Writers' Writers

     Last night was inspirational and in perfect conjunction with Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life".  I love hearing people read their own work.  But the best part, for me, was the Q and A.
     I'm intrigued by process and the array of conditions under which art can produced.  I've always admired artists who can work outside or in a busy cafe.  They look alert.  Groomed.  When I work, either drawing or writing, I'm usually pajama clad, armed with a coffee cup in one hand, and perched precariously on the edge of my seat.  I like to stretch out the morning and inhabit a world that is only mine.  Nighttime sneaks up on me and I regretfully bid adieu to my project.  It's like puppy love in a way - the desire, desperation really, to come back to it as soon as possible.  Brian Wilson wrote "God Only Knows" about music.  When I learned this fun fact, I felt immediately kindred.
     I had this art professor once who realized how lucky he was to love his work.  He admitted to our class that he felt like he'd been getting away with something for twenty years.  That's the thing about creative careers.  Even the most tortured or unrecognized artist emits this thing, this indescribable thing.  They're doing something right and something instinctual, even primal, is satisfied.
     Maybe it's an ability to listen to the self.  Art, to me, is something created by a human.  That's as far as my definition goes.  Sometimes it is functional.  Sometimes it's edible.  Sometimes it is merely conceptual.  People, understandably distracted by life, ignore the voices of their bodies, emotions, and instincts.  It's as though they speak in a language we, as a species, have forgotten.  Writing, art, carpentry, whatever your craft, is a calling.  All of the writers seemed to allude to that last night.  It just is.  For those who can decipher or remember, this compulsion to create is like a physiological need.  It might work, it might not.  Just keep working.  
  
 

Response to the Mixquiahala Letters

     The epistolary style of "The Mixquiahala Letters" does not merely defy linearity, it exposes the impossibility of the proverbial whole story.   Alicia and Teresa's letters are bits and pieces of a larger whole.  Their relationship, like any, is a process.  It evolves.  It regresses.

     Castillo's character development and representation is nothing short of spectacular.  This book is a time capsule between two presumably fictional characters.  While each volunteers glimpses from within, the reader becomes better acquainted with one via the other.  We are reminded that everything is interpretation.  Castillo masterfully assembled the fragments upon which either character might have fixated, and, in turn, the bits and pieces that make up a whole person.    

     As these women divulge their interpretations, the reader, this one anyway, is left with the fear that she will miss something.  Names and dates and times are not the ethos of this novel, but they are the keys to it.  Connections and conclusions exist.  But Castillo does not just set them out for the taking.  Her novel is impressionistic - a hodgepodge of moments and memories that form a collective narrative.  But not too perfectly.  The reader is convinced that the delicate selection is more a result of the clarity that comes with hindsight than an author's contrivance.

     I was tempted, and encouraged by one friend whose input I solicited, to take the cynics route.  Having decried Lorrie Moore's accessibility, and given that Castillo posed so many options, it was a surprisingly un-difficult decision to do the average bear thing and read this book front to back like any other Westerner.  Call it the easy way.  Call it a manifestation of the creature of habit - of doing things the way I know how to do them.  This is the way that I chose.  This time.  I will most certainly revisit this novel in all of its intended incarnations.        

Stretching A 6 Word Story

     "Harry Potter.  The end is near."
    
     "Cut!"

      "Come on, dude!  What now?"

      "Aside from it being ridiculous, isn't that the tagline?  You wanna get sued?"

      "You think that's gonna get us sued?"  Gary is making that face - that "you're so stupid it appalls me" face.

      Mike, resists his urge to slap it.  "We are breaking a major story here.  Try to be a professional."

      "It's called color, man.  News writing 101.  But hey," Gary's palms wave in mock retreat, "if you think you can do a better job you're more than welcome to step out from behind the camera."

      "Yeah sure, you should be able to operate this thing no problem.  It doesn't take any skill or anything."

      "Exactly, man." Gary nods.  "You do your job and I'll do mine."

      "Action!"  Mike chuckles when the aim marks appear, targeting Gary's face.  It never gets old.

      "Things are getting a bit, ahem, hairy, for some of the 'Harry Potter' cast.  We've got exclusive footage of some pretty steamy -"

      "Cut!"  Mike is agitated now.  "I'm sorry, I just can't deal with the 'hairy' thing. It's just not funny, dude."

       "That's it!  I've had it!"  Gary's shrill voice causes the microphone to squeal in agony.  He storms toward the door.

      "Where are you going?"  Mike is struck with sincere panic.  They've got to break this story.  "Are you serious?  Dude, we'll be famous.  We'll be guaranteed jobs."

      "I'm taking five - getting a coke."  Gary doesn't look back, but his palm is raised a la The Supremes.

      Mike paces the room, nibbling on his thumbnail.  Thirty seven takes.  "What's with this guy?"  He checks the time on his phone and realizes he's not going to catch the bus.  He dials his little sister, sadly the only female whose number he knows by heart.  She got dibs on Mom's Corolla when it was "time to get something a little more fun," and, in turn, indentured servitude to Mike's transportation needs.  Fair is fair, after all.

      "Maria!"

      "Whassup bro?"  Mike hated the influence all the hip-hop was having on Maria's diction.

      Choose your battles.  "Hey, I need you to pick me up at the studio in about an hour."

      "No dice my brotha.  I have a date."

      "A date?"  Who was this girl?  What happened to Maria, his brace faced, pajama clad, popcorn hoarding, videot of a sister?

      "Well, you'll have to bring your date to get me then.  I'm stuck.  Come on."

      "Hold on I have a beep."  Before Mike has a chance to respond Maria has already clicked over to the other caller.  Where the hell is Gary he wonders, looking upward at nothing in particular.

       "-ike!"  Maria is frantic.  "Ohmygod!There'saHarryPottersextapeonyoutube.Ihavetogowatchiti'llcallyouback!"

      Click.  Mike stands perfectly still, the phone still raised to his ear, his jaw hanging open.  The dial tone hums in his ear.  Still, he cannot move.  
 

            

          

Snapshot - New Hampshire - 1985

     I wish I still owned that jacket!  Just last year I painted my bedroom that same shade of purple.  "Cupid's Arrow", the paint salesman called it.  When I was four, I used to spend what felt like forever trying to get that color right in my self portraits.  Attention to details, the strangest of details.  Whoops, too much red.  Now I need more blue.  Once, I accidentally took a huge swig of the purple water, confusing it with my grape Kool-Aid.

     My Dad used to bring home these huge rolls of teletype paper.  I'd fill them up with drawings and paintings of everything I saw, and everyone I knew.  I'd have to ask for help when it was time to roll them back up so I could use the other side.  They were so heavy.

     "Haha, I look like a puptent," Ms. Nichols, my preschool teacher gasped when I gave her a portrait.  I was not yet critical of my art or self.  And, being four, I wasn't really sure about the definition of puptent.  I would beam with innocent pride when Gramma would immediately have to show Auntie Doris my rendition of her hair.  "Look at her muumuu," my uncles would point out to my Mum.  "She wore that one to Kevin's birthday party last Sunday!  Remember?"  Yes - Gramma wore muumuus then - I loved them and I gave them the kind of attention you're supposed to give to something you love.  I was excited when Gramma assured me that, one day, I would inherit them.  Now I don't want them.  I just want her to be around.     

Birds of America

     Lorrie Moore is a risk taker for sure.  I was surprised that "Willing" was her, or her editor's choice as the first story.  I don't have to tell you what "they" say about first impressions, only that mine was, "I have to read how many pages of this?  This is for people who like movies starring Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston, and that adaptation of that memoir that was so overrated starring Julia Roberts.  Not my bag, baby."  Cliches abound.

     By the end, however, I warmed up to some of Moore's characters - and even liked some of them.  The nameless mother, for example, who sang The Animals' song "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" to her hospitalized baby son in "People Like That Are the Only People Here", the meta-narrative of her battle with his cancer, struck me.  The ending, too, felt more honest. "There are the notes.  Now where is the money?"

     So how did Moore persevere?   I think it's because she was shameless, in some instances.  Perhaps I am biased or hyper-aware, but I saw the crazy cat lady (I am one myself) embodied in some of Moore's characters.  Bert and the "flourescent voodoo" to which he was subjected in "Four Calling Birds Three French Hens" made me cry, recalling memories of lost pets and already scared to death one of one day bidding adieu to my little Tarragon, only one and a half years old.

     Jack Kerouac, in "The Town and the City" claimed that each character was just another facet of himself.  One of my friends once asked me to try to explain obsession - why it happened when it happened.  The immediacy of my own response surprised me.  "Identification."  If you sense common ground, even with a total stranger, then strange connection occurs.  Resist as I might have wanted to at "Willing", I kinda like Lorrie Moore.