Lightly Held Adventures

So. The top of the mountain is now in sight. I’ve just uploaded the text for Pulled Into Nazareth, with its fresh ISBN number, which completes the adventure I set for myself this year: to publish the four books I’ve written in the last few years. The books are a series about Line, Marty and Paul, who move from their Midwestern cultural roots toward the wider world. The expedition now looks to be successful and I am surprised and pleased to see it through! In a couple of weeks, all four will be available for purchase on the Amazon website.

Connie, by Don Starnes, 2011

When Don and I first got together in 1999, we promised to hold each other lightly, allowing each other to be who we actually are. Lightly Held Films became the name of the production company we put together and when I turned to books, for me they were Lightly Held Books. Readers of this blog know all about the “making of” the series, which has the overall title of So Are You To My Thoughts.

Of course I’m using a “disruptive technology,” self-publishing, so I get what I deserve! I.e., so far not much in the way of reviews or attention. But also, as Don says, I am working “against story.” It may seem that I am naïve, or misunderstand the business of writing. But that is not the case. These books are exactly what I intend. Unpretentious characters, an atmosphere informed by my own life and what I know to have happened, an organic unfolding unlike what anyone could have predicted. This results in a vivid liveliness which contrived plots cannot match. A few readers have grown to love the characters and cannot wait to hear more about them.

And there is more. The currently written books leave off in about 1979. Line has a house full of kids, but wants work of her own, Marty’s marriage appears precarious and Paul is about to begin a new life in a new place. Where will their fortunes take them? Next year I will be working on their further lives in Nature’s Stricter Lessons. If all goes well, there will be three more books.

There is one other area in which I may be “disruptive.” One of my friends worried that perhaps I ought to have the permission of the Lenny Bruce estate, since the poster of him we had on our wall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, appears in a cover photograph. In fact, throughout the books, I quote snippets of the songs which so affected everyone I knew. The book titles themselves come from well-known songs. I believe that I use this material in the context of “fair use” of copyrighted material. Where songs are not well-known, I note the songwriter’s names in the text.

In the front of each book we state: "The author believes that all quotations in this book have been used under the 'commentary and criticism' fair use of copyrighted materials." The “fair use” doctrines, as they continue to be litigated, are based on the purpose of one’s use, the amount used and the effect of use on the value of the copyrighted work. As Ed Black, president of Computer and Communications Industry Association, says, “Fair use is the foundation of the digital age and a cornerstone of our economy.” Don too says, "If we want to have a culture, we must be able to quote from each other freely." In general, I believe that my quotes will enhance the use of copyrighted material, reminding people of its existence!

Books exist somewhere in the space between the reader and the writer. A book must leave space for the reader to become involved. The writer cannot, and should not, do all the work. If you read reviews, which are everywhere now, you will note that each tells quite a bit about the reviewer. Even professional reviewers, if not telling much about themselves, often reveal where their bread is buttered! The conversation is endless. It is what makes up a culture. What writers want is to be part of the conversation. It is certainly why we write.

Mentored by Writers

Not uncommonly, I think, for a young person who moved around a lot, I chose books and their writers as my chief window on the outside world. Narrative writers to begin with, though these writers were profoundly involved with reality. Later they were poets, essayists, those who told their own story. Using strict criteria, including having read most of their books, being involved with each over a long period of time and continuing interest in their work, I’ve come up with a very odd list of six writers. It surprises even me! Each of them commands my continuing attention, though there is little about their lives I do not already know.

From the time I was seven and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books were coming out with the Garth Williams illustrations, her prose has sounded in my head. The family she described closely mirrored my own, with a father and mother and four girls (soon to be more), as did their life on the plains, though Wilder described a pioneer girlhood 80 years previous to mine. Pa’s quest for a life lived in nature and Ma’s desire for education and civilization have been the twin sides of my own family’s values. The Ingalls family, even now, is as real to me as any I knew.

When I became aware of Ernest Hemingway’s direct, sensuous prose, I read as much of it as I could get my hands on. Even during the long period after his death when he was denigrated and I understood some of the damage he had caused, I never wholly let go of my fascination with Hemingway’s writing, his desire to be great. Lately this has been somewhat vindicated by reading the comic True At First Light, the book his son Patrick was able to carve from the “Africa book” Hemingway was working on. And, in the wonderful Hemingway’s Boat, Paul Henrickson quotes Archibald MacLeish as saying Hemingway was “the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creature I have ever known.”

I read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the summer of 1966 in the very first room I ever had of my own. I was struggling to get past Christianity, and this story of a poet at odds with Russia’s Bolshevik revolution helped. He wrote to his cousin in 1946, “The atmosphere of the work is my Christianity, slightly different in its breadth from Quaker or Tolstoyan belief, deriving from other aspects of the Gospel in addition to the moral.” I spent years reading everything Pasternak had ever written, as well as many biographies. As John Bayley writes, “Pasternak shares with Tolstoy the power of transforming and humanizing the actual and the terrible, not by shutting himself away from it but by remaining unexcited by it.” I have still not penetrated all that Pasternak was able to say about 20^th century life.

Woolf by Gisele Freund, 1939

In the 1970’s, biographies, diaries and letters began to come out by and about Virginia Woolf. I have not read all of them, but I read a great deal, and was especially moved by her great novels To the Lighthouse and The Years. I loved learning how The Pargiters, an attempt to set social history essays against a narrative, became, finally, The Years. Her life, the gritty details of it, is no less interesting than the novels. Records of Woolf’s unusual family, her partnership with her husband Leonard, the creation of the Hogarth Press and the lively life she lived among her Bloomsbury contemporaries are all chronicled and published by this time. In March 1941, having retreated to the house she shared with Leonard in East Sussex as their London house had been bombed, she wrote: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Of course I agree with her.

James Salter by Joe Tabacca, 1997

I must have picked James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime off a bookstore’s shelves some time in the early 1980’s. Quickly reading the other novels I could find, especially Light Years, he is a mentor for me in insisting on the beauty in real life. In 1990 he said, “My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy.” Somewhat hampered by his class (in my eyes), I don’t find his work consistently wonderful but I understand him and re-read him often. When I saw him speak (at least twice), I was impressed by his reserve and his dignity, though I believe, to a California audience, it looked like pretension. He died in June this year. I look forward to the biographies that will follow.

Gary Snyder is the most important living writer I know. I read all of his early collections of essays, took a workshop with him and enjoyed his attempts in poetry to put down “the flat, concrete surface of things, without bringing anything of imagination or intellect to bear on it.” Like Salter, he has never been at the center of the American stage, perhaps because he has never seen people as the epitome of creation. But wherever his words or his presence appear, the authority of his life and work is in no doubt. Peter Coyote quotes Snyder in The Rainman’s Third Cure: “Today the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.”

I have had many other mentors along the way. It is hard to know where to draw the lines, but the influence of these writers continues.