Tribute to Donald Barthelme

Six months ago, my wife changed his name to Harry. That was the difficult part. If he had just kept "Chris" it wouldn't have been so hard for me to make this transition. Chris is a unisex name. "Why can't you just keep 'Chris'?" I asked him.

"Well," he said, "that would mean that I wasn't taking this transition seriously. That I would still be Chris and not a new person."

Christina was out, too. All "Chris" variations were beyond consideration. He had to leave all that was Chris behind.

"Does that include me?" I asked.

"No, honey," he said. "I could never leave you."

Two weeks later, we were talking about the election and Harry, a lifelong Democrat from a blue-collar we-work-for-a-living-and-pay-our-union-dues-thank-you said he was voting for Romney/Ryan.

"You've turned Republican?" I said.

"We need a change," Harry said. "The country is going to shit."

"But Romney represents all that is unholy and hateful," I said.

"He's not that bad. And he's different," Harry said.

"But he said not killing Muslim's was unpatriotic," I said.

"Now you're being hyperbolic," Harry said. "But that's good. We can have real political debates, now. Never change."

Harry started going to political conventions. Then, a few weeks later, he quit his job at the city and said he was going to go to law school.

"We can afford it," he said.

"You hate lawyers," I said.

"No," Harry said. "Chris did."

I'd never gone to college and that suddenly for the first time in my life made me feel inferior. I asked if he wanted to do this together. And he laughed and hugged me.

"Why would you want to do that? You love your job. You're happy. Never change," he said. "I love you just the way you are."

I took careful notes and carried them around with me everywhere. Pronoun charts, class schedules, Republican Party platform points, and, shortly after that, Lutheran articles of faith.

Harry converted. One Sunday, I woke up and he wasn't there and I assumed that he was just at the library early studying. But then it happened again the next week, too. And again. Harry was a diligent student, but when I confronted him and learned the truth I was surprised. All his life he'd been an atheist.

"I need more in my life," he told me.

"Isn't what we have enough?" I asked.

"What we have is enough," he said. "But what I have isn't enough."

Then there were the Bible study groups. They were polite and ignored me, and that, I think, is what bothered me. I wasn't one of them, hunched over the Book, cookie in hand, asking how Jesus came into their everyday life, and how this verse was so relevant because they saw withered figs at Hy-Vee today.

One night, I asked Harry if he wanted me to convert. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "You don't believe in God."

"But doesn't that bother you?" I asked.

"Not at all," he said. "I pray for you, anyway."

That was comforting for a little while. Like everything, the study groups went the way of the pronouns, conservative rhetoric, and law text books and became everyday. So did the folk band practices, organic vegan food, transcendental meditation, Yoga, baseball card collections, wood carving, snake, bonsai trees, seances, Yo-yo competitions, and tarot consultations. But about a month ago, that was the day. I came home from work in a good mood, but on the walk back I got this feeling.

I poured myself a glass of water and sat down on the porch and was there until dark when Harry got home. Not really thinking, just sitting.

Harry sat down next to me on the wooden bench on our porch and said, "What a day. Torts is a bitch. What's wrong, baby?  You look stressed."

"I feel," I said, "like I need a change."

Harry didn't say anything for a long time. After a while, I tried to explain. "I just feel like there's something I need to do that I haven't done. I mean, I'm thirty-five and people tell me that I'm going to have a midlife crisis soon. Maybe I can head it off. What will happen when I realize that half my life is over? What will I do then? I mean, I drive a Toyota and I drink Jameson. Every day I go to work and wake up at 6:30. I read a few hours a night every day, and play the piano in a jazz band."

"And you're unhappy?" Harry asked.

"No." I said. "But I feel like I have to change something."

"What do you want to change?"

"Nothing," I said.

Two weeks ago, Harry asked me for a divorce. And I told him no. It was just too much to remember and to do, I told him. We fought. Oh, we fought over that one. But in the end, I convinced Harry it just wasn't worth it.

Suffering

During my first nonfiction class, my teacher told us a story. When she was eighteen she entered and won a place in a one-time workshop with a prestigious author whose name I don't remember. When it was her turn before the firing squad, the distinguished author ripped her and her work to shreds. The way she described it this was not at all in keeping with normal workshop decorum of constructive criticism. He made her cry.

After the class, the distinguished writer took my teacher aside and told her, "For the next three years, don't write a word. Go to Terrell County, Texas and get a job as a waitress. After three years, you'll have enough material to be a good writer."

Then she said, "Bull. Shit." Writing is about craft. And no one has the right to tell you what to do with your life or make a value judgement on your experience. That's why Lee Gutkind's article "The MFA in Creative Nonfiction: What to Consider Before Applying" in the most recent edition of Poets and Writers pissed me off.

In the article, Gutkind writes that the most important criterion a potential applicant should consider is "How much have you suffered--or experienced?" He elaborates, "I'm not contending here that young people can't write with power and beauty or that they haven't suffered. But it's often better to join the Peace Corps, take a job driving a taxi, or interact with a different culture before studying writing on a master's degree level."

Flannery O'Conner said something to the effect that if you make it through childhood then you've got enough material to write. All of our experiences, everything, is inherently interesting.

There's a scene from Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation that I particularly love, when Kaufman's meta-character sits in a screen writing class and asks the instructor, Robert McKee, how you write about the everyday world since it's mostly boring and nothing happens. McKee responds, "Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day... Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love. People lose it..."

Our everyday experience is a plenitude of bizarre wonders and miracles.

But this isn't what irks me about the "you need to suffer" philosophy of nonfiction writing. For one, this fetishizes and glorifies trauma. I think this can lead artists, young artists especially, to make stupid decisions -- I've met many who did. At worst, I think this devalues thoughts and experiences that aren't about this sexy suffering.

Chuck Palahniuk has a great essay in Stranger Than Fiction called "You Are Here" which criticizes the popular tendency to write about personal trauma. It's an ineffective and perverse form of exorcism. I'm not sure I agree with Chuck -- there's nothing wrong with writing as therapy -- but when you rest your life on life as story, trying to strong arm your memories into a thing that gives meaning to your suffering, you may need reevaluate your methods. Everyone has suffered. Telling the world is not a universal cure-all.

And that, I think, is what really bothers me about Gutkind's criterion of suffering. We're all filled with a wealth of material and memories, but not everyone who wants to attend a nonfiction writing program wants to write about themselves. There are whole galaxies of writing that fall under the category of "nonfiction." Just because the memoir and the personal essay are popular right now doesn't mean everyone wants to write them. What about those of us who want to write journalism, criticism, science articles, and social commentary and want to come at it from a different angle than the traditional disciplines?

What about those of us who just want to learn how to write more effectively about the facts? What if you just want to know how to best tell a true story, regardless if it's about suffering or not?

Material

This morning before he left, my roommate, the Viking, told me he and his fellow plant biology grad students were talking about plant volatiles. Volatiles are chemicals secreted by a plant when they are stressed -- like when a caterpillar is eating it. The chemical alerts helpful predators in the area to the plant's predicament, so a bird might come along and eat the offending caterpillar.

"So," the Viking said. "That smell of freshly cut grass is actually the cacophony of your lawn screaming in pain."

The things you learn when living with guy who reads biology textbooks for fun.

#

Last year I applied for six grad schools and was declined by all. After the initial embarrassment passed, I told a few friends and family and everyone said some variation on, "You know, you don't have to go to grad school to be a writer." This is no great comfort to me.

I'm a writer because I write. I don't expect two or three years of a grad program is going to transform me into a bestseller or award winning author. After I'm done, I'll probably find a job as a technical writer and that would suit me fine. In fact, that's basic the plan. I love writing and I'm not particular about form or content. I enjoy composing grants about as much as I enjoy writing stories.

Now I understand why people say they attend MFA programs to have more time to write. I worked full-time as an AmeriCorps member and now I have secured full-time employment again in St. Paul. Free time is precious. Writing time, even more so.

I'm far away from my workshop network. They're scattered throughout the country and world. The people whose opinions matter most to me have lives and have little opportunity to meet up at some mutually convenient location for a writing session or workshop.

After spending years toying with the idea, I have yet to actually try my hand at teaching. I have no idea whether or not I would be good at it, but I at least want to try. There's something deeply appealing about it, to me. Living in New Orleans, I helped put together and typically led a reading group called the Swimmers, which was the highlight of my week. I wasn't teaching -- we were peers -- but I got a kick out of guiding discussions and making notes to bring up particular subjects and I found that, after spending five years in literary analysis classes and workshops, I'm not half bad at it.

And, of course, I miss the academic environment. My job is intellectually challenging, I read all the time and write often. But there's a difference between having a personal library and easy access to an academic one, between a great Friday-night discussion on politics and literature and a class on contemporary world literature, between committing yourself to a life of learning and having the title "student." Well, here I'm being melodramatic. If you want an intellectual life you can live one.

So, no, I don't want to go to grad school to be a writer. I want to attend an MFA program because it would be a luxury. Because I've got unfinished business. Because I still hold out this small hope that I could teach and devote my working life to my passions: writing and talking about books with bibliophiles and writers.

#

New Orleans was a big city by my Iowan standards, but I've never lived in a place where I couldn't rely on my own two feet for getting around on a daily basis. It's still weird to me the ownership people feel over their bus routes. I was talking with a neighbor the other day who told me, "The 21A used to be my bus."

Three weeks ago, my first day at work, I took the 21A at 6:00AM (way too damn early, it turned out) and sat a few seats away from a woman hustling shots from a plastic bottle of gin. The other day, I sat across the row from a young woman telling a man, "I'm the most eligible bachelorette in town! I don't have diseases. I don't shoot up. I've got an apartment. Maybe if you factor in that I'm pregnant, I'm less desirable, but some people don't care."

LW told me a few days ago, "When I first got here, I used to hide behind a book when the crazies on the bus started acting up. Now I just watch and I'm amused. You should get some good material out of this."

Grocery Dispute

Looking back on it, Vicky was disappointed that her breakdown hadn't been more spectacular.

For several months, maybe even years, it had been building. A ferocious lump in her ribcage twitched and muttered, clawed and burned. At first, it just fired up every time some self-righteous customer bragged about riding his bike or bringing her own fabric bags to carry away terrifically expensive, organic, gluten-free, vegan, over-packaged food. Then it was the parking inconveniences. Then it was the apartment, the heat, the police sirens, the loud neighbors, the gnawing and itching I-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life.

One year, four months, and nine days after she started working at Conseco's Market, she came in for her evening shift more tired than usual. She hadn't been sleeping well. Loud neighbors. But it was pretty much a normal day on Esplanade, except there was some quality about the humidity that made it difficult to breathe.

At 10 o'clock, after a day of hearing the blaring PA system request her for managerial assistance, Daniel said something that sounded a lot like, "Manag- what? Fuck..." over the mic. She was sitting in the "break room," practically a closet in the back with a unusual window that made it possible to smoke in an indoor-ish area.

And for some reason, Vicky heard herself say over the PA system, "Repeat page please." A long pause. "Repeat page please."

"Managerial assistance to the register, please."

"Daniel, repeat the page, please."

"Managerial assistance to the register, please."

"Daniel, you said, 'Manag-what? Fuck...' Correct?"

"Please come to the register."

"What's the problem."

"...Is this really the place to be having this conversation?"

Then Vicky laughed. A cacophony over the PA system that made her involuntarily cringe even as she kept laughing. The absurdity of it. Hearing her own voice and laughter over the PA system sounded like someone else talking, a clipped, professional exchange devolving in content. What a cliché. This was the scene from Airplane where the announcers start arguing over an abortion.

But Daniel was not playing along. Not yet.

“This is precisely the time and place to have this conversation, Daniel. Loud and where everyone can hear. These people deserve to know. And this has got to be the last customer in the store – we’re about to close. What seems to be the problem?” Vicky leaned back in her chair and lit another cigarette.

“A customer wants me to accept expired coupons.”

“Customer. This is the voice of god. The manager, at least, which should be good enough for you, here. I kindly invite you to fuck yourself.”

“Vicky, maybe you should go home and I can close things down…”

“You? You can’t count to five, Daniel.”

“That was uncalled for.”

“That was uncalled for? Uncalled for? I’ll tell you what’s uncalled for,” Vicky said and then stopped.

After a moment, Daniel said, “Yes…?”

“Is the customer still there?”

“No. He stormed out. But there are a lot of people staring.”

“Well, now, hear this. It’s been a long, hot day. My back hurts. I have a degree in art history and I’m managing a grocery store. This is to be expected. It’s a good joke. For a long time I wasn’t laughing, but now I am and why aren’t you? You could be, but I wouldn’t know, because I can’t hear anything but the PA system in the back. You know, this thing is great. I never feel like I’m the one talking over this system. I hear my voice, but I can’t believe it’s me talking. And it’s this voice that’s speaking now. Now. Now. Fuck.”

“Boss…?”

“Yeah, Daniel.”

“There’s no one in the store.”

“You lied?”

“Yeah. Except for coupons.”

“So I guess I don’t have to fire myself.”

“Not if you don’t want to. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“… I'm firing myself.”

They closed the store. The next day, she woke up early for the first shift. For weeks after that, she worked doubles after another manager quit and she had to pick up the slack.

#

My short story, "The Law of Gravity," is now available for purchase through Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine's issue #56.

More more things

And a Brief Note on Things, Weddings, and Where the Hell I Am in Life...

1.) Reading The Lorax as an adult is a far more emotional and political experience than I ever imagined.

2.) An exchange at today's wedding, "It's been years since I've seen him." "Yeah, what happened to him?" "He got divorced."

3.) A few days ago I resolved to make it my mission this year to stop Worrying. Most likely I'll elaborate on this in the future. But suffice to say for now that this decision will take a few weeks or months to implement.

4.) Today I witnessed one my childhood friends, Mindy, getting married to her high school sweetheart. It was wonderful. However, my favorite part of the wedding was watching and listening to my parents dance and socialize with their college friends. To my college friends: I look forward to your future children's weddings.

5.) Got a job. Got an apartment. Working on getting a car.

6.) Charter schools are complicated.

7.) Words fall through me.

8.) I'm going to apply for grad school again this year. This will be interesting.

9.) Sorry this post isn't particularly fun. It's past midnight and I'm rather tired after the wedding. Tomorrow: Ren Fest. Tonight: Sleep.

Fin.

Well, Here We Go

The Immediate Life Checklist:
1.) Get a job (Check)
2.) Get a reliable, affordable car -- preferably a Honda Civic (In Progress)
3.) Get an apartment that accepts cats, has a gas stove, is near a bus stop, and off-street parking (In Progress)

Some people are blessed with an ability to enjoy life and not take it too seriously. I am, unfortunately, not one of them.

So, this isn't going to be an interesting post because I'm going a little crazy right now trying to get Everything In Order (everybody got that?). Don't worry. We'll get back to our regularly scheduled scribblings soon.

I try not to talk about my real life very often on this blog, because I think the day to day grind is boring. I've got a journal for that. This is supposed to be fun. Right now, though, my thoughts are pretty Mundane and require a great deal of Grief.

In the meantime, I'm glad, at least, that I'm not alone. The other day my three year-old niece looked up to me after she'd ran around the living room several times and, with gravity and deep existential concern that only a toddler can muster, said, "Do you think this is a game?"

Cover Letters (Tribute: Joey Comeau)

Notes from the Road: Currently in Oklahoma to witness my dear friends S's wedding (the Forbidden Union). Though the hotel is a lot nicer than we all expected for the price, this isn't ideal conditions for blog post composition. Yet, I'm with old friends and, after ten hours on the road, I'm still glad to see them every moment.

And then there's other things. Truth be told, I haven't been able to give SDR as much attention as I would have liked these past few months. I've been reusing material that I wrote months or years ago for exactly situations such as these. I'm very glad to share these pieces with you, but it's not necessarily by choice.

Since June, I've traveled from Louisiana to Minneapolis, four times back and forth between Iowa City and Minneapolis, and now from Minneapolis back and forth to Oklahoma. I've applied for more jobs than I care to share. Before I left New Orleans, I told AC that the job search was already weighing heavy on me and, in an uncharacteristic demonstration of disgust, he said, "Yeah, I know. Job searching is just so physically, mentally, emotionally exhausting..." It's that last point that resonates with me, and it took a few weeks for me to decide why.

Job searching, writing cover letters in particular, is a process of sharing with strangers your personal and professional triumphs and aspirations and then being told, more often than not, that "It's not a good fit," or, that they've found "a better qualified candidate." It's a horrifying, humiliating, scarring process if you stop to think about it.

IB told me that after writing so many cover letters she got to the point where she wasn't really writing cover letters anymore. They had devolved into weird, personal missives. One, which told the brief story of her odyssey to become a community organizer, landed her a job. After meeting her coworkers, I understand why this was attractive to them -- they are an emotionally involved lot, but nonprofit folk tend to be.

This all reminded me of a project and book by Joey Comeau, poet and author of A Softer World, called Overqualified. It's a series of fake cover letters he wrote channeling some of the more absurd points of job searching. You can read some of the letters here -- or buy the book and support indie authors.

Anyway, a tribute. This in response to my favorite job posting for a position I Really didn't want:

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am very glad to apply for the Private Investigator position with Walker and Ritter Investigators. With my qualifications, vastly superior to all the other candidates, I would make a terrific contribution to the company. What are those excellent credentials, you may ask? Well, being professional investigators, I leave that for you to discover (good luck). If you haven't been able to find substantial evidence supporting my claim in one month's time, then I guess we'll just have to both consider my craft and acumen proven. In the meantime, I have most of a page left, and I'd like to tell you a story.

There is a small bar/cafe in the Lichtenberg borough of Berlin that I visited with my classmates and friends. It was a cold day in January and we had just finished a long day of touring museums, including the infamous Hohenschoenhausen prison, the Stasi headquarters. It was a beautiful cafe. We sat crowded around a small, rectangular table drinking scotch and beer and talking idly about the city. I was taking notes, St. looked at me strangely and said, "Sam, stop writing." I asked him why, and he replied, "Because we just went to the Stasi museum. I'm German. Writing makes me nervous."

Indeed, the prison made us all nervous, especially the final stretch of the tour. All twenty of us Americans and two Germans stood huddled in a small, concrete, frigid enclosure with two impregnable metal doors on either side of us, wire mesh above, while the tour guide spoke.

I'll paraphrase: "There's a joke: Bush, Gorgachev, and Honecker are being chased by cannibals. Bush turns around and shouts, 'Spare me and I'll take you to a capitalist paradise.' And the cannibals eat him. Gorbachev turns around and shouts, 'Spare me and I'll take you to a worker's paradise!' And the cannibals eat him. Honecker keeps running and shouts over his shoulder, 'Keep following me and you'll be in East Germany in ten meters.' He looks back and the cannibals are gone."

We all laughed, and then the guide said, "It's funny, isn't it? But that joke was told by a twenty year-old man to his friends at a gathering after church. He was arrested and taken here." The guide gestured around him. "This is where prisoners in the later years were allowed to stand outside for fresh air. It was the only time any prisoner was allowed to be outside. You couldn't see the city or hear it -- you didn't even know you were in the city. But, at night you could see the stars in this tiny, concrete enclosure. And if you could see the sky, there was hope."

Chilling and uplifting, didn't you think? We come from very different backgrounds, Valerie Ritter, but I'm sure that you and I had a moment of empathy when you went on the same tour two weeks ago on vacation. The "rest chambers" are really unnerving, I found. But, I'm sure that you also felt some twinge of professional respect, just as I did.

You're probably wondering  how I knew that you were at the Stasi prison two weeks ago. Furiously wondering. Probably wondering how I know you didn't have anything but an Americano from Cafe Envie for breakfast because you hit the snooze too many times, very uncharacteristic. You order Caesar Salad with Ranch dressing on the side. You're left handed, but try to pretend to be ambidextrous. Last month you memorized the Salic Law speech from Henry V just to see if you could. You're obsessed with puzzles and logic games. Every evening you play Go, Chess, or Scrabble against opponents all over the world and typically win. Sometimes it's just Sudoku.

For the reasons stated above, and those credentials I'm sure you will never find, I believe I would make an exceptional member of your team. I very much look forward to hearing back from you and wish you all the best in discovering my contact information.

Best,

SF