From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

6. Reading, Lit Crit, and the Workshop

Don't underestimate the powers inside you that would have you flinch and convince you that you are doing the right thing.

Here's a good one. Let's read a good book. Let's read the latest Janet Burroway novel. Now, of course you must read in order to be a writer, and read ravenously. But there are points in your writing day, and even in your life, when you run the danger of hiding in somebody else's voice, somebody's else's vision and sensibility. A moment comes when it's time to find your own artistic identity and find a way into your unconscious. And then you will need to manage your reading carefully. There are even wonderful ideas that another voice will give you, which seem to be furthering your writing career but in fact may be invitations to avert your eyes. You have to write.

Readers as well as writers need to understand that if a work of art is not an object of the mind, if a work of art is a product of the dreamspace, then a reader's primary encounter with this object also needs to be in the dreamspace. As I mentioned

earlier, as readers you need primarily and necessarily to thrum to the work.

When I say that, I know I put myself in the position of contradicting much of what you've learned about how to read. So be it — because I think that some very basic mistakes have been made in how you have been taught to read. The peda-gogical approach itself may not be inappropriate, but there are important caveats that need to attend it in order for you to make sense of the process.

Walker Percy made a wonderful point about the semiotics of the novel: he thinks that a novel, for all its length, is just an extremely long name for a complex, evolving emotion that has no name but that. I've often thought that if someone were to ask me what's the meaning of my novel Fair Warning, the only answer is: read it again. Fair Warning is a 75,ooo-word name for a complex, evolving emotion or state of being or state of the universe — and, therefore, even what it's the name of is not statable. The Maori of New Zealand have a name for a hill that translates as "The Place Where Tomatia, the Man with Big Knees, Who Slid, Climbed, and Swallowed Mountains, Known As Land-Eater, Played on the Flute to His Loved One." And that's rather like a novel. What's the name of that mountain? Well, it's this. To ask, What does that name mean? is meaningless. It has no other meaning; the name is irreducible. So too are the novel and the short story, irreducible names.

Your experience of this name should be aesthetic, not analytical. A kind of harmonic resonance is set up within you. That is the primary and appropriate response to a work of art.

You don't listen to a Beethoven symphony or look at a Monet painting or watch Suzanne Farrell dance and walk away with your head full of ideas, having, say, sat in your chair and had the keen intellectual enjoyment of watching the way the t hemes of the first movement were echoed in the second and then turned into that crescendo in the fourth. That's a separate kind of pleasure with certain value, but it is not the aesthetic response.

It seems to me that a lot of literature classes go wrong because the teachers, unintentionally but often intentionally, give the impression that writers are rather like idiots savants: they really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can't quite make themselves do it. So they create these objects whose ultimate meaning and relevance and value come into being only after they have been subjected to the analysis of thoughtful literary critics, who translate that work into theoretical, philosophical, ideational terms. And that is somehow the final usefulness, purpose, and meaning of the work. In how many literature classes have you heard it asked, "What does this work mean?" As if it had no meaning in the mere reading of it. Or, worse, "What is the author trying to say?" Trying. You've been in the presence of these attitudes, have you not? Well, this is nonsense, folks. Absolute nonsense. In the presence of such attitudes, your ability to read a work of literary art is actually being destroyed. I suspect the reason cinema is presently the most popular art form in our culture is that so few people have had film appreciation classes. They still are capable of an aesthetic response in a movie house.

But, ironically, I think that many of those literature classes could be taught exactly the same way and be beneficial if two things were said, which everybody then understood and believed. Every literature course in the country should begin with this announcement: What we're going to do this semester is a purely secondary and artificial thing. We are going to do that in order to tune up the instrument inside you which thrums. We're going to add some new strings in the upper and lower regis-ters. We're going to tune up all the strings, so that after you've taken the course, when you encounter a work of art, you will thrum to it more harmoniously and completely.

Then it's OK, teach the same things that are taught.

The last thing that needs to be said in every literature course in the country is this: Now that we have done this artificial and secondary thing in order to tune up your instrument, your final assignment is: forget everything we've said. Because if you don't forget it, when you encounter your next work of art, if you begin to translate it into terms of ideas and theory, breaking it into its parts even as you read — then I have destroyed your ability to have an aesthetic response and to encounter a work of art in the way it was intended. I have taught you how to miss the essence of this object.

If you take literature courses and these things are not said, then please fill in those blanks. Give yourself that warning at the beginning of the course and that final assignment at the end.

Let me say that what I stress here, what I obsess about, I think is absolutely crucial to assimilate into your artistic process. There may seem to be resident in that obsession a criticism of the way others teach this subject. That criticism is not intended and would be wrong. I think you absolutely need to hear the things that I obsess about, since they are the foundations for other insights — you need, for example, to get to the matters of craft and technique once you have earned that step by getting your process right. But do not infer any criticism of anybody's else's workshop here at FSU. We are a bunch of obsessives, each in our cage, and you slip into the cage and crouch in a corner. It is necessary for you to slip into several of our cages, because my obsessions are different from Mark's, are different from Elizabeth's, are different from Virgil's — you need exposure to all of us. The nice thing about it is that we're a complementary group of writing teachers. If I were your only teacher, something would be missing for you. So it's really important for you to be exposed to all of us or many of us. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as Chairman Mao once said.

Also, please understand that you're in a terrific school, because the literature people in this English department actually love and appreciate literature. This is not always the case. There are graduate English programs in this country where no literature is taught at all — only secondary sources, books about the books, are taught — literally. There are a lot of wonderful literature teachers here at this university and almost none of the syndrome that I was describing to you. So it's good you are required to take literature courses. You're in a good place.

Now, let's talk about the workshop, how we'll run a workshop with the insights I've been trying to give you. I offer this to you as a model if you choose to teach with the same emphasis I have or even as a model for informal writing groups. All writing workshops have a built-in danger. If you are in the place in your creative development where you really need to get in touch with your unconscious — the point where my particular obsession is what you need the most — there are certain aspects of common pedagogy that need to be drastically adjusted. One of them is your pace of production. None of you will have an externally fixed quota of words placed upon you this semester. It's a kind of honor system. You need to start meditating every day, and if you're not writing you should at least be going into your trance to free-float, free-associate. At some point you will need to be writing, and then — I've already told you that you have to write every day.

A few weeks into the course you need to catch me and we'll set up a personal goal for you — where you feel you are in terms of your unconscious, what you think would be a reasonable production for the semester. The point of this class is to get you out of your heads, so I don't want to put you under strictures of production that will force you to start willing things into being. You do not have to workshop at all this semester, any given one of you. If on a particular week, no one has anything to workshop, that's OK. We'll come, we'll meet, we'll talk, meditate or whatever, and you'll go away.

If you have a novel to write, and the system I taught you last week is really tapping into your unconscious, then after most of the semester is spent dreamstorming and working up your possible scenes, we might want to make your goal just the first few pages of your novel, which you could give me at the end of the semester. Be very flexible in terms of your production goals.

The workshop is open to fragments, but they need to be the opening fragments of the work. I'm not going to be dogmatic about how a particular piece manifests from your unconscious. I have some suggestions, but there's some wiggle room there. As I indicated to you, my use of that system of predreaming changed with virtually every book. But I do think doing a fair amount of writing ahead of sequence is fraught with dangers. For inexperienced writers, it's usually a way of avoiding the hard stuff. So if you're going to bring a partial something in, let it be the beginning, and please make sure we all understand that's what it is when you hand it in.

We can effectively do probably four manuscripts a week, and if they're fragments, probably more. So, theoretically, we've got enough spots that everybody can submit twice. If one person wants to submit six pieces, that's fine, because I'm sure there are some who'll prefer not to workshop at all. I've never had a class where somebody who wanted to workshop didn't have the chance. If you put in a fragment early on, it's not as if you then go to the back of the line. If you don't workshop at all, then we'll have a one-on-one meeting at the end of term.

Another thing that will be different from other workshops is that you are not required to say anything about anybody else's work. You will have the opportunity to, but there is no requirement. I want to help prevent you from reading from your head. When you get your fellow student's manuscript, you must read it as a work of art. You probably

shouldn't have a pen in your hand. You certainly should not be asking yourself, "What am I going to say?" Not even if it's from a benign impulse — and it usually is. Certainly not, "I'm going to get this son of a bitch because he got me last week," and especially not, "Butler's my way into publishing and not only am I going to have a chance to impress him with my work, I'm going to impress everyone with my critical acumen and my eloquence about matters aesthetic." I am not impressed that way. It will not affect your grade. I don't give a damn if you ever write a brilliant book review. But if such things are in your consciousness, the chances of your reading a manuscript the way it's intended to be read are very slim. That's why when you read that work, the first time through especially, it's just as if it's been written by Leo Tolstoy or Flannery O'Connor. You read it as a work of art, and you go thrum thrum thrum, and then perhaps you hit a twang. The second time through you have a pen handy: thrum thrum thrum, twang; you mark the passage and you keep thrumming on or twanging on.

When you go back and examine the twang, I want you to focus not on the symptoms — that is, the technical aspects of it — but the cause. Think of cause in light of what I've been saying about process. If the evidence shows that this work absolutely comes from the unconscious and the character has manifest, felt yearning, only then can you begin to think in technical terms. I don't want to hear technical observations until these other things are right. My most common critique will be to show you in the text where I feel the yearning is absent; the indicators that the fiction came from your head.

I warn you that my most common recommendation will he: Put this away and never look at it again. Do not rewrite, do not edit, do not fiddle, do not work this over. It came from the wrong place. You see how you got into your head this time; next time go somewhere else. In your own criticism of each other, as well, I want you to focus on the root problems — yearning, moment-to-moment sensual experience — we've been talking about here. Then we can move on to matters of craft and technique that you'll get with brilliant insight elsewhere.

In our workshops, always cite text when you comment. This is the spot. And if you can't say what the matter is exactly, don't make something up. Just say, "You know, I don't know why this didn't work but it didn't work for me here," and we can examine it. Don't feel we've got to find technical solutions or think up reasons. That draws you into your head too, and I'd rather you say, "Fourth paragraph, twang," and that's your critical comment, and that will be useful.

Misty has asked about a problem beyond the workshop. She says she's got stories that she's worked on for two or three years. These stories were workshopped, and she got a lot of suggestions, and she did a lot of revising, and yet there's so much work to be done — there always seems to be work to be done — that she doesn't even feel she should send them out. What do you do? How do you know when to send a story out and when to give up on it? Well, any short story you've been working on for two or three years — this might not be true of a novel, of course — the odds are that the story came from your head to start with. You need to go back and look at it as if you were a reader coming to somebody else's work. If you are convinced that in spite of all the problems in that story, the work originated in your unconscious, and you feel there is manifest yearning in that character, then by all means you should revisit it. But just as you can have bad from-the-head writing, you can have bad from-the-head criticism, so I would urge you to go back to the very first draft you did and put aside anything anybody has said to you. Go back to the draft that is closest to your center. It may need work — even if we are in touch with our unconscious, parts of the story get willed in and some don't, so you still have to overcome all that — but the fact is that many, many workshops give wrongheaded criticism. You know, it's the blind leading the potentially sighted here. And ultimately, you will and should have only a very small number of people you trust to read your work.

So revisit your own work as if it were someone else's; do the best you can with it, and when you've revisited it a few times, and the twangs are now essentially gone in your own artistic view, put it in an envelope and send it out. As soon as you put it out in the world, let it go; just let it go. You move on to the next thing kicking around in your unconscious; you go down there and wrestle it out of there. Just keep on doing that.

If somebody rejects the story, with whatever criticism— you're going to get bad criticism from literary magazines too, let's face it — you let it go. What is the editorial reader's frame of mind? They have fifty things on their desk today, and there are going to be fifty tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you think this puts them in a frame of mind where they are naked to each manuscript they open? Where they put aside the worldview they've held all their lives and open up to a new voice, a new vision of the world? Rarely. That's why a lot of bad stuff gets perpetuated, the bland stuff and the mediocre stuff. It's because often those screening readers — I'm talking about those first two people who see it — those readers, just by the very nature of what they do, are going to be if not consciously looking for, at least more open to, things familiar to them. So all of this works against the unique voice of the real artist. And this happens at the highest, most prestigious, slickest magazines — for any number of reasons that don't have to do with art.

This is a good moment to make another point about how to read a work of art. You should read slowly. You should never read a work of literary art faster than would allow you to hear the narrative voice in your head. Speed-reading is one reason editors and, not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art. By their professions they are driven to speed-read. Some book reviewers review three or four books a week. Such reviewers could theoretically be fine on works of nonfiction. Or certain works of fiction that do not rely on many of the essential qualities I've been trying to identify for you as the characteristics of art. But if you read four books a week and you read them all at pretty much the same pace, you are inevitably going to be a bad reader of literature. A speed-reader necessarily reads for concept, skipping "unnecessary" words; she is impervious to the rhythms of the prose and the revelations of narrative voice and the nuances of motif and irony. This makes a legitimate response to a work of art impossible.

For this and for other nonaesthetic reasons, you're going to get all kinds of responses from all kinds of people in your lives, folks, and the nonsense never ends. It will never end for you, so you need to cultivate now your own inner confidence in your vision of things.

Of course, the flip side of that is I had such inner confidence when I wrote "The Chieu Hoi," the terrible story I'm going to read to you next week, that I was blind to its deficiencies. It's a paradox of life as an artist (or an artist manque).

While I'm at it, let me make a point about life experience. You grew up reading novels and collections of short stories — or Janet and I did — where no matter how short the bio of the eminent writer, there'd be a sentence like, "He picked grapes in California, drove an ambulance in Italy, worked as a newspaper reporter. Dishwasher. Worked in a power plant in Mississippi" — and so forth. It was understood in the culture that artists had to be directly connected to the real world. Now, even in this day and age, people who get lost in the track I'm about to describe to you have some kind of childhood or young adulthood, and the first novel of the hot young writer with the big-name publisher takes its power from the fact that there was some life actually lived at some point. But the bio says, "Got his undergraduate degree at Amherst or Brown, took his MFA at the University of Iowa, and has been teaching at such and such a college." The second novel, if the author is lucky, is a kind of derivation of the first; but the third novel is about a professor having an affair with a student, and the fourth novel is about a novelist. You just see the life — and, not incidentally, the career — shutting down. Then this author starts writing nonfiction. The enduring artists are ravenous for life, ravenous for experience. And so the things you've done in the world beyond academia, things that are not rooted in books and defined by ideas, these things fill up your unconscious, they are the primary stuff of your compost heap.

Now, in the context of certain stories or books you are given to write, some of your "life experience" will necessarily have to come from a kind of research, and I'd like to mention several rich resources for that research — beginning with the Internet, which is a whole new sort of library for writers. The kinds of sense detail you need are available in a way that they never were before. An example from my own experience: in Mr. Spaceman there's an old woman telling a story about her youth when she went out walking, came over the peak of a sand dune, and observed the flight of the first Wright brothers plane — which gave her the lifelong yearning to fly. When she describes that plane later in her life, she would know exactly what kind of cloth was stretched over the skeleton. But I didn't know. Now, how do you find out such a detail? You could spend hours searching in a traditional library — because you wouldn't find it in the obvious places like an encyclopedia. But on the Internet — at the time, Google didn't exist; AltaVista was the best search engine, so I went to AltaVista and put in "Wright brothers," "plane," and "material," and "cloth." Three minutes later, I'm at a Smithsonian Institute Web page where I discover that it was muslin.

There are also a number of useful books that should be on your shelf. One that's really helpful in terms of sense details is called The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary,

published by Oxford University Press. It's about 650 pages of line drawings of everything under the sun — a warehouse, a riverfront, a grocery store, whatever, and each of these very detailed drawings has sixty or seventy little numbered arrows to tell you what every part is called. If your character is walking out onto a pier in the Hudson River, and you have him sit down on one of those tubular, rounded things that comes out of the pier, with ropes around it where they tie up the ship— you sort of lose the moment if you say, "Well, he sat down on that tubular thing…." OK, you go to the drawing of the docks and you see an arrow pointing at that thing and, by golly, it's a bollard. They've got two pages of hats that tell you the difference between a porkpie and a boater and a bowler and a fedora, and so forth. It's a great resource.

The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate and the Random House Webster's Unabridged are to my knowledge the only two dictionaries of American English that will tell you when a word entered the language — and when you're writing in period that can be crucial to know. I was writing Wabash, set in 1932, and the cop was swinging — I was going to say a billy club, but billy club came into the language in the 1940s. Nightstick came in at the turn of the twentieth century, so it's his nightstick he's swinging, not his billy club. These are very useful dictionaries in that respect. And, of course, there is the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, that gives you the timing for every subdefinition of each word, which the other two do not.

Another useful book is The Pantone Book of Color by Leatrice Eiseman and Lawrence Herbert, published by the art

house Harry Abrams, which contains thousands of different shades of colors along with their official names. Sometimes having such a visual point of reference will be helpful.

There are several books that can aid you with period detail, but one I like is called American Costume, 1915–1970 by Shirley Miles O'Donnol, Indiana University Press, which will show you what people wore every day. You might also look for copies of all those wonderful old reproductions of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, which were popular a few years ago. You should steal a big city phone book next time you go to New York or Los Angeles.

There are a number of baby-naming books that I find really useful. One I especially like is Beyond Jennifer and Jason, Madison and Montana, which gives the period popularity, connotation, classical meaning, and so forth of hundreds of names. I find it useful to name my characters very early in the process, and it can be important to find the right name.

There's a great book called A Field Guide to American Houses, which will give you a view of and the accurate names for architectural features of common domiciles. Another, called American Shelter, is also useful in this regard.

It's a good idea to have handy a good slang dictionary. Two I recommend are The New Dictionary of American Slang and the Thesaurus of American Slang, both edited by Robert Chapman.

7. The Bad Story

I know that you've read "Open Arms" for tonight [see appendix], which is a story I'm proud of. But if I'm going to critique many of your stories by telling you to put them away and never look at them again, I think it's only fair that I begin by expos-ing to you a story that I had to put away and never look at again — except for the purpose of illustrating a good writer's bad beginnings — a story whose origins were, eventually, eighteen years later, recomposted into "Open Arms."

So tonight I'm going to treat you to that awful story, and I'm going to begin by reading a bit from the notebook that I carried around Vietnam in my hip pocket. I carried it with great self-importance. My ambition back then was to be famous. I carried that book in my hip pocket thinking that I could see it under glass some day: This was the curve of his butt. These are the smudges made by his fingers. Yes, this was his toothbrush.

These are the false things, where ambition goes wrong. Your ambition as an artist is to give voice to the deep, inchoate vision of the world that resides dynamically in your unconscious. That's what you must keep focused on; that's the only ambition worth anything to you as an artist. The desire to give voice and the desire to be published sometimes feel like the same thing, but they're not. The dream that comes from your white-hot center and the dream of fame — they are not the same.

In any case, I always carried a notebook around and I made hundreds of notes. After I figured out what art is all about, I never looked back at them again — except to look for this passage; and I didn't do that until I started to teach. Here's the passage from the notebook:

Nui Dat [the place where I was], chieu hoi [a Vietnamese phrase which means essentially "open arms"] at the stag films. Former political officer of large crack Viet Cong unit now watching the Aussies' Sunday night stag films, all four hours of them. Communist intense prudishness: punish people for having a pinup; what does he think of this? I talk to him later. He is very intelligent. A VC adjutant went to hills because he hated the wasteful, inefficient, corrupt government, and also because one day his wife and child were standing in a doorway and an ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam; that is, South Vietnamese] soldier gunned them down. Went to the hills. Finally decided that the war would never end this way, returned and

became bushman scout for the Aussies, took them to base camp after base camp. Names, stats on dozens of VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure, the shadow government people]. Driving through village, saw woman, just lower half of face, identified her as VCI. He met her only once six weeks ago. It took him four days to find the ARVN soldier before he went to the hills. The chieu hoi was a platoon leader of Sapper Recon Platoon. Went to COSVN, which is the North Vietnamese Army headquarters that nobody ever found. Went to Cambodia, a month's march. There he learned sapper techniques. One day I was watching Vietnamese television. He came in and smiled and he sat down with me. He asked if I spoke Vietnamese. He asked if I was an American. We talked and watched television together. I told him what I thought of the Vietnamese people, their warmth and kindness to me in spite of the bitterness they should have after all these years of the war. He said they'd had hundreds of years of war already — the Chinese, the French, and so forth — and it is part of life. He said they all want peace very badly, both those who speak against the war and those who make the war, but when the Americans and Australians pull out the Communists will take over. He says the Communists don't allow people to be anything but poor, don't allow people to print newspapers or speak against the government. The people who are against the war don't understand this; he says when you have a choice between a bad Communist government and a bad democratic government, you must choose the

bad democratic government because you can change it eventually.

That's what was in this little notebook I carried around. About six months after that event, I wrote the first short story I ever wrote as an adult. I had finally decided that I wasn't going to write plays; my future was in fiction. Luckily I didn't know how far-off that future was. The story is called "The Chieu Hoi," and — I take a deep breath — here it is:

"Hey, Yank! You sure you want to stay around? We've got some bloody hot stag films coming up." The warrant officer they called Wally laughed and began moving wicker chairs at the back of the club.

I hesitated a moment at the half seriousness of his jibe and thought of the tiny, sweet-smelling, whining girls lingering in the dark of our company street at Long Binh.

"Think I'll chance it," I said.

The snap of canvas in the twilight and I looked out the big tent at the blowing trees. I'd trade the Aussies some of our real sex for a few of their trees.

"You don't get anything like these at your camp."

"No."

I heard the crunching of the gravel floor as he struggled with the chairs. One more look at the trees going purple outside.

"Want some help?"

"You just relax yourself. I can handle these."

I got up. "I insist."

I went back to him and helped put the chairs in line facing the raised platform at the far end of the club.

"You going to be the projectionist?"

"Yes indeed. It won't be anything fancy, mind you. But the machine's good and we use a nice fresh bedsheet for the screen. Appropriate."

As we laughed, Thanh came in. I had seen him around the camp. One of the very few Vietnamese on the post. He smiled the eager, head-bobbing smile used for foreigners who don't speak Vietnamese and he sat down in a chair near the platform.

"That's Thanh."

"I've seen him around," I said.

"He's a chieu hoi. He was the leader of a VC sapper platoon." The Australian paused for effect. I looked at the slim young man quietly smoking a cigarette. There is always a silent moment of shared respect when two allied fighting men talk about sappers. They are the combat engineers who penetrate perimeters and are the toughest, gutsiest VC of all. "If all their blokes were like Thanh, the VC would have kicked our asses into the sea years ago. He's a bushman scout for us now. That little bastard has led us to base camp after base camp. He sat down and wrote out biographies on dozens of VC infrastructure people all over Phuc Tuy province. Incredible mind, that bloke."

Thanh continued smoking, seemingly unaware of our talk. He looked very small, sitting motionless in the large wicker chair.

"Why did he join the VC?"

"In '67 his wife and child were standing in the door of his house. A government soldier gunned them down. Killed them. It took Thanh four days to find the soldier. Then he went to the hills."

I left the Australian and walked forward to where Thanh was sitting. He looked up as I approached and he smiled and nodded again.

"How are you?" he asked slowly in articulated English.

"Toi manh gioi. Con ong thi sao," I said. It was the standard Vietnamese reply.

Thanh laughed loud and long and thrust his hand to me. "You speak Vietnamese very well," he said in his own language.

I sat beside him as I shook his hand. "Don't put me on a paper airplane," I said, using the Vietnamese saying that amiably rejects flattery. Thanh laughed loud again.

"Very good. Very good. You are an American, aren't you?"

"Yes. I'm just working with the Australians for a couple of weeks. We exchange people sometimes."

"How long have you been in Vietnam?"

"About three months," I replied.

"And you speak so well? That is amazing."

"I studied for a year in America before I came to Vietnam."

"I see. But you still speak very excellent Vietnamese. It is not the same just to study it. You are very good."

"Thank you. I am happy to have the opportunity to talk to the Vietnamese people." I began to feel that inevitable awkwardness that always comes at the start of conversations, as I sound for many minutes like a daily dialog from our language textbook.

Thanh took a long puff on his cigarette, savoring it, and blowing the smoke through his nose. After a moment of contemplating the cigarette in his hand, he looked at me and smiled easily again. "What do you think of Vietnam?"

"I like Vietnam very much," I said. I glanced past Thanh and out at the darkening sky. "The evenings are very cool."

"Yes, they are. Very fresh." I looked back at Thanh. He smiled and nodded, waiting for me to say more. I looked at his hands. I had heard so many whistles of respect for sappers from even the most grizzled "gook-killer" sergeants that I had an almost childish awe of these small brown hands. The left lay in repose on the arm of the chair. The right continually rolled the cigarette, meticulously keeping the lit end free of flaking ash.

"The fresh nights are fine to be with someone," Thanh said.

I looked up at him. The humor of the statement startled me as I saw in my mind the night roaming VC platoons. I could not tell if Thanh intended the joke.

"But is that your only feeling for Vietnam in three months?" he continued.

"No. Of course not."

"I am interested in your feelings."

It seemed a good chance to crawl out of my textbook. "Before I came to Vietnam I had expected half the people to be so miserable from the war that they would hate any foreigner and the other half of the people to be Communist sympathizers and therefore want to kill me."

Thanh laughed.

"But since I have been here I have talked to many Vietnamese people. And it is amazing. Without exception, every man and woman has been as friendly and open as anyone I have ever met."

"Of course."

"In spite of all the years of misery, the Vietnamese people have an innate sense of cheerfulness that is truly extraordinary."

"Vietnamese know how to enjoy life." Now Thanh looked out of the tent. His cigarette was gone and both his hands rested lightly on the arms of the chair. He turned back to me and smiled a more solemn smile. "The Vietnamese have had hundreds of years of war. Many countries have come here to war — China, Cambodia, Japan, France."

"The U.S.," I said.

"Many countries. So the Vietnamese people know what war is. But it makes no difference. If a people know how to enjoy life and they are used to war, it makes no difference. Their life goes on. The war is part of it. But they enjoy living. They are still happy in their days."

Among the high branches a few stars were beginning to appear. Thanh was watching the night now too.

"Why did you join?"

Thanh turned to me. The easy smile was gone. But his solemnity was simply thoughtful, still friendly. After a moment he said, "The government was robbing the people. It was corrupt and wasteful and repressive. At the time, the Communists seemed to offer an alternative." He paused, watching my face closely. I nodded my head and waited for him to say more.

Then I said, "Was that all?"

"No. Of course not." We looked at each other silently for a moment more. Then he said, "They murdered my wife and child." Another pause. "We had only two years together."

Other people were coming in. They were laughing at the back of the club, calling out orders for beer, pulling chairs around.

"And why did you leave the VC?"

"'The purity of the revolution must be preserved. The corruptions of the body are part of the decadence of our enemies.' One of the men in another platoon was caught making love to one of the nurses and was shot." Thanh thought a moment and then added, "Of course, that was logical to them."

People were sitting just behind us now. Talking loudly and sitting on my other side now too. Thanh paused and I leaned closer.

"The Communists love no one. They love nothing," he said.

The OC made a little speech about keeping the noise down but how it was difficult to applaud with one hand anyway and everyone laughed and the lights went out and the films began. There were nine twenty-minute Danish films. Three hours of close-ups. Working bodies. And hands. Avid hands.

Thanh sat unmoving through all nine films. He watched and the three-hour string of male jokes at the screen must have been nothing but a blur of foreign words. He watched earnestly, his hands quiet.

When the lights came up, Thanh and I remained as the others drifted out of the tent or back to the bar. Thanh was looking at his hands.

"Enjoyable, wasn't it?" I said.

"It was so short."

At first I didn't understand. Three hours, after all. I smiled.

"Only two years." He looked at me. Then the easy smile came again. He shook my hand and we spoke the conventional Vietnames good-byes before he left.

Lots of stuff wrong with this; in fact, everything's wrong with it in exactly the way I've been describing. "Hey, Yank. " Opening with a piece of dialogue very rarely works,

because there's no context. And, important, in this whole piece there's not a single line of dialogue with subtext. Nothing's going on beneath the surface. Dialogue gives you the illusion of moment-to-moment sensual experience— after all, these are the words this character is speaking aloud in the moment — but in bad dialogue all you're getting is the information, exposition, or emotional declaration; and that's where your summary, your generalization, your abstraction, your analysis, run and hide in plain sight. Beware of that as you work to get that unselected, unironic, there-for-information stuff out of your writing: it's going to try to find a new home in the mouths of your characters. This story is full of sheer chunks of analysis and abstraction, often straight from my undigested notes, included just for the convenience of the story.

The story is also inorganic. Even though there appears to be a motif, the images are totally unrelated. Looking out of the tent, and the trees, and going purple against the sky—what's all that about? It does not connect in its sensual pattern to anything going on in the story. Remember that I had written twelve just as awful plays, so these passages are like little stage directions (which was my failure as a playwright too): He's looking, I'm looking out, then he looks out, and I look out, and now we're both looking out. No resonance whatsoever.

The trap of literal memory is very clear here. It was eighteen years later that I wrote "Open Arms," which as you can see grew out of the composting of the same event. Let's call "The Chieu Hoi" the bad story and "Open Arms" the good story. In the bad story, things happen exactly as they did in real life, whereas the good story involves a dramatic inversion of the literal event. In the bad story Thanh's motivation is that he was in a place where he was comfortable and where he belonged, a South Vietnamese democratic society. The thing he did against his own deeper nature was go off to join the VC in response to the killing of his wife and child by a South Vietnamese soldier. And now, in the bad story, he's basically back where he belongs. You notice that in "Open Arms" all this is inverted. He was a Viet Cong true believer and the Viet Cong killed his wife and child, and this Australian porn show where we find him is not where he belongs but a place where he also doesn't belong. I had to free myself from the way it literally happened in order to make "Open Arms" work.

In the bad story the narrator is a passive observer. It's me. I'm sure every one of you has at least one story — and you may write another — where you are the sensitive writer responding to this unusual character you've met in life. You encounter somebody interesting and you go, Oh boy, that's a story. You sit down and write it, putting yourself in the middle as a passive observer watching this other person. Right? What's missing in every story where you've got a passive observer in the middle? The yearning. If the narrator in my bad story desires anything at all, it's to show what a swell sensitive American guy he is. Which of course is not a yearning at all. The narrator is doing fine, meeting this interesting guy he can communicate with in his own language, and the guy's doing fine, back where he belongs. Oh yeah, his wife and child are dead, but, you know, that's a problem, not a yearning. The dynamics of desire are utterly missing.

I don't care how smart you are. Your mind is stupid artistically, and here's another striking example of that. I have to emphasize that this event in the story I'm about to point out did not happen in real life. In "The Chieu Hoi," this sensitive American who speaks Vietnamese says, "Why did you join?" Thanh turns to him. His "easy smile was gone…" And Thanh even tries to avoid answering. " 'The government was robbing the people. It was corrupt and wasteful and repressive.."' And so forth. Then Thanh pauses, obviously hoping that's all he has to say on the subject. And the narrator drills in." 'Was that all?'" he asks. He makes Thanh talk about the tragedy.

This is utterly cruel. But it's no longer about people, it's about crudely applying fiction technique. The writer wants to get this information about Thanh into the story in his own voice, and to show how the guy is struggling, trying not to face the terrible thing that's happened. Gee, how do you show that? Well, you have your narrator ask him, and when he waffles, you press him. Now I promise you I never would have done this in real life. But when I wrote the story I was totally oblivious to the moral implications and didn't notice until I came to teach creative writing and pulled the old bad story out that this sensitive American guy does something truly heinous. That's what comes from writing from your head. As writers we must have compassion for all the characters we create. If we're going to play God, we have to be a loving God, and you can't love with your brain.

By contrast, the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms," whose yearning resonates organically into the story as it's reconceived, does a similar heinous thing; but he himself is conscious of it — and so am I as writer. Both the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms" and the American narrator in "Chieu Hoi" know ahead of time that the man's family was murdered and that is why he left his home. In both cases, even though they know it, they make him say it. But the Vietnamese narrator, says: "To my shame." He says it both times. To my shame. He knows he's doing a terrible thing here and acknowledges it. We see that tension in him.

Of course, you might write a story with an insensitive character like the narrator of "The Chieu Hoi." Obviously there are cruel characters and cruel acts in fiction. But in that story the cruelty is totally incidental — or maybe the intent of the author was to show a sensitive guy responding to a sad character who misses his wife. And that's all he takes away from an afternoon of porn films. How pathetic. The narrator's insensitivity is not an issue; there's no repercussion, there's no realization, and no seeming ill effect on Thanh. We don't see the cruelty of it in any manifest way. It's just on-the-surface cruelty, and it stays on the surface.

Let me elaborate on a point I made earlier in passing about the beginning of "Open Arms": "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." How do you establish dramatic irony in a story? Well, to begin with, anyone who has to say he's got no hatred in him is already protesting too much. And then, one way to suggest irony is with a qualifier, in this case just that one word almost. "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." He has self-doubt that lets us doubt him. "I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little" — perhaps—"that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn't matter. In the end, my country itself was lost. " My country.

This whole story, as you soon learn, has to do with trying to find a place in the world. "In the end my country was lost and I am no longer there.." It's not that it's no longer his country, it is his country, but he's no longer there. He takes some pleasure in the fact that his wife and her new lover are suffering. And then he brings up this stranger, this guy:

. who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I've been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

Let me indulge in a bit of artificial and secondary analysis. The Vietnamese narrator asserts that he understands the story he's going to tell. As a result of it, he has accepted his fate. None of that's true. I hope you understand the irony at the end, that little litany of I'm OK: I've got a VCR, I've got a good job, there's no hatred in me, everything's fine. Not so. He is utterly lost, for the same reason as that other man, Thap, who came to a moment in which he realized that he had no country whatsoever. That's what our narrator is really responding to, because in spite of his avowals at the end of the story, deep down he feels he belongs nowhere. I live on Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana. . And of course, his yearning is for a place in the world.

Understand that when I came to write "Open Arms," I did not refer to this older story at all. In 1988 I was finishing my sixth novel, The Deuce, which is in the voice of a sixteen-year-old half-Vietnamese, half-American former Saigon street kid who ends up on Forty-second Street in the bad old days before Mickey Mouse overran the place. Alan Cheuse called me to say he was producing a series for National Public Radio called The Sound of Writing, and he was soliciting original short stories that would be read by actors on the radio. He said, Would you give us one? You bet. I hung up the phone and… what have I done? I was writing good novels, and I'd convinced myself that it's a rare writer who is adept in both forms. I went back to those stories to see if there was something I could salvage, but they were worse than I remembered. So I put them away again.

However, there was a bit of Vietnamese folkway on one of the three-by-five cards I'd made for The Deuce, which I'd expected to put into the novel but hadn't. The card that fell out of the stack had to do with a Vietnamese boy who loved to catch, train, and fight crickets. Suddenly a voice came out of my unconscious, the voice of a Vietnamese father in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on a Sunday afternoon. Everything's boring and dull and his son is bored and he tries to interest the kid in cricket fighting. So I sat down and wrote it in one six-and-a-half-hour stretch. It turned out well.

I went to bed that night and the next morning when I woke up I had two dozen other voices in my unconscious, saying me, me, me. All the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain presented themselves to me at once. When "Open Arms" came to me, it was not in reference to that old story; it wasn't even a reference to the notebook. I didn't look at the notebook either. The voices came strictly from my unconscious at that point.

Before you go, let me give you an assignment for next week: you'll need to be able to tell some personal anecdote, something you've told before aloud. I don't want you to give this any thought; you don't need to write it out; it doesn't need to be profound; it can be totally trivial: taking a shower, sitting at a traffic light. You don't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be moving or well told. Just tell an anecdote as you would over coffee. Of course it's going to be full of summary and generalization and analysis. It should be. An anecdote is not a work of art; it's something else. So do the something else. It'll give me a little fragment of your life to walk you back through in a special exercise.

8. The Anecdote Exercise

How many seriously want to do this tonight? We're going to hear your informal anecdotes first, so you have to make a quick choice about whether you're open to doing this in front of the class. You will also get a fair amount of benefit from just observing and listening. Volunteers.?

You have to actually lift your arm above your head. One, two, three, four.

Good. Now the four of you are going to tell your anecdotes as you would over a couple of beers, and after you're all done I'll bring you up front one at a time. Everyone else — these are your instructions for the evening — when we redo these little narratives, nobody look at the speaker. Or at me. All of you are to go into your trance state and participate moment to moment with the person retelling a fragment of the anecdote. You will all stare at a blank sheet of paper, or your thumbs, or you'll close your eyes, meditating. You will concentrate on evoking the images that come out of the subject's

mouth. I promise you, we will not get past the barest first few moments of the anecdote.

Those of you in front of the class: I will walk you sentence by sentence through a fragment of your anecdote, demanding absolutely pure moment-to-moment through-the-senses narrative. When you vary from that, I will gently identify the way in which you vary it and have you back up. Then at some point I will even step in and make you consider certain things: What do you smell? — and so forth.

At every question, at every little fork in the road for the speaker, I want you at your desks to be making those same decisions. And if your decisions are different from the speaker's, fine; then back up, edit that, and keep going forward. I want you to be participating internally.

We're going to be utterly obsessive about moment-to-moment sensual flow of narrative here. We're not going to do any fast motion or slow motion, we're not going to allow the narrator the leeway of abstraction and generalization and interpretation that are sometimes allowable as voice — none of that tonight. The details that I'm going to be eliciting have no center of gravity to them, because we're not going to get involved with yearning; that will emerge, we hope, next week in the coached writing exercise. But tonight there's no center of gravity, so the details will be promiscuous.

Understand that what's coming out of your mouth is not the same as writing a work of literary fiction. It has a superficial similarity to literary fiction, but the purpose of the exercise is simply to make you understand what the normal mode of literary discourse is, what your normal focus and speed are in literary fiction, and to open up your sense memory and, therefore, to open you up to your unconscious. Don't be disturbed if it's frustrating and nothing comes of it. If you work your way through that, at least you'll feel what's wrong. I've seen spectacular breakthroughs a few times with people doing this exercise, but whatever happens is OK; you won't be graded, no one's judging you. It's just an exercise to help you and your colleagues.

Because I'm going to be asking these questions, and because your literal memories are not sufficient to remember the kinds of detail I'm asking for, I'm obviously not looking for your memories of the actual event. We're using the anecdote as a familiar takeoff point for you, but mostly you're going to be inventing. We're going to lead you to invent a reality for a tiny fragment of the anecdote. So if you don't remember it very well, that's fine too — probably better. The invention must come from your sense memory—not your ability to remember exactly where you smelled that thing or exactly what you heard ten years ago; but your ability to collect all the sensual impressions of your life as impressions, to break them down in the compost of your imagination, and then to recover them, reevoke them, and recombine them into these new imagined things.

Who's going to go first to tell your anecdote? Sandra— good, thanks.

I'll be taking a few notes, nothing evaluative; I just want to get it down so I'll know where to come back to.

Sandra: I don't remember how old I was, but I walked through the streets of Liverpool to visit my grandfather, who had a barbershop somewhere. It was probably nearby somewhere, but I thought it was a long way away. And I went to the shop to visit him, and he was shaving. He used an old-fashioned razor. He stopped what he was doing — I think he said something like "Hello luv" to me. And he went over to the window and he picked up a pair of earrings, which were in the window. I don't know what he was doing selling earrings, but they were in the window and he just picked them out and gave them to me and I put them on. I really loved them. My wonderful grandfather. My mother never understood why I liked him when she didn't, but I think that was one of the crucial moments forming a relationship with him.

ROB: Excellent, that's going to be very useful. That gives us a lot of good stuff to work with. Who else?

Mary Jane: This is about the day after my father died. My brother and I drove out to the funeral home to make arrangements for his funeral, and walked in the door, and it was like a movie cliche of a funeral parlor. It had this really thick carpeting on the floor and heavy curtains; it was dark inside and there was air-conditioning and it was really cold. And then the fellow who was the funeral director — you know, black mustache and a cheap suit — exactly what you would expect, I guess. We went in and sat down, my brother and I, across the table from each other, and went through the checklist of what you have to do to arrange a funeral. My father wanted to be cremated, but what we didn't realize is that by law you have to be cremated in a casket, so we had to choose a casket for him anyway. So we took a tour of the funeral parlor; we got to look at all the caskets, and my brother and I decided we would buy the cheapest thing, which was a cardboard box, which in a way is kind of shameful, but we also looked at each other and thought if we did anything else Dad would kill us if he were here because he wouldn't want to spend the money. Some weird things happened, like we sat there across from each other arranging this funeral, trying not to laugh the day after our father had died, because it was all such a cliche. And I said, "Can I pay for this with a credit card?" and I thought: this is weird, to pay for this with a credit card. And the last thing that happened was somebody had to go and identify the body, and my big, tough, army-helicopter-pilot older brother didn't want to do it, so I did it. I went in and saw my father wrapped up in a blanket, laid out in this room, and somehow I had to touch his head and he was so cold that I thought, "He's been in the refrigerator overnight." It was very strange.

ROB: Thank you, Mary Jane. Brandy?

Brandy: When I was three years old, I went on vacation to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, at Arrowhead State Park, and I was seesawing with both of my brothers, the older brother on one side of me and the next oldest on the other. The middle brother always had middle-child syndrome and couldn't stand me, and he got mad at one point and decided to get off, but he didn't realize that my legs were in the handle part of the seesaw, so when he did, it shot me up in the air and I broke my leg, and I had to drive all the way back home with a broken leg.

ROB: Thank you. That works too. Leslie?

Leslie: When I was small, I grew up in a house surrounded by hay fields and pecan orchards, and in the middle

of the fall, about this time of year, my cousin Gaines — who looked a little like Clark Kent, with big bottle glasses — would, get on his tractor, and he would mow all the hay and leave hundreds of bales of hay the size of a Volkswagen out on the edge of the pecan orchard. Then my brother and I would climb up on the hay bales and jump from bale to bale and play king of the mountain. The goal was to knock the other person off the bale. When I was very small, I couldn't get onto the hay bales because they were round, and sometimes they'd be so big that I couldn't get a grip in smooth hay without digging into it — and it's hard to dig into it because it's real dense — so I'd have to find two bales that were close together and crawl into that narrow space in between and inch away up sideways, and my brother would knock me off and sometimes it hurt really bad falling down.

ROB: Thank you, Leslie. If the four of you are serious about continuing, then that's probably all we're going to need. Who'd like to go first for the retelling? Come on, Sandra.

All right, I want you to remember that you're all in this together. I want you essentially to take on Sandra's consciousness, participate with her, really try to see this scene — a little bit ahead of her even.

Sandra, I want you to relax, clear your head. Don't consider your words. Speak in full narrative sentences, but don't worry about your grammar and syntax. Just try to keep things flowing, and just let what comes out of your mouth be simply an articulation of what's going on in that cinema of your own mind.

Let's take you from the first moment you step into the barbershop, Sandra. Pick us up there, and understand that the goal is to articulate only in the moment through the senses.

Sandra: I can see a lot of men pushing around me.

ROB: OK, you've just now generalized. "A lot of men" is a generality. You take that first step in the door and you stop. You place yourself in that room and I want you, like the camera eye, to see it in its fullness — look from left to right, up to down, whatever, but let's see what you're seeing in the moment.

Sandra: There are men sitting.

ROB: You've generalized once again. Let's start at one specific spot in the room. If you're taking in a generalized view of the room, it's not really general because, in fact, there's a picture full of detail, but because we're not painters — we're fiction writers — we have to place those details in a sequence, don't we? So take the step in, and I want you to look at a specific spot and see that spot, then move your eyes, and move them, and move them.

Sandra: OK, I go through the door.

ROB: That's also summarized: "I go through the door." There's no engagement of the moment with the doorknob, no sound of the door opening, no feeling of the exchange of air between the outside and barbershop. Do you understand? There are so many moment-to-moment sense impressions going through the door that were left out. What we're looking for is every moment-to-moment detail. But let's not get hung up at the door. You have entered and have just closed the door behind you. You are in your first moment completely in the barbershop. Let your eye fall on one specific thing right now.

Sandra: It's a man.

ROB: Now you've started this with a summarizing state-ment. I want you to see it in the moment specifically. What is the first feature on that man's whole being? What's the first thing your eyes come to? Engage him with your eyes in the moment. So tell me the first thing you see about that man.

Sandra: I can't see him properly.

ROB: OK, that's probably because you're trying to remember him from the literal event. What I want you to do now is invent him. Make him a sensual reality in this cinema of your mind, in your imagination. Take a moment. You've just touched the brass of that doorknob and it felt cool in the very center of the palm of your hand. You've turned it and you've leaned into the door and it has creaked open and a little bell tinkles at the top and the smell of powder and..

Sandra: Shaving cream..

ROB: Good. Pick it up. What else comes out of the air as you're just stepping through the door.

Sandra: The sound of the strap as he presses the blade.

ROB: OK, the sound of the strap — what is that sound? — give me that sound.

Sandra: Kind of like a dull little whack against the leather strap.

ROB: Good. What else? What else is coming out of you as you're inside.

Sandra: Coughing. Talking.

ROB: OK, you're generalizing those. Let's hear a specific cough, and tell me about that cough. And a fragment of talk. Tell me those things in narrative.

Sandra: A man's coughing.

ROB: Not too much removed from a cough. Tell me about that cough?

Sandra: It's a dry cough.

ROB: From where is it coming?

Sandra: It's coming from his throat.

ROB: All right. Hear a fragment of something that's spoken.

Sandra: I actually hear my grandfather's voice.

ROB: You've just summarized that for me, OK? What is he saying?

Sandra: He's talking about dogs.

ROB: You've summarized what he's talking about. Absolutely drop into the center of the conversation and let me hear a fragment of what he's saying.

Sandra: "Sheila's a beautiful bitch."

ROB: Good, very nice.

Sandra: "Sheila."

ROB: All right. Let your grandfather look in your direction. Tell me what you see and how you see him and what you see him do.

Sandra: He has the razor in his hand.

ROB: That's generalized for me. If that's the sentence, how is he holding it? Give me all the details.

Sandra: He has it pointed out. He's holding his forefinger to the back of the blade, balancing it, holding it very delicately. He's such a big man, he has such a big hand. He's holding the razor very gently and delicately.

ROB: OK, now those are abstractions — gentleness and delicacy. Tell me in the moment through the senses what you are seeing there that you have abstracted as delicate.

Sandra: Lightly. It's a kind of a shape of the hand.

ROB: What shape? How are the fingers arranged?

Sandra: The forefinger's out in front of the blade.

ROB: Where's the pinkie?

Sandra: It's balancing the very end of the razor.

ROB: Let his face turn to you. Let me see his face in the moment.

Sandra: He is not surprised to see me.

ROB: OK, you have just analyzed his face. He's not surprised to see you. We're not seeing a not-there; what are we seeing?

Sandra: He's looking as though he was expecting me to walk in.

ROB: You just analyzed it again. What do you read in the face? Because the little girl standing there perhaps rightly analyzes the look on his face, but what is it that's on the face she sees that leads her to that analysis? That's what we're after.

Sandra: That's abstraction?

ROB: That's abstraction. The thwack of that razor on the strop tells me that you have a very fine sense memory and also that you should drop into "She was a beautiful bitch" as the first words out of his mouth. Those are fine, striking moments, Sandra. Now what you need to do is turn that same faculty to this face.

Sandra: He seems to gaze at me with a very level expression. His expression hardly seems to change.

ROB: OK. From what?

Sandra: From what I would have expected him to.

ROB: OK, now you're begging the question. What feature on his face are you looking at? Focus on one feature.

Sandra: His eyes.

ROB: Tell me about his eyes.

Sandra: He's gazing.

ROB: Gazing is a kind of generalized thing, isn't it? There is an infinite variety of gazes. What are those eyes? Look at those eyes and let me see precisely what they are.

Sandra: They're blue.

ROB: Blue like what?

Sandra: Actually like a steely kind of blue-gray.

ROB: What do you smell?

Sandra: Tobacco.

ROB: What's that like? There are a lot of different kinds of tobacco. How do you experience that smell?

Sandra: I associate that with men.

ROB: Yeah, that's kind of generalizing for me now. There's a lot of different modulations of tobacco smell and they come to you in various ways. So let me smell that specific tobacco smell.

Sandra: It's sweet. And dark.

ROB: Sweet and dark. That's good. What part of your body does it make you conscious of? Where does it impact your body?

Sandra: In the stomach. It seems to go straight down into me when I smell it.

ROB: Good! OK, thank you Sandra. [Applause and much laughter.] It's very difficult. But so is writing literary fiction. And, you know, you must place these demands on yourself to be in the moment and through the senses. All the time, in everything you write in your fiction, this must be the standard mode of discourse unless and until the organic object not only allows but demands, from deep, resonant, dream-driven places, that the mode of discourse in a particular passage vary into other modes. What I'm trying to get you to do — though the details will be organically driven, as they are not now; and though the details will have yearning as their center of gravity or engine, as they do not now — nevertheless, that moment-to-moment sensual flow is your normal mode of speaking in literary fiction. As hard as it is. If you think this is hard, where you're free to make up anything, what if your choices are circumscribed by all the other detailed choices you've already made? See, this is what you're buying into, folks, coming to this university and wanting to be an artist.

ROB: Mary Jane is going to do hers now. OK, Mary Jane and everyone else, get into your space. I think I'd like to take you into the corridor approaching the room where you must identify your father. So take a moment and get yourself there; and pick me up in the corridor, in the moment and through the senses, very close to coming into his presence. [She does not respond.] All right, let's put you just inside the door. You have just opened the door to the room where he's been held. Place yourself in the room.

Mary Jane: I'm standing in a door frame looking into a room that is completely black.

ROB: You've summarized that to a fair degree. Let's put you in that door frame and I want you literally to be the camera's eye. Look off to your extreme left, because there's a little sound. Something draws your attention. Or a bit of light to the left. You focus on that, and then swing your eye moment-to-moment back to wherever your father is.

Mary Jane: It's like looking into a cave.

ROB: OK, you understand the problem with that? Yeah. Let's see something. And if you've got to put a little more light in this room, do so. Let's just take that last step into the room; give me that motion and then stop yourself and then your eyes fall on one thing.

Mary Jane: I step into the room. I can feel my brother right behind me.

ROB: How? Let's do this: let's put you in that door frame again. I want you to take a moment and be in your body there. Now, tell me about how you know your brother is behind you. How do you feel him? Where do you feel him?

Mary Jane: I have a sense of his presence over my shoulder. [She laughs.]

ROB: What is that sense?

Mary Jane: Maybe it's a smell.

ROB: Maybe it is. Let's go back into your body there, OK? And just wait upon it. You don't have to rush answers.

Just get into your body and stay in that doorway and if that room in front of you is dark, tell me where on your body you feel the darkness.

Mary Jane: In the center of my chest.

ROB: Tell me where in your body you sense your brother. Wait for it.

Mary Jane: Behind my shoulders.

ROB: Yes, but what part of your shoulders and what is the feeling on your shoulders?

Mary Jane: A sensation of warmth.

ROB: Is there really? Are your shoulders bare?

Mary Jane: It's March.

ROB: Don't try to remember, OK? In this moment that you're inventing now, imagine it.

Mary Jane: Yes, because I'm wearing a sundress. In front, it's very cold. There's a patch of warmth.

ROB: That's good. See where your father is now.

Mary Jane: There's a spot of light in the room, almost like it's been…

ROB: Where is it first, before you tell me what it's like.

Mary Jane: It's shining intensely on his head and illuminating the casket that he's lying in.

ROB: You're generalizing now. OK, a spot of light comes from where to where? It falls from point A to point B, and in point B what do you see in full detail? Give me that in a few sentences.

Mary Jane: Where it falls from?

ROB: I just want you to see it and tell me what you see, because there is a sense of that light moving from a place to a place, isn't there? The source of light is one place — I want your eyes to go first to the bright light above, and then follow it and see something.

Mary Jane: On his face. His face is an odd ash gray color and the shape of his face is not. there's a twist to his jaw and his mouth that doesn't look anything like him.

ROB: You've analyzed the twist of his jaw. Let me see the twist of his jaw right now.

Mary Jane: The twist of his jaw, his mouth, it looks as if someone had cupped their hand around his jaw and pushed up.

ROB: OK. I want you to have a flash of memory in this moment. You see that face flash to something, some memory of that face.

Mary Jane: Well, in the moment that he died, his jaw fell open.

ROB: OK, you've just summarized that. Go from a specific, in-the-moment, concrete, sensual encounter with the face before you in the funeral home to a specific in-the-moment encounter with that other moment. I know this is tough stuff. It's tough for you personally, and the sense impressions we're getting at are very challenging in themselves, but so are they always, when you do them right. So let's back up: clear your consciousness. One more time, evoke the face in the funeral home, and then evoke the face that you saw in the moments before his death. Don't try to remember what you said; I want you to see it afresh and just be there with it. I want to get both faces from you in the same flow.

Mary Jane: His chin and his lips and his nose looked as if someone had grabbed ahold and shoved them into a mask. The face that I remember from the moment of his death is soft.

ROB: Soft where?

Mary Jane: The chin was elastic. There was still mobility..

ROB: You're analyzing and generalizing here. Let's just look at something on his face. Let's look into his eyes before he dies; look into his eyes.

Mary Jane: His eyes are almost completely closed. There's some movement in the lids, a little water.

ROB: Look at his mouth. What's his mouth doing?

Mary Jane: His mouth is partially open.

ROB: Partially, what does that mean?

Mary Jane: Half open.

ROB: Do you see his teeth, his tongue? What do you see?

Mary Jane: You see his tongue. You see his lower teeth.

ROB: What are they like?

Mary Jane: They're yellow.

ROB: Yellow like what?

Mary Jane: Like old piano keys.

ROB: What do you smell?

Mary Jane: Room freshener.

ROB: OK, but what's that smell?

Mary Jane: Flowery.

ROB: Flowery, like what?

Mary Jane: Flowery, like jasmine. In bloom.

ROB: I can't buy that one. It's trying to smell like jasmine in bloom. What's it really smell like?

Mary Jane: Actually, the flowery jasmine room freshener is not doing a very good job of covering up.

ROB: You don't have to analyze it. There is that smell but layered under it is.

Mary Jane: The smell of old sweat and intense concentrated urine smell.

ROB: All right, that's fine. Thank you, Mary Jane.

It's tough. When you focus on this detail and that— his mouth, a smell. We had some nice things there. It's easy to get spooked doing this; very quickly you become conscious of how difficult and demanding it is, and then often your response to that stress is to start forcing it, willing it. The voice in your head that I talked about a few weeks ago starts going, "Oh, that's not good enough. This isn't working, is it? Better turn it up a notch." And then it falls apart.

But look, it's this way for everybody. Janet and I struggle with the same things every day. We fight off those impulses to will this, to analyze and describe it with technique. We get the same kind of panicky feeling when it's not quite there. You just have to learn to let it go, to stay loose with it.

Even if we're not fighting off serious emotion, this is still tough, isn't it? Just moving through space in the moment is very tough, it really is — but necessary, as I hope you're convinced. All right, Brandy, do you want to do it? Let's put you on the seesaw. Things are going OK. Let's do an up and down. Can we do that in the moment?

Brandy: The air is hot against the back of my neck as it blows my hair up as I go down.

ROB: You're at the top. Let's do a slow motion, and you're about to go down. Let's start you there. Put us on that seat of the seesaw with you and bring us down. So, you are sitting where?

Brandy: My legs are straight out in front of me. The seat is hard wood, the paint is slick, so at the top I'm almost sliding forward.

ROB: Where do you feel that?

Brandy: On the back of my thighs the paint chips dig in a little bit. And on the sides I can feel the handle that I'm also grabbing onto.

ROB: Let's put your hands on the handle. What does that feel like?

Brandy: It's hot metal, worn smooth on top.

ROB: Glance off — where are you looking? What do you

see?

Brandy: Trees to my right.

ROB: You just summarized that for me. See the tree. I turn my eyes to the right and. what've you got?

Brandy: The leaves are brown and crusty, but it's still pretty full, and I can't see all the branches.

ROB: That's what you can't see. I don't have a shape yet to that tree. You're a little girl. You're on a seesaw. You're up high, and when you go up high you love to let your gaze travel out to the world from a height that you're rarely at. And there's a tree. So let me see the tree through your eyes.

Brandy: The first thing I see is the leaves.

ROB: You just generalized that for me. I doubt if the first thing you see is the leaves unless the tree is at arm's length. What kind of tree is it?

Brandy: It's an oak tree.

ROB: Yes, oak tree's good; that's a concrete detail. What is the configuration of the great branches on this oak tree? An oak tree doesn't grab you first by its leaves, does it?

Brandy: Knobby branches?

ROB: You saw this wonderful tree and you want to tell me about this tree. I think you're just a little bit spooked now. It's really simple. Just think of the most beautiful, wonderful oak tree you've ever seen and let that be growing off to your right when you're at the height of this seesaw. You've just lifted and your thighs are prickled by the paint chips and your hands are warmed by the metal handle that you're grasping tightly and you lift your face and turn your eyes and what do you see? [Silence.] OK, let the tree go. Look down the seesaw at your brother. Let me see your brother through your eyes as you're at the apogee of your seesawing.

Brandy: He has tight brown curls of hair, his mouth is

open.

ROB: How so?

Brandy: Like he's going to scream or yell. It's like he's taking a big breath.

ROB: What's in his eyes? What are his eyes like?

Brandy: They're brown and very wide-open. He looks very excited.

ROB: "Excited" is an abstraction. But OK. He's just flexed his legs, he's pushed off, and you begin to fall. Tell me what you feel.

Brandy: My stomach jumps to my throat. I feel kind of like I'm lifted off the seat for a minute.

ROB: It's like you're lifted off the seat for a minute— that's kind of generalized. Let's feel that sensation with you. In fact you are lifted off, aren't you? And how do you feel that letting go? Where in your body do you feel the lift.

Brandy: My legs kind of unstick. ROB: Good, OK.

Brandy: And it's cooler, like there's air.

ROB: A sudden rush of coolness on your thighs as you lift off, right? The prickles are gone and the air replaces them, yes? Where else in your body?

Brandy: My hands are kind of pulled away. They're not gripping as tight, they're pulled to the fingers.

ROB: What do you smell? Do you smell sweat?

Brandy: Yeah.

ROB: What else?

Brandy: A metallic smell.

ROB: What do you hear? What's the sound in your ears?

Brandy: Like a wind or a breath, or…

ROB: OK, thank you, Brandy. Even if we're not fighting off serious emotion, this is still tough, isn't it? There were some very good things coming there.

All right, Leslie, let's send you out into the field. You're following your brother into the field. Give us that moment.

Leslie: Let me just say my brother's name is Prince. It's a family name.

ROB: The brother formerly known as Prince. [Laughter.] Or actually known as Prince. Say anything you want to after approaching the bales.

Leslie: The grass is deep and wet and grainy with seeds and Prince's head and arms rise up against the white sky washed with red, black as if he were part of the hill beyond.

ROB: How's he moving?

Leslie: The rows of hay bales like a row of animals against the sky. Prince wades through the grass with his arms outstretched as if he were walking through deep water.

ROB: What part of your own body are you most aware of at the moment?

Leslie: The dampness from the tall grass has wet my legs and shorts, but the cold rises up my stomach like a button being pulled on a drawstring from my sacrum up into the center of my chest, and I shiver. ROB: Where?

Leslie: Pulling my arms into the sleeves of my T-shirt, wrapping them around my chest as I jump over the grass to catch up to him.

ROB: A flash of memory now.

Leslie: But he's running too fast. And in the darkness I imagine that if I were to catch him and grab the back of his T-shirt something frightening would happen.

ROB: You're starting to analyze too much for this exercise, OK? Frightening is also being abstract. You've just shivered, trying to keep up, and you see him quite wonderfully, vividly before you, and the rows of bales like animals are out there. Just go straight to another concrete moment in the past like this. It could be the distant past. Just something comes to you, OK?

Leslie: I found the puppy on the hilltop beyond the hay bale.

ROB: Don't summarize, OK? Let's see the very moment you see the puppy.

Leslie: In a swirl of grass, as if it had bedded down as it squirmed to move, its legs broken, flies swarming in its ears and eyes.

ROB: Let's look at the leg more closely. See, you've analyzed the leg for me. I want to see the leg with you. In the very moment you perceive it's broken, I want to see it.

Leslie: Against the orange fur there was a deeper red, a black hole, where the puppy had been…

ROB: Don't analyze it, that's enough. What part of your own body are you conscious of now, seeing that puppy?

Leslie: The breath rushes out of me, and I stumble back so that the puppy is lost in the grass.

ROB: Link that to a parent, an image of a parent.

Leslie: My mother's eyes looked dark in the shape of fish with streaks running out of them down her cheeks.

ROB: Where are you? Look around. Look away from your mother's face and see something.

Leslie: In the rick of rotted pine beside the back door we heard the cat weeping. She, my mother, stepped down the concrete steps and reached for one silver stick of wood as if she were afraid it would collapse when she moved one piece.

ROB: That's a little bit of an analysis. Show me her body and her body language; have them reveal that she's afraid. Tell me how you perceive in the moment through the senses.

Leslie: She bends and leans, swaying on the edge of the step, touching the rough corner of the stick with just her forefinger, testing its balance in the pile.

ROB: What part of your body are you most aware of

now?

Leslie: My feet seem a long way away from me, as if I were very tall, but my head feels heavy.

ROB: Hear the cat again. Hear it more clearly in an extended way.

Leslie: The noise seems to come from inside the ribs, just a handful of ribs, a small noise that seems torn, already broken beyond repair.

ROB: Now what part of your body are you feeling?

Leslie: It's as if I swallow something sharp. I swallow and swallow and it won't go down.

ROB: Come back to your brother now. He does something; let's see him do a specific different thing now.

Leslie: Prince runs into the bale, digs his foot just above the coiled center, launches up onto the top as if he were running against the sky, his arms spread out, his thin hair wisp-ing around his head, each finger spread like a feather.

ROB: Let him turn and face you; see his face.

Leslie: It's too dark to see his face, but the sunset is reddish on the side of his cheek.

ROB: Red like what? [Long pause.] Reincorporate. Red like what?

Leslie: Red like blood in a sink.

ROB: OK. Thank you, Leslie.

That was very good, thank you, Leslie. This is what I'm getting at. Couldn't have planned it better. [Laughter.] Look, if it didn't work for you tonight, don't feel bad about it. This is really tough. You're approaching an awareness that you haven't been led to before but that is an essential basic skill. You must be masters of the sensual moment. These questions I've asked — when, in fact, you can range anywhere — are much less demanding than the questions your work will ask of you under similar circumstances. You must move your characters from here to there. They have to be in the moment, and they have to look into a face and see something, and you cannot analyze it, and you cannot abstract it. You're in the sensibility of the character, and you must be in the moment in terms of that character, and also there in terms of the rest of the piece. But what we've done tonight is artificial in many ways, and if it didn't work for you, don't feel bad about it. Just open up the negotiations between you and your unconscious and your computer. You'll make a lot of mistakes, and that's OK. It's part of the process of getting to where you want to go.

Actually, all of you had very good moments. None of you was up here without at least a few very good moments, and I hope you felt what you tapped into briefly when you were inventing, recombining, in the sensual moment.

9. The Written Exercise

Tonight we're going to do on the page exactly what we did last week orally; that is, to write moment by moment through the senses only. This will be a coached writing exercise in seven stages. I'll give you the first stage and you'll begin to write; then I'll drop in six more times, each time to give you another step. It's important not to go beyond the parameters of what I tell you to do. When I describe a new stage, if you've not finished the previous one, note the new instructions in the margin, then go back to where you were, pick that up, and move as quickly as you can to the new stage.

Don't run ahead, though. Stay within the boundaries of each instruction. Once again: no abstraction, no generalization, no summary, no analysis, no interpretation. Force yourself to write moment to moment through the senses only. Don't hassle your style at this point, don't agonize over just the right word; just keep the flow of it through the senses—

flowing, flowing, flowing. Don't think, don't think. Senses, senses, senses. If you really do that rigorously, you'll find yourself flowing right down — at least into the foyer of — this great house that is your unconscious.

I want you to write in the first person. When I say "you," I am referring to your character.

Now, about the character. If you have a character you're working with closely, you may write from the viewpoint of that character, but I'm reluctant to encourage this, because if that character happens to be one you're willing into being, then the exercise will not be very useful to you. In the absence of any character you feel a desperate need to get in touch with, I urge you to write through a character with demographics very similar to your own. This is not you, this is not autobiography, but unless you've got a really burning character that you need to explore, then the character you choose needs to be very close to you in age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth.

If you get to the end of a stage before I come in, don't write ahead, and don't go back and start rewriting; just put your pen down and meditate. I'll notice if there are a lot of pens down, and I'll jump in. It's likely, though, that if you finish these stages before I get to the next, you're not giving it enough intense moment-to-moment attention. In that case, try to focus more intently on the next stage.

When you finish the piece and feel done, just close your notebook and pick up your pen and go away. At some point if there are only a few of you left we may decide that you need to take your piece home and finish it later. I wouldn't think

that you'd be able to bear spending more than an hour and a half on this, if you do it as intensely as you should. Let's start. Here's your first stage. [Editor's note: what follows are the seven stages of the exercise, succeeded by three examples of the results from the class on the evening when the exercise was recorded.] The seven stages:

1. You awake abruptly, though it isn't morning, and you're not in a bed. But you are in the place where you live. The room where you awake is rich in objects and their associations. You are breathless and anxious from a dream you can't, and won't, remember. You look around the room, everything in it shaped by an unspecified anxiety. Let's see the room, in the moment, through the senses.

2. One object in particular catches your attention and suggests a strong connection to your anxiety. Move toward that object; touch it; experience it sensually.

3. The object evokes a memory as vivid as a dream but not the one you woke from. It is a real memory, one based on wanting, desiring something. But this is a surface thing you want — an object, a gesture, a touch, whatever. Focus on the moment-to-moment, specific memory of desiring this thing, which, nevertheless, carries an intimation of deeper yearning. But don't go to that deeper desire yet. Experience the surface thing through your character's sensibility.

4. Now let the memory of this want include a moment when a second memory is evoked. This second memory

involves another object, different from the one you are touching in the present time but similar to it in its basic sensual pattern. This second memory surprises you. You deeply connect it to the first. And the wanting suddenly goes deeper, into a state of being, a state of self. Don't label it. Play it out in the moment through the senses.

5. In that second memory you are moved to an action, driven by your yearning. Let the action happen moment to moment.

6. Some part of the action will bring you back to the present, to an awareness of the first object. Reexperience the object. Your sensual perception of it is altered, re-shaped by the emotion and yearning you have experienced in these two linked memories.

7. Now, back in the present, in the light of all this, you take an action.

The examples:

Rita Mae Reese

Magnets

A small spot of the green Formica table and the left corner of my mouth is slick with my warm drool. What woke me up? How did I fall asleep here? Outside the kitchen window is just darkness crouching and I can hear the hum of the little fluorescent light twitching over the sink, full of dirty dishes, but nothing else. There is no other sound in the house. The round white clock's hands say 5:16 but its battery ran out weeks ago. 1 look at the microwave but it isn't programmed. I'm sweating, my mouth is horrible, like I've been siphoning gasoline with it. I push the chair away from the table, noticing the letter I'd pushed to the other side before falling asleep. The white paper with its rows of neat black ink strains up from its creases like a tired child unwilling to go to sleep.

I ignore it and walk across the sticky linoleum. Had I spilled something? I open the fridge door and the light is too bright even in this brightly lit room. My heart kicks and I can almost see a scene — something slithers from the back of my neck, through my throat, and stops at my larynx. My mind struggles to see — some dream fragment, repulsive and indistinct. I stare at the carton of milk, the cartons of leftovers, and the little round jar of horseradish. What had I dreamed? I felt like I'd missed something important, the bus back home or a lover's last call. Is that what I'd dreamed?

I grab the carton of milk and it slips from my hands, the white ghostness of it splashing on my legs and over the dirty yellow linoleum. I bite my lip. I will not cry. I shut the door a little too forcefully and Jill's picture that she'd drawn of me and Sam slides with its magnet down and flutters into the milk. I crouch down and put the drawing on the table, after blotting it against my dress.

I pick the carton of milk up — there is still some inside— and put it back in the fridge. I wipe up the milk with paper towels and as I stand up to go to the trash can, my bare foot comes down on something cold and hard. It is the magnet. I pick it up and instead of just putting it back on the fridge, I sit down with it still in my hand. I hear the neighbor's dog bark, twice. I lift my head and listen but the house is still quiet. The magnet is an old-fashioned valentine, fifties-style cornball romance, a smiling orange saying "Orange you glad you're mine, valentine?" on metal, heavily laminated.

Sam had been on a magnet-making kick, and took anything she got her hands on — old stamps, postcards, cards, pictures — and turned them into an endless stream of magnets. Sam was with Diana then and I remember seeing them in their kitchen together, Diana was doing the dishes and Sam leaned into her in a way that made my own back feel cold and exposed. I thought of what it would be like to have Sam's lips on my neck, warm, laughing into my skin over some private joke. I pretended to look at the books on their shelves in the dining room, a good fifty square feet of shelving displaying Foxfire books, Marion Zimmer Bradley's entire body of work, and a lot of Quality Paperback selections. I was going to ask Diana if she wanted help washing up from the dinner they'd made for me, the new single girl at work. Diana at work is perfect and I admit I'd sort of hoped her home life was different but it was worse. Her girlfriend Sam was beautiful and handsome, with olive skin, an aquiline nose, and eyes that really looked at a person. She repeated my name when we were introduced and asked me what I thought of St. Petersburg. She looked in my eyes as I stumbled over the answer, revising it for her approval as I went along. I looked down, just to avoid her eyes, and saw the best mouth I'd ever stared at — a little smirk, with the lightest laugh line on the left. I thought of kissing her then but told myself that I'd been without a girlfriend for too long.

Holding the magnet, so square and so dense, a nice hard weight in the center of my palm now. Sam's mother had a laugh line just like hers in that little picture, the only picture, Sam had of her. I remember going to Sam's apartment after she'd moved out of Diana's, the sparseness of the furnishings— a rocker, a table and chairs, a dresser, a bed, a stereo, and one set of bookshelves. She kept her books boxed up by the wall next to the front door. On her dresser she had a photo of Diana (it hurt me every time I saw it but I'd never asked her to take it down) and the tiny photo in the metal frame of her mother. I'd picked it up while she was in the kitchen, making us dinner. I'd gone to the bathroom and since her bedroom door was open, I stepped inside, amazed at the austerity of the room— the unmade bed, the clean floor, the bare walls, the dresser with its two pictures. I'd lifted the picture of her mother, cupped it in my hands and lifted it to my face as if I were smelling it. I have no idea why. "That's my mother," her voice came over my shoulder and I jerked, put it back on the dresser, nearly knocking over the picture of Diana. Sam reached her arm around me and picked it up.

"Sorry," I mumbled, my face hot.

She didn't say anything. "She's beautiful," I offered and Sam nodded. She put the picture back down and for a moment I was afraid she'd pick up the picture of Diana and I couldn't stand that, I'd have to leave, and I desperately wanted to stay. "She looks like you," I smiled, trying to show I meant to harm.

"You think?" Sam wrinkled her nose, cocked her head. Is she playing with me?

"Your mouth," I began and floundered.

She smiled, ducking her head.

"You have the same mouth," I continued.

"Thank you," she paused, looking at me like I might be about to pass out and I might have. "Do you want some wine? That's why I came looking for you, to ask if you wanted some wine."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Diana. I've really fucked things up for you and I should leave."

"What do you want, Dee?"

I smiled helplessly, looking at the picture of her mother as if for guidance. She took a step closer. We were a foot away from each other. I smelled her lavender soap, her deodorant, a piney-clean scent, I could even smell the Carmex on her lips.

"I want to be with you," I said and didn't just mean it euphemistically. I do, I want to fuck her, I want to sleep with her, I want to wake up with her, but I want to just be with her too. Just sit very still with her sitting very still beside me and know that we are the only two people who belong in that room, who are wanted in that room.

"Why?" she asked, and I laughed. Why is never the right question to ask about sex. How, maybe. When, sure. Where, that can be an issue. Even what has its place if you know where to shop and you aren't timid. But why?

"Is that a 'no'?"

She grabbed my hand and led me to the kitchen, which smelled of basil and garlic and was warmer than the rest of the house. She poured wine into the two glasses on the counter without letting go of my hand. "You have through dinner to

tell me why," she said and raised her glass to mine before we drank.

I'm still thirsty, sitting at the table with the smiling orange-head magnet no longer cold in my hand. I squeeze it hard. It leaves dents in the flesh of my fingers. The orange face, faded to the color of Tang with too much water, grins up at me as if we share some embarrassing secret. "Orange you glad you're mine?" I hear the front door open. Sam's home. The why from my memory echoes in my head.

I pick up the picture of me and Sam drawn by her daughter. Jill has drawn the laugh line on Sam's face. It is a good likeness. I put it back on the fridge. I pick up the letter and crumple it up, stuff it beneath the milk-wet paper towels. I climb the stairs to our bedroom and find Sam already undressed, already in bed.

Christie Grimes

Stone

I fell asleep on the futon again. When I woke, my eyes darted to the muted TV and I wondered what could have woken me. I felt an ache in my chest as if all my muscle were taut against my breastbone. The dingy carpet was in the shadows but I spied pieces of tortilla chips that had been brushed from the coffee table in a feeble attempt to clean. My back and muscles ached. The muscles in my calves were tight from being rigid, poised, ready for some type of assault or flight. I smelled a faint odor of furniture polish which fit oddly into the forgotten dusty apartment. I rolled my head to the side feeling the creases on my face. I worked my jaw, slowly unclenching it and loosing the muscles. The clock on the bookcase read 4:00 and Oprah was smiling at a guest. The small marble cat on my coffee table appeared to grin at me in the shadows, its green eyes flittering in their purple housing. The cat was the last gift I had received from a man. Not a potential lover, mind you, he was married, had three children, and told stories about how he brought his wife a flower each day until she fell in love with him. He had given me the cat the day I left. Something he saw in the store and thought of me. Our relationship had always clicked. He would have bailed me out of jail or picked me up at the hospital, but 1 never would have asked. Our relationship was strictly work. His shaggy too long hair hung in his eyes when we hugged and wrestled, and I knew that he cared about me like an adoring brother, or maybe a what-might-have-been look with a smile. I treasured that purple cat, but today it spooked me. The toothy smile did not seem playful, it was sinister. The whiskers blowing from the air vent made the plastic come alive and twitch at me. I pulled the small blanket up to my chin and tucked my feet under me, locking the blanket into a sleeping bag comfort. I glanced up at a picture adorning my bookcase which I took alone at the top of a mountain. No one would climb the formation with me to see the spectacular view of green, yellow, and auburn tones. The picture did not show my smiling face, nor anyone else's. 1 had pocketed a chunk of granite on the way down. It was larger than my hand and heavy in my pack, but the grainy wholeness of the rock felt more real than the picture, and it gave me comfort even when I felt the solitude of not being able to share the moment with another. The rock lay at the base of my bookcase crammed between particleboard and the wall. I walked over to it, shuffling my coarse feet across the carpet, creating a scratching sound. I picked up the rock and rolled it from palm to palm, small particles of dirt and crystal attaching to my hands. I rubbed my forefinger over the black streak creating a jagged Z through the center of the beige and gray rock. My fingers traced the letter, feeling the smooth black penetrating. It felt coarser, more raw than the granite exterior. I rubbed my fingers into it, softly scraping my index finger, enjoying the painful sensation in my skin. Still holding the rock in my left hand, I gently swung my arm up, feeling the lift of the weight of the rock. My finger wandered to the blunt edge of the back of the rock. On the floor it balanced flat, raised in a trapezoid shape with the black only visible in a small streak on the top and only completely visible in design from underneath. I had almost ruined the Z by breaking the rock. I hurled it the last time he left me. He walked through the door leaving me only with myself. No answers, no accommodations, and no love, understanding, or kindness on his face. I wanted answers. I thought I could fix everything if he would only let me kiss him, grab him by his large arms and trace his lips with my tongue. Slowly, erotically seducing him, sucking on his lower lip and forcing my tongue into his mouth probing for answers. But he pulled away, taking a backward step toward the door when I tried to push my body into his and against the wall. Instead he turned to the side like a matador and he left me. Motionless without a grip, I saw his hand reach behind him and I stood tense, afraid to spook him. He glanced at me, at my body rather than my eyes and his head started to shake but he stilled it, cocking it instead. He opened the door, sidestepping through it and quietly pulling it shut, clicking into the door frame. I stood for a moment before crumbling to the ground. It was no use chasing him. I knew when he would not look at my eyes. I felt it in my chest, a strange tightening, a hope coiling around nothing, pulling tighter and tighter trying to capture something so thin that it cannot be grasped. That is when I walked to the window and stood at the edge, trying to see out the corner of the blinds without moving them and without being seen. I could only see the dark headlights of his car as it reversed out of view. I felt angry, humiliated, and defeated. I backed away from the window into the bookcase and tripped into the rock, stubbing my large toe. I hopped backward and seized the rock, hurling it with my arm and my body into a shot-putter stance and flinging it into the floor where it bounced on the hard ceramic tile, breaking a quarter inch off the side into a crumbling piece and shattering the tile beneath it into cracked jagged pieces. I walked over to the rock and carefully rolled it over, afraid to see what I had done. I saw the dirt and residue on my hand and the small black shards falling off in dust. I looked for the Z. Once I brushed it clean, it was still there, only slightly torn, a small piece of the end of the rock still had the black streak but now that flat surface was no longer level, it was split into several layers of rocky slope down a path of granite. I breathed out, he never even knew what that rock meant.

We shopped for rings one time, halfheartedly joking but serious in that way that you hope it will be right, that you hope that you are not imagining things, that you are wanted and loved and protected. So, we window-shopped which took us into a jewelry store where I saw the ring that would mean it for me. Like choosing the cup of life or death, it was a test. We walked through the display cases promising eternal love for any price, the greater the amount, the greater the result did not add up in my estimate. I dragged my fingers across the glass cases leaving trails of smears behind. He followed me, rubbing my shoulder and leaning into my back, pressing me into the case until I laughed. When I first walked around, I spotted it. A small band interlaced with weaving. Like serpents braided together in a loop, the lace a continuous Escher connection in a Celtic pattern. He ambled to the other side of the store browsing among crosses and ID bracelets and finally asked to see an elaborate ring made of smooth white gold. Its pale color disguising its value. He turned it over in his fingers and winked at me. The ring had a large diamond inset in the middle with two small emeralds on either side. It sickened me. My stomach felt gassy and my breath lacked oxygen, as if breathing through a filter. He held it out to me and I touched the fold, cold to my finger and hollow and light in my palm.

"Try it on, seven and a quarter, right? It should fit."

I shook my head, hoping my fingers had grown fatter, that it would not slip over my knuckle. This hope left me when he took my hand and gently looked into my eyes and smiled, his cheeks tightening, his eyes crinkling at the edges. I felt the band slide onto my finger effortlessly. He lifted my hand to my eyes and I felt a band go around my heart.

"What do you think?"

"Is this the one that you like best?"

"I came in last week and had it fitted for you."

I thought about the effort that he had put into it, but it didn't fit. It did not fit my heart, my head, or any other part of my body. My finger felt alien to me as I looked at it. I slowly reached up and disentangled my hand, sliding the ring off and placing it in his hand. I smiled.

"Let's look some more, shall we? It's beautiful but I'd really like something simple."

He snorted and then his mouth hung open and his eyebrows raised as he realized I was serious. I absently popped my ring finger, massaging the area where the ring had set.

"Look over here, for instance. What do you think of this one?" I led him back to the small silver case, pointing at the ring displayed in a velvet prop.

"That's just a plain old ring. Why would you want it?"

I shrugged and asked to see it. I took it and rolled it between my fingers, feeling the bumps and holes between the intertwined metal ropes. The outer edge was smooth but I pressed my finger into the pattern. My skin seeped through. I released the ring between my index finger and my palm and I looked at the tiny snake pattern it had left. I tried to place it on my finger but it was too small and would only loosely slip onto my pinky finger.

"I like it because it means something."

"Means what? What meaning is there in a cheap piece of silver? That says a lot to me."

I looked up and stared into his brown eyes. His brow was furrowed and he looked at me with a mixture of amusement and patronizing knowledge that he knew me better than I knew myself. I placed the ring on the counter and let it twirl in a small circle, rattling before I led him out of the store. We went home that night and tried to make love but there was a wall. His skin felt synthetic and his kisses forced. I was content to lie there within myself knowing me and realizing that he did not.

I felt the same chill now. My skin loose and the air chilling me internally as I sat the rock on the ground and rocked it back into place with my big toe. I rubbed my hand across my throat and let it rest on my chest. He had come the closest to penetrating my armor, getting past my skin, my tough hide, and all of the challenges that I placed for him to prove himself. He passed. But after all that he had not reached me. He had only reached someone that he thought was me. And, maybe it had been.

I sat with my knees hugged to my chest and rocked slightly, pushing the rock with me. I tilted it out onto its broken side and let it fall heavily back to its resting place. I could run my entire foot across its top and lift the base by lifting my heel, pointing my toes down when I arched my foot. The black streak was barely visible, showing and then disappearing as I rocked it and stopped as I leaned forward with the rock raised. The floor was hard beneath me and I leaned into the wall beneath the windowsill. With a quick thrust of force from my foot, I pushed the rock against the wall, stuck and exposed, the beautiful black marble visible, smooth and worn. It was covered by the granite, rough and crumbling. Years of sediment piled onto it, covering the delicate beauty hidden beneath the coarse exterior.

My toe rubbed a piece of the black edge and I wondered if I wasn't better without him. The colors of the granite swirl in some areas and the drab colors hide the vivid pure black underneath. The black rock feels powerful, and the rock surrounding it poor and dry. The light granite color was a mask of ugly plain mountain, deceptive and tamed. I stood and left the rock propped upward against the wall, revealing the jagged black design underneath. I walked to the door and opened it. I stepped out into the hallway, the dirty runner cold beneath my feet. Barefoot, I walked outside my building and stepped onto the cement. Stepping gingerly around loose stones and pebbles, I looked across the lot and felt the cool air brushing my skin. Taking a deep breath, I felt the air chill and burn my lungs. I felt the breath in my fingertips and my toes. I stood on my tiptoes, pressing my feet into the cold pavement. I scanned the area and walked over to a large curb. I sat beneath a tree and crossed my ankles, staring at the ground. Amid pine needles and gravelly rocks, there were small pebbles and stones that had blown to their resting place. I leaned over and brushed my fingers through them. I picked up a small red stone. It was smooth and had shades of burnt red and orange swirling across its smooth surface. I rolled the cold stone in my hand and closed my hand over the stone, embracing the color.

Gay Milner

Marzipan

Gunshot. What? I must have fallen asleep; the red patch burns on my thigh against the Naugahyde. It's hot, and the air damp with stickiness that belongs to this landlocked land. The gunshot? — yes—The Virginian, that blond boy Travis, snub nose and cupid mouth on the other side of the smoking barrel. But the grainy black-and-white, the grainy sound (a soup of music) is just the faded image of some more violent dream. I can't hold it. I pull myself hand over hand back into it because I must save myself, or her, or it. What did I need to do? A lump of failure in my chest.

Over the cowboys a cheap cardboard frame sits on the fake wood of the TV set, little gold pressed curlicues around a snapshot of Dogzilla, his rich red hair curly on his ears that hang like a pageboy to his thin black smile. Irish setter as coed circa 1958. And is that my only personal memento, the only photograph worth bringing after thirty-five years? What was that dream? I'm a cowgirl, my dog has been abducted by a rustler; crap. What creature is it that I must save?

I balance myself, pain slicing up from my spine across my right hip socket, unsteady on my feet, and hobble to the front door, swing the squeaky screen. On the porch — knobbled knuckles of my stockinged feet on the red cement — I reach for the post and am overcome with dread. This porch support is a double cylinder of painted metal, held ten inches or so apart by (also painted, rusting white) metal shapes: a series of interlocking tendrils, leaves, two birds in flight. Where it disappears into the clapboard ceiling it has been patched with grainy putty. Its two feet are buried in the red cement. The grain of the paint grates on my fingertips.

I look "into the eyes" of this flat white metal bird, and there tumbles out of the hot void where the dream has fled a moment from Liege. I was — what? — no more than eight or nine because the market was still there, and yet there was some fear attached to food, the possibility of want. Nine, then. 1939. My mother's hip warm against my shoulder in a coat of loden green. A bird was pecking at the edge of a puddle, at a piece of cake or petit four. Yes. My mother was buying bread and I was waiting to see if there would be a marzipan, a biscuit, a mille-feuille for me. I was — why? — terrified that I would be ignored, denied, expected to go home without a treat. I wanted to bend and snatch the cake away from the bird, who seemed impossibly bold at my feet. Like the German boys who would not hesitate to say anything— scum! kike! gypsy! This bird had my sweet, unless (her voice murmured above me, the inconsequential murmur of the housewife and the merchant, his deeper, dulcet, reasoning plaints mixed in with hers) — unless she would remember me. Why did I both suppose that they could feed me and fear that they would not? The bird cocked a beady eye at me. Taunting. An ordinary small brown bird, fat with feathers, who might yet pluck out my eyes.

My mother said, "Simone. M. Partenier is speaking to you."

Partenier. The name comes back unbidden, the patissier of the open market. His banner ran along his stall at the level of my knees in red scrolling script that I could read: Partenier Patisserie. In front of that the malevolent bird sat pecking at the petit four, shaking it like a dog with a sock (like Dogzilla my only darling, my only offspring, whom I have abandoned).

"Say thank you to M. Partenier." Who handed down a plain crust of day-old roll. Betrayed, I couldn't speak.

I grasp the metal pole and feel its contour on my palm, turn my palm on its painted surface, feel the white sides of the hospital bed before they wheeled me in. It was a tube of just such stuff. They raised the sides and suddenly my pallet had become a cage. I looked up through the bars and reached up on both sides to hoist myself but my muscles were straw. The beak-nosed nurse told me not to be "irritable now," and someone — someone else — there were how many in charge of me? — stuck a needle in my arm. My weakness became lightness, I could have floated from my cage, but all the while I knew that this was because they had stolen away my will. They were taking her, I had been tricked. They told me that a broken child was worse than no child at all, but they were tricking me. I rose against the needle, against the bars, against the hand of the nurse who now — thieving bird, big keeper of sweets, hot hip of my mother, abandoned dog — I rose and struck her full in the face.

I think what I said was not intelligible. To myself I said, "I've changed my mind. I'll have the broken one."

"No!" I said to M. Partenier. "I don't want your old crust!" And my mother marched me home and washed my mouth. Soap bittered on my tongue where I had wanted marzipan.

And later, when there was no food, how I would have welcomed a crust of bread. As, now, I would have a deaf child, welcome a heart with a hole in it, see for blind eyes, instead of this none, this nothing, this no one. I have a metal bird and a snapshot of an Irish setter I abandoned. I have a metal pole in my hand, a cement porch, a TV set. The music swells inside, full of unlikely sugar.

My knuckles ache. I have been gripping the two poles with my two hands. The pain across my back has sharpened with the tensing of my torso. Under my fingers the brushstrokes in the paint — how many coats has somebody applied? — some young couple proud of their clapboard dream and then the landlord hoping to salt away a little nest egg, wanting to be a man of property. The bird does not regard me with its flat eye. There is no malevolence in things. Not even in a hypodermic needle. M. Partenier gave me a crust because the sugar had run out. The bird had probably got a bit of dirty discard and my longing painted it into something precious. I wish I had Dogzilla. But I could not have raised a baby on my own, faulty or whole.

I use the poles to stretch, hanging in an arc against the pain, which pulls my spine, releases, and relaxes. The moon has risen across Oak Alley and tangles in the cottonwood leaves. The dust has dropped with night and left spiced balmi-ness. I turn and go back in, latching the screen behind me.