Erik Compton and the Importance of Failure

I was listening to a sports psychologist talking on the radio the other day about failure.  It came shortly after the U.S. Open Golf Championship at Pinehurst, where a golfer named Erik Compton tied for second.  This psychologist wasn’t talking about Compton failing to win the tournament, he was using him as an example of how failure can prepare us for success.

You see, Erik Compton is on his third heart.  When he was nine years old he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy.  His heart muscle was inflamed and unable to work hard enough to do its job.  For four years, doctors tried to treat his condition with medications – steroids, to be specific.  If you’ve ever had to take massive doses of steroids, or know anyone who has, you know how they can ravage the body in their attempt to heal it.  Erik’s features became bloated and grotesque, and this at a time when kids are trying to find themselves, to fit in with the world around them.  Erik didn’t fit, and in the way children can be exquisitely mean, he was often taunted and ridiculed because of his appearance.

By the time he was twelve, it was obvious the steroids weren’t going to work, and so doctors gave him a new heart and a new lease on life.  He became a golfer, a very good one, with a college scholarship to the University of Georgia.  When he graduated, he turned professional – playing on mini-tours, then the Nationwide Tour, and even a handful of tournaments on the PGA Tour.  He won some, and could see a bright future ahead as a professional.

Then came the big setback.  His second heart began to fail, and in 2008 he had another transplant and had to start all over on the long road to physical recovery and his quest for a life on the links.  You could say that when Erik Compton finished his final round at Pinehurst earlier this year, tied with Rickie Fowler for second, he had finished the journey.  No matter that Martin Kaymer won the golf tournament by eight strokes.  Erik Compton won the life tournament.

You can say all sorts of good things about Erik Compton.  He has great talent, he works hard, he has persistence and spirit.  He has heart.  But what this sports psychologist was talking about was how Erik’s life of setbacks contributed to the golfer and person he is today.  He had to endure childhood ridicule, and what has to be one of the most difficult physical challenges I can imagine, having your heart taken from your body and replaced with another one – twice.  He confronted failure, and the threat of failure, at every turn.  So on one of golf’s biggest stages, under mind-boggling pressure, he performed with skill and grace because he had faced failure and conquered it.  No mere golf tournament could compare with what he had been through.

This psychologist says his advice to parents is to let our kids face failure honestly.  Don’t try to sugar-coat it, don’t say it doesn’t matter, don’t make excuses.  We can’t keep our kids from failing, no matter how hard we try.  The best we can do is help them recognize it, deal with it, and learn from it.  If we’re having trouble with that, we can sit down with our kids in front of a TV, find a professional golf tournament, and watch Erik Compton.  He knows how to fail, and through failing, win.

Robert Inman's novels -- Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, Captain Saturday, and The Governor's Lady -- are available on Amazon.com.

The Storyteller Considers Robin Williams

I suppose it is the curse of fiction writers that we are doomed to be amateur psychoanalysts.

Stories – at least the best ones – are about people, and the people who appear in our fictions are made up.  They may be based on or inspired by real people from our own experience, but when we put them in our stories and start getting inside their heads and hearts and souls, we begin the process of invention.  We imagine their internal lives, including the things they try to keep hidden from the world.  We see what they do and hear what they say.  But what they do and say may be in conflict with what is going on inside.  And that conflict is an essential part of any good story.

We talk of our characters having an arc.  They begin here, and during the course of a story confront some kind of dilemma, internal and external, that transforms them in some meaningful way.  And they end up over there.

An example is the central character in my latest novel, The Governor’s Lady.  Cooper Lanier grows up in a political family and comes to despise politics as a thief that robs her of the people she should be able to depend on – especially, her parents.  But through twists of fate, she marries a man who becomes a highly-successful politician, and then becomes one herself.  How does she resolve the internal conflicts, the dilemma, that bring her to such a pass?  That’s the crux of her story.

If you read the book and Cooper Lanier resonates with you, it is because you can find something of yourself in her.  If I’ve been successful in imagining her, you will feel her joys and sorrows, will agonize with her through her trials and rejoice with her in her triumphs.  I must present her honestly, warts and all, in a way that strikes you as genuine and authentic.

So in the process of imagining and presenting Cooper and my other characters, I have to be something of a shrink.  What they do, say and think has to be believable so you can take a leap of faith with me into a story.  If what I write about a character doesn’t make sense, you won’t make the leap.

I say this is something of a curse, because we fiction writers can’t help psychoanalyzing people – those we know and those we don’t.  And thus I found myself trying to understand the brilliant and troubled mind of Robin Williams in the wake of his tragic passing.

A couple of days after his suicide, I listened to a radio interview from a few years back.  He was a man of a thousand personalities and voices, every one of them both riotously funny and profoundly perceptive of what it means to be human.  After the interview was over, I thought, “How hard must it be to have that many people – most of them zany – inside your head?”

Williams’ good friend Dick Cavett, writing in Time Magazine, said it well: “Can this be good for anyone? Can you be able to do all these rapid-fire personality changes and emerge knowing who you yourself are?”  He remembered Williams coming off stage after a brilliant club performance saying, “Isn’t it funny how I can bring great happiness to all these people, but not to myself.”

Have you ever had a piece of music bouncing around in your head, unable to get rid of it?  Imagine having a thousand pieces of music in there, all going at the same time.  The shrink in me says that was Robin Williams, and that he was desperate to escape from that, to find some peace, and that he finally saw no way out but death.

I came to that way of thinking on my own, before I read Dick Cavett’s article in Time, but we came to the same conclusion.  I never met Williams, but admired him immensely from afar and marveled at the brilliance of his art.  And the psychoanalyst in me can’t help but imagine his great joy and his exquisite pain, and perhaps understand how it finally ended.

Delbert Earle's Window of Opportunity

Late Summer always brings thoughts of a new school year about to begin, and for my friend Delbert Earle, that always brings thoughts of Miz Pirtley.  She was his senior English teacher, and Miz Pirtley’s favorite saying was, “Delbert Earle, if you ever stop acting the fool, you might amount to something.”

Delbert Earle thought he was quite the dude in the Fall of his Senior year.  He was playing halfback on the football team, going steady with a girl so cute she made him blush every time he thought of her, and headed toward graduation.  Well, hoping he was headed toward graduation.

Delbert Earle was the class cut-up, always the center of attention, and something of a practical jokester.  Whenever Miz Pirtley found something in her desk drawer that wasn’t supposed to be there, she knew exactly where it came from.  She found a good many strange things in her desk drawer that Fall, many of them alive and wiggling.

One afternoon, a warm and lazy Indian Summer day begging to be enjoyed, Delbert Earle was standing on top of a desk in study hall, leaning out the window, talking to his girl.  Miz Pirtley passed by in the hall, saw Delbert Earle, and moved faster than anybody had ever seen Miz Pirtley move before.  She grabbed him by the ankles, gave a mighty shove, and threw Delbert Earle clean out the window into a nandina bush.

Then Miz Pirtley got up on the desk and looked out the window at Delbert Earle.

“What did you go and do that for?” he asked, his pride more damaged than his body.  (The worst part was that his girlfriend laughed.  Loudly.)

“Delbert Earle,” Miz Pirtley said sweetly, “I was just acting the fool, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Delbert Earle turned out all right.  He’s got a good job and a nice family now, pays his taxes, never misses voting in an election, and speaks pretty good English.  He’s acted the fool a few times in his life, as we all have.  But a few times he’s started to and didn’t, and the reason he didn’t was that he thought of Miz Pirtley.

One of these days soon, as Summer becomes Fall, Delbert Earle plans to go by the school and thank Miz Pirtley.  But he plans to stay clear of the windows.

Mountain Men Win The War

Remember studying the Revolutionary War in school?  Paul Revere’s ride, Lexington and Conord, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Washington crosses the Delaware, the British surrender at Yorktown.  And that was it.

Well, not quite.  While school textbooks focus attention on the war in the New England colonies, a compelling argument can be made that the struggle for American independence was won in the South, in the Carolinas.  And that the pivotal battle in that campaign was fought on a low ridge called Kings Mountain, just below the border between the two Carolinas.  That is the subject of my new play, Liberty Mountain, which premiers this Fall.

In early 1780, the war in New England was at a stalemate.  The British held New York and not much else, and George Washington’s Continentals were unable to force a decisive battle.  The British had grown weary of the war and its drain on the royal treasury and national patience, but King George III was determined to force a victory in the Colonies.  The answer: Go South.

The Carolinas until then had been a backwater in the five-year-old war – a few battles and skirmishes between those loyal to the Crown and those who advocated independence – but nothing on the scale of the New England campaigns.  So the British thought the Carolinas might be ripe for the picking.  The strategy would be to invade and capture Charleston, subdue South Carolina and then its northern neighbor, drive into Virginia, and trap Washington between the southern and northern British forces.

It almost worked.  By May of 1780, Charleston was in British hands, the Continentals had been dealt a crushing defeat at Camden, and the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, reported to London that South Carolina was firmly in his hands.  But the British – brutal and arrogant in victory – were their own worst enemies.  Their Loyalist allies, many of them little more than outlaws, murdered Patriots and their families, burned and looted homes.  A British force massacred Patriot militiamen trying to surrender after a battle in the Waxhaws area.  And suddenly the Carolinas were enraged and up in arms, staging successful guerilla raids and defeating British and Loyalist troops in a series of pitched battles.

Still, Cornwallis persisted in his plan to drive north.  He ordered one of his best officers, Major Patrick Ferguson, to recruit and train a force of a thousand Loyalists, march them into western North Carolina, subdue the area, and protect Cornwallis’s left flank while he captured Charlotte and prepared for the next phase.  Ferguson thought his main threat would be from the area known as the Overmountain Territory, across the Appalachians in what is present-day Eastern Tennessee.  The Overmountain Men were fierce, rugged frontiersmen, staunchly independent, veterans of Indian wars.  Ferguson sent them a message: lay down your arms and swear allegiance to the King, or I will cross the mountains, hang your leaders, and lay waste to your homes.

That was a fatal mistake.  The frontiersmen didn’t take to threats.  As depicted in this famous painting by Lloyd Branson, a thousand of them quickly organized and set out on a grueling journey across the mountains, bent on fighting Ferguson.  They were joined by militia units from both Carolinas and on October 7, 1780, they found Ferguson atop Kings Mountain.  Within an hour they had destroyed his militia – hundreds killed (including Ferguson) and wounded, the rest taken captive.  The Patriots lost 28 killed, 58 wounded.

Historians agree that it was a turning point in the Revolution.  Cornwallis retreated, and though there were other battles in the South, he never regained the momentum.  Just over a year later, he surrendered at Yorktown.

Kings Mountain was a battle between Americans.  The only British soldier in the fight was Ferguson.   It was neighbor against neighbor, even brother against brother.  The play, Liberty Mountain, tells the story of the people who settled the Carolinas – mainly hardy Scots-Irish Presbyterians, the lives they carved out of the frontier for themselves and their families, the will and courage they showed in the cause of American independence.

Liberty Mountain takes the stage the first two weekends of October at the Joy Performance Center in Kings Mountain, North Carolina with a cast of more than fifty under the direction of theatre professional Caleb Sigmon. 

The play will become a summer fixture in southern drama.  In the future, the company will stage the play for a month every summer in Kings Mountain, beginning June 26, 2015.

Auditions for the premier production are Monday and Tuesday, July 28 and 29 at the Joy Performance Center.  No theatre experience required, just an interest in re-creating and making history. 

Babies, Elephants and Novels

I’ve been thinking a lot about babies and storytelling since my recent post, “Real Men Change Diapers.”  I applauded my son-in-law David for his hands-on approach to our new grandson and noted that babies are messy little things.  Well, so are books.

Likewise, in my extensive study of pregnant elephants over the years, I have found that they too have some similarities to book writing.  An elephant pregnancy entails a very long gestation period, and when the baby finally arrives, you hope nobody notices that it has long, floppy ears.  Books (at least the kind of fiction I write) take a good while to bring to fruition, and when I finally finish, I hope readers and reviewers will largely ignore the long-floppy-ears aspects of the story.

A case in point is my new novel, The Governor’s Lady, published last year by John F. Blair Publishers.  The story took ten years to finish.  About six or seven drafts; I lost count.  Readers and reviewers tell me it’s a page-turner, my best yarn yet, so they’re apparently willing to forgive the occasionally floppy ear. 

One reason novels can take a long time to write is that you’re trying to get it right.  Maybe you’ve got your central character pretty much in mind, and you have some notion of where the plot might be headed.  So you start writing.  And then you stop and look over what you’ve written and say, “Nah, that’s not how I imagined it.”  So you re-write, and hopefully you make it better.  What you have to avoid is trying so hard to get the words right that you get in the way of the story.  You try to describe everyone and everything exactly, and you just weigh the whole thing down with words until the story disappears in a sea of verbiage.

The trick, I’ve learned over the course of finishing five novels, is to not try to get it exactly right.  Instead, I’ve learned to trust my readers.  If I put down a few well-chosen words, I’ll engage my readers’ imaginations, and they will complete the picture.  Each reader’s imagination is different, so each reading experience is different.  So if I write a book and a thousand people read it, I’ve really written a thousand different books.  It’s the trust thing that’s important.

What took me so long to finish The Governor’s Lady?  In this case, it wasn’t trying to get it exactly right.  Instead, I violated my own principle of maintaining momentum.  I became a playwright during the ten years – seven plays produced and published and now being performed by theatres across the country.  But writing a play and nurturing it through the production process takes a lot of time and energy.  I kept putting the book aside, and when I’d get back to it, I would have to get it re-booted.  I’ve vowed not to make that mistake again.

A far worse mistake a writer can make is surrendering to failure.  I hear frequently from folks who say, “I’ve got a great idea for a book, but when I sit down to write, it’s so awful I give up.”  Lots of folks never get through that first daunting experience.  They never get to the re-writing-and-making-it-better stage.  There are lots of folks with a great story and an ability to put meaningful words on paper, but only a few who will face that initial failure head-on and spit in its eye.

To get back to the elephant thing, the end result of the writing will have some long, floppy ears.  But if you’ve stayed faithfully with the work, dealt honestly with your characters, and trusted your readers to fill in the blanks, the floppy ears won’t matter much. 

And to get back to the baby thing, the story-writing process involves a lot of feeding, burping, nurturing, and diaper-changing.  Nobody ever said parenthood was easy.

Real Men Change Diapers

I don’t think you can truly appreciate fatherhood unless you get it on you.  Babies are messy little things, and the thing about messes is, they have to be cleaned up.  Later, baby becomes a teenager, and there’s the teenager’s room…but hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I am so proud of my son-in-law David.  Baby Paul Gordon arrived a week ago, and David dived right in.  He’s a hands-on father, and that includes diapers.  He goes about it like he’s been doing it all his life.  There are some things, like nourishment, that David can’t provide; daughter Lee is in charge of that.  But everything else, David is eager to do, and does.  The guy bonding thing is in full bloom, and I predict that it will last a lifetime. 

Fatherhood can be an awkward thing.  For one thing, what precedes fatherhood is mostly out of our hands.  In my novel Old Dogs and Children, my heroine, Bright Birdsong, is pregnant, and husband Fitzhugh is at loose ends.  A wise older woman says to Bright, “He can’t help it.  Biggest thing a man ever do is begat.  Every time a woman get with child, you see the man struttin’ around like a peahen ‘cause he done begat.  Hell, ain’t nothing to begattin’.  It’s after the begattin’ that you gets down to bidness.  And that drive the man near about crazy ‘cause he can’t run the bidness.”

This sort of male displacement often continues after the blessed event.  Our instincts run to hunting and gathering, and after we’ve returned to the cave with what we’ve hunted and gathered, we are prone to kick back by the fire, light a pipe, pop a beer, and sit by as the little woman does the rest, which includes the nurturing stuff.  So when we put aside the pipe and the beer and get fatherhood on us, we’re working against type.  But when we do that, we discover that the rewards are enormous, that being hands-on touches deep and important things in our souls.  Not to speak of what we give the kid.

My own father never had much chance at the messy stuff.  Soon after I was born, he shipped out for Europe and the Big War, so it was just Mom and me and the messy stuff.  The one story I heard from that period was about a 2:00 AM feeding that went awry.  Dad put my bottle in a pan of water on the stove and promptly dozed off, to be awakened by a loud boom when the bottle exploded, leaving the ceiling above the stove dripping with milk and embedded with bottle shards.  Europe may have been a relief for him.  By the time he returned from war, I was well out of diapers and wondering, WHO THE HELL IS THIS STRANGE MAN IN MY HOUSE?  We bonded, but it took awhile.

As for me, I was a diaper changer when our girls came along.  I wasn’t the perfect father – no man is – but along with the hunting and gathering, I tried to contribute to the nurturing part, too.  I got fatherhood on me, and I’m mighty glad I did.

Okay, diaper changing isn’t essential for successful fatherhood.  For one reason or another, a new father may not help with that job.  But hands-on nurturing is.  Touching, holding, loving unconditionally.  Guiding, supporting, caring.  Those are the essentials.  All I have to do to remind myself of that is watch my son-in-law.  David, You the man.

Upon Hanging Georgia O'Keeffe

It’s officially summer at my house.  I know, folks who are sticklers for that sort of thing say it won’t be summer until next week when we pass the Vernal Equinox, the longest day of the year.  But enough of sticklers.  For me, it’s summer because I’ve hung Georgia O’Keeffe.

I’ve long been an admirer of the late Ms. O’Keeffe’s paintings, many of them capturing the objects and forms she found about her in the years she lived and worked in New Mexico.  My favorite is a sunflower – a bold, celebratory eruption of color.  The original hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, but we have a poster-sized framed print.  It stays well-protected in the house during the winter months, but in the summer, it hangs on the back porch just above the settee (some would call it a love seat, but I prefer my grandmother’s term, “settee”).  I wake up one morning and realize that the world is finally green and warm, and that’s when I hang Georgia O’Keeffe.  Okay, it’s summer.

To me, there are three phases of summer.  The first is when the sunflower takes its place above the back porch settee.  It ushers in a time of minimal clothing, the smell of mown grass, the blaze of sun and cool of shade.  Summer invites a certain amount of sloth and decadence, and if we don’t slow the hectic pace of our lives to indulge in a bit of that, we have not truly experienced summer.  The sunflower tells me it’s okay to gear back.

The second phase of summer is Vacation Bible School, which follows closely on the heels of Georgia O’Keeffe.  The signs are everywhere on the churches I pass, reminding me of the days of my youth in a small southern town.  Each church had a week of VBS, and the timing was a conspiracy led by our mothers.  No two churches had the same week.  They followed, one after the other, and we kids went to all of them – a week at the Baptist, the next at the Methodist, followed by the Church of Christ.

By the time the first VBS started, we kids were already in the full rowdiness of summer, so having a place our moms could park us where we could enjoy moral instruction and build bird houses was blessed relief for them.  It’s not that we left our rowdiness at the door to the Sunday School building.  I well remember tacking one friend’s pants to his chair while we were in bird house construction.  And I well remember Mrs. Althea Prescott, an imposing school marm and VBS director, saying, “The Lord wants everybody to sit down and shut up.”  We did, but not for long.

The third phase of summer is okra.  There are few smells in the world as rich and fragrant as that of frying okra.  To me, okra is the Queen of Vegetables – elegant without being overbearing.  It is an efficient food: like shrimp, you snip off both ends and eat everything in the middle.  Then too, it is a simple food, perfect for summer.  I dare say you will not find a recipe for okra quiche or okra Rockefeller.  You don’t have to worry about whether to serve white wine or red.  The proper way to serve okra is with iced tea or buttermilk.

My dear wife is a gardener, and this year she has vegetables in abundance.  Tomatoes, squash and cucumbers are beginning to sally forth.  The okra plants look fine and sturdy, and if we can keep the stink bugs at bay, we will have a banner crop.

In another month, the okra will be ready, and then summer will be in full, joyous bloom.  Until then, I enjoy Georgia O’Keeffe, indulge in a certain amount of sloth and decadence, and send up a prayer for the ladies of the church, trying to keep rowdy young’uns under control at Vacation Bible School.

Robert Inman's novels are available through this website and on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

In Praise of Being Silly

I’ve always been a huge fan of slapstick comedy – the kind where folks fall all over themselves and everything and everyone around them, spreading zany mayhem and making me laugh so hard I have to contemplate a trip to the emergency room.  There was, in my opinion, no one better at slapstick than Buster Keaton, who pratfalled his way through a series of silent films in the 1920’s, performing his own impossible stunts and beginning a lasting comedic legacy.

One of my favorite TV shows in the 1950’s was Candid Camera, the brainchild of a man named Allen Funt.  The idea, in case you don’t go back that far, was to hide a camera somewhere, and film people’s reactions to ridiculous stunts and practical jokes.  When the joke was finally revealed, the victim would be told the show’s catchphrase: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”

My all-time favorite episode starred Buster Keaton.  He’s sitting on a stool at a diner.  Some unsuspecting person takes the stool next to him.  Keaton orders toast and coffee.  He picks up the coffee cup, but only holds onto it by his index finger.  The cup tilts and the coffee pours out onto the plate of toast below.  The guy on the next stool does a huge double-take.  But it gets better.  Keaton puts down the coffee cup, picks up the soggy toast, wrings it out, and puts it back on the plate.  Then he does the coffee spill thing again.  By this time, the guy next door is bug-eyed with astonishment.  The reaction is what the camera is after, but the whole thing works because Keaton does the stunt absolutely deadpan, which was one of his trademarks during his long career.

If laughter is the best medicine, I prescribe sheer silliness, the kind that Buster Keaton and Candid Camera did so well.  And if you want to witness silliness in its purest form, watch a kid being silly.  Up to a certain point in their lives, kids aren’t burdened with the hangups that we adults tote around like peddlers’ sacks.  Their laughter starts deep and bubbles up like a magical fountain of youth and infects everything and everyone around them with uninhibited joy.   On rare occasions, if we’re lucky, we adults stumble upon something that reminds us of what it’s like to laugh just for the pristine sake of laughter.   And I think the best bet we have for doing that is being silly with a kid.

I say all this because I’m about to become a grandfather again.  This time a boy, after two lovely granddaughters.  He will be born into a family with wonderful parents and grandparents who will love and nurture him.  We’ll no doubt shower him with gifts over the years – some tangible, some intangible.  I think one of the best intangibles we can provide is some delicious silliness.

One of the best memories grandson's mother and I have of her own childhood was the day we -- totally without premeditation – draped a sheet of plastic over our heads and ran around the yard.  We weren’t pretending to be anything, we just ran and laughed like maniacs because it made us feel absolutely free and unconnected to anything except the moment.  Someone looking on from the street would have thought we were nuts.  Well, we were, and it was exquisitely good.  We wouldn’t trade that memory for anything.

I’m absolutely sure that grandson's parents will, along with all of the solemn duties and responsibilities of parenthood, take time to be silly with him.  Those will be some of the best moments of his childhood, and theirs.  I know this: his grandfather relishes silliness, and still watches Buster Keaton movies.  I can’t wait.

From Tragedy, Art

I’m so glad I discovered Sam Baker.  I heard him interviewed on my favorite National Public Radio show, “Fresh Air,” by my favorite interviewer, Terry Gross.  Sam Baker ‘s life is an riveting story, the centerpiece of which is terrible tragedy that he has used to reshape his life and transform it into songs that touch deep places in our souls.

Baker was a vigorous, athletic young man in 1986 – 32 years old, a former football player, a rock climber and whitewater river guide.  He was in Peru on a train bound for Machu Pichu, seated with a German family – husband, wife, 16-year-old son.  He was engrossed in conversation with the teenager when a bomb, planted by terrorists, went off in the luggage rack above them.  The German family were killed, and Baker was horribly injured: brain damage, mangled limbs, blown-in eardrums.  He calls his survival a miracle, and 17 reconstructive surgeries later, he is a singer-songwriter of uncommon grace and poetic beauty.  Many of his songs reflect on that horrific day on the train, but there is nothing in them of self-pity or unreconciled darkness.

Sam Baker has a new album, his fourth, Say Grace.  Rolling Stone magazine called it one of the top 10 country albums of 2013, but there is nothing of the rock-influenced pickup-truck, woman-done-me-wrong, hard-drinking stuff I think of these days as country.  Baker’s songs are things of gentle beauty, things of the soul of a man who has been to the brink, survived, and – instead of giving up – opens his heart for the rest of us.  iTunes says, “Baker informs his songs with a sense of life’s fragility, as well as gratitude for small everyday miracles.”  Baker himself is a pretty big miracle, but he takes joy and sustenance from the small ones he sees around him.  There is a sadness to some of them, but a reflective sadness that sees beyond itself.

My favorite song on the album is the last one, “Go In Peace.”  It is full of wonderment, hope, and benediction.  I hope Mr. Baker won’t mind me quoting from it:

Go in peace, go in kindness, go in love, go in faith.  Let us go into the darkness, not afraid, not alone.  Let us hope by some good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.

I take from that a sense that Sam Baker has gone in peace, arrived at home, and found that it is in his own heart.  He has made peace with life as he knows it, healed at the broken places, and is profoundly aware that it has given him a gift to share.

Sam Baker has turned tragedy into art, and I think a great deal of art is born of tragedy.  Artists of all stripes pour out their hearts -- in music, painting, sculpture, stories-- and find some measure of solace and strength in the doing,  a way of dealing with inner demons.  Winston Churchill painted, calling it a refuge from the severe bouts of depression, “the black dog,” that sometimes overwhelmed him.  Had he not painted, would he have been the monumental figure who led his nation through the dark agony of war?  Maybe not.

Sometimes, even art can’t suffice.  Vincent Van Gogh, that giant of post-impressionism, died in1890, age 37, from what’s believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a lifetime of anxiety and mental illness.  Of his 2,100 works of art, some of the best came during the last two years of his life.  A struggle against madness by a genius who left behind incredible art, but failed to save himself.

Sam Baker lived through tragedy, came to terms with it through his art, and when he is finally done, will leave us with those things he celebrates in song – peace, kindness, love, faith.

When you get a chance, listen to some Sam Baker music.  And go in peace.  

The Slow Death of Reading

When our daughters were very small, we sat them in our laps and started reading.  A captive audience, to be sure, but we found before long that we were the captives in one of the most treasured times we had with them.

Our favorite book in those early years was The Three Little Kittens.   You probably know the lilting rhyme by heart: “The Three Little Kittens, they Lost Their Mittens…”  We read that one book over and over and over.  The girls loved to hear it read and would often bring it to us, ready to settle in.  They soon learned the text by heart.  Paulette and I would occasionally change a word, just for fun.  “The Three Little Kittens, they Lost Their Asparagus…”  “No, no!” the girls would cry, “it’s MITTENS!  Silly Daddy.”

Of course, we soon graduated to a much broader variety of books, but we kept coming back to Kitten Trio until the book literally fell apart.  It was not until years later that we saw the famous quote from award-winning children’s author Emilie Buchwald:

I’ve been thinking about all that as I hear more and more alarming news about reading (or rather, lack of it) in our modern world. 

The Washington Post reports on new studies by neuroscientists about how our brains process information.  Researchers are finding that we spend an increasing amount of time (five hours a day and climbing) on electronic devices – smart phones, laptops, I-pads, etc. – and that we are mostly skimming and scanning, rushing through text to find something that catches our interest.  Conversely, we are spending less and less time with more in-depth reading:  books, and the sort.  We are re-wiring our brains to dash pell-mell through the torrent of online information.  We cover more ground, but we absorb less.  We see it, but we don’t really get it.  Comprehension, it turns out, seems better when we read from paper. 

This is especially true for children, whose brains are developing patterns that will last a lifetime.  They are drawn to adults’ electronic devices and they learn to skim and scan.  Deep reading skills don’t get the nurturing they need.  From books.

There’s more bad news from a couple of other recent surveys:

33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives.

42% of college graduates never read another book after college.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

In 1984, only 8% of 13-year-olds said they hardly ever or never read for pleasure; today, 22% of 13-year-olds say that.

That’s all depressing news.  We live in a complex, fast-moving world and the problems we have to tackle, and hopefully solve, require deep, creative thought.  We adults are passing those problems on to new generations, but we’re not giving them the tools they need – comprehension, reason, the ability to make sense of complicated ideas.  They won’t find the answers flipping madly through e-mails and social media.  Those may be good tools, but they aren’t the essential ones.

If I had one wish for parents, it would be that we would read – a lot – to our children, and start as soon as they’re able to hold their heads up.  My mother did that for me, and gave me the gift of a fertile imagination, which has served me richly in a long love affair with words.

If there’s a kid near you – your own or someone else’s – grab the kid and a book, snuggle up, and start reading.  That’s true for parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, even older siblings.  Kids are mimics, and when we read to them, we let them know that reading is important and rewarding.  Once that sinks in, they’re hooked, and they can’t wait to learn to read themselves.  If you can find one, I suggest a copy of The Three Little Kittens to start with.  The asparagus thing, that’s optional.

In Praise of Procrastination

In a recent article for The American Scholar magazine, the very fine novelist David Guterson recalled his first college creative writing class.  His teacher, Jack Brenner, gave the class a piece of advice that has stuck with Guterson during his distinguished career: JUST PLUNGE IN.  Don’t worry about whether you’re prepared for whatever writing project is on your front burner.  Don’t be afraid of writing badly, of failure.  Just plunge in.

I agree, and share that advice often with people who tell me they have a great idea for a book, a story, a movie, whatever.  Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair and do the work.  Talkers talk, writers write.  My own college writing teacher had a similar piece of advice.  His term was, “Just blast it.”  Put something down, no matter how much you cringe when you read what you’ve written, and then go back and make it better.

However, there is also something to be said for procrastination, which flies in the face of what we’ve been told from infancy about getting along in life.  “Don’t put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today,” our parents admonished.  In school, in work, in life, we face deadlines.  Sporting events have rigid time constraints.  The shot clock is ticking.  Golfers are penalized for slow play.  Pit stops are timed down to the last chaotic millisecond.  We are all in a race, and those who slow down are doomed.

But wait.  How about the story of the tortoise and the hare?  Who won that one?  The slow and steady guy, who just kept plodding along at his own sweet pace, smelling the roses and enjoying the scenery.  I like to think he paused periodically to just contemplate the journey.  He not only finished first, he no doubt lived a lot longer than the hare and enjoyed it more.

For me, writing is like that.  I work at the business, putting in my daily time, aiming for a reasonable output of words.  I admire those folks who can spend eight hours a day at their writing, but I’m not one of them.  When I’ve met my daily goal, I need to get up and go do something else, something unconnected with the work.  But if I’ve got a good yarn going, the characters and their story are always with me.  When I’m away from the actual writing, the story is marinating.  And often, at odd moments, something from the story speaks to me in a serendipitous way, something I can use the next time I sit down at the computer.  I call it creative procrastination.

Maybe the best piece of advice came from Fred Rodgers.  When our daughter Lee was small, she watched Mister Rodgers’ TV show every day.  One day when we were getting ready to go somewhere, we told Lee to hurry up.  She put her hands on her hips and said, “Mister Rodgers told me to take my time.”  I try to remember that.

We probably all need to rush less and marinate more.  No telling what we might discover along the way that we would have otherwise missed.  Like the tortoise.

It's Festival Time!

It’s Spring, and that means a raft of literary festivals, especially in the South.  At last count, I noted eleven in this part of the country.  Every state worth its name seems to have one – some as short as one day, some lasting several – in which writers and readers are brought together in joyous celebrations of the written word.

I’ll be involved in two during the month of April.

On Saturday, April 19, it’s the Alabama Book Festival in Montgomery.  It’s a day-long affair featuring author presentations, workshops, book signings, food, music, and schmoozing.  More than 50 authors, all with Alabama connections, will be there to share our work and enjoy the interaction with readers.  alabamabookfestival.org  

Then Thursday – Saturday, April 24-26, it’s the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville, home of Harper Lee, author of one of the two truly iconic books in American fiction, To Kill A Mockingbird (the other being Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn).  The Symposium honors an outstanding author and literary scholar each year, and this year the awards go to two longtime friends and truly gifted writers – novelist and screenwriter Mark Childress and historian Wayne Flynt.  www.facebook.com/pages/Alabama-Writers-Symposium/

Writing, as I’ve said many times before, is lonely, painful work – an individual sport.  We scribblers spend hours, days, years behind closed doors battling demons, writers’ blocks, and infected paper cuts.  Then at some point we stagger out into the light of day clutching dog-eared stacks of paper and proclaim, “I just wrote THE END.”  At this point, as I tell aspiring writers, art meets commerce.  Writer meets reader.  To have a reader express an interest in what you’ve just toiled over so mightily is the payoff.  When organizers of a literary festival bring tons of readers together to express interest, that’s as good as it gets.

When writers gather, we talk shop: who’s written what, which agents are hot, who’s got the latest mega book deal; and we commiserate over the profound changes, for good and evil, that are taking place in the book business.  We swap tales over manuscripts rejected, e-books launched, the pleasures and perils of marketing.  The art/commerce thing.

But more importantly, we congratulate each other over having written, and we rejoice in the opportunity to look our readers in the eye and thank them for their encouragement and support.  It’s a love fest.

And for readers, it’s a chance to meet, see, hear, touch the poor souls who labored so long and hard to bring forth works of poetry, fiction, memoir, history – all of the written things that entertain, inform, educate, and even disturb.

If you love good writing and reading, seek out a literary festival near you and go.  You’ll find yourself among folks of like mind, you’ll have fun, and you’ll make a bunch of deserving writers mighty happy.

Imagination In A Jar

My friend Andrew posted this photo of his son Sean on Facebook the other day, and it got me to thinking about Raggedy Ann and Andy.  Or more to the point, kids and imagination.

When our daughters were small, they loved stuffed things – dolls, animals, the like.  Our older one had an entire menagerie that we referred to collectively as “the friends,” and when we took a trip, the friends had to go along.  They were simply part of the family, and for our daughter, they were a little community of bonny companions with whom she played and talked.  She endowed each of them with a personality that came right out of her imagination.

Our younger daughter likewise had a bevy of stuffed friends, and for her, they often made up a classroom.  She liked nothing better than to arrange the friends in front of a chalkboard and teach school to them.  Her lesson plans were quite involved, and ranged across the firmament of subjects the daughter was herself learning in school.

For both kids, the menagerie included Raggedy Ann and Andy.  I figured out that the best thing about Ann and Andy was, they didn’t do anything.  And therefore they could do anything.  Ann and Andy didn’t cry, burp, close their eyes, or say “Mama.”  Our girls had dolls that did those sorts of things, but they weren’t much interested in them.  Ann and Andy, though, could be, do, or say anything that the girls’ imaginations could conjure up.  The possibilities were limitless.  I think the same thing applies to Sean and his jar.  He can imagine the jar being full of anything or nothing, or being just a jar, or something entirely different.

Lots of toys these days do lots of things.  You wind them up or put in batteries and turn them on or switch on the remote, and then you sit and watch them do whatever they do.  And that’s it.  They are what they are.  But if you’re a kid (or an adult, for that matter) with imagination, they can become much more.  And maybe, the less they do, the more they can become.

Kids are born with a vast capacity for imagination, plopped down in a world that’s strange and fascinating and laden with possibilities.  There are all sorts of ways to cultivate imagination, and the best one is reading.  It starts with the kid being held and cuddled by someone older, feeling safe and warm and hearing the comforting rise and fall of a familiar voice.  The child associates that good feeling with whatever reading material is being held in the older person’s hands, full of pictures and little black things that squiggle across the page.  At some point, as language develops, the child begins to realize that the pictures and squiggles are telling a story, setting off more pictures in the child’s mind.  And once that happens, the kid is hooked.  Imagination, I tell young people, is what you see when your eyes are closed.  You might be looking at what’s on the page, but what you’re really seeing is that movie reel going on inside.

When a child’s imagination is nurtured and set free, good things happen.  Kids with imagination do well in school and grow up to be people who solve problems because they can envision how things can be better.  For a kid with imagination, a toy is just a receptacle for possibility, and the sophistication of the toy doesn’t matter so much.  Raggedy Ann and Andy will do just fine.  Or just a jar.

Well, It's About Time

My dear wife is complaining about Daylight Saving Time.  She heard some fellow on NPR who has written a book that says DST is mostly hogwash, that we really don’t save any energy, and that all this fussing about with our clocks disrupts business affairs and sleep patterns.  My wife’s main complaint, and it’s a legitimate one, is that kids have to wait for school buses in the dark, and that can be dangerous.  For my part, I like having that extra hour of daylight in the late afternoon when I can enjoy outdoor sports, yard work, and other useless activities.

The idea of making the most of the day has been around for a long time.  My favorite American, Benjamin Franklin, famously said, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  While living in Paris in 1784, he anonymously penned a satire in which he suggested taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.  Get those lazy Parisians out of bed and on to their labors.  None of Ben’s suggestions were followed, and thus  Parisians did not become healthier, wealthier, or wiser.

The first person to propose Daylight Saving Time was the New Zealand entomologist G.V. Hudson in 1895.  He wanted more daylight hours to collect bugs.  His proposal fell on deaf ears.  Then the British businessman William Willett brought up the idea again in 1907.  He was an avid golfer, and wanted more daylight hours to pursue that nonsense.  His idea also came to naught.  It took the Germans and their allies in 1916 to actually do the clock shift thing as a means of saving coal during wartime.  Well, we know who lost that war.

“Fast time,” as it’s sometimes called, has always been surrounded by controversy.  I was a young reporter in Montgomery in the early 60’s when that august body, the Alabama Legislature, debated whether to put the state on DST.  The Alabama Farm Bureau was staunchly opposed to the idea.  I interviewed a spokesman for the Farm Bureau who explained with a straight face, “We believe it will confuse the farm animals.”  I was too stunned to ask the obvious follow-up question, having to do with clocks in barns, etc.  The Legislature, despite the Farm Bureau’s opposition, approved the idea.

My grandmother, Nell Cooper, had a simple solution to the confusion surrounding the clock shifting.  In the winter months, she arose from her bed at 7:00am.  During the months of DST, she slept until 8:00.  She had it in her mind that she gained (or lost, I never quite figured which) an hour every day.  Some of the members of the family tried to explain it to her, to no avail.  Nell Cooper always had a healthy attitude toward time, which is probably why she lived to be 94 and said, on her deathbed, “I’ve give out, but I haven’t give up.”

My wife’s protestations to the contrary, most of us are now on Daylight Saving Time.  The neighborhood kids are waiting for the school bus with flashlights in hand and I’m puttering about my yard at 7:00 in the evening.  But I’m also considering laying abed until 8:00 each morning.  Maybe Nell Cooper had it right.

Delbert Earle and the Sound of Spring

Oh ye who are weary of Winter, take heart.  It’s Spring already!

Or, at least it is in Glendale, Arizona where the Los Angeles  Dodgers have started Spring Training.  Pitchers and catchers reported February 8, and the full roster encamped last week.  The Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks (the only other team now in Spring Training) will open the major league season March 22 in Australia.  My friend Delbert Earle believes that one or both will try to sign a kangaroo as a base runner.

Spring is that time when the earth awakens and flowers, never more so than in the souls of baseball fans.  If you are a fan worthy of the name, Spring is the time when you believe that your favorite team’s best pitcher will win 25 games in the coming season, the cleanup batter will hit .400, and some guy who has been laboring in obscurity in the minors will be called up to the big team and hit 50 home runs.

Baseball, of course, is a sport that never quite goes away.  When they’re not actually playing baseball, they give out awards and trade players and sign insanely mega-buck contracts.  But it’s not really baseball season until the weather turns warm, as it has in Glendale.  When the crack of the bat is heard in Glendale, Winter is truly over.

I say crack of the bat in deference to my friend Delbert Earle, who is a Dodger fan worthy of the name.  Delbert Earle is of the old school that believes that real baseball is only played with bats that crack.  He has no truck with bats that clank.  As in aluminum.

Delbert Earle deeply regrets that in our schools and colleges, they play baseball with aluminum bats.  His boy Elrod plays high school baseball after a fashion, and like any good father, he goes to the games.  But he winces every time he hears a clank.  He is about aluminum bats as he is about cars with diesel engines.  Delbert Earle has a hard time listening to an engine that sounds like it has termites.  I have tried to tell him that modern diesel engines are quiet, but he says I’m just not listening hard enough for the termites.

Delbert Earle hopes they don’t have many diesel cars in Glendale, Arizona, where he plans to retire one of these days.  He wants a small bungalow in Glendale, preferably within walking distance of the Dodgers’ Spring Training site.  He hopes Elrod will come to visit every Spring to hear what real baseball sounds like.

Delbert Earle vows to be a purist in his old age.  He doesn’t even plan to drink soda pop from aluminum cans.  Beer?  Well, maybe.

Bad Weather? Blame an Author

There are some folks who seem to think my writing contributes to natural calamities.  There may be some truth to that.  The evidence keeps piling up.

As I look out my office window, there is a foot of snow in my back yard and on the golf course just beyond the hedge.  Kids on sleds are having great fun barreling down the twelfth fairway while some of their parents are slipping and sliding along the roadways in our area.  It’s the biggest snowfall in North Carolina in a decade.  For those who consider anything more than an inch of snow a calamity, I’m afraid they may start blaming Cooper Lanier.

Cooper is the heroine of my latest novel, The Governor’s Lady, newly-elected governor of her southern state.  On the second day she’s in office, the state is hit by a blizzard which paralyzes everything, and the snow serves as a backdrop against which a test of wills plays out between Cooper and her husband Pickett (former governor and now presidential candidate).  Will Cooper be a figurehead, a stand-in for Pickett, or will she be a dynamic decision-maker in her own right?  How she deals with the blizzard sets the stage for what comes after.

When ill-prepared Atlanta got flummoxed by snow a couple of weeks ago, several readers suggested that the honchos there should have read The Governor’s Lady to see how to handle things.  So far, no one has suggested that my inclusion of the blizzard in the story was a portent of Atlanta’s calamity.  But with a foot of snow in my back yard today, and folks slipping and sliding, I’m a tad concerned that rumblings will begin and Cooper and I will get the evil eye.

Nonsense, you say.  But it has happened before.  I grew up in a river town in Alabama, and during my youth the local lore was rife with stories of the Great Flood of 1929, when the river got out of its banks and inundated the town.  My grandmother and her four kids had to escape their home in a rowboat.  While I was growing up, the river behaved itself.  Then in 1991, I published Old Dogs and Children, set in a southern town much like my own.  One of the major events is a flood.  My heroine, Bright Birdsong, escapes with her small child in a rowboat.

The novel had barely made it into print when – you guessed it – my hometown flooded.  The river, calm all those years, went nuts.  Local folks are invariably nice people, and no one said to my face that the book was to blame for the calamity, but for years after, I got jaundiced looks whenever I visited, even in church on Sunday.  I think most folks have finally forgotten and forgiven.

I would like to share the blame for any natural disaster with my fellow storytellers.  We may all be complicit in this sort of thing, whether we write of calamities or not.  The computer age has a lot to do with it.  I sit at my keyboard typing away and constantly mashing the backspace key or even highlighting and deleting entire sentences – nay, paragraphs – of slovenly prose.  By definition, it is bad stuff, not worthy of human consumption.  Where does all that bad stuff go when I zap it from my computer?  I wonder if it may be floating around out there in the ether, roiling the atmosphere and contributing to floods, hurricanes, forest fires, sun spots, and other assorted natural maladies.  Who knows, it may even be contributing to the dysfunction in Congress.

But if any of this is the case, my fellow storytellers and I will just have to live with it.  We scribble on, employing imagined disasters as grist for our tales.  All we ask is, the next time a blizzard hits your locality, don’t run over your local author with your sled.

Ralph Keyes on "The Courage To Write"

My guest blogger today is Ralph Keyes, superbly-talented and prolific author, renaissance man, and good friend.  His fine book, The Courage to Write, has been an inspiration to me and countless other writers.  Ralph’s books are available on Amazon.com.

Before publishing The Courage to Write I sensed that a fear of putting words on paper was common among aspiring writers.  I had no idea how common that fear is.  Nor did I realize that it wasn’t just neophytes who are anxious about writing, but anyone at all.  Only after Courage was published and I began to hear from other writers did it become clear how prevalent writing anxiety is.  “Each fear described is of acute familiarity to me,” wrote one.  “I’m not alone in my fears and silly writing habits!” added another. 

 On the verge of publishing his first book, a Canadian author wrote me, “For a long while I was (and am) dealing with the kind of issues you wrote of.  The writers I knew rarely discussed anxiety, or failure, or even fear. I thought we were supposed to strut around with this hard shell attitude, this blazing self-confidence, and I always wondered why I alone suffered these crippling anxieties and doubts.”

 After getting enough responses like this I finally concluded that the definition of a frightened writer is “whoever dares to put words on paper (or in pixels).”

 Why should writing be so scary?  I think it’s due primarily to a fear of being exposed. “Will readers see right through me?” is a question that plagues writers as they write.  “Naked” is a word they commonly use to describe how they feel when their work is about to be published.  One bestselling novelist compared that feeling to dancing nude on a table.  (She’d done both and found publishing novels far more frightening.)

 But there’s an upside to the nerves all writers experience.  Just as actors, athletes, and public speakers find that being on edge gives them an edge, anxiety can lend a powerful edginess to writing.  It also helps writers reach out to readers. 

 Everyone has an inner self that they’d rather others not know about.  We go to great lengths to hide that self, the one that is ambivalent about our mother, who betrayed a friend in high school, and who sometimes picks its nose no one’s looking.  Keeping this self hidden isn’t an option for writers, at least ones who are any good.  Because the secret self is usually the most interesting self.  His lair is where the richest nuggets of golden material can be found. 

 One reason memoirs are so popular these days – especially ones like The Liar’s Club and Angela’s Ashes – is that their authors risked sharing their inner lives with readers.  Since readers too have hidden lives, they identify with that type of writing, and are grateful for the authors who dared to be so candid.  To the degree that an author can risk being candid, to that degree his or her writing will leap off the page, grab readers by the lapel, and say “This is something you’ve got to hear!”  Doing that is scary.  Terrifying even.  Yet it’s the best way to produce anything better than pablum.  That’s why I believe the most important line in The Courage to Write is “If you’re not scared, you’re not writing (anything of consequence that is).”

Ralph Keyes's new e-book, Second Thoughts: The Power of Positive Regret, is available as a Kindle single on Amazon. 

Just Open A Vein And Bleed

I often quote my graduate school fiction teacher, the late novelist Barry Hannah, who had a keen sense of the process by which stories get told.  One of the things Barry said that has stuck with me through my writing career: “What we do when we write fiction is fracture reality and put it back together as truth.”

Barry said that if you walk around all day with a recorder and capture everything that was said in your presence, what you get is mostly mundane and un-memorable.  But somewhere on that recording there is a little nugget of truth, something said that raises it above the trivial and goes to the heart of what it meant to be human that day.  A nugget of truth, that’s the thing.  For a writer, it’s the raw material of storytelling.

There is much about all our lives that is mundane and un-memorable.  But in every single life there are nuggets of truth that make up our essentials – the twists and turns of our existence, our joys and sorrows, victories and defeats, our most basic beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world.  We are fascinating, intriguing, complex creatures, capable of all sorts of acts and ideas, much of which borders on the impossible.  As a writer, if I can’t find something sublime in all that stew of human existence to tell a story about – well, I should check to see if I still have a pulse.

For all of us – writers or not – our reality is made up of millions of pieces of humanity, and the older we are, the more millions there are.  We are the sum of everything we’ve done, every person we’ve met, every place we’ve been, everything we’ve read and heard, every thought we’ve had.  We are, in short, the sum of ourselves.  As writers, we use every shred of it we can get our hands on.  We create out of ourselves, and in that sense, everything we write is autobiographical. 

It can be a painful process.  When we write, whether we like it or not, we reveal ourselves.  There are parts of us in every character we imagine, warts and all.  I think that can be especially daunting for young writers just starting out.  When I visit with a group of high schoolers, listen to them talk about their work, read what they’ve shared on the page, I remember what it was like for me at that period when I was half-formed, vulnerable, wondering if what was going through my hormone-drenched body and mind was impossibly weird.  To reveal oneself through writing at any stage is an act of courage.  For the young, it’s especially so.

But it’s worth doing.  For writing to be worthwhile, it has to be honest.  And to be honest, it has to be worth the pain.  The great sportswriter Red Smith once said, “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed."  Red Smith’s writing was honest and elegant, and only he truly knew how much it was wrenched from his gut.  Because it was, I’m sure he found the result profoundly satisfying.  For a writer, that’s just about the best payoff imaginable.

Happy Birthday, Ben Franklin

Back when I was in the news business, somebody asked me which figure from history I would most like to have interviewed.  I answered without hesitation, “Benjamin Franklin.”  He’s simply one of the most intriguing human beings to have ever walked the face of the earth.

Wikipedia describes Franklin as a polymath – “a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas.”  Franklin was “a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.”  He focused the hot glare of his wide-ranging brilliance on practical, as well as theoretical matters.  His inventions include the lightning rod (he almost became one himself) and bifocals.  He was opinionated and outspoken and could on occasion be insufferable.  But by golly, he was smart and clever and when he saw something that needed to be done, he got about doing it.

What I most want to celebrate about Mr. Franklin today, his 308th birthday, is his influence on education.  His most famous and influential utterance on the subject was a pamphlet published in 1749, in which he said, “It has long been regretted as a Misfortune to the Youth of this Province that we have no ACADEMY, in which they might receive the Accomplishments of a regular Education.”

The American colonies of 1749, including Franklin’s Pennsylvania, were still in their raw, formative years.  But Franklin was a man of vision, who could see the upstart land coming of age.  Many of the older, leading citizens had been educated in Europe and brought that knowledge and perception to the new land.  But what about the younger folk, born in America and – ready or not – faced with leading the next, vital phase of the colonies’ growth?  American youth, he said, were not lacking in capabilities.  What they needed was “Cultivation.”  Ignorance, he said, would lead to “Mischievous consequences.”

So Franklin proposed that people of means and public stature form a corporation, obtain a charter from the government, and establish an academy of learning.  He insisted that the leaders of the corporation visit the academy often, take a personal interest in the lives and education of the students, and help and encourage them in their careers.  Their education, he said, should be both broad and practical: mathematics, science, language, writing, history, geography, ancient customs, morality, commerce, oratory.  It was a recipe for producing a renaissance person who could draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.  In other words, people in the mold of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin was successful in his campaign.  Soon after the publication of the pamphlet, the leading lights of the community established the Academy of Philadelphia.  In 1791, it became known as the University of Pennsylvania.  Throughout its long and distinguished history, it has been a superb institution of higher learning.  It all started with Ben Franklin, who saw a present need and did something about it.  But he also saw into the future.  He was a leading voice for independence from Britain, and he could envision a dynamic nation based on the principles of freedom, justice and opportunity – but only if it embraced knowledge, reason and wisdom.

The question here on Ben’s 308th birthday: do we still believe what he believed about the power of education, and do we and our leaders support that ideal?  The answer says a lot about where we’re headed.

Barry Hannah and the Big Tricks

My fiction teacher in graduate school was the late novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah, who told his students in general right off the bat, “I can’t teach you to write, but I can encourage your writing.”

To me in particular he said, “When you learn the big tricks, you’ll be okay.”

“What are the big tricks?” I asked.

“You’ll figure them out as you go,” he said with a smile.

I think, after a good number of years of making up stuff and putting it on paper, I’ve figured out at least a couple of the big tricks:

1. Be honest with your characters;

2. Trust your readers.

Since all stories are about people, the way to make stories authentic is to tell about authentic people, and that means presenting them warts and all.  We human beings are a fascinating stew of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and dark.  Even the best of us have some secrets of the soul we’d rather nobody else know about.  And even the nastiest, smelliest of us have some tiny redeeming quality.  Since the great privilege of the fiction writer is to plumb the depths of characters’ souls, what we find down there – the dark as well as the light – is what makes them real.  Sometimes my characters infuriate me; sometimes they embarrass me.  But always, they fascinate me with their spirit, their energy, their insistence on being human in every way.  My job is to be honest with them.  So if you read one of my stories and find characters who seem authentic, I’ve succeeded.

Then that other big trick, trusting the reader – first, to be able to deal with authentic characters honestly presented.  My characters may occasionally infuriate and embarrass you, as they do me, but I believe you can handle that.  I trust that you will find something in them, in their honest presentation, that rings true and possibly resonates in your own life, or the lives of people you know.

Then too, I have to trust that you will bring your own imagination to the work.  I don’t have to tell you everything, and in fact, the more I try to tell you, the more I get in the way of the story and the characters.  I need to tell you just enough to get your imagination engaged, and you will fill in the blanks and make the story much more than what I could offer.  It will become your story, and the characters will become your people.

My good friend Ralph Keyes, a wonderful writer and a wise and perceptive man, has written a book called The Courage To Write.  Every person who writes, or wants to write, should read it.  Ralph talks, in part, about this business of being honest.  I don’t know if Barry Hannah ever read Ralph’s book, but part of what he encouraged in my writing was this business of honesty.  It was the best thing he did for me.

By the way, Barry encouraged some pretty darn good writers in his many years of teaching, including Mark Childress and Donna Tartt.  He was generous and nurturing, and he knew what he was talking about.  In a way, Barry’s at our elbows every time we sit down to write.

In my next post, some thoughts about the writer’s imperative to be honest with himself.  Warts and all.  Stay tuned.