But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I first met Langston Hughes in 1990. He’d been dead some twenty-three years by then, and I was a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. We met almost by accident.

It was January, and the country’s eyes were on football. The NFL had moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California because Arizona had failed to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day an official holiday. To protest Arizona’s decision, and to show support for the new holiday—and, perhaps even to show solidarity with the NFL—someone on my college campus in northwestern Pennsylvania decided to celebrate with a rally. I can’t remember how, but I wound up on the program.

I read Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

To tie in to the King holiday, I added a verse of my own, how the Negro stood on the banks of the Potomac, on the steps of an American temple, and dreamed a dream of peace and justice with a preacher from Montgomery.

It was King’s day, to be sure, but for me, my big takeaway was Langston Hughes. He wrote “Rivers” when he was only nineteen, inspired by the sight of the Mississippi while on a bus trip. The poem appeared in The Crisis in 1921, and it made Hughes’ reputation almost instantly.

The Great Migration had already shifted the face of the country: Southern blacks had moved into northern cities, and possibility was palpable in the air. World War I infused everyone, particularly marginalized blacks, with a can-do attitude and renewed faith in the American dream. No where was this more evident than in Harlem, New York, which thrummed with creative energy, intellectual optimism, and wild, white-hot jazz. “In a Harlem cabaret / Six long-headed jazzers play. / A dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken gold,” Hughes wrote in “Jazzonia.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the intellectual fathers of the Harlem Renaissance, touted the power of the “talented tenth”—the top ten percent of the black population, representing the intellectual and creative genius of the entire race, who would show the rest of the world just what that race was capable of. Hughes, too, stood at the front and center of the movement.

Born in 1902—the same year Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk—Hughes moved around a lot growing up because of divorced parents. He was raised for a while by his maternal grandmother, by family friends, and eventually by his mother and her second husband. In 1919, he lived for a while with his father in Mexico, but the two shared a troubled relationship. He continued to move around throughout the twenties, attending then dropping out of Columbia, traveling overseas, living in D.C., and then finally alighting in Harlem permanently by 1929.

During that time, he continued to publish, following up on the attention “Rivers” brought to him. A chance encounter with Vachel Lindsay provided a further boost. As legend has it, Hughes had been working as a busboy at a restaurant where Lindsay was dining, and he slipped the famous poet some of his own work. Lindsay, impressed by the “busboy poet,” proved to be an energetic advocate.

Hughes counted Walt Whitman as a major influence. Carl Sandburg, too. “By 1926, when he published his first volume of verse, The Weary Blues, he already had fused into his poetry its key technical commitment,” writes biographer Arnold Rampersad:

the music of black Americans as the prime source and expression of their cultural truths. In these blues and jazz poems, Hughes wrote a fundamentally new kind of verse—one that told of joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, of ordinary black folk, in the language of their typical speech and composed out of a great love of these people.

Listen to the rhythm, for instance, in “Song for a Banjo Dance”:

Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em swift and wil’—
Get way back, honey,
Do that rockin’ step.
Slide on over, darling.
Now! Come over
With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em, honey chile.

“If there was a Renaissance going on in Harlem, the people on the street didn’t know it,” Hughes later said, perhaps a bit disingenuously. After all, Hughes served as the voice of the common black man and woman of those times. Compared to the formal poetics of Countee Cullen, for instance, Hughes was the poet-laureate of the street.

Consider the voice he captures in “Dressed Up”:

I had ma clothes cleaned
Just like new.
I put ’em on but
I still feels blue.

I bought a new hat,
Sho is fine,
But I wish I had back that
Old gal o’ mine.

I got new shoes,—
They don’t hurt ma feet,
But I ain’t got nobody
For to call me sweet.

Over the span of more than forty-five years, Hughes wrote poems, essays, plays, short stories, histories, and even libretti. In his later years, he also served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. In the sixties, even as that preacher from Montgomery led the March on Washington to the banks of the Potomac, Hughes supported King’s peaceful, moderate approach. He defended King against attacks from militant blacks, Rampersad says, and he himself attacked the “obscenity and profanity in the new militant black writing” of the time.

Years after his death in 1967, Hughes even made a cameo appearance for a younger generation. In Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical Rent, in the act-one closer “La Vie Boheme,” he appears with “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, and Cage. Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes [and the stage].” A new generation, singing along, celebrated all things Bohemian and, in doing so, found a new excuse to rediscover Hughes’ poetry.

But it’s for his association with the Harlem Renaissance that Hughes is best remembered. The poems he wrote then swing wild with energy and resonate deeply with voice. They are, most of all, fun to read. They are a delight.

Poetry “is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words,” Hughes said shortly before his death. For Hughes, poetry was life.

“He wanted no definition of the poet that divorced his art from the immediacy of life,” Rampersad says.

That is why a poet can look back and know ancient rivers, because that knowledge helps him understand the now. “Each human being must live within his time,” Hughes said, “with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country.”

Each human being must live.

I worry about hyperbole whenever I hear someone talk about a physical reaction to a piece of writing, so I’m hesitant to describe Rachel McKibbens’ book of poems, Pink Elephant, as a gut punch—but damn, it is. At one point, it also sent willies down my spine, too.

This is a collection of poems not to be trifled with.

“I am the star of the violence,” she warns in her first poem. In the second, “The First Time,” she and her brother are trying to run away. It might be any two kids running away from home, as almost all children are apt attempt at some point.

But subsequent poems make it clearer and clearer—and more horrifying—why they’re trying to escape. Jealousies, abuse, alcoholism, molestation, terror. “God was too busy for kids like us,” she realizes.

She watches her father beat a man with a crowbar at a gas station as the man’s wife watches impotently.

She watches her stepmother get dragged over the glass of a shattered taxicab window as they tried to escape. “The sprinklers came on / in the courtyard / as I made my way up the sidewalk, / following a trail of blood back / all the way home.”

When her father admits, drunk, that he killed the family dog years earlier, her fury finds itself. “That night, I learned vengeance can mean / one less knife at the dinner table; / an infuriated child tucked beneath / her father’s bed, / waiting. / Waiting.”

Even when her father is not the main antagonist, he helps heap on the misery. In “For Peter’s Sake,” she gets molested by a stranger on a church playground. “Proud, I told my father,” she writes. In response, “he smacked me like a housefly” and swings her into the car by her hair.

McKibbens is insidious in her efficiency, though. She frontloads “For Peter’s Sake,” for instance, with the phrase “The first time”—as in, “The first time I was molested….” The awful implication of that sits like a big ugly thing over the rest of the poem. Another poem in the collection, “The Doll,” tells of molestation, too. It is one of the most devastating poems I have ever, ever read.

“The Balance” tries to conjure the good memories she has of her father. “To live at all, I have to remember these days, too / place them on the highest shelf like glass figurines caught mid dance,” she writes. They are the memories that power her own attempts as a parent to break the cycle of violence. Poems chronicle that struggle to become the kind of parent she wants be, not the kind of parent she herself had feared. Her own childhood, filled with large-scale violence, boils down into all the small ways a parent can hurt a child. Check out the heartbreaking “Central Park, Mother’s Day”:

“To forgive my father means to uncover / the value of my own life,” she writes in “How It’s Done.” Pink Elephant searches, searches, searches for that value.

McKibbens’ poetry is not for the fainthearted, but Pink Elephant is a collection that’s so powerful, so unrelenting, so uncompromising, that you can’t afford to ignore it. After these poems hit you in the gut, they’ll sit there for a good long time afterward.

There is, he suggested, “a kind of heroism and commitment missing from contemporary American poetry….”

Hoagland’s own poetry is filled with heroism of the everyday kind: slightly broken people trying to move through the world even as they’re besieged by consumerism, vapid media, and stuff. He’s wry and witty and keenly insightful, and everything always comes back to the struggle to understand what it means to be human.

Much contemporary poetry—at least of the post-New York School—forgets that struggle, though, and instead gets preoccupied by all that stuff.

Hoagland characterizes the New York School as being “[s]paced out on the page, distracted, full of domestic minutiae and vagrant parentheticals, dropped lines of though, and goofy asides” that “declare their harmlessness with a vengeance.” They are ruled, he says, “by the muse of deviant triviality: Dissheveled Lite.”

As someone who recently considered poetry a foreign language, I freely admit that much of Hoagland’s essay went right over my head because there was much name-dropping I didn’t recognize—poets so famous and influential that they obviously made no dent on me, an innocent bystander outside poetry circles. (Frank O’Hara, I at least recognized, and his infamous off-the-cuff casual happenstance poetry.) Hoagland also assumed a familiarity of poetic traditions and trends I could only scratch my head at. I’m not a poet or a literary critic; I’m just some schmoe who occasionally consumes poetry as a casual reader. This semester, I even tried to write some, and I was such a novice that I felt like I needed a lot of handholding to get through it.

But to suggest that much contemporary American poetry lacks “heroism and commitment” seems like a big enough statement that even I, in my ignorance, have to sit up and notice.

After all, as a writer and teacher of writing, I preach the Gospel of Risk: something must be at stake in the writing; something must be at stake for the writer; something should even be at stake for the reader. Such risk-taking requires courage—some might say “heroism”—and commitment.

That’s what I like so much about being here at S&R: there’s an urgency about much of the writing here.

Hoagland argues that the malaise affecting poetry results from “many forces.”

He cites “middle class manners, shyness, a learned humility, media saturation, a sense of powerlessness as citizens and humans, and embarrassment for same.”

My stomach dropped when I read his list because it articulates exactly the very things I’ve struggled with recently in my own writing. I’ve even tried to capture my frustration and disappointment in my poetry, but I’ve failed miserably. I’ve not been able to find a voice to articulate the discontent I feel with my artistic self—but Hoagland suddenly nailed it for me.

Some of the poetry I’ve heard from my own contemporaries at Binghamton University have absolutely amazed me. My peers—most of them at least a decade or more younger than me—struggle in their poetry with loss, addiction, poverty, alienation, and the terrifying feeling of being unloved and unlovable. I have seen honesty and rawness and anguish, all on display in the least pretentious, most vulnerable sorts of ways. It’s the old writing saw “in the specific lies the universal” put into action in the very best of ways.

Much of the success comes from the guidance of poet Maria Gillan, who urges poets to “go to the cave”—that dark, haunted place inside ourselves where our scary stuff lives. Go to the cave, she says. Spelunk.

Whatever a poet brings back from the trip must be honest and true. The best poets have taken that truth and given bold voice to it.

In comparison, I’ve felt like I write in the vanilla voice of the polite middle class. I don’t have angst to exploit. I don’t have a bunch of horrible things in my past to exorcise. I have the constraints of courtesy and the privilege of a white, middle-class, middle-age man.

Don’t get me wrong: I thank my lucky stars that I’ve not had to live through personal calamity and misfortune. I have heartbreak to draw on, and that’s no small thing, and it’s universally recognized.

Besides, if I’m honest with myself, I realize that an anguished past is not a prerequisite to be an artist. I don’t need angst to make art.

Part of it, I know, is my own frustration with the times—because I am very much a product of them, like it or not. “Our present environment,” says Hoagland’s friend David Rivard, “is already speeded up, superficial, bright, distracted, sensation-filled, and wholly approving of personal pleasure as a birthright.”

Good God.

I’m doomed.

It doesn’t help, Hoagland argues, that “a more insular and self conscious poetry world” has largely failed to engage that present environment in a meaningful way. The result, he says, is a shortage of “the visionary.”

“Can the pleasures of mobility, deflection, fragmentation and wit be joined to the resonance and gravity of adulthood?” Hoagland asks.

I don’t know enough about contemporary poetry to know the answer to Hoagland’s question. I don’t know enough to know if he’s right about a shortage of “the visionary.”

But I’ve sat in a room with a bunch of young poets who have struggled to engage the world and their place in it in meaningful ways through their art. They have gone to the cave and have confronted themselves there. They have found words to express the truth they’ve found, and they have done so without gimmicks, without detachment, without “distractedness and haplessness.”

So, perhaps, I’m not doomed after all. The visionary is out there. I have seen it and have seen that it comes from within, from those with the courage and commitment to go to the cave to confront what they find. In the struggle, they continue to find those things that make them—that make all of us—human.

Tony Medina sweeps into the Japanese steak house with the old Vapors song on his lips: “I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Even as he sings, he swoops around the end of our long table to hug his former mentor, the poet Maria Gillan, sitting at the far end. In the background, a fireball fwooshes up from one of the other grills across the room.

Our own chef has not yet started to cook. We’ve been waiting for Medina, the guest of honor, who’s back here in Binghamton, New York, for a brief writing residency at his alma mater. “He needed pants,” Gillan had told us a few minutes earlier, when Medina called to let us know he was running late. “He’s at Boscov’s, trying on pants.”

This is how Medina’s homecoming gets announced, with great good humor and the smell of sizzle in the air.

Medina, who just made full professor at Howard University at the start of the semester, has a new book of poems out, although the work covers some old ground. Much of it had been written ten years ago as Medina’s dissertation.

9/11 had just happened. Medina’s father, a victim of chronic high blood pressure, had just died unexpectedly. Medina had just relocated from Harlem to Binghamton to restart life at 35 as a college student. That tempest of experiences combined to inform the poems that would become My Old Man Was Always on the Lam.

“But I always felt like something was missing,” Medina explains to one of Gillan’s classes the morning after the steakhouse. “The narrative arc of the book focuses on my father. My mother was missing, though. I didn’t know enough about my real mother to complete the story.”

You have to get that other side of the story, he says. “You might not remember it from memories and stuff,” he says, “so you have to sometimes create that other narrative.”

Medina, born a heroin baby, was abandoned by his mother as an infant. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, she left her little heroin baby, her wheezing asthma baby,’” he says. “It’s harder to ask ‘What dreams did she have?”

Medina’s father, also on drugs, couldn’t take care of him, either:

My old man was always on the lam
From love & life from family & me
Ran the streets like they was a

Treadmill & he, Richard Simmons,
Charles Atlas or Jack LaLanne
Ran through women like they was

The Holland Tunnel & he, a little
Red Corvette….

So, Medina’s paternal grandmother raised him. “She had raised nine kids of her own—all of whom had the same father,” Medina says. “That was ‘old school.’ She raised those kids and some of her kids’ kids, and some of them gave her grief, and some of us turned out okay.”

He describes her as the “Last of the Big Mamas.” She’s visible only occasionally, appearing in poems like “My Father’s Mother Was My Mother” and “My Grandmother Had One Good Coat,” but her presence moves through the background of My Old Man like a pressure wave.

It was the “abundance of love, an atmosphere of love” that his grandmother offered, Medina says, that allowed him to open his heart—and his house—to his mother during the last year of her life, when she was terminally ill, even though they’d had only a sporadic relationship for forty years.

“Even though she abandoned me as a baby, when I needed her at the beginning of my life, I didn’t abandon her when she needed me at the end of hers,” he says. “I didn’t hold her feet to the fire for not being there for me.”

Instead, he took advantage of the chance to learn “her side of the story,” which then allowed him to tell it as part of his own story through his poems.

* * * * *

The narrative arc of My Old Man follows the sudden decline and death of Medina’s father, then shifts to the unresolved relationship Medina has with his mother. In the collection’s final movement, the two find closure before she, too, passes away.

“I had been prepared, psychologically, for my grandmother to go,” he admits. “You know, she’s older, you just sort of get ready for that to happen. But my father—I wasn’t ready for that.”

In “My Father Is a Brown Scar,” Medina captures the heartbreak of seeing his diminished father in the hospital. “My father is a beanbag slumped in a corner,” Media writes,

His mouth wrenched open
To received holy communion
From the world of medicine
And science, the world
Of mechanical breathing
And silence.

Medina eventually faced the decision of whether to take his father off life support. “As a Marxist/Leninist, religion wasn’t really on the table for me,” he says. “But I was holding out to the end. ‘Any miracle could happen,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what happens.’”

The final moment comes, in the book, as a question from a bed-ridden, tube-filled father: “Is this it? Is this how it all ends? I don’t even get a chance to get my shit together and go out with some dignity?”

* * * * *

Medina is best known for his political poetry and, in a much different capacity, for his children’s books, which include biographies of Langston Hughes and Bob Marley written as sequences of poems. His work appears in more than forty anthologies, and he’s compiled a couple of his own, including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam. He’s published sixteen books in all.

“He’s truly an American poet,” Gillan says of him. He writes from the gut, she explains. Place is integral to his work.

By the time Medina arrived at Binghamton in 2001, he’d already established a reputation for himself as a poet—well enough that he’d been able to adjunct for eight years at Long Island University’s campus in Brooklyn with only a bachelor’s degree. Adjuncting promised a dead-end academic career, though, so he sought out a program to “get my credentials and shit.”

That’s when Gillan snatched him up.

Taking a full schedule and piling summer classes on top of that, Medina earned his master’s and then his doctorate in two years—reputedly the fastest anyone has ever moved through the program.

“Some people gave him shit. They said, ‘That’s not fair,’” Gillan recalls. She laughs. “Not fair? Could it just be that he’s brilliant? ‘What’s not fair is that he’s smarter than you—that’s what’s not fair.’ Gimme a break.”

In fact, during his final semester, Medina’s work attracted the attention of the English Department at Howard University, which created the first-ever faculty position in creative writing especially for him. The job was waiting for him by the time he finished his dissertation—which happened to win the university’s distinguished dissertation award that year.

The poems in that collection incubated for nearly a decade before seeing print as My Old Man Is Always on the Lam in 2010. Nightshade Press published a small run—and then went out of business. “It had nothing to do with me!” Medina laughs. New York Quarterly Press picked it up and issued the current edition.

“Poetry had always been something strange to me when I was in school,” he says. “It’s like, ‘That’s poetry, and you don’t understand it, and you’re dumb.’ So I was like, ‘Fuck this shit. It’s too hard!’”

But Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon had turned him on to the power of words. “The book reeled me in like a big fish,” Medina says. He read it straight through over a single weekend. “I thought, ‘Wow, I want to be able to create worlds with words. I want that,’” he says.

A first-place win in a school poetry contest set his course as a poet. He fed his head full of Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Emily Dickenson, Langston Hughes, and others. They taught him rhythm and the music of language and how to immerse himself in the moment.

“You’re going to regret those times you wasted by not being present,” he tells an auditorium full of students who show up to hear him read on his last night on campus. “Unplug. Deal with the silences. Don’t be afraid of the voices in your head. The Muse is the voice in your head the rest of us can’t hear.

“I’m not talking about your schizophrenia,” he adds, triggering laughter through the hall.

He tells them to develop their listening skills. He tells them to engage art. Most of all, he tells them to read. “You’ve gotta read. You’ve gotta read,” he says. “Study the masters. It shows you what’s out there, what’s come before you, what you can do and what you can add to all that.”

After the reading, a few of us go out for five-dollar martinis. “Did that go okay?” he asks. “Did that go all right?” Medina orders extra olives and leans forward against the bar. The sweeping energy he’s maintained ever since he sang his way into Kampai on Saturday night has finally settled. He still brims with plenty of laughter, but I now get glimpses of his quietude, too.

By the time we leave, fog has started to rise from the Susquehanna River and spill through the streets of downtown. Sites once familiar loom out of the mist even as they loom out of memory—but then something snaps into place and Medina sees each thing clearly. The library. A church. The Forum.

It’s been ten years since he’s seen any of this. He’ll return to D.C. in the morning, but already he’s talking about coming back.

Tony Medina is no longer on the lam.

“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. But the problem she faces is one many women in their thirties have struggled with – the call of motherhood vs. the call of career. Complicating all this is her position as a public figure (a successful news anchor) as well as the strain on her marriage.

* In “Mr. Chicken” the main character, manager of a successful hibachi restaurant, must find a way to handle a creepy customer who is damaging her business – even as she struggles with  “coming out” as her true self – a bearded woman.

* In “Cyclops” the main character, whose “otherness” is explained by the story’s title, struggles to find ways to help her family’s failing business. She considers that most self-damaging of options, selling herself – even as she tries to trust in a relic from a saint to bring her a miracle….

*******

There are other fascinating and yet ordinary characters – a woman with snakes for hair like Medusa who works as a bartender with the attendant problems those in that profession face;  another with two sets of ears who must cope with a stalker – all face problems that we all face and all either find or don’t find solutions.  But there is another theme that pervades this wonderful book of tales and I am undecided as to whether to call it meta-textual or sub-textual.

The story that best illustrates this, “The Shell,” is unusual for a couple of reasons. First, the main character, a wood carver/sculptor who discovers that he has a talent for carving “designer coffins” in shapes ranging from an ice cream cone to a tool box, is male. Second, in this story more than any other, that theme I mentioned above comes closest to being an overt element of the text.

The talented coffin maker, Martin Wyss, meets the story’s other main character, a woman named Odessa, whose body is being reduced to twisted freakishness by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis and who requests of him a casket shaped like Aphrodite’s scallop shell in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.  The struggle that ensues between artist and audience for control of the work he creates illustrates that theme I’ve mentioned that pervades all these wonderful stories – how does one exist as an artist in a world where one’s bared soul (i.e., artistic talent) must be sold as a commodity?  And further, is it worth the personal cost, both emotional and psychological, to display one’s talent – no matter how rich/famous/notorious it might make one?

Or is it better, as in the other stories from this collection that I’ve cited above, to keep one’s “talent” hidden – behind a news anchor’s desk, behind a shaded visor, behind a razor’s sharp edge.

Bearded Women explores these questions in disarmingly clean and enjoyable prose that draws one in – then shakes one’s tree quite vigorously.

I recommend it highly – and I look forward to whatever this gifted writer brings us next.

Painting on Papyrus

 The blue feathered ibis
	is a symbol of immortality;
the crescent-shaped lotus flowers,
	symbols of immortality;
even the goggle-eyed asp
	who sheds his skin,
		symbol
			of immortality.

Surely the redskinned priest
	or honeybrown priestess
	striding in silhouette
		know this;
And the painted hieroglyphs—
	owl, vulture, eye of Horus—
	make it clear.

The only ones who
do not seem
to understand
are a long-tailed civet cat
			beautifully striped,
caught in the act of bagging
		a bluebilled goose
with red head and
		downy yellow belly,
beautifully dying.

Le Loi

I cross the red bridge
over the sleeping waters
of the Lake
of the Returned Sword

Here Le Loi
	went fishing
and reeled in
a magic sword

With it he drove the Ming
	out of Viet land
		and beheaded
their general;

he said: “better to win
people’s hearts
		than break down
castle walls”

The red bridge
	“soaks up sunlight”
		and leads
to the Moonlit tower.

After the war
	Le Loi went fishing--
		a giant turtle
	 of pure gold surfaced--

an immortal, it’s said,
	who seized the sword
		and dove back
	into the green depths

where it remains to this day
	in the shadow of
		the red bridge
and the moonlit tower.

_____

Luke Powers teaches English and Folklore at Tennessee State University, an historically black university in Nashville, TN. He moonlights as a songwriter and has recorded with Garth Hudson of The Band and Richard Lloyd of Television.

I’m ferociously cramming contemporary poetry into my head this semester in an attempt to force-feed my brain. Ostensibly, I’m a poet—but only because I’m taking a graduate-level poetry-writing workshop. I’m trying to figure this shit out, trying to figure out what I am and what I’m not by reading lots of stuff by poets who are.

I’ve taken recommendations from friends and classmates. I’ve browsed random collections at the bookstore. I’ve looked up names I’ve heard once upon a time and barely remembered. I’ve returned to old favorites.

Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010) caught my eye because it was about comic books. Or so I thought.

Like all of today’s best comic books, Missing You, Metropolis has a lot more going on in it than just action heroes. It’s sophisticated, witty, and thought-provoking—and it doesn’t require a fanboy’s sensibilities or background to appreciate.

Some of the poems capture what “real life” must be like for superhumans and the people around them. An old washed-up Juggernaut, riding out his retirement years, uses his super-strength to take on all-comers in arm-wrestling tournaments. Mary Jane Parker makes her husband, Peter, have sex with her while wearing his Spider-Man costume “because she likes to pretend Spider-Man is her other lover.” Lois Lane hopes Clark Kent, just once in the quiet of their kitchen over dinner, will bleed a little when he pretends to cut himself because she’s desperate for a glimpse of him as a non-super human.

Other poems capture the experience of reading comics, “the power to inhabit a world a page removed from our own.” For young kids, it’s about escape and adventure and wish fulfillment. As the boys get older, they adopt superhero names and chat with girls online while wishing they had real girls to talk to instead. Sexual awakening mixes in as part of their “diet of Snickers, comics, and porn.” They talk about which superheroine they’d like to screw. “Jim says Invisible Woman,” Jackson writes. “We imagine the feel of soft air like Kansas clouds in fall./But Jim claims seeing his own dick/inside her is a sight/he can’t afford to pass up.”

Many of the poems feature Jackson and his friend, Stuart. They read comics together and grow up together—and that’s how Jackson’s poems transcend mere fanboy pap. By experiencing comic books, Jackson explores darker themes of racism, death, and the strangling ordinariness of small-time life. Stuart’s story in particular provides a tragic undercurrent to the collection: his search for identity takes increasingly darker turns, heading eventually to self-mutilation and then suicide.

Memory, too, serves as a recurrent theme. “Memory’s so treacherous,” says The Joker in the Alan Moore graphic novel The Killing Joke, which Jackson epigrams for his poem “Origin of Memory.” “One moment you’re lost in a carnival of delights…the next it leads you somewhere you don’t want to go. Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can’t face them we deny reason itself.”

Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyaka selected Missing You, Metropolis as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, given to the best first collection by an African American poet. “This collection captures the anguish and pathos often associated with the complexity of today’s human existence, which seems to be doubly troublesome in an era of technological adroitness and fluency,” Komunyaka writes in the book’s introduction. “Playful, jaunty, rueful, and highly serious—sometimes within a singular poem—this persona has been forged in the cauldron of popular iconography….”

That makes the characters—costumed and not—recognizable to all of us, not just fanboys. That’s what makes Missing You, Metropolis such a success.

Honestly, I thought this would serve as nothing more than a light snack in the middle of my poetry gluttony. There’s more to Metropolis, though, than meets the eye.

by Lindsay Hayes

A recent study conducted at University of California, San Diego revealed that people enjoyed short stories more when they had been given a spoiler about the ending. That’s nice, but as far as I’m concerned spoilers are still the revelation of the damned.

While some have taken this study to mean spoilers aren’t so bad after all, I have a different take. Uses and Gratifications theory tells us that people use media for whatever purpose suits them at the time. Enjoyment is far from the only use of media consumption. It’s worth noting that the participants in this study were just that – participants in a study. They were not at the local Barnes & Noble seeking the gratification of a good read after a hectic work week.

If you are seeking pure enjoyment from your reading (or movie watching, etc.) then the assurance of knowing the ending is quite comforting. And sometimes that’s all we want; a zero-calorie equivalent of grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy. But at other times, we want something quite different. Perhaps we want a thrill ride or mystery to solve.

It would be easy to see the research and think enjoyment is paramount in leisure media consumption. I can’t say I “enjoyed” watching Saving Private Ryan or reading The Grapes of Wrath but they were made no less effective as a result of my non-enjoyment. I would not exchange my delight in discovering the ending to Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants for the comfort of having known the ending throughout my reading. The enchantment I experienced in reading the ending simply could not have been equaled without first having “lived” the rest of the story.

This is not to say there is no place for enjoying a spoiled story. The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club – these are all great movies (and in some cases books) made no less great upon your second viewing. But would you really want to give up the excitement of that initial viewing? I still enjoy The Usual Suspects but remember the surprise I felt at the twist when watching this for the first time late at night in my parent’s living room. I am happy to save the increased enjoyment for the second viewing. Increased enjoyment is too high a price to pay for not letting the storytellers take you on their journey during that first reading or viewing.

Expecting your typical good times fare from Harrison Ford, I had no idea what I was walking in to when I saw What Lies Beneath upon its theatrical release years ago. I vividly remember thinking, “I hate this movie” while sitting in that dark theater, a bit more frightened of Indiana Jones than I had expected. Enjoyment, no. Enthrallment, yes. When it later came on TV, I enjoyed watching it again. I enjoyed that my knowledge of “what lies beneath” enabled me to see how the viewer is manipulated into being tense and maybe even scared.

If I want safety and guaranteed enjoyment from my media, I’ll reread an old favorite or watch a movie I remember fondly. But you can keep your spoilers; I like the (hopefully) unpredictable ride of not knowing the ending.

Lindsay Hayes was very passionate about (some might say obsessed with) entertainment media as a child while growing up in Oklahoma. Realizing how influential media had been on her own life, she decided it was important to examine such an influential phenomenon. Lindsay decided to take part in that analysis in her own small way. A BA in English literature was quickly followed by an MA in communication with an emphasis in media. When she is not overthinking American culture she can be found figure skating, rock climbing or spending time with her own personal mathematician and their two rabbits at home in Colorado.  

My fascination with the Congo began, I think, with Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” Through sixty-six and seven, Roland fought the Congo wars with his finger on the trigger, knee deep in gore.

Or perhaps it was a Time-Life book I read at about that time, part of a series about unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, that featured tales of the mokele-mbembe, the dinosaur that lurked in the Congo’s dark swamps and jungles. The idea of such a thing captivated me; any landscape where such a beast could live had to be equally fantastic.

There’s been Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo”…Henry Morton Stanley and “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In 2000, there was Jeffrey Tayler’s beautifully descriptive Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Little surprise, then, when I saw Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and jumped on it.

The book subtitles itself as “The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa,” but these aren’t the Congo Wars of Roland and the Thompson Gunners. There’s no romanticism here, no “Dark Continent” mythology.

“There is a long history of taking pictures and stories from Central Africa out of context,” concedes author Jason Stearns.

Instead, Stearns offers a profoundly disturbing look at a conflict that has torn the central part of the continent asunder and left millions dead—all of which has basically been ignored by the West.

“How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?” Stearns asks. The antagonisms at work, he later goes on to say, are “fueled by struggles over land, tenure, citizenship, and access to resources, but also and most directly by popular prejudice and a vicious circle of revenge.”

Those prejudices sprang from the conflict in Rwanda between Hutus and Tutsi’s, which lead to a genocide that did attract worldwide attention but little relief aid or action. From there, the fighting spilled into the Congo and was seemingly lost from world view in the country’s deep jungles, where it simmered and boiled and where people bled and died.

“It is not a war of great mechanical precision but of ragged human edges,” Stearns says. “The Congo’s suffering is intensely human; it has experienced trauma on a massive and prolonged scale.”

Stearns does stalwart work—as heartbreaking as it sometimes is—tracing the four main phases of the war in the years since it broke out in the mid-90s.

“Since independence, the story of political power from Joseph Mobutu to Joseph Kabila has been about staying in power, not about creating a strong, accountable state,” Stearns writes. For instance, Mobuto once told the Congolese army, “You have guns; you don’t need a salary”–akin to an open invitation for his soldiers to plunder the country at will. “It was another manifestation of his famous ‘Article 15,” explains Stearns, “a fictitious clause in an obsolete constitution that called for the population to do anything they needed to do to survive.”

There is “layered complexity” to the Congo’s story, which Stearns tells through site visits and interviews with aid workers, politicians, military officials, rebel leaders, refugees, and survivors.

“The Congo war had no one cause, no clear conceptual essence that can be easily distilled in a couple paragraphs,” Stearns writes. “Like an ancient Greek epic, it is a mess of different narrative strands—some heroic, some venal, all combined in a narrative that is not straightforward but layered, shifting, and incomplete.”

As one Congolese tells Stearns, “There are too many people to blame.”

If Conrad’s novel offered a glimpse at man’s heart of darkness, then Dancing in the Glory of Monsters offers a glimpse at the dark heart of an entire continent. A soundbite, 140-character world has no room for that kind of exploration, no attention span for that kind of chronicle.

But there are a million dead Africans at the heart of that dark story.

Stearns, thankfully, finally, has brought them to light.

Can aquaculture save the world’s last wild food? That’s the question posed by the cover story of the July 18 issue of Time, which takes a look at the continuing collapse of the world’s fisheries. Fish seems so superabundant on our dinner plates that one can hardly fathom how we could possibly run out. After all, the ocean is so BIG.

Well, the deep blue sea is getting emptier and emptier, and even if the shoreline seems far away, the fisheries crisis is going to start hitting close to home—soon.

That’s the outlook, grim as it is, forecast by author Paul Greenberg in his recent book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg dives into the topic with gusto—in part, one has to imagine, because the oceanic crisis is so catastrophic.

The four fish Greenberg highlights—salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna—mark “four discreet steps humanity has taken in its attempts to master the sea.”

“[E]arly human fishers first overexploited their freshwater fish and then moved down the streams to their coasts to find more game,” Greenberg explains. “[H]umans marshaled the resources of industry into building offshore fishing fleets when they found their near-shore waters incapable of bearing humankind’s growing burden.”

Each fish, then, symbolizes a step in the evolution of fishing practices. Each fish symbolizes, too, an ecosystem plundered by those same practices.

Salmon, which live their adult lives in the sea but travel into freshwater to spawn, are “the species that marks the point at which humans and fish had large-scale environmental problems and where domestication had to be launched to head off extinction,” he says.

Sea bass, a close-to-shore species, represent the point where people “first learned how to fish in the sea and where we also found ourselves outstripping the resources of nature and turning to an even more sophisticated form of domestication to maintain fish supplies.”

Cod, an off-shore species that existed in “seemingly irrepressible abundance,” heralded “the era of industrial fishing.”

Tuna, finally, a giant deep-water species, is “the stateless fish, difficult to regulate” because it migrates through the territorial waters of a number of countries and, where it’s most vulnerable, through the largely unregulated waters of the open sea.

Greenberg contends that “the world fishing fleet is roughly twice as large as the oceans can support.” That overcapacity, he says, is maintained through government subsidies, which also make wild fish “unreasonably cheap” at the market.

Worldwide, seafood consumption continues to rise—sixty percent since 1974, according to the Time article. In America alone, some seven million tons of seafood gets eaten each year.

“So,” Greenberg says, “if we take as a given that humankind will keep eating fish, more and more of it every year, then we need to come up with a way to direct that appetite away from sensitive, unmanageable wildlife and usher it toward sustainable, productive domesticated fish.”

Greenberg’s book explores several key suggestions:

• A profound reduction in fishing
• A move away from heavily extractive (and heavily subsidized) vessels that employ very few individuals
• The conversion of significant portions of ocean ecosystems to no-catch areas
• The global protection of unmanageable species—that is, species that swim from one country’s waters to another’s to another’s or that populate international waters
• The protection of the bottom of the food chain

“What is needed above all,” he says, “is a standard for boosting fish supplies in as sustainable a manner as possible.” Fish farming seems obvious, perhaps, but it does come with its own challenges. Selective breeding—the same way farmers breed sheep or cows for certain features—can help overcome some of those difficulties, Greenberg says. Critics worry about “Frankenfish” that might contaminate wild populations, a legitimate concern that aquaculturists must be prepared to address.

Greenburg also advocates the “smarter use of subsidies” to promote polycultural, rather than monocultural, aquaculture practices. Instead of just raising salmon, for instance, a farm would also raise muscles to filter the salmons’ waste from the water.

The world’s last wild food, then, might not remain wild, but farmed fish is far better than no fish. “Or we can run roughshod over the wild ocean,” Greenberg says.

In that case, the world’s last food will have no future at all.

Wonderland
     - Club 1350, Long Beach, California

Tonight I want to go to hell, I want
to know there are Hearts more rock
than the granite in me. Down
Anaheim Street, the yellow dandelion street lights
spread more sparingly in the rear view,
the city reaches—like a garden
of hungry blossoms and weeds—to me.

I’m going to hell, past Wilmington
where all is mechanical and rust
to Club 1350, a black wall, a rabbit hole
grafted to night, to sea water stench, to dark.
I’m going to hell, like Alice, who talks
To doors that warn:
“This is a Private Club, you may be asked
to leave” and I think how odd,

After all this time, hell still tries to imitate
heaven. Poor Hearts. I pray for them
shoving behind me, rushing to doom,
to some other wonder land—

The upper level of hell has lockers
to keep families and clothes locked up, mirrors
dripping streams of steam and no one looks through them.
Naked men, winter pale like rabbits or white roses.

They have no eyes—eyes are for love, eyes are
for heaven—just penises, pendulums
reminding you that you’re late! No matter,
hell is eternal.
Stairs sink to the next level, lit
on the sides like movie theater isles
and naked wanting bodies usher me
to the Queen’s Court…

It is hell’s second level and stinks of bleach and cum
of sweat and shit, decapitated Hearts and hunger, foul
from being so long in this dark, here
where it fermented and crawls up black walls,
On tiles where bare feet and asses lift it
on to the white bleached sheets, under
the angels, the Hearts, the ones
I need to see…

Body over body, indistinguishable,
some nightmare Nazi-camp deck of bodies, stacked
still groans, still sweats and shivers, cold
in the black walls pierced with glory holes;
The red diamond lights and the porn showing
the Hearts how the angels do it, and they
do it, staring through the looking glass,
at me, and I know they don’t see…

—–

J.D. Isip’s poetry has appeared in DASH Literary Journal, Loch Raven Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Thirty First Bird Review. His play, WISER, was published in In Uniform anthology from Slash Books. A short story, “The Flowers,” was published in the Pain and Memory anthology from Editions Bibliotekos. He is currently a doctoral student and English Teaching Assistant at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

But what happened to them during their twelve-day trip?

According to novelist Paul Harrington, the “epic journey” was something like “Indiana Jones meets Lawrence of Arabia at a Lord of the Rings barbecue.”

History itself is largely silent on the story of the Magi, but Harrington—author of Epiphany: The Untold Epic Journey of the Magi—saw a story rife with possibility.

“The Ancient world was dying,” Harrington says. The Roman Empire had risen to the peak of its “bronzed might,” and Israel, conquered, suffered under the empire’s heel. King Herod, paranoid and corrupt, ruled as a despot.

And into the mix, following the Star of Bethlehem, came the Magi.

“Western culture took these bare-boned facts about the Magi and built an entire mythology around them that has just snowballed over time,” Harrington says. “The Bible doesn’t even mention the number of Magi. It just says there were three gifts, so from that we’ve extrapolated that there were three Magi. And were they kings? Were they wise men?”

The story of the Magi first hooked Harrington as a teenager when he heard a recording of T.S. Eliot reading his poem “Journey of the Magi.”

“The poem was haunting, so dark and grim,” Harrington says. “Just the whole idea amazed me—the whole enterprise and the adventure side of it. The whole idea that you could see these beautiful images of magic.”

Harrington has chased the story of the Magi ever since, but it’s largely been a futile chase. Little factual information about them exists.

That dearth of information, though, gave Harrington great leeway in creating his own triumvirate of protagonists—an Arabian king, an Ethiopian chieftain, and a Chinese monk.

“There isn’t a lot out there, so I was able to take great liberties with the story,” he says. “I took some liberties with the Christian canon as part of that.”

Specifically, he cast a skeptical eye on the idea that magic isn’t part of the Christian traditional. “The Old Testament is full of supernatural and magical events,” he points out. “It’s just that, in those instances, the source of that power comes from God.”

His novel is not an explicitly religious story. Rather, Harrington says, “I’m interested in the idea that there was this little baby born, and it was a fulcrum point. A big hand on the clock moved, and the whole world changed right there.

“I love the scope if it,” he continues. “It was this small little thing, and it changed the entire globe.”

But Epiphany is not just a story of global change; it’s a story of individual change, too. Aside from the big epiphany that awaits them in Bethlehem, each of Harrington’s three Magi comes to a personal epiphany along the way.

“It’s like asking what is the Epiphany versus what is an epiphany,” Harrington explains.

In that regard, the message of the book might be a little heavy-handed. After all, Harrington says, “You have this story of these men who took up this quest and were rewarded to it by, literally, coming face-to-face with God.”

Face-to-face with God. Yeah, that’s kind of big. Big risk, big payoff. “Sometimes, you have to hang a fastball over the corner of the plate and see what will happen. You have to take that risk,” Harrington says. “People hang back and don’t accept the challenge. You have to be open to the revelations you can have in your own life.”

Skeptics might argue that people never really change, anyway. A leopard and his spots—that sort of thing. Harrington says his book urges readers to reconsider that kind of thinking. “What kind of cataclysm can make a person change?” he asks.

Whether it’s switching careers, going to college, moving across the country—we all embark on our own “epic journeys.”

“There’s something exciting about venturing out into unknown territory,” Harrington says. “People can learn about themselves and the world.”

Harrington has characterized Epiphany as “the greatest story never told.” The book can be read as pure action/adventure escapism, on a more textured level as historical fiction, or even on a more thoughtful level that invites introspection and reflection.

Whichever approach a reader takes, epiphany awaits.

So growls the Grinch as he laments the oncoming onslaught of Christmas joy certain to echo up from the little town of Whoville.

And for fifty-three years, we’ve put up with him.

It was fifty-three years ago this year, in 1957, that the Grinch made his first appearance. And it was forty-four years ago this week that he first appeared on television.

The idea for the Grinch came one December 26th when Theodore Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—looked in the mirror. “Something had gone wrong with Christmas,” Seuss later wrote, “or more likely with me. So I wrote the story about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that I’d obviously lost.”

The result, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, has become an enduring holiday favorite, and The Grinch has become as universally recognized as the crotchety, tight-fisted ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to anti-holiday grouchiness.

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

The central question at the heart of Seuss’s book: “What does Christmas really mean?”

The Grinch, of course, thinks the holiday is about presents and food, so he steals them all to prevent Christmas from coming to Whoville. But just as he’s about to dump everything off the top of Mount Crumpit, he hears the residents of Whoville singing in celebration that Christmas has arrived—Grinch or not.

With his Grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, he puzzles and puzzles—and then reaches an epiphany.

“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

Once he realizes the true meaning of Christmas, of course, he brings back all the toys, and he joins the Whos for their Christmas feast of “roast beast.”

The book turned out to be one of Dr. Seuss’s most popular. It has never gone out of print.

In 1966, on December 18, CBS premiered the Grinch TV special. CBS had great, unexpected success the year earlier with A Charlie Brown Christmas Special, so the network was interested in a follow-up. By the time it was done, The Grinch was reportedly the most expensive half-hour program ever created for prime-time television up to that point.

For the special, Dr. Seuss collaborated with acclaimed animator Chuck Jones to bring the Grinch to life. It was there that the Grinch took on his green hue for the first time.

The book takes about eleven minutes to read. “Most people said you had to pad it,” Jones later recalled in an interview. “No, I felt that you had to extend it. That’s very different. If you pad it, it’s fat.”

Jones doubled the time by expanding action sequences like the sled ride and the Christmas-morning antics of the Who girls and boys. He fleshed out the character of Max the dog. “The dog turned out to be the most important character to me,” Jones said. “He represents the audience. He plays a very important part to me all through the picture.”

Jones also added songs composed by Albert Hague, who collaborated with Seuss on other projects like The Cat and the Hat Songbook. Geisel wrote the lyrics.

“That’s what a director, I think, has the right—or the duty—to do to develop the story,” Jones explained. “After all, this is not a book any longer. This is a visualization…. You have to show, not tell.”

Boris Karloff, best known as the actor who played Frankenstein’s monster back in the 1930s, narrated the special and provided the Grinch’s voice. Seuss originally thought Karloff would be too scary for the role. Jones, though, called Karloff “one of the most important” components of the special’s success. “He had this lovely, wonderful voice,” Jones said. “And he was so dear when he read it, you know?”

The deep voice that sings “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” was provided by Thurl Ravenscroft—who also did the voice for Tony the Tiger in Frosted Flakes commercials. Ravenscroft was accidentally uncredited for his vocal work, an oversight Seuss didn’t catch until the studio showed him the final production. Seuss called Ravenscroft to personally apologize and wrote to newspaper editors across the country to clarify the error. To this day, though, people still mistakenly believe Karloff did the singing.

The other speaking role—little Cindy Lou-Who’s plaintive, “Santy Claus, why? Why are you taking our Christmas tree? Why?”—was voiced by June Foray, best known for her work as the voice of Rocky the Squirrel and, from Looney Tunes, Witch Hazel and Tweety Bird’s owner, Granny.

The Grinch later went on to appear in two other TV specials—winning Emmy and Peabody Awards—and of course he was brought to life on the silver screen by Jim Carrey, directed by Ron Howard. The Grinch even appeared in a limited-run Broadway show in 2008.

“[I]t’s important to note,” writes Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen

that Ted [Geisel] kept tight control over his creations, so he was directly involved with many of the changes to the Grinch, Max, and the Whos over the years. He obviously didn’t feel that his characters had to be completely static and immutable entities. Some of the innovations, like the greenness of the Grinch, were so successful that they have almost replaced Ted’s original vision.

But there’s something gratifying to read the book to a classroom of elementary school students—as I did today—and, afterwards, see the kids nearly crawling out of their skins with eagerness to tell their own stories about the Grinch. Their hands shoot up, their words spill out, their smiles curl wide on their faces.

Seuss’s original book that will always charm and delight Grinch fans the most.

———-

For additional reading: Charles D. Cohen provides some insightful behind-the-scenes background and commentary in the 50th anniversary edition of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel, the biography by Judith and Neil Morgan, also offers a little bit of background, too.

photo by Talbot Eckweiler

“All writing is the same,” says playwright Christopher Shinn. “The hard part is doing it in the first place.”

Shinn, who won the Obie Award for playwriting in 2005 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2008, is Skyping with a group of creative writing students. He’s in New York City, where he teaches playwriting for the New School for Drama; they are in Allegany, New York, where they attend St. Bonaventure University.

“Writing is the hardest thing you will ever do,” Shinn tells them. “And once you understand just how hard it is, you realize it’s even harder than that. And it’s harder than that.”

Beginning writers can find the work difficult, and many give up because they’re frustrated or embarrassed. “Good writers have stopped writing because it was too hard,” Shinn adds.

photo by Talbot Eckweiler

But there is, he says, no substitute: “Work hard and be prepared to work harder the more you work hard.”

The students, sitting around their O-shaped table, take notes and ask questions. They make references to scenes and characters in Shinn’s play Dying City. They want to know about his career, about his plays, about playwriting in general.

Shinn, obviously delighted to be talking with them, fidgets in his seat as he answers, hardly able to contain himself. Later, he will describe the experience as “a blast.” He smiles frequently as he answers.

Shinn tells them what he tells all his writing students: “The first thing is to acknowledge who you are and what level of accomplishment you’re at. You can’t get any worse than that. You can only grow from there.”

Shinn’s own growth as a writer started in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, where his earliest influences were actually novelists. “It was easier to read a novel than to see a great play,” he explains. He ticks off a list that includes Cheever, Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Welty, Carver. “They were the classic American writers,” Shinn says. “They had a certain vision of America—a realistic vision of America. They captured the American psyche, the pain and sadness of human suffering, the existential challenges of just being alive.”

Playwright Tennessee Williams impacted him. So did Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “I gravitated to canonical major American authors,” Shinn says.

He attended high school at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts then went on to NYU’s Tisch School to earn his B.F.A. in dramatic writing. His professional career as a playwright launched in 1998 with Four, which premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre. His first major American production came in 2002.

In that span, Shinn has cranked out ten plays, and theaters across the country continue to bring those scripts to life regularly. November alone saw two productions of his Pulitzer-nominated Dying City go up—one in Billings, Montana, the other in Portland, Oregon.

His most recent play, Picked, gets a staged reading next month as part of the New Stages Series at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

photo by Talbot Eckweiler

Along with his work as a playwright, Shinn started teaching in 2004. He enjoys it, he says, because he learns as much as the students do. “It keeps me growing as an artist,” he says. “Teaching forces you to articulate what you believe. It forces you to think about it.”

That process of reflection and self-examination is the key to Shinn’s playwriting.

“Ideally, if I have nothing else to do, I’ll close myself in my room for the entire day and just give myself the freedom to write,” he says. “Cumulatively, that might actually amount to only an hour of writing. The rest of that time is spent thinking, dreaming, sleeping, imagining, reading, reflecting, fantasizing. I try to stay within myself as much as possible…. I give myself over to my internal world as much as possible.”

To write, Shinn taps into “very deep, very private” parts of himself. “It’s hard to access it,” he says.

Shinn does so through meditation, yoga, psychoanalysis, “pretty intense engagement with critical thinkers and artists—there are lots of ways,” he says. “It takes an extraordinary level of honesty and courage and self-scrutiny to know yourself.

“Create circumstances for self-scrutiny,” he tells the young writers.

That’s helped his writing, particularly as he’s gotten older. “The writing is more me,” says the 35-year-old Shinn. “I’m truly communicating myself through my work.”

Self-knowledge has immense payoff particularly with characterization. “That’s all you can do—is use yourself to write your characters,” Shinn says. “If you’re going to write about human nature, you better know your own nature.”

Art has a function to get people “to really look at ourselves, to really look at each other,” Shinn contends.

“Not knowing isn’t just ‘not knowing.’ Sometimes it’s not wanting to know,” he says. “Sometimes what we want to say is too upsetting to ourselves.”

And so people lie to themselves and they lie to each other—frequently because they just don’t want to deal with something that’s true.

That makes for great drama, but it can also make for difficult playwriting because, Shinn points out, playwrights are just as likely to lie to themselves as anyone else might be.

“Sometimes, when I find out that I can’t write, it sometimes means I don’t want to write,” he admits. “Then I need to figure out why, and I’ll really scrutinize that and figure it out and realize that I have some hard work ahead.”

But that just comes with the territory. “Art exists to represent things that are difficult to deal with,” he says. “Those kinds of things never go out of style.”

It usually takes Shinn somewhere around a year to hammer an initial idea into a finished script. “That’s a year of dealing with the pain, dissatisfaction, and agony of it,” he says, chuckling. “That’s a year of making sure it’s what I want [the play] to be.”

Seldom does he have a complete story when he first sits down. “I usually start with an image or a line and go from there,” he says.

A year later, “[t]he basic shape and form and meaning of the play are basically finished, are what I want them to be,” says Shinn. “The more I write, the older I get, the more I feel like a play is finished when I say it is.”

He’ll send the script to his agent, who’ll then shop it around to theaters—and also act as a buffer against rejection. “You have to develop really thick skin,” Shinn says. “You have to be willing to deal with a lot of rejection.”

Having a production, though, feels just the opposite. “When it all goes well, it’s a magical, intimate, profound experience,” he says. “It’s agony if it goes poorly, but it’s great if it goes well.”

Only once did a production go so poorly that Shinn felt “traumatized.” He says he couldn’t even look at the script for years afterwards. “It was so painful, so horrible,” he says, declining to name the play because the experience still haunts him.

photo by Talbot Eckweiler

But mostly, productions are a chance for a playwright and a theater company to “create something important and profound together,” he says. “I really love the collaboration. If you love people, if you want a life as a writer where you’re not living a solitary life in your room, playwriting is it.”

Shinn’s role in that collaboration, as playwright, is to create a good story. He leaves it to the director and actors to figure out how to tell that story. “The most important thing is to tell your story first, and then worry about the best theatrical way to get that to come across,” he explains.

“Open your mind, and let it guide you,” Shinn says. “If you open your mind to creativity, you never know what will happen.”

Let’s run the numbers.

At approximately 2:00 a.m., EST, I finished the first draft of my novel for National Novel Writing Month. My word count came in at 50,390; NaNoWriMo’s word count validator clocked me in at 50,101 words.

I actually passed the 50K-word mark at 1:43 a.m. A few days ago, I was unsure I’d make it to the finish line, but over the past three days, I hammered out 15,539 words. That’s 31% of my novel. (What the hell kind of art is that, part of me still wonders. I’ll get to that in a future post.)

I average about 500 words in 25 minutes. I could write faster if I pushed and didn’t try to work the language too much. I could write slower, too.

Aside from the 50K+ words I wrote for the novel, I wrote another 10,071 words (so far) about writing the novel as part of my S&R coverage of NaNoWriMo. On top of that, I wrote another 3,510 words about it for my own blog. Fold in the 2,654 other words I put together for S&R over the course of the month, and that totals 16,235 words on top of the 50,101 I clocked on the novel—a total of 66,336 words for November (and that’s not counting some significant writing projects for work that I had to crank out).

I’m stating the obvious here, but them’s a lot of words.

My head’s still swimming, but at least this damn novel isn’t crammed in there anymore. Maybe there’s a little room for sleep.

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.

It’s crunch time.

I’m about 8K words off-pace on my novel, and I only have a few days to go.

I’d like to say this update on my National Novel Writing Month project, which was due on Thursday, was delayed because I was hammering away at my novel, but no—I was giving thanks, just like most other Americans.

While I stuffed my face with turkey and sweet potatoes and collard greens (yes!), my novel sat, alone and lonely, quietly whispering my name and saying, “We’re falling so far behind on NaNoWriMo, we’ll never catch up. I thought you had this?”

NaNoWriMo’s website suggests that I should be at 43,334 words. I’m at 35K. That means I’m staring down a double-barreled 8K deficit. That means I have 15K words to crank out in four days. That means I have to average 3,750 words a day in order to win.

I got this.

I think.

I can do 4K words in a day pretty easily, so long as I physically have the time to sit and write. But that’s been my problem: I’ve been crushed for time. Life keeps getting in the way.

It is, I believe, The Great Challenge for all writers. Life gets in the way—as it does for everyone—and so it becomes a struggle to make sure writing remains a top priority.

Those who know me know I take my writing seriously enough that it falls high on my priority list. The things that bump it have to be pretty damn important.

Thanksgiving comes, what, once a year? It’s hard to pass up that kind of fantastic celebration of family, friends, and food. Yeah, I suppose I could just hold off until next month, because Christmas is basically the same thing but with presents and a tree, so maybe I could bump Turkey Day—but hey.

Because of the holiday, an old friend from out of town came home for a week, so I spent some time hanging out with her. I’m told that beautiful women have been the downfall of many a fine novel, and perhaps mine will be the next to fall victim, but it’s a once-a-year thing, so I really can’t pass that up. Perhaps I should’ve better planned for that, but I really didn’t think I’d be hanging out with her as much as I did—and no, I’m not sorry about it one bit, especially because she found the whole novel-in-a-month thing fascinating. (NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty suggested, in his book No Plot? No Problem!, that cute women would “no doubt be impressed by the crazy novel project”—and it’s true! She’s asked me about it every day since, which has been one more voice in a chorus of supportive people urging me onward.)

But holiday-related stuff aside, life got in the way in other ways. I managed to get sick, for one thing. That, of course, saps anyone’s strength and can be hard to work around, no matter how much Day-Quil you swill.

I also got some potentially calamitous news from a close family member, so that threw off my game.

Plus there was the usual busyness that comes with work. I can pin part of the blame, too, on SUNY-Binghamton, The Cult, The Black Ryder, JFK, Marvel Comics, and the city of Cleveland.

In other words: Life.

Sunday, November 21 was NaNoWriMo’s Write-a-Thon, a day intended to encourage writers who might’ve been lagging behind to catch up. I spent the day conducting a writing retreat for a bunch of my students, which was totally great fun but didn’t do a single thing toward advancing the word count on my novel.

I had intended to go to a write-in that evening but had to shuffle plans at the last minute. “It’s probably good you weren’t able to make it,” my regional liaison, JessAnn told me. “We didn’t really have a write-in…. It was more of a talk-about-anything-in.”

A few of my writing buddies seem to be struggling toward the finish line. Looking at their word counts online, some have fallen further behind than I have. A couple have given up.

From Madrid, Anna Maria Ballester Bohn wrote to tell me that she hasn’t lost her stride. “Mostly, I still have a grand time when I sit down to write,” she said. But only mostly. “I definitely will be glad it’s over,” she adds. “I’m beginning to feel the drag and the pressure.”

Because she jumped to such a huge lead because of her vacation during Week One, she’s hoping for an early finish. “Thanks to my great start, it’s not so much going to be a mad sprint but a leisurely sauntering,” she said.

In Cleveland, Jen McConnell had fallen behind, then jumped ahead, but then, in the past couple of days—because of the holiday—fallen about 3K behind. “I don’t want to take too much time away from my family during the holiday,” she said. Still, she was well past the 40K mark, so she’s in good shape.

For Jill Smith, in Bradford, Pa., the holiday was actually a chance to catch up. “I’m thankful that I’ve caught myself up and there won’t be the ‘mad dash’ to the finish line like I thought there would be,” she told me. “I’m still moving along and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to write a little more each day to lesson the blow at the end. I’m planning on doing a lot of writing this weekend between breaks of turkey and some good beer!”

And Jill was true to her word: I saw her out Wednesday night, having some good beer. So was I. We talked about our novels and the fun we were having writing—and the steam we were blowing off that night by not writing.

But now it’s time to build up steam again, to push forward, to crank out those last few thousand words. I have friends who’ve already passed the 50K-finish line, and others who have nearly reached it.

I can do it, too. I got this.

Yeah. I got this.

I’m running about a day-and-a-half behind pace on my novel writing. According to National Novel Writing Month’s official website, the cumulative word count is supposed to be 30,000 as of today. I’m a little shy.

It’s not that the words aren’t there—they are. What’s missing are the hours in the day. There just aren’t enough of them. I physically don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do (join the club, eh?) let alone write everything I need to write.

And oh, yeah, there’s this rotten little voice in my head saying, “Fix that! Now!”

The voice belongs to a notorious entity known in NaNoWriMo circles as “The Inner Editor,” that part of our writerly selves that urges us to take great care with our work, to polish, to edit, to proof, to keep things tidy, to do it right, to self-censor.

Not that there’s anything wrong with those things (except perhaps the self-censoring, at least when it comes to creativity). But NaNoWriMo emphasizes quantity over quality, whereas the Inner Editor demands just the opposite.

“The fear of doing things imperfectly turns what should be fun, creative endeavors into worrisome tasks,” writes NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty in his book No Plot? No Problem!.

That worry can paralyze writers, which in turn can make in nearly impossible to crank out a 50K novel in thirty days.

“Write with abandon,” NaNoWriMo advises. “Editing is for December.”

But damn, I just can’t do it. I have not been able to let myself go. As a writer, I edit as I write. That’s just the way it works for me. I can’t hammer out a draft and then go back and edit and revise and proof and polish. I have to do it as I go.

With my fiction, it’s even harder to just cut loose because I tend to really work the language. I concentrate on rhythm and imagery and description and detail. I love the words themselves as much as I love the story they’re conveying. That, for me, is where I find the fun in my creative endeavors. That, for me, is where I find the joy in creation.

To abandon that in order to “write with abandon” gnaws at me.

“I definitely understand what you mean about struggling with it,” says my friend Lizz Schumer in London. “If I write a sentence, a paragraph or a scene that doesn’t jive right to me, I can’t not go back and fix it. I know, I know—it’s against the rules. But that paragraph etc. will haunt me for days if I don’t fix it.”

Lizz’s novel, like mine, demands a keen eye for practical purposes. “The nature of my story requires a sort of alternate reality, so I’ve had to pay closer attention to consistencies in time and place than I would if I were setting the scene closer to home,” she explains. “A few times I have ended up discovering plot or setting inconsistencies as I go, and I go back and fix those.”

Is that against the rules? she asks. “Maybe. But again, if I don’t fix it when I see it,” she says, “I might not see it next read-through. So I’m a naughty, naughty NaNo-er in that respect.”

Anna Maria Ballester Bohn in Madrid, Spain, has an Inner Editor that sets in on her before she even sits down to write. “I call my inner editor Mr. Brocklehurst, after the character in Jane Eyre,” she says. “He’s the guy in charge of telling me how unworthy and thoroughly stupid everything I do is, especially anything that’s fun and makes me feel good.”

Brocklehurst starts in on Anna right away. “He gets his field day before I start: ‘Why do you want to write for? Do you really think this will ever be good enough for someone to read? What do you mean, you want to do it for yourself? Of all the selfish things to say…’ Every day, I have to look him in the eye and say firmly, ‘I’m going to do this! Step away from my computer, sir!’”

The more she writes, the easier it is for Anna to ignore Brocklehurst. “Once I’m writing, he leaves me pretty much alone,” she says.

In Cleveland, my friend Jennifer McConnell seems to have her Inner Editor tamed. “I usually don’t have a problem turning off the editor for the first draft of anything,” she says. “I give myself permission to ‘throw up on the page.’ And sometimes it’s fun to see how truly awful I can make a sentence and still get out what I’m trying to say.”

Anna seems to be finding the whole thing a great lark, too. “It’s so wonderful when you’ve done 1,000 or 2,000 words of utter crap and suddenly the magic happens,” she says. “It makes it all worthwhile.”

NaNoWriMo urges writers not to sweat the details. Details slow down your pace. Offer enough to suggest a setting, for instance. “Don’t worry overly much about lending an enormous amount of realistic detail to the tale’s backdrop,” suggests Baty. “In the same way that a theater set will use two or three potted trees to suggest a forest, so should you leave much of your setting to the reader’s imagination in the first draft.”

I happen to be really interested in my setting and want to take the time to explore it. I recognize, though, that slows down my word count. So do I hack out some words for the sake of meeting the word count? Or do I slow down and explore and experience my work?

My friend Yennie Cheung, editor of the groovy Hipster Book Club and a fiction whiz, came to my rescue with a good pep talk.

“In the first draft, the important thing is that you’re writing things that may or may not be useful to you. It’s in your revisions that you worry about the reader,” she reminded me. “I say write everything that comes to mind; if it doesn’t work, you’ll change it later.”

Anna agreed. “Anything that keeps me writing is fine,” she said. “Secret for all you NaNo-ers out there: I’m writing down entire conversations with my MC, where he asks me how my day was and I ask him about stuff in his life, AND INCLUDING EVERY WORD IN THE FINAL COUNT. Sue me. Super-secret secret: some of those conversations are not even half bad!”

I’ve come to realize that NaNoWriMo’s premium on quantity over quality—for the first draft, anyway—just isn’t designed for writers like me in mind. Its chief virtue is to impose structure on writers who need structure, but that’s something I seem to do just fine with on my own.

That does not mean I think NaNoWriMo is a bad idea. Quite the contrary: I see huge heaps of worth in the event. It is craziness, community, and creativity all crammed into one frenetic event. That it is, on some level, also some kind of global publicity stunt-meets-fraternity prank is completely irrelevant. It gets people writing.

Plus, the experience is helping me learn some interesting things about myself as a writer that have been useful, too.

And yes, I’m having fun.

I guess I just need to tell my Inner Editor to fuck off—or I need to just shut the hell up and pound out some words. I can do that. I’ve been doing it my entire professional life. I need to forget being an artist and revel in being a hack. After all, aside from the time issues, I’m having no trouble at all popping out a couple thousand words a day, even if I tend to agonize over some of those words more than I should at this point.

So I’ll keep playing by the rules and see this thing through. Just yesterday at some point, I passed the halfway mark without even realizing it. I’m on a roll, and I’m excited about what I’m doing. And if I died tomorrow, I’d leave behind something I’m not entirely embarrassed by (although certainly not anywhere close to satisfied with); finding that balance has perhaps been the most satisfying part of the adventure for me.

“Writing a novel in a month is utterly ridiculous, an undertaking for fools and those who don’t know any better,” Baty write. “Thankfully, we belong to the latter camp, which makes us dangerously powerful writers.”

So yeah, it’s getting ugly. But there’s power in it, too.