"As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities. Jim Harrison is a writer of the second type, and "Returning to Earth" is his extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one's appetite for life even at its darkest."

Will Blythe, NY Times 2/11/07

The first piece of the new Queens semester is due Friday.  It's time to put away the bucket and sand shovel and get back to work. 

I also auditioned yesterday for the first time in two years.  There have been a few print jobs in between, including one with a spasmatic dog, but no stage work.  This was the real thing, and it went well considering how out of shape my chops are.  The song was so-so, but they got the idea that I can sing.  The monologue, a piece from "The Goodbye People," worked very well. 

We'll see.

The last Queens residency seems ages ago.  Other priorities crowd into the frame: family, travel, remodeling, calling the plumber to fix the damage I caused while remodeling. I wonder if this is what it will feel like after graduation? 

Writing has faded into the background, but I managed to force myself to the desk this week and get down a couple thousand words. There are contests to enter, and pieces to polish and submit, and a novel that needs an ending; the sweaty monkey needs to get his butt off my keyboard and sit somewhere else.

Now, if I could just find something in the mailbox other than Netflix movies and rejection notices . . .

  By 1929, four years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald could command $4000 from The Saturday Evening Post for a single short story.

In 2008 dollars, that's the equivalent of $50,000.

I've noticed a disturbing trend of violence toward animals in fiction, usually employed as a foreshadowing device.  If a lazy writer wishes to evoke the emotional impact of injury and/or death, but without killing off any characters, they tend to put the crosshairs on the family pets. 

As you might have guessed, I have a problem with this. 

Attacking the "lower" lifeforms is a thin and tired cop-out.  Either bite the bullet and whack a human, or aim your violence at a different kingdom.  Specifically: fruit.  Who doesn't enjoy a good fruit death?  Imagine the evocative power of a well-written banana mangling!  What about the wicked soon-to-be-ex accidentally (or not) running over a peach with a diaper truck?  Same splatter, less fur.  Think of the catharsis available to an audience that has been told endlessly to "eat more fruit," when they are submerged in a scene involving power tools and a watermelon.

Leave the pets alone, and go after the fruit, especially those sneaky little kiwis.  Bastards. 

I pulled out the stack of critiques I received from the workshop residencies and read through them, which led to a few wild highs, some head-shaking and a lot of laughter. 

I have a thick skin.  Although movies about dogs can still make me cry, too many years of auditioning have completely deadened my nerve endings when it comes to criticism.  You try getting up before dawn, standing in line for hours on a street that smells like the inside of a cow's bladder, while an angry Korean grocer waves a broom at you, only to get into the audition space and get out 10 seconds of your monol- 

 "Thank you.  Next."

It builds character.  And cynicism, and bile and anger.  It's a good system.  I like it.

So, reading or receiving critiques isn't painful for me, but until now I've been confused about how to use the feedback I've received.  The folks in workshop are trying to be . . . (wait for it) . . . helpful and constructive.  It's weird. 

This time, in my second residency at Queens, I already feel as though I have a better grasp of how to use it.  I submitted a piece this time that was minimalist and edgy, and it got a lot of "WTF?" comments.  Just knowing exactly where people got lost (especially when they coincided with each other) showed me the spots where I cut too much.

A lot of the comments I read, appreciate, and discard.  That's simply the nature of the beast, since writing-by-committee doesn't work.  It seem easier, now, to identify the people who can see what I'm *trying* to do (no matter how poorly) and keep their advice in mind as I work.

" . . . on sleepless nights, the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned."

- Yasunari Kawabata



The alarm goes off in two hours.

No cell phones ringing, no rustling or fidgeting or looking at the clock.  The faculty don't have to raise their voices, because the entire room is focused on what they have to say.  One small class ran an hour over time, voluntarily, simply to continue a lively discussion.  Then the conversations move to the lunch table, or outside under the huge trees that shade campus, flowing through changing groups of intelligent and vibrant writers.

This is grad school for grown-ups: dedicated people who have traveled a long way and spent a lot of their own money to learn about writing.  This is the Queens MFA program, and I'm loving every second of it.

I had no desire to be on campus for the anniversary and its media vermin, so I escaped to the mountains.  Being a state employee has its perks, two of which are the paid community service days we get each year.  I usually spend mine doing volunteer work on the Appalachian Trail. 

Wednesday was beautiful, sunny and sixty degrees.  Peter's Mountain, like most of our mountains down here, is actually a long ridge.  It rises from the New River at Pearisburg, climbing up above 4000' and winding north along the border of Virginia and West Virginia for a dozen miles.  It varies in width from a half-mile to fifty feet and back, and sports sandstone outcrops shaded by oak and maple and the occasional pine.  Naturalists have told me that timber rattlers love the south-facing slope of that ridge, although I've hiked its length a dozen times and never seen or heard one. 

I parked at the base of the ridge halfway along its length on the Virginia side and took an old side trail, overgrown now and known only to the locals, up the heart-poundingly steep flank to the top, gaining 1500' in less than a mile.  Spring hasn't reached these elevations yet, and the only green was the rhododendron clustered around the streams and the ever-present catbrier.  I met a turkey hunter coming down, all in camo with his face covered, and it gave me a bit of a start.  I've seen many hunters in the woods and never had a problem with it, but there was something about the combination of the gun and the mask that made it strange and frightening.  I squeaked out a "Good morning," and the reply of,  "Fine one, ain't it," coming from behind the camo mesh, broke the unpleasant feeling.

 Peter's Mountain is a wilderness area, which means only hand tools are allowed.  When we remove fallen trees, we haul in a hundred year-old crosscut saw borrowed from the Forestry school at Virginia Tech, carrying it up to the top because there are no roads.  Today, however, I'm only painting blazes and moving a little brush, so all I have to carry is a scraper and an "As Seen on TV" Rubbermaid paint roller.  I don't know how they work at home, but those little $7 pieces of plastic may as well have been purpose-made for blazing trails. 

Two inches by six inches: that's the standard.  A white rectangle painted at eye-level on trees and, where necessary, rocks (although the AT Conference never specifies whose eye), far apart to maintain the wilderness experience, but close enough together to keep people on the trail.  Trying to figure out where to put one is like laying out a maze, putting yourself into a thousand pairs of boots while guessing what will still be visible when the leaves explode in a few weeks.  On the straight parts with a clear footpath, blazes will be far apart.  In heavy undergrowth or on a rocky section with a lot of options for turns, I try to blaze more often, putting them where the eye falls when looking for the trail.  It's not virgin territory, of course.  There are old blazes out there, some in perfect spots, and some in seriously stupid ones, too.   You have to work with what you've got.

The backpackers have started to arrive from further south.  I meet seven all told during the day, young and old, some out for three weeks and a few going the whole 2100 miles to Maine this year.   Peter's Mountain is about 500 miles north of the southern terminus of the AT down at Springer Mountain in Georgia, so by the time they get here these folks are trail hardened and rail-thin.  Everyone stops to chat except one young man with a beautiful dog, a pair of headphones to keep the natural sounds out and a burden that looked heavier than his pack.

A mile and a half from the gap where I started, I hook up with where I stopped last autumn when I began at the end and came south, so I turn around to start back. I work only one direction at a time to get the blazes right for northbound and southbound hikers alike, rather than looking over my shoulder and guessing.  Without foliage on the trees, it's hot under the spring sun.  To the east a second steep ridge cuts off the view into Virginia, but to the west the land rolls out into a fat green valley of farms and woodlots.  When the wind dies down, a lone dog's barking floats up to the ridgetop.  

I make it back to my starting point and continue south to fix a trouble spot the hikers told me about.  Going slower now, a little drunk with the sun and logy with the cold pizza I carried in for lunch.  I make it about a half-mile, maybe a bit more before I run low on desire (and paint). I turn around again and finish the last bit back to where I started.  The gap with the secret trail back down to the car is marked in the old way, with a single upright stone, three feet high, painted red.  I give it a pat, and start down, drinking the last of my water and taking my time to ease the strain on my knees, which are old before their time from years of heavy packs.

I'm sure lost hikers will curse me as an idiot, as I've cursed trail-blazers when I've been turned around, but hopefully a few people will follow in my footsteps for these miles and not worry about where they are going.  It's a shame to concentrate on the trail when the views are so extraordinary. 

So, the CERN Large Hadron Collider . . . it’s pretty cool.  Lot’s of gee-whiz stuff going on, bashing particles together at enormous speeds to see what happens.  Physicists are divided on exactly what they’ll get when hit the ON button.

Pros:  small versions of the Big Bang, perhaps wormholes that bend time
Oh, yes, and many, mini black holes that will quickly evaporate if Stephen Hawking is right.

Cons:  If Stephen Hawking is wrong, however, no one knows what might happen.  Theories cover the gamut from "Oh shit," to "It should be okay."


Physicist 1:  "Hey, how should we test Stevie’s hypothesis?"

Physicist 2: "I know, let’s ram particles together at temperatures thousands of times hotter than the core of the sun and create little black holes under Switzerland.  If he’s right, we’re Nobel all the way, baby."

P1: "What if he’s wrong?"

(silence)

P2: "If he’s right, the shiksas will be all over us.  Besides, Stevie is running the Big Brain.  How could he be wrong?"

P1: "Seriously?  Shiksas?"

P2: "Of course. They dig a Large Hadron Collider!"

P1: "Sweet."