I’ve been rereading Annie Dillard’s fine Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for the third or fourth time. It’s a marvelous work, almost like drinking in the molten stuff of imagination itself, for the language of the book is a series of fireworks, pinwheels of whirling thought, cascades of explosive insight, and then soft candles of introspection.

Dillard gets her nose right into nature, flopping face down on the ground and opening her eyes wide, and—with her alchemy of observation forged into words—tells us what she sees and how to see it, in a way that makes pages breathe. Among the many things that struck me in this reading was a passage about how cicadas go about their business:

“In the South, the periodical cicada has a breeding cycle of thirteen years, instead of seventeen years in the North. That a live creature spends thirteen consecutive years scrabbling around in the root systems of trees in the dark and damp – thirteen years! – is amply boggling for me. Four more years – or four less – wouldn’t alter the picture a jot. In the dark of an April night the nymphs emerge, all at once, as many as eighty-four of them digging into the air from every square foot of ground. They inch up trees and bushes, shed their skin, and begin that hollow, shrill grind that lasts all summer.”

Now, that passage is much less poetic than countless others in the book, but the thought of those burly insects biding their time, working the years, establishing and refining all things cicada threw me into considering how long as writers we might be buried, mere potential, waiting for wings to harden. It’s always amusing when there’s a new writing sensation, some breakout author who’s touted as the newly crowned best and brightest, and you learn that they also have three other novels that never made a stir, and four that they abandoned or are still gestating. Loud (and potentially annoying) as those cicadas might be, they earned their shrill grind. The long seasons of work are often invisible to outside eyes, buried to all except the worker.

Words Have Sound, as Well as Shape and Sense

Sometimes writing work is a shrill grind. Yesterday I started reading my newly completed novel aloud, in order to hear the rhythm of the words, to see if the sentences made music. I’d already edited it on screen, but putting voice to the page let me hear the places where the saxophone squawked rather than soared. In the space of twenty-five pages, I made at least seventy-five corrections, sometimes just transposing two words, sometimes shifting a phrase from sentence middle to end. It reminded me of when I’ve been given something to edit by a writer who thinks it’s near done, and I return it to them dripping the blood of the red pen—the horror!

So, more than 200 more pages to go—a bit tedious, but it’s cicada work: something buried will burst forth. I’ll be happy if the damn thing crawls, much less takes wing. Let’s end this with another passage from Dillard’s work, this time from another book I highly recommend, The Writing Life:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. …Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

Open your safes, writers. Whether you let the silver lie thirteen years or seventeen, you must let it go. Otherwise, it will tarnish. (Besides, you might be able to make the latest sale on quill pens at Walmart.)

Stone Sleight-of-Hand, Big Sur Style

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand.  I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
—e.e. cummings

Another in a succession of mornings of deep fog; the sun does struggle forward as the day turns, but effort is fitful, the results tenuous. The change from summer to fall always provokes melancholy in me. It’s a host of things: the winds pick up a bit, and their whispers are cooler; they curl under my collar, with cold intent. Leaves dry and curl, lose vitality and color, and fall brittle to the ground. The light itself, its weak slant, its ebbing warmth, seems a conspiracy. Or even a taunting: time rolls on, what have you done? I have a touch of SAD, that aptly named Seasonal Affective Disorder, where the shorter days and the dimming light seem to drain my batteries.

But whatever the physical component of that, whatever the tangible indicators of time’s timeless march, there’s a kind of surrender to the conspiracy that’s purely psychological. After all, it’s not winter that’s here, but fall, a time of harvest, often one of fruition. (And of course, I live in California, where folks of the Eastern flavor would make a scornful roll of the eyes at whimperings from a body that’s never touched a snow shovel.) And yet, and yet, there’s always the feeling for me at fall’s outset that the movement is toward winter, and that spring won’t come again. I’ve looked at fall as an ending, rather than a beginning.

There’s Really Not An Effing Thing to Whinge About

But I’m making the effort to be more conscious of my moods, and look at them with a sort of dispassionate affection: “Oh, a bit on the whiny side today, are we? Maybe it’s just a nap after lunch that’s needed, or a quick go-round with a neighbor’s cow and the trebuchet.” Partially because I’ve been trying to put one of the tenets of the book I’ve been reading, Buddha’s Brain, into practice. One of its many salubrious offerings is to recognize that there is the situation, and then there is your reaction to the situation. I know, old porridge that, but the book offers a number of approaches to recognize that when the elements of your nervous system light their alarms and dispense their flight/fight/brain-blight chemicals, you can consciously pour on a cerebral cocktail of your own making to soften the assault.

Thus we have fall. Instead of thinking of the next Ice Age, I can think of my coming birthday, the sympathetic shape of pumpkins, the writing conference I’m soon to attend, and good soup. I can try to take to heart Samuel Butler, who said, “Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”

Oh, about that fog this morning: it broke early. My girlfriend and I drove down to Big Sur, one of God’s palaces on earth, with the top down on the Miata, hiked around a winding hillside overlook with waves crashing on rocks below, went to the sweetly eccentric Henry Miller Library, where I fondled the Ginsberg and the Kerouac, flipped through old vinyl records from decades past, envied the giant coon cat sleeping on the warm deck, ate a scrumptious lunch high on the hill at Ventana, and came home dizzy with sun.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
—William Cullen Bryant

Fall, there are worse seasons.

Thinking about my writing influences, I make a beeline for Mark Twain—why not set your standards high? But then I mosey about some, bumping into Kurt Vonnegut, who seemed to pick flowers from the same field as Mr. Clemens. But whether a writer’s echo can be heard in your work isn’t necessarily a mark of their sway over you. There are people whose writing I fiercely admire, like Marilynne Robinson or Cormac McCarthy or Annie Dillard, and the DNA of their superb stylings can’t be traced to my pratfalls on the page. (For that matter, I may have been influenced as much by Dr. Seuss, or maybe Steve Martin.)

But the original influence? That’s easy. That’s the woman up above, who is cracking up the nearby priest with some tale. That woman has been telling stories for a lot longer than me, and with more accomplishment. That woman is my mother. Before Sarge Bentley got his hands on her, she was Eileen O’Brien, and though Iowa cornfields were the setting for her growing up, I’m sure the storytellers of the Old Sod made their ancestral mark on her. And she on me.

From my earliest memories, I saw her absorbed in reading. Hey, books! They must be good. I want to do that too. She never pushed reading on me, but the obvious pleasure it afforded her was generously transferred to me. And because she could shape a story, could find the odd and often humorous angle on some episode of human folly, I was drawn to storytelling too.

Stories: 100% Nutritive, Taste Great Too
The absorbing thing is, my mom’s stories, like her life, have never been pocked with pettiness, or buzzing with the trivial, or interested in shoving someone aside so she could shine. As a writer, I tire myself with my own jealousies over other writers’ successes, with my own trivialities and peeves. My mother has never swum in that shallow end of the pool—she laughs at the human comedy, but there’s never been spite in her smiles.

So here’s to my mom, my biggest writing influence. The photo is from her 90th birthday party a couple of weeks ago, where she was surrounded by friends, young and old, who uniformly wished her well. She’s wearing those test-pilot’s welding glasses because she can barely see a damn thing anymore and light bothers her, but she still reads wielding a fat magnifier. Words—can’t get away from them. By her side is a priest from my old parish being entertained by her point of view (though the margarita he’s drinking may have helped).

Thanks Mom.

Bonus Prizes!
A couple of good things just happened to me between my sojourns from the Airstream office to my house. MediaBistro and GalleyCat have been hosting an online literary festival with live webinars sporting the likes of Susan Orlean, Rebecca Skloot and Elissa Schappell talking about aspects of writing. A pal told me that you could win free admission to the occasion by tweeting what you considered to be the best sentence you’ve ever written. Well, I thought “I will not take them soft or scrambled, despite an argument well-rambled” was pretty good, so I—no, I actually tweeted one of mine, and I won. The festival has been fantastic.

I also entered a contest to win a year’s admission and a bunch of other goodies in the Freelance Writer’s Den, just by writing a blog post. So I did, and was chosen as one of the co-winners. Lots of good writerly stuff there that I’m just digging into. I entered both of these on a whim, and whimsically enough, won. That does tell you to enter contests if you think you’ve got a shot—who knows what might happen?

Thanks again, Mom.

Margaret Atwood talking about Fanado on YouTube

Because I don’t waste enough time already searching for videos of cats quoting Milton on YouTube, I decided to mess around a bit more with Twitter the past couple of weeks. Under the rationalized pretext that it might open up some more channels for my copywriting business (and because I thought someone might tweet about a cat riding a unicycle on YouTube), I started tweeting more than the thin, desultory wing-flappings I’d shot out over the past year. You know, about important stuff, like the fact that you can now get an espresso machine in your car.

I also started following more people, other than the ones named things like IPostCatsTypingOnYouTube. I guess I don’t get out much, but it surprised me that there are prominent writers on Twitter, and some of them tweet their fool writerly heads off. Somewhere in the ether, I saw a tweet from Margaret Atwood, so I started following her (@margaretatwood). I knew that Margaret Atwood was hip to tech because I’d read about her LongPen work years ago. But I was amazed to see how much she tweets, and how casual and fun she can be in her stream.

I am talking about Margaret Atwood, author of Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye—all works that I marveled at for the sureness and scope of the writing, the power of the imagination, the glint of the language. I think Atwood is one of the best fiction writers alive, a giant in the field, and to see her merrily tweeting—she sent many funny tweets from the recent Comic-Con—boggled my mind. I suppose I think the literary mandarins are levitating on silk pillows in a Patagonian opium den, not furiously pounding their iPhones. Who knew?

Seth, Let’s Do Lunch
I did have some inkling, when I emailed Seth Godin a while back, and he quickly replied, that many of the titans are actual human beings. I am a member of Seth’s Triiibes network, and indeed I had a Triiibes-related question, but that a guy like Seth, who undoubtedly gets emails by the bushels, takes the time to answer some nebbish’s question struck me. I’ve emailed other cybersphere celebrities, like Chris Brogan, and received back cordial replies as well. Atwood even retweeted a tweet of mine expressing interest in her Fanado project that interactively links artists, creators and fans. You might kick a buck in to that Indiegogo project of hers if you dig what she’s putting out there.

So, this obviously isn’t an invitation to go badger your writing idols on Twitter or by email. It’s more of a reminder that we live in interesting times. I’m going to check and see if Mark Twain has a Twitter account so I can get some cigar recommendations.

Margaret, Seth, know of any good cat videos?

Traveling to somewhere you’ve never been, especially when you stay for more than a few days, exerts odd temporal and spatial pressures on your consciousness. That Heraclitus quote about never being able to step twice in the same river is of a piece with what I’m talking about: your traveled self is not the same self untraveled. And extending upon that, the “home” you return to seems a little slippery too: I keep glancing around here like there’s a joke being played, like the walls of the house are hastily thrown up curtains with a corner out of plumb.

For three of the last nine months, my gal Alice and I have been living outside the US: a two-month stint in the Bahamas last fall, and now just back from a month in Panama. Among all the things that bit me in those thermal zones must have been an unbalance bug, because my thinking has been just a wee bit off since then. Nothing major: just the usual “Is the life I’m living real or just a series of disconnected contingencies?”

If This Life Isn’t Real, Would You Mind Adjusting the Sound Track?
Rack one up for the contingency corner. It’s not that I’ve ever doubted that our scraping skating on this little ice chip of a planet was held together by hand-tightened screws (and punctuated by pratfalls and whoopee cushion sounds), but going and living in other cultures, even insulated by the knowledge that you’ll return to your own, is oddly jarring. Or maybe it’s just that the literal jarring of crashing my host’s car into a high-grass-concealed curb and smashing the front suspension while there torqued my steaming cranium a mite.

To the point (god, man, finally—this ramble is wearing on me): I’ve begun to write some of the literal (and some merely mental) adventures that took place overseas, out of my alleged comfort zones, because if I continue to wait, I fear that whatever lies and distortions I do distill in that writing might not bear even a shadowy relationship to fact. The fish-out-of-water story—when the gaspings of the fish are sharply rendered—can still provoke interest. It’s just odd to come back and have the home water taste just a little weird.

Godspeed Brother Ray
Ray Bradbury died this past Tuesday, at 91. If you have read his writing (and by golly you should), you know he was a fine, imaginative storyteller. If you have read of him discussing his writing, you know he was an enthusiastic advocate for the work, for getting after it every day, and every day discovering what the work can pull out of you, and what you can pull out of it. See you later, Ray. I’ll bet the green dudes on Mars are raising a glass of something potent in your honor this week too.