Out of My Dreams and onto the Page

Today I began the process of querying my novel This Tangle of Thorns. I could obsess, but instead I’ve let go, let my compass swing back to the novel I’ve recently started (my fourth). That’s my north while the agents do their thing.

Fourth novel…third approach. First novel I wrote the main scenes, then built bridges. Next two, started writing until it felt done. This time, I’m dreaming.

Dreaming is a very simplistic description of the process Robert Olen Butler offers in From Where You Dream, a candid kick-in-the-pants distillation of the literary boot camp lectures he gives at Florida State. (The book is beautifully edited by Janet Burroway. whom I spent a few hours with recently in workshop at the Loft Literary Center.)

Pen and 3x5s nearby, I drift. Down I go, past the detritus of life—lists…and lists of lists. There’s Mighty Mouse and Foghorn Leghorn (you tell me!). I smell cumin and hear the clicking whir of Grandma’s hand-held eggbeater. My breath quickens, then falls, seeing her in the casket. I kick off from the fear of who will be next in the box and careen off the certainty that I have nothing left to give the page and then…

A man in a field watching another man bleed to death from the sharp, accidental swipe of a scythe…two ladies (and I’m the only man, jah!)…a hobo camp and man whose hands smell of a woman…a short, portly rural postmaster balanced on the edge of counter like Shamu begging for fish…a boy whose belly is clenched from hunger…a Indian child who can smell and foresee the end of safety…a lonely married woman enlivened by the call of the fiddle and a leading touch she just might follow.

Just 40 to 60 more of these dreams and then I’m ready to start seeing how they fit together. So it’s back to dreaming. Talk to you later…

…Leave a Note that Will Remind Us

Time slows when you’re waiting for gravity to empty the post-chemo saline bag into the belly of your old friend. She sleeps. I read. And when we talk it’s about the deep and shallow, the new and old.

In the last month, cancer has forced my chum to do lots of things against her will, including getting a cell phone. We’re a “gotta reach you now” society in 2016, and even the most passionate resister will give in to the intrusion of technology when the caller is ovarian cancer.

It’s my buddy’s third chemo, the first I’ve taken her to. I am still learning the ropes. Technology helped: the night before I’d used Google Earth to “drive” the route to the treatment center on the huge University of Minnesota campus.

Her cell phone. My Google pre-drive. All the technology made me remember how the world worked in the slow days of my childhood. Up from the past swims an image of a small wood box, fastened to the clapboards beside my grandparents back door, the one their friends used. The box was built to mimic a door—a frame made up of a threshold, two jambs and a lintel; then the little hinged door with its tiny knob. And when you opened it, inside was a pad of paper and a small pencil. The contraption’s use is enlightened by the ditty printed on the door: “If at home you do not find us, leave a note that will remind us.”

(Technology to the rescue again. The word jamb didn’t come to me right away, so I Googled “parts of a door frame,” then “define lintel” to make sure it could be made of wood. A old-fashioned dictionary would manage the latter but not the former.)

Back in the chemo suite, the outside world is moving at lightning speed. And I’m supposed to be riding that bolt. But really, right now, all I want to do is hold my friend’s hand while in my mind I open the miniscule door and with the little pencil leave a note that will remind us. Of what? Surely not this—anti-naseua meds and beeping flow meters. No, I’ll write of everything that came before. I’ll remind us of all we’ve done that’s not this. Of life, not survival.

“It’s Alive!”

“You are the god of the world of your novel” — one of my brilliant teachers at the Loft Literary Center

I’m doing as all authors must, musing on who I need in the world of my new novel to bring it to life. I know there is a family—two parents, three kids, an estranged father, an unmarried second cousin—and a few strangers who are the instruments of the family members getting themselves into trouble. Simple, but where to go from there?

My minds skips to a pre-feminist white-centric childhood and …

… jumping rope: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy.” The novel’s set in the Depression and war is coming, so there are lots of possibilities here. And it’s set in South Dakota, so certainly there will be an Indian (although likely not a chief).
…watching Sesame Street: “Who is a person in my neighborhood?” A postman is a person that I meet each day. And he knows things about you that you might not want anyone else to know.
…watching Mr. Rogers: I wonder if Henrietta Pussycat and Daniel Striped Tiger would starve in a time when people are going hungry. But maybe Henrietta’s a good rat catcher (and I don’t just mean rodents). And a tiger, even a shy one, could live on the bloody entrails of conflict.

I’m on to literary inspiration. Should I craft a sprawling Dickens novel or Waiting for Godot? Perhaps a Lord of the Flies devolution (but that’s more males). This list is certainly lacking in estrogen, so I look to Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others. Or if I’m willing to be menopausal, The Golden Girls.

What I know is that the world of which I am the god must be more than the false front of a Saturday matinee Western. There must be a place for people to play and pray, to buy and sell (even if it’s only their souls). I need Germans and Norwegians (jah, you betcha) but also Sioux and English and an Irish woman with enviable red hair. There must be truth and lies, and a secret keeper and a gossip. One narcissist and one Christian martyr (or perhaps two of the latter engaged in out-martyring each other). A straight talker. A person on the verge of death (fueled by either desire for or fear of that death). Someone must be handy (if not downright mechanical) and someone helpless. Sex must be a new excitement, an old comfort, a distant memory and a future dream. People must love food and song and art and nature. Or hate them. Knees and backs and hearts must ache. Someone will hide six toes. There must be logic and imagination. I need FDR and that devil Hitler and a petty despot of a mayor (oh, my!). On the western and eastern horizons—both so visible on the flatness of the eastern South Dakota prairie—the shadow of the Great War is falling while the next war rises as a gathering storm. There must be ghosts and longed-for future lovers and the consequential children (wanted or not).

I hear voices in my head. That’s either Mary Shelley speaking of galvinism or Frau Blücher’s violin. My fingers itch to rob a few graves, stitch some parts together, throw the switch, and scream “It’s alive!”

Bye Bye Big O

It’s a day I hoped would never come. After years and years of pleasure, anticipation and revelation, never again will I enjoy the coming of O. The magazine, I mean.

I realized today the pile moldering (okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic) by the side of my downstairs reading chair is precarious in its height. And it shames me whenever I get close. Sometimes I don’t have to even be in the house. On errands, while I’m working my to-do list in my head, the Os cajol, “don’t you miss me?”

But I don’t. Not even a bit (except for Martha Beck, but in a flash I’ve subscribed to her wisdom directly). As I try to hone my life to what is important and urgent—relationships, writing and self-care—what started as cachet has become chore.

Thanks, O Magazine, for 16 years of inspiration and beauty. And thanks, me, for ending a habit that’s bound rather than freed me. Now I think I’ll tackle that closet!

The Slow Approach

A recent photo essay in the New York Times Magazine is keeping me awake. “Forty Portraits in Forty Years” shows an annual accounting of the Brown sisters—Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie—beginning in 1975. The photographer, Nicholas Nixon, is married to Bebe. Susan Minot writes the text that accompanies Nixon’s photos (which will hang in MOMA in November 2014), and she tells the story of those sisters better than I can.

All I can share with you is the slow reaction the photos evoke in me.

I know why I love the first photo. I am easily one of them—just 15 in 1975 and as clear-eyed as they seem. Comfortable in the power of my youth. My life is ahead of me, and what could lie ahead but good things.

I move through the photos, wishing for color in 1977 so I can confirm that Laurie is wearing the striped cowl neck sweater I wore for my high school graduation photo. Did she take it out of my closet?

In 1980, Bebe is half hidden behind Laurie; that shakes me. I make my way through the ‘80s and ‘90s, and with each photo anxiety grows. The century turns and I think of turning back. I’m now dreading what each year will bring.

Soon it will be 2008, the year my dear sister Connie died.

But we are still in 2007, and the Brown sisters are looking right into my eyes. Their mouths don’t move, but I hear them whisper, “Hold on to us. Hold on and go forward.” It’s as though they know how bad the next year will be for me. And because I haven’t yet seen the portrait that captures their 2008, I wonder if it will be bad for them, too. In only seven more photos I will reach 2014—I will see who is left. I fear terribly that by then there will only be three. Or worse, two or one.

What builds suspense for readers is the slow approach of what they fear.