Parnassus Readings: Nothing Beats a Local Indie Bookseller

I'll admit that the local music events often fill my calendar, but almost every week, Parnassus Books in Green Hills offers another book event that's hard to pass up. This past week, I joined Gail and Premi, a couple of my book club friends, to hear New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner interview his friend, author Jonathan Miles (Johnny to his friends and family, we learned). Miles is touring with his latest novel Anatomy of a Miracle, the story of a veteran who returns from Afghanistan a paraplegic, until one day, outside a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenient store, he inexplicably stands.  What follows is the investigation by everyone from his doctor to reality TV hosts to the Vatican.

I was familiar with Miles from his earlier novel Dear American Airlines, the tale of a man stranded at the airport while trying to reach his daughter's wedding. I did not know, however, that he's also a regular contributor to Field and Stream. He claimed that his journalism work had been a seed bed for his fiction, which fed off it. Journalism, he said, had granted an all-access pass to so much of life.

Though originally from Ohio, Miles feels he came into his own as a writer in Oxford, Mississippi, certainly a hotbed of literature. There he developed friendships with such writers as Barry Hannah and Larry Brown (in whose writing shed he worked on his fiction.)

The interview--or conversation--between Miles and Garner veered toward Miles' writing process and his journey toward novel writing. (When he married his wife, he told the audience, he was a landscaper.) He describe fiction writing as "this assemblage of fibs that somehow adds up to something true." He quoted Doctorow about the writing process: "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way" and Russo, who said it's like throwing a pebble in to a pond--and then you have to swim around until you find your pebble.

Asked about the humor in his writing, Miles said he had been called a comic writer and wondered if he could consider it praise.  Larry Brown told him, "You never want anything in front of the word 'writer.'"

When Garner pointed out that there were some some surprises in the novel, including some intensive war writing, Miles said that one of the joys of writing is the research. He called writing a novel "this fantastic crammed eduction.  He also compared it to the worst drug in the world: 99 times out of 100 it makes you feel worse, but that one time . . . .

He discussed his writing process and answered the question about a word limit, saying he sometimes wrote zero words but other times, 8000.

Miles, when asked whether he believes in miracles, called himself a "fundamentalist agnostic." He referred to "that sense of not knowing and wanting to ask these questions and find something to believe in.  What novels do best, he said, is to ask questions, make those questions deep, put flesh on them.  After all, to be a good novelist, there's a certain level of empathy required.

"Nobody reads the same book anyway," he said. He recalled reading Reynolds' Stone Fox after losing his grandfather and crying more tears over the story than over his own loss.

I'd be willing to bet that after the Parnassus event, I wasn't the only audience member who was eager not only to go home and read but to write as well.

Parnassus Readings: Nothing Beats a Local Indie Bookseller

In Rilke's Footsteps: Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer

I had the pleasure this summer of working with a group of teenagers to help them start a writing group. Their writing goals and genres were varied but they shared the desire to write and they exhibited such mutual respect for one another. Now that they're back in school, I realize that some English, journalism, and creative writing teachers are going to feel so fortunate to have their spark in the classroom.

This week I listened to Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer, a title he borrowed from Rilke . I'm a great fan of McCann's novels, Transatlantic and Let the Great World Spin, so I trusted that he would have something valuable to say. I was right. I also appreciated that he acknowledged that his "young writer" might, indeed, be any age.

Since McCann read the audiobook himself, I got to enjoy his lovely lilt, but I hadn't made it far through the CDs before I realized that I probably need a copy for my own library shelves. Each chapter begins with a quotation from a great writer--living or dead. I wanted to write them down and stick them to my mirror or over my desk (if I had one) or on the dash of my car.

The advice is practical enough that an individual writer or a  writing group could spend time working chapter by chapter. McCann doesn't claim to have all the answers, but he dispenses wisdom in a straight-forward, sometimes self-deprecating way. He acknowledges that no one can TEACH you to write.

He kept the book short, too, letting readers get back to the role of writers, following his strongest bit of advice: get your arse in the chair.

In Rilke's Footsteps: Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer

First Novels

According the conventional wisdom, everyone has at least one novel inside waiting to come out. Whether everyone has the words, perseverance, or even the desire to get that story on paper is another issue altogether. Quite often, though, I've encountered first novels that are beautiful, powerful works of literature. All of us wonder what Harper Lee might have written if she's ventured beyond To Kill a Mockingbird. Surely we would have snatched up Margaret Mitchell's sequel to Gone with the Wind, had she not had that untimely death.

Even for those who go on to produce many other novels, the first one may be rich, despite inexperience with the form, because writers let it roll around in their heads before they finally get the courage or the motivation to get it down on paper.

Kathyrn Stockett's first novel The Help tells the story of black maids and their white employers during the turbulent 1960's. While her white protagonist Skeeter may be only partly autobiographical, Stockett's leaves little doubt in her epilogue that her own experiences with her own family's maid Demetric compelled her to write the story. She admits uncertainty about her ability to speak authentically from the point of view of her other two narrators, Aibileen and Minny, but she felt the story was important to tell.

She even admits in her last pages that in spite of her editor's fact checker, she included a few details anachronistically. She inserts a reference to Dylan's The Times, They are a'Changin'," despite knowing it wasn't released until a year after the events in the book because it wasn't central to the plot but reinforced a point for her characters.

While I grew up in a Southern family that certainly never had full-time help, my mother occasionally employed an ironing lady. (Having grown up despising ironing in a time when even sheets weren't permaprest, that was one of Mama's rare indulgences. Since she was raising five daughters, the ironing pile was a constant.) The most colorful of these employees I remember was Frankie Lee, who drank huge glass-bottled Pepsis for lunch and watched the soaps as she worked.

Our family's relationship with African-Americans wasn't quite stereotypical in the South either. At one point, to supplement his preacher's income (back in the day when preacher's didn't bring home the big bucks, at least not in untelevised congregations), Dad built spec houses with a partner. One of these houses, a tidy one-story ranch, was built on one of the few vacant lots in an older, established neighborhood. The residents around the building site, many quite content for the lot to stay vacant, began spreading rumors about what just might happen if "the wrong kind of people" bought the house. Getting wind of the rumors, Daddy convinced the woman who ironed for us and a young black college student who attended the Christian Student Center where Daddy served as campus minister to ride over with him to the house and pose as potential home buyers at a time when the neighbors were more likely to be home to see. They all had a big laugh when they got back in the car.

Stockett also describes the quandary of being from Mississippi (and by extension for me, Alabama): It's all right for us to complain about our home state, but we just dare an outsider to do so. And while the social climate still has a long way to go in some areas, the times, they are a changin'.

First Novels

I Did It--and I Didn't Do It!

November is always such a busy month, and this one has taken the cake. With the Washington, DC, trip with the Holocaust class and the trip to San Antonio, TX, for the English conference, I was over-committed. Then I read about NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. But I heard about it through Poetic Asides, the poetry blog I've been participating on since April's poem-a-day challenge. Robert Lee Brewer, the moderator, issued a new challenge for November: Write a poem a day, working toward a chapbook. He issued prompts each day, and we were off.

Since I've been writing with these people since April, we have begun to feel like we know each other. In addition to writing our own poem drafts daily, we read the others and often comment. I'll admit that a response to one of my poems always made me happy. A lot of my poems had references to music, particularly that of my teen years (when music was great.) I also included some literary allusions, which should come as a surprise to no one who knows me.

I actually started the month trying to undertake both challenges. My novel, however, didn't go the direction I wanted, and then in Washington, I just couldn't keep up with the 1600 plus word limit per day. I finally did something against my nature: I didn't finish. I decided February will be a much better month for a novel; November was just right for poetry.

Now I have a nice little portfolio of poems and a little over a month to tweak them, select my best 10-20, and submit for bragging rights. For the time being, we're back to once-a-week Wednesday prompt, andI'll admit it: I miss the daily challenge.

One thing I know for sure: poetry is alive and well in the world!

I Did It--and I Didn't Do It!