Bob's Door

“One of these days, I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter, to all the good friends I’ve known.” That’s one of my favorite Neil Young lines from a great song on his HARVEST MOON album. And it kind of goes along with my favorite Neil Young song of all time from his original HARVEST album that opens with, “Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.”

Tomorrow night Thea and I are having Bob Pope and the wonderful Lisa Sarkis over for dinner. I’ve wanted to do this for some time as a little “thank you” for Bob’s incredible generosity and kindness. He came into my life a year and a half ago and has championed me in ways I can never repay other than carrying on the joy of reading and instilling the wonders of reading in others, which is how I think he would like to be remembered by colleagues when he eventually retires. Like my undergraduate mentor and dear friend, Joe Soldati, I think Bob might have seen something of himself in me when we first met, and I know I saw something of myself in him. On a car ride from the Cleveland airport to Akron after just shaking hands for the first time we started talking about reading and found ourselves quoting aloud lines from the opening paragraph of Gabriel García Márquez’ ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” It’s a great opening line to a magical book and I did not know that day that my own life was to open to a great new chapter with a wonderful man who took a chance on me, just as reading opened the door to a magical world for me in my youth. The door has never closed, and Bob continues to prove that to me every day.

There is a wonderful line I identify with near the beginning of Daniel Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE in which the narrator says, “Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts.” As the third of four children in an enormous family with too many children to count I didn’t exactly feel special as a little boy and often fell into the world of my uncontrollable imagination. I once heard Francis Ford Coppola say something to the effect that all people with an artistic impulse seem to have been born at the start with incredible insecurity and have to overcome that insecurity by overcompensating. That was certainly true for me as a child who struggled in school from dyslexia and was placed in special education classes until the middle of the seventh grade. I struggled with horrible spelling problems and reading was definitely no pleasure back then. What I did have going for me was an imagination.

The reader in our family, at least how I remember it back then, was my oldest brother, Todd. Like so many younger siblings, I did not want to be “me” as a little boy. I wanted to be my older brothers, Todd and Scott. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but I recall a family vacation to Lake Chelan in Washington State and seeing Todd reading TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson. I was not a reader at the time. I was a boy obsessed with going to the movies and reenacting the plots I loved. My father was one of the first people in our neighborhood to buy a VCR, one of those big ones with the fake wood paneling and large knobs. He would often record movies for us that played on television so we could watch them over and over again and one that I loved was the 1950 Walt Disney version of TREASURE ISLAND. I remember breaking one of my mother’s brooms in half and taking duct tape from my father’s workshop in an attempt to fasten it to my knee to play the part of Long John Silver in my playtime fantasies. TREASURE ISLAND is probably not the first but is certainly one of the first books I read by choice. Todd’s copy was most likely a children’s abridged version, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it took me to a place that a movie could not and still cannot. I read it for two reasons; I knew I liked the story from the movie and I wanted to be like my oldest brother who excelled in school and did not have dyslexia.

Coming from a big family, I had built in playmates, but the truth is that I spent a lot of time by myself imagining stories and acting them out. One of the places I would do that was Highland Forest. Had my mother known I was riding my bicycle into the forest, discarding it and setting off to play out the adventures of the characters I loved from books and movies she would have grounded me until puberty. But she didn’t and I had that special place to believe I really was Jim Hawkins in TREASURE ISLAND or David Balfour in KIDNAPPED. And when the adventures Stevenson put to the page ran out, I created my own because I didn’t want them to end. Alone there in Highland Forest, lost within my own imagination and the world of stories, I found a way to feel special. I would run about the trees singing “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— / Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!” having no idea what rum was at that age, but Coca Cola would do just fine to play the part. I was a suburban boy dreaming inside boy’s adventures. This past November when I heard Joe Meno read at the Winter Wheat Writing Festival and he talked about how much he loved the CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE book series as a kid I perked up. It was my brother Todd who read those books and eventually gave them to me when he was finished. Like so many places of my childhood, Highland Forest is no longer there, having been clear-cut almost completely for development. But my imagination is still there among the vanished trees, believing I am living within a story. I now live in my own house and today my backyard that slopes downward is covered in snow. This morning I went outside to watch the neighborhood children sled down my yard. Three of them had a long sled to fit them all and one was telling the others, “Get in the boat, I get to be the captain this time.” Of course the sled was a boat, and of course that little boy really was a captain!

This time last year Thea and I were getting ready to go on our honeymoon in Scotland. Bob Pope said to me, “You gotta bring your Stevenson.” And he was correct. I took a copy of KIDNAPPED. And as I read it on the plane something wonderful happened. I simply could not imagine a fictional David Balfour or the Scottish landscape I was about to see in person for the first time in my life. As I read, “I” was David Balfour and Highland Forest was Scotland. I was once again a little boy finding a way to feel special through reading.

One of the places Thea and I made sure to visit on our honeymoon was the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. It was open but unfortunately its special Robert Louis Stevenson exhibit in the basement was closed. I politely pleaded with the staff. It was early in the morning and Thea and I were literally the only two people there. A kind, old man looked at me and in a husky Scottish accent said, “I can give you ten minutes.” He took us downstairs, opened the exhibit hall, turned on the lights, and left us in the chilly, unheated section of the museum to ponder Stevenson’s life in letters and pictures and personal belongings. In one of the security protected glass cases was a copy of the first printing of TREASURE ISLAND. I stood and looked at it and thought of being that little boy who didn’t feel special who read a book by choice simply because his older brother was reading it and slipping into the world of the imagination. And I thought of Bob Pope. I hadn’t read any Stevenson in a very long time and he was right, I did have to bring him along with me on my honeymoon. A book had opened a new door to my life and as a newly married man I was opening another. The two seemed a perfect fit.

After our ten minutes with the Stevenson collection I was smiling and happy like a little boy as I ascended the stairs to the main floor exhibits. I made a little detour for the small gift shop. There I found a postcard of a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and “wrote a letter to a good friend” back in Akron. When I returned to campus weeks later the postcard was taped to Bob Pope’s office door. And every time I walk down the hallway now, there is Stevenson, looking right at me: the once little boy with dyslexia who found his life in the special gift of reading staring at one of the seeds on Bob’s door.

THE LOST IMAGINATION

When I was a little boy one of my favorite places to visit was The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). At the museum I could run from exhibit to exhibit, sit in one of the actual rocket modules that had gone into space, etc. I even took a class on whales at OMSI during a summer (my mother signed me up for it because I have always loved animals). As a teenager I would even revisit OMSI for countless laser light shows. And every time I went there I made sure to stop at the marble ball exhibit displaying an intricate contraption designed by the husband of my first Hebrew school teacher (it would captivate me for hours every time).

As a fiction writer, I’ve also had a lifelong love for reading about science, mostly because it is something that does not come naturally to me. Mostly, I love reading about the scientists themselves or reading books that give me an idea of who they are or were. I adore Albert Einsten’s “Ideas and Opinions.” I devoured Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” I’ve always had a fondness for Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 and 2010 (yep, we’re almost there). I can’t say I ever finished James D. Watson’s “The Double Helix," but hey, I tried. Last summer I finally read Frank Herbert's "Dune" and couldn't put it down.

As an undergraduate I took a summer astronomy course at Lewis & Clark College from then physics department chair Dr. Thomas Olsen (“Tolsen” for those of you who remember). The class was aptly described as “Physics for Poets.” I went to every tutoring session, never missed a class, and loved the evenings at the campus observatory looking at consolations, and I even drove to my parents’ house in Beaverton every night for my father to tutor me through the math (the screaming sessions were not as bad as they had been in high school when he had to coach me through learning log rhythms for algebra). I never worked harder for a “C” in my life! I simply couldn’t do the physics. Tests would have questions such as “Calculate the radius of light falling to Earth from a star eighty billion miles away at the velocity of…” You get the point, and for those of you with a science background, I worded that fabricated question for a reason (keep reading and you’ll see why it doesn’t matter that the science is ridiculous, it’s the point that matters).

I am not programmed with a scientific mind. On the final exam for Dr. Olsen’s course, when I blanked out, I literally started scribbling down aspects of the lives of the great physicists that the text described at the beginning of each chapter just to show I had read the material (I seem to recall one of the great astronomers lost his nose in a dual) . I loved the class and I loved being taught by a man who had once been a contestant on Jeopardy. Dr. Olsen was also the first person to introduce me to Alan Lightman’s book “Einstein’s Dreams.” When I gave it to a dancer/theater director friend of mine in Los Angeles he was blown away. And when I saw Lightman’s book “A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit” I just had to buy it (one of the few authors I can talk about with my father-in-law, but more on that later in this blog). However, I have never pretended to know much about science and certainly never had the arrogance to try to correct somebody who did.

What am I getting at here? The point is that I’ve always liked science itself but I was a terrible science and math student my entire life. More importantly, I’ve always loved science in movies and books. If my father took my three brothers and me to the movies—which he did a lot—there was a good chance we were going to see a science fiction tale.

I’m thinking of all this because the Sunday, December 14 edition of The Cleveland Plain Dealer had an article by its science writer, John Mangels, titled “Hollywood Failed Science Class.” In it, I learned that filmmakers are now employing scientific advisors. That’s right; screenwriters are having their scripts scrutinized by scientists to make sure they are scientifically accurate. In the article, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at California SETI Institute who is the astrobiology advisor for the new and unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still” (I love the original) says, “Today, if you have silly errors in a film like this, people will talk about it in their blogs.” Hmm? So, improbable science in a film is the equivalent of the boom mic being caught in the scene? Well, with this logic, and since I write a literary blog, I feel I should write about the “silly” assumption that science in film or literature has to be accurate.

I recently led a session at Bowling Green State’s annual Winter Wheat Writing Festival on incorporating research into a fictional narrative. Likewise, I just wrote a forthcoming piece on the subject for Glimmer Train. And since I am now specializing in the researched novel, let me say unequivocally that accuracy is the least thing on my mind as somebody with a creative impulse. In fact, most writers will tell you that they couldn’t care less about the facts being accurate in their fictiom. It’s always amusing when we writers get correspondence from readers pointing out supposed inaccuracies in our work. Typically, these are by readers who feel they are smarter than the writer and all of them are by people who would never be able to commit themselves to the years it takes to write a book. But they are also symptomatic of the greater loss to our culture, and that is the present inability of people to release themselves to an imagined world. It’s sad, but sometimes I get the impression that readers and filmgoers go into the experience of exposing themselves to art with the very intention of wanting to find an inconsistency or inaccuracy they can voice. But it makes sense. I can’t remember whom Laurence Goldstein is quoting in his wonderful book “The American Poet and the Movies” but the line basically says, “Americans are born critics.” True enough.

Mangels’ article has a major underlying problem. First, it assumes that scientific accuracy is necessary in art. It’s not. And to be honest, when a book or a movie is scientifically accurate it runs the very high risk of being pretty poor because the creator of that art is having his or her imaginative inclinations shackled in order to deflect a bogus credibility accusation. A scientist telling an artist to get the science of his creative narrative more accurate is the equivalent of a fiction writer walking into an ER and demanding that a doctor correct the grammar on the patient release form.

Mangels’ piece quotes “Day” director Scott Derrickson saying his choice to use scientific advisors “was just a basic respect for science that we all felt the movie needed to demonstrate.” Very interesting. But what about the respect scientists should have for the artistic community, particularly writers? Among the ridiculous supposed gaffs in Ron Howard’s 1995 film “Apollo 13” that those on the Internet scrutinized was the change of the actual line from real life, “Houston, we’ve had a problem” to the supposedly unforgivable “Houston, we have a problem.” If people in the scientific community want to help artists “create more-believable make-believe worlds” I would like to suggest they enroll for at least one semester in one of my Introduction to Fiction Writing courses. Accuracy does not produce the dramatic elements of a compelling narrative. Writers love to take elements of real life and real events and transfer them to a fictional world. I do not personally know the screenwriter for “Apollo 13” but it is clear to me that “Houston, we HAVE a problem” lends far more immediacy to the urgency of the terrifying situation of America possibly losing three of its astronauts than the incredibly passive “Houston, we’ve HAD a problem.”

Unfortunately, the talent of a good storyteller to make his or her audience “feel” the “spirit” of what he or she is trying to capture is rarely appreciated any longer. I wonder how Dr. Olsen would feel about this need Hollywood has to “employ science advisors who scrutinize scripts, sets and characters.” I recently finished writing a novel set in late 1940s Los Angeles and felt frustrated that I actually needed to put a note to the reader at the beginning of the manuscript explaining that my rendition of those times is one writer’s hyper-sensitized depiction and that historical or factual accuracy is not intended.

My father-in-law is a retired optical physicist living in Boston. When my wife and I have chances to visit him we spend a lot of time in his home because he has had a stroke and doesn’t get out much. He loves music and art and has a very impressive library filled with science and philosophy texts both classic and contemporary. He also loves to watch old episodes of Star Trek with me (original series only since I am a purist). Mangels suggests that part of scientists acting as consultants to artists is, in a way, to diminish the stereotype that scientists are “a bunch of pasty, lab-coated, socially stunted dweebs” and are “hopeless, hapless nerds.” That’s a pretty lame reason to have scientists imposing their scrutiny over a craft they have absolutely no understanding of. And most of the people I know who are scientifically minded wear those labels as a badge of honor; the ones who don’t probably haven’t evolved past a junior high school mentality.

I am not trying to pick of fight with John Mangels. His article was interesting, intelligent, and well written (I can’t say that about a lot of journalism). But it left me thinking a lot about the increasing necessity for all fictional tales to be grounded in reality or a plausible reality. When I read a good book or see a great movie I am just not looking for that. And all of this has made me think about a professor I had in college who I am certain has no recollection of me, even though it is nice to see that he is now Assistant Director of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) and Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics honor society. I wonder now why the physics department chair at L&C was willing to teach a summer course to a bunch of humanities majors who might earn “C” grades at best. In the end, I think Dr. Olsen might have been one of those dedicated teachers who knew his students were never going to fall in love with science but wanted us to appreciate it and see that it has a place in our lives, just as I hope my students appreciate literature in their lives.

Dr. Olsen ended our last class session before the final exam by talking about the probability of us discovering “intelligent” life on another planet. He explained that there were only a small number of scientists working on this and that if we did discover extraterrestrial intelligent life they would at least have to have something similar to radio technology. I took his course in the summer of 1997, the same year that the film Contact was released. Mangels’ article mentions the inaccuracy of how Jodie Foster scans for signals of intelligent life in a particular scene of the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel. I don’t recall Dr. Olsen even mentioning the specifics of how radio technology was the most likely first contact we would have with intelligent life beyond earth. All I remember is that he spoke with great passion about the possibility, and how exciting it would be if it did happen. He got me excited thinking about it! This teacher is an expert on chaotic patterns in fluid flow (I have no idea what that is) and never made his students feel stupid. Likewise, I recall that one day he overheard a classmate of mine ridiculing people who believe in astrology and saying that it was not right to make fun of such people. Dr. Olsen was not just teaching science, he was teaching science as a way of living a kind life, to paraphrase an essay topic by my friend Joseph A. Soldati.

Looking back, I think Dr. Olsen probably prepared me for a teaching career in a very important way. I often teach a general education undergraduate course at The University of Akron called Fiction Appreciation. The students who take this course are rarely English majors. They are usually nursing students or accounting majors looking to fulfill a graduation requirement, just as I was when I enrolled in Dr. Olsen’s summer course over eleven years ago. I know these students are not going to become the kind of readers of fiction that I am. But every time I teach the course I end the semester by giving them two lifelong assignments. I ask them to read at least two books of fiction each year for pleasure and that if they have children to read to them before they go to bed. It’s the “appreciation” of fiction I am teaching. I think Dr. Olsen knew he was teaching an “appreciation” of astronomy that summer, and I always think of that class when I look up at the stars at night (not all the time, but occasionally I do) and see The Big Dipper. And yes, when I visited Egypt and learned that the three major Pyramids at Giza align to the three stars in Orion's belt, I smiled and thought of the class as well, and of course Dr. Olsen.

Dr. Olsen was not trying to tell me how to write fiction and I was not trying to tell him how to talk about astronomy. Every time I teach Fiction Appreciation I inevitably get an e-mail from a student at the end of the semester admitting they were out of their element analyzing literature but that they really enjoyed the class and are going to try to read more. When I get those e-mails I think about my final exam in my undergraduate astronomy course and how I wrote a note to Dr. Olsen saying that I perfectly accepted whatever grade I earned but that I loved the class. It’s the appreciation that matters in the end. The book Dr. Olsen recommended in the L&C faculty survey was “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I can’t imagine Dr. Olsen scrutinizing its accuracy (the author, Robert M. Pirsig, admits it's not very accurate about motorcycle maintenance anyway).

If you need the science of “imagined worlds” to be accurate you probably don’t have any “appreciation” for the created narratives writers present you with. I don’t know how Dr. Olsen would react to me saying that. But I do know he would be happy that the next time I am able to be in my hometown of Portland, Oregon with my nieces and nephews I would like to take them to OMSI so that they too can appreciate something that I am not naturally inclined towards but am fascinated by to no end. Maybe they can even lose themselves to the world of the creative imagination and not worry about accuracy. If science and literature make them “feel” something that contributes to the “spirit” of their lives that’s a whole lot important than making sure it’s accurate. I think that would also be okay with John Mangels.

THINKING OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

THINKING OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV


"Lord, help me to finish my novel, 1931."

—Mikhail Bulgakov, notes while working on THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

NICE GUYS FINISH IN THE TOP FIVE

NICE GUYS FINISH IN THE TOP FIVE

The National Book Awards have been announced and Salvatore Scibona did not win for his beautiful debut novel, THE END. I sent Salvatore an e-mail just before the ceremony and he zapped me back from a coffee shop in Manhattan. I said that my wife and I had our fingers crossed for him, that we were rubbing rabbits’ feet and all. He responded, “Thanks. But I already won, as far as I'm concerned. Just to have the book on a shelf with these people. Those poor rabbits!”

I understand his sentiment and I know that creativity should not be turned into a competition, but I still wanted him to win. Why? For two reasons:

1.) Salvatore is just a really nice guy and it would be great to see a nice guy whose novel is published on a small press (Graywolf) win the NBA. THE END is going to be coming out in German and French as well (funny that there is not yet an Italian translation for a novel about Italian immigrant.).

2.) When people do things for me and they don’t know it I want the best for them, and this past semester meeting Salvatore, appreciating his work and hearing about his process has done something invaluable for me. Sometimes it’s hard for me to let people know how much I appreciate them, but it’s even harder when they have no clue that they are helping me at all.

I wrote a short story while living in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1998. That short story eventually grew into the manuscript for a novel. I had to abandon 500+ pages. Since then I completed my short story collection and my first novel. But I was always taking notes for that original novel, always compiling the necessary research, etc. I am once again tackling that original story that came to me in Jerusalem over ten years ago. It took Salvatore ten years to write THE END. Sometimes we depreciate inspiration that comes to us in subtle ways, but for the past few months Salvatore’s story has been an inspiration. He didn’t win the NBA, but I hope he knows that what he has given me is quite meaningful.

Onward! EW

READING “THE HOPEFUL”

The current issue of The New Yorker has an interesting profile on New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. I’ve always found Friedman’s work interesting, even when I disagree with him. I started reading his columns ten years ago when I was living overseas; they were printed frequently in The International Herald Tribune. The New Yorker profile contains a funny little comment by Friedman about his wife. “She is extremely well read…She really knows her dots, and I’m really good at connecting them. The biggest fights in our marriage are about ‘I’m keeping that paragraph!’”

Indeed, many writers, including me, rely on their beloved as an ideal reader. My wife, Thea, certainly is mine. And I identify with what Friedman says. The biggest disagreements between Thea and me are usually literary (I love Hemingway, she doesn’t; she loves Proust, I don’t). Other than her occasional complaint that I am a workaholic or my inability to understand her addiction to oatmeal, we’re a pretty good team. However, as a novelist I am usually trying to keep whole chapters Thea doesn’t like. (Disclosure: she usually wins, but sometimes I put up a good fight).

One of the greatest joys of being married to Thea is being able to sit quietly together, each reading a book. I have bought my first home and it has a wonderful fireplace that is ideal for sitting front of with a good book. But I haven’t had the chance yet. Life has been rather busy the past few months, but in a good way. I read along with my students as we explore the books I assign (I don’t think I will ever grow bored of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) but I haven’t been able to sit down with a new book for enjoyment lately.

However, this morning I realized that my life is not devoid of stories. I’m constantly reading them. Only lately, the stories I have been reading are by “The Hopeful.” On one end they are from undergraduate students in my Introduction to Fiction Writing course and graduate students whose MFA theses I am directing. I know these young writers personally. I see them all the time and am given the honor and privilege of reading their stories and coaching them along the way, seeing them excited when bouncing revision ideas off me or withholding revisions from me because they don’t want to spoil how they are re-approaching their tales. These are “The Hopeful” whose work I have an easier time evaluating. I know them and in some cases have come to know their work over a long period of time and find enormous gratification when I see them hit upon something good and run with it. I see myself in each of them every day, see that young writer hungry to make a story memorable, dreaming that one day it might even find its way to the printed page.

On the other end, I have just completed the process of reading and evaluating applications by “The Hopeful” applying to our MFA program. These stories are much more difficult for me to get my fingers around. I do not know these people personally and I do not know their work. They are hoping I will be able to read a one-page statement of goals and their writing samples and assess that they have what it takes to be admitted to the NEOMFA. This has been a great experience, but not without its shortcomings.

There is a part of me that is uneasy with the responsibility of having a say when it comes to somebody else’s dreams. I must be fair and as objective as possible. And I keep thinking of Thea and how we do not always have the same literary taste. Can I look at a story and know it’s not what I personally like to read but has great merit? Can I read a 200-word statement and assess whether a young writer will thrive in a workshop environment?

As I sipped my morning coffee today in the breakfast room I love, looking out at the yard I cleared of leaves yesterday, I thought about having not read a book for pleasure in a few weeks. I thought of “The Hopeful” and what their stories were telling me. My students and those hoping to be my students told me a lot. The most important thing they told me is that stories still matter to people, especially young people. We live in an age of facts that can be obtained with a quick Google search. Sometimes I get down and think that stories don’t matter to people anymore, that iPod downloads—people bobbing around the sidewalk with earphones on shutting them out to the world around them—have replaced the timeless experience of getting lost in a story.

I’m a little less cynical this morning thinking about all the stories I’ve been reading by hopeful young writers. Yes, cinema’s influence on the written story still troubles me even though I am a huge movie buff. And I wonder why some young writers feel they must present sex and violence simply for the sake of shocking the reader instead of using it to make a point. (Another disclosure, Thea tells me I write violence really well). But in the end, I love stories and I love people who want to tell stories.

Like many writers, before I wrote stories I collected them. For instance, I have always loved family history. And before I became an avid reader I also loved playing with my brother Scott as a kid, taking television shows such as Star Trek (the original series) and Battlestar Gallactica (also the original series) and 240-Robert (did anyone else watch this show other than us?) and creating our own adventures based on those familiar plots. We loved watching the TV show Emergency, but we loved making up our own stories from that show even more (we desperately wanted to be fireman but had to settle for tossing stuffed animals down the stairs and descending to rescue them by tying boating rope to the top of the banister and wearing plastic Fisher Price firefighter outfits). We loved watching Superfriends, but we loved pretending we were superheroes more. Creating my own adventures is what drew me to being a writer. It was and probably still isn’t imagination; it’s about story.

I want to believe that stories still matter to people. And when I mean stories I am talking about the personal and individual experience of reading and becoming lost in a story, almost becoming part of that story. Because, for me, reading is personal. Film is at its best when it is a collective experience. But reading is a different kind of story all together.

I’ve finished reading MFA applications and I have finished reading the student stories for this coming week. This morning I am about to take part in the spiritual and religious experience of submerging myself in a story. Like many book lovers I have a goal that I will read at least ten books this year that I have bought but haven’t read yet (none of us reach this goal because we keep buying new books). I am looking at the little room in our new house that Thea and I have lined with bookshelves, fulfilling our dream of having our own little library. There is a comfy chair we put in this room by its one little window (the cats are occupying it now but maybe they want some company). All I need to do is decide which story I want to plunge into. And after solely reading the work of “The Hopeful” for the past few weeks, I know they are also thinking that reading a good story would make a perfect Sunday afternoon.

A HOUSE AS A NOVEL

I haven’t written a blog in a few weeks and feel bad. So, I’ll write a short one here.

My wife and I recently bought our first house. My Uncle Mike told me he likes my style: We are facing the worst economic problem since The Great Depression and I buy a home. Oh well, when times were good I couldn’t afford health insurance, so things are always backwards for me.

What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that a house is not too different from starting to write a novel. No, my task is not as daunting as David Giffels writes about in his new book, All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House. But it’s a headache in the most beautiful terms.

A house is a skeleton upon moving in. Like coming to a novel, I know what I want to accomplish but must go about it by trial and error. It took me an exhausting weekend to get moved in (sort of the equivalent of an exhausting first draft over a much longer span of time). My house was built 88 years ago. I am hoping that it will take me less time to get the place to where I want it to be. Now that I am moved in and have my rough draft, it’s time to do the real work, revision. I am already thinking about how to build detail, how to be subtle but still make my point, how to make every room (or every chapter) survive on its own and yet still contribute to the greater story.

It took me over four years to get my new novel right. I’m hoping my new home will come along a little faster but with just as much care and love. And yes, I am at work on a new novel. It will be interesting to see how its evolution parallels my new home.

HONESTY SHOULD TRUMP DISINGENUOUSNESS

This week I read a piece in The New Yorker on Lionel Trilling that quoted him as once having said the following in 1944:

“I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically track back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a ‘Jewish writer.’”

Give me a break.

I have no intention of telling another writer how to see himself or his work, but it makes me irate when “Jewish writers” put on a disingenuous façade when they start making statements such as “I don’t think of myself as a Jewish writer, simply a writer who happens to be Jewish.” It especially unnerves me when these writers continually draw on the Jewish experience for their subject matter. And I hate to say it, but “Jewish writers” I consider friends and colleagues seem to follow this same ridiculous line of thinking.

I think it is important that I have never heard such a ridiculous statement from Philip Roth, arguably the greatest “Jewish writer” to walk the planet. But the “I’m just a writer with no background” line of thinking is a perpetual problem in fiction on Jewish themes and contemporary literature in general. When wordsmiths are unwilling to accept that they are “Jewish writers” it is typically derived from some bogus notion that they don’t want to be pigeonholed as far as the expectations for their content. The truth is that their inability to accept what they are is a monstrous demonstration of their insecurity.

Cynthia Ozick once said that while Michael Chabon is Jewish and also a writer, that he isn’t a “Jewish writer.” Regardless of Ozick’s literary accomplishments, her attitude is beyond juvenile concerning ethnic literary legitimacy. Anyone born Jewish—religious or secular—is by his or her very nature a “Jewish writer.” Period!

To deny what you are as an author is completely disingenuous. If you want to be accepted by the New York City literary establishment and play the politically correct game, more power to you. But if you have integrity and do not give in to your own insecurities, you will simply say, “Yes, I’m a ‘Jewish writer’ and here’s my story." And that story does not even need to have Jewish themes. Eileen Pollack’s new collection, In The Mouth, has stories that do not all necessarily have Jewish characters, but there is always a Jewish sensibility present.

I AM A “JEWISH WRITER!” Are you willing to admit it, too?