A few years ago, during one of those gratuitous and uncomfortable conversations you have with people just because they happen to be standing in front of the wine table, I mentioned to two directors of another writers’ organization here in the Berkshires, one that also hosts writers who do readings, that I wanted to get Amy Hempel to read for Word Street. They told me not to bother. “Hempel doesn’t read in Massachusetts,” they told me. “We already tried.” Did I mention Word Street is in Massachusetts?

I went to Williams College to hear Rick Moody read a few years ago, and after he finished reading some excerpts from Demonology, I watched the aforementioned wine table blockers bee line to where he was sitting, like vultures on a dead carcass, to get him to do a reading for them.

Maybe that’s why people don’t like you. You think?

I’m wondering off topic, though, like Montaigne on his fourth glass of a nice Rivesaltes.

The reading was fantastic. In fact, it was like going to a small club to hear your favorite band play and find that they decided to try out all their new material on the audience. Lydia and Amy went on stage (separately) with folders and papers and drafts and polished stuff and made everyone feel something.

We had planned to go to the Brix Wine Bar for dinner afterward, and that made me a little nervous because it’s so expensive. We, of course, were picking up the tab for Lydia and her husband, Amy and her friend…God, I forgot her friend’s name, but she was Ukrainian or Bulgarian or French or something — she had an incredible energy, was intense and feisty, and wrote screenplays, I think, and all you had to do to rile her up and send her off on a rant was mention Americans and their government.

I sent the group to the Wine Bar ahead of me, as I had to finish cleaning up after the reading, what with all the blood everywhere. “You will be joining us, won’t you?” said Lydia.

“Yes, dahling. I will be joing the party of…” what? the “party” went from six of us, seven or eight…to something like fourteen when the final count was taken.

We had an after-party a few years ago when Dave Eggers and Jim Shepard came to do our benefit. We set up a volunteer recruitment booth in the lobby of the theater, and the volunteers at the volunteer recruitment booth were instructed to give special after-party passes to those who expressed interest in volunteering at Word Street. The plan flopped, because the after-party was filled with people I haven’t seen at Word Street since the reading, and they drank the cases of free wine we got from a local liquor store.

I raced to Brix to find it closed. Sigh of relief: Word Street wouldn’t be spending $1000 for dinner that night. The crowd went across the street to the restaurant in the hotel where Amy was staying. I walked in and had to find an extra seat to stick on the end of the table. I was elated, though. We didn’t make a lot of money that night, but I got Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis to come to Pittsfield, and now I was having dinner with them.

I read what Chuck Palahniuk wrote about meeting Amy Hempel for the first time, about it being somewhat of a disappointment, but there’s nothing disappointing about her. She’s funny, charming, and brilliant — and during dinner she whispered to the person sitting next to her “Would you switch seats with Frank so that I may sit next to him…”

The food was terrible — flat out terrible, but what does any of it matter when you are the one Amy Hempel bends her head toward when there’s conversation to be had? The only distraction was the woman (not really a woman, more like a girl), 19 or 20 years old, never saw her in my life, French accent, Yoda-type speech and pretentiousness (”From North Adams, I am not”), one of those permanent scowls on her face, asking Amy to buy her drinks because the restaurant made a regular practice of carding annoying jackasses at the table.

So here Amy is, getting drinks for her, and the girl keeps apologizing to Amy for having to get the drinks. Across the room security is eyeing the girl, waiting for her to take a sip so they can bust her, Amy’s friend is cursing the security guard, calling him a fascist, and all I’m wondering is who brought this idiot. Did she pay for her ticket for the benefit? Am I paying for the drinks she’s getting through Amy Hempel?

It’s like the other day at Starbucks. Woman from the adjacent Quiznos comes over with a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and asks for a shot of vanilla for her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The ‘Bucks girl was like, “Are you kidding me, Moron?”

Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger started my fascination. I was particularly interested because of my lifelong love of The Catcher in the Rye and that Salinger’s life has been a reclusive one. How could anyone really penetrate well enough to give me anything of substance? After I read this book I learned that Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, wrote an autobiography that explored her childhood. I was going to pick it up until the day I took my family on an excursion away from the normal route home from my wife’s mother’s house and into the driveway of J.D. Salinger.

As I mentioned before, I had no intention of going to his house that day. I think the whole idea of autographs and hallowed ground is ridiculous. I didn’t used to think so. I visited Seattle in 1994 with a friend in search of Eddie Vedder, and I visited Bruce Lee’s gravesite. His son Brandon had just been killed during the filming of “The Crow” and his site was fresh, with a temporary stone in place while the permanent one was being engraved. He was buried next to his father, so my friend and I thought it cool to have our pictures taken standing next to the headstone of Bruce Lee. It was decidedly uncool, like most things I did fifteen years ago.

The Connecticut River separates Vermont and New Hampshire and runs along Interstate 91. The key to finding Salinger’s house was finding Windsor, Vermont a beautiful little town that served as the summer retreat of the great, Maxwell Perkins, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe (This is where the rash stuff was about Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I removed it. See the comments for the gist of what I wrote. This is the nice thing about blogs, I suppose: being able to retract an irresponsible statement.)

Alexander did the rest. As I drove, my wife read aloud:

“I turned left coming off the covered bridge from Windsor and drove down the main road that wound along the river. On my right I passed a side road which, a sign informed me, led to Saint-Gaudens Historical Site.”

“You’re going to fast,” I said to my wife, “I just came off the bridge.”

“OK, OK,” she said.

“Soon, I passed a green history marker commemorating the old Cornish Colony. The marker stood near the Blow-Me-Down Mill, a three-story stone structure with wood siding. Past the mill, at the Chase Cemetery, a small graveyard surrounded by a white picket fence, I turned right onto a narrow asphalt road. Next I drove just over a mile, passing a three-story slat-shingled mansion and then two huge red barns built among green sloping hills, until I turned right at a small abandoned guard house.”

We were a little confused because of the “small abandoned guard house.” It’s like a little toll booth, and we were expecting something bigger. We saw a house with a porch and I was like, “Well, that could be a guard house, ’cause you can sit on the porch with a shotgun and guard stuff…Like farmers do, or like the farmers do on television.”

“You are a dumbass,” my wife said.

“Going up the asphalt road, I passed Austin Farms. Just beyond the farms, the asphalt road turned into a dirt road, which then ran under a long heavy canopy created by rows of tall green trees growing on either side of the road. In time, to my left I saw a red house that appeared to be a converted barn. Next, continuing up the road, I topped a hill, which was bordered by spacious pastures – pastures, I later learned, that belonged to J.D. Salinger. Driving up the road, I stopped at an old dilapidated barn.”

This is the part I love to recall in my mind, yet, I’m not ever able to tell it well because two things were happening simultaneously, my wife was reading and my eyes were doing what Alexander said he was doing. It was really quite magical, I assure you.

“Finally, I looked up through the trees on the hill in front of me and I saw it – Salinger’s house.”

Out of all the things to be amazed and wondrous about, I was obsessed with his mailbox. Look at the size of this monster. Not only must he get a lot of mail, but he must want a lot of mail, too. I was tempted to find a Kinko’s or something to print out the manuscript I had on my laptop and put it in his mailbox with a note. I wanted to write any kind of note to him.

“I’ll go knock on his door if you want,” my wife said.

“You’re just going to go up there and knock on his door.”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“No, you’re not,” I said. For her to go up and knock on his door, I would have had to been knocked out, like B.A. Baracus before getting on an airplane, and then she would have had to tell me the whole thing afterward.

So she didn’t knock on his door, and I didn’t leave him a note.

I read somewhere that you had to be a woman, or a teenage girl, for him to respond, and you needed to send a picture. I also read that he can sniff a fanatic from a mile away, that all his close friends call him Jerry and not “J.D.” or “Mister Salinger.” They really do. I swear they do.

Two houses, two reconnaissance missions, presumably two scenes of misery, one trip. Maybe the answer to everything that is eating me alive has been lying right next to me in our gritty, sandy bed for the last ten years – that all along it’s been Jennet who has kept me alive and breathing by suffering all of my impulses and broodings.

Jennet, please look at me closely. I’m not going to kill myself. I promise.

So when I’m in pain, in consistent mental discomfort, and my beautiful family’s existence can do nothing to help me, I find my church in the lives of imaginary people: literary characters, maybe, or real people whose lives I know nothing of, but I still choose to impose melodrama upon them. For what? To make me feel better about my life and my pain? I don’t know.

My wife helps me in my search to find these people.

That’s another one of the new cliché’s, by the way, isolating a line like it’s supposed to completely wreck you and send you breathing sighs of pity and exasperations.

I read a good biography of J.D. Salinger called Salinger: a biography by Paul Alexander, and in the first chapter Alexander recalls the time he sat at the end of J.D. Salinger’s driveway to wait for his daily jaunt down the hill to the post office or the grocery store. Well, Salinger comes down the driveway in this anticlimactic moment, but then Alexander makes up for it by describing the exact route he took to get there. My wife would read the directions from the book verbatim, and I’d drive us there, like we were little kids in search of treasure.

We were on our way home from my mother in-law’s house, nestled (another cliché) in the most beautiful part of the country I’ve ever seen, the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before we even thought of chasing Salinger down, as we had little guidance aside from wispy memories and the remainder-pile book I had, I was compelled to stop the car near a house peculiarly close to the edge of the main road that runs through North Danville, Vermont. We’d driven past this house about a hundred times in the nine years we’d been together, and every time I’d have more questions. I figured she’d know, because this is the kind of town where everyone knows whether or not you had corn for dinner two nights ago.

There’s a barn in the foreground that housed some horses. The tons of snow they get up there had buckled the roof, and that’s saying a lot for a Vermont-made roof. The owner, I figured, didn’t take care of it like he should have. When I asked about it, my wife said that the worst part of it all was the hoof rot, that the horses were left to walk in a small penned-in area, and the surface was so muddy, so soft, that the horses hooves sat caked in it all the time, and this, in turn, caused what is known as hoof rot. The neighbors, which could mean anyone in a ten-mile radius, apparently were all in an uproar over this and had reported this owner several times to the appropriate authorities, whoever they were.

I cared more for the people inside, though, for some reason. Usually, I might have a little bit of disdain for people like these, but when my wife told me the man who owned the house, a husband and a father of two or three adult children, had terminal cancer, things changed. It’s so easy for me to make assumptions about people I don’t know, or people I do know, but haven’t seen in a while.

He has not emailed back in a long time, therefore, he must hate me.

No one has praised my work all year, so, therefore, they must want to fire me.

That house is in severe disrepair, a blue tarp covers a hole in the side of the house, and look: one of them drives a school bus for a living; therefore, I must be far superior to them.

You would think I’d know better, especially in growing up the way I did, what with the food stamps and the pea soup, and the crusty bread, and the hard government cheese…

And my father reminding me constantly, as we drove past nice houses on Long Island to get to Roosevelt Field to set up our flea market booth, that it was never about the outside of the house but who was inside.

But I’m angry. I’ve always been angry about the way things were for me when I trudged through the most formative years of my social and emotional development being figuratively kicked along.

I am not angry at rich people. I have no bitterness toward the privileged few. My anger seems to be with those who are down, the ones who looked like I did, with the hair sticking up and the dirt under the fingernails. I want them to get the fuck up and fight for themselves. I’m not even angry at them.

I’m angry with me.

My wife scampered up the woods across the road from this house to snap these photos two years ago. I told her I wanted to write about them, but I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with them. I had no idea, at this point, that we would find our way to J.D. Salinger’s house the same day.

There was a moment during my wife’s reconnaissance mission when I thought they were looking out their windows, that he might be standing at a window, stricken with cancer and resigned to the fact that it was probably another neighbor gathering evidence against him.

I don’t really know how to tell if a horse is being mistreated. In the old cartoons I used to watch a broken down horse had a concave back. This horse didn’t look too miserable to me, but I imagine the back of his legs could have been treated a little better.

I heard the cancer-stricken man had three grown kids, two sons and a daughter. I remember he had kids, because the story that followed that up was that they were doing well for themselves, that they were holding down regular jobs and making regular money.

My father has never had a nice car in his life. My brothers and I have always had better cars than he did because that’s the way my dad wanted it. It wasn’t something he ever mentioned, either. My brothers and I talked about it all the time.

I imagine him in his deathbed, home hospice down to their last day or two, because they are keen to such things, and set up in that top window so he can see his horses and he can see us. That one brown horse is looking right at my wife as she takes the picture, and if you scroll up to see the other picture this horse is in, he’s turned the other way and looking right at her.

What bothers me the most about this is the way this man could have felt as he was dying. He’s gone now, died in his 50s, I think, and he left his house like this when he died. That bothers me for some reason because if I knew I was dying and this was the way I was leaving things for my family, I’d feel like I completely failed in my duty as a man. I’m not saying it’s a rational way to think, but I know how disgusted my father was with himself when things got really bad for us. I remember coming out of the bathroom shower at fourteen and complaining to my parents that I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap. My father yelled at us for a lot of things, but he didn’t say a thing at that moment.

The horses aren’t there today. The weeds are all overgrown where they used to walk, so I imagine they sold them off and got a few dollars for them. I’m imagining that the family got rid of the horses like people get rid of boxes of clothes of those who have passed out of their lives. Maybe it was the money, that they could get a few thousand dollars for them. If it was the money, though, why didn’t they sell them off to repair the house a little? Maybe they kept the horses to spite the neighbors. Perhaps with all the complaining, some of the proper authorities paid them a visit, inspected the horses, and found that they were happy.

Using Specific Song Titles as a Way to Inform Setting: Are you so lazy and unable to construct an authentic setting that you have to mention song titles to place the reader in the time period of your story? Watch any episode of the television program, “Cold Case,” and you’ll see what I mean.

“In my mind’s eye”: What does this mean, anyway? Poets and prose writers are guilty of this insanely stupid phrase. Are you seeing things in your mind? Having visions? Dreaming? Well, what, jerk?

Transfixed: There’s something there, something mesmerizing, and your main character can’t take his eyes off. Or better: you’re writing an essay and something holds you in such a trance that you’re “transfixed.” Would you give me a break already?

Going “hmm” or “mmm” at a Poetry Reading After Someone has Finished Reading a Poem: Have you heard this pretentiousness at your local poetry open mike? Apparently some people can’t just be moved by poetry; they have to make sure everyone else in the room knows they were moved by what they just heard. Whenever I hear people make his quiet groaning sound after a poem’s done, I like to let out a big “AHHHHHHH” or a “WHOOO HOOOO, MoFo.”

Sentence Fragments: Dude, learn how to construct a complex or compound sentence. Stop isolating meaningless lines, because I’m not impressed. Are you able to use the comma? Are you seriously that wrapped up in yourself and inept at cultivating emotion from your reader that you have to throw a sentence fragment in the middle of nowhere?

Chuck Palahniuk: I loved Fight Club for sure, then read Survivor and Invisible Monsters…Choke…the bird one…Can his books be any more identical? I read in an interview he did where he said he wrote the way he did because he was so disgusted with all the bad literature, and he wanted to create something fresh and new. Well congrats, Chuck, you’re now a cliche. A few years ago, when I didn’t know any better, I stood in line at a Cambridge, Massachusetts bookstore to meet him, get one of his books signed. My wife, my baby boy, Jack, and I waited at least two hours to meet him. The whole time we’re standing there, Jack’s chewing on my copy of the Palahniuk book. He saturated a corner of the book. It was a mess. When we got to the entrance of the bookstore, one of the employees came out and told us (We were like the last ones in line.) that he had to lock the doors, that Chuck couldn’t see anymore people, that they had to stop the line somewhere, but that he’d exchange my book for an autographed one. Before I could think clearly, he had my soggy slobber book and I had a brand new, generically-signed copy in my hand. Not having that sloppy spit book today is one of the biggest regrets of my life.

Anything Mentioning How Bad our President is: We get it: No one likes the president, the economy is bad, gas prices are high, war is terrible. All right already. And if you’re a high school teacher bullying malleable minds into hating the president, into believing you are actually making informed statements: shame on you for not allowing students the space to make up their own minds. Shame on you for alienating the young conservative minds in your classroom. Shame on you, asshole.

Stories in the Second Person: You look at your accumulated collection of various writings and think to yourself, “I need a story in the second-person to balance this out.” Look at me: No, you don’t.

Saying “I didn’t see it. I don’t watch television.”: Oh stop. I watch too much television and I read more than you do.

There are more, but I’ll save them for another time.

I read a book called Arkansas, by John Brandon. It’s a McSweeney’s book (of course), but seriously, there are more than a couple of McSweeney’s books and stories I do not like at all. This one I liked, though. Brandon gave me my Denis Johnson, circa Jesus’ Son, fix without being too derivative. I bought the book from a very good local and independent bookshop, paid about ten more dollars for it than I would have at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, and…Well, I wrote the following letter to Eli Horowitz, Managing Editor of McSweeney’s:

Dear McSwys,

I rushed down to one of the McSweeney’s 100 stores, The Bookloft, in Great
Barrington, MA, to pick up a copy of ARKANSAS, on hold for me. I love the
feel of this book, this “rectangular” design makes a guy want to carry it
everywhere with him. Anyway, I got home and parked myself on the big chair
(not big enough to be a love seat; not small enough to be a regular chair)
and started reading. My first mistake was thinking I could skip over the
excerpt I had read in McSwy’s 26, because, of course, I had read it already
and thus, had to buy the whole book, which, I think, was your plan all
along. I found out I couldn’t just skip, that the excerpt was strategically
taken from different parts of the book and pushed together into a tight
little plot-driven, hi-speed adventure. So it’s no longer an error; I’ve
gone back and read every word so far.

The next part might disturb you. I have this habit of pausing during a
riveting piece of literature and contemplating the type, the cover, my life,
while fanning through the pages to see how much longer I’ll get to be
wrapped up in this story. To my dismay, I came upon page 99/100 (They’re
back-to-back.) and half the page was torn out. Upon further examination, I
noticed it was most definitely NOT a page excerpted in McSwy’s 26, so I had
not read the missing section prior to buying this book. You understand my
problem. I need someone, preferably the author, Mr. Brandon, to call me and
read that section to me. It wouldn’t take him more than fifteen minutes,
although he’d have to read the missing paragraph on page 99, then wait until
I read the intact part of page 100 before continuing with the section torn
away on page 100. Can you arrange this for me?

Why don’t I take it back to the store, you ask? Well, I don’t like
confrontation, and I’m afraid I’ll be accused of having accidentally torn
this page and asking for a new one under false pretenses. I assure you that
I had nothing to do with the torn page. Plus, I think they might have to
order a new one for me, and I don’t want to wait.

Thanks for your time and attention.

A faithful reader and subscriber,
Frank Tempone
413/442-2732

I don’t know what I was doing the next night. I think I may have been on study hall duty at school, but when I came home, everyone in the house was asleep. I suddenly felt like an idiot for even sending the email. So I pulled back and wrote Eli Horowitz again:

Hey Eli…

Please don’t worry about it..I felt like writing a goofy letter…Really
nice job on the book…Frank

Eli Horowitz responded immediately:

He called you! Said he talked to your mother.

I don’t live with my mother.

I ran upstairs and shook Jen awake and asked if anyone called. She said a guy named John called and wanted to read to me — that he left his telephone number and that I should call him the next morning. She didn’t say any of this coherently. It was a mighty struggle and there was more shaking.

But I’m not Marcia Brady and he’s not Davy Jones, so I never called him. Don’t be too disappointed. It’s textbook me.

To balance this bit of bad news, I revisited a magazine’s site that always intrigued me, Narrative. They’re holding a contest for stories written in the first person. I’ve never entered a contest before because they cost money, but more and more contest fees include subscriptions to the magazine or in this case, web content, so I feel better knowing I’d get something in return. So I paid the steep $20 fee and entered one of my stories. In exchange, I received access to what they’re calling “Narrative Backstage,” a limited access part of the site containing audio lectures, PDF articles on craft, and works-in-progress by notable writers. Authors featured include Robert Olen Butler, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Jenks, Amy Tan, Stuart Dybek, and Tobias Wolff. So the $20 was well spent. If you want a year of Backstage access, it costs $50 per year — all a good value, in my opinion, because the content changes often enough to keep things interesting.

A brilliant analogy he made was a pretty simple one: the shot clock in basketball. College basketball has a 35-second clock, during which time the team on the offensive must shoot the ball. If the ball is not shot in 35 seconds, the other team takes possession. Incidentally, Women’s College Basketball uses a 30-second clock. Why? Is it a kind of “Hurry the hell up and let’s get this over with” thing?

Anyway, there wasn’t always a shot clock. A team could have, and did, run several minutes off the clock by playing keep-away from the other team. It was a boring brand of basketball for sure. Bachelder’s point, if you haven’t figured it out already, is that things became more exciting when the shot clock was introduced. The players on the floor had to make, sometimes, split second decisions. Also, the audience knew that something HAD to happen at least every 35 seconds. This made things more exciting, had the audience always anticipating things.

Bachelder talked about television programs, too — sitcoms in particular. You used to know that some kind of climax had to happen by the 27 or 28-minute mark. Television writers have gotten way smarter, today, though, because shows don’t always end that way anymore. Take CSI for instance. Sometimes it’s resolved and sometimes you see Jerry Bruckheimer’s name and you’re like: What the hell just happened? What the writers have done is make the viewer anticipate the anticipation. It’s absolutely brilliant.

So the 35-second clock, the 30-minute sitcom, the 60-minute drama all have back walls. What about stories?

Bachelder talked about Ulysses, which takes place in a day. I thought of the back wall of The Catcher in the Rye, which takes place over three days, and you know Holden has to go home to his parents some time, or you think Holden has to go home sometime.

The clock has to begin early in a story. The opening of the story opens up the back wall for the reader. Bachelder used Raymond Carver’s opening to his story, “Cathedral”

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing -eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

There’s a lot here to anticipate. The evening the blind man spends at the house is going to be interesting: the narrator is going to be uncomfortable, and uncomfortable things are interesting to watch from afar. This paragraph contains enough to want to know what happens the evening the blind man shows up. The second paragraph, though, goes even further:

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in the officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED — Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’s worked with the blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, he nose — even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

Paragraph two certainly raises the stakes: the narrator’s wife loved another man before him; she had an emotional attachment to the blind man; the blind man had his hands all over her face (”even her neck!”); and thinking back, the blind man is traveling five hours just to see her and stay overnight.

You want to read the rest of this story, don’t you.

So I’m working on my Keys story with all of this in mind, or not in mind at first. It’s nine pages now, which is important to me for some reason.

As the manuscript consultation approached, I felt more and more like I was about to meet a prostitute, not that I know what that feels like, but I was developing a dirty feeling about this process. I told him this when I met him. You know, like an icebreaker.

I’ve been hearing the same comments from editors for the last year now, but somehow they started making sense when Bachelder shared them with me. My work is driven by voice, he said, and at times too much so. My problem (one of my problems) is that the voice is overwhelming. I remember an editor sent an email to my agent saying that once — that the narrative voice is relentless. Big shocker. I don’t think you have to be an editor to know that my voice, narrative or other, is absolutely relentless.

Anyway, I have this story that uses voice almost exclusively. It was published in Another Chicago Magazine, Issue 42. In the story, the narrator, father of a toddler, is watching two teenagers out his office window push a giant boulder off of his property. The story is about the father’s fears of bringing his son into a dangerous world, and these two teenagers represent this fear for some reason. Bachelder’s question to me was Why didn’t the narrator ever go outside to confront the teenagers? His point was that I had the makings of a conflict and I failed to confront it as a writer. It says a lot about me personally, but I never realized my misstep by not addressing the simple issue of conflict in a short story. My narrative voice expressed a conflict with the outside world but my narrative action did not physically confront the outside world. I thought this was fascinating. He told me to go beyond the unpleasantness of every day life to confront a conflict produced naturally by the circumstances of the story.

As a participant in the conference, I chose to attend certain “craft sessions” before arriving. I don’t remember choosing Holland’s, and I don’t think I would have, considering it dealt with first lines in fiction. But like always, I was skeptical, then surprised about its usefulness. She started out by saying:

“If you wrote down every first line you ever created, what would it say about your tendencies…”

This isn’t a direct quote, even though I made it look like it, but you get the idea. Here are some of my first lines.

When it wasn’t enough to watch Superfly Snuka soar from the top rope, or watch Mad Dog Vachon slap a sleeper hold on a dazed and disoriented patsy, we created our own neighborhood wrestling league on our little piece of Long Island.

We used to hang out at a bar called The Melrose.

This is the only photograph I have of Erin.

I don’t tell many people that I was nineteen before I had sex for the first time.

Today I’m in my son’s room before I leave for work, knelt over one of his open dresser drawers, looking for a fashionable outfit so I can dress him.

The one thing I have always wanted to avoid is fashioning opening lines just to be clever or varied. The best first lines I probably ever crafted were ones I never intended to be first lines. I used to attend a writers’ group with a woman who was brilliant at advising where a story should start, based on the text I had already written. There’s a person like this in every writers’ group. It’s the easiest comment to make without actually analyzing the writing. This woman, though, was really good.

So what do my first lines say about my sensibilities as a writer?

• I write almost exclusively in the first person.
• My first lines break into a conversation of sorts with the reader. This goes along with the voice I’ve developed and my philosophy that my writing is at its best when I write as if I’m telling a story to someone.
• In terms of what the lines do, it seems to vary. I’m foreshadowing action in some, while in others I introduce a setting…
• I like to think my sentences are varied in length naturally.

Holland had us examine some of Joy Williams’ first lines, and I find them to be similar to the approach my students take when they write their first stories. The first lines work, but they seem to be too easy, or too basic in how it interacts with the reader. Take this first line from Joy Williams’ story, “Marabou”:

The funeral of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly.

I’m giving Williams the benefit of the doubt because she’s widely admired, but I don’t agree with how I perceive she’s treating her readers here. It’s as if she expected a new set of readers to take her work on, and she’s employing very basic strategies to rope them in. Maybe I’m making too much of it, but I would not have chosen this line as representative of a good first line. Here’s another, from her short story “Honored Guest”:

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.

Here’s another example of what I perceive as writing to a new audience. This feels like the start of a story for new teenage readers, and it has little to do with the reference to eleventh grade. If the sentence stopped at the end of the first independent clause, it would have the feel of the first example. When Williams added the rest of it, it felt like that bouncy kind of voice, despite the subject matter, that you get in young adult novels. Am I wrong?

On some level, probably. Holland didn’t present this craft talk to show us how to start our stories, but to survey the ways good writers have started their stories. Her handout was a two-pager that included about forty first sentences, all organized according to categories she created. It was an interesting read. I’ll fax you a copy if you want to see what she did.

Noy Holland opened a discussion on the first lines of poetry, and one of the participants said that she measures the value of a poem, or buys a collection of poetry, based on what she thinks of the last lines of each poem. This fascinated me even more when Holland reacted as if it were common knowledge.

So I guess it’s the first five pages of the novel, the first line or paragraph of the short story, and the last line of the poem.

Some other little paraphrased fascinations of note during her session

A story should occur within itself rather than be dependent on continually added events on the end of each plot point. This could be the major difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. If genre fiction is dependent on plot twist and turns and the next thing happening, literary fiction is partly dependent on being contemplative about the specific plot points. For example, I would label my story, “Keys” as literary because it takes a very simple plot and constantly analyzes it.

On strength versus reservation: Writing a good story, or a good section of a story, is like great singing in an opera. A huge reserve of power releases itself in a controlled fashion through a small opening. I’m obviously paraphrasing, but I love this concept. There has to be an incredible amount of power behind the words, but the words have to be used precisely and in a controlled way.

]]> http://www.absolutegentleman.com/2008/07/19/holland/feed/ http://www.absolutegentleman.com/2008/06/27/keys-together-on-a-ring/ http://www.absolutegentleman.com/2008/06/27/keys-together-on-a-ring/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:39:37 +0000 frank http://www.absolutegentleman.com/?p=86 Despite what my wife thinks, I spent only a short span of time marveling over the numerology associated with my sons’ birthdays. Most of the day I worked on the keys story. I added some stuff and put it all together into one piece.

—

Later, I suppose I had to admit that I got a bit of joy from it, this mystery of the keys. She would never know, as she left town soon after, in what was either a disappearance or just a bit of irony. Who can say? The point is that she’s gone.

She didn’t approach me about the keys. I offered them to her. I’m not sure why I offered both keys, because only one of them worked, and now that I think of it, how sinister it could have looked considering neither worked for her. In fact, I have this helpless feeling now that I can’t explain myself to her.

I had an extra set and they accessed a studio I had been given the use of, free of charge. Overcome with good-fortune and the enthusiasm of having such a place, I hardly use it at all. I would arrive soon after dropping the kids at school, put on a pot of coffee, and rub my hands together like I was actually going to get down to business and work.

Ever since I’d begun taking the medication, though, I haven’t had any idea what work is, actually. There’s no putting my finger on — wrapping my mind around, as it were — what, exactly, I was supposed to do while at the free studio.

The coffee takes five or six minutes to get ready, so that time could have been devoted, nearly entirely, to mapping out a plan of attack — a veritable blueprint for action. The space was conducive to this, too. There were white boards and cork board walls and enough paper to lay everything out neatly, pin plans to the walls, but just like always I’m perpetually getting ready to get ready.

There were things to turn on and repair, candles to light, perhaps if, at that particular moment, I craved a candle — or a scent — because candles aren’t right for every moment.

I offered the keys because I could, and it was a great place just to be. I made the joke that the bathrooms were “industrial looking” but that they were clean, although I never knew how clean they were. I had some knowledge that the bathrooms were clean at one time, that someone took an afternoon to scrub things. I remember there was a fresh coat of paint at some point. But when I told her things were clean, I had no real idea. Maybe I thought I’d clean it another time, before she had a chance to use the place. I handed her the keys on a day she visited the studio, so I knew she wouldn’t have to use the keys until, at least, the next day.

I may have falsely made the reader believe that my days consisted of nothing but dropping the kids at school and daycare, then arriving at the studio with the intention of working every day. The truth is that I have a job — that the studio is a luxury of sorts, and I can access the studio to work any day at any time, provided that my schedule is free of my job and familial obligations. I do not babysit our children because I am the father of these children. Any time I spend with them, no matter how monotonous it is, no matter how much it feels like a sentence, I am not the babysitter.

When you have such obligations, the days march behind one another, and unless you’re close, and your eyes haven’t crossed, vision hasn’t blurred, from lack of sleep, there’s no way to read the name tag to know what day it is.

Now, was that metaphor too drawn out? My idea was to make the days like soldiers marching for some reason, and soldiers have name tags, I think, and so I made the analogy hoping that the reader would understand the connection. Looking at the sentence now, I see that length isn’t a problem. If the metaphor is clear, the sentence length shouldn’t throw the reader off too much. I’m wondering, though, if the phrase “name tag” is a problem. Can the reader successfully make the connection between the days and soldiers without this pretentious metafictional explanation?

A few days pass in this fashion, and when my phone vibrated in my pocket, I wasn’t thinking about how many days had passed since I had given her the keys. In fact, I must have forgotten about the keys completely, as I never even recognized the number on the phone as hers.

“I need you to come down here…”

“I’m busy right now…in the middle of something. What’s wrong?”

“The keys don’t work.”

She was upset, which was a little surprising. They were keys, after all, and my thoughts could have floated toward one of two ways. They showed themselves like a multiple-choice answer in front of my eyes. Is she

a) a lunatic? or

b) severely disappointed by her inability to access the studio?

I didn’t make a choice, but instead thought about how well I must have sold her on the beauty and functionality of the studio, for her to think she could call me at work for this problem. It had been difficult for me to get many people excited about anything I had to offer.

“I went at five this morning,” she said. “I felt like an idiot.”

There was embarrassment too, apparently. I hadn’t accounted for the possible humiliation, although it sounds a little heavy-handed, of standing there for what she thought was a long time, trying to get the door open. There was also the fact that she must have planned this way ahead of time — that it became something that got her excited about her life at that particular moment. Plenty of people awaken at 5 A.M., but who arrives anywhere at 5 A.M.? This studio meant something to her.

Faces. Maybe the distinguishing characteristic of each solider and, in turn, each day, is in the physiognomy. Unless you are perceptive enough to recognize that which strays from the patterns of daily life — unless you get close enough to see the wrinkles in the faces — the days will pass by in a nondescript blur.

That afternoon I met her at the studio. Her hands were on her hips and she had a look that said, “You little rascal – so forgetful and careless in your varied and packed schedule. This is just like you. I bet you’re giving wrong keys all over the place.” She had the condescending smile, the head titled slightly; the only thing she was missing was the wagging finger, which I could have put in here because what do you know about this person, anyway?

I’ll say she had a crooked smile, one ruined by sprigs of dark Italian hair on the edges of her mouth. She loved getting mail, any kind of mail. A slip of paper with the letter ‘R’ on it would push her to ecstasy. She designed and executed ransom-note looking collages, daily, and for no special occasion. When she prepared her green tea, she steeped the tea with loose leaves, then drank the loose leaves with the water, oftentimes neglecting to remove them from her teeth afterward. She missed the husband who left her, her three sons away at boarding school or college. She’d have strange men over to her house to randomly move entire furniture settings from one room to the next. She once had a little writing desk in her bathroom.

All I could do was hate her. I didn’t make a habit out of carrying eight pounds of keys everywhere I went like I was some janitor or building superintendent. I have six keys on my ring; there was no way I gave her the wrong key. In fact I remember thinking I should not make a mistake and give this lunatic my house key, because she’d use it, just as a joke. She’s the kind of person who’d use it to make a point. She’d come crawling up the driveway in her rusty maroon two-door, dog hair covering the seats like fur. She’d knock, then put the key in and, surprisingly, open it smoothly on the first try, my wife and I stunned and frightened in our living room. She’d open the door in a way that told me she had planned it all along, that she might have even practiced a few times before pulling off what she thought was a hilarious and memorable gag on me.

“Give me the key,” I said to her. There are only two locks on the door of the studio: a deadbolt and the one on the doorknob. The deadbolt wasn’t engaged, wasn’t in place, didn’t breach the matching hole in the door frame. The deadbolt didn’t work. The key was meant for the doorknob lock, which made things even more mystifying. I put the key in the lock, turned it, without a jiggle or a trick, and opened the door.

She looked at me as if I had a trick key, hidden for this occasion. She ran her hands up my arms, one at a time. At first I thought it was just an excuse to touch me, that she might go down my pants next, but after seeing the serious creases in her forehead, I knew she was serious, and I let her continue. I owed this to her, what with her not being able to get into the studio and me having offered such an essential thing to her, personally. Her hands along my sides went from smooth strokes to pattings, as I thought she even realized this was getting a bit awkward, even for her.

“There’s nothing else,” I told her. “The keys work.”

She pushed me aside. “There’s something wrong with the lock then. There’s must be something stuck in there.” And she bent down, shuffled her feet a bit to get eye-level with the doorknob, and scrutinized it thoroughly. “I think I see something,” she said. I stepped in front of her and opened the door. The knob was now inside the studio, but she was still bent over, her eyes now looking at the ground in the doorway.