Waiting for the Toad

One of the more pleasant of my many duties at the University of Central Arkansas is to serve as Associate Editor of Toad Suck Review, our national--and international--literary magazine.  (The journal is named after a place in central Arkansas, but we publish writers from everywhere.)  It's an especially pleasant time now as we read over and put final edits on the latest issue we have assembled, our third.   As I see all at once what took chief editor Mark Spitzer and me many months to put together piece by piece, I cannot help but feel proud.  I am struck by the quality and daring of the work, a solid portion of which came to us in our gmail inbox from writers we had never heard of.  Little miracles just delivered to us out of the blue.  It's one of the most exciting aspects of working on a literary journal.  Some of these writers are Arkansans, but most of them are not.  Most have never visited our state; some have never visited our country.  Yet as I look over the magazine I see that in every genre we publish--eco-literature, Arkana, short fiction, poetry, translations, criticism--sterling work came to us from these previously unknown sources.  Just as a small example of what I mean I offer you a taste of Georgian poet Zviad Ratiani, whose lyrical, existentialist musings were sent to us by his translators, Dailila Gogia and Timothy Kercher:

     And take me now to Rome, I say to my life,
     my snickering life.

     I suppose I couldn't quite believe that the world really existed,
     that those countries, cities, waterfalls, islands,
     really existed,

    so, when I found myself somewhere I'd never been before
    for the first, second, third times,
    I felt altogether embarrassed, disappointed,

    disappointed with both the world and myself,
    yet more with the world since I had expected more of it,
    while it turned out to be what and only as
    it should have been.  That is,
    besides being real.

Imagine just finding that one day in your inbox.  TSR debuts at the AWP Conference in March, and I feel confident that it will grab its fair share of well-deserved attention, if for the cover alone, which is the brainchild and masterwork of our mad genius Mr. Spitzer.   But I won't say anything more about that.  You'll just have to wait to see it in March.   For now, I'll say that we really like what we've put together for our readers, and we are eager to to show it to you.

Lagniappe 1:  I had a lot of fun participating in The Pinch magazine launch party reading last Saturday. They are good people, and it's a great journal.  It was an especially rewarding event for being able to catch up with two formers students who have settled in the Memphis area and were kind enough to come out to hear me read.  Thanks to managing editor Chris Moyer for inviting me to participate--and to submit in the first place.  When he introduced me on Saturday, Chris told the crowd that when he tweeted about my participation in the event, what he heard back was, "Is he performing live?" "Yes," he responded, "and no cover charge!"  Once again, I am mistaken for John Vanderslice, the west coast indie rock singer. (I'll have to meet this guy one day.)  As I told the group on Saturday, if they ever heard me sing, they'd gladly pay a cover charge to get me to stop.

Speaking of singers, the drive over to Memphis gave me the opportunity to listen (again) to Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1 by Jackson Browne.  The CD was released in 2005, but I only bought it in October.  Since then I've been listening to it compulsively.  Can't seem to get enough of these hauntingly stripped down versions of some of his more familiar songs.  Coming back to Arkansas, however, I had to put the dang thing away.  Too soulful!  I needed to stay awake! 

Lagniappe 2: Like many others, I am mourning the loss of Isaiah Sheffer, the founder and artistic director of public radio's Selected Shorts program.  Like thousands of others I was a dedicated fan of the Selected Shorts podcast, and I even had the opportunity to see the program recorded on stage in Chicago several years ago.  I can't count the number of fine writers it has introduced me to, writers I read regularly now and cherish.  Sheffer's life was all about bringing art to as many people as possible, and that is a life well-lived.  You can follow this link to read tributes to him composed by grateful listeners.

Lagniappe 3: You may or may not have noticed that as we approach the American holiday of Thanksgiving, various people on Facebook--that is, Americans--have been putting up daily gratitude posts.  The reception is mixed.  My British friend and colleague Garry Craig Powell,  a self-described "unsentimental, miserable old git" has just about run out of patience with all this gratitude.  Last week he excoriated  Facebookers (all in good fun, of course) for their "mawkish posts about being grateful for Jesus, their wonderful husbands, wives, children, dogs, cats and goldfish."  So far I've refrained from inflicting any of my own gratitude on the Facebook universe, but with Garry's permission I'll say a little something here.  On Wednesday, my family and I will travel to Lowell, Arkansas to celebrate the holiday with my younger brother and his family, and with my mother.  I am quite looking forward to this trip.  It's been a beautiful, but in some ways painful, semester.  It will be good to get away.   Last summer, this same group was assembled at Cobb Island, Maryland for the better part of a week.  At the time, my mother was only a few months removed from finishing up (light) chemotherapy, post-surgical treatment for ampullary cancer.  Her spirits were good, but as a lifelong very active person it was frustrating for her to be hampered by the same old bum hip that had kept her on a cane for almost two years.  For so long she had wanted to get the hip replaced--it was during a doctor's visit to consider the feasibility of the operation that the cancer was discovered--but she could not be sure if or when the doctors would clear her for the procedure.  After all, her body had been put through the very difficult whipple procedure for the cancer and, on top of that, her heart was showing new, mysterious symptoms.  Fast forward four months, my mom's cancer is still gone, her heart is better, and her hip replacement surgery is scheduled for January.  Recovery, she has been told, will not be difficult--nothing like recovering from the whipple surgery--and she is on cloud nine with anticipation.  It should be a fun Thanksgiving, and for that I am very much grateful, if in advance.

International in North Little Rock

For most of the past week, I participated in a terrific short story conference in North Little Rock, Arkansas.  The conference, The International Conference on the Short Story, is the brainchild and baby of Maurice Lee, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Arkansas.  For over twenty years now, it has been held in far flung metropoles like Alcalá de Henares (Spain), Cork (Ireland), Lisbon (Portugal), and Toronto.  This year the conference returned, after a break of several years, to America.  It is one of the most unique literary conferences I have ever been to, for various reasons.  First, it's the only conference I can think of that features presenters and guests that divide equally between writers and scholars.  (And of course some attendees are both writers and scholars.)  One can and does move freely between academic discussions of the story form and ideas on how to teach it to sessions in which superb story writers read from their own work.  Each day the entire conference gathers in the afternoon for a plenary session.  Groups that in many circumstances frown on each other's disciplines and occasionally are at each other's throats, listen to and learn from each other. Unlike a few jam-packed, hyper-rushed, steroids-driven conferences I can think of,  at this conference plenty of time is allowed for coffee and conversation; for cordiality; for getting to know and understand other peoples.   The food is plentiful.  The conversations are thoughtful.  The spirit is genuine.  It became quickly clear how many of the attendees return to this conference time after time; so much so they have become old friends: to themselves and to the conference.

Perhaps the best aspect of the International Conference on the Short Story is the most obvious: its international flavor.  Most literary conferences I attend are entirely, or almost entirely, America-centered.  While America was well respresented in North Little Rock, so too was the rest of the world.  Very good writers, thoughtful teachers, and energetic scholars who I otherwise would never have known about are now names I refuse to forget as well as professional friendships I hope to maintain.  The other day at lunch at the wonderful Starving Artist Cafe I was sitting with a Scotsman who now lives in Australia, a Bosnian who now lives in Sweden, and a South African who nows lives in Ireland.  It was fantastic to hear their life stories and about their creative projects as well as to hear about how creative writing--and creative writing teaching--gets on in their adopted countries.  I learned a great deal in a mere hour of conversation, far more than in the hurry up/eat and run/back to networking lunches I've experienced at other American conferences.  The hightlight reading at Friday's lunch featured a prominent Canadian writer; the highlight reading at Friday's dinner featured a Jamaican writer, an Indian writer, a New Orleans writer, and a New York writer.

I can happily report that I had the pleasure, in a Thursday afternoon session, of introducing not only my friend and colleague Garry Craig Powell but the amazing Xu Xi from Hong Kong.  What Xu read compelled me to purchase Access, her most recent story collection, and to invite her to submit to Toad Suck Review, which I serve as Associate Editor.  I can even more happily report that in my session on Wednesday afternoon, the historical short story I read (one of the Nantucket stories featured in my collection-in-progress, Island Fog) wowed none other than the eminent Robert Olen Butler, who happened to be there to hear the other presenter.  He made the point of telling me afterward how much he had enjoyed the story and asked several energized questions about the collection, which--as I said to a friend--now means I can die happy.

Whatever kind of stories you write, historical or otherwise, I urge you to attend the International Conference on the Short Story when it next gathers in 2014.  (The conference is held every two years.)  Where will it be?  Berlin?  Hong Kong?  Lisbon again?  They have not yet announced the destination, but I guarantee that if you can get there you'll say it was worth it.

The Power of Social Media

You might think it's odd for someone who makes a habit of writing blog posts to wonder at the power of social media. Now, blogging is not quite social media; a blog is about a good deal more than making and maintaining social connections. As blogger Ben Davis said yesterday when he visited my campus for a literary festival featuring Arkansas writers, a blog isn't about keeping a diary of what you did in your day but "sharing your intellectual capital with the world." In fact, that is exactly how I view my own blog. That said, it's undeniable that one benefit of blogging is that you do make social connections, even if those connections are purely internet ones. You can be read, potentially, by anyone anywhere in the world. And you, conversely, are able to read the blogs of anyone else anywhere in the world. It's impossible for that give and take to not render real, direct, personal, and important connections. So it's no surprise that most everyone who blogs also uses Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of other media platforms.

True confession. I've never tweeted in my life. But I'm sure I should and will learn to do so. Because a recent development with my Van Gogh novel has proven to me, if ever I doubted it before, the power of social media. As you know if you read this blog, I recently concluded a mysterious and befuddling relationship with a New York agent who had worked closely with me on preparing my manuscript for publishers. My friend and UCA colleague Robin Becker (the author of the zombie novel Brains) tweeted about my post, sharing a link to it. What do you know, within hours an agent who follows Robin's tweets read my post and contacted me, asking me to send her a query. Of course I did, and at present the manuscript is in her kind, capable hands. I can never scorn Twitter again, which was precisely Robin's reaction when I told her that the agent had contacted me. You are right, Robin. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

So thanks to Robin. And thanks to Twitter. And let's (meaning me) never doubt social media again.

Little lagniappe: Given how nice one writer was to me, I feel I should pass on the good will and suggest that you check out the new blog of my colleague Garry Craig Powell. Garry Craig will soon be publishing a fascinating collection of short stories, called Stoning the Devil with Skylight Press, a British outfit. The book details the lives of both natives and expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates in the early 00s. On Garry Craig's blog, stoningthedevil.wordpress.com, he provides background about the settings for the stories, including pictures he took during his years living in the middle east. Cool stuff. Check it out.

Obstacle course travel, Part Two

So I wandered into the Gare de Lyon, happy to see that there was over an hour before my train left. It wasn't on the board yet, but I didn't expect it to be. All the extant seats were taken, so I meandered for a bit; then, sick of being overburdened with the bags, I just stopped and leaned against a pole for a while. Finally, a little spooked after the earlier mishaps, I decided to show my tickets to the woman at the information booth. Were these okay? See, reader, I'd bought them over here, weeks before I left, from an outfit called Rail Europe. Everything written on the ticket was in English and the price was in dollars not euros. I didn't want anyone to tell me the tickets were no good, not valid, just as I tried to step on the train and when it was too late to catch another one. I needed to get to Arles before 5:00 in order to pick up a rental car I reserved. And the rental car agency wasn't even in the train station. (A whole other story that.) So I actually needed to get to Arles well before 5:00 to get a cab to the rental car place before they closed. From previous trips abroad I knew that if a business says it is closing at 5:00, it is closing at 5:00, if not sooner. And if I didn't get my rental car, things were hairy, because I had no other way to travel the six miles to my rental house, to say nothing of carrying the groceries I hoped to buy on the way. In short, I had to catch the train I was booked on out of Paris.

I'd already encountered difficulties when I tried to get the tickets through Rail Europe. When I simply requested a reservation for Paris to Arles, the system showed me the route: TGV (high speed)train from Paris to Lyon, regular train from Lyon to Arles. Except that on the day I needed to leave Paris there were no seats available on a morning train to Lyon. It turned out that the day I was travelling was among the busiest travel days in the whole year in France, as it came at the end of a long holiday weekend (to celebrate the anniversary of the end of WW II). The first available seat was on an afternoon train. And that was too late to get me into Arles before 5:00. I cursed my luck--and myself for delaying buying my tickets--and raved (sort of) to my friend Garry Craig Powell, who shared an office right across from mine in Thompson Hall. Garry, who has toured the south of France before, suggested I look for a train to Avignon. If you can get to Avignon, you can get to Arles, he said. Sure enough, like magic, I found a TGV to Avignon leaving exactly when I needed it to. I simultaneously bought a one way ticket from Avignon to Arles on the same day, getting me in well in advance of 5:00. (TGV trains that could carry me non-stop from Arles to Paris for the return trip were readily available.) How come, I wondered, was Rail Europe so fixed on the Paris to Lyon route? (Reader, if you're smelling the scent of a looming problem, you're astute.)

The woman at the information booth in the Gare de Lyon scrutinized my tickets for a moment as my heart pounded and then pronounced them satisfactory. But you want to wait upstairs, she said. Upstairs? She pointed to a stairway nearby. Okey doke. I lugged my luggage up the stairway; when I reached the top and saw the upper floor of the Gare de Lyon, I had a comforting realization. I had been here before. While teaching for UCA in a summer-in-Holland program in 2001, me and my family had traveled to Paris for a school-sponsored "field trip." This was the station we had come into to and left out of. Now, it felt like an old friend. I moved to the waiting area, sat down, happy again to remove again the burden of all that damned luggage. On a nearby board, track assignments flashed, but only ten minutes or so before the departure time for each train. That was certainly cutting it close, but I figured I was okay. I could see all the tracks before me, lettered from A to I. No matter which track it was, I could be there in a minute. I waited and watched with amusement as employees of the national rail system rushed to meet a just arrived train, in joyful guerrilla style, hooting and shouting and clapping, even doing a spontaneous Wave as people exiited. Who are they cheering for, I wondered, and then I realized: no one, or, that is, everyone. It was a promotional stunt, a feel-good thing. The exiting passengers looked bemused momentarily, then laughed, getting the joke. The rail employees--they were likely hired just for this gig, because they roved the station with the enthusiasm and smart alecky self-possession of an acting troupe--wore t-shirts promoting train travel. This too amused me, because I didn't see the necessity. It wasn't like the French were going to stop taking trains anytime soon, and it's a nationalized rail system. It's not competing with any other. This promotional stunt was akin to the US Post Office running commercials at Christmas, advertising their services. So what, people rightly asked, the Post Office thinks it doesn't get enough business at Christmas already?

I had just about lost interest with the "players" when I saw my train's track designation flash on the board: 7. Seven? Where the *#*%* was track seven? I looked at the tracks before me once again: A through I. Meanwhile, with the announcement, a whole crowd of travelers surged to my right. With nothing else to do, and panicking again (was nothing going to go smoothly on this day?) I followed. I stopped to check a big station map and thought I made out where track seven might be. In pidgin French, I asked a Frenchmen nearby if I had my bearings straight, and I believe he answered in the affirmative. I didn't really have time to figure out, though, because the clock was ticking. My train--the train I had to be on--was leaving this station in under ten minutes and I still didn't know exactly where I was going. I went where I thought I should, moving as fast as I could with my luggage, flowing with a crowd of other travelers I could only hope had the south as their final destination. Sure enough, shortly after, I saw a whole other row of tracks, perhaps 15 in all, these all bearing numbers. I found track 7 and the the train. I saw travelers stopping to run their tickets underneath some machine. What for, I had no idea. Did I need to do that? Would my Rail Europe tickets even get "read"? I decided to ignore the machines and move for my car. Minutes later, my huge suitcase was stored in a luggage compartment inside, and I was sitting in a comfortable seat, my laptop and backpack at my feet. I was here. I'd made it. All I had to do now was just ride. In an hour and a half I would be in Avignon. I had a comfortable layover there, close to two hours, with the Avignon to Arles trip then taking only 25 minutes. I would make it. I'd get there. As the train rolled out of the station, out of Paris, and--in a shockingly short time--into the beautiful countryside and small communities beyond the edge of the city, I relaxed for the first real time that day. Sunlight broke through the clouds once in a while, sending stiff, wide rays across a landscape that could have been right out of an Impressionist painting. I brought out one of the novels I'd carried across the Atlantic--Rick Moody's The Diviners--and tried to read, but found myself dozing. I hadn't slept well in Paris--I never do when I'm just off a transatlantic flight--and the accumulated weight of exhaustion, combined with the frantic scrambles of a day that wasn't half over but had already unnerved me, was overpowering my brain. Go ahead and doze, I said to myself. You've got 90 minutes before Avignon. And from there the rest of the day is gravy. Go ahead. You're clear now.

Oh no, I wasn't.

(Tomorrow: Will I ever make it to Arles?)

The First Unveiling

I took my novel on the road this weekend when I attended, and read at, the annual conference of the Arkansas Philological Association. This group puts on a comfortable and very welcoming get together every year in some lovely regional locations. This year the gathering was held in the grand old Ozarks mountain town of Eureka Springs, and given that my novel is just begging to be heard, even if it's still in progress, I jumped on the invitation from Conference Director Chuck Bane to participate in a creative writing session. I did read a tiny bit of the novel to a class of mine about a year ago, but the APA conference was the very first time I'd revealed it in anything approximating a public forum. And it also happened to be the very first time my wife heard it--something I'm a little chagrined to admit, but only a little, because I'm about to dump the entire, and too long, manuscript on her.

As you can imagine, I was rather tense. I've talk about what I'm doing to many people--family, colleagues, students, friends, readers of this blog--but never actually exposed it. But, honestly, what really frazzled me was deciding which scenes to read. This, I've learned, is a whole other level of difficulty from deciding which of one's short stories to read. After all, the novel scenes must effectively represent an entire book. The story needs only be itself. And in my case, it was the first time "out of the house" for this book. Ahhhh! I figured I had time enough (20 mins.) to read two scenes. But which? Good gosh, there are scores of scenes in this book, at least in its current form. How would I decide which two are absolute right two? The day before I left I ran off about ten different scenes and started rehearsing them over and over, trying to figure which two would best strike an audience as well as best fit the time limit and best present the range of characters and perspectives that are in the book. I finally chose to read the scene about the party in Paris attended by Suzanne Valadon (see a previous post) and a scene in which Vincent paints the well known portrait of his Belgian friend Boch. I guess it was a fine enough choice, because I received many compliments afterwards, but what interested me most about the whole experience was realizing once again how much you learn about your own writing by reading it aloud. I know, I know, this is a very old and boring truth. It doesn't sound like a revelation. In fact, I tell it to my own students all the time, but this weekend I learned that I can afford to be reminded of it myself. After all, I thought these scenes were fairly polished already, and yet I found myself--as I practiced reading them--slashing through them with pen: cutting words, cutting more words, cutting more words, changing words, inserting other words, changing names, attacking whole paragraphs. Whew! I put those suckers through the wringer. How could I have not realized before how much additional editing they needed?

Garry Craig Powell, a great writer and a good friend of mine in the Writing Department at UCA, told me last spring that the most valuable thing he did when revising his own novel was to read a chapter of it aloud every night to his girlfriend. Not only because she is his best critic but because by reading aloud he learned so well what worked in the sentences and what simply didn't. At the time I told him that I understood what he meant--because I did--but now I really understand. And now my wife has not only a mammoth manuscript to wade through but will be forced to listen to it every night as I start a new phase of revision: reading the entire thing aloud. Thanks Garry, thanks APA, and thanks Chuck Bane. You've already made my book a lot better.

Quick note: I received a lovely note from the poet Anne Whitehouse, who has published a poem called "Van Gogh in Arles." Click on the title to get to the poem. As I told Anne, she's really captured well the physicality of Van Gogh's attraction to the landscape of the region. Anne's poem reminds us too how this once utterly unknown painter has so captivated the imaginations of myriad literary artists. I know he did mine. That's something of a miracle, as are his paintings.