“I’d say just…write the damn story.”

Author Ryan Gattis and I, back a few years, talking about his book All Involved. We don’t generally use microphones to talk to each other when we get together these days.

This the thirteenth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of the first things I did on sabbatical was hit up my friend Ryan for some advice on the novel I’m trying to write. Well, that and to get some chorizo he’d been raving about. More on that later.

Early one morning in January, I drove the hour southwest from where I live, hit the 710, and shot across the bridge to San Pedro, a small part of me disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to reproduce the scene in Gone in 60 Seconds when Nic Cage—excuse me, Memphis Raines—jumps a line of cars in unbelievable fashion to take the last stolen car on his list to a guy who’d go on to play Destro in the G.I. Joe movie.  

My mild annoyance was put to rest, however, with the breakfast we got at a diner called Rex’s Café. The food was great, the conversation better.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Ryan is he wrote one of my favorite multi-voiced novels, All Involved. It is the fictional treatment of the King Riots in LA and a masterclass on carving one story from numerous perspectives.

That’s what I asked first: how did he navigate all those voices without them bleeding into and overwhelming each individual story? He paused, moved his napkin a couple inches on the table, and then looked at me. 

“I’d say just…write the damn story. I didn’t plan mine beyond knowing who my characters were. Felt like trying to know more would make the stories harder to get to.”

Ok, so maybe I was projecting my issues onto his process. I’ve been working on this thing going on eight years, so sometimes I feel a little like this:

We talked a little more about the craft of multiple voices, but more helpful was my living a little vicariously through where Ryan was at in his work at the time. One book in the pipeline, and idea for another brewing, some screenplays to write. A soccer match to watch when we got done that morning. Speaking of that coming book, it’s called The System and you should check it out.

It was more than vaguely comforting to see what’s possible, even if it’s not a probable outcome for me. In an odd way, his having numerous projects in the works made me feel like I might—someday—get one of mine out the door.

Oh, and about that chorizo. Yeah, you should make the trip to the ChoriMan’s laboratory kitchen tucked in a residential San Pedro neighborhood. Go buy a pound of the traditional red or the maple habanero or grab one of the burritos they’re selling that day. It is all phenomenal.

When it comes to food, Ryan has yet to steer me wrong. Pretty solid with the writing advice too.

Books — Little Faith

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Little Faith

Nikolas Butler, Ecco (2019) 

Find the book here. Check out Butler’s website here.

I read Nickolas Butler’s Little Faith on the advice of my friend Chris, who suggests books from time to time and is always on the money with what he thinks I’ll resonate with. In specific, there are three elements of this book that really align with what I try to create in my own work. 

First, this is what I would refer to as a quiet narrative. It slowly burrows into the lives of a retired couple living in rural northern Wisconsin who are trying to hold onto their tenuous relationships, primarily with their adopted daughter and grandson, around whom their lives increasingly revolve. Buried in the core of all of this is the loss that reformed their lives in the first place. 

“The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne the burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome. It blots the sun, steals every color, snuffs out any music—it dissolves marriages like acid, bleeds out happiness and leaves in its wake nothing but gray despair.

“No one knew this better than Lyle and Peg…” (291).

This loss is what every moment is reflected against for the entirety of the novel, deepening even the casual gestures of connection with their community while adding weight to every slight and rejection of human connection.

The second facet I gravitate to in this narrative is the way in which it interrogates fairly the damage bad religious practices can inflict and also the ways in which faith is pervasive in the face of it all. Butler captures this in a spot-on depiction of a corner of Evangelical culture ripe for becoming a cult of personality reconstituting the object of its belief around a charismatic pastor.

Rather than just depict faith this singular way, however, Butler counterpoints what might be seen as an easy representation of bad church culture with Lyle’s relationship with his life-long friend and now Lutheran pastor Charlie, who listens to jazz over bourbon, shepherds a slowly dying congregation of stoic Midwestern believers, and dispenses quiet, worldly wise advice when Lyle feels like he might be losing his ability to believe.

The contrast between the two is necessary in any depiction of faith because, counter the American desire to overwrite one cultural narrative on any diverse community, religious practices and expressions of faith are numerous and divergent and seeing them as such matters.

And finally, I love stories built around decisions characters make that have clear necessity but don’t discount the costs they also carry. In this case, Lyle decides to take his grandson, who is gravely ill and being denied medical care by the cult his mother has joined, by physical force. The decision may have saved the boy’s life, but it also likely ended his relationship with his daughter. 

In sum, this book is a meditation on loss and love and what people hold closest when life inevitably begins to strip the rest away. And it is just so good.

Another former student, another first book

This book is gorgeous and nails every one of the characters it centers on the page. You can find it here.

This the seventh installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Around the time I was finishing up the edits on Black Was Not a Label, I received a cryptic message from Heidi, another student who was in the same Master’s cohort as Kathryn. It went something like this: 

I have some news to tell you soon. It’s very exciting.

Heidi is another of those former students who I worked with both as an undergraduate and as a grad student. She is, also, a walking idea factory with interests in everything from music (check out her EP here) to podcasting (two different going concerns you can sample here and here) to youth and musical theater (look no further than her musical version of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces that’s in the works) to poetry (which she doles out on her socials) to academic writing.

And, of course, there’s the fiction I’ve worked on with her for several years now, culminating in serving as her committee chair for her creative capstone at the end of the Masters process.

That project was a collection of four short stories that showed astonishing breadth without losing connection with each other. The pieces, all set against the backdrop of coming of age in Maui in the early 21st century, ranged from the grittiest of realities to unflinching questions of the what lies just beyond our human understanding of reality on the spiritual plane.

The complexity of these stories is only increased by the fact that all are told by characters who exist in a truly narrow liminal space in Hawaiian culture: the white island resident who isn’t a tourist but will also never be a native of the place. Walking that razor’s edge as a writer—where one wrong step could lead to further erasure or co-opting of the Hawaiian—is a delicate balance and one that a younger writer might, understandably, have struggled with.

Heidi, on the other hand, devoted herself to the work and to rendering full characters who live, grow, and change in the light of all those same cultural pressures. The result was a four-story cycle that went on to be published in each of its parts.

After finishing her degree, she kept working, looking for a place that would give a home to her collection. And then her follow up message: the manuscript won the Heritage Prize: the Great Story Project contest and with it publication. 

Now working under the title of The Sacred Art of Trespassing Barefoot, Heidi’s book is in the hands of an audience who have no idea how challenging and moving and powerful what they’re about to read truly is. Oh, and she’s gearing up to move all the way across the country for the next step in her development, and MFA.

I can’t wait to get my copy signed and talk shop with the author herself next time she’s in town.  

Books — Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

Trent Hergenrader, Bloomsbury Academic (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Hergenrader’s website here. And you can find the books we edited together with our friend Joe here and here.

Few ideas have influenced my creative writing instruction around the concept of setting more than those that have come in conversation with my friend and long-time co-editor Trent. Specifically, he is the number one apologist of the effectiveness of collaborative world building as an element of teaching and nurturing the creative process of writers at all levels.

A little backstory: when we were grad students together, Trent took a huge risk—at least in the eyes of the norm core English department establishment—and tied his critical studies to elements of RPG and video game theory.

Then he convinced the powers-that-be of course assignment to allow him to pilot what I would call a radical departure from the traditional creative writing course set up, rolling out a worldbuilding-based course that led his students creating a sprawling, post-apocalyptic version of Milwaukee replete with rules, characters, context, and guiding world principles from which thousands of stories could be written. 

In short, he did what good teachers do: he made the normal strange and the strange a way back to what his students thought they knew. And, in that class, was the seed that became his book Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers. Having seen this idea develop almost since its inception, it was really fun to tear into it while away on sabbatical.

Part teaching manual, part transmedia universe theory, and part idea generator for creating richer, deeper worlds for stories and campaigns alike, Trent’s book is a practical balance of philosophical notions of how settings operate and pragmatic explorations of how to get the most out of hashing out the rules of an environment shared by a writer and her audience or a group of gamers gathered to play Dungeons & Dragons complete with a worldbuilding card deck.

Bigger, though, he makes the case for how immensely helpful it is to re-conceive preparing to tell new stories in this way:   

“Imagine the collaborative worldbuilding process as the creation of an enormous story-generating machine. In this view, the act of worldbuilding is distinct and separate from conventional storytelling” (6).

And, along with being a helpful guide to opening up the creative process, the text also helps readers consider how the limitations to expressing their own worlds most effectively might lie within their own assumptions.

“Worlds are deceptively complex and we must be aware that our natural inclination is to generalize lived experiences….How we distinguish between worlds, what we identify as the rules of different worlds, and how social forces operate in a given world are all matters of importance” (16).

That’s why I suggest this book to my students; it benefits their art and their character in ways they probably aren’t expecting when they fold back the cover.

Books — House of Broken Angels

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea, Back Bay Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Urrea’s website here.

I’ve been a fan of Luis Urrea‘s work since someone handed me his book Beside the Lake of Sleeping Children almost a decade ago. His prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is so spare and precise without losing its emotional energy.

Urrea has a way of using the sequence of his details to carry the sense of a moment, whether in scene or dialogue, that is powerful in its unassuming form. He leaves the reader to sit with what’s what’s just been revealed on the page and also prompts us to explore what they make of where it takes us off of it. The effect allows his stories to feel strangely familiar even when the circumstances are not.

This is a key to the deeply moving story at the core of his novel The House of Broken Angels, a multi-perspective rumination on family and belonging and the endings that inevitably follow beginnings.

The basic premise of the book revolves around the funeral of Big Angel’s mother and the last birthday party he will ever have, both of which happen within a few days of each other. The two events bring Angel’s extended family together at his East County San Diego home where all of them wrestle with where life has taken them and how it will, inevitably, give way to something else in death.

Swirling around Big Angel—who until his cancer became advanced was the loud, decision-making patriarch of the clan—his children and siblings try to honor his wishes for one more party and chance at reconciliation for all the ways life has estranged and bound them together at the same time.

In everyone else, the patterns of life and family unwind in new generations while the members of Angel’s ponder slipping into the roles of the elderly, some clinging to their youth while others succumb to the persistent erosions of time. This reminded me quite a bit of the dynamic of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy  in which the characters who attend the titular Billy’s wake construct themselves in the same moments they build an increasingly complex portrait of him. 

And in it all, Big Angel tries to understand what he is about to give up in death; to evaluate whether or not he has truly lived and lived well. This rumination ends in a single moment when he is able, in his weakened way, to act one last time as the father figure so many in the family still needed.

“And that was it for Big Angel. The string was cut. He felt and saw sparks rise around him. Now he knew why he was not dead yet. The sparks whirled. He thought he had stayed alive to enjoy his own wake. He thought he was still alive to make amends. He thought he was still alive to try one last hour to unite his family. But now he knew. What a pretty little tornado of light” (306).

The House of Broken Angels, then, is a novel about the living we do when we know that dying will come, not in the abstract but the tangible. And in this space, Urrea challenges readers to ask the same questions of themselves they find his characters asking.

This, I believe, is a gift.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.