Really?  Joe DiMaggio?  Another WWII novel?

I know.  Like everything I write, this new novel, The Powers, just followed me around and insisted on being written till it wore down my resistance.  It started during a conversation my then-draft-age sons were having about the Iraq War and whether they could in good conscience claim C.O. status.  That topic led us to WWII, the one war we collectively tend to think of as the “good war,” which led me to think about 1941.

So what’s the connection between baseball, photography, and pacifism?

Valerie Sayers

DiMaggio’s 1941 hitting streak remains one of the greatest feats ever, equal parts psychological will and physical bravado.  I was interested in the way a whole country trying to decide the right thing could project their ideas of a hero onto a single man’s shoulders (which hurt very badly that summer).  Everyone made Joe such a Superman that I gave him the power to foretell the future (there are a lot of quasi-magical powers floating through the book).  Walker Evans’s subway photos are another kind of witness to the weariness of ordinary folks during those pre-war years.  And finally I was interested in the way pacifists maintained their sanity as they took in the news from Europe, and how they tried to be witnesses, and heroes, and mostly failed.

How are all those photos in the book supposed to work?

Valerie Sayers reading from “The Powers.”

The prose is the primary narrative, the photos another, parallel way of seeing.  They’re almost all portraits, some of New Yorkers on the subway or on job sites, some of passengers on the SS St. Louis, fleeing Germany  (nearly all the passengers on the St. Louis were refused entry in Havana, and Roosevelt refused to intervene to grant them entry to the U.S.).   It was important to me that the images of the refugees not portray them as stereotypical victims, so many of the photos are joyful: the final image shows a couple of handsome young guys roller-skating on the deck of the St. Louis.

Did writing the novel help you figure out your own position on pacifism?

No.  It remains a moral quandary,but it’s one worth wrestling with.  And meanwhile I did revel in some extraordinary photographs, and got to re-live a whole lot of swell baseball games, play by play.

What’s with you and Stephen Colbert?

You might say The Powers is a meditation on Colbert’s favorite subject, America.  Plus, we’re both Catholics from South Carolina.   In my trailer, I shamelessly beg for the Colbert bump.  Are you listening, Stephen?

[Valerie Sayers's new novel, The Powers, has just been published by Northwestern University Press.  It's about baseball, pacifism, and photography, and it's set in the year 1941, the year of Joe DiMaggio's famous hitting streak and Walker Evans's surreptitious subway photos, the year isolationists and interventionists and pacifists duked it out.  She teaches in the MFA writing program  at Notre Dame.]

Here’s the first page and the illustration by my new favorite artist, Derrick Dent.

 You can find it at Barnes and Nobles, among other places.

Then the student got the edited version back from his editor. He called me, he wrote me, he cried. He didn’t know what to make of all the marked-up pages and the long letter full of suggestions and re-workings.  

What I told him was that this meant he had a good editor, one who thought a lot about the books he took on and one who cared.

Which was true except that I remembered when I got my first edited manuscript back. The howls of rage.  “It’s like they cut off my arm,” I yelled to my wife about one deleted passage. (I wish I was exaggerating for comic effect; I am not.)

That was over eighteen years ago, and while I still get pretty worked up upon first seeing my marked manuscripts, I have come to understand how much editing, and working with editors, is not just a partnership but, at its best, a collaborative creative act.

As for advice, here is some that I sent to my student, in no particular order:

Remember it is normal to freak out at this point in creating a book. (Same as all the other points.)

Consider time.  Time is vital. Read the edits and let them sit there—inside you. It is often not comfortable. It is another person’s vision imposed on your vision. Got for a walk. Try to sleep. Let time pass with the edits.

 This is important because very often something that an editor suggests will seem idiotic at first and then a week later you will say “wait a minute.” (You might even convince yourself that it was your idea.)

Some writers don’t take any edits. They “stet” everything.  But generally these people are dicks. (Stet is a copyediting mark that means “Don’t fucking change this. Put it back the way it was.”)

It is completely fine and acceptable to hold the line in places. To “stet” a bit. But try to think about why you are holding the line in terms of the larger work. This will be helpful for a couple of reasons:
 
1. It will get you thinking about your work again in big picture terms.
 
2. It may make you see things in a new way, and even add new sentences, chapters.

For me writing at the editing stage is all about problem solving and that is always creative. Rather than fight with specifics think about what problems your editor is suggesting and how they can be solved.  You may not solve it in exactly the way the editor suggests, but you should be thankful that the problem was pointed out. The point is to solve it.

Working with an editor is a creative act. Just a different kind of creative act than writing it in the first place.
 

In the end no one knows your book as well as you. But it’s nice to know there is someone who knows it almost as well.  And it’s nice to have someone else, a teammate of sorts, as the book makes its way out in the world.
 

P.S. Whenever they run one of those monthly “The End of Books” articles they always mention that “editing is dead.” I always wonder what planet they are living on because on my planet editing is alive and well.

Here’s my cartoon:

And for more on the danger of drones in the woods, here’s my latest blog post at OnEarth…

            The orginal draft of this was a lot meaner and potentially more paranoid. It included this quote from Ed Abbey:

           “Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution in human history …. As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country … there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element — always present in our history — to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance (not excluding torture of course) in order to preserve — not wilderness! — but the status quo, the privileged positions of those who so largely control the economic and governmental institutions of the United States.”  

          Abbey composed those sentences in the 1970s. When I first came across them a couple of decades later, I probably rolled my eyes — maybe even laughed a little at what must have sounded to me, at the time, like paranoia. And it’s true: the warning does have a distinctly  Unabomber-ish whiff to it. By all rights, Abbey’s language should seem even more cringe-worthy now: we have all been well trained, in the years since, to regard with reflexive suspicion anyone who starts muttering about “the government” while simultaneously declaring that they want to be left alone. But here’s the odd, and discomfiting, thing. When I re-read these words today, I don’t roll my eyes or laugh. Here, at the beginning of the Drone Age, they no longer sound quite as farfetched to me.

Ben Fountain

War is a petri dish for the creation of great literature. Setting aside the absence from the “forgotten war” in Korea, the United States‘ recent military engagements have inspired The Naked and the Dead and Catch 22 from World War II and The Things They Carried and Dispatches from the Vietnam War. Yet until recently there has been a glaring absence of a defining work from the War on Terror. Until now.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain is “as close to the Great American Novel as anyone is likely to come these days” according to one critic. Billy Lynn is a 19 year old member of Bravo Squad, a military unit in Iraq that finds itself heavily outnumbered in a firefight with insurgents. Serendipitously, an embedded Fox TV News crew comes on the scene and produces a three and half minute video of the ensuing battle that goes viral. Bravo Squad’s eight surviving members become national heroes and are brought home for a triumphant two week celebratory tour. Fountain’s novel narrates the final 24 hours of that tour as our heroes are brought to Texas Stadium for the Cowboys annual Thanksgiving Day football game.

As an example of this book’s capacity for verisimilitude, at one point while reading I actually reached for my laptop to look at the You Tube video of Bravo Company’s heroics. Far more than merely a book about the destructive effects of war, Halftime is an eviscerating snapshot of the hollowness of contemporary American culture. While we may try to fill that void with the inanity of things like football and alcohol and money, the emptiness, author Fountain suggests, is partly what defines us. But this remarkable novel, National Book Award nominee and winner of the Critic’s Circle Award, also reminds us of the capacity for art to lift us above the daily fray and provoke us to reflect upon where we wish to go from here.

Bill Lundgren and Ruby

[Bill Lundgren is a writer and blogger, also a bookseller at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine (“A Fiercely Independent Community Bookstore”).  He keeps a bird named Ruby, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College.]

Episode Five

[To read episode 5, click here][To read Episode 4, click here][To read Episode 3, please click here][To read Episode 2, please click here][To start at the beginning with Episode One, please click here]

Deputy Jerold Day got run off the island on a beautiful spring day, about a month after the pistol-whipping. Since attacking Alex, he’d gotten the cold shoulder from every islander. No one waved at him on the road or acknowledged him at the post office or the store. His kids – a pair of goofy, home-schooled teenage boys – were cruelly mocked and taunted. The worst harassment, however, occurred under the cover of darkness. Someone poisoned the deputy’s geese and threw a bucket of black oil paint on his white truck. Rumors circulated of shots being fired at his house, but no bullet holes were visible.

Fuck You Jerold Day

Everyone knew the deputy was leaving on the next ferry. The sheriff had decided not to replace him. The short-lived law enforcement experiment was over. The deputy spent his last week on Matinicus packing boxes and nailing big sheets of plywood, painted day-glo orange, over his windows, turning his blue house into a tantalizing target for potential drive-bys. His wife and kids had already left, taking the mail plane to the mainland to find a new place to live.

On the morning of the ferry’s visit, a bunch of us gathered for a going-away party at Benny and Paul’s fishhouse, which had a bird’s eye view of the Steamboat Wharf, a couple hundred feet away. The guest of honor, of course, was not invited due to the weed and booze. He was busy, anyway. When the ferry arrived, minutes before high tide, the deputy jumped aboard and climbed into the cab of a large U-haul, first in line for disembarking. When the ramp came down, the truck raced off. His wife and kids, who’d taken the ferry from Rockland, were crammed in the front seat alongside him. The truck bounced and sped to their house in the center of the island.

“Better hurry, you sonofabitch, better hurry,” slurred Brenda, Alex’s 40-year-old mom, already three-quarters drunk on coffee brandy. “Less than an hour to pack that big friggin’ truck.” She laughed. “Tides and ferry don’t wait for nobody.”

“I almost hope the bastard misses the boat,” said Pierre, Alex’s step dad. “Jeezum Christ, imagine the friggin’ late fees if that truck stays on the island for an extra month.” The ferry visited Matinicus monthly, except during the three darkest months of winter, when it didn’t come at all.

“I just want the motherfucker gone,” Brenda said, shaking her head. “Asshole.”

“Imagine the friggin’ late fees…”

The party continued. We all drank and smoked and got higher and higher, watching the ferry, wondering if the Deputy was gonna return in time. He made it with a couple minutes to spare. The whole family climbed out of the truck and lined up against a gunwale for a final look at the island. Standing on Benny and Paul’s roof deck, I watched them through binoculars. I could see the relief on their faces.

The party grew louder and louder. There was raucous hooting as Brenda and Pierre unfurled a banner. Pierre, in his role as a selectman, called assessors on the island, had the only personal computer on Matinicus; the banner was made with a dot-matrix printer on an eight-foot-long piece of tractor-fed paper. It read: “Fuck you, Jerold Day!”

“Fuck you, Jerold Day!” the crowd screamed in unison. “Jerold Day, FUCK YOU!” A song, almost.

I took another look at the deputy and his family through the binocs. They seemed puzzled. From their vantage point, the banner was too puny to read. They couldn’t see the many middle fingers, or the lone moon from a fat, drunk islander, either. And the rumble of the ferry’s diesel engines muted our chant.

The ferry left and the party broke up soon after. Not even noon and everybody was hammered. Now that the deputy was gone, the buzz seemed wasted and anticlimactic. And while Matinicus was cleared of cops, it wasn’t like all hell broke loose. Just no one gave a damn about herb or drunk driving or car registrations. The summer came without a bit of drama.

The police stayed away. Word was, they were scared.

Ironically, many years later, Alex purchased the house where the deputy pistol-whipped him.

Next Episode: Crash gets Cougared

As a young sternman, Crash Barry helped chant “Fuck You Jerold Day!” These days, he lives near a marijuana grove in the foothills of western Maine. His column One Maniac’s Meat appears monthly in The Bollard, and details his exploits as a sailor in the U.S. Coast Guard fighting the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Haitian Refugees.” His rollicking novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries and the complete version of Tough Island are available at Maine bookstores and libraries or via crashbarry.com or on Amazon. His latest book Marijuana Valley, Maine: A True Story will be published this fall. Crash is currently blogging about turning a novel into a film at crashbarry.com.

IN REVERSE ORDER…….

NUMBER 10: JOHN MUIR

(Here’s the link to where this photo orginally appeared.)

NUMBER 9: RACHEL CARSON

The “come hither” look that sold a million books (and helped outlaw DDT).

NUMBER 8: HENRY “BIG DADDY” THOREAU

Just because he never had sex doesn’t mean he wasn’t sexy.

NUMBER 7:  WILLIAM LEAST HEAT MOON

Those who know, call him “Most Heat” Moon.

NUMBER 6: VIRGIL

The original beefcake.

NUMBER 5: ALDO LEOPOLD

Everyone knows about his land ethic, but few have heard of his secret “sex ethic.”

NUMBER 4: ED ABBEY

Number 1 on our list of horniest nature writers.

NUMBER 3: TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

Saving the West, and lookin’ good doing it.

 NUMBER 2:  GARY SYNDER

“Hey, Baby, want to come back to my Tepee?”

AND NUMBER 1, WHO ELSE BUT ANNIE DILLARD?

 Thanks, Dave!

An Early Draft

Here’s a test exercise to invoke as you’re writing a book or story, a play or essay, really anything: flip to any page thereof and declare any paragraph or scene you find there the first paragraph or scene of the work in hand.  And read as if it were.  Read it aloud.  Does it rise to the occasion?  It should.  Does it inspire a new way of thinking about your material or story?  It might.  Does it seem to cast a different character or idea or storyline in a newly leading role?  Think about that (all of our characters are the stars of their own stories).  Is the voice and timbre and delivery and energy and interest and draw and promise everything the original start was?  The current finish?  It better be.  No room for slacking anywhere, never.  Every paragraph (or scene) should be rich enough to be the first.  Repeat.

Jane Austen

I bring this up because so many books flag in the middle, only to revive long enough to deliver an ending.  Others poop out altogether, DOA.  It’s an easy case to make, that your opening and ending should be sharp and commanding.  But why should the standard for any other paragraphs be less demanding?

Let’s try this with Pride and Predjudice, on the bet that most of you have read it and know the actual first paragraph well (young man with a fortune, etc., etc).

So, opening randomly, I find the start of Chapter 25 (and startlingly, my mother’s elegant handwriting in this old edition, a cryptic and pointed notation: “Bennet needlesome.”):  “After a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity, Mr. Collins was called from his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of Saturday.”

I’d say that promises a story!  While in fact, Austen is in the midst of delivering one.

From The Call of the Wild, about halfway in:  “By the time Cassiar Bar was reached, he was so weak that he was falling repeatedly in the traces.  The Scotch half-breed called a halt and took him out of the team, making the next dog, Sol-leks, fast to the sled.  His intention was to rest Dave, letting him run free behind the sled.  Sick as he was, Dave resented being taken out, grunting and growling while the traces were unfastened, and whimpering broken-heartedly when he saw Sol-leks in the position he had held and served so long.  For the pride of trace and trail was his; and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.”

Right?  That could start a book or a story, full excitement.  Jack London, halfway in, is still delivering a plot, but adding fresh knowledge and deepening character.  Plus, the dying dog’s name is Dave.  Just saying.

And how about a quieter novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson?  Oh, page 66, since that was the page I happened to turn to in the much shorter The Call of the Wild.

“This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success.  I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven.  I could never have imagined the world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it.  People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough.  But children think they will grown into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.  That’s clearer to me every day.  Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable.  What of me will I still have?  Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion.  Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path.”

Whoa.  Even contemplative as it is, that could be the first paragraph of a great novel for sure (it promises so much, delivers so much character), and yet it’s just an odd paragraph in the middle of a section in the middle of a chapter in the middle of a book.

Now mine your own bookshelves.

Later, turn to your own work.  What’s happening on page 66?  And on all the others?  And why should it be any less riveting than what happens in paragraph one?

#

Bill Roorbach has been somewhat adrift since the end of his book tour, to be found in his garden or in his woods, more and less confused about what do to next.  He learned to type in high school during a bout of pneumonia, when his mother brought him tea and Ruth Ben’Ari’s typing manual, saying: “You might as well learn to type if you’re going to miss school for two weeks.”  Proudly, he typed the passages above without looking at the keyboard, and making only a few mistakes.  But who knew in 1969 that we’d all have computers in our laps before long, and that carbon paper would be extinct, and that you, gentle reader, would see these words minutes after they were written, all around the world?

Jim Harrison

As readers we all have our favorites–authors whose work seems to speak directly to us and resonate in our very bones. For me Jim Harrison is one of those writers and now we are graced with a new collection of novellas, The River Swimmer, that further enhances Harrison’s legacy as a writer with “immortality in him.”

The River Swimmer consists of two novellas, a literary form that Harrison has almost single-handedly resuscitated since the publication of Legends of the Fall in 1979, and it renews Harrison’s obsessions with the themes of food, lust/love, art/literature and a connection with and appreciation of the natural world. The opening story, “The Land of Unlikeness” tells the story of an academic returning home to the familiar environs (for Harrison fans) of the upper peninsula of Michigan to care for his ailing mother. Clive’s Ivy League life in academia has been a success but he has always regretted his early failure as a painter. The journey home becomes an opportunity to reassess his life and eventually to send away for painting supplies and begin anew. For as Clive’s sister reminds him, “No one gets over anything.”

The title story recounts the fantastical adventures of a young man with an obsession for water. Among his exploits is an epic swim across Lake Michigan and an encounter with otherworldly creatures. Though uncharacteristically sloppy, the story reaffirms Harrison’s insistence that we pay heed to the physical world surrounding us or suffer the inevitable consequences of our ignorance.

In his wonderful review of The River Swimmer in the NY Times, Dwight Garner offers the following counsel as found in “The Land of Unlikeness”:

1. get outside as often as possible, ideally right now.

2. take your meals seriously.

3. keep your libido stoked.

4. have a sense of humor about yourself.

5. read good books.

6. scorn snobs and greedheads.

7. live the examined life.

Sorta says it all, wouldn’t you agree? Happy reading.

Bill Lundgren and Ruby

[Bill Lundgren is a writer and blogger, also a bookseller at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine (“A Fiercely Independent Community Bookstore”).  He keeps a bird named Ruby, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College.]