Ars Medica, Fall 2011

A young aide in a nursing home believes she can rescue a patient after another aide’s harsh restraint–but she must face her own revulsion and rage in order to offer the compassion she intends.

- Do ask everything that pops into your head. Writers have ideas, we let our imaginations crawl into corners and peep into dirty human motivations. The ideas and questions might seem bizarre, but ask. Sellers are not obligated to tell you as much as you think. Write down every little question and write every one in both past and present tense. Write them multiple times in multiples ways–you got this skill. Then send that long list of all the questions in all the tenses by email or hard copy to the seller before you pay for a home inspection. If you ask sellers directly, they have a legal obligation to answer. Demand details. Be as picky with these questions and answers as you would if an editor sent you back a short story to check before publication. Line by line, word by word, comma by comma. E.g. Is there asbestos in the house? Was there ever asbestos in the house? Is the sewer main line clear? Has the sewer main line ever been cleared?

- If the house is older or doesn’t contain any serious renovation–but then, hey, there’s one room or one ceiling or one part of the basement with totally new work, be suspicious. You know sloppy writing, when you or another writer slaps some lazy deus ex machina into a story to fix a major problem. Bad writing is bad writing, and only hard work in the structure of the whole piece can fix it. It’s the same with construction. If it’s out of place, ask when, where, why, and for what purpose. What’s it hiding? What really needs to be done?

- Visit the house at various times of the day and night. Where does the light fall, what are the noises. If you like to write at night with the starry sky, make sure neighbors don’t have a couple outdoor spotlights illuminating a two-acre diameter around their garage. If you like to write in the morning sun, make sure the knot of trees and mildewy arbor vitae drooping over the neighbor’s fence doesn’t block your office–no matter how wonderful it looks on the inside.

- Look up the word “efflorescence.” Know it, inspect for it, avoid it. Or you will spend too much time in your basement fiddling with a dehumidifier and online researching drainage ditches rather than writing.

- Junk is surprising. It always masks more junk. A house with a basement, garage, and shed full of old doorknobs, broken shutters, drippy paint cans, moldy boards, scraps of metal screen, rusty grills, styrofoam planks, and musty tins of nails and screws might be a bargain. But it is also an optical illusion. Under all that crap is more crap. And more crap. And more crap. And several writing weekends lost.

- Even if you hike, garden, camp, or compulsively clean, when you move into a new house–buy a respirator mask for scrubbing and moving. We live in an atmosphere of funk and ozone. Don’t inhale it, don’t act tough. Don’t be afraid of looking like a word dweeb in a mask, too frail for the hard hands-on labor of brooms, mops, rags, chemical cleaners, concrete, cobwebs, and sawdust. Or a good chunk of your writing time might slip away as you loll in bed recuperating from all those nasty bits in your lungs. On the other hand, if you want to enrich your next description of a character struggling for breath, feeling the truth of her tiny mortality and absolute alone-ness with each wheeze, don’t get a mask.

- Use the PennySaver, Craigslist, and the free local papers. Search out free or cheap help the same way you search out free or cheap submission opportunities. People will give you estimates on the strangest jobs–filling, sanding, and staining/polyurethaning all those empty cable and phone line holes left throughout the house. People will happily and with gratitude carry sawed-up old floorboards full of nails out of your house and into theirs. People will battle to pay $20 for a twenty-year-old chest freezer. People will give you stories as they help you with all this housework.

- The old saying “Good fences make good neighbors” depends on the ‘hood you live in. And the type of fence. Sometimes a six-foot solid stockade fence is the best plan, sometimes it gets you ostracized from the random street and sidewalk chatter. Explore your setting and the logic of that world before you make the fence call.

- If you want to be a writer, live life and ask for help with your craft. If you want to be a homeowner, live life and ask for help with the chores and repairs. If you want to be a writer who owns a home, those are your life.

The Rumpus.net, May 2011

“Happy Sometimes”

Yellow Medicine Review, Spring 2011

Barbara asks Thomas to leave her house, so he packs and takes his dog to a friend’s mobile home. Thomas assumes he’ll eventually move back in with her–but she doesn’t call. He focuses on training his dog the same way he learned in prison to train service dogs. And comes to the realization that his work with the dogs is more meaningful than his fantasy of the American dream with Barbara.

If you want to see a true and pure slice of America–America in all its glory of conglomeration, weirdness, exuberance, achievement, and commotion–visit a community college. The word “community” actually means what it says in this case: everyone in the area, from all different backgrounds, in some type of sync for some vaguely shared goal. In this case, formal education. Everyone and anyone.

Last semester, a reticent young woman who moved to western Massachusetts from Cambodia showed a knack for camera work and an interest in digital editing. I was impressed with her audacity–she used a digital still camera to secretly record all of us on our last day of class, made a video with creative cuts and music, and then told us by handing out DVDs.

So I made up my own production company, French Fry Productions. And asked if she wanted to make a video of this semester’s class. It took some negotiating. I think she wanted to believe I was joking. At one point, far into the process, her nephew downloaded a virus onto her laptop; she had to re-format and lose the file. Or at least that was her explanation for the delay…

She made this video with promotion in mind, the promotion of education for people who didn’t think they would go to college. Students who need not only academic preparation, but also cultural initiation. Because college is its own culture, with distinct jargon, conventional practices, accepted creative and intellectual products, and behavior patterns that are passed along. (I remember the pummeling of my own initiation, just a year after my father’s death, 17-years-old at a summer program in Boston. Surrounded by heirs to distinct privilege and bearers of international ambition, I flailed my way through the process of registering, getting syllabi, meeting professors, and walking across the yard to the cafeteria. I learned to cast away my parochial suburban habits–I was self-possessed yet pliable, dominant traits of the striving adolescent.)

I realized after a semester of teaching the “adult transition to college class” that psychological reinforcements help students flourish as well. Most have not had positive experiences with formal education. They harbor deep secret personal anxieties which can be triggered by stress from the unknown and the pressure of college deadlines. Fear of success with its expectations can sabotage as easily as the fear of failure with its despair or simple familiarity. I write prompts on the board like “What are external obstacles to college? What are internal obstacles?” and they brainstorm and we discuss.

The students who stay, those who believe formal education is worth everything or those who come to the decision they will transcend into anything they might become in this world–they develop trust in me and each other, and their willingness allows me to share my own terrors (granted from the safety of my instructor position and advanced degree).

This reciprocity, this soulful contact amidst the daily grind of paperwork, attendance sheets, and repetitive instruction, gives my life such moments of grace.

Night Catches Us is a film, and it blew my mind in all the right ways. Anthony Mackie is on frickin fire. Smoldering intelligent strong righteous sexy fire.  And you’d think after all the attention for The Hurt Locker, he might have pulled a bigger spotlight onto Night Catches Us.

But this film is challenging as well as entertaining. While I consider that the perfect combination, most American moviegoers are not so interested in the challenge part. Especially any challenge about America’s racial history and its insistent legacy. (Most aren’t interested–I’m not being nitpicky or oversensitive. That’s the way it is.)

So while Night Catches Us entertains, it doesn’t pander. It’s about serious themes.  The influence and sting of family. The way our past can be both comfort and baggage. The ability for anyone, given the opportunity, to abuse power.

And most forcefully, it is about the persistence of police violence against black men, the relentless antagonism it stokes, the family rifts it exacerbates, and how black women find ways to manage with it all.

It is so smart. It is deep and intriguing. It is entertaining and contains a mystery that must be uncovered–who snitched?

But Night Catches Us didn’t get the mainstream attention it deserved.

Maybe Winter’s Bone took whatever mainstream attention rough little indie films could chisel away from the sparkling award circuit. (Because both are good films that tell stories of family and our inability to totally ditch it, or its past.)

Maybe Winter’s Bone gathered more attention because it’s about poor white people and their infighting–rather than about politically active black people, their infighting and their fight. Winter’s Bone doesn’t critique the system as much as explore an unseen part of it. Night Catches Us critiques the system while revealing complex layers.

That’s what makes it a film. It can be discussed many times. Weeks later.

For example, I love the director’s use of a Black Panther comic. It isn’t just a comic–it’s a repeating metaphor with the viewer roped in the same way as Iris and Jimmy (two young characters, each impressionable in different ways).  Then the comic comes alive on screen, as it does in their imagination. Planting its seeds. And we, the viewer, believe that the Black Panthers made those drawings of black men with guns going after pigs in cop uniforms.  But the Panthers didn’t. The comics were planted by the Feds.  By COINTELPRO. But we are tricked, like most people were. Then the viewer gets to walk away. However, the black men and women who romanticize that imagery–like Jimmy does–get jailed, hurt, or killed.

Black men and guns is an American issue. It goes back to the 1600s. It goes back to slave laws.  It goes to Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey and Rob Williams. It goes to the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and MOVE, and also to NWA and gangsta rap and Boyz N the Hood.  It goes to the rise of the black cop and Amadou Diallo and thug imagery and The Wire and Hurricane Katrina.

But the issue of black men and guns has been separated from textbooks and from the NRA. Instead we’ve been fed simplistic images, like the COINTELPRO comics and COPS television show. We don’t hear complicated conversations about power, rights, access, confidence vs. pride, the limitations of revolution, and the intransigence of institutional violence. Night Catches Us feeds the viewer these challenges with a big spoonful of suspenseful, entertaining sugar. Tanya Hamilton (writer/director) did this drama right. Raw, passionate, intelligent.

And if you didn’t get everything in this blog, I hope it makes you curious enough to watch the film and re-read my random thoughts.

Franzen appears in all the magazines and at every major New York lit event. His name flits across essays and public radio. The man does not need any more press or publicity.

But I must add this comment: based on Franzen’s two most recent novels, he’s Nicholas Sparks for the over-educated, affluent, white American crowd. Family, love, sex, separation, arguments, humor, and melodramatic moments of reconnection and redemption–packed with just enough college references, alternative careers, advanced vocabulary, and a smidge of loose ends.

He made this move intentionally. Franzen was once a striver for the postmodern set–that was the 1990s. In the 2000s, The Corrections and Freedom maneuvered him to the center of the literary mainstream. He decisively shifted away from writing that used the novel to push and explore language, artistry, and the limits of story. And toward writing that uses the novel to tell traditional stories peppered with conscientiously simplified, unthreatening postmodern tics. It’s like American suburban teenagers running around in Che Guevara t-shirts. They’re wearing a consumer representation of rebellion–they aren’t rebelling. It’s just so much easier than actually rebelling though.

This approach sells more books while still attracting critics and literary readers, who demand the appearance of intellectual challenge within the pleasure of seamless, naturalistic narrative. In Franzen’s own interview patter, he’s become “more interested in story”–a novelist’s way of saying more plot-driven and commercial.

Franzen accelerated down this path during the Oprah Book Club Smackdown of 2001 (no, not the “you betrayed millions of readers” guy–he’s a different media manipulator). Oprah chose The Corrections for her book club. Of course the publisher and Franzen accepted the pick and issued new books with the OBC stamp. Only then did Franzen make some comment about the womanly appeal of Oprah and how he felt uncomfortable with the book club. So Franzen got his name all over the media plus got out of his appearance on the daytime talk show (he would’ve felt so tacky and dirty afterward). Very savvy–popular sales and literary cred all bound into one neat package. (But in 2011, it’s Oprah’s last season. Freedom was chosen as the momentous final book, and Franzen expressed appreciation for the historic acknowledgement.)

I am not arguing against Franzen per se. I’m just saying let’s call it like it is. Franzen has gone the way of Grateful Dead posters, girl power, and Miramax. He’s softened the most radical elements of his fiction for the mainstream–it’s where the audience, income, and speaker fees reside.

I don’t particularly enjoy avant-garde or experimental or postmodern or whatever theorists are calling bizarre fiction these days. (As a teenager, I preferred the Rolling Stones to the Ramones, even though intellectually I understood the value of the Ramones’ art and music.) But I guess I have greater respect for authors who take sincere creative risks. I also have great respect for authors of traditional fiction who are obviously writing from their own authentic artistic place without self-consciousness–like Alice Munro.

All that said about “Franzen the Famous Author”–he is a good writer, has a fabulous head of hair, makes an effort to raise attention for women authors, and does amazing work on behalf of birds and their habitats.