My book's been out for awhile, so I wanted to post some of my favorite reviews before they vanish from the web entirely.. This one below came from Tad Simons, the art critic at Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine: The Best of the Twin Cities. The review came out months after the book was print and was a wonderful surprise. The other book feaured is Warren Read's The Lyncher in Me, which I still look forward to reading.

http://www.mspmag.com/entertainment/books/103400.asp?action=print

Hang Time

Two of the most notorious incidents in Minnesota history provide the backdrop for books that grapple with our collective shame in very different ways.
April 2008
By Tad Simons

When it comes to lynchings, Minnesota does not have a stellar record. More than a few times in our state’s history people have opted for the expedience of the rope over the plodding rule of law, and each time it has happened, whether the motive was to hang a few black men or rid the prairie of Indians, a wave of shame and guilt has rippled through Minnesota’s collective conscience.

Minnesotans are good people by and large, not given to bursts of vengeance, but these tragedies are part of our legacy, and though we might wish otherwise, all of us share the responsibility for making sure such things never happen again. One of the ways we do this is by continuing to tell the stories of these unfortunate events; or, as two Minnesota– bred authors have done in their new books (one fiction, the other nonfiction), tell the story behind the story.

Thomas Maltman’s novel, The Night Birds, is set in the prairie outside of New Ulm in the decades before and after the infamous 1862 Dakota uprising, which resulted in the massacre of scores of white settlers and the subsequent hanging in Mankato, after a hasty tribunal, of thirty-eight Indians and sympathizers—an event that still holds the United States record for number of people executed simultaneously in one day. Though the massacre is central to the tale, Maltman wisely lets the horror of that day burble in the background, creating a slow, seething tension that builds for nearly 300 pages before he even mentions it.

In the meantime, the narrative shifts back and forth between 1876 and the late 1850s, telling the story of a German immigrant family that settles in a valley outside of New Ulm, across the river from a band of Dakota Indians. Through much delicate and beautiful writing, the saga of the Senger family unfolds and their relationship with the tribe of Indians on the other side of river grows more complicated. The children play with each other and occasionally fight; the adults have an uneasy but respectful friendship; and when push comes to shove—when one or the other is sick or in need of assistance—they act like neighbors and help each other out in order to survive. But they are not the same. Both sides know it, and their differences eventually lead to bloodshed.

There is nothing didactic or cloying about The Night Birds; it is simply a first-rate tale of historical fiction that rings true with every word, amplifying one of the most horrific episodes in our history without exploiting or sensationalizing it. However, Warren Read takes a far more personal and confrontational approach to history in his memoir, The Lyncher in Me: A Search for Redemption in the Face of History.

During a random Google search, Warren Read discovered an awful truth: That his great-grandfather, Louis Dondino, was the man responsible for inciting the riot that led to the infamous Duluth lynching in 1920 of three black circus workers accused of raping a white girl. Starting with the seed of this unsettling fact, Read does a brilliant job of showing how his grandfather’s shameful legacy (the men were later proven innocent) was not an isolated event, but rather part of a pattern of violence and bigotry that extended through the generations to his own abusive, alcoholic father all the way to the present and the hatred Read himself has felt as a once-married man with three kids who is now openly gay.

Read doesn’t just tell his story, though—he attempts to make amends for his family’s ignorance and brutality and in the process fashions a kind of heroic template for how a thoughtful, conscientious person can take active responsibility for their own life, however uncomfortable or inconvenient the facts of one’s life may be. Read can occasionally be faulted for polishing his own halo a little too brightly, but for the most part he presents the facts of his personal life and the back story of the Duluth lynching with unflinching honesty and a great deal of effective, poignant writing on a subject that Minnesotans, try as they might, can’t seem to forget.

The Night Birds, by Thomas Maltman, Soho Press, 2007. 370 pages, $24 The Lyncher in Me: A Search for Redemption in the Face of History, by Warren Read, Borealis Books. 208 pages, $24.95

I am always on the hunt for good books on writing so I gave this one a try based on the recommendation of a good friend. I liked it so much I assigned the book for my fiction workshop last fall and I'm glad to report that students responded well to it, too. I've included some of my favorite quotes below, along with my comments in italics.

Quotes from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird

“Publication is not all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.”

Writing is a lonely business filled with rejection slips and disappointment. For most of us, it just won't pay the bills. Publication does matter, however, but Lamott is right in pointing out that there's more to strive for. We should try to make art with our writing, something lasting and true. We should savor those rare successes, a publication, an award, but the key thing is to keep up with the daily struggle of writing and growing in our craft.

Getting Started

“The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth” (3).

“But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith” (3).

“Flannery O’ Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life” (qtd in Lamott 4).”

“You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively” (6).

I love the Flannery O'Connor quote. I recently had my students complete an activity where they draw the floorplan of the first house they remember living in--an activity inspired by Janet Burroway's great introductory text Imaginative Writing. Once the floorplan is complete they trace the map with their fingers, marking places of special significance. The bathroom mirror where they invoked "Bloody Mary." The spot on the white carpet where they spilled kool-aid. It's always surprising to hear the memories that rise to the surface. We then talk about the O'Connor quote and how each of us has experienced the requisite emotions--sadness, joy, betrayal--the raw working material of good fiction.

Daily Work

“What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you’ll get better” (14).

“It reminds me that all I have to do to is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame…just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her” (18). “E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (qtd in Lamott 18).

I love the idea of the frame. Not everyone can write Stephen King style--2000 words a day. For busy parents, for those who teach, Lamott's idea of a frame is more practical.

First Drafts

“Now practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts” (21).

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people” (28).

“I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out” (30).

“Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth’” (qtd in Lamott 32).

“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is supposed to look like until it has finished developing” (39).

On Character Shaping

“And finally as the picture comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need and who we think we are” (40).

“Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way a Polaroid develops: it takes time for you to know them. One image that helps me begin to know the people in my fiction is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own […] One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in” (44-45)?

“Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one feels, thinks, talks, survives” (46).

“One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t” (47).

“Someone once said to me, ‘I am trying to stay in the now—not the last now, not the next now, this now. Which ‘now’ do your characters dwell in” (48)?

On Hope
“In general, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this” (51).

Plotting Your Work

“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen” (54).

“Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is set-up, buildup, payoff—just like a joke…Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable…The climax is that major event, usually toward the end, that brings all the tunes you have been playing so far into one major chord, after which at least one of your people is profoundly changed” (59-61).

“…which goes ABCDE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what is going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they most care about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean” (62)?

Jim the Boy

I'm ashamed to admit the first time I tried reading this book I put it down. "What a dumb title for a book," my wife said when she saw what I was reading. Last summer, about sixty pages in, I put it away, thinking it too simple and quiet.

But of two of my good writing friends were unwavering in their testimony about this novel, so I picked it up again a few days ago, and I am so glad I did.

Jim the Boy is a wonderful novel, one of those books other writers pass around. It's the kind of book people will still be reading fifty years from now. From the perfect metaphors to the indelible scenes-- a twilight baseball game, a town blazing with new electricity--this novel draws you in to a universal experience. I love the stories of Jim's father, which come second hand through his uncles. I've dogeared passages that I'd like to share with you below.

Compelling Scenes
It's one thing to be a sensory writer, to write in such a way that the reader sees, hears, tastes, touches, or smells the moment we are trying to capture. The hard part is rendering that moment so that it also resonates on a deeper emotional level. Here's Jim, describing what should be a joyous moment, when electricity finally comes to Aliceville:

"Jim climbed up on the steps and looked down onto Aliceville as if he were a prince and the town was his kingdom. Soon he felt weighted by a prince's worries. The brightness of a few lights burning in Aliceville only magnified the darkness that still surrounded the town. The uncles' electric lights drew fragile boundaries around their houses; around those boundaries a blackness crept that suddenly seemed as big and powerful as God. Jim had never noticed the darkness before. He felt on the verge of knowing something that he didn't want to know. He jumped off the steps to be closer to the uncles" (149).

Notice how this moment derives its power. Jim is a "prince," the darkness is "God," or the "unknowable." What could have been a simple image, a town lit up, instead has all of these mythological connotations. It's not what we were expecting and that rendering of the moment, emotionally complex and even contradictory, is what takes our breath away.

Potent Metaphors
"Jim stepped closer to Mr. Carson without realizing it. He had heard every story his mother and uncles had to tell about his father so many times that over the years his father had become less vivid. It was as if each story was a favorite shirt that had been worn and washed and hung in the sun so often that its fabric, while soft and smooth and comfortable, was faded to where its color was only a shadow of what it had once been" (104).

Now that's a rather plain metaphor plucked from a lovely book. It does convey how the telling of familiar stories dims their power over time, rendering them comfortable. And then along comes somebody one day who shakes up how we see things.

Starling Description
Here's Jim viewing his grandfather, the despised Amos, for the first time. "As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out a bed pushed close to the window. In the center of the bed lay an old man, naked except for a sheet bunched around his waist. His body appeared to be constructed of sharp sticks, covered with the gray paper of a hornets' nest. Yellowed claws twisted from the ends of his fingers and toes. His head lay in a matted nest of long white hair: a bramble of scraggly white beard sprouted on his sunken cheeks. From the dark oval of his mouth came a liquid, metallic rasping. Jim realized in a rush that his grandfather was going to die soon" (222).

This is an old man of the mountains, a whiskey runner who's spent time in jail. I love all the wilderness imagery wrapped up in the description of his body. He almost becomes fairy-tale like, a troll. Through tight observation and startling metaphor the old man becomes otherworldly.

Suspense
And then there's that final bugaboo, the way to keep a reader involved. Notice how the Uncle's telling of a story Jim has never heard before hooks both boy and the reader hovering over the scene...

"Mountain boy like your daddy ain't scared of nothing, Doc. So there they were. They didn't have a gun and the lantern was broke. They didn't have enough pine knots to keep the fire burning all night, and there was the panther stalking them, just waiting for that fire to die out. And the dogs--and these were dogs that would run a bear to ground--were crawling around their ankles, whimpering, scared to death.'

'What did my daddy do then?'

'Well, just as the fire was about to die out, the panther screamed a second time. And it was closer. This time it sounded like it was right there in the light where they were. And then it spoke.'

'It spoke?'

'It spoke. It said, in a woman's voice, 'Help me for I am killed.'

'What happened?' Jim asked. 'What happened then'" (191)?

By writing the scene in dialogue, Tony Earley adds a second layer to the story. The boy's prodding questions add to the urgency. If we were primed for a ghost story, many contemporary readers might roll their eyes, but the way this story is told, in homespun simple dialogue, is chilling. It adds an extra chill knowing how Jim's father died.

These are just a few scenes from a great book. "What happened? What happened then?" That's the question we want our readers asking.

And there is darkness in this story, too. I won't forget Uncle Al shooting those vultures that have come to feed upon horses a farmer killed to keep the bank from taking them. I won't forget Abraham, an African-American, risking his own life to save Jim and a friend after town "roughs" surround them. I won't forget the folklore-tinted story of Jim's father and the "haint" who puts a chill in his heart.

Such scenes, it seems to me, defy summary. I have one final thing to say. If you care about craft, if you care deeply about the human condition, and all the possibilities for goodness that exists in each one of us, then read this book.

Here's the link to my Goodreads review"View'>http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1328495?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.

Imagined Realities

How much of this really happened? At readings and author events this question ranks right up there with the standard where do you get your ideas from? But I’ve been thinking about it recently since my family moved back to Minnesota where we are spending the summer on a small family farm. Last summer, I baled hay with my father-in-law at sundown. There was a rain-cooled wind, a storm on the horizon, and the swallows skimming insects just above the mown hay. We raced to beat the rain and it was a perfectly lovely time. The next day I wrote this idyllic passage about haying for my second book, Little Wolves, a redemptive scene that follows a dark moment in the book. There’s too much else happening in the novel to explain in a short blog entry. Little Wolves is based on a true story of murder and betrayal I heard in a small town we lived in. I’d like to show just a brief page-long passage here and then discuss whether or not it’s realistic. Did I really capture the truth of hard physical labor?

Late afternoon finds them in the hayfields once more, the old man driving a lumbering International tractor that is trailed by a baler and Bear standing on the hayrack. The tractor glints silver; the baler licks up lumps of hay from the green ground and spits out neatly-roped, twenty pound bales that Bear catches and stacks on the hayrack behind him. He has to keep a wide stance as the rack sways over the uneven ground and the bales come without ceasing. Each bale has to be wedged in tight, a mountain of hay that might all come tumbling down if Bear’s aim is not quick and true.

Hay sticks to sweat-streaked skin. Blades of it probe for tender places to make fresh wounds. He breathes in the tractor’s exhaust and dust and bugs kicked up from the fields.

And yet it is beautiful to be with the old man in the hot sundown. Swallows dip and dive around him, hunting insects the tractor stirs up from the soil. The fields shine emerald in the fading light. From this upper meadow, they have a view of the river valley and the old man is turning now to point toward the west where black clouds are flexing into thunderheads. They will have to hurry before rain comes. If the hay gets soaked, it will mold and rot and all their hard work will be for nothing. The wind already carries the sweet smell of wet. A shadow from a chicken hawk passes over the field and chases away the swallows. Bear takes the bales and forms neat square stacks while Seth kicks the tractor into a higher gear. They work in wordless rhythm, moving faster to beat the rain, the old man’s focus on maneuvering the tractor in tight turns, Bear yanking out bales and tossing and stacking.

Then the work is done and Bear rides down the hill standing atop his lurching hay mound, sapped but triumphant. From his perch, twenty feet above the mowed ground, he can see Aden’s Landing on the other side of the valley and the copper glitter of the river, and beyond it the rim of the world itself, turning black now with storm.

There’s more to this scene as the storm unleashes itself and Bear fights wind and rain to get a tarp stretched over the rack in time to save the hay. Did I capture the truth of the moment, what it’s really like to bale hay? It’s easy to sentimentalize physical labor. Think about it. Writers spend all day in dark basement rooms fighting off carpal tunnel syndrome while working on stories, poems, and chapters and sometimes at the end of the day they throw all that work away! There’s something deeply satisfying about the outdoor life, about working with your hands. But since writing that scene I’ve baled many racks of hay and alfalfa. I’ve climbed into the loft of the barn where the temperature roasts well over a hundred degrees. I’ve been gashed and bled and drained and inhaled so much alfalfa chaff that even my teeth went green.

Is it true? Is it a realistic scene? Would I write it differently after coming to know the labor of haying so much better this summer?

No. I don’t think I could change that moment in the book. It has to happen. Our work shapes and changes us and sometimes, and if we are very lucky, even a hardship can make us into a better human being. Some moments in our life are transcendent and sometimes these moments happen even while doing ordinary jobs.

Guru and the Initiate

Guru and the Geek

Over winter break, I rediscovered an old favorite in John Gardner. Three decades after its publication, The Art of Fiction remains a staple in creative writing courses across the country. Let me say this from this outset, Gardner is a snob, and his elitism colors his works. What can you say about somebody who dismisses Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, one of the truly great American novels, as mere melodrama? Worse, Gardner often attacks female writers, dismissing Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys as “second class.” It’s no accident that he exclusively uses the pronoun “he” when referring to the “writer” in his work.

Prejudice aside, Gardner is also a genius and a wise guide for any initiate seeking to understand the art of storytelling. His tragic death in a motorcycle accident deprived the world of great teacher and writer. In preparation for the fiction workshop I’m teaching this semester at Silver Lake College, I reread Art of Fiction and also discovered one of Gardner’s lesser known works, On Becoming a Novelist. In this post, we’ll take a good look at the first section of this book. Later posts will cover parts II and III.

On Lyricism

“Though there are exceptions, as a rule the good novelist does not worry primarily about linguistic brilliance—at least not the showy, immediately obvious kind—but instead worries about telling his story in a moving way, making the reader laugh or cry or endure suspense, whatever it is that this particular story, told at its best, will incline the reader to do” (5).

Gardner is a big believer in what he calls the “vivid, continuous dream.” It is the creation of this dream, the shaping of a believable world, that he concerns himself with above all, and anything that interferes with the dream must be discarded.

But I wonder what Gardner would say about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road winning the Pulitzer Prize? McCarthy is a stylist and a poet. Language crackles within every sentence and the rules of semantics and syntax are suspended in the telling of his stories. For McCarthy “linguistic brilliance” walks hand-in-hand with suspense and story. When I consider The Road, I think what makes it McCarthy’s greatest work is that he tames his prose and instead hones in on an emotionally harrowing tale, the journey of one father and son trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. Linguistic fireworks take a backseat, and the result is every bit as “moving” as Gardner commands a story to be. “Shakespeare fits language to its speaker and occasion, as the best writers always do,” Gardner points out later, seeming to contradict himself, until he adds that “[in] the work of Shakespeare language always serves character and action” (10).

Exercises for the workshop

Throughout Becoming Gardner does provide exercises to dramatize his points. As an instructor of workshops, I was particularly struck with the idea to have students perform a “psychodrama” before the class. The actors play the parts of a psychologist, a harried mother, a druggie son. The rest of the class takes notes and describes what they witness. Afterwards, the workshop discusses what students noticed or failed to notice about non-verbal signals in the actors. It’s worth a shot. Some other ideas:

--Write an authentic sentence four pages long (do not cheat by using colons and semicolons that are really periods).
--Write a two-or three-page passage of successful prose (that is prose that
is not annoying or distracting) entirely in short sentences.
--Write a brief incident in five completely different styles—such an incident as: A man gets off a bus, stumbles, and looks over and sees a women, smiling. (16)

In this same section Gardner also advises a writer to work on improving word power by “systematically copying from your dictionary all the relatively short, relatively common words that you would not ordinarily think to use…and then making an effort to use them naturally.” I see echoes of the simplicity and minimalism of Raymond Carver (a disciple of Gardner) in this advice. Aside from the dictionary, Gardner also advises beginning writers to copy, by hand or word processor, great works like James Joyce’s "The Dead." I haven’t done this yet, but I know Francine Prose has similar advice in another book I’m reading right now, How to Read Like a Writer.

Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist is largely about “what makes a writer a writer.” The entire first section is dedicated to describing what Gardner terms the defining characteristics of a writer: “verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, intelligence,” and most of all “daemonic compulsiveness.”

There are no shortage of books on writing being published every year, but as a friend points out, many of those books quote from Gardner, or borrow indirectly from his work. Here’s his definition of a story, for example: “A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts) and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw” (54). I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen similar definitions in other works. If you are looking for a guide on writing, I suggest starting with Gardner. Shrug away his priggishness, as you would a ranting professor, who is a little touched. There is genius in his writing.

Up and Away

A friend of mine scored me a galley of Amy Bloom’s forthcoming novel, Away. The novel is a model of compression—at 236 pages it reads like a much vaster story. Those pages contain a mother’s migration from Russia after her family was massacred during a pogrom, to New York where she takes up life as a seamstress and mistress of two Yiddish actors, onward to Seattle and the Yukon, as she undertakes an epic journey to Siberia where she has heard the daughter who haunts her dreams and nightmares is still alive.

This is a bawdy story, a carnal little tale, since Lillian, the protagonist, will sell everything she has to see her daughter again and this often means selling herself. Still, this is a book that will be around a long time and has much to offer any disciple of the craft. I’d like to explore a few principles of the creative process and focus on what Amy Bloom has to teach us with her splendid novel.

Forward Momentum
On a basic level, any good story must create in the reader a desire to want to know what happens next. Bloom has a knack for the perfect, chapter ending. Here’s the final sentence of the first chapter: “She has gone on, she has traveled through a terrible darkness and come upon Jerusalem surrounded, Jerusalem saved.” In this chapter, we witness the horrifying, dreamlike massacre of her family and also Lillian’s plucky determination in the New World, after she latches onto the Burnsteins who offer wealth and hope to an exile. Bloom’s final sentence is a poetic summary that also propels us deeper into the story.

The Perfect Detail
“Lillian takes a deep breath to calm herself, and she smells her mother beside her, perspiration and green onion and the singed, nutty scent of buckwheat groats tossed from one side of the skillet to the other in a perfect, nonchalant arc.”
Lovely, isn’t it? I've never eaten groats, but I can sure see that arc and smell the buckwheat! One single telling image transports us to another time and places us in a deeply sensual moment. Do you believe this story? How you can doubt when the details are so perfectly chosen? This is what art does.

Extended Metaphor
When a cousin brings the news that Lillian’s daughter is still alive, Bloom slows down and pays close attention to the emotional resonance of the moment. Here’s her describing what’s happening to the icy landscape inside Lillian:

“Sophie’s name is a match to dry wood. Ice is sluicing down Lillian now, running off her in sheets. Trees of fire are falling across a frozen field, brilliant orange, blue-tipped and inextinguishable; fire leaps from the crown of one tree to another, until the treetops send waves of fire back and forth between them, tossing flames like kites. Lillian’s hands are bleeding fire, her hands and feet rippling with it. Hawks and sparrows drop down from a blackened sky. Lillian’s face hurts. She stands in front of the window, her wrapper open, and presses her face and body against the cold glass. She has clawed four dark red scratches on her cheeks, and she will have them for weeks and the fire will not go out.
Alive. Not dead.”

This is rich prose, one long extended metaphor that carries the reader into a frightening interior landscape. Rich prose has the pitch and cadence of poetry. Look at all those short sentences, packed with tight details. I am haunted by those hawks falling out the sky. A truly awe-inspiring paragraph that is a doorway into emotion while never crossing over into sentimentality. Despite the length of the extended metaphor, it does not feel extravagant. Bloom shows here how to open up a moment in time using figurative language.

Time and Compression
Part of the sprawl in this short novel comes from the masterful way Bloom moves back and forth in time. While the story is almost always tightly focused on fully rounded scenes, occasionally Bloom will take a great leap, such as here: “Later it will seem to Lillian that only Yaakov Shimmelman was truly her friend and everything he recommended or encouraged or suggested pointed her toward death.” Bloom doesn’t give anything away with this sentence, while still projecting us into the future. Even minor characters take on the flesh and blood of real people, because even as Lillian’s life touches theirs and then moves on, Bloom takes the time to describe what will happen to each of them after Lillian is gone. They don’t just vanish never to be seen again. They live and die within this story.

Using Lists to Create a Landscape
“They walk away and it is darker than before. Lillian can see nothing of the country she is passing through. She smells traces of the man’s bay rum and the woman’s attar of roses. Apple orchards, green, red, yellow, brown, and dark plowed fields and muddy grazing cattle, and hoboes ducking through railroad yards and shoeless children in flour sacks waving to the train as it comes ‘round the bend, and clusters of shacks and red silos and large bodies of water whose name Lillian doesn’t know…”

Here, Bloom deviates from the short, punchy sentences, stretching out her lines. We’re on a train, moving quickly, and through this listing, joined by the word “and” a landscape flickers by. Long sentences, paradoxically, move the reader at great speed, as Bloom shows in this passage, all through smell and the focal character's imagination.

I’ll come back later, because there are few other issues I’d like to discuss about this novel. Read it when you get the chance, when you’re done reading The Night Birds!

Now and Zen

Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing is a jolt of energy straight from Mr. Electro himself. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality can’t destroy you,” Ray writes at one point, capturing in a memorable sentence the intensity of our craft. The entire book is hyperbolic and charged with such statements. Ray’s like a kid talking to us with his mouth full of pop rocks and fizzing soda and when you skim away the froth there’s plenty here to sustain any writer.

I met Bradbury about seven years ago at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books where he was signing his newly re-released copy of Farenheit 451. Attending an MFA program was a distant dream then, much less one day writing a novel. I was teaching middle school and lugging around a backpack full of poems, hoping to be discovered. White-haired and Buddha-chinned, Ray was kind to me. I didn’t show him any of my poems, but I did ask him about dealing with rejection. (I was still a few months away from my first acceptance.) Ray could have dismissed me with a wave of his hand. I’m sure, by that point in his career, he’d been approached by thousands of would-be writers, but his response was measured and patient. I left his presence inspired to go on and that’s ultimately the effect I think this hyper little book will have on readers.

Like many others, Ray advocates writing every day, or “[t]aking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive till sunset.” Sometimes the book seems to oversimplify the process. “Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Then shoot him off.” Is it really that easy? With all of our terminology we do have a way of complicating the process of structuring a narrative work.

“In quickness is truth,” Ray says, suggesting the lizard as the totem animal for writers. Ray makes lists, big, brimming lists and from out of these free associations grow his greatest works. Can you recognize this novel from the list that follows? THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON. “And the stories,” Ray writes, describing these lists “began to burst, to explode from those memories, hidden in the nouns, lost in the lists…”

He’s also getting somewhere important when he notes “that is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit that pays off.” Ray advocates reading poetry everyday, noting that even if we don’t understand the words, the sense of them burrows into our brains.

“The most improbable tale,” he writes, “can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands in the middle of events.” There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor here. Like Stephen King, Ray also pushes toward our fascinations, our deepest loves. “I was in love then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and, at last, the red planet, Mars.”

To reveal more would siphon away the kinetic energy of this book. Zen is a collection of essays about his work and writers and fans of Ray can both benefit. If you need a jolt, pick it up and you won’t be disappointed.