Books — Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories

As I’ve said before here, I love that my job means I work with talented authors whose work I can platform from time to time. Such is the case with Thomas Allbaugh’s collection Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories, a set of unvarnished portraits that center characters wrestling with the extraordinary weight they bear while living the most ordinary of lives.

Throughout the collection, the stories revolve around shared characters and places echoing the world of George Willard in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or the way Hemingway’s In Our Time wraps itself around Nick Adams’ experiences. Stories shift with the characters at the center of them, but the world always feels connected, even in the less directly linked pieces.

For my money, though, Allbaugh’s tone and delivery are reminiscent—strikingly at times—of Larry Heinemann’s surprise 1987 National Book Award-winner, Paco’s Story. That novel, which follows a Vietnam veteran’s attempt to reintegrate with life back home, leans on a sparse directness that presents the main character’s lowest and highest moments in the same way: trapped in the amber of all he lost in his time in the military. 

Similarly, Subtle Man presents a series of people who want to create something meaningful in their lives but are very often prevented from doing so because they cannot free themselves from an anchor in their past. 

Turning on the hub of the Side Step bar, paths cross and uncross in meaningful ways that act as a practical framework holding it all together. However, what most connects the elements of this collection is a shared wistfulness for a time when sadness and loss could be held up to the light and examined, not so much to convert those feelings to something more positive, just so that the characters and the center of it all can catch a glimpse of what’s gone, if only to give shape to the hole their lives revolve around.

This is not to say that there aren’t moments of humor throughout Allbaugh’s stories. In truth, there are several, but they act as attenuators for the losses borne. The beauty of this book, then, is the way in which subjective notions trapped in the past are made objective in physical things that hold present grieving and rumination.  

A supermarket manager’s lost name tag becomes a cipher for relationships fizzling in middle age. (Full disclosure: I edited and published the initial version of the story carrying this symbol more than a decade ago in a journal I worked at, and seeing how it had progressed, in the light of the entire collection, was very satisfying.)

A teenager’s transistor radio saves him nightly even as it can never be the stereo his father took that would allow him to connect with the music—and, by extension, the world—of his high school peers.

A once-open garage door found closed resides as both a youthful infatuation squashed and a metaphor for almost every story in the collection as every story seems to return to what its characters must do when they’ve been cut off from what they thought they needed for their life to mean something. 

The recording of a lost father’s voice and the headphones that play it for his unborn child intersect one man’s worries, pressing his attention out into the wider world of concerns that daily swirl around him. 

An empty picture frame affixed to a cubicle wall becomes a provocation no one seems provoked by except the man who hung it there.  

All told, the stories of Subtle Man hold space for what their characters could not hold onto in order for them to see how those losses helped lead to what they do have. And, if we’re paying attention, they allow readers to see this in their own lives.  

As one of those reader, I appreciate the subtle way Allbaugh goes about giving me the chance to do so.

*Ours* is no certainty

Photo by Steve Houghton-Burnett on Unsplash

Four years ago, I wrote here and here about how terrified my then nine-year-old son had become of an America that could, in any way, take a Donald Trump presidency seriously. My boy asked how anyone could listen to the way he speaks about other humans and think he would care about people who don’t have something to offer him.

He was not wrong.

Over the past four years, I have seen men who, in my youth, pounded pulpits about the central importance of character and taught classes on the danger of situational ethics and morality become the immoral, power-hungry figures they cautioned against.

I‘ve watched old friends spiral deeper into overt worship of conspiracy theories and project their fear and disdain for people unlike themselves onto anyone who does not ideologically align with their “truth.”

I’ve grown increasingly frightened not just of the way self-centering algorithms have walled off people from each other, but of how excitedly those people have embraced their walls. Decorated them with hate and fear and false proclamations of love for the people outside of them…if those people would just see things the right way…would just act the way they should…would just be, well, more like the pictures on their walls.

I’ve agonized over the hate that has become, to some, logical. Aspirational even. How divided we’ve always been has become an overt tool employed by the few to profit on the many. To be clear, this has always been our way. But now, there is a sizable portion of our country who openly champion the central lie of division as multiplication.

The Trump presidency has not broken America. It’s merely laid bare the many, deep fissures that fracture us despite our myths about being *one* nation. Nostalgia—the fabric of most propaganda—is violence when it erases the hurting to preserve the pride of those empowered to hurt them.

So, no, this election will not fix America, regardless of who wins. To be certain, one candidate has proven his willingness over and over again to do whatever damage will enrich him and his wealthy cronies. There is a clear and better choice between the two, if the people choosing care to be honest with themselves.

But poverty will still oppress many Americans on November 4.

Voter suppression will still silence the will of millions, potentially with increasing power.

Power will still be abused, by law enforcement, politicians, hateful bigots with access to violence, and the wealthiest fraction of Americans who live somewhere outside the system most of us experience.

Education will still be under-funded while big business gets buy-outs we supposedly don’t have the money for.

Funding the world’s largest military will still get more support than addressing the social issues waging war on our most vulnerable neighbors, if we even allow ourselves to see them as such.

Millions will still be one bad medical moment away from bankruptcy.

The world will still be burning, literally and figuratively.

Members of a religious majority who claim peace and love as core values will continue to live the very sins they claim to reject, simply to preserve one more judge or receive one more tax break.

No, the work that lies ahead is ours, not theirs. I’m just not certain “ours” is an attainable goal at this point. I hope it can be and pray for that outcome.

But of this I am certain: unless we see everyone as equally human—regardless of how different they are—and build a world where our choices are focused most on how they will impact the least powerful, the candidates we elect will all be the same. Just symbols of which group we most identify with.

And that’s not the fictional America I was taught as fact.

Closing time

Sunset on the sabbatical.

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

At the end of the sabbatical, what did I really accomplish? Well, there are a couple ways I can go about totaling that up.

I mean, I kept a tally of all the work I did. Here what it looks like:

Projects in Progress

Novel “Breached” Progress:  31,000 words in manuscript file/60,000 written

Academic Collection Innovative Teaching – under contract as of August 15 with April 1,

2020 delivery deadline

Essay Collection “Grafted” Progress: 15,000 words written/Four essays draft complete

In Progress – “Hamstring Nemesis” (working title), “Bill Cosby and My Herniated Childhood” (working title), “Submersibles” (working title) with (4,000 words)

Short Story “The Sun in Not Ours to Hold”: 1,000 words written and edited

Novel “Coast Highway 101” 90s revise: not started

Completed

Short Story Collection Grip Complete/48,200 words in manuscript

Editing: two articles for Journal of Creative Writing Studies — completed January

Novel Concept (Rough) – Billy Florence in China (basketball novel from my short story “Crossover”)

Blog – Six Sabbatical Posts (4 Top Shots, One Short Story Reflect, “Coaching Small”) –

2,400 words

28 Post Sabbatical Posts – 13,000 words

Editing Black Was Not a Label: content edits for Pronto Press – Oct. 18 publication            

Putting a title on a long-form project for the first time in years was a bit daunting.

Publications

“Shakespeare’s Dogfish.” Academic essay in Thinking Creative Writing (Routledge) —

May 7

“The Best Thing” short story: in Bull & Cross journal — May 21

“One Perfect Episode: CHiPs ‘Roller Disco 1&2.’” Pop culture column in Drunk

Monkeys —August 15

“One Perfect Episode: Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels and Burton Guster’s Goblets

of Fire.” Pop column in Drunk Monkeys — November

“Toward Disruptive Creation in Digital Literature Instruction.” Academic essay in

Journal of Creative Writing Studies — September 25

My essay “Eulogies for Those Who Haven’t Left” was republished in The Other Journal’s print edition.

Submissions

“Towards Creative Disruption.” Journal of Creative Writing Studies — January 15, 2019

(Accepted)

“Innovative Teaching” – Bloomsbury Academic, March 1, 2019…Resub June 1, 2019

(Accepted)

CNF Essay “Signal to Noise Ratio”: The Rumpus, May 9, 2019 - Rejected

Pop Culture Essay “One Perfect Episode: CHiPs ‘Roller Disco 1&2’”: Drunk Monkeys

            May 14, 2019 - Accepted

Flash Fiction “The Sun Is Not Ours to Hold”: The Master’s Review May 29 - Rejected

Short Story “Francis the Shards”: Barrel House June 30 – Rejected

Black Was Not a Label Book Edit – Pronto Publications, August 15, 2019 (published)      

Projects Ready for Submission

Collection “Grip” (submitted and under consideration)

Short Story “The Sun in Not Ours to Hold” (submitted)

CNF Essay “Subsidence” (submitted)

CNF Essay “Signal to Noise Ratio” (published)

CNF Essay “Precautionary Tales” (published)

But the final products, as always and in every circumstance, don’t really do a good job of conveying the work that went into their creation.

I could, of course, point you back to the more than 13,000 words of blog posts I wrote about my sabbatical work. I’ve tried, for a number of reasons, to encapsulate the experience for myself and for anyone who might be interested. But even that is a selected set of reflections that in no way captures the scope of it all.

Speaking of the scope of it all, one of the most rewarding projects of my sabbatical was coaching a team of 6-8 year old basketball players. They were phenomenal and I, despite my misgivings about working with kids that young, drew so much joy from the experience.

I could take an aerial view and say that, like always, I got a lot but done but not near as much as I would have liked. That is the perpetual state of being of the species academic.

So maybe it’s best summed up in this way: I’ve already started the clock on the seven years I have to wait before I have the chance at another sabbatical. I’m sure I’ll find things to keep me busy in the interim.

The downside of down time

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

Turns out this joke photo I posted at the beginning of sabbatical is actually the way some people assumed the time would go for me. It’s like they don’t know me at all…

“So, you’ve got, like, a half year to just hang out? Really?”

No, not really. Sabbatical is designed to produce rest and recharging, but it is not a vacation. Add to that my Type A tendencies and nascent-but-still-present workaholism and no, I was not lying around…

…except when my depression flared and kept me from writing or researching or doing, well, anything much meaningful in terms of all the projects I’d given myself and the ones that presented themselves along the way.

I took this picture in the middle of the worst of that season. Looking at it now, it shows.

Days lost to bone-deep fatigue and crushing self-doubt piled up in the early portion of my time away. This was supposed to be when I could focus, when I could swipe away all the distractions that truly do get in the way during my busy semesters.

Depression, it seems, doesn’t hold much concern for my hopes and dreams. As it settled in, I was paralyzed and piling on, chastising myself for being lazy even as I know that I was working harder to stay level than I would when the words were flying from my fingertips to the screen.

Early sabbatical was a gray period, inside and out. The view from where I did most of my writing.

The lowest lows are manual labor of the soul and no one is equipped for that work alone. Fortunately, Heather kept checking my negativity. Kept reminding me that on my good days I could be very very good, so the bad ones weren’t just a loss. Kept reminding me that staving off burnout was one of the reasons we’d needed me to have this time so badly.

And then it passed and I was working. Writing. Exercising. Actually sleeping at night. Shoulda known it was too good.

Soon enough, a weird and persistent calf injury sidelined me for most of the spring and early summer, eliminating my ability to do the work on my health I’d wanted to. Which led to more depression. Which led to more missed days of writing.

Writing this here is part of this process for me,

And yet, I kept going. What’s the alternative?

And then the end of my sabbatical rose on the horizon and I was not where I wanted to be on my primary projects. It was bad. But Heather was better.

She pointed to what I had completed. The people I’d helped with their studies and texts. The book I’d edited without expecting the project in the first place. The friendships I’d reengaged.

Life is like that. Never all we want, but maybe all we can give and that should be enough. For ourselves and for everyone else in our lives.

Dissecting “Shakespeare’s dogfish”

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

One of my favorite types of projects is the kind the turns the same article into two publications. The academics in the house know this particular joy.

I managed one of these two-fers with an article I wrote called “Shakespeare’s dogfish: a case for building Creative Writing Studies from the outside.” I know, I know, the second half of that title is really in-group.

Side note: if you’re not familiar with the Walker Percy essay from which the first half of that title is derived, “The Loss of Creature,” you really should be. Consider that my reading assignment to you for the week. 

Here’s the short version: teaching creative writing is actually a subject that people pay a good deal of attention to, not that popular academic culture would see that as the case. Despite this lack of visibility, the work to legitimize the field has largely and roundly been done.

This opens space for some questions that interest me.

What do other fields of study and the pedagogical approaches instructors are taking in them have to offer professors of creative writing? And what could they learn from spending time with people from my field? 

And if that kind of collaborative work is going to take place, what will that mean for disseminating what gets learned and the notion of shared credit for work that will, in many cases, look unlike most everything in either of the disciplines that are converging?

In essence, I used this piece to dream about what might come next in my field because that’s where Creative Writing Studies is at: we either move outward and into novel, non-legacy spaces with our research or we run the risk of stagnating and slowing the discipline’s momentum.

The piece first appeared in the journal New Writing in the middle of my hectic fall prepping for my impending sabbatical and wondering if I would have a job when I got back from it given some financial strife on the campus where I work.

Then I forgot about it until an email from our editor Graeme reminded me that Routledge had agreed to publish several articles from New Writing—mine included—as a special issued collection in book form. A few weeks later, here it was on my doorstep.

Like I said, get you an article that can fill two lines on a CV.  

Rejections, an acceptance, and reminders

Check out the full version of my story here.

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

Early in the spring of my sabbatical, I submitted my short story “The Best Thing” to Bull & Cross, a journal I’ve been watching for a while after a couple of my students placed work there. I was struck by the range of stories and the particular care the editor, Dan, takes with them.

Larger, Terry and Butter (the main characters of my story) needed a particular home. My stories tend to run on the quiet side (except the novel I’m at work on, but that’s a different matter). Small moments that connect to the largest parts of our humanity are what interest me.

With that in mind, and like most working writers, I saw “The Best Thing” get passed on by a number of journals. Twelve to be exact. That’s typical, but also it sucks and, like anyone putting their work in front of an audience, I had some moments of doubt as to whether it would get seen for what it is.

Cue Bull & Cross. They got it. Published it with a rather appropriate tweet to promote it (if I do say so myself.

And the reaction I got was really gratifying. The people who read it and reached out got what my characters were going through even as they didn’t like where going through it with them took the piece.

The best kind of discomfort, that. The whole experience was a great reminder that stories aren’t for everyone, but they’re always for someone. Even writing teachers need that lesson retaught from time to time. 

Books — The Irreversible Sun

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 Irreversible Sun

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, West End Press (2015)

Find this book here. Check out more of Lim’s work here.

Just before I left on sabbatical, my university and department welcomed poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim to campus for our annual lecture series. I was not familiar with her work before the event and, given the pressure of trying to tie up all my loose ends to leave for several months at the end of the term, I didn’t have time to read up before she came to read.

I did, however, purchase her book The Irreversible Sun on the strength of what I heard her read that night and it was the first thing I read after I filed my grades for the fall term and leaned into setting my course for all my projects.

It felt a bit providential, if I’m being honest. Lim’s work in this collection is a meditation on the external environments of Southern California all of us experience if we would but slow down and pay attention to it. If we would care for it more intentionally.

This encouragement to deep observation—an element in every poem throughout the text—landed in my mind at the exact moment I was turning over an essay that required the same level of focus on the peculiarities of California’s climate, particularly the drought culture. I literally stopped mid-stanza while reading her poem “California Sun” and scrawled notes on my essay and her poem before returning and re-reading the following lines multiple times.

“Paradise is thirsty this November.

Seven months without rain, it’s sober,

a drunk without a drink. Still, tourists

come for sun and ocean, list

rare wine in pretty bottles,

pretty girls in bare sandals

and smiles….”

Most of Lim’s work carries this seemingly straightforward delivery of the sublime. It is not ornamented so much as subtly styled toward the objects of her fascination as likely to be found on her morning walks as they are in spaces demarcated as particularly meaningful.

This is the power of quiet poetry. Sometimes, it exerts a force on our preexisting concerns in such a way that it clarifies what reams of explanation and prose cannot. These moments are epiphanous. And for me, the lightning bolt was this:

Thirst and hunger, rest and fatigue, all are imbalanced in the mind of the tourist and the tyrant, both of which are roles we sometimes play without intending to or recognizing that’s what we’re doing. 

One (or two) perfect episodes…well, now three…

Check out my take on the perfect episode of one of my childhood favorites here.

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

One of the more enjoyable projects I worked on while I was away from the classroom found me in a message from a former student, Sean. He writes and edits for Drunk Monkeys, a site I frequent for quick, pithy film takes and writing that often finds depth in its brevity.

In particular, Sean thought I might have something to contribute to one of their features, One Perfect Episode. The series features 1,000-ish word takes on the singular episode of the author’s television series of choice. Given my penchant for all things pop culture, this was not a bad assumption on his part.

Specifically, of course I had something: CHiPs. 

The genesis of my childhood television consumption begins with afternoon rebroadcasts of shows like Emergency and SWAT and Ironsides. But the first show I claimed as mine is the buddy cop classic depiction of swinging bachelor lawmen on bikes, cruising the LA freeways and doling out justice. The show had everything I was looking for: twenty-car pileups and high-speed chases, a slick disco soundtrack that matched the zeitgeist of the culture, and highly implausible storylines that always ended with the good guys coming out ahead just in time to share a good-natured joke at each other’s expense.

CHiPs was my gateway drug to shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider, and Air Wolf. Popcorn action with heroic possibilities and some humor to lighten the burden of the real-world experience of growing up in the 80s.

As for that one perfect episode of CHiPs, well, that was easy. “Roller Disco, Parts 1 & 2” is the singular achievement of all the show wanted to be. It is the moment of triumph and the exact point at which the show began to descend into a parody of itself. The argument could be made that it was the exact same moment for the end of the 70s and disco culture.

But that’s a big claim, and while the action of CHiPs was always larger than life, it’s issues were not. And that’s why is still resides in my head as a priori form of engaging with culture, even as I have watched my heroes, Ponch and Jon, go on to sell cheap land in Oklahoma and bad financial advice respectively.     

Enjoyably, the CHiPs post led to another on a show I love even more, Psych. Check out my working against type One Perfect Episode on “Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels, and Burton Guster’s Goblet of Fire.”

You know that’s right.

And if you want more, here’s my counter-popular-opinion take on “Mistaken Identity,” the perfect episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Books — Paintings that Look Like Things

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. 

Paintings that Look Like Things

Derek Updegraff, Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2018)

Find the books here and here. Check out Updegraff on his university page here.

Sometimes I read poetry because it is suggested to me, sometimes because I encounter it out in the wild, and sometimes because the author joins the department where I work. Such was the case with Paintings that Look Like Things, a collection by my newest colleague Derek Updegraff.

Reading through the pieces in this book, I was constantly moved by small moments that call the reader’s attention back to the present tense in the face loss, of love, of life, and of the things we long for. These moments are realized, usually, too late for the person at the center of the poems. 

For example, this piece of “Between Pit Stops at Late-night Diners:”

                          “Now in uncertainty,

let’s keep each of our shorter hopes at hand

but not neglect the long ones we have planned” (29).

Or these lines from “On This Loss:”

“He’d pictured some things right when the day came,

but he misremembered the one who’d shoulder

his absence….” (16)

Or this moment in the first of “Four Exeter Book Poems (from the Old English):”

“In carefree conversations we so often claimed

that nothing could divide the two of us

but death alone. Well that has been undone” (41).

What I appreciate in Derek’s work here is his ability to ball up the energy his pieces quietly build and then release it in these stark, clear moments of insight that redirect the reader’s focus from the people they find in the stanzas to their own lives.

In essence, he captures that moment when what we see in the lives of the people around us unexpectedly aligns with something we’d forgotten we needed to remember. This is not an easy response to elicit, and he does it consistently.

“Disruption” of the best kind

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

I dropped my grades the second possible day I could in the middle of December and began my sabbatical with three weeks of not working on anything.

Well, that was the plan anyway…

A little context: I haven’t taken three weeks away from working since before the turn of the century. The myth of the open summers where educators frolic carefree and workless? Sure thing, Boss.

See, I had this plan. Unplug completely for three weeks. Spend the break my wife and kids had in their schedule with them and nothing else pulling me away. Then another week with just myself to recharge a little. Maybe play some video games. Maybe a book for no other reason than I liked the cover.

I jokingly posted this on the first day of sabbatical. Secretly, though, I kinda hoped for a little more of this than the first month provided me.

It was a good plan. Then I pulled the sucker’s card. I opened my email to check on something completely unrelated to work, only to realize I had a deadline I’d forgotten about. For an academic essay I’d pitched months earlier. And had accepted. And then promptly filed in the “I’ll Get To It” file.

About that…the deadline was just a couple weeks away when I opened the email.

So my third week of coasting, the one for myself, became a bit of a mad dash to pull myself together, lay my hands on some sources I needed but didn’t have, and bang out the essay. I haven’t felt that much like the daily journalist I once was in a long, long time.

Fortunately, the topic was a present concern of mine, something I had spent a good deal of time thinking about in the recent past and for the several years before that. So, at the end of the week, I had a good version of what would become “Toward Disruption Creation in Digital Literature Instruction,” a brief exploration of one of the more fanciful flights I’ve taken pedagogically in my almost 20 years as an educator.

You can read about the specifics here, but the gist of it is this:

What if the future of learning is in turning over the majority of control to the students and then consistently disrupting their work—creatively and for their own good, of course—over the length of the term until they make something together for a public audience?

I know, right? It’s the youngest child’s fantasy work environment!

Turns out, though, that my theory seems to have some merit. Also, it’s just a fun class. Don’t take my word for it. Check with my #DigLit crews who likely have something to say about the matter and are more active on the socials that I am. 

I finished up and hit send and then read the fine print. Not only was I writing a piece, but I was part of a truly collective effort to crowd source edit the 11-article journal edition I was going to be a part of.

In specific, I got to be the first-round reader of two of the other pieces. Which, because I’m the type of nerd I am, was fascinating. It was also work I’d not planned on doing during my time away, so it also felt like a bit of an imposition…until I started commenting and receiving comments on my work from two other scholars in the field.

I can honestly say this was the smoothest and most collegial academic editing process I’ve ever been a part of. I benefitted from all of the conversations I had about my article and feel like I was truly able to help the authors I worked with move their pieces toward the expressions of their ideas they wanted them to be. #unicornedits 

So, yeah, I had to “give up” some time on the novel. But for this kind of an experience, I’ll take it. Check out the results here in the full volume of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies.