Today’s guest: Andrew H. Kuharevicz
With so many cancellations of in-person author events due to World War C, I’m devoting my blog to Indie Monday interviews for the coming months to help my fellow authors with promotion. I’ll be featuring indie and small-press authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.
Today I’m happy to host Andrew H. Kuharevicz, author, poet, editor, blogger, and book-buyer and manager for the indie bookstores The Book Nook & Java Shop in Montague, Michigan, and The Book Nook Too in downtown Muskegon. Andrew is also the editor-in-chief of West Vine Press. He is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including most recently Okay Birds Quiet Please, a book of poems; Pickpocket of Reality, his fourth poetry and prose collection; and the novel, The Future Book of War, the final volume of the Adventures of a Dying Young Man series.
Recently I posed some questions to Andrew. Here’s what he told me.
DL: Could you tell us a little about yourself?
AHK:A little about myself? What … self? Ok, where to start. Right off the bat a very loaded question but here I go:
I’m an American citizen, a human and all around pretty normal sorta guy who lives in a sleepy sorta town in Michigan named Montague. I run a bookstore called, The Book Nook & Java Shop. In my opinion, one of the best indie bookshops in the world. I’m biased but yeah, we’re on the smaller side but we do move a lot of books. There’s a full bar and a stage, which in non-pandemic years features author readings and music three or five days a week. Basically, my life feels like a dream. I mean I get to sell books for a living, something numerous people said wasn’t possible in the modern United States economy.
Today, I live a much different life than I did when I was younger. Instead of a wandering writer where I prepared for chaos each day I woke up, I now live a somewhat reasonable stable existence, I’m a father to two great kids, Sawyer (2) and Lucy (6 weeks), so they keep my wife and me pretty darn busy. Often it feels like real life is the novel, and that somehow, I just ended up here.
Prior to the Book Nook, I worked in a crazy pharmacy for a couple years in Downtown Muskegon, but before that I traveled the country as an idealistic young writer for about ten years. That happened after I moved to Ann Arbor and was fired from a job at a wine store. Back then I wanted to write and not sell wine, drink wine, not sell wine. I wasn’t ready to settle down yet so getting the boot I got on the road. I graduated from Western Michigan University, majoring in Sociology and Criminal Justice, with a minor in philosophy. Furthering my education, because I didn’t want to get stuck in my hometown, I started grad school studying Philosophy of the Mind. I dropped out, though, by the second semester because get this, I just wanted to write.
I grew up in Roosevelt Park in Muskegon, going to Catholic School from grades 1-12. Other than my parents, my grandmother was the most important person in my life. She was one of the only people who would sit and listen to me read my material. But writing isn’t something I developed when I was young. My first love was baseball, and during the summer I’d ride my bike every day with the other kids in the neighborhood to the little league field and we’d play until sunset. I continued playing baseball in high school and my first year of college.
During my last semester in university, The Stranger by Albert Camus was assigned by a criminology professor. I stayed up all night devouring the book, and when I got to the end, I decided that I was going to be a writer. After that I lived in many states, and worked many strange jobs. As they say, it’s a long and winding road, but I’ll stop there.
DL: Tell us about your latest books and works in progress.
AHK: Most recently, the end of 2019, I published a big novel that I worked on for about six years, The Future Book of War. It’s a stand-alone novel that takes place in the world of the main protagonist named Henry Oldfield. You can call it a series because he is featured in more than one book I’ve written, but you don’t have to read any others to enjoy the others. Each of the five novels that make up The Adventures of a Dying Young Man Saga is a complete story with a beginning and an end. But if you want to know more, you can read another one, which layers the story with a fuller picture. The overall story is about a boy born dumb who wanders the last years of what we know as the United States before it becomes something different and new. The Future Book of War is a book I’m very proud of and was influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and also, e.e. Cummings’s The Enormous Room.
Other than my novel-length books, I also work on poetry, mostly spontaneous and in the vein of the Beat Generation. My most recent book-bound publication was a book titled Pickpocket of Reality, words about Manhattan, where I go just about every year for the Book Expo. Inside of Pickpocket of Reality you’ll read words about cats and there’s also poems about water, writing, and running a bookshop during the technological age. Basically, just life ya dig.
Also, my best-selling collection is a book that I got to read in the Village in Manhattan at this Lit-Pub named The KGB. It was the highlight of my writing career reading with other poets and friends at a place that is rich with so much history of great writers. The book I was reading from is called Okay Birds Quiet Please, and is more of the same. Just a book about writing, the love of life and the world at large, as well as the society we live in. It’s full of contradictions, just as we as a people are. It’s about silence and the moment before you start the tap… tap … tap, which is what I call typing on a typewriter.
Lastly, and briefly, I’ll be having a new book coming out in the next couple months. It’s a mix of creative nonfiction, poetry and journalism, typed up on a typewriter and titled, In Madness We Spring: Novel Words During A Pandemic. It tells the story of the first days of the Covid-19 outbreak up until the Michigan Stay at Home Order ended. It’s from the perspective of a small business owner and the pandemic, really uncharted and crazy times; In Madness We Spring will be out the end of September/Early October, published by West Vine Press, an indie from Michigan, for which I also act as an editor.
DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?
AHK: The question why I write is a good question. Also, a question I’ve forgotten about as my writing life has aged. So, I’ve written or edited in ninety-five percent of the days that make up the last ten years or so of my life. Hemingway said (and I paraphrase) that a writer is only a writer if they write, also, that when you are a writer you should restrain from talking so much. So maybe that’s why I write. To communicate with both myself and my expanded human family.
Writing is of course artistic, but art is still created for some kind of cause. A reason, if you will, and as you get older you often forget about the why; simply, art becomes part of you, a routine, something you do, like breathing, there’s always a reason but when it becomes habit, the reason disappears. Like brushing your teeth. Not sure if that’s a good answer, but I write to see what’s going on. I write to dig into my mind. I write to have fun. I write to talk and I write to predict the future. Ha.
Honestly, I write because I love to write, and as far as what I want to accomplish with my writing, well, back when I was just starting out I did it because I wanted to be the best writer to ever live. How outrageous is that? I was young and words were magic back then. I wanted to write the Great American Novel, living a life like Hunter S. Thompson and Henry Miller had done. Of course, that was naïve, but I had one hell of a time believing that was possible. But these days I just want to release books and try and get better with every new project I start. Being a specific type of writer, a so-called big-time successful author, isn’t Important to me, I just want to write and the only way to accomplish that is by, well, writing.
DL: Please talk about your writing process. Where do your ideas come from? What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?
AHK: I have two ways I write. One for long-form (fiction, novel, short stories, and creative nonfiction) and another process for poetry.
For long-form writing projects, first, I mentally prepare for the writing process weeks and sometimes months before I even start the first draft. In the morning on some random day, I come up with a story in my head, I think it over, and play it out in my mind. I let it simmer if you will. Then when I’m ready to write, I pick a typewriter, each new book I write needs a new typewriter, one just right, fitting of the vibe if that’s possible, one to match the feeling of the story I’m going to tell.
Then, I place the typewriter somewhere in an isolated room, with no internet, no distractions, nature can be there but that’s it. Next, I place a blank piece of paper in, and just start typing. No breaks, little care for spelling and punctuation; I type for one straight hour every day until the story is done. I end each session during the first draft when I know what will happen next, so tomorrow I can pick up where I last ended and have no road blocks following the story.
It takes a good year for the first draft. Often more than one, and when I’m done there’s a stack of paper that I take and copy-write/edit into the second draft into the computer. After that’s done I edit it again multiple times and pick out a good font and change the size of the paper. Writing a long-form book is like sculpting, or building a good house, it takes time.
When I was in college, my friend who taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, said he liked my writing, but I needed to learn to edit more. So, I took that to heart and now my favorite part of the writing process is editing, I don’t know why, most writers say they dislike that aspect but to me that’s when what you’ve written really becomes something real, a world in-itself, self-sustaining with ozone and all.
As far as my poetry, I use whatever I have. I sketch ideas and pseudo-haikus down in notepads, type some disorganized poetics on a typewriter, write on my hand if I have an aha moment.
Writing poetry is like journalism to me, most of the truest pieces I’ve written have happened during the waiting moments of life, such as in airports, on flights, waiting for the bus, or just sitting by Lake Michigan for fifteen minutes during the middle of the afternoon. I can write a poem anywhere, it’s much freer than the long-form writing process.
DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?
AHK: The label of being a writer means nothing to me. I write because I like to do it. I have things to say, stories to tell, so I say and write them. But if I try to give you a better answer…
Writing has made me who I am, opened my mind, refined my critical thinking skills, opened up the world, like a Copernican Revolution, and it’s humbled me, connected me to other writers and poets all around the world. Writing has created a path for me, and writing, it’s how I ended up here, today, now.
DL: What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?
AHK: Below are links to my blog, and my publisher, West Vine Press; a Facebook page of the creative process of my current project; and direct links where you can purchase some books if you’d like to.
Andrew H. Kuharevicz blog: adventuresinamericanwriting.com
The Future Book of War: https://www.buybooknookbooks.com/product/the-future-book-of-war-by-andrew-h-k-/4662?cs=true
Pickpocket of Reality: https://www.buybooknookbooks.com/product/pickpocket-of-reality-by-andrew-k-/4794?cs=true
Okay Birds Quiet Please: https://www.buybooknookbooks.com/product/okay-birds-quiet-please-by-andrew-k/4795?cs=true
More can be found here . . . go to Buy Books Here and scroll to bottom of page: westvinepress.com
The Novel streaming first draft From Author Andrew H. K.: https://www.facebook.com/thenovelahk/
Indie Monday
Today’s guest: Yvonne Glasgow
With so many cancellations of in-person author events due to World War C, I’m devoting my blog to Indie Monday interviews for the coming months to help my fellow authors with promotion. I’ll be featuring indie and small-press authors who produce quality work outside the boundaries and strictures of the traditional mass-produced, mass-marketed commercial publishing world and traditional bookstore shelves.
Recently I posed some questions to Yvonne. Here’s what she told me.
DL: Could you tell us a little about yourself?
YG: I’m Yvonne Glasgow, a full-time writer with a passion for poetry and art. My entire life revolves around creativity, from writing lifestyle articles for my “day job” and working on books I self-publish to creating collage art and packing eclectic grab bags of goodies that I sell locally. This year, I started writing short stories and poetry to submit to anthologies (I’ve been in two so far) and entering contests (I was a top-ten finalist and got a short “opening line” story published in Writer’s Digest).
DL: Tell us about your latest book and works in progress.
YG: Poetry is how I process feelings. It’s how I get through life without completely losing my mind. My most recent book is titled Carry Our Virus In Death – 19 Pandemic Poems. It’s a collection of nineteen poems reflecting on the start of the 2020 pandemic. There’s a little comedy mixed in, which is something new for me, but it’s mostly a serious collection of poetry about fear and change.
The books on my Works-in-Progress and To-Do lists that are getting the most attention right now fall into the categories of wellness and short stories. I came up with a great idea for a short-story collection. My wellness book is all about getting yourself on the right path in life and learning to be happy again.
I also write divination books and am starting a major project that includes a book and an accompanying set of oracle cards. I love combining my passion for writing with my passion for art. The project requires that I travel around Michigan this summer and next (which has been inhibited a bit by COVID-19). I am running a GoFundMe to help with expenses (since artist residencies aren’t happening this year) and will be running a Kickstarter campaign once the art is done to help cover the cost of printing card decks (which isn’t cheap).
DL: Why do you write? What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?
YG: I am a prolific writer, so I like to write about anything and everything. I write about lifestyle topics and strange history for my day job. My short stories usually revolve around horror, science fiction, and speculative fiction. I am a poet, and that’s where my passion for writing started. I also love to write wellness articles (that are posted on Vocal.com) and books.
I write because I want to share my creativity with people. I write because I want to help people.
DL: Please talk about your writing process. Where do your ideas come from? What is your favorite part of the process? Least favorite?
YG: Most of my ideas come from everyday life. Sometimes I am inspired by something I see; other times, it’s by something I read.
I used to love to do research, but now it’s my least favorite thing to do. I do it Monday through Friday for work, so I’d rather write my own projects about stuff I am already super knowledgeable about (I have a Ph.D. in Holistic Life Coaching, a D. Div. in Spiritual Counseling, and took a plethora of college courses on nutrition, physical wellness, and alternative health while working toward a degree in health and wellness).
My favorite part of the writing process is when the creativity just flows onto the paper (or through the keyboard). Then the editing process gives me a huge headache, but it always ensures an amazing final product!
DL: Could you reflect a bit on what writing or being a writer has meant for you and your life?
YG: Writing has gotten me through so many of life’s trials. I don’t know what I would do without it. It’s not only a way to get out your own ideas (and sometimes demons), but also a way to let other people know they’re not alone. It’s a chance to take someone away to a different world; to help them forget about life, even for a few minutes.
DL: What are links to your books, website, and blog so readers can learn more about you and your work?
YG: Here are links to my works:
“The plague full swift goes by”
Like most other people in the world today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been taking me back to the time in the 1980s when I worked as speechwriter for the commissioner of the Department of Health in New York City. At that time, the prevention of AIDS/HIV was the main public health concern in the city, followed closely by tuberculosis.
There were, of course, many other problems, some particular to NYC (window falls by children, for example) and some more common everywhere (dog bites, drug abuse, the diseases associated with poverty, and so on).
The commissioner at the time, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, was very active across the five boroughs, speaking on public health problems. He strongly believed that public health was a political process, and he spent a good deal of time out of the office, explaining and garnering support for the department’s policies across the city and in Washington.
(One policy was the necessity for widespread testing for infection by HIV, which exactly parallels the discussions over testing─or lack of testing, I should say─that we are hearing today.)
It was a wonderful job for me . . . I felt I was contributing to the most important health issues of the day in the best way that I could, though my words.
Sometimes I wrote up to eight speeches a week, along with op-ed pieces and articles for medical journals signed by the commissioner and other physicians in the department. And whenever the Mayor’s Office needed something for Koch to say or write about public health, I was often tapped to write that, too.
Afterwards I calculated that I wrote roughly four hundred speeches about AIDS/HIV in my five years there.
And yet, the job had its consequences.
When I started, they found desk space for me in a cubicle in the Office of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Every day when I came in to work, I passed full-color posters of chancres, rashes, warts, and all the other lesions that STIs can cause.
I certainly don’t mean to make light of any of this─but in the beginning, writing speeches every day about the effects of AIDS/HIV and tuberculosis, and spending my days among public health workers who spent their days tracing contacts of people who might have been infected with STIs without knowing it . . . all had an impact on me.
Riding on the subway to and from work each morning, I began to imagine the city as a vast sea of infection and all the people I passed as unknowing vectors of disease.
Not a healthy outlook.
I got over it, of course, but I’ve been reminded of that time a lot lately. The same issues that the city faced then─the critical need for testing to stem the spread of HIV despite (at that time) there being no treatment for it─are issues now.
When I began to write poetry seriously, infection as a metaphor was one I came back to time and again, due in large part to my time at the Department of Health.
Today’s blog entry includes two poems about infection. The first one, “Serial Killer,” is based on a story an office mate of mine years ago once told me about a job he had infecting mice in a vaccine development lab. It seemed a particularly gruesome occupation when he told me about it, and it stuck with me until I tried to exorcize it in the poem.
As you think about labs trying madly to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, give some thought to the little creatures who give their lives to the effort.
The second poem, “Influenza,” uses the idea of infection as a metaphor for how we respond to other things in our lives.
As always, please enjoy. And stay healthy!
Serial Killer
So the god swooped down, descending like the night.
─Homer
They weighed next to nothing, their bones
more fragile even than a bird’s
when I reached into the cage and
cupped one in my palm, tenderly.
Tenderly, too, the needle, filled
with what poison, what rare
killing toxin tested on these
small creatures, deftly slipped between
their brittle shoulder blades, the fur
bunched in my thumb and forefinger,
a move I learned the first week, saving
time and wasted motions.
They all died. Before injecting
my day’s subjects, I harvested
stiff tiny corpses from the
night before. Or else collected
those I had to sacrifice with
another kind of shot. How like
a god I was, reaching in and
randomly selecting this for
Vaccine Beta, that for Toxin
Alpha, this for a quiet end
in its sleep, that to be rudely
snatched away from the life it knew.
How they feared me, feared the shadow
of my hand as it moved into
position, nudged the cage door open,
and plunged down with unconcerned
speed to snap up the unlucky
and slip in my fatal point,
forcing them to yield up, squealing,
all of their terrible knowledge.
© Donald Levin, 2002. A version of this poem first appeared in Delirium, November 2002.
Influenza
All language is vehicular and transitive.
─Emerson
The vehicle of
a moving tenor
catches us unaware.
When it first appears
we try our best to
ignore its urging
but when it makes its
presence felt, we take
some certain pleasure
in surrendering
to it. At the end
it makes us feel so
awful we wish we
had never been born
though after, we are
better protected
against its striking
again. People the
vehicle with the
rider of your choice:
love, death, sadness, joy,
or even the flu.
© Donald Levin, 2005
Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet
This is one of my older poems. I wrote the draft of it on a plane on the way to Boston in 2002 to visit cousins and an elderly uncle whom I hadn’t seen in years. It was the first time I had flown since 9/11.
I wasn’t scared, exactly, but I was plenty uneasy.
Flying is not my favorite activity under the best of circumstances. But I was flying in the near-aftermath of the terror attacks, when everybody was on edge, and lots of other things down on the planet Earth below me made it seem as though order was collapsing.
This was the time when a sniper in a blue Caprice was shooting people randomly on Washington DC highways. Chechen rebels held 700 people hostage in a Moscow theatre, and the attempt to rescue them went horribly wrong. Bombs were routinely going off on Israeli busses.
The world seemed a tad nuts.
As it happened, I had assigned Jane Austen’s Emma to my Intro to Graduate Studies students that semester. I brought the book along to reread—and as we always say literature does, it took me out of myself and my worries and transported me into Austen’s world.
If you’ve read Austen, you know it’s very different from our own. Though her world was also in transition, her characters negotiated the changes with civility and grace
I tried to capture the differences—along with my yearning for a more orderly world—in the poem.
At the time, it seemed as if things couldn’t get any crazier.
Except today, 2020 says, “Hold my beer.”
There’s a new movie of Emma out, and I saw it last night. It was a decent translation of the book to film, with the exception of some casting choices I took issue with. (Note to producers: next time switch the actors who play Knightley and Robert Martin; if you’re going to use the great Bill Nighy, give him more to do).
It reminded me again why great novels like Emma hardly ever make great movies: novels are all about language, and no film can do justice to the sparkling wit of Austen.
But shifting into Austen’s world is still a serene experience as disease, financial catastrophe, corruption, and stupidity rage outside the darkened theatre.
It helps us realize that once there were people who were civil and agreeable to each other. And maybe there will be again.
Hope you enjoy “Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet.”
Reading Jane Austen at 37,000 Feet
A voice from the flight deck mumbles—something
about the weather in Boston—as the plane lumbers
into the dawning day above it all,
the sniper’s nest in the blue Caprice, endless
wars, dead hostages, suicide bombers
blowing nailed starbursts through sunblind busses.
Jane, how I welcome your astringent lines, sly
as a measured throw of cards on green felt tables,
the ordered games of Hartfield after dinner
while poor cold Woodhouse worries over the dangers
of rich cakes, and pretty Emma schemes.
Sealed in steel dread six miles up, I enter
your safe art gladly, shaking the dust
of crumbling civilizations off my boot-soles.
[© 2005 Donald Levin. A version of this poem appeared in my poetry book, In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005; reprinted in Detroit Metro Times, November 23, 2005).]
The Mysteries of Time Passing
I’m reading a book now called The Order of Time by an Italian theoretical physicist named Carlo Rovelli. Its subject is time (duh), and more specifically what contemporary physics has to say about our received notions about time.
Rovelli asks questions like, why do we remember the past and not the future, do we exist in time or does time exist in us, and what does it really mean to say “time passes?”
He talks about the ways in which modern physics has basically upended everything we thought we knew about time. Our beliefs that it flows uniformly, runs in a measurable course from a fixed past to an open future, and so on . . . all our assumptions about time are provably false, Rovelli claims.
The book examines how our ideas about time have crumbled, and what we are left with.
Fascinating stuff.
And yet, I think it’s fair to say that most of us still abide by those old verities of time. In this season particularly—when we count down the final days and hours of one year and look toward the beginning of a new year and the promises we hope it holds—we seem to be called to reflect on time. Not as an abstract concept of contemporary theoretical quantum physics, but in its more human aspect . . . we are drawn to think about how we used the time we had, what it meant for us, what we might do differently when we have the chances that (again, we hope) the coming year will allow us.
I’m especially fascinated by what I can only call the mysteries of time passing. I regret I don’t have a more nuanced vocabulary to describe what I mean here. This past year I turned 70, which has been more of an “uh-oh” milestone for me than I thought it would be. This year I’ve also been in touch with some friends whom I haven’t seen in decades, and even though I know intellectually that people age, it’s still a surprise to see how thirty or forty or fifty years turn dark hair white, expand thin waistlines, corrugate smooth skin . . . and seem to turn people I knew in their teens and twenties into their own grandparents.
One of my favorite photographers is a man named Milton Rogovin, who was an optometrist in Buffalo until he lost his profession when he was discredited by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ‘50s. Then he became a social documentary photographer of people whom he called (as the title of one of his books says) “the forgotten ones” . . . working people whose lives were overlooked, as well as the poor and marginalized and immigrant communities who lived on the lower west side of Buffalo.
His genius was not only to focus his camera on those groups and reflect back to them the meaning of their own lives, but to return several years later to photograph them again, and then return years after that to photograph them once more.
His photos therefore take on an added temporal dimension. They become enormously moving documents that invite us to reflect on, among so many other things, what time does to people.
One of the photos of his that I find most intriguing is the photo used for the cover of the book, The Forgotten Ones.
I love this photo. It’s endlessly fascinating for me. I love the people and actions and setting it portrays; it continually invites me, as a writer, to enter into it imaginatively. It’s a partner to another photo of the same two men that Rogovin took years later, and the difference between the two is striking: youth and age, hope and despair, promise and failure.
I don’t have permission to post either the early or the late photo, but the one on the cover of the book is the early photo, so I feel pretty secure in posting that. My continued engagement with the photo resulted in the following poem, “Time Lapse.”
As I said, I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to do justice to my thoughts and feelings about the mysteries of time passing, but in this poem I try to use language to catch something.
Time Lapse
(after a photograph by Milton Rogovin)
How is it possible to capture
a moment in a life—
and not just any moment, but
the instant before everything changes,
youth goes to age, future goes to past,
might do goes to have done?—
because here are Johnny Lee Wines
and his friend Ezekiel Johnson
paused on the cusp of their lived lives
caught in a black-and-white photograph
in a lower west side Buffalo bar
in their hats and cut-rate disco clothes
after working all day at the ice factory
doing the Kung Fu Fighting
in nineteen-seventy-three, at
eleven twenty-six p.m. exactly
(how do we know that, you ask?
so says the Genesee Beer clock
cocked between two crooked Genesee signs
on the painted particleboard wall
preserving this moment forever)
with Johnny the hopping happy one
the one with personality
saucy untroubled face looking off
cigarette in hand pointing out to
the future where they both head
and Zeke, he’s the quiet one
behind his square shades, grooving
in his own cool way but without
Johnny’s sassy pop in the reek
of cigarette smoke and old beer
though in the next jolting second
time will change them both forever
when Johnny shifts his willowy weight
from right foot to left, right-angled ankle unbends
and the dancer turns away, all put-on cheek still,
and Zeke (he’s still the cool one)
shifts his hips on the tawdry
checkered linoleum bar floor
where they dance in nineteen-seventy-three
(Everybody was kung fu fighting
Them cats was fast as lightning)
and their short-lived convexity
will alter and propel them forward
into what future awaits them,
where two tired and portly men
will stand in the bleak Buffalo snow
years from now in another photo,
after all the fights, reunions,
exiles, returns, mistakes,
regrets, chances lost, found, and lost again,
Johnny’s face sad and bloated with woe,
Zeke’s youthful cool now equally absent
in his worn-out and broken body
two casualties of the mysteries of time passing
that release their power in the instant
after Johnny and Ezekiel
jumped into the upcoming.
© 2019 Donald Levin
still inside
The college in Detroit where I taught for twenty years is closing for good this week. As I’ve been reflecting back over my experiences there—twenty years is a long time—one event in particular stands out.
It concerns a sequence of eight poems I wrote, titled “still inside.”
I originally wrote these back in 2007. Every so often when I give poetry readings, I bring these out to read because they’re among my favorites. After all these years, I still find them tremendously moving, and my audiences usually do, too.
The poems are monologues written in the voice of a little girl who suffered, as the poems describe, every kind of bad luck a child can have.
The sequence is based on the situation of an actual little girl. The basic events in the poems are true—a baby was born as a twin, but suffered life-altering hypoxia because the medical staff didn’t know there were two babies and she stayed inside her mother too long. She was born into a world of poverty and disregard.
That much is true. The rest is “truly imagined.”
(As Marianne Moore said, poets should create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”)
My stepdaughter is an attorney specializing in rights of the handicapped, and she’s the one who told me about this girl. The third poem in the sequence mentions an attorney who steps in because the little girl’s regular lawyer wouldn’t release enough money for her proper care; my stepdaughter is the one who intrudes to help the child. (The other attorney said to her, “What are you, an avenging angel?”)
The story of this little girl affected me for a long time, until it moved and saddened me to the point where I felt compelled to give her a voice that the circumstances of her short life had denied her.
I felt I had to bear witness to all she endured.
But I didn’t just want to focus on her sadness. My grandson Jamie was also born with a number of severe handicapping conditions, and everyone who came into contact with him during his own shortened life was profoundly transformed by his loving nature. I wanted to imaginatively imbue the little girl with some of Jamie’s indomitable spirit as a way of counteracting all the misfortunes of her life.
I had always thought these pieces could form the basis of a multi-media project consisting of words, music, art, and dance. I showed them to one of my friends and colleagues, Geoff Stanton, when we were both teaching at the college. Geoff is a phenomenal composer and musician, and he jumped at the chance to compose music for them.
The result was a stunning series of eight songs using the poems as lyrics set to music for two voices, piano, and cello. We presented them as part of one of Geoff’s annual concerts, and I was thrilled with the way they turned out. I’m including the poster for the event, left.
(As I write this, I don’t have a recording of the music available, or else I’d include a sample of that, too.)
As these things go, I haven’t moved my multi-media plans forward. Perhaps at some point in the future they will come to pass.
Until then, I offer this sequence in the hope the pieces will affect you as much as they continue to affect me.
still inside
by Donald Levin
i
another one
no doctor saw my momma
before we came
no exam no test
no money no thought
for another waiting
when it was time
it happened so fast
at the poor people’s hospital
my sister came quick
but after she was born
nobody knew
i was still there
awaiting my turn
quiet as i ever was
they turned away
to bathe and weigh the new one
and while i was waiting
i ran out of air
in the dark channel
of my momma’s narrow body
and it wasn’t till later
when she started screaming
that the nurses and doctors
caressing my sister
ran back
and discovered another one
still inside
and they did what they could
but the story of my life
was written by then
ii
absence of air
hypoxia
the doctors called it
to explain why my sister was good
and i was the bad one
right from the start
which meant no walking
or talking for me
though i could understood
what people would tell me
if only to hum in reply
and i did try to smile
if i thought it would help
which wasn’t often
though i cried at the seizures
that made me go stiff
and roll my eyes
and afterwards whimper
till i fell asleep
the medicine made me so
dizzy and tired
couldn’t see either
no sight in my eyes
except shapes and shadows
and the flashing lights of seizures
the only things i could see
retarded, they said
which probably i was
since i couldn’t learn
the way my sister did
who was always quick
even when she was born
she was the first
and i was last
iii
the house we lived in
momma bought with the money
they gave her for me
at first a lawyer handled the money
but wouldn’t give us enough
till another one made him
we never could have had
such a big house
there was supposed to be
a ramp and special bath
but momma never had it made
used the money for sofas
i was not allowed to sit on
so i couldn’t ruin them
by drooling which
i couldn’t stop
and she bought the other children
clothes there were two more
after me and my sister
so i stayed inside
for most of the time
and when a nurse came
to care for me
which wasn’t often
i was clean and dry
but when nobody came
i had to wait for gramma
who watched me when momma was out
but she didn’t always remember
so i stayed in my diaper
till it got so heavy with wet
she couldn’t lift me
or turn me over
when she finally remembered
so i had to stay still
inside my room
in pants that were heavy and wet
till someone remembered
and came to take care of me
but i was patient because
i was already such trouble
my momma told me
iv
school
when the bus came to take me
every morning
they would strap me inside
in my wheelchair
so i wouldn’t bounce
on the trip to school
with the driver and an aide
who cleared my throat
if i needed it
and when i got to school
my teachers were so happy
to see me
when they rolled me off the bus
they’d take my coat
and change my pants
and my teacher who is very tall
held my hands to say hello
and later they all sang
good morning to you
good morning to you
and sang about
my bright shining face
which i had because
i was so happy to see them too
every morning i also saw
my friend zach
who was in my class
and who liked me too
our teacher wheeled us together
so we could sit and hold hands
even though we couldn’t see
we felt each other’s hands
which were both crooked
because our muscles were so tight
but the touch of our fingers
twisted together
kept us warm
till it was time to go to music
which i also loved
v
momma always wanted
to be where she wasn’t
before we bought our house
we lived in different places
and she always wanted to be
someplace where we weren’t
when we moved to the city
from the town we were born in
she wanted to go back
to our old home town
and when she went back
at night to meet friends
she wanted to be back
inside our new big house
and when she was with us there
she yearned for jamaica
where she came from
she said she never was happy
since she left jamaica
if she had stayed there
she said her life would be
completely different
she must have been right
because i never remember
seeing her smile
or hearing her laugh
except when her friends were around
and i thought she must have
lots of friends
in jamaica
to miss it so much
vi
on valentines day
one year i got to eat chocolate
which i never had before
i never ate by my mouth
always got formula
through the button in my tummy
when i tasted the chocolate
i couldn’t breathe
gramma called an ambulance
momma wasn’t home
and gramma had to stay
with the other children
so I went by myself
to the hospital
they said i couldn’t breathe
because i was allergic to
peanuts in the chocolate
they gave me medicine
which i was also allergic to
the doctor gave me something else
that worked this time
and i could breathe again
so he sent me home
but i couldn’t breathe again
at home my throat closed
so i had to go back
in the ambulance
the doctor wanted to put
something in my throat
a little hole
an always open o
so i could keep breathing
but he couldn’t do it
without momma’s permission
and nobody knew where she was
so the doctor called the lawyers
in charge of my money
they must have said sure
go ahead then the doctor said
well you know
this will be permanent
it’ll mean round the clock care
from now on
it will mean a nursing facility
it will be pretty expensive
i just wanted you to know
he listened
and hung up
and told the nurses
who were holding my hand
her trust won’t fund the care she’d need
let’s try something else
he sent me home
with a machine
to suction my throat
and now when the mucous
collects in my throat
i get suctioned
if anybody’s there to do it
the lawyers must have said
they would pay for it
but somebody has to remember
to suction me
which doesn’t always happen
and i wind up coughing
until i can spit out the mucous
and sometimes i can
but sometimes i can’t
and i just have to lay there
and cough and cough
vii
sailing
my momma didn’t want
nursing care for me
didn’t want people around
telling her how to take care
of her daughter
but once when a nurse came
her name was nancy
she took care of me for a while
brought a big boat
and hung it from the ceiling
i couldn’t see it
except as a blur
but she described it
it was different colored ribbons
like a rainbow
with sails so big
when the breeze blew in
when the windows were open
in the warm weather
nancy said the boat would float
back and forth like a real boat
sailing on the waves
of the ocean
and after the company
nancy worked for took her away
to care for another child like me
who they said needed her
more than i did
she left my boat
hanging in my room
and when i laid in bed at night
waiting to be turned over
i would think about the boat
waving in the breeze
and pretend i was the captain
sailing around the world
on my boat of colored ribbons
and everywhere i went
people would wave
and clap as i sailed by
viii
still, inside
though everyone did
the best they could
i was not to live long
scoliosis twisted my spine
like a cane’s bent handle
in my fifth year
and as it curved around itself
my organs compressed
till one day
my lungs couldn’t move
enough air
and all my spit pooled
in the back of my throat
and i inhaled it
and got pneumonia
a speck of mucous
was all it took
hidden like a grain of sand
in my chest
the bright red ring of sickness
pearled around it
and because i couldn’t rise
or blow it away
the infection overwhelmed me
and the fever
made my seizures so bad
i couldn’t breathe at all
and before anyone knew
to call the ambulance
i died
but at my funeral
everyone came to say goodbye
momma my sister my gramma
the rest of the family
the lawyers and doctors and nurses
who took care of me
and i could feel them all
standing crying
over my coffin
as i lay still
inside
©2019 Donald Levin
Three Favors
I’ve been reading a lot of online postings lately about people dealing with their grief over loved ones—brothers, sons, parents, spouses—who have died. I suppose I’m sensitive to the subject at this time because the anniversary of the death of one of my loved ones, my grandson Jamie (the model for Toby in my mystery series), came around a week and a half ago.
Jamie was twenty-five when he died, and we all loved him dearly; his brother Alex used to say Jamie was the glue that held the family together. He was in a year-long vegetative state that preceded his death, and that somewhat prepared us for losing him. But we still weren’t ready for the 2:30 a.m. phone call from his mom telling us he was gone.
Who is ever prepared for that call?
Even now, eight years on, his loss is still hard to manage. I find myself talking to him almost every day, narrating my life, telling him how much I miss him. When I find feathers on my walks, I like to think Jamie left them as reminders that he is still around in some form.
Wishful thinking, I know; dead is dead.
So when I’ve been reading about how people are trying to come to terms with their grief over loved ones who have died, I empathize with their losses deeply.
But there’s another kind of grief—the grief that comes in the wake of losing someone you should have been close to, but weren’t. Sometimes what you grieve for then is not the loss of the person from your life, but the loss of the possibility that any closeness could ever happen.
While that could describe my entire family of origin, I think of it particularly in terms of my brother Cal.
His name was Charles, but everybody called him Cal because of his initials: Charles Allan Levin. He died in 1984; he was only 41 years old. He was older than I by six years, and for a variety of reasons we weren’t close as brothers. Or even as strangers, for that matter.
Not only were we completely different personalities. Much of the problem in our adult years came from his long-term drug use, which wreaked a seemingly endless havoc on the family, as these things will do.
It’s conventional to say people died after a “long battle” with drug abuse, but that’s not quite true in his case. He didn’t so much fight against the drugs as embrace them like a lover. Yet even as I write it, I know that’s not exactly accurate either.
He died in a YMCA in Honolulu after failing to complete a lavish drug-treatment program in Hawaii that he conned my father into paying for. My father told everyone (including me) that Cal died from emphysema, but on the death certificate I saw the actual cause of death was amphetamine poisoning.
The only surprise was that his usual drugs of choice were barbiturates and pain-killers.
My last contact with him was several years before he died, when he called to ask me for money because our father (his usual touch) was out of town. I refused, and he hung up on me.
As you might expect, my anger at him and what he did to the family was profound and corrosive. It lasted for a long time, both before and after his death. He sucked up all the oxygen in the family for years; he and my parents formed a demented triad of mutually-assured destruction that left me on the outside looking in on my own family.
As I grew older, however, and gained some distance on it all, and began to deal with my own issues created by our family which was, if not broken, then really really bent, my attitude toward my brother began to change.
I started to get some insight into why he turned to drugs, and why he had such a hard time giving them up, or even admitting he couldn’t live without them. I started to see that, far from being the reason for the upset in the family, his drug use was a reaction to existing family problems, which of course only worsened because of his addiction.
I came to realize that the pain affecting me from my family pre-dated his antics, and also affected him. I understood we each tried to deal with that pain in different—albeit equally ineffective—ways.
When I started writing poetry, I found myself writing some about my brother. One in particular helped me come to a sort of accomodation, if not forgiveness, with him, in part through a recognition finally of both what he had lost and of the similarities between us. I think this poem captures those insights.
A version of this poem appeared in the April 2004 issue of Saucyvox.
Three Favors
1
It is 1966 and I’m struggling
to figure out the chords for “Desolation Row”
needle-dropping on my turntable
when my brother calls from next door where
he and the neighbor are watching a movie
and the 16mm projector jammed.
“Can you try to get it going?”
A simple problem to diagnose:
the worn sprockets on the well-watched film
have twisted over one of the feeders.
The curl in the plastic needs to be freed
and the film rethreaded. I start
the old machine and in the square of light
thrown on the screen in the neighbor’s bedroom
appear grainy black and white images
of a truly epic blow job
in extreme close-up, a woman’s lips
and sinuous tongue slaver up and down
a monster phallus glistening with spit
for longer than I would have thought possible.
My first stag flick makes me gape in wonder
at the animal rawness of it
as though it is a documentary
about an encounter between two apes
and the camera morbidly scientific
instead of pornographic—exactly
the opposite of erotic, with
a sound track filled with soggy sucking
and a man’s hammy moaning
tinny on the project’s tiny speaker.
When another actor enters the scene
and begins to take his own clothes off
I judge I have seen enough and leave them
to their whoops and fun. “The world’s longest
blow job,” the neighbor chortles. I return
to the silence of my own room
where I take up my guitar again
and rest an ear on the curve of its shoulder
to let the hard vibrating wood
ring the bones of my head like a bell.
2
The second time, 1971,
we stay in the Southfield apartment
where our parents moved when they fled Detroit.
My brother needs a ride to a job
to meet a friend, this contractor,
he tells me, and he can’t drive himself
since he wrapped his Mustang around a tree.
I am in another room, this time reading
(I’m in my hard-boiled mystery phase)
when his spare and stricken figure heaves
into the doorway. “Can you give me a ride?”
he asks, his scarred right arm hanging limp
at his side, casualty of a scalding bathtub
he had fallen into once while stoned.
This is the time when he makes phone calls
day and night cadging prescriptions for pills
from shady physicians. He tells them
he is a cancer patient from out of town
grappling with terrible pain. He makes
his voice quake in pretend agony.
He directs me to a cracked and potholed street
on the east side of Detroit where we roll
to a stop outside a house with black paint
hiding living room windows and high grass
gone to seed in the lawn. He steps from the car
uncertainly and hobbles stiff-legged
up the walk. Rings the doorbell and waits.
It occurs to me this is not about a job.
No light escapes from the front door
that cracks to allow him entrance.
A minute later he is out, walking fast.
“We’re done,” he says, and drops into the car.
“Take off.” I smell his sour sweat and his voice shakes,
this time for real. In his lap he cups
something small, like an animal he shelters
and gives me a sidelong glance that says more
than I want to know about fear and shame.
For the rest of the day he wanders around
the apartment with a spoon in his pocket
and I stay in my room and read about Sam Spade.
3
‘Seventy-seven, in another room,
grading essays for my classes at Wayne State
when my brother phones, which he never does.
Our father is away for the weekend. “Can I borrow
fifty bucks?” he asks. “I swear I’ll pay you back.”
I don’t even remember why he said
he wanted the cash, but I thought I knew.
He must have been desperate indeed
to try me. But I am through granting favors.
I blame him for every unhappiness
visited on our family, for all the problems of my own.
“Don’t lay that on me,” he spits, and hangs up.
It is the last time I speak with my brother.
Years later he is dead, found in a room
at the Y in downtown Honolulu.
Today, older than he would live to be
I imagine bars of tropical sunlight
peeking through his window blinds, striping
his decomposing body, his mouth twisted
in lines deep as cracks in asphalt, hair wild
as stalks of unmown grass as he sprawls,
melting after seven undiscovered days,
across his narrow bed, forlorn as a poor woodsman
in a dismal tale who has squandered his three wishes
and died alone, without family, friends, job,
or money, having lost, along with his
precious time in the sun, his last lucky chance
that some indifferent lips might try,
tirelessly, to coax him, childless and self-
abandoned, back into despondent life.
On Advice, and Where It Comes From
This morning over coffee I saw one of those ubiquitous bits of Facebook wisdom attributed to everyone from Anonymous to Abraham Lincoln to Morgan Freeman. It said, “Some of the best advice I’ve ever been given: Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t ever go to for advice.”
No matter who said it, when we’re starting out as writers, we’re always (or should be, anyway) looking for advice and help from established authors. When I give talks, I’m sometimes asked what was the best advice I ever received. I’m hardly ever asked what was the worst advice, yet that can sometimes be as useful as the best advice.
Back in the seventies, when I had written my first novel, I gave the manuscript to the author John Gardner to read, comment on, and, I’d hoped in my wildest dreams, recommend to his agent. Gardner is no longer with us, but at the time he was quite a famous guy. I was hungry for what he could tell me.
Not to be confused with the John Gardner who took over the James Bond series, this one wrote some best-selling literary novels in the late seventies and early eighties (including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, October Light, and Mickelsson’s Ghosts) in addition to children’s books, well-regarded books of criticism, and—guess what—advice for writers (The Art of Fiction, On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist).
At that time he was running the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, and he was friends with my wife, who was also teaching in the English Department.
I was an adjunct instructor in the department, and had met him on several occasions. He had the reputation for being extremely helpful to apprentice writers. I’d see him around the department, and in my interactions with him he was warm and friendly, and treated me like a colleague. He asked to see some of my writing, and told me he’d publish me in the new literary journal he had started at Binghamton, he’d recommend me to his agent, he’d help get me published, and so on.
I had written a draft of a novel, my first, a kind of bildungsroman about a young man who gradually learns to get in touch with “the life he had lost in living,” to paraphrase T.S. Eliot. Called Vital Signs, it was a typical first book, not groundbreaking, I knew, but still I thought it had its merits.
I put it off as long as possible, but I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and with high hopes I gave him the manuscript.
Time passed.
More time passed.
Even more time passed and I hadn’t heard back from him. So one night, when we were both at the English Department’s annual Christmas party (a huge event, since the department was large, with large undergrad and grad programs), I took the opportunity to approach him to ask if he’d had a chance to read the book.
He told me he had.
And he told me my book was evil.
He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Not like, “Dude, your book is eeeeevillllll!”
No, the best-selling author of On Moral Fiction had just told me I’d written an evil novel.
Evil, as in morally corrosive.
As in bad. As in no good.
I’d read On Moral Fiction . . . I knew what he meant: it was trivial, it was boring, it was a lie.
He told me there wasn’t much to do with an evil book.
As you might expect, this was not good news. Here was this big-time, best-selling, hot-shot author known around the English department (and indeed, around the country) as a generous and helpful mentor of young writers, and all he had to say about my book was that it was evil.
It was a blow it took me a while to recover from. (If you’ve read my June 4th blog post, you’ll know this was one of a series of blows that drove me away from writing for awhile.)
Two things happened that helped me come to terms with it. One was what I subsequently learned about that night. Not only was he drunk when I talked to him at the party, but his wife had sued him for divorce earlier that day.
So he was not only plastered, but he was in a particularly foul mood.
The second thing was, a few days later, I got a note from him, apologizing. He told me he enjoyed the book, that he meant to just skim it but it engaged him so much he read it through entirely, that there were many good things about it, and that he would gladly write a blurb for it.
That salved the wound, but the constant little demon-critic who lives on our shoulders still had me wondering: was it really such a bad book that it took drunkenness for him to be honest about it? In vino veritas?
Still, I gained a lot from this interaction with Gardner—not so much that I am an evil writer, but that you really do have to be careful about whom you seek criticism from (despite all his gifts, Gardner was, I subsequently discovered, an extremely, even reactionarily, conservative critic); you have to be careful about when you ask for it; and—most of all—you have to be very careful about investing too much in what you hear. Another writer, even the hottest, best-selling peddler of moral fiction, is just another point of view, a man or woman with problems and limitations of perspective and weaknesses and failed marriages that sometimes color the advice.
I also learned the importance of being kind when dealing with a young writer, something I never forgot when I became a professor, and, ultimately, a published novelist and poet interacting with other writers, both beginning and established.
I never did publish that manuscript I gave Gardner to review, but I published lots of other things, and why I was able to go on writing was due in part to something he wrote about being a novelist. In fact, it was the best piece of wisdom I’ve ever read about writing in his On Becoming a Novelist:
”Finally, the true novelist is the one who doesn’t quit. Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or ‘way,’ an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.”
I’ve gone back to this paragraph time and again for its wisdom. While the episode with Vital Signs was demoralizing, it turned out that Gardner’s words have seen me through some difficult times, after all.
Two Poems about Summer
I haven’t been writing much poetry lately, but it wasn’t so long ago that I thought of myself exclusively as a poet. I had always written occasional poems—poetry for special occasions like weddings—but I identified as basically a fiction writer.
I came to love writing poetry, though . . . for the intense use of language, of course, but also for the experience of writing a poem as opposed to a long work of prose, and most especially for the craft of poetry. I wrote a lot of poems, and they began appearing in print and e-journals, and I even brought out two small collections of poems.
I stopped for a variety of reasons, but mostly it was because I had to write a 300-plus page accreditation report for the school where I was teaching. It not only brought my poetry-writing and -publishing to a screeching halt, but it made me remember how much I enjoyed working in the marathon of the long prose form. So I started back to fiction.
I was reminded of all that this week when I saw a YouTube video by Michael Martin, a great friend and one of the most talented poets I know. In the video (you can watch it here), he reads two poems: his translation of a poem by Virgil and an original poem responding to the translation. Michael and I used to share poems with each other almost every day . . . one of us would churn one out and immediately send it off to the other for a response . . . we inspired and trusted each other.
Michael has continued writing poems, as well as lots of other things, and his video inspired me to drag a couple of my oldies out of the crypt for this week’s blog entry. The title of today’s post says, “Two Poems about Summer,” but of course they’re not really about summer. I picked them because they’re both set at exactly this time of year (August) and because they gave me the chance to revisit a couple of my favorites and share them with you.
The first one, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” I reworked a bit from its original version, but the second, “Steve Allen Returns to Weekly TV,” is pretty much as it appeared first in the online publication Tryst and then in my first collection, In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005). (BTW, that handsome devil on the cover is my grandfather.)
Enjoy.
Et in Arcadia Ego
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position.
—W.H. Auden
Standing waist deep in the water,
my older brother slaps a hand
on the surface of the startled round
blue sunny mouth of the above-ground pool
on the driveway in our back yard
to mark the seconds advancing
in the breath-holding contest.
Beside him, buoyant, his best friend
does a perfect dead-man’s float—
face down, arms outstretched, legs limp
and trailing in the water—
passing ninety-nine one-thousand
as tiny waves slosh over the edges
of the corrugated metal sides
burnishing a dark halo
in the sand cushioning the pool.
The day warm, the sky blue and cloudless
in Detroit in 1962.
“Aguirre on the mound,” announces
Ernie Harwell from the transistor
on the webbed chair beside the pool
where I am sitting, watching.
“Swing and a miss,” Harwell calls it
and a tinny approving murmur
issues from the ballpark’s August crowd
in the summer of my thirteenth year.
At once the door to the porch
off my brother’s second floor bedroom
flies open and our mother, stricken,
thrusts her head out. “Marilyn Monroe
died!” she cries, voice raspy from smoking,
her shocked grief compelling her
to notify someone, anyone, and
we are all she can find right now—
we for whom that churl death is still
a stranger mocked by a boyish game
(“How long you can hold your breath,”
Death will chide back; “good practice for forever”),
unaware as we are this is how
it enters our lives, with the surprise
burst of a swinging screen door.
Ears submerged but thinking from her tone
she is agitated about him,
the teenager still drifting face down
like a felled log lifts a calming hand
and sends her up an okay sign
while my brother keeps splashing his count—
up to one-hundred-twenty one-thousand—
as the cruel seconds race past.
Steve Allen Returns to Weekly TV (August 1967)
Lying shirtless and pantless in the heat
of an overwhelming Detroit summer
at the end of my seventeenth year
alone on an unmade narrow bed
watching the Steve Allen Show
through a murk of endless cigarettes
on a black and white TV with an unbent
hanger for an antenna, I imagined I dwelt
among the habitues of Hollywood Boulevard
who stopped along whatever path
they were traveling to stare into the red
eye of the camera trained on the street
for a slice of southern California life
primed to catch their random amblings
and report the findings out to America
for the amusement of the nation’s viewers
who, like me, laughed along with
the host’s high giggle and comic invention
of lives for ladies with shopping bags
bubbling over with ripe oranges
and hose drooping at thick ankles,
and crazy-eyed men with dirty
pants cinched with neckties bunched
around their waists, and young men
bare-chested as I was, raving
about the government’s intrusions
into their lives, and now and then
a man wearing, say, a shower cap
might wander down the street at the wrong
time and turn up on snowy screens
across the country, his story concocted
for the occasion, and what is amusing
about such desperation, you might ask,
and if you do then you must not be
staring down the maw of your eighteenth
birthday, or understand how
the dusk of LA is as desolate
as the cruel deserted nights of Detroit
or how a camera’s glare can peer into
the deepest fears of those who dream
their truest lives into being, or even
how these could converge with your own.
Six Sure-Fire Ways to Kill Your Writers’ Group
I rarely take part in writers’ groups anymore. I totally get their usefulness—writers need support from peers, they need responses to their work from actual readers who won’t just say they loved it, a sharp reader can point something out that a writer might not have thought of, and so on. A good writers’ group can be beneficial, no doubt.
In large part, I don’t do it because it’s not how I work best. When I came of age as a writer, I learned to do most of my work alone. I wrote projects to order and under pressure of deadline; there wasn’t the time or the opportunity—or the expectation—to get other writers’ perspectives on what I was doing. My boss—or the client—had the final say.
In larger part, though, my avoidance of writers’ groups comes from my having run or taken part in so many of them over my careers as a writing teacher and writer. The other day, I estimated how many writers’ groups I’ve been part of over the years. I came up with the semi-astonishing figure of roughly 1,200 groups over twenty-plus years, both inside and outside the classroom.
That’s 1,200 groups of writers, ranging in number from three to thirty, where people responded to each other’s stories, poems, novel drafts, or essays. I was either an active participant or a facilitator helping the writers themselves carry the conversations.
I was deep into collaborative writing, see. The whole being the “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage” thing, to use one of the more ridiculous clichés of education that still makes me gag.
I thought a lot about the subject. I took courses in how to run writers’ groups. I attended workshops in how to do it. I even gave workshops for my colleagues and others in the benefits of writing groups and how to work with them.
In all that time, I saw how and why groups could be valuable. But I also saw what could go very wrong. In particular, I came to learn that certain behaviors will kill a writers’ group dead. If you’re a member of a writers’ group and you want to make your partners miserable, try some of these out:
1. Everybody’s a Critic.
Interpret “critique” to mean “criticize mercilessly” (instead of, say, “offer careful judgment about”), and criticize the hell out of the workshopper (the one who reads or presents a piece for discussion). Pick every single nit you can find, from structure to grammar, regardless of what stage the draft is in. Find fault, instead of reflecting your responses to the piece back to the author, who can then make decisions about how well she/he framed the writing in preparation for revising.
It also helps if you gang up on the writer with other members of the group.
2. Do As I Say, Not As I Do.
Understand that your other main job as participant (besides telling authors what they did wrong) is to tell the writers what they need to do to improve the work. Regardless of your own experience of literature and writing, don’t be shy about telling the author what to do with a particular work. The wronger the advice, the louder you should insist on it.
3.Tu Casa Es Mi Casa.
Take over the author’s writing completely. Pay no attention to an author’s intentions, but respond to a piece of writing based on how you would have written it yourself. Don’t give the author any chance to make decisions about what to do or change based on how well you got what she/he was saying. This works especially well if you’ve never written anything like what the author is sharing.
4. If You Can’t Say Something Bad, Don’t Say Anything, Part 1.
Don’t mention any of the strengths of the piece, and don’t bother telling the author what you liked or appreciated about the work, or thought the author did well. Your job is to focus on the bad parts. The good parts are already good, aren’t they? Why talk about them?
Besides, agents and editors aren’t going to go easy on a writer, so why should you? You’re helping to toughen up the workshopper. Writing group as WWF Smackdown!
5. If You Can’t Say Something Bad, Don’t Say Anything, Part 2.
Never mind articulating any questions you have about the piece, or points of confusion you wonder about, or interesting places where you’d like to hear more details; these might be too helpful. Your criticisms are enough.
6. I Object!
When you’re the workshopper, defend your draft loudly and vociferously. Don’t bother trying to learn from your partners’ responses and get ideas for revision, but instead show them how wrong they are in their appraisals of your work. If you have to explain or defend what you said, it just shows how little your responders get you (and how much smarter you are).
If you try all these strategies in your next writers’ group, I promise your group mates will develop some very special feelings for you.
If, on the other hand, you find yourself doing any of these, you might try to back off from them and maybe—just maybe—your writers’ group will be more enjoyable, and a whole lot more useful.
