“The Staying Freight”–I love the title–was first published in the Harvard Review. At 36 pages, it’s a long story. And it’s divided into 20 sections. But I really want to slow things down. I think I’ll just look at the first section.

The first section is 4 paragraphs. The first sentence is 17 words:

Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller discs set a fog over the field.

The first sentence sets the scene in a lyrical, poetic way–dust and dusk, burned and churned, fog and field. The camera angle is wide–looking at the ridgeline and the field.

Followed by:

He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he’d reserved for the sowing of winter wheat and so much was yet to be done.

With the second sentence, character and a very small action (blinking) enter the picture. Why “he” instead of a name? I think because of the two sentences that end this first paragraph:

Thirty-eight and well respected, always brought dry grain to store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles.

The writing creates a picture for us–the field, the man in the field, a good man, and then the final flourish, his name. Instead of simply giving us the man, Heathcock is drawing our attention to the man.

Here’s the second paragraph all in one go because, even as I didn’t want to read the next word that I was afraid would be there, I just couldn’t lift my eyes from the words:

Winslow simply didn’t see his boy running across the field. He didn’t see Rodney climb onto the back of the tractor, hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Didn’t see Rodney’s boot slide off the hitch.

Note the repetition: didn’t see, didn’t see, didn’t see. There were so many chances. Note the details that grab at your heart: the meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Note the simply: I imagine the sentence without it, and it’s harsher. The simply tells me it was just one of those things, just bad luck. The simply tells me Winslow wasn’t doing anything wrong. And the simply tells me the narrator is kind.

The third paragraph:

Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. The tiller discs hopped. He whirled to see what he’d plowed, and back there lay a boy like something fallen from the sky.

Second by second. Dabbed, hopped, whirled. That’s how fast it happened.  A boy like something fallen from the sky. That’s how to create emotion. Verbs + a simile.

The fourth and final paragraph of the first section:

Winslow leapt from the tractor, ran to his son. With his belt, he cinched a gash in the boy’s leg. He pressed his palm to Rodney’s neck. Blood purled between his fingers. Winslow cradled his son in his lap and watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading arc of dust toward the freight rail tracks that marked the northern end of all that was his.

No time for conjunctions. Short sentences and details. Leapt, cinched, pressed, purled. Until the final long sentence that contains the beginning but with everything now changed. 34 words that create a picture. A man crouched in a field, cradling his son, with the tractor rolling on.

34 words that slow us down.

*For more on Volt, read Jodi Paloni’s review in Contrary Magazine
**Cross-posted at Contrary Blog

a shop window in Montpelier

ice!

snow!

graduation

graduated!

the sun going down on graduation evening

with the moon already rising

On my way home from Montpelier, Vermont and the successful completion of  a two-year low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This last residency went by so fast–it’s hard to believe it’s over.

Both my lecture and reading were on January 1st. And graduation was yesterday.

This morning, breakfast at the Skinny Pancake. Then a drive to Burlington and a flight to JFK. Now waiting to board a flight to Atlanta. Then I’ll have an hour and a half drive to Columbus.

As many of you know, I love traveling and airports. Today, especially, it’s nice to have all these hours in transit to mark the transition.

There are some things I miss even before they’re gone. The sound of my children’s feet against the wood floor as they run from their bedroom at one end of the hallway to the bedroom I share with their father at the other end of the hallway is one of them. It might be six-fifteen in the morning; it might be seven. No matter the hour, that pitter pat of two pairs of childfeet is the way I begin most days.

On this day, like all school days, the four of us rise and scramble through the dress-eat-brush teeth-locate books, backpacks, snacks, and coats routine in various states of calm and agitation, rancor and love. By 8:25, I’m walking my children to school. It takes about ten minutes to reach the big brick building where my son attends first grade and my daughter kindergarten. I hug them one by one in their separate classrooms, and then I walk solo down the hallway and out the side doors into the cool December air and I’m free.

It’s 8:45. Time to work.

Sometimes it seems as if there’s a giant kitchen timer installed permanently in my momhead that begins ticking the moment I push through those school doors. I know precisely how many hours and minutes I have before the bell will ding.

I pull out my iPhone. I want to be the sort of woman who walks down a sunny morning sidewalk without checking her email, but I’m not currently that woman. I scroll, I skim, I almost break my ankle tripping over uneven chunks of sidewalk while I read the tiny text on my screen. By the time I get home I know who I have to answer first and I do that while drinking the coffee my husband Brian has kindly made for me, even though he doesn’t drink it himself. He’s an artist too—a filmmaker—and we chat briefly before he departs for his office a block away from our house.

I don’t have an office. I’ve tried in the past, but an office hasn’t ever been terribly productive for me. I’m not a desk person. So instead I currently work in my bedroom while sitting on a blue velvet chair I bought in a thrift store when I was pregnant with my first child and revising my first novel. My cat Gulla sleeps on the bed nearby. Every couple of hours she rises and comes to sit on the wide arm of the chair and lick me before stretching and returning to the bed.

I answer email. I tool around on Facebook for no good reason. I open the calendar on my computer and see today is the day by which I’m meant to send my publicists the answers to a Q & A they plan to use in promoting my forthcoming memoir, Wild.

I open the document and begin. It’s more challenging than I thought it would be. I wrote the book. I know the answers, and yet I have to craft each one carefully. I try to be entertaining and intelligent without repeating myself. Soon, I understand that this thing I thought would take half an hour will take most of the day.

Carlo Saraceni's “Saint Sebastian”

In one question my publicists write “…there’s an almost Homeric feel to your journey…” and I have to Google “Homeric” so I can answer the question, but when I type the word into the search field my overly helpful computer changes it to “homoerotic” and so I end up spending a good twenty minutes reading about a long-dead Italian painter named Carlo Saraceni who made a painting called “Saint Sebastian,” which depicts a young naked man with an arrow shot into his lower abdomen/upper groin. Eventually I realize I really do know what my publicists mean by Homeric, so I return to my document and answer the question.

After a while, my iPhone makes a little sound: a text from Brian. Do I want to have lunch and then take a walk with him? he inquires.

I do. I’m too busy to do this because the great kitchen timer in my head is ticking ever so loudly and I’ve gotten distracted by an early-Baroque Italian painter, but I say yes.

He comes home and warms a pot of soup and makes kale salad and slices an apple while I shout to him from the blue chair in our bedroom that I’ll be right down. We eat. We walk. I don’t ask him what Homeric means. He goes back to his office and I go back to my blue chair.

Can you introduce us to Monster? my publicists want to know when I return to the document open on my computer screen. Monster is the name I gave my backpack on the long hike I wrote about in Wild. It’s basically a character in the book. I begin to describe it, but then I decide it would be better if I had Monster sitting right beside me as I wrote my reply, so I go down to the basement to get it and instead I see a mountain of laundry near the washing machine, so I sort and start a load, and return to my blue chair empty-handed, remembering only when I reach it why I left it.

I email my publicists to ask if they really, truly need this Q & A by today. Within minutes I’m given an extension until after the holidays.

I answer more emails. I make comments about people’s status updates and photographs on Facebook. I text Lidia. I text Sarah. I text the other Sarah. I text Brian. In an hour and a half he’ll get the kids from their afterschool class.

I open a folder titled Novel and then a Word document titled Emily and I read what I wrote the last time I wrote anything in this particular document and I feel sort of excited about it and I feel sort of sad too because it’s a new novel that I’ve begun ever so slowly to write knowing I don’t have any business starting a novel right now because I’ve got other writing commitments on the burner and my soon-to-be-out book to promote, but I start messing around with a paragraph anyway and pretty soon an hour and a half has passed and I hear loud footsteps on the porch below me—Brian and the kids—and though the day isn’t over and there is what-are-we-going-to-have-for-dinner and having dinner and play time and bath time and out loud reading time and zapping off quick emails and texts on my iPhone in between all those times—there is a way in which the day is done and the front door opens and my kids yell, “Mommy! We’re home!” and the great kitchen timer in my head goes ding.
.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Pam Houston’s new novel Contents May Have Shifted, which will be out from W.W. Norton next month. She’s so perceptive, so intimate and intelligent on the page. I felt known by this book, like I do by all of her books. I got an advanced reading copy when Pam and I were interviewed on stage together at an event at the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association Trade Show in Denver a few months ago. I gobbled it up immediately and have been waiting impatiently to share it with the world ever since.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• My first bit of advice is to take only the advice that works for you. Writers have different processes, different approaches. There aren’t rules. Having said that, I’ve found it helpful to read every word I write out loud at least twice, but more like three or four times. There’s something I can’t seem to know about my sentences and scenes until I’ve heard myself say them.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I take walks by myself when I’m deep in my writing. The walks aren’t breaks, but rather an important part of the writing process. Something I can’t get in a chair always clicks into place when I’m walking alone. I don’t think it’s strange, really. A better way to put it is that a strange thing I’ve learned about writing is sometimes you have to not be writing in order to get where you need to go.

.

By Cheryl Strayed:

I’m ready to go!

If you can find twenty minutes, you can listen to Dylan Thomas’ story ”A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” read by the author–courtesy of NPR.  The written story is also available online.

Thomas grounds the story of this long-ago Christmas in real details–snow and fire brigades and uncles–and yet he tells it as if it were a fairy tale.

The ending:  “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

Still, some of Toibin’s passages took my breath away, like this one from the title story, with its building of emotion by the use of repetition and the cadence of the words:

And all I have in the meantime is this house, this light, this freedom, and I will, if I have the courage, spend my time watching the sea, noting its changes and the sounds it makes, studying the horizon, listening to the wind or relishing the calm when there is no wind.

And from the same story:

It came to me then that the sea is not a pattern, it is a struggle.

I’ve come back to this line several times–the ocean as a struggle.

***Actually, if anyone would like me to send the copy (a hardback with my marginalia in pencil) his or her way, just leave word in the comments before I head to the post office on Monday, and I’ll email for your address.

A week ago, I was so struck, as I came up over a hill, to actually be able to see the end of the storm–see it in the sky. At its source. Rather than notice the rain had stopped or it was getting lighter outside.

Sometimes it’s easy to see the endings of things. But sometimes you don’t know it’s the end until you look up to see the next thing has started.

One morning recently, I woke to find bare branches. And I thought, so fall is over just like that.

We’re nearing the end of another year, and I’m looking around trying to see it happening.

…
I’m writing from the road, I had to see,
and not just know, to see clearly
the sights and fires of a single world…
~from “To See” by Adam Zagajewski
Without End

There’s this idiosyncratic little thing EM Forster says in Aspects of the Novel I’ve always loved. It goes: “The main facts of human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. Let us briefly ask ourselves what part they play in our lives, and what in novels.” It seems apt for considering a day in my writing life to ask those very questions. To the schematic:

1) Birth. Life: My two-year-old Abigail goes to daycare at 8:30am. My wonderful perfect assiduous wife has already left for the hospital, where she’s a psychiatry resident. I get Abby up, feed her, negotiate her into clothes, make her lunch. The chronology of these things is unclear, but at some point complete. At some point she is at daycare.

Novels: During the semester I don’t have headspace for generative work. I find an hour in the morning to check in with a manuscript. I’ve been at work on a short novel about a guy who makes a brother out of duct tape for long enough that I started before I had a kid. Now I’m revising. Today I layer some parenting stuff that the pre-parenting me didn’t have in his coffers. I take a moment to feel grateful for wife, child, layering.

2) Food. Life: After my hour of revision, in which today I realize that my first reader was right and this thing sure doesn’t need an epilogue and I fold the language from the epilogue into a late chapter, I eat turkey-and-swiss-on-a-croissant-with-dijonnaise. I’m a big fan of compound words. I’m a bigger fan of compound condiments.

Novels: Because who needs an epilogue? And about this language-salvaging instinct. It can be dangerous. It can mean you’re too attached to the sounds or the images or the place you were in the moment you wrote it. In this case I feel convinced there are ideas from the epilogue that need to stay. I’ll keep them for now. In a week or two, we’ll see.

3) Sleep. Life: Five, maybe six hours.

Novels: Sounds boring.

4) Love. Life: I love my wife and my kid and having a kid allows me to focus on both. That said, by far my favorite thing in Forster is his wry (the wryest in all of western literature?) description of love, which I take as a really good joke but fear Forster took seriously: “Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in it, as in other animals, which changes often lead to union with another human being, and to the production of more human beings. And our race goes on.”

Novels: Part of me just wonders: why didn’t Forster put “love” under “birth,” then? As for my writing, I’m actually a fan of the sex scene, but novels about brothers made out of duct tape definitely don’t need sex, duct tape or otherwise.

5) Death. Life: At the end of my day I host a reading by one of my favorite short story writers. At lunch we talk about a colleague who’s been diagnosed with cancer. We wonder what it must mean to live over that abyss. We’re writing nerds, so we talk about what that meant for Chekhov (TB), Flannery (lupus), Dostoyevsky (epilepsy), Kafka Keats Orwell Thoreau (TB TB TB TB). We talk about that thing from “Gooseberries”: “Every happy man should have someone with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him— illness, poverty, loss.” We thank the Lord for our health. Later we go say things about or from books in front of people.

Novels: The novel I was working on in the morning is about a kid who makes a brother out of duct tape. It’s also about the brother’s chronic illness. And about living with chronic illness. And ooh—after I give the audience my introduction, as I sit in the wash of language as one of my favorite young story writers reads on stage, I hit on this: that “Gooseberries” thing might make a good epigraph. Or a profoundly bad one. Only one way to find out.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Adam Levin’s The Instructions. We just kept making eye contact across the bar. I’m glad I finally took it home.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• I’m an inveterate perseverator, so here’s my favorite thing to tell my students when they’re having a hard time revising: In life, it’s important to make good decisions. As a writer, sometimes it’s better just to make a decision, and not worry if it’s a good one. Or, to put it another way: in writing, unlike in life, there’s always OpenApple+Z.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Candy. Lots of candy. Often Good ‘n Plenty, which gets strange looks at the movie theater but only plaintive sniffs from the cat in my home office.

By Daniel Torday:

The Duct Tape Brother, excerpt in The Kenyon Review
Hunger Mountain, The Writing Life, List #3

1 - The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I bought this hardback book because I’ve become fascinated by process–the process of writing in particular. I’m on page xxiv. “The global skill of drawing a perceived object, person, landscape…requires only five basic component skills, no more…They are perceptual skills.”

One: the perception of edges. Two: the perception of spaces. Three: the perception of relationships. Four: the perception of lights and shadows. Five: the perception of the whole, or gestalt.

2 - Raw Silk by Janet Burroway, published in 1976. Already read this hardback twice–in 1990 and 1998. It’s a classic–a novel about a marriage falling apart. I’m on page 56.

I don’t run everywhere as I used to, and Oliver’s humor is not so fresh. But I thought that was age, and age doesn’t trouble me overmuch. I know that we’ve chosen compromises, but no choice has seemed to lead inevitably to another. I thought we could go this direction but keep our essential selves intact, and turn off any side road that took our fancy.

3 - Torch by Cheryl Strayed was recommended by a friend. Now I recommend this debut novel. I’m on page 207 of 311.  Cheryl has a new book coming out in March (Wild) and will be writing about How She Spends Her Days in January.

She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor–the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the glass–while he sat on his little stool with wheels and wrote in a notebook.

4 - The Best American Short Stories 2011. I wasn’t going to buy this, but after reading Claire Guyton’s review (in a series on each story in this volume), I ordered it. Am not disappointed. Have read the first story, reading the second as soon as I finish this post. From “Ceiling” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Was he unhappy? It was not that he was unhappy, he told himself, it was simply that he had been long enough in his new life that he had begun to think of alternative lives, people he might have become, and doors he had not opened.

5 - An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski was recommended by Connie May Fowler at the last residency as a good book to read when preparing to give a lecture or a reading, both of which I’ll be doing at this upcoming residency. I’m on page 62 of 336.

There is a good side to this period of waiting. It drives you into such a state that all you can do is to long for your turn to get through with the thing that you are afraid of.

6 - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. See what I’m reading now. I’m on page 52, just about to begin Chapter 5. Solidly good.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory–meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion–is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

7 - Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns was recommended by several different people at the last residency. And it is lovely. I’ve read the first two chapters–the second one on metaphor is itself worth the price and space of the book (and it includes a right brain-left brain discussion). Theoretically on poetry but every bit as useful so far to a prose writer.

Obscurity must be a tool. It works to force the reader to ask questions that will direct him to an understanding…Any question that does not increase our understanding detracts from it.

Suggestion won’t work until the reader has enough information to brood about. The poem works when the reader can contemplate the relationship between its parts.

8 - The Empty Family by Colm Toibin. Hardback. It’s the November choice for my writing group. Very soothing writing. On the third story of nine. From “Silence,”

…no matter how much they talked of love or faithfulness or the unity of man and wife, no one would ever realize how apart people were in these hours, how deeply and singly themselves, how thoughts came that could never be shared or whispered or made known in any way. This was marriage, she thought, and it was her job to be calm about it. There were times when the grim, dull truth of it made her smile.

I don’t always read this many books at one time because all this unfinished-ness can get to me. But there is so much out there–I sometimes wonder how I can do anything other than read. The question of how we end up reading what we do in our lives is one I will return to.