Why don't these two just kiss already?

Two of my favorite short stories—Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t” and Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”—have at least one thing in common. Both arrive at what the story is by first relating what the story is not. For Dybek, all the times the couple did not have sex, which heightens the overall sense of loss on which the story lands. For Wolff, the things that the pretentious editor does not think as a bullet passes through his brain, peeling away his contemptuous exterior to a more empathetic version. Rick Moody employs a similar technique in The Ice Storm to transport the reader back to 1973, listing all the things that haven’t happened yet or haven’t been invented.

Prose writers don’t often think about negative space, since our art form doesn’t have a physical canvas. Even a poet can tinker with how a poem looks on a page, but prose writers rarely even consider the effect paragraph length can have on a reader. It’s not a spatial art; however, any narrative implies its anti-narrative. When we write a word, we could have chosen virtually any other in its place and each of those possibilities lends itself to any number of parallel narratives, like all the books in Borges’ “Library of Babel.”

Red on black? How posh.

You may remember learning about the stages of Greek pottery in art history. How they eventually tired of painting figures in black onto the red clay pots and began painting around the scenes, so that the figures were red and the backgrounds were black. Like in the short stories, the artists applied their energy to the things that were not being rendered, in order to reveal the image. More complicated to achieve, and new to the consumer. Now it’s essential for visual artists to consider how they are interacting with negative space, since it has become such an important element of the medium.

When I read a short story that utilizes negative space, it’s certainly refreshing. A lot of times when I’m reading in the Willow Springs slush pile, it feels like I’m tossing black on red pots over my shoulder, disappointed. Which often leads me to wonder, what exactly I’m looking for. The answer isn’t a story that explores negative space—that’s far too specific. And I’m almost positive that I don’t have some notion of the Platonic story that I measure everything against—I certainly couldn’t articulate it. It’s more likely the opposite; the things that excite me as a reader, are things that subvert the notion of Platonic story. Like using negative space or an interview, narrative play and imposed structures, anecdotal forms, magic, the page as a canvas, time expansion and collapse, fantasy, collage, having a gun that never goes off.

There’s a saying around my apartment: Influences sell books; enemies facilitate art. Which is, of course, something that people who can’t sell books say; however, there’s definitely value in taking issue with the established order. And it’s not a matter of experimental versus traditional. It’s a matter of good versus bad.

Every story presents the writer with a unique set of problems—solving these problems (for instance, getting an audience to sympathize with a cranky old man or finding a new angle on a story of love and loss) is where the magic happens. We accomplish this by breaking the rules—by doing something decidedly un-“Story”like. Every story needs to break the rules to succeed.

So, if you’re like the high school students I teach, you begin to wonder: what is a story; if everything is permissible, why are there all these rules. The simple answer is: so we can break them, but the answer is also steeped in this idea of negative space—that to put forward a notion of what story is implies that there are infinite things that a story is not. I guess, for me, defining story-ness is accomplished by proving, slowly, that the negative space deserves our attention. As with all things that are impossible to define, it’s best to try and to miss, but to miss as well as we possibly can. Then to try again.

I don’t mean this with regard to human relationships.[1] I mean it with regard to fiction writing. I have a tendency to start new stories[2], get really excited about them, and then, two to six pages in, lose interest entirely and discard them. 

I’m aware that this is not an uncommon problem for writers[3]. In fact, I think pretty much everyone does it. But I worry I do it too much. How much is too much? Well, that’s always the question with everything, right? In this case, I know I’ve spent a lot of time working on projects that never even get close to being finished and I’ve come to find this behavior frustrating. I have two folders on my computer dedicated to short stories. One is called “ideas.” It has 74 documents in it[4]. The other is called “stuff that’s done.” It has 13 documents in it[5].

So, I’m looking for advice. I’m looking for ways to trick myself[6] into finishing stories that I start. After all, I’m trying to write a thesis here. And, someday, God willing, fingers crossed, I’ll be trying to write a book[7]. And I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a hunch that being able to commit to ideas is a necessity for successful completion of these projects.

The Plymouth Duster had been patched together for years.  Literally.   Once I found myself  epoxying chicken wire over a dent in the right passenger door and painting it with Rustoleum.  Then I lost myself again, and for years she took me to and from class, climbed the Allegheny mountains and transported kegs of beer to mythic realms where Bon Jovi and Madonna still reign as King and Queen (no one can convince them otherwise).

Anyway, it was a sad day when the tail pipe fell off and careened along the median strip, causing mayhem for the traffic coming in my rear-view mirror.  But the day that I’m recalling — that time of the infamous stalling in the midst of rush hour — is not that day…

During that particular turn of the Earth’s axis I called my father, an automobile mechanic for over forty years, and asked him for help.  I called him from the counter of the fitness center where I belonged and where the body-building guru had once taken a look at my torso and asked me if I’d left “my chest at home.”   My dear ol’ Dad could be just as calloused when it came to my feelings, but as I described for him the car’s diagonal position in the road and how we were about to make the evening news, he seemed downright cheerful and calm.  ”I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said at 5:35 in the afternoon, and with the Fidelity Bank sign blinking the digits of 5:45 he appeared in his greasy overalls and got to work.

First on the agenda involved a problem I failed to mention over the phone.  That is, in my haste to exit the vehicle and run across the parking lot, I had locked the keys in the car.   (Don’t ask me how.)   And so, with the trusty bent-clothes-hanger technique, Mr. Fix-It opened the door.   He then popped the hood and stuck his head into the guts of the engine.  He yanked, twisted, tightened and told me to get in the driver’s seat and try to start her up.

I did and nothing happened.  Nothing…

Just a few clicks.   And the rain continued to pour.   The gutters along the curbs began to swell.  And the commuters maneuvering around us, in what now constituted a small lake, made their presence felt.

At this juncture, my father’s even-keel disposition took a hit from the side, which is to say, a guy passing by honked his horn and displaced a wave of water than crashed upon his head.  His blue Esso baseball cap had now been drenched.   And without much warning, he let fling a heap of expletives and pleasing consonant-combinations that I’d rarely heard him utter in my life…  Not long after that venting, the skies cleared and the spark plugs sparked and the timing belts squealed and the other Plymouth Duster gizmo’s began to sound like normal.  ”Thanks a lot, Dad,” I said, driving away.

But one thing about our circumstance had not been normal.   One thing in the midst of the chaos I could not leave behind, and neither could the mechanic who came to my rescue.  The spiritual core of that incident happened during the interval between my Dad’s tirade and the car’s repairs when some unknown pedestrian approached us and said, “Excuse me…  I noticed you cursing and I just wanted to tell you… ah… I mean… this doesn’t matter.”

This doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t matter?

Well, in the moment, it sure as hell mattered.

It mattered a great deal.

But now that I’ve had years and even decades to contemplate the words of this mysterious Buddha, I consider that multi-layed episode to be the paradigm of my existence — and it DID matter, but only in this sense — in the sense that Gary Snyder suggests that nothing matters, or that “emptiness” matters:

I first saw it in the sixties,

driving a Volkswagen camper

with a fierce gay poet and a

lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

we came down from Canada

on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue

Mountains, lava flow caves,

the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges—

and the glittering obsidian-paved

dirt track toward Vya,

seldom-seen roads late September and

thick frost at dawn; then

follow a canyon and suddenly open to

          silvery flats that curved over the edge

O, ah! The

awareness of emptiness         

brings forth a heart of compassion![--from Finding The Space In The Heart]

Don't cry, football fan. It's going to be okay.

1) Catch up on all of the reading and writing you probably should have been doing every Sunday.

2)Watch basketball or hockey or whatever is on ESPN 8 until football comes back.

3) Play Madden 12 until your team reaches the Super Bowl at least a half dozen times.

4) Troll football blogs or read mock drafts and dream about what your team will look like in the fall. Dream of them making the playoffs. Dream, dream, dream.

5) Reanalyze this past season, see where your team went wrong. Reanalyze again and again from every angle until you’re thoroughly depressed. Then write a poem about it.

6) Find a new reason to drink on Sundays. Think about joining a bowling league.

7) Watch Mad Men every Sunday night. Season five premiers March 25.

8) Start a blog or start reading blogs. Start doing the New York Times crossword puzzles again. Sundays are tough. They’ll keep you busy.

9) Watch all of the movies in your Netflix queue.

10) Catch up on politics. In no time you’ll have something to talk about other than football.

This past week I had the pleasure of helping out with and attending my second Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals. (For those of you who don’t know, Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry memorization and recitation competition for high school students. There is scholarship money available at the state and national levels of the competition. Scholarship money! For poetry recitation! Winners also receive money for their school to purchase more poetry books, which is equally as cool.)

Each student recites and performs two poems of their choice from the POL anthology. This year’s selections ranged from Emily Dickinson to Alice Fulton, Percy Shelley to Robert Wrigley. And the performances were very, very good.

After the competition part of the evening, the students had an opportunity to talk about why they chose the poems they did. I was floored by how eloquently they all spoke about emotional connection and personal meaning for them (and mind you, they didn’t know we were going to ask them this question, so they were pretty much put on the spot). I noticed too a theme among their answers: They selected poems about strength, perseverance, and rebellion against the expected. It occurred to me that those were things that we probably all hoped to embody as teenagers (and perhaps still), and here were nine students who had found their own unique ways to embody these traits through the words of famous poets, both old and new.

But they weren’t just the words of the poets anymore. I’ve always believed that when we memorize a poem, it becomes a part of us. Without knowing it, we internalize the cadence and the emotional drive of that poem. We might even replicate it in the way we communicate or even the way we bowl (yes, sometimes I recite poetry in my head while bowling to establish a rhythm). But these students didn’t just know the individual words of the poems they selected, they had to perform them. They had to give voice to them, their own voice, and therefore make them their own. The words of Anne Sexton were spoken with such compassion, the voice of Ozymandias embodied with such raw power, that it was clear that the feelings driving the performances were completely sincere.

I’d like to think that if I had known about an opportunity like this in high school, I would have jumped on it. I mean, I already loved poetry. I fear though that I wouldn’t have had the courage that it takes to get on a stage and truly give yourself over to a poem. I admire those students and I hope they know what a brave and meaningful thing they’ve done. I hope when they’re 70, they can stand up and knock out some silly twenty-something poet with their performance of “Dover Beach.”

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

Hello and welcome. Have a nice day.

I have a fantasy—we all have a fantasy—that someday someone will write a dissertation on our body of work—that one day someone will read something we wrote, looking for meaning rather than flaws. In my case, the paper would be titled: “Over Easy: Diners and Dives in Michael Bell’s Early Stories” and would trace the absolute saturation of my little canon with diners as settings and eggs as images.

I didn’t realize that diners were my fallback until graduate school, when three of my first four workshop pieces took place in diners. Instead of rejoicing at how easy it would be to title a collection of such stories (House of Pancakes, Dave’s, Lumberjack Special, etc.) I began to panic. I thumbed back through my earlier stories, found a big diner scene in my undergraduate thesis and, to my horror, the second story I ever wrote was titled “Sunnyside Up.”

So I banished diners for a while.

Then, this last week in my poetry workshop, fellow barker, Leyna Krow, mentioned that the diners were back. I looked down at my poem and there was a scene in which the speaker complains to a waiter about the taste of his eggs. Dammit. The worst part is that, once I thought about it, there were restaurant scenes in my two previous poems as well. Poetry, it seems, has freed me up to get back to my obsessions.

Using diners as a setting for fiction is a bad idea, but it make sense with my aesthetic. I like boring, real-time stories where two people sit and talk, but still have something to do with their hands. I like when there are random interruptions, like the ones provided by the wait staff and the other patrons. And I love it, especially, when nothing happens. So, for me, diners are perfect.

They also remind me of how my life used to be, when my mom and I would meet for breakfast at Millcreek Café on Friday mornings. Or my first year of college, how my friends and I spent the hours between midnight and two at a place called Dee’s eating hot fudge sundaes—Cami brought them out to us before we had a chance to order. Or in high school when we would skip our seminary class and go get scones at Sharon’s. Or the summer in jr. high when I convinced these two girls I went to church with that, for some unknown reason, we should make our parents get out of bed at six in the morning to drive us to IHOP—how we couldn’t afford anything but a la carte pancakes—and we just sat there laughing about nothing until they picked us up at eight.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me to Carl’s Café sometimes before we’d shop the sales on Saturday morning. He said it was the best greasy spoon restaurant in the city. It was this tiny place, only about six tables, and the food really was excellent. My dad lead by example, ordering the #2 with bacon, hash browns, sourdough toast, and his eggs served over-easy. I ordered the same. Still do.

It’s enjoyable to be like my dad sometimes, because usually I’m afraid of it. He’s a hoarder, so I have to second-guess everything I save. I have to watch out for any related impulse control disorders like fingernail biting, verbal ticks, trichotillomania, all of which I wrestle with. It was weird to grow up watching him allow what I considered junk to control him. But now I worry about my own ability to make decisions: I get all claustrophobic when faced with even the simplest choices; I write almost exclusively about people who are similarly paralyzed; and, as a result, plot seems to elude me. I guess I prefer diners as settings, because, I don’t know, sometimes it’s a big move, ordering eggs. Sometimes it’s all a person can manage, one of the better things he can pass down.

I guess that paper they write about me will be Freudian, but it’s even simpler than that, I think. I love diners because they’re safe. I can think in a diner. I can talk in a diner. I don’t have to rely on myself to cook breakfast. Of course, safety doesn’t make good fiction, so if I want a story, I’ve only got two options: take the man out of the diner or let the danger in. But I’d probably do better to put an end to all this writing about diners entirely—keep at least one of the safe places to myself.

Just so you don't get any illusions about where I'm going with this. (Photo Credit: IVAW.org)

“How’s it that the only ones responsible for making this mess, got their sorry asses stapled to a god damned desk?” – Tom Waits,  “Hell Broke Luce”

*          *          *          *

I read an article on Huffington Post the other day, written by a former SEAL, one Chris Kyle, United States Navy (Retired). It recounts his first kill as a sniper out on the Teams, back during the early days of the Iraq war. The premise is one we’ve all read before: young marksman, part of a campaign to win hearts and minds, makes the call to take down an enemy combatant when faced with a threat to the lives of his fellow soldiers. In this case, the target is a woman, berobed, who approaches a squad of Marines then produces a Chinese grenade from the folds of her abaya.

The narration was functional enough. Spare. Utilitarian. I found the recounted dialogue, chewed-up and dumbed-down for a clearly civilian audience, to be stilted and unconvincing. There were clearly ghostwriters involved. The author might have been a crack shot, sure, but he’s certainly no Timothy O’Brien or Anthony Swofford. And that’s okay. A warrior doesn’t need to be particularly well-spoken to do his job; we just lionize the ones who are.

The author talks a lot about his decision to kill a civilian woman in the line of duty; about how his conscience is clean in spite of his actions. “That woman was already dead,” Kyle writes. “I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her.” And you know what, that’s fine with me. With regard to the survival of oneself or one’s battle-buddies, I’ve always felt one should have zero compunction about doing what is required to stay alive and return home. Sad fact is, a lot of the people we deride as war-criminals were once soldiers who tried to do what was necessary at the time to survive, or to cope with the horrors of one’s situation. We don’t think about that very much, but there you go. I think Alan Moore’s take on the Batman mythos, The Killing Joke, had it about right: we are all just one bad day away from turning into monsters.

I pulled my rifle on a woman once while I was deployed. True story. Maybe 75 yards; brought her right up center-mass on my front sight post, sighted down the bore with my thumb ready to flick the safety to 3-round burst. Granted, it turned out she was approaching the guard tower in which I was posted, daughter in hand, to beg for food and water using a succession of hand gestures, but try telling that to a twenty-four year old kid, less than a month into his tour. And just in case you’re wondering: No. I didn’t shoot her. But I also didn’t give her any food or water, either. My buddy and I instead just waved her off, cursed her in English and told her in Arabic Yalla! (Buzz off!) and Imshi! (Go away!) Then her child gave us the finger, and we both lowered our rifles and laughed nervously.

Fact is, we don’t write about those kinds of stories when we write about war. We either write about Modern Warfare-style acts of flag-waving heroism, or Vietnam era horror-stories in the style of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In this regard, I prefer Anthony Swofford to Tim O’Brien; the cynicism about war he displays in Jarhead, his willingness to catch the boredom and stupidity of young Americans abroad makes for  a much more honest and necessary portrait. There are many stories we don’t tell about war, least of all the ones that lie hidden beneath our prose. So no: I don’t begrudge the author his lackluster writing, any more than I begrudge him the choice to kill someone who endangered the lives of his fellow warriors. What I do begrudge him is the way he wrote about the woman he shot:

My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul. I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job. But I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. I hate it to this day. Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy “savages.” There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

To the author, whose combat skills and expertise clearly far outstrip my own, I would respond thus: For all you know, that woman was a victim, coerced by local authorities into approaching those Marines as a suicide weapon. Perhaps they threatened to hurt her, hurt her family, if she didn’t cooperate. Then again, perhaps she was just like you, or like me — a patriot. Perhaps in her situation, we’d have done the very same thing. 

There came a time once when I looked a local national in the eyes, smiling, and realized that man might be partly responsible for the barrage of mortar attacks that pounded our post daily. Saw it all the time from local farmers: moving down the line, tending their crops of cabbage or sunflower or rhubarb, saw them smile and wave at us one day. Maybe the next day, or maybe even that evening, they might stand up a length of PVC tube lying between the rows, drop in an old Saddam-era 155, pull a lanyard and Thump! Lay it back down and keep moving. Sneaky, like the smile of that man whose hand I shook. And yet, even then, I heard that troubling voice in my head: wouldn’t you do it if the situations were reversed? And the thing was, I would have. So if I was right to do what was needed to go home to my wife, and if he was right to do the exact same thing, what else could be said but that our circumstances, not our allegiances, were the problem?

Which is why Mr. Kyle did what he did, and why I chose to leave that life behind — because to do that sort of work for a living, one has to possess an overwhelming sense of moral certitude. And I don’t possess that certitude.

When we write that “war is just,” we write about a limited set of circumstances, a kind of moral abnegation which reduces the highest good down to one basic element: one’s own personal survival. Sometimes, that survival dovetails with a larger political agenda, and sure that makes it easier to do what is necessary. We call it duty, rather than prejudice or self-preservation, and that somehow makes it nobler. Conversely, however, when we write that “war is wrong,” we write of worst-case scenarios — of monstrous acts made necessary by the love we hold for our friends, by our feelings of rage and helplessness, by our thoughts of our families and our own natural fear of dying. Nobody writes, though, about the culture that sits and watches from home, that swallows these misrepresentations of an entire society, that applauds such horrors with parades and free beers for the ones who come home from perpetrating them. We don’t pose these kinds of troubling questions in writing, and I fear that until we do, nobody will pose them of themselves.

Or worse: that even if we do pose them, nobody will care.

You start to look a lot like Egon, when you're crazy.

Near the end of last school year, when I had run into a creative wall—long before the assignments stopped being due—I was doing everything I could to avoid writing. Mostly listening to hyper-emotional music. The sad stuff while lying on my back, under a sheet. The pop punk while jumping from my bed to my desk chair…because the floor was lava.

It all made sense at the time—unlike my final workshop story, which chronicled, among other things, an argument with my garden gnome, Armando, as to whether or not I was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele.

Sounds great, I know.

The piece may sound like it had no redeeming value, but there was this one anecdote from my actual childhood that stuck out through all the weirdness. It was about a time during high school when I tried to comfort Thomas, a victim of bullying, who was contemplating suicide, and how I ultimately failed to respond effectively.

I determine, in the piece, that I should have told him about the time I bit a kid’s shoulder during a playground disagreement in elementary school. How when the principal questioned me about it, I said I didn’t do it and that was that. I wasn’t punished because Cameron, the kid I had bitten, had a history of bad behavior. I guess, what I wish I could have communicated with Thomas was the sense that I didn’t get away with it emotionally. Since I couldn’t apologize on behalf of his tormentors, I should’ve talked about how I had no way of apologizing to Cameron, and how I still wish I could, everyday.

The piece was ultimately a failure, but I couldn’t get the memory out of my head. So the anticlimactic search for Cameron began. I found one match on facebook, but when I contacted the guy with Cameron’s name, he said he never went to Cottonwood Elementary. Dead end.

At that point I just needed an outlet. So I searched for some guy named Greg who had done a few recording sessions for my band, back in high school. The band broke up two or so songs into the process and I didn’t have the money to purchase the tracks myself, so I just avoided Greg’s calls until they stopped. After some persistence I found an email address for his new recording company and sent him a message apologizing for wasting so many hours of his time and never paying him. He was really cool about it. Told me it showed character to come forward, even after all this time. I asked him if, maybe, he still had the tracks, but he’d deleted them a long time ago—which I’m almost certain is a shame.

Following that exchange, I noticed that, over the past month or so, my outbox had been piling up with apology emails. One meant to rectify a small oversight in the Willow Springs online submission manager, a few others addressing the intensity with which I had conducted myself in workshop earlier that school year. There were some addressed to ex-girlfriends, childhood acquaintances, some girl I had teased for having a crush on Elijah Wood. It seemed sort of freeing at the time, until I recognized the sick game I was playing.

My senior year of undergrad, my faculty mentor suggested that I wouldn’t get into grad school, that my writing wasn’t good enough, that I ought to take some time off and see the world. The idea of not being in school, however, scared me to death. So I decided to prove her wrong, which fueled my most productive writing period to date in which I produced the material I applied to graduate school with.

The next semester, as I was writing my creative thesis, the rejections started to roll in. So I thumbtacked them to the wall over my desk and wrote with a fury that I will likely never replicate. I was so driven to prove everyone wrong that I maintained a quasi-psychotic work ethic. Then, when I got the call from Greg Spatz during a shift at the Pizza Factory, I felt as if I had somehow arrived. So off I went, to Spokane, WA.

By the time I had my apologetic outburst at the end of that first year, graduate school had broken me: my confidence was completely shattered; I didn’t want to write because I hated myself; I figured nothing I could possibly come up with would be worth anyone else’s time. I was digging up all this shit I had done, not to tie up lose ends, but as a twisted way of getting validation. Forgiveness, since it wasn’t coming from the MFA program, certainly not from myself, had to come from somewhere else.

My undergraduate teacher, we can assume, was right. I probably would have benefitted from more time—a sturdier sense of self to anchor some confidence in my own work. Still, why must the MFA chew students up and spit them out? To prepare us for failure or to make us tough? I just know that I’m still trying to get my legs back, if I ever had them at all.