Preparing to Remember

I’ve been saying recently that until I wrote the novel that’s currently floating around to publishers (called The Va-va-va VOOM! but may end up being retitled North Side Girl), I’d never really written about the neighborhood where I grew up.

I was wrong.

I wrote two short stories. One of them was called “Neighborhood,” and the other was called “The Tigers of Wrath” (I think, I don’t have a copy around for me to confirm). I also wrote at least one poem, “Michele Constance,” and maybe a lot more in a book-length batch of poems I’d never dream of inflicting upon you, called Intensive Care Ward.

The poem wasn’t bad. I forget where it was published, but it did get into print (now I remember – it was the magazine Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff edited called Oink!). The stories were probably good, too, or better than I’ve thought they were for a long time. They were pretty much universally rejected, though they received some interesting notes from editors. They were strong stuff. They dealt with revenge and cruelty. They had a very hard edge, and there was really nowhere to place such stories at the time.

The literary magazines and journals were looking for “New Fiction,” which was fiction allegedly all about itself. It was about technique, and cleverness, and blandness, and about being above your material. It was about the authors discovering that fiction was fictional, which was about as profound as discovering that an iceberg is made of frozen water. But it was all the rage, and no one was interested in a story about how the iceberg was going to sink the ship everyone was sailing upon.

The stories were sent to dozens of places. They always came back. I consigned them to the back of my file cabinet until Northern Illinois University asked me if I wanted to contribute some of my papers. They received them, and a number of other stories I couldn’t sell, and I never thought about them again, until now.

You probably wouldn’t like them anyway. A lot of bad things happen in those stories. The language isn’t buffered. The cruelty isn’t cloaked in innuendo. The narrators are sick, though they not sociopaths. They are deeply injured, and they do terrible things. The stories do not absolve them, nor do they allow their narrators to absolve themselves. We see more than the narrators think they are revealing. One might compare them to early Nelson Algren being grafted to early Hubert Selby, Jr. The implicit message was: danger! These people are there. They have wounds we can’t even imagine how to begin to heal.

We see those same wounds today, still festering, still incurable, still unanswered in our culture. And those same wounded people, I humbly submit, are still infecting the culture (or what’s left of our culture).

In way, they were horror stories, but they did not contain the one or two things that would qualify them for the short fiction “horror” markets, so those publications had no interest in them either.

So I wrote that stuff. And it didn’t sell. I moved on and wrote other stuff, because writers don’t give up after a couple of stories. And writers don’t keep on writing the same kind of stories over and over again, do they?

Not that I was going to write that 1970s-era “New Fiction” malarkey, which is still highly praised. Much of it, though, to me reads like a package without a product – an empty container.

At least my packages always contained something, even though when the editors opened them, the contents bit them. My submissions came with return stamped envelopes, and editors were unanimously all too willing to use them.

I do, now, remember one rejection, that came from a college literary journal, and it was sent by one of the assistant editors, one of the first readers, not from any of the “big” editors – big as one can get when the circulation of the publication was no more than 250. It was like once of those comments whispered to you when no one else is looking, one of those comments that begins like, “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but …”

The rejection went on to say, I’m paraphrasing, from memory: This is really good, uncompromising, vivid … but we can never use it at our publication. We haven’t the guts. I hope this story finds a place that does.”

At that time, I was a fairly depressed kid, or young man, stuck in a dead-end job, my academic training unused and apparently unusable. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong world. It wasn’t that I missed the bus – the bus stopped running. I was built for one job – making stories. I didn’t know much about how to make them, but make them was what I had to do. Except – kids from my part of the world weren’t supposed to do those kinds of things. And the world wasn’t ready to break any rules just for me. I was going to be one of those in the multitudes of failures – one of those who may have not failed for lack of ability or determination, but for no good reason at all. Like one of those millions of soldiers in millions of battles in millions of wars – the soldiers who didn’t survive for no other reason than that the bullet went here instead of there.

Rejection slips, the personal ones  – they were these little notes slipped to me that both confirmed and negated my status in a world I chose to live in. You’re good, but it just doesn’t matter. Good we got. Millions more good writers than we’ll ever need. Sorry.

Well. What can you say? I tried to do it right, and what I got was “Sorry.”

The literary landscape faced one way. I faced another. I could try to write the stuff the literary editors liked, but … wasn’t that what my teachers taught me writers do in the “popular fiction” markets? Wasn’t that the thing we were supposed to avoid because we were real, true artists who didn’t pay attention to the beck and call of editors and readers?

So – “literature,” the light of civilization, turns out to be the same sort of marketplace that guides and guards this world with invisible hands.

Not that I’m complaining, or was complaining at the time. All I regretted was that I didn’t receive the memo sooner.

If you’re going to the market, you better bring something someone wants to buy. Eventually, I found something I could sell, and sold it.

But it wasn’t my old neighborhood. It wasn’t the people I knew. It wasn’t all I had grown up with, the things I observed, the feelings and the explicit  expression of those feelings. Nobody wanted to read that shit, so I stopped trying to sell that story – until now.

Maybe this time I’ve figured out how to tell the story. Maybe this time I will find an audience that’s ready to listen.

A Science Fiction Writer's Mantra

Ages since I’ve posted anything here. My apologies.

When last I left this hallowed blog I was about to launch into a memoir of my kindergarten experiences, and how “formal education” can be anathema to learning and creativity and critical thinking and all the other things we hope and expect from our schooling.

And then all these folks posted pieces on their blogs about what they remember a dozen years after 9/11. That started my memory heading in that direction. It turned out that I remembered a hell of a lot, and before I knew it I had a few thousand words that added up in some way, but math was never my strong suit.

The 9/11 recollections reminded me of one of Algis Budys’ best essays in his old “Galaxy Bookshelf” column, written about the days directly after the assassination of Martin Luther King. His conclusions, I thought, were not all that different from some of my own in the days directly after 9/11. I tried to weave the bits of his essay into my own recollections, which was going to take more time than I had anticipated. But then, Budrys’ essay didn’t appear until over a year after the events he was writing about.

And hey – wasn’t I supposed to be doing, like, some real writing? Writing I could get published and paid for?

And in the middle of this muddle, I received an email from Delphyne Woods’ sister-in-law: Delphyne had been discovered dead in her apartment by her landlord. She had been dead for at least a week when discovered.

Everything I was working on went out the window.

Then, I thought about writing a piece about Delphyne. And I couldn’t, not really. I sat down at a little table in the Glenview Public Library and took out a legal pad. What could I say about Delphyne, who I still mostly called Joan, because that was her name when I first met her and what remained her name, for me, even after she had it changed?

Instead, I started working on a scene.

It’s a scene for a story I started back over a decade ago, but since it includes the appearance of several of the saurs I’ve been writing about since “The Measure of All Things,” I’d gone back to it, to help fill out the collection Marty Helpern and I have been hoping to put together.

Looking over the old story, with the temporary title “The Agent,” I saw things that were relevant to the whole social networking world we’ve entered since I first embarked on the story. I thought: yes, this is the time to write this thing; the time is now. Let’s get this done.

So I had a scene where the protagonist, Charlotte, a high school senior, meets up with four other young women, in person, though they have been brought together by the “app” named “Reggie” (yes, that Reggie – of the Reggiesystem in the saur stories).

One of the girls she meets up with, in this little French bakery in this shopping mall (Water Tower Place, if you must know) Valerie Walker, suddenly takes this moment to express both her her exhilaration and her frustration with the world around her. Her friend, Molly, who is a cynical, tough-as-nails kid, gets into it with her.

There in that little library, I started writing with a passion, the pen scribbling away at a speed that threatened to set the paper alight.

There was “stuff to do” – I was teaching a class in a couple of hours and I had to prepare for it, there were papers to read, notes to take. But I couldn’t get away from writing this scene because in my feelings of loss at the death of Joan, and the memories of 9/11, and the memories of the thugs that were passed off as teachers in my kindergarten class, I discovered that Valerie’s frustrations and my frustrations were speaking in the same voice. Valerie was helping me find my voice as I was helping Valerie express hers.

I couldn’t get away from writing this scene because in spite of what I may do that’s “writing related” (teaching, critiquing, editing, reading, making coffee and spitting out paper clips … ) I know that IF I’M NOT WRITING I’M GOING CRAZY. And if I’m going crazy, I’m dying.

And there has been way too much death in the air already.

And so I had Valerie say this in the little bakery:

Val took Charlotte by the sleeve. “You know what I’m talking about, right? You go somewhere, you see something, you’re looking at this awful, crazy atrium and it’s all filled with shit! And there’re all these people around and they’re all looking for this shit! Shit! Worthless, worthless shit all over the place! And you look at the mall, you look at the people, and you look at all this shit everywhere and you feel something, feel this deep rumbling, shivering, howling feeling that comes over you, rolls right up to your lips. And as it rolls up to your lips you can hear the words you’re forming – know the truth – the complete, obvious, thorough, irrefutable truth of the words in your mouth, in your head, in your heart: IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! Sure, it can be worse – much worse. Better to be better – and it can be better. But it does not have to be this way!”

There’s more to the scene, and more that I didn’t get to, but the mantra is there: the mantra of the science fiction writer – and the mantra of anyone trying to be alive and real in this so-called world of ours, where planes are deliberately crashed into buildings, where civil rights leaders are assassinated and neighborhoods are consumed in flames, where kindergartners can’t go to teachers to stop the bullies because the teachers are the bullies, and friends I’ve known for more than three decades die alone in squalid apartments.

It does not have to be this way.

What some of us appear to have missed is that life has changed fundamentally, and science fictionally.

– Algis Budrys

Taking Dixon's Road After Twenty-Odd Years

Last week, I started back to work on a story that's been dead-and buried for at least twenty years. I started working on it in the 1980s. I even sold it once -- or placed it -- when Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith were still putting out Pulphouse. But an issue with my story in it never came out. After a while, I imagined Kristine had taken the story just to be nice. I always had a feeling, although I'd worked long and hard on the story and ran it through draft after draft, there was some sad, intrinsic flaw in it. The only thing that kept me from rewriting it to death was that placing with Pulphouse.

I'd read the story to audiences a few times, once at a venue where, by the time I reached the end, I found I'd taken a copy of the story with the three last pages missing. I felt like I'd driven off a pier. But that night I discovered I was a trouper, at least at readings, and simply told the audience the last few pages of the story -- like a storyteller, which is what we writers are supposed to be.

Friends liked the story. Some of them, like Forest Ormes and Julie Stielstra, really liked the story, and remembered it passionately -- to this day. Audiences liked the story -- or a few did. Other editors, at least the ones I sent the story to, said "Meh."

It was, to my mind, an okay story but I didn't nail it. I moved on. I had a lot of nice photocopies of it way in the back of my files.

Oh, it was called "Dixon's Road." It was a love story between a guy who terrforms planets and a poet. He wants to move on to the next job and take her with him. She wants to stay on the planet he's just finished putting the finshing touches on. Oh, and by the way, in the story, there's no faster-than-light travel. It will take forty years for the terraformer to get to his next job. Four or five years work on the planet, named Gaza by the way. Forty years back -- if he wanted to come back. He almost never comes back. After a century or so, places change. The terraformer never feels at home in the homes he creates.

The terrformer, Jim Dixon, and the poet, Laura Michel, after pleas, admonitions and arguments, part ways. He has to do what he has to do. She has to do, what she says, she has to do. The poetry she wants to write has to be written here, on this planet, now. He doesn't understand.

While he's away, though, he begins to get it. There's an issue, in the story, about what's so important about poetry. Here's humanity, in an interplanetary future, with all sorts of entertainments and diversions. And the weird thing is that in the midst of all this techno-everything, poetry is making a comeback. Why? The thing I stumbled over saying at the time was that poetry is the planet you take with you. It's the touchstone, the marker for humanity. And though it may be the most portable of expressions -- you carry it in your head -- sometimes you have to sit still to get it done. That's why Laura didn't go with Jim. She loved him as deeply as he loved her, but they both had their "important stuff" to do.

So, against his better judgment, Dixon goes back to the planet, named Alceste. He finds the home he lived in with her has been turned into a museum of sorts, the way you see historical places preserved here and there (maybe not as often as they should be). A young guide shows him around but . . . he knows the place already. He's part tourist of his own life, part history. Alive and ghost at once. But it is a place -- a place he recognizes and remembers. It's a home, even if it isn't his home any more. He walks back to the city on a road named for him, "Dixon's Road." End of story.

It was written in third person. It followed fairly chronologically the events, from the couple's last night together to Dixon's return. Fairly straightforward. After four years in grad school, studying the intricate constructions of Nabokov, Conrad, Dickens, etc., I found it best to make my own structures as simple and direct as possible.

Recently, after losing my full-time job of many years, working my way through the meager savings I managed to hold onto, working out means by which I might monetize my poverty, I looked at the story again -- not really looked at it again, because my original copy already went to the NIU library (can you believe that?), but in my head -- thinking about Jim and Laura and the house and the planet . . . all that stuff. And it occurred to me, yes, you could still tell this story. And get it right. "Right-er" than you did the first time. It's not a science-heavy story, so most of it still floats (I think I screwed up some of science anyway -- I always do when I don't keep it simple, or make it too simple).

It also occurred to me that the story should begin when Jim returns. Everything else is prelude to his confrontation with the house-now-museum. And . . . it should be told in first person, by the curator/guide at the house -- someone who knows the whole story, except for the part that's most important.

I've got a lot of writing projects -- my plot to monetize my poverty -- and it's possible that I've always screwed up my career by going on tangents when I should be sticking to one thing at a time. But last week, I really wanted to get started. All the little markers were taking position in my head, lining up. I felt like I could get the whole thing done in a few sittings, with a minimum of hemming and hawing over word choices and what to include and what not to include. I could get this thing done, and this time maybe sell it. Hell, it's only been waiting twenty years to be told.

I felt a little like Jim Dixon himself, coming back to the home he had known, still there, though he himself was long lost in time. And, counter-intuitively, the more I knew how Dixon felt, the more I knew I could not tell the story from his point of view. His emotions are too strong. If we don't take a step back from them we'll be burned in his fire.

So I started to write (knowing I'll have to clean up a bit here, adjust a bit there):

"He must have come straight from the spaceport in Prescott, on the first morning shuttletram. I hadn't even opened the place yet and saw him standing out in front of the sign, looking at it like it was something that fell out of a strange sky -- not unlike himself."

It's not much like the story Forest and Julie and the others remember (if they do remember it, or remember their memory of it), but I think it will end up in the right place this time.

I hope they don't mind.