as the early morning sun glinted off a wall of redorangegold. Prior to this, I’d never experienced a place where there were more trees than people.

But I’m a flatlander. I grew up in central Iowa, and while Iowa rolls somewhat, especially along its river borders on the east and west, my comfort zone has always been big sky and wide open vistas of corn and bean fields broken only by the occasional silo or barn miles in the distance.

So as I drove west into the sunset through central Ohio on I-80 that first December following my move, I realized suddenly I was breathing more deeply. It was December and we were on the Interstate, but my lungs insisted on more oxygen, so I opened the car window. I could breathe. For the first time in six months, there was nothing to break the vast expanse of sky and the land had flattened. It wasn’t Iowa yet, but that air, the sky, offered the promise of it.

Time does funny things to scale.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to explore the house of my childhood. I hadn’t been inside it since 1985, though I’d made it a point to walk by every time I was in town to visit my mom. My sisters, mother and I, wine glasses in hand, toasted my dad the evening following his death, as we stood in the alley behind the old house staring up at the great oak in the darkening backyard and what used to be my bedroom window. But by then we’d been gone from the house for many years and we were outsiders looking in.

So when my sister arranged with the current owner for us to actually go inside and tour the old house, we speculated, reminisced, anticipated. Would the old wooden banister look the same? What might have happened to the ugly speckled linoleum in the kitchen? Had the owners kept the lead glass window at the landing or the ancient iron heat registers? The house of my childhood had been a vast, creaking, haunted playground.

When we walked in and presented the thank you apple pie to the owner, I was stunned by the shrinking effect time had rendered. The enormous landing between the first and second floors on which I had created whole cities of blocks and dominoes had not been altered. But now, only two adults could comfortably stand there together. The endless, dark hallway upstairs that I believed to be too long to run without being caught in the cold tentacles of sort of night spirit was now impossibly narrow and maybe ten adult steps in length. The front foyer–once dominated by an enormous wardrobe in which I could hide until I was 8 or 9, and my father’s upright Baldwin piano, siren to his former jazz gigging days–now seemed barely large enough for the few strategically placed decorative items there.

Scale is a distracting detail in Time’s elegant outfit. It’s the brazen-colored bra strap that can be neither tucked nor ignored.

Thirteen years after I moved east, I still take deep breaths when I return to Iowa. Its wide, open spaces remain, though I find now I am acutely more aware of the possibility of their impermanence.

When I meander the country roads near my old home, I breathe.

And shoot.

Breathe.

And shoot.

_____

Andrea Breemer Frantz teaches journalism at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA, though often still ponders what she wants to be when she grows up. She still has hopes NASA will come knocking, looking for middle-aged, female astronauts who don’t fully comprehend the science, but still want to walk in space and discover new frontiers. Until then, writing, photography, challenging students to know and understand the implications of the First Amendment, and pampering her high-maintenance mutt, Jennie, pretty much dominate her life.

King Subway (Tokyo Station)—October, 1988▲

Vampire

Walk. Walk amongst the people. Make no sound as you walk.

Walk light, step bright and ghostly kiss the passers-by. Here. Hear the sounds of their step. Pound their hearts with the aura of your love. Watch the waves of ochre sound.

They love you and they need you and they don’t know you exist.

You walk through them. Your blood cells and theirs shake hands. You kiss every forehead. You own ever fiber of their suits and their jewelry. You own every crowd. You are a harvester of chaste souls, of buttery blood vessels.

You are what you need them to think you to be. You are something I see without you seeing me.

_____

When you run a creative writing journal, you publish things you like. And things you really like. And things you love, even. Every once in awhile, though, something comes along that absolutely de-cleats you, if I might borrow a sports term.

Not long back I got a submission from Dan Ryan. At a glance it didn’t look like poetry, it looked like a photoessay. So I forwarded it on to our Nonfiction editor, Jim Booth. A few days later Jim kicked it back to me, saying something to the effect of “look at this again.” He was right. It looks like a photoessay, but is in fact something entirely else. I don’t really know what to call it. Maybe Photographic Poet-Journalism?

Whatever. The great thing about being S&R is that we don’t have to care about labels. Tokyo in the Underbrush is brilliant, and we’re honored at the opportunity to present it to our readers.

It will go live Sunday morning. See you then.

If there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band. – Alan O’Day and Johnny Stevenson

British neo-soul superstar Amy Winehouse joined The 27 Club yesterday. If you haven’t heard of this select group, the term refers to all the musicians who have died at the age of 27. It’s a pretty famous crowd.

• Janis Joplin, dead of a heroin overdose in 1970, was regarded as perhaps the preeminent female rock vocalist of her generation.
• Jimi Hendrix, still regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in history, had died less than a month earlier.
• Brian Jones, the brilliant and multi-talented co-founder of the Rolling Stones, died under suspicious circumstances in 1969.
• Two years to the day after Jones’s death, Doors lead singer Jim Morrison died of “heart failure.”
• Kurt Cobain, who many regard as the voice of his generation, committed suicide in 1994.

These are the really famous ones. But the list goes on.

• Robert Johnson, probably the most influential guitarist of all time.
• Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, founding member of the Grateful Dead.
• Chris Bell of Big Star, a band whose impact on the Power Pop underground is still felt today.
• Dave Alexander, bassist for The Stooges.
• Pete Ham, leader of Badfinger.
• Gary Thain, bassist for Uriah Heep (a band whose bombast and notoriously revolving cast of musicians served as a model for Spinal Tap).
• D. Boon, lead singer of The Minutemen (a band I saw live the night before he died).
• Pete de Freitas, drummer for Echo & the Bunnymen.
• Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits.
• Kristen Pfaff, bassist for Hole.
• Richey James Edwards, guitarist and lyricist for Manic Street Preachers.
• Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson, lead singer for Canned Heat.

Again, the list goes on. Add to these names an equally lengthy list of actors, athletes, poets, politicians, artists and other political figures and at some point the head begins to swim. A lot of genius (and a good bit of the infamous) has departed this realm at the age of 27.

To some extent The 27 Club represents an observational fallacy. There are only so many ages at which a person can die, after all, so of course a lot of famous people have died at any particular age you want to consider. The 28 Club, if there is such a thing, includes The Big Bopper, Jeff Buckley, Shannon Hoon, Heath Ledger, Brandon Lee, two Kennedys and Caligula. The 29 Club? Marc Bolan, Anne Bronte, Josh Hancock, Christopher Marlowe, DJ Screw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ronnie van Zant, Hank Williams and yet another Kennedy. It’s always tragic when talented people die young and our society – perhaps any society – feels an excess of pain when we see wasted potential. We can’t help imagining what might have been accomplished over the course of a full lifetime.

We spend a lot less time thinking about those who do great things by the age of 27 and then live out long, comparatively pedestrian lives, though. That kind of narrative doesn’t make especially good fodder for songwriters or filmmakers, as it turns out.

Still, when it comes to the cultural process of myth-making, 27 seems a especially dire age, full of promise and throbbing with danger. Maybe we’re subliminally drawn to the numerology – three is a divine number and 27 is three times thrice. Or maybe it’s more mundane than that. The span between 25 and 30 represents the crescendo of the first phase of our lives, the nexus of youthful verve and the onset of experience and wisdom. It is the age of greatest accomplishment by our most outstanding athletes, and in artistic pursuits it is a period where we begin to understand how we can harness our creative energies. In intellectual and rational endeavors, our minds are growing in power but very few of us have reached the top of the mountain, so our expanding capabilities are boosted by an intense drive to succeed.

In many ways we are never more on fire with life. And when someone is snatched away in their “prime,” the tragedy feels greater. When someone my age dies, we might lament that he was too young to go, but still, he was 50 – he’d had time to make his mark. When a child dies it’s horrific, but rarely can we lament tangible promise. A girl of eight may have been good on the piano, but she probably hadn’t reached the point where she was regarded as a budding superstar.

Maybe 27 is the number of epic tragedy. Or maybe we’re just feeling a primal need, born of grief and fear, to canonize an observational fallacy that seems to cluster unnaturally and unfairly around a set of artists that we loved.

I can’t really say, although I certainly can empathize. I was a big Amy Winehouse fan and I’ll never forget the moment when I heard that Kurt was gone. I understand why we memorialize The 27 Club, why we draw these icons together and pull a velvet rope around their portraits, portraits that always depict them as they crest.

If there’s a rock and roll heaven, The 27 Club is going to be hell to beat come next year’s Battle of the Bands….

_____

References at Wikipedia and Disabled-World.com.

November 1962

“Go call your daddy and Uncle Kenneth,” Papa says, taking his big thermometer from the scalding trough.  “This water’s near hot enough.  We need to get to killing these hogs.”

He gestures toward the pen some thirty feet away.  The hogs grunt and start away as if they understand him.

“Yes sir.”  I rise from my crouch.  I have been tending the fire, making the water hot enough for scalding the hair off the hogs after they are slaughtered.  I trot up the hill to the house and stick my head in the back door.

“Water hot?” asks my uncle.  I nod.  He gets to his feet and pulls on his jacket.  Daddy puts down his coffee mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

I lead the way as he and Uncle Kenneth follow me down to the hog pen.  As he reaches our truck, parked near the scalding trough, Daddy opens the door and takes out his single shot .22-caliber rifle from behind the seat.  He slips it free of its cloth case, then takes a box of bullets from the glove compartment. He shakes three or four into his hand and closes the box, tossing it back onto the truck seat and shutting the truck door with a bang.  “Where’s Papa?” he says, looking around.

Uncle Kenneth is busy working the scraping table nearer to the scalding trough.  I run and help him.  Just as we get it situated, we hear the clank of metal.  Papa comes down from the smoke house carrying a tin wash pan full of butcher knives and hog scrapers.  These are rounded pieces of steel, slightly conical, with handles attached to their outer centers that make them look rather like shallow hand bells except that their edges are sharp.

I go to Papa and take the pan.  He selects a particularly wicked looking knife and tests its edge with his thumb.  He smiles and winks at me.  “Razor sharp,” he says conspiratorially.

I smile back uncertainly.  Papa goes to the hog pen as I take the scrapers and other knives to the scraping table.  I hear the crisp snap of the bolt as Daddy loads his rifle.

Papa is already in the hog pen.  Daddy hands his rifle to Uncle Kenneth and climbs in carefully.  He takes the gun again.  “You want to kill all three or just the two?” he asks Papa.

Pap stands and surveys the hogs for a long moment.  “Just the two,” he says deliberately.  “We’ll wait on the big boar.  I’ll get him castrated next week.  Then we’ll fatten him up and kill him to sell for sausage after Christmas.  Make a little money.”

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth look at each other.  Though all three have invested in the hogs about equally, Daddy has said several times before that the only person who ever makes money turning hogs into sausage is Papa.

Uncle Kenneth shakes his head, then lightly vaults over the fence into the pen.  His action disturbs the hogs and they begin to stump about the square circle of the pen like boxers maneuvering for an opening.  One comes over to Daddy and noses the barrel of his gun.  In a smooth motion Daddy swings the gun barrel up to the hog’s forehead and fires a bullet into its brain.  It immediately falls to its knees.  Papa is beside it immediately.  He grabs it by its right ear and pulls it over onto its left side.  Kneeling on its right shoulder he plunges his butcher knife into its throat.  Long experience helps him find the jugular vein, and blood spurts in a long stream, some spattering next to Daddy’s boots.  He deftly steps away.

The other two hogs smell death now, so they move warily around the far end of the lot.  Daddy coolly reloads his rifle.  The click of the bolt as the bullet goes into place makes the hogs jump and trot first toward one side of the pen, then toward the other.

“Don’t let them run,” says Papa, rising laboriously from the dead hog.  “Can’t kill that one if she gets heated.”  Uncle Kenneth stands still.  Daddy has walked nonchalantly to the side of the pen opposite his brother.  Uncle Kenneth takes a step toward the hogs and they turn and start for the other side, stopping short when they see Daddy.  Papa has moved toward the hogs trying to prevent them from running toward the front of the pen, away from both Daddy and Uncle Kenneth.

Papa gestures to me.  “Charlie, come here and help us hem in this hog.”

I put down the scraper I have been fingering.  Papa has never asked me to help with the killing, even though I am ten now and this is my third hog killing.  My eyes are on the hog already dead.  It lies on its side, its back toward me, the ground around its head dark with blood stain.  I move timidly toward the pen.

“Come on, son.  These hogs are getting restless.”  Daddy’s tone makes me hurry and I catch my jacket on the hog wire as I tumble over the fence, nearly falling onto the frozen ground except that my jacket keeps me suspended.  After gaining my footing and freeing the buttons of my jacket from the wire, I turn to face the hogs.

They eye me curiously, their heads turned to one side as if they were dogs.  The hog on my right snorts philosophically and turns to my daddy.  He shoots it.  Uncle Kenneth grabs its ear and turns it on its side.  In a moment Papa has slit its jugular and its blood spills on the ground.  Its legs move as if it would run away, find safety.  Suddenly I wish that it could.

Papa senses my confusion.  “Go to the smoke house, Charlie, and bring two big wash tubs.”  I stare at him a moment, his hands covered in blood, his butcher knife smoking.  Then I turn and run to the fence, vault over it, and race up the hill to the smoke house as fast as I can.  It seems essential to escape the sight and smell of the killing.  I fumble with the latch on the smoke house door.  It swings open after a small struggle.

The still cold inside the smoke house is penetrating; it chills me quickly.  The two large washtubs are too heavy for me to carry.  I put one inside the other and drag them down the hill toward the hog pen.

Daddy meets me at the scraping table.  He takes the tubs apart. One he puts aside; the other he slides under a singletree hung from a limb on a big oak tree near the scalding trough.  Then he goes to help Papa and Uncle Kenneth with the first hog.  It is dead and they are ready to begin scalding it.  For a few minutes I stand dumbly as they maneuver around the hog trying to figure out the best way to lift it.  Then I am in the hog pen with them taking a firm hold on the right foreleg.  The four of us carry the hog to the gate of the pen. “Let it down,” Uncle Kenneth tells me.   I open the gate after we have put the hog down.  When we have carried the carcass through, Daddy shuts the gate with his foot.

“Charlie, go latch that gate. Kenneth can hold your leg.”  At Papa’s words my uncle takes the leg I have been straining to hold.  As I lock the gate, I look across the pen at the other downed hog.  It has stopped moving.  The big boar who is to be killed later for sausage stands on the unbloodied dorsal side his late companion.  He puts his snout down and nudges the back of the dead animal as if to wake it.  Then something, the smell of death maybe, frightens him and he turns sharply away.  His gaze fixes on me. He grunts low and mournful. Then one, high pitched like a shriek, that startles me and stops the others from their work.

“The dead hogs have upset him.  He’ll be all right once we get the other one out of there.  By tomorrow he’ll have forgotten that they were ever there with him,” Papa says.

His words seem all wrong. How can the boar forget so easily?

I watch the boar. He grunts once more, then turns and goes to the far end of the pen.  There he lies down in the same posture as his dead friend.  He looks around awkwardly once or twice to see if the dead hog has moved, then settles down, his breath rising steamily in the chilly air.

“See.  He’s over it already,” Daddy tries to reassure me.

The clanking of chains, then a splash, tells me the first hog is in the scalding trough.  I turn back to Papa and the others.  With the help of two chains, held on each side of the trough by Daddy and Uncle Kenneth, they turn the hog from side to side so that the scalding water loosen its hair.  “Lift her up,” says Papa.  He plucks at hair along the hindquarter, the side, and the neck of the hog.

“She’s about right on this side,” he says.  “Turn her over.”  Daddy lowers his chains as Uncle Kenneth lifts his and the hog rolls splashily to its other side.  “Not quite ready on this side,” Papa says, plucking at hair. ”Turn her back over.” Uncle Kenneth and Daddy reverse their chain movements and the hog sloshes back to its original position.

“Charlie, stoke that fire a little bit.” Uncle Kenneth waves an elbow at the end of the trough under which the fire burns.  I kneel by the fire hole and chunk the coals with a tobacco stick, then add two more pieces of wood.

That’s good,” Daddy gestures with his head for me to stop feeding the fire. “We don’t want to overheat the water.  Just keep it right for scalding.”

Papa checks the other side of the hog again.  “She’s ready.  Pitch her out on the table.”  Uncle Kenneth and Daddy lift the hog with the chains and it rolls toward Uncle Kenneth who stands in the narrow space between the trough and the scraping table.  He grabs the hog’s legs and hangs on.  Daddy drops his chains and rushes around the trough to grab hold of the hog.  I want to help but there is no room.

Uncle Kenneth sits back on the table and lifts his legs, resting his behind and heels on the table.  He tugs at the hog as he scoots backward.  Daddy and Papa shove mightily from the other side and the hog comes to rest on the table.  Somehow Uncle Kenneth keeps from being knocked off the table and swings around to land on his feet.

Papa grins.  “Kenneth, you and that hog can’t lay there together on that table.” I hand around the “bell scrapers.”

The hair comes cleanly off the side of the hog.  It gathers in large clots that I must pull free from my scraper.  Daddy and Uncle Kenneth do the same.  We fling hair on the ground until soon there are pile around the table like those around a barber’s chair.

Some parts are harder to clean than others. Papa works on the face and chin of the hog with a butcher knife scarping off hair, then rinsing off the blade in a small pan of water taken from the scalding trough, much as Daddy rinses his razor as he shaves.  As I watch him working I remember something my Grandmother Lea told me. Dead men have to be shaved by undertakers because their beards continue to grow after they’re dead.

Daddy nudges me and I step back so that he and Uncle Kenneth can turn the hog over. We move to the other side of the table, hemmed in from behind by the trough, and scrape off the rest of the hair.

Uncle Kenneth and Daddy have stopped scraping now and use knives to clean the hair from the hog’s feet.  Papa finishes with the other side of the snout.

“Let’s hoist her up and get the insides out,” Papa says, straightening, his task done.  The four of us carry the hog over to the block and tackle.  Papa uses his knife to make a hole through the hog’s back legs, about where the ankles would be on a human.  Uncle Kenneth and Daddy slip hooks through the hog’s ankles, then attach the hooks to the singletree that is fastened to the chain pulley.  In this way the hog can be hoisted into the air with its legs apart making its middle easier.

When the hog is swinging, gently suspended from the singletree, Papa slides the large washtub under its head.  Blood drops slowly from both the hog’s nostrils.  The drops make a hollow ring as they land in the empty tub.

I have seen this before.  On a television show.  Except people were hung up like this hog.  In Germany.  During World War II.  This is the same.

I shiver.

Suddenly Papa plunges a gleaming butcher knife between the hog’s haunches.  As the knife moves down the middle of the hog’s stomach and chest it makes a ripping sound like tearing cloth, stopping occasionally as Papa tries to guide the fall of the hog’s innards into the tub.  First the intestines, then the liver, then the heart and lungs droop, slither, and finally drop into the tub, all with a whooshing and splattering of blood, some bright red, some dark purplish black.

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth have just pulled the second hog from the scalding tank where they had put it without any of my ten-year-old help.  I go to it and begin furiously scraping its shoulder trying to forget the image in my mind.  I get my left hand out of the way of my right too slowly and the edge of the scraper cuts across my knuckles.  It stings, so I jerk my hand away and shake it.  When I look at it, blood trickles down two fingers.

“Whoa, there.”  Daddy stops his scraping and takes my hand.  He gets out his handkerchief and wipes away the blood.  “Go up to the house and get some iodine and a band-aid on that first finger.”

Suddenly I hear a sound somewhere between a thump and a crack.  I look around at the suspended hog.  Papa is cutting it in two with an ax.  He has already decapitated it.  He chops straight down the hog’s backbone.  He puts down the ax, takes up a saw, and begins again with that.  I watch woozily, feeling my own blood trickle, feeling the saw’s rasping in my own bone.

“Run on to the house and tell Granny what you need,” Daddy tells me.  I go.  I run.  The rasping of Papa’s saw gets fainter with each step.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

I dawdle, talking to Granny, watching a little of the Macy’s parade on TV.  It is Thanksgiving Day.  When I get back to the hog pen, the second hog has already been gutted and split into halves.  Washtubs full of internal organs sit on the scraping table.  The two heads rest on feed sacks at one end.

Papa asks, “Did you get a band-aid on that finger?”  I hold up my hand to show him.  He nods.  “Good.  Go look in the back of your daddy’s truck.”  He gestures with a blood-stained hand.

I stand on the truck’s running board and look into the truck bed.  Half a hog rests on feed sacks.  It is easier to look at now, more like meat in the grocery store.

“When I get the jowls cut up, I’ll save some out for you,” Papa is saying.  “You can get them tomorrow or Saturday.  We still going to hunt tomorrow?”

“All right with me.”  Uncle Kenneth lights a cigarette.

Daddy leans against the side of the scraping table.  “What time ya’ll want to start?”

“Be here at six o’clock and we’ll get into the woods at first light.”  Papa dips his hands into the scalding trough.  The fire is out now and the water has cooled some.  He rubs his hands to remove the caked blood, then dries them on a feed sack.

Uncle Kenneth winks at Daddy.  “I’ll be here about seven-thirty.  We can get started by eight.”

“That sounds about right.”  Daddy puts his hand on my shoulder as I stand by him.  “You about ready to go home?  We’ve got to get that hog to the frozen food locker place to get it cut and wrapped.”

“Yes sir.”  I shiver again.   The cold is still strong.

“Ya’ll run on, then,” Papa tells us.  “Kenneth can help me take this to the house.  We’ll see you in the morning.”  Papa holds out his arms and I go to him.  He hugs me roughly, fondly.  “You have a happy Thanksgiving at your Grandmother Lea’s.  You’ve been a good helper.  Don’t eat too much Thanksgiving dinner.”

“I won’t.  You have a happy Thanksgiving, too, Papa.”

Daddy and Uncle Kenneth have already walked over to our truck.  “You gonna let Charlie hunt tomorrow?” I hear my uncle say.

“I reckon so.  If he can help kill hogs, he’s old enough to hunt with us.”

Daddy ruffles my hair as we sit in our pickup waiting for Uncle Kenneth to move his so we can back out to the road.  I have unbuttoned my coat and taken off my toboggan.  We wave to Kenneth as we drive away.  I look down the hill toward the hog pen.  Papa has the two hog heads, one in each hand, holding them by the ears.  He hoists one in a gesture of farewell as we wave goodbye.

Just as we turn from the unsurfaced road Papa lives onto the paved Draper Road, Daddy asks me, ‘Did some of that today bother you?”

“A little bit,” I answer, tentative.  I do not know how to tell him that I hated it, that I do not want to hunt, that I want no more of killing.

“Well, don’t worry about it,” he says lightly, patting my knee.  “You’ll get used to it.”

“Yes sir.” I say no more.

A few moments later he says, “We had to do what we did.”  He shrugs uncomfortably.  “People have to do things to live.  You understand, boy?”

“Yes sir.”

That night in my dreams Papa uses his ax to hack men suspended from singletrees into gushing, bloody halves.

Jim Booth

At the same time, and in the contrary spirit that often typifies what we do around here, I’d like to be the one who acknowledges that our relationships with our fathers are often less than we’d hope for. Frankly, some dads are complete bastards, and in many cases they’re probably at least a complex mixed bag. And why not – being a parent is hard, I’m told. This basic reality makes the guys who get it right even more worthy of our love and respect.

It’s no worse than fair to say that my own father lived his life out between Mixed Bagville and the untamed Bastardlands, and truth be told I have a hard time remembering him as more good than bad. Whatever salvation he may or may not have reached at the end, I’ll never have a chance to make peace with the man any more than he was able to make peace with the demands and obligations of fatherhood.

So this is dedicated to everybody out there today honoring the institution of fatherhood under protest, and in particular it goes out to my little sisters, Marty and Cindy, who shared the experience of Norris G. Smith with me. I laugh as best I can, and I try to be honest about the ambivalence of it all.

_____

Originally posted April 10, 2008.

It’s around 9 a.m. May 1, 1994. My stepmother, Kathie, has spent the night at Forsyth Memorial Hospital with my father, Larry, who will die late this afternoon. Their next-door neighbor, Wayne, is driving her home so she can shower and maybe get an hour or two of sleep. She hasn’t slept much in the six weeks since Daddy was admitted to the hospital with massive liver failure. Wayne has been a constant and salving presence during his friend’s illness.

Ten miles, maybe, down Silas Creek Parkway, through the south side of Winston-Salem, then on out Highway 109′s low, pine-strewn roll of hills to where Gumtree Road cuts across, demarcating the northern boundary of Wallburg, NC. This is where Daddy and Kathie live, and it’s where I grew up. These are the cultural outlands of the sprawling new metropolitan South. Our neighborhood straddles the Davidson and Forsyth County lines, and stands too far out into the country to be properly called suburban. But it’s also way too close to Winston to be considered rural. In some senses it’s a border town, possessing neither the urban sophistication of the city nor the kind of “agrarian virtue” my college Politics professor liked to attribute to country living. Antebellum mystique is dead elsewhere, and it never happened here.

Daddy’s place is one of the neighborhood’s older houses, built up in the late 1950s just as the baby boom was starting to lose its steam. But since they converted the carport into a den, added a new covered garage on the side, and painted everything a nice shade of sunshiny yellow, it’s one of the nicer places on the street, offering a welcome visual alternative to the predominant red-brick rancherscape. This is especially true since some of the more recent additions to the neighborhood have involved “prefabricated homes” and double-wides. Longstanding “real house”-owners like my father stand in their gravel driveways and talk about these things amongst themselves sometimes, arms crossed, eyes squinting as the sun slips behind the pines.

Wayne and Kathie turn into the driveway. The house key is hidden inside Daddy’s big smoker grill around back. Kathie cuts through the carport and turns the corner in time to look up and see Randy Wilson, my best buddy from childhood, crawling out through her bedroom window. The Wilsons live down the street a couple of houses, and our families have been friends for over 30 years. Daddy and Greer, Randy’s father, are men whose children grew up together, played baseball together. Although they aren’t intimate friends, exactly, they are men with much in common, men who relate to one another easily. Neighbors. Men who are comfortable trading tales over the occasional beer.

Kathie screams. Randy topples to the ground, more or less head first, rolls and comes up hauling ass for the woods. He’s busted, but due to the stress of the moment he hasn’t quite figured it out yet.

By now Kathie has made it back out front, hysterical, so Wayne retrieves the key. They go in the house and once he gets Kathie calm enough to explain what happened, they call the Sheriff’s department. Or rather, they’re trying to call the Sheriff’s department, but are distracted by Randy, who has evidently come to understand the nature of the pickle vat in which he now finds himself soaking. He slinks out of the woods like a cur dog, circles through the scrubby side yard between Daddy and Kathie’s house and the Weaver’s trailer, eases around the corner, and, as nonchalantly as possible, wanders in the front door. At some point during the past couple of minutes, Wayne has made his way into the bedroom and retrieved one of Daddy’s pistols, which somehow Randy missed during the burglary.

Randy begs them not to call the law. He’s currently out of prison on parole and out of jail on bail. It’s unclear what he was in prison for, but three weeks ago he got a call from his little sister, Tammy, who was stranded up in Winston-Salem somewhere and needed a ride home. Randy doesn’t have a car, so he walked up to the Baptista’s house – they live directly across the street from Daddy and Kathie – and appropriated theirs.

Apparently car thieving doesn’t constitute a parole violation in Davidson County. Then again, even a bad-ass television DA might have trouble convincing a jury that boosting the Baptista’s car, a rusting monument to the genius of coathangers, baling twine, and duct tape, merits a grand theft charge. Regardless, Randy somehow made bail, and this is how, three weeks later, he found himself rummaging through the drawers in my father’s bedroom.

For her part, Kathie has experienced nothing in her life which prepares her for this moment. She calls Randy names he’s never heard before, which is something of an accomplishment given that, in his pre-incarceration days, Randy was a Marine. Wayne tells Randy to leave while he still can and Kathie goes back to calling the law. Randy walks out the door. A moment later he’s back, doing his best to look penitent.

“Please don’t call the law Kathie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he pleads. The dialing continues. He walks out the door, pauses on the cement porch, then comes back in again. Evidently trying to lighten the mood with small talk, he asks, “So, has Larry died yet?”

Wayne, in the passion of the moment forgetting that he’s outsized by a couple of inches and at least 40 pounds of hard, prison-yard muscle, whips around, grabs Randy by the front of his shirt, and pounds him hard up against the wall by the front door. For the first time he brings the pistol, a nondescript .45 automatic, to bear, laying it against Randy’s jaw.

“Motherfucker, you’re closer to being dead than Larry is. If you don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to blow your goddamned head off.”

Wayne lets go of Randy’s shirt, cautiously, allowing him to edge toward the door. Randy shrugs and smiles kind of vacantly at Wayne, who’s all of a sudden very aware of the odd weight of the gun in his hand. He’s never pointed a gun at anybody before, but he figures Randy probably has.

Randy holds his hands up in front of him and backs into the doorway, where he stops and bows his head for a second. “All right, all right.” He turns, walks out the door, through the front yard, and heads off down the street.

* * * * *

Larry “Chugger” Mulraney led what might charitably be called an imperfect life. He liked Cadillacs and diamond rings and junkets to Vegas. He liked women way too much to suit my mother and my first stepmother, who it turns out was originally one of the women Daddy liked too much to suit my mother. And the wheel goes around. Kathie, the third and final significant woman in his life, was the only one he didn’t run around on. That we know of.

Larry was not enlightened on questions of racial and gender equality. He wasn’t in favor of equal rights for gays and lesbians. And he absolutely, positively, had no time whatsoever for anybody who believed that smoking ought to be restricted in public places due to the hazards of second-hand smoke. Your lungs and my lungs were beside the point. Empirical research showing nicotine in the blood of fetuses whose mothers were non-smokers was beside the point. At stake was a more fundamental consideration: his Constitutional right to smoke wherever and whenever he pleased. When I once suggested that the Constitution didn’t explicitly articulate such a provision, it merely reinforced his long-held opinions regarding the relative merits of book learnin’.

Chugger was a shrewd trader of horses and cars and motorcycles and anything else you could turn a quick buck on. So shrewd, in fact, that his own family was reluctant to do business with him. I have no idea just how much I got took for in the two or three deals we transacted, and frankly I don’t want to know.

But even as he picked people clean to the bone, he did so according to an inflexible, if not necessarily noble, code of honor. My youngest sister, Carla, and her husband Bo are still scratching their heads over a deal they struck with Daddy a few months before he died. They were having financial problems (new babies can be expensive, they were learning) and were looking to unload their pickup. Daddy was quick to pay them the first amount they mentioned, even though it eventually proved to be significantly less than they could have gotten elsewhere. “I gave ‘em what they asked for it, didn’t I?”

Daddy just had a gift for dealing with the dumb and trusting. He’d always give people precisely what they thought they wanted. If they were witless enough to ask a fraction of what he knew the merchandise would fetch, well, that was hardly his fault, was it? That’s why I don’t want to know how badly I got skinned when we traded my Dodge Omni for his 1976 Caddy Sedan de Ville back in 1987.

I remember one Saturday morning back in the late ’70s he paid a guy up in Winston $100 for a piece-of-trash old Dodge truck that was missing fourth gear. By sundown he sold it to some enterprising halfwit for $1,100 cash without so much as taking it to the car wash. It’s a shame that Daddy went to work for Piedmont Airlines when he graduated from high school. Had he gone into the car business I’d have had a rich father. Mind you, my sisters and I wouldn’t have been rich, just him.

Larry Mulraney wasn’t always the most indulgent of neighbors, either, and as fate would have it, the two craziest families in Davidson County live next to him. Next door you have the Weavers. If you’ve heard comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck if….” routine, you have an introductory idea of what they were like. One of my favorites lines is, “you might be a redneck if you have a house that’s mobile and three cars that aren’t.” And there’s another one which goes, “you might be a redneck if your wife leaves the Marlboro in her mouth while telling the State Trooper to kiss her ass.”
The Weavers could have posed for the poster. Their tin-sided mobile home looked to be on the verge of collapse 35 years ago, but somehow or another it’s still standing. The three junkers clogging the driveway have been there since the Eisenhower administration. This next one I made up: you might be a redneck if people who keep livestock indoors complain that you’re dragging down their property values.

Directly across the street from Daddy’s place you had the Baptistas, who were a whole ‘nother case. Whereas the Weavers were your garden-variety, inbred, white trash kind of crazy, the Baptistas had this exotic, dark-eyed, inbred, Eastern European gypsy mojo working, and folks in the neighborhood were pretty much unanimous that they were loopy even by Jehovah’s Witness standards. Daddy would sit in his living room trying to watch the evening news, but he’d wind up transfixed as the various Baptista daughters took turns pushing their 300-pound mother up and down the street in her wheelchair. The sheer visual unattractiveness of the spectacle he could have endured – he’d grown up in Forsyth County, and as such, he’d seen his share of ugly. No, the part that vexed him to oratory was the fact that Mrs. Baptista didn’t need a wheelchair.

I always thought she was actually handicapped, but I was over at Daddy’s one day when the Baptista girls were pushing the “vegetable cart” around, as Daddy put it, when he told me how he found out she could walk.

“Remember the other week when that storm blew up all of a sudden? Well, they were out rolling her up and down the street like they always do when I’m trying to watch the news. They were up in front of Fuzzy’s place when a big old lightning bolt hit somewhere close by. Thunder damn near rattled the windows out of the house. And you shoulda seen her. Came up out of that wheelchair like she had a rocket up her ass, and she didn’t walk down the street, she ran. Full-tilt boogie. You wouldn’t think something that big could move that fast, but I couldn’t have caught her on my motorcycle. Ran her fat ass all the way down the street and nearly ripped the front door out of the frame trying to claw her way into the house. Crazy goddamned bitch – I swear, sometimes I almost feel sorry for her husband.” Daddy leaned back in the recliner and drew a long gulp off his Schlitz. “Course, he’s damned near as crazy as she is.”

For awhile there was talk that Puddin’, the Weaver boy, was sneaking around with Magdalena, the eldest Baptista daughter, who was probably ten years his senior. The very thought of a Weaver-Baptista spawn running wild in the neighborhood probably kept Daddy awake at night, although he wasn’t a man to show outward signs of fear. “Let me tell you something, boy. Inbreeding is nature’s way of containing defective genes. Over there,” he waved his Schlitz at the Baptista house, “and over there,” indicating the Weaver place, “are two sets of genes that you don’t want to see getting loose. Especially with each other.”

I never thought to ask where he learned so much about genetics, but underneath all the ignorance and seething ill will was a good point. Puddin’ and Magdalena copulating was a sure-fire recipe for an ubercarny, and in this case, a policy of genetic confinement seemed reasonable.

All this talk of Puddin’ bonking a Baptista was peripheral, though. Daddy’s primary beef with the Weavers had to do with the dog they kept chained up in back. And had always kept chained up in back. It’s probably not the same dog they had in 1960, but you can’t really tell for all the weeds and trash in the yard. It’s not like you ever actually see the dog. They never walk it or play with it or let it run around. They just kind of have it. But the dog had this bad habit of barking in the middle of the night when Daddy was trying to sleep.

Every so often Daddy would get fed up with the barking. The situation would unfold something like this. Daddy’s been drinking and shooting pool at Shade’s, a cinder-block watering hole about three miles up the road toward Winston. He and Kathie get home around 2:00 a.m., get in bed around 2:30, and at 3:00 Bosco hears a squirrel snoring and commences to yapping, waking up every dog within a mile radius in the process. At 3:05 Daddy’s had all he can stand. He gets up, grabs his shotgun, walks out into the yard wearing nothing but his boxers. He aims the gun straight up in the air and cuts loose.

“I was shooting ducks,” he once explained. “There was a whole flock of ‘em up there.” This sort of thing happened often enough that the details run together, but one time the Baptistas called the Sheriff. Daddy answered the door in his underwear and told the deputy he had no idea what those crazy bastards across the street were talking about. He hadn’t heard a damned thing. Didn’t mention anything about the ducks. The deputies just nodded, thanked him, and left.

A couple of years before Daddy died I was at a gun show down in Randolph County (not too far from the home of the King, Richard Petty) and found some 12-gauge shells that fired flares instead of shot. It seemed like just the sort of thing Daddy might like for his nocturnal duck hunts. I figured if he could illuminate his targets a bit it might improve his chances of actually bagging one, so I bought him a box – three white ones and three green ones. He never got around to using them.

Larry just loved beer. Loved it to death, you might say. I never checked but I assume that, commencing in mid-March of 1994 when he first went into the hospital, Schlitz sales dropped precipitously. I had pondered for years what might happen in the first meeting of Coors executives after my father’s death. Some VP of Sales and Distribution in Golden, Colorado, would note an inexplicable plummet in sales of their Schlitz brand 16 oz. tallboys. He’d see his entire career flash before his eyes, and would frantically dispatch some hapless toady to find out why in the hell the public had suddenly lost its thirst for the beer that made Milwaukee famous. Then, several years later, the grizzled modern-day Parsifal would arrive one rainy winter evening at the marble grail marking Daddy’s final repose, and there he’d kneel, praying and weeping that he never knew the man. He’d return to report his story to the corporate directors, and they would erect a monument to Larry “Chugger” Mulraney, understanding at last that it was he who had made Milwaukee famous.

My best guess goes like this. Daddy probably downed eight to 10 beers, on average, every day for 37 years or so. More on days when he was off work, but this is a good working estimate. That comes to roughly 135,050 beers. Which is 2,160,800 fluid ounces. And this was just his everyday beer routine. We’re not even talking wine with dinner and the several varieties of hard liquor associated with special occasions. Which means that, while my father only went around once in his 56 years, he sure as hell grabbed all the gusto he could lay his hands on.

The doctors didn’t waste a lot of Latin on Daddy’s case. His liver just quit. I’m not sure how much gusto the average human kidney can take, but I’m guessing that the red line on the gauge falls somewhere to the left of two million ounces.

“What people don’t understand is that he didn’t really drink that much beer,” Kathie explained. “They’d always see him with a beer in his hand, but a beer would last him an hour or so. He just liked the taste of beer.”

I remember one time on vacation he found this shop that made fake newspapers, inserting your name into one of their prefabricated headlines. He came back with one reading, in 72-point bold type: Larry Mulraney Quits Drinking; Schlitz Goes Out of Business.

* * * * *

All this isn’t to say that Daddy was a bad man. On the contrary. He was one of the most loved and respected people who ever drew breath. He wasn’t formally educated beyond high school, but there was no mistaking his innate intelligence. His sense of humor ran to the earthy, but laughter followed him everywhere he went socially, and nobody he knew ever threw a party without inviting him. And in spite of all his faults, he was in many ways one of the most honest men I ever knew (car dealing notwithstanding). His marriage to my Mom was short and ugly, lasting only long enough to produce my sister, Jeri, and me. A marriage made in hell, it was, but he was always straight with me about his failings as a husband and a father. Mom wasn’t blameless, I knew, but he never demeaned her in front of me. He actually defended her several times during periods when I was hacking through some emotional trauma and blaming her.

“Nina did the best she could, Junior,” he said. “I was out running around and she was stuck at home with two kids. You ought not blame her. She did what she thought was best for you.” He wasn’t exactly good at these sorts of talks, but he did have the guts to own up to his drinking, his infidelity, and his immaturity. Not that there would have been much point in denying it – there were simply too many witnesses. A lesser man might have been overcome by the fear of how he might look in the eyes of his only son. The only concern Daddy had, though, was that his boy knew his father would shoot straight with him.

Co-workers, friends, trading partners – pretty much everybody except the Baptistas and the Weavers – agreed that Larry was one hell of a guy. And I think even the Baptistas and Weavers had a soft spot for him somewhere. Probably. Deep down. Maybe.

Given Daddy’s immense popularity, when we had his surprise retirement party you could hardly get in the place. The house was full. The carport was full. The yard was full. Daddy had worked for Piedmont Airlines, then the Great Satan, USAir, for 33 years. When USAir bought out Piedmont it was, to Daddy’s way of thinking, the moral equivalent of having your mother raped by Yankees. But that’s another story. Everybody who ever worked with him, for him, or near him was at the party. For a while I wondered if everybody who had ever flown on Piedmont Airlines was going to show up. The party was a huge success, to say the very least.

And many of the faces from the party came around again during his six weeks in intensive care first at Forsyth Memorial, then at the UNC Medical Center down in Chapel Hill, then at Forsyth again when the doctors finally threw in the towel and sent him back to his hometown to die.

* * * * *

After the cops are called and Randy leaves, Kathie does a quick inventory and realizes that some of their stuff is AWOL. The most prominent piece of missing property is Daddy’s prized nickel-plated .38. We’re the sort of family for whom firearms often have sentimental value.

Randy has ambled on down the street to his house, presumably to wait for the deputies. Kathie storms out the front door and heads down to the Wilsons’ to personally expedite the recovery of her stolen property. Kathie is a slight woman, and she has endured a long history of poor health. Some of us have wondered among ourselves whether Daddy’s illness might not kill her before it does him. As such, she does not cut a terribly imposing figure, in spite of the fact that she possesses one of these faces in which every nuance of her emotional state is clearly readable. At this moment, she is very obviously on the edge.

Kathie bangs on the Wilsons’ storm door and demands, in no uncertain terms, that her property be returned to her right now. Randy plays dumb, tells her she’s crazy. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Then Randy’s mother, Carol, pokes her head out and says that Randy saw some people going in to Larry’ house and he went in to chase them away. “He was trying to help you, Kathie. Randy was trying to help.”

Carol’s slant on the events of the past half-hour might be forgiven, I suppose. Life has not blessed her with model children, and it’s no wonder she wants to put the best face on a rapidly deteriorating situation. In fact, many of us who grew up with Joanie and Randy and Tammy Wilson would argue that Randy isn’t even the black sheep in the family. That distinction goes to Tammy, who displayed abnormal hellcat potential even as a preschooler. And this was in a neighborhood overrun with all manner of aspiring delinquents. I don’t know how many of my childhood friends finally wound up in jail, but off the top of my head I can think of seven or eight the gendarmes would do well to keep an eye on.

In shock and disbelief, Kathie retreats to her house to wait for the authorities. They finally arrive around 10:00, arrest Randy, haul him up to Kathie’s to be identified, and then cart him off to the county jail in Lexington.

By sundown he’s made bail and is back at home, and Wayne wonders out loud why, exactly, the Davidson County Sheriff even needs a jail. “The cop shows on TV always make out like breaking parole is a big deal.” Of course, as I pointed out later, law enforcement in Davidson County bears a lot closer resemblance to The Dukes of Hazzard than it does NYPD Blue, so you have to lower your expectations a bit when you dial 911.

Later that night one of Randy’s acquaintances, a man the Sheriff’s deputies say is a known drug dealer, calls Kathie and offers to sell Daddy’s .38 back to her for $500. All this information – locations, descriptions, serial numbers – is handed over to the deputies.

“We’re on our way over there to bust him right now,” they say, as they hustle out the door. It’s the last she hears from them for five months.

Five months – that would make it early October of an election year, and the Sheriff’s bid for another term was on tenuous footing. The last thing Davidson County’s highest-ranking peace officer wants to see at this point is the meticulously detailed letter which arrives from Kathie via registered mail, a correspondence which is conspicuously cc’ed to all five daily newspapers serving Davidson County. Her late husband’s property had never been recovered. She had not been kept apprized of the disposition of the investigation or Randy’s trial. Her calls had not been returned. Etc.

This is the only victory Kathie wins during the whole debacle. Less than 24 hours after the letter was mailed, her doorstep was littered with public servants. That night the cherished .38 was recovered.

Six weeks later the Sheriff was looking for work.

* * * * *

Not with a bang, but a whimper. Such was Daddy’s death. The whole thing just stank of injustice. Not that he didn’t bring it all on himself – he did. Larry Mulraney abused his body mightily for nearly four decades, and several months earlier the doctors had given him a rather unambiguous ultimatum: stop drinking completely or die. And since they had just drained a gallon of fluid out of his gut, there was ample reason to expect they might be taken at their word.

And he did stop for a while. But the weekend before his liver finally checked out for good, according to Kathie, he had killed a gallon bottle of vodka. The vodka didn’t go down without a fight, and a couple nights later he was, for all intents and purposes, history.

“It was the liquor that killed him,” Kathie says. “He knew he couldn’t go back to drinking beer because he liked it too much, and there towards the end he was trying to drink liquor like he did beer.”

It doesn’t quite set that a man whose life presented him with so many chances to die dramatically should, in the end, waste into silence on the wrong end of a respirator. When he totaled his car so spectacularly back in his teens, it didn’t kill him. In 1965 he lost control of a motorcycle at 90 m.p.h. up on the expressway and slid, rolled, flipped, tumbled, and generally Evel Knieveled several hundred feet on the concrete, and somehow that didn’t kill him, either. I was four, I guess, and saw him the next morning. There was no two-by-two inch patch of skin on his body that wasn’t lacerated, abrased, bruised, or scarred, but he hated hospitals, so he had a buddy sneak him out.

And that pack of liquored-up South Davidson County dropouts didn’t kill him that night a few years back on Highway 109, just north of Denton, when they tried to run him and Kathie off the road as they were driving home from dinner at this barbecue place Daddy really liked down there. Of course, his survival that time probably had a lot to do with the other driver’s reaction when, looking over, he realized that Daddy was no longer paying the least bit of attention to his steering wheel. Instead, he was leaning out the window with the aforementioned revolver leveled at the driver’s earhole. The road simply wasn’t big enough for the both of ‘em, the little thug must have figured, so he opted for a quick and cinematic detour through the cornfield paralleling the highway.

None of the bulls Daddy rode on his way to winning the very first Love Valley Rodeo Bullriding Championship killed him, either. I was maybe eight or nine the first time my grandparents told me that Daddy used to ride bulls. Grandmother backhanded me for being impudent when I laughed in her face, but I couldn’t help it. I genuinely thought they were pulling my leg. My daddy was the consummate pretty boy – 6’4″, with thin, high cheekbones tracing back several generations to a full Indian grandmother, never a strand of that immaculate jet-black hair out of place, never a bead of sweat, never even the suggestion of exertion. The very thought of my father on anything as rough and dirty and smelly as a Brahma bull – I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d never seen him brave so much as a riding lawn mower.

But once they showed me photos I had to believe them, so I asked him about it one day. Some of his stories about being chased around the ring and over the fence by a rampaging ton of torqued-off ribeye, well, to this day I prefer my rodeos with three clowns, a high fence, and eight or nine rows packed with spectator between me and the mayhem erupting out of chute five.

All of this excitement was such a far cry from the bland desperation of the Intensive Care Unit at Forsyth Memorial. That day in mid-March when they first called me they said he probably wouldn’t last the night. I’d heard that crap before – that’s what they said when Grandmother first went into the hospital five years earlier, and she lasted another year or two before officially clocking out. So I wasn’t too surprised when a few days passed and he was still hanging on. I was in Boulder, in my first year of grad school at CU, and the family told me to just sit tight until they knew more. A month later they called and said it looked grave, and that I should come home right away.

In spite of all I knew about the situation, there was a big part of me that still revered the myth of Daddy’s immortality. I knew the odds – my friend Alex is an internal medicine specialist at Presbyterian Hospital in Atlanta, and he had pretty much acquainted me with the realities of the situation, given the facts as he understood them. But the head and the heart were not quite reconciled. And when I walked back into the ICU the first time, I wished on the spot that he’d died that first night, like the doctors promised, as quickly and painlessly as possible. I wished he had died in that car wreck, or on the expressway, or on the rodeo floor. Anywhere, anyway except this. It was exactly like when I flew home from Iowa in 1989 to see my grandmother. That husk, that improbable assemblage of flesh and fluid lying inert and incognizant on coarse, institutional sheets in a dank, gray institutional room. I’ve never quite known what it was, but it wasn’t Grandmother.

Likewise, there was precious little left of my father. I had been there three days before I had any notion that he had recognized me. He was drugged pretty heavily, thankfully, and I suspect that when he was conscious he played possum on us. Ignored us. Kind of like when you’ve kenneled the family cat for your vacation and you come home and the damned thing won’t acknowledge you for a week because it’s mad that you put it in that place. Daddy would rather have been dead at home than alive in the best hospital in the world.

The hospital had him hooked up to a stunning array of life-enhancing technology. You could have taken a picture of Daddy and all these machines and used it in a medical technology brochure. Hire an artist to doctor the photo a bit, maybe make the patient look a bit more lifelike, insert little numbers on each gizmo with lines leading off into the margins, where you’d have the make and model and a brief description. Add an 800 number and a price list and you’d have yourself a damned fine sales tool.

One of the things my thoughtful side wanted to ask him then, but couldn’t, was whether he had reconsidered his decision regarding Grandmother and the feeding tube. He couldn’t bring himself to have it removed. He couldn’t “play God.”

“I can’t make that decision. Can you?” he’d yelled. Well, yeah, actually I can, I said. I wanted to ask him if he’d changed his mind in light of what was happening to him now, but I couldn’t, because even when he finally woke up he couldn’t talk. The respirator makes that pretty much impossible.

There was one moment on the last night I was there. He had attained consciousness and seemed alert for the first time since I had arrived three or four days earlier. Several of us were back in his little room in ICU – Kathie and Wayne, as well as Chester and Donna, a couple of Daddy and Kathie’s closest friends. Daddy and Donna had some sort of private running joke going which I never got fully explained to me, but which everybody insisted was really a hoot. Her part in the joke involved asking Daddy if he wanted her to fetch him a Pepsi. We were all trying to be up for him the way people are when they’re around somebody who’s going to die. We smiled a lot, joked, told him how good he looked. Or rather the others did. I’ve never had much of a bedside manner.

Donna looked down at Daddy and recited her end in the long-running joke – “Chugger, you want me to get you a Pepsi?” And she laughed, I suppose the way she always did at this point in the gag.

Daddy, of course, couldn’t speak his line. But I was watching his eyes. YES! God yes, please bring me a Pepsi, the thought as clear as any words he ever spoke. He even strained upward like he wanted to climb out of the bed. He was on the respirator, though, and couldn’t have anything to drink – hadn’t had moisture in his mouth in a month – I know Donna didn’t mean to torment him, and I don’t even know if anybody besides me noticed.

I flew back to Colorado the next day, slightly encouraged by the fact that he had shown some improvement during my visit. If we could just get him stabilized. If the doctors could keep him alive and functioning and if Kathie could keep him on the wagon for six months, then maybe UNC would consider him for a liver transplant. Maybe. Maybe.
Two weeks later the phone rang.

* * * * *

It’s May 1, 1994, around 5 p.m. Larry Mulraney has just been pronounced dead. At roughly the same time, down the street at the Wilson house, Randy is back home after making bail. Tammy comes in. She’s heard what happened this morning. Whatever faults she might have, Tammy Wilson does understand something of the respect one accords to people who have been friends and neighbors for three decades. Especially when one of those people lies upon his deathbed.

An argument erupts between the two of them, and like most of the arguments I remember them having as children, this one rapidly escalates into a full-tilt flamethrower. Tammy simply cannot believe her brother could have done what he allegedly did. Not wanting things to deteriorate further, Greer attempts to intervene and halt the argument between his kids, which is kind of like a housecat trying to pull two pit bulls apart.

At about 5:15 p.m., a few scant minutes after Daddy died, Greer Wilson’s heart goes the way of Daddy’s liver – it just quits – and he drops at his children’s feet and dies.

* * * * *

I imagine Greer and Daddy boarding the train together. Hopefully there’s a lounge car, and maybe a pool table, so they can shoot a few games, enjoy a beer or two, and shoot the bull as the celestial engine chugs their souls off into eternity. Greer has a High Life and Daddy’s got a Schlitz, and since I’m not there to jinx him, Daddy’s probably whipping all comers in eight-ball. “Goddamn kids,” Greer says, hands on his hips. “I swear, Chugger, I don’t know what the hell I did wrong.” Daddy grunts, sizing up his next shot.

He runs the eight ball down the rail to win another one. Good karma early in the next life. It’s a positive sign for a man who was raised with Jesus, strayed as a young man, then, according to Kathie, came home to the Lord in the final weeks of his life.

Still, Larry Mulraney never was much for harp music. I can’t help hoping that Daddy and Greer are sitting in the lounge car of the Big Black Train, talking, drinking, comparing notes on the day’s events, and laughing their asses off.

That means three lives’ worth of Richards’ memories from the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, right? Well, kind of. It seems Richards spent one of those extra lives as a heroin addict and most of another one feuding with Stones front man Mick Jagger. He spares no ink on those topics, so Life actually works about to about a life and a half. Having said that, it still lends itself to being read in big chunks. Fans of classic rock will devour it.

The book begins by establishing a main theme: It’s always been the Stones vs. the Establishment (read: police), and the Stones make a fool of The Man every time. In the opening chapter, Richards writes about being foolish enough to stop at a roadside diner in Arkansas on Independence Day weekend in 1975, when the Stones were touring. He and the guitarist Ronnie Wood

“… went into the john. You know, just start me up. We got high. We didn’t fancy the clientele out there, and so we hung in the john, laughing and carrying on. We sat there for forty minutes. And you don’t do that down there.”

Their behavior led to the diner staff calling the police, who stop the rockers’ car as soon as it pulls out of the diner parking lot,

“… and there they are with shotguns in our faces. I had a denim cap with all these pockets in it that were filled with dope. Everything was filled with dope. In the car doors themselves, all you had to do was pop the panels, and there were plastic bags full of coke and grass, peyote and mescaline. On my God, how are we going to get out of this?”

In this episode, and every other “busted!” episode throughout the book, the Stones (read: Richards) beat the bust, thanks to powerful, well-connected lawyers who know people who know people. Richards also contends that after police nabbed the band, they didn’t know what to do next because they were afraid of being seen as heavy-handed. During other brush-ups with the law, he relies on his I’m-a-rock-and-roller, smack-is-part-of-my-life, I’m-not-hurting-anyone defense.  Richards and the band are the ultimate rebels, flaunting the laws and making up their own rules as they go along. It makes for humorous reading now because we all know how the story turned out: Everybody lived (well, almost everybody), no one went to prison, and Keith turned into a Pirate of the Caribbean. It makes for humorous reading because Richards thinks it all was funny and writes it that way. He’ll have you laughing out loud when he describes how he and an associate are trying to flush drugs down a toilet and spilling pills all over the bathroom floor in a madcap attempt to get rid of evidence against them.

Richards’ humor, though, wanes fairly early on, save for wisecracks that go off like firecrackers throughout the book. Life becomes less funny because of almost interminable stories of his go-rounds with heroin: either by himself, or with his former wife-in-all-but-a-legal sense Anita Pallenberg, or with musicians like John Lennon: “But the thing was with John—for all his vaunted bravado—he couldn’t really keep up.” Richards continues, “John would inevitably end up in my john, hugging the porcelain. And there’d be Yoko in the background, ‘He really shouldn’t do this,’ and I’d go, ‘I know, but I didn’t force him!’” Lennon, he says, never left his house “except horizontally. Or definitely propped up.”

There’s only so much humor that can be extracted from addiction, though, and after awhile, Richards’ bragging about using heroin to take the edge off of life so he could function better, or boasting about using drugs to stay up and work once for nine days without sleep, gets tiresome—as do his descriptions of trying to go cold turkey to clean up, only to relapse, and then go cold turkey again, and then relapse again, etc. We get it, Keith. You were a junkie. Move on.

Drugs, of course, contributed to the demise of Brian Jones, one of the original members of the Rolling Stones. You’d think Jones’ death—apparently by drowning in his swimming pool shortly after Jagger and Richards expelled him from the band—might elicit more of a reaction from Richards than a page and a half, but that’s all there is. And much of that space covers a conspiracy theory about Jones actually being murdered as opposed to drowning accidentally. Still, even at this point, Richards refers to his former band mate as a “whining son of a bitch.” Not much sympathy for the devil.

Richards’ account of his feud with Jagger peaks in Life when he complains, “The immediate problem was that Mick had developed an overriding desire to control everything” in the ‘80s. Well, it’s not as if Mick could have leaned on a perpetually nodded-out Richards for help. Richards misses that point; he misses the point that Jagger’s business acumen led to untold riches for the band members; he misses the point that it was simply unreasonable to expect Jagger to share control with him, given his habit of relapsing into addiction; he misses the point that with his bloodstream almost being a liquid pharmacy, maybe he wasn’t thinking lucidly for vast stretches of time. Who else was going to take control?

Richards’ indignation reaches its zenith when he discusses Jagger’s venture at a solo career. Quick: In the mid-to-late ‘80s, how many solo LP’s did Jagger release? What were their names? That’s right: Jagger’s career as a solo artist is an obscure footnote, even to those of us who were around at the time. But instead of taking a long-term view of it and recognizing its insignificance, Richards lets it worry at him like a festering sore—and he misses the clear contradiction that results when he talks about what a great project his solo band—The X-Pensive Winos—was. Apparently, Richards feels the Winos tipped the solo stars’ scales his way. Quick: How many albums did the Winos put out? Exactly. Clearly, though, the self-styled “Glimmer Twins” weren’t always at odds—and to his credit, Richards repeatedly acknowledges Jagger is a prodigious songwriter and a front man who can entertain like no other.

Besides writing at some length about how he and Jagger co-wrote so many songs, Richards provides us other insights into what it’s like to be a Rolling Stone. Stories about how the band was founded, its influences, and its travels around England, Europe, and America paint a picture of rock stardom that is far less glamorous than we might expect. The picture shows us a band working, constantly working, only able to snatch the odd day off here or there, especially in the early days. It shows us the strains that touring can have on relationships, on wives and children, as well as on band members and their associates.

For music aficionados, Richards provides insight on how he gets his unique sounds out of his guitar. He talks about playing with Jones; with Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor; and with Taylor’s replacement, Ronnie Woods. Clearly, Richards thinks Taylor was the best of the three, but he doesn’t speculate much about why Taylor abruptly left the band. Perhaps the musician who gets the most respect is the Stones’ dapper drummer, Charlie Watts. Richards pays Watts homage in the book, and it’s due him, actually, because Watts so often was overshadowed by drummers like John Bonham, Peter (Ginger) Baker, Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell. Watts is sneaky good and a worthy target of Richards’ praise—but it would have been interesting to hear what Richards had to say about those other drummers, or about all the great musicians he’s seen and heard over the decades. There’s barely any of that. And there’s barely a mention of the Stones’ longtime bassist, Bill Wyman. Curious.

Richards is to Jagger as Lennon was to Paul McCarthy, and late in the book, Richards writes a few paragraphs about abruptly meeting Sir Paul (whom he barely knew) on a beach in the Caribbean:

”We were really pleased to see each other. We fell straight in, talking about the past, talking about songwriting. We talked about such strangely simple things as the difference between the Beatles and the Stones and that the Beatles were a vocal band because they could all sing the lead vocal and we were more of a musicians’ band—we only had one front man.”

At times—when Richards is talking to McCartney, for instance, Life seems ready to settle into a relaxed groove. The most obvious opportunity is the description of his courtship of and love for his now-wife Patti Hansen. But Richards’ ego always re-emerges—for example, when he writes about women. His attitude toward them is lamentable. I know: It was the ‘60s. Sexual mores were changing. Beautiful women swarmed around rock musicians; rock musicians appreciated their company. Sometimes they really appreciated their company. Richards was as appreciative as any. But all these years later, is it so unreasonable to expect him to look back and use words other than “bitches”? Sure, hail hail rock ‘n’ roll rebel and all that. But Keef, you’re a grown man now. Why hasn’t your language grown up too? Why aren’t you enough of a gentleman now to eliminate the name of a woman who is doing naughty things to you in the back of a car?

In the end, the excesses of Life flaw it. The book still is fun to read, but not as much fun as it should have been. Granted, rock ‘n’ roll is largely about excess, but Keef gives us excess in the wrong places. Richards carps about Jagger’s ego but fails to reel in his own. Something less self-centered or with broader views on a wider range of subjects might have struck a truer chord. Richards sometimes gives other voices the chance to speak—his son Marlon among them—but what we find in this book is largely Richards worrying about making sure he can get drugs and clean needles in the next city on the tour, and bitching about Jagger.

Richards reportedly changed the title of his book from My Life late in the process. If he’d kept the title, it would have been more honest. Stones fans (this writer among them) still would have read it. But at least going into the book, we would have had a better idea of how much of a Keef-fest it is.

If writing a 50,000-word novel in a month sounds like a crackpot idea, it is. So admits Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month and author of No Plot? No Problem! But Baty’s book also makes the idea sound like a total lark—and totally doable, too.

Baty and twenty of his friends, living in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, launched NaNoWriMo as nothing more than something to do to kill time. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” he writes: “Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in out mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

No Plot? No Problem! is not the book he set out to write that week. Instead, it’s a how-to book designed for daredevil fiction writers who want to replicate Baty’s literary feat. It provides an outline for how to tackle a novel-in-a-month project, and it also includes a wealth of tips from Baty and dozens of other NaNoWriMo veterans.

“Perhaps flinging a random assortment of characters at a Microsoft Word document…was not the soundest approach to book-building,” says Baty, who warns that starting from scratch—as a true daredevil fiction writer might be wont to do—isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. “Of the twenty-one people who participated,” he writes, “only six of us made it across the 50,000-word finish line that first year, with the rest falling short anywhere from 500 to 49,000 words.”

NaNoWriMo might be nothing more than a big gimmick, which Baty treats as serious-but-light-hearted fun. He wants subscribers of his vision to do the same. “[Y]our novel is not a self-improvement campaign,” he says. “Your novel is a spastic, jubilant hoe-down set to your favorite music, a thirty-day visit to a candy store where everything is free and nothing is fattening.”

The key to the event, and the message central to Baty’s book, is for writers to take risks. “The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy,” Baty says.

Self-censorship and meticulous attention to craft are no-no’s. Instead, the book counsels a breakneck speed of 1,667 words per day for thirty days. “You will be bathing in dizzying amounts of momentum and literary moxie,” he says.

Why one month? On one hand, it’s an arbitrary amount of time, easy to measure—but it’s also absolutely crucial. “A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most ass-kicking form,” Baty says. “Deadlines are the dynamos of the modern age.”

The deadline forces action, and with novel writing, it necessitates an emphasis on quantity over quality. “Thanks for the go-go-go structure of the event, the stultifying pressure to write brilliant, eternal prose had been lifted,” Baty says. “And in its place was the pleasure of learning by doing. Of taking risks, of making messes. Of following ideas just to see where they lead.”

And in a way, that’s the joy of No Plot?: It is a celebration of the raw act of creation. Art and craft come later—but the novel must first of all be born before the writer can turn it into something.

Baty never seems to take the novel-in-a-month idea too seriously—but he does take the writing itself very seriously. After all, No Plot? could’ve been little more than a 50K-word promo for NaNoWriMo. Baty avoids that trap by hammering home the importance of risk and creation and by plugging the book chock-full of excellent writing advice.

Some of this suggestions sound like writing truisms:

• Allow change, and plot will happen.
• If you won’t enjoy reading it, you won’t enjoy writing it.
• When picking out your pen, you must be absolutely sure that you have found the right one…. Getting the wrong pen for the job would be a disastrous start to the writing process.

But beyond the truisms, Baty offers excellent time management strategies, suggestions for generating well-realized characters, and over coming writers block (my favorite: start your novel as an e-mail to yourself because “something about the rhetorical situation of e-mail writing keeps [your] internal censor and editor quiet).

He does offer, too, suggestions specific to novel-in-a-month writing, such as advice for managing “word debt” and tips for padding word counts: “Afflict one of your characters with a stutter,” “Word-processing programs tend to count hyphenated words as a single unit,” “The dream sequence and its cousin, the hallucination, go on for as long as you like and don’t have to many any sense whatsoever.”

Overall, it’s a well-balanced mix of universal writing advice and advice for daredevil novelists.

It’s clear, throughout the book, that Baty loves writing and he loves being a writer. “If we loved books, we were equally awestruck by their creators,” he says. “Novelists were clearly a different branch of Homo sapiens; an enlightened subspecies endowed with a monstrously overdeveloped understanding of the human condition and the supernatural ability to spell words properly.”

That’s one of the delights of the book: Baty makes it abundantly clear that he’s having one first-class helluva good time as a writer. “I find flinging balls of paper, pens, and other assorted office supplies across the room helps the whole writing process feel more romantically agonized, and I’ll throw things for fun even when my novel is going well,” he says.

Baty has been criticized for urging people to churn out a novel’s worth of unrefined garbage in a month—garbage then unleashed on weary literary agents worldwide—but Baty is quick to point out that the first draft is only the beginning of a long process. “Making the myriad tweaks, fixes, and alterations necessary to get your book up to bookstore quality is a huge, challenging project,” he writes.

The book spends time offering tips on how to revise and edit, although the section feels like an after-thought. Baty’s genius shines during the act of creation but the brilliance dims a little when the hard work comes. The section is there because it has to be, but it’s clear that it’s not Baty’s passion.

Creation, clearly, is—high-octane, super-caffeinated, no-holds-barred, go-go-go creation. And that alone makes No Plot? No Problem worth reading. With so many Very Serious books about writing on the market, No Plot? No Problem! stands out with whirling dervish energy—whether a writer wants to tackle a novel in a month or not.

The weather in Dallas that afternoon could not have been more beautiful. President Kennedy, with the top down in his limousine, took full advantage of the sunshine and warm temperatures, waving to the throngs of people lining the motorcade’s route and flashing his winning smile. Camelot had come to central Texas.

Farther down the route, overlooking Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald waited, rifle at the ready. The scope on the gun was a little wobbly, the lens in the scope a little blurry, Oswald’s marksmanship skills a little questionable—but Oswald had his mission.

The president’s car rounded the curve into the plaza and came into Oswald’s line of fire. Oswald squeezed the trigger.

So, too, did a gunman hidden across the way near the top of a grassy knoll.

And now, forty-three years later, that second gunman is ready to speak.

That’s premise behind Chuck Helppie’s new novel, Kennedy Must Be Killed. Helppie has spent decades researching the Kennedy assassination, pouring through more than 125,000 pages of documents in his search for clues. He has sat in Gerald Ford’s private office at the Ford Presidential Library and looked through the former president’s personal collection of materials from the Warren Commission’s investigation. He’s been to the book depository overlooking Dealey Plaza and sited a replica of the rifle Oswald supposedly used. He’s worked with police and military snipers. He’s read memoirs and public and private documents and personal correspondence.

“My research, I guess you could say, quite literally started on November 22, 1963,” Helppie says.

He was eleven at the time, living in Arlington, Virginia just blocks from the Pentagon. “We were literally at Ground Zero of the Cold War, and the whole neighborhood knew it,” he says. His father, an economist, worked for Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division.

Helppie had stood on the capital lawn with his mother to watch JFK’s inauguration. From his own front lawn, two-and-a-half years later, he could hear the twenty-one-gun salute fired when JFK was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

“I was there at the beginning,” Helppie says, “and I was there at the end.”

“The horror of the Kennedy assassination shocked me to the core because I had never seen adults mourn en masse before,” he says. “The nearest thing I can liken it to is when you go to a funeral, and inside the church, everyone is mourning, but when you go outside the world is still going. When President Kennedy was assassinated, it was entirely different. The whole world shut down.”

It was, he says, “a very, very dark, almost smothering time,” and it left a deep impression. “The experience imprinted itself on me,” he says.

His father left the Justice Department soon thereafter for a faculty position at Eastern Michigan University. But for Helppie, questions about Kennedy’s assassination lingered. “I kept looking for an answer that wasn’t there,” he says.

Helppie stills lives in Michigan, where he has worked for as a financial advisor in the financial services industry for more than thirty-three years. But throughout adulthood, he has never stopped looking for those answers.

“As I began to put all the information together, I was still searching for a motive,” he says. “What eluded me intellectually was that there was really no motive.”

So he stepped back to take a broader-angle view, examining the cultural, social, political, historical, and global forces at work at the time—and what he saw stunned him. “I began to see this panoply play out in front of me,” he says. “And as I began to weave these threads together, I thought it was too good of a story not to write down.”

The result, his “fact-based novel” Kennedy Must Be Killed, tells the story of the motive behind Kennedy’s murder.

“I wanted to share this information in a way that would get people invested in the tale,” Helppie says. “The book can be read simply as a thriller—people can do that and enjoy it—or as a piece of history, or a Shakespearean tragedy, or a literary form of Greek drama. I tried to create something that worked on multiple levels so readers could get a lot out of it.”

Particularly important to Helppie is the first-person narrator, which gave him a way to process and interpret “complicated events” for readers. “He’s also the moral center of the book, and he’s tugged in different directions,” Helppie says.

While the main characters are fictional, Helppie has put them in accurate historical settings. Readers can fact-check him, he says. “But I wanted to [write the book] in a way that would let readers draw their own conclusions,” Helppie says. “I wanted to build a lot of historical context into the book without hitting readers over the head with history dumps.”

Helppie tells the story from “a contrarian standpoint of history” that will, he hopes, challenge readers to questions what they know—and what they think they know.

“There are all sorts of problems with the chain of evidence,” Helppie says. “It’s been broken, tainted, manufactured. There are so many inconsistencies in the story. I want people to see them, understand them, and ask why the government doesn’t want to acknowledge them.”

The government’s official position, he points out, is that JFK’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy. That position, the result of hearings in 1979, refuted the findings of the Warren Commission, which originally investigated the president’s death—yet the hearings also tried to support parts of the commission’s report even while refuting others. “It’s a tremendous mess,” Helppie says.

But, he points out, “Conspiracy theorists do have the weight of the government behind them.”

Helppie’s novel tries to point out the extent of that conspiracy. “There is a realization that people in government at the time were willing to commit one of the most heinous crimes—and they got away with it,” he says. “The assassination of a president was a supremely abominable sin.”

Forces behind the assassination had four options for removing a president they felt was completely incapable and incompetent, says Helppie:

• They could try to vote him out of office, although the results of that would be uncertain and the timetable was a year away.
• They could try to create a scandal that would force the president to resign. Marilyn Monroe’s death, engineered by the mob, was just such an attempt, but the Kennedys were able to sanitize her “suicide.”
• They could impeach the president over the embargo of Cuba, something the Kennedys themselves saw as an impeachable offense. To do so would create a constitutional crisis at the height of the Cold War, which could potentially leave the country vulnerable to a Soviet sneak attack.
• They could kill and replace the president—something that could happen so fast the Russians wouldn’t have time to respond.

In the end, JFK’s assassination was nothing less than a coup.

“Lyndon Johnson was a ruthless politician with ties to people with blood on their hands,” Helppie points out.

That’s not all, of course. There’s sex, drugs, and lots of money, and as is almost standard with JFK conspiracies, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, the Cubans, and the Pentagon are all involved in varying capacities. Lee Harvey Oswald is the patsy—although Helppie believes Oswald wasn’t even a shooter.

Helppie points out, too, that the American people themselves played a complicit part. People today tend to remember Camelot, he says, but they tend to forget “there was no love for Kennedy in the South at that time.”

“There was so much blind hatred toward him,” he says. “There was an almost evil presence that was going to lead to trouble in Dallas on that day.”

Kennedy Must Be Killed is Helppie’s attempt to present the broad-canvas truth—presented as fiction—about an event that manages to still hold the public imagination forty-seven years later.

“The government has too much at stake for people to know the real truth,” Helppie contends. “It would bring down fortunes. It would bring down powerful men. It would be devastating to the nation. How could you ever trust your Pentagon again? There are questions that are horrifying in their conclusions.

“How do you deal with that?”

So I’m in Boston visiting a new granddaughter, born three and a half weeks ago but unseen by me until this past Thursday when I flew in from London, and boy, is she a peach. I’m getting some quality grandfather time in with her, and also getting to read to the older ones. Well, just the one who’s three and a half—the one in the middle, who is not quite two, doesn’t quite sit still long enough. But the oldest one will sit still for books now, and will let me read to her for quite a while—just like my own kids did. And this brings back one of the main pleasures of parenthood—reading to my children. And now I get to read to my grandchildren.

When my kids were growing up, my schedule was always a bit uncertain, at least when they were very young. But there was always time for some reading before bed. I don’t know who this was more important for—them, or me. For them, this was sometimes the only time they would see me during the day for a couple of years there, and that was hard for both them and me. For me, this was the special time of the day, the time that made the rest of the day worth it. I must have spent ten or eleven years there reading to them altogether, and it was time well spent—perhaps the most important time I spent with them, in fact.

When we only had the one, I was largely at home, so I got to spend lots of time reading to her while Mrs W was off at grad school. We still have all those books—or my daughter does, and I keep running into them in the collection to read to my granddaughter. Just yesterday, in fact, I rediscovered Gyo Fujikawa’s Oh, What a Busy Day!—what a wonderful book! Great pictures of happy (mostly) children, and hundreds of wonderful rhymes of the three to four year old sort. This was one of the first books we bought our kids, and I love the fact that’s it’s still around.

I still remember those first few books—I had a temporary job at Green Tiger Press in San Diego for the Christmas season, and got some deals on some wonderful books with some wonderful Jesse Wilcox Smith illustrations, and some weird but very colorful books by Cooper Edens. But the prize was the edition of Stevenson’s A Child Garden of Verses that they had gotten the rights to, with the extraordinary illustrations by Charles Robinson. What a classic. This really is one of the best kid’s books ever, and it lasts for years. They seem never to get tired of it. And I can still remember the ones we read the most—”The Swing,” of course, but also “The Moon,” and “The Lamplighter” was a favorite too, even though there was no way they could know what a lamplighter was. For years I had so many of these memorized that I can still remember them. What wonderful poems to clog your memory with.

We were generally broke those days, as young parents often are, so we spent lots of time at the library—San Diego wasn’t broke yet, so the children’s room at the main library had a really good collection, and some really nice librarians, as I recall. So every week or two we would head down there, load up, and come home with a fresh batch. Picture books, mostly because those were the ones you generally couldn’t afford. We would load up on the Margaret Wise Brown books, although we had bought a couple at that point—Goodnight, Moon, and The Runaway Bunny. We fell in love with that whole era of children’s book publishing—it was a golden age of writing, and illustration, and we started adding to the Brown titles—Little Fur Family, Sailor Dog (my favorite book as a kid), Mister Dog (my other favorite book as a kid—you know how it is), The Little Island. Brown was prolific, writing many wonderful children’s books, and she know exactly what would work. There’s a reason why Goodnight, Moon is still in print.

This was also around the time we started really just exploring writers we had never heard of. Who has heard of children’s book authors (except maybe Maurice Sendak) who doesn‘t have children? And we started to get a feeling for the delicate balance of words and pictures that characterized great children’s books, at least for younger readers. So we discovered the magic of Eve Rice, whose Goodnight, Goodnight is a brilliant depiction of, well, people saying goodnight to each other across the city. But what makes it work are the illustrations, all black and white and yellow, which are perfect. What often makes Brown’s books so brilliant are the clever illustrations, usually by Clement Hurd. Again, there must be some instinct here that lets people tap directly into what children want, and what will work—Hurd certainly had it, given the huge number of successful and still-in-print books he illustrated.

And it’s clear that most books for kids this age—say three through six, or at whenever kids start to read—are meant to be read aloud. And that there’s almost an art to reading aloud—everyone does it, I did it, but sometimes it takes a while to get a book just right. No matter how many times I’ve read Goodnight, Moon aloud (hundreds), I still take some pains to try to get it right, to do it justice, because that’s when it works the best. And when I say works, I mean that it does what it sets out to do—reach into the minds of children.

Rice’s book was one of the first we bought, and we weren’t buying that many books those days—and we’ve got it still (which is good, because it’s out of print, although your library may have a copy). Even very good children’s books go out of print, for all the strange and mysterious reasons that good books are allowed to go out of print. Fortunately, many stay in print—all of Sendak remains in print, like nearly all of Brown, and nearly all of James Stevenson’s wonderful books as well. Virginia Burton’s The Little House (also with Clement Hurd illustrations), Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand, Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats, classics every one. But some of Tomie de Paola’s books are not, astonishingly, including An Early American Christmas, along with gems such as Goodnight, Goodnight, or Irene Trivas’s delightful Emma’s Christmas, a re-telling of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” from the view of Emma, the recipient of all that largess. Go figure.

De Paola was another discovery around this time, another writer with uncanny instincts for knowing exactly what will work for children of a certain age—we’ve still got those Strega Nona books. The same with the Ahlbergs, and in particular John Burningham. Burningham is a master of writing and illustrating stories that kids think are just wonderful—the Mr. Gumpy stories, or the ones with Shirley (Come Away from the Water, Shirley), and particularly Would You Rather, in which Burningham captures an incredible range of thoughts and wishes that any kid is bound to have in embarrassing situations. In the Shirley books, Burningham captures better than any children’s writer I have come across the simultaneity of adult instructions and conversations with what’s actually going on in a child’s head.

As the kids grew older we moved a couple of times, and I still have vivid memories of the libraries they spent time in—the branch library on Hope Street in Providence, the great children’s library in Highland Park, the average one in Hingham. But all have strong memories for me, because of the time spent there, and because of what they gave my kids. Which was access to entire worlds. Which is what libraries are supposed to do. If some libraries did it better than others, it was largely because of the librarians—a good children’s librarian is a find. The same is true for bookstores with good kids books areas. Ironically, the town with the best library had the most useless bookstore. But these were the years when we would vacation in Vermont and Maine, and there is no shortage of good bookstores in Vermont or Maine, nosiree, especially Northshire Books in Manchester, and Maine Coast Books in Damariscotta, but then there’s Brattleboro, and Chester, and Blue Hill….

What characterizes all these books whether they’re “great” or not, is that they’re great fun to read. I suppose “great” children’s literature is literature that stays with children as they grow up, for whatever reason. But sure there has to be some appeal to adults as well, at least the ones who are doing the reading. What makes Brown, or di Paola, or Stevenson great to read, or Natalie Babbitt or E.L. Koenigsberg for when they’re older, is that they’re incredibly wonderful to read aloud as an adult—there’s an appreciation for this sort of thing that you develop after hundreds of hours of reading aloud. There are children’s books in my library that I will never part with because of the joy that I had reading them. Particularly for an adult, starved for meaningful fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, discovering Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting or Koenigsberg’s Father’s Arcane Daughter was a revelation.

So right now I’m enjoying reliving all of this with Bibs, who is three and a half and just ripe for it. She picks out a bunch of books for me to read, and I dutifully read them, whatever they are, because she picked them out, and it’s important to let her do that. Then she lets me pick out one or two, and I read them too. And then she picks out a couple more. And I know that this little ritual will go on for years, with any luck. Right now it’s Brown and the Berenstain Bears, and Fukiyama, and McCloskey, and Richard Scarry. Soon it will be Stevenson and the Ahlbergs and Anno and Steven Kellogg and Nancy Willard and the Provensons. And then on to Lois Lenski, and eventually to Babbitt and Koenigsberg and other writers for young adults, or older children, or however one choose to describe eleven or twelve year olds. And along the way we’ll discover again the joys of Rosemary Wells, and Bernard Waber, and Arnold Lobel, and William Steig, and David Macauley, and Jane Yolen, and Chris Allsburg. And who knows who else. By then they’ll have found their own authors. My daughters found Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones and Madeline L’Engle on their own. But there’s enough shared experience here across generations to keep us busy and content.

The poet Donald Hall titled his book of baseball essays Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, trying to capture a certain American tradition that still exists. Parents reading books to children is another one, but one that probably gets less attention. I can’t say whether it’s more or less important, or frequent, than fathers playing catch with sons. But those moments of reading to them in the evening always counted as the high point of the day for me, and the fact that both are incurable readers and book people today is something I can take some of the credit (or blame) for was well. And the fact that I can take part in extending this tradition to the next generation is something I’m grateful for. What binds us together can always be greater than what divides us, and that’s as true for families and generations as anything else—even more so, in fact.

When I’m around, I’ll sit on the couch with one or more grandchildren next to me, reading what they want to hear, or in some cases what they don’t want to hear (at least initially). Many of these books are the same ones that I read to their mother when she was the same age. And I’m looking forward to keeping this going as far as I can take it. Realistically, this generation is probably the last one I’ll be able to do this with—it’s not likely that I’ll be here thirty years form now to do this with their children as well, although you never know. But it’s a nice thought, and maybe something to shoot for. If you measure your life by books, as I do, then knowing that these patterns can recur brings me great joy. As does the fact that the next generation is already carrying this wonderful ritual on.

The stamps above were issued by the UK in 2006 in celebration of animals in children’s literature, as part of a joint issue with the United States.

A WordsDay Special

Week Two usually takes a heavy toll on the writers participating in National Novel Writing Month, but for Lindsey Grant, the week has offered a little bit of a reprieve. NaNoWriMo’s program director has been fighting off a cold—a gift everyone in the office has been passing back and forth for days.

“Usually everyone’s sick in December, once we all crash from the adrenaline of this month,” Grant says. “This year, I guess it just came a little early.”

During Week One, she lost her voice and had to offer to do interviews by e-mail. But by the middle of Week Two, the 28-year-old Grant was back up to speed. “I’m surrounded by soup and tissues,” she laughs.

Grant is one of five full-time employees, assisted by another two part-time tech supporters and a team of contractors and interns, who run The Office of Letters and Light (OLL), the nonprofit organization in charge of NaNoWriMo. The event also depends on some 590 volunteers who act as liaisons in more than 528 different regions around the world; an additional 350 volunteers assist in various other capacities.

“We eat, sleep, breath this,” Grant says. “We really have to be an inseparable team in October, November, and December. We’re going to events together. We’re writing together. We share an open office space, so we’re always sharing ideas together. We sound things out with each other and run things by each other.”

The environment is “very collaborative, very accessible,” Grant says. “It’s really lovely.” Three skylights fill the main room with sunlight—the light to complement the OLL’s letters.

“On top of that, we’re all writing,” Grant says. “We have a responsibility to see if it’s truly feasible. We felt like we really couldn’t get an idea of what it’s like for writers unless we were doing it with them.”

A lot of NaNoWriMo participants use the staff as a barometer. If people see founder Chris Baty behind on his word count, it can actually be reassuring. It’s just one more way, Grant says, to remind participants that “we’re all in this together.”

Baty started NaNoWriMo in 2000 when he and some of his friends decided to crank out 50,000-word novels in thirty days. “Of the twenty-one people who participated,” Baty writes in his book No Plot? No Problem!, “only six of us made it across the 50,000-word finish line that first year, with the rest falling short by anywhere from 500 to 49,000 words.”

By 2009, the number of participants had leapt from twenty-one to 167,000. That year, 32,000 of them “won”—the NaNoWriMo term for successfully reaching 50K. “The growth has been astronomical,” Grant says.

“Interestingly, as we’ve seen the number of participants increase, we’ve seen the percentage of winners increase, too,” Grant adds. Last year about 19% of the participants won, compared to about 18% the year before. The trend, says Grant, has held true for several years. “We’re waiting for it to finally level off. I mean, it has to eventually, right?”

But Grant speculates that the climbing success rate might relate to NaNoWriMo’s learning curve. As writers return to the event year after year, they come equipped with a better sense of what it takes to tackle a 50K-novel.

At the start of NaNoWriMo this year, some 172,000 writers had registered. By the end of day three, that number had jumped to 185,587. In all, Grant estimates there are somewhere around 210,000 NaNoWriMo writers tapping away at their keyboards.

“A lot of people delay logging in at the beginning,” she says, explaining that people sometimes don’t like to make the commitment to the event until they know they’re committed to their novel. “We’ll see a big spike toward the end,” she says, predicting “thousands more people who’ll register when it’s time to validate their word count.”

A small population of NaNoWriMo participants have been pushing for custom word counts. “There’s a trend among some of them who think 50,000 words is too easy,” Grant says. “Some people want to try for 100,000 or even 150,000.” She laughs. “Most people find 50,000 plenty challenging.”

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Grant joined the Office of Letters and Light in 2008 as the nonprofit’s third employee. She had just graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Mills College in Oakland. “My parents couldn’t believe the job posting when I showed it to them,” she laughed. “It could not have been more perfect.”

She had wanted to work at a nonprofit that called on her personal and educational background, and the OLL offered a perfect fit. “We were all so on the same page,” Grant says.

As NaNoWriMo’s program director, Grant spends her off months prepping for the madness of November. She solicits pep talks from published authors, for instance, which she’ll send out during November. This month, writers have heard from fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), and John Green (Looking for Alaska). Later this month, Dave Eggars (McSweeney’s), Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles), and Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Incidents) will offer advice.

The pep talks are archived on NaNoWriMo’s website, as are pep talks that she writes and sends out during the month. The site’s blog posts, which she also writes, get written as breaking news each day or two.

The website also includes a collection of writing resources, as well as curricular support for schools through NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program. Last year, more than 35,000 kids K-12 in more than 1,200 classrooms participated in the program. College students, too, can participate through NaNoUniversity.

“November is a busy time for students and teachers,” Grant admits, which is one reason she’s developing a “tear-down” version of the event called Camp NaNoWriMo, which people can use any month of the year as their schedules might allow. Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! offers similar guidance.

NaNoWriMo staffers coordinate write-in programs with libraries and independent bookstores, and they attend in-person events in the San Francisco Bay area. On the afternoon I talk with Grant, for instance, Baty is sitting in on a class at Stanford University, writing with the students.

In 2007, OLL launched a companion writing project called Script Frenzy, which takes place in April. Playwrights and screenwriters have thirty days to write 100 pages of a play, movie, TV show, or graphic novel. “We ramp up [for NaNoWriMo] then wind down, then we’re ramping up again,” Grant says.

All of OLL’s programming—the write-ins, the pep talks, the website, the writing resources, the curriculum support, the Script Frenzy—is all free.

“The fact that it’s free is so important because it allows so many people to participate,” Grant says. “We hope that people who get something out of it then come back to us and make a donation. From five to fifty dollars—it doesn’t matter. We’re funded through many, many small donations.” OLL enjoys 501(c)(3) status, so donations are tax-deductible.

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NaNoWriMo certainly has its critics. “It’s not a project for skeptics,” Grant admits. “Writing a novel in a month is kind of crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do.”

But critics who focus on that, she says, typically fail to acknowledge the demands of the project and the hard work that goes into it.

Critics also focus on NaNoWriMo’s quantity-over-quality approach, but there again, says Grant, they miss the point. “Any first draft is going to need an intense amount of revision,” Grant says. The point of NaNoWriMo is to get that first draft down so that then “the real work of honing and reshaping” can begin—in December.

“You can’t revise a blank page,” Grant says.

But if NaNo’s naysayers don’t get it, enthusiasts do, and Grant hears from them frequently and loudly. “I absolutely love hearing from people who say they got something out of participating,” she says.

Of course, participants get a manuscript out of it. And some participants have gotten published, the most notable being New York Times #1 bestseller Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

But Grant says there’s more to it than that. “We get letters from people who say, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to write a novel but never thought I could.’ I love the confidence it gives them. It makes them ask, ‘What else can I do?’”

Writing a novel sometimes leads to other projects, too. “It can be a gateway to other creative endeavors,” Grant says.

“There’s an immense feeling of satisfaction that comes with [finishing a novel] that’s wonderful,” Grant says. “For me, that makes it all worthwhile.”

As a NaNoWriMo participant herself, Grant loves creative power and energy that comes during November. Now, near the end of Week Two, she admits she’s running a few thousand words behind pace, but she’s not worried. She still anticipates her third win. In each of her two previous outings, she’s gone right down to the wire and expects to follow tradition this year.

Her story, a romantic comedy, focuses on a couple that’s been together for years. When they each begin poking around on Internet dating sites, craziness ensues. “The whole idea is that the person you end up with is the person you choose,” she explains. “It doesn’t come down to fate. It comes down to choice.”

And that, perhaps, can serve as the perfect metaphor for NaNoWriMo: Sometimes, you can’t wait for the Muses to tap you on the shoulder; sometimes, you have to make it happen. You can’t just be inspired to write, you have to choose to. You have to sit down and pound out 1,667 words a day for thirty days and see what happens.

“Why is it so hard?” Grant asks. “Does it have to be so hard? I think it does. You have to fight for your novel. It has to be worth fighting for.”

And so, for Lindsey Grant and the Office of Letters and Light and the 220,000 novelists pounding away during NoNaWriMo—the fight goes on.